Red Orchestra (42 page)

Harro Schulze-Boysen used the rest of the summer to prospect for
new allies. One important contact was Arvid Harnack's friend Egmont Zechlin, a prominent history professor and Bismarck scholar. In the thirties Zechlin had often debated Harnack's notion that a Soviet-style planned economy could be an answer to the global depression. But these differences did not alter their mutual respect, and the two men grew closer over the war years. By mid-1942 they found common ground. Zechlin, who was maimed in the trenches of World War I, wrote:

They agreed that Germany could only be saved by people who were willing to treat the Nazis not as unsavory compatriots, but as foreign enemies. With Zechlin's help, Harro and Arvid met with Albrecht Haus -hofer, a professor and politician who had once been popular with the Nazis. Haushofer had experienced a change of heart and had joined the military conspiracy against Hitler that would come to be known as the 20th of July movement.
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Zechlin later stated that he was hoping to create “a functional coalition,” and that Haushofer “was in favor of backing the Harnack group with their focus on the East, in order to facilitate negotiations with the British.” Zechlin had the impression that Harnack and Haushofer “understood each other very well.”
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Harro Schulze-Boysen and other members of the group made frequent attempts to communicate with the armies of foreign workers who had been shipped into Berlin. They sometimes went drinking at the Bärenschenke bar on Friedrichstrasse, looking for foreign recruits. They tried to persuade skeptical French laborers to join “legions” that would rise up against the regime when the time was ripe. Germany's population of forced laborers would eventually number over twelve million, and there had been sporadic outbreaks of rebellion, especially among Poles and Ukrainians.
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Harro's drinking companions were dubious about his plans.

But Harro's energy was usually contagious. Somehow his wife got a
second wind, and she decided to reenter the fray. In July 1942 she summoned a young man named Alexander Spoerl to her office at the Kultur-film center. Spoerl, a tousle-haired youth of twenty-three, was puzzled. He had received an excellent offer as a script editor for Kulturfilm, completely out of the blue. His father was a well-known writer, but his own background was in mechanical engineering. Spoerl explained all this to the dazzling, slightly older woman: he had no experience as a script editor, and the mission of the Kulturfilm center was actually a mystery to him.

Libertas listened calmly, then suddenly asked him, “Are you still operating your Antiwelle?” Spoerl had no idea why he felt he could trust this stranger, but he answered in the affirmative. The Antiwelle, or “anti -wave,” was an anti-Nazi organization run out of the film industry. This was another project that bore the fingerprints of producer Herbert En-gelsing. The Antiwelle's name had been coined by Tobis cameraman Heinz Landsmann, who had been working with Herbert Engelsing on the feature films
Philharmonik
and
Die Grosse Schatten
over 1942, and Engelsing was the one who told Libertas about Spoerl and his Antiwelle involvement, arranging for him to be transferred to her office.

Libertas quickly outlined her plans for their collaboration. It was to be both artistic and political in nature. Libertas wanted to try to expand the influence of the Kulturfilm center to make an impact on the entire production of documentaries in Germany. At this point Spoerl decided that Libertas was simply an idealist, and he had no idea that she was part of a group. But he was excited at the prospect of getting involved in a larger effort than the Antiwelle. He found Libertas “enchanting”—“the instinct of a woman, with a woman's naiveté and ardor, and a very strikingly male intellect.” The two of them began an enthusiastic collaboration, experimenting with filmmaking with the goal of making “great, innovative films together once the Nazi period was over.”

Gradually Spoerl realized that Libertas belonged to a larger organization. She introduced him to Harro and other friends, usually out at the lake or at afternoon teas at the Schulze-Boysen apartment. In July 1942, Spoerl received his first assignment for the resistance. Leica films were coming in to the office from the eastern front, showing atrocities committed by the SS. As a well-trained amateur photographer, Spoerl was
asked to develop and enlarge the images. Libertas took the initiative of equipping a darkroom at the center and procuring a photocopying machine, where they could duplicate newspaper clippings, reports, and flyers. Libertas told Spoerl how she had brought Adam Kuckhoff into the center, and that he was traveling back and forth to Poznań on a regular basis.
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Spoerl took the stills of SS atrocities home to his apartment at night and enlarged them for the archives.

The campaign on the eastern front had bogged down, offering the Berlin circle moments of hope and euphoria. It was clear that the tide had turned; the only question was how long it would take for the regime to go down. Spoerl felt in retrospect that the group became too outspoken in public, preparing for an open struggle far too soon. Members of the circle weren't even sure how to define an “open struggle,” and Harro Schulze-Boysen wasn't able to explain it to them. They supposed that the eastern front would collapse and take the regime down with it. Some members of the group planned to grab weapons that they had stockpiled in Teupitz, a tiny town twenty-five miles south of Berlin where the Schulze-Boysens had bought a plot of land with some of Libertas's inheritance.
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The arms would be used to occupy post offices and town halls. Looking back, Spoerl judged their plans to be honorable but naïve.

“If I speak so critically of our hopes, I don't want it to sound in any way as if I'm disparaging what we did,” Spoerl wrote later.

As the group continued to try to enlighten the German public, it pursued more direct action as well. John Sieg, working for the state railway, served as the linchpin for opposition groups in German factories and plants. Later Kurt Hess, a member of his group, recounted their attempts to make mischief: “War munitions trains and army transports were misdirected,
or [Sieg] caused them to be held up for hours, without anyone knowing who was directly responsible.”
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Sieg's contacts included defense workers in the Hasse & Wrede engine plant, the AEG electric company, and the Alkett armaments manufacturer. Their efforts included work slow downs, assistance to forced laborers, and the distribution of illegal literature.

But the Soviets were still focusing on their critical need for radio communications. Over the summer of 1942 the Germans mounted a second offensive across southern Russia, aiming for the oil fields of the Caucasus, just as Schulze-Boysen had indicated. The Soviets wanted more such intelligence, and decided to take drastic measures. They recruited two German Communists in the Soviet Union to return to Germany, one a veteran of the International Brigade in Spain, the other a German prisoner of war. In early August 1942 the Soviets dropped the two into East Prussia by parachute, bearing a new radio.
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The two made their way to Berlin, pretending to be German soldiers on leave. They were supposed to stay in a country house Mildred Harnack had prepared for them, but they ended up staying at the Schumachers' instead.
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The parachutists sent a radio message to Moscow that they had met with Schumacher and made contact with Harro. “The anti-Fascist group has grown considerably and is actively working,” they reported. “Their radio apparatus is functioning but for some reason cannot make contact.”
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The Soviets were set on directing the groups' energies back into intelligence. They saw the antifascist activities as counterproductive, serving only to endanger their intelligence work. But the flyers, the stickers, and the relief efforts persisted, no matter how much the Soviets discouraged them.

From the perspective of the regime, every activity undertaken by the group, from assembling atrocity archives to misdirecting Reichsbahn trains, was enough to warrant a death sentence, or at the very least consignment to a concentration camp. But ironically, the group was not compromised by Harro Schulze-Boysen's audacious street actions, John Sieg's defiant publications, or Greta Kuckhoff's unceasing concern for her Jewish friends. When the Berlin circle was finally apprehended, it was through the careless incompetence of the Moscow “professionals.”

O
NE DAY IN EARLY SEPTEMBER 1942, LIBERTAS SCHULZE-BOYSEN'S
young assistant, Alexander Spoerl, realized that Adam Kuckhoff had gone missing. He was still on assignment to produce the documentary on Poznań, working out of the branch office in Prague. But he had suddenly stopped communicating with the home office, and Libertas's telegrams to him went unanswered. The company production chief showed up from Prague, tense and tight-lipped. Then Libertas called Spoerl to her office and started agonizing about a missing suitcase. Spoerl had no idea what was in the suitcase, but it was obviously something dangerous. “For the first time since I'd met her,” he wrote later, “Libertas lost control.”

Libertas had planned to visit her sister Ottora in Sweden, where she lived grandly as the wife of a Swedish count. Göring had promised to help her get permission to travel, but at the last minute she learned that her permit had been canceled.

Libertas still hadn't gotten over the puzzling telephone conversation with Harro's secretary a few days earlier. Harro had been summoned urgently from his office near Potsdam to report to his senior officer, the secretary said, something about a courier mission to the front. He ran out of the office and didn't come back. But he had left behind his hat, his gloves, and his insignia.

The danger signals mounted. The woman who delivered Libertas's mail at her apartment stopped her on the staircase and told her that her letters were being monitored by the Gestapo. Libertas called the Engelsings
and told them that she believed that Harro had been arrested, and that she was being shadowed. They asked her to come stay with them, but Libertas rejected the idea. Herbert Engelsing tried to contact Adam Kuckhoff, but there was no answer. Their dentist friend, Helmut Him-pel, was missing, too.
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Libertas and Alexander tore apart their darkrooms at the Kulturfilm center and Alexander's home, destroying the archives, emptying waste-baskets, and burning rolls of film that Alexander had hidden in an old radio set. Then they set about fabricating evidence of their “innocence,” copying personal snapshots and writing fake letters to each other about their undying loyalty to Nazi ideals. These were placed strategically around the room.

Libertas had already ransacked her apartment's hiding places for Harro's political papers—flyers, notes, drafts of essays—and stuffed them into a suitcase. She parked the suitcase at the home of an actress friend for a few days, but the actress lost her nerve and called a director friend. She asked him to send the suitcase on to his friend Günther Weisenborn.
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Weisenborn's first hint of disaster arrived with a confused call from the director. A young soldier had left behind a suitcase, he said. It contained strange writings and he was a little concerned about it. Weisenborn agreed to take a look. When Weisenborn opened the suitcase, he immediately recognized Harro's handwriting and realized that the group had been compromised. Weisenborn went to a phone booth and tried to call Schulze-Boysen's office at the Luftwaffe. He was not there, and they couldn't say when he'd be back. Weisenborn hung up the phone, and joined in sounding the alarm. He had last seen Harro the day before his disappearance, when thirty members of the circle had converged on Wannsee for a day of sailing. It had seemed a Sunday like any other, with music, a cookout, and long talks about the future.

Link by link, the members of the circle cleared their homes of incriminating evidence. One Soviet radio was bundled into a pram and shoved into the River Spree. John Graudenz put another radio set in a large suitcase, locked it, and bound it with wire. He intended to leave it with Helmut Himpel, but Himpel knew that if Harro was under arrest, he
wouldn't be far behind. Himpel approached his neighbor, pianist Helmut Roloff, who agreed to hide the suitcase in his apartment.
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