Red Orchestra

also by ANNE NELSON

SAVAGES
(A Play)

THE GUYS
(A Play)

MURDER UNDER TWO FLAGS:

THE U.S., PUERTO RICO, AND

THE CERRO MARAVILLA COVER-UP

TO THE CHILDREN OF THE ROTE KAPELLE:

Stefan, Hans, Karin, Saskia, Ule, Irene, and so many others

Cast of Characters

Preface

Prologue

CHAPTER 1
Greta Goes to Amerika

CHAPTER 2
Greta and Adam

CHAPTER 3
Berlin

CHAPTER 4
The Masses and the Media

CHAPTER 5
Things Fall Apart

CHAPTER 6
The Takeover

CHAPTER 7
Denial and Compliance

CHAPTER 8
Going to Ground

CHAPTER 9
The Prague Express

CHAPTER 10
The Gentlemen's Club

CHAPTER 11
A Faraway Country

CHAPTER 12
The Dinner Party

CHAPTER 13
The Birthday Party

CHAPTER 14
The Inner Front

CHAPTER 15
“The New Order”

CHAPTER 16
All Possible Foolish Rumors

CHAPTER 17
The Road to Barbarossa

CHAPTER 18
Other Worlds

CHAPTER 19
“Distress About Germany's Future”

CHAPTER 20
The Antiwelle

CHAPTER 21
Crime and Punishment

CHAPTER 22
The Survivors

CHAPTER 23
Life in a Cold Climate

EPILOGUE
To Those Born After

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Greta Lorke:
Sociologist. She met Arvid and Mildred Harnack as a student in Wisconsin in the 1920s. She met Adam Kuckhoff in Germany in 1930 and married him in 1937.

Adam Kuckhoff:
Playwright, novelist, journalist, screenwriter. A contemporary of Bertolt Brecht's in Weimar theater.

Arvid Harnack:
Economist. He came from a distinguished family of German scholars, and was a Rockefeller Fellow, University of Wisconsin, where he met and married American Mildred Fish in 1926. A number of his cousins—including Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer and Ernst von Harnack—were involved in the July 20, 1944, coup attempt.

Mildred Fish:
Scholar and professor of American literature from Wisconsin. She also worked as a professional translator and English tutor in Germany.

Falk Harnack:
Arvid Harnack's younger brother and supporter. Also an early member of the White Rose student group in Munich.

John Sieg:
Journalist, factory worker, and railroad employee. Born in Detroit and grew up in the United States and Germany. Resettled in Germany in 1928 and married Sophie Wloszczynski. Joined German Communist Party in 1929.

Sophie Wloszczynski:
Secretary and typist. Her family members were ethnic Poles who suffered under German occupation.

Harro Schulze-Boysen:
The scion of a prominent military family. Student journalist before the Nazi takeover, later joined the Luftwaffe, where he worked in the air force intelligence division. Married Libertas Haas-Heye in 1936.

Libertas Haas-Heye:
Film publicist and producer. Granddaughter of a Prussian prince, family friend of Hermann Göring.

Walter Husemann:
Journalist. Was sent to Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald in the 1930s as a Communist political prisoner; released. Married Marta Wolter in 1938.

Marta Wolter:
Actress. Before the Nazi takeover, she appeared in the Brecht/Weisenborn stage premiere of
The Mother
and in the Brecht film
Kuhle Wampe.
Sent to the Moringen concentration camp in 1937 for hiding a political fugitive; released. Friend of Günther Weisenborn; knew John Sieg through Communist Party circles.

Kurt Schumacher:
Prize-winning sculptor. Also created decorative work for architectural design. His working-class parents joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. Married Elisabeth Hohenemser in 1934. Drafted into the German army in 1941.

Elisabeth Hohenemser:
Graphic artist and photographer. A half-Jew, who was supported as a young student by Jewish relatives in Frankfurt.

Herbert Engelsing:
Lawyer and UFA movie producer. Introduced the Kuckhoffs and the Schulze-Boysens. A “shadow partner” in the Rote Kapelle resistance activities. His law partner, Carl Langbehn, was involved in the July 20, 1944, coup attempt.

Ingeborg Engelsing:
A half-Jew, from a family of prominent lawyers and academics. She and Engelsing used their connections in the movie industry to get Hitler's permission to marry.

Helmut Himpel:
Dentist. Had many patients in the film industry, thanks to friendship with producer Herbert Engelsing. Long engaged to Marie Terwiel, but was forbidden to marry her under the Nuremberg race laws of 1935, as she was a half-Jew.

Marie Terwiel:
Law student and musician. Half-Jew, practicing Catholic.

Hans Coppi:
Young Communist blue-collar worker. Was repeatedly arrested by the Nazis for protest activity, and sent to Oranienburg concentration camp. Heard Harro Schulze-Boysen speak at a meeting, and later agreed to help with the radio operation. Married Hilde Rake in 1941.

Hilde Coppi:
Young activist, involved with Communist youth anti-Nazi underground.

Adolf Grimme:
Social Democrat official and former Prussian Minister of Culture. Close friend of Adam Kuckhoff since college. After the Nazi takeover, became active in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's branch of the dissenting Lutheran Church.

John Graudenz:
Journalist, photographer, and businessman. One-time United Press and
New York Times
reporter in Berlin.

Günther Weisenborn:
Playwright and journalist. Brecht collaborator in the 1920s, friend of Harro Schulze-Boysen and Marta Wolter.

Helmut Roloff:
Classical pianist. Conservative, friend of Helmut Himpel and Maria Terwiel. Motivated by his anger at the treatment of Jewish friends and neighbors.

Cato Bontjes van Beek:
Young ceramicist. Created links between Harro Schulze-Boysen and student circles.

Katja Casella and Lisa Egler-Gervai:
Young Jewish art students, and friends of Cato Bontjes van Beek.

Ambassador William Dodd:
U.S. ambassador to Germany (1933–1937). Early critic of the Nazis. His work was complicated by his unruly daughter, Martha.

Donald Heath:
U.S. embassy official in Berlin (1937–1941). Close friend of Arvid and Mildred Harnack; conveyed Arvid's economic intelligence to the State Department.

Leopold Trepper:
Polish Jewish Communist, recruited as a Soviet intelligence agent in the 1930s. After escaping Stalin's purges, he set up a Soviet intelligence post in Brussels, Belgium. He coordinated some Soviet intelligence operations in Western Europe, but he never met or had any direct contact with the group in Berlin.

Anatoli Gourevitch (code name “Kent”):
Soviet agent assigned to Trepper's operation in Brussels. Dispatched to Berlin in late 1941 to restore contact and correct radio problems.

Alexander Korotkov (also called “Alexander Erdberg”):
Soviet agent. Sought out Arvid Harnack in 1940, set up communications to Moscow, and left Germany after the 1941 invasion.

T
HIS BOOK BEGAN BECAUSE THE REICHSTAG WASN'T FINISHED.
It was April 1999, and a colleague and I, in Germany on business, had jumped on a train to spend the weekend in Berlin. He was set on seeing Norman Foster's gorgeous new dome for the Reichstag, the home of the German Parliament. This symbol of German democracy had been gutted by fire in the days of the Nazi takeover, and pulverized by the Soviet assault twelve years later. Now it was being reinaugurated as a delayed consequence of reunification. But we were disappointed. The guard at the door told us that the building wouldn't open for visitors until the next day, and we had to depart that evening.

Instead, I took a stroll. As a New Yorker, I appreciated Berlin as a walker's city. One could still feel the chill of the past in certain places, but I was struck by the palpable energy for engaging the future.

Turning a corner, I saw what appeared to be a construction site. The ground was torn up, sheltered in spots by makeshift roofs. People wandered around the area, reading material posted on the walls.

Drawing closer, I learned that we were standing on the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. The exhibit consisted of pictures and captions about the people who had been detained there, many of them tortured and killed. I was surprised to see that a number of prisoners were identified as
Widerstand
(resistance).

Among these were two women. One who immediately caught my attention
was Mildred Fish Harnack, a beautiful literature professor from Wisconsin with a grave, gentle gaze. The caption called her “the only American woman to be executed by Hitler.” Another photograph, from a later date, showed a fierce older woman named Greta Kuckhoff. She, too, had studied at the University of Wisconsin, and belonged to the same group, labeled the
Rote Kapelle
(Red Orchestra). Remarkably, she had survived both the Gestapo and the war, and rose to the position of president of East Germany's Central Bank.

The names were new to me. I had heard of Claus von Stauffenberg and the military conspiracy against Hitler, and had seen a movie about Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. But I had no frame of reference for the Rote Kapelle, nor for the idea of Americans who were members of a German resistance movement in the middle of the war. I returned home and began to explore. Initially, it was slow going: a footnote here, an obscure article there. But the more I learned about Greta, Mildred, and their circle, the more compelling their story became.

One reason for this was my own professional history. As a young journalist I had lived under military dictatorships in Central and South America, and had reported on the dynamics of opposition. I had witnessed the strange alliances that take shape in such situations, aligning individuals with differing religious and ideological beliefs through a commitment to a common humanity. I had also noted that under repressive governments, the population tends to divide into three groups: those who approve of the dictatorship; those who dislike it but go along with it; and those who resist. Later I worked in many other countries that were only starting to emerge from a brutal past, among them Cambodia and Romania. The three social groupings held firm; only the proportions shifted.

Why, I wondered, was Nazi Germany different? After all, hadn't we been told that German society underwent a wholesale conversion to Nazism overnight, to become a nation of murderers?

One early revelation came at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., which wisely directs its visitors to tour the exhibit in sequence, on a route that tracks the evolution of Nazism. The initial floor lays out the story of how Germany's struggling democracy was overcome in the
early 1930s, and how its institutions were dismantled and subverted by the regime.

I pursued my questions about Greta and Mildred at the same time that I explored the history of the society that forced them into such unlikely roles. In the minds of many Americans, World War II began in 1941. But there were many crucial historical lessons that unfolded long before Pearl Harbor. The Holocaust could not have occurred if the Nazis had not succeeded in purging the German legal system of its honorable judges and lawyers. The fascists had to intimidate and silence reporters and turn the national media into vehicles for propaganda and mindless entertainment. The Nazis seized upon ongoing international tensions and used propaganda to inflate them into “threats.” Then they obliged Germans to prove their patriotism by supporting cruel, ill-considered wars that could not be won. Soldiers were ordered to violate the Geneva Conventions, and officers who protested this breach were marginalized or abruptly retired.

One young member of Greta and Mildred's group expressed her impatience at the Germans' passivity concerning their crisis. “Everybody's talking about it,” she said, “but nobody's doing anything.” Why did these particular Germans decide to “do something,” I wondered. The stakes were unimaginably high—most of the resisters paid for their convictions with their lives. I explored the differences in their motivations and conduct, using my firsthand observations in other countries as a point of departure. Who among the resisters shunned danger, and who found it appealing? How did the actions of young, single members differ from those of older resisters who were married with children? How did individuals weigh the comparative consequences of exile, conformity, and opposition? How did the large percentage of women affect the group's identity?

Underlying each line of inquiry was the question that haunts every book about Nazi Germany: How could they let it happen? This book is not directly about the Holocaust, but the event must cast its shadow over every account of the period. Greta and Mildred's circle had precious few resources to contest the massive evils of their time: the destruction of civil society, the mass slaughter of Soviet prisoners of war, or the Holocaust
itself. But they risked their lives to do what they could. Many others, including powerful figures in London and Washington, could not say the same.

Finally, I had to return to the question of why the story of this group was not better known in the West. This query led me into the thicket of cold war politics that arose as soon as the war ended. The Gestapo had invented the idea of the Rote Kapelle as a Soviet conspiracy, and after the war, the Soviets, the Americans, and the surviving Nazis each exploited this misconception to further their own ends. In doing so, they distorted and diminished the historical legacy of the group for over fifty years.

It took German reunification and a new generation of dedicated scholars to begin to set the record straight. I have relied heavily on a remarkable institution in Berlin, the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial) and its scrupulously assembled archives and exhibits on the German resistance. I also benefited from the work of Stefan Roloff, a brilliant artist and the son of a member of the group, who assembled a remarkable documentary and book about his father's experiences.

Wherever possible, I have let my characters speak for themselves, through their writings and memoirs. The circle was made up of intellectuals and wordsmiths, and their voices render a unique sense of their time. Early on, I decided to frame the story through Greta Lorke Kuck-hoff; first, because she was the connecting link between so many of the other participants, and second, because she was one of the few who lived to tell the story. I had to make a certain leap in citing her memoirs. The book was published in East Germany, and even though she had occupied a prominent public position, she fought a losing battle with the Communist Party over the right to tell her own story as she saw it.

I have included direct quotes from her book, but have tried to mediate between the passages in her voice and the rhetoric that was inserted by the state publishing house to meet the party's requirements.
^*
(Every direct quote in this book is taken from the memoirs and correspondence of, and in a few cases my interviews with, those present.)

From all available evidence, Greta was an intelligent and decent woman, a devoted wife and mother, and a serious scholar. But she was no secret agent, and it is ironic that her group was painted as “Soviet spies.” No collection of individuals has ever been further from the popular image of James Bond. Greta was anything but deft, devious, or glamorous. Instead, she was awkward, ignorant of tradecraft, and a skeptical idealist. But for me, her ordinary quality was part of her appeal. Here was a working mother who tried to defeat fascism when she wasn't doing the dishes. Greta often expressed the belief that if enough ordinary people stand up to an abusive government, decency will prevail.

Later in life, Greta bitterly noted that not enough people stood up to Nazi Germany. But our common history must recognize the courage and the sacrifice of those who did. The story told in these pages chronicles many failures and frustrations, but it should be read in the broader context of the many Germans who argued that true patriotism required them to oppose their own government.

One cannot argue that Greta Kuckhoff, Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, or any other individual resister changed the course of history. But taken together, the actions of Germany's anti-Nazis are impressive. The head of German military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, helped to deprive the Nazis of the strategic foothold of Gibraltar, clearing the way for the North Africa campaign. His aide, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster, offered ongoing military intelligence to the Western European democracies. German antifascists were active outside the country. In Switzerland, Rudolf Roessler passed German military intelligence to the Swiss, the French, and the Soviets, and Fritz Kolbe delivered state secrets to the Americans. The OSS's “Hammer” team of German exiles bravely parachuted into Berlin to guide Allied air strikes in the final days of the war.

Uncounted numbers of other Germans inside the country stood up to the regime out of conviction, with quiet acts of humanity toward its victims, and sabotage of its goals. Many of these individuals were working for the German government at the same time they were helping its enemies, courting accusations of treason as well as death.

A few years after my first visit to Berlin, I was able to visit the Reichstag
with my family. The glass dome was worth the wait. As a living symbol of transparency in government, it floods the parliament below with rivers of light. Inside the dome there is a spiraling installation, complementing the exhibit in the Holocaust Museum, both telling the story of how German democracy was lost and regained at a terrible price.