Authors: Anne Nelson
Over the course of his trial Arvid asked his cousin Adolf von Har-nack to represent him on personal matters. Later, Adolf wrote,
Arvid performed one last valuable service for the family in the face of death. He got the message to me through his lawyer and the prison chaplain, Dr. Poelchau, that in a number of his interrogations he was intensely questioned about my brother Ernst and advised him immediately to go abroad, though there was only the slightest evidence against him. I passed along this very serious message immediately. Since my brother was not involved with Arvid Harnack's trial in any way, he did not follow this warning.
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Arvid's Social Democrat cousin Ernst would pay a terrible price for dismissing Arvid's counsel. Deeply involved with the Oster-Bonhoeffer conspiracy, he would meet his end on the same beam as Arvid only weeks before the Allies took Berlin.
On the evening of December 21, 1942, the condemned prisoners were conveyed to Plötzensee and allowed to write their farewell letters. Harro Schulze-Boysen told his parents, “This death suits me.” It was, he said, what he had always expected.
Arvid Harnack's thoughts returned to his childhood, and he asked for his execution to be accompanied by an early Christmas celebration. He was supported by prison chaplain Harald Poelchau, himself secretly involved
in the rescue of Jews and resistance activity. Arvid, with the help of the minister, recited the story of the Nativity according to Luke, then sang his favorite hymn, “I Pray to the Power of Love.”
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The court official who observed the executions said that the hangings took place without incident. “As far as I could see, complete unconsciousness came at the very instant when the noose tightened.”
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The women were guillotined. Most went quietly to their deaths. Only Libertas Schulze-Boysen struggled to the end, screaming, “Let me keep my young life!”
Friends and family were generally aware of what was happening, but they were not apprised of the schedule. At Christmas, Herbert Engelsing informed Alexander Spoerl that the Schulze-Boysens had been sentenced to death. The following day, Libertas's mother told him that her daughter had already been executed.
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After Christmas the cases of Mildred Fish Harnack and Erika von Brockdorff were reviewed, applying more stringent standards, a smidgen of fresh evidence, and a keener understanding of Hitler's wishes. The court sentenced both women to death.
It is not certain how much the prisoners learned of developments beyond the prison walls, but they would have found some of them heartening. One was a long overdue acknowledgment from the Allies. On December 17, 1942, the United States, Britain, and ten governments signed the Allied Declaration, confirming and condemning Hitler's extermination policies toward the Jews. The BBC's European service read the document over the radio several times a day for a week. Only a tiny minority of Germans possessed both the radios that could receive foreign broadcasts and the secure conditions in which to hear them. Nonetheless, historians believe that this alert saved lives by urging some Jews to hide and by prompting non-Jews to help them. Many of the members of the Rote Kapelle group awaiting execution had been involved in these activities for years, without the need for outside encouragement.
The Royal Air Force dropped some 1.2 million flyers about the Nazi extermination program over the course of January. About 150,000 copies of it were dropped on Berlin alone. Perhaps some even fell within the prison walls.
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Beyond their borders, the German armed forces were experiencing humiliating military setbacks. In late October, they were defeated by the British at El Alamein, and the following month British and American forces landed in North Africa. In the Soviet Union, the Germans were being beaten back, pounded by winter and Soviet reinforcements, and cut off from their supplies. The hand of the German resistance could be perceived on both fronts. The North Africa campaign benefited from German Admiral Canaris's trip to Spain a few years earlier, when he advised Franco to remain neutral, depriving the Germans of the choke-point of Gibraltar. The Allies were also aided by intelligence about the Soviet campaign flowing in from a number of antifascist Germans, including Rudolf Roessler in Switzerland, who helped them ward off the Nazi offensive.
If the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen group had been able to hold out a few more months, they might have encountered a more favorable opportunity to help. In November 1942, only weeks after the mass arrests, an American lawyer named Allen Dulles landed in Bern. He described himself as “the last American to reach Switzerland legally before the German invasion of southern France cut the Swiss off completely.”
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Dulles, a high-ranking OSS officer, established the first serious American intelligence presence on the scene, and immediately forged contacts with a broad network of German exiles. His best source was an antifascist German government official named Fritz Kolbe, working inside Germany. Kolbe contacted Dulles after he had been turned away by the British. (When Kolbe offered his documents to the British attaché in Bern, the officer answered, “I don't believe you. And if you're telling the truth, you're a cad.”)
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Kolbe went on to provide Dulles with over two thousand official documents over the next two years, including plans for major offensives and secret aircraft designs.
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Only six months earlier, Harro Schulze-Boysen and John Graudenz traveled toward the Swiss border, searching for a route to smuggle military information to British intelligence in Switzerland.
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Dulles might have been easier to reach than the British, and he was certainly more open to collaboration.
The second mass Rote Kapelle trial took place over several days in mid-January 1943. Its nine defendants included many of the young people
recruited by Cato Bontjes van Beek and her boyfriend, Heinz Strelow, a noncommissioned officer in the army. Others were Friedrich Rehmer, a factory worker and army conscript, and nineteen-year-old Liane Berkowitz, his half-Jewish fiancée. Berkowitz, whose forlorn face peered out beneath a tangle of dark curls, was six months pregnant. Rehmer had been seized in a military hospital, where he was recovering from grave wounds sustained on the Russian front. He may have been severely traumatized as well; in the hospital he was reported as ranting, “Anyone who has seen what we have done in Russia must think it an eternal disgrace to be called a German!”
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The students had taken part in an extensive anti-Nazi propaganda campaign, distributing leaflets and pasting stickers on phone booths, but they had no involvement in Soviet espionage. Nonetheless, state prosecutor Roeder sought the death penalty for them, in retaliation for their “aid and comfort to the enemy.” In most cases, he was successful.
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Shortly after the second round of death sentences were handed down, some of the judges had second thoughts. They had attempted to maintain at least a semblance of legality, and they recognized that Roeder was rewriting the legal definition of espionage before their eyes. The Reich court-martial recommended a pardon for nineteen-year-old Liane Berkowitz and twenty-two-year-old Cato Bontjes van Beek.
The request reached the desk of Hitler himself, who vehemently denied the motion. His ruling was countersigned by Wilhelm Keitel, head of the armed forces high command. The precedent had been set. Putting up anti-Nazi stickers was now legally equated with Soviet espionage.
Over the next two weeks, dozens of defendants rotated through the courtroom, and the death sentences were handed down in profusion: Hans Coppi's wife, Hilde, the mother of a newborn, who had helped to hide a radio. The dentist Helmut Himpel and his fiancée, Marie Terwiel, whose solidarity with persecuted Jews led them to produce anti-Nazi flyers and store a radio. Philip Schaeffer, the China scholar and librarian who had tried to help Elisabeth Schumacher rescue her Jewish uncle and aunt.
Greta and Adam Kuckhoff were tried at the beginning of February in a group of eight defendants. The couple was allowed a few minutes together before the trial “to talk about personal issues, children and stuff
like that,” their guard told them. But Adam was intent on enlisting Greta's help in clearing Adolf Grimme, the Social Democrat minister who had been his friend since student days, who was also in the group.
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The eight prosecutions were completed in a single day.
Afterward the defendants were shown into a waiting room and allowed to talk among themselves. They traded excited rumors of a stunning German defeat just a few days earlier, in a frozen city on the Volga called Stalingrad. The guards paid no attention. “The SS people were enjoying their free time too, joking among themselves and ignoring us,” Greta recalled grimly. “For them we were nothing but dead people on vacation.”
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On February 2 they were called back to the court for the last time and asked if they wanted to make any final statements. Adolf Grimme reminded the court that he was a man of substance. As the Prussian minister of culture, he had received the Goethe Prize from Field Marshal Hindenburg himself. He was never a Communist, he was a religious socialist who had fallen under the sway of Adam Kuckhoff.
Then came the verdict: Greta and Adam were both among the condemned. Adolf Grimme was not. Greta was amazed at her husband's reaction of happiness and relief that his friend had been spared. Greta had found Grimme's self-defense to be shabby and inappropriate. To make things worse, Greta's last precious moments with her husband were interrupted by his exchange with Grimme.
“I didn't like the way Grimme was cleaning his glasses all the time, so he didn't have to look Adam in the eye,” Greta wrote angrily years later. “He also made sure to change the subject as soon as possible and told my husband how sad he was that he hadn't been able to finish his writings. For one precious moment my husband let go of my hand to shake Grimme's hand, and asked if he would be willing to take care of his unfinished writings after his death.”
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Adam Kuckhoff may have known that he could not escape a death sentence, and decided to do what he could to protect his old friend. Still, it was a hard choice for his wife to accept.
Greta returned to the prison and prepared to die. She thought obsessively about Grimme, who, in her opinion, had regressed to his spineless Social Democrat ways, even if there was nothing in Grimme's power
that could have saved Adam. She wrote letters full of longing to her parents and her son, and dreamed of food—her mother's herring and pancakes; the oysters of New England, raw and fried; and the barbecued pork chops she had savored at the frozen lake in Wisconsin.
Greta filed an appeal for clemency, as the others had done before her, with little hope of success. Time passed slowly. On February 16, 1943, Mildred Harnack was led to the execution shed at Plötzensee. Although she was only forty, her hair had turned pure white, and she had the thin, stooped frame of an elderly woman. She had spent her last days translating verses by Goethe and holding deep conversations with the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau. As she approached the guillotine, hair cropped, her last words were: “
Und ich habe Deutschland so geliebt!”
— “And I have loved Germany so much!”
Seventy-nine defendants linked to the group were tried in a total of nineteen trials in the seven months between December 15, 1942, and July 1943. Forty-five were sentenced to death, twenty-nine were sent to prison, and two were acquitted for lack of evidence.
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One of these was John Sieg's wife, Sophie. The investigators were unable to find enough evidence to indict her, but she was sent directly to Ravensbrück concentration camp without trial.
The parachutists who had been sent from Moscow also went untried. Albert Hoessler, a German Communist veteran of the Spanish civil war, died early on in Gestapo custody at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Two others were captured and executed.
The case of the fourth parachutist, Robert Barth, was far more complicated. A German Communist typesetter for the
Rote Fahne
in John Sieg's day, Barth served a year in Plötzensee in 1933 and joined the resistance upon his release. He was drafted into the German army, captured by the Soviets in 1942, then recruited as a Soviet agent out of a POW camp. After he parachuted into Germany, he was arrested by the German police at his wife's hospital sickbed and taken to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The Gestapo succeeded in “turning” Barth, and he collaborated in the transmission of fake radio messages to Moscow for the next two years. After the war the Soviets placed him under arrest and sent him back to the USSR. He was court-martialed in the summer of 1945 and executed by a Soviet firing squad.
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Another prime source of Soviet intelligence fared no better than the Berlin group. Richard Sorge, the Soviet agent in Tokyo, was arrested by the Japanese in October 1941. The Japanese held him long after his trial, assuming he would be valuable in a prisoner exchange, but the Soviets abandoned him. It is said that Stalin's response to the offer was, “ ‘Richard Sorge.' I do not know a person of that name.”
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Sorge was hung in a prison outside Tokyo on November 7, 1944.
Some of the Rote Kapelle defendants escaped with prison sentences. Adolf Grimme and Günther Weisenborn were both given three years for “failure to inform the authorities” of the conspiracy. They were sent to the penitentiary in Luckau, southeast of Berlin. The former Prussian minister of culture and the screenwriter were put to work gluing paper bags.
Falk Harnack, Arvid's devoted younger brother, soon found himself directly in the line of fire. In 1934 he had started an antifascist student group in Munich, which carried out leafleting campaigns. He eventually made contact with siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and joined their protest circle called the White Rose. After Falk was drafted in 1941, he was posted to Chemnitz on the Czech border. In the winter of 1942, Hans Scholl and his friends traveled to meet him there. Falk told the Scholls about his family's resistance activities. Arvid had already been arrested, but Falk hoped to introduce them to his Bonhoeffer cousins.