Red Orchestra (34 page)

On June 26, 1941, newly appointed radioman Hans Coppi finally coaxed his balky apparatus into action. He tuned it to the agreed-upon frequency and tapped out a traditional salutation in halting Morse code: “
1000 Grüsse an alie Freunde
” (“A thousand greetings to all friends”). An operator in Moscow promptly replied, and told Korotkov, “We have received and read their test message.” In the future, they planned to communicate through a primitive code.

But there would be no further radio communications from Coppi to
Moscow.
⁴⁹
The subsequent transmissions failed, whether it was due to defective radios, inexperienced operators, or both.

This did not deter German military intelligence. They made a priority of tracking clandestine radio transmissions out of occupied Europe to Britain. The German operators assigned code names to the operations they detected, applying their own wry logic to the task. Because the operators sent their messages by tapping out the Morse code on a key, the Germans called the apparatus a “keyboard,” or
klavier.
A network of radios was a “chamber orchestra,” or
kapelle.
(The transmissions from occupied Europe to Britain were said to emanate from a
Wald Kapelle,
or “orchestra of the woods.”)

The German military was also monitoring transmissions from Western Europe to Moscow. One of the Soviets' most active networks was based in Brussels, led by Polish Soviet agent Leopold Trepper. German army radio operators had systematically monitored and recorded their traffic to Moscow long before they could locate the source, break their codes, or identify their authors.

The standard terminology was extended to the Soviet “Reds,” assigning the name
Rote Kapelle
to the Soviets' Brussels operation. Through a strange maze of circumstances, this name would be applied to the Berlin group as well, even though the two groups had little in common and virtually no contact.

Hans Coppi, the struggling amateur radio operator in Berlin, would have been particularly confused by the designation. He was the opposite of what the Soviets looked for in a spy. He was a conspicuous German Communist, born into a blue-collar KPD family and educated at a left-wing “school farm” whose students gravitated toward party organizations. Coppi's past, which included terms in prison and a concentration camp for his KPD activity, put him on all the wrong lists.

But Harro Schulze-Boysen saw no problem in reaching out to such individuals. They had met in 1939, as Coppi's circle of young Communists struggled to comprehend the Hitler-Stalin pact and what lay ahead. Coppi recalled the evening when Harro, calling himself “Hans,” appeared at one of their meetings and told them not to despair. The Soviet Union and the Nazis were on an unavoidable collision course,
he told them, and when they finally clashed, the Nazis were sure to fall.

When Harro had to replace his radio operator, his thoughts turned to the young mechanics and metalworkers he had met that evening. Hans Coppi and his friends had no knowledge of Soviet operations in Brussels or Leopold Trepper. Like the other members of the Berlin circles, they had never heard of anything called the Rote Kapelle.
⁵⁰
The idea that Coppi belonged to such an organization would have astonished him.

T
HE SOVIETS HAD UTTERLY FAILED TO HEED THEIR WARNINGS.
This was incomprehensible to Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, and Adam Kuckhoff. But there was more to the story than they would ever know.

Stalin had received additional warnings from across the globe as an uncertain world began to coalesce against the Nazis. Harro Schulze-Boysen's intelligence had been the most detailed, but his information was reinforced by a remarkable array of sources across a broad political spectrum. These included the State Department in Washington, the Tory government in London, a German-Russian Communist agent in Tokyo, and a German Lutheran exile in Lucerne. Many of them were conduits for anti-Nazi dissidents inside Germany. All of them believed that it was in their interest to warn the Soviets of the German invasion.

Washington's alert resulted from the efforts of Erwin Respondek, a German economist who was well-connected in Nazi circles but secretly offended by their anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic policies.

Respondek shared his secrets with a U.S. embassy official in Berlin named Sam Woods, whose modus operandi was to buy two reserved seats at the movies and send one ticket to his German source. Over the winter of 1940, Respondek offered the Americans extensive details of the plans for the Soviet invasion, provided by members of the German military conspiracy against Hitler. The U.S. mission in Berlin was now openly hostile to the idea of gathering intelligence. As the Nazis advanced
their scenario leading to world war, the U.S. chief of mission stated that it was improper for American diplomats, as he put it, to “run around Berlin digging up secrets.”
¹
Woods managed to forward the information on to Washington nonetheless.

Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles was among the few who took it seriously. On March 1, 1941, Welles passed along Respondek's warning to the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Konstantin Oumansky, an agile Stalinist who had come through the recent purges unscathed. The Soviet's reaction to Welles's assistance was to place a call to the chargé at the German embassy, and tell him that the Americans were spreading ugly rumors designed to damage German-Soviet friendship.
²

On April 3, 1941, Winston Churchill instructed his ambassador to Moscow to deliver his personal note to Stalin. The message described the massive troop buildup on the Soviet border, which the British had learned about by intercepting coded German messages.

Soviet agent Richard Sorge, the Russian-German working for the Soviets in Tokyo, sent Moscow an even more precise alert, pinning down the date of the invasion as June 22.

Sorge's June date was confirmed to the Soviets by yet another intelligence source. This was Rudolf Roessler, who has been called the most effective anti-Nazi agent of the entire war. Roessler, a nondescript journalist from Bavaria, had student ties to a group of young men who became career officers in the German military. Roessler moved to Berlin in the 1920s and was appointed as a public arts administrator in the field of theater. His publications quoted Adam Kuckhoff, and he worked under the ministry of Adam's friend Adolf Grimme.
³

Roessler's department was purged by the Nazis in April 1933, and he fled to Switzerland the following year. There he established contact with Swiss intelligence, and began to pass information from his military friends in Germany to the Swiss, who shared it with French intelligence. As war approached and the Swiss remained neutral, Roessler turned his attention to the Soviet Union.

Roessler's operation, which the Soviets called “Lucy,” sent its own detailed descriptions of the plans for Barbarossa to Moscow. Roessler's information was delivered to Soviet army intelligence, while Arvid Har-nack's and Harro Schulze-Boysen's reports were routed through the
NKVD. But all of them pointed in the same direction, and all were ignored.
⁴
Over a hundred warnings from various sources reached Moscow before the German invasion took place.

The final alarm was sounded on the eve of the attack, when a German soldier deserted and crossed the lines. He informed his Russian interrogators that the invasion would be launched at three o'clock the next morning. Stalin received the report three hours later—and responded by ordering the German deserter to be shot.
⁵

Once the invasion was launched, Soviet intelligence was frantic to get more news from Berlin. But now the Soviet embassy route was closed. Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen continued to diligently gather information and divide the necessary tasks among their supporters, who encoded the messages and delivered them to the designated radio operators. What none of them realized was that, due to defective radio transmitters and novice operators, their efforts were in vain.

But intelligence for the Soviets was only one arena of opposition. The Berlin circles stepped up their activities on other fronts, viewing the situation as more urgent than ever. Western Europe had submitted to Germany, and now the German army was racing toward Moscow.
⁶
The German public seemed to be lulled into a propaganda-induced stupor. Every victory was easy, every German soldier was heroic, every Nazi cause was noble. The Schulze-Boysens, the Harnacks, and the Kuckhoffs were burdened by their privileged knowledge to the contrary.

Much of their secret information concerned the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. The German military had been carrying out large-scale atrocities in Poland ever since the 1939 invasion, and members of the Berlin circles were shaken by whispered reports from the front. Now another horrific calamity was occurring in Russia. The Berlin groups realized that the Soviet Union was of absolute strategic importance; if Hitler conquered the Soviet Union, little else could stand in his way.

But the massacres on the Soviet front also affected members of the group on a personal level. The Harnacks had visited the Soviet Union and had friends there. Greta Kuckhoff loved Russian literature and avant-garde Soviet cinema. John Sieg was a steadfast Communist Party member, and Harro Schulze-Boysen had his own odd, uninformed attachment to his notions of the Soviet Union and Marxist ideals. They
were also aware that the Germans were targeting Jews, and all of them had Jewish friends and colleagues.

Millions of Soviet soldiers had been captured in the initial German onslaught. The early reports received by Greta Kuckhoff and her friends suggested a disaster of epic proportions. Europe had known horrific wars before, but previous European conflicts had produced a shared military code known as the “laws of war.” The Geneva Conventions and other agreements held that civilians should be protected and prisoners of war were entitled to certain rights. But in the period leading up to the Soviet invasion, Hitler issued orders that released German soldiers from the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, based on the argument that international law was not applicable to the “subhuman” Slavs.
⁷

Hitler's “Commissar Order” abandoned all notions of civilized warfare. In the struggle against Bolshevism, “The troops must be aware that in this battle, mercy or considerations of international law with regard to these elements is false. They are a danger to our own safety and to the rapid pacification of the conquered territories.”

Any Soviet prisoner who was believed to be a Communist Party official or commissar was to be shot on sight. Any Soviet soldier found in civilian clothes was to be shot on sight. Any civilian who resisted any aspect of the occupation was considered a “partisan,” to be shot on sight.
⁸

German soldiers were granted immunity for abuses committed on Soviet soil, unless they involved sexual excesses or other actions that were considered detrimental to troop morale. Some German officers objected to the murderous orders as an offense to their code of honor. They feared, correctly, that German atrocities against the Soviet population could inspire revenge if the tables were ever turned. But these concerns were ignored. Many German soldiers who objected to the orders were shot for insubordination.
⁹

Events on the eastern front were far away to most Germans, unfolding in alien places with unpronounceable names. But sometimes the news struck close to home. In 1939, economist Franz Six was appointed dean of the university's school of foreign affairs, where Mildred Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen taught. But Six was also a prominent Nazi and notorious anti-Semite, and as the plans to invade Great Britain advanced, he was instructed to create
Einsatzgruppen
to execute British intellectuals,
resisters, and Jews. After the Germans decided to invade the Soviet Union instead, Six was appointed chief of
Vorkommando
Moscow, and served in Smolensk from July 25 to the end of August 1941.

Franz Six participated in the execution of tens of thousands of Soviet civilians. An August field report described his units' operations: “
Vorkommando ‘Moskau
was forced to execute another 46 persons, amongst them 38 intellectual Jews who had tried to create unrest and discontent in the newly established Ghetto of Smolensk.”
¹⁰

The legions of Polish and Soviet prisoners of war required a wholesale repurposing of Germany's concentration camps. Dachau, near Munich, and Sachsenhausen, outside Berlin, had been established in 1933 as permanent versions of the Nazis' improvised “wild camps” and later expanded into “reeducation camps” for Communists, Socialists, criminals, and “social deviants.” Some were executed, some worked to death, and some released. During the Kristallnacht violence of 1938 the sites were used as holding camps for nonpolitical Jews. But the camps were not yet the scene of mass executions.
¹¹

This began to change with the invasion of Poland, where large-scale executions of Polish civilians and prisoners of war occurred from the start. On May 3, 1940, twelve hundred Polish prisoners arrived at Sachsenhausen, where they were subjected to brutal conditions. A year later, on April 4, 1941, camp commanders authorized euthanasia for prisoners who were too ill or weak to work (echoing the domestic policy instituted for the mentally and physically disabled two years earlier).