Red Orchestra (19 page)

Dodd had agreed to stay in Germany until March 1938, but suddenly Roosevelt informed him that he would be recalled at the end of 1937. The president was reacting to “pressure” (though Dodd was uncertain whether it originated with the Nazis or his enemies in Washington). The ambassador and his family sailed for the United States on the last day of 1937. Germany had been a heartbreaking assignment, and the last of his long career. (Within a few months Dodd's wife was struck down by a heart attack, and the ambassador himself died two years later.)
¹¹

American policy was in a muddle, and the nation's amateur diplomats were sending mixed messages to the world. Roosevelt understood that Europe was heading toward war, and knew that in a contest between Germany and Britain, he would favor the United Kingdom. But he muted his sentiments, knowing that he faced both clear-cut opposition and public apathy that could quickly turn into disapproval. For most Americans, Europe's problems still seemed very far away.

But Washington was not much better informed than the public. As of 1937, as the Nazis stepped up their persecution of the Jews and Hitler completed his plan to dismember Europe, the U.S. government's understanding of Germany was partial, contradictory, and badly out-of-date.

One senior American diplomat later wrote, “It must be confessed that our Intelligence organization in 1940 was primitive and inadequate. It was timid, parochial, and operating strictly in the tradition of the Spanish-American War.”
¹²

This dismal state of affairs had a simple explanation: there was, to put it bluntly, no functioning U.S. intelligence service. The Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, which would eventually evolve into the CIA) was still five years away from creation. The army and the navy had intelligence services, but the two branches did not collaborate. Their officers were cynically described as military attachés who would go out and count tanks when parades passed by
¹³

Embassy officials gathered data that pertained to their individual departments, especially in the all-important spheres of trade and economics. But no one collated or analyzed information that arrived from the various departments and countries before it was sent to the White House, which was itself chronically short-staffed and consumed with breaking domestic crises. In desperation, Roosevelt turned to a socialite friend, Vincent Astor. Astor had set up an amateur spy club with his friends at a town house on New York City's Upper East Side, and liked to send Roosevelt intelligence reports from his yacht as he circled the globe.
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Such antics drove the British intelligence professionals to distraction.

The Americans' disarray had important consequences for the antifascist circles in Berlin. Arvid Harnack now had a secure position at the heart of the Reich's Economics Ministry. As a trusted member of the Nazi Party he enjoyed access to important officials and documents. He had intentionally positioned himself to do whatever he could to undermine the Nazi regime. He considered himself a Marxist, but thanks to his experiences in Wisconsin, his wife's patriotism, and the couple's many friendships at the embassy, he also closely identified with the Americans and sought ways to share his intelligence with them. The problem was that the Americans had no one in place to make use of it.

Part of the Americans' complacence resulted from an acute lack of information. The German opposition saw Adolf Hitler's book
Mein Kampf,
published in two volumes over 1925 and 1926, as a chilling blueprint for Nazi policies to come. But non-German readers were left in the dark, and there was no initial interest in an English translation. When one was finally commissioned for the British and U.S. markets in 1933, the German government demanded the right to approve the text, and excised the most extreme anti-Semitic and militaristic passages. (One example
was the deletion of Hitler's opinion that Germany should have gassed “twelve to fifteen thousand Jews” during World War I.) Further-more, the English-language edition gave no indication where the deletions occurred.
¹⁵

Greta Lorke shared the desire to alert the West to Hitler's intentions, and the book offered her an unusual opportunity. In 1936 she moved to a new apartment, where a neighbor introduced her to another tenant, a picaresque Irishman named James Murphy. Greta learned that Murphy, said to be a defrocked priest, was a professional translator. (He had recently translated works by the eminent physicist Max Planck.) Murphy had been taken ill and needed an assistant on an upcoming proj ect. Greta's landlord vouched for her competence and industriousness.

When Greta met with Murphy, she learned that his illness was closely linked to the consumption of alcohol. Soon Murphy asked her to assist him on his next assignment: a complete translation of
Mein Kampf,
including the racist, militarist, and anti-Semitic passages. Greta found the work repellent but significant—she wanted the Western democracies to understand Hitler's menace. The “Murphy edition” of
Mein Kampf,
published in 1939, was one of the first complete translations to appear in English.
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Berlin had become an anxious and foreboding city, but personal lives continued to unfold. In 1937, Adam Kuckhoff and Greta Lorke decided to get married. There was a pressing reason: at the age of thirty-four, Greta was four months pregnant. Adam was still legally married to Gertrud, his first wife's sister, and he was not eager to ask for a divorce. He balked at the idea of getting an
Ariernackweis,
the proof of “Aryan purity” that was now required for marriage in Nazi Germany. Relatives, churches, and registries across the country had to be contacted for evidence of ancestry.

Furthermore, Adam worried over the prospect of a child. They lived in dangerous times, when friends were disappearing into prisons and concentration camps. “The child will need you for years,” he told Greta. “What if something happens to you?” But she insisted on having the baby. The couple agreed that marriage was important for the child's sake, and they assembled the required documents.
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Adam and Greta's August wedding party gathered their oldest and
closest friends, many of whom occupied sensitive positions. The best man was Greta's old friend Hans Hartenstein, whom she had known since her student days. Hartenstein had been wrestling with his own political problems. A longtime Social Democrat, he avoided joining the Nazi Party after the takeover, and retained his position in the Economics Ministry because of his indispensable specialization in currency policy.

Hartenstein's career at the Economics Ministry ended around the time of Greta's wedding, when he was recommended for a promotion that required Nazi Party membership. Hartenstein refused, and left the civil service for private industry. He quietly supported the Kuckhoffs' resistance activities, and remained Greta's loyal and trusted friend.
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The other witness at the wedding was another prominent Social Democrat, Adolf Grimme, the former Prussian minister of culture. Grimme, who had once moved in circles with Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, lost his position in the political shuffle that immediately preceded the Nazi takeover. He now filled his time by freelancing for publishers, studying languages, and writing a scholarly commentary on John the Baptist.
¹⁹
He also worked with Adam Kuckhoffs antifascist circle, drafting anti-Nazi flyers and serving as a link to the dissenting Confessing Lutherans. Sometimes Grimme brought Lutheran flyers for Arvid Harnack to analyze. Grimme's stolid Lutherans responded to different rhetoric than the leftist intellectuals. They objected to Hitler as “plebeian,” and chastised Göring for his greed and Goebbels for his “big mouth.”
²⁰

Hartenstein and Grimme maintained their august bearing. At the wedding ceremony, Greta wryly noted that the registrar was visibly impressed by the two men, who outranked him by countless rungs in the German civil service universe. The local official was still obliged to order them to attention and give the “Heil Hitler” salute, an instruction they pointedly declined to follow. This threw the petty bureaucrat into a lather of officiousness, discomfort, and awe. The gathered company found him so comical that they decided not to be irritated.

The city around them was suffused with suffering and fear, but Greta managed to enjoy her wedding anyway. It was a day, she recalled, “when the very air tasted like wine.”
²¹

H
ITLER WANTED A WAR, AND HIS OPPONENTS FOUND IT INCREASINGLY
difficult to see any way to avert it. They believed that no matter where the conflict began, it would necessarily lead to a confrontation with the Western democracies. But Arvid Harnack and his genteel relations found it astonishingly hard to engage the very nations that had the most to lose.

Harnack and his circle made a point of maintaining contact with the U.S. embassy, but its relevance was diminishing by the day. When Dodd was recalled in November 1937, he was replaced by Hugh Wilson, a career diplomat who immediately made it known that he would take a softer line toward Hitler. One of his first actions was to accept an invitation to the annual Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg, which Dodd had been boycotting. Dodd tersely commented that “Mr. Wilson … was very welcome to the Nazis.”
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More cordial gestures followed. In January 1938, Nazi SS officials Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich invited police from around the world to tour their new criminal police headquarters in Berlin. Edmund Patrick Coffey, head of the FBI's new crime laboratory, was one of the honored guests. The Nazi newspaper
Völkischer Beobachter
heralded the FBI official's visit with the headline “German Security Police as Model,” describing Coffey's “great pleasure” at the work of the German police forces.
²
German antifascists were appalled.

Many American businesses profited from a close relationship to the
regime. One of these was John Sieg's old employer, the Ford Motor Company, run by the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford. The company had opened its German branch in 1925, in time to profit from Hitler's massive roadworks. The Nazis' military mobilization represented a Ford windfall, and between 1934 and 1938, company revenues increased 400 percent. The Nazis were pleased to officially designate Ford a German company, making it eligible for government contracts. The German plants could not meet the increased demand. Prebuilt components were secretly imported from the United States to complete the 3,150 trucks needed for the incursion into Czechoslovakia planned for 1938. In July 1938 the Nazis awarded Henry Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest decoration a foreigner could receive. Ford's U.S. operations were still providing trucks to the German army as late as 1941.
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November 7, 1938, brought a major political development. A seventeen-year-old Polish Jewish student named Herschel Grynszpan, distraught over his parents' deportation from Germany to Poland, entered the Germany embassy in Paris and shot an official (who was unrelated to the deportation). The diplomat died two days later, and the Nazis used the incident as an excuse to unleash a wave of violence against Germany's Jews. The event came to be known as Kristallnacht.

The following week, U.S. secretary of state Cordell Hull recalled his ambassador in protest, leaving a chargé d'affairs to handle outstanding matters in Berlin. The Nazis retaliated by withdrawing the German ambassador to the United States. The two countries would not restore diplomatic relations until the end of the war. For the Harnacks and the Kuckhoffs, this meant the loss of an important American haven and potential advocate.

They had few other places to turn. The French government was enmeshed in complicated negotiations with both the Nazi regime and its own vexing Communist Party. The British seemed to offer a better option—at least they had the benefit of their professional Secret Intelligence Service, begun in 1909. Arvid's cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had served as the pastor for the German Lutheran church in London, worked tirelessly to cultivate allies in the United Kingdom. But the British also responded to the Nazi regime with ambivalence. Winston Churchill's 1935 book
Great Contemporaries
was published after two
years of Nazi rule. Germans had been wantonly beaten to death by thugs acting in the name of the regime. Leading figures from opposition parties had been held hostage, first in “wild camps,” then in permanent concentration camps. Jews had been progressively stripped of their rights, and the German legal system had been attacked and corrupted at every level. Yet Churchill still found the evidence inconclusive: