ARVID HARNACK WAS alone when the man called. Mildred was taking a break in the country to celebrate her thirty-eighth birthday and to escape the RAF air raids, which had begun on Berlin the previous month. Work had kept Harnack in the city, and he was sitting in a chair reading when the doorbell rang at their fifth-floor apartment in Woyrschstrasse, a trendy street south of the Tiergarten.
The visitor was unexpected and a stranger. Tall and very thin, he spoke German but with a Russian accent. It was September 1940 and the Soviets were still allies, still had an embassy in Berlin, but Harnack had had no contact with anyone from Moscow for two years.
Taking off his hat to reveal smooth, slicked-back hair, the man said he was a comrade of Harnack’s old friend Alexander Hirschfeld, the embassy official who had been part of the ARPLAN economic group eight years earlier. Harnack was suspicious: The man could well be a Gestapo plant.
Cautiously, giving nothing away, Harnack invited the man in, but neither sat. The visitor studied the paintings on the wall and the lines of books on the shelves, and said his name was Alexander Erdberg and that he worked for the Soviet embassy. Moscow was keen to renew its relationship, Erdberg said boldly.
Sensing Harnack’s suspicion, Erdberg invited the German to the embassy so that he could prove he was who he said he was. Harnack took up the offer and was convinced.
In fact, thirty-one-year-old Erdberg was a Soviet agent whose real name was Alexander Korotkov. He was a close associate of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s head of intelligence, and his boldness and confidence were something of a trademark. Thanks to them, he had so far enjoyed a charmed career. As a nineteen-year-old keen to join the OGPU (the forerunner of the NKVD), he had sidled up to an intelligence official at a soccer match and made friends. The man had got him a job as an elevator operator in the OGPU’s headquarters, the Lubyanka, a seemingly unpromising position but one from which Korotkov had been able to make the acquaintance of a number of important officers. Having taught himself German, he got a job in the foreign intelligence service and had been with the trade mission in Berlin during Stalin’s brutal purges. Recalled to Moscow when so many of his colleagues had been arrested, he escaped execution by appealing directly to Beria himself. He had now returned to Berlin, officially as third secretary to the embassy, but in reality with a daunting mission: to create a Soviet spy network inside Berlin.
Harnack told Korotkov that he was not interested in money or becoming a puppet for Moscow, but he did feel sympathy for the “ideals” of the Soviet Union. Korotkov sharply observed that the German was more interested in his own “antifascist conspiracy” than being a source for Soviet intelligence, and therefore he would be a difficult agent to control.
But when Harnack agreed to work with him, Korotkov quickly realized he had struck gold: The first thing Harnack told him was that Hitler planned to break his agreement with Stalin and invade the Soviet Union.
Korotkov’s intelligence reports began arriving on Beria’s desk, quoting his source Harnack under his new Soviet code name, Korsikanets (Corsican). These reports immediately expanded on Hitler’s plans to go east, using the occupation of Romania as a stepping-stone to continue into “western European Russia” and to turn the rest of the Soviet Union into a Vichy-style pro-Nazi state.
If Korotkov was expecting warm praise and a medal for this massive intelligence coup, he was disappointed. The intelligence he had gathered from Harnack ran counter to everything Stalin—and many others in Moscow—currently believed. The Hitler-Stalin pact appeared strong; Stalin was convinced that Hitler still needed to invade Britain, and that there was no rational reason for the Führer to start a war on a second front. It made no military sense.
When Stalin asked Beria for his opinion, the intelligence chief chose to back his master’s view rather than argue for his agent.
KOROTKOV WOULD HAVE to do more and took Harnack into his confidence. Harnack realized that his economic reports were not enough to jolt Stalin into understanding what Hitler was planning. Inviting Adam Kuckhoff and Greta Lorke to his home, he asked for their views. Lorke immediately came up with an idea. A short time ago she and Kuckhoff had attended a party at the home of a cinema executive named Herbert Engelsing, an anti-Nazi who wanted to give Kuckhoff some work writing dialogue for the light comedies and romances that his company specialized in.
Engelsing’s wife, Ingeborg, was a Mischling (a half-Jew under Hitler’s laws), but she enjoyed the protection of Göring, who wanted her continued friendship so that he could stay close to one of the couple’s most famous actresses. Ingeborg Engelsing was well aware of the Kuckhoffs’ opposition to the Nazis and had been keen to introduce them to a dashing young couple who had commanded a great deal of attention at the party.
The man was an important figure at the Air Ministry, she said, but his views would be of interest.
Lorke told Harnack that she remembered the man’s name. It was Harro Schulze-Boysen.
TALL AND FAIR, with blue eyes and chiseled features, Harro Schulze-Boysen was the perfect Nordic Aryan physical specimen, with the family pedigree to go with it.
The great-nephew of Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, his father, Commander Erich Schulze, had been chief of staff to the German naval commander in Belgium during the First World War. His mother, Marie-Luise Boysen, was from a family of distinguished lawyers and was a central figure in the most exclusive society circles in Kiel.
Schulze-Boysen both reveled in his family’s past and rejected it. Handsome and good-humored, he had a tendency to see himself as a romantic hero, but he had rebelled at an early age against his family’s upper-middle-class snobbery. While studying law at Freiburg University, he had joined a republican group whose aims had been to attack the values of German bourgeois society. Later, while studying in Berlin in 1930, he joined a more radical organization called the National Revolutionaries, which opposed all the mainstream political parties then vying for power in the Weimar Republic. Clad always in a black sweater, Schulze-Boysen was every bit the typical revolutionary student, hanging around surrealists and opposing everything.
When the National Revolutionaries launched a magazine, Der Gegner (The Opponent), it aimed to bring together all the discontented in Germany, but its main opponent was National Socialism. Schulze-Boysen became its editor, working with the support of his close friend Henry Erlanger, a Jew. Schulze-Boysen’s editorials were increasingly hostile to Nazism, and the magazine was quickly banned after Hitler came to power. All the same, Schulze-Boysen planned to join the Nazis’ May Day parade while carrying a Der Gegner banner—a provocation in keeping with the streak of recklessness that ran through him.
But Schulze-Boysen was betrayed, and on learning of the May Day plot, Himmler sent an SS unit to trash the magazine’s office at Schellingstrasse and arrest Harro and Henry. They were brought to the unit’s headquarters, stripped naked, and made to run the gauntlet between two lines of SS men, all armed with lead-tipped whips. Three times Schulze-Boysen was forced to run through the hail of blows, but he refused to let the violent bullies defeat him. At the end of the third run he suddenly turned and ran back through. Reaching the end again, he was on the verge of passing out but instead stood straight, clicked his heels, and shouted: “Reporting for duty! Order carried out plus one for luck!” The SS men smiled grimly; the show of bravado had impressed them. “Man, you really belong with us,” one said.1
Then they turned to Erlanger, who fell on the third run. Shouting anti-Semitic insults, the SS thugs beat him to death. With a seriously damaged kidney and the top of his ear sliced off by a whiplash, Schulze-Boysen could do nothing to help his friend. He was thrown into a cell.
Schulze-Boysen’s mother argued successfully for his release and brought him to the family home. It would be a year before he was well enough to return to Berlin. As he recovered, he brooded and reflected on what he was sure were Hitler’s plans for Germany. “I have the vague but definite feeling that, in the long run, we are heading for a European catastrophe of gigantic proportions,” he confided to his parents.2 His mother pleaded with him to stop challenging the Nazis, but Schulze-Boysen still winced with pain at the thought of the swastika one of the SS men had carved into his leg with a knife and at the thought of his friend’s cruel death. He told another friend: “I have put my revenge on ice.”3 But from that day his commitment to avenge Erlanger was irrevocable.
THE IDEA OF hiding in plain sight appealed to Schulze-Boysen’s swashbuckling side, and he began to consider a life in uniform. His family connections—and the fact that he was a keen sailor—seemed to make the navy an obvious choice. But after some thought he opted for the air force instead, beginning a yearlong observers’ course before his astonishing skill for languages—he could speak French, English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Dutch—was picked up by his superiors and they found him a role as an interpreter in the rapidly expanding Luftwaffe.
While sailing on the Wannsee in the summer of 1935, he met a young aristocrat named Libertas Haas-Heye, who was blonde, beautiful, and brimming with confidence. Known to her friends as Libs, she shared Schulze-Boysen’s wild sense of romance and—despite her being an enthusiastic Nazi—they fell in love. Libertas was the granddaughter of a prince of the aristocracy, Philipp zu Eulenburg und Hertefeld. Privately educated by a tutor into her teens, she had been sent to a finishing school in Switzerland and a college in England. She returned to Germany to resume living in her family’s Schloss Liebenberg, a castle surrounded by manicured gardens and a library filled with thirty thousand books. In the evenings she played the grand piano in the music room after a day riding one of the stallions in the stables. Her elegance, horse-riding, and musical talents combined to encourage more than one suitor to come calling. She merely flirted with them all. She had been the center of attention her whole life: Even when her parents separated, they remained in bitter competition for her love.
In 1933 she had joined the Nazi Party’s youth movement, attracted by its keep-fit programs. The political lectures she had to attend made no impression on her; the castle library had all the information she needed. Nevertheless, the attraction of Berlin drew her to the city, and she moved into one of her grandfather’s houses. Within a week she had been hired by the Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as its Berlin publicist.
Although Libertas dreamed of life as a film star or poet, her connections with the dark side of the Nazi state were close. Her father had run an art school at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse in Berlin, where Himmler had now established the headquarters of the Gestapo. The family’s Liebenberg country estate counted Göring as a neighbor. He loved to visit and hear Libertas’s mother, Countess Thora, play sentimental songs on the piano. When Schulze-Boysen and Libertas married in the castle chapel at Liebenberg the year after they met, Göring was a witness at the wedding. His wedding gift to Harro Schulze-Boysen had been a job at the Reich Air Ministry, housed in a new building that stretched 250 meters along Wilhelmstrasse. With its two thousand rooms, stair banisters of aircraft aluminum, and foyer lighting modeled on antiaircraft searchlights, it was the largest office building in Berlin, and Schulze-Boysen now found himself at its heart.
The ministry’s press office, where Schulze-Boysen worked hard writing for various Luftwaffe publications, was part of the Luftwaffe general staff and liaised closely with the section charged with keeping a watch on foreign air forces. His superiors talked highly of him and he was promoted to lieutenant. His articles criticized Bolshevism and praised Hitler. On the surface he was now the perfect Nazi from a classic German military family, but his antifascist opinions had not changed, only hardened.
THE REPORTS THAT had passed across Harro Schulze-Boysen’s desk at the Air Ministry during 1938 convinced him of one thing: that Hitler’s aggressive international foreign policy was leading Germany into a European war. That October he wrote to his parents: “I now say that in 1940/41 at the latest, but probably even next spring, there will be world war in Europe with class warfare as its sequel. I state unequivocally that Austria and Czechoslovakia were the ‘first battles’ in this new war.” While he cloaked his outward opinions under the veil of a Nazi follower, he now had a small private group with whom he could share his inner thoughts.
He had persuaded his wife, Libertas, against Nazism and introduced her to some old friends, a group of bohemian dissidents who looked to him as their leader. Libertas noted that Kurt Schumacher was as blond and handsome as her husband. The two had been friends since Harro’s time on Der Gegner. A talented sculptor from Stuttgart, Schumacher had been a leading exponent of abstract art until his work was banned by the Nazis. The son of a trade unionist, Schumacher was anti-state and anti-bourgeois but was not a member of the Communist Party. Neither was his wife, Elisabeth Hohenemser, a happy and sociable woman with wavy blonde hair. Half-Jewish, she had managed to keep her work as a poster artist and photographer. Her money supported the couple now that Schumacher had little work.
Another friend, Walter Küchenmeister, was a committed Communist. A First World War veteran, he had edited a left-wing newspaper during the late 1920s. When the Nazis came to power and cracked down on known Communists, they sought out Küchenmeister and put him in one of their first concentration camps, at Sonnenburg. There he developed tuberculosis and stomach ulcers, and by the time he was eventually released, he was unfit to work. He was nursed back to health by his devoted lover, Dr. Elfriede Paul, another old friend of the Schumachers’. A shy, birdlike woman with round spectacles, Paul had a busy practice in the fashionable suburb of Wilmersdorf.
Libertas Schulze-Boysen brought two others into the group: her cousin Gisela von Pöllnitz and her friend Günther Weisenborn. Pöllnitz was an ambassador’s daughter who had started a career with the United Press, the American press agency in Berlin, and longed to do something decisive against Hitler. Her poor health, though, was a constant concern to her friends.4 Weisenborn, the journalist turned playwright who knew Kuckhoff and Lorke, got to know Libertas through his work in film. Having tried to get around a ban on his work by writing under various pseudonyms, Weisenborn had immigrated to the United States for a year but was now back in Germany. He had resumed his friendships with Kuckhoff and John Sieg, and had fallen for Libertas. Within a short time, and with the knowledge of Harro—the Schulze-Boysens enjoyed an open marriage—Weisenborn became Libertas’s lover.
These friends met in each other’s homes and talked about what could be done against the Nazis. They looked to Harro Schulze-Boysen, with his respected military position and astonishing access to state secrets, for inspiration. “If you are anti, must you not actually do something against it?” Kurt Schumacher asked his friends one day. All nodded slowly.
LIKE SO MANY on the antifascist European left in the 1930s, the Schulze-Boysen group had looked at the civil war in Spain as a harbinger of what was to come.
Hitler committed to sending troops, arms, and munitions to support General Franco, whose coup against the Popular Front government had widened into an all-out civil war, which already looked to many like a rehearsal for a wider European conflict.
Inside the Air Ministry, Göring had set up “Special Staff W,” a department charged with directing men and supplies to Spain. Information on this German support for Franco would not only aid the antifascist struggle—now joined by leftists and idealists from around world, including Germany, as part of the International Brigades—but also be of value to Stalin. With Britain and France championing a noninterventionist policy, aid for the Republican Army facing Franco came mainly from Moscow.5
Quickly and carefully, Schulze-Boysen began to compile all he could about the work of Special Staff W: details of air and sea transports to Spain, the numbers of men deployed and how many officers accompanied them, and the German Abwehr’s operations behind the lines in Spain. His group typed up reports, and Gisela von Pöllnitz volunteered to post the envelope through the mailbox of the Soviet trade delegation at Lietzenburger Strasse 11. The Gestapo had the address under observation, followed her to her office at the United Press, and put her under arrest.
On hearing the news, the group panicked. Küchenmeister left for Cologne to prepare to escape over the Dutch border, while Weisenborn and Schulze-Boysen made plans to follow him or head for Luxembourg. When Pöllnitz refused to reveal what was in the envelope, the Gestapo let her go, although they did investigate her friends. Schulze-Boysen’s home in Berlin was searched, but nothing was found, and when questioned, his superiors described the wonderful work he was doing at the Air Ministry.
AFTER THEIR SCARE with Pöllnitz’s arrest, the Schulze-Boysen gang quickly went back to work again. Now meeting at Schulze-Boysen’s home, they worked together on a news sheet called Der Vortrupp (The Advance Guard), while Schumacher and Küchenmeister wrote antifascist leaflets, which would be copied on a duplicator or typed up in a rented room in Waitzstrasse, off the bustling Kurfürstendamm.
Sometimes members of the group walked through the streets leaving leaflets in bus shelters and telephone booths; other times random names and addresses were taken from the telephone directory and the propaganda leaflets were posted to their homes.
Despite an effort to keep the group secure, there was a human desire to share their work with others, to feel less isolated in their opposition to the regime. Telling others was a huge risk, but slowly they took it and drew more people in, finding support from people from various walks of life, such as Oda Schottmüller, a well-known dancer and sculptor, and Dr. Hugo Buschmann, a wealthy cement merchant.
Libertas Schulze-Boysen was, by now, a key element in her husband’s group. Apart from their official jobs, they devoted their time to resistance. They lived well—eating out every night—and remained deeply in love. For Schulze-Boysen, Libertas was his “closest companion and confederate.” Realizing that his group depended on him, he told his wife that if anything happened to him she would need to be especially strong, in order to carry on with their efforts.
The beautiful, spoiled aristocrat and the handsome military man were unusual “leftists” and were almost certainly never Soviet Communists. They lived in the upper-class Altenburger Allee in the West End, “enemy territory” to any dyed-in-the-wool German Communist, but found their best allies in their fight against Hitler on the Communist side. As Schulze-Boysen’s mother put it, “the most active, uncompromising, and courageous resistance fighters were in [the Communist] ranks.”6 For Schulze-Boysen, Germany’s future appeared locked between either a dictatorship of the right or the left, and “the Fascist dictatorship gives the Marxist new arguments.” The Communists who fought back and faced concentration camps and death were “the martyrs,” he said, and he never forgot his pledge to avenge Henry Erlanger.
Schulze-Boysen’s group now met only twice a month, but they were altogether lighter affairs than those officiated over by the Harnacks. There would be a literary element, with Libertas and Küchenmeister reciting poetry, but there would also be music and dancing, food and gossip. Libertas was the heart and soul of these evenings, breathlessly sharing bits of news and insisting everyone sing when she played the accordion. Political discussion would not be built around an agenda but would mix in through the night: the natural energy of old friends talking and arguing. Sometimes as many as forty people would join the parties—which also included picnics on the Liebenberg estate and sailing on the Wannsee. New friends included Walter Husemann, a toolmaker and trade unionist who had served time in Buchenwald, and his wife, Marta Wolter, star of the 1932 film Kuhle Wampe, a Depression-themed drama written by Bertolt Brecht. Like Weisenborn, both knew John Sieg, the working-class, American-born journalist who linked the Harnacks and Kuckhoffs to groups of antifascists in industry and on the railways.
A young dentist named Helmut Himpel and his fiancée, Maria Terwiel, joined the group, too. Like many, they had personal as well as political reasons for loathing the Nazis. As a Jew, Terwiel had been banned from practicing law and marrying Himpel. Himpel hit back by forging ration cards and travel documents for Terwiel and other Jews. Two Communists, Heinrich Scheel and Hans Coppi, who as a teenager in the early years of the Nazi regime had already been in prison for preparing antifascist leaflets, completed the core element of the network.
And the resistance work continued. Dr. Paul’s waiting room in Wilmersdorf provided an additional space for copying leaflets, with articles denouncing the Spanish Civil War. The leaflets were put in plain envelopes, and Dr. Paul—who traveled regularly making house calls to patients—would post them from mailboxes all over the city.
AT THE AIR Ministry, Göring was delighted with his protégé’s work. The personnel reports the Reichsmarschall received about young Schulze-Boysen—highlighting his skills at reading foreign-language reports and putting together succinct but in-depth summaries of the state of other nations’ air forces—seemed to confirm that his faith had been well placed. Göring, who enjoyed the attention of the aristocracy, still went shooting on the estate owned by Libertas’s family, and was persuaded that Schulze-Boysen’s brushes with the left were youthful indiscretions. “That’s yesterday’s news,” Göring had said when one Luftwaffe officer had nervously raised the issue of Schulze-Boysen’s early career in anti-Nazi journalism. “Let it go.”7
Of course, Schulze-Boysen was copying the material that passed his desk and taking it home. Being courted by Nazi power and simultaneously betraying it greatly appealed to Schulze-Boysen’s sense of adventure.
And having Göring’s support was vital. The Gestapo remained suspicious of Schulze-Boysen following the Pöllnitz arrest but knew they had to step carefully.
Then they thought they might have reason to suspect him again.
AT THE HEIGHT of Schulze-Boysen’s undercover work copying and sharing Nazi secrets about military operations in Spain, one of his key contacts, a newspaper photographer named Werner Dissel, was arrested by the Gestapo. Dissel had helped Schulze-Boysen obtain information about the deployment of two Panzer companies but had been arrested for spreading “Communistic demoralization.” Some at the Gestapo still suspected that Schulze-Boysen was not all he appeared to be, and knowing of his friendship with Dissel, they suggested the Luftwaffe officer should meet him in his cell.
Schulze-Boysen immediately sensed that something was wrong and knew enough about Gestapo methods to suspect that the room in which they met would be bugged, the Gestapo hoping that the two men would say something that would incriminate them both.
Their trap set, the police left the two men alone and Schulze-Boysen calmly offered Dissel a packet of cigarettes. Written on the packet was a short note telling Dissel that the Gestapo knew nothing and he should give nothing away. Schulze-Boysen shared an innocuous conversation with Dissel before rising to leave. His parting look told the other man to keep strong.8
THE WEATHER HAD been hot and humid in Berlin when the city had awakened on August 23, 1939, to the news that the government had signed the pact with the Soviet Union.
At work Schulze-Boysen had listened to colleagues’ assessment of the agreement: Not only would there be a newly opened back door for the import of food and raw materials from the Soviet Union, but there also would be no way Britain’s Royal Navy could strangle the Reich as it had done during the Great War—and Stalin was going to allow Germany to deal with the troublesome Poles. Older veterans told friends there would be no repetition of the winter of 1917, when turnips had been the staple diet.
But that night, Schulze-Boysen told his friends that Germany and the Soviet Union were fundamentally different and that the Nonaggression Pact was a “Not-Yet-Aggression Pact.”9
A few days later while sailing on the lake at Wannsee with Günther Weisenborn, his friend and his wife’s lover, Schulze-Boysen said: “Tomorrow night we move against Poland.” Weisenborn stopped what he was doing, watching Schulze-Boysen steer the boat, a strong wind blowing through his blond hair. “So far Hitler’s had room to maneuver,” the Luftwaffe man went on, “but now he will start to box himself in. Now the real world history will be made, but not by him alone. We’re all going to play our little part, everyone around us and we ourselves. It will be the biggest war in world history, but Hitler won’t survive it.”10
Weisenborn, a man of words, had nothing to say by way of a reply. His eyes settled on the darkening trees along the edge of the lake, and he wondered where the next few years would take them.
ON THE EVENING of September 1, Schulze-Boysen went to the home of film producer Herbert Engelsing to celebrate their joint birthdays. Schulze-Boysen was turning thirty, a landmark that he felt fell appropriately on the day Germany had gone to war: He saw his life as somehow inextricably linked to the conflict ahead.
The Schulze-Boysens, as was normal, led the festivities. Libertas had brought her accordion, and together they sang songs they had heard from Great War veterans in their families: “La Marseillaise” and “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”
Schulze-Boysen lurched from wild excitement to deep melancholy as the night went on. His blue eyes hard and piercing, he told friends that Hitler was leading them into avoidable catastrophe, that perhaps they could not be sure of the Russians, and that he was sure the United States was the only hope for victory against the Nazis.
Then he was on his feet, dancing and belting out at the top of his lungs the Polish national anthem: “Poland is not yet lost, as long as we still live . . .”
Terrified, Frau Engelsing walked around the house to check no one was listening.
When she went back inside, Harro Schulze-Boysen was taking turns dancing with the women one by one. Despite his drunkenness he was elegant, swift, slender.
But eventually the dancing stopped. As dawn broke, they were all silent.
SCHULZE-BOYSEN’S GROUP HAD courted danger in a way that Harnack never had. In fact, five years earlier, the two men’s paths had crossed briefly.
Harnack’s friend Rudolf Heberle had known Harro Schulze-Boysen since they had shared a long correspondence during the latter’s days editing Der Gegner. Heberle’s wife, Franziska, was a distant relative of Harro’s. The circles around the conspirators in Berlin were tight, but Heberle learned about his old acquaintance’s work with his group and planned to bring him together with Arvid Harnack. The fit seemed perfect.
One evening in 1935, Heberle and Schulze-Boysen had arrived at the Harnacks’ home and they talked. As Heberle had suspected, they agreed entirely on ideas, but their personalities were very different. Harnack was cautious, careful in what he said; Schulze-Boysen was eager, enthusiastic, with a flamboyance at odds with the other man. They shook hands, and Schulze-Boysen left. Harnack sighed and turned to Heberle. “Tell your cousin that I appreciated meeting with him,” he said. “I was very interested but I don’t want to see him again because it’s too dangerous.”11
Now, though, Germany was at war, and Korotkov was building up a dossier to persuade Stalin that Hitler was really his enemy. Harnack knew he had to reconsider. Greta Lorke was right. He had to put aside his security fears and reach out to Schulze-Boysen.
Harnack was committed to making the United States and the Soviet Union see that they had to stand up to Hitler before it was too late. The kind of intelligence Schulze-Boysen would provide from his job at the Air Ministry could well be critical.
IN OCTOBER 1940, within a couple of weeks of having Korotkov arrive at his door, Arvid Harnack called the first meeting at which he, Adam Kuckhoff, and Harro Schulze-Boysen were all present.
Harnack and Schulze-Boysen each shared with the other the secret orders reaching their desks. Luftwaffe documents Schulze-Boysen copied contained demands for more airfields, more pilots, more aircraft, more surveillance flights, more aviation fuel. Arvid’s paperwork dealt with the economic consequences of the fighting for Germany.
They discussed the kind of information they needed to continue, how it would be collected, and how it would be passed to Alexander Korotkov. Schulze-Boysen said he would work with anyone who would bring down the Nazis.
Harnack met Korotkov and told him that he and Schulze-Boysen were now in regular contact.
Delighted, Korotkov reported directly to Lavrenty Beria, the head of all Soviet intelligence gathering, that he had his Berlin spy ring.