He spied on the Gestapo and the Polish underground. He said he was “something like” Hans Kloss

was born in 1906 to a German family from Lodz. Father managed a spinning mill in Russia. He joined the Communist Union of Polish Youth in junior high school. In 1927, the 21-year-old Ritter was active in the Communist Party of Poland, in the 1930s he underwent intensive intelligence and sabotage training, he also began cooperation with the NKVD. He became a “matrioshka” – a sleeper agent, and after being arrested for communist activities he left the CPP. After the outbreak of World War II, he first went to Białystok, and in 1941 he returned to cooperation with the intelligence service and ended up in Warsaw. This is how it begins, which was to become an inspiration to create the character of Hans Kloss from “Stakes greater than life” (to be watched on TVP VOD).

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The real Hans Kloss? He spied on the Gestapo and fought the Polish underground

Ritter knew German, he also had contacts from before the war, so his task was to infiltrate the German services and collect as much information as possible. He was ordered to “immediately transform into a German and start intelligence tasks”. He became a member of the Sturmabteilung (SA), “killed” his wife on paper, and baptized his children in the Protestant church. And waited for further orders. When he settled at ul. Rozbrat 34/36, in the then German district of Warsaw, he met a Gestapo officer, he also made friends with the circle of former tsarist officers. At the well-drinked evenings organized by him, drunk guests would reveal their secrets to him. Thanks to this, he was able to locate the place where the Abwehr was training its intelligence, but also prevent the transfer of a German spy named … Brunner. Ritter, with the help of Bogusław Hrynkiewicz (in the 1950s accused of collaborating with the Gestapo), spied on a secret Polish political and military organization, “Sword and Plow”, thanks to which plans for V1 and V2 missiles fell into Moscow’s hands. He also led the operation to take over the archives of the Home Army, as a result of which the Gestapo received data on the underground.

Although he was arrested by the Soviet army in 1944 and spent a year in prison as a German spy, his career did not end after the war. He still fought the Polish underground, including partisans from the National Armed Forces, worked in the Lublin Security Office, was a military attaché in Rome, and finally the head of the General Self-Defense Inspectorate.

He claimed to be “something like” Hans Kloss. “He’s a creepy character”

“He is a disgusting figure,” emphasized historian Prof. Paweł Wieczorkiewicz in an interview in 2008. He believes that Ritter, who after 1945 took the surname Jastrzębski, was the prototype of Hans Kloss. – After the war, he was a high-ranking security officer, considered a conscientious performer of genocidal policy, and then he worked, among others, in the at the General Staff of the Polish Army. Why do I think he was the prototype of Kloss? Because of the agents I know operating in German skin, he is closest to the hero of “Stawka” – he added.

The thing is that the writers of the series “”, Andrzej Szypulski and Zbigniew Safjan, swear that when creating the character of agent J-23, Stanisław Kolicki, they had no idea about the existence of Artur Ritter. He, in turn, proudly said that he was the inspiration for the iconic character. He even met the screenwriters. – He introduced himself as a LWP general. He said that during the war he served on behalf of the Soviet intelligence in Warsaw, on Szucha Street, and that he was something like Kloss. It didn’t seem very interesting to us, Safjan recalled.