Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group

The Red Orchestra, as historically viewed in the world today, are mainly the resistance groups around the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, the writer Adam Kuckhoff and the economist Arvid Harnack, to which historians assign more than 100 people.^[15]

Origin

Harnack and Schulze-Boysen had similar political views, both rejected the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and sought alternatives to the existing social order. Since the Great Depression of 1929, they saw the Soviet planned economy as a positive counter-model to the free-market economy. They wanted to introduce planned economic elements in Germany and work closely with the Soviet Union without breaking German bridges to the rest of Europe.

Before 1933, Schulze-Boysen published the non-partisan leftist and later banned magazine German: Gegner, lit. 'opponent'.^[16] In April 1933, the Sturmabteilung detained him for some time, severely battered him, and killed a fellow Jewish inmate. As a trained pilot, he received a position of trust in 1934 in the Reich Ministry of Aviation and had access to war-important information. After his marriage to Libertas Schulze-Boysen in 1936, the couple collected young intellectuals from diverse backgrounds, including the artist couple Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher, the writers Günther Weisenborn and Walter Küchenmeister, the photojournalist John Graudenz (who had been expelled from the USSR for reporting the Soviet famine of 1932–1933) and Gisela von Pöllnitz, the actor Marta Husemann and her husband Walter in 1938, the doctors Elfriede Paul in 1937 and John Rittmeister in Christmas 1941, the dancer Oda Schottmüller, and since Schulze-Boysen held twice-monthly meetings at his Charlottenburg atelier for thirty-five to forty people in what was considered a Bohemian circle of friends. Initially, these meetings followed an informatics program of resistance that was in keeping with its environment and were important places of personal and political understanding but also vanishing points from an often unbearable reality, essentially serving as islands of democracy. As the decade progressed they increasingly served as identity-preserving forms of self-assertion and cohesion as the Nazi state became all-encompassing.^[17] Formats of the meetings usually started with book discussions in the first 90 minutes, were followed by Marxist discussions and resistance activities, and were interspersed with parties, picnics, sailing on the Wannsee and poetry readings until midnight as the mood took.^[18] However, as the realisation that the war preparations were becoming unstoppable and the future victors were not going to be the Sturmabteilung, Schulze-Boysen, whose decisions were in demand, called for the group to cease their discussions and start resisting.^[17]

Other friends were found by Schulze-Boysen among former students of a reform school on the island of Scharfenberg in Berlin-Tegel. These often came from communist or social – democratic workers' families, e.g. Hans and Hilde Coppi, Heinrich Scheel, Hermann Natterodt and Hans Lautenschlager. Some of these contacts existed before 1933, for example through the German Society of intellectuals. John Rittmeister's wife Eva was a good friend of Liane Berkowitz, Ursula Goetze, Friedrich Rehmer, Maria Terwiel and Fritz Thiel who met in the 1939 abitur class at the secondary private school, Heil'schen Abendschule at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg. The Romanist Werner Krauss joined this group, and through discussions, an active resistance to the Nazi regime grew. Ursula Goetze who was part of the group, provided contacts with the communist groups in Neukölln.^[9]

From 1932 onwards, the economist Arvid Harnack and his American wife Mildred assembled a group of friends and members of the Berlin Marxist Workers School (MASCH) to form a discussion group that debated the political and economic perspectives at the time.^[19] Harnak's group meetings, in contrast to those of Schulze-Boysen's group, were considered rather austere. Members of the group included the German politician and Minister of Culture Adolf Grimme, the locksmith Karl Behrens, the German journalist Adam Kuckhoff and his wife Greta and the industrialist and entrepreneur Leo Skrzypczynski. From 1935, Harnack tried to camouflage his activities by becoming a member of the Nazi Party working in the Reich Ministry of Economics with the rank of Oberregierungsrat. Through this work, Harnack planned to train them to build a free and socially just Germany after the end of the National Socialism' regime.^[9]

The dancer Oda Schottmüller and Erika Gräfin von Brockdorff were friends with the Kuckhoffs. In 1937 Adam Kuckhoff introduced Harnack to the journalist and former journalist railway worker John Sieg, a former editor of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) newspaper the Die Rote Fahne. As a railway worker at the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Sieg was able to make use of work-related travel, enabling him to found a communist resistance group in the Neukölln borough in Berlin. He knew the former Foreign Affairs Minister Wilhelm Guddorf and Martin Weise.^[20] In 1934 Guddorf was arrested and sentenced to hard labour. In 1939 after his release from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp,^[18] Guddorf worked as a bookseller, and worked closely with Schulze-Boysen.^[9]

This network grew up after Adam and Greta Kuckhoff introduced Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen to Arvid and Mildred Harnack, and the couples began engaging socially.^[21] Their hitherto separate groups moved together once the Polish campaign began in September 1939.^[22] From 1940 onwards, they regularly exchanged their opinions on the war and other Nazi policies and sought action against it.^[9] Through such contacts, a loose network formed in Berlin in the early weeks of 1942, of seven interconnected groups centred on personal friendships as well as groups originally formed for discussion and education.^[23] This disparate network was composed of over 150 Berlin Nazi opponents,^[24] including artists, scientists, citizens, workers, and students from several different backgrounds. There were Communists, political conservatives, Jews, Catholics, and atheists. Their ages ranged from 16 to 86, and about 40% of the group were women. Group members had different political views, but searched for the open exchange of views, at least in the private sector. For instance, Schulze-Boysen and Harnack shared some ideas with the Communist Party of Germany, while others were devout Catholics such as Maria Terwiel and her husband Helmut Himpel. Uniting all of them was the firm rejection of national socialism.

The historian Heinrich Scheel, a schoolmate of Hans Coppi, judged these groups by stating:

Only with this stable hinterland was it possible to survive all the minor mishaps and major catastrophes and give our resistance permanence.

As early as 1934, Scheel had passed written material from one contact person to the next within clandestine communist cells and had seen how easily such connections were lost if a meeting did not materialise due to one party being arrested. In a relaxed group of friends and discussion with like-minded people, it was easy to find supporters for an action.^[25]

Acts of resistance

From 1933 onwards, the Berlin groups connected to Schulze-Boysen and Harnack resisted the Nazis by:

• Providing assistance to the persecuted.
• Disseminating pamphlets and leaflets that contained dissident content.
• Writing letters to prominent individuals including university professors.
• Collecting and sharing information, including on foreign representatives, on German war preparations, crimes of the Wehrmacht and Nazi crimes.
• Contacting other opposition groups and foreign forced labourers.
• Invoking disobedience of Nazi representatives.
• Writing drafts for a possible post-war order.

From mid-1936, the Spanish Civil War preoccupied the Schulze-Boysen group. Through Walter Küchenmeister, the Schulze-Boysen group began to discuss more concrete actions, and during these meetings would listen to foreign radio stations from London, Paris and Moscow.^[22] A plan was formed to take advantage of Schulze-Boysen's employment, and through this, the group was able to get detailed information on Germany's support of Francisco Franco. Beginning in 1937, in the Wilmersdorf waiting room of Dr. Elfriede Paul, they began distributing the first leaflet on the Spanish Civil War.^[26]

In the same year, Schulze-Boysen had compiled a document about a sabotage enterprise planned in Barcelona by the Wehrmacht "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Helmuth Wilberg to analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Kondor during the war.^[27] The information that Schulze-Boysen collected included details about German transports, deployment of units and companies involved in the German defense.^[28] Libertas's cousin, Gisela von Pöllnitz placed the letter in the mailbox of the Soviet Embassy on the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.^[29]

After the Munich Agreement, Schulze-Boysen created a second leaflet with Walter Küchenmeister, that declared the annexation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 as a further step on the way to a new world war. This leaflet was called Der Stoßtrupp or The Raiding Patrol, and condemned the Nazi government and argued against the government's propaganda.^[22] A document that was used at the trial of Schulze-Boysen indicated that only 40 to 50 copies of the leaflet were distributed.^[22]

Call for popular uprising

Acts of espionage

The Invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, was seen as the beginning of the feared world war, but also as an opportunity to eliminate Nazi rule and to invoke a thorough transformation of German society. Hitler's victories in France and Norway in 1940 encouraged them to expect the replacement of the Nazi regime, above all from the Soviet Union, not from Western capitalism. They believed that the Soviet Union would keep Germany as a sovereign state after its victory and that they wanted to work towards a corresponding opposition without domination by the Communist Party of Germany.

Around 13 June 1941, Harro Schulze-Boysen prepared a report that gave the final details of the Soviet invasion including details of Hungarian airfields containing German planes.^[45] On 17 June, the People's Commissariat for State Security presented the report to Stalin, who harshly dismissed it as disinformation.^[46]

In December 1941, John Sieg published The Home Front (German:Die Innere Front) on a regular basis.^[47] It contained texts by Walter Husemann, Fritz Lange, Martin Weise and Herbert Grasse [de], including information about the economic situation in Europe, references to Moscow radio frequencies, and calls for resistance. It was produced in several languages for foreign forced labourers in Germany.^[48] Only one copy from August 1942 has survived.^[49] After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hilde Coppi had secretly listened to Moscow radio in order to receive signs of life from German prisoners of war and to forward them to their relatives via Heinrich Scheel. This news contradicted the Nazi propaganda that the Red Army would murder all German soldiers who surrendered. In order to educate them about propaganda lies and Nazi crimes, the group copied and sent letters to soldiers on the Eastern Front, addressed to a fictitious police officer.^[50]

In autumn 1941 the eyewitness Erich Mirek reported to Walter Husemann about mass murders of Jews by the SS and SD in Pinsk.^[51] The group announced these crimes in their letters.

The Berlin group undoubtedly provided valuable intelligence to the Soviet Union.^[52] However, a Soviet memo dated 25 November 1941 and recently discovered by Shareen Blair Brysac, details the organisational problems in evaluating the intelligence. Reports were forwarded to Lavrentiy Beria, who was unable to act on their contents, which resulted in the Red Army being unable to form a cogent response.^[53] Ultimately, the groups' efforts had no effect on Soviet military strategy.^[53]

The von Scheliha Group

The cavalry officer, diplomat and later resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha was recruited by Soviet intelligence while in Warsaw in 1934. Although a member of the Nazi party since 1938, he took an increasingly critical stance against the Nazi regime by 1938 at the latest. He became an informant to journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt.^[54] Intelligence from von Scheliha would be sent to Herrnstadt, via the cutout Ilse Stöbe,^[55] who would then pass it to the Soviet embassy in Warsaw.^[56] In September 1939, Scheliha was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office, that was created to counter foreign press and radio news by creating propaganda about the German occupation policy in Poland.^[57] This necessitated a move back to Berlin, and Stöbe followed, attaining a position arranged by von Scheliha in the press section of the Foreign Office,^[58] that enabled her to pass documents from von Scheliha to a representative of TASS.

Von Scheliha's position in the information department exposed him to reports and images of Nazi atrocities, enabling him to verify the veracity of foreign reports of Nazi officials. By 1941, von Scheliha had become increasingly dissatisfied with the Nazi regime and began to resist by collaborating with Henning von Tresckow.^[57] Scheliha secretly made a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo, and in particular, on murders of Jews in Poland, documents which also contained photographs of newly established extermination camps.^[59] He informed his friends first before later attempting to notify the Allies, including a trip to Switzerland with information on Aktion T4 that was shared with Swiss diplomats. His later reports exposed the Final Solution.^[60] After Operation Barbarossa severed Soviet lines of communication in Berlin, Soviet intelligence made attempts to reconnect with von Scheliha in May 1942, but the effort failed.^[61]

Individuals and small groups

Other small groups and individuals, who knew little or nothing about each other, each resisted the National Socialists in their own way until the Gestapo arrested them and treated them as a common espionage organisation from 1942 to 1943.

• Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein was a German SS officer who had twice been sent to concentration camps in 1938 due to close links with the Confessional Church and had been expelled from the Nazi Party. As a mine manager and industrialist, Gerstein was convinced that he could resist by exerting influence inside the Nazi administration. On 10 March 1941, when he heard about the German euthanasia program Aktion T4, he joined the SS. Assigned to the Hygiene-Institut der Waffen-SS (Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS), he was ordered by the RSHA to supply prussic acid to the Nazis. Gerstein set about finding methods to dilute the acid, but his main aim was to report the euthanasia programme to his friends. In August 1942, after attending a gassing using a diesel engine exhaust from a car, he informed the Swedish embassy in Berlin of what happened.^[62]

• Willy Lehmann

Willy Lehmann was a communist sympathiser who was recruited by the Soviet NKVD in 1929 and became one of their most valuable agents. In 1932 Lehmann joined the Gestapo and reported to the NKVD the complete work of the Gestapo.^[63] In 1935 Lehmann attended a rocket engine ground firing test in Kummersdorf that was attended by Wernher von Braun. From this Lehmann sent six pages of data to Stalin on 17 December 1935.^[64] Through Lehmann, Stalin also learned about the power struggles in the Nazi party, rearmament work and even the date of Operation Barbarossa. In October 1942 Lehmann was discovered by the Gestapo and murdered without trial.^[63] Lehmann had no connection to the Schulze-Boysen or Harnack group.

The Trepper Group

Belgium was a favourite place for Soviet espionage to establish operations before World War II as it was geographically close to the centre of Europe, provided good commercial opportunities between Belgium and the rest of Europe and most important of all, the Belgian government was indifferent to foreign espionage operations that were conducted as long as they were against foreign powers and not Belgium itself.^[65] The first Soviet agents to arrive in Belgium were technicians. The Red Army agent, communist agitator^[66] and radio specialist Johann Wenzel arrived in January 1936,^[67] to establish a base. However, the Belgian authorities refused him permission to remain, so he moved to the Netherlands in early 1937, where he made contact with Daniël Goulooze, who was director of the Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN) and who acted as the main liaison officer between the CPN and the Communist International in Moscow.^[68]

Leopold Trepper was an agent of the Red Army Intelligence and had been working with Soviet intelligence since 1930.^[69] Trepper along with Soviet military intelligence officer, Richard Sorge were the two main Soviet agents in Europe and were employed as roving agents setting up espionage networks in Europe and Japan.^[4] Whereas Richard Sorge was a penetration agent, Trepper ran a series of clandestine cells for organising agents.^[4] Trepper used the latest technology, in the form of small wireless radios to communicate with Soviet intelligence.^[4] Although the monitoring of the radios transmissions by the Funkabwehr would eventually lead to the organisations destruction, the sophisticated use of the technology-enabled the organisation to behave as a network.^[4]

During the 1930s, Trepper had worked to create a large pool of informal intelligence sources, through contacts with the French Communist Party.^[70] In 1936, Trepper became the technical director of Soviet Red Army Intelligence in Western Europe.^[71] He was responsible for recruiting agents and creating espionage networks.^[71] During early 1938, he was sent to Brussels to establish commercial cover for a spy network in France and the Low Countries. In the autumn of 1938, Trepper approached a Jewish businessman and former Comintern agent Léon Grossvogel, whom he had known in Palestine.^[72] Grossvogel ran a small business called Le Roi du Caoutchouc or The Raincoat King on behalf of its owners. Trepper had a plan to use money that had been provided to him, to create a business that would be the export division of The Raincoat King.^[73] The new business was given an unidiomatic name of Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company.^[72] Trepper's plan was to wait until the company gained market share, and then when it was of sufficient size, infiltrate it with communist personal in positions such as shareholders, business managers and department heads.^[74] On 6 March 1939, Trepper, now using the alias Adam Mikler, a wealthy Canadian businessman, moved, with his wife, to Brussels to make it his new base.^[75]

In March 1939, Trepper was joined by GRU agent Mikhail Makarov posing as Carlos Alamo,^[76] who was to provide expertise in forged documentation e.g. preparation of Kennkartes.^[77] However, Grossvogel had recruited Abraham Rajchmann, a criminal forger, to the group and thenceforth Makarov became a radio operator.^[78] In July 1939, Trepper was joined in Brussels by GRU agent Anatoly Gurevich posing as the wealthy Uruguayan Vincente Sierra^[79] Gurevich has already completed his first operation by meeting Schulze-Boysen in order to reestablish him as an intelligence source and to arrange courier service.^[79] Gurevich's original remit was to learn the operation of the raincoat company and establish a new store in Copenhagen.^[79]

The Jeffremov Group

This network was run by Soviet Army Captain Konstantin Jeffremov. He arrived in Brussels in March 1939 to organise various groups into a network.^[90] Jeffremov's group was independent of Trepper's group, although there were some members who worked for both and it was likely that by 1941, Jeffremov knew about Gurevich's network.^[91]

Jeffremov's most important agent, was the Belgian Edouard Van der Zypen, who worked at Henschel & Son, a manufacturing company in Kassel that made aircraft and tanks.^[92] His other recruits were Maurice Peper and Elizabeth Depelsenaire. Peper was a professional radio operator who was recruited into the network in 1940 and became the main liaison between Belgium and Amsterdam.^[56] After the reorganisation, he worked as the cutout between Jeffremov and Rajchmann.^[93] Depelsenaire was responsible for her own sub-group, that provided safe accommodation in the Brussels area.^[94] Anton Winterink worked for Jeffremov for most of 1940 in Brussels but made frequent trips to the Netherlands where he established another network.^[95] Later in 1940, Jeffremov ordered Winterink to take charge of the network, that became known as group Hilda.^[95] By December 1940, both Wenzel in Belgium and Winterink in the Netherlands had established a radio link with Moscow, that was being used to transmit intelligence provided by Jeffremov.^[91] In 1939, the married couple, Franz and Germaine Schneider were recruited by Jeffremov.^[96] The couple were members of the Communist Party of Belgium and had been running Communist International (Comintern) safe houses in Brussels. For a number of years^[97] Germaine Schneider was the most important of the two, working as a courier from 1939 to 1942 that involved extensive travel across the Low Countries.^[98] Before the war, she was Henry Robinson's contact to Soviet agents in Great Britain.^[98] While she worked from Jeffremov, she couriered between Brussels and Paris.^[98]

In May 1942, as part of a reorganisation effort after the raid on the Rue des Atrebates safehouse, Trepper met Jeffremov in Brussels to instruct him to take over the running of the Belgian espionage network^[99] in the absence of Anatoly Gurevich who had run the network from July 1940 to December 1941.^[100] The most important aspect of Jeffremov's new commission was to ensure the continued transmission of the intelligence they were receiving from the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group. This information was forwarded to Soviet intelligence via a French Communist Party radio transmitter.^[99] Jeffremov was frequently admonished by Soviet intelligence for his lack of activity and slow production of quality intelligence.^[91] In May 1942, following Makarov's arrest, Wenzel agreed to begin transmitting for Jeffremov^[99] and operated out of a safehouse at 12 Rue de Namur in Brussels.

On 30 July 1942, the house at 12 Rue de Namur was raided by the Abwehr and Wenzel was arrested.^[101] Germaine Schneider managed to warn Trepper, who warned Jeffremov, who managed to escape.

Dutch Information Service

In 1935, Dutch Comintern member Daniël Goulooze established the clandestine Dutch Information Service (DIS), an intelligence organisation to collect information for consumption by Soviet intelligence.^[102] In 1937, Goulooze was sent for intelligence training to the Soviet Union.^[103] When he returned, he became the main rezident (резиде́нт)^[104] agent for the Netherlands.^[103] In the years leading up to the war, Goulooze had contacts with the KPD officials in Berlin and Comintern members in the Low Countries, France and Great Britain.^[103] In 1937, Goulooze established a wireless telegraphy connection between the Comintern in Amsterdam and the Soviet Union.^[105]

In October 1937, Johann Wenzel contacted Goulooze in Amsterdam and they discussed plans for the construction of a radio network in Belgium.^[106] At the end of 1938, Wenzel again visited Goulooze, to recruit Dutch national and Rote Hilfe member Anton Winterink.^[68] By September 1939, Wenzel had trained Winterink as a radio operator, in Brussels. ^[68] Winterink subsequently became the radio operator for the Jeffremov group in Belgium.^[68] In the lead up to the war, Wenzel continued to recruit Dutch communists from Goulooze, for the Jeffremov group.^[68] In October 1939, Gurevich visited Goulooze to request help to build his espionage network in Belgium.^[103] Gurevich asked that a temporary wireless telegraphy link be established for his use, while he established his own wireless telegraphy link. This was used until January 1940.^[103]

As the war progressed and the other communist organisations were destroyed, the DIS became increasingly important to Soviet intelligence as the only organisation in Western Europe that could maintain contact with Soviet agents on the ground.^[107] Such was the level of communication Goulooze conducted with Soviet intelligence, that he maintained four separate and active wireless telegraphy sets and one in reserve.^[108]

Knöchel Emigre group

In 1940, it was decided by the Comintern that various KPD sections (Abschnittsleitungen) in Germany should be amalgamated into a single operational section,^[109] that was to be led by German KPD organiser Wilhelm Knöchel.^{[lower-alpha 3]} The Comintern decided the planning stage for the operation would be done in Amsterdam.^[109] From mid-1940, Knöchel with the assistance of Goulooze began to train the emigre group of communists in the Netherlands, to work in Germany as political activists, informers and instructors.^[110] Goulooze was able to obtain blank identity cards, along with official stamps to enable the KPD members who were in hiding, to interact with CPN members in Amsterdam and to travel safely to Germany.^[109]

In January 1941, the first Comintern instructor Alfons Kaps [de] travelled to Berlin,^[111] followed by Willi Seng,^[111] then Albert Kamradt and Alfred Kowalke [de].^[111] On 9 January 1942, Knöchel travelled to Berlin. ^[112] Goulooze arranged for everything that was published by the Comintern executive in Moscow, to be couriered to Knöchel in Berlin.^[113]

The seven networks

Trepper directed seven networks in France and each had its own group leader with a focus on gathering a specific type of intelligence.^[120] Trepper constructed them in a manner so that they were independent, working in parallel with only the group leader having direct contact with Trepper. Regular meeting places were used for contact points at predetermined times and these could only be set by Trepper. This type of communication meant that Trepper could contact the group leader but not vice versa and stringent security measures were built in at every step.^[120] These were as follows:

Rote Drei

The Red Three (German: Rote Drei) was a Soviet espionage network that operated in Switzerland during and after World War II. It was perhaps the most important Soviet espionage network in the war, as they could work relatively undisturbed. The name Rote Drei was a German appellation, based on the number of transmitters or operators serving the network, and is perhaps misleading, as at times there were four, sometimes even five.^[144]

The head of the Soviet intelligence service was Maria Josefovna Poliakova, a Soviet 4th Department agent,^[145] who first arrived in Switzerland in 1937 to direct operations.^[144] The other important leader in the Switzerland group was Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed Sonia, a colonel of the GRU, who has been sent to Switzerland in late 1938, to recruit a new espionage network of agents^[146] that would infiltrate Germany.^[147] Poliakova passed control to the new director of the Soviet intelligence service in Switzerland, sometime between 1939 and 1940. The new director was Alexander Radó, codenamed Dora, who held the secret Red Army rank of Major General.^[148][149]

Radó formed several intelligence groups in France and Germany, before arriving in Switzerland in late 1936 with his family. In 1936 Radó formed Geopress, a news agency specialising in maps and geographic information as a cover for intelligence work, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the business began to flourish.^[150] In 1940, Radó met Alexander Foote, an English Soviet agent, who joined Ursula Kuczynski's network in 1938, and who would become the most important radio operator for Radó's network. In March 1942, Radó made contact with Rudolf Roessler who would become the most important source of information.^[144] Roessler was able to provide prompt access to the secrets of the German High Command.^[151] This included the pending details of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union and many more, over a period of two years. A 1949 study by MI5 concluded that Roessler was a true mercenary who demanded payments for his reports that ran into thousands of Swiss francs over the course of the war years. This resulted in Dübendorfer being continually short of money, as Soviet intelligence insisted the link be maintained.^[152]

Radó established three networks in Switzerland. The three main sources of information, in decreasing importance:

• The first network was run by Rachel Dübendorfer, codename Sissy and who had the most important contacts of the three subgroups. Dübendorfer received intelligence reports from Rudolf Roessler (Lucy) via the cutout, Christian Schneider. Dübendorfer passed the reports to Radó who passed them to Foote for transmission.^[152] Roessler in turn received the information from sources whose aliases were named Werther, Teddy, Olga, and Anna.^[144]
• The second network was run by the French journalist Georges Blun (Long). His sources could not match the production of Lucy's group in quality or quantity but were nevertheless important.^[144]
• The third espionage network was led by Swiss journalist Otto Pünter (Pakbo). Pünter's network was considered the least important.^[144]

The three principal agents above were chiefly an organisation for producing intelligence for the Soviet Union. But some of the information that was collected for the Rote Drei was sent to the west through a Czech Colonel, Karel Sedláček. In 1935, Sedláček was trained in Prague for a year in 1935, and sent to Switzerland in 1937 by General František Moravec. By 1938, Sedláček was a friend of Major Hans Hausamann who was Director of the unofficial Buero Ha, then a covert arm of the Swiss Intelligence disguised as a press-cuttings agency. In the summer of 1939, Hausamann has been introduced to Rudolf Roessler by Xaver Schnieper, a junior officer in the Bureau and invited Roessler to work for Swiss intelligence.^[153] It was unknown whether Hausamann was passing information to Roessler, who passed it to Sedláček who forwarded it to London Czechs in exile, or via an intermediary.^[144]

Berliners with foreign representatives

From 1933 to December 1941, the Harnacks had contact with the US Embassy counsellor Donald R. Heath and Martha Dodd, the daughter of the then US Ambassador William Dodd. The Harnacks would often attend receptions at the American embassy as well as parties organised by Martha Dodd, until about 1937.^[161] As like-minded people, the group believed that the population would revolt against the Nazis and when it did not, the group became convinced that new avenues were needed to defeat Hitler. From the summer of 1935, Harnack worked on economic espionage for the Soviet Union, and economic espionage for the United States by November 1939. Harnack was convinced that America would play a part in defeating Nazi Germany.^[161]

In September 1940, Alexander Korotkov acting under his codename of "Alexander Erdberg", a Soviet intelligence officer who was part of the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin, won over Arvid Harnack as a spy for the Soviet Embassy.^[162] Harnack had been an informant but in a meeting with Korotkov in the Harnacks' top floor apartment at Woyrschstrasse in Berlin and later in a meeting arranged by Erdberg in the Soviet Embassy to ensure he was not a decoy, he finally convinced Harnack, who was reluctant to agree.^[163] Several reasons have been advanced as to why Harnack decided to become a spy, including a need for money, being ideologically driven, and possibly blackmail by Russian intelligence. It was known that Harnack had planned an independent existence for his friends. According to a statement by Erdberg discovered after the war, he thought Harnack was not motived by money nor ideologically driven but that he was specifically building an anti-fascist organisation for Germany as opposed to an espionage network for Russian intelligence. He considered himself a German patriot.^[164]

In February 1937, Schulze-Boysen had compiled a short information document about a sabotage enterprise planned in Barcelona by the German Wehrmacht. It was action from "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Luftwaffe general Helmuth Wilberg to study and analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Kondor during the Spanish Civil War.^[28] A cousin to Schulze-Boysen, Gisela von Pöllnitz, placed the document in the mailbox of the Soviet Embassy in Bois de Boulogne.^[165]

In April 1939, Anatoly Gurevich was ordered to visit Berlin and attempt to revive Schulze-Boysen as a source. He arrived in Berlin on 29 October 1939 and arranged a meeting, first with Kurt Schulze, the radio operator for Ilse Stöbe and then Schulze-Boysen.^[166] At the meeting, Schulze-Boysen confirmed there would be no attack on the Soviet Union that year, that Germany did not have enough oil to conduct the war fully.^[166] Gurevich persuaded Schulze-Boysen to recruit other people as sources. From 26 September 1940, Harnack passed on knowledge received from Schulze-Boysen about the planned attack on the Soviet Union to Korotkov, but not about the open and branched structure of his group of friends.^[167] By 1941, Schulze-Boysen had succeeded in creating his own network. In March 1941, Schulze-Boysen informed Korotkov directly about his knowledge of the German attack plans.^[168]

Schulze-Boysen employed the following people in his network: his wife, Libertas, who acted as his deputy; Elisabeth and Kurt Schumacher, who were close contacts; Eva-Maria Buch, who worked in the German Institute of Foreign Affairs; Oda Schottmüller and Erika von Brockdorff, who used their houses for radio operations; Kurt Schulze, radio matters; Herbert Engelsing, an informant; Günther Weisenborn, who produced Nazi commissions for Joseph Goebbels,^[169] John Graudenz, whose work as a salesman to the Luftwaffe allowed him to visit most airfields.^[170] Horst Heillman, a Funkabwehr officer and Elfriede Paul, who acted as a cutout for Engelsing.^[171]

Harnack employed the following people in his network: Herbert Gollnow, an Abwehr officer; Wolfgang Havemann, a scientist in German Naval Intelligence Service; Adam and Greta Kuckhoff; German industrialist Leo Skrzypczynski; politician Adolf Grimme; and railway worker John Sieg. Tool designer Karl Behrens and Rose Schlösinger, a secretary at the Federal Foreign Office, were couriers to Hans Coppi.^[172]

During May 1941, Korotkov had taken delivery of two shortwave radio sets that had been delivered in the Soviet Union embassy diplomatic pouch, in an attempt to make the Berlin group independent.^[173] They were handed to Greta Kuckhoff without precise instructions on how to use them, nor in how to maintain contact with the Soviet leadership in case of war.^[173] The two radio sets were of different design. The first set had been damaged by Korotkov and had been returned to the Soviet Union for repair, returned and kept by Greta Kuckhoff on 22 June 1941. That other set was battery-powered, with a range of 600 miles that was passed to Coppi on the instruction of Schulze-Boyson at Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher's apartment.^[174] On 26 June 1941, Coppi sent a message:A thousand greetings to all friends.^[175] Moscow replied "We have received and read your test message.^[175] The substitution of letters for numbers and vice versa is to be done using the permanent number 38745 and the codeword Schraube", and directing them to transmit at a predefined frequency and time.^[176] After that, the batteries were too weak to reach Moscow.

In June 1941, the Soviet Embassy was withdrawn from Berlin, and from that point, Schulze-Boysen's information was couriered to Brussels where it was transmitted using Gurevich's network.^[171]

In November 1941, another radio set was passed to Coppi at the Eichkamp S-Bahn railway station. It was supplied by Kurt Schulze, who gave Coppi technical instructions on its use.^[177] This set was more powerful, being AC powered. Coppi would later accidentally destroy the AC-powered transmitter by connecting it to a DC power socket, destroying the transformer and vacuum tube.^[178] Coppi and the Harnack/Shulze-Boysen resistance groups never received sufficient training from Korotkov. Indeed, when Greta Kuckhoff was trained she concluded that her own technical preparations were "extraordinarily inadequate".^[179] Only a few members of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Group knew about these radio experiments.

Contact with other groups

Since the beginning of the war in 1939, the Berlin group of friends intensified both exchange and cooperation among themselves. They had a desire to connect with organised and non-organised resistance groups from other regions and sections of the population and to explore common possibilities for action.

Both Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack were good friends with lawyer and academic Carl Dietrich von Trotha.^[180] Harnack knew Horst von Einsiedel, also a lawyer, since 1934.^[181] Schulze-Boysen knew the diplomat and author, Albrecht Haushofer from the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, where he was holding seminars.^[182] In 1940, Trotha and Einsiedel joined the Kreisau Circle, a resistance group that was officially formed with the merging of the intellectual peers of Jurists Helmuth James von Moltke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg.^[183]

Its members included lawyer, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Albrecht Haushofer, industrialist Ernst Borsig, bureaucrat Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, philosopher, Alfred Delp, politician Julius Leber, scientist Carlo Mierendorff and many others.^[183] Harnack and Schulze-Boysen had a frequent discussion with the group until 1942.^[184][185] The prison chaplain Harald Poelchau who accompanied the members of the resistance groups who were to be executed, was part of the Kreisau Circle resistance group.^[186]

Other members of the German group sought contact with the then largely destroyed underground network of the KPD. In 1939, the machinist Hans Coppi established contact with the resistance group associated with theatre actor and former KPD member Wilhelm Schürmann-Horster, while they were both taking evening classes.^[187]

In 1934, John Sieg and Robert Uhrig met Wilhelm Guddorf and sinologist Philipp Schaeffer while imprisoned in Luckau prison in Brandenburg,^[188] later making contact with KPD officials when released from concentration camp. Guddorf, on the other hand, held talks with the Bästlein-Jacob-Abshagen Group in Hamburg.^[189] The lawyer Josef Römer who had contacts with Sieg, Uhrig and Arthur Sodtke ^[190] also had contact with a Munich resistance group through Bavarian politician Viktoria Hösl.^[191]

In November 1942, in a meeting organised by Munich artist, Lilo Ramdohr, White Rose resistance group members Hans Scholl and Alexander Schmorell visited Chemnitz, to meet Falk Harnack, brother to Arvid Harnack.^[192] Scholl and Schmorell were looking to contact anti-Nazi resistance groups in Berlin and unite them together as allies with a common aim.^[192] Harnack held discussions with his cousins Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in order to prepare them for a meeting with Hans Scholls.^[193] In the spring of 1943, four members of the White Rose met Falk Harnack again in Munich, but received no clear commitment to his cooperation.^[194]

Reorganisation

In July and August 1942, the Soviet Main Directorate of State Security (GRU) tried to re-establish contacts with internal German opponents of Hitler. To this end, German communists in exile who had been trained by the GRU as espionage agents were parachuted into Germany.

On 16 May 1942, Soviet agents Erna Eifler and Wilhelm Fellendorf were parachuted into East Prussia.^[195] They were instructed to contact Ilse Stöbe in Berlin. However, they never managed to locate Stöbe and by June 1942 found themselves in Hamburg, a city they knew well. Fellendorf's mother, Katharina Fellendorf, hid the two. Later they moved and were hidden by Herbert Bittcher^[196] In early July, they took shelter with Bernhard Bästlein.^[196][197] Eifler's location was leaked by a communist informer to the Gestapo and she was arrested on 15 October 1942.^[195] Fellendorf managed to escape arrest for another two weeks.^[195]

On 5 August 1942 Albert Hoessler and Robert Barth parachuted into Gomel,^[198] reaching Berlin via Warsaw and Posen, a few days before the arrest of Schulze-Boysen.^[199] They had been sent to establish a radio link to the GRU for the Schulze-Boysen Group initially from Erika von Brockdorff's apartment and then Oda Schottmüller's apartment.^[200] They were caught before they could make preliminary contact with Soviet intelligence.^[201]

On the 23 October 1942, Heinrich Koenen parachuted into Osterode in East Prussia and made his way to Berlin,^[202] to meet his contact Rudolf Herrnstadt.^[203] He carried a radio set and a receipt for $6500 that had been signed by Rudolf von Scheliha in 1938.^[204] He planned to use it to blackmail von Scheliha, if he had proved recalcitrant in his endeavours. The Gestapo had advanced notice of Koenen's arrival from a radio intercept message that they had decrypted, and he was arrested on 29 October 1942 by a Gestapo official waiting at Stöbe's apartment.^[205]

The group around Robert Uhrig and Beppo Römer had more than two hundred members in Berlin and Munich with branches in Leipzig, Hamburg and Mannheim.^[206] In February 1942, the group was infiltrated by the Gestapo. By October 1942, the many members of the Bästlein-Jacob-Abshagen Group in Hamburg had been arrested.^[206] Several members of these groups including Anton Saefkow, Bernhard Bästlein and Franz Jacob, fled from Hamburg to Berlin and began building a new resistance network of illegal cells in the factories of Berlin, that became known as the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization.^[206]

Unmasking

The events that led up to the exposure of the Red Orchestra were facilitated by a number of blunders by Soviet intelligence, over several months.^[207] The radio transmission that exposed them, was intercepted at 3:58 am on 26 June 1941^[208] and was the first of many that were to be intercepted by the Funkabwehr. The message received at the intercept station in Zelenogradsk had the format: Klk from Ptx... Klk from Ptx... Klk from Ptx... 2606. 03. 3032 wds No. 14 qbv.^[208] This was followed by thirty-two 5-figure message groups with a morse end of message terminator containing AR 50385 KLK from PTX. (PTX)^[209] Until that point, the Nazi counter-intelligence operation did not believe there was a Soviet network operating in Germany and/or the occupied territories.^[210] By September 1941, over 250 messages had been intercepted,^[211] but it took several months for them to reduce the suspected area of transmission to within the Belgium area^[212] using goniometric triangulation. On 30 November 1941, close range direction-finding teams moved into Brussels and almost immediately found three transmitter signals. Abwehr officer Henry Piepe was ordered to take charge of the investigation around October or November 1941.^[88]

Arrests

Funkspiel

When the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle captured Soviet radio operators, instead of immediately executing them after interrogation as was normal practice for other agents, they were instead forced into running separate Funkspiel operations,^[275] under the direction of Giering.^[3] The term Funkspiel, defined by the German name "Funk" meaning radio and "spiel" meaning play or performance,^[276] was a common counterintelligence technique where controlled information was transmitted over a captured agent's radio, where the agent's parent service had no knowledge that the agent had turned. It was undertaken for a number of reasons that included poisoning the source by conveying deceptive material, discovering important intelligence and identifying networks.^[275]

To facilitate the operation, Hitler had given permission to pass on messages in coordination with the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, even if it fulfilled the definition of treason.^[277] The Gestapo's purpose in running this particular funkspiel was to discover Soviet links to the French Communist Party, the French Resistance and the Red Three.^[278]

Two transmission stations were built on the outskirts of Paris^[279] that were operated by the German Schutzpolizei^[279] for use by the agents captured in France. In Brussels, a house on Rue de l'Aurore was used for Funkspiel operations.^[280] From August 1942 to October 1942, the RSHA ran four Funkspiel operations in Brussels,^[82] for agents captured in Belgium.^[281] The Sonderkommando in France ran the funkspiel from 25 December 1942 to August 1944.^[82] Gurevich continued his own funkspiel in various locations until May 1945.^[82] Six radio sets that had been captured out of eight were used.^[282][3]

Johann Wenzel ran a radio station called Weide that started in August.^[281] Anton Winterink, ran a station known Beam Tanne that began in September.^[283] In October, two stations were established, one for Jeffremov that was known as station Buche-Pascal and one for Hermann Isbutzki known as Buche-Bob.^[246] Trepper's was known as Eiffel began on 25 December 1942, in Paris^[271] and Gurevich's funkspiel known as Mars began in March 1943.^[82]

The German funkspiel operation was largely a failure.^[279] In Belgium, Soviet intelligence was likely given an early warning when Germaine Schneider informed Trepper of the raid at 12 Rue de Namur in July 1942.^[281] In Paris, the Germans made a series of fundamental mistakes in procedures during the operation. The principle mistake they made was not recognising the difficulties faced by Trepper in establishing and maintaining communications in the first place. They made no attempt to model the types of communication difficulties the group would have faced.^[279] They also made series of sloppy mistakes in operational procedures, e.g. sending multi-part message out of order, nor taking cognisance of the supposed location of individuals and repeatedly sending the same message on different days. The Sonderkommando were also unable to overcome the problem of passing false information to Soviet Intelligence.^[279] While Trepper's Eiffel operation was running, the Germans passed general statements that had no detailed military information. This was another failure as Trepper had made a career out of delivering high-quality intelligence. Soviet Intelligence became increasingly strident in their demands for precise and accurate details.^[279] However, on 5 June 1943, the Commander-in-Chief West Gerd von Rundstedt refused to answer any further questions sent by Soviet Intelligence.^[277]

In August 1943, Heinz Pannwitz became director of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle in Belgium and France, replacing Giering.^[284] Panwitz reduced the size of the Sonderkommando and changed the type of messages sent; reducing the military aspect and instead focused on reports from the Catholic church, the German economy, Russian emigration and other civilian areas.^[3] The messages that Pannwitz sent in coordination with Heinrich Müller were designed to deepen mistrust between the Soviet Union and the western allies.^[3] The funkspiel operations continued until 3 May 1945.

Judgement

Execution

German contemporary witnesses

In the first post-war years, the performance and role model of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group were unreservedly recognised as an important part of the German resistance against the Nazis. In his book Offiziere gegen Hitler (Officers against Hitler) (1946) on the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 plot, resistance fighter and later writer Fabian von Schlabrendorff paid tribute to the Germans executed as members of the Red Orchestra.^[343]

In 1946, the German historian and author, Ricarda Huch publicly called for contributions to her planned collection of biographies of executed resistance fighters Für die Märtyrer der Freiheit (For the Martyrs of Freedom).^[344]

Huch explained the task as

How we need the air to breath, light to see, so we need noble people to live... When we commemorate those who lost their lives in the struggle against National Socialism, we fulfill a duty of gratitude, but at the same time we do ourselves good, because by commemorating them we rise above our Bad luck.^[344]

She named the men and women of the Red Orchestra at the forefront. Günther Weisenborn published Der lautlose Aufstand (The Silent Uprising) in 1953, based on material collected from Ricarda Huch, upon her death.^[345]

Western Intelligence

Western intelligence agencies were interested in the Red Orchestra after the war, as they hoped for information about the workings of Soviet foreign espionage.^[346][347]

In June 1945, British and American intelligence agencies submitted the first report on the Red Orchestra, the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and the funkspiel operation run by Heinz Pannwitz.^[348] Allied intelligence agencies questioned a large number of people and came to the conclusion that remnants of the Red Orchestra could still exist.^[349] The defector Igor Gouzenko warned them that Soviet agents still existed that were sleepers before being activated.^[349] At the same time, MI5 came to the conclusion that the Trepper organisation was working against the west.^[349]

The British also interrogated Nazi informers, e.g. Horst Kopkow who was head of the special commission Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle.^[350] In August 1945, Hilde Purwin told the American Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) about a secret Berlin spy ring for the Soviet Union,^[349] about which the judge advocate Egon Koepsch and general judge Manfred Roeder could willingly give information about its dismantling. These were then put out for investigation.

For the British, the most important intelligence were papers captured by the Gestapo, known as the Robinson papers that were created by Henry Robinson,^[351] a German comintern agent in Paris with close links to Leopold Trepper. The papers indicated that Robinson had been liaising with Soviet agents in Great Britain.^[351] Evelyn McBarnet, an agent of MI5 had worked on the papers to try and identify the names, but they were either aliases, post-boxes, or locations that had been bombed.^[351] Another officer of MI5, Michael Hanley also worked on the papers in the 1950s. He identified more than 5000 names belonging to the Red Orchestra organisation.^[351]

On 23 December 1947, Manfred Roeder along with Walter Huppenkothen had become informants for the CIC, placing them out of reach of a prosecution brought by Adolf Grimme and Greta Kuckoff.^[352] In 1942, senior Gestapo officer Huppenkothen was in charge of department IVa for counter-espionage. On 31 December 1947, the CIC wrote a report in which Roeder had the code name "Othello" that summarised Roeders testimony. Roeder had testified that the "Red Orchestra continued to be alive and active" and that "despite certain interests and attempts to portray it as a resistance organisation, it was in fact a spy network controlled by the Soviets".^[353] In his first report, Roeder testified that the Red Orchestra was still active and controlled by the Soviets.^[354] Written in early 1947, the 37-page report written for the Americans, identified all members of the Red Orchestra and their functions.^[353] He, Roeder, could not avert the death sentences, because Hitler's "People's Pest Ordinance" left him no choice at the time. The "civil justice system" had carried out the sentences and carried out a "reconstruction" of the execution site. Hanging was more humane than the fall-by-case. Hitler alone was responsible for rejecting the requests for clemency. He had demanded a summary condemnation of all the imprisoned members against which the Reichskriegsgericht had successfully passed on a case-by-case examination. Huppenkothen also pointed to Gestapo's experience with communist espionage and added a list of Gestapo "experts." On 19 January 1948, Roeder released another report at 90 pages, with photographs of Red Orchestra members, under the name "Bolshevik High and Treasonous Organisation in the Reich and Western Europe" describing it as a spy network spread across Europe that the Soviet Union had built up since the 1930s to conquer the continent.^[355] The report used the type of language and mentality characteristic of Roeder and other Nazi judges.^[355] As Roeder pointed out that the trial records of the prosecutions had been burned, he felt capable of distorting the historical truth.^[355] As the CIC had told Roeder that his reports would only be accepted if he wasn't convicted, the reports became the method by which he defended himself and this led to him distorting many historical facts and defaming the victims of the Nazi dictatorship.^[355]

By 1948, although the evidence obtained from the CIC was dubious, the Central Intelligence Agency were convinced that Red Three in Switzerland was still active.^[349] Roeder's description of the group indicated how little the Nazi state knew about the Swiss group.^[349] As a result, the Allied services took on the Gestapo myth from their informants.^[356] However, by 13 May 1948, a CIA memo was in circulation that detailed how Roeder had delivered no concrete evidence.^[357] In the summer of 1948, the American military government handed over the investigation against Roeder to the German authorities. Because Roeder was in US custody in Nuremberg at the time, his case was transferred to the German prosecution in Nuremberg.^[355]

Federal German Justice

On 15 September 1945, Adolf Grimme filed a complaint against Manfred Roeder with the military government of the British Occupation Zone in Hanover.^[359] Along with Greta Kuckhoff and Günther Weisenborn, Grimme also reported Roeder to the International Military Tribunal for crimes against humanity.^[360][361] By January 1947, the Nuremberg prosecutors were convinced he should be tried for war crimes, but after examining the complaint, no charges were brought.^[362]

On 7 January 1949 Roeder was released and returned to his family in Neetze.^[2] In October 1948, the Nuremberg prosecutors turned the case over to the German courts and the Lüneburg public prosecutor was tasked with pursuing the prosecution.^[2] Nuremberg prosecutor, Hans Meuschel hoped that due to Control Council Act No. 10 (Kontrollratsgesetz Nr. 10), the German law that recognised crimes against humanity, that justice would prevail against Roeder in the court of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice.^[2] Lüneburg prosecutor Hans-Jürgen Finck investigated Roeder, producing a 1732-page report in 1951, half of it recording in detail the supposed crimes of the Red Orchestra.^[2] Finck stated in the report that It cannot be refuted that the death sentences were lawful. Roeder was seen by Finck as a victim, not a perpetrator.^[2] On 1 November 1951, Finck closed the case. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice kept its final report under wraps for years, as it obviously coincided with Roeder's assessment of the "Red Orchestra".

This interpretation prevailed in the minds of the West German public of the 1950s and was also represented by leading West German historians at the time. Since then, the Red Orchestra in the Federal Republic of Germany has been largely portrayed as a purely secret service organisation. Helmut Kohl wrote in a letter to Harro's brother Hartmut Schulze-Boysen in 1987 that the German resistance consisted of the group around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the White Rose, that the Red Orchestra did not belong to it.^[363]

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union kept quiet about the Berlin group of friends for twenty years. On 6 October 1969, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner to Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff, Ilse Stöbe and Hansheinrich Kummerow.^[364] Günther Weisenborn, Karl Behrens and Albert Hoessler received the Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class.^[364]

Articles in Pravda^[365] and Izvestia^[366] praised the resistance of those so honoured, but interpreted it only as confirmation of the unifying force of the communist Popular Front policy under the dominance of the KPD, which was the only organised anti-fascist resistance group that had specifically collected information for the Soviet Union. Only publicly available Western sources were used in the articles. The Soviet intelligence files remained under lock and key.

In 1974, Juri Korolkov published Die innere Front Roman über d. Rote Kapelle that was about the group.^[367]

East Germany

From 1949 onwards, the GDR banned the publication of everything related to Soviet intelligence.^[368] Those of the German resistance who had contact with Soviet intelligence and what information they had, remained secret.^[369] In December 1966, a plan by Erich Mielke was organised in liaison with the KGB to formerly identify the scouts and honour them.^[369] By August 1967, public appreciation of the group began in earnest when proposals for the posthumous honouring of the German group as a Scout organisation were made, that specified the award for scouts of the Red Orchestra.^[369]

In 1970, a DEFA feature film KLK an PTX... was released that portrayed the official histories of the Red Orchestra as a group dependent on the anti-fascism of the KPD and therefore only capable of joint action. Here too, the intelligence activity was overemphasised, but it was seen positively here. Since the 1960s, all biographies of the members of the Red Orchestra in the GDR have been adapted by the Stasi to give the GDR secret service a story with anti-fascist roots.^[370] The 1979 book Rote Kapelle gegen Hitler^[371] by Soviet military historian Alexander Blank and Stasi officer Julius Mader is used today as an example of a manipulated historiography.^[370] The GDR's image of history solidified the false image of the Red Orchestra in the Federal Republic as a communist spy group.^[372]

Historical research

The first attempts to secure sources on the history of the German resistance against Nazism were made by the branches of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in all German occupation zones. In 1948, Klaus Lehmann documented his information about the German resistance group around Shulze-Boysen and Harnack for the Union in East Berlin.^[373]

After positive appreciations of the immediate post-war period, West German historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter judged the Red Orchestra.^[374] Rothfel, writing for an American audience in The German Opposition to Hitler, An Appraisal (1949), wrote for the sake of historical justice, placed the resistance fighters of the 20 July plot, as well as the Harnack group at the centre of his study.^[374] Rothfel conceded that the German resistance to Hitler was much more extensive than could have been expected under the conditions of terror and lauded the convictions of the resistance fighters and their vision of a European mission.^[374] Ritter's Carl Goerdeler and the German Resistance Movement (Carl Goerdeler und die Deutsche Widerstandsbewegung) (1954) based his work on Roeder's writing "Die Rote Kapelle" and adopted his thesis of treason.^[375] He focused more on the resisters values and ideas.^[374] Ritter stated that not every resister who was unsatisfied or criticised the Nazis could be included in the German resistance movement.^[376] He was vehement in stating that socialist opposition against the Nazi state did not deserve the honorary title of Resistance. In his evaluation he stated, The group had apparently nothing to do with German Resistance, one should have no doubts about this....Any person who can persuade a German soldier to defect or betray important secrets...is a traitor.^[376]

The situation remained decisive in the 1960s when new publications by writers Gilles Perrault and Der Spiegel journalist Heinz Höhne were published. Perrault focused more on Western European resistance cells. Höhne used a collection of 500 radio messages belonging to veteran radio cipher officer Wilhelm F. Flicke, as his research base. However, Flicke had worked for another department between 1942 and 1943 and did not learn of the Red Orchestra until 1944. In 1949 and 1953, Höhne published two books, that are now considered sensational and a form of Colportage novel without a valid source base.^[377] In the book 'Codeword: Direktor', Höhne repeated Nazi accusations in great detail including Roeder's accusations, fabrications and slander. Not a single message was sent using the faulty radios. Höhne also repeated the spurious charge that was presented by the Nazis that the group was mercenary in its nature, which was entirely false.^[378] Perrault researched extensively in newspapers and interviewed witnesses but staged his own research.^[379] Perrault also interviewed contemporary Gestapo witnesses knowing they were responsible for torture.^[379] Witnesses like Harry Piepe were paid to tell their story.^[379]

In 1983, historian Peter Steinbach and designer, Hans Peter Hoch were commissioned by Richard von Weizsäcker, then mayor of Berlin, to fully document the German resistance to Nazism, in all its diversity.^[380] In 1989, the Memorial to the German Resistance established a permanent exhibition on the subject.^[381]

The effort by people like Weizsäcker led to an intensification of research, but it was only with the ending of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union on 8 December 1991, that the evaluation of Soviet archive documentation on the Red Orchestra could begin, without the lens of ideology intruding. In 2002, for the first time, Hans Coppi and Soviet political historian Boris Lwowitsch Chawkin and historian Yuri N. Zorya brought to light many original documents from the Russian archives, which refuted the myth that the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups were a spy organisation.^[382]

In 2009, a study by American political scientist Anne Nelson that was published as a book, came to the following conclusions:^[383]

• The members viewed themselves as rebels who were enlightened.
• That after the war, the Stasi manipulated history to fit their own agenda, specifically to reinforce the prescribed German-Soviet friendship and to legitimise its own spying activity as anti-fascist.

Johannes Tuchel, Director of the Memorial to the German Resistance commented on the astonishing agreement between the east and the west, in the reception that the group received. Tuchel noted how the historical context, as defined by the Gestapo, was transported into the Cold War and as result, falsified the legacy of the group, e.g. the impressive AGIS pamphlets.^[46]

In 2017, French author Guillaume Bourgeois, published the La véritable histoire de l'Orchestre rouge,^[384] offering a thorough analysis of the Trepper group. It tries to address the lack of sources in prior years that is accomplished by a rigorous examination of German and Soviet archives, in an attempt to provide an accurate historical revision. Bourgeois's conclusion on how little strategic information came from the apparatus of the Orchestra, i.e. from Brussels or Paris, was new.^[385]

Karl Barth tribute

The theologian Karl Barth made a rare exception to the West German assessment of the 1950s when he declared the group to be a model of the church resistance because of its openness to people from different social classes, its efforts to protect Jews and the timely clarification of the War Plans of the Nazi's. In his speech to the Hessian state government during the Volkstrauertag of 1954 in Wiesbaden, he stated:^[386]

And no matter whether it suits us today or not, we shouldn't hide the fact that there was also such a thing as a 'Red Orchestra': communists who were also involved in this struggle and also fell as victims of Nazism. No matter what their ideological background was and what one might think of their particular motivations and actions: these people didn't want to be part of what the Nazis wanted; they wanted to set a limit to their depraved and ruinous regime, to put an end to it. [...] Had they succeeded, it might have rendered a large amount of further human as well as material sacrifices unnecessary. But they didn't succeed. And this was not just their own fault, but was also because so few in Germany were willing to join and help them with determination, before it became safe to do so, and that they received so little understanding or meaningful assistance from outside

These and other speeches provoked outrage and rejection in the audience at the time.^[387]

Painting

From 1936 to 1941, the artist Carl Baumann was a student at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Baumann was also a resistance fighter, who was in contact with Schulze-Boysen. In 1941, he created Rote Kapelle Berlin, his famous painting that is located in the Stadtmuseum in Münster in which he portrays Harro Schulze-Boysen, Walter Küchenmeister and Kurt Schumacher building a bridge away from Nazism.

• Rote Kapelle Berlin (1941) Tempera on Nesse, 79×99 cm in Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History in Münster.^[388]

Literature

The writer Günther Weisenborn was arrested as a member of the resistance group in 1942 and was sentenced to death, but was later reduced to ten years in prison. Weisenborn dedicated his play in three acts The Illegals (German:Die Illegalen), to the resistance group, which premiered on 21 March 1946. In it, he portrayed two organised resistance fighters as tragic individuals whose love for each other fails due to the forced isolation and secrecy of their resistance work.^[389]

The writer and artist, Peter Weiss dedicated his magnum opus, three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance to the resistance from 1971 to 1981 celebrating their courage.^[390] For him, the resistance was the organisation in which it was possible to overcome the division of the labour movement into social democrats and communists in the common struggle against fascism.^[391]

Film

In 1970, DEFA made the film KLK an PTX – Die Rote Kapelle under the direction of Horst E. Brandt based on a screenplay by Wera and Claus Küchenmeister. The Harnacks were played by Horst Drinda and Irma Münch, Horst Schulze and Barbara Adolph played the Kuckhoffs, Klaus Piontek and Jutta Wachowiak played the Schulze-Boysens.^[392]

In 1972, the ARD released the multi-part TV series Die rote Kapelle by Franz Peter Wirth based on a screenplay by Peter Adler and Hans Gottschalk.^[393]

In 1989 the Yuri Ozerov film, Stalingrad was released, in which the Red Orchestra's espionage activities are one of several storylines.^[394]

In 2003, Stefan Roloff's second documentary, The Rote Kapelle, a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter and companion book Rote Kapelle^[395] corrected the Cold War-shaped image for the first time and told the true story of the resistance group through interviews with survivors and contemporary witnesses.^[396] It was premiered at the Memorial to the German Resistance, followed by cinema screenings, including in Berlin and New York, where he was nominated for Best Foreign Film 2005 by the US Women Critics.

In 2017, the documentary The good enemies. My Father, the Red Orchestra and I by Christian Weisenborn was released, consisting of private film material,^[397] excerpts of letters and diaries as well as interviews with relatives and authors.^[398] Weisenborn devotes a great deal of attention to the representation of the perspective of women in the resistance group and recalls that the story of resistance is still told primarily as one of men in the resistance.^[399]