Authors: Anne Nelson
Kempner invited Rote Kapelle survivor Adolf Grimme to attend the interrogation and confront Roeder in person. Grimme was now fully restored to his former stature in West Germany, serving as both minister of culture in Hanover and as educational adviser to the British occupational authority.
26
Greta Kuckhoff couldn't understand the delays in the Roeder prosecution. She knew that the Nazis were taking every opportunity to destroy incriminating files, and she feared that the records of Roeder's orders for torture could disappear before he reached trial.
Beyond her frustration over Roeder, Greta was smarting from a cold bath of postwar politics. The German public was shockingly unrepentant. Richard Cutler, an OSS officer stationed in Berlin after the war, recorded that many German army officers still viewed their country's mistakes in terms of tactics, holding that
Success is right. What does not succeed is wrong. It was, for example, wrong to persecute the Jews before the war since that set the Anglo-Americans against Germany. It would have been right to postpone the anti-Jewish campaign and begin it after Germany had won the war.
Cutler was startled that “no German ever mentioned to me that the war resulted from a clash of principles.”
27
But Greta found that discussions of principle were lacking on the American side as well. On August 5, 1947, she was invited to speak on Radio Berlin on the fourth anniversary of her husband's execution along with eleven women from the group.
28
Greta used the occasion to take issue with Allen Dulles's recently published book,
Germany's Underground,
which praised the 20th of July movement at the expense of other resistance efforts.
Dulles's brief passage about Greta's circle dismissed it as “an interesting plot in 1943.” He missed the most salient points of its history, and managed to make major factual errors in nearly every sentence. Dulles had little interest in Lieutenant “Harold” Schulze-Boysen and his circle. “Always wearing a black sweater, he went around with revolutionaries, surrealists, and the rag-tag and bobtail of the ‘lost generation.' ”
29
Dulles added that “Otto” Harnack was a member of the group, but omitted Arvid's service to the Americans, as well as the role of his American wife. He made no mention of the group's many actions on behalf of persecuted Jews.
30
Greta, still grieving for a husband and friends who
sacrificed their lives fighting the Nazis, could not live with their depiction as “ rag-tag and bobtail.” Greta told her Berlin radio audience that her group had “only noble motives.”
31
But by 1947, with the cold war under way, no one was interested in the noble motives of the past.
On August 28, 1947, an officer in the U.S. Army counterintelligence office in Berlin reported on a “telephone intercept” between Greta Kuck -hoff and an unknown person. Greta repeated her criticism that Allen Dulles's book “did not give a true picture of the Rote Kapelle” and characterized it as “just a small unimportant group of espionage agents.”
32
A few weeks later, as Nuremberg prosecutors were interrogating Manfred Roeder, Greta opened her door to two Americans with a different set of questions. One of them, whose misspellings suggest that he was not a native English speaker, boasted that he found Greta an easy mark:
On 10 October 1947, this agent using the cover name Conrad and [Special Agent] Jonston, using the name of Brown, visited Greta Kuckhoff at her apartment located at 18 Wilhelmshöherstrasse, Berlin Friedenau. Posing as two strong leftists, dissaffected with the way the US is handeling its foreign affairs and especially Germany, Kuckhoff's confidence was soon obtained and most important and touchy political subjects were freely discussed and aliased. GK is one of the few survivors of the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen subversive movement.
The agents wrote that Greta “openly stated that she was a strong radical socialist advocating German unity the Soviet way, whereby united Germany under a socialist government is the sole hope for survival and reconstruction.”
The CIC agent also recorded Greta's drive to stir the conscience of the German people, and to honor the memory of her husband and their friends:
K[uckhoff] is still interested in making the Germans, especially those in the Soviet sector … conscious of the great sacrifices and hardships endured by the Schulze-Boysen group and uses readily every opportunity to propagandate the entire matter.
Army CIC agents “Conrad” and “Brown” were pleased to report that they were able to trick Greta into naming “Soviet agents.”
It is believed by the undersigned agent that Mr. Hans F. Johnston has the full confidence of Greta Kuckhoff and this is proven by the fact that she gave him for his “study” a lot of documents and printed material pertaining to the activities of the Rote Kapelle. This material was returned to Greta Kuckhoff after photocopies had been made.
33
But there had been no need to trick her. Greta was always proud to name the people close to her who had died fighting the Nazis. She never hid the fact that they had given information to the Soviets as one of their myriad activities.
As it turned out, this information was of no value to Allied intelligence. The names that Greta provided were the same ones that appeared in the 1943 Gestapo report, which had been in the possession of British intelligence for over a year.
34
However, based on this supposed “breakthrough,” the CIC opened an investigation of the Rote Kapelle, rooted in the belief that there were still survivors at large in Germany working for Soviet intelligence. And no one was better qualified to help track them down, the army officers reasoned, than Manfred Roeder.
On December 23, 1947, the Army CIC took custody of Roeder, effectively placing him out of the reach of the Nuremberg prosecutors. Bestowed with the code name “Othello,” Roeder proceeded to spin his new hosts a tale. Roeder told the gullible Americans that his bloodthirsty prosecutions were a matter of just following orders—an excuse that was not supposed to hold up in the Nuremberg proceedings.
Roeder expanded on his argument to explain the death sentences he had demanded for marginal figures in the case. “The Führer decreed that everyone who took part in the Rote Kapelle was to be sentenced to death immediately,” Roeder stated. This was demonstrably false. A number of defendants had been convicted and sentenced to prison terms, especially those who had been tried in the months after Roeder left the case. Others who had been swept up from Leopold Trepper's operations were kept alive to convey false intelligence to the Soviets.
35
In fact, Hitler reserved
his personal interest for representatives of Germany's elite. Most of the other sentences were left in the hands of the court. Roeder's prosecution drove the death sentences of most of the minor defendants.
The CIC housed Roeder with another notorious prisoner who had been borrowed from the war crimes authorities. Walter Huppenkothen, a senior Gestapo official, had served as the liaison with the murderous
Einsatzgruppe I
squad during its first wave of Polish massacres. Toward the end of the war, he was the officer who ordered the executions of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Oster, and Wilhelm Canaris. After Germany's defeat, Huppenkothen's Gestapo chief had advised him to lie low for as long as possible. “It's only a matter of time until the Americans will want you in their coming fight against the East,” he told him.
Once in detention, Huppenkothen volunteered to enlist his Gestapo contacts to help the Americans. They offered to round up the German Communists they had sent to concentration camps, but only if the Americans could give them “some assurances.”
36
*
Benno Selke, the deputy director of the Evidence Division for Nuremberg, was angered by the U.S. Army Intelligence's recruitment of Roeder and Huppenkothen. He wrote:
This office finds it hard to believe that CIC would knowingly enlist the aid of two such notorious, unscrupulous opportunistic Nazis who would sure have been tried [at] Nuremberg, had the scope of the Nuremberg trials been greater. It seems that their only selling point could possibly be the fact that they are presumably anti-Communist and have knowledge in connection with Russian underground methods.
37
Like Huppenkothen, Manfred Roeder sensed what the Americans wanted to hear. He gave the CIC the names of “Soviet agents”: specifically, Greta Kuckhoff, Günther Weisenborn, and Adolf Grimme, the
very same individuals who had filed charges against him. The list was as unlikely as it was suspect. Greta Kuckhoff was the only one of the three who had ever had any contact with a Soviet intelligence officer. That contact was minimal, and took place only through her late husband. Günther Weisenborn was neither a Communist Party member nor did he have Soviet ties. Adolf Grimme, far from being a Communist, was a leading member of the rival Social Democrats. He was also a prominent figure in the Confessing Lutheran Church and a trusted liaison to the British occupational authority.
The CIC was understandably confused by the welter of information about the various Soviet spy networks described in the Nazi files. The Nazis had intentionally fabricated parallels between the Brussels operation run by paid Soviet agent Trepper and his associates, and the Berlin circles that established only a late and haphazard connection to the Soviets amid many other resistance activities. U.S. Army intelligence hoped that Roeder would help them untangle the relationships between Mos cow, Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, and the possible Soviet networks that could follow in their wake. But Roeder's goal was to deflect his own prosecution for war crimes by obscuring the facts.
The cold war that stirred into existence in postwar Berlin was an early chill of McCarthyism. A May 13, 1948, CIC memorandum pointed to a suspicious article in the University of Wisconsin alumni magazine “glorifying Mildred Fish-Harnack as an American woman who had died as a member of a German underground movement.” Greta Kuckhoff, the memo noted, was a University of Wisconsin alumna and may have been a source for the article praising Mildred. The author suggested pursuing an inquiry at the University of Wisconsin for pro-Soviet activities in the United States.
But the memo also acknowledged that Manfred Roeder's accusations were wearing thin. “No concrete evidence has been obtained through Othello's interrogation that any one of the survivors of the R/K is presently engaged in espionage work for Soviet-Russia.” The CIC agents reluctantly reached the same conclusion as their counterparts in British intelligence—“The Rote Kapelle, as such, is not active today”— and moved to distance themselves from Roeder. There was now no official obstacle to his prosecution.
But then the Americans found a new sticking point. “If Othello [Roeder] was ever hard pressed,” the officers worried, “he might reveal his relationship with the CIC in order to protect himself.” Therefore, the CIC requested, “If and when [Roeder] is released, his release [should] be arranged in such a manner that he will not come under the control of Soviet or Soviet-sponsored authorities.” No such assurance could be made if an international trial was pursued.
Roeder was returned to the Nuremberg prosecutors, but now he confidently refused to answer their questions. He didn't need to, he said, because he was working for the CIC. Nuremberg investigator Benno Selke, clearly frustrated with Roeder's manipulation, protested in an August 4, 1948, memorandum to the commanding general at army intelligence:
The interrogation and investigations in the case of Roeder are seriously hampered, if not completely stalemated, by the fact that he steadfastly refuses to give information, stating that he was so directed by a C.I.C. officer, Lt.-Col Hayes of Regensburg, for whom he is presently working according to his statement…
Roeder, one of the most hated men in Germany at the present time, who could well qualify as Public Enemy No. 1 in any German democracy, is a notorious former Air Force Judge, whose brutally harsh and bloodthirsty methods earned him the right to act as “investigating officer and prosecutor,” not only in the “Rote Kapelle” case but also in other cases involving members of the German underground.
39
In a recent review of the surviving files on the case, the Interagency Working Group at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., concluded that the Allies were unwilling to include the Rote Kapelle in their dispensation of postwar justice:
It is clear from the contents of the file that Allied intelligence officers were interested, not in possible Gestapo misdeeds (use of torture) in eradicating the Red Orchestra, but rather in what information about Soviet military intelligence practices might be
gleaned from German files and from interrogating those Germans involved with the case. …
Despite evidence of Gestapo mistreatment of Red Orchestra agents, there was apparently little interest on the part of the western Allies in prosecuting German officials connected with the Red Orchestra investigation. Indeed, as differences between East and West grew greater in the postwar period, American intelligence officers showed more interest in the Red Orchestra case as a source of information on Soviet intelligence trade craft and methodology, rather than as a case for possible prosecution in the wake of Germany's defeat. The U.S. Army file on the Red Orchestra clearly reflects this state of affairs.
40
Irony was heaped on irony. It is hard to imagine anyone less qualified to comment on espionage tradecraft than the amateurs of the Rote Kapelle, whose every action was marked by zealous ineptitude.
After Manfred Roeder was released, he settled in a small town near Lüneberg, in northern Germany. The Nuremberg officials turned the case over to German courts in October 1948, but the local German prosecutor did not exert himself in pursuing the charges. Greta Kuckhoff and Falk Harnack doggedly provided evidence and interviews for the proceedings, but in November 1951 the investigation was suspended.
41
(One of Roeder's successful arguments was that he had acted according to the laws of 1942. If this defense had been honored at Nuremberg, the top Nazi leadership would have gone free.)