WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
On July 13, 1938, Rudolf Klement was kidnapped in Paris and murdered by the Stalinist GPU, the secret police of the USSR. At the time of his kidnapping and murder, Klement was the secretary-designate of the Fourth International. He had been organizing its founding conference. His headless corpse was found later in the river Seine.
Born in 1908, the young German student from Hamburg arrived in Turkey in 1933 to serve as the secretary to Leon Trotsky, the co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution and implacable opponent of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow. Already possessing precocious skills in five languages, Klement added Russian to his repertoire within months of arriving at Trotsky’s residence in exile at Prinkipo. Klement accompanied Trotsky to Barbizon in France and remained there to work on behalf of the International when Trotsky was expelled to Norway in 1935.
Klement actively participated in the collection of material for Trotsky’s defense in the face of the Moscow frame-up trials. He did an enormous amount of work both in translating, corresponding with the sections of the Fourth International, keeping files, and writing articles for the press and internal bulletins. After the murders of Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov and his secretary Erwin Wolf, it was Klement who drove forward the work of the International Secretariat and in particular the task of preparing for the Founding Conference of the Fourth International.
World Socialist Web Site for more