Red Orchestra (17 page)

After the Comintern's Seventh (and last) Congress in Moscow in 1935, the German Communists held a follow-up meeting to assess the damage. The proceedings opened with a grim report. Of 422 leading figures in the KPD, 219—over half—were in German prisons and concentration camps. Another 125 were in exile, 41 had left the party, and 24 had been murdered.

Only 13 of the 422 were still active inside the country. Local committees had been repeatedly wiped out by arrests and killings. Leaders were soon replaced, but the life span of these individuals and groups was often measured in weeks.

The German delegates in Moscow, fed up with Stalin's minions, called for a new election. They discarded Stalin's favorites and voted in a surprise raft of new leadership, all veterans of underground work in Germany who had witnessed the destruction of their groups and lost faith in Moscow's directives.

The German Communists set to work reshaping their operations. Earlier, the KPD had established border stations outside the German frontiers. Now these were upgraded into border secretariats called
Ab-schnittsleitungen,
with specialized functions. The Prague secretariat was responsible for central and western Germany, including Berlin, while the Zürich office oversaw the south. Other regions were assigned to bureaus in Brussels, Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. The Paris bureau had the added responsibility of organizing a cultural popular front. Party
workers called “instructors” traveled in and out of Germany from the border secretariats, carrying messages and writing reports on party operations.

The KPD no longer imported large quantities of printed materials into the country; it was simply not worth the risk. The report on the 1935 meeting itself was smuggled into Germany with great care, bound in a cover labeled “Proper Care of Cactus Plants.”
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(The KPD often chose its titles with a measure of wit. Willi Münzenberg's famous “Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and Burning of the Reichstag” appeared as “Electric Home Heating,” while the 1934 Communist Party program was published as a “Cook Book with Seventy Approved Recipes.”)
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Over his career, John Sieg had written moody poetry and impressionistic essays from America, and colorful newspaper stories in Berlin. Now he transferred his talents to the shadowy world of underground flyers, or
flugblätter.

The centerpiece of his Neukölln publishing operation was a mimeograph-like machine called the hectograph. (The group sometimes referred to it as “the apparatus.”) The device used chemicals and wax plates to reproduce written materials in moderate quantities, and merely to own one was to invite a Gestapo interrogation. It appears that the Neukölln group had access to several machines, one of them hidden in a cellar after 1933 and later installed in Otto Dietrich's apartment on Biebricher Street.
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Another hectograph hiding place was Max Grabowski's hut in Rudow, on the southern outskirts of Neukölln. Max and his brother Otto had been active in Sieg's group since the beginning. Max's hut was little more than a shed that was set up for a construction business. Its exterior bore commercial signs for paints, varnishes, and wallpapers, providing a convenient excuse for deliveries of supplies and equipment.

The hectograph was a finicky machine and required extensive cleaning. “Dirty work,” one member wrote. “You can't even smoke there because of the Benzine. The apparatus already has an illegal past. It escaped capture, but its lord and master sits behind bars.” Its “lord and master” was young printer Herbert Grasse, who had been arrested in 1936 and sentenced to two and a half years in the penitentiary. His loss
had been a blow to the group's technical operations as well as its morale. But its members took comfort in the fact that no further arrests followed, indicating that Grasse had remained silent under Gestapo interrogation.

The hectograph's wax plates and paper were difficult to procure. The Gestapo kept close tabs on the bulk purchase of everything from office supplies to stamps, in hopes of detecting just such operations. Some of the flyers were handwritten, but John Sieg preferred to use a typewriter—another dangerous possession. Sieg's prior imprisonment in 1933 made him a strong candidate for house searches. The typewriter became another piece of bulky machinery that had to be hidden and moved, along with the supplies.

It had been different back in the early days of 1933, when boxes of flyers could be smuggled in from Switzerland. Members of the group carried the boxes into the subways, five thousand flyers at a time, right under the noses of the police and the informers. But it turned out that their luck was indeed too good to be true. The police were actually tracking the members and biding their time until they could make a mass arrest. When they pounced, they hauled in twenty-five members at once. Now the group was more cautious. Flyers were produced in runs of a hundred, two or three hundred at most, and distributed surreptitiously in mailboxes.

The flyer contents evolved along with the political situation. Over the summer of 1936, the Nazis convened the Olympics in a splendid new stadium in a northern district of Berlin. The city glistened, as unkempt Gypsies and anti-Semitic signs were temporarily removed from public view. While the rest of the world gawked at the Games, the push for a united front gained momentum. That summer, the international edition of the
Rote Fahne
published a joint statement by leading Social Demo crats, Communists, and members of the exiled intellectual community in Paris. Its banner headline read:

The Neukölln group echoed this policy from their grassroots perspective. Members compared notes about which of their acquaintances was a
“reliable” Social Democrat committed to fighting fascism, and which was an ideologically “obsessed” Social Democrat who would rather cozy up to the Nazis than cooperate with Communists.

Many of the Social Democrats had decamped to Prague, with additional publishing operations in the Czech town of Carlsbad, on the German border. In 1934 they began to publish reports on conditions in Germany, but they made for depressing reading:

The Neukölln group met as often as it could, shifting locations. The members gave reports on various activities, including the challenges of recruiting new collaborators while remaining on guard against
Flitter
(informers). Industrial workers were crucial to their effort, and at first glance Germany's factories looked like fertile grounds for recruitment. The KPD's pre-1933 membership had been heavily blue collar, concentrated in urban areas such as Berlin and Hamburg. But the Nazis were adept at thwarting worker initiatives. In 1934 and 1935, after elections for factory worker delegates went badly for Nazi candidates, Hitler simply canceled further elections.
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Over the course of 1936 and 1937, tensions mounted between industrial workers and the Nazi regime. German workers were initially enthusiastic about the new jobs generated by the Nazis' public works programs, as well as new benefits such as subsidized holidays, cafeterias, and recreational facilities. But gradually they realized that once their unions were destroyed or absorbed into Nazi fronts, the possibility of collective bargaining vanished with them. The workers mounted a series of strikes and protests over 1936 and 1937, but Nazi shop stewards and the Gestapo guaranteed that their actions remained small, scattered, and temporary.
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The Neukölln resisters not only had to endure the perils of their work, they also had to overcome a sense of futility. Most members of the
group were blue-collar factory workers and small tradesmen. Under Germany's rigid educational system, they had been placed on an apprenticeship or trade-school track at an early age, with limited exposure to the liberal arts or the professions. For such Germans, higher education held a mystique, and this worked to John Sieg's benefit. By Harnack standards, Sieg's academic credentials were slight; limited to some teacher training in West Prussia and a few night-school classes at the City College of Detroit. But this was more than most of his Neukölln counterparts had, and Sieg was a published author as well. The Neukölln-ers appreciated the way he organized meetings as study groups and led the participants through Marxist catechism as well as operational plans.

One of the Neukölln group's riskiest undertakings was foreign travel. The Nazis had been steadily tightening travel restrictions, but with so many Communist exile operations based in Prague, couriers were necessary. Under normal circumstances, the train ride from Berlin to Prague (some 230 miles, a little farther than New York to Washington) was a day's scenic journey. Over the years of 1936 and 1937, however, the trip was anything but normal.

The archival files on John Sieg include one account of a journey by a Neukölln courier called “Franz.” The identity of Franz has not been established; if it was not Sieg himself, it was possibly one of his circle.

The young man boards the train at a Reichsbahn station in central Berlin in February 1937. His mood is both anxious and somber. The past year has been hard on his circle. One member died of tuberculosis and another committed suicide. Still others were caught in the brutal revolving door of prisons and concentration camps, though a surprising number of them resumed their illegal work as soon as they were released.

The first leg of Franz's journey is a few hours' ride through the neatly cultivated hayfields of Brandenburg, graced by weeping willows. The stop in Dresden offers a glimpse of the splendid city of the Saxon kings, under the suspicious gaze of local Nazi officials. After Dresden, Franz's route veers west. It would have been more direct to proceed due south, along the Elbe and its fabled sandstone cliffs, but the dogleg in Franz's route allows him to skirt the heavy surveillance at the main border crossing. The towns are even smaller now, with quaint local details such as the pointed Saxon domes that crown old buildings like inverted
radishes. This is a rougher landscape, steeply graded through dense pine forests. As the train approaches the Czech border, tensions rise. Immigration and customs inspections lie ahead.

It is not a congenial spot for a member of the underground. The Nazis have long been aware that the Socialists and Communists were running opposition activities out of the Czech borderlands, as well as out of Prague. But recently the Nazis had taken an additional interest in the area. The westerly rim of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, was a predominantly German-speaking territory, assigned to the new nation of Czechoslovakia with the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the Great War. In recent years a local ethnic German party had been complaining of mistreatment at the hands of the Prague government, and the German Nazis leaped to advance their claims. Czech president Edvard Beneš, a staunch anti-Nazi, was trying to steer an uneasy course between his dislike of the fascists and his country's neutrality, with only sporadic support from the Western democracies.

Franz avoids the German border officials altogether. Fourteen hours after boarding the train in Berlin, he gets off in Plauen, a small industrial city on the German side of the border known for its lace. There he is met by an older man. They establish their bona fides, and the guide talks him through the positions and habits of the border patrols.

“The illegal crossings have been a lot tougher since the Nazis got so interested in the Sudetenland,” the guide tells him. “In the old days you only needed to say that you wanted to go and get soused on good beer and they were fine. They don't go along with that anymore. So look sharp, stay back fifty paces, and stick with me.”

Snow lies in patches. Franz's feet are soon soaked, but there is no time to attend to them. He startles at every noise; freezes at the sight of a tree stump or a half-rotten fence. His guide simply watches and waits. No other human is to be seen, and the guide continues without interruption. Two hours later the guide turns to him. “So, we're over the border. The big job lies ahead.” Franz is handed off to a succession of German immigrants, unpacking news from Germany at each stop along the way. A Berliner he doesn't recognize calls his name, asking for news of the city streets, businesses, bars—“Have all the girls in Berlin become Nazis yet?” Franz dodges him. That night Franz makes it to Prague, where a
German family hosts him in their rented rooms. He should enjoy a few days in a city without Nazis, they tell him, to say nothing of the strangeness and beauty of Prague itself.

The next day he proceeds to a pub to meet with two exiled party representatives. They warn him that the familiar precautionary measures still apply. Gestapo informers are all over the city, and they take full advantage of its democratic freedoms like everyone else: one photograph sent off to Berlin, and unfortunate consequences are sure to follow. The party leaders then devote themselves to discussing how to support the underground work in Germany. Franz thinks they overestimate the possibility that the Nazis could infiltrate the organization, but it seems that some bad experiences inform their conversations.

Franz has a few days to produce his written report. The weather is turning unpleasantly cold, and Franz, a little homesick, has no wish to postpone his departure. The evening he is to go, Franz strolls through Wenceslas Square in the center of Prague looking for a pub. If he drinks enough, he thinks, maybe he could string enough Czech together to express himself to the locals. He feels a sudden need “to talk to people who are not contaminated by fascism—to tell them about the other Germany, the better Germany.”

Instead, he is suddenly greeted in German by someone he knew slightly before 1933. “What are you doing here?” the man exclaims. Another cat-and-mouse game ensues. “Vacation,” Franz says nervously. “To drink good Czech beer and eat cheap.”