The world is, in many ways, a far better place than it would be had Victor Grossman, a U.S. Communist who defected to East Germany at the age of 24, not lived his incredible life. He died of pneumonia in Berlin on Dec. 17.
John Reed, the American Communist and journalist who first became known for covering the Mexican Revolution, achieved even more fame with his book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Without that book, millions around the world would never have learned what really happened in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The capitalist ruling classes on our planet were not about to let us know.
Without the information we received from Victor Grossman after his defection to the GDR in 1952, we might never have learned much of what we did about the struggles to create a better and socialist world in the eastern part of Germany and much of Europe after World War II.
While Americans were being taught to question and disbelieve the results of those efforts, Grossman was busy showing us why we shouldn’t. Over a span of nearly 40 years, through his books, articles, and lectures, he told those of us back in his home country what was really happening in the GDR and other socialist countries.
With knowledge comes freedom, and it was Victor Grossman who, by sharing his knowledge about the building of socialism, along with its victories and setbacks, that contributed so heavily to our ability to maintain our freedom.
Why would a 24-year-old Harvard graduate leave his home country in 1952 and “escape” to a country his compatriots were told was “behind the Iron Curtain?”
It wasn’t the first surprising thing Victor did. As soon as he graduated from Harvard and said farewell to his communist and leftist comrades there, he ended up in the working-class neighborhoods of Buffalo, N.Y., where he worked with Hattie Lumpkin and helped organize steel workers fighting for the right to a union.
When I met him for the first time in 1980 in Berlin, when I brought a group of U.S. actors to the GDR under the auspices of the U.S. Committee for Friendship with the GDR, he told me that his days as a communist union organizer in Buffalo were some of the proudest of his life.
In 1950, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, which was filling its ranks for the imperialist war in Korea. Instead of being dispatched to Korea, however, he was stationed at an Army base in West Germany, near the Austrian border, as part of the U.S. occupation of West Germany.
Soon after his arrival there, it became clear that McCarthyism was rearing its ugly head in the U.S. Army, with both former and then- present members of the Communist Party being rounded up and jailed. After receiving a letter ordering him to report to a military judge for having been a member of prohibited progressive organizations in the past, Victor made a choice that changed his life forever.
Rather than facing the same fate as other persecuted and imprisoned soldiers, he decided to defect. Under cover of darkness, without the aid of a GPS or anything like it, he made his way to the shores of the Danube River. Relying on only a crude compass, he carefully selected a point at which to take the plunge into the icy cold water.
Victor calculated that, if he swam in a straight line, it would land him inside the Soviet occupation zone of Austria on the other side. Luckily, his calculations were accurate. There were no Soviet soldiers waiting for him, but after wandering for a few hours, a local person found him and took him to the Soviet authorities in the area.
Naturally, it took a while for the Soviet authorities to verify the authenticity of his story. U.S. intelligence services, of course, were not beyond infiltrating areas in which they had a special interest, so the Soviets were initially suspicious.
Eventually convinced, the Soviet authorities sent him to the newborn German Democratic Republic, which had been formed in 1949 after the Western powers, in violation of the Potsdam Agreement which ended the war, illegally united their zones into the Federal Republic of (West) Germany.
The original deal after the war was to form a demilitarized, de-nazified, and unified Germany, with all major industries nationalized. It was the West that violated the deal, setting up a separate currency and turning over many companies to their former Nazi owners, thus beginning the division of Germany which, of course, they blamed on the Soviet Union.
Victor knew all of this, so although he may have been unsure about what would happen to him when he defected, he never regretted the decision. When he met his beloved Renate, whom he married and with whom he raised a family, he was sure he had done the right thing.
Victor was born Stephen Wechsler to Jewish parents in the United States on March 11, 1928. He grew up in the harsh years of the Great Depression, learning first-hand what the capitalist system had in store for the working class. Stephen Wechsler became Victor Grossman after his arrival in the GDR in order to shield his family in America from any retaliation and persecution from the U.S. government during the McCarthyite terror visited on communists, leftists, and trade unionists.
Among his many writings were his books, Crossing the River and A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl Marx Allee.
Both are filled with details about not only Grossman’s personal life but also the history of the building of socialism in the GDR. There is no course in political science in the universities of the United States that teaches, from his unique perspective, the socialist side of the class divide, about both the development of and the reasons for the demise of the system in the GDR.
They also leave the reader with hope and an understanding that socialism, in 40 years, cannot undo entirely what capitalism had centuries to carry out. They detail the incredible efforts by capitalist countries to sabotage the development of socialism every step of the way.
But Victor’s later life, with capitalism restored, for now, in the former GDR, shows that the struggle goes on. His apartment on Karl Marx Allee in Berlin became a headquarters for the tenants’ rights movement to meet on a regular basis. He helped lead the effort to bring about a five-year rent freeze in Berlin.
He was at every peace demonstration in Berlin fighting hard against the attempts by the political leadership in Germany to move in an imperialist and militarist direction.
He was an active member of the Communist Platform of Die Linke, Germany’s Left Party, and contributed heavily to the victories that catapulted them into the government in Berlin and more recently to garner the support of 40% of the young voters in Germany.
For many years, his articles appeared monthly and sometimes even more frequently on the pages of People’s World, providing our readers with his unique understanding of life during and after socialism in Germany and in Europe more broadly.
“Victor experienced life on both sides of the Cold War divide, growing up in the capitalist U.S., then spnding 38 years of his adult life in socialist East Germany,” C.J. Atkins, managing editor of People’s World said after Grossman’s death.
“The ‘socialist defector’ knew both worlds and spoke honestly about their respective pluses and minuses, never holding back to please anyone’s agenda.”
Victor never forgot his roots in his U.S. homeland and remained a member of the CPUSA—which he joined 80 years ago, in 1945—until the day he died. He was a comrade and friend to many of us around the globe.
He was proud to return to the United States in 2019, when he attended the national convention of the Communist Party USA as a representative of the Communist Platform of Die Linke.
Joe Sims, co-chair of the Communist Party USA called him “a beacon, a giant in the fights for peace, democracy, and socialism whom we will never forget.”
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