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The Infiltrators
The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis
Norman Ohler
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The Infiltrators
The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis
Norman Ohler
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A Daily Telegraph History Book of the Year 'An astonishing story... brilliantly told' Antony Beevor 'Gripping... Will appeal to anyone who relishes Ben Macintyre's tales of wartime espionage and cryptic codes.' Sunday Telegraph 'A detailed and meticulously researched tale about a pair of young German resisters that reads like a thriller. ' New York Times 'Deeply engaging, enticingly written and extremely affecting.' Philippe Sands, Spectator Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet - and one of history's greatest conspiracies is born.Harro Schulze-Boysen had already shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascists that stretched across Berlin's bohemian underworld. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funnelling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler's surprise attack on the Soviet Union. But nothing could prepare Harro and Libertas for the betrayals they would suffer in this war of secrets - a struggle in which friend could be indistinguishable from foe. Drawing on unpublished diaries, letters and Gestapo files, Norman Ohler spins an unforgettable tale of love, heroism and sacrifice.
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Topic
GeschichteSubtopic
Deutsche GeschichtePART I
ADVERSARIES
(1932–33)
No one could risk more than his life.
— HANS FALLADA
It was an attempt to join together in overcoming all the old antagonisms. We were known as “adversaries.”
— HARRO SCHULZE-BOYSEN
1
In the fall of 1932, democracy still rules in Germany. There’s unrest at the university — a brownshirt has hung swastika banners from the student memorial wreath and a leftist has cut them down. Now the two enemy camps stand in front of the main building of Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University filled with hate, separated only by a narrow gap, “ready at any moment to go at each other if a word of provocation comes from either side,” as a college friend of Harro’s recalled.
On one side, the red students gather, the socialists and communists and a sprinkling of social democrats. From the right, the Nazis and members of the allied nationalist students’ corps scream their battle slogans decrying “Judah” and “the system.” The university has been frequently paralyzed by political protests during the insecure Weimar Republic. This time, too, the president of the university wrings his hands helplessly, appealing in vain to both sides.
Harro Schulze-Boysen is a young political science student, and on this day he’s slept in at the so-called Red-Gray Garrison. One of the first communal living arrangements in Germany, it is an eight-room apartment on Ritter Strasse in the central Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg. There is no furniture, and everything is shared — cleaning, cooking, money.
Alongside Harro is Regine, a slim young fashion designer from a formerly wealthy family. Wearing nothing but lipstick, she swishes the strawberry blond hair out of her face — and suddenly says something so shocking, so in love as she is, that Harro gets up, throws on his trademark blue sweater, and shuffles into the kitchen to look for something edible. He finds nothing but two dry bread rolls, but it doesn’t matter — at least there’s a nice cup of tea.
Does he want to have a baby . . . ? Is Regine harboring bourgeois dreams?
Harro is twenty-three and wants to radically alter society. Along with his best friend, Henry Erlanger, and others in their circle, he is serving the future of not one child, but many — the children of all of Europe, of the whole world. There’s enough to do, especially during the current devastating worldwide crisis: soup kitchens all over the place, bank failures, unpayable rents, six million unemployed in Germany alone, depression and helplessness across all classes, the imminent fall into the abyss always looming. An entirely new society is necessary; the situation is polarized. Parties like the Social Democrats or the German Center Party no longer seem to represent the people. But what is supposed to replace them? And just what is the people, anyway?
The thoughts in Harro’s young mind are far too complex to offer up simple solutions. His goal is still too diffuse, and he’s even intrigued by right-wing positions, supporting, for instance, the battle against the Versailles Treaty, which saddled Germany with expensive reparations after the country lost the Great War. Such thoughts, anti-parliamentarian impulses, pervade his thinking, all of it still half baked.
How are you supposed to responsibly raise a child when there are so many fundamental questions to settle? How can Regine not understand this? Harro looks down the hall into the large room where she’s lying on a mattress seductively. But he has to go. Off to university.
The streetcar is jammed, kids scurrying around, the smell of sweat and tobacco in the air, ads on the varnished pale wood doors: kakadu — THE BEST BAR ON KURFÜRSTENDAMM. A drunk leans against a window, dozing; a haggard woman of about fifty stares brazenly at the tall, blond Harro with his athletic build and gleaming blue eyes. Horse carriages, hackneys, freight trucks. vote social democrat! A line in front of the unemployment office, the people surprisingly well dressed, different from the morphinists on a bench, with their deep, dark eye sockets and sickly bodies, still addicted from the war, when opiates were dished out liberally to wounded soldiers.
“Europe was the clock of the world. It’s stopped,” Harro had written in the most recent Gegner, the publication he works for: “The gears of the clock are beginning to rust. One factory gate after the next is closing.” Everywhere, economic processes that grant power to cartels are surging. Capitalism must be banished! thinks Harro. But communism doesn’t lead to anything good either: just a rigid apparatus, slaves to Moscow. COME TO SOVIET RUSSIA! screams another ad: CHEAP EDUCATIONAL TRAVEL FOR DOCTORS, TEACHERS, WORKERS.
“I’ll say it again, I’m not a communist.” That’s what he told his worried mother, Marie Luise, who runs a bourgeois household in Mülheim, a city far west of Berlin, near Germany’s Dutch border. “The communist party is a form of expression of the global socialist movement,” Harro had written in a letter to her, “the Bolshevik Party being typically Russian. Hence not suitable for Germany.”
On the streetcar winding through Berlin, Harro looks out on a tumultuous city — one rife with what he calls “big city disease.” The neighborhood of Friedrichshain, for example, is known as the Chicago of Berlin because of its gangsters. It’s a confounding, unsettled time — one ripe for experimentation.
Harro steps out of the tram close to Alexanderplatz, where the road is being redone. Workers are ripping up the old cobblestones as if tearing scabs off wounds, then pouring hot asphalt into the hole. The ground shudders as a U-Bahn rumbles underground. The leaves are already brown on the trees, and it’s getting cold. Striding easily, with his hands in his pants pockets, he nears the plaza in front of the university, where beggars are sitting at small tables in front of the university’s gates. Suddenly he sees the standoff between the groups of students — leftists versus right-wingers — and he realizes immediately that the situation calls for decisive intervention on his part. Harro knows the crowd, and they all know him and his blue sweater. He enjoys the trust of students from across the political spectrum — because he debates things so effectively, but also because he stands out. He has a rare quality that is all the more noticeable at a time of chaos: charisma.
As the desire to fight is rising in those on both sides, he retains his amiable and upbeat equanimity: he greets one brownshirt after the next with a handshake, asking what’s going on, listening placidly to the saga of the removed swastika banner. No, he’s no friend of the Nazis — he thinks they’re dullards and rejects their anti-Semitism outright — but he’s still able to talk to them. Next he wanders over to the other side, where they’re loudly singing “The Internationale,” and shakes hands there, as well. It’s the side that appeals to him personally: he reads Karl Marx and he can damn well distinguish between an internationally oriented ambition for a just social order in which everyone has access to education, living space, health care, and the extreme right wing, the anti-Semitic affectations of the Nazis, with their goal of division and discrimination.
After a while, the rallying cries on both sides begin to subside. Everyone looks at him, including the university president, and like any instinctive revolutionary, Harro seizes the moment, continuing to shake hands, going back and forth between the two sides now, managing to defuse the conflict.
2
Things with Regine are moving along briskly. Together the occupants of the communal apartment are a merry bunch: artists, gays, gay artists, revolutionaries, bohemians. They’re all young and attractive and lead erratic lives in this erratic Weimar era. For Harro, the most important thing isn’t love, but politics, just as it has always been. He is, as a friend says of him, an “ardent German,” with a “very deep German cultural awareness, artistic and philosophical, possibly innate, inherited from his family but also acquired.”
Harro’s most renowned relative is a brother of his paternal grandmother, the grand admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who’d built the ocean fleet for Kaiser Wilhelm so Germany could hold its own in a war with Great Britain. Into his old age, Tirpitz sported a two-pronged beard that impressed the grandchildren with its pair of martial-looking wedges protruding downward. Uncle Tirpitz is the battleship of the family and the great model for the adolescent Harro. He wants to do just as much for “the German cause” as Tirpitz, and “champion the country, consciously working toward its improvement,” as he says in a letter to the legendary great-uncle.
Harro’s father, Erich Edgar, who also served in the navy, is involved, like Tirpitz, with the right-wing German National People’s Party. With his intellectual leanings he could have been a scientist, perhaps even an artist, but Erich Edgar, known as E.E. for short, with his strong sense of duty, exemplifies the Prussian work ethic. He’s a father who tells his son not only that he can cry, but that he should, in order to show that he indeed has feelings, but just one tear, please, then immediate composure before a second one falls. Harro’s mother, Marie Luise, is less disciplined, but spirited: a tenacious, assertive person of small stature and sometimes great excitability, a lively, romantic woman who always has a decisive opinion, sometimes speaks before she thinks, and as a result often leaves dumbstruck her cool-headed husband, who is reserved even in bed, as she later in life complained to her grandchildren.
Harro has a perfect political sparring partner in his father, a professorial figure with a huge collection of books who often sits upright at his mahogany desk, reading by candlelight for hours at a time, almost otherworldly in his rigor. Erich Edgar’s goal is to raise a free-thinking conservative. But increasingly over time Harro overtakes his father in his skills at argumentation, because his mother’s hot blood also flows in him, and passion is as much a part of politics as rationality.
The vehicle for Harro’s engagement, the Gegner, has in 1932 developed a new concept under his direction: to change from a static publication to a bona fide movement. Toward this end he set up what were called Gegner meetings, where authors and readers enter into dialogue: “public contradictory debate nights,” as one of the flyers puts it. Harro writes confidently to his parents about the approach: “There’s not a newspaper in Germany that manages to zero in on people who have something to say in such an autonomous way.”
Developing visions beyond party boundaries, transcending conventions, and testing novel arguments appeals to many. Young people looking for answers to the burning questions eating at everyone take part in the evening Gegner gatherings at Café Adler on Dönhoffplatz. The meetings quickly become so popular that they are taken beyond Berlin and staged in other German cities as well. “There’s extraordinary discipline and a strange camaraderie between left and right,” reports a participant, indicating how unusual such behavior is among overheated twenty-somethings: “Young people who would immediately start throwing punches at each other on the street instead listened to arguments, united in the collective rejection of the boastful, doctrinaire party bigwigs.”
Even if the way forward is still unclear, Harro attributes the Gegner movement to a rebellious moment, and speaks of an “invisible alliance that numbers in the thousands, who might still be distributed around in various other camps but who know that the day is approaching when they’ll all need to come together.” Harro wants to reconcile the society that is threatening to split apart — just as he had at the university. “A people divided by hate . . . cannot get up again,” he writes in the Gegner — a twist on the words of Abraham Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” It’s no easy task that Harro takes on in this late phase of the Weimar Republic.
3
There are manic days and nights that fall of 1932, the last months of freedom, one of the most inspired periods in all of German history, with Berlin possibly the most intellectually vibrant city in the world. One literary circle feeds into the next, and Harro’s best friend, the slender, dark-haired Henry Erlanger, drags him around everywhere. “The crust is suddenly broken, as the old powers, those of the Weimar system, are finally beginning to stand down” is how a friend of Harro’s describes the equally precarious and exciting situation: “Suddenly heads everywhere were emerging above the fog clouds of jargon and starting to speak in a language that was in a new sense shared . . . It was intoxicating.”
This rush-inducing discourse comes to fruition, among other places, in the editorial offices of independent publications such as Carl von Ossietzky’s Weltbühne, where Kurt Tucholsky, one of the most prominent political authors of the Weimar Republic, writes, or Harro Schulze-Boysen’s Gegner, housed in a sparsely furnished attic room with a view of Potsdamer Platz. From the hall, visitors enter directly into the first of the two long, narrow rooms, the second filled with books from German philosophers, a typewriter, a seating area, a fold-up cot. Harro often stays overnight here because it’s convenient just to sleep at the office, where there’s always something to do: editing text, speaking to new writers, preparing contracts — plus in the evening the theater is nearby, putting on things like Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a “fairly crazy piece, music definitely good,” as Harro describes it to his parents.
It’s a fulfilling, exciting existence — despite or perhaps because of the unsure future. “Every person feels inspired by the voice of God at some point,” Harro rhapsodizes in a letter from the Gegner period: “And you can supplant this arrogant word through knowledge, need, or desire; but it remains the same.” The mission, perhaps seemingly pretentious, but bitterly necessary: saving the world from impending ruin. Because while “the discussions between fish and roast, over tea and whisky continue blithely along, outside the SA is marching steadily forward with firm steps.”
There’s a photo of Harro from this time over which his mother regularly frets: his facial features are more striking than usual, and his beautiful blue eyes look possessed — and that’s what he is as he races from one event to the next in his light coat, colorful shirt, tousled hair, feeling “never more alive.” He tirelessly writes and makes connections, and...