Red Orchestra (12 page)

According to Sieg's city editor from the
Rote Fahne,
Hermann Grosse, Sieg owed his freedom to the quiet heroism of Theodor Haubach, a prominent Social Democratic journalist. Haubach had been the police press spokesman under a previous government, and he took it upon himself to make the police dossiers on the
Rote Fahne
editors “disappear.”
²⁰
The Nazis knew who was on the staff, but still had to go through established legal channels for sentencing. When the Nazis prepared to prosecute the editors, no files were to be found. “John Sieg was unknown at the police stations, and other arrests and measures of persecution were initially avoided.”
²¹
Within a year Haubach himself was locked up in Columbia-Haus as a result of his opposition activities, and he continued to struggle against the Nazis for the rest of his life. His gesture showed that, whatever the rivalry between Communists and Social Democrats, there were also instances of generosity and mutual support.

Many Communists saw that the advantage lay with the Nazis and changed sides, but John Sieg was not among them. While he was in detention
at the Hedemannstrasse barracks, he was approached by Karl Ernst, the SA Group Leader for Berlin. The storm trooper offered Sieg his immediate freedom if he would work for the Nazi press. Sieg refused.
²²

Following his release, John Sieg returned to Neukölln, the heart of the Communist Party underground. Several of Sieg's
Rote Fahne
colleagues lived in the area, trying to rebuild a network from whomever was left after the killings, the exiles, and the arrests. Hundreds of thousands of Communist Party members and sympathizers had been released from detention or escaped arrest, but it was difficult to organize and take action. Many of them had earned their living from trade union or professional party positions. With these organizations closed down, economic survival was the priority.

John Sieg's newspaper was one of these defunct operations. He was now unemployed and virtually unemployable. His wife, Sophie, still had her office job, but the lawyer who employed her was Jewish, making her situation precarious.

The Nazis realized that powerful forces in German society opposed them, and moved to consolidate their regime. They had already dismantled rival political organizations. Now they set out to impose their ethos of conformity on the rest of German society, with special attention to institutions that affected public opinion through media, culture, and education. The Nazis installed their own candidates in leadership positions, while leftists and Jews were purged.

At the helm of this process was Joseph Goebbels. His first objective was German broadcasting. When the Nazis took over the government, the newspaper and movie industries were still privately owned, and they realized that it could take a few years to bring them into full compliance. But German radio had been state-regulated since 1925, and this simplified the control of its content.

Less than two weeks after he took office as minister of propaganda, Goebbels addressed the managerial staff of the state broadcasting house in Berlin:

Within a year the German broadcasting system had been purged and unified into the Reich Radio Company. The nine regional broadcasters were downgraded to “stations,” run by general managers under Goebbels's control.

Goebbels maintained his interest in drama of every variety. His most celebrated piece of street theater took place on May 10, 1933, on Unter den Linden, just across the street from the University of Berlin, where Greta Kuckhoff and Arvid and Mildred Harnack had studied and taught. It involved the burning of books.

Over 40,000 Berliners gathered for Goebbels's spectacle, watching and chanting as students and storm troopers heaped some 25,000 books on the sidewalk and set them aflame. The burning ceremony, or
Verbren-nungsakt,
was conducted as a pagan perversion of a Christian rite. Huge bonfires erupted into the darkness; their flickering light transforming stolid German faces into ominous masks. The crowd of thousands chanted a litany of “fire oaths”: first, an offense, then a remedy, and finally the name of the writer to be cast out.

Among those blacklisted were many of Germany's most popular writers. Kästner was an antifascist, but he was best known for his enchanting children's books. Theodor Wolff, one of Germany's leading journalists and civil rights activists, was the Jewish editor of the prestigious
Berliner Tageblatt.
Erich Remarque's autobiographical novel
All Quiet on the Western Front
spoke for the “generation that was destroyed by war, even though it might have escaped its shells.” The book touched such a profound chord in German society that it sold a million copies in 1929, the year it was published.

Joseph Goebbels took his place before a podium draped in a Nazi banner. His resonant tenor voice, always marked by precise enunciation, was raspy that evening, perhaps from the smoke. But his message rang clear. The German
Volk
and their wholesome cultural values were going to be restored. Germany would be purged of urban, avant-garde, cosmopolitan culture.

The flames consumed thousands of the books that had given Berlin's “golden twenties” their luster, by Jews as well as by Catholics, Communists, feminists, social scientists, and Americans. Bertolt Brecht's plays burned next to Freud's treatises. The prints of Marc Chagall (a Jew) and Georg Grosz (a leftist) smoldered next to books by Americans Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, and Jack London, condemned for their pacifist or socialist tendencies.

The pyre also included works by Brecht's young friend Günther Weisenborn. His most recent play had been closed down on the same day it opened two months earlier. As far as the Nazis were concerned, the thirty-year-old playwright's career was over.

There were consequences for every writer in Germany, even those whose works escaped the flames. The bonfire consumed political texts that Greta Lorke and Arvid Harnack had studied in graduate school, and the works of Adam Kuckhoff's authors from
Die Tat.
The American authors included the subjects of Mildred Harnack's lectures and critical essays.

But the Nazis were acting to silence the intellectuals, not eliminate them. They needed time to strengthen their base, and knew they would require the ongoing productivity of Germany's skilled laborers, technocrats, and intelligentsia. The most effective means of harnessing them to their system was through systematic terror, rendering noncompliance too fearful to bear. Central to this effort was the new institution of the concentration camp, which combined elements of a prison, labor camp, and execution facility.

On March 14, 1933, the newly appointed Nazi head of the Munich police, Heinrich Himmler, described the innovation as a humane measure:

The following week Himmler gave orders to convert an abandoned munitions factory into a “concentration camp for political prisoners,” to handle the huge number of people being taken into “protective custody.” The grounds, a few miles northwest of Munich, lay just outside a market town called Dachau, known for its lovely views and picturesque fountains.

Over the following year the camp acquired almost 5,000 prisoners, the great majority of them Communists, as well as many Social Democrats and trade unionists who had been swept up in the raids. The early concentration camps tended to be relatively nonlethal, temporary operations. Over the second half of 1933, Dachau usually held about 3,800 prisoners at any given time. Anywhere from 600 to 2,000 chastened prisoners were released per month, replaced by newly arrested individuals.
²⁶
Officials gave press tours to journalists from major newspapers, to assure the public that conditions were civilized.

Shortly after the opening of the camp at Dachau, another concentration camp was created outside Oranienburg, just north of Berlin, adjoining an area called Sachsenhausen. Rumors of its brutality spread, and the regime quickly released a propaganda film showing the Communist and Socialist prisoners, clad in their own suits and sweaters, learning how to line up in an orderly fashion, and engaging in wholesome activities such as gardening and calisthenics.
²⁷
Within a year, Berlin's grim Columbia-Haus was redesignated as a concentration camp as well. It is reckoned that over the course of 1933, about 100,000 people were sent to concentration camps, although this figure does not include those who were taken to the “wild camps,” tortured, and released. Between 500 and 600 prisoners were killed.
²⁸

Germany's artistic community faced a choice between detention, exile, and compliance. The Nazi leadership tended to patronize artists, viewing them as useful pets and moral imbeciles. In 1938, for example, a Nazi official produced a 1933 Communist manifesto that had been signed by one of Hitler's favored sculptors, Josef Thorak. Hitler brushed it
aside, saying, “We should never judge artists by their political views. … Artists are simple-hearted souls. Today they sign this, tomorrow that; they don't even look to see what it is, so long as it seems to them well-meaning.”
²⁹
Thorak, with five years of faithful service to his credit, kept his position.

Hitler also made special allowances for the theater. His courtiers noted his “amazing knowledge of stagecraft, his interest in the diameter of revolving stages, lift mechanisms, and especially different lighting techniques.” As chancellor he moonlighted as a stage designer, sitting up at night for weeks on end drawing fully executed set designs for his favorite operas.
³⁰
Theater was central to his political philosophy. “We must bring the masses illusions,” he said in 1930. “Just because life is grimly real, people have to be exalted above the routines of every day.”
³¹

Much of Berlin's creative community, including Adam Kuckhoff's friends and collaborators, conformed to the new order. But not everyone fell into line. One prominent exception was Hans Otto, Brecht's friend and Kuckhoff's brother-in law. Otto, who had joined the German Communist Party in the early 1920s, was an enthusiastic participant in workers' theater, mixing his classical roles with parts in revolutionary works. Otto made the leap to Berlin in 1930, around the same time as Adam Kuckhoff. Otto's star continued to rise. In the 1930–31 season he appeared in almost two dozen stage productions, and had his first starring movie role in a UFA comedy called
Das Gestohlene Gesicht (The Stolen Face).

But as the political tensions mounted, Otto stepped up his activism. He served as a leader in the Communist Party's theater and film unions, contributed to party publications, and directed Marxist study groups in his theater.
³²

The endgame was near. January 21, 1933, marked the premiere of a stunning new production of Goethe's
Faust, Part II.
It was to be the iconic play of the Nazi era, the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for worldly gain. The production starred the theater's new regional acquisitions, Gustaf Gründgens as Mephisto and Hans Otto as the Kaiser. Herbert Jhering, Berlin's leading theater critic, gave the actors a rhapsodic review: