Talk:Jan Valtin

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Untitled[edit]

Hi all, this is the first thing I've written for Wikipedia so please bear with me if I have made any mistakes. Also I realise that it could be better, this is just the first draft!

I don't have any info on the novels that he wrote...

Possible stuff to add:

appearance before HUAC make bio more complete. (my summary is just based on OotN.)

fleeing to the US[edit]

At the end of the article Valtin "fled to the United States". Then again "Valtin fled to the United States." The exact chronological order seems to need some clarification. Did he flee before or after his wife has been killed? --Alex1011 13:08, 17 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

What happened to him?[edit]

I read elsewhere that he was liquidated by the KGB. Anybody know? The Sanity Inspector (talk) 20:29, 9 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Unreliable sources[edit]

This article is untrustworthy. It's based on the book The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, which was written in 1946 — not 1926, as cited in the article — by Albert E. Kahn and Michael Sayers.

If the authors of this article had bothered to do the least amount of research, they would have found that according to Wikipedia's own article "Albert E. Kahn", " … in 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the United States." and that "Kahn, an outspoken opponent of the Cold War, … ". Kahn therefore had a motive to discredit anyone who exposed Soviet espionage and subversion.

Myron B. Kuropas, "Fighting Moscow from afar: Ukrainian Americans and the Evil Empire" in: Ieva Zake, ed., Anti-Communist Minorities in the U.S.: Political activism of ethnic refugees (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 53, identifies the authors as " … two Communists — Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn, a Soviet agent with the code name "Borets." " The substantiation of these claims appears on page 64 (FBI depositions of Soviet agents & decoded Soviet communications).

Furthermore, if anyone had bothered to actually obtain a copy of The Great Conspiracy Against Russia and read pages 126 and 127, they would have seen that Kahn and Sayers cite NO sources to substantiate their claims about Jan Valtin. Here is a link to the book: Hathi Trust.

Kahn and Sayers' findings regarding Jan Valtin are at variance with other, more reliable, sources. See, for example: Jefferson Adams, Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence (Scarecrow Press, 2009), pp. 247-248.

Multiple sources have discredited Kahn and Sayers' book. See, for example:

Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors (Regnery, 2001), pages 418-442. "Kahn, for his part, was the coauthor with Michael Sayers of three books that promoted the Soviet party line. The most egregious of these was The Great Conspiracy, written in 1946, which claimed that the United States government had been involved in a conspiracy since 1917 to overthrow the Soviet Union. … The Communist Party USA promoted the book, and in 1947 CPUSA general secretary Eugene Dennis instructed "all State and District secretaries" of the Communist Party to organize the sale of an updated paperback version of it."
John V. Fleming, The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), p. 68: " … The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against the Soviet Union. This book, armed with an impressive-looking apparatus of learned notes, was the work of two Americans, Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn. Its title tells its tale. We shall meet this pseudoscholarly work, which Sidney Hook once dismissed as "plain propaganda," in upcoming sections."

Any part of the article that cites Kahn and Sayers' book should therefore be deleted. Cwkmail (talk) 11:29, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously The Great Conspiracy's agenda was to discredit or debunk anti-communists. But to say Sayers and Kahn "cite NO sources to substantiate their claims" is wrong; they cite Federal hearings. Furthermore, Fleming in the book you yourself cite writes on page 172, "It seems obvious that [Valtin] cooperated with the Nazis and became a 'double agent.' That is perhaps too grand a term for the modest level of his actual services to either side, but it must serve." He also points to fabrications in Valtin's book. It would therefore seem that Sayers and Kahn were more right than wrong on this specific subject. --Ismail (talk) 13:59, 30 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]

No German[edit]

The ex German diplomat Wolfgang zu Putlitz claimes in his autobiography to have met Jan Valtin during the second world war via publisher Isaac Don Levine. Expecting to meet a fellow German he tries to talk German with Jan Valtin but quickly discovers that Valtin doesn't speak German. The story about his adventures in Germany published in Out of the Night couldn't be true at all. Zu Putltz discovers that Valtin was in fact called Krebs and only had a German father, a sailor, and was raised by his English mother in Ceylon. Zu Putliz there fore withdraws from the deal he made with Levine who'se aim, according to Zu Putlitz, seemed to be more on selling books than on the facts of the matter. I personally wouldn't be surprised if the whole story of Krebs was in fact the imagination of journalist Isaac Don Levine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.86.90.39 (talk) 21:23, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]