Red Orchestra (41 page)

Schulze-Boysen's group knew that terrible events were transpiring in occupied countries, but they needed proof in hand. In early 1942, Libertas Schulze-Boysen used her influence at the Kulturfilm center to get a job for Adam Kuckhoff directing a short documentary called
Poznań—Stadt im Aufbau
(
Poznań—City Under Construction).

Adam's official task was to document the Nazis' ambitious program to reshape the city as Germany's gateway to the east. At the same time that Jewish and Catholic Poles were being shot en masse elsewhere in the district, workers in the city center were unloading trainloads of rare marble. Hitler planned to refit Poznań's castle as his personal palace, perfectly situated to greet victorious troops coming home from the front. But Kuckhoff traveled east with his own agenda of gathering material for the atrocity archive and forging contacts for the circle. Greta wangled permission to visit him, and was shocked at what she saw.

On her return, she promptly drafted a report on “all of the inhumane treatment, of both Jewish and Polish citizens.” She described how “the kiosk, used under martial law to post death sentences carried out for the
smallest infractions or cases of insubordination, was plastered with notices.”
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Anyone with eyes in their heads, Greta wrote, could see that this was a site of mass murder.

But Arvid Harnack informed her there was no way that the group could publish her report as a flyer. It would be too easy for the Gestapo to track the information—too few people had access to it. Circulating her report would give them away instantly.

Over early 1942, the resistance circles struggled to find new avenues for action. The intelligence work was stalemated. Both the U.S. and the Soviet missions were now shuttered, and radio contact had failed. Harnack, Kuckhoff, and Schulze-Boysen continued to infiltrate members of their groups into the Nazi bureaucracies. Harro was pleased with the progress of writer Günther Weisenborn, who had joined Goebbels's Reich Broadcasting Company in July 1940.

Within a year Weisenborn was sitting in on the company's secret conferences and passing the reports on to Schulze-Boysen. One of the benefits of his job was privileged access to speeches by foreign leaders. He would take them home overnight and copy them, then hand off the typescript to another member of the circle for reproduction. Within days, statements by Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill were secretly circulating in Berlin.
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Weisenborn also tried his hand at sabotaging the news. He was harshly chastised for his “mistakes,” but he was promoted nonetheless, first to chief of correspondents, then to cultural editor.
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The circle continued to churn out leaflets. Ceramicist Cato Bontjes van Beek drove much of the effort, writing and typing out originals, with John Graudenz at the helm of the hectograph. Cato's artist friends and other members of the group participated in the distribution, discreetly leaving the flyers in subway stations and telephone booths.

The bombs were falling faster now. By night, large areas of the city lit up in flames. The ruins were still smoking in the morning, as neighbors and rescue workers pulled bodies out of the rubble. Anxiety and opportunity went hand in hand. On blackout nights the circle would assemble: soldier-scholars in mufti, pretty young art students, blue-collar workers from the Communist cells. Taut with nerves, they would pad their clothing and load their bags with flyers, then fan out across the city. They learned
how to avoid attracting the attention of passersby, disguising themselves as girlfriends having a casual chat or a young couple locked in a shadowy embrace. The next morning, puzzled policemen would be ordered onto the streets to gather up leaflets and scrape anti-Hitler flyers from the walls.

The members of the circle were driven by zeal, hurling themselves into noble actions one day and preposterous escapades the next. “For use at night the group also constructed a contraption which looked like a suitcase,” Weisenborn reported. “When it was set down in the street it stamped some anti-Nazi slogan on the pavement.”
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It is hard to imagine the appeal of such a device, which courted death for the meager return of a slogan on a sidewalk.

In May 1942 the Nazis launched a new propaganda effort that struck the circle as a personal affront. Joseph Goebbels had designed a major exhibit called “The Soviet Paradise” to occupy most of the Lustgarten, the vast public space directly in front of the downtown cathedral. Massive photo panels depicted Russian Slavs as subhuman beasts who lived in squalid villages where the sun never shone. German soldiers, on the other hand, were portrayed as the innocent victims of terrorists. Once again, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism went hand in hand. Visitors were handed official booklets that read:

The exhibit's most distressing feature was an installation about SS measures against “partisans.” Greta and her friends were horrified by the images. “There were photos showing the firing squads, and bodies of young girls, still half-children, dangling horribly from ropes like their comrades,” she wrote. Greta knew that many of the Nazis' “partisans” were Russian and Jewish civilians. She and her husband stayed at the exhibit for two hours, watching the dense crowds and wondering what they were really thinking.
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The circle decided to act. They decided to base their protest on an unexpected technology. A couple in the group, Fritz and Hannelore Thiel, had come across a child's rubber-stamp set. Soon it was put into action, printing tiny wax-coated stickers that could be attached to walls and phone booths. The couple delivered the stickers to the young people for a
Zettelklebeaktion
(sticker-pasting operation).

The stickers mocked Goebbels's rhetoric with the words:

Harro Schulze-Boysen led the charge. He believed that the public needed a bold, public demonstration to show them that the opposition had not been extinguished in Germany. He was opposed by many of the older members of the group. John Rittmeister, Adam Kuckhoff, Günther Weisenborn, and Arvid Harnack all argued that the action was not worth the risk. But Harro was determined. He assembled a team, starting with regulars John Graudenz and Marie Terwiel. They were joined by Hans Coppi, the young machinist–radio operator, and his wife, Hilde. Harro
also invited a band of young students, including some of Cato's art school friends and Liane Berkowitz, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Russian-Jewish symphony conductor, who had joined the group with her boyfriend.
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On the night of May 17, 1942, Schulze-Boysen donned his Luftwaffe uniform, seized his pistol, and led his motley band into the streets. He stood guard, pistol cocked, as they moved through the broad boulevard and down narrow alleyways, plastering hundreds of stickers on walls darkened by the blackout. They took special care to cover the surfaces of posters advertising the “Soviet Paradise” exhibit. Liane Berkowitz was handed a hundred handbills and sent to the Kurfürstendamm thoroughfare with a young soldier. The two were told to behave like young lovers wandering from lane to lane, leaving a trail of handbills in their wake.
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Only blocks away from Harro's handbill operation, a dark-haired young electrician was nursing plans to take the protest a step further. Herbert Baum was a Jewish Communist, born in Poznań, who had been pressed into labor at a Siemens plant. He and his wife, Marianne, had collected a number of Berlin's young Communist and leftist Jews. They hosted meetings in their house, helped with immigration where possible, and maintained links with other leftist underground circles, especially in the factories. One of his contacts was Walter Husemann, Marta Wolter's husband and a Communist member of Harro's circle.

Herbert Baum was even more reckless than Harro. On May 18, he and his group delivered bags containing incendiary bombs to the exhibit at the Lustgarten square. The bombs injured eleven people and damaged part of the exhibit, but the government managed to hush it up. Four days later the Gestapo started the roundup. Some 250 Jews were arrested in retaliation for the act, of whom around a hundred were shot at Sachsen-hausen.
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Twenty-two members of Baum's group were sentenced to death and executed. Baum himself spent several days in the Gestapo torture cells and died in custody. Officials described his death as a suicide.

Shortly after the “Soviet Paradise” action, Arvid Harnack asked the Kuckhoffs to revisit the exhibition and see what marks were left by the actions. Greta was depressed to report that little evidence of the fires remained. The word on the street, she learned, was that “the Jews had attacked the exhibit because they can't stand the truth.”
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Nerves were beginning to fray. Following the “Soviet Paradise,” some members of the circle began to distance themselves from Harro. How could he risk their lives for such a modest return? One potential deserter was his own wife. Libertas Schulze-Boysen told Günther Weisen-born that she wanted out. She wasn't a political animal, and some members of the circle hadn't accepted her from the start. She had supported her husband for the past five years and didn't want to leave him in the lurch. But she was frightened. It felt as though “every action led them closer to Death.”
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Harro, on the other hand, seemed to gather energy from the risk. On May 19, two days after his group action, he started a long, spirited letter to his parents about his plans for their annual Pfingsten outing at the lake. The weather was summery and he hoped it would stay that way. “When you're working hard, you forget whether it's summer or winter for weeks at a time,” he wrote.
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Libs had just spent four days in Vienna in film meetings, which had gone well. It seemed, he wrote, that the trip had done her good.

Harro and Libertas got their splendid weather for the spring holiday. They spent it with members of their circle, which had been woven into a web of genuine friendship. Earlier that month Harro cataloged his fascinating friends for his parents:

Harro's antic good humor masked his growing frustration. That spring he had discovered that the Germans had captured some British codebooks, which enabled them to chart the course of Allied convoys between Iceland and northern Russia before they had even sailed.
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These convoys extended the critical lifeline of the Lend-Lease Program across the Arctic Ocean to the Soviet Union. From late 1941 through 1942, the “Murmansk Run” supplied the beleaguered Soviets with 7,000 tanks, 350,000 tons of explosives, and 15 million pairs of boots from the United States. The Germans recognized the importance of the supplies, and organized a massive attack on the British, Canadian, and U.S. vessels, deploying U-boats, aircraft, and battleships, among them the massive
Tirpiti
(named after Harro Schulze-Boysen's great-uncle).

Schulze-Boysen was anxious to alert British intelligence to the danger. In June 1942 he and John Graudenz traveled to the mountains south of Frankfurt for several weeks, and stayed in the imposing castle of Stet-ten, which belonged to a friend, in the village of Kocherstetten. The trip was described as a vacation, but the two men had a more urgent purpose.

At Kocherstetten they met up with Marcel Melliand, a friend of Grau-denz's. Melliand, a textile manufacturer and secret antifascist, was planning to travel to Switzerland on business. Schulze-Boysen convinced Melliand to convey his information to British intelligence in Switzerland. But Melliand was ultimately unable to get a visa, and his trip was canceled.
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Had Harro's mission succeeded, he might have averted a devastating outcome. German submarines and aircraft ravaged the Allied convoys over the summer.
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There was a poignant underlying reality to the group's activities. Harro Schulze-Boysen's beloved younger brother Hartmut was in the German navy, and Arvid Harnack's brother Falk was in the army. Adam Kuckhoff had a son in the armed forces. They could not escape the thought that their actions, undertaken to counter the ravages of Nazism, could also endanger their loved ones.