Authors: Anne Nelson
The military conspirators mistakenly assumed success, and moved to take over the government. But Hitler's forces reacted rapidly, and maintained control. The Gestapo arrested six hundred suspects, and rounded up thousands of additional opponents the following month.
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Judge Roland Freisler, who had tried Falk Harnack and the students of the White Rose movement, was put in charge of the trials. Some two hundred prisoners were immediately executed. A number of the July 20 resisters met their end in the shed at Plötzensee, consoled in their last hours by Harald Poelchau, the same minister who comforted Mildred Fish Harnack. They were suspended from the same meat hooks that were installed for Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen.
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Arvid's cousin, Social Democrat Ernst von Harnack, died in the same small chamber at Plötzensee where Arvid and Mildred were executed some months earlier. Once, long ago, newlyweds Arvid and Mildred Harnack had visited him in his official castle, where Mildred was haunted by the ghost of a headless page.
Other Harnack cousins involved in the plot, including Hans von Dohnanyi and Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were sent to a concentration camp. For a long time, the investigators failed to prove their links to the July 20 conspiracy. As the war drew to a close, their families cherished hopes of seeing them again. But then a hidden copy of Admiral Canaris's
diary was discovered, providing the evidence the Gestapo had been seeking. Now they could prove that Canaris and his intelligence officers had been early instigators of the conspiracy. Nazi officers arranged an impromptu trial, and the men were executed in the final hours of the war, after Soviet troops had already surrounded Berlin.
Greta Kuckhoff saw the dawn of 1945 from a prison fortress in the tiny Saxon town of Waldheim. She and the other women prisoners worked on an assembly line by day, and spent nights in a crowded attic. They tried to make out the progress of the war through forbidden glimpses out the window, to the menacing sound of aircraft overhead.
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Finally, one morning in May, the Soviet army arrived. The soldiers went from door to door releasing the prisoners, who rushed out to fill their stomachs with the guards' abandoned bread and jam. Greta had no idea of the devastation that was taking place in Berlin, where the final battle had flattened every structure in sight and vengeful Soviets subjected girls and women to mass rape. Greta found some salvaged fabric and pieced together a semblance of a dress, cutting it narrow. In prison her weight had dropped from 118 to 97 pounds.
Outside the prison walls, Greta encountered a strange new world. She walked for days. Trains were erratic, bridges were down. It was a glorious spring and blossoms hung heavy on the bough, but her attention was drawn to decaying corpses strewn by the roadside. She passed farmhouses that had been oddly bypassed in the assault, and breathed the aroma of coffee and potato pancakes wafting from their tidy kitchens. But when she got to Berlin, the air of normalcy vanished. Her city was a field of rubble stretching in all directions. Berliners called it
Stunde Null
(Zero Hour).
Greta's first concern was to join her parents and her son, Ule. But she was also anxious about the orphaned children of her executed codefen-dants. She located Hans and Hilde Coppi's baby son, Hans, born in prison ten months before his mother was executed. The toddler had his mother's fine features and his father's searching eyes. Greta became a kind of godmother to him, and looked out for him for the rest of her life. Greta also sought out the little daughter of her neighbor Erika von Brockdorff, who had been guillotined for hiding one of the radios. Saskia, a sweet-faced child with long blond braids, couldn't understand
why her mother had abandoned her. Saskia later recalled how Greta made friends with Jewish American GIs, and included her in jeep rides to birthday outings.
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Greta also searched for John Graudenz's two daughters, Karin and Silva. The two pretty teenagers had been arrested and interrogated at the same time as their parents, then released and sent back to the family cottage to live on their own. (Their father was executed; their mother served part of her prison sentence and was then granted a mysterious early release.) It was too late for Greta to help Liane Berkowitz's daughter, Irene, who had died in Nazi custody shortly after her birth.
Greta closely observed the aftermath of the war, and took every possible aspect of it personally. She noted grimly that the Nazis' surrender was signed by General Wilhelm Keitel, the same man who had signed the death sentences for Arvid Harnack, the Schulze-Boysens, and the other members of her group. Keitel was also the officer who issued the infamous “Commissar order” authorizing the mass murder of Russian civilians, telling his soldiers that “any act of mercy is a crime against the German people.”
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Keitel was tried at Nuremberg the following year. When he received his death sentence, Keitel requested a firing squad, but the court assigned him a less honorable death by hanging. His punishment was inadvertently exacerbated by the American GI hangman who botched the job. Like the hapless German antifascist resisters hung from the meat hooks at Plötzensee, the general took over twenty minutes to die.
The surviving members of Greta's group had dispersed. For Günther Weisenborn, the writer, liberation came in the form of a Soviet soldier in a sheepskin cap. Weisenborn had spent the end of the war in the Luckau penitentiary, not far from Berlin. As the Russian troops approached the city, the Gestapo rounded up groups of political prisoners and took them away to be shot. But the Soviets arrived before it was Weisenborn's turn, and it fell to the writer to bring order to the chaos that ensued. Starving prisoners stormed the kitchen, breaking open kegs of syrup and sucking the liquid up from the floor. Weisenborn joined a committee of six that called the desperate horde to order.
The Soviet captain gathered the surviving political prisoners and appointed
them mayors of the surrounding towns. Weisenborn, the bespectacled, pacifist playwright, set off for the nearby village of Luckau and presented himself to the Nazi mayor. The nervous official reviewed his papers and quickly ceded his office to the newly sprung convict. Mayor Weisenborn supervised the villagers in restarting the mill, opening the school, and burying the bodies that lay scattered across the fields.
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Then he set off for Berlin.
That summer Weisenborn returned to the site of his interrogation at the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse to look for any remaining trace of his friends. When he examined Cell 2, where Harro Schulze-Boysen had awaited his interrogations, he found a piece of paper wedged into a crevice. It was a poem in Harro's handwriting, dated November 1942, the month before his execution. The final stanza read:
The final argument
Won't be left to the gallows and the guillotine,
And today's judges don't
Represent the judgment of the world.
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With the end of the war, German antifascists could finally come out of the woodwork. No one could tell, then or now, exactly how many there were, but some tried to extrapolate the figures. For example, several thousand Jews called “ U-Boats” survived the war, most of them hidden by non-Jewish citizens of Berlin. The German writer Peter Schneider estimated that every Jew who survived under such protection required the collaboration of an average of seven non-Jewish Germans.
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One interested observer was Eric Boehm, who had fled the country as a German-Jewish teenager and returned as a U.S. Army interrogator. After the war he began to document the German resistance. He tried to tally the number of Germans who had suffered the consequences of taking a stand against the regime, and wrote:
Over a period of twelve years almost 3,000,000 Germans were in and out of concentration camps and penitentiaries for political reasons—sometimes for as little as a remark critical of the government.
About 800,000 of these had been arrested for overt anti-Nazi acts; only 300,000 of them were still alive after the war—so that among the “illegals” alone 500,000 gave their lives.
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Boehm realized that the very idea of a German resistance would be startling to his American audience. But, he reminded them, the machinery of propaganda had made it impossible for them to get an accurate picture of what had happened in Germany.
In the newsreel shots of Nazi pageantry we saw the masses marching and heiling their Führer. We read of 99 per cent plebiscites. But of course we saw no newsreels of anti-Nazi opposition, of concentration camps, of surreptitious distribution of leaflets, or of arrests at night by apparently harmless civilians—the Gestapo. Only the fanatic supporters and the masses giving their wholehearted or conditional support were in evidence.
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The survivors of this devastated population looked to the Allied occupiers, and to the Americans in particular, to carry out “the judgment of the world” against their Nazi persecutors.
Günther Weisenborn and Greta Kuckhoff were among those who waited impatiently for justice from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In 1946 they joined Adolf Grimme in submitting a brief that accused Manfred Roeder of crimes against humanity, based on his use of torture in interrogation and his brutal prosecutorial methods. Arvid Harnack's younger brother, Falk, recently returned from fighting with the Greek partisans, joined in the effort. He called Roeder “one of the bloodiest and cruelest persecutors of the German anti-Fascists.”
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The survivors were certain that the case against Roeder would be straightforward. The Nuremberg prosecutors took a special interest in pursuing the German judges and lawyers who had corrupted their nation's legal system, and made a public example of their trials. In the celebrated “Justice Trials” of 1948, sixteen Nazi judges were tried, and ten of the sixteen were convicted and sent to prison.
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One of the court's strongest denunciations was directed at a judge who had sentenced a Jewish man to death for an alleged offense that was usually punished
with a prison sentence.
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Manfred Roeder easily fell under the same category. He had aggressively pursued death sentences for a number of victims, including the half-Jewish, pregnant nineteen-year-old Liane Berkowitz, guillotined for attaching some stickers to a wall. By any authentic legal standards, and certainly by Nuremberg's, Roeder was ripe for punishment.
But unfortunately for the Rote Kapelle survivors, other political forces were now at work. When American correspondent William Shirer returned to Berlin in 1945, he noticed some disturbing trends, such as “a certain American lieutenant colonel… who stoutly declares that our official denazification policy will drive the Germans to Communism and who therefore opposes our denazification whenever he can.”
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By November 1945, Shirer wrote, there was already a pronounced change in the U.S. military personnel in charge of the process.
The magnificent American Army which landed on the Normandy beaches and swept to the Elbe in less than a year is deteriorating at a frightening pace. Officers and men have but one thought: to get back home. Those who stay are pretty inferior. They know nothing of Germany or Germans and they are not fit to govern our zone. Too many of them have already been taken in by German propaganda. Few of them have the faintest idea of what Nazism was. Most of them therefore either are opposed to denazification, even though it is a military order that they are supposed to carry out, or are uninterested in doing anything about it.
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Among those headed for home were many of the Jewish GI's who had befriended Greta and shared her desire to see the Nazis brought to justice.
Writing in the spring of 1947, Shirer noted that the Germans themselves were turning hopefully toward a democratic socialism. “If in space they were caught between the United States and the Soviet Union, so were they in their ideas. They wanted neither our unbridled capitalism nor Russia's totalitarian communism. They sought something in between.”
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Here Shirer captured the ideological spirit of Greta's circle in Berlin, both the living and the dead. But the occupation would not make
this course easy. Shirer was disgusted at the way the American military government cut deals with notorious Nazis, hounded survivors of the Communist resistance, and sabotaged Eisenhower's decrees: “Already what the Germans had done was being rapidly forgotten. A new enemy and a new war was beginning to be talked about. Russia! The Bolsheviks! Gotta fight them bastards next.”
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These phenomena would have a profound impact on Greta's future.
On May 8, 1945, only a week after Adolf Hitler's suicide, Manfred Roeder had been taken into U.S. custody as a witness for the Nuremberg trials. When the three Rote Kapelle survivors called for him to be tried as a war criminal himself, they aroused the interest of the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). But the CIC regarded Nazi prosecutions as yesterday's news. Roeder told the American Army intelligence agents that he could help them root out Soviet spies, and they believed him.
Once again, the chaotic nature of Allied intelligence led to a fumble. The CIC agents might have saved themselves considerable trouble by conferring with their British colleagues. British intelligence had already carried out an extensive investigation of the Rote Kapelle, and quickly concluded that the Berlin group had been driven by anti-Nazi motives, with little relevance to professional Soviet postwar espionage. But the American CIC had no idea the British investigation had taken place.
The Nuremberg prosecutors were continuing on their own parallel, equally uncoordinated, track. By January 1947 they reached the decision that Manfred Roeder should be prosecuted for war crimes. In May the Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes reclassified him from mere witness to “Defendant A” (a prisoner who is to be indicted and tried).
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The following month Roeder was interrogated at length by Robert Kempner, a Jewish lawyer from Berlin who had fled the Nazis and returned as a Nuremberg prosecutor.
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