Red Orchestra (27 page)

As the Nazis stepped up their preparations for a broader war, opposition figures increased their international efforts. The young diplomat Adam von Trott was the strongest link between the German resistance and British officials. He was connected to Arvid Harnack through their mutual friend Egmont Zechlin. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Trott had made many influential friends among the British elite. He had joined the German foreign ministry with the intention of pursuing resistance activities from an international base.

Trott embarked on an ambitious program of one-man shuttle diplomacy, enlisting the support of influential friends from his student days. But Trott had also made an influential enemy at Oxford by running afoul of literature professor Maurice Bowra. The malicious don took it upon himself to discredit Trott with his contacts at the British Foreign Office. Despite Trott's many distinguished references, the British government wrote him off. The Foreign Office considered the idea of a diplomat trying to overthrow his own government to be “traitorous”—even if the goal was to save millions of lives from his government's policy of mass murder.

The British government passed the discouraging word on to the Roosevelt administration. Trott traveled to Washington and New York in the fall of 1939, almost overlapping with Arvid Harnack's summer trip. He, too, was granted only inconclusive meetings with low-level American officials. Trott's storehouse of information and contacts offered Washington a tremendous advantage in dealing with the Nazis, but the Roosevelt administration dismissed him without a hearing, and the FBI shadowed him as a spy.
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In early 1940 the disappointed diplomat finally returned to Germany by way of Japan.
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The various German resistance groups erratically divided up the world. Arvid Harnack reached out to Washington and Moscow. Trott
shuttled desperately to London and Washington, in hopes that a peace could be negotiated that would avert a world war and leave Germany intact.
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Only a few foreign officials were sympathetic to their plight. One of them was the British military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Noel Mason-Macfarlane. A man of action, he informed his government in 1939 that his apartment window offered a good bead on Hitler's cavalcade, and offered to shoot him. The British government disapproved of his plan, considering it bad form.
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In 1940, Roosevelt dispatched Sumner Welles to Europe to explore the possibilities of preventing war. Welles's office commissioned young diplomat George Kennan, an expert on both Germany and the Soviet Union, to write a policy paper for his review. Kennan took a shortsighted view of the situation, warning against “the siren songs” of German dissidents “who held out the hope of overthrowing Hitler and setting up a government of ‘reasonable men.' ” Kennan lived to regret his analysis.
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Stalin, taking advantage of the diplomatic lull, pursued his own aggressive campaigns. After digesting their half of Poland, the Soviets invaded Finland in late November, taking advantage of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the momentary paralysis of the Western democracies.

Stalin trusted Hitler and assumed the alliance would hold. In late 1939 he took the astonishing step of cleaning out his German intelligence networks. Soviet intelligence services contacted their leading undercover agents across the globe and informed them that their efforts were no longer necessary. These included the Polish communist Leopold Trep-per, who was building up his network in Western Europe from his base in Brussels, and master spy Richard Sorge, who transmitted a wealth of detailed intelligence from Toyko under cover as a German journalist. The agents were told to suspend their intelligence operations and come back to Moscow at once. Reading between the lines, Sorge and Trepper found ominous hints that they could expect some difficult conversations about suspected Trotskyite tendencies.
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Both agents managed to disobey orders and remain abroad, thus surviving the purges. They maintained their covers and continued to build up their operations, convinced that no matter what Moscow said, the
confrontation between Germany and the Soviet Union was inevitable. For the moment, their priority was to keep a low profile.

Other Soviet intelligence agents were less fortunate. All over the West, the Soviet
re^identuras,
offices charged with in-country intelligence oversight, were devastated by Stalin's purges. In Berlin, only two of the sixteen members of the Soviet intelligence staff survived.
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The Soviets had groomed members of the German Communist Party to backstop their intelligence, but there wasn't much to work with. Historian Michael Burleigh writes that by 1939, the party's remnants were reduced to

Thus it is little wonder that the German Communists' party-in-exile rejected the overtures of Dr. Paul and her stubborn clique of concentration camp survivors and antifascists in the spring of 1939. The KPD itself was in disarray.

For years, the Schulze-Boysen and the Harnack groups had worked to infiltrate the Nazi policy circles. Their success depended on blending into Nazi society and remaining inconspicuous. Now they were personally tested by their emotional reactions to the suffering around them. Harro Schulze-Boysen put everything at risk when he helped Kurt Schumacher's friend escape from a concentration camp. The Harnacks aided their friend, Jewish publisher Max Tau, in his flight to Norway in 1938. The couple saved food from their own scarce rations to offer their other Jewish friends, and Mildred collected documents for refugees.
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But their humane impulses led to internal debates. Everyone in the circles had Jewish friends, colleagues, or relatives, and all of them condemned the country's mounting anti-Semitism. But clandestine activity imposed an algebra of inverse proportion: the more effectively one
worked to topple the regime, the less conspicuous one could afford to be in helping its victims.

Greta Kuckhoff insisted on maintaining contact with her Jewish friends, even if it meant attracting attention. She took her son, Ule, around for frequent visits, and offered free English lessons to Jewish families waiting for visas to Britain and America. But it was an unsettling experience. Once she went to see a couple who had a new baby boy. She entered the building, holding Ule's hand, and noticed that the couple's brass nameplate was missing. When she reached their door, she found that the family and their possessions had vanished without explanation.
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The neighbors only shrugged: “Maybe it's for the best. This way the boy can grow up with his own kind.”

Greta's Jewish friends told her they felt German to the core, and some regarded emigration as an act of cowardice. Why, they demanded, should they allow a crass Austrian usurper to evict them from their own country?

Adam Kuckhoff was sympathetic, but he warned Greta that helping a Jewish family here or there wasn't going to change the larger picture. The only real way to help persecuted Jews and other victims of the regime was to overthrow Hitler as quickly as possible.

Greta was stung by criticism from Arvid Harnack as well. Her visits to “obviously” Jewish families was attracting attention to them all, he told her, and she was only doing it to make herself feel better by proving her altruism.
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Granted, Mildred Harnack continued to help Jews trying to flee Germany, but she did so on discreet trips abroad, not by knocking on doors and quizzing the neighbors.

The circle was experiencing its first divisions over the question of ethics and methodology. Was it proper to concentrate on overthrowing the regime or should they be helping its victims? Or should one attempt to do both, at the risk of endangering both activities? Greta, the sociologist, still hoped that setting a good example would inspire her fellow citizens, while Arvid, enmeshed in high-level intelligence activity, was deeply concerned about security.

Over the course of 1939 and 1940, members of the Harnack-Kuckhoff circle advanced their strategic positions in government. Arvid's job at the Economics Ministry continued to generate valuable information
for Donald Heath. Their exchanges were facilitated by the closing of the American School in Berlin, where Heath's son, Donald Jr., had been a student. In late 1939, Mildred became his tutor in English and American literature, and the boy became a courier for messages between his parents and the Harnacks.
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Even from his child's perspective, young Donald could recognize his family's delicate position. One day he came home early to find the family cook in the music room with a Leica poised over a photo stand, taking snapshots of his mother's diary. The cook was fired immediately.
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Adam Kuckhoff continued to work in publishing, but he expanded his contacts in the film community. Producers still inquired about the film rights to his novel, but he was more conscious than ever of how his words could be twisted in the interests of “false patriotism.” The couple needed money, but his wife approved of his resolve. “It took more courage to turn down the film than to make a blind jump off a cliff,” Greta noted.
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Adam churned out articles on film theory, and Tobis Film commissioned him to polish dialogue for their upcoming productions, including the 1939 thriller
Die Vierte Kommt Nicht (The Fourth One Isn't Coming),
and
Der Fuchs von Glenarvon (The Fox of Glenarvon,
1940) starring Olga Tschechowa.
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Greta occupied herself with their young son, Ule, and her role as her husband's secretary, but she also kept up with her own work. Her translation business was another rare opportunity to get news of the outside world. It was only through her work with Italian texts that her group learned that the Italians had adopted a variant of Nazi race policies against the Jews.
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The Kuckhoff apartment also became an archive of illegal materials. Frightened friends appeared at regular intervals with banned literature to drop off as they tried to sanitize their own house-holds. Soon the Kuckhoffs' bookshelves were lined with the dangerous volumes. The Kuckhoffs had access to information, but few ways to disseminate it.

This was one reason they were glad to know John Sieg. John had been working at the Reichsbahn (state railways) since 1937, rising through the ranks to senior positions at important train stations. Before 1938 the railways had offered the German underground a vital artery to the opposition in exile in Prague and Paris. That period was over. Prague
was now under German occupation, and the train service had become the prime conduit of men and supplies to the front. But the altered conditions also presented new opportunities: John was now well-trained in telegraph operations, signal towers, and worker oversight, an enviable battery of skills for an antifascist with the will to do mischief. John Sieg was no longer a working journalist, but every day, as he switched the engines to Prague and counted the boxcars to Warsaw, he realized that he was staring down the biggest story of his life. His Neukölln network gave him access to Germany's blue-collar antifascists and the remains of the KPD network. All in all, he was a useful person to know.

O
NE CHILLY SUNDAY IN THE WINTER OF 1939–40, JOHN SIEG
met with some old Communist Party contacts for a walk in Treptower Park; it was now too dangerous to meet on the streets of Neukölln. They chose to ignore the proposition of the Hitler-Stalin pact that the Soviets and the Nazis were currently friends. As German Communists, they had been discounting instructions from Moscow for a while, staying focused on their resistance activities against the Nazis. But they still lacked basic facilities: a meeting place, an office, a clandestine publishing base.

John's Neukölln apartment was out of the question. As a Communist Party member,
Rote Fahne
reporter, and former Nazi prisoner he was too conspicuous. But one of the group suggested a possibility nearby—Otto Dietrich's modest home at 5 Biebricherstrasse. The gray three-story building, close by a vast cemetery, became the base of the group's activities for the next two years.

“Hot days and cold days followed one another. The thread ran invisibly through the streets of Neukölln, and the junction was in Biebricher Street,” one member of the group wrote later. “The revolutionaries also followed each other—in and out of prison—but this home remained undisturbed.” The young Communist printer Herbert Grasse had emerged from his two-and-a-half-year sentence in January 1939; Biebricher Street soon welcomed his friends from the concentration camp into the circle. “Whoever comes along with Herbert is welcome. We have full confidence in his friends,” they said.
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Grasse found a job
printing handbills in a small shop, which gave him access to printing and paper supplies. He reached out to his old Communist Party youth contacts, and he soon activated a new network of antifascist informants and collaborators in the factories and the arms industry.
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