Authors: Anne Nelson
Red Orchestra (39 page)
Libertas set to work gathering the information and filing the results. The primary sources of her photos were the soldier perpetrators themselves. They returned to Berlin from the front, bearing snapshots from the field. (Soldiers were forbidden to photograph executions, but photographs were taken nonetheless.) Libertas, through a combination of
flirtation and flattery, coaxed them into giving her photos to copy in the UFA facilities. Greta Kuckhoff later wrote that Libertas's images showed “cynically grinning torturers” posing with their victims. “The men were proud of their crimes. Some of them were youthful, others had graying temples.
“It was a strange collection,” Greta continued.
There were pictures from the Röhm massacre and—here the number of photos grew enormous—pictures of interrogations, “special treatment” [torture] and the liquidation of Polish, Jewish, and Soviet civilians. Libertas had a skillful way of asking the men the reasons for their actions, whether they had children who loved them, and what their professional plans were. Names and addresses were collected as well. Everything was carefully recorded. She sometimes brought us the evidence. It made for a shattering picture of the relapse into barbarism.
There was one man who spoke in lyrical terms of the beauty, habits, and usefulness of certain insects. He was incapable of harming a potato beetle. Then he displayed a photo of himself with a tiny baby that he was about to hurl against a wall.
Another one, from the countryside, began by showing pictures of his five kids with skinny legs, and then, without hesitation, produced a snapshot from “the East.” It showed him pulling his bayonet from the body of an old bearded farmer. Libs, as we always called Harro's wife, suffered agonies from this work. But she accomplished it consistently, because we considered it necessary.
16
The Kulturfilm office was the perfect staging ground for her efforts. The educational film division shared offices with the hard-line propaganda filmmakers, who received a constant flow of material from the front. Libertas was surrounded by military files and film, meaning she could hide her archives in plain sight. Rarest of all, the office held a wealth of cameras, typewriters, and supplies, providing the technical means of copying materials inconspicuously.
By December 1941 it was clear that Hitler's military plans had gone
badly awry. German troops were stretched across Western Europe, many of them occupying hostile countries. Erwin Rommel, one of his best generals, was tied down in North Africa attempting to bolster Hitler's wobbling Italian allies. The German forces in Russia were now hopelessly stranded, facing the Soviet counterattack and the brutal Russian winter. Then the Americans entered the war.
Some German officers had doubted Hitler's plans from the start, but had been deterred by the early string of victories. Now they sought ways to control the damage. As the military situation grew more difficult, Hitler became more erratic, behaving less like a military strategist than a sociopath pursuing private vendettas. At the heart of his mania were the Jews.
Historians disagree as to exactly when the Nazis made the fundamental decision to exterminate Europe's Jews. Some believe that their prolonged discussions of a Jewish colony in Madagascar indicate that the decision was made after the war began. Others argue that Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribes in
Mein Kampf
revealed his ultimate intentions over a decade earlier.
Whichever the case, once genocide was decided, the Nazi hierarchy took great pains to conceal the plans from the German public. For the past eight years, Germans had known that “concentration camps” functioned as horrific prison and labor camps with high mortality rates. For years they had witnessed political prisoners and common criminals who served out their sentences, and were then released or given a furlough in their weakened states. Many concentration camp prisoners died suddenly, often under mysterious conditions. But before the war there was no reason to connect the term “concentration camp” with the concept of industrialized mass murder.
In other words, as the deportations began, it was impossible for Germans to avoid the conclusion that something very bad was happening to Jews. But few of them possessed the means, or the desire, to learn exactly what.
On December 18, 1941, Heinrich Himmler met with Hitler and recorded in his notebook, “Jewish question—to be exterminated as partisans.”
17
The plan was elaborated on January 20, 1942, at an elegant villa
in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb graced by lakes where Harro Schulze-Boysen liked to sail. There, fifteen top Nazi military and civilian officials met to discuss the “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” chaired by thirty-eight-year-old SS officer Reinhard Heydrich.
Together, the group formulated a plan that integrated the full range of barbarities already visited upon Polish intellectuals, Soviet prisoners, mental patients, and Eastern European Jews. Ranged around a table in a gracious, light-flooded room, the meticulous bureaucrats spent eighty-five minutes assembling the basic architecture of the Jewish genocide. Historians do not know exactly which officials received copies of the Wannsee Protocol that resulted from the meeting, but it is believed that thirty copies were produced, and that each one reached at least five to ten officials.
18
Greta Kuckhoff wrote that Harro Schulze-Boysen caught a glimpse of documents from the Wannsee conference and conveyed their content to “reliable people in various countries,” who took no action.
19
Some scholars question this claim, and no independent evidence has established that it took place. But if the transcript of the Wannsee meeting was indeed viewed by 150 to 300 officials from a dozen different ministries, it is possible that Harro could have caught sight of it and reported its contents to foreign contacts.
As the Berlin circle learned more about the atrocities taking place on the eastern front, Harro and Libertas felt compelled to step up their actions. Harro began to clip articles from Nazi newspapers that quoted party members bragging about their crimes.
20
Libertas continued to collect snapshots and filmed evidence from the East, and started a file of information she heard from the soldiers who brought them back. As the atrocity archive grew, Harro began to hold small meetings in his house to review the materials and discuss what action to take.
The Schulze-Boysens were not the only ones gathering evidence. A similar archive was being accumulated by Arvid Harnack's cousin, lawyer Hans von Dohnanyi, a leading figure in the Hans Oster conspiracy. After the war, Allen Dulles wrote that Admiral Wilhelm Canaris's papers had included Dohnanyi's chronology of Nazi crimes from 1933 on. Canaris maintained his own card file of Nazi leaders and their crimes
and kept a diary “to inform Germany and the world once and for all of the guilt of those people who were guiding the fate of Germany at this time.”
21
In January 1942 the Schulze-Boysens added a new couple to their circle. John Rittmeister was a melancholy psychotherapist who had studied with Carl Jung. The doctor described himself as a “leftist pacifist,” and shared the Schulze-Boysens' antagonism to the Nazis and anger at the persecution of the Jews. He and his wife, Eva, a former nurse, had gathered their own small group of dissidents. Rittmeister was heartened by Harro's reports of German military setbacks on the Russian front, and wanted to let Germans know that the tide had turned. He convinced Harro Schulze-Boysen to join him in drafting a flyer that would reach an influential audience and explode the myths of Nazi propaganda.
On February 23, 1942, Berlin police recorded a disturbing occurrence in their blotter. It concerned
a large number of six-page inflammatory pamphlets … written under the title
“Die Sorge um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk!”
[“Distress About Germany's Future Runs Throughout the Land”]. The typed flyers were sent to various Catholic dioceses and to a number of people in intellectual professions such as professors, doctors, engineers, etc. through the post office.
22
The pamphlet denounced the culture of lies the Nazis had foisted upon the German people, stating
Minister Goebbels strives in vain to throw ever more sand in our eyes. … But no one can deny that our situation worsens from month to month… No matter what lies the High Command puts out, the number of war victims is rising into the millions.
23
The authors argued that the Nazis' policies had created a vicious cycle of conquest and want: “The struggle for raw materials for the war effort only leads to ever-new theaters of war; that is, to new fronts and new mass graves.” Hitler had assured the Germans that England would break down. But the British had stiffened their resolve, and support was
flooding in from America. Germany's army was utterly overextended, and by summer it would deplete its last reserves. German soldiers would die senseless deaths in the ice and snow by the hundreds of thousands, and the entire continent would be left a field of rubble.
The pamphlet urged the “stupid people” in Germany to heed the anti-Nazi warnings of the Catholic bishop of Münster and the Lutheran bishop of Württemberg. Hitler was going to go down in defeat, just like Napoleon, and the Germans must find a way not to go down with him.
“Write to soldiers in the field,” the authors urged. “Let them know what's going on at home. Tell them that Germans are no longer willing to submit to the yoke of the Nazi Party bosses. … Let the SS know that the people abhor their murders and their betrayal from their deepest souls.” The flyer turned the principle of the “Führer Oath” on its head: “Each of us should do exactly the opposite of what this government demands.”
The pamphlet was signed “AGIS” in homage to an ancient king of Sparta who rallied his people against corruption. The document was drafted by Harro Schulze-Boysen, John Graudenz, and John Rittmeister. John Sieg may also have contributed.
The production and distribution of the pamphlet required a small army. The twenty-year-old ceramicist Cato Bontjes van Beek and her boyfriend, Heinz Strelow, typed the master copy.
24
Marie Terwiel reproduced it on her typewriter, five copies at a time, and located mailing addresses in the phone book. John Graudenz manned the hectograph. He and Helmut Himpel ran off and distributed between three hundred and five hundred copies.
25
Himpel's friend Helmut Roloff, the classical pianist, helped stuff the envelopes, wearing gloves to prevent fingerprints.
The addressees represented an extraordinary range of powerful and influential figures. They included anti-Nazi religious leaders, Hitler's half-brother Alois, and Johannes Popitz, former finance minister and a conservative anti-Nazi. An even more noteworthy name appeared on the list: Roland Freisler, the bloodthirsty state secretary for the Ministry of Justice, who had just returned from the Wannsee conference on the “final solution.”
26
Most of the recipients declined to circulate the flyers as requested, and immediately sent them to the Gestapo. The police registered receipt
of 288 copies by mid-March.
27
This was not surprising. The mere possession of the flyers was a criminal offense.
Gestapo agents fanned out across the city, trying to trace the origin of the flyers. They sought the authors and the hectographs, scoured the post offices where they were mailed, and questioned shop owners who sold paper and envelopes. But they failed on every count. Harro's friends had covered their tracks.
A
T THE SAME TIME THAT THE GESTAPO WAS RACING TO TRACK
down the originators of the AGIS flyers, the circle was working on an even bolder document, this one produced at the initiative of John Sieg. Recently Sieg had been working at the railroad telegraph office in Tem-pelhof, and continued to link the Communist and trade union resistance circles with the Schulze-Boysen intellectuals. He drafted articles for both groups' underground publications.
John was also tending his wife, Sophie, who was shattered by her family's recent sorrows. Her sister's husband in Poland had been shot by the SS, and her nephew was deported to Sachsenhausen. Sophie comforted herself by helping with her husband's articles for flyers and the underground newspaper
The Inner Front,
intent on getting her Polish translations into the hands of Polish slave workers and prisoners of war.
1
The group was also publishing editions of one hundred to two hundred copies in Czech, Italian, and French. Russian was more complicated, since they couldn't lay hands on a Cyrillic typewriter. Max Grabowski had to copy the letters on the plate by hand. One member of the group, Kurt Heims, had become a firefighter. As the bombs fell on Berlin, he was able to acquire knapsacks full of paper from burning businesses. (His friends noted that his uniform gave him an advantage.)
2
In early 1942, John Sieg told Adam Kuckhoff that he had a new document to share. It was called “Letter from Captain Denker to His Son.” (The captain's name translates to “thinker” or “philosopher.”) The letter
described the emotions of a former Social Democrat who has just visited a military hospital full of soldiers returning from the eastern front.