Red Orchestra (29 page)

In late July, the British spurned Hitler's offer of a compromised peace, but they knew that the Germans were far better prepared for war. The Nazis had spent years intensively building up their armed forces, militarizing their industry, and honing state-of-the-art field operations with advanced technologies. The same could not be said of the Polish, the French, the British, or the Americans.

In some cases, invisible gestures contributed to immense consequences. As German and British strategists raced to control strategic chokepoints, one obvious focus was Spain. In July 1940, the Germans sent military intelligence chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to convince his old friend Franco to join the Axis powers and give them control of Gibraltar.
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It was another Nazi miscalculation. Canaris told Franco that the Nazi cause was doomed, and there was no reason for Spain to go down with it. Franco elected to maintain Spanish neutrality and Gibraltar remained in British hands, clearing the way for the Allied invasion of North Africa and Italy in November 1942.

For the Berlin circles, the way forward was unclear. Harro Schulze-Boysen was determined to continue to enjoy life amid the tension. In May 1940, as the Dutch offensive was under way, he organized a bicycle trip to Libertas's family castle with artists Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher and writer Günther Weisenborn. Their friends Herbert Engel -sing, the film producer, and his wife, Ingeborg, joined them, and Libertas brought along her accordion. To all outward appearances the group was merely relishing another spring holiday of swimming and cookouts at the lake. But, Ingeborg Engelsing wrote later, Harro had also brought secret reports from the German press agency and forbidden foreign press reports. He gathered the group to discuss plans for another round of flyers based on the information.
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Harro was exasperated with the Western democracies. Britain had squandered precious time, France had capitulated, and America stood
idly by. As the crisis grew, his vision became more apocalyptic. As he now saw it, Hitler's military machine had overwhelmed the corrupt Western democracies. The Germans would have to plot their own course, distinct from both the West and the Soviets.
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Schulze-Boysen's vision illuminated another fault line running through the expanding circle. The few orthodox KPD veterans in his circle often retained their loyalty to Moscow and were offended by his irreverence. Others were more critical than Harro. Another member of his circle, cement merchant Hugo Buschmann, was so incensed at the Soviets that he turned down a trade mission to Moscow, refusing to travel in a country allied with Hitler.
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As of the summer of 1940, Arvid Harnack was the only member of the circle with an active, ongoing exchange with a foreign government. He continued to meet with Donald Heath from the U.S. State Department, though the encounters were increasingly difficult to arrange.

Heath's superior in Berlin, U.S. chargé Alexander Kirk, found it ever more uncomfortable to support the U.S. policy of neutrality in the European conflict. Even the reticent Kirk was moved to strong language. On July 17, 1940, he sent Roosevelt an impassioned memorandum summarizing the political and military situation in Europe. The possibility of long-term neutrality was an illusion, he argued: “There will be no place for the United States in the world envisioned by Hitler, and he will exercise his power with a view to eliminating it as a great power as soon as possible…” The United States must decisively cast its lot against Hitler, Kirk wrote. “That alignment must be immediate, it must be open and unequivocal, and it must be supported by the extension of material help…”
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Roosevelt's personal sympathies were clearly with Britain, and he took what steps he could, but he was severely limited. The idea of a war was still unpopular with most Americans, and Roosevelt was facing a tough election. Furthermore, Alexander Kirk's call for “material help” could be called an exercise in wishful thinking for the time being. At the time of his writing, the U.S. Army ranked eighteenth in the world, outnumbered by Germany, France, Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and China—as well as by Belgium, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. The German military had 6.8 million men, compared to 504,000 in the U.S. armed forces.
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Winston Churchill understood that
part of the Americans' paralysis resulted from their intelligence deficit, and tried to fill the gap. In June 1940 he sent Canadian officer William Stephenson to New York to open a British intelligence office in Rockefeller Center. But Stephenson found the Americans less than eager for his help.

In August the war entered a new phase. On August 13 the Germans launched a massive air attack against Britain called Operation Eagle. The British responded in kind, sending bombers over German cities and facilities in occupied countries. Initially, both air forces were commanded to concentrate on military targets. But on August 23, a mission went wrong. A dozen German bomber pilots, under orders to bomb aircraft factories and oil tanks in the London suburbs, unloaded their bombs over residential areas in the heart of London instead.
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Two nights later, the Royal Air Force retaliated for the German error by launching its first air raid on Berlin. Now both sides were committed to a policy of aerial attacks on civilians.

Berlin was in shock; Field Marshal Göring had assured its citizens that it was impossible for the British to penetrate the city's air defenses.
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Now Berliners saw that he was wrong, deepening their misgivings about the road ahead.

For months, German troops had been poised for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Great Britain, but both Hitler and his high command vacillated over the plan. There were many obstacles. The Luftwaffe had not scored its expected victory in the air battle over Britain, and weather conditions were uncertain. On September 17, 1940, having lost the last of the favorable tides, Hitler called off the plan indefinitely.

As the wages of war grew more costly, so did the penalties for opposition. Capital punishment had not only become more frequent under the Nazis, it was more dramatic. As of 1934, death sentences were carried out with an ax, but in December 1936 the Nazi minister of justice decreed a shift to the guillotine. Two months later the device was installed in a shed on the grounds of the massive redbrick prison at Plötzensee. Many of its initial victims were members of the German Communist Party, such as twenty-eight-year-old Liselotte Hermann, a former biology student and mother of a four-year-old son. Hermann was beheaded after she was arrested with the floor plans of a munitions factory in her possession.
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Under the Nazis' standard procedure, the broken bodies were taken to be dissected at the Institute of Anatomy and Biology, just off the Tier-garten park where the Harnacks and Donald Heath took their tense, furtive walks.
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Only a decade earlier, the medical institute worked under the direction of Adam Kuckhoff's friend, Adolf Grimme. Now its laboratories had been commandeered for a political end, to inflict a final humiliation on the remains of traitors against the regime.

O
VER THE COURSE OF 1940 THE HARNACKS AND THE KUCKHOFFS
watched their society settle into the grim rhythms of war. As Nazi forces stormed across Europe, they gathered momentum and swept up everything in their path. Each conquered territory became a source of manpower and supplies. Ethnic Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia were recruited or press-ganged into the German army, while Frenchmen were recruited or forced into slave labor. Poles were terrorized, enslaved, or murdered. Foreign mines and factories were retooled to feed the German army, while soldiers' wives and parents were placated with silk stockings and Dutch cheese.

With France's June 1940 surrender, the Nazis reached the high-water mark for domestic popularity. Many Germans saw the recent conquests as a simple means to redress the accumulated grievances of the past thirty years. The boundaries of Greater Germany now closely resembled a 1914 map of Europe, uniting the German-speaking peoples of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and doing away with the notion of Poland altogether. France's punitive terms at Versailles had been reversed (and the penalties exacted many times over). With Germany's old enemies crushed, the Reich appeared invincible.

The resistance circles in Berlin were stalemated, and the production of anti-Nazi flyers dropped off sharply. They had lost their audience. For the moment, the antifascists were at a loss for new arguments that could
shatter mass delusions of the Nazis' success, and they concentrated on communicating within their circles.

The German generals realized that the prospective Russian invasion was a different matter. Hitler was asking them to commit their forces to a two-front war, going into the harsh Russian winter. But at least in its earliest conception, this was not an impossible undertaking. The generals reasoned that if the German army could conquer Russia before winter set in and the United States remained aloof, the British would have no choice but to sue for peace. Hitler would win, and a massive slave nation with a staggering supply of natural resources would be added to his arsenal.

On the home front, the hardships of militarization mounted faster for German civilians than the benefits of victory. The government imposed food rationing in 1939, a few days before the invasion of Poland, to save supplies for soldiers at the front. The rationing, which grew more severe over time, made it more difficult for Jews to survive and for their German friends to help them. In January 1940 the government decreed that baths were limited to Saturday and Sunday, a harsh blow for the fuel-starved Berliners, who relied on hot baths to stay warm.
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In August 1940, Berlin suffered its first civilian casualties from British air strikes. Berliners' routine now incorporated sirens and air-raid shelters by night, and mounds of fresh rubble in the morning.

In the occupied countries German troops stripped the land and terrorized local populations, but the German media filtered all such unpleasantness from its reports. In the Neverland of Nazi news, German troops were always welcomed with flowers by smiling children, and grateful citizens thanked the troops for “cleansing” and “pacifying” their land.

The Nazis never considered releasing the number of civilian casualties in their campaigns. But in May 1940 the Nazis stopped releasing the number and names of German military casualties as well. Hitler distinctly recalled that in World War I, the more Germans dwelled on their casualty lists, the more they questioned the war itself. That inconvenience, too, could be minimized.

But one sector of the population had irrefutable firsthand knowledge
of the war. This was the front-line military itself. A number of officers had already objected to the Nazis' persecution of the Jewish and Christian communities, and had begun to explore resistance activities.

Until Poland, it was possible for many German officers to believe the rhetoric of liberating ethnic Germans and redrawing the boundaries of Versailles. The Polish campaign was something else again. This time, ad hoc units of Gestapo and SS personnel were attached to the regular army, with orders to carry out mass executions. They were known as
Ein-satfammando
units, variously translated as “mission command” or “task force” (also known as
Einsatzgruppen
). By 1940, these mobile killing units were held responsible for the deaths of 52,000 people in Poland, many of them Polish aristocrats, intelligentsia, and Jews, the sectors that were expected to lead resistance against German occupation.
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But the presence and the activities of these death squads were deeply disturbing to many regular army officers, operating outside the traditional chain of command and violating every norm of military conduct. In the opinion of some military historians, Poland represented the turning point of the German military resistance movement.
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In November 1939, the commander in chief of the eastern districts, General Johannes Blaskowitz, wrote a memorandum to Hitler describing the atrocities and abuses he had witnessed, and expressing his “utmost concern” regarding their impact on the troops.

Hitler called Blaskowitz's message “childish” and condescendingly told the general, “You can't wage war with Salvation Army methods.” But Blaskowitz persisted, sending another strongly worded communication to the army commander in chief, deploring the “bloodthirstiness” of the
Einsatzkommandos
and calling for a “new order.” In January 1940 he told his commanding officer, “Every soldier feels sickened and repelled by the crimes committed in Poland by agents of the Reich and government representatives.” Blaskowitz's protests were suppressed and he was dismissed from the eastern front in May 1940. But anti-Nazi officers circulated his reports to other commands, where they caused “great agitation.”
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One colonel, Helmuth Stieff, cited Blaskowitz's charges in an agonized letter to his wife: