The Red Orchestra (, ) was the name given by the Abwehr Section III.F to anti-Nazi resistance workers in Germany in August 1941. It primarily referred to a loose network of resistance groups, connected through personal contacts, uniting hundreds of opponents of the Nazi regime. These included groups of friends (centred on Harro Schulze-Boysen, Adam Kuckhoff and Arvid Harnack in Berlin, alongside many others) who held discussions. They printed and distributed prohibited leaflets, posters, and stickers, hoping to incite civil disobedience. They aided Jews and resistance workers to escape the regime, documented the atrocities of the Nazis, and transmitted military intelligence to the Allies. Contrary to legend, the Red Orchestra was neither directed by Soviet communists nor under a single leadership. It was a network of groups and individuals, often operating independently. To date, about 400 members are known by name.
The term was also used by the German Abwehr to refer to associated Soviet intelligence networks, working in Belgium, France, United Kingdom and the Low Countries, that were built up by Leopold Trepper on behalf of the Main Directorate of State Security (GRU). Trepper ran a series of clandestine cells for organising agents. He used the latest technology, in the form of small wireless radios, to communicate with Soviet intelligence.
Although the monitoring of the radios' transmissions by the Funkabwehr would eventually lead to the organisation's destruction, the sophisticated use of the technology enabled the organisation to behave as a network, with the ability to achieve tactical surprise and deliver high-quality intelligence, including the warning of Operation Barbarossa.
To this day, the German public perception of the "Red Orchestra" is characterised by the vested interest in historical revisionism of the post-war years and propaganda efforts of both sides of the Cold War.
Reappraisal For a long time after World War II, only parts of the German resistance to Nazism had been known to the public within Germany and the world at large. This included the groups that took part in the 20 July plot and the White Rose resistance groups. In the 1970s there was a growing interest in the various forms of resistance and opposition. However, no organisation's history was so subject to systematic misinformation, and as little recognised, as those resistance groups centred on Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen.
In a number of publications, the groups that these two people represented were seen as traitors and spies. An example of these was Kennwort: Direktor; die Geschichte der Roten Kapelle (Password: Director; The history of the Red Orchestra) written by Heinz Höhne who was a Der Spiegel journalist. Höhne based his book on the investigation by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office against the General Judge of the Luftwaffe and Nazi apologist Manfred Roeder who prosecuted the Harnack and Schulze-Boysen cases during World War II and who contributed decisively to the formation of the legend that survived for much of the Cold War period. In his book Höhne reports from former Gestapo and Reich war court individuals who had a conflict of interest and were intent on defaming the groups attached to Harnack and Schulze-Boysen with accusations of treason.
The perpetuation of the defamation from the 1940s through to the 1970s that started with the Gestapo was incorporated by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office and evaluated as a journalistic process that can be seen by the 1968 trial of Nazi judge turned far-right Holocaust denier Manfred Roeder by the German lawyer Robert Kempner. The Frankfurt public prosecutor's office, which prosecuted the case against Roeder, based its investigation on procedure case number "1 Js 16/49" which was the trial case number defined by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office. The whole process propagated the Gestapo ideas of the Red Orchestra and this was promulgated in the report of the public prosecutor's office which stated:
In the course of time, a group of political supporters of different characters and backgrounds gathered around these two men and their wives. They were united in their active opposition to National Socialism and in their support for communism. Until the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union, the focus of their work was on domestic policy. After that, it shifted more to the field of treason and espionage in favour of the Soviet Union. At the beginning of 1942, the Schulze-Boysen group was finally integrated into the widely ramified network of Soviet intelligence in Western Europe. The value of the intelligence passed on by the Schulze-Boysen group to the Soviet intelligence service cannot be underestimated according to general judgement. All persons who had to deal with this material in their official capacity agree that it was the most dangerous treason organisation uncovered during World War II.... In no... case, however, it is certain that those convicted were only sentenced for high treason and favouring the enemy. The Schulze-Boysen group was first and foremost a spy organisation for the Soviet Union. Since the outbreak of war with Russia, internal resistance took a back seat to espionage work, and it can be assumed that all members were used directly or indirectly for intelligence gathering.
From the perspective of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the Red Orchestra were honoured as anti-fascist resistance fighters and indeed received posthumous orders in 1969. Accordingly, the most comprehensive collection of biographies that exist are from the GDR, by Karl Heinz Biernat and Luise Kraushaar Die Schulze- Boysen- Harnack- Organisation im antifaschistischen Kampf (2002) and they represent their point of view, through the lens of ideology.
In the 1980s, the GDR historian Heinrich Scheel, who at the time was vice president of the East German Academy of Sciences and who was part of the anti-Nazi Tegeler group (named after the area they met in, in Berlin) that included Hans Coppi from 1933, conducted research into the Rote Kapelle and produced a paper which took a more nuanced view of the Rote Kapelle and discovered the work that was done to defame them. Scheel's work led to a re-evaluation of the Rote Kapelle, but it was not until 2009 that the German Bundestag overturned the judgments of the National Socialist judiciary for "treason" and rehabilitated the members of the group.
Name
The name Rote Kapelle was a cryptonym that was invented for a secret operation started by Abwehrstelle Belgium (Ast Belgium), a field office of Abwehr III.F in August 1941 and conducted against a Soviet intelligence station that had been detected in Brussels in June 1941. Kapelle was an accepted Abwehr term for counter-espionage operations against secret wireless transmitting stations and in the case of the Brussels stations Rote was used to differentiate from other enterprises conducted by Ast Belgium.
In July 1942, the case of the Red Orchestra was taken over from Ast Belgium by section IV. A.2. of the Sicherheitsdienst. When Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich was arrested in November 1942, a small independent unit made up of Gestapo personnel known as the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was formed in Paris in the same month and led by SS-Obersturmbannführer (Colonel) Friedrich Panzinger.
The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the counter-espionage part of the Schutzstaffel (SS), referred to resistance radio operators as "pianists", their transmitters as "pianos", and their supervisors as "conductors".
Only after the Funkabwehr had decrypted radio messages in August 1942, in which German names appeared, did the Gestapo start to arrest and imprison them, their friends and relatives. In 2002, the German filmmaker Stefan Roloff, whose father Helmut Roloff was a member of one of the Red Orchestra groups, stated of them:
Because of their contact with the Soviets, the Brussels and Berlin groups were grouped together by the Counterintelligence and Gestapo, under the misleading name of the Rote Kapelle. A radio operator who tapped Morse code characters with his fingers was a pianist in the secret service language. A group of "pianists" formed a "band", and since the Morse code had come from Moscow, the "orchestra" was communist and therefore red. This misunderstanding laid the foundation on which the resistance group would later be treated as a Soviet espionage organisation, until this could be corrected in the early 1990s. The construct of a Red Orchestra organization, created by the Gestapo never existed as such
In his research, the historian Hans Coppi Jr., whose father was also a member, Hans Coppi, emphasised that, in view of the Western European groups:
..a 'Red Orchestra' network in Western Europe, led by Leopold Trepper did not exist. The various groups in Belgium, Holland and France worked largely independently of one another.
The German political scientist Johannes Tuchel summed up in a research article for the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.
The Gestapo identifies it under the collective name "Red Orchestra" and wants it to be viewed above all as an espionage organisation of the Soviet Union. This designation, which reduces the groups around Harnack and Schulze-Boysen to contacts with the Soviet intelligence service, continues to shape the public image in Germany also after 1945, distorting their motives and goals, even after 1945. At the end of 1942, the Reich Court Martial passes the first death sentences; in total, more than fifty members of this group are murdered.
Germany Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group The Red Orchestra, as historically viewed in the world today, are mainly the resistance groups around the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, the writer Adam Kuckhoff and the economist Arvid Harnack, to which historians assign more than 100 people.
Origin Harnack and Schulze-Boysen had similar political views, both rejected the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, and sought alternatives to the existing social order. Since the Great Depression of 1929, they saw the Soviet planned economy as a positive counter-model to the free-market economy. They wanted to introduce planned economic elements in Germany and work closely with the Soviet Union without breaking German bridges to the rest of Europe.