Red Orchestra (50 page)
Authors: Anne Nelson
I always felt there was nothing I could do, although I found the whole National Socialist development dreadful. That was the difference between me and the women of the “Red Orchestra.” They were people who wanted to do something, who couldn't put up with nothing being done. To write off all the Red Orchestra people as Communists misses the truth.
I regret not having gone as far as they did and regard it as a weakness. But that was what I was like. I regret it but perhaps if I had acted like them I would no longer be alive, and I am a sufficiently normal woman to have wanted to stay alive for the sake of my two sons.
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The Western occupiers had political reasons for suppressing the history of the Communist resistance in Germany, but some officials admitted their errors regarding the German resistance as a whole. In his 1947 book, Allen Dulles frankly acknowledged that the United States and other Allied governments had failed to give German antifascists the support they deserved.
Before the war the West did not take too seriously the pleas of those anti-Nazi Germans who tried to enlighten it. … After Hitler went to war and Western eyes were finally opened to what
Hitlerism meant, no one would have anything to do with any German, whether Nazi or not. All were suspect.
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Neither the occupiers of West Germany nor those of East Germany possessed a political vocabulary that encompassed Greta and her group, and the survivors were unwelcome in both worlds. Arvid Harnack's younger brother, Falk, was an example. After the war, he had a successful career in German theater, which led to projects for the East German film company DEFA. In 1949 he directed another feature film that directly confronted the Nazi past, called
Das Beil von Wandsbek
(
The Axe of Wandsbek),
based on the true story of a humble butcher who agreed to fill in for an executioner, beheaded four Communists, and committed suicide out of remorse. After its initial critical success, the East Germans pulled the film from the theaters for being too sympathetic to the moral struggle of the butcher. It was Harnack's first and last film in East Germany. He departed for West Germany, where he resolutely continued to produce films that dealt with the Nazis and the resistance, even though they ran counter to the cultural tide. In 1955 he and Günther Weisenborn collaborated on the screenplay for
Der 20. Juli (The 20th of July),
which Harnack directed. One of the first films to deal with the military conspiracy, the feature won a West German Film Award as “outstanding feature film promoting democratic values.”
Falk Harnack and Günther Weisenborn resumed their collaboration in 1974 on a television movie version of Weisenborn's novel
Der Verfol-ger (The Pursuer),
another depiction of life in the underground. Weisenborn died in 1969, Falk Harnack in 1991, both in West Germany. Neither man ever abandoned his mission to defend the memory of the resistance. In his later years, Falk used to brood for days about the unsettled past, then telephone Manfred Roeder in the middle of the night to berate him.
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Greta Kuckhoff was also haunted by her legacy. By the fall of 1945 she was at work on a book called
Adam Kuckhoff zum Gedenken: Novellen-Gedichte-Briefe (In Memory of Adam Kuckhoff: Novels, Poems, Letters).
The slender volume was published the following year, printed on cheap postwar paper with a blurred photo of Adam in the frontispiece.
Greta was only four months out of prison when she completed her lengthy introduction. For the first time in twelve years, Greta could write without fear or Nazi censorship. For the last time in her life, she published writing that did not have to pass a Communist litmus test.
As a young widow, she described her husband's struggles of conscience. He was an artist who lived in the world of the senses, responding ecstatically to the beauties of nature. He was a moralist who wrestled with the ideals of truth and justice. His natural form of expression was fiction and poetry. He loved her and their son, Ule. Why then had he risked everything—and lost—in his quixotic vendetta against an all-powerful enemy? She answered,
Kuckhoff was glad to be alive, but he loved liberty and truth more than his life. He was deeply imbued with the knowledge that there was no possibility to serve this truth searchingly as long as the barbaric false teachings of National Socialism maintained their tyrannical rule.
In 1933, Greta recounts, Adam had received many invitations to leave Germany and resettle in a place where he could “breathe freely and write.” But he felt obliged to decline. “Of the small group of politically engaged writers, Kuckhoff was among the few who were not politically or ‘racially' under attack,” Greta explains. “He was able to stay, and therefore he had to stay.”
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The most striking aspect of Greta's essay is what it omits: it makes no mention of Communism, Marx, or the Soviet Union. Instead, she writes of God, freedom, and the influence of American writers Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. Even the murdered Hans Otto is cited only as an in-law and fellow artist, with no reference to the Communist Party. Greta's selections from her husband's writings include passages of aesthetic theory, lyrical poetry, and moving letters of farewell. There are no Communist calls to arms or works of Marxist theory. Perhaps this brief moment is the closest that posterity can come to hearing Greta's true measure of her husband.
Berlin's freewheeling postwar period was coming to an end, and the cold war loomed unmistakably on the horizon. Even most militant German
Communists resented the Soviets' excesses. They had extirpated German civilian populations from regions of East Prussia they had inhabited for centuries, and stripped Germany of every bit of industrial material they could carry, including the wherewithal for food production.
But Greta's disillusionment with the Americans was also growing. Instead of prosecuting Roeder, they investigated her. While the Soviets commemorated her group's resistance activities, the Americans derided them. She was shocked by the Americans' lackadaisical approach toward the Nazis as they reinstated many local officials and recruited others for intelligence work.
In 1948 matters came to a head. The United States and its Western Allies, frustrated by the Soviets' grabs for power and refusal to cooperate in reconstruction efforts, decided to launch a new currency system in their zones to jump-start the economy. There was an exchange of hostile gestures, culminating in the long-term division of Germany and the city of Berlin.
Greta's apartment was in the American sector, but she had been employed as a social worker for the municipality of Berlin, which was run by the Soviets. Now her paychecks, issued in the old currency, were worthless outside the Soviet sector. She packed up her belongings and moved. There were many advantages to her action. In East Germany the resistance was honored, and survivors were granted ample rewards. Greta's benefits would eventually include a handsome villa in Pankow, the Berlin suburb favored by the party elite, and a dacha in the country
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As a member of a privileged class, she benefited from access to state stores and scarce goods.
But Greta's choice was based on emotion as well as expedience. In 1949 she publicly announced that she was giving up hope that Roeder would ever be brought to justice. “Conditions in West Germany are such that no equitable outcome can be expected,” she wrote.
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Greta soon found that life in East Germany subjected her to other pressures. The difficulties were traceable to April 30, 1945, the day Hitler died, when the Soviets transported Germany's Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht back to Berlin. Ulbricht had a long and ugly history. As a Comintern official in the Spanish civil war, he was instructed to identify
“politically unreliable” German leftists in the international brigades and mark them for execution. He had sat out the war as Stalin's guest in Moscow, looking the other way as Stalin murdered hundreds of his fellow German Communists in Soviet prisons and concentration camps.
Now Moscow's surviving guests rejoined the KPD members who had stayed in Germany and others who had found refuge in the West. Often their political perspectives varied according to their experience. Many KPD members who stayed in Germany had worked alongside non-Communists: Christians, Jews, and Social Democrats. Together, they had faced prison, concentration camps, and execution.
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Under Moscow's new rules, any resulting heterodoxy in their outlook made them second-class citizens.
Ulbricht set to work reshaping East German society and the German Communist Party according to the dictates and needs of the Soviets. In West Germany, the Marshall Plan would help to prevent economic crises that could drive more political upheaval. But in the East, factories, vehicles, and art collections were dismantled and shipped off as compensation for the Soviet Union's terrible losses.
The Soviets had captured over three million German prisoners of war, and demanded that many of them remain in the Soviet Union as forced labor. Other soldiers who had made it home against impossible odds were sent back to join them. Some of the Soviets' POWs were held well into the 1950s, and over a million German POWs died in Soviet captivity.
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One of the most tragic Soviet abuses involved the persecution of members of the non-Communist resistance. East German intelligence official Markus Wolf later wrote how his Soviet masters used the denazification process as an excuse to purge political rivals:
When Soviet occupation officials carried out mass arrests of ex-Nazis and assorted opponents of Stalin, thousands of Social Dem ocratic opponents of Nazism were swept up, and some ended up in labor camps that, ironically, had only recently been Nazi concentration camps. We knew very little about that, and what we did know we viewed as cruel Western propaganda.
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One of their victims was Arvid Harnack's cousin Justus Delbrück, a member of the 20th of July conspiracy who had narrowly escaped execution by the Nazis. He was liberated by the Soviets from the Lehrter-strasse Prison at the end of the war, only to be rearrested shortly after.
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Delbrück reportedly died of diphtheria in Soviet captivity in October 1945. Michael Burleigh writes that some 122,600 German prisoners were detained in the Soviets' Special Camps immediately after the war. “Some of these people were discreetly murdered. The low figure for deaths in these camps ‘as a result of sickness' is 42,800.”
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East Germans who had only recently escaped the enveloping lies of Nazi propaganda were now blindsided by the Soviet version. Greta's neighbor from New York, Edith Anderson, was struggling to remain a loyal Communist, but early on she realized that the average East German periodical was less a newspaper than a “smokescreen and cattle prod.” One of the most closely held secrets was the story of Stalin's purges, including his persecution of German Communists before the war. Only a handful of returnees from Moscow knew the terrible truth before it was revealed in Khrushchev's “secret speech” of 1956. Edith Anderson later speculated that Berlin's Moscow crowd was so standoffish because they were shamed by what they knew.
Ulbricht and his government took measures to co-opt the Social Democrats by transforming the German Communist Party (the KPD) into the German Socialist Unity Party (SED). When the new party faltered in early postwar elections, the regime responded by banning the other parties and making East Germany a one-party state. (The East Germans stated that the KPD and the Social Democratic Party had “merged.”) Ulbricht's regime subjected East Germany to disastrous economic policies and repressive police state measures. Soon his government was facing waves of opposition from disaffected workers, frustrated intellectuals, and dissenters from the party itself. East German officials were especially distrustful of German Communists who had spent the war in Britain and the United States. Intellectuals were high on their list, routinely suspected of treason and ties to Western intelligence by the Moscow contingent. Intelligence chief Markus Wolf wrote, “In East Germany, the word ‘intellectual' had a disparaging ring in both the Party
and the Ministry of State Security. Many tried to defend themselves from accusations of ‘elitist thinking' or ‘immodesty' by stressing their acceptance of the leading role of the working class and biting their tongues about the idiocies perpetrated in its name.”
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Nonetheless, over the following decades many of them were purged, tried, imprisoned, or worked to death.
One early attack affected the prominent actor and director Wolfgang Langhoff. This was Günther Weisenborn's friend, the Communist concentration camp survivor who had tried to help Harro Schulze-Boysen's group from his exile in Switzerland. After the war Langhoff was appointed director of the prestigious Deutsches Theater, where he employed Falk Harnack and hosted a 1946 memorial service for actor Hans Otto, killed by the Nazis in 1933. In August 1951, Langhoff was accused of vague connections to Noel Field, an American Quaker Communist who had worked for the OSS. The East Germans stripped Langhoff of his position and the episode blighted his career. (Even less fortunate individuals were expelled from the party and public life altogether, making them “nonpersons,” while others were imprisoned under harsh conditions.)
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Greta Kuckhoff, struggling with survivor's guilt, fixed her attention on the mission of honoring the memory of her husband and friends. Initially, East Germany offered Greta Kuckhoff many of the opportunities she craved. She became an iconic fixture at the commemoration and naming ceremonies. Rote Kapelle orphans and survivors' children remembered her pale, grave face as she bent over them to ask after their lives and their studies.
But now her own personal history was trapped in the pincer of cold war politics. The West Germans, under the tutelage of the Americans, were not eager to admit that German Communists had led a spirited resistance movement through the Nazi period, after many other political parties had sold out or given up. The heterodox nature of the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group, mixing Communists with every other political description, made them doubly uncomfortable.
