10 Facts About Hans Kahle

Hans Kahle was a German journalist, communist, and head of the Volkspolizei in Mecklenburg.

Hans Kahle fought as a cadet and later as an Oberleutnant in the 82nd Infantry Regiment of the Imperial German Army during World War I and became a prisoner of war in 1918, held by the Third French Republic, from which he was repatriated in 1920.

Hans Kahle became a member of the German Communist Party in 1928.

Hans Kahle fought until 1938 in the Spanish Civil War, in the International Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.

Between 1940 and 1941, Hans Kahle was interned by the United Kingdom on the Isle of Man and in Canada.

Hans Kahle was a founding member of the Free Germany Movement, which was believed by MI5, the British domestic counterintelligence service, to be a front for recruiting anti-Nazi refugees into a Soviet NKGB spy ring.

MI5 believed Hans Kahle to be a very high level Soviet intelligence operative and spymaster and, in addition to opening his mail, MI5 secretly had Hans Kahle under constant surveillance.

In February 1946, Hans Kahle returned to the Soviet Zone of Occupied Germany, which he helped to build into a future Soviet Bloc state that would later be named the German Democratic Republic.

Hans Kahle became chief of the Volkspolizei in Mecklenburg and state chairman of the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany in Mecklenburg.

Hans Kahle died in Ludwigslust in 1947 at the age of 48.