Authors: Anne Nelson
The following year Frau Schulze-Boysen's wayward son made an about-face. He enrolled in a flight academy for pilot training, and began to look for a job. Germany was still forbidden to have an air force under the terms of Versailles, but the Nazis were quietly assembling a new Air Ministry under Hermann Göring, and Harro's father had connections to the principals. And so began Harro's extraordinary double life.
In 1934, Harro was assigned to air force intelligence. Göring, always eager to ingratiate himself with high society, was willing to overlook Harro's past infractions. This was not the case for everyone. Others on Göring's staff, including his personnel officer, nervously pointed out Harro's previous anti-Nazi journalism. Göring's reply was brusque: “That's yesterday's news. Let it go.”
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Harro was less than thrilled with his new career, with its tedious paperwork, cramped working conditions, and officious colleagues. He still aspired to be a journalist, and eventually he won a slot as a contributor to the Air Ministry's magazine,
Luftwehr.
He simultaneously wrote for underground publications under a pseudonym. One of these,
Wille zum Reich (Will to Rule)
enlisted a broad cross-section of antifascists, ranging from quasi-Communists to lapsed Nazis.
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Harro set about forming his own circle. His initial meeting with Arvid Harnack had gone poorly, but he had no problem attracting others into his lively crowd of artists and performers who liked to combine a good party with their fulminations against the regime.
In 1934, Harro fell in love with a vivacious young aristocrat named Libertas Haas-Heyes. Libertas's mother, the daughter of a Prussian prince, had raised her children in the family castle on a property near Hermann Göring's estate. In 1935, Libertas had joined a hunting party with Göring, who enjoyed her flirtatious attentions. She used the occasion to argue for Harro's promotion.
Libertas confided in Ingeborg Engelsing about her slightly scandalous past. Her mother had eloped with her tutor, an art professor, to the great horror of her aristocratic father. The couple had divorced when Libertas was nine, and “this lively, lovely girl lived like a migratory bird, first with her father, then with her mother,” doted upon by both.
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Libertas's father taught in the fashion design department of the state-run School of Industrial Arts and Crafts, housed in the elegant edifice at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Libertas often romped in its grand hallways as a child. But those days were long over. The academy had been commandeered by the Nazis in 1933 as the new Gestapo headquarters, and the basement, which once housed spacious ateliers for sculptors, had been carved into a warren of tiny torture and interrogation cells. John Sieg and his colleagues had numbered among its early inmates.
Libertas was not overly concerned with politics. Her childhood had been a dazzling round of finishing schools in Switzerland, luxury hotels in Paris, and horseback riding on the family estate. Her choice of career was similarly diverting. In May 1933—the same month that Goebbels burned books on the Opern-Platz—she landed a job down the block in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer office at 225 Friedrichstrasse.
It should have been a banner year for MGM in Berlin. The company had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture with
Grand Hotel.
The story, told from the point of view of a shattered German World War I veteran living in a Berlin hotel, was written by a popular Berlin journalist. It featured Greta Garbo, who had been a film star in Berlin only a few years earlier, and the “Grand Hotel” itself was a fictionalized version of the Hotel Adlon, a few blocks north of MGM's Berlin office.
But the original “Grand Hotel” was also near Goebbel's book-burning site, which was more to the point. The author of the story, Vicki Baum, was a Jewish feminist. Baum had left for Hollywood in 1932, and now it was clear she would not return. Her novel and play had triumphed in Weimar Germany, but the movie closed in Berlin shortly after its February 1933 premiere. “Nazis Halt ‘Hotel' Due to Race of Vicki Baum,” Hollywood's
Variety
reported.
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Libertas chose not to dwell on such contradictions, perhaps because she stood to benefit. Like several of her prominent relatives, she had joined the Nazi Party and its girls' auxiliary (the
Bund Deutscher Mädel)
after the takeover, once it became socially expedient.
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Now the nineteen-year-old had a chance at a plum position in the film industry, thanks in part to the Reich's Film Chamber's purge of “every Jewish film man employed in all of the American film offices and branches.” Jews had accounted for over fifty percent of the Hollywood representatives in Germany, so there were many vacancies to fill.
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Libertas celebrated her new position by having her picture taken behind her typewriter, wearing a dark dress accented with a prim white color, and a broad smile. Wildly attractive (if not conventionally beautiful) she was an outrageous flirt. She had a bold gaze, a full mouth, and wavy blond hair bobbed into a
Bubikopf.
Libertas enjoyed shocking her elders, and often posed for snapshots with a cigarette or pipe dangling from her lips. She and Harro shared a sense of adventure and a love of the movies.
The couple lived together for a year before they finally bowed to parental pressure and wed in 1936.
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First, of course, it was necessary to fill out the obnoxious official “race” certifications. There had been rumors that Libertas had a Jewish great-grandmother in France, and Harro
complained that he didn't know how to prove otherwise without “digging her up to check on whatever the worms haven't eaten.”
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(Harro never lost his hostility to Nazi anti-Semitism, and claimed that the Nazis' motivation was to exploit the Jews as scapegoats for their own economic blunders.)
Harro and Libertas's wedding took place in the chapel at Libertas's grandfather's castle. Harro took on the tasks of vetting the Lutheran hymns and keeping his little brother in line: “I suggested ‘A Mighty Fortress,' which Hartmut needs to learn by heart, because we have to sing at the end,” he wrote to his parents. The couple honeymooned in Sweden, where Libertas's older sister Ottora was preparing to marry a Swedish count.
Within a year of her marriage, Libertas Schulze-Boysen left the Nazi Party. Hitler always said that a good wife's place was in the kitchen, and Libertas cited this reason in her resignation. In reality, she was influenced by her husband's strong antagonism to the Nazis. Harro had little interest in her learning how to cook and keep house, and Libertas had no intention of curbing her adventurous spirit. Soon after their wedding, with her husband's encouragement, she set off on a coal freighter for the seedy port city of Constanza in Romania, planning to write about the experience. Harro was content to ship his laundry off to his mother.
One of the newlyweds' few gestures toward domesticity was their frequent entertaining. Their home offered a large, comfortable living room on a quiet side street in an exclusive Berlin suburb. Over 1936 and 1937, every other Thursday night, they invited a few dozen friends over to socialize. The couple served cakes and tea to a roomful of celebrated artists and shaken concentration camp survivors (sometimes the two groups overlapped). They were often joined by friends from high society and relatives from the aristocracy. These individuals could be problematic, more inclined to harbor Nazi sympathies than the bohemians. The first requirement for any social gathering was to survey the room, then mete out one's remarks accordingly.
Libertas was the star of many of these evenings, as an enthusiastic accordion player and song-leader. The group joined in rousing campfire songs, alternating with favorites from the banned Brecht-Weill repertory.
Libertas was assisted in her hostess duties by her cousin Gisella von Pöllnitz, an aspiring journalist with the United Press agency who was subletting a room in their apartment.
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Harro was a devoted son who wrote often to his parents, describing his sparkling social life: “Every two weeks we hold this great picnic evening at home. Everyone likes it so much that we're going to keep doing it. It's a great way to see all your friends from time to time and settle your social obligations too. It's usually about 25–30 people … we've got enough space. We just give them tea. The others bring biscuits, wine, etc. The first hour or so there's a good lecture, then music and dancing til 12. At 12 o'clock sharp we throw them out.”
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Harro's boldness could rub some people the wrong way, but others adored him. Ingeborg Engelsing, the movie producer's wife, was a devoted friend, grateful for his kindness to her little son, Thomas. Harro often stopped by to keep her company while she fed him.
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Many of their conversations centered on politics, but foundered on the question of what one could actually do to defeat the Nazi regime.
“[Harro] doesn't surrender secrets, but he makes it very clear that he has bottomless hatred for the Nazis,” Ingeborg reflected. “Hitler is for him vulgar, rude, and ill-bred.”
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Ingeborg was intrigued by Harro's idiosyncratic brand of politics. “He doesn't see parties in the usual ‘right and left' constellation, but as a circle, in which the Nazis would collide. His explanation impresses me in such a way that I incorporate it and still hold to it today,” she wrote years later. “There was no indication that he was a Communist, but rather an aristocratic Bohemian who doesn't want anything to do with either the narrow-minded bourgeois nor pedantic bureaucrats. He dreamed of a revolution of the elite.”
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Ingeborg realized that Harro was protecting her from the full knowledge of his activities. As a half-Jew and a young mother she was doubly vulnerable. But Harro wasted no time in recruiting other rebellious souls. The Schulze-Boysen salon of creative dissidents grew rapidly, and it seemed as though every friend brought in other like-minded acquaintances who were tired of hating the Nazis in isolation. From Harro's
Gegner
circle came a gifted sculptor, Kurt Schumacher, whose carvings graced the doors of Hermann Göring's country estate.
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He had once attended
night classes at the art academy on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse where Libertas's father had taught, and where the Gestapo now had its headquarters.
Schumacher, like Harro, looked like an ideal Aryan beau, with thick blond hair and strong handsome features. His parents were early members of the KPD, but Schumacher himself was as much of a dreamer as a party militant. He pledged allegiance to “a peaceful community of peoples who, by the work of their own hands, could create an existence worthy of humanity”
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Schumacher's style was influenced by his teacher, Ludwig Gies, a sculptor who reworked Christian motifs into Gothic forms. The Nazis labeled the style “decadent,” and Schumacher did his own sculpture in private, camouflaging his personal work with state commissions. Schumacher's wife was another welcome addition to the circle. Elisabeth Hohenemser, an open-faced woman with blond wavy hair, had met Schumacher in art school. She was an accomplished graphic artist and photographer in her own right. Elisabeth was half-Jewish, but the couple had married in 1934 before the Nazi race laws became an impediment. However, her racial status made it difficult for her to get regular employment after 1939, and she was obliged to moonlight for income.
The Schumachers brought other friends into the Schulze-Boysen circle. One was a doctor Kurt had known since his student days, Elfriede Paul, a birdlike woman with round spectacles and a shy smile. She ran a busy medical practice in the fashionable suburb of Wilmersdorf.
Movie producer Herbert Engelsing introduced a second member of the medical profession. Engelsing met Helmut Himpel, a young dentist, through shared family connections in the Rhineland. Thanks to Inge-borg Engelsing's useful introductions around the film industry, Himpel became Berlin's “dentist to the stars,” responsible for the smiles of Germany's leading performers.
Himpel's hatred of the Nazis stemmed from their race laws. He was deeply in love with a beautiful law student named Marie Terwiel, but they were forbidden to marry because she was half-Jewish. (They had no Göring connections to smooth the way.) The young couple's stand against the regime was personal, principled, and extremely dangerous.
Himpel flouted Nazi regulations on every front, illegally treating Jewish patients in his home, and forging ration cards and travel documents for them, along with his fiancée.
As Gestapo surveillance increased, doctors such as Elfriede Paul and Helmut Himpel were doubly welcome in resistance circles. Medical waiting rooms were excellent venues for underground meetings, and antifascist doctors and dentists soon acquired rafts of new “patients” who fell silent and assumed pained expressions the minute a stranger walked in.
Playwright Günther Weisenborn was another new prospect for the circle. Harro Schulze-Boysen had met Weisenborn at a rally in 1932, fresh from his triumph with
U-Boat S-4
and his collaboration with Brecht on
The Mother.
But the following year Weisenborn's novel and plays were consumed on Goebbels's pyre.
Weisenborn reacted to the Nazi takeover by going into a deep depression, and left Germany in disgust. In early 1937 he traveled to New York, where he stayed with a friend on Central Park West and found a job with the
Staatszeitung und Herold,
New York's leading German-language newspaper. But by the end of the year, Weisenborn decided to return to Germany.
Later, he wrote that Kristallnacht, the night of November 9–10, 1938, marked a personal turning point. He described the scene at a burning synagogue in Berlin, where crowds of hate-filled Nazis gloated, and indolent firefighters smoked and laughed instead of putting out the flames. Weisenborn wrote, “ ‘As of today,' I said, ‘any means against these people are justified.' ”
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Following Weisenborn's return to Germany, he published books and plays, many of them contributing to the growing body of “between the lines” literature indirectly critical of the regime.
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He worked briefly as a representative of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Libertas's old shop, and made two trips to England.
42
As a screenwriter, he was also part of the Engel -sings' social circle.
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