Red Orchestra (espionage)


The Red Orchestra, as it was known in Germany, was the name given by the Gestapo to anti-Nazi resistance workers during World War II. It primarily referred to a loose network of resistance circles, connected through personal contacts, uniting hundreds of opponents of the Nazi regime. These included circles of friendship and discussion centered around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack in Berlin, alongside many others. They printed and distributed illegal leaflets, posters, and stickers hoping to incite civil disobedience; helped Jews and opposition escape the regime; documented the crimes of the Nazi regime; and forwarded military intelligence to the Allies. To date, about 400 members are known by name.
Contrary to legend, the Red Orchestra was neither directed by Soviet communists nor under a single leadership but a network of groups and individuals, often operating independently.
The term was also used by the Gestapo to refer to unassociated Soviet intelligence networks, working in Paris and Brussels, that were built up by Leopold Trepper on behalf of the Main Directorate of State Security.
To this day, the public perception of the "Red Orchestra" is characterized by the transfigurations of the post-war years and the Cold War.
created in 2010 and sitting in Schulze-Boysen-Straße 12, in Lichtenberg, Berlin

Reappraisal

For a long time after World War II, only parts of the German resistance to Nazism had been known to the public within Germany and the world at large. This included the groups that took part in the 20 July plot and the White Rose resistance groups. In the 1970s there was a growing interest in the various forms of resistance and opposition. However, no organisations' history was so subject to systematic misinformation, and recognised as little, as those resistance groups centred around Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen.
In a number of publications, the groups that these two people represented were seen as traitors and spies. An example of these was Kennwort: Direktor; die Geschichte der Roten Kapelle written by Heinz Höhne who was a Der Spiegel journalist. Höhne based his book on the investigation by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office against the General Judge of the Luftwaffe and Nazi apologist Manfred Roeder who was involved in the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen cases during World War II and who contributed decisively to the formation of the legend that survived for much of the Cold War period. In his book Höhne reports from former Gestapo and Reich war court individuals who had a conflict of interest and were intent in defaming the groups attached to Harnack and Schulze-Boysen with accusations of treason.
The perpetuation of the defamation from the 1940s through to the 1970s that started with the Gestapo, was incorporated by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office and evaluated as a journalistic process that can be seen by the 1968 trial of far-right holocaust denier Manfred Roeder by the German lawyer Robert Kempner. The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, which prosecuted the case against Roeder, based its investigation on procedure case number "1 Js 16/49" which was the trial case number defined by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office. The whole process propagated the Gestapo ideas of the Red Orchestra and this was promulgated in the report of the public prosecutor's office which stated:
To these two men and their wives, a group of political supporters of different characters and of different backgrounds gathered over the course of time. They were united in the active fight against National Socialism and in their advocacy of communism. Until the outbreak of the war with the Soviet Union, the focus of their work was on domestic politics. After that, he shifted more to the territory of treason and espionage in favor of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of 1942, the Schulze-Boysen Group was finally involved in the widespread network of the Soviet intelligence service in Western Europe. The Schulze-Boysen group was first and foremost an espionage organization for the Soviet Union.

From the perspective of the German Democratic Republic the Red Orchestra were honoured as anti-fascist resistance fighters and indeed received posthumous orders in 1969. However, the most comprehensive collection biographies that exist are from the GDR and they represent their point of view, through the lens of ideology.
In the 1980s, the GDR historian Heinrich Scheel, who at the time was vice president of the East German Academy of Sciences and who was part of the anti-Nazi Tegeler group that included Hans Coppi, Hermann Natterodt and from 1933, conducted research into the Rote Kapelle and produced a paper which took a more nuanced view of the Rote Kapelle and discovered the work that was done to defame them. Heinrich Scheel's work enabled a re-evaluation of the Rote Kapelle, but it was not until 2009 that the German Bundestag overturned the judgments of the National Socialist judiciary for "treason" and rehabilitated the members of the group.

Name

The term "Red Orchestra" was a cryptonym that was invented by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the counter-espionage part of the Schutzstaffel, which referred to resistance radio operators as "pianists", their transmitters as "pianos", and their supervisors as "conductors".
The Red Orchestra was a collective name that was used by the Gestapo, the German secret police for the purpose of identification, and the Funkabwehr, the German radio counterintelligence organisation. The Funkabwehr used the name to identify the Paris and Brussels groups that were opponents of the Nazis, that appeared after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Only after the Abwehr had decrypted radio messages in August 1942, in which German names appeared, did the Gestapo start to arrest and imprison them, their friends and relatives. In 2002, the German filmmaker Stefan Roloff, whose father was a member of one of the Red Orchestra groups,
wrote:
The German political scientist Johannes Tuchel summed up in a research article for the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.

Germany

Harnack group/Schulze-Boysen

The Red Orchestra in the world today are mainly the resistance groups around the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, the writer Adam Kuckhoff and the economist Arvid Harnack, to which historians assign more than 100 people.

Origin

Harnack and Schulze-Boysen had similar political views, both rejected the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and sought alternatives to the existing social order. Since the Great Depression of 1929, they saw the Soviet planned economy as a positive counter-model to the free-market economy. They wanted to introduce planned economic elements in Germany and work closely with the Soviet Union without breaking German bridges to Western Europe.
cemetery in Berlin-Zehlendorf, Onkel-Tom-Straße 30–33
Before 1933, Schulze-Boysen published the non-partisan leftist and later banned magazine lit=opponent. In April 1933, the Sturmabteilung detained him for some time, severely battered him, and killed a fellow Jewish inmate. As a trained pilot, he received a position of trust in 1934 in the Reich Ministry of Aviation and had access to war-important information. After his marriage to Libertas Schulze-Boysen née Haas-Heye in 1936, the couple collected young intellectuals from diverse backgrounds, including the artist couple Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher, the writers Günther Weisenborn and Walter Küchenmeister, the photojournalist John Graudenz and Gisela von Pöllnitz, the actor Marta Husemann and her husband Walter in 1938, the doctors Elfriede Paul in 1937 and John Rittmeister in Christmas 1941, the dancer Oda Schottmüller, and since. Schulze-Boysen held twice monthly meetings at his Charlottenburg atelier for thirty-five to forty people in what was considered a Bohemian circle of friends. Initially these meetings followed an informatics program of resistance that was in keeping with its environment and were important places of personal and political understanding but also vanishing points from an often unbearable reality, essentially serving as islands of democracy. As the decade progressed they increasingly served as identity-preserving forms of self-assertion and cohesion as the Nazi state became all encompassing. Formats of the meetings usually started with book discussions in the first 90 minutes were followed by Marxist discussions and resistance activities that were interspersed with parties, picnics, sailing on the Wannsee and poetry readings, until midnight as the mood took. However, as the realisation that the war preparations were becoming unstoppable and the future victors were not going to be the Sturmabteilung, Shulze-Boysen whose decisions were in demand called for the group to cease their discussions and start resisting.
Other friends were found by Schulze-Boysen among former students of a reform school on the island of Scharfenberg in Berlin-Tegel. These often came from communist or social - democratic workers' families, e.g. Hans and Hilde Coppi, Heinrich Scheel, Hermann Natterodt and Hans Lautenschlager. Some of these contacts existed before 1933, for example through the German Society of intellectuals. John Rittmeister's wife Eva was a good friend of Liane Berkowitz, Ursula Goetze,, Maria Terwiel and who met in the 1939 abitur class at the secondary private school, Heil'schen Abendschule at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg. The Romanist Werner Krauss joined this group, and through discussions, an active resistance to the Nazi regime grew. Ursula Goetze who was part of the group, provided contacts with the communist groups in Neukölln.
From 1932 onwards, the economist Arvid Harnack and his American wife Mildred assembled a group of friends and members of the Berlin Marxist Workers School to form a discussion group which debated the political and economic perspectives at the time. Harnak's group meetings in contrast to Schulze-Boysen were considered rather austere. Members of the group included the German politician and Minister of Culture Adolf Grimme, the locksmith, the German journalist Adam Kuckhoff and his wife Greta and the industrialist and entrepreneur Leo Skrzypczynski. From 1935, Harnack tried to camouflage his activities by becoming a member of the Nazi Party working in the Reich Ministry of Economics with the rank of Oberregierungsrat. Through this work, Harnack planned to train them to build a free and socially-just Germany after the end of the National Socialism regime.
Oda Schottmüller and Erika Gräfin von Brockdorff were friends with the Kuckhoffs. In 1937 Adam Kuckhoff introduced Harnack to the journalist and railway freight ground worker John Sieg, a former editor of the Communist Party of Germany newspaper the Die Rote Fahne. As a railway worker at the Deutsche Reichsbahn, Sieg was able to make use of work-related travel, enabling him to found a communist resistance group in Neukölln in Berlin. He knew the former Foreign Affairs Minister Wilhelm Guddorf and. In 1934 Guddorf was arrested and sentenced to hard labour. In 1939 after his release from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Guddorf worked as a bookseller, and worked closely with Schulze-Boysen.
Through these contacts a loose network of seven Berlin friends, discussion and training groups formed by 1941, that constituted some 150 Berlin Nazi opponents. Included in the group were artists, scientists, citizens, workers and students from several different backgrounds. The combined group included Communists, political conservatives, Jews, devout Catholics, and atheists. Their ages were from 16 to 86, and about 40% of the group were women. They had different political views and searched for the open exchange of views, at least in the private sector. Schulze-Boysen and Harnack were close in some ideas of the Communist Party of Germany, others were devout Catholics such as Maria Terwiel and her husband. Uniting all groups was the firm rejection of national socialism.
On the initiative of Adam and Greta Kuckhoff, they introduced Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen to Arvid and Mildred Harnack and began engaging then socially, with their hitherto separate groups moved together once the Polish campaign began in September 1939. From 1940 onwards, they regularly exchanged their opinions on the war and other Nazi policies and sought action against it.
The historian Heinrich Scheel, a schoolmate of Hans Coppi, judged these groups by stating:
As early as 1934, Scheel had passed written material from one contact person to the next within clandestine communist cells and had seen how easily such connections were lost if a meeting did not materialize, due to one party being arrested. In a relaxed group of friends and discussion with like-minded people, it was easy to find supporters for an action.

Acts of resistance

From 1933 onwards, the Berlin groups connected to Schulze-Boysen and Harnack resisted the Nazis by:
From mid-1936, the Spanish Civil War preoccupied the Schulze-Boysen group. Through Walter Küchenmeister, the Schulze-Boysen group began to discuss more concrete actions, and during these meetings would listen to foreign radio stations from London, Paris and Moscow. A plan was formed to take advantage of Schulze-Boysen employment, and through this the group were able to get detailed information on Germany's support of Francisco Franco. Beginning in 1937, in the Wilmersdorf waiting room of Dr Elfriede Paul, began distributing the first leaflet on the Spanish Civil War.
After the Munich Agreement, Schulze-Boysen created a second leaflet with Walter Küchenmeister, that declared the annexation of the Sudetenland in October 1938 as a further step on the way to a new world war. This leaflet was called Der Stoßtrupp or The Raiding Patrol, and condemned the Nazi government and argued against the government's propaganda. A document that was used at the trial of Schulze-Boysen indicated that only 40 to 50 copies of the leaflet were distributed.
The Invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, was seen as the beginning of the feared world war, but also as an opportunity to eliminate Nazi rule and to a thorough transformation of German society. Hitler's victories in France and Norway in 1940 encouraged them to expect the replacement of the Nazi regime, above all from the Soviet Union, not from Western capitalism. They believed that the Soviet Union would keep Germany as a sovereign state after its victory and that they wanted to work towards a corresponding opposition without domination by the Communist Party of Germany.

Call for popular uprising

AGIS leaflets
From 1942 onwards, the group started to produce leaflets that were signed with AGIS in reference to the Spartan King Agis IV, who fought against corruption for his people. The name of the newspaper Agis was originally the idea of John Rittmeister. The pamphlets had titles like The becoming of the Nazi movement, Call for opposition, Freedom and violence and Appeal to All Callings and Organisations to resist the government. The writing of the AGIS leaflet series was a mix of Schulze-Boysen and Walter Küchenmeister, a communist political writer, who would often include copy from KPD members and through contacts.
They were often left in phone booths, or selected addresses from the phone book. Extensive precautions were taken, including wearing gloves, using many different typewriters and destroying the carbon paper. John Graudenz also produced, running duplicate mimeograph machines in the apartment of Anne Krauss.
On 15 February 1942, the group wrote the large 6 page pamphlet called Die Sorge Um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk! (English:The concern for Germany's future goes through the people!. The master copy was arranged by the potter Cato Bontjes van Beek and the pamphlet was written up by Maria Terwiel on her typewriter, five copies at a time. The paper describes how the care of Germany's future is decided by the people... and called for the opposition to the war the Nazis all Germans, who now all threaten the future of all. A copy survived to the present day.
The text first analysed the current situation: contrary to the Nazi propaganda, most German armies were in retreat, the number of war dead was in the millions. Inflation, scarcity of goods, plant closures, labour agitation and corruption in State authorities were occurring all the time. Then the text examined German war crimes:
The Soviet Paradise exhibition
In May 1942, Joseph Goebbels held a Nazi propaganda exhibition called The Soviet Paradise in Lustgarten, with the express purpose of justifying the invasion of the Soviet Union to the German people.
Both the Harnack's and Kuckhoff's spent half a day at the exhibition. For Greta Kuckhoff particularly and her friends, the most distressing aspect of the exhibition was the installation about SS measures against Russian "partisans". The exhibition contained images of firing-squads, bodies of young girls, some still children, who had been hung and were dangling from ropes. The group decided to act. It was Fritz Thiele and his wife Hannelore who printed stickers using a child's toy rubber stamp kit. In a campaign initiated by John Graudenz on 17 May 1942, Schulze-Boysen, Marie Terwiel and nineteen others, mostly people from the group around Rittmeister, travelled across five Berlin neighbourhoods to paste the stickers over the original exhibition posters with the message:
On 18 May, Herbert Baum a Jewish communist, who had contact with Schulze-Boysen group through Walter Husemann, delivered incendiary bombs to the exhibition in the hope of destroying it. Although 11 people were injured, the whole episode was covered up by the government and the action lead to the arrest of 250 Jews including Baum himself. Following the action, Harnack asked the Kuckoff's to revisit the exhibition to determine if any damage had been done to it, but little damage was visble.
.

The von Scheliha Group

was a calvary officer, diplomat and later resistance fighter who was recruited by Soviet intelligence while in Warsaw in 1934. Although a member of the Nazi party since 1938, he took an increasingly critical stance against the Nazi regime by 1938 at the latest. He became an informant to journalist Rudolf Herrnstadt Intelligence from von Scheliha would be sent to Herrnstadt, via the cutout Ilse Stöbe, who would then pass it to the Soviet embassy in Warsaw. In September 1939, Scheliha was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office, that was created to counter foreign press and radio news by creating propaganda about the German occupation policy in Poland. This necessitated a move back to Berlin, and Stöbe followed, attaining a position arranged by von Scheliha in the press section of the Foreign Office. that enabled her to pass documents from von Scheliha to a representative of TASS.
Von Scheliha position in the information department exposed him to reports and images of Nazi atrocities, enabling him to verify the veracity of foreign reports of Nazi officials. By 1941, von Scheliha had become increasingly dissatisfied with the Nazi regime and began to resist by collaborating with Henning von Tresckow. Scheliha secretly made a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo, and in particular, on murders of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of newly established extermination camps. He informed his friends first before later attempting to notify the Allies, including k a trip to Switzerland with information on Aktion T4. His later reports exposed the Final Solution. After Operation Barbarossa severed Soviet lines of communication, they made attempts to reconnect with Von Scheliha but the effort failed..

Individuals and small groups

Other small groups and individuals, who knew little or nothing about each other, each resisted the National Socialists in their own way until the Gestapo arrested them and treated them as a common espionage organization from 1942 to 1943.
was a favourite place for Soviet espionage to establish operations before World War II as it was geographically close to the centre of Europe, provided good commercial opportunities between Belgium and the rest of Europe and most important of all, the Belgian government were indifferent to foreign espionage operations that were conducted as long as they were against foreign powers and not Belgium itself.
The first agents to arrive in Belgium were technicians. The Red Army Intelligence agent and radio specialist Johann Wenzel arrived in January 1936.

France

The Trepper Group

was an agent of the Red Army Intelligence, with the code name of Otto, and had been working with them since 1930. Trepper was an experienced intelligence officer and an extremely resourceful and capable man who was completely at home in the west, a man who could not be drawn in conversation, who lived a concealed life and whose special talent was a keen judge of people that enabled him to penetrate significant groups.
During the 1930s he had worked to create a large pool of intelligence sources, through contact with the French Communist Party. During early 1939, he was sent to Brussels, posing as a Canadian industrialist, to establish a commercial cover for a spy network in France and the Low Countries. Trepper established the cover company the Foreign Excellent Raincoat Company in Brussels, an export company with offices in many major European ports, to sell crockery and raincoats. After the conquest of Belgium in the month of May 1940, he fled to Paris and established the cover companies of Simexco in Brussels and Simex in Paris. Both companies sold black market goods to the Germans and made a profit doing so. Belgian-born socialite Suzanne Spaak joined the Trepper group in Paris after seeing the conduct of the Nazi occupiers in her country.
Trepper directed seven GRU networks in France and each had its own group leader with a focus on gathering a specific type of intelligence. Trepper constructed them in a manner so that there independent, working in parallel with only the group leader having direct contact with Trepper. Regular meeting places were used for contact point at predetermined times and that could only be set by Trepper. This type of communication meant that Trepper could contact the group leader but not vice versa and stringent security measures were built in at every step. The seven networks in France were as follows,
These networks steadily gathered military and industrial intelligence in Occupied Europe, including data on troop deployments, industrial production, raw material availability, aircraft production, and German tank designs. Trepper was also able to get important information through his contacts with important Germans. Posing as a German businessman, he had dinner parties at which he acquired information on the morale and attitudes of German military figures, troop movements, and plans for the Eastern Front.
During December 1941, German security forces stopped Trepper's transmitter in Brussels. Trepper himself was arrested on 5 December 1942 in Paris.
The Germans tried to enlist his help as part a sophisticated anti-Soviet operation, to continue transmitting disinformation to Moscow under German control, as part of a playback operation. According to orders, and relying on training, Trepper agreed to work for the Germans, and began transmitting, which may have included hidden warnings, but saved his life. During September 1943 he escaped and hid with the French Resistance.
Operations by the Trepper team had been entirely eliminated by the spring of 1943. Most agents were executed, including Suzanne Spaak at Fresnes Prison, just thirteen days before the Liberation of Paris during 1944. Trepper himself survived the war.

Switzerland

Rote Drei

The Red Three were perhaps the most important espionage network in the war, as they could work relatively undisturbed. The head of the Soviet intelligence service was Maria Josefovna Poliakova, a Soviet 4th Department agent, who first arrived in Switzerland in 1937 to direct operations. The other important leader in the Switzerland group was Ursula Kuczynski, codenamed Sonia, a colonel of the GRU, who has been sent to Switzerland in late 1938, to recruit a new espionage network of agents that would infiltrate Germany. Poliakova passed control to the new director of the Soviet intelligence service in Switzerland, sometimes between 1939 and 1940. The new director was Alexander Radó, codenamed Dora, who held the secret Red Army rank of Major General.
Radó formed several intelligence groups in France and Germany, before arriving in Switzerland in late 1936 with his family. In 1936 Radó formed Geopress, a news agency specialising in maps and geographic information as a cover for intelligence work, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, business began to flourish. In 1940, Radó met Alexander Foote, an English Soviet agent, who joined Ursula Kuczynski's network in 1938, and who would become the most important radio operator for Radó's network. In March 1942, Radó made contact with Rudolf Roessler who ran the Lucy spy ring. Roessler was able to provide prompt access to the secrets of the German High Command. This included the pending details of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union and many more, over a period of two years. In a 1949 study by MI5 concluded that Roessler was a true mercenary who demanded payments for his reports that ran into thousands of Swiss francs over the course of the two years. This resulted in Dübendorfer being continually short of money, as Soviet intelligence insisted the link be maintained.
Radó's established three networks in Switzerland that became known as the Rote Drei. The Rote Drei was a German appellation based on the number of transmitters or operators serving the network, and is perhaps misleading, as at times there was four, sometimes even five.
The three principal agents above were chiefly an organisation for producing intelligence for the Soviet Union. But some of the information that was collected for the Rote Drei was sent to the west through a Czech Colonel, Karel Sedláček. In 1935, Sedláček was trained in Prague for a year in 1935, and sent to Switzerland in 1937 by General František Moravec. By 1938, Sedláček was a friend of Major who was Director of the unofficial Bureau Ha, a supposed press-cuttings agency, in fact a covert arm of the Swiss Intelligence. Hausamann has been introduced to the Lucy spy ring by Xaver Schnieper a junior officer in the Bureau. It was unknown whether Hausamann was passing information to Lucy, who passed it to Sedláček who forwarded it London Czechs in exile, or via an intermediary.
Radio messages examined
The radio stations that were known were established at:
Wilhelm F. Flicke, who was a cryptanalyst and unofficial historian at the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, the German High Command signal intelligence agency, worked on the messages transmitted by the Swiss group during World War II and estimates some 5500 messages, about 5 a day for three years, were sent. The Trepper Report stated that between the radio stations that were established by the three subgroups between 1941 and 1943, well over 2000 militarily important messages were sent to the GRU Central office. In September 1993, the CIA Library undertook an analysis of the messages and estimated that a reasonable number would be 5000.

Networking

Berliners with foreign representatives

From 1933 to December 1941 the Harnacks had contact with the US Embassy counsellor Donald R. Heath and Martha Dodd, the daughter of the then US Ambassador William Dodd. The Harnack's would often attend at receptions at the American embassy as well at parties organised by Martha Dodd, until about 1937. As like-minded people, the group was convinced that the population would revolt against the Nazi's and when it did not, it convinced the group that new avenues were needed to defeat Hitler. From the summer of 1935, Harnack worked on economic espionage for the Soviet Union, and economic espionage for the United States by November 1939. Harnack was convinced that America would play a part in defeating Nazi Germany.
In September 1940, Alexander Mikhailovich Korotkov acting under his codename of Alexander Erdberg, a Soviet intelligence officer who was part of the Soviet Trade Delegation in Berlin, won over Arvid Harnack as a spy for the Soviet Embassy. Harnack had been an informant but in a meeting with Korotkov in the Harnacks top floor apartment at Woyrschstrasse in Berlin and later in a meeting arranged by Erdberg in the Soviet Embassy to ensure he was not a decoy, he finally convinced Harnack who was reluctant to agree. Several reasons have been advanced as to why Harnack decided to become a spy, including a need for money, being ideologically driven and possibly blackmailed by Russian intelligence. It was known that Harnack had planned an independent existence for his friends. In statement by Erdberg discovered after the war, he thought Harnack was not motived by money, nor ideologically driven but he was specifically building an anti-fascist organisation for Germany as opposed to an espionage network for Russian intelligence. He considered himself a German patriot.
From 26 September 1940, Harnack passed on knowledge received from Schulze-Boysen about the planned attack on the Soviet Union to Korotkov, but not about the open and branched structure of his group of friends. In March 1941, Schulze-Boysen informed Korotkov directly about his knowledge of the German attack plans.
During May 1941, Korotkov had taken delivery of two shortwave radio sets that had been delivered in the Soviet Union embassy diplomatic pouch and handed them to Greta Kuckhoff without precise instructions on how to use them, nor in how to maintain contact with the Soviet leadership, in case of war. The two radio sets were of different design. The first set had been damaged by Korotkov and had been returned to the Soviet Union for repair, returned and kept by Greta Kuckhoff at 22 June 1941. That other set was battery powered, with a range of 600 miles that was passed to Coppi on the instruction of Schulze-Boyson at the Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher's apartment. On 26 June 1941, Coppi sent a message:"A thousand greetings to all friends". Moscow replied "We have received and read your test message. The substitution of letters for numbers and vice versa is to be done using the permanent number 38745 and the codeword Schraube", and to transmit at a predefined frequency and time. After that, the batteries were too weak to reach Moscow. The second set was passed to Coppi at the Eichkamp S-Bahn railway station. The second set was more powerful, being AC powered. Coppi would later accidentally destroy the AC-powered transmitter by connecting it to a DC power socket, destroying the transformer and Vacuum tube. Coppi and the Harnack/Shulze-Boysen resistance groups never received sufficient training from Korotkov. Indeed, when Greta Kuckhoff was trained she concluded that her own technical preparations were "extraordinarily inadequate". Only a few members of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack Group knew about these radio experiments.

Contact with other groups

Reorganisation

This is scout section.
p. 86 of perrault, Rita Arnould.
The radio transmission, sent by Johann Wenzel in Brussels

Persecution by Nazi authorities

Unmasking

The events that led up to the exposure of the Red Orchestra were facilitated by a number of blunders by Soviet intelligence, over several months. The radio transmission that exposed them, was intercepted on the 3.58am on 26 June 1941 and was the first of many that were to be intercepted by the Funkabwehr. The first message received at the intercept station in Zelenogradsk had the format: Klk from Ptx... Klk from Ptx... Klk from Ptx... 2606. 03. 3032 wds No. 14 qbv. This was followed by thirty-two 5-figure message groups with a morse end of message terminator containing AR 50385 KLK from PTX. Up until that point, the Nazi counter-intelligence operation didn't believe that there was a Soviet network operating in Germany and the occupied territories. By September 1941, over 250 messages had been intercepted by the Funkabwehr, but took several months for them to reduce the suspected area of transmission, to within the Belgium area. On 30 November 1941, close range direction-finding teams moved into Brussels and almost immediately found three transmitter signals. The Abwehr choose a location at 101 Rue des Atrébates, that provided the strongest signal from PTX, and on 12 December 1941 2pm, the house was raided by the Abwehr.
Inside the house was courier Rita Arnould, along with Soviet agent Sophia Poznanska. The radio transmitter that was still warm. The woman were trying to burn enciphered messages, which were recovered. The man was radio operator, Anton Danilov. The Germans found a hidden room holding the material and equipment needed to produce forged documents, including blank passports and inks. Rita Arnould's, psychological composure collapsed when she was captured, stating; I'm glad it is all over. While Arnould became an informer, Poznanska committed suicide in Saint-Gilles prison, after being tortured. The next day Mikhail Makarov turned up at the house and was arrested. Trepper also visited the house, but his documentation was so authentic he was released.
Arnould identified two passports belonging to Trepper and Gurevich, his deputy in Belgium. From the scraps of paper recovered, Wilhelm Vauck of the Funkabwehr was able to discover the code being used was based on a chequerboard cypher with a book key. Arnould, recalled the agents regularly read the same books and was able to identify the name of one as Le miracle du Professeur Wolmar by Guy de Téramond. After scouring most of Europe for correct the edition, a copy was found in Paris on 17 May 1942. The Funkabwehr has discovered that of the three hundred intercepts in their possession, only 97 here enciphered using a phrase from the Téramond book. The Funkabwehr never discovered that some of the remaining messages had been enciphered using La femme de trente ans by Honoré de Balzac.
Following the arrests, the other two transmitters had remained off the air for six months, except for routine transmission. Trepper assumed the investigation had died down and ordered the transmissions to restart. On 30 July 1942, the Funkabwehr identified a house at 12 Rue de Namur, Brussels and arrested GRU radio operator, Johann Wenzel. Coded messages discovered in the house contained details of such startling content, the plans for Case Blue, that Henry Piepe immediately drove to Berlin from Brussels to report to German High Command. His actions resulted in the formation of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle.
Vauck succeeded in decrypting around 200 messages belonging to Soviet intelligence. On 15 July 1942, Vauck decrypted a message that was dated 10 October 1941. The message was addressed to KENT, and had the format:KL3 3 DE RTX 1010-1725 WDS GBD FROM DIREKTOR PERSONAL. When it was decrypted, it gave the location of three addresses in Berlin.

Arrests

Trepper was arrested on 5 December 1942 by Abwehr officer Henry Piepe and Karl Giering.

Judgement and execution

All of the men in the Red Orchestra were executed in the most gruesome manner, hanging by a meat-hook, at the Plotzensee prison in Berlin.

Reception after the war

German contemporary witnesses

In the first post-war years, the performance and role model of the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group were unreservedly recognized as an important part of the German resistance against the Nazis. In his book Offiziere gegen Hitler on the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944 plot, resistance fighter and later writer Fabian von Schlabrendorff paid tribute to the Germans executed as members of the Red Orchestra.
In 1946, the German historian and author, Ricarda Huch publicly called for contributions to her planned collection of biographies of executed resistance fighters Für die Märtyrer der Freiheit.
Huch explained the task as
She named the men and women of the Red Orchestra on the forefront. Günther Weisenborn published Der lautlose Aufstand in 1953, based on material collected from Ricarda Huch, upon her death.

Western Intelligence

Western intelligence agencies were interested in the Red Orchestra after the war, as they hoped for information about the workings of Soviet foreign espionage.
In June 1945, British and American intelligence agencies submitted the first report on the Red Orchestra, the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle and the playback operation run by Heinz Pannwitz. Allied intelligence agencies questioned a large number of people and came to conclusion that remnants of the Red Orchestra could still exist. The defector Igor Gouzenko warned them that Soviet agents were sleepers before being activated. At the same time MI5 came to the conclusion that the Trepper organisation was working against the west.
The British also interrogated Nazi informers, e.g. Horst Kopkow who was head of the special commission Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle. In August 1945, Hilde Purwin told the American Counterintelligence Corps about a secret Berlin spy ring for the Soviet Union, about which the judge advocate Egon Koepsch and general judge Manfred Roeder could give information about its dismantling. These were then put out for investigation.
On 23 December 1947, Manfred Roeder along with Walter Huppenkothen had become informants for the CIC, placing them out of reach of a prosecution brought by Adolf Grimme and Greta Kuckoff. In 1942, senior Gestapo officer Huppenkothen was charge of department IVa for counter-espionage. In his first report, Roeder testified that the Red Orchestra was still active and controlled by the Soviets. In January 1948, he produced an additional 37-page report that identified all members of the Red Orchestra and their functions. He, Roeder, could not avert the death sentences, because Hitler's "People's Pest Ordinance" left him no choice at the time. The "civil justice system" had carried out the sentences and carried out a "reconstruction" of the execution site. Hanging was more humane than the fall-by-case. Hitler alone was responsible for rejecting the requests for clemency. He had demanded a summary condemnation of all the imprisoned members against which the Reichskriegsgericht had successfully passed on a case-by-case examination. Huppenkothen also pointed to Gestapo's experience with communist espionage and added a list of Gestapo "experts." On 19 January 1948 Roeder released another report with photographs of Red Orchestra members, describing it as a spy network spread across Europe that the Soviet Union had built up since the 1930s to conquer the continent.
By 1948, although the evidence obtained from the CIC was dubious, the Central Intelligence Agency were convinced that Red Three in Switzerland was still active. Roeder's description of the group indicated how little the Nazi state knew about Swiss group. As a result, the Allied services took on the Gestapo myth from their informants. However, by 13 May 1948, a CIA memo was in circulation that detailed how Roeder had delivered no concrete evidence.
For the British, the most important documents were papers captured by the Gestapo, known as the Robinson papers by Henry Robinson, a German comiterm agent in Paris with close links to Leopold Trepper. The papers indicated that Robinson had been liaising with Red Orchestra in Great Britain. Evelyn McBarnet, an agent of MI5 had worked on the papers to try and identify the names, but they were either aliases, post-boxes, or locations that had been bombed. Another officer of MI5, Michael Hanley also worked on the papers in the 1950s. He identified more than 5000 names belonging to the Red Orchestra organisation.

Federal German Justice

On 15 September 1945, Adolf Grimme filed a complaint against Manfred Roeder with the military government of the British Occupation Zone in Hanover. Along with Greta Kuckhoff and Günther Weisenborn, Grimme also reported Roeder to the International Military Tribunal for crimes against humanity. By January 1947, the Nuremberg prosecutors were convinced he should tried for war crimes, but after examining the complaint, no charges were brought.
On 7 January 1949 Roeder was released and returned to his family in Neetze. In October 1948, the Nuremberg prosecutors turned the case over to the German courts and the Lüneburg public prosecutor was tasked with pursuing the prosecution. Nuremberg prosecutor, Hans Meuschel hoped that due to Control Council Act No. 10, the German law that recognised crimes against humanity, that justice would prevail against Roeder in the court of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice. Lüneburg prosecutor Hans-Jürgen Finck investigated Roeder, producing a 1732-page report in 1951, half of it recording in detail the supposed crimes of the Red Orchestra. Finck stated in the report that It cannot be refuted that the death sentences were lawful. Roeder was seen by Finck as a victim, not a perpetrator. On 1 November 1951, Finck closed the case. The Lower Saxony Ministry of Justice kept its final report under wraps for years, as it obviously coincided with Roeder's assessment of the "Red Orchestra".
This interpretation prevailed in the minds of the West German public of the 1950s and was also represented by leading West German historians at the time. Since then, the Red Orchestra in the Federal Republic of Germany has been largely portrayed as a purely secret service organization. Helmut Kohl wrote in a letter to Harro's brother Hartmut Schulze-Boysen in 1987 that the German resistance consisted of the group around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the White Rose, that the Red Orchestra did not belong to it.

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union kept quiet about the Berlin group of friends for twenty years. On 6 October 1969, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner to Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff, Ilse Stöbe and Hansheinrich Kummerow. Günther Weisenborn, Karl Behrens and Albert Hoessler received the Order of the Patriotic War 1st Class.
Articles in Pravda and Izvestia praised the resistance of those so honoured, but interpreted it only as confirmation of the unifying force of the communist Popular Front policy under the dominance of the KPD, which was the only organized anti-fascist resistance group that had specifically collected information for the Soviet Union. Only publicly available Western sources were used in the articles. The Soviet intelligence files remained under lock and key.
In 1974, Juri Korolkov published Die innere Front Roman über d. Rote Kapelle that was about the group.

East Germany

From 1949 onwards, the GDR banned the publication of everything related to Soviet intelligence. Those of the German resistance who had contact with Soviet intelligence and what information they had, remained secret. In December 1966, a plan by Erich Mielke was organised in liaison with the KGB to formerly identify the scouts and honour them. By August 1967, public appreciation of the group began in earnest when proposals for the posthumous honouring the German group as a Scout organisation were made that specified the award for scouts of the Red Orchestra.
In 1970, a DEFA feature film KLK an PTX... was released that portrayed the official histories of the Red Orchestra as a group dependent on the anti-fascism of the KPD and therefore only capable of joint action. Here too, the intelligence activity was overemphasized, but it was seen positively here. Since the 1960s, all biographies of the members of the Red Orchestra in the GDR have been adapted by the Stasi to give the GDR secret service a story with anti-fascist roots. The 1979 book Rote Kapelle gegen Hitler. by Soviet military historian Alexander Blank and Stasi officer Julius Mader is used today as an example of a manipulated historiograph. The GDR's image of history solidified the false image of the Red Orchestra in the Federal Republic as a communist spy group.

Historial Research

The first attempts to secure sources on the history of the German resistance against Nazism were made by the branches of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in all German occupation zones. In 1948, Klaus Lehmann documented his information about the German resistance group around Shulze-Boysen and Harnack for the Union in East Berlin.
After positive appreciations of the immediate post-war period, West German historians such as Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter judged the Red Orchestra. Rothfel, writing for an American audience in The German Opposition to Hitler, An Appraisal, wrote for the sake of historical justice, placed the resistance fighters of the 20 July plot, as well as the Harnack group at the centre of his study. Rothfel conceded that the German resistance to Hitler was much more extensive than could have been expected under the conditions of terror and lauded the convictions of the resistance fighters and their vision of a European mission. Ritter's Carl Goerdeler und die Deutsche Widerstandsbewegung, focused more on the resisters values and ideas. Ritter stated that not every resister who was unsatisfied or criticized the Nazis could be included in the German resistance movement. He was vehement in stating that socialist opposition against the Nazi state did not deserve the honorary title of Resistance. In his evaluation he stated, The group had apparently nothing to do with German Resistance, one should have no doubts about this....Any person who can persuade a German soldier to defect or betray important secrets...is a traitor.
The situation remained decisive in the 1960s, when new publications by writers Gilles Perrault and Der Spiegel journalist Heinz Höhne were published. Perrault focused more on Western European resistance cells. Höhne used a collection of 500 radio messages belonging to veteran radio cipher officer Wilhelm F. Flicke, as his research base. however, Flicke had worked for another department between 1942 and 1943 and did not learn of the Red Orchestra until 1944. In 1949 and 1953, he published two books, that are now considered sensational and a form of Colportage novel without a valid source base. Perrault researched extensively in newspapers and interviewed witnesses but staging his own research. Perrault also interviewed contemporary Gestapo witnesses knowing they were responsible for torture. Witnesses like Harry Piepe were paid to tell their story.
In 1983, historian Peter Steinbach and designer, Hans Peter Hoch were commissioned by Richard von Weizsäcker, then mayor of Berlin, to fully document the German resistance to Nazism, in all its diversity. In 1989, the Memorial to the German Resistance established a permanent exhibition on the subject.
The effort by people like Weizsäcker, led to an intensification of research, but it was only with the ending of the Eastern Bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union on 8 December 1991, that the evaluation of Soviet archive documentation on the Red Orchestra could begin, without the lens of ideology intruding. In 2002, for the first time, Hans Coppi and Soviet political historian Boris Lwowitsch Chawkin and historian Yuri N. Zorya brought to light many original documents from the Russian archives, which refuted the myth that the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen groups were a spy organisation.
In 2009, a study by American political scientist Anne Nelson that was published as a book, came to the following conclusions:
Johannes Tuchel, Director of the Memorial to the German Resistance commented on the astonishing agreement between the east and the west, in the reception that the group received. Tuchel noted how the historical context, as defined by the Gestapo, was transported into the Cold War and as result, falsified the legacy of the group, e.g. the impressive AGIS pamphlets.
In 2017, French author Guillaume Bourgeois, published the La véritable histoire de l'Orchestre rouge, offering a thorough analysis of the Trepper group. It tries to address the lack of sources in prior years that is accomplished by a rigorous examination of German and Soviet archives, in an attempt to provide an accurate historical revision. Bourgeois's conclusion on how little strategic information came from the apparatus of the Orchestra, i.e. from Brussels or Paris, was new.

Karl Barth tribute

The theologian Karl Barth made a rare exception to the West German assessment of the 1950s when he declared the group to be a model of the church resistance because of its openness to people from different social classes, its efforts to protect Jews and the timely clarification of the War Plans of the Nazi's. In his speech to the Hessian state government during the Volkstrauertag of 1954 in Wiesbaden, he stated:
These and other speech's provoked outrage and rejection in the audience at the time.

Painting

From 1936 to 1941, the artist Carl Baumann was a student at the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Baumann was also a resistance fighter, who was in contact with Schulze-Boysen. In 1941, his famous painting located in the Stadtmuseum in Münster in which he portrays Harro Schulze-Boysen, Walter Küchenmeister and Kurt Schumacher building a bridge away from Nazism.
The writer Günther Weisenborn was arrested as a member of the resistance group in 1942 and was sentenced to death, but was later reduced to ten years in prison. Weisenborn dedicated his play in three acts The Illegals, to the resistance group, which premiered on 21 March 1946. In it, he portrayed two organized resistance fighters as tragic individuals whose love for each other fails due to the forced isolation and secrecy of their resistance work.
The writer and artist, Peter Weiss dedicated his magnum opus, three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance to the resistance from 1971 to 1981 celebrating their courage. For him, the resistance was the organization in which it was possible to overcome the division of the labour movement into social democrats and communists in the common struggle against fascism.

Film

In 1970, DEFA made the film KLK an PTX – Die Rote Kapelle under the direction of Horst E. Brandt based on a screenplay by Wera and Claus Küchenmeister. The Harnack's were played by Horst Drinda and Irma Münch, Horst Schulze and Barbara Adolph played the Kuckhoff's, Klaus Piontek and Jutta Wachowiak played the Schulze-Boysen's.
In 1972, the ARD released the multi-part TV series Die rote Kapelle by Franz Peter Wirth based on a screenplay by Peter Adler and Hans Gottschalk.
In 1989, Yuri Ozerov film, Stalingrad was released, in which the Red Orchestra's espionage activities are one of several storylines.
In 2003, Stefan Roloff's second documentary, The Rote Kapelle, a portrait of his late father, Helmut Roloff, a resistance fighter and companion book Rote Kapelle corrected the Cold War-shaped image for the first time and told the true story of the resistance group through interviews with survivors and contemporary witnesses. It was premiered at the Memorial to the German Resistance, followed by cinema screenings, including in Berlin and New York, where he was nominated for Best Foreign Film 2005 by the US Women Critics.
In 2016, the documentary The good enemies. My Father, the Red Orchestra and I by Christian Weisenborn, which consists of private film material, excerpts of letters and diaries as well as interviews with relatives and authors as a cinematic biography. Wiesenborn devotes a great deal of attention to the representation of the perspective of women in the resistance group and recalls that the story of resistance is still told primarily as one of men in the resistance.

People of the Red Orchestra

Literature

Documents

The Der Spiegel articles of 1968 by Gilles Perrault and Heinz Höhne contributed to idea of the Red Orchestra being considered communist.