Red Orchestra (18 page)

“And not have to listen to that Nazi propaganda, right?” answers his acquaintance.

“I'm not interested in politics,” Franz replies quickly. He disentangles himself from the encounter and takes a different route back to the house in case he's being followed. Then he makes his way back to Berlin. This time his guide across the border is a woman with a red market satchel, which Franz worries could be clearly visible in the fair, springlike weather. The Sudetenland seems more ominous on the return trip. Suddenly Franz hears a voice in German addressing the woman: “Halt! Where are you going? What do you have in there?” Franz hangs back, unseen. The border is hot today—one wrong step could mean a charge
of treason. But the woman is allowed to pass, Franz is undetected, and he reaches his train to Dresden and Berlin with an hour to spare.
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John Sieg was involved in many such border crossings. In March 1937 he was offered an exciting new opportunity by Karl Hellborn, a member of the Neukölln group and stationmaster for the Berlin suburb of Char-lottenburg. Hellborn used his union connections to get Sieg a job at the freight yards of the Stettiner train station, in a northern zone of the city.
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The idea appealed to Sieg, who had lacked regular employment for four years since the
Rote Fahne
had been closed down. Barely thirty-three, he had already done stints as a Ford factory worker, a freelance writer, a staff reporter, and a semiemployed construction worker. Now the Reichsbahn—the German state railway—would provide him with his final and most dramatic career.

Once Sieg proved himself loading freight, he was offered a permanent position. This required him to submit an official autobiography to the Nazi officials. It had to be a sanitized version, of course. (This was a necessary formality. Officials could easily find evidence of his Communist past, but they could not afford to disqualify the millions of former Communists and Socialists from employment.) Sieg's carefully written statement explained that he had interrupted his studies at the City College of Detroit because “my loyalty to Germany was so strong that I returned to Berlin.” His literary career consisted of “translations and travel writing.” Unfortunately, he added, “I was unemployed for certain periods.”
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He declined to mention that his loss of employment at the
Rote Fahne
was accompanied by a brutal SS beating and three months' imprisonment. Likewise, Sieg omitted his wife's former secretarial position with a Jewish lawyer who had fled the country. The autobiography was a good illustration of
Gleichschaltung:
simply erase the inconvenient aspects of the past, and everyone emerges as a satisfied beneficiary of the regime.

In 1936, Hermann Grosse, the
Rote Fahne
city editor who had brought John Sieg to the paper, emigrated to Czechoslovakia. The following year he sent word to introduce some new members to the group.

Walter Husemann, another reporter from his stable, was a dark-haired young man with fierce eyes. His beat of labor and court proceedings
had placed him on the front lines. In the final days of the Weimar Republic, Nazi paramilitary squads would execute workers accused of disorder, even if they had been tried and acquitted in court. After Huse-mann covered one such incident, he was placed on a hit list himself. Following a failed assassination attempt, he fled from Berlin to the western cities of Essen, Cologne, and Mannheim, where he wrote for local Communist newspapers.
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Husemann was well known in Communist circles, but the greater celebrity was his partner and future wife, the actress Marta Wolter. Many of the Neukölln Communists recognized the slender blonde from her performances in Brecht and Weisenborn's stage production
of Die Mutter (The Mother),
and in Brecht's film
Kuhle Wampe.
Marta was only twenty-four, but she had already led an eventful life. Trained as a seamstress, she enjoyed a brief but glowing career in Communist theater. She met Husemann in 1930 and joined him in Mannheim in 1932, where he was swept up in the first wave of Nazi arrests in January 1933. After his release the couple returned to Berlin, where Husemann lived illegally.

Marta Wolter sold novellas and short stories to Berlin dailies to make ends meet, sometimes submitting the blacklisted Husemann's work under her own name. Her old theater friend Günther Weisenborn helped place her writing in Ullstein publications. When the Gestapo searched Husemann's rooms, Weisenborn gave Marta a place to stay. Walter Husemann concentrated on producing underground flyers and activating contacts to other Communist networks, such as the Jewish group that gathered around the young electrician Herbert Baum in central Berlin.
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On November 26, 1936, Husemann, his father, and Marta Wolter were arrested for sheltering a fugitive Communist official. Husemann's brother Wilhelm managed to escape to Moscow, but Walter and his father were sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen without trial. Marta Wolter was consigned to the Moringen concentration camp, also without trial, from March until June 1937. She was said to owe her release to a camp visit from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS; Himm-ler ordered her to be freed because she looked too “Aryan” to be there.
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Dark-haired Walter Husemann was not as lucky. In 1937 he was transferred to Buchenwald, where he worked as the camp librarian.

Marta Wolter rejoined John Sieg's Neukölln circle soon after her release, and served as a link between the workers and her theater friends. Günther Weisenborn, ever supportive, introduced her to his friend Harro Schulze-Boysen, whom he had met at a left-wing student gathering in 1932.
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Marta soon joined Schulze-Boysen's floating left-wing salon of theater people, artists, and aristocrats, most of whom detested the fascists and sought outlets for their rebellion. After Walter Huse-mann was released from Buchenwald a few months later, he, too, was welcomed into the group. He and Marta married soon after.

Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife both came from money, and took special pleasure in inviting their less privileged friends to spend the day on Harro's sailboat. A set of photos survive from the spring of 1938, when Weisenborn invited Marta along for a lakeside holiday. Barely a year out of the concentration camp, the young woman appears in a strapless bathing suit, laughing at Weisenborn and Schulze-Boysen as they try to hack off a slice of corned beef.

A
RVID HARNACK WAS STILL SEEKING A COURSE OF ACTION, AND
he agonized over his next step. Germans were increasingly surrounded by the high walls of Nazi propaganda, and mounting censorship and travel restrictions left them more isolated all the time.

Arvid Harnack and Adam Kuckhoff turned to the radio in search of uncensored news, but the Nazis had made it both illegal and impractical to monitor foreign broadcasts. It was hard enough to lay one's hands on a working shortwave set, and by the time the device was placed in a secure location and tuned to a foreign station, the broadcast was often over.
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But the Harnacks and the Kuckhoffs firmly believed that the German people should know what was being said about them in the outside world, and the broadcasts offered crucial evidence. Mildred and Greta translated the banned speeches of Roosevelt and Churchill from English to German, and their husbands helped distribute them to various discussion circles.

Mildred was unhappy; homesick for America and worried about her mother, who was terminally ill. She wrote plaintive letters to friends back in the States, asking if there were any available teaching jobs. But it was the depths of the Depression, and responses were not encouraging.
²

In early 1937, Mildred Harnack traveled back to America to visit her ailing mother. She lectured at New York University, Haverford College, and other universities, seeking recommendations and job openings along
the way. Her inquiries were once again fruitless. Mildred's family and friends found her greatly changed: reticent, austere, and tense.

That January, the Nazis tightened their grip on the German civil service. They proclaimed a new law that allowed them to dismiss any tenured employee who was judged untrustworthy. Soon ninety percent of the Prussian civil service were members of the Nazi Party. One of them was Arvid Harnack, who joined in May 1937 and became party member number 4,153,569.
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This number hardly qualified him as one of Hitler's favored “old fighters,” nor did it include him as one of the “March Violets” that suddenly blossomed in the spring of 1933. Arvid's Nazi Party card indicated that he was a practical man who worked for the government and wished to keep his job. Party membership notwithstanding, Harnack continued to offer information to the Soviets and the Americans, as well as to antifascist circles in other government ministries and circles of German society
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Arvid and Mildred Harnack had deep and strong ties to the United States, and continued to look to America for personal and political support. Ambassador Dodd's embassy offered them a sympathetic hearing and a safe haven, but his concern did not take them far. Few U.S. officials shared Dodd's sense of urgency, and many of them considered him amateurish for putting his commitment to human rights on a par with traditional matters of state.

Dodd had arrived in Berlin in 1933 full of nostalgia for the Germany of his student days, but he was alarmed by the country's transformation at the hands of the Nazis. His initial mandate was to represent the interests of American firms, such as claims from National City Bank and Chase Manhattan on massive German loans that had gone into default. But as conditions worsened, Dodd transferred his attentions to American and German Jews who came under attack.

One of Dodd's biggest frustrations was the inability of Americans at home to grasp the nature of the Nazi threat. In November 1934 he met with Frank Gannett, a prominent New York newspaper owner and friend of President Roosevelt's, who was seeking an interview with Hitler. Gannet informed Dodd that many “ well-to-do people at home … are arguing for a Fascist system there, with a sort of Hitler to head it. They use the facts of perfect order and absence of crime in Germany as arguments
for such a move.” Dodd's diary records that he “told [Gannett] there were other phases of the regime which would shock Americans to the limit.”

But Dodd was swimming against the current. In 1936 the Nazis staged a major public relations campaign in the form of the Berlin Olympics. There were widespread calls to boycott the Games, but the plans went forward in triumph.
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The Nazis took the trouble of removing visible signs of anti-Semitism from Berlin for the duration of the Games, and welcomed the throngs of visitors with a carefully managed veneer of normalcy.

In early 1937,
National Geographic
took the bait, and published an article called “Changing Berlin,” written by Douglas Chandler, an American Nazi sympathizer. In his eyes, the Hitler Youth was “a substitute for Scout training,” while the Nazis' Winter Aid, a barely veiled extortion racket, was “aiding the needy,” supported by “voluntary workers contributing their services.” Chandler closed with a vignette of small boys singing “that moving modern national song,” the Horst Wessel storm trooper anthem. Chandler neglected to remind his American audience of the recent Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their civil and political rights, and omitted the Nazis' four-year record of purges, prisons, and concentration camps.
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Instead, the
National Geographic
's vast American readership was shown an enviable picture of German peace and prosperity.

Over 1936 and 1937, Ambassador Dodd's attitude toward Hitler, Göring, and Goebbels shifted from indignation to outright repulsion. He began to renege on his duties as ambassador, boycotting official functions and avoiding face-to-face meetings with top Nazi officials. He watched in disgust as American businessmen cut deals with the Nazis and European democracies acquiesced to Hitler's brash forays abroad. He devoted an increasing amount of time to persecuted individuals and asylum-seekers who would have been assigned to a lower-level consul in less dire times.

By early 1937, Dodd, plagued by nervous headaches and what he called “unbearable tension,” was ready to leave. Washington asked him to hold on until March 1938.
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For the rest of the year his diary served as an outlet to denounce the latest Nazi outrages. On April 17 he described
a list of ninety-one Germans who had been deprived of their nationality, including a child of two.
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The following week he received a telegram from Washington regarding the case of Helmut Hirsch, a twenty-one-year-old Jew who had been accused of trying to bomb a Nazi rally in Nuremberg. The cable described Hirsch as a U.S. citizen (his father had lived in America) and instructed Dodd to visit the Foreign Office to press for a legitimate trial. Dodd returned from his visit in a state of disbelief, having been told that Hirsch “must be executed though he did not actually try to commit the crime.”
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Dodd, whose son was Hirsch's age, threw himself into the effort to save the young man, and sent a personal appeal to Hitler himself, to no avail. On June 4, the ambassador recorded that “poor Hirsch had his head chopped off this morning at sunrise.”
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