Red Orchestra (14 page)

Arvid pressed Greta for her working-class contacts even though she was uncertain of what she could offer. The key to their future work, Arvid replied, lay in expanding their circles of acquaintances, their
Bekanntenkreise.
He urged her to find a job that would reach into new communities. Arvid had connections to opposition circles that produced antifascist literature, and he shared their goal of warning German workers not to be seduced by the Nazi propaganda. Both Arvid Harnack and Adam Kuckhoff had early connections to the Soviets, but their origins are not entirely clear. Arvid's government work brought him into contact with officials in both the Soviet and the U.S. embassies, and as his antifascist convictions grew, he strengthened his foreign ties. Adam Kuckhoff had a broad range of political contacts through his former authors for
Die Tat,
among them KPD member John Sieg, but German Communists and Soviet intelligence agents did not necessarily overlap.

Whether or not Harnack and Kuckhoff attempted to contact Moscow directly at this point, Moscow was clearly trying to reach people like them. One indication came to light recently with the release of Soviet intelligence files.

On May 20, 1933, a Moscow official named Karl Radek sent a message to Boris Vinogradov, a Soviet intelligence agent and embassy official in Berlin. Radek, one of the founders of the German Communist Party, had settled in Moscow to work with the Communist International, and was recruited for intelligence functions.
⁷
Radek instructed Vinogradov to hold “discreet talks” with several individuals, including Oskar von Niedermayer, “Grabovski,” and “the people from ‘
Tat Kreuz.
' ” He urged Vinogradov to proceed “whether Faigt and Ku are in Berlin or not.”
⁸

With their KPD contacts scattered, the Soviets were struggling to assemble alternate sources of information. The Oskar von Niedermayer
mentioned by Radek was a German army intelligence officer who had overseen joint German-Soviet training exercises in the 1920s.
⁹
Far from being a Communist ideologue, he served the Nazi regime throughout the war. “Grabovski” was probably Adolf Grabowski, a prominent political science professor from Berlin and a member of Arvid's study tour of the Soviet Union. The “
Tat Kreuz
” was a mistranscription of
Tatkreis
(Tat Circle). This was the group of conservative intellectuals that formed around Adam Kuckhoff's former magazine
Die Tat.
(At least one author, Stephen Koch, believes that “Ku” signified Adam Kuckhoff.
¹⁰
)

There is no record of Vinogradov's response to Radek's instructions, but they would have been simple to implement. The Russian diplomat could have encountered many of the individuals listed on his usual rounds. Diplomats also encountered the Harnacks and Greta Lorke on the circuit, as well-connected members of Berlin's intellectual elite.

John Sieg's connections were of a different sort, and they demonstrated the risks and benefits of Communist Party membership. His KPD affiliation had led to his arrest and imprisonment, but it also offered him an avenue for activism on his release. Germany's Communists had a long history of secrecy and front organizations, and they had laid the foundations for underground activity long before their public organizations were erased.

A few weeks after John Sieg walked out of Plötzensee prison in June 1933, he and his wife, Sophie, moved into their new apartment in Neukölln, where Greta Lorke once tended her orphans. The neighborhood lay to the south of the city, in a district of sprawling cemeteries, forbidding tenements, and grimy corner shops. Behind the gray walls lay honeycombs of Communist cells. Living in Neukölln put Sieg at the center of the action.

For many anxious Germans like Harnack, Kuckhoff, and Sieg, the Communists represented the only functional opposition to fascism. But despite the KPD's emphasis on hierarchy and party discipline, the party was anything but orderly and united, thanks in large part to Stalin's obsessive machinations.

Stalin had reason to fear political compromise in Germany. The country's Social Democrats had enjoyed good relations with the Western democracies, calling on them in times of crisis for assistance. A
united front between Germany's Communists and the Social Democrats evoked Stalin's worst nightmare: a united West confronting the Soviet Union. The dictator found the idea of a divided Europe to be far more congenial. Stalin was aware that his approach would provoke the Nazis to crush the KPD, but he was unperturbed by the notion of thousands of German Communists undergoing torture, exile, and concentration camps. Stalin's cynical maneuvers were invisible on the ground. Many German Communists assumed that any criticism of Stalin was simply right-wing propaganda, and could not imagine Stalin delivering them into the hands of their fascist enemies.

The KPD's first concern was the Nazis. Immediately after the takeover, thousands of KPD members fell victim to Nazi violence. One of the first was presidential candidate Ernst Thälmann, who had come in third in the national elections only months earlier. Thälmann had belatedly called for a Social Democrat–KPD joint effort (after years of thwarting such a possibility), and was swept up in the first wave of March arrests. His trial was repeatedly postponed, then canceled, and he was eventually executed.
¹¹

The KPD had been a major force in German society, recording 300,000 members in 1932, and reaping nearly 6 million votes in the November elections. But the Weimar police's detailed files on the Communists made it absurdly easy for the Nazis to arrest them en masse. It was estimated that over 1933, 2,000 Communists were killed and 60,000 were made prisoner. Thousands left the party, and thousands more fled to Paris, Moscow, and Prague. By the end of the year, only 60,000 to 150,000 KPD stalwarts remained in Germany, uncertain of their course and bereft of leadership.
¹²

When John Sieg was released from his three months of torture and imprisonment, all that remained of the KPD in Germany was a ragged network of cells. These small groupings functioned in factories, trade unions, or other discreet communities over a matter of years. John Sieg's new neighborhood of Neukölln was a KPD enclave, but like most working-class neighborhoods, it also hosted notorious storm trooper clubs that doubled as commissaries and torture centers. One of them, Sturm 21 at 35 Richardstrasse, operated just a few blocks east of the Siegs' Jonasstrasse apartment.
¹³

As soon as he arrived, Sieg contacted Kurt Heims, the former labor correspondent for the
Rote Fahne.
Heims belonged to the southern Neukölln district organization of the KPD, and his home on 91 Berliner Strasse became a meeting place for regrouping party members. Sieg was instantly welcomed back into the circle, which included Otto Dietrich; Werner Mendelsohn, a Jewish Communist; and Herbert Grasse, a twenty-three-year-old printer.

Sieg, the displaced journalist, took a special interest in the group's principal project, an illegal newspaper called the
Neuköllner Sturmfahne
(Neukölln Storm Flag). Grasse printed the paper secretly in Otto Dietrich's home in an unassuming building a short walk from Sieg's apartment.
¹⁴
“Newspaper” was something of an exaggeration; the
Sturmfahne
involved a few crude mimeographed pages featuring clumsy illustrations and hand-lettered text. The “news” consisted of denunciations of Nazi officials and urgent KPD concerns, such as the ongoing imprisonment of Ernst Thälmann, information that was censored from the state-controlled press. It was a challenge for the group to distribute the copies to moribund Communist cells; anyone caught producing, disseminating, or even in possession of such literature was severely punished.

Sieg was glad to find people who were taking action, in contrast to the millions of Germans who succumbed to Nazi propaganda or sank into passivity. As the Nazis intimidated and took over the country's mainstream news organizations, the underground press served notice that Nazi control was not absolute.

Sieg needed more than an outlet for activism—he was also broke. Through the Neukölln crowd, John Sieg met Karl Hellborn, a trade unionist who worked for the Reichsbahn, the state railway. The railway workers' union had been subjected to
Gleichschaltung
by the Nazis, but the old union networks survived in secret. Hellborn promised to try to get Sieg a job through his connections.
¹⁵
In the meantime, Sieg had to settle for odd jobs and construction work, as he once did in Chicago and Detroit.

Sieg and his friends found that even mundane political transactions were painfully difficult. It was no longer possible to exchange information in accustomed ways. Meeting halls, party newspapers, and even cabarets were closed down or converted to fascist use. The neighborhoods
Neukölln, “Red Wedding,” and Wilmersdorf continued to brew opposition activity, but they were also rife with informers. The Gestapo lacked vast numbers of agents, but it received ample assistance from ordinary Germans who were all too eager to spy on their neighbors.

The antifascist opposition had few resources to counter the regime's propaganda machine, which now turned to the mass production of hatred. The Nazis used every means at their disposal to blame the country's problems, past and present, on “Bolsheviks” and “Jews,” suggesting the two were synonymous. Ubiquitous caricatures showed Jews as hooknosed businessmen clutching their moneybags or as glowering, lurking
Ostjuden
in long black robes. Leftists were bespectacled, effete intellectuals who trafficked in the politics of “complexity,” instead of subscribing to Hitler's simplistic gospel of national unity.
¹⁶
The Bolshevik was portrayed as a swarthy proletarian (often with vaguely Asian features) in a cloth cap with a menacing scowl, sowing chaos in an orderly land.
¹⁷
Thanks to the machinery of
Gleichschaltung,
these vicious images were multiplied in street posters, textbooks, Nazi newspapers, feature films, and cartoons.

Only a few years earlier, the Communists had answered Nazi propaganda with its own mass media, employing some of the best minds in the business, notably Willi Münzenberg. The epic film
Kuhle Wampe
raised the bar. The Communist melodrama depicted the suicide of a handsome young worker, driven to desperation by unemployment. But his family and friends (including the teenaged Marta Wolter) triumph over adversity by uniting in proletarian solidarity. Just as the plot threatens to completely disintegrate, the joyous Communist youth of Berlin assemble for wholesome athletic contests and elaborate bicycle formations. Many of the movie's elements were to reappear, with polish, in future Nazi films.

One early imitation came quickly on the heels of the takeover in 1933. The plot for
Hitlerjunge Quex
was based on the story of a Hitler Youth who had been killed by Communists in a street brawl the previous year. The film expropriated familiar Communist mythology and turned it upside down. A wholesome towheaded youth, Heini (nicknamed “Quex,” or “Quicksilver”) lives in a slum surrounded by seedy Communists, the most brutal of whom is his drunken Communist father, complete with
cloth cap and menacing scowl. One day Quex stumbles across Hitler Youth camping in the countryside. He is entranced by their clean-cut appearance and mystic rituals. He secretly joins the Hitler Youth, performs heroic acts of rescue, and is beaten to death by Communist thugs. In the misty finale, phalanxes of Hitler Youth march triumphantly into the foreground to the strains of a Nazi anthem.

The Nazis scored a major propaganda coup by casting Heinrich George in the role of the drunken Communist father. George was one of the country's leading actors. His leftist credentials were also extensive, including a number of Erwin Piscator's agitprop productions, among them young Günther Weisenborn's antiwar play
U-Boat S-4.
He had been directed by Brecht, and collaborated with Willi Münzenberg's Prometheus Productions. He had spoken at KPD rallies and served as Hans Otto's comrade-in-arms, organizing Communist theater workers' strikes. In March 1933, the Nazis banned Heinrich George from working in the National Theater. After an anxious interlude, he came to an “arrangement” that allowed him to work again. Part of the price was his role in
Hitlerjunge Quex
as the boorish Communist father who batters his noble Nazi son and lives to regret it. German movie audiences witnessed one of their foremost actors publicly convert from communism to Nazism on the silver screen.

Quex
was not a Goebbels favorite. The propaganda minister privately disparaged overt propaganda films, believing that the masses could be lulled into submission more effectively through a diet of mindless entertainment.
¹⁸
But he publicly praised
Hitlerjunge Quex,
as did many others. Before the film opened at Loew's Yorkville Cinema in New York in the summer of 1934, the distributors removed Hitler's name from the title, replacing it with the anodyne
Our Banner Flies Before Us.
The
New York Times
gave
Hitlerjunge Quex
a positive review, recommending it to “persons desirous of getting a pictorial idea of how the Nazi doctrine was spread among the rising generation in Germany.” It went on to note, “Technically, the picture is well done … the action moves fairly fast and many of the scenes, particularly in the humble home of the young hero and in the streets during the political campaign, are genuinely entertaining.”
¹⁹
The
Times
gave special mention to “such
excellent players … as the massive Heinrich Georg [sic], as a rank-and-file Berlin Communist,” and “the likable young Claus Clausen” as his Hitler Youth son.
²⁰

In 1937, Goebbels named George an official “State Actor,” and soon after, he was appointed head of the prestigious Schiller Theater.
²¹
Heinrich George was living proof of the assertion made by theater-lover Hermann Göring: “It is easier to turn a great artist into a decent National Socialist than to make a great artist out of a humble party member.”
²²