Authors: Anne Nelson
John Sieg's blue-collar co-conspirators took note of his contacts among the educated elite, including the Kuckhoffs and the Harnacks. The workers never learned their names, but they were impressed that such “big shots” were linked to the cause. Rigid social divisions still prevailed in Germany, and some KPD working-class regulars doubted that privileged intellectuals could be true partners in the class struggle, especially if they lacked party credentials. University educations were regarded with a mixture of suspicion and awe.
The Kuckhoffs and the Harnacks were anxious to hear John Sieg's reports on working-class resistance. Within the confines of the propaganda-saturated state, it was easy for opposition circles to feel isolated and abandoned. Battered Communist workers watched resentfully as leftist intellectuals joined the Nazi Party and assumed comfortable positions in the Nazi bureaucracy, while intellectuals feared that the working classes were all too eager to follow orders in return for a factory job and a few beers. Only a few feeble, clandestine connections remained to suggest that anti-Nazi sentiments transcended any single class.
“John always brought questions that workers from this or that factory wanted answered,” Greta recalled later. “Then he carried back the answers from the previous time, with analyses of certain Nazi projects. He also took articles that were not written for workers.”
3
This last statement was somewhat defensive. Greta had been born into a blue-collar family, but schooled and married into a different class. Now she was subject to criticism for her group's impenetrable academic prose.
John's Neukölln friends cautioned him not to put too much faith in bourgeois intellectuals. They weren't as careful and disciplined as the KPD regulars, they warned. Some of them talked too much, and the Gestapo was always attentive to indiscretions. John Sieg chose to ignore the warnings, and served as a rare link between the Neukölln KPD cell and the unaffiliated Kuckhoff-Harnack circle.
John Sieg could vouch for Adam Kuckhoff, having known him for years. Harro Schulze-Boysen was new to the scene. John quietly questioned
Marta Wolter Husemann, a member of the Schulze-Boysen circle whose husband was a KPD militant with the Neukölln group. Marta was fond of the artists and movie people who gathered around the Schulze-Boysens, but she confirmed to John that they were in no way comparable to a KPD cell. They lacked a “unified and single political purpose” and were in no way “oriented as uniform Communists;” in fact, their politics weren't even clearly defined.
4
In other words, Marta enjoyed their company because Harro was still campaigning for his “Party of Life.”
Greta Kuckhoff did not attend the Schulze-Boysens' lake parties, and it is not clear whether she was ever invited. Greta was feeling increasingly marginalized in many regards. She contributed to the resistance efforts in a number of ways, including translating, typing flyers, arranging meetings, and transmitting information, all of which required energy, and some of which entailed risk. But she resented the way the men in the group treated her as though she were just a housewife. Her husband, Adam, was often distant and self-absorbed. Arvid Harnack had returned to the imperious manner that had been so off-putting back in Wisconsin. She had traveled to London in 1939 to help with Jewish immigration matters and meet with British trade unionists. When she returned, Arvid rebuked her for taking an afternoon to see
Snow White
at the movies.
Now she was aware that when John Sieg, Adam, and Arvid met, they would disappear behind closed doors. The official explanation was that they were “protecting” her from inside information for the sake of Ule, her little son. Greta and Adam were the only couple in their group with a child; the Harnacks, the Schulze-Boysens, and the Siegs were all childless. The others often urged Greta to spend as much time as possible with her son.
It wasn't that Greta was an unwilling mother. One of the few glimpses of her smiling is a snapshot of her gazing blissfully at her baby boy. But she was still ambivalent about parenthood. These were challenging times. She didn't know how to answer young Ule when he begged for a swastika flag, just like the other kids'. One day he proudly produced a small Nazi flag he had found on the street. His parents were upset until his father thought of a stratagem to get rid of it: “Go plant it in the ground,” he told Ule, “and it will grow into a big one!”
5
Greta supplemented her housekeeping chores with her intellectual
tasks, getting up long before dawn to read through drafts of clandestine publications and make editorial suggestions. But sometimes she felt she was wasting her time. Adam, Arvid, and John generally ignored her ideas. They increasingly followed the editorial guidance of a new member of their circle, who had far more impressive journalistic credentials.
This was Johannes (known as “John”) Graudenz, an older man with craggy features, deep-set eyes, and a stubborn cowlick. He had learned English as a teenage waiter in England, then drifted into journalism and a job with the Americans' United Press agency. In the early 1920s, UP posted him to Moscow, where he broke the story of Lenin's death to the world.
Graudenz wrote of Lenin in favorable terms, but his precise political affiliations were unclear. He had joined a leftist splinter party as a youth in Berlin, but he showed an independent spirit. In 1924 he organized a journalists' trip down the Volga through famine-stricken regions of the country. The Soviets were angered by his photos and expelled him from the country, but he managed to sneak his film out with him to Berlin. The United Press published his images across the United States, showing starving children under the headline “Tearing the Veil Off Russia.”
6
Graudenz was popular among the foreign correspondents, and American journalists were especially grateful for his help in negotiating bureaucratic obstacles.
7
Graudenz was also a serious photographer. In 1924 one of his pictures was chosen as the subject for a “portfolio for Walter Gropius” by six master artists from the Bauhaus. It was reinterpreted as paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and others.
8
In 1928, Graudenz was hired by the
New York Times
bureau in Berlin, and the
Times
hosted him on a visit to New York. But in 1932 he fell out with his new bureau chief and left the paper. After the Nazi takeover, he worked as a traveling industrial salesman, eventually marketing brake systems for heavy vehicles. He was antagonistic to the Nazi regime from the start, and open to any opportunity to prove it.
Graudenz joined the Schulze-Boysen circle through an unlikely connection. His neighbor, Annie Krauss, was a professional fortune-teller and psychic who counted Libertas Schulze-Boysen among her clients. The fortune-teller and the former journalist eagerly accepted Libertas's
invitation to join her husband's underground efforts. Annie Krauss's customers included superstitious military officers, who shared details of upcoming campaigns as they asked for her forecasts, which she passed along to the group.
But she played on the superstitions of the group as well. Graudenz's teenage daughters saw them bring in plans for resistance actions for her approval. “She would lay her hand on it and say, ‘Nothing will happen to you,' so they didn't take enough precautions.” The girls were unimpressed. They called Krauss, a matronly woman with an ominous glare, the old
spökenkieker
(spook-spotter).
9
But Annie Krauss made a significant contribution to the group. Her living room soon acquired a printing apparatus for anti-Nazi flyers, produced under John Graudenz's expert supervision.
10
In 1938, Krauss took in a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Sophie Kuh, who was nervously awaiting a British visa. Sophie, a fragile young woman from a broken home, was deeply grateful for the haven. Soon Sophie Kuh found another source of unexpected support. “One day a tall gentleman came to visit Annie Krauss,” she recalled later. It was her neighbor John Graudenz. He was kind and supportive to the young woman, even though he knew that any assistance to Jews was closely monitored by the Gestapo. Sophie called Graudenz “a wonderful friend,” and he impressed her with his willingness to appear with her in public. On one occasion, she recalled,
We were traveling in his car on the Kurfürstendamm. My passport already had a “J” stamped in it. The police stopped the car. I jumped out and disappeared into the crowd so he wouldn't get into trouble. He said later that he didn't care, I should have stayed in the car. But the Nazis did these terrible things at that time, very quietly. Someone would just disappear.
Sophie told Graudenz about her stepfather, a prominent writer and, as a Romanian Jew, a member of the highly vulnerable population of stateless Jews from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. After their homeland was dissolved following World War I, many were unable to get alternate passports and visas. Graudenz helped him with money and
food. Sophie's British visa eventually came through and Graudenz himself drove her to the train station. But there was no way to save her stepfather. He was deported and died in a concentration camp.
11
The months between September 1939 and April 1940 passed slowly and miserably. In London, British civilians stared at the skies for the first German bombers to appear. Only the most deluded optimists believed that a shooting war could be averted now.
The antifascists working inside Germany felt the pressure mount. For Colonel Hans Oster, the anti-Nazi officer in military intelligence, the decisive moment came on November 7, 1939, two months after the German invasion of Poland. Oster asked a friend to drive him to the apartment of a Colonel Gijsbertus Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, whom he had befriended three years earlier.
When Oster returned from his conversation with Sas, he was visibly upset. “There is no way back for me,” he told his waiting friend. “It is much easier to take a pistol and kill somebody; it is much easier to run into a burst of machine-gun fire than it is to do what I have done.”
Oster's friend learned later that he had just given Sas the entire plan for Germany's invasion of Western Europe.
12
Sas shared the information with Danish and Norwegian officials, as well as his own government. But Oster's intelligence was undermined by Hitler's changes in plan— the invasion was postponed twenty-nine times.
13
Instead of taking advantage of the warnings to mount a defense, the Dutch commander in chief dismissed them as false alarms, suppressed the information, and accused Sas of sensationalism.
14
Oster's intelligence grew more and more detailed, yet the intended beneficiaries shrugged it off. “The people who received the message laughed about it,” recalled Dutch official J. G. de Beus. “But when the time came they were not sufficiently prepared.”
15
Sas's final meeting with Oster on May 9, 1940, was like a “funeral meal.” After dinner Oster stopped by his headquarters one last time to check his information, and returned full of despair. “The pig [Hitler] has gone off to the western front, now it is definitely over,” he told Sas. “I hope we shall meet again after this war.”
16
Oster, a career officer, fully understood that his actions could contribute to German casualties in the field. He also understood that in the eyes of many, his actions had crossed the line between dissent and treason. Yet like Harro Schulze-Boysen
and other dissident officers, he regarded his decision as the act of a patriot. He told Sas, “One might say that I am a traitor
(Landesver-räter),
but in reality I am not; I consider myself a better German than all those who run after Hitler. It is my plan and my duty to free Germany, and at the same time the world, of this plague.”
17
The German invasions were launched amid northern Europe's hazy spring. On April 9, 1940, the German army marched into Norway and Denmark. On May 10 it attacked Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The operations went smoothly and successfully. France, Germany's traditional rival, had been complacent in the period leading up to the onslaught, confident that its defenses would hold.
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They lasted a matter of weeks. France was vanquished on June 4.
The situation went from bad to worse. By late May the German armed forces had driven hundreds of thousands of British Expeditionary Forces to the French coast at Dunkirk. Over the next few weeks the world was transfixed by the spectacle of a massive rescue, as some 326,000 British escaped across the Channel on a motley flotilla of British motorboats and fishing smacks.
The Nazis reveled in their victory, lavishing medals on one another and parading their spoils. American correspondent William Shirer found that few Berliners around him shared a sense of triumph. “Strange, the apathy of the people in the face of this decisive turn in the war,” he wrote after the conquest of Holland and Belgium. “Most Germans I've seen, outside of the officials, are sunk deep in depression at the news.”
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The circle of military resisters around Admiral Canaris and Hans Oster was devastated. They had been counting on the horrors of a protracted European war to tip German public opinion in their favor. Once again they were stymied.
The summer wore on, giving every indication that the European contest had entered its endgame. Talk of the British invasion resumed. On July 15 the Nazi-controlled press announced the German troops “now stand ready for the attack on Britain. The date of the attack will be decided by the Führer alone.”
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But the Führer refused to show his hand. Hitler expansively announced that he was ready to consider peace proposals from Britain.
The Nazi hierarchy set about imagining the future. The following
week, the economics minister and the president of the Reich Economic Chamber unveiled plans for the “new order” in Europe: a population of 320 million people covering 1.5 million square miles.
21
The Reichsmark would be substituted for the gold standard, bankrupting the United States and making Germany the clearinghouse for the world economy. In this imagined empire, all roads led to Berlin.