Red Orchestra (26 page)

Harro spent the day following the invasion with a group of friends at the Engelsings', celebrating his and Herbert Engelsing's joint birthday. Harro was turning thirty. Wine flowed freely, and the Engelsings used the last of their gas ration to fetch Libertas's accordion. She played the
old songs from the lake as the company sang along, but then, stirred by the events of the day, she played “The Marseillaise” and “It's a Long Way to Tipperary.”

Then, perhaps in his cups, Harro led a loud chorus of the Polish national anthem, a nineteenth-century hymn that had once rung across Europe:

The song was a daring choice for September 2, 1939. Ingeborg En-gelsing nervously circled the house to make sure no one was listening. The party went on until dawn, and Harro's mood darkened, burdened with knowledge. Hitler, he said, would try to conquer England, but the outcome was questionable. The Western Europeans couldn't defeat Germany on their own, and the Soviet Union's position was still in doubt. Only the entry of the United States could secure an outright victory. But he believed it would be a long time before the West could unite in a full counterattack.

In the meantime, Harro mused, their own prospects were not good. Hitler's dictatorship will only grow madder and more reckless, he said. No one would escape the inferno.
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One of his friends later described Harro's mood that evening.

Harro fell silent. As though weary of his own sense of doom, he started to dance—expertly, elegantly, enchanting all the women. And just as abruptly, he tired of his spectacle and stopped.

H
ARRO SCHULZE-BOYSEN WORKED IN A SPARE, MODERN OFFICE
in Göring's Air Ministry, a large gray slab of a building across the street from Hitler's chancellery. If Göring's ministry had been constructed slightly farther down the block, Harro might have looked out on the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, where his father-in-law had once taught art classes, and where political dissidents were now brutally interrogated.

A few blocks west, next to the U.S. ambassador's residence, an even larger set of granite slabs loomed over a central courtyard. This was the Bendler Block, a complex that once included the vast quarters of Harro's great-uncle, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Now it served as the command center for both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and German military intelligence.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the white-haired chief of military intelligence, belonged to the same military caste as Harro Schulze-Boysen, but with different leanings. Canaris had served under Harro's great-uncle as a young submarine officer. Harro's father, a decorated naval officer, was friendly with Canaris, and Harro's younger brother Hartmut would soon become a submarine officer himself.

But the two men approached politics from opposite ends of the spectrum: Harro was a thirty-year-old leftist romantic rebel disguised as an air force lieutenant, while Canaris was a conservative Catholic monarchist. Both men became notable figures in the resistance. But Harro had
opposed the Nazis from the start, and joined the military only to attack them from within, while Canaris had initially favored the Nazis and took several years to recognize their menace.

The Nazis had promoted Canaris soon after the takeover, perceiving him as a sympathetic and easily manipulated ally. Their ambitions meshed neatly in Spain, where Canaris had spent years and maintained close ties. As a Catholic, he strongly identified with the Spanish Falangist cause, and hung a picture of his good friend Francisco Franco over his desk. When Franco joined the revolt against the Spanish Republicans in 1936, Canaris was one of the first people he called. Canaris successfully argued the general's case before both Hitler and Mussolini, winning him arms, air strikes, and intelligence support.
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During the Spanish civil war, Canaris and Schulze-Boysen worked at cross purposes. Canaris infiltrated German agents into Spain, while Harro took measures to disclose their identities to the Republicans via the Soviets.

But as the Spanish civil war wound down and Nazi abuses gathered momentum, Canaris began to catch Harro's consuming hatred of Adolf Hitler and his party. Canaris watched in dismay as the Nazis subverted the church, the military, and the legal system, every institution Canaris held dear. He was certain that their adventurism would destroy the nation as well as the German armed forces. By the late 1930s the admiral was doing everything he could to slow the onset of war. On the day the final orders were given to invade Poland, he pulled an associate aside, into a dimly lit corridor of the command center, and told him, “This means the end of Germany”
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Canaris was also sickened by the atrocities that accompanied the invasion of Poland, and supported fellow officers' attempts to court-martial soldiers who committed war crimes. But the Nazis took no notice of their protests. Instead, they informed Canaris and his colleagues of their secret plan for mass executions in Poland. The murders were given the sanitized Nazi code name of “Extraordinary Pacification Action,” and Jews were to be given “special” treatment. According to one postwar account, Canaris received an eyewitness report of one massacre and went to Hitler to protest. “You're getting too soft, sir!” Hitler answered. “I have to do it, because after me no one else will.”
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A small group of dissident officers began to collect around Canaris,
but others were torn. Hitler's land grabs had been popular with army personnel, who were still smarting from the territorial losses under Versailles. Furthermore, after 1934, the traditional pledge of allegiance to the German nation was replaced with an oath of loyalty to the Führer himself, required of every member of the armed forces:

German soldiers, steeped in religious discipline and the cult of military honor, did not take their vows lightly.

Yet some officers, like army conspirator Henning von Tresckow, held a different definition of patriotism. In the summer of 1939 he told a fellow conspirator that “both duty and honor demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National-Socialism, in order to save Germany and Europe from barbarism.”
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Tresckow's view was fervently shared by Admiral Canaris's right-hand man, army Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster. Oster was outraged at the Nazis' offenses against German military tradition, and tormented by the crimes against Germany's Jews. Oster lamented that the Jews were being “driven to their destruction,” and took dramatic action to help them, at great personal risk.
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A massive military conspiracy began to form, with army intelligence at its heart. Hans Oster ran the day-to-day logistics, reaching out to political leaders to help shape a transitional government once Hitler was deposed. Canaris provided essential cover. The Oster conspiracy ran parallel to Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack's efforts, but there were many points of contact.

One of Oster's most trusted allies was Arvid Harnack's cousin, Hans von Dohnanyi, a justice official and architect of the thwarted 1938 coup attempt. Another cousin, Ernst von Harnack, convened his own overlapping circle of conspirators. Like most Social Democrats, Harnack had lost his government position in 1933. Over the winter of 1938–39 he
summoned Dietrich Bonhoeffer's brother Klaus and other prominent Social Democrats to his home to plot the regime's overthrow. They drew up a plan for a “Unity Front” of civilian and military groups, which would unite German antifascists without regard to party background.
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Although many of the conservatives in Oster's group had staunch anti-Communist backgrounds, there was a tacit understanding that different groups would try to cultivate different sources of foreign support. It was a ragged process with many intermediaries. One of them was historian Egmont Zechlin, a friend of Arvid Harnack's since his student days, who connected Harnack to a number of participants in the military plot.

The Harnack clan was also responsible for informal connections between the two resistance networks. Arvid's cousin, Social Democrat Ernst von Harnack, was placing himself at great risk by simultaneously helping Jews escape to England and participating in the Oster conspiracy. He remained in touch with Arvid, promoting the theory that in order to succeed, the “opposition must spin their web through the whole machinery of the regime … and at the same time try to make contact abroad.”
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Arvid and Mildred never wavered in their political convictions, but they personally questioned how far they were willing to go. In 1939, as the wider war loomed, Arvid became increasingly anxious about Mildred. She was prone to nervous depression. Although she longed for a child, she had little hope for the immediate future in Germany, and debated returning to America.

In October 1939, Mildred applied for fellowships from both the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations, to work on a book on American literature. Both applications were rejected; the Guggenheim committee dismissed her as a “beginner.”
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Arvid had experienced a similar disappointment two years earlier when he applied for a Rockefeller grant, hoping to use his time in America to lobby for the German resistance. The foundation responded that it was limiting its work with Germans because “foreign experience might decrease the willingness of the beneficiary to adjust himself to German conditions on his return.”
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The Harnacks lived in a constant state of anxiety. They refused to have a telephone or hold meetings in their home for fear of surveillance.
They limited their visits to the apartments of their less conspicuous contacts, where they could exchange news and secretly monitor foreign broadcasts.
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There was good reason to fear. By 1939 the Nazis had made great progress in wiping out the opposition. In April the Gestapo reported that over their first six years in power, the Nazis had placed 162,734 people in “protective custody,” which usually meant concentration camps. They added that 112,432 prisoners were sentenced by trial, and 27,369 were awaiting trial. In the month of May 1939 alone, 1,639 people were executed for political offenses.
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(Under the Weimar Republic, capital punishment had been virtually abolished. Only three executions took place in Germany between 1928 and 1930.)
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Despite these alarming signs, Arvid continued to smuggle information out of the Economics Ministry. He had lost contact with the Soviets in 1938 as a result of Stalin's purges of the embassy staff, but over the course of 1939 he frequently met with U.S. diplomat Donald Heath to pass on economic intelligence.
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Arvid believed that economics was the key to understanding the German crisis, granting him a unique role. Heath disapproved of Harnack's connections to the Soviets, but Harnack believed that both the Soviets and the West were required to ensure a victory over the Nazis. Heath's young son Donald Jr. once overheard Arvid tell his father: “I can be a bridge between the United States and the Soviet Union here in Germany. I understand you, you understand me, and I can be helpful to both sides.”
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Heath sent carefully worded summaries of Arvid's analyses to his superior, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles. A brilliant analyst, Welles shared Franklin Roosevelt's elite social background and was informally known as the architect of FDR's foreign policy
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But Welles also had powerful rivals at the State Department, and his career suffered from a campaign of innuendo regarding his homosexual activity. Welles was receptive to Donald Heath's reports from Arvid Harnack and other Germans dissidents, and understood the urgency of Heath's communiqués. But he was far from an ideal advocate within the bureaucracy.
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It was still utterly unclear what role, if any, the United States would
assume in the European conflict. But Heath's German sources held on to the hope that the United States would help them avert catastrophe. One of Heath's letters to Welles quoted a prominent anti-Nazi, referred to only as “our friend”: “President [Roosevelt], in the desire to bring the world back to sanity, must endeavor to exert an influence not only on the governing circles in Great Britain but also on Germany as well.”
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