Red Orchestra (22 page)

Film producers immediately began inquiring after movie rights, but after the Nazis' enthusiastic reception, Kuckhoff was wary. He had witnessed Goebbels's strange gift for fabricating Nazi propaganda out of anti-Nazi material. (The most notorious example was currently in production: the film version of the 1925 novel
Jud Süss,
an attack on anti-Semitism by the Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger, which had been transformed into an attack on Germany's Jews.) Adam found it all too easy to imagine his novel turned on its head and rendered into a Nazi propaganda film to justify war against the French.

But Engelsing and Kuckhoff had other interests in common. Both men were natives of the city of Aachen on the Belgian border, and Engelsing responded warmly to the themes and conflicts expressed in Kuckhoff's work. Engelsing had entered the film business a few years
earlier as a lawyer for Tobis Film.
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After the Nazis purged Tobis, Engelsing was offered a newly available position with the title of
Herstellungs-gruppenleiter
(director of production groups). Engelsing retained his right to practice law by joining the firm of Carl Langbehn, a prominent attorney
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Herbert Engelsing lived on the very knife-edge that ran between accommodating the regime and undermining it. Engelsing's law partner and close friend, Carl Langbehn, socialized in the highest Nazi circles, but he was secretly involved in conservative anti-Hitler conspiracies.
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Engelsing himself maintained a high profile in the film business and a low profile in the resistance, but he played the role of consummate producer in both fields: making introductions, brokering deals, securing locations; then disappearing once the action was under way.

Tobis Film was a small company compared to the giant UFA, but it still released over a hundred films between 1937 and 1945.
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Its stars included some of the greatest names in Germany, including the legendary Emil Jannings, Gustaf Gründgens, Heinrich George, and the German-Russian actress Olga Tschechowa, niece of Anton Chekhov himself.

Although Tobis Film functioned under Nazi control, it tended to produce the light comedies and romances that Goebbels used to sedate the public, instead of dealing overtly with politics. Even entertainment could have political overtones. The films of Austrian writer, actor, and director Willi Forst sounded Austrian nationalist themes all the more emphatically after his country was digested by the Reich. Other films were set in Ireland or India with story lines that disparaged the British. But most political references required reading between the lines; cultural expressions of protest that could be disavowed if necessary, just as Adam Kuckhoff and his fellow novelists critiqued the regime through deniable allegory.

Herbert Engelsing also expressed his antagonism to the Nazis obliquely. His position offered him unusual access to the highest reaches of power. The Nazi hierarchy took a keen and often competitive interest in the performing arts. Propaganda Minister Goebbels fancied himself a writer-producer and oversaw big projects, while Field Marshal Göring was more of a state patron dispensing favors. Goebbels was also a notorious enthusiast of the casting couch, while Göring took pride in his buxom wife, Emmy, best known as a stage actress who had appeared in
several movie roles. The couple enjoyed hobnobbing with the film community.

In fact, Herbert and Ingeborg Engelsing owed their marriage to Field Marshal Göring and his wife. Ingeborg, a petite gamine with tousled hair and a charming grin, came from a distinguished family of lawyers and scholars. She was also a
Mischling
(half-Jew). When the couple got engaged in 1936, Ingeborg, just twenty years old, was instructed to report for her
Rassenmerkmale
(race characteristics) assessment, to be “examined, weighed, and medically measured.”

“I can only remember that my upper lip was judged to be too short,” she wrote later. Her photographer found a special lamp that lightened her hair and helped portray her as “tall, slim and blond.”
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Nonetheless, the permission to marry failed to come through. The couple began to look for every possible string to pull.

Fortunately, Engelsing found an advocate in one of Tobis's leading ladies, a dark-eyed soubrette named Käthe Dorsch. Hermann Göring had been smitten with her as a young (and slender) World War I flyer. Dorsch wed another, but Göring sustained his affection for her through his two subsequent marriages. The actress took advantage of his attachment to help a long list of acquaintances, many of them Jews, who were being hunted by the Gestapo. (Göring was fond of saying, “I'll decide who's a Jew and who's not.”)
¹⁰
Now Käthe Dorsch took up the cause of the Engelsings. Finally, in September 1937 came the welcome news: Göring had placed the Engelsing request on Hitler's cake plate one day and emerged with his permission for the match.
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Göring's wife Emmy sometimes joined Käthe Dorsch's efforts, pleading special cases of Jews and leftists, winning a concentration camp release here, an exit permit there.
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German Jews began to pass the word that the actress disapproved of their persecution, and was at heart a “good soul.”
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Emmy Göring played her cards carefully. Even if she intervened, it was in everyone's interest that she never appeared to do so.

Herbert Engelsing was one of the producers who approached Kuck-hoff about filming his novel. He was surprised to find an author who resisted making a film version of his work. Engelsing's wife later described Kuckhoff's principles: “His political convictions meant more to him than prestige and profits,” she observed. “So he made do with writing dialogue
for apolitical films. My husband worked off and on with this talented writer, without having any idea that both Kuckhoffs were committed Marxists. He only knew that they were no Nazis, and that meant that the Schulze-Boysens [the other guests] would please them.”

At that point, Greta Kuckhoff was in need of a pleasing experience. The evening, which would lead to such momentous events in their lives, began in disaster. Greta had felt nervous about the dinner from the start, and had taken special pains with her appearance. She was still a working-class girl from the factory town across the river, going to dine with the Grunewald elite. But her husband insisted on saving money by setting out for the Engelsings' elegant suburb on foot. Their path ended suddenly at a garbage dump, leaving them no choice but to climb over it, at which point they were surrounded by a pack of barking dogs. They finally gave up and took a taxi. “A fine economy measure,” Greta fumed.

Ingeborg Engelsing recalled their entrance with amusement: “So they arrived, not only late, but quite tattered. Their droll descriptions of the various obstacles made us all laugh.”
¹⁴
Greta was less amused, grumbling, “They'd already started eating without us.

“Adam told them the story of our odyssey partly at my expense. It was looking like one of those evenings that was going to pass without consequence.” But the after-dinner conversation took a different turn. In Greta's words, it was “one that wouldn't be forgotten.”
¹⁵

The Engelsings' other guests, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, specialized in the unexpected. This was their first actual meeting, but the Kuckhoffs may have heard of Harro from Arvid Harnack, who had met him in 1935. At that point Arvid had not pursued the connection, describing it as “too dangerous.”

Harro Schulze-Boysen was just entering his thirties, and cut a striking figure as a Luftwaffe lieutenant with his pale coloring and chiseled features (a friend once said he had “a head like a greyhound”). His extraordinary facility with languages led him to a position in the intelligence division of Göring's Air Ministry, analyzing foreign press reports in French, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Russian. In a society that was glutted with propaganda and starved for information, Harro's access to foreign news placed him among a narrow elite.

Like the Kuckhoffs and the Engelsings, Harro Schulze-Boysen was a
committed antifascist, and his animosity was even more visceral. He had been born to privilege, the scion of a distinguished Prussian military family. His great-uncle, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, had prodded the kaiser into building up the German fleet to rival the British, helping to create the conditions that led to World War I. Harro's education included a long stay with a British family in Liverpool and tramps through the Scottish Highlands, where he perfected his English and expanded his international perspective.

Harro inherited the daring of a military man without the attendant discipline. As a teenager he was briefly imprisoned by the French for agitating against their occupation of the Ruhr. He then entered a quixotic phase that led him to various youth groups, ranging from left-wing Nazis to a congress of “revolutionary European youth.” He enrolled in the university in Berlin, but soon dropped out of classes to spend more time on politics. (His family had long accepted that their boy was less likely to study for grades than to serve as a “spirited leader for his older schoolmates.”)
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In 1931, Harro took part in a decisive political encounter in the great hall of the university. Someone had cut off the swastika ribbons from the wreaths on the student memorial, and the Nazi students were furious. The two political camps staked out their positions, one side of the hall held by Socialists, Communists, and a few centrists; the other side by the Nazis and their brownshirt supporters, who screamed insults against “Jews” and the administration. The rector, “a helpless old man,” stood wringing his hands and pleading ineffectually for order. Harro Schulze-Boysen, still enrolled as a student of political science, boldly intervened. “Harro appeared with a good-natured expression, hands in pockets, and strode back and forth between the enraged parties,” a friend recalled. He approached “the decent guys among the misguided Nazi fanatics, trying to bring them over to the Left to talk.”
¹⁷

The polarization made it impossible to focus on school. In 1932, at the age of twenty-four, Harro joined the staff of a magazine called
Gegner (Opponent)
with a circulation of about three thousand. The magazine corresponded to a movement which, like Harro himself, was marked by youthful exuberance and haphazard leftist politics. Its closest ties were
with a French trade union movement supported by the visionary architect Le Corbusier.
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Harro laid out his position in a March 5, 1932, editorial. His belief system was actually an anti-ideology, a condemnation of the rash of doctrinaire movements surrounding him. It was also anathema to the strict, intolerant dogmas of the KPD:

Harro ran his magazine on energy and sheer charisma. His political meetings, held in Berlin cafes, overflowed with spirited debate going in all directions. But when the Nazis seized power in March 1933, they took him seriously. Harro was detained in the initial March arrests and spent the night in jail. He returned to work the next day not too much the worse for wear.

A month later storm troopers broke into the
Gegner
offices not far from the university, where the editors were discussing plans for an antifascist protest march.
¹⁹
The Nazis seized the staff, including Schulze-Boysen and his coeditor Henry Erlanger. The two were dragged off to a “wild camp” in a dank cellar, stripped, and forced to run a gauntlet as they were flogged with lead-weighted whips, a sadistic reference to an old Prussian military tradition. Erlanger, who had the added liability of being half-Jewish, was beaten to death. Schulze-Boysen made it through
the ordeal three times, then defiantly chose to run a fourth. The Nazis were impressed. One of them remarked, “Man, you really belong with us.” They left a calling card of swastikas carved into his thigh.
²⁰

Schulze-Boysen's mother was a Berlin socialite married to a high-ranking naval officer. She worked every possible connection to obtain her son's release, and persuaded family friend Magnus von Levetzow (an admiral who had become chief of police) to send a squad to raid the cellar. Harro was rescued, but Levetzow was soon fired. Some claimed it was for helping Harro, but others said it was because he declined to persecute Jews.
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After the three days of torture Harro was finally delivered to his mother, bound and flanked by two SS men, “like some terrible criminal.” Frau Schulze-Boysen found her son looking “pale as a corpse, with deep black shadows under his eyes, hair chopped off with a garden shears, no buttons on his suit.”
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One of Harro's kidneys was so badly injured that he had to be hospitalized. Harro was under orders to remain silent about Erlanger, but he could not forgive the storm troopers for his friend's death. His mother returned to the police to report Erlanger's murder, and Harro was rearrested and taken to police headquarters. His mother succeeded in freeing him once again.
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A friend who saw him shortly after his second arrest didn't recognize him. Part of an ear was missing and he was still bleeding from wounds on his face.

By this point even Harro could see the futility of open defiance. He told a friend, “I have put my revenge on ice.”
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