The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle)

Where the name came from

The name ‘Rote Kapelle’ was coined by the Nazis themselves. The Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) writes that it began as a collective term used by German military counter-intelligence, and the German Historical Museum that the Gestapo used it to cover several different resistance groups. According to the German Resistance Memorial Center (GDW), the Gestapo uncovered the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen circle in the summer of 1942 and investigated it under this collective name.^1,2,4

A report by a researcher at the US National Archives (NARA) links the name to the jargon of Soviet intelligence at the time, in which transmitters were called ‘music boxes’ and radio operators ‘musicians’.³

Berlin: the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen circle

According to the GDW, in 1940–1941 a loose network of seven Berlin circles took shape, uniting more than 150 opponents of National Socialism: students, artists, journalists and civil servants, many of them women. They documented Nazi crimes, distributed leaflets and stuck up notes, and helped people who were being persecuted.²

From 1935 Arvid Harnack worked in the America Department of the Reich Ministry of Economics. From 1934 Harro Schulze-Boysen was employed in the ‘Foreign Air Forces’ department of the Reich Air Ministry.^5,6

In 1940–1941 Harnack and Schulze-Boysen passed militarily important information to the Soviet Union; at the beginning of 1941 they told a member of the Soviet embassy about the preparations for the attack. Harnack also talked to representatives of the US embassy.^2,5

According to the German Historical Museum, the first information reached Moscow at the end of October 1941. The bpb says that in the summer of 1942 German military counter-intelligence intercepted a Soviet radio message in which Schulze-Boysen appeared under his real name. According to the bpb, the extent of the contacts with Moscow was long disputed.^1,4

The network in Western Europe

The NARA report describes Leopold Trepper as an agent of Soviet military intelligence who set up a network in Western Europe in 1939. Besides Belgium, France and the Netherlands, and Berlin, it names the ‘Lucy Ring’ operating from neutral Switzerland.³

According to NARA, the first agents were arrested in Belgium in the spring of 1942, and over the next year and a half more than 600 people in all were arrested in Germany, Paris and Brussels.³

The UK National Archives hold, among other things, MI5 papers on the interrogation of the Gestapo officer Rudolf Rathke (1945), with details of the German investigation of the network (reference KV 2/411).⁷

Arrests, trials, executions

Harro Schulze-Boysen was arrested on 31 August 1942, and Arvid and Mildred Harnack on 7 September 1942 on the Curonian Spit. Between August 1942 and the spring of 1943 the Gestapo detained 126 people according to the bpb, about 130 according to the German Historical Museum.^1,4,6,8

The Gestapo portrayed the group as a Soviet espionage organisation; members were tried for treason before the Reich Court Martial, which passed the first death sentences at the end of 1942. Harnack was sentenced on 19 December.^2,5

On 22 December 1942 eleven members, among them Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack, were executed at Berlin-Plötzensee prison.^4,5,6

On 19 December 1942 the court sentenced Mildred Harnack to six years in a penitentiary. Hitler revoked the judgment and ordered a second trial, which ended with the death penalty on 16 January 1943. She was murdered at Plötzensee on 16 February 1943.⁸

According to the GDW, more than fifty members were murdered. The German Historical Museum gives at least 57 people, including 19 women, who were sentenced to death, executed, murdered without trial or died by suicide in custody.^1,2

After the war

The bpb writes that in West Germany members of the group were for decades defamed as communist ‘traitors to the fatherland’, and many West German historians treated it as an espionage organisation. East German historiography idealised it as a tightly organised communist cadre group of anti-fascist heroes.⁴

The US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) was interested in the case mainly as a source of knowledge about Soviet intelligence methods. In 1952 a CIC agent met Manfred Roeder, a former Luftwaffe judge and prosecutor in the case. In 1979 the CIA Counterintelligence Staff’s history The Rote Kapelle was published.³

The Lichtenberg district office in Berlin announced a ceremony for 22 December 2022 at the ‘Rote Kapelle’ memorial in Schulze-Boysen-Straße, marking the 80th anniversary of the murder of eleven members of the network.⁹