Authors: Anne Nelson
Soviet prisoners of war began to pour into the camp in August 1941. Many were immediately designated “commissars.” The Germans shot ten thousand Soviet prisoners over eight weeks in September and October. In the town of Oranienburg, just outside Sachsenhausen, local residents complained about the smell of burned flesh.
12
In May 1940 the Germans had repurposed some old army barracks as a concentration camp outside Auschwitz, a small town in the newly annexed Polish territory. Heinrich Himmler ordered an adjoining camp to be built in October 1941, to hold Soviet prisoners as slave labor for major German industrial corporations. The POWs were also designated as subjects for experimentation. In September 1941, camp commandant Rudolf Höss and his assistants selected six hundred Soviet prisoners of war to test a
new method of execution—a gas called Zyklon B, delivered in a sealed chamber.
13
In October 1941, a shipment of over ten thousand Soviet prisoners arrived at Auschwitz. Within six months, only a few hundred of the prisoners were still alive, and camp commandant Rudolf Höss began to seek new uses for the camp.
Many of the practices that would later become infamous were first applied to the Soviet POWs. Camp officials divided them into four categories: “fanatic Communist,” “politically suspect,” “not politically suspect,” and “suitable for reeducation.” Most of the prisoners were identified by numbers written on their chests with indelible ink, but “fanatic Communists” were labeled with chest tattoos, reading “AU” (for Auschwitz) followed by a number. The tattooing system was eventually extended to the rest of the Soviet POWs, as well as to Jews, Gypsies, and other inmates.
14
By September 1941 the Nazi regime had drastically cut back the food rations for Soviet POWs, in some cases down to 600 calories a day. By February 1942, 2 million of the 3.3 million Soviet prisoners in German custody had perished of starvation, exposure, disease, or execution.
15
Over the course of the war, the Soviet POW deaths would rise to 3.3 million, a number exceeded only by the Holocaust of the Jews, representing over half of the Soviet POW population. (The death rate for the 231,000 British and American POWs in German custody was, by comparison, 3.6 percent.)
16
There was no way for the resisters in Berlin to know the full extent of the catastrophe. But thanks to Harro Schulze-Boysen's position in air force headquarters and Arvid Harnack's in the Economics Ministry, they had a more detailed perspective than most. They had already taken a principled stand against the growing violence and abuses committed against the Jews, and risked their own safety to help Jewish friends escape persecution. In September 1941 they saw evidence that the fate of the Russians and the Jews had begun to converge.
That was the month when Hitler ordered that German Jews would be required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing. Greta Kuck-hoff experienced the event through the eyes of her son. One day when
she took Ule out for a walk, she watched as he ran over to a Jewish boy. Ule gave the child a big hug and asked, “Could you give me a golden star too?”
17
Until this point, much of the regime's public discussion of the “Jewish problem” had centered on their removal. The Nazis had devised lucrative schemes to let Jews buy their way to England, America, and Palestine, provided they could produce the visas and the cash. From 1940 to 1942, some members of the Nazi hierarchy seriously considered a proposal to export all of Europe's Jews to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of southern Africa. Over 1941 the Berlin circle continued to help persecuted Jews and anguished over the mass murders taking place. But there was no way for them to foresee the full scale of the Holocaust.
The Berlin circles continued to expand, and the Harnacks, the Schulze-Boysens, the Kuckhoffs, and the Siegs' contacts rippled in all directions. One participant, language professor Werner Krauss, called the resisters “The Catacomb Society,” after the winding underground passages where early Christians escaped Roman persecution. Most of the Berlin resisters knew only one member of another group at most, and very few of the groups were aware of one another.
The circles radiated out from unlikely hubs, attracting odd assortments of neighbors and friends. One group centered around the dentist Helmut Himpel and his fiancée, Marie Terwiel. Himpel's friendship with the Engelsings had given him a glittering list of German movie stars as his clients.
But 1941 was a stressful time for dentists in Berlin. They were required to spend half their time working for the armed forces, and the rest of their clientele suffered from the effects of a poor diet and twelve-hour workdays without sunlight. (Berliners' “teeth are decaying … all at once almost like cubes of sugar dissolving in water,” wrote American correspondent Howard K. Smith.)
18
Himpel postponed his regular patients' appointments to make room for underground meetings, and continued to treat his Jewish patients, illegally, without charge.
19
Himpel and the other doctors in the group also helped conscientious objectors, writing out medical waivers for soldiers and defense industry workers to certify them as “incapacitated for duty.”
Under other circumstances, Marie Terwiel would have been judged as blessed by fortune: a beautiful dark-haired musician, looking forward to a career as a lawyer, betrothed to a man she adored. But her future had collapsed under the Nazi race laws. Because of her Jewish-born mother, she was forbidden to marry Himpel, even though she and her mother were practicing Catholics. She was barred from completing her law degree or practicing a profession on the same grounds. Instead, she moved in with Himpel and found work as a secretary to a textile firm.
Marie was deeply worried about her mother, and provided secret assistance to other Jews in the form of ration cards and identity papers.
20
She found comfort in Catholic bishop Clemens von Galen's courageous stand. Galen, an anti-Communist aristocrat, had been critical of the Nazis from the start. In the summer of 1941 he gave a series of sermons denouncing the Gestapo and the Nazi Party, culminating in an attack on their euthanasia policy for the mentally ill. Word of the bishop's condemnation traveled quickly through Catholic circles, but the regime would not allow his statements to be published. Marie typed multiple copies of the sermon for distribution as flyers. Other German Catholics did the same, and the sermon was soon secretly circulating across the country. It created such a stir that Hitler was obliged to reverse the official euthanasia policy (though the practice continued unofficially until the end of the war).
Himpel and Terwiel recruited others to their underground publishing operations. One was journalist John Graudenz, another of Himpel's patients. Another was a member of their social music circle, young pianist Helmut Roloff. A political conservative, Roloff was motivated by the Nazis' mistreatment of his Jewish friends. He was especially stirred by the plight of one of his parents' neighbors, a Jewish architect named Leo Nachtlicht, who was forbidden to practice his profession and reduced to taking in boarders. One day Nachtlicht told Roloff about a young woman who had been renting one of his rooms. When she was told to prepare for deportation, she had turned on the gas rather than submit.
Roloff befriended several struggling Jewish families, including some neighbors named Kuttner that he had met in 1939. He was especially kind
to their teenage daughter, a delicate girl with large frightened eyes. After the war, Annemarie Kuttner wrote that Roloff “came almost every day, bringing us provisions and helping us in every imaginable way. He hid a suitcase of ours in his room so the Gestapo wouldn't find it. He was a great psychological support to us in our years of most desperate need.”
21
These experiences drove the young pianist to join Himpel's resistance activities, with no particular interest in ideological debates.
The resistance circles acquired a note of glamour with the recruitment of Ina Lautenschläger, a member of Hans and Hilde Coppi's Communist circle. The statuesque brunette worked as a model at Annemarie Heise's fashion salon, one of the most exclusive in Berlin. At that time, salon models also served customers and rang up sales. Ina was popular with both the salon's owner and her clientele. “I knew wives of the big Nazis, high-ranking officers, artists and movie stars,” she recalled. Her customers included Hitler's mistress Eva Braun and Goebbels's wife, Magda.
22
The salon staff competed for the privilege of serving Eva Braun. The salesgirl and the trunk of new dresses were transported by attentive SS drivers to Hitler's residence in Munich or his country house in Berchtesgaden.
Nonetheless, the shop's owner took a dim view of the Nazis. Frau Heise was a close friend of the film star Joachim Gottschalk and his family. She confided in Ina that Goebbels was trying to force Gottschalk to divorce his Jewish wife, which would soon lead to tragic consequences.
In late September 1941, Ina was asked to model in a series of fashion shows to promote German styles in occupied Brussels and Antwerp. Shortly before her departure, Hans Coppi arranged a meeting for her with Harro Schulze-Boysen at a downtown coffee stand. Harro questioned her about her travel schedule, and a few days later Coppi handed her a small package, no larger than a pack of cigarettes, with instructions to deliver it to an address in Brussels. When Ina arrived, a woman answered the door and took the packet without a word. Ina never learned the identity of the recipient.
23
One of the most charismatic new resisters was a spirited twenty-year-old artist named Cato Bontjes van Beek, an acquaintance of Libertas Schulze-Boysen. Cato was the daughter of a well-known Dutch ceramicist
and his dancer wife. A gifted ceramicist in her own right, Cato also had a good head for business, and was virtually running the family ceramics works before she was out of her teens. After she witnessed the arrest of Jewish neighbors, Cato started raising money and collecting ration cards to help other Jews. She was impatient at the Germans' passivity toward the repression. “Everyone's talking about it, but nobody's doing anything about it!” she complained to her family
24
After the Nazi invasions of Western Europe, Cato and her sister Mietje took up the cause of French forced laborers and prisoners of war. The two young women would position themselves in the Berlin subways, waiting for the Frenchmen to be herded past; then they would jump into the same subway car at the last minute. The prisoners soon learned that they could slip the girls notes listing their most urgent needs. At their next meeting the girls would sneak supplies into their pockets, including warm gloves, soap, and cigarettes, often bundled with flyers from the Schulze-Boysen group.
The two girls filled sketchbooks with drawings of the prisoners, sometimes casting grateful glances in their direction. Like Helmut Roloff, Cato was an artist with little interest in political affiliations or ideology. (Earlier she had managed to dodge membership in the Nazi girls' organization.) Cato recruited a number of family members and art students, most of them free spirits with compassionate hearts like herself.
25
For some of her friends, participating in resistance activities was a way to withstand the cruelties of the regime. One day Cato was visiting the art academy when she noticed that one of the students was near tears. Katja Casella was a beautiful, vibrant, and immensely talented twenty-year-old painter who had just received a stipend from the Nazi Ministry of Culture for her studies. She was also Jewish, but she had managed to hide this fact from the regime. Katja was deeply in love with her fiancé Karl, a Jewish student who was sent to Sachsenhausen after Kristall-nacht, then ransomed to England by relatives. It was impossible for Katja to communicate with her fiancé, but she remained close to his mother and fourteen-year-old sister Evalin, who still lived in Berlin. One day when she was on her way to visit them, she noticed that the flowers had
disappeared from their balcony. The two had been deported to the camps. Katja was distraught.
After she told her story to Cato, the young woman looked at her gravely and said, “You should not be alone today. I want you to meet my group.”
Cato took Katja by streetcar to a comfortable apartment in a Berlin suburb. When they entered the living room, Katja saw a dozen women sitting quietly, listening to a Bach chaconne on the gramophone. Cato left her for a moment. When she returned, Katja was shocked to see that she was accompanied by a very tall young man in a German officer's uniform.
The lieutenant soberly asked Katja what had happened to her fiancé's family. Then he folded his arms around her and gave her a strong embrace. “This barbarity has to stop,” he told her. “We all have to work together to stop that devil.” She found his voice warm and reassuring, and she took heart. Around seven p.m., men began arriving at the apartment, carrying their briefcases. Cato and Katja left them to their work.
Katja Casella had just been granted a rare glimpse of Harro Schulze-Boysen and his circle as they prepared to meet. She departed, uncertain of what she had seen, but reassured nonetheless. Here was proof that it was possible not to surrender. She joined Cato's circle of friends and co-conspirators, and recruited her best friend, Lisa, to work with her. The two pretty girls delivered clandestine messages and sheltered fugitives in Katja's small studio.
26
Katja learned not to ask questions, but one day Cato explained her position. “Look,” she said, “imagine a stone, that's how you can understand the whole group. I throw a stone in a pond and it makes circles, and in one of the circles, there sit you and Lisa.”
By the end of 1941 the circles had spread and multiplied in many directions. There was never a way to count their members, since no roster could be kept, and knowledge of other groups was kept to a minimum for security's sake. But the groups extended to the medical profession, the military, academia, and the arts. Politically, they were made up of Conservatives, Communists, Social Democrats, and former Nazis. Their religious affiliations included Catholics, Lutherans, Jews, and a professional fortune-teller. Their ages ranged from teenagers to elderly grandparents,
their status from aristocrats to slum dwellers. Their activities were concentrated in a few neighborhoods in central Berlin, but their contacts extended across the country.