Berlin at War (58 page)

Nazi excesses and the rights of sovereign nations, now they were being

called upon to defend the very homeland of the proletarian revolu-

tion. With the period of ideological limbo at an end, Römer and Uhrig

were among the first to call the faithful to arms.

Their primary weapon in the struggle was the monthly ‘Information

Service’ pamphlet, which they produced in Berlin for distribution to

communist cells in the city, as well as across Germany and abroad.

Intended to inform its readers about the military and political situ-

ation, and inoculate them against Nazi propaganda, the pamphlet also

called for sabotage actions against industrial and military targets. Its

December 1941 issue, for instance, made the following demands of its

readers:

Every intervention that we can make in the economy, however modest,

must lead to an effective blow against the imperialist, anti-proletarian

war of the Hitler-Bourgeoisie.

. . .

Hitler’s Achilles Heel is the fuel supply. Any action that destroys

fuel, weakens his military capacity.

Rubber is rarer still. Its destruction will ground German bombers.

. . .

Above all, give your full backing to every slowing of the work-rate

to weaken productivity. In this way, the proletarian revolution will break

forth, and will be victorious.18

Both Uhrig and Römer were reasonably adept at avoiding the atten-

tions of the Gestapo, but they could not escape detection for long.

Early in 1942, a wave of arrests across Germany signalled an end to

the conspiracy. In Berlin alone, more than 150 individuals were arrested,

Römer and Uhrig among them. Charged as ‘enemies of the state’,

and members of an ‘illegal organisation’, they would spend over two

years under interrogation, being shunted between some of the most

odious camps and prisons of the Berlin area, including Sachsenhausen

and Wuhlheide. Brought to trial for high treason in the summer of

1944, both men were sentenced to death and guillotined. Over seventy

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of their fellow conspirators faced the same fate, while many more

were sentenced to lengthy periods of hard labour.19

With the demise of Römer and Uhrig, the baton passed initially to

Anton Saefkow, a trained machinist, who sought to gather all those

who had not been arrested. Under his leadership, acts of sabotage,

distribution of flyers and help to fugitives continued. Like his prede-

cessors, however, Saefkow could not escape the Gestapo and was

arrested in the summer of 1944. Along with another sixty members

of his group, he was sentenced to death and executed that autumn.

A similar fate awaited the most famous communist resistance group

in wartime Berlin – the so-called ‘Red Orchestra’. Founded by Air

Ministry officer Harro Schulze-Boysen and the economist Arvid

Harnack, it too was active in producing fly-posters and aiding fugi-

tives in the capital, but its primary activity was espionage – it was one

of the many sources that warned Moscow of the looming German

attack in the early summer of 1941. The group – which is known by

the name given it by Gestapo counter-intelligence – was large and

eclectic, and unlike the Uhrig–Römer and Saefkow groups comprised

not only communists, but also left-leaning intellectuals, artists and

pacifists, including the playwright Adam Kuckhoff and the writer

Günther Weisenborn. Despite this more elitist complexion, however,

the ‘Red Orchestra’ fared little better than its more working-class

fellows, and was rounded up in the autumn of 1942. The vast majority

of its members – including Schulze-Boysen and Harnack – paid for

their actions with their lives. Among them was Harnack’s wife,

Mildred Fish-Harnack, the only American woman executed during

the Second World War as an underground conspirator. As she was led

to the guillotine, her last words were ‘And I have loved Germany so

much’.20

Berlin’s Christians were also active. Most notable among them were

those of the Confessing Church, which had emerged in protest at the

Nazification of the established Protestant Church. One of the move-

ment’s founders was Martin Niemöller, a parish pastor in the Berlin

suburb of Dahlem. A former U-boat captain from the First World

War, Niemöller had been an early supporter of Hitler who was spurred

to resistance by his objection to Nazi racial policies and the regime’s

interference in religious affairs. Arrested for his public criticisms in

1937, he would spend the entire war in a succession of concentration

enemies of the state

275

camps. The post-war poem attributed to him eloquently summed up

the humanitarian case for resistance against Nazism:

First they came for the communists,

and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews,

and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak out for me.21

The Provost of Berlin’s St Hedwig’s cathedral, Bernhard Lichtenberg,

was another outspoken critic of the Nazis, often fulminating against

the regime’s excesses from his pulpit. Most famously, he wrote to the

Chief Physician of the Reich in August 1941 in protest at the ‘T4’

euthanasia programme. ‘As a human being, a Christian and a German’,

he wrote, ‘I demand of you . . . that you answer for the crimes that

have been perpetrated at your bidding and with your consent, and

which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the

German people.’22 In the autumn of 1941, Lichtenberg was denounced

for concluding his evensong sermon by saying: ‘Now let us pray for

the Jews and for the poor prisoners in the concentration camps.’23

Arrested soon after, he perished en route to Dachau.

Churchmen were also well represented in the resistance groups that

were formed among Berlin’s elites. The first such group was the Solf

Circle, which was established in the capital in 1936 as a traditional

‘salon’, where intellectuals would gather to discuss the pressing matters

of the day. Meeting initially in the Wannsee home of Johanna Solf,

the widow of the former German ambassador to Tokyo, the group

contained a number of prominent and well-connected members,

including minor aristocrats, diplomats and senior civil servants. Though

it was not primarily involved with subversion or active resistance

against the Nazi regime – despite Solf and her daughter personally

assisting many fugitive Jews – it was intended to provide a forum for

like-minded individuals, where they could exchange opinions and keep

the concept of intellectual and political liberty alive. Yet, even these

rather modest ambitions were too much for the authorities, and in

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berlin at war

the autumn of 1943 the circle was infiltrated by a Gestapo informant,

a doctor by the name of Paul Reckzeh. Though the members were

warned about the infiltration by Helmuth James von Moltke, they

were rounded up for questioning the following January. Only a few

of them would survive the end of the Third Reich.24

Moltke himself was typical of this type of non-violent, intellec-

tual opposition to the Nazis, and was the focus of perhaps the most

famous opposition group in Nazi Germany, the Kreisau Circle. Named

by its Gestapo investigators after Moltke’s Silesian estate, where the

group had first come together, the circle held most of its meetings

in Moltke’s Berlin flat on Derfflingerstrasse, close to the Tiergarten.

Moltke was a dynamic and genial host. Born in rural Silesia, the scion

of an old Prussian military family but with a South African mother, he

was self-consciously cosmopolitan. Educated in Berlin, he had travelled

widely and had completed his legal training in Britain, before returning

to the German capital with the outbreak of war in 1939. It was there

that he began to gather like-minded individuals, who would meet for

largely theoretical discussions on topics such as international law and

the nature of the state and society that might succeed the Nazis. It was

an eclectic group – socialists, aristocrats and churchmen – but one whose

resistance was primarily a cerebral one, influenced by Christian morality

and by Moltke’s strict advocacy of non-violence. Indeed, when they

were finally tried, Moltke quipped that he and his fellows were to be

hanged ‘because we thought together’.25

The uncomfortable truth for all of the organised resistance groups in

the capital, however, was that ordinary Berliners were not generally

minded to risk their lives to oppose the Nazi regime. Most were not

minded to resist at all. It should be remembered that the regime ruled

primarily by consent. It was very effective, not only at co-opting those

who might have opposed it – through the promise of work, for instance

– but also at maintaining at least nominal popular support through

its social policies and the expert use of propaganda. It had also been

astonishingly successful, not only in restoring the nation’s fortunes

before 1939, but also in the early phase of the war that followed. These

successes convinced vast numbers of ordinary Germans that the Nazi

regime deserved their support. For the majority, therefore, ‘resistance’

to the Nazis never went beyond a raised eyebrow.

enemies of the state

277

Importantly, even those who might have thought otherwise were

often silenced. Would-be opponents of the regime often had their

rebellious impulses curbed by the reflexive patriotism engendered in

a nation at war. They were also dissuaded from voicing their dissent

by knowledge of the dark role played by the Gestapo in preserving

the consensus. And the fact that almost every one of the capital’s

resistance groups – of whatever hue – had been infiltrated, betrayed

and judicially murdered would have done nothing to embolden them.

Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, herself a member of the ‘Uncle Emil’ resist-

ance group, outlined the difficulties in her diary: ‘If we talk, plan, and

recruit allies, we are hanged; among ten people there is always at least

one who is treacherous or loose-mouthed.’26 For many ordinary

Berliners, therefore, engaging in formal organised resistance must have

seemed like something akin to suicide.

Yet, there was still much that determined and principled individ-

uals could do on a personal level to express their opposition. It was a

course of action that was certainly not without its perils and could

easily result in a visit from the Gestapo or a spell in a concentration

camp, if betrayed. But it was nonetheless a relatively common occur-

rence in wartime Berlin; more common indeed, than anywhere else

in the Reich.27

One method was simply to refuse to give the Nazi greeting. George

Kennan noted that this was already common in the capital early in the

war. Berliners, he recalled, ‘could never be induced to give the Nazi

salute. They continued to greet each other with the usual “
Guten Morgen
”

in place of the obligatory “
Heil Hitler
”.’28 Maria Nickel was one of those who chose this route and taught her two young sons not to use the

new ‘German Greeting’. In retrospect, she recalled, it was her first revolt

against Hitler and the Nazis.29

Other protests were more overtly political. The reports of the SS

security service attest to a spate of incidents of politically motivated

vandalism and graffiti, beginning in the autumn and winter of 1939.

Anti-Nazi leafleting also flourished. One of the most remarkable

cases was that of Otto and Elise Hampel, an ordinary couple from

Wedding, who began leafleting in the autumn of 1940 after Elise’s

brother was killed in France. Beyond a vague, working-class soli-

darity, the couple were largely apolitical and their protest was as

much spurred by the slaughter of Germany’s young men in war as

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berlin at war

anything else. Centred on their home district of Wedding, they

distributed postcards and leaflets – which were often crudely printed,

with disjointed, misspelt text – calling for civil disobedience and

decrying the Nazi ‘Winter Aid’ scheme as fraudulent. One of their

cards implored the German people simply to ‘wake up’, while another

urged that ‘we need to believe in ourselves’. For over two years, the

Hampels evaded detection and distributed countless postcards and

leaflets across the German capital. Denounced and arrested in the

autumn of 1942, they were sentenced to death and executed the

following spring.30

The Hampels were not alone. Many others followed suit. Most

commonly, leaflets would be fly-posted on street signs and postboxes

in the centre of the city, where they would be visible to the largest

number of citizens. In content, they ranged widely from simple slogans

– ‘Down with Hitler!’ – to subversive ditties such as:

Great are the times