Red Orchestra (16 page)

Martha had a quick mind and an observant eye, but little bent for analysis. She trusted Mildred to interpret the situation and to connect her to Germans who were disaffected with the regime. “I knew intimately no other woman in Germany who possessed such sincerity and singleness of purpose,” she recalled later. “She was never glib, never sarcastic at someone else's expense, never hasty nor bigoted. … Her words were cautious, persuasive, charged with unobtrusive but incontrovertible logic.”
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Mildred, for her part, found Martha to be an eager partner in exploring the German scene, writing to her mother that she was “clear and capable and has a real desire to understand the world. Therefore our interests touch …”
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It was still just possible for the stubbornly optimistic to believe that the fascists could be swept away as abruptly as they had come to power. But other former opponents were coming around. Many among the traditional elite, including the Prussian aristocracy and the army officer corps, were repelled by the Nazis' crass style and brutish methods. At the same time, they acknowledged change on the horizon. For the first time since Versailles, Germans saw the potential for their national prestige to be restored, their economy reenergized, and their lost territories reclaimed. Many found the social cost acceptable. Most of the elite had never been overly fond of Jews and Social Democrats in the first place, and many had openly battled Communists.

Still, as the dictatorship entered its second year, the situation was far from stable. As the institutions of democracy were irreversibly dismantled and the concentration camps filled to bursting, even conservatives had second thoughts.

In June 1934, the situation came to a head through an internal Nazi Party crisis. The SA, or brownshirts, had grown rapidly under the leadership of Ernst Röhm. Now they were threatening to spin out of control. With over two million members, the paramilitary group far outnumbered the German army.

On June 17, Röhm convened the SA leadership for a retreat at a small
resort outside Munich. Hitler issued orders that were executed with shocking speed. The SS (the elite military force founded as Hitler's bodyguards) moved across the country as coordinated death squads, mowing down strategic pockets of Hitler's rivals and opponents, including Röhm and the SA leaders.

On July 13, Hitler gave a speech about the seventy-two-hour bloodletting, calling it “The Night of the Long Knives.” He acknowledged seventy-seven deaths. (Sixty-one were described as executions, and the rest as “suicides” and “killed resisting arrest.”) Other estimates ran into the hundreds. Hitler justified his actions under an impromptu law that stated: “The measures taken on June 30 and July 1 and 2 to strike down the treasonous attacks are justifiable acts of self-defense by the state.”
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The Night of the Long Knives turned Ambassador Dodd's low opinion of the Nazis into full-blown disgust. The ambassador, no born diplomat, decided he would refuse to take part in any voluntary meetings with the Nazi hierarchy. His wife's health began to suffer from the nervous strain. The couple had their hands full with their daughter Martha, who had transferred her favor from Nazi officials to a handsome Soviet diplomat, First Secretary Boris Vinogradov. Now she began to play another dangerous game, sharing her father's confidences with her new beau. Stalin's state security intelligence service, the NKVD, noted the development with interest and made plans to draw Martha into their network of informants.
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It was becoming more difficult to make social contact with Soviet officials; the Nazis had stepped up surveillance of the Soviet embassy. Nonetheless, Arvid Harnack remained in touch with his Soviet embassy contact, and relied on his wife to do the same with the Americans. In April 1935, Arvid passed another round of rigorous professional examinations. This qualified him for a position at the Ministry of Economics, which gave him access to extensive economic intelligence.

On May 8, 1935, the U.S. embassy in Berlin hosted a major literary event. The ambassador's daughter, Martha, held an embassy tea in honor of Thomas Wolfe, the towering young American novelist, and Random House publisher Donald Klopfer, both in Germany on a visit.
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Wolfe, thirty-five, was at the peak of his powers. A Germanophile,
Wolfe had already made several trips to the country, and a leading German firm had just translated and published his best-selling novel
Look Homeward, Angel.

Martha Dodd asked her friend Mildred Harnack to assemble the German guest list. But from the viewpoint of the ambassador's spoiled daughter, the party was a flop: “a dull, and at the same time, tense afternoon.” Mildred Harnack had invited “about forty people, writers, poets, publishers and magazine editors,” many of whom were already involved in secret anti-Nazi activity. But Martha, for all her intrigues, still responded as a petulant child, unable to observe anything in the room beyond its failure to entertain her:

Greta Lorke approached the party with an entirely different agenda. Mildred Harnack had personally visited Greta Lorke and Adam Kuck-hoff to deliver the invitation and give Greta her assignment, described in her memoirs:

The reception provided a welcome opportunity for anti-Nazis to gather in a group. It included leading American journalists Sigrid Schultz of the
Chicago Tribune
and Louis Lochner of the Associated Press, both outspoken critics of the Nazi regime. Mildred's German guest list gathered novelists, poets, and journalists from beleaguered Berlin dailies. Adam Kuckhoff brought John Sieg, who no longer fit the definition of a working journalist, but produced and distributed clandestine anti-Nazi leaflets to factories and trade unions.

Most of the evening's tense political discussions went over the heads of the American guests of honor. Thomas Wolfe and Mildred Harnack took an instant liking to each other, and he granted her an interview. She proudly published the results in both English-language and German periodicals. Wolfe had less respect for Martha Dodd, calling her “a little middle western flirt—with little stick out teeth, and a little ‘sure that will be swell' sort of voice.”
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Nonetheless, Wolfe soon joined Martha's long list of conquests, and their turbulent affair lasted until he sailed for New York at the end of June.

Arvid Harnack continued to cultivate his contacts in the U.S. embassy, but made little progress. The Americans still had no defined policy toward the Nazi regime, and U.S. intelligence capabilities were almost nonexistent.

An alternative soon appeared. That August, Arvid was contacted by Alexander Hirschfeld, an acquaintance from the Soviet embassy, who asked for a meeting. Hirschfeld told Harnack that his new job in the Economics Ministry could provide useful information, and offered to set up a mechanism to convey it to the Nazis' enemies in Moscow. Hirschfeld laid out the first rule of collaboration: maintain a low profile and keep well away from any kind of political activity. In particular, Harnack was instructed to keep his distance from anyone involved with the illegal German Communist Party, and to avoid working with the resistance.
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Arvid heard him out, but he declined to comply.

Each man was holding out on the other. Hirschfeld, as political counselor for the Soviet embassy, was aware that Stalin was pursuing multiple
agendas in Germany. Harnack, for his part, was never interested in becoming a Soviet agent.
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He identified himself as a Communist, but he focused his concern on his own country's future. He would provide information to any power that promised to shorten Hitler's reign, whether American or Soviet. Harnack showed no regard for NKVD's instructions on tradecraft, and explored every opportunity to turn his fellow Germans against the regime, even if it placed his intelligence work—and his life—in jeopardy.

Between 1935 and June 1938, Arvid Harnack provided the Soviets with extensive information about the German economy, foreign investments, and trade agreements. Against the wishes of his Soviet contacts, he circulated related information to both Communist and non-Communist resistance circles in factories and government offices.
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Harnack remained true to his mission to “establish contacts between different circles and groups, and increase the sources of information.” A memo in his KGB files, drafted a few years later, described his approach to proselytizing among the intelligentsia.

By 1935 the Harnacks' contacts had grown to an impressive array. They included Arvid's Social Democrat and dissenting Lutheran relations, Mildred's night-school students, their U.S. embassy contacts, and their literary and academic friends. The circles often shifted and sometimes overlapped.

But even Harnack had his limits. That same year, another Rockefeller Fellow from his Wisconsin days, sociologist Rudolf Heberle, offered to introduce him to his wife's cousin, who was also a fervent anti-Nazi. Harro Schulze-Boysen was an urbane young aristocrat who had joined
the Air Ministry the previous year. Like Arvid, Harro had penetrated a fascist stronghold with the express intent of undermining it. Heberle thought the two men should meet, and the Harnacks invited Schulze-Boysen to their home.

Afterward, Arvid asked Heberle to tell Schulze-Boysen that he “appreciated meeting with him” but didn't care to see him again. The two men were utterly different in temperament: Schulze-Boysen was bold and impulsive, while Harnack was cautious and deliberate. In Arvid's opinion, another meeting would be “too dangerous.”
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J
OHN SIEG AND HIS NEUKöLLN CROWD WERE ROUGH AROUND THE
edges, but they knew how to get things done. Before the Nazi takeover, their district's cheap housing and high unemployment had made it a prime recruiting ground for radicals of every stripe, including the KPD, the
Rote Fahne,
trade unions, and the Rote Hilfe (as well as their Nazi archrivals). But the waves of arrests deprived them of their established leaders and organizational structure.

Thanks to this leadership vacuum, John Sieg quickly evolved from a journalist gadfly to a dynamic political operative. Although the group's objective was nothing less than overthrowing the Nazi regime, its members' immediate goals were necessarily short term: to break the Nazi monopoly on news and propaganda; to help victims of political persecution; and to create whatever obstructionist mischief they could.

Shortly after the war, the survivors from the Neukölln group recorded a series of testimonies about their Nazi-era activities. Buried for decades in East German state archives, the files conveyed a vivid portrait of clandestine life.
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Similar groups operated all over Germany, both before and during the war, but two factors made the Neuköllners unique. First, they operated in the heart of the German capital, only blocks away from the Nazi high command. Second, thanks to John Sieg and a few other well-placed individuals, they had more access to other strata of German society than the industrial workers' cells. This placed them among the few actual Communist Party members within the artists and intellectuals'
network that would come to be known as the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra).

The German Communists inside the country were increasingly isolated from both the exile communities in Western Europe and the bureaucrats in Moscow. Sometimes it was hard for members of the German underground to restrain their resentment of party officials living in safety outside the country, who churned out piles of unrealistic speeches and manifestos for them to distribute in Germany at the risk of their lives. They also wanted more autonomy in running their operations. Taking orders from abroad had yielded poor results; they had suffered badly for following Stalin's instructions to oppose the Social Democrats in 1933.