Ludwig Martens

 ( 1875 Births ) 

In 1896, he was arrested and imprisoned for three years. In 1899, as he was thought to be a German national, he was exiled to German Empire, where he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and was forced into the German Army. In 1902, he graduated from the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin). In 1905, he fled from Germany to Switzerland, where he supported Lenin as an aide and ensured that pamphlets and explosives were smuggled into Russia.

In 1906, following the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Martens emigrated to Great Britain and secretly established a machine gun factory for Lenin. Martens worked as a procurement agent for the Demidov Iron and Steel Works, purchasing machinery for the large industrial works, one of the largest steel works in Russia. In 1914, he declared himself a German alien and left for New York after British intelligence began surveillance of him.

In New York as an engineer, he worked for an import-export business and became close to other similarly politically minded persons to spread Lenin's work and ideas.

In 1915, with the onset of World War I, the Kursk steel mill owned by Martens's family was confiscated by the Russian Empire because the Martens family were considered German nationals. In 1916, Martens emigrated to the United States where he worked as a vice president of the engineering firm Weinberg & Posner (New York City).

In 1917, after the February Revolution, Martens – together with Leon Trotsky and 278 other Russian Social Democrats – returned from the United States to Russia on a steamship.

In March 1919, to break the embargo against Russia, Martens returned to the United States and founded the Russian Soviet Government Bureau at 110 West 40th Street, an informal embassy of Soviet Russia in opposition to the prerevolutionary Imperial Russian Embassy located in Washington, D.C., which the United States still recognized. On 19 March, 1919, as de facto Ambassador from Soviet Russia, he presented diplomatic credentials from People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin to the U.S. State Department. On behalf of the Soviet Russian government, Martens was to settle legal claims, disperse funds, and seize the Imperial Russian Embassy and consulates, which were still occupied by the Russian Provisional Government. He established commercial contacts (formally illegal as the USA boycotted Soviet Russia at the time) with more than 1,000 American firms, including the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of J. P. Morgan. He negotiated a loan with the then Irish Emissary to the United States, T.D. Harry Boland, using Russian jewels as security. As the Soviet Bureau's administrative head, commercial attaché, and financial advisor, Julius Hammer, father of Armand Hammer, was assigned to generate support for the Russian Soviet Government Bureau and funded the Bureau by money laundering the proceeds from illegal sales of smuggled diamonds through his company Allied Drug.

In June 1919, under pressure from the Lusk Committee, the Bureau was searched by police.

In response to charges by the United States Department of Justice, Martens stated in Washington, D.C., on 10 January, 1920, that he had done nothing to justify being deported. “My activities in the United States have been entirely friendly and along commercial lines,” he said.United Press, “Soviet Leader Denies He Can Be Deported,” Riverside Daily Press, Riverside, California, Saturday 10 January 1920, Volume XXXV, Number 9, page 1. After hearings in the United States Senate and the United States Department of Labor, Martens was finally deported to Soviet Russia in January 1921.