Authors: Anne Nelson
West Germans who believed that the war had been lost from “poor timing” saw the group as traitors responsible for the deaths of Germans on the Russian front, rather than as citizens who were trying to save their
country from tyranny and disaster. The history of the anti-Nazi resistance was suppressed and the West German legal system upheld the convictions of Germans executed for resistance activities. Widows of the officers and statesmen who gave their lives in the 20th of July coup attempt were denied government pensions until the 1960s. Dietrich Bon-hoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who rescued Jews and campaigned tirelessly against Nazi abuses, was not publicly exonerated of his legal conviction until 1996.
21
The East Germans, on the other hand, were reluctant to admit that the German resistance included anyone but Communists. They expropriated the history of the Harnack /Schulze-Boysen group and rewrote it to their own purpose. The official East German accounts conveniently omitted the involvement of many of the non-Communists in the group, and inflated the roles of the Communists. The members' many ties to Social Democratic and religious institutions were ignored wherever possible.
Furthermore, the East German version of history was extremely elusive concerning the Jews. In many regards, it was a question of omission. Many monuments to the victims of the Nazis were dedicated to “antifascists,” which was treated as a synonym for “Communists.” The memorials at Sachsenhausen and other concentration camps honored German Communist inmates, and largely ignored Jews and other populations. When officials in East Berlin erected a plaque in memory of the Herbert Baum group, they labeled them “Communists” but neglected to add that they were also Jewish resisters awaiting deportation to the camps. The East Germans' versions of the Harnack /Schulze-Boysen story gave no weight to the many chapters concerning Jews, half-Jews, and Jewish rescue efforts. These were not areas of interest.
22
Greta's benefits in East Germany came at a high price. For the rest of her life, she was torn between passively enjoying the rewards of party privilege, and bitterly defending her concept of the truth.
Once she moved east, Greta was rewarded with official positions that required membership in the Communist Party. This led to an early compromise. East German records show that Greta actually joined the Communist Party after the war, but party officials backdated her membership to 1935.
23
The record needed to be bent to conform to the myth.
Another compromise may have occurred in the direction of intelligence. In 1947, the year in which Greta realized that U.S. authorities were tapping her phone and sending agents to investigate her instead of Manfred Roeder, she made contact with East German intelligence. Assigned the code name “Cannes,” she stated that she had ties to Americans and British in West Berlin. A 1966 “top secret” review stated that in 1948 her file was “withdrawn” without explanation. In 1950, according to her file,
the connection to “Cannes” was restored, but there are no materials about working with her in the file. The file also lacks the materials which described when and under what circumstances Cannes was enlisted, and to what extent the materials she delivered in the years 1947–1949 were accurate and valuable. Also missing in the file is its comprehensive and accurate personal information.
24
Was Greta's intelligence connection active, or an unspoken requirement for working in the East? Did Greta actually inform against the Americans and the British, or did she target the Nazis in her midst? How much actual intelligence against the West could someone moving to East Germany actually offer? (Wouldn't East German intelligence prefer an informant who stayed in the West?) Greta's file raises more questions than it answers.
Greta rose quickly in the East German bureaucracy. She won a place in the country's first trade delegations to neighboring Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union. In December 1950 she was appointed to serve as president of East Germany's Central Bank. Two years later she presided over a plenary session for a trade conference in Moscow. The East Germans boasted that “this is probably the first time that such a conference was presided over by a woman.
25
As an uneasy equilibrium was restored in both East and West Germany over the next decade, the reconstructed histories of the Nazi period took root. In the West, the story of Greta's group was largely suppressed. Arvid Harnack's assistance to the Americans and Harro Schulze-Boysen's attempt to help the British went forgotten. Donald
Heath, Arvid's contact at the U.S. embassy, mourned his friend for the rest of his life, but his government discouraged him from publicizing Arvid's services to the United States.
Despite her early success, Greta Kuckhoff soon experienced political difficulties. The troubles began in the early 1950s. Stalin died in March 1953, to Greta's relief. (She told one of her young protégés that “Stalin was bad for socialism.”)
26
But East German strong man Walter Ulbricht gambled that, in the aftermath, the Stalinist hard-liners would prevail. He tried to impress them with a policy of “accelerating socialism” by imposing onerous taxes, limiting the production of consumer goods, and repressing church communities. On June 17, 1953, angry workers marched on the government ministries in Berlin. Hundreds were shot and killed, many directly in front of the former Air Ministry where Harro Schulze-Boysen had worked.
27
Bertolt Brecht, recently returned from America, acidly wrote that since “the people had forfeited the confidence of the government,” the Communist government should “dissolve the people and elect another.”
28
Instead, the East German government initiated a series of sweeping investigations and arrests. By 1958 a growing number of “soft” German Communists protested Ulbricht's hard-line tactics, calling for economic and political liberalization. Many sympathized with the reformist movements in Eastern Europe.
One of East Germany's leading voices for change was a high-ranking Communist official named Karl Schirdewan, who had spent eleven years in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. In 1958, Ulbricht struck again, purging Schirdewan and his followers and going on to remove legions of suspect party and government officials. The
Washington Post
reported that the number reached as many as thirty thousand.
29
For days, East German schoolchildren recited condemnations of Schirdewan from the party newspaper and attended classes devoted to criticizing the fallen official.
Greta Kuckhoff was among the thousands who lost their posts. A few years earlier, she had been magically transformed from a political prisoner to a high-ranking government official. Now, even more abruptly, she was “retired” from her position as president of the Central Bank.
In November 1958, she was included in a list of “persons who fell from grace in the Party purge that started in February of this year, e.g. Schirdewan … Greta Kuckhoff and Grete Wittkowski, all tarred with the brush of hostility to Ulbricht or of preference for ‘excessively soft' planning targets, cultural policy etc.” The report was compiled by an analyst for the U.S. government's Radio Free Europe.
30
The abrupt departures of Greta Kuckhoff and Grete Wittkowski were especially noteworthy because they were the only two high-profile female officials in the
frauenlose welt
(“women-less world”) of East German politics.
31
The East Germans strongly encouraged their deposed officials to cite “reasons of health,” and Greta dutifully announced that her asthma had flared up. But her friends privately commented that her health seemed unchanged, and she remained active for decades to come.
32
Some victims of 1958 (such as Greta's roommate Grete Wittkowski) were eventually restored to high position, but Greta spent the rest of her career working in organizations of lesser influence, notably the German-British Relations sector of the German Peace Council.
Greta never abandoned East Germany, but she never entirely conformed to its demands. She presented the Rote Kapelle orphans with mixed messages. She chided young Saskia von Brockdorff when she decided to emigrate to the West. But Hans Coppi recalled that for all her bitterness over the handling of Roeder, she always spoke warmly of the United States and described Wisconsin as “the happiest time in her life.”
Greta's struggle to define her legacy was not over. As researchers delved into records from the war, troubling accounts boiled to the surface. In 1967, French author Gilles Perrault published a book called
The Red Orchestra: The Anatomy of the Most Successful Spy Ring of World War II.
He built his narrative around the Nazi manhunt for Soviet agent Leopold Trepper in Belgium, but his story necessarily wound back to the circles in Berlin. Perrault's passages about Greta's circle were generally sympathetic.
But 1970 brought a West German rebuttal in the form of a book called
Codeword: Direktor.
Greta was shattered to learn that the author, journalist Heinz Höhne, had based his account largely on Nazi sources, quoting extensively from Gestapo interrogations, the trial transcript,
and interviews with Manfred Roeder himself. Höhne interviewed many important sources firsthand, and wrote scathing passages about the Nazi abuses and Roeder's prosecution. But at the same time, he echoed the Nazis' depiction of Harro Schulze-Boysen and his associates as traitors who worshipped at the altar of “crazy fanaticism.”
33
They “cannot be included in the ranks of German resistance,” Höhne argued. They were only “an unfortunate aberration.”
34
Höhne repeated Nazi accusations against the group in great detail, including Roeder's innuendos, fabrications, and outright slander. The charge: that Schulze-Boysen's group had sent “500 messages to Moscow containing primarily military information.”
35
Not one such message had been conveyed by the faulty radios, and Korotkov only sent a total of a few dozen reports to Moscow over the entire period of contact. Höhne also quoted the Nazis' spurious charge that the group was driven by mercenary motives, listing phantom payments as “wages of treachery.”
36
Manfred Roeder's prosecution had been marked by his prurient allegations of sexual misconduct, depicting the group as a “wanton sex-obsessed society.” One member was credited with the unlikely feat of “intimate relations with four Soviet agents in a single night.”
37
Höhne reprinted Roeder's claim that Libertas Schulze-Boysen was a lesbian, adding that Adam Kuckhoff had been drawn into the conspiracy by his “passionate attachment” to her. Greta Kuckhoff was angered and wounded. She could not understand why, years after the war, the Nazis' vicious allegations against her circle should be revived to poison future generations.
At the same time, Greta was unhappy with the East Germans' distortions. The East German regime kept the actual records of the Rote Kapelle under close wraps. East Germany's foreign intelligence chief Markus Wolf wrote:
Details about [the Rote Kapelle] were more accessible for me in Western publications than in our own ministry's archives. [Stasi chief Erich] Mielke kept files about the Nazi era under his personal control in a special section of the Investigations Department, and try as I might I could not gain access to them.
38
Nonetheless, Wolf pursued his strong personal interest in the story. His father, Communist physician and playwright Friedrich Wolf, had worked in the same theater circles as Hans Otto and Adam Kuckhoff. As a member of a Jewish family from the German Communist Party elite, Markus Wolf would have been proud to identify with the Rote Kapelle's actions. But he was honest enough to confirm that it was not the nest of Soviet Communist spies that his government made it out to be. Indeed, he wrote, while the Rote Kapelle was “one of the biggest resistance organizations,” only “a few of its members were Communists, and a small portion were agents of the Soviet intelligence services.” Instead, Wolf was struck by the group's lack of Communist orthodoxy.
I was interested in how these people of such varied backgrounds and political convictions dedicated themselves to resisting Hitler. … What was the source of their inner strength to swim against the tide and battle an omniscient and barbaric regime? Such issues of the moral and historical responsibilities of individuals were largely passed over in publications within the GDR.
39
For the first two decades following the war, the West German debate over Greta's group was dominated by the question of treason. There were still unreformed militarists who were looking for ways that Germany could have won the war, regardless of the consequences for humanity. The East German government was more supportive of the indivdual survivors, but uncertain of the nature of the group. Immediately after the war, the names of Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, and Adam Kuckhoff were unknown to the KPD leadership, who surmised that they were part of the 20th of July conspiracy.
The ground had begun to shift in the 1960s. Gilles Perrault's and Heinz Höhne's books coincided with new initiatives in Moscow and Berlin to claim ownership of the Rote Kapelle as a Communist Party initiative. The story of the Rote Kapelle had been absent from East German history books until 1969.
Suddenly, the group was in the limelight. Erich Mielke, the notorious chief of the Stasi, decided to promote the idea that his agency was inspired
by the Rote Kapelle's service to Soviet intelligence. In late 1969 the Soviet regime showered honors on members of the group, including the posthumous presentation of the Order of the Red Banner, complete with the legend “Workers of the World Unite.” (A Soviet official had to travel to West Germany to deliver it to Harro Schulze-Boysen's patrician parents.)
That same year, the East Germans mounted a major exhibit on Harro Schulze-Boysen, John Sieg, and Wilhelm Guddorf, emphasizing Sieg and Guddorf as members of the Communist Party, and passing over the majority of the group who were not. Erich Mielke compiled an archive of Rote Kapelle documents and interviews that produced a vast stream of East German books, articles, and exhibits, all part of a propaganda campaign to create the fiction of the “unbroken continuity of resistance led by the KPD.” The archive itself was off-limits.