older children were themselves arrested and charged with anti-revolutionary activity and forming anti-revolutionary groups. International communists living in the Soviet Union were hard hit, especially Germans, who were there in large numbers, fleeing Nazism. While German parents were rounded up and accused of espionage, this charge was not plausible for foreign children who had not been outside the Soviet Union in years. Instead, they were charged with having formed a branch of the Hitler Youth. New allegations Investigations regarding NKVD Order Number 8842 - the Hitler Youth conspiracy - began in January 1938. The commissar of the NKVD gave an order to find and arrest a group of young people who were alleged to have formed a branch of the Hitler Youth and were planning acts of sabotage and assassination. They were also accused of praising Adolf Hitler. Department 4 of the Main Directorate of State Security under the NKVD handled secret political affairs and took care of the administration of the case while Department 7, which handled foreign intelligence, implemented the orders. Those carrying out the arrests were directed to reach quotas for both arrests and confessions and were given deadlines. An interpreter who served during the interrogations, Rudolph Traibman, later said that when he complained to his superior, he was threatened with arrest. According to another contemporary, Leonid M. Sakovsky, "When Sorokin and Persitz ordered G. Yakubovich to sign arrest warrants, Yakubovich laid his wristwatch on the desk and said, 'Look how many arrest warrants I can sign in one minute.' And then he began to sign the warrants, without reading them." The investigations produced completed arrest reports that, according to one historian, are hardly worth reading; they report no details other than personal identification. Instead, they followed a template, devoid of other evidence. Some 70 teenagers and adults were arrested between January and March 1938, primarily the children of German and Austrian foreign workers and exiles, but also a few Russians. Some of those arrested were not members of the Hitler Youth; 20 were over the age of 30 and one was 62. Others were students at local technical schools or workers in factories. There were 13 pupils and two teachers arrested from the Karl Liebknecht School and a number from Children's Home No. 6. There were seven people, most adults, from the Left Column theater troupe, including Helmut Damerius, a close friend of Wilhelm Pieck's son,