Lovers who risked their lives to bring down the Nazis
THE INFILTRATORS
by Norman Ohler, tr Tim Mohr & Marshall Yarbrough
In the wake of the sensational worldwide success of Blitzed, an exposé of the extensive role that the consumption of amphetamines played in the Third Reich, the German popular historian Norman Ohler has turned his journalistic skills to an equally gripping subject – the Rote Kapelle, “the red chapel”, an episode in the resistance to the Nazis that, in comparison with Sophie Scholl’s White Rose movement and Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination plot, has received little attention outside Germany.
This is a book that will appeal to anyone who relishes Ben Macintyre’s tales of wartime espionage and cryptic codes, underpinned by terrifying risk, desperate courage, and double dealing. For more fastidious tastes, Ohler’s prose may seem somewhat lurid and his narration too loosely novelistic: assumptions are made that a more cautiously academic approach might have baulked at, Christian names are liberally used and gratuitously gruesome details lingered over (the final pages are stomach-churningly horrible). Moving at a cracking pace through a succession of snapshot cross-cut chapters, it is ripe for transformation into a film or television series. But great heroism is properly honoured here: Ohler has done his research diligently and he has an enthralling story to tell.
Its central character is Harro Schulze-Boysen. Rebelling from his conservatively patriotic uppermiddle class Prussian background (his great uncle was Alfred von Tirpitz, who did so much to build the German navy), he was a student of political science who ran an overtly liberal magazine that immediately got him arrested and beaten up by the Brownshirts when the Nazis seized power in 1933. Rescued by his connections but radicalised by the experience, he decided to feign remorse and apply for a humble post in the air ministry in the hope that he could gradually gain access to classified material.
It was a shrewd move, not least because the Gestapo had no jurisdiction over anyone employed by the Luftwaffe, and his impeccably Aryan appearance and manners made his persona convincing.
His milieu in Berlin was Bohemian, however, and in 1934 he encountered through his louche friends Libertas Haas-Heye, also a scion of an aristocratic Prussian family and an ebullient creature who had a glamorous job as a publicist for MGM. At the age of 19, she had mindlessly become a Nazi party member and initially she seemed to ignore the horrors of book burning, the Night of the Long Knives, the first waves of Jewish persecution and the decimation of civil liberties. The affair with Schulze-Boysen that ensued was her moral awakening and they married in 1936. But it won’t altogether suit Hollywood’s purposes that despite the romance implicit in Ohler’s subtitle – “The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis” – their relationship emerges as rather puzzling and unsatisfactory – Schulze-Boysen had kidney stones that made sexual intercourse agonisingly uncomfortable, and both he and she openly had other affairs and spent long periods apart.
Through the personal patronage of Göring, a friend of Haas-Heye’s family, Schulze-Boysen was slowly promoted in the air ministry and was able to feed information about German involvement in the Spanish Civil War to the Russians (the British Foreign Office having shown little interest), establishing a radio link that continued throughout the crisis of Stalingrad.
Other activities were opportunistic and intermittent, including help for Jewish refugees and the flyposting of subversive stickers in public places, pasted to walls by couples whose diversionary tactic was to engage in energetic canoodling from which passers-by averted their gaze.
What will be most interesting to students of underground or terrorist activities, however, is that the “Rote Kapelle”, as the investigating authorities later decided to call it, was so fluid and amorphous. It was simply an organic growth of friends
– and friends of friends – of SchulzeBoysen and Haas-Heye, “the vast majority of them unaffiliated with any party”, almost half of them women and largely from the intelligentsia – artists, writers, doctors, psychiatrists and academics who had managed to evade the claws of the totalitarian state.
As Ohler emphasises, “there was no controlling principle, no statute, no formal membership, no structure” to the “members” of the Rote Kapelle: what united them was not a shared political ideology but a bond of trust and revulsion to Nazi rule. SchulzeBoysen functioned not as a leader but a driving force, whose special value was as much his wide social circle as his fifth-column access to the War Ministry. But he sailed close to the wind, and it is somewhat astonishing that he was able to function as long as he did – especially as his student misdemeanours had earned him a place in Heydrich’s black book.
The denouement of the story should not be revealed; it’s enough to say that it shows human nature at both its best and worst. Yet one deeply moving moment occurs in a foreword, when Ohler meets an elderly historian called Hans Coppi, who becomes his primary source: in 1942 Coppi’s mother, associated with the Rote Kapelle, had been guillotined immediately after giving birth to him in prison. We may think we live in dark times, but here is black barbarity beyond imagining.
Moving at a cracking pace, the book is ripe for transformation into a film