Red Orchestra (52 page)
Authors: Anne Nelson
Greta was deeply disturbed by the East German exhibit. She acknowledged that Sieg had been an active member of the group, even if he had “too many irons in the fire.” But Guddorf was a marginal figure at best, coming late to the leafleting activity and contributing little to their circle's actions. Her strongest memory of him involved his arguments with Harro, as he tried in vain to enforce KPD orthodoxy.
Greta appealed to the Party's Institute of Marxism-Leninism, which was responsible for historical reinterpretation, and informed it that the KPD had never recognized her group's work—in fact, her husband had tried to contact the party leadership and had never been honored with a reply. There were no possible grounds to suggest that the circle had been “under the direction of the Moscow leadership of the KPD.”
40
Greta told an East German interviewer that the exhibit “sickened” her. It treated her husband and herself as “peripheral figures,” which hardly reflected their level of illegal activity.
41
She decided that the only remedy was to write her own book.
But her effort was rapidly overtaken by rival efforts. Heinz Höhne was working on a West German television series based on his book. (Its racy tone was suggested by the title of one of the episodes: “The Rote Kapelle: The Game Is Up.”) The East Germans rushed to create their own film version, with the eminently forgettable title
KLK to PTX
(based on the Soviets' radio call signal). Greta was chagrined that the individuals in charge of the production didn't see fit to consult her. Not even the actress playing her in the film got in touch.
42
Now, in 1971, Greta sat down with an East German publisher to discuss the completion of her book, with renewed motivation. “Life has become so bitterly hard,” she said. “I find the Höhne book disgusting.”
43
But while Greta was determined to do battle with Höhne's book, the East German publishers had an entirely different purpose in mind. They wanted a book that would give the East German Communists the moral high ground over the Nazi period. They were telling the story of how the Central Committee of the KPD led a heroic twelve-year resistance against the fascists. The problem with Greta's account was that she would not compel her life to conform to the myth.
The East German publishing house was anything but independent. Controlled by the government through the Ministry of Culture, the Office for Literature included a desk of intelligence officers who operated out of the publishing division.
44
At the outset, Greta wasn't above making demands. “If the New Life Publishers want to take a long time and use shoddy paper, I'll have to publish in West Germany,” she informed them. This was probably an empty threat. But Greta's travails had just begun. The guardians of the state found her memories politically unacceptable.
Greta's editor objected to the tone of her manuscript, and fought her on it, line by line, over large political points and quibbling details. When Greta wrote that her father was a “musical instrument maker,” her editor demanded to know why she was so pretentious. What was wrong with the proper Marxist term, “worker”?
The complaints went on and on. Greta refused to show proper deference to the Soviet Union and the German Communist Party. Why did Greta need to bring up “the destruction of the Trotskyite opposition in Russia”?
Why did she write with such warmth about her friends Hans Harten-stein and Adolf Grimme, both Social Democrats, while her treatment of Communists and the Party was always “critical” and “generalizing”?
45
Greta was told to compensate for the utter lack of evidence that either her husband or Arvid Harnack had ever joined the Communist Party.
(The most they could say about Arvid was that he had “worked with Communists” before 1933.)
46
German Communists had certainly been active in the resistance, but for the East Germans, this meant the denial of other resisters. Greta wrote that after her arrest, there were plans for “other large-scale resistance efforts, for example, that of the Officers.” Her editor replied, “The Putsch of the 20th of July 1944 cannot be classified as a ‘resistance effort.' ”
47
When Greta referred to the Baum Group as “Jewish Communists,” her editor told her that the term “Jewish” was irrelevant. “They were engaged in a class struggle, not a race struggle.” But Greta knew that while German Communists could elect to leave the party, Jews were not allowed a choice.
Her editor threw a tantrum when Greta wrote that the Nazis wanted a country “free of Jews, Communists, Gypsies, and above all, anyone with a little ability to think for himself.”
“This is the terminology of fascism,” her editor fumed. “It doesn't follow any political or party critique. The struggle wasn't about race, it was about class, and the big push was against the revolutionary working class and the KPD, not against those with the ‘ability to think for themselves.' ”
“Not about race” was the East Germans' way of stating that Greta had violated their historical judgment that the Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) Holocausts were negligible compared to the repression of the KPD.
When Greta criticized the Communists' wavering policies over the 1930s, her editors responded that her “understanding of the KPD policies toward the creation of worker unity and the German popular front is only presented from the standpoint of negative memories and a pessimistic evaluation of the correct strategic line of the KPD.”
In mind-numbing party prose, her editor informed his superiors that the woman clearly needed to be taken in hand:
Her narrow subjectivity, through the manifold personal experiences and fixed personal opinions that mark the profile of this author, require the objectification of this book in every term that is demanded by Party literature in the Leninist sense.
Greta was unwilling to have the central drama of her life “objectified in the Leninist sense.” However, this was the condition for publication. In his general comments, her editor reported, “Throughout this whole manuscript, there is an ongoing indirect polemic against the circles of the KPD that were supposedly ‘hostile to intellectuals.' ” Greta dared to suggest, he wrote, that these KPD militants feared that intellectuals like her and her friends would “seek to be independent (and therefore dangerous!).”
48
At the heart of the dispute was the regime's effort to fabricate a history of unified resistance, led by the Central Committee of the KPD. Time after time, Greta's matter-of-fact account undermined the falsehood.
Greta wrote of her group's interest in the analyses of the KPD's
Aus-landsleitung,
or “leadership abroad,” which included the outposts in Paris, Prague, and Amsterdam. Her editor took her to task, insisting that she change the reference to the “ZK,” or the Moscow-based Central Committee.
The disagreement over the role of the KPD's Central Committee had deep implications. During the 1930s, Stalin eliminated independent-minded members of the Central Committee and replaced them with his minions. He also targeted many of the leaders in exile in Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam. Stalin went on to murder hundreds of German Communists and deliver hundreds more into the hands of the Gestapo.
These murders occurred over the same period that Greta and her group were seeking new ways to oppose the Nazis: by helping Jews, recruiting diverse new members, and lobbying the United States. (At the same time, they were trying and failing to make contact with German Communist Party leadership outside the country.)
Nonetheless, the problem, according to the East German editor, was that Greta didn't offer “appropriate representation of the struggle of the Party organizations, the leadership status of the Central Committee of the KPD, and the historic place of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Organization within the overall antifascist struggle in Germany.”
Greta had reasons to omit the Central Committee. Over the years, it had blindly followed Stalin's instructions to help the Nazis bring down the Weimar Republic, and gone along with the German-Soviet Nonag-gression Pact of 1939. Greta, along with countless other German antifascists,
had suffered the direct consequences of Stalin's attack on the German left and the fractured response to the Nazis' consolidation of power. Why should she prettify the forces that had devastated her life?
Greta battled with her editor over the changes. There were reports of hours of heated arguments, and one acrimonious exchange between her and her editor came to thirty pages. Greta won ground on some points, and lost on others. There is evidence of the text she was obliged to change, but there is no way to measure the extent of her self-censorship.
Every round reminded her that, as far as the regime was concerned, the purpose of her life story was to manufacture a myth. There was no monolithic block of resisters following a strategy dictated by the KPD Central Committee. This fantasy of the East Germans and the Soviets was built on the paranoid mythology of the Gestapo. The reality was far messier—but also more compelling. The German resistance consisted of many fragmented groups—including Greta and her friends, the KPD circles, and the 20th of July movement—who undertook many activities, sometimes overlapping, sometimes at cross purposes.
Greta's book,
Vom Rosenkranz zur Roten Kapelle: Ein Lebensbericht (From Rosary to Red Orchestra: A Life Story),
was only a partial victory. Her memoirs were published in 1972, in time for her seventieth birthday. They suggested the path of her life, but left many telling details in the shadows of censorship.
The East Germans covered Greta with prizes, and over the following years she would be invited to a host of naming ceremonies for their newly rediscovered martyrs. Adam Kuckhoff was honored with a traffic circle in Berlin. Mildred Harnack had a high school named after her in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg. John Sieg's name was attached to a technical school in the bomb-blasted neighborhood of Friedrichshain, not far from Neukölln. As a final irony, Sieg, who had been tortured for days by the Gestapo before ending his own life, was memorialized on a medal bestowed by the Stasi, East Germany's own secret police.
Greta's book remains a conundrum. As the warring voices sound within its pages, the reader must guess which passages correspond to Greta's editorial minder and which represent the thoughts of the woman herself. Read closely, Greta's book still suggests the outlines of an extraordinary life, devoted to her ideals, her family, and her friends. It begins
with the shy young student en route to her great adventure in Wisconsin, and follows her saga until she sinks beneath the weight of her unimaginable history
Greta Kuckhoff died on November 11, 1981, at the age of seventy-nine. The orphans of the Rote Kapelle remembered her as a woman of caring dignity and rectitude, who offered support and sustenance, but also expressed stern disapproval at their lapses. Despite his privileged upbringing, her own son, Ule, never managed to make much of himself. He committed suicide at the age of fifty-one in 1989—the year the Berlin Wall came down and East Germany ceased to exist.
Fortunately, Greta's mangled autobiography is not the only record of her voice. Another, clearer version had emerged in an earlier piece of writing. In 1947, Greta wrote an essay describing her reaction to a celebrated novel called
The Seventh Cross,
the tale of a Communist who escapes from a concentration camp in the 1930s. The novelist, Anna Seghers, was a Jewish Communist who escaped the Nazis and wrote her book in Mexico, based on interviews with recent émigrés. The novel became an international best-seller, and Spencer Tracy starred in a popular movie version in the United States.
*
Seghers described the lives of ordinary Germans living under the Nazi regime, including some who risked their lives to help the prisoner. But Greta's response to the book bordered on anger. It raised the wrong questions, she said. Greta was not interested in taking credit for the actions she and her friends performed out of conviction, but she wanted to know what everyone else was doing at the time:
Wasn't the situation such that, at least after 1945, it had to be made clear to readers that they too ought to have taken part in the struggle—there would have been fewer victims. It seemed to me—and still does—that in a book about this time every citizen must be challenged, so that he will finally see clearly it wasn't a question of the victims, it was a matter of clever, well-thought-out
deeds. A
little less fear, a little more love of life in a few hundred thousand
and the war wouldn't have been possible or would have been over sooner.
Sympathy for the fighters without victory only has meaning if it strikes like a bolt of insight to people who until then had been indifferent or hardened: This is your concern—it ought to have concerned you then. Don't evade the issue! You don't need to feel sorry, sympathy is evasion. It is soothing, it allows one to speak an
ego te absolvo
over the evil deed one did oneself or at least allowed to happen, an absolution through which nothing is basically changed.
49
Greta recognized that dramatic social change, for good or for ill, is often achieved by passionate minorities. Whether they succeed or not depends on whether they reach a critical mass. Greta had no time for the idle moralizing of those who waited out the regime in silence, safety, or exile. She didn't distinguish between Communist or Socialist, Catholic or Jew. For her, the world was divided into two categories: those who took action, and those who did not.
*
Hollywood altered Seghers's Communist character's affiliations.
T
HE EXECUTION SHED AT PLöTZENSEE STILL STANDS, CONVERTED
into a memorial. The guillotine has been removed, but the meat hooks still hang across the beam. The Gestapo headquarters at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse were damaged in the war and razed soon after. The outlines of the basement interrogation cells were long visible, and their retaining walls displayed an exhibit about the prisoners who were held there, including the Harnacks, the Kuckhoffs, and their friends. It is now home to a permanent memorial.
The Bendler Block hosts a different kind of memorial. The military headquarters where the 20th of July conspiracy was launched now houses the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial), a massive archive commemorating the various forms of German resistance, including the Rote Kapelle. It is a daunting display of specialized scholarship, almost entirely in German, and unknown to most foreign visitors.
The Air Ministry where Harro Schulze-Boysen worked somehow escaped destruction. It now serves as the German Finance Ministry. After the war, a quote from Harro's poem (recovered by Günther Weisenborn from his cell) was carved over a bull's-eye window on an upper story:
Wenn wir auch sterben sollen
So wissen wir: Die Saat
Geht auf. JVenn Köpfe rollen, dann
Zwingt dock der Geist den Staat.
“Glaubt mit mir an die gerechte Zeit, die alies reifen lässt.”
Even if we should die,
We know this much: The seed
continues to sprout. Heads may roll, but
the Spirit still masters the State.
“Believe with me in the just time that will allow all to ripen.”
Most of the survivors of the Berlin circle went on to lead productive lives. Besides Greta Kuckhoff, Günther Weisenborn, and Adolf Grimme, they included Dr. Elfriede Paul, Sophie Sieg, and Helmut Roloff. Dr. Paul served a Nazi prison sentence until the end of the war, and returned to practice medicine in East Germany. Sophie Sieg, liberated from Ravensbrück concentration camp by the Red Army in April 1945, returned to Neukölln and became a local Communist health official. The party wheeled out the tiny, bespectacled old lady many times over the years for ceremonies to commemorate her husband. She died in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down.
Helmut Roloff, the young pianist, was saved by his friend, the dentist Helmut Himpel, who convinced the Gestapo that Roloff had no idea what was in the locked suitcase. Roloff was released after a few months' questioning. He became a noted concert pianist and music educator in West Berlin, and died in 2001. Herbert and Ingeborg Engelsing survived the war, but their marriage did not. Ingeborg moved to California, where she remarried, wrote her memoirs, and earned a doctorate in German literature. She died in Carmel in 2007.
The postwar years also brought many hardships. One of them was a rash of suicides among Germans who could not come to terms with the past. Stella Mahlberg, Harro Schulze-Boysen's lover toward the end of his life, killed herself in 1947, reportedly at a time she was undergoing
American interrogations.
1
Gustaf Gründgens, the leftist actor who made a devil's pact with the Nazis, took an overdose of sleeping pills in 1969.
The postwar period held no joy for many of the Soviets' wartime field operatives. In contrast to the amateurs in Berlin, the figure in the Rote Kapelle file who came closest to the technical definition of a professional Soviet spy was Leopold Trepper. He survived the war as a result of the German intelligence effort to broadcast disinformation back to the Soviets. After 1945, Trepper returned to Moscow, where Stalin incarcerated him in the infamous Lubyanka Prison for a decade. He was finally released and went back to Poland, but then fled the country in reaction to Polish anti-Semitism. He died in Jerusalem in 1982.
2
A similar fate awaited Trepper's colleague Anatoli Gourevitch, who as the agent “Kent” had visited the Kuckhoffs and the Schulze-Boysens in Berlin. Gourevitch survived the war in custody, another beneficiary of the Germans' disinformation campaign against Moscow. At the end of the war he flew back to Russia and was taken straight to Lubyanka. After sixteen months of interrogation, the Soviets sentenced him to twenty years in a gulag. He was released in a general amnesty in 1955.
3
The other true intelligence professional in the Rote Kapelle saga was Alexander Korotkov, the Soviet agent who recruited Arvid Harnack in Berlin. He fared better than his colleagues, escaping Stalin's purges to acquire the position of KGB resident in Soviet-occupied Berlin. Markus Wolf once overheard him reminiscing with KGB colleagues about their experiences repressing the 1956 Hungarian revolt. In 1961, Korotkov died of a heart attack as he played tennis in Moscow; he was fifty-one.
The scholars, authors, and artists of the Rote Kapelle left a remarkable literary and artistic legacy, but few of their works are currently in print. This holds true even for Günther Weisenborn, whose early book on the German resistance is widely cited by scholars, and whose play about the underground was an important marker of postwar culture.
One literary critic recently wrote,
Today Weisenborn is virtually unknown; few of his plays have been performed since his death on 26 March 1969, and his novels have practically disappeared. He was not an experimental playwright and did not use nontraditional dramatic techniques. It is
likely that his plays will be viewed primarily as documents of the inanities and horrors of Nazism.
4
This suggests that chronicling the “inanities and horrors of Nazism” is not a worthwhile pursuit. But Weisenborn's writing offers a firsthand glimpse into the inner workings of fascism and resistance that exiled writers could only imagine.
Members of the resistance circles, both executed and surviving, left a number of children, and they have produced books of their own. Hans Coppi was the son of Hans and Hilde Coppi. Both of his parents were executed within a year of his birth. He grew up in East Germany and was trained as an engineer, but over time he developed an avid interest in the story of his parents and their organization and became a noted scholar in the field. After German reunification he joined Professor Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial, to collect, codify, and publish scholarship about the group.
The surviving documentation had been scattered across half the globe, in East and West Germany, Russia, and the United States. It took the end of the cold war to allow historians to begin to create a unified narrative. Coppi and Tuchel have done more than anyone else to assemble historical research about the group and to reverse the long history of cold war distortions and misconceptions.
In 2000, journalist Shareen Brysac published a book about Mildred Harnack,
Resisting Hitler,
based on extensive interviews and research into American and Soviet files. Brysac presented extensive evidence of Arvid Harnack's intelligence work for the Americans as well as the Soviets, casting his antifascist activities in a different light. It is clear that a great deal of documentation remains to be discovered, whether in private American collections, German attics, or in the depths of the Kremlin's files.
Artist Stefan Roloff is the son of classical pianist Helmut Roloff, who provided assistance to Helmut Himpel, Marie Terwiel, and their associates. Over 2002 and 2003 he released a documentary and a book about his father and his associates, drawing on interviews with his father and other survivors as well as his own innovative cinematic techniques. His was the first comprehensive approach to the subject of the Rote Kapelle and the
postwar aftermath. He conducted exhaustive archival research about the Gestapo interrogations, the irregular legal proceedings, and the subsequent American investigations.
The name of Libertas Schulze-Boysen has been carried on in an unlikely fashion. At the time she was arrested, Libertas was hoping to find refuge with her sister Ottora, who was married to Count Carl Ludwig Douglas in Sweden. The year after Libertas was executed, the couple gave birth to a daughter, who became Libertas's namesake. Dagmar Rosita Astri Libertas Douglas grew up to become the British Duchess of Marlborough. As Rosita Marlborough, she has continued the family's artistic tradition as an accomplished painter who exhibits in London and New York.
Harro Schulze-Boysen's memory has been cherished by his younger brother Hartmut, who became a highly regarded diplomat in the German foreign service and served as the German consul in New York. He always took pride in his brother's courage, regardless of passing political currents in Germany.
If history is written by victors, fame tends to accrue to those who succeed rather than those who attempt the impossible. Bertolt Brecht, raging against the Nazis in exile, wrote a poem asking for the understanding of future generations, asking them to resist passing judgment on others' efforts if they have not shared their circumstances. His words could serve as an epitaph for Greta Kuckhoff and her friends.
Our forces were few. The goal lay far in the distance.
It was clearly visible, though I probably wouldn't reach it myself.
So went the time I was granted on earth.
You, who will emerge from the flood that submerged us,
Also remember, when you speak of our weaknesses,
The dark times that you have been spared.
5
The last known surviving participant of the Berlin circle is Katja Casella. As a twenty-year-old art student, she joined her best friend Lisa Egler-Gervai in supporting the group. The two pretty students served as
couriers and sheltered fugitives, learning not to ask questions along the way. They were among the Jewish participants in resistance activities that enlisted Lutherans, Catholics, Communists, Socialists, Conservatives, and artists without political portfolio, to work against a common enemy.
Katja narrowly escaped arrest by fleeing to Poland. After the war, she was reunited with her fiancé, Karl Meirowsky, and the two were married. A few years later, Katja organized a “surrealistic cabaret” in Berlin called
Die Badewanne (The Bathtub),
an entertainment that combined modernist performance art with fierce social satire. The sketches skewered craven Nazi-era officials and depicted death by guillotine and suicide. They climaxed with harsh lights shone into the faces of the audiences, as the performers demanded to know who among them was a Nazi.
Eventually Katja and Karl tired of confrontation and withdrew to the Spanish island of Ibiza. There she painted picture after picture: large, glowing canvases of abstract designs, haunting portraits of faces suffused with sorrow and light.
Sixty-five years after the Gestapo swept through the streets of Berlin making its arrests, Katja was still welcoming visitors to her modest home in a northern suburb. The painter was in her late eighties and nearly blind, but she was still vibrant and beautiful, with a bright gaze and a strong, throaty laugh. Her paintings now lined the walls of her house, some of them echoing the influence of her teacher, Marc Chagall. Every aspect of her life reflected the essence of the Rote Kapelle that ideological historians could never capture: the free spirit that reacts to injury and outrage by choosing to take action, whatever the risk.
Katja had known years of happiness married to the love of her life. After Karl's death, she stayed on in Ibiza, returning to Germany only when her medical condition made it necessary. She lived quietly in Berlin, uncertain whether the Nazis were really gone. But in trusted company, she wanted to talk about old times. She recalled every detail of her first encounter with the Rote Kapelle, that terrible day when she was crushed by the deportation of Karl's mother and sister. She remembered
the women gathered quietly in the drawing room, the Bach chaconne on the gramophone, Cato sitting with her on the sofa.
And then the tall young Luftwaffe lieutenant, with a head like a greyhound, came and folded her in his arms, saying, “This barbarity has to stop. We all have to work together to stop that devil.” With those words, Harro Schulze-Boysen transformed her from a victim to a resister.