Gruber, Kurt, born 13-05-1912, in Bockum-Hövel, Hamm, 
Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Before the war, Kurt Gruber was a German miner from the Ruhr area. He was an anti-fascist and a member of the Communist Party. 
Before they were even in power, the Nazis shot his brother Karl on 24-03-1931. When the Nazis took control of Germany in 1933 Gruber came under great danger from the regime, and he fled to Prague in 1935. After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia he managed to escape to Great Britain, and settled in Glasgow. There he again worked as a miner, became a member of the Scottish miners’ union, and was very active in the Free Germany movement. 
In the summer of 1944, Kurt Gruber married, after he found found love Jessie Campbell, born Leith, she was a Scottish woman who after leaving school at 14 worked as a secretary. She was subsequently involved with the local Communist party, where she met Kurt Gruber during anti fascist campaigning in Glasgow. Jessie Campbell. 
Kurt and Jessie married in a civil ceremony in Glasgow before moving to London to be closer to where OSS was based, in preparation for the mission. His recruiting officer would be Lieutenant Joseph Harlod Gould ,
an American labour law expert from New York with proven experience in trade unions. Gould had been assigned to the Office of Strategic Services’ Labour Division. It was an office dedicated to the recruitment and training of dissident workers, trade unionists, and other civilian anti-fascist collaborators for deployment in a variety of stealth operations.
He also published a brochure titled I am a German Miner.
In 1944, the US Office of Strategic Services, the forefather of today’s Central Intelligence Agency, began recruiting Germans from the Free German Movement to be parachuted into Germany to serve as spies. Their task was to transmit information about German troop movements and the political conditions in the country as the Allied Forces moved into Germany. Kurt Gruber was among those who volunteered to serve in this capacity, and he joined the OSS as a spy. Gruber was killed on March 20, 1945 when the aircraft carrying him to his parachute drop crashed in bad weather. (This was the same plane crash that killed Sgt. Frederick Brunner who is also buried at the Ardennes American Cemetery.) Gruber was posthumously awarded the (civilian) Medal of Freedom.
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