Red Orchestra (49 page)
Authors: Anne Nelson
By this time, Roeder had regained public prominence as a supporter of a West German party on the radical right. He used his platform to revive his charges of wartime treason against the Red Orchestra. In an April 25, 1951, speech he attacked two survivors who had achieved distinction in West Germany. Social Democrat Adolf Grimme was now director of Northwest German Radio. Helmut Roloff, a political conservative who had joined the conspiracy through his efforts to help Jewish neighbors, was an acclaimed concert pianist and music educator.
42
Neither man had the stomach to pursue Roeder, but they were also tired of defending themselves against his calumny. (After the war, it was said that the well-rewarded Communist survivors of the resistance in East Germany
remembered “more and more” of their wartime activity, while survivors in the West, battered by defamation, remembered “less and less.”)
Roeder fired yet another salvo in 1952, when he repeated his attacks in a book entitled
Die Rote Kapelle: Europäische Spionage (The Red Orchestra: European Espionage).
The cover showed the dastardly hand of Moscow suspended over Europe, pulling strings in a dozen different countries. Roeder repeated his attacks on the West German official Adolf Grimme, who he said had been “ninety percent convinced by Adam Kuckhoff's Communist ideology.” Roeder expressed scorn for those who complained about the forty-four death sentences he won in the Nazi court: “How many German soldiers were direct or indirect victims of their deeds will never be known.”
Roeder argued that German troops fighting for their country had been betrayed in the field. For Roeder, the struggle was not between Nazism and its millions of victims, it was between patriotism and treachery.
It was a struggle which the German soldier led against an enemy in disguise, that ambushed him with novel but malicious methods, paying lip service to the words “freedom, love of humanity, and patriotism.” His real language traveled through the ether—and that was treason.
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Roeder lived for a time on his wife's family estate, then moved to what was described as a “ California-style villa” in a picturesque town called Glashütten, outside Frankfurt am Main, where he was elected to the town council.
44
There he entertained visiting journalists, dropping anti-Semitic remarks and boasting about his good friends in the CIA.
45
Manfred Roeder never stood trial, and lived until 1971.
46
Roeder's colleague Walter Huppenkothen, who had presided over the concentration camp “trials” and death sentences of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans Oster, also escaped lightly. He was tried in Munich in 1950, but the verdict was set aside for two years. He was finally convicted of the concentration camp executions in 1955 (for violating procedures), and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He never stood trial for his murderous Gestapo activity in Poland.
The Nuremberg trials of 1945–46 won wide publicity, and “Nuremberg” became a synonym for the idea that war criminals will ultimately face retribution. In the initial round, eleven high-ranking Nazis were sentenced to death, and on October 16, 1946, ten of them were hung at dawn. (Hermann Göring cheated the executioner by taking poison the previous day.) There were subsequent Nuremberg trials for groups of Nazi doctors, judges, and
Einsatzgruppen,
accompanied by widespread publicity suggesting that justice was being served.
That was not how it looked to the German resisters. Some six million people had belonged to the Nazi Party, and the expansive crimes of the Third Reich required the participation of hundreds of thousands. But from its beginning in November 1945 until its end in June 1948, the Nuremberg process initiated only 3,887 cases (many involving groups of defendants). Of these, 3,400 cases were dropped. A mere 489 cases— thirteen percent of the total—went to trial, involving a total of 1,672 defendants. Of these, 1,416 were found guilty.
Fewer than 200 of them were executed. The judges sentenced 279 of them to life imprisonment, but by 1955, only about 40 convicted Nazi war criminals were still behind bars (including those with life sentences or commuted death sentences).
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In late 1945, the Allies gave German courts the power to try Germans accused of crimes against fellow Germans and stateless persons, and after 1950 German courts were authorized to try all Nazi crimes. This process was also disappointing. Up to 1992, German prosecutors initiated proceedings against 103,823 individuals, but they resulted in only 6,487 convictions. The Nazis were a powerful presence in the postwar legal system, and tens of thousands of cases bogged down, then completely disappeared.
48
Soon after the war, the Allies began to facilitate the reentry of notorious Nazis into public life, including Gestapo agents and concentration camp personnel.
The Nazis had terrorized German democrats, Jews, and leftists for twelve years, and had organized a machinery of mass slaughter across Europe. They had placed millions of individuals in prisons and concentration camps, and executed 4,980 people for their connections to the failed 20th of July plot alone. The insults rippled through the generations.
The widows and children of Gestapo and SS officers were considered the survivors of patriots. Widows and children of the executed resisters of the 20th of July movement were deprived of their pensions and called traitors.
Greta Kuckhoff moved back into the apartment she had once shared with her husband. Now Greta shared her home with seven-year-old Ule and a roommate named Grete Wittkowski, a Jewish Communist who had escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to England. (Wittkowski would become East Germany's highest-ranking female official.) A neighbor described Greta's living room as a museum to her past, full of “mementos and overstuffed, scraped leather furniture … the darkened buff walls covered with pictures and framed photos. No trace remained of the Gestapo family who moved in after Greta and Adam were arrested.”
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Nevertheless, everywhere she looked, Greta saw signs of “renazi -fication.”
*
Neither Roeder nor Huppenkothen could be called the most egregious CIC recruit. This was surely Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his zeal in tracking down French Jews and sending them to their deaths. In 1947 the CIC recruited Barbie as a paid agent to infiltrate the German Communist Party on their behalf, and paid him $1,700 a month. Over the next four years, army intelligence shielded him from numerous French attempts to extradite him for war crimes.
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When this was no longer possible, the CIC presented him with a set of false documents and packed him off to Bolivia.
B
ERLIN WAS IN LIMBO. IT WAS RECKONED THAT A THIRD OF ITS
buildings had been razed, and displaced persons flooded into the city with nowhere to live and almost nothing to eat. Over five million German soldiers returned from the front, and some thirteen million German and ethnic German refugees arrived from the east.
Berlin was technically divided into four occupation zones, but in the early days people still moved easily between sectors. Even amid the rubble, the town was starting to recover its old spirit. Prisoners from concentration camps and penitentiaries joined returning Jewish and leftist exiles, all bent on reclaiming remnants of their past lives. Günther Weisenborn wrote, “No one believed that the division of the city would last. … We lived a reckless life, full of hope and with a critical eye in this strangely unnerving city.”
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Theaters were among the first buildings to be refurbished and heated, and Berliners flocked to their warmth, drawing on the power of theater to interpret the nightmares of the recent past. Rote Kapelle survivors were among the earliest authors to reemerge. Günther Weisenborn was one of the first. His 1946 play,
Die Illegalen (The Illegals)
portrayed the world of the Schulze-Boysen group in a series of short, deft scenes. Weisenborn published it within a year of leaving prison, and the play was performed extensively in Germany over the following decade.
Die Illegalen
dramatized the anxiety of parents who opposed the Nazis but feared for their children in the resistance, and depicted the shy
embraces of young people assigned to play lovers in order to paste anti-Hitler stickers on the walls. Weisenborn's program notes commented on the complexity of postwar culture:
Among the audience there are courageous and indifferent people; refugees, returnees from the front, former traitors and secret Nazis; indifferent bourgeois and young hopeful people. There are widows of fascism sitting next to people of good will, villains next to desperate people, those who are exhausted and those who still have hope.
2
Three years later Weisenborn published a slim volume called
Memorial,
which he had begun in prison, writing on paper bags. The book was a collage of his reporting days in New York, his underground work with Harro Schulze-Boysen, and his ordeals in prison. Its epigraph stated: “It surprises me that we still have the same faces that we had three thousand years earlier, after so much hatred and suffering has been dragged over them.”
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Weisenborn gradually resumed his work in German cinema, but he was not always welcome. The Allies, and particularly the Americans, were unenthusiastic about artistic explorations of the recent past. U.S. authorities initially forbade the production of new German films, even by proven antifascists, and fed German audiences a diet of light Hollywood entertainment.
Weisenborn and Falk Harnack struck up a collaboration with Wolfgang Staudte, a veteran of Piscator's Volksbühne who had been banned from working in theater under the Nazis. Staudte directed the first feature to deal with the Nazi legacy, the 1946 film
Die Mörder sind unter uns (Murderers Among Us)
starring Hildegarde Neff. It told the story of a concentration camp survivor who returns to Berlin after the war to find her apartment inhabited by a traumatized veteran. American officials refused Staudte permission to produce the film, so he took it to the Russians and made it at East Germany's new DEFA film center, built on the ashes of the UFA in Babelsberg. The film became a postwar classic.
A few years later Staudte made
Rotation,
an ambitious film depicting
a resistance group similar to Weisenborn's. The plot concerned a printer who is torn between his brother-in-law's commitment to the antifascist underground and his son's loyalty to the Hitler Youth. He joins an underground leaflet campaign, is arrested by the Gestapo, and narrowly misses execution. The film shows non-Communists and Communists working together against the fascists, watching in silent agony as their children's minds are warped by Nazi propaganda. Western occupation authorities also judged this film as unsuitable for postwar German audiences.
4
German playwrights had dealt with World War I through the
Heim-kehrerdrama
(homecoming drama) that portrayed a soldier's returning to “face the difficulty, or impossibility, of reintegrating into a society which rejects them as symbols of a recent past that it wishes to forget.” Now many of the same writers faced an even more difficult task. This time they were not just reflecting the horrors of war back to their countrymen, but the horrors that had enveloped the entire society. This task would consume Günther Weisenborn for the rest of his life.
German books about the resistance were also discouraged. After the war, Rosemarie Reichwein, the widow of a 20th of July conspirator and leading Social Democrat, hungered to know more about her husband's fate. “Above all, I tried to get hold of literature on the
Widerstand
[resistance]—a difficult job,” she told an interviewer.
I found the first book on the subject in Sweden; the diaries of Ul-rich von Hassell. At first this book could only be published in Switzerland … since the Allies did not like to see this kind of literature. They just did not want it to be known that there had been any resistance at all.
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There were even greater efforts to erase the record of the Communists. “To this day the Communist resistance is misunderstood,” Reichwein stated in the 1990s. “To be sure this is not surprising in light of the fact that the GDR was our neighbor. We were afraid and wanted nothing to do with Communism. But despite all this we should not overlook that the Communists lost more lives.”
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Reichwein had a special appreciation for the women in the Communist resistance circles.
There was a distinction between us wives whose husbands were active and the Communist wives in the city. There, the wives themselves took a very active part, distributing leaflets or establishing underground links. They probably did more than us; we stood in the background, approved of what our husbands were doing and supported them but weren't active ourselves.
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Freya von Moltke, whose aristocratic husband was executed as an antifascist, praised Greta Kuckhoff's circle in an interview.
