Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was a German special commission that was created by German High Command in November 1942, in response to the capture of two leading members of a Soviet espionage group that operated in Europe, that was called the Red Orchestra (German: Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was an internal counter-intelligence operation run by the Abwehr and the Gestapo. It consisted of a small independent Gestapo unit that was commanded by SS-Obersturmbannführer Friedrich Panzinger and its chief investigator was Gestapo officer Karl Giering. Its remit was to discover and arrest members of the Red Orchestra in Germany, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy during World War II.
Archival history While some documents on the "Rote Kapelle Special Commission" are available, others for example, from the Military Historical Archives in Prague and Moscow have not been examined. At the same time, none of the former Gestapo or Abwehr personnel made reports after the war, for obvious reasons. This means that the history of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle is only partially complete.
Name The name Rote Kapelle was a cryptonym that was used by the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the security and counter-espionage part of the Schutzstaffel (SS), which referred to resistance radio operators as "pianists", their transmitters as "pianos", and their supervisors as "conductors". The Rote Kapelle was a collective name that was used by the Gestapo, the German secret police, for the purpose of identification, and the Funkabwehr, the German radio counterintelligence organisation. The name of Kapelle was an accepted Abwehr term to denote secret radio transmitters and the counterintelligence operation against them.
Size and location
The Sonderkommando was a small organisation of around 12–15 investigators that included two typists. When it moved to Paris, it was located in the third floor in four rooms (335-339) of the French ministry of the interior at 11 Rue des Saussaies. As a unit, they did not outwardly present themselves as Gestapo officials. Instead, they wore suits and ties to work to enable them to operate clandestinely, with the demeanour of businessmen In August 1943, the Sonderkommando moved to the Boemelburg hotel at 40 Bd Victor-Hugo in Neuilly-sur-Seine in Paris. In March 1944, the unit moved to rooms at 63 Rue de Courcelles next to Avenue Hoche due to a disagreement between Heinz Pannwitz and the (BdS) . It was also a matter of convenience as it was closer to where the staff were headquartered.
Formation On 26 June 1941, a radio transmission was intercepted by the Funkabwehr, the German radio counterintelligence organisation in Brussels. This was the first of many. In August 1941, when the Abwehr realised the nature of the signals, they created a counterintelligence operation with the name Rote Kapelle that was started by Abwehrstelle Belgium (Ast Belgium), a field office of Abwehr IIIF. In October–November 1941, Abwehr officer Henry Piepe was ordered to take charge of the investigation. Piepe became the liaison between the Sonderkommando and the Abwehr.
By September 1941, over 250 messages had been intercepted. On 30 November 1941, close range direction-finding teams moved into Brussels and as a result of Piepe's work, almost immediately found three transmitter signals. Piepe chose a location at 101 Rue des Atrébates, that provided the strongest signal. The house was raided by the Abwehr on 12 December 1941 where they found Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich's transmitter and arrested radio operators Mikhail Makarov and his assistant Anton Danilov. On the 30 July 1942, the Funkabwehr identified a further house at 12 Rue de Namur, Brussels and raided it As well as arresting Soviet agent and radio specialist Johann Wenzel, two messages that were waiting to be enciphered were discovered in the house that contained details of such startling content, the plans for Case Blue, that Henry Piepe immediately drove to Berlin from Brussels to report to German High Command.
The start of the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle cannot be precisely established. Walter Schellenberg, recorded details in his memoirs of an agreement that came about between Fritz Thiele, Wilhelm Canaris, Heinrich Müller and himself in the summer of 1942, to establish a "special commission" to investigate the problem. German counter-intelligence spent months assembling the data and finally Wilhelm Vauck, a cryptanalyst in the Abwehr succeeded in decrypting around 200 of the captured messages. On 15 July 1942, Vauck decrypted a message that was dated 10 October 1941. and addressed to Kent, (Anatoly Gurevich) that gave the addresses of several individuals of German nationality. This resulted in another meeting between Schellenberg, Thiele, Canaris and Müller where it was decided that the investigation should include Germany and that the Belgium and the Low Countries investigation would continue to be carried out jointly by the Gestapo and the Abwehr, while the German investigation would be carried out only by the Gestapo. In July 1942, the investigation was transferred from Ast Belgium to Section IV. A.2. of the Sicherheitsdienst. After the arrest of Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich, a small independent Gestapo unit, known as the "Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle" was established in Paris, France in November 1942. The unit was led by Friedrich Panzinger and the investigation was led by Heinrich Reiser. The Belgium investigation was conducted by Karl Giering of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) department AMT IV A 2. The Berlin unit was led by Horst Kopkow. When the Belgium investigation was completed, Giering moved to Paris to take over the investigation there.
The unit had to work in occupied French territory but not under the command of the BdS but instead was commanded by the RSHA.
Processing Gestapo interrogations followed a standard process. Prisoners were interrogated and tortured several times in the first few days and their confession recorded onto an auto recording device, for example the Lorenz Textophon. Several days or weeks later the prisoners would be visited by General Judge of the Luftwaffe Manfred Roeder who conducted a shorter, formal interrogation. The prisoner's final statement would then be recorded: "I stand by my statements to the Secret State Police. They correspond to the truth and I make them the subject of my judicial hearing today" The interrogation by Werner Krauss, Heinrich Scheel and Günther Weisenborn were the exception to the standard process as they largely dictated their confession. By the time of the interrogation phase, the Gestapo already knew many of people's names.
The torture and interrogation would often last a particularly long time, even to determine the smallest detail. For example, Wilhelm Guddorf was asked to provide details of three communists that he had met in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in November 1939, while he was imprisoned there. His torture lasted from 15 October to 16 October at 4 a.m.
Operations Brussels In Berlin, the Gestapo was ordered to assist Henry Piepe and they selected Giering, who took what reports Piepe had prepared and took over the investigation in Brussels Giering's investigation linked the name Carlos Alamos with GRU officer Mikhail Makarov, who had been arrested during the Rue des Atrébates raid. On Giering's instructions, Makarov was taken to Berlin to undergo interrogation. Instead of being sent to Breendonk or a concentration camp, he was taken to Giering's home, where Giering hoped the homely environment would make him talk. However, Makarov never exposed any details of the network and he was sent back to Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels.
Giering then turned to Rita Arnould as the new lead in the investigation and she identified the Polish-Jewish forger Abraham Rajchmann. Rajchmann was an informer to the Belgian Police Judiciaire des Parquets (Judiciary Police). It was Rajchmann who had been forging identity documents in the secret room of Rue des Atrébates. Rajchmann in turn betrayed Soviet agent Konstantin Jeffremov who was arrested on 22 July 1942 in Brussels in a sting operation, while attempting to obtain forged identity documents for himself to enable him to escape.
Jeffremov was to be tortured but immediately agreed to cooperate. As a collaborator, he exposed several important members of the espionage network in Belgium and the Netherlands. Eventually Jeffremovs commitment led him to work for the Sonderkommando in a funkspiel operation. Through Jeffremov, contact was made with the Belgian courier Germaine Schneider who carried intelligence between Brussels and Paris. However, Schneider contacted Leopold Trepper, the technical director of Soviet Red Army Intelligence in western Europe, to warn him. Trepper advised Schneider to sever all contact with Jeffremov and move to a hideout in Lyons. Giering instead focused on Germaine Schneider's husband Franz Schneider as the next lead. In November 1942, Franz Schneider was interrogated by Giering but he was released from protective custody as he wasn't part of the network. Schneider on his released contacted Trepper to inform him that Jeffremov was under arrest.
Rajchmann was arrested by Piepe on 2 September 1942 when his usefulness as an informer to the Abwehr was at an end. Rajchmann also decided to cooperate with the Abwehr resulting in his betrayal of his mistress, the Comintern member Malvina Gruber, who was arrested on 12 October 1942. Gruber immediately decided to cooperate with the Abwehr, in an attempt to avoid interrogation. She admitted the existence of Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich and his probable location, as well as exposing several members of the Trepper espionage network in France.
Simexco As part of the routine investigation, Harry Piepe discovered that the firm Simexco in Brussels was being used as a cover for Soviet espionage operations by the Trepper network. It was used as a means to generate monies that could be used in day-to-day operations by the espionage group unbeknownst to the employees of the company and at the same time provide travel documentation and facilities for European wide telephone communication between group members. Piepe was concerned about the large number of telegrams the company was sending to Berlin, Prague and Paris and decided to investigate it. Piepe visited the Chief Commissariat Officer for Brussels, who was responsible for the company. In the meeting Piepe showed the two photographs that had been discovered at the house at 101 Rue des Atrébates, to the commanding officer who immediately identified the aliases of Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich. As part of a combined operation with Giering in Paris, Piepe raided the offices of Simexco on the 19 November 1942. When the Gestapo entered the Simexco office they found only one person, a clerk, but managed to discover all the names and addresses of Simexco employees and shareholders from company records. Over the month of November, most of the people associated with the company were arrested and taken to St. Gilles Prison in Brussels or Fort Breendonk in Mechelen.
Amsterdam