Red Orchestra (36 page)
Authors: Anne Nelson
The group still depended heavily on foreign broadcasts for news, but the BBC was inadvertently making it harder for them. In 1941, a British intelligence officer came up with the idea to mount a Churchill-inspired “V for Victory” campaign, with the goal of encouraging anti-Nazi sentiments in Europe and convincing the Nazis they were surrounded by enemies. BBC broadcasts began with the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony—ta-ta-ta-
dum
—which was also the Morse code signal for the letter “V.” The broadcasters invited their audiences in Germany and Occupied Europe to echo the rhythm wherever they could, knocking on doors, blowing train whistles. But the BBC's clandestine listeners were not entirely enthusiastic. They found that Beethoven's sonorous theme traveled all too easily through apartment walls to the ears of eager informers.
Over 1941, the circles stepped up their production and distribution of underground publications. These were generated by scattered cottage industries, whose workrooms were determined by the locations of typewriters, hectographs, and supplies. John Sieg, the journalist-turned– railway worker, ran one publishing operation from a shed in Neukölln in partnership with the young Communist printer Herbert Grasse.
Sieg and Grasse published a number of irregular periodicals, including
21 Seiten (21 Pages)
and
Vortrupp (Frontlines).
In 1941 they launched a new underground newspaper called
Die Innere Front (The Home Front),
with Walter Husemann as a contributor. The paper offered political updates, listed the frequencies for Soviet broadcasts, and offered encouraging reports of the Soviet army's fight against the Nazis. It urged German soldiers and foreign laborers to distrust the propaganda about an impending Nazi victory, and seek ways to sabotage the regime.
27
At least fifteen issues of
Die Innere Front
were published over two years in both German and French.
28
John Sieg's Neukölln was only blocks away from the Kuckhoffs' and the Harnacks' apartments, but it still represented another world. Only a few years ago it was a neighborhood of tenements, factories, and sprawling cemeteries. Now, just a few blocks east of John's apartment, the old
National Cash Register factory was converted into the “NCR” munitions plant. Hundreds of slave laborers were imported from Poland, Russia, and France, some Jewish, and many female, to work there.
29
Soon additional slave laborers were imported from across the eastern front. Dozens of crude barracks were thrown up around the neighborhood, some of them on the cemetery grounds. John's daily walk to the subway took him past sheds crammed with hundreds of Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, frozen, starved, and beaten. Some residents of Neukölln slipped them bread and potatoes as they passed.
30
John's circle also handed them flyers with messages of solidarity, many of them translated into Polish by his wife, Sophie.
John Sieg coordinated his publishing efforts with his former editor, Adam Kuckhoff, and Greta welcomed him to the house often. “He never arrived empty-handed, and he never left empty-handed either,” she recalled.
31
“He would always bring something along for us… Either flyers or banned literature or information about other resistance cells.”
32
John liked to transport his clandestine literature pasted between the covers
of Andersen's Fairy Tales.
Adam and John disappeared behind closed doors for their intense conversations, following the unwritten code of illegal activity: information was shared on a need-to-know basis to minimize collective risk. But Greta still bristled at her exclusion, doubting that the Nazis would accept her ignorance as a defense if the group was betrayed.
She also worried that the group was overextending itself. Each month brought word of new pockets of antifascists who hoped to connect to a larger effort. But their efforts seemed paltry: soap and gloves slipped to some slave laborers, scant rations and foreign currency scraped together for Jewish friends, a few flyers stuffed into the mailboxes of frightened German bureaucrats. Did their work make any real difference?
The leaders at the center of the activity believed that sending intelligence to the Soviets was the most effective way to oppose the Nazis. Their information-gathering capacity improved all the time, but transmission remained a nightmare. Every night Arvid Harnack came home from the Economics Ministry for a second shift of encoding messages. These were delivered to Hans Coppi to relay to Moscow, but the radio continued to fail. Crucial information was not getting through.
The intelligence officers in Moscow were impatient. The intelligence that was arriving from Richard Sorge in Tokyo and from Rudolf Roessler in Lucerne was making a real difference. They knew that another critical body of intelligence could be provided from the group in Berlin, but the broken radios placed it out of reach.
This technical difficulty propelled the fate of the Berlin circles into the orbit of a man they would never meet: Leopold Trepper, the Polish Communist who ran the Soviets' Brussels operation. Trepper had been working for Soviet intelligence in Europe for years, and had narrowly escaped Stalin's purges by keeping a low profile.
33
Now, as the Soviets labored to reconstruct what Stalin had destroyed, they ordered Trepper to assemble a radio intelligence network across Western Europe. He stayed on in Brussels by posing as a Canadian industrialist.
“I became Adam Mikler,” Trepper wrote later. “So Adam Mikler was from Quebec? I could talk for hours about the charms of Montreal.” Trepper, of course, had never set foot in North America.
34
Trepper launched his Brussels operation by acquiring a raincoat manufacturing company with the unlikely name of Au Roi du Caoutchouc (House of the Rubber King). He soon expanded it into an import-export business called the Foreign Excellent Trenchcoat Company
35
Trepper's raincoat business enlisted unsuspecting salesmen across the continent. His espionage partners represented a wide spectrum of committed antifascists. A considerable number of them were Polish Zionists he knew from his early days in Palestine. Others were German Communists who had honed their forgery skills in Berlin. One of Trepper's most heroic partners was a Parisian art collector named Suzanne Spaak. The beautiful socialite combined her intelligence work with humanitarian missions, and smuggled scores of Jewish children to safety
36
Before the war, Trepper also lacked radios. He wrote that eventually his network accounted for three in Berlin, three in Belgium, and three in the Netherlands. But until June 1941, his agents sent their information through the Soviet military attaché in Vichy France. Trepper's group invented an ingenious system for smuggling documents across borders.
The first step was to reserve a berth in a sleeping car. Another member of the network would independently reserve a compartment, which would remain empty—preferably it would be one that communicated with the first. After the ticket-taker had passed through, the agent would leave his sleeping car, go into the compartment, unscrew an electric light fixture, place the fountain pen in which the microfilm was concealed inside the fixture, and return to his own place.
At Moulins, for instance—the station at the line of demarcation between Occupied and Unoccupied France—our courier and his baggage would naturally be searched. Then the German police would open the compartment, see that it was empty, and go on without stopping. After that the agent had only to retrieve the pen with its storehouse of information.
37
The Soviets insisted on sending two of their own agents to support Trepper's efforts, and perhaps to keep an eye on him as well. Trepper was unimpressed by his new colleagues from the start. One Soviet agent, who called himself “Carlos Alamo,” was an impetuous amateur who had recently returned from assisting the Republican air force in Spain. Alamo was fond of boasting about a valiant solo mission he had flown there. The only problem with his story, Trepper noted, was that Alamo was a mechanic, not a pilot. Trepper was further dismayed when Alamo missed both his first and his second outdoor rendezvous, because he panicked and decided that the Belgians strolling in the park were enemy agents. Trepper complained that Alamo's three months' training in radio operation wasn't adequate preparation. When he was put in charge of the raincoat shop, he was so inept that Trepper had to hire another manager to back him up.
38
The Soviets redoubled Alamo's incompetence with a second agent, named Anatoli Gourevitch, whose idea of an effective cover was to pose as a Uruguayan national, with the code name “Kent” (chosen from a British spy novel). Kent, like Alamo, was delighted to be living in Belgium instead of the Soviet Union. An aspiring roué, he wore his hair in a flattop and habitually puffed on a pipe. He soon acquired a blond mistress,
while his colleague Alamo indulged his expensive taste for fast cars.
In Trepper's eyes, Kent's tradecraft was even more feckless than Alamo's: “When Kent, fresh out of his ‘academy of espionage,' went into a working-class bar in the Paris suburb and ordered tea, he aroused ridicule but, above all, he attracted attention. For an intelligence man, this is against the rules. At school they forgot to teach Kent to be inconspicuous.” The situation became even more serious when Trepper needed help for two of his lieutenants from the Jewish underground in Palestine.
I asked Kent to find each of them a very safe hideout, but he did nothing of the sort. Sophie was staying … in a rented house we used for broadcasting, and Kamy was living with Alamo. The most elementary requirements for security had not been respected. If we had deliberately set out to bring on a catastrophe, we would not have acted otherwise.
39
Trepper contrasted the Soviet bumblers with himself and his friends, who had spent half a lifetime evading pogroms in Poland and arrest by British colonial officers in Tel Aviv. “This irreplaceable experience was worth all the courses in the world.”
40
By late summer 1941, as the German army raced toward Moscow, the Soviets ordered their Brussels operation to help them reestablish radio contact with their prime sources in Berlin. On August 26, 1941, intelligence officers in Moscow sent a radio message to Brussels, ordering Kent to drive to Berlin and find out what the problem was. The coded message was excruciatingly detailed:
Go to Berlin to Adam Kuckhoff or his wife in Wilhelmstrasse 18,
*
tel. 83 62 61, second stairway to the left, upper story and explain that you were sent by a friend of Arvid's and Harro's, that Arvid knew as Alexander Erdberg… Suggest to Kuckhoff that he arrange a meeting with Arvid and Harro.
If possible, find out from Kuckhoff:
If the radio connection is there and why isn't it working?
Where are the friends and what is their situation? Italijanes, Lutschisti, Leo, Karl and the others?
Let them be informed about the transmission to Erdberg.
Suggest the connection to Istanbul, through a Soviet businessman, or to Stockholm, through the consul, both in the name of von Strahlmann.
In case you can't meet with Kuckhoff, go to the wife of Harro Schulze-Boysen, Libertas, Altenburger Allee 19, tel. 99 58 47. Explain that you come from someone who met with Elisabeth (Schumacher) in Marquardt (near Potsdam). This order also applies if you meet Kuckhoff.
41
Moscow also ordered Gourevitch, or “Kent,” to get detailed information from the group to transmit back to Moscow once he was back in Brussels, and to instruct them to prepare a safe house near Berlin to receive sensitive visitors.
When Trepper heard that Moscow had broadcast the actual names and addresses of the contacts in Berlin, he was incredulous. “It's not possible. They have gone crazy!” he exclaimed.
42
The messages were in code, but Trepper knew that the Germans were advancing their code-breaking capabilities by the day.
Trepper could not be certain of catastrophe, but he suspected it. The German army's radio service had indeed begun intercepting and recording messages from Trepper's outpost two months earlier, only days after the Soviet invasion, and was already hard at work deciphering the code.
As the German army moved in on Moscow in autumn, the atmosphere in Berlin began to change. With the shortwave radio procured by Arvid Harnack's brother Falk, Harro and Arvid could now monitor the German exile radio broadcasts from Moscow. This showed them how their intelligence reports might have benefited actual field operations, and added to their frustration when their transmissions failed.
43
One night, Adam Kuckhoff asked his wife to follow him to the rooftop, even though she balked at exposing herself to the bone-freezing rain.
He spoke quickly. Arvid Harnack had insisted that he inform her that Moscow had been in touch by way of Brussels. Furthermore, the radio transmission had included their names.
“Addresses, too?” Greta demanded.
“How else can they find us!” he answered.
Greta was not placated. “Why so many names? Wasn't one enough?”
Adam tried to calm her. If someone was sent to work on the radios, he would be more likely to go to Mildred's or Libertas's apartments, which were more conveniently located. The most that would probably be asked of Greta would be to give him directions.
Once more, Greta suspected that she was the last to know. Perhaps she was only being informed because the visitor was already in town, about to arrive on her doorstep. She resented the men for giving her only half of the pertinent information, when she shared equal risk. But she was getting used to not asking questions.
44
It took Kent two months to make his way to Berlin. He arrived on October 29, 1941, and touched base with other Soviet agents in town.
45
Then he called Schulze-Boysen at the home number sent by Moscow. Libertas answered and agreed to meet him in a subway station. She explained the problem with the broken radio and arranged a follow-up meeting with her husband. The couple brought Kent back to their apartment for a four-hour meeting.
