Red Orchestra (2 page)

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I was able to view the correspondence between Greta and her editor, contesting these passages, in the archives at the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.

I
N THAT URGENT SPRING OF 1941, IT WAS EASY TO BELIEVE THAT
fascist Germany would rule the world, especially if you were viewing events from the epicenter of Berlin. Austria and Czechoslovakia had fallen to the Nazis in 1938 and early 1939, followed by Poland a few months later. Then went France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway, in easy succession, over 1940. Great Britain was supposed to be next, but Hitler had put the invasion on hold. That didn't stop British and German bombers from exchanging violent visits over each other's major cities, leaving behind piles of civilian corpses and smoldering ruins.

In June 1941, the German armed forces launched Operation Bar-barossa, their massive invasion of the Soviet Union. The regime informed the German people that this was the beginning of the end of the war. Once their blitzkrieg defeated the Russians, the Reich could gorge itself on the country's vast natural resources and exploit the slave labor of millions. Nothing could stand in the way of global domination. The Americans were steering clear of the war, and soon the British would have no choice but to sue for peace.

Only two decades earlier, Germany had been a spectacle of humiliation and defeat. The Nazi Party promised to transform the country, and so it did, ruthlessly driving the process with the doctrine of
Gleichschal-tung,
“make everything conform.” Every sector of civil society—the parliament, the military, the schools, the mass media—was rigorously
purged of dissent, teaching the survivors the value of silence and submission.

Even so, there were cracks in the monolith. Only four days after the Soviet invasion, a German army monitoring station picked up a coded radio message to Moscow emanating from somewhere in northern Europe—possibly from Germany itself. The intercept raised disturbing possibilities. In the coming weeks, German troops found Red Army units waiting to meet their assaults on obscure hamlets in the Russian countryside. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that the German military machine had a leak.

There were lapses inside the Reich itself as well. Everyone knew that even a passing private criticism of the Führer could bring down a death sentence. The Gestapo had spent years shutting down opposition newspapers, impounding dissidents in concentration camps, and registering every typewriter in the land. Yet on certain mornings, citizens of Berlin awoke to find anti-Nazi stickers attached to the walls of their houses, or anonymous letters in their mailboxes denouncing the regime. Squads of energetic police were dispatched to oversee the scraping of walls, the gathering of flyers, the collection of offending letters.

Yet the leakage continued—even at the borders. Germany's frontiers had been sealed tight for years. But from time to time, one heard whispers. A political prisoner escaped from a concentration camp and made it to Switzerland through an underground railroad of safe houses. A family of German Jews, stripped of civil rights, economic assets, and social contacts, somehow secured the visas and foreign currency to flee the country. These reports were banned from the state-controlled news media, but word traveled nonetheless.

Berliners pretended not to notice such events, as part of their stubborn effort to simulate a normal life. Their urban landscape was sadly altered. Old street signs, which had once honored liberal statesmen, freethinking writers, and Jewish artists, had disappeared or, rather, were magically transformed. The new street names paid homage to Nazi officials who had only recently been shunned as thugs and murderers. Berlin's edgy noise of music, theater, and art from the 1920s had become as safe and leaden as an oompah band in a beer garden.

Greta Kuckhoff blended easily into Berlin's ranks of blond, neatly
dressed Aryan housewives, queuing for groceries or picking her way through the rubble to the park with her three-year-old son. In her youth, Greta had dreamed of becoming a professional woman, but now the regime declared that her place was in the home. She spent most of her time coping with rations and shortages, running after little Ule, and keeping things tidy for her husband, Adam.

Like many of his generation, Adam had once fostered high literary ambition. He had achieved some success as a writer before the war, but now the arts were judged according to their service to the Reich. Adam joined many of his former theater friends in the Reich's government-controlled movie industry, some working in Joseph Goebbels's propaganda film units, others helping to produce fluffy musicals to distract the Germans from the war. Adam's work often took him on the road to occupied Prague and Posen (alternately known by its Polish name, Poznań). The German state film company had taken over some first-rate studios in Czechoslovakia, and the public was always interested in foot age of the boys in uniform. Adam came back from his trips tired and out of sorts, and it was up to Greta to put a pleasant face on things.

Others in Adam and Greta's circle were even more active in their service to the Fatherland. Arvid and Mildred Harnack, two of Greta's oldest friends, dating from her graduate student days at the University of Wisconsin, were both working for the Reich. Because they were childless, it was easier for them to organize their time. Arvid had always been an academic star, inhibited only by his scruples. Once he joined the Nazi Party in 1937, he had risen briskly through the ranks of the Economics Ministry. Now he was in the middle of the action. He spent his days tending the economic underpinnings of the Reich: tracking the factory output that fed the ravenous military; overseeing resource allocations, labor quotas, and production statistics. As a graduate student, Arvid's passion had been for centralized economic planning. Now, just past his fortieth birthday, he was central to the planning of the most powerful economy in Europe.

Mildred was also doing her part, even if she was an American. It had not been easy to join the Nazi women's auxiliary, and she had to present her Daughters of the American Revolution certificate as proof of her “Aryan purity.” But once accepted, she was treated with the same deference
as any other Nazi Party wife. Even her Wisconsin degrees in En glish literature proved useful. She had placed a newspaper ad offering her services as an English tutor, and a young army officer, hoping to distinguish himself in the upcoming invasion of Britain, had signed up for weekly lessons.

Other friends were no less industrious. Perhaps the most glamorous people in Greta's circle were her new friends, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen. Harro was a dashing young intelligence officer in the Luftwaffe, the German air force, whose nerves were frayed by his work on the top-secret plans for the Eastern front. His wife, Libertas, was a social butterfly. The pampered daughter of an aristocrat and an art professor, Libs worked in the movie industry. Her family's aristocratic pedigree made it a magnet for Nazi social climbers, starting with her husband's boss at the Air Ministry, Hermann Göring. Göring thought Libs was absolutely enchanting when they met on a shooting party. Greta and her husband were introduced to Harro and Libs at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend in the film industry. Now all of them got together on a regular basis.

Not all of Greta and Adam Kuckhoff's friends were aristocrats like the Schulze-Boysens. The Siegs, for example, were definitely blue-collar types, even though John and his little Polish wife, Sophie, were surprisingly conversant in literature and music. Adam Kuckhoff had published John's writing years earlier at his magazine, and thought he showed real promise. But politics intervened. Now John worked for the Reichsbahn, the German state railways. It wasn't a bad life. Through ambition and hard work, he had been promoted to stationmaster at a busy train station in Berlin. The railways were the arteries of the German war effort, transporting soldiers and matériel to the front, and moving booty and captives back to the Reich. It was John's job, quite literally, to make the trains run on time.

Greta's friends all had other friends, of course, and it was common for them to gather in one another's homes on a regular basis. So the four couples would get together in different combinations in living rooms scattered across the city: the domestic Kuckhoffs, the intellectual Har-nacks, the socialite Schulze-Boysens, and the proletarian Siegs. They each hosted their own evenings as well, ranging from the spirited singing
and dancing at the Schulze-Boysens' to the cerebral tea parties at the Harnacks'. It was the best way to find out what was going on. Public discussions were out of the question, so if people came across juicy news, gossip, or speculation, they shared it in private. Overlapping members carried the best tidbits from circle to circle, fervently hoping there were no informers around to report them to the Gestapo.

But beneath the fun and the gossip of the circles lay an additional tier of activity. Greta and her friends, the four couples at the heart of the enterprise, were living double lives. Beyond their day-to-day service to the Nazi regime, they carried out activities that would have astonished their colleagues at the ministries.

For years, the austere, bespectacled economist Arvid Harnack would say good evening to his secretary and go home with a head stuffed full of intelligence to use against the regime. Luftwaffe lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen did the same as he walked out the door of Göring's Air Ministry every night. Their smuggled information made its way clandestinely to Hitler's enemies abroad.

Harro's wife, Libertas, sat at her desk at the Propaganda Ministry, cajoling soldiers into giving her snapshots of atrocities at the front, which she squirreled away into a secret archive. Adam Kuckhoff came back from his trips bearing still more damning evidence. Someday, they told one another, there will be a reckoning, and we must be ready with the proof.

John Sieg, the disappointed journalist-turned-stationmaster, had found a way to employ his writing skills after all. He and his friends ran a secret printing press that published anti-Nazi leaflets, including information gathered from Arvid, Libertas, and other members of the circle. Producing and distributing the leaflets was fiendishly difficult—the mere possession of a copy could mean arrest and torture. Friends of friends of friends, from many interlocking circles, secreted them into mailboxes, dumped them into telephone booths, and even stuffed them into the backpacks of soldiers bound for the front. Greta received each of these individuals in her modest kitchen and helped wherever she could, as translator, courier, and recruiter for the group.

By the summer of 1941 the Nazi state was at its apex, having crushed every preexisting German institution that had stood in its way. And yet
the totalitarian system was not quite total. Beneath the frozen surface of the fascist society, as stubborn as a mushroom ring underground, was the small universe of the
Zirkel.
As circles began to overlap, they formed a new geometry. The German word for it was
Querverbindung,
a “network of interlocking relationships.” This network's members exerted an immense effort not only to undermine the regime, but to keep Germany's lost culture alive through acts of defiance and the power of the written word.

Sometimes Greta Kuckhoff—Greta the worried mother, the frustrated sociologist, the reluctant spy—wondered how all of this death-defying behavior came about. Why hadn't this small band succumbed to the opportunism, the fatalism, or the paralyzing fear that had afflicted most of Germany's population? And how did this odd collection of individuals, so wildly different in background and temperament, come together in pursuit of such perilous, noble, and possibly doomed activity?

As unlikely as it seemed, Greta herself had been the principal agent of their union, the common thread that ran through the skeins.

But for the moment, the more pressing question was: Which, if any, of them would survive?