Red Orchestra (30 page)

The regime recognized that such officers' agitation was problematic. In early 1940 the high command responded by removing SS police formations in Poland from army jurisdiction, reasoning that if regular army officers were not legally responsible for the SS, the officers would express fewer qualms and the SS would be less impeded in its actions.
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Many Germans smelled catastrophe in the air, but they tried to maintain a sense of normalcy day to day. Their country's fate was being driven by Adolf Hitler, a man of little education but stunning intuition, who was right just often enough to throw everyone off balance. His foreign adversaries were proving equally unpredictable. Many anti-Nazi officers believed that the West would actively oppose the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia over 1938 and 1939. When Britain and France responded with appeasement, they assumed that the West would stand idly by as Poland was dismembered in 1939. The conquest of Poland stirred Britain and France to action, but now, with France and Western Europe under occupation, no one could predict the actions of the Soviet Union or the United States.

Hitler's invasions had left his opponents increasingly isolated. The Nazi occupation of Western Europe shut down support from the outside world and eliminated a host of exile havens. German Communists fled the Nazi advances from one capital to another, trying to keep a step ahead of the Gestapo. Many failed. Paris had sheltered Willi Münzen-berg, the German Communist media czar, who occupied a permanent spot on the Nazis' blacklist. Münzenberg was expelled from the Communist Party for suspected “diversionism” in 1938, and refused a subsequent summons to the Soviet Union. The French government put him in
a camp for enemy aliens when war broke out, but released the prisoners in June 1940 as the German army advanced. Münzenberg and another internee set out for Switzerland. In October his decayed body, with face battered, was found hanging from a tree in a French forest. The other escapee had disappeared without a trace. Some called Münzenberg's death a suicide, but others saw the hallmarks of a Stalinist assassination.

Berlin's antifascists watched their city close down around them. By the fall of 1940, many of the Western press corps and embassy staff had already left. On October 8, William Shirer told his diary about yet another U.S. embassy good-bye party, hosted by Donald Heath. He reported that Heath had personal cause for celebration; a few weeks earlier a British bomb splinter crashed into his office and passed directly over his desk. Fortunately, Heath had gone home early and missed the blast.

Shirer was making his own plans to leave Berlin. Journalism as he defined it had become impossible:

Many Berliners had given up reading newspapers. When the radio propaganda became too much for them, they turned off their sets muttering
“ Quatsch!”
Not even the movies guaranteed an escape. They opened with
Deutsche Wochenschau
(German Weekly Show) newsreels showing Polish peasants as they happily harvested potatoes and SA troopers in Poland who passed their time reading newspapers in the library.
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The few remaining Western correspondents were allowed to listen to foreign broadcasts, but only on the condition that they did not share the contents with their German acquaintances. Foreign radio was the only reliable source of news; if a foreign newspaper arrived, it was usually months old.

Arvid Harnack's younger brother Falk succeeded in getting him a powerful shortwave, to give him and his wife access to foreign news. They carefully noted developments and shared them with a small circle of friends, as part of their limited resistance activity over the summer of 1940. Harnack also continued to meet with Donald Heath from the U.S. embassy, though with ever greater precautions. Despite his straitened circumstances, Harnack never asked Heath for money. Sometimes Harnack asked Heath to provide him with paper, whose bulk purchase was carefully monitored by the Gestapo. “He needed a lot, and he couldn't buy it himself,” Heath's son recalled later. “My father didn't feel good about it, and soon stopped. If he had known about the propaganda, he would have been upset. Before he came to Berlin he had received training in ground rules: you don't mix political activism with intelligence work.”
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These were ground rules that Harnack violated at every turn. He knew that his clandestine newsletters represented a liability for his intelligence work, but they offered his circles of friends an antidote for despair.

Harro Schulze-Boysen spent much of 1940 expanding his circle of contacts. The new members included artists, students, KPD militants, and dissident officials working inside the Nazi ministries. Their beliefs and their backgrounds were diverse, and this could set off sparks. Some of the disputes involved old political baggage. In the autumn of 1940, Walter Husemann introduced a KPD official and former
Rote Fahne
editor named Wilhelm Guddorf to the circle. He arrived at a meeting of the Schulze-Boysen circle only to find that the group included Walter Küchenmeister, the companion of Harro's friend Dr. Elfriede Paul. Guddorf was appalled. He protested that Küchenmeister had been expelled from the KPD in 1926 for helping himself to party funds. The party condemned him as a deserter and he could well be a Gestapo informer.
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Guddorf demanded that they cut off relations with Küchenmeister at once.
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Harro Schulze-Boysen was impatient with this old Communist grudge. He had nothing against the party, but he had no use for KPD militants who were more interested in party vendettas than the crisis at hand. Harro had known Küchenmeister from his
Gegner
days, and Dr. Elfriede Paul brought him into the group in 1935. Like Guddorf,
Küchenmeister had served time in a concentration camp, where he had barely survived a severe case of tuberculosis. In Harro's view, the man had paid his dues. With his usual willfulness, Harro went out of his way to strengthen his ties to Elfriede Paul and Walter Küchenmeister, and distance himself from Guddorf. If his group needed a way to communicate with the KPD, there were plenty of other routes. Kurt Schumacher came up with a fellow sculptor with party connections, and Guddorf's protests were ignored. Harro Schulze-Boysen enjoyed annoying his family by calling himself a “Communist” and throwing around Marxist jargon, but it is doubtful he would have been welcome in the KPD. The party took a dim view of chronic insubordination.

Harro encouraged the new members of his circle to infiltrate the Nazi bureaucracies to gain access to information. In July 1940 he drove his friend Günther Weisenborn to a job interview at the state radio company, the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk. Weisenborn was hired as an editor on the news desk at a crucial juncture in German broadcasting. The previous month Goebbels had launched a new schedule, coordinating daily nationwide programming with civil defense reports on air raids.
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Weisenborn's job was to review reports of what was actually happening, and recycle them into stories that conformed to the propaganda.

Harnack, Kuckhoff, and Schulze-Boysen were frustrated. They pursued every possible avenue to oppose the regime, but their actions were desultory and indirect, and it was hard to argue that they did any real damage to the Nazi war machine.

A stunning new opportunity arrived, quite literally on Arvid Har-nack's doorstep, on September 17, 1940, the same day that Hitler called off the British invasion. The surprise visitor spoke fluent German with a slight accent. He informed Arvid that he brought greetings from an old friend at the Soviet embassy, which immediately aroused Arvid's suspicion. He had not communicated with the Soviets for the two years since Stalin's purges had eradicated his embassy contacts. This man could well be a Gestapo agent sent to entrap him. The Russian invited Arvid to the Soviet embassy as proof of his bona fides, then asked him to renew his contact with the Soviets. Arvid was reluctant (his visitor described him as “mistrustful and tense”) but following a long conversation, he agreed.

The visitor turned out to be Alexander Korotkov, an officer of the
Soviet intelligence agency NKVD. Korotkov was a sleekly groomed thirty-one-year-old with a bold, ironic gaze. He also had an eye for the main chance. He had begun his career at the age of nineteen, after striking up an acquaintance with an intelligence official at a soccer match. That meeting led to a job as an elevator operator, and a few years later he was posted abroad as an agent. He worked for several years at the Soviet trade mission in Berlin, where Gisella von Pöllnitz made her ill-fated drop of Harro Schulze-Boysen's Spanish intelligence in the trade mission mailbox. (There is no evidence that the Soviets passed the warnings on to the Spanish Republicans, while young Gisella endured a Gestapo interrogation for her pains.)

Korotkov ran into his own difficulties in 1939, when members of his wife's family were accused of treason, but he appealed directly to Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's notorious head of intelligence, and was reinstated. He returned to Berlin under diplomatic cover in the summer of 1940 and sought out Arvid Harnack soon after. Korotkov had been handed the difficult task of putting the Soviets' intelligence network in Berlin back in order.

Since Arvid Harnack's initial encounter with Soviet agents in 1935, the residencies, or the Soviet agents stationed abroad, had experienced constant upheaval. NKVD personnel had served as Stalin's executioners for countless Russians, Ukrainians, and ethnic minorities. Hundreds of NKVD officers had themselves fallen victim to the purges. In the process, Soviet intelligence also lost its most astute and experienced officers. The Berlin office was especially disupted. Harnack's first intelligence contact, who was recalled to Moscow and executed, was replaced by an agent who died on the operating table within a year. The next agent was appointed through nepotism, with no foreign experience and no German language.

Korotkov was a more effective choice, since he had worked illegally in Western Europe since 1933 and spoke fluent German. Now Korotkov had been sent to ask Harnack to reestablish his intelligence link with the Soviets. Korotkov found Harnack reluctant, but he agreed in the end. There is no record of the conversation from Harnack's perspective, but Korotkov made a careful entry about the meeting in his file.

Harnack, he reported, was not motivated by money and did not “see
himself in the role of an agent with us as his chiefs.” Harnack did not hide the fact that he had his own agenda, which concerned the future of his own country. Korotkov dutifully told his superiors that Harnack considered the Soviet Union “a country with whose ideals he feels connected and from which he awaits support.” (This was not the entire story. Harnack repeatedly told his friends of his aversion to Stalin and the Soviets' bullying methods, and warned Adolf Grimme that they would need “a fist in order not to become a puppet of Moscow.”)

Korotkov described Harnack as “an honest person, a truly moral person, who says what he means,” and recognized that he had scored an intelligence windfall.
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He and his circle possessed extraordinary access to classified information and excellent covers. This was made clear from their first meeting, when Arvid informed Korotkov that Hitler planned to break his agreement with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union.
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Over the following nine months, Alexander Korotkov and Arvid Harnack engaged in an exotic minuet—although under less dire circumstances, it could have been considered a comedy of errors. Moscow's file on Harnack lacked context and was out of date. It was well and good for Korotkov to field abundant intelligence, but he also had some explaining to do. Over the coming months, Moscow demanded to know who Harnack really was. What was his relationship with the KPD? Who exactly were these friends of his? What was their motivation?

The only surviving records of Korotkov's meetings are those sent by Korotkov, written to ingratiate himself with the home office. Nonetheless, they offer a fascinating glimpse into the period between September 1940 and June 1941.

Korotkov recognized that, as an agent, Harnack was far from the Soviet ideal. His antifascist principles were considered a liability. The best amateur agents were the most easily controlled, usually motivated by greed or blackmail, weathering the bizarre shifts of international politics without scruples. The perfect spy was dedicated to the single narrow function of espionage, and rejected any political activity or relationship that could attract attention. This model supported more traditional Soviet agents, such as Richard Sorge in Tokyo and Gestapo officer Willy Lehmann, one of Korotkov's paid contacts who had begun reporting to
the Soviets in 1929.
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But Arvid Harnack made it clear to Korotkov, as he had to Donald Heath, that he would not allow his intelligence work to extinguish his resistance work.

Korotkov's first brief outlined his September meeting with Harnack, who was assigned the code name “Korsikanets” (“Corsican”). He quoted Arvid's report from an unnamed army staff officer at the high command that Germany would go to war against the Soviet Union the following year.