Red Orchestra (24 page)

Libertas Schulze-Boysen, an aspiring writer herself, was dazzled by Weisenborn's talent and success. Weisenborn was even more dazzled by her. Later he wrote a rhapsodic description of their days at the lake. “Almost alone on the beach, we swam naked. At that time the weather
wasn't hot yet. We all enjoyed it, especially Libs and Marta [Wolter], our two beauties. They always competed to see who could go home after three or four days with the best tan. They spent long hours off by themselves, not so interested in the discussions, baring their breasts to the sun.”
⁴⁴

Libertas and Weisenborn soon became lovers and collaborators, with Harro's tacit permission. In 1938 he wrote proudly to his parents that Libertas had earned some money with a film treatment, “though the script still has to be written.” Libertas and Weisenborn began work on a new play, based on the life of Robert Koch, the German scientist who developed a vaccine for tuberculosis.
⁴⁵
They called their drama
Die guten feinde (The Good Enemy).

Weisenborn's career gave him entrée into the country's highest cultural circles, which he observed with a dramatist's eye. In 1939 he attended the Day of German Art in Munich, where he was seated near Hitler. Weisenborn recorded the dictator as “an ugly malicious pasha … in a smoking jacket, with that modest brutality that our people so loved in him.”
⁴⁶

Before Weisenborn could join Harro's resistance activities, he had to pass a screening process. Members of the group always started out gingerly, planting conversations with a new prospect to discern his true leanings. After a few weeks' scrutiny, Weisenborn was summoned to confer with Harro and two co-conspirators. Weisenborn later described the meeting and its participants. Walter Küchenmeister, Elfriede Paul's lover, was a former Communist journalist, battered by his recent sojourn in the Sonnenburg concentration camp. Weisenborn saw him as “a small, dark-haired man with glasses and a young, intelligent worker's countenance.” Sculptor Kurt Schumacher had “a bright young artist's face with short blond hair and a certain fanaticism in his eyes.”
⁴⁷
Harro looked on intently, Weisenborn wrote, “as though I were his son taking a school exam.”

Schumacher put the matter squarely on the table. “If you're against something, don't you have to actually
do
something to oppose it?” Weisenborn agreed, though with a certain fatalism. He knew that their prospects for success were slight, and the risks were unthinkable.
Nonetheless, the four young men sealed their trust over the tea table and shook hands. By the time they left, they were calling each other by the familiar “
du
” instead of the formal “
Sie
.”

Günther Weisenborn introduced friends from the theater world to the group, including actress Marta Wolter, recently emerged from the concentration camp. Marta was awaiting her fiancé Walter Husemann's release from Buchenwald in September 1938. He would become another liaison between the Schulze-Boysen circle and John Sieg's Communists in Neukölln.

The camp survivors' eagerness to rejoin the resistance was both admirable and worrisome. Not every victim was a saint. One heard uplifting reports from the camps of prisoners' self-sacrifice and solidarity, but there were also accounts of inmates who militated against each other— Stalinists against Trotskyites, politicals against Jews. Former concentration camp inmates posed special problems for the resistance groups. Many political prisoners were released on the condition that they seek out their old networks and inform on them. It was only reasonable for newly freed prisoners to be shunned as probable stool pigeons by their old contacts.

These crises of confidence made Schulze-Boysen's circle all the more unusual. In Harro's “Party of Life,” old friends were welcome, especially if they had been persecuted. Members were judged as individuals, not by political affiliation. Harro was determined to live life as he pleased, socializing and debating with anyone he liked. But some of Harro's political contacts whispered that his circle had grown too quickly, with a membership that had spun dangerously out of control.

A
s
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR APPROACHED ITS CLIMAX, HARRO AND
his friends grew increasingly incensed by the Nazis' support for the Spanish fascists.

Spain was everyone's laboratory. Harro's Air Ministry executed the Nazis' experiments with aerial bombardments of civilian populations, devastating the Basque village of Guernica in April 1937. Stalin used Spain as a testing ground for his blood purges, ravaging the ranks of Spanish Republicans, their foreign supporters, and Soviet officials in the field. Harro had inside knowledge of German actions, but if he was exposed to accounts of war crimes on the Loyalist front, he may well have dismissed them as Nazi propaganda.

In late 1937, Harro was ordered to report to the Gestapo. The summons was a result of a contact with an old friend from the
Gegner
days, a photographer named Werner Dissel. Dissel had come to Harro unbidden, with an important piece of military intelligence: two Panzer tank regiments had been dispatched to the nearby town of Neuruppin, en route to Spain. That fall Dissel was arrested for “organized activities and communist demoralization” against the army, and his interrogators linked him to Schulze-Boysen. Harro arrived at Gestapo headquarters without knowing how much Dissel had already revealed.

Dissel managed to hand Harro a pack of cigarettes that contained a hidden message: “
Extra Fontana Terra Incognita
.” Harro deciphered the code as: “
Unknown territory
[to the Gestapo that I told you about the two
Panzer regiments being deployed to Spain, currently]
outside
[the town of Neuruppin (the birthplace of popular German writer Theodor)]
Fontane.
This permitted Harro to fashion a cover story that allowed him to escape detection.
¹

Harro's social life presented an additional peril. One of his salon's aristocratic guests was a Hapsburg count named Karl von Meran, who doubled as a Nazi informer. Meran told the Nazis that Harro was a “skillfully disguised Communist.” Harro's colleagues at the Air Ministry came to his defense, and it is unclear how far the investigation proceeded. But Harro and Libertas brought their living room soirees to an abrupt halt by the end of 1937.
²

Nevertheless, Harro stepped up his activities against his employers. In February 1938 he learned of plans to infiltrate German agents into Spain for a sabotage operation in Barcelona. Anxious to warn the Republicans, he wrote a report that included secret details on the men and munitions that the Luftwaffe was transporting to Spain.
³
Libertas's cousin Gisella von Pöllnitz was commissioned to drop the document into the mailbox of the Soviet trade representative in Berlin. Harro hoped he would forward it to the Soviet embassy in Paris, to pass along to the Spanish Republicans. But a Gestapo agent observed the young woman making the drop, and she was arrested at her workplace in the United Press office in Berlin. The Schulze-Boysen apartment was searched, and the Air Ministry was once again informed that they had a security risk on their hands.

Harro and his closest collaborators panicked. They made plans to flee to Cologne, and from there on to Amsterdam, where Libertas's brother worked in the United Press office.

Fortunately, Gisella stonewalled her interrogators, and the house search failed to produce incriminating evidence. Furthermore, the Air Ministry resented the Gestapo meddling. Luftwaffe officers frostily informed the secret police that they could handle their own internal affairs. Harro got off with a warning, and his next letter home was as breezy and affectionate as ever, he was careful not to worry his parents.
⁴
But he shared his broader concerns with them, describing the tensions among the Nazi hierarchy and speculating on how the coming conflict could ripple throughout Europe and the Far East.

When German troops marched into Austria in March 1938, Harro's prediction came a step closer. The disparity between Nazi propaganda and the information he possessed created an unbearable tension. Harro and Libertas joined Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher in a meeting with Dr. Elfriede Paul to discuss what to do. They could not tolerate the idea that the Nazis could bury all public objections to their war crimes and aggression, and decided to produce a flyer denouncing the war in Spain. Harro and Paul's partner Walter Küchenmeister, who had worked on several Communist newspapers in the 1920s, went to work drafting the text. The authors presented Harro's descriptions of the fascists' “animalistic behavior” in Spain, hoping they would stir the German public to opposition.
⁵

Soon Dr. Paul's waiting room was transformed into a clandestine print shop, where some fifty copies of the document were painstakingly reproduced by typewriter and carbon paper.
⁶
As always, distributing the flyers was the biggest problem, since the authorities kept a close watch on anyone buying multiple stamps and paper in bulk or sending mass mailings. Dr. Paul traveled around the city on the pretense of making house calls, mailing disguised flyers from remote locations.

Few glimpses of the day-to-day operations of the underground survived the war. One was offered by one of the few surviving participants, who wrote a memoir about his experiences in one small group within the network. Hans Sussmann had been a member of the Communist underground since 1933, and started out working on clandestine newspapers in the southeast district of Berlin. He also raised money for persecuted Communists and their families, and helped smuggle fugitives out of Germany.

Sussmann's memoirs illustrate how the lines blurred between political and religious interest groups. The first stop for his group's underground railroad was a nursing center run by the Sisters of St. Mary in Neukölln. There, a sympathetic Dr. Höllen had set up an operation to smuggle Jews out of the country. The fugitives were taken to Höllen's parents' home in the ancient city of Trier to the west, then smuggled over a border to Belgium, Switzerland, or France. Another way station was a monastery on the Bavarian-Swiss border. Sussmann recounted how Dr. Höllen's network also rescued two Communists from his circle.

Sussmann's resistance activity included writing articles for clandestine newspapers in his home. He made certain to blast loud music from the radio to cover the sound of his typewriter from the neighbors. His friends brought large packets of Persil (Germany's leading laundry powder), emptied the boxes, inserted the newspapers, then refilled the containers with detergent, carefully resealing the packages. Then they nonchalantly carried their soap packets in grocery bags to clandestine meetings.

By 1936, Sussmann's original group had broken up. One member was arrested, another went underground, and a third succumbed to a drinking problem. This was when a friend directed him to the heterodox Schulze-Boysen circle as a way to remain active.

For Sussmann, the psychological impact of resistance work was like a chronic illness. “If you're fighting an opponent that you hate from the bottom of your heart, you don't take it lightly,” he wrote. “It's as though you're possessed, and the urge to fulfill it is an indispensable obligation. One constantly lives in fear—in fear of death.”

Sussmann met Elfriede Paul, Walter Küchenmeister, and the Schumachers, though not under their real names. They asked him to resume his production of illegal flyers, which included messages from the KPD Central Committee, news of the outside world, and updates on the fates of Communist, Socialist, and other antifascist leaders. Sussmann and his wife, Else, distributed some of the flyers on evening walks, placing them in telephone booths, public toilets, subway stations, and movie houses. Others would go into Persil boxes to unknown destinations.

Sometimes unidentified strangers appeared at Sussmann's meetings with Dr. Paul and Küchenmeister, introduced only by a first name. Sussmann believed they were connected to a larger group, but he was given no further information. Paper supply was a constant headache. “The regime made it impossible to purchase such materials in bookshops, because you had to present your identity card with every large purchase.” Kurt Schumacher came to the rescue—as an artist he could get stencils and paper from wholesalers without attracting attention.
⁷

Harro Schulze-Boysen may have been one of the pseudonymous strangers at the meetings, and he was almost certainly involved with the
flyers. But as the breakup of Sussmann's first group showed, it was safer to keep contacts and activities compartmentalized.

The Schulze-Boysens resumed their social life on a much-reduced scale. When weather permitted, they migrated out of doors, to the patchwork of lakes west of the city or the sandy beaches of the Darss peninsula on the Baltic coast. There they hosted cookouts and sailboat rides for their regulars: the Engelsings, Marta Wolter Husemann, and Günther Weisenborn from the movie industry; the Schumachers, Elfriede Paul and her partner Walter Küchenmeister from Harro's student days. The group, accompanied by Libertas's ubiquitous accordion, greeted the furtive German spring with an outing at Pfingsten on Pentecost (a holiday just after Easter). Their snapshots show them huddled together in shorts and swimsuits, pale bodies exposed to the sun, their brave smiles showing strain about the eyes. It was a brief respite in a country hurtling toward war.