Red Orchestra (13 page)
Authors: Anne Nelson
The following week the Nazis came to power. Within a month, the Reich stag was burning and the purge was under way.
On February 27, 1933—five weeks after his triumph in
Faust—
Otto received an official communication from Franz Ulbricht, the new director of the Staatstheater:
Esteemed Mr. Otto!
I truly regret to be obliged to inform you that the collective artistic group of our theater finds it impossible to extend your contract after its expiration.
With the greatest respect, FU
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On May 23, 1933, Hans Otto played the Kaiser in
Faust, Part II
one last time. It was to be his last performance. Otto's friends urged him to leave the country. Many of his leading collaborators had already been forced into exile. His popular costar Elisabeth Bergner, a Jew, was driven out of the country. Max Reinhardt, the Jewish producer who had launched him in Berlin, contacted Otto from exile and invited him to join his theater in Vienna.
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Other offers came in from Zurich and Prague.
But Otto was reluctant. As a gentile with a successful stage career, he had the option of staying in the country and fighting fascism from within. His decision was sealed one evening after his dismissal, as he took a stroll with his wife and a friend near the park in central Berlin. The three spotted a freight car crossing the railway bridge, guarded by storm troopers. It was crammed with political prisoners en route to a concentration camp. After this experience, Otto refused to consider emigration.
Instead, he plunged into clandestine activity. It is difficult to know exactly what actions were involved, but one set of clues exists in a roman à clef called
Mephisto,
by Thomas Mann's son Klaus, who had worked with Otto and Gründgens in the 1920s. It is believed that Klaus Mann's 1936 novel depicts Hans Otto as a character named Otto Ulrich. At one time, Otto “had been an amiable, even tender-hearted man,” but after the Nazi takeover “he was no longer amiable, no longer tender-hearted. His gaze had developed a threatening gravity. Otto Ulrich was a man poised between caution and boldness, between attack and flight; he was playing a perilous game.”
Mann describes how Otto Ulrich contrived to remain at the Staats -theater for as long as possible, ingratiating himself with theater patron Hermann Göring and his circle. He glided between roles, making “Heil Hitler” salutes to Nazis one moment and holding clandestine meetings with antifascist stagehands the next. Mann writes that the actor had been briefly shocked into paralysis by Nazi terror, but then “he overcame his despairing apathy.” “‘When you have witnessed those horrors, you have only one choice,' he said. ‘You can either kill yourself or go back to work with greater dedication than before.' He went back to work.”
The objective was to gather together the dispersed forces of Resistance, to weld into a single movement an opposition composed of mutually antagonistic ideas and backgrounds. … And so he spread the net of the conspiracy wider than his close party comrades. He was much more anxious to contact opposition Catholics, former Social Democrats or independent republicans. At first the Communist encountered distrust in middle-class liberal circles. …
“But you are just as much against freedom as the Nazis,” protested the democrats. “He answered, ‘Look—we are all for the overthrow of tyranny. We can all come to an agreement about the kind of order that should be set up afterwards.' ”
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The actual Hans Otto threw himself into the same sort of underground activity with similar zeal.
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The Communist Party was in disarray, its membership gutted by arrests, desertion, and flights into exile.
For the next six months Otto traveled the city, seeking out the survivors. One gathering might take place in an old suburban mansion; another clandestine encounter might occur on the subway. Some meetings included Otto's wife, Marie, and her sister, Gertrud, who was still married to Adam Kuckhoff. It was a desperate situation in which little progress was possible. Otto and his friends continued to produce and distribute anti-Nazi flyers, but the work was tremendously dangerous. Given that the meetings involved leading celebrities from stage and screen, it was hard to be inconspicuous.
On the evening of Wednesday, November 13, 1933, Otto arranged to meet Gerhard Hinze, an actor from his underground group, at a little cafe on Victoria-Luise-Platz south of the Tiergarten. A signal was given and five storm troopers entered and arrested the men—someone had betrayed them.
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Otto and Hinze were taken to the Comet Cafe, a storm troopers' restaurant at a lakeside resort just outside Berlin. There the two actors were flogged, punched in the face, and kicked in the gut, as the music of a dance band played inside. The storm troopers demanded the names of other members of the underground, but Otto refused to talk, even after they pounded his head into the wall.
After four days of torture, Otto and Hinze were dragged off to another neighborhood. They were thrown into a stinking basement with a number of other battered men and women who appeared to have been there a long time. They were moved again, interrogated and beaten along the way, then delivered to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse for more interrogation. Their last stop was the SA barracks on Volkstrasse, just down the street.
Hinze and Otto were separated. Hinze recalled their final encounter:
During this ghastly night I saw Hans Otto once more. It must have been approximately around midnight. He no longer was able to speak but could make only indistinct sounds. His mouth and his eyes were thick and swollen. And then, seeing me, he tried to smile. … A few hours later I saw him for the last time. He was half naked and I could no longer recognize his face. His body was one bloody lump. He was unconscious. They kicked him and poured water on him to try to restore consciousness. In vain. A
few hours later they threw his battered body down on the pavement.
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Hans Otto died in the Berlin public hospital on November 24, 1933. Word traveled quickly that his murderers were three SA men named Witzke, Möder, and Kubik.
This was not the official story. Otto's wife was informed that her husband had committed suicide by leaping out of the top floor of the storm trooper barracks. It was said that Goebbels himself signed off on this account. There was a news blackout on Otto's death, and the regime warned that the act of attending Otto's burial would be considered an offense. Only a few friends and relatives showed up, closely monitored by the Gestapo. But it was impossible to keep Hans Otto's death a secret.
The German diarist who wrote as Sebastian Haffner described the shock of the German public:
Brilliant young Hans Otto, who had been the rising star of the previous season, lay crumpled in the yard of an SA barracks—yes, Hans Otto, whose name had been on everyone's lips, who had been talked about at every soiree, had been hailed as the “new Matkowsky”
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that the German stage had so long been waiting for. He had “thrown himself out of a fourth-floor window in a moment when the guards had been distracted,” they said.
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The impact of Otto's death rippled through the city. Adam Kuckhoff was one of the brave souls who dared to attend Otto's funeral. It was days before he could bring himself to talk about the experience: the lurking Gestapo agents, the sorrowing family, the inspiring eulogies. Kuckhoff had lost a friend, colleague, and relation, and this galvanized him into action. For Otto's friend and fellow party member John Sieg, his death was a reminder of the deadly perils of underground party activity.
German theater had changed forever in the course of a single year. An entire generation of playwrights, directors, and actors had vanished. Many of those who stayed behind (at least those who were not Jewish) found they could reach an accommodation with the new regime. Gustaf Gründgens, Hans Otto's friend, costar, and comrade-in-arms in leftist
theater, made a public show of his new allegiance. So did Heinrich George, another Staatstheater star who had worked closely with Pisca-tor, Weisenborn, and Brecht, and had joined Otto as a Communist theater union organizer.
Hans Otto's death also resonated abroad. It gave stern notice to the artists in exile that things would get worse before they got better. Letters, articles, and protests concerning Otto's fate flew across the continent.
Bertolt Brecht was finishing up a project in Paris, en route to Denmark. But he took the time to write an open letter about Otto to Heinrich George, who had, at least until recently, been a friend and collaborator to them both. For once, Brecht's voice was neither ironic nor direct; it wavered between an accusation and a plea:
We must address a question to you. Can you tell us where your colleague from the State Theater, Hans Otto, is? He was supposedly arrested by the SA, held in secret, and delivered to the hospital with terrible injuries. Some of us would like to know whether he died there. Can you not go and see about him? You know that this is not about a negligible man. … Where is he?
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Hans Otto was one of the first prominent artists to be murdered by the Nazi regime. He was thirty-three years old.
T
HE NAZIS' MOST DARING OPPONENTS TOOK DRASTIC MEASURES.
On March 3, 1933, German police arrested a group of Communists led by a shipwright in the Baltic port city of Königsberg. The conspirators had met secretly twice over the month of February to plan a bomb attack on Hitler at a Nazi rally on the eve of elections. They were released at the end of the year for lack of evidence, but the plot was the first of many attempts on Hitler's life over the course of the Third Reich.
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But over the Nazis' first year in power, most antifascist Germans were not yet disposed to assassinate. Their first concern was to buy time. It was difficult enough for them to comprehend what had happened; it was impossible to predict where things were going. The liberal and left-leaning intellectuals who remained in the country had lost their usual means of engaging in politics, and they stood to lose their livelihoods as well.
Mildred Harnack's situation illustrated their dilemma. Resolutely anti-Nazi, she was also a dedicated teacher who encouraged antifascist sentiments among her students. But if she wanted to continue teaching at the night school, she was obliged to become a member of the National Socialist teachers' organization. She joined in June 1933.
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Compliance had its rewards. In the throes of the Depression, good jobs were scarce, and the country's civil servants were hard pressed to save their paychecks. As thousands of Communists, Socialists, and Jews were eliminated from public life, their positions became available. Nazi
Party members quickly moved up the ladder. It was little wonder that in the three months between February and May 1933, 1.6 million people joined the Nazi Party (compared to a total membership of only 108,000 in 1929).
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Every aspect of German life had been hijacked by politics, even romance. Greta Lorke had been lured back to Berlin by Adam Kuckhoff, but he seemed to make his courtship conditional on her political engagement. “It is because I love you that I cannot give up having you at my side in the political struggle,” he told her.
4
Adam was strongly influenced by the Communist commitment of his “other family”—his former wife, Marie, and her husband, Hans Otto, who had been raising Kuckhoff's son Armin-Gerd. Kuckhoff's convictions were only deepened by Otto's murder.
Because the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Soviet Union had loudly opposed Hitler from the start, Germany's remaining antifascist intellectuals and artists decided to initiate new points of contact. Many of them naturally assumed that the KPD and the Soviets acted in unison. But they required very different avenues of approach. Most of the surviving KPD militants were blue-collar workers, often bearing a class-based grudge against intellectuals and aristocrats. The Soviets, on the other hand, tended to operate out of the embassy, moving in different social circles entirely.
There is no record that Adam Kuckhoff ever joined the Communist Party, but he was among those who turned to the Communists hoping for a coherent response to the crisis. His theater work and journalism had brought him into contact with many Marxists, both militants and dilettantes, and now they offered resources that were lacking among the rest of the political opposition.
Adam challenged Greta to abandon the detachment she had learned as a social scientist. She shouldn't just stand back and offer analysis and advice, he told her; she should get involved. Greta had returned to Germany intent on joining opposition activities, but she was still taken aback to find that her love affair was contingent on political action.
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Greta found a room to sublet, in a boathouse on a lake in the far western suburb of Pichelswerder. She remained in close touch with Arvid Harnack, who also pressed her to join anti-Nazi activity. Greta visited
the Harnacks at their Tempelhof apartment once, but usually they met in out-of-the-way spots near her rented room.
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Arvid told Greta about his recent visit to the Soviet Union, and worried aloud that the Nazis would go to war against the Soviets in order to acquire lebensraum in the East. It was up to Germans like them, he argued, to thwart those plans. Resistance would require new lines of social communication, cutting across class divisions and prejudices.