Red Orchestra (37 page)

Kent's arrival came as an utter surprise, but Harro did not focus on the breach of security. He was pleased by the Soviet's appearance. He had been trying to undermine the Nazis for months with his transmissions of intelligence, with no evidence that it was getting through. The German army was now closing in on Moscow, and it appeared that the next few months could determine the outcome of the war.

Harro hoped that Kent would make good use of his information. The two men sat down in the living room and Harro offered his visitor a long menu of military intelligence, which Kent carefully recorded in his notebook.

Kent was under pressure from Moscow to get more information and wanted to arrange another meeting, but Harro was wary. He had already endured one Gestapo investigation and assumed that he was still under
surveillance. If Kent visited or called again, the Soviet's thickly accented German would arouse further suspicion. The two men traded proxy addresses.

Kent returned to Brussels and prepared a series of transmissions to Moscow with Harro's information. Over the month of November 1941, he reported the location of Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia, known as the Wolfsschanze, as well as information on Germany's preparations for chemical warfare.
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He let the Soviets know that the Germans were planning to move on the Caucasus, the gateway to Soviet oil fields, before they attacked Moscow. Harro passed along the additional news that the Germans were facing severe shortages in oil and field provisions; their supply lines were badly overstretched. Kent also conveyed Harro's crucial data on German aircraft production and losses sustained in combat.
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Harro had handed the Soviets a mother lode of invaluable intelligence and Kent transmitted it from Brussels in marathon sessions, breaking every possible security precaution by staying on the air for long sessions every night, for seven days straight. This offered the German counterintelligence operators an easy means of homing in on the signal. They tracked the transmissions and carefully recorded the coded content.
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As of October, the German army had still appeared unstoppable. But over the next two months, their luck began to turn. The Soviets' additional intelligence was part of the equation, and became a factor for the British as well.

In late June 1941, the British and the Soviet governments had sent military missions to each other's headquarters in London and Moscow to set up intelligence exchanges. (Britain sent Noel Mason-Macfarlane, the attaché in Berlin who had sought permission to shoot Hitler from his window.) The British had initially advised the Soviets to prepare for the German victory by destroying everything of value and sinking the Soviet fleet.
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But over the summer and fall of 1941, Churchill decided to reinforce the Soviets, supplying them with high-grade intelligence obtained from British code-breaking operations.
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(This included highly sensitive material that had not been offered to the Americans.)

The Soviets' agent in Tokyo, Richard Sorge, provided other crucial
information over the same period. In October 1941, Sorge informed Moscow that the Japanese had decided not to invade the Soviet Union from the east—they had an entirely different offensive in mind. In his last dispatch before his October 18 arrest, Sorge pinpointed the date for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which would trigger the war in the Pacific (and, together with Hitler's declaration of war on the United States, another world war). Sorge's information allowed the Soviets to transfer fresh, winter-ready troops from the east to fight the Germans. Intelligence began to flow between London and Moscow, benefiting both.

The Americans were still trying to steer clear of a war, but their neutrality was rapidly eroding. Roosevelt feared that an absolute Nazi victory in Europe would leave the United States isolated and exposed. In March 1941 he initiated support for the British through the Lend-Lease Program. After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June, Roosevelt decided to extend the support to Moscow. The United States completed an aid agreement with the Soviets in October 1941, and the Americans began to ship critical military vehicles and supplies eastward.

Now the Soviets gained an additional strategic advantage. The German army was already literally bogged down in the Russian winter. By November their tanks and trucks were crippled by mud, and snow was on the way. The Germans' overtaxed supply lines meant that their troops were running short of food and fuel, preparing to fight a winter campaign in the heart of Russia with the same uniforms they had brought in June.

The Nazis demonstrated this vulnerability in December, when Hitler asked the German people for donations of warm clothes for their soldiers in Russia. Joseph Goebbels offered a detailed list of needed items on an evening radio broadcast. The German public reacted angrily. They had bought the idea of an invincible German war machine. Now they were told that their loved ones were stranded on a freezing, treacherous front without even hats and gloves.
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By December 4, 1941, German troops had fought their way through worsening weather to the outskirts of Moscow. But winter hit full force, with temperatures falling to thirty-two degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Then, on December 6, 1941, the Soviets mounted a massive counterattack.
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The Germans faced 100 Soviet divisions over a 200-mile stretch (including the 18 fresh divisions from the east), equipped with 1,700 tanks and 1,500 planes.

Hours later, on the other side of the world, another event transpired to tip the balance: the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The strike was a calamity for the United States, but European antifascists hailed it as a ray of hope. Once the United States entered the war, with its untapped resources and manpower, the fascists could be defeated.

Americans were so focused on the war in Europe that some believed there were German pilots in some of the planes at Pearl Harbor. This was not the case, although Hitler did greet the event as a cause for celebration. The United States declared war on the Axis powers the following day, and Hitler judged that Japan would be more effective as a partner than the United States would be as an enemy.
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As he often had, he was indulging in wishful thinking, based on a notion of America that was vague and out of date. He imagined that German-Americans would lead a powerful pro-Nazi movement, and he totally underestimated the ability of American industry to convert to wartime demands.

Winston Churchill was more astute. He later wrote that his nation's fate hung on two eventful days in 1941. The first, he said, was the Germans' June 22 invasion of the Soviet Union. On that day, Churchill recalled, “I knew we would not lose the war.”
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The second date was December 7.

As the tide continued to turn against the Nazis, Harro Schulze-Boysen took satisfaction in watching his predictions coming to pass, relieved at the prospect of Allied reinforcements.
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He continued to write to his parents from his Luftwaffe post in Potsdam in guarded terms. “The war is flooding over an ever-greater part of the globe,” he wrote in December.
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A week later he updated his father, a high-ranking naval officer, couching his analysis in official language: “On the Eastern Front the Russians appear to be bringing in some additional reserves. This endless front, where we're now on the defensive, is already a very serious problem.”
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Berlin shrank once more. In the days following Pearl Harbor, the last remaining American embassy officials burned their files and prepared to receive Hitler's declaration of war. Then they were packed onto a train
and sent to an internment camp near Frankfurt, where they languished for five months, until an exchange could be set up for their German counterparts.
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As British bombs rained down on German cities, the Kuckhoffs, the Harnacks, and the Schulze-Boysens tried to balance their personal lives with the demands of their situation. They still had possession of Hans Coppi's Soviet radio. To be discovered with it was tantamount to a death sentence, whether the radio was working or not. Some members of the group were high-profile government officials. Others were Communists, subject to surprise searches by the Gestapo. The group reviewed its members, trying to identify the most innocuous individuals to house the device. One candidate was Oda Schottmüller, a modern dancer who participated in the German army equivalent of USO tours to entertain the troops. At other times the radio was stored with Greta's neighbor, Erika von Brockdorff, a blond secretary who worked in a government industrial safety office with Kurt Schumacher's wife, Elisabeth.
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One night Greta Kuckhoff dashed into a shelter during an air raid and was shocked to see Brockdorff carrying the telltale radio suitcase. Greta quickly realized that bringing the radio was safer than leaving it in the apartment during the raid. Besides, it wasn't as conspicuous as she feared. Once it was stored away, the radio looked like the air-raid suitcases that every mother in Berlin now kept packed and ready.

Air raids had become a quotidian nightmare for Berliners, especially for parents of young children. Greta hated pulling her little son out of bed to shelter from the bombs, which often came three or four times a night. She would sit up with him in the cold cellar, telling stories until it was safe to go back. Sometimes after she put Ule back to bed, she and Adam would venture out into the night, stumbling over the rubble and counting the buildings in flames. Berlin was not yet extensively damaged, but on one family visit, the couple witnessed a devastating raid on Adam's ancient home city of Aachen. They were filled with rage, less at the British bombers, Greta wrote, than at the German fascists whose war was leaving so many cities in ruins.
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It threatened to be a dismal Christmas. That winter Mildred Harnack suffered an ectopic pregnancy. At the age of thirty-nine she feared she would never have children.
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Libertas Schulze-Boysen lost her grandmother
in December, and she and Harro spent a melancholy weekend attending the funeral at the family castle.
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Greta and Adam Kuckhoff longed to show their son a world that was different from the travesty outside their door. When Greta thought of her own meager childhood, she fondly remembered the toys her father crafted by hand. Her favorite was a Noah's ark filled with tiny animals. When she got pregnant, she had started a collection of miniatures for her child. By Christmas 1941, Greta and Adam had gathered more than twelve hundred pieces. They included little bicycles and families of pigs and geese. There was a small farm with cattle, a village with houses, and a forest with rangers and their dogs. After the Kuckhoffs told their friends abroad about the project, they started receiving exotic additions from Africa, France, Britain, and the United States.

At first the couple had decided to keep the gift packed away for their son's sixth birthday, still two years off. But that winter their resolutions broke down. It was a bad day. They had been trying to send a transmission to Moscow, but the radio kept breaking down. They had just run off a new set of anti-Nazi flyers, but people were hesitant even to accept them. Arvid Harnack had come over to the apartment for a tense meeting on the freezing roof. They stood there grimacing and shivering as the storm clouds threatened to open up.

Back downstairs, Adam and Greta looked at each other and decided it was time to recover some joy. Soon they had lost themselves in their miniature fantasy. In one corner of their living room they attached a moon and tiny stars to the ceiling, then laid down silver wool to make a winter landscape. They found a mirror for the duck family's pond, and fashioned a hilltop for the mill. Villages, forests, and farms sprang up across the floor, a tiny world without Nazis, bombs, or concentration camps. Greta realized that it was no longer for their child. “Now we were building it for ourselves.”

They stood up and saw it was good. The couple couldn't bear to pack it away again. When Ule beheld their creation, he was openmouthed with joy. Greta was glad that they didn't wait for another Christmas, glad that they were both able to share the moment with their son: “My husband always used to say, ‘If you don't do something too early, you usually do it too late.' ”
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O
NOVEMBER 1, 1941, HARRO'S WIFE, LIBERTAS, THE FLIRTATIOUS
aristocrat and former MGM press agent, started a new job at the Reich's Kulturfilm central office. In the new order, this position was as coveted as her old spot was at MGM. It was also politically sensitive. Kulturfilm was an important division of the Nazis' movie empire, and this was the undisputed domain of Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda and public enlightenment.

Libertas's family connections led to Goebbels's rival, the portly air minister Hermann Göring, whose enthusiasm for the dramatic arts waxed with his marriage to actress Emmy Sonnemann. But he had limited influence in the world of film. Joseph Goebbels had a stranglehold on cinema that even Göring couldn't break.