Red Orchestra (21 page)

Arvid Harnack was only one of Heath's many sources. Heath continued to troll Germany's economic waters, netting bigger and bigger fish, including Reichsbank director Emil Puhl and Arvid's former boss Hjal-mar Schacht, a prominent banker who had helped Hitler come to power.
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(Schacht resigned as minister of economics in 1937, in protest over the regime's military buildup and anti-Semitism.)
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Both Heath and his German sources understood that they were skirting the boundaries of treason. In 1937 the German government warned its citizens that providing economic information to foreigners could carry the penalty of death.
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On March 13, 1938, the Germans marched into Austria with the collusion
of Austrian Nazis. The Nazis deliberately avoided calling it an invasion, substituting the word
Anschluss,
a term with almost tender connotations of an attachment or an embrace. A plebiscite was held a month later, under strict Nazi vigilance, which confirmed public approval by a massive majority. In September 1938, Hitler turned his sights on the Sudetenland, attacking Czech president Beneš in a Nuremberg speech.

The German public greeted these events with jubilation. Some Germans disapproved of Hitler's provocations, but there was no longer any possibility of public opposition. Tens of thousands of Germans languished in concentration camps at any given time. Political parties, trade unions, the media, and academia had all been suppressed and purged.

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was not satisfied with passivity. The regime sought universal enthusiasm, and he argued that the key lay in his new model of totalitarian communications. Under his initiative, the regime had promoted the mass production of small, inexpensive “people's radio” sets, whose dials were restricted to local stations, all of which were controlled by the Nazis. An improved design was introduced in 1938. A square brown Bakelite box with a large round speaker, the set was soon dubbed the
Goebbels-Schnauze
(Goebbels snout). The cheap radios flooded the marketplace. In the decade after the Nazis came to power, the number of German households with access to a radio almost quadrupled, reaching seventy percent of the population—ranking among the densest radio penetration in the world.
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Germans now had more “news” but access to far fewer sources of information. The Reich stepped up the penalties for listening to foreign broadcasts. Nazi radio wardens were instructed to convince their neighbors to listen to party programs, to report foreign-broadcast listeners, and to forward local feedback on programming back to a central agency. When they reported that audiences were tiring of endless propaganda and speeches, the ministry sweetened the mix with light musical offerings.
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German antifascists condemned the maddening docility of the “ninety percent” who had acquiesced to the regime, but their own “ten percent” was eroding from exile, execution, and defeatism.

Nonetheless, the seeds of an anti-Hitler conspiracy continued to take root, some to wither, some to grow. One plot enlisted ten former Prussian
police officers who had been ransomed from German concentration camps. In 1938 they planned an attack on Hitler, but the conspiracy ran into difficulties and dissolved.
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Another 1938 conspiracy looked more promising. It was spearheaded by a member of Arvid Harnack's clan, Ministry of Justice official Hans von Dohnanyi. As Hitler's machinations against Czechoslovakia came to a head, Dohnanyi enlisted an impressive circle of German military officers and intellectuals, among them psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (Dietrich and Klaus's father).

The plot was straightforward enough. Hitler's plans for aggression constituted such an egregious breach of international relations, Dohnanyi argued, that it would surely trigger a swift retaliation from the Western powers. This would embolden his critics in the German military, and disgrace him in the eyes of the German people. The Dohnanyi group would step neatly forward and take Hitler into custody, then set about getting German democracy back on track.

The assignments were handed out with care. Dohnanyi assembled a criminal dossier on Hitler. The eminent Dr. Bonhoeffer prepared to certify that Hitler was mentally ill. Army relations would be handled by General Ludwig Beck, a conservative opponent of Hitler's who had recently been forced to resign as chief of staff. Hitler's arrest was assigned to military intelligence officer Hans Oster, aide to Admiral Wilhelm Ca-naris. There was no doubt about the goal, but the group disagreed on tactics. Oster believed that Hitler must be assassinated for the plot to succeed, while others hoped he could be institutionalized. Oster and his supporters therefore planned a conspiracy within the conspiracy, the staging of an unfortunate “incident” during the arrest that would lead to Hitler's death.
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The conspiracy hinged on one critical event to trigger the plan: an open confrontation between Hitler and the governments of Britain and France. Hitler had summoned the British and French prime ministers to Munich. As the meeting progressed, a call came in from London to say that the British now expected to go to war against Germany on Czechoslovakia's behalf. Back in Germany, the conspirators' phones were ringing with calls from new supporters volunteering to assist in the coup.

Then came the stunning news: on September 29, 1938, the parties
reached an agreement. The British prime minister expressed his relief to his countrymen in a radio address: “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here, because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.”
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Germany gained the Sudeten region, and Hitler's popularity surged.

Back in Berlin, the conspirators gathered in Hans Oster's apartment for a gloomy postmortem. “You see, gentlemen,” one of them mused bitterly,

In May 1939, Donald Heath told his Washington superiors that his German antifascist sources were sorely disillusioned with the European democracies. They believed that “a firm stand would be made against Hitler,” in which case he “would have been afraid to go to war and the check to his prestige would have been sufficient to bring down his regime.” France and Britain's approach was a bitter disappointment. Heath concluded that “their one hope is in President Roosevelt, in whose democratic ideals and ability they have a very considerable belief.”
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Many German antifascists, including the Harnacks, labored to win the Americans over to their cause, but the Nazis appeared to be winning the public relations campaign. The antifascists found their united support chiefly among German exiles and Jewish communities in New York and California. The Roosevelt administration trod cautiously, under mounting pressure to steer clear of Europe altogether. Memories of World War I were still raw, and “America First” isolationists argued against any involvement in the mounting conflict. American Nazi groups flourished. They littered New York subways with anti-Semitic literature and held a mass rally in Madison Square Garden in February 1939 that drew a crowd of 22,000. Jewish protesters were met by American storm troopers who beat them on the street in front of Macy's.

U.S. embassy officials in Berlin were obliged to keep a low profile. The United States had never replaced its ambassador, but in May 1939 a new chargé was appointed. Alexander Kirk was a laconic American diplomat of the old school, but in the eyes of his aide George Kennan, he was a decent and intelligent man who “despised the Nazis and held them at arm's length with a barbed irony.” Kirk, the heir to a cleaning-product fortune, liked to deflate pompous Nazis by extending his hand and declaring, “My line is soap. What's yours?”
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Kirk was supportive of the German opposition, and held a number of secret meetings with Count Helmuth von Moltke, a member of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's resistance circles. Moltke, a political visionary, could already perceive the seeds of the Nazis' destruction, and was studying the American Federalist Papers for ideas on reconstituting post-Nazi Europe. But few of Kirk's superiors in Washington shared his sympathies.

In the summer of 1939, Arvid and Mildred Harnack traveled to Washington, hoping to recruit American support for their cause. Arvid Harnack's official assignment was to guarantee international copper and aluminum supplies to Germany before war broke out. He fulfilled his public duty with U.S. trade officials who were happy to supply Germany's arsenal.

But Harnack also wrote a secret memorandum to the State Department, offering his assistance against the Nazis.
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He succeeded in meeting privately with officials from the U.S. Treasury Department, probably with the help of Donald Heath. Tragically, the U.S. officials dismissed him out of hand.
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Even with the Nazi takeovers of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the impending crisis in Poland, Americans believed they could still keep Europe's troubles at arm's length. They did not want their prejudices to be disrupted by information. More traditional American diplomats took a dim view of German dissident officials, regarding them as “suspicious,” and were not even interested in their intelligence value.

The Harnacks stayed with Mildred's family in Maryland, but her relatives found her increasingly remote. They thought Arvid was even worse—cold and uncommunicative, a “typical German.” The couple were undoubtedly aware that there were Nazi spies in Washington and that they were monitoring the Harnacks closely. A frank conversation,
with even a close relative, could always be repeated to the wrong person. But the effect of their caution was unfortunate; at least one of Mildred's family members took Arvid's demeanor as proof that he was a zealous Nazi.

The Harnacks returned to Germany in mid-August 1939. The Nazis had been busy in their absence.

O
NE EVENING IN 1940 SHE COULDN'T RECALL EXACTLY WHEN
Greta Kuckhoff put on a freshly ironed dress, a precious pair of Italian silk stockings, and a cape, and set off with her husband to a dinner party.
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It was a big occasion. Their host, Herbert Engelsing, was an executive producer at the Tobis Film Company, making him a major player in the German movie industry. Greta was less than enthusiastic. Their son, Ule, was still a toddler, and she felt uncomfortable leaving him at home, but there were compelling reasons to go. Herbert Engelsing could help Adam get work. Since Adam had left his regular employment, he was concentrating more on his own writing, and they needed the additional income from contract work for the Reich's film studios.
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Adam was still striving for literary success, but he had to balance it against other considerations. He was well aware that by now, any form of writing—or not writing—was a political act in Germany. Lion Feucht-wanger and Thomas Mann published screeds of anti-Nazi essays and fiction from their safe havens in America, but this was not possible for those who had stayed behind. Adam Kuckhoff belonged to a growing school of writers who used coded situations to critique German political realities. Many chose to describe the calamity of World War I as a warning against the next one. Others created character studies of men who sold out to vicious interests in the name of ambition, or who withdrew into ineffectual silence in the face of injustice.

In 1937, Rowohlt, a leading German publisher, released Adam's novel
Der Deutsche von Bayencourt (The German from Bayencourt),
adapted from a play he had written during World War I. Like many writers, Adam spent his career returning to a central overarching theme: the tension between patriotism and social ethics. Adam intended his novel to be the first volume of a trilogy, but he was cheated of the opportunity to write the subsequent two volumes.

Der Deutsche von Bayencourt
told the story of a German farmer named Bernard Sommer, who had settled in a small French village long before the Great War. His loyalties are tested when a stranded German patrol asks him for refuge. He is found out by the French, court-martialed, and executed. His pacifist son argues that the real enemies are the warmongers and profiteers on all sides who unleash “the boundless horror of this war.”

Adam composed his book with care, but even he must have been surprised when it was favorably reviewed by both the leading Nazi newspaper,
Völkischer Beobachter,
and the leading Nazi cultural journal,
Nationalsozialistichen Monatshefte.
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Fascist reviewers heralded Sommer's tragic gesture as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice, and ignored the other characters' calls to pacifism and social justice. German critics called the book Kuckhoff's “masterwork,” and an American professor put it on his short list of important works in his “Survey of German Literature During 1937.”
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