Authors: Anne Nelson
And then—silence.
Libertas moved in with Spoerl for a few days. The two of them moved about the city like ghosts, convinced they were being followed and watched at every turn. Finally, her nerves gave way. She announced that she was going to take a three-week vacation in an area of the Black Forest where Harro's brother was staying. She could try for the French border—or perhaps she could make a dash for Switzerland. Libertas asked her mother to take her to the train station.
A few days later, Alexander Spoerl contacted her hosts in the countryside. They were surprised to hear from him. Libertas? She had never arrived.
4
Harro's father, a career naval officer, was currently stationed in the Netherlands. After relatives informed him that his son and daughter-in-law had disappeared, he rushed to Berlin, and then to military intelligence headquarters to consult his fellow officer Admiral Canaris. The admiral was on the road, but the colonel in charge told Schulze-Boysen that his son's situation was serious. The Gestapo was in charge. At Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Schulze-Boysen learned that Harro had already confessed to subversive and treasonous activity. He wasn't able to see his son until September 30, when two Gestapo agents accompanied him into the room, “emaciated, pale, with deep shadows under his eyes.”
5
The arrests were the result of a chain of gross errors committed by Soviet intelligence. The disaster had been set in motion a year earlier, on August 26, 1941, when Moscow had wired the encoded names and addresses of Adam Kuckhoff and Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen to their agents in Brussels. This action provided the Gestapo with the text, although they were initially unable to interpret the code.
The next bungle came a few months later, when Leopold Trepper's agent Anatoli Gourevitch (code name “Kent”) returned to Brussels from his October trip to Berlin. He had stayed on the air transmitting material from Harnack and Schulze-Boysen for seven nights in a row, for hours at a stretch. This allowed the Germans ample time to locate the source of his signal.
On December 13, 1941, German agents had broken into Trepper's Brussels quarters. There they discovered compromising materials and arrested those present, including the Belgian housekeeper Rita Arnould and the young Polish encipherer Sophie Poznanska. Trepper and Goure-vitch (“Kent”) fled, but they were tracked down in Paris in less than a year.
6
Sophie Poznanska, who had met Trepper through Jewish circles, underwent months of torture and committed suicide to avoid compromising her associates. But Rita Arnould talked, giving away names and critical information about their communications system.
Each piece of intelligence yielded a harvest of arrests. The Germans spent months assembling the data and honing the techniques they needed to break the Soviet code. Eventually, by mid summer 1942, they met with success. The Germans painstakingly worked their way through stacks of intercepted messages. Among them was a transmission from Moscow, providing the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of Adam Kuck-hoff and Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen.
7
The German names were a shocking revelation. These were not their usual blue-collar KPD malcontents; they included members of the Prussian elite. But identifying these individuals was only the first step of the investigation. The Gestapo placed them under tight surveillance to identify additional collaborators, and took careful note of their contacts.
At the end of August a protégé of Harro's forced their hand. Horst Heilmann, a young mathematician who worked in military intelligence, caught sight of a document incriminating Schulze-Boysen. He called his mentor to warn him, but failed to get through on the phone. He left a message, and when Harro unwittingly returned the call, Heilmann's superior answered and realized that the game was up. He moved quickly to control the damage. On August 31, 1942, the Gestapo made its first move, arresting Harro Schulze-Boysen in his office. No one in his family was notified.
Other arrests followed swiftly. On September 7, the Gestapo tracked the Harnacks down at the seaside, where they were on a holiday with history professor Egmont Zechlin and his wife. (Zechlin later speculated that the Harnacks might have been seeking a fishing boat to Sweden.)
8
On September 9, Gestapo agents arrived at a Berlin station in time to locate Libertas Schulze-Boysen on a westbound train and escort her off.
Greta Kuckhoff was first alerted to the risk on August 31. She was getting ready to celebrate her husband's birthday with his mother, their son, and his two former wives. Adam came home looking more serious than usual, and told her that Harro Schulze-Boysen had disappeared from his office. The couple tried to assess the danger without arriving at any conclusion. A few days later, Adam followed through with a planned business trip to the film center in Prague, and Greta went on with her chores, unaware of what was happening to her friends.
After her arrest, Libertas Schulze-Boysen was taken to Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the stately building where she once played outside her father's classrooms. Libertas languished in detention, certain that her relative lack of involvement and her aristocratic pedigree would free her in the end. One day she met a pretty redhead who was present in the office in some uncertain capacity. Libertas and the young woman, whose name was Gertrud Breiter, struck up a casual conversation. Libertas was convinced that she had found a friend.
9
“I have only one favor to ask you,” she said. “I can't tell you the address, but will you warn Hans Coppi?”
Gertrud Breiter was actually the secretary of Libertas's police interrogator. She immediately reported the conversation to her superior and came back for more. As a result of the exchange, Hans Coppi, who had recently been drafted into the military and posted to a town outside Poznań, was arrested that night, and his wife, Hilde, was seized in their Berlin home. Libertas's conversations with the obliging Gertrud continued, and the names began to flow: the Kuckhoffs, the Schumachers, John Graudenz, and others.
10
“She was very intelligent,” Gertrud Breiter observed later, “but very, very unstable.”
11
For her patriotism, Breiter was rewarded with 5,000 reichsmarks, a medal, and a personal letter from Heinrich Himmler.
The Coppis were only two of the Gestapo's arrests of September 12. That same day Adam Kuckhoff was picked up in Prague and Greta was tracked down at home with her son, Ule. She asked the Gestapo agents if she could leave her child in the kindergarten downstairs until his grandmother could pick him up. The agents followed them, but before they could stop her, Greta told the teacher that she was under arrest. The agents intervened. “Frau Kuckhoff is mentally ill,” they told the confused
teacher. “We're taking her to an institution. Forget all the nonsense she's telling you, it's a symptom of the disease.”
12
Greta was taken to police headquarters at Alexanderplatz. Other prisoners from the group who saw her there noted that her face looked drawn and white.
13
Kurt Schumacher was seized in his army barracks in Poznań; his wife, Elisabeth, was arrested at their Berlin home. The Gestapo attacked their apartment and studios, smashing Schumacher's work. The destroyed works included Schumacher's gypsum model for a sculpture entitled
Antiwar Relief
and a wood carving called
Dance of Death.
14
They came for John Graudenz at his cottage in Stahnsdorf. He tried to escape through the basement, but the Gestapo had the house surrounded. He was taken in along with his wife and two teenage daughters.
The dentist Helmut Himpel and his fiancée, Marie Terwiel, were arrested together in his home on September 17, the same day as their friend, pianist Helmut Roloff. The Gestapo quickly located the suitcase containing the Soviet radio stored in Roloff's house, but it was still locked. Roloff told the police that he was just storing it for his friends and had no idea what was inside.
On the twentieth they came for Cato Bontjes van Beek and her father at his house. (Katja Casella and Lisa Egler-Gervai, the two young Jewish art students, were alerted by a panicked phone call from Cato's boyfriend. They jumped on a train for Poland and miraculously avoided arrest.)
Günther Weisenborn and his wife heard a knock at the door at five o'clock in the morning on September 26. He answered it to find four men in civilian clothes on the doorstep, their hands in their pockets.
The cellars at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse were filling up. Weisenborn counted over a hundred members of the groups: doctors, professors, writers, artists, former government officials.
15
Most of the women were held across the river in the Alexanderplatz jail. Radio operator Hans Coppi's wife, Hilde, and nineteen-year-old Liane Berkowitz was pregnant.
Over the fall of 1942, German authorities detained over 120 people in connection with the case. Treatment of the prisoners varied a great deal, as did the prisoners' responses. Officials were required to apply in writing for permission for “intensified interrogation.” Torture was meticulously
monitored by an SS doctor to gauge the effect on the prisoner's state of health. Official records showed that Harro Schulze-Boysen's questioning began with twelve blows of an ax handle. Arvid Harnack, John Graudenz, and Adam Kuckhoff were beaten with rubber truncheons.
16
Remarkably, the three men withstood the first round of torture and stubbornly maintained a common front: they were friends, that was all. Sometimes they spent their holidays together.
Each prisoner was painstakingly photographed for the files: first a side view (with the head stabilized against a metal brace); then full face; then three-quarter profile, sometimes with added accessories like hat or glasses. Harro and Arvid looked relatively fresh when their pictures were taken, but Helmut Himpel and Kurt Schumacher's faces already showed signs of abuse. A number of the prisoners wore German army uniforms. Mildred Harnack was pale and gaunt, while Liane Berkowitz looked ready to burst into tears.
The record is contradictory as to which of the prisoners gave way under interrogation and named names. It is clear that the members of the circle tried to hold out as long as possible to give their friends time to escape. In October the police took Arvid Harnack and Adam Kuckhoff to the “Stalin room,” which featured whips and thumbscrews. Some reports state that at that point, Kuckhoff gave up the names of Adolf Grimme and John Sieg.
17
A few days later, on October 11, one of John Sieg's underground contacts went to pick him up from work at the Tempelhof train station in Berlin. Sieg was uncharacteristically late. When he finally appeared, his friend noticed that he looked unusually pale and that two men were following close behind. Sieg walked straight past him without a word, offering only an intense stare as a warning that he was under arrest.
18
His friend kept walking, and never saw Sieg again. Sieg's wife, Sophie, was arrested at her job the following day, and the Gestapo called for Grimme and his wife at their home around the same time.
Greta Kuckhoff was devastated to hear that her husband and Harnack had succumbed. “Finally they told everything and gave away all the names in the belief that people had made themselves scarce. I was speechless when I heard that Adam had confessed.”
19
It was reported that eventually, under harsh interrogation, Kurt
Schumacher told the police about the German Communist agents who had been dropped by parachute bearing new radios, one of whom had stayed with his wife. Soon the Gestapo was on the trail of the KPD parachute agents, as well as the succession of Germans who had sheltered them in their homes.
20
Many of the hosts had been members of Schulze-Boysen's leafleting circle, with no knowledge of or involvement in his links to the Soviets. Others were KPD loyalists who had no ties to Schulze-Boysen, Harnack, or Kuckhoff, other than the shared misfortune of Moscow's carelessness.
Elisabeth Schumacher's friend Philip Schaeffer was one of the outsiders arrested in the round up. Schaeffer was the friend who tried to help her rescue her Jewish uncle and aunt from suicide. He was still in the hospital with the injury he sustained in the attempt. Schaeffer, a major China scholar and KPD member, had little to do with the Schulze-Boysen circles, but he had been in and out of concentration camps for contributing to anti-Nazi publications in the past. Schaeffer and his wife joined the ranks of prisoners in the Gestapo interrogation chambers.
The more experienced members of the KPD underground were prepared to guarantee their silence. On October 15, after three days of torture at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, John Sieg hung himself in his cell. Well before his arrest, Sieg had told his friends that he would kill himself if he was ever interrogated, as the only way to ensure he wouldn't betray others.
21
Sieg's friends credited his suicide with saving many lives. Remarkably, several members of his Neukölln circle survived the war.
The young printer Herbert Grasse followed Sieg's example by throwing himself out of the fifth-floor window of the police headquarters at Alexanderplatz the day after his arrest.
22
Guards foiled Walter Husemann in the same gesture, prying him away from the interrogator he had grabbed in an attempt to take him along.
Mildred Harnack attempted suicide as well. It was not clear whether she was tortured or not, but she was deathly ill and full of despair. She tried to kill herself by swallowing pins, and was punished with solitary confinement.
23
Libertas, who had long feared for her delicate nerves, clung to the hope that her family and their Göring connections would save her in the end. From the beginning, she seemed to be getting favored treatment.
Unlike the other prisoners, she was allowed to exchange letters with her mother. She was permitted to hang pictures on her wall, listen to the radio, read magazines—and, from time to time, have coffee with her interrogator and his charming secretary. Alexander Spoerl brought her suitcases filled with food, sprigs of violets, and her favorite cigarettes. Her mother went to Göring to plead his favor as she had in the past.