Out of the NightPickle Partners Publishing, 2020 M01 30 - 724 pages A bestseller in 1941, selected by the Book of the Month Club for a special edition and described by Book of the Month Club News as: “...full of sensational revelations and interspersed with episodes of daring, of desperate conflict, of torture, and of ruthless conspiracy...It is, first of all, an autobiography the like of which has seldom been.” The son of a seafaring father, Richard Julius Herman Krebs, a.k.a. Jan Valtin, came of age as a bicycle messenger during a maritime rebellion. His life as an intimate insider account of the dramatic events of 1920’s and 1930s, where he rose both within the ranks of the Communist Party and on the Gestapo hit list. Known for his honesty and incredible memory, Krebs dedicated his life to the Communist Party, rising to a position as head of maritime, organizing worldwide for the Comintern, only to flee the Party and Europe to evade his own comrade’s attempts to kill him. As a professional revolutionary, agitator, spy and would-be assassin, Krebs traveled the globe from Germany to China, India to Sierra Leon, Moscow to the United States where a botched assassination attempt landed him a stint in San Quentin. From his spellbinding account of artful deception to gain release from a Nazi prison and his work as a double-agent within the Gestapo, to his vivid depiction of a Communist Party fraught with intrigue and subterfuge, Krebs gives an unflinching portrayal of the internal machinations of both parties. |
From inside the book
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... port to port at Company expense. One result of this nomadism was that by the time I was fourteen I spoke, aside from my native language, fragments of Chinese and Malay, and had a smattering of Swedish, English, Italian and the ...
... port to port at Company expense. One result of this nomadism was that by the time I was fourteen I spoke, aside from my native language, fragments of Chinese and Malay, and had a smattering of Swedish, English, Italian and the ...
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... port. Five hundred and eighty mutineers from the Thüringen and the Helgoland, among them my father, were arrested and jammed into cells in the ships. At home we spent two dreary nights. My mother prayed. The younger children shivered in ...
... port. Five hundred and eighty mutineers from the Thüringen and the Helgoland, among them my father, were arrested and jammed into cells in the ships. At home we spent two dreary nights. My mother prayed. The younger children shivered in ...
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... ports of Chile and Peru during the war. Desperately anxious to leave the hungerridden Fatherland, thousands schemed and bribed to get a berth aboard the Lucy Woerman. Scores of the nearly four hundred who were signed had been among the ...
... ports of Chile and Peru during the war. Desperately anxious to leave the hungerridden Fatherland, thousands schemed and bribed to get a berth aboard the Lucy Woerman. Scores of the nearly four hundred who were signed had been among the ...
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... The ship weighed anchor and shaped a course down the west coast of South America, calling at Callao and ports to the south. The majority of the men on the Lucy Woerman refused to man the ships for the voyage home. There.
... The ship weighed anchor and shaped a course down the west coast of South America, calling at Callao and ports to the south. The majority of the men on the Lucy Woerman refused to man the ships for the voyage home. There.
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... ports conjured up before me vistas of high coast-lines, of warmth and abundance, of laughing brown-eyed girls, and of jobs under foreign flags or in the copper mines, of jobs with decent wages and with promise for the future. I decided ...
... ports conjured up before me vistas of high coast-lines, of warmth and abundance, of laughing brown-eyed girls, and of jobs under foreign flags or in the copper mines, of jobs with decent wages and with promise for the future. I decided ...
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Out of the Night: The Memoir of Richard Julius Herman Krebs Alias Jan Valtin Jan Valtin Limited preview - 2004 |
Common terms and phrases
aboard agents Albert Walter Antwerp Apparat arms arrested arrived ashore asked Bandura Berlin British Brownshirts Captain cell chief Cilly Comintern Communist Party Comrade Copenhagen courier crew death Dimitrov door Elite Guards Ernst Wollweber eyes face Firelei front Fuhlsbüttel gave Gestapo girl guns Hall Halvorsen Hamburg hands harbor head headquarters Heinz Neumann Heitman Hertha Jens Hitler Hugo Marx hundred Inspector Kraus International Club Jensen John Scheer Karl Liebknecht knew later leaders Leningrad looked marine mass Michel Avatin morning Moscow murder Murmansk mutineers Narvik Nazi never night organization passport Pioner police policemen political ports prison Profintern propaganda Radam Reichswehr Rotterdam Russian sailors Samsing seamen secret sent shouted smuggled socialist Soviet Union station steamer stood storm troopers street strike told took towline train voice waiting walls wanted waterfront Western Secretariat window woman workers yard young