Red Orchestra (15 page)

T
HE CATACLYSM OF 1933 WAS FOLLOWED BY WAVES OF KILLINGS,
exiles, and arrests, transforming German public life. But it was impossible to regulate the private transactions that take place on a daily basis among a population of sixty-six million people. Much of life seemed to go on as before. One could criticize the regime as long as it was done within a closed circle that guaranteed confidentiality. Such conversations persisted at family dinner tables, in pubs and cafes, and in workers' huddles on factory floors.

Still, as the Gestapo made its presence known, thousands of zealous new Nazis competed to inform on their neighbors. It became increasingly dangerous to trust anyone. A jealous relative or disgruntled coworker found it all too easy to settle old scores or eliminate a competitor; a simple denunciation would do. Trust could no longer to be taken for granted.

Arvid and Mildred Harnack were lucky to belong to the close-knit Harnack family, which prided itself on its liberal values. Now the extended family's long, philosophical dinner conversations took on a new urgency. Arvid and his cousins Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer were cut from the same cloth: cerebral, but unwilling to limit their work to theoretical realms. The entire clan—extended by marriage to the Delbrücks, the Dohnanyis, and the Schleichers—represented an impressive range of liberal German social scientists and civil servants.

A remarkable proportion of the family had taken an active stand
against Nazism, extending their professional ties to fashion a dozen strands of resistance. The Harnack clan was offended by the pseudo -sacred rhetoric of the Nazis, and repelled by the resurgence of anti-Semitism. They stood by their many Jewish friends, and went to great lengths to defend them. The Bonhoeffers' ninety-one-year-old grandmother took the lead when she defied the first anti-Jewish boycott by marching past a cordon of brownshirts to enter the Jewish-owned KaDeWe department store. Soon Mildred Harnack began to work her connections at the U.S. embassy to help her Jewish friends emigrate. Ernst von Harnack arranged for a number of his Jewish friends to leave for England. (Some of them were annoyed at his insistence, convinced that “it would all blow over.”)
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Arvid's younger cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer never wavered in his opposition to fascism, but it wasn't always clear what path he would take. He had originally intended to become a psychiatrist like his father, but to everyone's surprise he gravitated toward theology and found a vocation as a Lutheran pastor. In 1930 he followed in Arvid's footsteps to the United States, arriving in New York only a few months after Arvid and Mildred returned to Germany. Bonhoeffer did postgraduate work at Union Theological Seminary near Columbia University.

Bonhoeffer was fascinated by his Harlem neighborhood, and soon attached himself to the African-American Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street, just north of the seminary. He was deeply influenced by the nonviolent civil rights movement taking root in the black Christian community, and collected recordings of gospel music to take back to Germany. Once he returned, Bonhoeffer accepted a teaching position at the University of Berlin around the same time that Mildred joined the faculty.

Like the rest of the family, Bonhoeffer watched the political developments in his country with growing alarm. On February 1, 1933, he gave a radio talk deploring the way young Germans were imbuing the “Führer” with the qualities of a sacrilegious icon, but the microphone was cut off as he spoke.
²
A few days later, he drafted an essay called
“Die Kirche vor der Jugenfrage”
(“The Church and the Jewish Question”), declaring that Christians had an ethical responsibility to defend the Jews. That same week Dietrich and his brother Klaus reached out to American
Jewish theologians, including the prominent Rabbi Stephen Wise.
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That spring Bonhoeffer witnessed the spectacle of Goebbels's book-burning on the pavement just outside his classrooms. In August the university informed him that his services were no longer required.

Like many Germans, Bonhoeffer was torn between leaving a country that trampled his most deeply held values, and staying on to fight for its soul. He believed that the international community, especially ecumenical organizations, had a duty to thwart the Nazis' plans for conquest and bloodshed. He spent the next year in England as a pastor to Lutheran congregations, making many friends. Just as Greta Kuckhoff had used her trip to England to alert British trade unionists to the dangers of Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer sounded the alarm among British academics and church people.

It was not an easy task. Many Britons regarded Hitler and the Nazi movement with sympathy, just the thing to subdue the Bolsheviks and get the German economy back on its feet. Anti-Semitism was commonplace in British society, and Britain incubated its own version of fascism. In 1931, British aristocrat Oswald Mosely undertook a political study tour of Italy and Germany, and returned to found the British Union of Fascists the following year.

Bonhoeffer finally decided that his place was in Germany, where both Catholic and Lutheran churches showed worrying signs of accommodation. The Vatican reached an agreement with the Nazis in July 1933, signing a Concordat that allowed the dissolution of Catholic trade unions and the Catholics' Center Party. In return, the Catholic Church was allowed to go on functioning in Germany as a religious institution, and the Church retained its property. Some courageous Catholic clergy and laypeople objected, but they were a minority.

The Lutheran Church was more influential than the Catholic, and even more complicit. The 1925 census identified 40 million of Germany's 65 million people as Lutheran, compared to 21 million Catholics and 620,000 members of smaller denominations.
⁴
The Nazi regime moved quickly to subvert the Church into a state institution that synthesized Nazi ideology and conservative Protestant tradition.

This campaign was offensive to many Lutherans, including Pastor Martin Niemöller, a World War I submarine commander and a onetime
Hitler supporter. Niemöller reacted by founding the Pastors' Emergency League, which evolved into a dissenting branch of the Church known as the
(Bekennende)
Confessing Church. When Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from England in 1934 (only twenty-eight years old) he joined the effort and became its leading theologian. The Confessing Lutheran Church attracted thousands of German Protestants with its argument that true Christianity was incompatible with Nazism. Bonhoeffer interpreted his calling as a mission to create a sanctuary for principled opposition, grounded in faith. This was the community that sustained the anti-Nazi activities of Adam Kuckhoff's friend, Social Democratic minister Adolf Grimme.

Over 1933 and 1934, Arvid and Mildred Harnack remained in close touch with their Bonhoeffer relatives. Mildred, seeking alternate sources of income, launched a lecture series sponsored by the U.S. embassy, presented in Klaus and Emmi Bonhoeffer's home.
⁵

Arvid was immersed in preparations for his examinations, but the young couple's social circle continued to grow. Their simple but welcoming salon attracted liberal writers and publishers, and served as a meeting place for Berlin intellectuals and American expatriates. Arvid and Mildred Harnack saw America as a symbol of hope. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just come into office, and they were cheered to learn that his administration was hiring their friends from the University of Wisconsin for crucial positions in government. Suddenly their shared causes, such as labor reform and economic planning, were official policy objectives in a program called the New Deal, implemented by people they knew and admired.

The couple received an additional boost in July 1933 with the arrival of the new U.S. ambassador. William Dodd arrived in Berlin with Mrs. Dodd and their two grown children, Martha and Bill. Mildred was especially interested in Martha, a twenty-four-year-old University of Chicago dropout and occasional journalist. The two young women were opposites in many ways. Mildred was tall, gentle, and grave, while Martha was a tiny, dark-haired spitfire who liked to live dangerously. But they shared literary interests and became fast friends. Soon they were coauthoring a book column for the local English-language paper.
⁶

Martha had cultivated a number of celebrated American writers. She
wrote to her friend Thornton Wilder about the Harnacks' literary circle, and described her new friend Mildred as “very poor and real and fine and not much in favor though the family is old and respected.” Martha, prone to self-importance, announced that “the Harnacks and I (since we have concluded we are the only people in Berlin genuinely interested in writers) conscientiously encourage all such free intellectual endeavor as there is left.”
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Mildred and Arvid's literary teas were more than mere social occasions. The guests were survivors of a beleaguered and depleted culture, seeking shelter in one another's company. Mildred wove a path among her guests, offering liverwurst sandwiches and fruit. All the while she and her husband were testing the waters. Which of the assembled acquaintances shared their political views? Could they be trusted with secrets? Who might cross the line from private skepticism to active opposition?

The Harnacks understood the degrees of opposition. Many intellectuals opted for “inner emigration,” trying to sit out the Nazi period in rural retreats, by neither complying nor opposing. The next level was called
Resistenz,
“resistance” in the sense of a substance that fails to conduct an electrical current. These Germans expressed their positions passively through everyday acts of noncompliance, such as refusing to contribute to fund-raising drives or failing to return a Nazi salute. Under the wrong circumstances, even such passive rebellion could result in criminal charges. The third and most serious level was called
Wider-stand,
literally “taking a stand against” the regime through acts of opposition. The Harnacks believed that this was the only effective course to take.

Ambassador Dodd arrived in the early days of the Nazi regime, before either the American press or diplomatic corps had a clear sense of its nature. (Roosevelt was inaugurated March 4, 1933, the day before the German elections that brought Hitler to power.) But the Nazis presented extraordinary challenges in diplomacy, and the new ambassador soon had a growing caseload of Americans who ran afoul of the regime. His consular headaches were reflected in an October 15, 1933,
New York Times
article. It reported that the Germans, responding to diplomatic pressure, had arrested storm troopers for beating up a U.S. citizen who failed to return a Nazi salute.

Ambassador Dodd was hampered by Hitler's successful public relations campaign, which won him a sympathetic audience among influential Americans. Many of them were open to the Nazis' early policies, and condemned the New Deal reforms of social security and public works as creeping Marxism. Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest with a vast following in the United States, peppered his radio talks with effusive praise for Hitler and Mussolini and crude anti-Semitic remarks. In 1934, Boston businessman and politician Joseph Kennedy, who was awaiting a political appointment in the Roosevelt administration, sent his nineteen-year-old son Joe Jr. to Germany for an eyewitness report on conditions. Joe Jr. returned full of enthusiasm:

Within four years, Joseph Kennedy Sr. would be the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, and would turn often to Joe Jr. for advice.

The ambassador's daughter, Martha, approached Germany differently. A vivacious woman who considered herself a femme fatale, she initially found German fascists intriguing, and even charming in a sinister way. Her father's position made her a desirable social commodity, and she spent her early weeks in Berlin dating a succession of Nazis, ranging from young storm troopers to high officials. Her mother diplomatically had tea with Mrs. Göring and Mrs. Goebbels (who made a good impression). Hitler himself kissed Martha's hand.

But the niceties of Berlin society provided scant cover for the brutality going on around them. On a motor tour of the countryside, Martha
was startled by the sight of Nazis brazenly assaulting Jews. Her family soon realized that the phones in their residence were tapped, and that many of the guests at their social functions lived in a permanent state of fear.