for National Minorities. In 1935, Damerius acted with troupe member Bruno Schmidtsdorf in Wangenheim's anti-Nazi film, released in the United States in 1936 as Der Kampf. He received his Soviet citizenship in 1935 and transferred to the State Institute for Theater Arts in Moscow, where he studied drama direction. He also consulted at the Mezhrabpom Film Studio and staged productions at the German Collectivists' Theater in Odessa. From 1936 to 1938, he was secretly employed by the Moscow NKVD, where he was known as "Dojno". Arrest and confinement On 17 March 1938 he was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, on suspicion of having been involved with the Hitler Youth Conspiracy and was expelled from the KPD. He was held at Lubyanka Prison in a severely overcrowded cell and subjected to interrogations. His interrogators subjected him to verbal abuse and urged him to confess to the charge that he was a recruiter for Hitler Youth. He didn't fight back against the interrogator's abuse because he expected that the interrogator would simply get help. He was afraid "that they could kill the communist in me", as he later wrote. Damerius was charged with "suspicion of espionage" and, in October 1938, was sentenced to seven years in a Siberian gulag. He was sent to Solikamsk ITL, a newly opened labor camp housing up to 37,200 people in the Taiga, where he was made to do hard labor such as cutting down trees, and he suffered from hunger, exhaustion and the cold. In 1945, he was accused of "counter-revolutionary agitation" and was sentenced to five years in a forced labor camp, where he was put in a vermin-infested cell and given rations of 300 grams of black bread and a single ladle of thin soup. When interrogated, however, he refused to sign false statements. Under the belief that the Communist Party leadership knew nothing about the gulags, he wrote to Joseph Stalin 17 times over the course of his internment, never once receiving a reply. Damerius later called himself "naive". In 1947, his second conviction was reviewed and commuted to banishment to a "free settlement" in Kazakhstan, where he was not permitted to travel within the Soviet Union, much less abroad. In 1948, Damerius learned that his ex-wife would be heading a delegation to the Soviet Union. He sent her a telegram, in hopes she could help him. He received a