Authors: Anne Nelson
Personal relations were beginning to fray. Harro and Libertas, a thoroughly modern couple, had elected to have an “open marriage.” It is not clear which of them strayed first, but Libertas, needy of attention and admiration, embarked on a series of affairs (that included her involvement with Günther Weisenborn). Harro tolerated the situation without reproach, and pursued his own romantic interests.
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As the German conflict broadened, Harro stepped up his anti-Nazi journalism. In October 1938 he coauthored a new flyer with Walter Küchenmeister, denouncing the German occupation of the Czech Sude-tenland. The Schumachers helped to reproduce and distribute about fifty copies.
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International contacts became more crucial than ever. Elfriede Paul's medical practice gave her the means and the excuse to travel outside the country. Over 1938 and 1939 she made a series of trips to Paris and London to assist in the emigration of Jewish friends.
In the spring of 1939, Dr. Paul and the Schumachers accompanied her companion, Walter Küchenmeister, on a trip to Switzerland. Küchenmeister suffered from a serious case of tuberculosis, aggravated by his concentration camp sentence, and Dr. Paul recommended alpine air as a remedy.
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But the agenda also included a meeting with a member of the German Communist Party in exile, Wolfgang Langhoff. Dr. Paul and
her companions wanted to offer the services of their Berlin network to the international struggle against fascism.
Langhoff, an old theater friend of Günther Weisenborn's, was an international celebrity. A prominent actor and producer of agitprop theater before the Nazi takeover, he had suffered through a succession of Gestapo torture chambers and concentration camps. He spent a year in slave labor hauling peat at Börgermoor, one of the first concentration camps for political prisoners. Langhoff channeled his experience into the lyrics to a haunting song called
“Die Moorsoldaten”
(“We Are the Peatbog Soldiers”), which quickly became an anthem of suffering and defiance in the camps and soon traveled to the world beyond.
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In 1935, Langhoff published a book about his experiences, subtitled
Thirteen Months in a Concentration Camp.
It became an international sensation as one of the first major exposés of Nazi abuses.
Langhoff welcomed his visitors from Berlin to his new base in Zürich, but he could not be encouraging. He was only a way station to the KPD party leadership that was now scattered across Europe, with bases in Paris, Stockholm, and Moscow.
Furthermore, Langhoff's comrades-in-exile were ludicrously out of touch. In January 1939 the German Communist Party marked its twentieth anniversary with a conference outside Paris, which included leaders from France and the cross-border operations. But members from the underground in Germany were notably absent. From their seemingly safe distance, the exiled leaders outlined their bold visions for reactivating Germany's mass organizations, as though they had not been thoroughly infiltrated and smashed by the Gestapo several years earlier. They exhorted their beleaguered counterparts inside the country to build up their regional and factory leadership base, although many members of their cells were now either residents of concentration camps or Gestapo informers. One conference participant angrily responded that “the speakers displayed complete ignorance of the conditions in Germany.”
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Langhoff listened carefully to Küchenmeister and Dr. Paul, and dutifully conveyed their offer of assistance to his superiors. But the KPD's Paris Secretariat, already crippled by Stalin's purges, dismissed the idea. They pointed out that the unorthodox band of Berliners was “ideologically dubious.”
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Few among their unruly artists and intellectuals had
ever bothered to join the party. Even worse, one member of their group, Walter Küchenmeister, had been thrown out of the KPD in 1926 for pilfering from the party till. But at least the Paris Secretariat responded. KPD officials in Moscow and Stockholm didn't even favor Langhoff with a reply.
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Schulze-Boysen's group was acquiring new members all the time, but they could achieve little in isolation. The dogged Dr. Paul returned to Switzerland in June to try again, this time with Gisella von Pöllnitz in tow as her tuberculosis patient. The trip was a failure on both counts; the doctor failed to find new contacts, and young Gisella died shortly afterward.
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Between the near-disaster of the letter drop at the Soviet embassy in Berlin and the disappointment of Dr. Paul's Swiss expeditions, Harro's group was blocked at every turn. This was intensely frustrating. Over the course of 1939, Harro's work brought him increasingly intimate knowledge of the Nazis' military planning, while his zeal spurred him on to ever more daring action.
In early 1939 the Nazis began preparations to invade Poland. Air force intelligence was directly involved in the process.
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That spring Harro wrote an analytical paper comparing Germany's air force capabilities to that of Britain and France. The report conveyed Harro's longstanding view (perhaps a product of wishful thinking) that the two democracies could soon overtake Germany's aircraft production. Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe, panicked at the result, and ordered Harro's defeatist analysis to be destroyed.
On April 20, 1939 (the Führer's birthday), Harro was promoted to lieutenant, and the following month he was placed in the new press office of the air force intelligence division.
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Harro's superiors, impressed with his linguistic abilities, assigned him to review foreign press reports, which gave him a rare grasp of international events at a time when Germans viewed the world through a scrim of propaganda and censorship.
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Harro was eager to share the benefits of his privilege, and offered foreign news briefs to Dr. Paul and the Schumachers, who secretly retyped and copied them for their information-starved friends.
In August, Harro initiated an even riskier venture. Kurt Schumacher was using his sculpture studio as a hiding place for Rudolf Bergtel, a political
prisoner who had just escaped from a concentration camp, and Harro volunteered to help him flee the country. He asked Bergtel to memorize a large amount of military intelligence, including German aircraft and tank production figures, as well as plans for a new submarine base in the Canary Islands. Bergtel was instructed to recite the information to the KPD representatives in Switzerland on his arrival. Harro dressed Bergtel in a Luftwaffe uniform and took him to the central train station, walking him past wanted posters displaying his own face. Harro put the escapee on a train to Austria and Schumacher took a seat nearby. They got off the train at the Austrian-Swiss border, and Schumacher, an accomplished mountaineer, guided Bergtel over the Alps into Switzerland.
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Once again, their effort was futile. The KPD representatives distrusted the source of the information because Schulze-Boysen and his circle were outsiders, not party regulars. Bergtel's information, which three men had risked their lives to convey, was never even passed on to Moscow.
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In late August the German public awoke to the startling news that the Nazis had reached an agreement with the Soviets, known as the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. The two countries would refrain from attacking each other and, under the secret protocol, would carve up and divide Finland, the Baltic republics, and Poland as spoils. Expanding on their secret military collaboration after World War I, the Soviets would supply the Germans with raw materials in exchange for advanced military technology.
Stalin was jubilant, convinced that the alliance with Hitler would guarantee his survival. The Germans would help him rebuild the Soviet military institutions he had just destroyed, and together the two dictatorships could face down the Western democracies.
The political discourse in both countries was turned upside down. Prisoners in Soviet reeducation camps were ordered to avoid the word “fascist” in favor of the friendlier term “German National Socialists.” European Communist Party leaders were informed that their adversary was no longer German fascism; it was imperialism, which made Britain the new archenemy
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Stalin began to ship massive trainloads of raw materials to augment the German arsenal.
One of Stalin's first gestures of friendship was to round up the suspected German and Austrian dissidents he had been holding in Soviet camps and prisons. These included Communists, other German antifascists, and Jewish refugees.
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German Communists accounted for about 570 of the prisoners. They were herded over the bridge at Brest-Litovsk to German-occupied Poland, where Soviet and Gestapo agents checked their respective lists, sorting out the candidates for interrogation, concentration camps, and execution.
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One of the prisoners at the bridge was the widow of KPD official Heinz Neumann, who had been executed by the Soviets in 1937. Greta Buber-Neumann, the daughter-in-law of Martin Buber, had been sent to a slave labor camp in Kazakhstan. Now the Soviets delivered her over to the Gestapo. The Germans dispatched her to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she spent the rest of the war.
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The events of 1939 continued to unfold rapidly. For months tensions had been building on the German-Polish border. Poland, which had been reconstituted under Versailles, had few admirers abroad. The country had failed to achieve political stability, due to a long history of internal power struggles, extreme poverty, and a bitterly contested border. In 1938,
Life
magazine published a major feature under the headline “Poland: Misery, Pride and Fear Call the Tune.” The author described the country as “almost friendless in Europe,” and criticized Poland's land grabs in Lithuania and Czechoslovakia as the actions of “a jackal to Germany's lion.”
“Polish politics is a mess,” the article went on. “There is ample excuse ready to hand for intervention [by Germany and Russia].” The piece highlighted the country's ethnic divisions, reporting that Poland's six million Russians were restless. One million ethnic Germans were “scattered thinly all over Poland and many of them are anti-Nazi.” Poland's three million Jews, who had suffered repression under various regimes in different countries, “continue to wear the dress and haircuts the Tsars forced on them … the most miserable, submissive and hopeless people in all Poland.”
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British and French diplomats attempted to stave off Poland's rapacious neighbors, but Hitler's forces were ready to move, and no one was prepared to prevent them. The Nazis launched a series of pseudoterrorist
incidents, blaming them on the Poles. These actions culminated on the last day of August, when German SS units, disguised in Polish-style mustaches and sideburns, staged attacks on three German targets, including a radio station in the border town of Gleiwitz. German radio audiences listened breathlessly to a live broadcast of the station's “takeover” by “Polish militia,” complete with gunshots and a ranting speech in Polish. Once the Germans “retook” the station, they found a “Polish” corpse slumped over the transmitter. This was an unfortunate prisoner who had been dragged out of the concentration camp at Sach-senhausen, dressed in a Polish uniform, drugged, shot, and dumped on the scene. Hitler proclaimed that this vicious pantomime provided the justification to invade Poland, and a million and a half German troops stood ready at the border.
As Harro Schulze-Boysen saw it, the escalation was Germany's only way out: things had to get worse before they could get better. He could even see a bright side to the Hitler-Stalin pact. The last week in August, Kurt Schumacher had invited Harro to address a roomful of young working-class Communists. Harro, wearing civilian clothes and identifying himself only as “Hans,” told them not to despair over the pact. It would help Germany in the end, he said, because the combined German-Soviet threat was the only thing that would stir the sluggish Western democracies into action against Hitler. Besides, Harro argued, Germany and the Soviet Union had by no means smoothed over their fundamental ideological antagonisms. Their fight to the death would come in good time, and the Soviets would benefit from additional time to prepare for battle. The “ Nonaggression Pact,” he quipped, was really a “ Not-Yet-Aggression Pact.”
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A week later Harro Schulze-Boysen traveled out to a lake in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where his sailboat was waiting. He met Gün-ther Weisenborn—his friend, co-conspirator, and wife's lover—at the dock. The two sailed with a strong wind against an evening sky. Harro was in a pensive mood. “Tomorrow night we move against Poland,” he told Weisenborn. “So far Hitler's had room to maneuver, but now he will start to box himself in. Now the real world history will be made, but not by him alone. We're all going to play our little part, everyone around us
and we ourselves. It will be the biggest war in world history, but Hitler won't survive it.”
On September 1 the Germans invaded Poland at dawn. Soon the air force was obliterating Polish roads, bridges, and cities with the world's first large-scale aerial bombardment. The Polish armed forces were no match for the Germans. By the end of the day, the British and French governments informed Berlin that unless German troops were withdrawn from Poland immediately, they would declare war. The Germans declined, and on September 3, Hitler's latest act of aggression was transformed into a regional conflict.
If Hitler was expecting the German capital to hail him as a conquering hero, he was disappointed. The stubborn Berliners remembered the miseries of World War I all too well. Some even recalled that in
Mein Kampf,
Hitler himself had written that going to war against the British was the kaiser's fatal error. American diplomat George Kennan recorded the city's response:
The Berliners themselves—the simple people, that is—were, of all the major urban or regional elements among the German population, the least Nazified in their outlook. They could never be induced to give the Nazi salute. They continued to the end to greet each other with the usual
“Guten Morgen”
in place of the obligatory “
Heil Hitler.”
Nor did they evidence any particular enthusiasm for the war.
I can testify (because I stood among crowds of them on the Pariserplatz, outside our embassy, on that particular day) that they witnessed with a reserved, sullen silence the victory parade of the Polish campaign. Not even the most frantic efforts of professional Nazi agitators could provoke them to demonstrations of elation or approval.
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