The Republic of Estonia was occupied and annexed by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. A year later, Estonia came under German occupation during the Second World War. For many communists and collaborators who had risen to positions of power in the Estonian SSR during 1940–1941, later Soviet historiography faced a dilemma: how to account for their pre-war and wartime activities. In 1941, thousands of Soviet activists remained in Estonia, the vast majority of whom were captured and executed by the German occupation authorities. During interrogations – likely under pressure – they generally provided candid accounts of matters of interest to the German security police. Some, however, were identified as having potential for collaboration.
In October of 1944, the Red Army’s Leningrad Front counterintelligence directorate submitted a report to Nikolai Karotamm, secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia, concerning the wartime activities of Johannes Sauer, the subject of the present source publication, who had served as People’s Commissar for the Food Industry of the Estonian SSR in the summer of 1941. The report indicates that Sauer remained in Estonia performing underground work but was arrested by German authorities on 16 September 1941. He proved valuable as an informant in exposing the underground network and was spared execution, subsequently serving as a chamber agent in German detention facilities. In the spring of 1943, he was recruited into German military intelligence. On 21 September 1944, he was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence.
Although recruitment of enemy agents was not uncommon, employing someone of Sauer’s high-ranking party position in intelligence work was unusual on the Eastern Front, making his case exceptional in the Estonian context. Sauer subsequently demonstrated his usefulness to the Soviet authorities. Although surviving documents and memoirs offer only indirect evidence, it can be stated with reasonable certainty that he was employed after the war by the Soviet security organs in a role familiar to him from before – as a chamber agent.
In 1945, he was sentenced to twenty years in a labour camp for treason but was released early in the spring of 1956. Notably, shortly after his release, he was appointed to a position of significant responsibility: on 19 March 1956, he became workshop manager at the Tallinn Lemonade Factory.