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Editor's Blog: Schoolmarm Spy, Stephen Esrati on the 'Red Orchestra'
Schoolmarm Spy
by Stephen Esrati
On March 24,1964, the German Democratic Republic issued a set of stamps showing seven people. The stamps said they had been engaged in anti-Nazi propaganda in Berlin during the Second World War. The high value showed Dr. Arvid Harnack and his wife, Dr. Mildred. The stamps proved to be the first step in the political rehabilitation of the former Mildred Fish, who had taught at the University of Wisconsin and was a native of Milwaukee. She was decapitated in Berlin's Ploetzensee Prison on Feb. 16, 1943.
Although the trial and executions were kept secret by the Nazis, the Milwaukee Journal reported on May 16, 1943, that Arvid Harnack had been hanged. The Journal learned two days later that Mildred Harnack still had relatives in Milwaukee. But not until Oct. 6 did the Journal learn that she, too, had been executed.
Harnack, a German, had studied at the University of Wisconsin in 1926 under a Rockefeller fellowship and had fallen in love with the lecturer in English literature who became his wife. But the East German semipostal stamps of 1964 concealed more than they revealed. The Harnacks were not executed for illegal propaganda activities. They were spies, Soviet spies. However, in 1964, it was still too politically embarrassing for the East Germans to say so. Communist propaganda kept labeling the Harnacks as "resistance fighters," a much more palatable term, even if totally untrue.
Meanwhile, a number of books had begun mentioning the Red Orchestra, a Soviet espionage ring that spread from Berlin to Belgium and France. Its name had come from the Abwehr, Germany's counterintelligence agency. The Abwehr's job was to zero in on illegal radio transmitters and to put them out of commission. It referred to each radio as a piano, its operator as a pianist. A whole network of such radios became an orchestra, and this one became the Red Orchestra.
Most of the books, however, contradicted each other. Communists in the Soviet Union and in East Germany, as well as the survivors of the Red Orchestra, were laying down smoke screens and sowing seeds of misinformation.
The reason was simple. Leopold Trepper, head of the Red Orchestra, had been arrested on his return to the Soviet Union even though he had expected a hero's welcome. Not until long after the death in 1953 of Josef Stalin was Trepper freed from the prisons in which he had been held since 1945, a victim of Stalin's paranoia.
Trepper was given a Soviet pension then left for his native Poland, where he quickly was arrested again as a "Zionist." All this made it somehow difficult for the East Germans to honor the Harnacks without giving away what was going on behind the Iron Curtain. Writers continued to turn out fantastic tales of Red Orchestra accomplishments. The spies were given credit for all manner of Soviet victories and German defeats, but the flood of misinformation got so bad that the Hamburg Association of Journalists decided in 1952 to urge writers to "erase the Red Orchestra from their vocabularies."
The advice fell on deaf ears. The flood of books continued. In West Germany, rightists called the spies traitors who "betrayed brave German soldiers to Moscow." The survivors joined the campaign to convert the Orchestra into "resistance fighters."
After the 1963 defection to Russia of Soviet spy Kim Philby, who had once headed British counterintelligence, the Soviets took a new tack. They started to honor their spies as heroes. That cleared the way for East Germany's 1964 stamps, even though the spy angle was still suppressed.
On March 5, 1965, the Soviet Union issued a stamp showing Richard Sorge, the spy who had warned Stalin of Hitler's planned invasion of the Soviet Union. Sorge had just been made a hero of the Soviet Union. It took the East Germans another 12 years before it, too, came out with a Sorge stamp.
On Oct. 6, 1969, the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the U.S.S.R. parliament, awarded the Order of the Red Banner to several members of the Red Orchestra, including Arvid Harnack. Now Communist newspapers broke the silence: Harnack had been a spy.
The Milwaukee Journal learned of the honors almost a year later through a report in an East Berlin newspaper. It reported that Mildred Harnack had been among the 70 members of the spy ring honored for warning the Soviet Union of the German invasion, something the Berlin branch of the Red Orchestra could not have done since it was not yet functioning at that time. The Journal talked to Mrs. Harnack's sister, Mrs. Albert R. Carlson, in a Milwaukee suburb, and found that the sister knew nothing of the award.
But the award from the Supreme Soviet was the last step in the rehabilitation of the Red Orchestra. Even Trepper eventually reached freedom in Denmark. Still, the flood of misinformation and outright lies continued. There is no assurance that the following reconstruction of what happened to Mildred Fish on her way to the guillotine is correct. It is based on several sources, including Trepper's auto-biography and a scholarly work by Heinz Hoehne of the German magazine Der Spiegel, who seems to have read most of the original documents and interviewed survivors, not only of the Red Orchestra, but also of its will-o-the-wisp pursuers.
The picture that emerges is not of sophisticated spies out of an Ian Fleming book on James Bond, but of the most bumbling bunch of spies who ever were. In the end, they were betrayed by Moscow Center, also inefficient and not up to "007" standards.
The Berlin end of the Red Orchestra can be seen on two other stamps of that 1964 set of semipostals. One of its principal leaders was Luftwaffe Lt. Harro Schulze-Boysen, a grand nephew of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and son of Navy Capt. Erich Edgar Schulze. Another was Dr. Adam Kuckhoff, a playwright and author whose widow, Greta, became an official in the DDR after the war. A 1961 semi-postal shows Hans Coppi, the hapless radio operator whose unreliable trans-missions brought down the spy network.
No stamps will ever be issued for Libertas "Libs" Schulze-Boysen, wife of Harro, but the story may as well begin with her, the granddaughter of Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg und Hertefeld. Her father, Prof. Wilhelm Haas-Heye, had run an art school at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin. After the Nazis came to power, Heinrich Himmler took over the art school as headquarters of the dreaded Gestapo, the secret police. Libs' mother, the Countess of Eulenburg, lived on an estate adjoining Hermann Goering's Karinhall. Goering was a witness at the 1936 wedding of Libs and Harro Schulze-Boysen.
Harro Schulze-Boysen had been a radical in his youth and was arrested when the Nazis took power. Naked, he was forced to run the gauntlet between rows of billy-swinging storm troopers three times, together with his friend Henry Erlanger. After three runs and all bloody, Schulze-Boysen went back to the beginning and made a fourth run. Then he snapped to attention, clicked his naked heels, and shouted: "Reporting for duty! Order carried out, plus one for good luck." Some of the Nazis were impressed and shouted: "You belong with us." Erlanger, a Jew, was kicked to death. Schulze-Boysen silently swore vengeance for his murder.
Through family connections in the corrupt Nazi hierarchy, Schulze-Boysen wormed his way into flying school, into the navy, and eventually into the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, the German air force. All the time, he out-Naziied the Nazis. Just before Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Trepper provided Schulze-Boysen with three radio transmitters.
But the messages from the growing Schulze-Boysen/Harnack spy network could not get out. Schulze-Boysen had only one radio operator, Coppi, who had to rush from one secret sender to another, often missing his scheduled time to transmit. At other times, he was sending when he should have been receiving orders from Moscow Center. The radio connection, or lack thereof, eventually brought disaster to the Red Orchestra.
Meanwhile, on the Tirpitzufer, named for Schulze-Boysen's great uncle, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris' Abwehr was trying to track down the illegal senders.
Mildred Harnack, who had been teaching at the University of Berlin since 1930, after two years at Gaucher College in Baltimore, became one of the eyes and ears for Moscow Center. She got her information in bed. An Abwehr officer, Lt. Herbert Gollnow, became her lover, thus allowing the American to learn what counter-intelligence was finding out about the Red Orchestra.
She reported what she learned to "SchuBoy," as his fellow spies began to call him as he went from bed to bed, including those of two secretaries in the Ministry of Aviation. This made Libs angry and she began a love affair of her own. And what Gollnow revealed in bed showed that the Abwehr was not asleep. It had borrowed radio direction-finding equipment from the Luftwaffe and had started to triangulate on the Red Orchestra's sender in Brussels, Belgium. The Abwehr's Capt. Harry Piepe caught the station while it was on the air. That started the internal treachery of these heroes of the Soviet Union. Somebody began talking immediately, telling the Germans everything he knew.
But the Germans had still to break the intricate code used by Soviet spies. The arrest in Belgium led the Abwehr to the novel on which the Red Orchestra code was based. In Berlin, a cryptographer, Dr. Wilhelm Vauck, began the tedious job of decoding the intercepted messages. On Oct. 10, 1941, Moscow Center broke the cardinal rule of espionage. It sent Trepper, who had fled to Paris, a desperation message to straighten out the incompetent Coppi: "Go forthwith to the three addresses in Berlin given below and find out why radio communication is always failing." And then it gave the addresses of Kuckhoff, Harnack, and Schulze-Boysen. Further compromising Kuckhoff, it named one of his plays.
Kuckhoff was scared silly and told his wife of Moscow Center's amateurism: "They've sent a radio message from which I could be easily identified." Canaris' radio detectors were rushed into the three neighborhoods disguised as postal vans. But somebody goofed. The vans still had army license plates and Coppi, coming out of one of the buildings housing a radio, spotted the incongruity and sounded the alarm. The radios were moved elsewhere.
Now a fight started between the Tirpitzufer and the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. The Gestapo wanted to shut down the indignity of a Soviet spy network in the heart of Berlin; the Abwehr wanted to use the Red Orchestra's radios for a "play-back," putting the enemies of Germany at the service of Adolf Hitler. The Gestapo started picking up Soviet agents parachuted to the Red Orchestra. The warning signals were getting more and more obvious. Schu-Boy and Harnack ignored the danger.
In August 1942, an Abwehr corporal, Horst Heilmann, a member of the Red Orchestra, grew alarmed when he saw that Vauck had decoded the Oct. 10 message from Moscow. Heilmann took a chance and called Schulze-Boysen at his Luftwaffe office, but couldn't reach him. He left a message, giving his own Abwehr office number. When Schulze-Boysen called back, he reached Vauck. "Schulze-Boysen here," he said to the amazed Vauck, who had just figured out that Schulze-Boysen was a Soviet master spy. Vauck did not know what to say, so he asked: "Do you spell your name with a y?" With that, the game was up.
The arrests came quickly, and Libs immediately started to sing like a canary in a gilded cage. After all, she was a German princess, and she thought turning state's evidence would get her off. The Harnacks fled Berlin to Preil in East Prussia, a vacation retreat. The Gestapo caught them there a week after it had arrested most of the Berlin network.
The Abwehr won the battle with the Luftwaffe and the trials were held in the greatest secrecy so the "play-back" would not be compromised. Moscow Center kept right on talking to the Nazis who now ran the Red Orchestra, even sending in more agents, money, documents, and information that helped round up other spies the Gestapo had not even known about.
At the trials, Libertas Schulze-Boysen incriminated everyone. It did not save her. She was sentenced to death along with the others. But Mildred Harnack was sentenced to life in prison. Hitler refused to approve that sentence and she was retried, this time with the proper result, the death penalty. Hitler had ordered that all the conspirators be hanged, even though that was not the method of execution in Germany, where beheading was used. The Gestapo rigged up meat hooks and strangled the men. The women were guillotined.
Mildred Harnack of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died on Feb. 16, 1943. She was "resurrected" by the Soviet Union with that award of the Red Banner on Oct. 6, 1969.
[This article originally appeared in Stamp World for February 1982. Copyright 1982 by Stephen G. Esrati.]
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