And days when the best heads are those that hang.
—ALBRECHT HAUSHOFER, EXECUTED ON APRIL 23, 1945
An assistant from the University of Berlin’s Anatomical Institute was present at the executions on December 22, 1942. He placed the bodies in wooden coffins and transported them in a specially outfitted truck to Charité, the largest hospital in Berlin and one of the largest university clinics in Europe.
Hermann Stieve, for many years the head of the Anatomical Institute, sought out primarily the younger women, from whom, late that night or early the morning after the executions, he removed tissue samples and examined them for his research. The men’s bodies were used as cadavers for students to perform autopsies on.
Libertas’s final wish to be laid to rest in Liebenberg was not fulfilled. The relatives were prohibited from burying the bodies of their loved ones. There was to be nothing left to preserve their memory; they were not even granted their right to peace in death. After the removal of tissue samples and the autopsies, the mortal remains were taken to the Zehlendorf crematorium. Where the ashes were taken has yet to be determined.
In 2019, seventy-six years after the executions, Stieve’s descendants found artifacts from his research in the attic of the family home. These preserved tissue remains were handed over to the relatives of the victims. Among them was Hans Coppi, who was able to have these remains buried in Berlin’s Dorotheenstädtischer Cemetery, in a ceremony presided over by a Catholic priest, a Protestant pastor, and a Jewish rabbi. Thus, finally, some of the victims—and their relatives—were able to find some peace.
I do not know the endpoint of the path you chose to follow, maybe it was still unclear even to you; maybe you would have found it if you had wandered longer and more patiently. But you followed it bravely and fearlessly to the bitter end. Some fire that burned within you consumed you quickly. No one, now that you are dead, shall slander or speak ill of you in my presence. No one shall tear my love for you out of my heart. For you the words were spoken: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
I meanwhile call out to you in your unknown grave to say something that once, perhaps, you wouldn’t have understood, but that in the end you felt most deeply: “Love never faileth!”
E.E.
In June 1943 the sailing club Blau-Rot receives a visit from men in ill-fitting suits. The Duschinka, Harro and Libertas’s sailboat, is inspected, but judged worthless by the Gestapo. Their reason: “Hull completely rotten.” The following inventory is taken: “1 sail with mast (sail severely tattered), 1 rudder, and the floor boards.” The head of the Charlottenburg-West financial office places his stamp on the document and it is sent to the estate assessor’s office, a division of the Ministry of Finance created in 1941 with the main purpose of appraising and selling off the possessions of dispossessed Jews.
For twenty Reichsmarks Horst Kopkow makes off with the crockery from Altenburger Allee 19. Harro’s officer’s pants, his topcoat, his peaked cap, and the short dagger with holster as well as his sword knot go to the army attire office. Over the course of this war that will last another two and a half years, they will be used by other men. The twenty-four-horsepower “Fiat-Cabrio-Limousine” is also confiscated; the estate assessor’s office for Berlin-Brandenburg is free to dispose of Caesar, which once drove to Venice and then back to Kristallnacht in Berlin.
A police officer, Kriminalrat and SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Werner Gornickel, moves into the apartment at Altenburger Allee 19. He is responsible for a monthly rent of 123 Reichsmarks. He keeps some of the furniture, sits at the desk where Harro once sat. Harro’s typewriter, a 1925 Remington Portable, is bought by a man from Berlin-Wilmersdorf.
The execution victims of December 22, 1942, are just the beginning. On February 16, after being retried, Mildred Harnack climbs the scaffold. Pastor Poelchau records the American’s last words: “And I loved Germany so much.” This is what she says, the once radiant blond woman, whose hair is now white and who in her cell on death row translated the last lines from Goethe’s “Testament” into English. Among her registered effects is a ticket for ship’s passage to the United States, valid for any date, a present from Arvid. A gift she never got to use.
Erika von Brockdorff’s case is also retried, with the same result.
On May 13, 1943, the dentist Helmut Himpel, the toolmakers Walter Husemann and Karl Behrens, the gifted linguist Wilhelm Guddorf, the psychologist Dr. John Rittmeister, the soldier and aspiring poet Heinz Strelow, the anarchist substitute teacher Friedrich Rehmer, the precision engineer Fritz Thiel, the writer Walter Küchenmeister, the sinologist Dr. Philipp Schaeffer, and Erika von Brockdorff are beheaded.
On July 21 of the same year, Hitler refuses fifteen requests for stays of execution, thirteen of them for women.
On August 5 the guillotine claims the writer Dr. Adam Kuckhoff, the philologist Ursula Goetze, the musically gifted lawyer Maria Terwiel, the dancer and sculptor Oda Schottmüller, the secretary Rose Schlösinger, the young mother Hilde Coppi, the student Eva-Maria Buch, the for-tuneteller Annie Krauss, the ceramicist Cato Bontjes van Beek, the high school student Liane Berkowitz, the milling-machine operator Stanislaus Werolek, the eighty-one-year-old furniture dealer Emil Hübner, and the stenographer Klara Schnabel. On September 9, the actor Wilhelm Schürmann-Horster is also murdered in Plötzensee.
The physician Dr. Elfriede Paul, the writer Günther Weisenborn, the librarian Lotte Schleif, the university teacher Werner Krauss, the historian Heinrich Scheel, the Heidelberg publisher Marcel Melliand, the actor Marta Husemann, and Greta Kuckhoff receive prison sentences and live to see the end of the Nazi dictatorship.
Marie Luise and Erich Edgar Schulze celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary in 1968. Harro’s mother dies in 1973, his father in 1974.
What happened in the past is constantly evading attempts to pin it down. The transcript of the trial of Harro and Libertas was destroyed, likewise their Gestapo interrogation transcripts. One of the defense attorneys assigned to the proceedings, Dr. Behse, testifies after the war that all records of the trial before the Reich Court-Martial were shamefully destroyed by officials. In this way the Nazi regime meant to perpetuate the “Secret Reich Matter” designation. The hail of bombs in which so many files burned took care of the rest.
After the war both East and West seized hold of the legend of a cell of Soviet agents in the heart of Berlin—a legend created by Horst Kopkow for thirty thousand Reichsmarks—and bent it to fit their own respective ideologies. In the Ministry for State Security—home of the Stasi—and at KGB headquarters a heroic tale was cobbled together, centered around a so-called scout unit that fought the imperial evil from the heart of the Nazi capital in the name of world peace and socialism, guided of course by the canny headquarters in Moscow. In the East the loose network was known until 1966 as the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack Resistance Group, and after 1966 as the Schulze-Boysen-Harnack Resistance Organization. Harro was celebrated as a hero; he, along with Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff, and John Graudenz, was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner by the Soviet government—the highest medal in the “Great Patriotic War.” Harro had streets named after him, Berlin-Lichtenberg is still home to the Mildred Harnack Secondary School, and Berlin-Karlshorst to the Hans and Hilde Coppi High School. A torpedo boat of the East German navy, the Arvid Harnack, once sped over the torpid waves of the Baltic Sea—maybe all the way to the Curonian Spit.
In the West there wasn’t any interest in a genuine investigation either. When Harro’s brother, Hartmut Schulze-Boysen, who pursued a diplomatic career and worked in the West German embassies in Tokyo, Bucharest, and the United States, appealed to Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s with the question of whether Harro shouldn’t finally be included in Germany’s culture of collective memory, the chancellor’s office wrote back with a snide reply saying that all resistance fighters “deserve our respect. When we ask however what it is we must build on . . . then the idea of a state founded on the rule of law must be reckoned as the legacy of the resistance.” As if Harro, the proud Prussian, would have had any objection to this. Only in 2006 did Hartmut Schulze-Boysen manage to have the verdict of the trial before the Reich Court-Martial on December 19, 1942, nullified.
Thus the nuanced reality of the group that never gave itself a name—a group that didn’t fail as a result of its own actions, but rather as a result of a mistake made by the supposed pros in Moscow—was distorted even as its memory was handed down. Professor Johannes Tuchel, head of the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin, speaks of a “baffling similarity” in the reception on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The memory of the very people who advocated for a reconciliation between East and West was ground up between the two blocks on either side of the Cold War.
After 1945, Dr. Manfred Roeder, the “bloodhound,” worked with the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, a precursor to the CIA. He told the intelligence-hungry Americans that the “Red Orchestra” still existed and was working for Moscow. Under the code name Othello, the Counterintelligence Corps mined Roeder for stories, trying to learn as much from him as possible about the Soviets’ intelligence agency. A trial brought against the retired Oberstkriegsgerichtsrat by Greta Kuckhoff, Adolf Grimme, Günther Weisenborn, and others in the years right after the war was dismissed in 1951: here he was saved by an old boys’ network of former Nazis like himself, who still had a lot of say in the young Federal Republic.
Horst Kopkow, until May 1945 responsible for the torture and death of countless allied agents and German resistance fighters, likewise suffered few consequences for his actions. He was questioned about his methods for combating Soviet espionage by MI6, the British intelligence agency, given immunity from potential prosecution, and in June 1948 was even declared dead so that shortly thereafter he could return to the Federal Republic of Germany with falsified papers. There he called himself Peter Cordes and continued to work for MI6.
Friedrich Panzinger, former head of the special commission Rote Kapelle, was arrested in October 1946 by the Austrian authorities in Linz, handed over to the Soviet Union, and sentenced there to twenty-five years of hard labor. In 1955 he was released to the Federal Republic of Germany in connection with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s efforts to secure the release of German prisoners of war. Afterward he served in the newly founded German intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst.
Johannes Strübing, Kopkow’s deputy and Harro’s interrogator, was also an in-demand source for Western spy agencies and found a job in the 1950s with the newly founded Verfassungsschutz—Germany’s domestic intelligence agency—as an expert on the “Red Orchestra.”
The trail of the other protagonists gets lost in the fog. What became of Stella Mahlberg? Could she have been something more than a minor character? Her arrest and release from Gestapo custody were undated, unlike every other person arrested, more than 150 in all. She remains the phantom with the raven-black hair. She goes to Stuttgart and keeps a low profile until in 1947 she is interrogated there by the Counterintelligence Corps—and in the course of these interrogations dies. My request for information from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act brought no further details to light. The National Archives in Washington couldn’t help either: “We were unable to locate a file pertaining to Stella Mahlberg . . . It is possible that you are seeking a file that no longer exists.” For some things the explanation is simply lost.
In Plötzensee, a few minutes by car on the way to Tegel Airport from Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s major boulevard, a somewhat hard-to-find memorial is located today. The iron beam hangs, unchanged, from the ceiling of the spare execution shed. A drain in the floor, around which the cement is still lightly discolored, shows where the blood flowed.
It is a lonely room, but still it is never completely silent. As if from a great distance comes the clatter of typewriters: the black ones the Gestapo used, with a special key for the SS rune insignia; the dark green Soviet models with Cyrillic letters; but also the beloved American Remingtons that belonged to Harro and Libertas, to Adam Kuckhoff, Mildred and Arvid Harnack, Dr. John Rittmeister, Werner Krauss, Günther Weisenborn, John Graudenz, and all the others, who wrote constantly, feverishly, and together composed this story of the German resistance, a story that has been fought over like few others.