Authors: Anne Nelson
The origins of the letter are obscure. Greta wrote that Sieg, along with her husband, took material that Libertas Schulze-Boysen coaxed from soldiers on leave and elaborated on it,
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supplementing the information with their own research. The letter's narrator speaks about police matters and medical facilities in impressive detail, no doubt obtained from some of Sieg's resistance contacts, which included some members of the Schutzpolizei (civil police), who remained tacitly antifascist. The resistance circles also included several doctors with access to hospitals, as well as soldiers who had recently returned from the front. John Sieg had seen a picture of a child in the situation described, in Libertas Schulze-Boysen's archives.
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Adam Kuckhoff responded to the idea with enthusiasm, and assumed his old role as editor to help Sieg shape the eight-page document. Whether or not there was an actual Captain Denker, the “Open Letter” is a rare and accurate depiction of the German war crimes that were taking place, and reflects their psychic impact on a man whose “mental illness” represented his last flicker of humanity.
The letter merits quotation at length. It demonstrates the authors' determination to shine a light on the massive human rights violations that were occurring without the possibility of public investigation or disclosure. The style of the letter is also striking. It reflects John Sieg's eye for detail and ear for dialogue, developed as a reader of American realism and a reporter on the streets of Berlin. But the story also unfolds with the benefit of Adam Kuckhoff's literary sensibility, progressing from the banality of the hospital wards to its devastating conclusion. Despite its passages of clichéd propaganda, the work emerges as an aching and compassionate treatise on the madness of war.
The letter opens with the narrator expressing shock that his correspondent has joined the military police at the eastern front, given his background as a sober and professional civilian police officer. He then continues:
In the state hospital in —— I've recently visited some comrades from the police who have been transferred from the eastern front,
all of them as a result of nervous breakdowns. You know the atmosphere of a hospital, that special kind of quiet. They had cheered up the rooms with flowers; the patients have to listen to music. To these ridiculously simple means of raising their spirits they have added, as if in a novel, a few rays of sun.
There is also one ward there, which the comrades told me about with almost shy relief, where even worse cases of nervous collapse are housed. There, once strong, really tough district officers hop around continually like kangaroos, you know, and others crawl around on all fours, shaking their heads deliberately the whole time, their hair falling disheveled over their faces, with an expression, someone swore to me, like that of a St. Bernard. I have learned many shocking things from the comrades. The quiet of those rooms was deceptive; the furies were raging in there. In whispers, not looking me in the eye, hoping for me to offer some redeeming justification, they told me of mass executions of Russian civilians, of elaborate cruelties, of limitless blood and tears, of the brutal orders of the SS, of the unfathomable equanimity of the helpless victims, and yes, of course, they told me a lot about the struggle of the partisans, which was something that greatly interested me from a political and tactical point of view.
Of course I didn't offer a word of comfort to any of these sick men, nothing that would have helped them in the ghastly horror of the darkening hours of evening as they told me all the more eagerly of their deeds. Am I really supposed to exorcise the spirits of those who have been struck down? Am I supposed to offer some kind of absolution to those who went on to tell me (even if they were blushing) that they carried out orders, month after month, as a kind of routine task, to shoot as many as 50 people a day?
One of these nonetheless deplorable executioners—and this will interest you as an expert in criminality—can't shake off the memory of a small, dirty rag doll. Moreover, he told me, in haste and confusion, one of his fingers stiffened up as the result of being badly bitten. You must forgive me for passing along this detail, since of course it now simply drowns in the everyday sadness of the hundreds of thousands of details of the terrorism practiced by
the organs of those who are today in power—even just those that are committed here in Germany. Do you still remember all the horrors you told me about right away in 1933, the countless bestialities committed in the dungeons of the SA and the SS, in the cells and torture chambers of the Gestapo, the accursed marshes, and the other hellish concentration camps? …
According to his account, this comrade had to carry out executions with his revolver. The victims had to kneel. Then he walked along the row behind them, shooting each one in the back of the head at close range. When I asked him about the pools of blood, about the way in which the bodies had fallen and piled up, he answered in the matter-of-fact fashion of an anatomist—no, rather with the flat tone of a slaughterhouse worker—without, as far as I could see, any awareness of the gruesome particulars of what he'd done, let alone the meaning of the “National Socialism” of his bosses. But at last there was one thing that made him crack: he was told to execute a young woman, a peasant, and her three children. “Why?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders. “It was an order.”
The woman was holding an infant in her arms. It was bitterly cold, and she was trying vainly—for the two minutes of her life that remained—to shelter the crying child warmly in her pitiful rags. With a helpless demeanor of apology she explained that this was all she had; everything else had been stolen from her. The woman's six-year-old son was kneeling on the woman's right; to her left was her two-year-old daughter, who was groping around behind her as she knelt down to find her doll. So—“the doll too.” As I said, it was a ridiculous, pathetic scrap of a rag doll. And after the child knelt down, in that awkward childish way, she fussed with the doll until it too was kneeling in the snow beside her.
“Who did you shoot first?” I wanted to know. “The woman or the baby?”
“Oh, I'd never have shot the baby first.”
“I see, so you spared it, thinking that perhaps you'd give it to someone later?”
No, he said, there were more and more cases of disobedience among the police. On this occasion an SS man had been lurking
behind him in the background, and suddenly the six-year-old boy had jumped to his feet and thrown himself at the gunman. According to his account, there must have been a fierce, bitter struggle between the boy and the officer, only for a few seconds of course, but that's when his finger was bitten—the one that had stiffened up—so he had to fire twice at the boy. The first shot missed and the second one turned the boy's eye into a dripping, bloody pulp. The girl meanwhile remained very still and simply fell over without a sound next to her doll. There's nothing more to be said about this insignificant doll, except that it became our murderer's little obsession—his “tic”—according to the other comrades. That doll, the last wretched leftover, had become the focus of his “illness,” and soon he would be sent “downstairs” to be with the “kangaroos” and the “St. Bernards.”
Adam Kuckhoff suggested to John Sieg that they rework the Captain Denker letter to send to soldiers on the eastern front. According to Greta, her husband had an activist agenda, hoping that the document could “appeal to the morality shown in former times. The former Social Democrat captain could offer the soldiers—or if possible, whole companies and regiments—insights that will lead them to proper conduct.”
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The sculptor Kurt Schumacher was now stationed near Poznań, a major way station to the Russian front. He clandestinely circulated the letter among the soldiers. Sieg and Kuckhoff prepared a second version of it specifically for military distribution a few months later. There is no evidence of its effect, but producing the letter was an important gesture in itself, as an attempt to alert Germans to acts that the Nazis energetically concealed. Over the second half of 1941, the barbaric nature of the German occupation on the eastern front was grossly misrepresented to the German public.
On July 11, 1941, days after German troops rolled across the Soviet border,
Einsatzgruppen
squads received a confidential order to execute male Jews between the ages of seventeen and forty-five who were “convicted” of looting. The soldiers were required to carry out the executions in secluded places and forbidden from taking photographs. The victims were noted in official registers as “Bolsheviks,” “partisans,” and
“looters,” distorting the official records in case they fell into the hands of outsiders.
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The mass killings of Jewish and other civilians were further disguised, even within internal German military communications. Executions were labeled “special duties,” “pacification,” or
Aktion nach Kriegsge brauch
(“actions according to the custom of war”).
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In a July 16 meeting, Hitler was pleased to announce that the Soviets issued a call for partisan resistance behind the lines, which to his mind offered a justification to execute at will.
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The German public was further misled by the mass media. Government newsreels presented clean-cut German soldiers comporting themselves bravely on the battlefield, executing dangerous “criminals” only to assure orderly occupation conditions. The “Open Letter” from Captain Denker was rare in circulating, in however limited a fashion, a different version of reality.
The second revelation of the “Open Letter” was the depth of trauma experienced by German soldiers who carried out atrocities. This information had also been suppressed by the regime. By 1940, Heinrich Himmler was already aware that his orders to massacre civilians could have damaging psychological effects on police forces.
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In 1942, SS leader Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was hospitalized in a condition similar to the one described in the Captain Denker letter. In the opinion of the chief SS doctor, the officer suffered a nervous affliction that was partly brought on by the executions he had conducted. Laid up in an SS hospital in Berlin, he was tormented by flashbacks of the shootings of Jews he had overseen.
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Such conditions were closely guarded secrets. Kuckhoff and Sieg's Captain Denker letter reflected the contents of classified reports arriving from the eastern front, but conveyed the information to an entirely different readership.
Harro Schulze-Boysen's new target audiences, foreign slave workers and soldiers at the front, represented risky ventures. His group often had the sense that they were risking their lives to reveal urgent truths to a passive society, without any proof that their efforts made any difference.
But Harro Schulze-Boysen told his associates that their actions would resonate in the future: “If the Russians come to Germany (and they will come) and if we are to play some role in Germany, we must be able to
show that there was a meaningful resistance group in Germany. Otherwise the Russians will be able to do what they want with us.”
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Over the same period that John Sieg and Adam Kuckhoff were working on the Captain Denker letter, related flyers were emerging from a different source. In early 1942, several exiled German Communists secretly returned to Germany in the effort to revive their old networks. One of them, Wilhelm Knöchel, made his way to Berlin from Amsterdam and established contact with underground Communists. His connections indirectly extended to some members of the Schulze-Boysen circle with Communist ties. Knöchel soon launched his own hecto -graphed publication,
Der Friedenskämpfer
(“The Fighter for Peace”), offering detailed accounts of German atrocities across the eastern front. The flyers quoted German soldiers and SS personnel who were “disgusted and horrified” by the actions committed by their units.
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In a remarkable “special edition” published in June 1942, Knöchel's group detailed the mass executions of French, Czechs, Germans, and Norwegians across Europe. They went on to list specific companies that carried out mass shootings of Soviet POWs in Leningrad and civilians in Lvov. The publication referred to a collection of incriminating photographs from the front.
Like John Sieg, Knöchel lacked the technology to reproduce photographs for publication, but the flyer used line drawings to present shocking images of mass murders at execution pits. These images correspond closely to photographs taken at the front by soldiers, which became public only after the war. At the time, the Nazis forbade soldiers to disseminate testimony or images of the mass killings, under the strictest penalties. Knöchel's flyer represented something close to real-time reporting on one of the largest-scale human rights crimes of the period.
It is not known whether Knöchel ever met John Sieg or saw his “Inner Front” flyers, but Knöchel's and Sieg's groups established contact and exchanged micro photocopies of materials through intermediaries Elisabeth Schumacher and Wilhelm Guddorf. This raises the possibility that some of Knöchel's line drawings could have been based on photographs from Libertas Schulze-Boysen's archives.
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Although the Russian front provided much of the breaking news, Poland also remained a pressing concern. The province of Poznań lay in the heart of the territory Germany had ceded to Poland after World War I, and had then retaken in 1939. In the summer of 1941, Kurt Schumacher was drafted and sent to guard French laborers there. When his wife, Elisabeth, traveled east to visit him the following spring, she was stricken to see the conditions of prisoners of war and Jews in Poland. The experience only compounded her fears for her Jewish relatives in Germany.
A few weeks later Elisabeth learned that her elderly Jewish uncle, a leading musicologist named Richard Hohenemser, and his wife had stopped answering their door. She contacted a close friend, an eminent China scholar and Communist named Philip Schaeffer, to help her break into their apartment. Schaeffer tried to lower himself into their window from the roof, but the rope did not hold. He fell to the street and was badly injured. It turned out that the old couple was already dead, having turned on the gas to avoid deportation. Elisabeth was also unable to save her uncle Moritz, who had bankrolled her through art school, from deportation to Theresienstadt.
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