If not us, who? If not now, when?

German resistance to the Nazis was not that effective. But it was perhaps more widespread than we think. A recent book gives a vivid insight into subversion at the heart of the Third Reich

The history of German resistance against the Nazis is a subject maybe not well understood in Britain or the US. We are familiar with the French resistance and Italian partisans, but of the German resistance, most of us would know only of the July plotters and Claus von Stauffenberg, who got within an ace of killing Hitler in 1944.

In fact, there were numerous plots to kill Hitler, and at least two others got quite close. One, in 1939, was by carpenter Georg Elser, whose bomb in a Munich beer hall exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left it early. Then in 1943 a Wehrmacht officer, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, planted a bomb on Hitler’s plane in Smolensk. Disguised a package of cognac bottles, the bomb iced up and didn’t detonate, forcing von Schlabrendorff to rush to Germany and retrieve it. (Elser was executed; von Schlabrendorff nearly was too, but survived and had a distinguished postwar career as a judge.)

More generally, quite a few Germans did take part in the Widerstand, or resistance, either active or passive. How many, is very hard to know. But there are startling stories – not least the so-called Edelweiss Pirates, a loose grouping of teenagers who rejected the regimented nature of the Hitler Youth (and occasionally beat up its members). They seem also to have done heavier stuff such as helping deserters from the Wehrmacht. But they had no love of the Allies either; they seem just to have hated everyone. Other, more organized resistance groups spread propaganda. The best known outside Germany is the White Rose, a Munich student group that was active for only six or seven months before its leading members, Hans and Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst, were caught and guillotined in 1943.

However, the circles around charismatic Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, his attractive wife Libertas and the economist Arvid Harnack probably did more, and for longer. Besides propaganda work, they also made a determined attempt to pass information to the Allies. When they were finally caught, the Nazis were badly rattled to find so much subversion at the heart of the German establishment, and they reacted with savagery. 

The Schulze-Boysens and their friends are remembered today as part of the Soviet spy ring – the Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra. But the reality was messier. Now we have a vivid insight into the Schulze-Boysens and the Rote Kapelle, thanks to a German writer, Norman Ohler.

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Ohler is a versatile writer. A German journalist who spent time on the West Bank as a writer-in-residence, he has also been a novelist and once collaborated on a screenplay with Wim Wenders. In more recent years Ohler, now 51, has put his hand to writing history. In 2015 he published an account of the role of drugs in Nazi Germany. The book, published in English the following year as Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, suggested that drugs such as coke, methamphetamine and crystal meth played a huge role in the war; workers and soldiers were encouraged to take them, and much of the German high command was basically off its tits. The book was a huge success and established Ohler in the anglophone world. It was vivid – some would say lurid; it mixed a factual style with a much more popular approach, and attracted some criticism. But it also drew admiration from some serious historians – not least Antony Beevor and Sir Ian Kershaw, both authorities on the era.

Now Ohler has turned his attention to the German resistance with a biography of Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, the glamorous couple at the heart of the Rote Kapelle. The book’s English title is The Bohemians – The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis. It is a big claim. Do the Schulze-Boysens deserve it? What did they achieve?

 Harro Schulze-Boysen was born in 1909 in Kiel, into a family with strong naval links; his father was a naval officer and his great-uncle, who he knew as a child, was Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. It was a patriotic officer-class background, and Harro seems always to have been very much a member of that class all his life, despite the odd twist it would later take. He studied at Freiburg and later at Humboldt University in Berlin. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he was running a leftish periodical, Der Gegner (The Opponent), and promoting political discussion; if Ohler is to be believed, he reached out across the political divide.

But in the spring of 1933 Der Gegner was shut down by the Brownshirts and he and a friend, Harry Erlanger, were arrested and very badly beaten. Erlanger died. Schulze-Boysen survived, being released with the help of his young fashion-designer girlfriend, Regine Schütt, who managed to find him and enlisted the help of his family. The latter was well-connected and Harro’s mother got him sprung. But the beatings had damaged his kidneys, which never fully recovered; the SA had also carved a swastika into his thigh.

What Harro Schulze-Boysen did next seems odd, and Ohler never quite explains it. The 24-year-old donned uniform and went off to do a maritime observer’s course at the German Aviation School in Warnemünde. His entry into the course seems to have been organized by his naval-officer father to get him the hell out of Berlin and away from trouble. But Ohler suggests this was also a move by Harro to go into deep cover so that he could continue to resist the regime from within. Probably neither is a full explanation. Neither is it completely clear why Harro suddenly decided to dump Regine Schütt, who had helped get him out of the hands of the Gestapo. Maybe Harro wanted to start with a fresh sheet so as to keep the Gestapo’s eyes off him. At any rate, Schütt disappears from the story and Ohler does not say what became of her. (In fact she became the single mother of a girl not long afterwards; both survived the war and eventually emigrated to Canada, where the daughter became a noted artist.)

Harro went further. On completion of the course he got a job in the Air Ministry, which was expanding rapidly. From now on he was in uniform, becoming a Luftwaffe staff officer. And before long he met 20-year-old Libertas Haas-Heye, an aristocrat from one of Germany’s poshest families – and a Nazi sympathizer. They married, and Libertas was persuaded to abandon the Nazi cause. It may have helped to convince her that Harro had been so badly beaten by the Gestapo that he found it painful to have sex with her.

From then on, the Schulze-Boysens were in it up to their necks.

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Harro was involved in anti-Nazi plots from about 1935, soon after he joined the Air Ministry. In 1937 he tried to send the Spanish Republicans the names of infiltrators within their ranks. He also established contact with the Soviets and in 1941, at huge risk, he and his associate, senior Government economist Arvid Harnack, managed to warn them about Operation Barbarossa, including attack details and the date, June 22. Their detailed warning was brought to Stalin by Moscow Centre on June 17 1941. Stalin refused to believe it. “Send your ‘source’ back to his whore of a mother,” he scrawled on it. Harro and Harnack continued to supply the Soviets with as much information as they could, although the Soviets appear to have been disorganized and not always helpful.

Harro and Libertas in 1935, a year
before their marriage
(Deutsches Historisches Museum)

It is this connection that has led to Schulze-Boysen’s network being seen as part of the Soviet spy ring, the Rote Kapelle; and after the war the Eastern bloc played up this connection. But while some other members of the group did have Soviet sympathies, there is no evidence that the Schulze-Boysens ever did. Harro’s motivations were different; he realized the Nazis might destroy Germany and opposed them not because he wasn’t patriotic, but because he was. If he helped the Soviets it was because they could hurt Hitler. He also attempted to contact the British to warn them that their naval codes had been broken, and that the Germans knew exactly when their Arctic convoys were sailing and by which route. The economist Arvid Harnack did have some Communist links, but was never a Party member and up to 1940 supplied detailed information on Germany’s war economy to the US State Department via Donald Heath, an American diplomat he knew through his American wife.

Meanwhile Libertas worked in the film industry, initially as a publicist for MGM; later she managed to get a job as a censor in the documentary film department of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Here she collected photographs, letters and other evidence of atrocities from the occupied territories, and compiled them into an archive that she intended to hand to the Allies after the war. She had no shortage of material; some of those at the front were only too pleased to describe how they had done the Fuhrer’s bidding, and Libertas had no problem getting them to tell her more. She was appalled by what she saw. Harro also used it as material for underground flyers. Some of the material was hard to take. One photo that passed through Libertas’s hands showed a family of four, including an infant, being lines up to be shot; one of them, a little girl, has a rag doll and politely stood it in line to be shot, too. Libertas reproduced some of the material at the Ministry itself and smuggled it out for her archive.

The Schulze-Boysens also built up a large circle of fellow-resisters, many from Berlin’s underground bohemia, and organized contacts and assistance for French and other forced labourers. Other activities included the printing and distribution of flyers and widespread stickering of walls and buildings with subversive slogans. In so doing, the couple and their friends became a refuge for many from the nightmare, a place where they could meet kindred spirits, gain a sense of purpose – and feel they were safe, if only for a few hours at a time.

A good account of how one might be drawn into the Schulze-Boysens’ activities is given, not in Ohler’s book, but in an earlier one by Anne Nelson, Red Orchestra (2009). Cato Bontjes van Beek was a 20-year-old potter from Bremen (her family name came from her Dutch father). She had taken up active resistance against the regime after seeing the fate of Jewish neighbours, and met Libertas Schulze-Boysen at a work gathering in Leipzig. They became friends. Not long afterwards Bontjes van Beek met a beautiful art student of her own age, Katja Casella, who appeared badly upset; she found out the Casella was Jewish (a fact she had kept concealed) and had a Jewish fiancé who was in exile. Casella had now found that her fiancé’s mother and sister had been deported to concentration camp. Bontjes van Beek decided to take her to the Schulze-Boysens. Nearly 70 years later, the art student, Katja Casella – by then the only known survivor of the Rote Kapelle – told Nelson what happened:

When they entered the living room, she saw a dozen women sitting quietly, listening to a Bach chaconne on the gramophone. Cato left her for a moment. When she returned, Katja was shocked to see that she was accompanied by a very tall young man in a German officer’s uniform. The lieutenant soberly asked Katja what had happened to her fiancé’s family. Then he folded his arms around her and gave her a strong embrace. “This barbarity has to stop,” he told her. “We all have to work together to stop that devil.” She found his voice warm and reassuring, and she took heart.

From then on Casella, too, was heavily involved in the circle’s activities and, with Bonjes van Beek, helped shelter Jewish fugitives from the regime.

It was never going to end well. In 1941, in an act of quite unbelievable stupidity, the Soviets included the names and addresses of the Schulze-Boysens and their collaborators the Kuckhoffs and Harnacks in a radio message to their agents in Brussels. The message was encoded but in 1942 the Germans arrested the agents and broke their code. In September 1942 the Gestapo hoovered up Schulse-Boysen and Harnack’s entire network. After a perfunctory trial, the Schulze-Boysens were executed in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison on December 22 1942. Harro was hung; Libertas was guillotined in the same shed about an hour later. They were aged just 33 and 29. Nine others, mostly friends or associates of theirs, also died, including Harnack, sculptor Kurt Schumacher and his artist wife Elisabeth. Further executions followed in 1943.

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Norman Ohler is a good writer. This is a gripping book and an easy read. Ohler manages to have an unusually light touch while still respecting his subjects. He cares about them, has tried to understand them, and brings them alive; you become invested in the Schulze-Boysens and their story, even though you know what their fate will be. Moreover, although he centres on the Schulze-Boysens, he pays plenty of attention to the many who worked with them; in fact there are almost too many characters. This is not the first book about this circle of resisters. Anne Nelson’s, mentioned earlier, was published some years ago and is centred on another couple, the Kuckhoffs, rather than the Schulze-Boysens; Greta Kuckhoff’s own account was published in German in the 1970s. American writer Shareen Blair Brysac’s book on Mildred Harnack, Resisting Hitler, was published in 2002. There have been others. However, Bohemians is likely to introduce the German resistance to a popular readership who have hitherto heard little of it.

Arvid Harnack's American wife, Mildred,
was a crucial link between her husband and
US intelligence 

But there are also some odd things about Bohemians. For instance, Ohler’s use of the present tense throughout the book grates somewhat, though this may have been a translator’s decision. More seriously, he is a little uncritical of the Schulze-Boysens. Their courage is not in doubt – Harro’s, especially; and they did make the supreme sacrifice. But they were amateurs. Not all recent books on the German resistance have been so kind about them. In particular, a recent biography of Harnack’s wife, Mildred (who was American), has been highly critical. The book, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler, is by an American writer and academic, Rebecca Donner. Donner is related to Mildred, who was also very active and who played a crucial role in passing Arvid’s economic intelligence to the United States. She was also executed, some months after her husband. Donner presents the Sculze-Boysens as an absolute menace whose actions put the more careful Harnacks in danger.

One wonders if Donner’s quarrel may be at least in part with Ohler, rather than the Schulze-Boysens. Ohler’s book was published a year before hers, and she makes a slighting comment on it in her references, suggesting that it included factual errors; but she says little about what they were. However, she may be at least part-right. For instance she states that Harro had tried to work with Arvid Harnack as early as 1937 but Harnack had sensed that he was too fanatical and potentially careless, and decided to avoid him, changing his mind only after the war had begun. From other sources, this is quite true; Nelson quotes Shareen Blair Brysac as saying that Harnack had been introduced to Harro before the war (Nelson says in 1935) but was unsure of his judgment, and thought it safer not to meet him again.

It’s true that, as a spy, Harro’s tradecraft was awful. He got away with it for years by hiding in plain sight at the heart of the German establishment. However, he let his circle get too big for safety – his, and theirs. This was not simply carelessness; Ohler explains that Harro wanted the resistance circles to expand constantly until opposition to Hitler reached a critical mass. So the Schulze-Boysens encouraged recruits. Ohler states that about 150 people were eventually involved, although it is not clear how he reaches that figure; there were many different interlocking circles, some of which originally had nothing to do with the Schulze-Boysens, and the real number could have been much larger. Harro seems to have been sincere in his welcome to people like Katja Casella, who found in the Schulze-Boysens a refuge from the ugliness outside. He also seems to have had an honest conviction that the circle would widen until it became invincible. But the regime was never going to let that happen.

Harro also had an unwise affair that may have helped lead to his arrest, and that of his friends. This was with an attractive dark-haired actress, Stella Mahlberg. Not much is known of her, except that she was almost certainly the daughter of architect and designer Paul Mahlberg. Although half-Jewish, she had been permitted to continue her career; it is not clear why. Ohler speculates, at the end of the book, that she played a role in shopping the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack circle to the Gestapo, and a postwar American report records that she appeared to have committed suicide in Stuttgart in 1947 when she learned she would be questioned by US intelligence. No-one really knows what her role was, and she may have been blameless. But if she wasn’t, Harro may have walked into a honey-trap. 

Oda Schottmüller, who allowed her
studio to be used for radio transmissions;
she was executed in 1943

As for Libertas, her nerve went towards the end and she became increasingly frightened. In prison, she gave up the names of some co-conspirators to a woman she thought was a sympathizer, hoping she would warn them, but the woman was an informer. There is no evidence this changed anyone’s fate; the prosecutor told interrogators after the war that they had already had all the names – maybe from Mahlberg, but just as likely through months of careful detective work after decoding Moscow’s unwise message. Besides, most people who associated themselves with the Schulze-Boysens, or the other groups they had contacts with, would have understood the risks. But it does seem that security was poor. It did not help that Harro wanted the group to carry out large-scale stickering and distribution of flyers, which were extremely dangerous and which Moscow discouraged, preferring to receive hard military information from inside Germany. These efforts alarmed Cato Bontjes van Beek’s partner; feeling that Harro was taking a risk too many, he asked her to withdraw from the group.

It would not save Bontjes van Beek; she too would be swept up in the Gestapo dragnet and would be executed some months after Harro and Libertas, at the age of 22. Others would include the beautiful dancer and sculptress Oda Schottmüller, who had lent Harro her studio for a clandestine radio broadcast; she was also executed in September 1943. The young Jewish artist, Katja Casella, would be one of the very few survivors. Hearing of the first arrests in September 1942, she fled into hiding in Poland. She would be reunited with her fiancé after the war, and would go on to a successful artistic career; the last known survivor of the Rote Kapelle, she died in Berlin in 2012.

*

In retrospect, the Rote Kappelle and the other German resistance groups do not seem to have achieved much. Harnack and Harro’s one major coup was to warn Stalin of Barbarossa, but it was to no avail because Stalin was an idiot. Attempts to contact the British and warn them their ciphers had been breached also failed. A later effort to make contact with Britain via Sweden also came to nought, apparently because the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had no wish to deal with the German resistance. Looking back, he had reasons for this; the resistance’s objectives, at least those of people like Schulze-Boysen and von Stauffenberg, was to decapitate the regime and make peace while Germany was still intact. But it’s not hard to see why the British would have preferred to see Germany completely destroyed this time, so that history would not repeat itself. This would also prevent a repetition of the insidious “stab in the back” myth, by which some Germans of the inter-war period were persuaded by the Right that they had been defeated only by treason within.

Neither is there any evidence that the circle’s propaganda activity had much effect, other than alarming the regime (though it certainly did that). Most recipients of such efforts would simply have turned them over to the Gestapo. This is what happened with the postcards distributed by a working-class Berlin couple, the Hampels, who were eventually caught and executed (a story later told, in fictional form, by the writer Hans Fallada in Every Man Dies Alone). If one wished, one could argue that the only result of Schulze-Boysens’ activities was to salve their own consciences and get other people, like Bontjes van Beek and Schottmüller, killed. Ohler does not really confront these questions in Bohemians. Much as I liked the book, I felt that he should have done.

Memorial plaque to the Schulze-Boysens outside their
apartment atAltenburger Allee 19, Berlin
(Axel Mauruszat/Wikimedia Commons)

But maybe the Schulze-Boysens’ flaws aren’t what matters today; it’s the fact that they felt they should act. They must have asked the terrible questions: If not us, who? If not now, when? They paid a ghastly price, as they knew they might. They were not alone. Although only a minority of Germans took part in the resistance, a surprising number were involved in some way. Anne Nelson quotes the writer Eric Boehm, who fled the country as a teenager (he was Jewish) and returned in 1945 as a US intelligence officer; he went on to document some of the resisters and estimated that, of 3 million Germans imprisoned between 1933-45, about 800,000 were arrested for overtly anti-Nazi activities and that less than half, about 300,000, survived the war. Other sources record that even before the July 1944 plot, nearly 10,000 German soldiers had been shot for refusing to follow orders.

It is hard to verify all this, and it remains very political. It suited the Allies to play down the story of the German resistance after the war, and I believe we have all done so since, not least because the vision of Germans as monolithically evil reinforces our own self-image. “It couldn’t happen here,” we have smugly said. As it happens, it didn’t – but does that mean it never could? It’s certainly true that Germans of that generation had some terrible questions to answer. But Germans were not a separate species. Nothing they did absolves the rest of us from anything we may have done, or might do in the future. Perhaps in the end, the real achievement of the German resistance is that it confirms that shared humanity; good, like evil, knows no borders.

In Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, one of the characters makes an oblique reference to Genesis 18: 26-32: The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

It is said that Libertas cried out for her mother as she was led to the guillotine. The day after her execution, her mother, unaware of her death, tried to deliver a package of Christmas gifts for her.

Since 1980 there has been a German Resistance Memorial Centre (Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) in Berlin. It has an English section to its website that is worth a visit. The Centre also maintains the execution shed at Plötzensee as a permanent memorial.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or Amazon and other online retailers as paperbacks or e-books.

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