Red Orchestra (46 page)

But in February 1943 (shortly after Mildred Harnack's execution), the students were betrayed by an informer. They were tried by Judge Roland Freisler, a participant in the Wannsee conference on the “final solution,” and a recipient of Harro Schulze-Boysen's AGIS flyer only a few months earlier. Freisler sentenced most of the students to death, including Hans and Sophie Scholl. The authorities were convinced of Falk Harnack's guilt, but they decided to release him as a decoy to lead them to other resisters.

Falk was posted as a corporal to Greece, where he made contact with the Greek resistance through a relative. On December 20, 1943, his commanding officer received a secret order signed by Himmler himself, bearing the instructions that Falk should be discharged from the army and delivered to the SS. Falk was informed only that he was to fly back to Chemnitz. The next day Falk arrived at the airport with his lieutenant,
with whom he had been friendly. He was awaiting departure, his luggage already loaded on the plane, when his lieutenant called him aside.

“Is it good or bad?” Falk asked. “Not good,” the lieutenant answered. He allowed Falk to escape into Athens, a city he knew well. As Falk saw it, “it was a choice between a certain, horrific death in Germany, or a chance for survival in Greece.” Still wearing his Wehrmacht uniform, he stole from house to house by night, aware that those who sheltered him were risking their own lives as well as those of their families. Eventually he made his way to the mountains and spent the rest of the war fighting alongside the Greek partisans. There he continued in the family tradition, drafting flyers that told German troops to refuse to die for Hitler, and live for a free Germany instead.
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The spring of 1943 passed slowly for the condemned women in Berlin. Greta savored her scant rations of winter sun, and worried about little Liane Berkowitz. Still a teenager, she was frantic with worry about her unborn baby. In April she gave birth to a little girl in the women's prison and named the baby Irene. The baby was taken away. Liane would remain mercifully ignorant of her baby's death a few months later, which occurred under mysterious circumstances in the midst of a government euthanasia operation.
⁶¹

In May, as another round of executions took place at Plötzensee, Greta was put to work making paper butterflies to decorate Nazi rallies. Sometimes she was allowed precious family visits from her parents, and on one occasion from her son. At the end of August, Greta heard her prison door open slowly, unlike the usual sharp motions of the guard. It was the prison chaplain. “Now they are all dead,” he told her. “Your husband, and the girls. All of them.”
⁶²

Sixteen prisoners had been guillotined on August 5, 1943, between 5:00 and 5:45 p.m., at precise three-minute intervals: Greta's husband, Adam, died at 5:06, followed by Marie Terweil, Hilde Coppi, Cato Bont -jes van Beek, and Liane Berkowitz.
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Many of the women's bodies were delivered to Dr. Hermann Stieve, a gynecologist and anatomist at the University of Berlin. Dr. Stieve was obsessively interested in the impact of terror on the female reproductive organs. When the women were notified of the date of their executions, Dr. Stieve began to monitor their menstrual cycles in order to “observe
the effect of highly agitating events on female sexual organs.” An execution was timed to allow Stieve to perform a gynecological examination while the woman was still alive; upon death, her pelvic organs were removed for examination. Stieve boasted in one of his books that the “materials” arrived in his laboratory within ten minutes of availability. His subjects included Elisabeth Schumacher, thirty-eight; Libertas Schulze-Boysen, twenty-nine; Cato Bontjes van Beek, twenty-two; and Liane Berkowitz, twenty. Prison authorities noted that the arrangement with Dr. Stieve saved the state from dealing with “difficulties with respect to burial.”
⁶⁴

The previous February, Mildred Harnack's body had also been delivered to the medical institute for dissection. But through a strange twist of fate, it turned out that Dr. Stieve knew the Harnacks through family connections. He recognized Mildred's remains and delivered them to the family, allowing them to cremate her and bury her ashes in a cemetery in Berlin.
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Mercifully, Greta knew only that her friends were gone. She had a sudden vision of her survival as its own exquisite form of torture, leaving her as the last tree standing in the forest. But these thoughts were disrupted by the memory of her son. Wasn't she supposed to stay alive for his sake?

On September 27, Greta was summoned back to court. She felt defiant—they had killed her husband and condemned her to death. What more could they do to her? To her astonishment, she learned that her death sentence had been revoked the previous May. With the principal executions carried out, Roeder had been transferred to other cases and Hitler's attention had turned elsewhere. The army judges grilled her for four hours, and then informed her that she was sentenced to ten years in prison.

And then another odd thing occurred. Shortly after her court date, Greta was told she needed to return for some formalities. The guard who picked her up told her they would not go by car; this time they would walk to the court. She was initially suspicious, but once they were outside, the guard took her aside. “I had to take your husband and some of your friends to Plötzensee, and it was very difficult for me,” he confided. “How can people behave like this? Now I'm very happy to accompany
you—and not to Plötzensee.” He took her to a quiet bar where she could make some phone calls, and handed her his wallet.

Greta called her friend Hans Hartenstein. He listened to her soberly, then advised her to hold on until the war was over and to stay as healthy as she could.
⁶⁶
Hartenstein convinced the officials to give Greta a brief leave before she started serving her sentence, and she spent the day with him and his family outside the city. Then Greta was transferred to a prison in Cottbus, east of Berlin. Over the following months she spent many long hours on a prison assembly line, making gas masks for the front.

T
HE 1942 ARRESTS EXTINGUISHED THE ACTIVITIES OF GRETA
Kuckhoff's circle, but they did not end the German resistance. For the next two years the conspiracies expanded on several fronts. As the German army suffered relentless defeats in Russia, military men gravitated toward the officers' conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Hans Oster and his inner circle maintained contact with prominent civilians who were laying the groundwork for a democratic post-Nazi government. One of their first actions was going to be the liberation of the concentration camps.

Many members of Arvid Harnack's family were deeply involved in the conspiracy, including Harnacks, Dohnanyis, Bonhoeffers, and Del-brücks. They lamented Arvid's arrest and tried to help where they could, but had no choice but to keep their distance.

Nonetheless, the fate of the resistance circles began to converge. On April 5, 1943, as the Rote Kapelle executions were well under way, Luftwaffe judge advocate Manfred Roeder made an unwelcome visit to the office of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Roeder's prosecution of the Rote Kapelle was considered to be unusually brutal, even by government insiders. Now he came to inform Canaris that he was pursuing a new investigation, based on suspicions of a vast conspiracy to overthrow the regime.

It was natural enough for him to pass the word on to the admiral as head of military intelligence. But Roeder was approaching the whitehaired
officer not as a colleague, but as a prime suspect. Canaris was put on notice that he was under investigation. His deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster, was suspended from office and placed under surveillance.
¹

The two anti-Nazi officers had been skirting calamity for years. The previous month, in the wake of the disaster at Stalingrad, Oster and Hans von Dohnanyi had made two separate assassination attempts against Hitler. Their massive network of conspiracy came to be called the 20th of July movement, named after its final and most ambitious attempt to overthrow the regime. Four of its civilian leaders were Harnack cousins: Hans von Dohnanyi, the Bonhoeffer brothers Klaus and Dietrich, and Ernst von Harnack.

Over the previous months the military plotters had somehow managed to hide the evidence of their many assassination attempts. Their downfall came through different means. For years, the Oster group had been assisting persecuted Jews, intervening in arrests and secretly channeling resources to help the victims leave the country. In 1942, Oster, Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer devised a plan they called “Operation U-7” to help a group of thirteen Jews and Jewish Christian converts escape to Switzerland. They designated the refugees as “intelligence agents” and provided them with foreign currency and false documents. Hans Oster personally accompanied one Jewish family to the train station and put them on the train to Switzerland.
²

These escapes required large amounts of cash in foreign currency, which was tightly controlled by the regime. One of Hans von Dohnanyi's couriers was caught, and implicated him under interrogation. The Gestapo arrested Dohnanyi, on suspicion of illegal currency trading. He was tried and sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen.
³
The Gestapo followed the trail to Hans Oster, who was caught red-handed as he attempted to destroy evidence of Dohnanyi's transactions. He was discharged from his office and placed under house arrest.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested in March 1943. Manfred Roeder conducted his prison interrogation, only three months after the execution of Arvid Harnack. Bonhoeffer stayed true to his calling as a Lutheran pastor, and wrote a series of prison letters and essays agonizing whether it was ethical to lie under interrogation in order to protect his collaborators. (He decided
that it was.) Bonhoeffer remained serene in the belief that the plot to overthrow Hitler would proceed without him, and that the Germans would soon be approaching the Allies for peace talks.

With many of his closest associates under arrest, Admiral Canaris stepped up his efforts to communicate with the Allies. In April 1943 he approached FDR representative Commander George Earle in Istanbul, seeking ways to bring the war to an end quickly. That summer he reportedly met with the head of British intelligence and U.S. intelligence chief William Donovan in Spain. Roosevelt disapproved of the meeting and refused to respond to Canaris's overtures.
⁴
Adam von Trott continued to reach out to the British at enormous personal risk, trying to explain that millions of lives could be saved by killing Hitler and brokering an early peace—first, by liberating the concentration camps, and second, by sparing the German civilian victims of British air raids. But the British were even less interested in dialogue than the Americans.

One of Trott's close British friends worried that his clandestine diplomacy was exposing him to excessive danger, and wrote to the Foreign Office in concern. But Foreign Office official Geoffrey Harrison had made his position clear in July 1942, when he circulated a memo downplaying the value of the German opposition. He followed it with a statement that he saw no need to take precautions on Trott's behalf. Trott's “value to us as a ‘martyr,' ” he wrote, “is likely to exceed his value to us in post-war Germany.”
⁵

Despite their harsh interrogation, Bonhoeffer, Oster, and Dohnanyi said nothing to betray the conspiracy to the Gestapo. But other damaging evidence mounted. The Nazi investigators learned that instead of merely embezzling money for personal gain, the truth was far more serious: the funds were actually being used to help Jews. The three men had also exploited their official travel privileges for antiregime activities and helped dissenting Lutheran clergy avoid military service.

As Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi, and Oster waited out their detentions, the military conspiracy drew to a climax. Even before the coup attempt, 9,523 German soldiers and officers had been executed by the Nazis on charges of mutiny and political opposition.
⁶
Now the coup leaders reached out to civil society, religious circles, and the military. Dozens of individuals had stepped forward to volunteer for further assassination attempts,
by carrying loaded guns to official ceremonies and strapping themselves with explosives as would-be suicide bombers. One after another, the attempts failed, often by the narrowest of margins. Hitler still had the luck of the devil; he called it
Vorsehung,
pronounced with his extravagantly rolled Austrian “r.” The dictator's infamous intuition led him to chop and change his itinerary constantly, foiling the most elaborately planned attempts.

The conspirators scheduled their final move for July 20, 1944, armed with what they believed were watertight plans. But the plans went terribly wrong. One of the coup leaders, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, left a bomb in a briefcase next to Hitler in a room where he was meeting with his officers. It was speculated that an aide, seeking leg room, moved the briefcase behind a portion of the thick wooden table, which absorbed the shock when the bomb detonated. A single random moment determined that Hitler was wounded and enraged, but not killed.