Book review: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis
In the face of authoritarian rule, what is a citizen to do? Some will join the oppressors, while others, such as the diarist of the Nazi era Victor Klemperer, will keep their heads down, hoping the horrors will pass (they usually do not). Some, generally a tiny minority, choose the path of civil courage and resistance, of activity that aims to sabotage the regime. Such acts may take many forms, one being to work secretly from within the new establishment of which you are a part. That was the one taken by Libertas Haas-Heye and Harro Schulze-Boysen, two Berlin intellectuals who fell in love and worked to undermine the Nazi war effort.
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By Norman Ohler. Reviewed by Philippe Sands
The story told by Norman Ohler, which is not newly
discovered but not well known, is deeply engaging, enticingly written and
extremely affecting. The author opens with a personal episode, which has the
effect of universalising one of the themes evoked, the consequences over time
of nefarious actions taken long ago. He reveals the moment in which, at the age
of 12, his grandfather disclosed his participation in elements of the Nazi
period, handing over an envelope that contained a party membership book.
The Infiltrators - characterised as The
Bohemians in the American edition - met in the summer of 1934 and
married two years later. The relationship is one of equals, an arrangement that
is open. At the time, Libertas is working as a publicist in the Berlin office
of the MGM film studio, and is a member of the Nazi party who would prefer to
be a poet. A photograph from 1933 shows her among a group of employees in the
American company’s swastika-bedecked office, a disturbing image that raises
questions about the studio whose German arm will soon be free of Jews.
Harro, an idealist from a distinguished family that includes
the venerable Admiral Tirpitz, publishes Gegner, an intellectual
magazine, and soon comes into conflict with the Nazis and their propensity for
torture and killing. The welts on his back shock his new girlfriend, and make
him adopt a different approach. He decides he will ‘appear outwardly
unsuspicious in order to change the system from within’. The resisters are hauled in, there are sham trials,
convictions, then sentences of death. By 1938 the situation in Germany is becoming ever nastier,
and by the time of Kristallnacht, in November, the turn to active opposition
has been made, and jointly. Such activities are processed through the piecemeal
construction of an extensive group of fellow travellers, not in a party
political sense but as an ‘enigmatic network’ of bourgeois and bohemian
resisters.
The risks they take are serious, as Ohler’s prodigious
archival work makes clear. The letters of Libertas and Harro, in particular to
their families, offer the beating heart of the narrative, pulling the reader
into a story that seems to unfold in real time, urgently reinforced by the
effective use of the present tense. The material is original and fascinating,
drawn from family papers and German, Russian and other collections, offering
detail and colour to the times and the dangers. To be required to read between
the lines is to create a space in which the imagination begins to work its
magic.
With the assistance of Hermann Göring, a friend of
Libertas’s family, Harro obtains a position in the Reich air ministry. The
young lieutenant becomes a contact point for Luftwaffe attachés from around the
world, giving him access to confidential reports about military activities in
various capitals. As documents cross his desk - including, in January 1941, the
elements of a plan to attack the Soviet Union in what came to be known as
Operation Barbarossa - he passes copies to friends and colleagues, knowing the
material will make its way to the Soviets. He is 31 years old, and his parents
have suspicions. ‘Please do not worry on my behalf,’ he tells them. ‘The length
of a life is no measure.’
A contact is made with someone at the Soviet embassy. Harro
obtains a code name, ‘Starshina’. He knows exactly what he is doing, and what
the dangers are. So does Libertas, who supports him in his various efforts,
including the production of a resistance pamphlet, ‘Concern for Germany’s
Future is Spreading Among the People’. They are anti-Nazi, not pro-communist. The community of resistance comes to be known to the
authorities and is closely observed. A commission is established, in the Reich
main security office, to hunt the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra - as the Gestapo would call Soviet espionage networks in western Europe - headed
by Friedrich Panzinger, who reports to Himmler. Harro and his colleagues are
not careful enough, and clues emerge that allow the commission to pick off the
infiltrators one by one. The net is cast ever wider as more are ensnared.
Interrogations and torture produce details of acts that will be characterised
as treasonable. One thing leads to another, the group is hauled in, there are
sham trials, then convictions, then sentences of death, although not for
everyone.
This is a remarkable story, powerfully told, of love and
courage and of the balance in the relationship between a couple. Ohler writes
compelling non-fiction, even if, as he confesses, what he really wants to do in
life is write novels or make movies. Perhaps this remark left me wondering at
times whether the line between fact and faction might have been crossed. There
has been criticism of his acclaimed but controversial account of the propensity
of senior Nazis to blitz their way into mass killing and other horrors assisted
by high- octane narcotics. There is, too, the occasional excess. Would that it was so
simple to establish, as Ohler puts it, that ‘every single person in the giant
machine of the Reich’ who gained knowledge of the move to mass killing is a
participant who ‘becomes a murderer’.
And there are matters left unexplored. The writer Javier
Cercas tells us that ‘it is more important to understand the butcher than the
victim’. I would have liked more about the hunters. Panzinger, for example, was
caught by the Soviets, spent years in their prisons, was turned, and returned
as a Soviet agent to penetrate the West German intelligence service, the Gehlen
organisation. They in turn recruited him as a double agent to play him back
against the Soviets. The Nazi hunter of Libertas and Harro became a Soviet spy
and a spy for the West. He eventually committed suicide in 1959 when arrested
by the West Germans for war crimes — not the executions of Harro and Libertas,
but the killing of a French general and POW. It’s a filthy world. That’s what makes the resisters so rare
and so fascinating. To take such risks deserves recognition, and this highly
readable book should give Libertas, Harro and their comrades the greater
attention they deserve. Their story is a timely reminder of what some citizens
are willing to do in the face of autocracy and oppression that once again
haunts our times.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-heroic-couple-who-defied-hitlersee also
