Red Orchestra (33 page)

Now Adam Kuckhoff gave his wife a new assignment. They knew the plan of attack, village by village. Greta was to memorize the names of a dozen Russian towns, then meet with other members of the circle and repeat them. It was too dangerous to hand them around in writing. But Greta was too rattled, she couldn't make the names stick in her head. Adam asked Libertas Schulze-Boysen over to help, and together they completed the task.

Libertas returned to see Greta the next day. Greta invited her to the rooftop, and the two women took deep breaths of the spring air over coffee and cognac. Libertas was tired and shaky, too. Her family had a history of delicate nerves, and now she was in the thick of a conspiracy. But she carried an additional burden. Through Harro and her other connections she had been exposed to classified news from the front, and it was shattering. Years ago she had joined the Nazi Party as a lark, but now terrible things were happening in Poland and spreading beyond. “In my deepest heart,” Libertas told Greta, “even though I've seen the reports and the photos, I can't believe that German people are capable of committing such horrible deeds. I know
what Harro went through [in 1933]—and Hans Otto, and Ossietzky, and countless others. But this murder of entire peoples! I can't take it anymore!”
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At the beginning of May, Harro informed the Soviets that “the question of the German campaign against the Soviet Union has been definitely decided, and can be expected at any time.” This message caused Arvid and Harro's Soviet contact in Moscow grave concern, and he forwarded it to several branches of the Soviet government and intelligence service. Schulze-Boysen's May 9 report was even more ominous.

Now, at the end of his report, Harro described how the Luftwaffe had responded to the Soviets' objections to the surveillance. They simply increased their altitude: “Despite the note of the Soviet government, German aircraft continue their flights over Soviet territory for the purpose of photography. Now the pictures are taken from a height of 11,000 meters and the flights are undertaken with great care.” Harro's report of May 11 provided another update:

There were at least some officers in Soviet intelligence who were anticipating war. They were concerned that once hostilities broke out, they would be cut off from their informants in Berlin, making the radios a growing concern. As May wore on, Soviet intelligence devoted an increasing amount of its traffic with Berlin to secure the link. Harro Schulze-Boysen had tapped Kurt Schumacher as radio operator, but in early June he was drafted into the German army. On June 6, Schumacher's
Landes-Schüteen
(territorial defense) company was sent to Poznań to guard French forced laborers.
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Schulze-Boysen scrambled to find a replacement, finally settling on Hans Coppi, the young Communist who had helped with the radio hand-off. Coppi was a twenty-six-year-old machine operator, a tall, lanky man with dark eyes magnified behind thick spectacles. He, too, had served time in prison and a concentration camp for distributing Communist underground flyers. He was engaged to marry a slender young woman named Hilde, who also had ties to the Communist underground.
²⁹
Coppi had no experience with radios, but Schulze-Boysen hoped he could learn quickly.

Arvid Harnack took on the task of encoding the messages. One of his wife's night-school students, Karl Behrens, volunteered to deliver the coded messages to Coppi and serve as backup operator.
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Behrens was another young German whose politics were driven by personal grievance. After an early stint in the Nazi Party, Behrens joined the KPD. In 1939 he was arrested for forging exit papers for his sister's Jewish husband, Charly Fischer.
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His efforts were in vain; Fischer was sent to Sachsenhausen and executed.
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As Hans Coppi and his friends struggled to master radio communications, Schulze-Boysen accelerated his reports to Moscow. At the beginning of June he told the Soviets that air bases in Poland were being readied for aircraft. He had seen the plans for a German pincer movement to surround the Red Army, moving in from West Prussia and north from Romania. Arvid Harnack added a list of the quartermasters who had been assigned to oversee occupied Russian territory.
³³
But Harnack's group was concerned. Korotkov implied that the Soviets still saw room for doubt.

In early June, Adam and Greta Kuckhoff confronted Korotkov head-on.
The Soviets had been handed the exact date and extensive details of the invasion. Were they prepared or not? To the couple's immense frustration, Korotkov dodged the question.

Harro's reports from the Luftwaffe reached a climax when, on June 11, he told the Soviets that Göring planned to advance the preparations by moving to new headquarters in Romania within the week: “According to senior officials in the Aviation Ministry and on the air staff, the question of an attack on the USSR has definitely been decided. One should consider the possibility of a surprise attack.”
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On June 13, Harro's alert was reinforced by Soviet agent Richard Sorge in Tokyo, who warned: “I repeat: Nine armies with the strength of 150 divisions will begin an offensive at dawn on June 22.”
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Sometime on June 15 or 16, Schulze-Boysen and Harnack provided Korotkov with a final memorandum on the imminent German attack. Korotkov immediately passed it on to Moscow.

Stalin arrived at his office on June 17 to unwelcome news. Vsevolod Merkulov, the head of the NKVD state security service, presented Stalin with the stunningly detailed report. It included Arvid Harnack's description of the future German civilian administration for occupied areas of the Soviet Union. These were to be led by Alfred Rosenberg, a principal architect of the Nazis' notorious race policies. Harnack quoted Rosenberg's speech at the Economics Ministry stating that “the very idea of the Soviet Union must be wiped off the map.”
³⁶

Harro Schulze-Boysen laid out more strategic specifics:

Stalin had no patience for such nonsense. He scribbled his reaction in the margin of the document: “Comrade Merkulov, you can send your ‘source' from the headquarters of German aviation back to his much-fucked mother. This is no informer, this is a disinformer.”
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On June 22, 1941, all of the predictions came to pass. Operation Bar-barossa, “the greatest land invasion in modern warfare,” began at dawn, a mere five days after Stalin received Harro's final report.

On the eve of the attack, a German officer had gazed through his binoculars at his targets across the border in Brest-Litovsk, marveling at their utter lack of military preparedness. Most of the fortress's defenders appeared to be on leave, and those who were left behind were relaxed. The only visible activity involved some Chechen recruits who were practicing a march formation to music.

In the final hours before the invasion, the Soviet government continued to nourish the German war effort. Sometime after midnight on the morning of the attack, a Soviet train full of grain rolled across the border en route to Berlin.
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The Nazis deployed over three million troops: seventy percent of the German field army, plus 600,000 soldiers of other nationalities, including Croats, Finns, Romanians, Italians, Slovaks, and Spaniards. They met little resistance from the Soviet army. Stalin's most capable army officers had been shot in the purges. The Soviet intelligence services had been forbidden from providing any advance warning to units in the field, so these were taken by surprise, without the opportunity to concentrate their troops on the border. Many of their troops were on leave when the attack took place. Communications systems collapsed, leaving divisions isolated, with no means of receiving orders, and there were few orders to follow. The Kremlin had neglected to create a high command or confirm a commander in chief. (Stalin's appointment was pending.)

The Luftwaffe reconnaissance flights described by Harro Schulze-Boysen provided detailed instructions for German pilots, who handily destroyed networks of Soviet roads and railways.

The Soviet air force presented another fat target. The Soviets had concentrated over half of their air divisions in the western border districts, easily within striking distance. Fighters and bombers, old and new, were jammed together on the same airfields, without enough pilots to
man them.
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On June 19, three days before the invasion, a last-minute Soviet government decree went out, calling for “camouflage of aircraft, runways, tents and airfield equipment,” but there was not enough time to implement the order.
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Antiaircraft defenses were slight, and the Luftwaffe knocked out the Soviet airfields on schedule, with minimal effort.

German tanks and troops raced through the countryside at up to fifty miles a day. The Russian towns, whose names were so painstakingly memorized by Libertas Schulze-Boysen, were also defenseless. They quickly fell to the Germans, and many of them went up in flames. German forces broke Soviet army formations into small pockets that were easily captured or killed by a second-wave assault.
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In the first ten weeks of the invasion, the Germans captured 3,800 tanks, 6,000 artillery weapons, and 872,000 prisoners.
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German news-reels showed guards channeling an ocean of Soviet POWs westward, blond Russian teenagers staggering alongside impassive Mongols and Muslim Chechens.

Stalin bellowed and raged at his generals, but the situation he had created was beyond their repair. He fell into a deep depression. Eventually he emerged from his funk and swung into action.

Stalin's first move was to eliminate the witnesses to his monumental error. He rounded up many of the Soviet air force and intelligence officers who had futilely alerted him to the intelligence provided by Schulze-Boysen, Harnack, and others. On October 28, 1941, fourteen of the most competent officers in the Soviet armed forces were executed without trial. They were joined in death by four civilian officials and two officers' wives.
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Back in Berlin, the members of the circle were full of consternation. Greta Kuckhoff worried about her husband, who sat at home day after day puzzling over the catastrophe. “Adam would stare at the big map of the Soviet Union that he had put up on the wall, hidden behind a curtain. … He compared the news reports with the information that he had conveyed, and couldn't grasp how it could have had so little effect.”
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Together the group sifted through possible explanations. Had they been too cautious in their reports? Were the Soviets suspicious of them because their group was politically heterodox?

With the outbreak of war, Germany and the USSR broke off diplomatic relations. Alexander Korotkov and other members of the Soviet embassy staff packed their bags and waited to be shipped home in exchange for the Germans stranded in Russia. Korotkov managed to make a final contact with Harnack and Kuckhoff, to offer a small contribution in support of their activities. Arvid Harnack received some 12,000 marks for expenses (worth about $5,000 in 1941 U.S. currency), which he parceled out to his collaborators. Small amounts went to Adolf Grimme, the Social Democrat working with the dissenting Lutherans, and three members of the makeshift radio team. Harnack kept 1,000 marks ($400), for his own expenses, while Adam Kuckhoff received 1,500 marks from Korotkov in a separate payment.
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The Soviets settled on a coding system for the Berlin radio operations, based on a 1939 novel,
Der Kurier aus Spanien (The Courier from Spain).
One copy of the book was allegedly sent to Moscow and the other entrusted to Hans Coppi.
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Korotkov had one last request, and called a meeting with Adam Kuckhoff to convey it just before he left Germany for good.

Moscow wanted the group to help out, Korotkov reported, by scattering nails on the roads east of Berlin to slow the military vehicles heading for Russia.
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Kuckhoff was incredulous. After all of their efforts to secure the highest-level military intelligence, after the risks they had taken to convey it to Moscow—the Soviets had come back and asked them to puncture some tires? Adam Kuckhoff, shaking his head, returned home to stare at his map. Korotkov filed his last report from Berlin on June 24 and prepared for return to Moscow the following week under diplomatic protection.