Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha (31 May 1897 – 22 December 1942) was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was incorrectly linked to the Red Orchestra espionage group.
He fought in World War I, an experience that defined his politics and made him a pacifist. He joined the German Foreign Office, was trained to be a diplomat and was sent to the embassy in Warsaw, in position of trust in the Foreign Office. In the years leading up to the Second World War, he became a committed opponent of the Nazi regime and of its antisemitic policies. In 1937, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence, while he served in Warsaw. When World War II started, he passed documents to Soviet intelligence through his contacts Rudolf Herrnstadt and later Ilse Stöbe.
In September 1939, he began working in the information department in the Foreign Ministry, which was established to counter enemy propaganda. As part of his position, photographs of atrocities against Jews and other people passed through his department and were used in propaganda. Appalled at what he saw, he began to resist and built a dossier of the worst images over several years. In 1940, he helped several of his Polish friends flee abroad after the Invasion of Poland, In 1941, when he learned of the murders of the Polish intelligensia during operation Sonderaktion Krakau, he protested to Reinhard Heydrich, which enabled him to save the lifes of several Polish academics. During that period, he continued to save documents for his portfolio. It was eventually smuggled to London in January 1942. Later in the war, he tried to warn Swiss diplomats about the Aktion T4 campaign. In June 1941, after the invasion of the Soviet Union, his controller Ilse Stöbe lost contact. Soviet intelligence tried several times to reinitiate communications with her but were unsuccessful. A blunder by Soviet intelligence that exposed Stöbe's address, led her and von Scheliha to being discovered in July 1942 by German military intelligence. Stöbe was arrested in 12 September 1942, Von Scheliha on 29 October 1942. He was tried by the Reichskriegsgericht and executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison on 14 December 1942.
After the war, Von Scheliha was seen as a traitor and his wife Marie Louise von Scheliha and children were left destitute. In the decades after the war, she worked tirelessly to rehabilitate her husbands reputation, eventually succeeding in the late 1990's with the help of Ulrich Sahm, who wrote a biography of von Scheliha that described him as a "daring and honourable resistance fighter".
Life Rudolf von Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia (now Cieśle, Oleśnica, Poland), as the son of the Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha (1865–1946). His mother was the Marie Luise von Scheliha née Miquel (1876–1942) who was a daughter of Lord Mayor of Frankfurt and Prussian Finance Minister Johann von Miquel. His younger sister, Renata von Scheliha (1901–1967), was a classical philologist.
In 1927, Rudolf married the noblewomen Marie Louise von Scheliha (1904–2003) née von Medinger, the daughter of a large landowner and industrialist. The couple had two daughters: Sylvia, born on 14 November 1930, and Elisabeth, born in 1934. Sylvia became an engineer, and Elisabeth received a doctorate in chemistry, with the latter surviving to 2016 and dying in Adliswil.
Military He served as an army officer in World War I and volunteered after his graduation in 1915. Scheliha volunteered at the same regiment, the Cavalry Rifle Regiment, Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, in which his father and uncle had served; its officers were drawn from the nobility.
On 8 August 1918, he was shelled in a ditch with two brothers, who were blown up, and one brother died months later from his injuries. Scheliha was buried; when he was rescued, his hair had turned grey, and he was suffering from shell shock, a type of post-traumatic stress disorder. His parents were shocked at the change but he never spoke of his experiences. The experience left a pacifist. He was honoured for his efforts by both Iron Crosses and the Silver Wound Badge.
Education After the war, he studied law in Breslau. In May 1919, he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia that year and came in contact with republican and anti-totalitarian groups.Kösener corps lists 1996, 140, 1312 He was elected to the AStA, the General Student Committee (Students Union), where he vehemently opposed the students' antisemitic riots.
Career
After his examination in 1921, he became first clerk at the Court of Appeal in 1922. In February 1922, von Scheliha joined the regional office of the Foreign Office in Hamburg. After six months, he was promoted to attaché. He began to work in the department responsible for East European affairs in the office of Undersecretary of State Adolf Georg von Maltzan in Berlin. In December 1924, he was promoted again and was admitted to the diplomatic service. Over the following years, von Scheliha took over tasks in the diplomatic missions of Prague, Constantinople, Angora and Brno. In 1927, he was appointed to the position of legation secretary. In 1929, von Scheliha was appointed to the position of vice-consul at the Germany embassy in Katowice. At the time he tried to solve several intractable problems in the relations between Germany and Poland that had reached a new low, by maintaining an open house where he invited members of the Polish elite to talk to embassy staff. He hoped the convivial environment combined with common shared values would lead to an improvement in relations.
In July 1933, a few months after Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichskanzler, von Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party, a requirement as a diplomat, resulting in him participating in the Nuremberg Rally. At the time, he didn't understand the threat of fascism that the Nazi Party posed.
Warsaw From 1932 to 1939, von Scheliha was a member of the German embassy in Warsaw. In October 1932, he joined the embassy staff as a Legation Secretary. While in Warsaw, Von Scheliha became part of a group of left-leaning, liberal anti-nazis that met regularly. By 1936, these included his colleagues the ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke who he was on first name terms, the press-secretary Hans Graf Huyn, the Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, poet Julian Tuwim, the actress Ida Kaminska, Polish foreign minister Josef Beck. His close friends were the Polish Countess Klementyna Mańkowska and Count Konstantin Bninski (1889–1972) and the German journalist who was the foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Vossische Zeitung. Also in the group was Rudolf Herrnstadt, the foreign correspondent for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt who had moved to Warsaw in 1931 and Ilse Stöbe, the foreign correspondent for the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper who had moved there in 1935. The couple were Soviet GRU agents.
Von Scheliha work was principally looking after diplomatic guests of the embassy and ensure the correct protocol was followed. After the signing of the German–Polish non-aggression pact in January 1934, the embassy faced a continual stream of new guests whose visits were organised by Von Scheliha. Amongst these were Hermann Göring ostensibly coming to hunt but in reality to satisfy pre-invasion questions and the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In 1936, Von Scheliha arranged a visit for Hitlers lawyer Hans Frank and along with his wife Marie, escorted Frank and his family around the sights of Kraków. When Poland was invaded, Frank became the Governor-General of the vast occupied territories and was responsible for the mass-murder of Jews and the Polish intelligensia.
In August 1936, Von Scheliha and his wife escorted several Polish dignitaries to the 1936 Summer Olympics before going on holiday to East Prussia. He planned to try and warn several members of the Prussian nobility about Hitler. A friend of his sister Renata, also a philologist, described how "He wanted to appeal to the conscience of the nobility on the large estates". Von Scheliha tried to describe to the nobility how they would be committing "partial suicide" if they became part of the regime. Mommsen stated, "It is unnecessary to speak about the accuracy of this prophecy. But it is worth remembering how much determination and courage it took to travel around the country with such a slogan". Mommsen noted how brave Von Scheliha was but also careless as he threw caution to the wind, even in Warsaw and put himself in danger with his convictions.
Informant Both Herrnstadt and von Scheliha had similar political views on the Nazis, a deep hostility, but had different views on the Soviet Union as von Scheliha was opposed to communism. Both knew that Hitler was going to start a war. When Herrnstadt had to leave his newspaper in 1936 due to the Reich Editors law for being Jewish, it became impossible for Moltke to defend him. Only von Scheliha out of the embassy staff remained in contact but their meetings were secret.
In 1937, while his career progressed with a promotion to Councillor II Class, during the summer, Herrnstadt used subterfuge to trick Von Scheliha into becoming an informant. Herrnstadt did this by disguising the delivery location of any received intelligence, i.e. to show the reports weren't going to the Soviet Union. In 1937, he travelled to England and through a comintern agent Ernest David Weiss and his sub-agent Ilse Steinfeld, a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt who worked for The Guardian, he met the German legation councillor Hermann von Stutterheim (1887–1959) of the German embassy in London. When he returned to Warsaw, he informed Von Scheliha that had met a contact in England, who was an "intermediary" for the secret service who was interested in the political situation in Poland. He further informed him that he was authorised to act for this intermediary. This finally convinced Von Scheliha by mid-September to begin supplying embassy reports. Until September 1939, Herrnstadt passed the documents to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw through the cutout Stöbe. It is still not known however, whether von Scheliha knew that the reports he was passed to Herrnstadt were being sent to Soviet intelligence.
Berlin
Invasion In August, Herrnstadt met with von Scheliha to inform him that his "wife" Ilse Stöbe would be taking over his duties in Berlin, as he had to leave Poland. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, he would have been the subject to immediate arrest and execution by the Nazis had he remained in Warsaw. Von Scheliha was initially reticent about the decision as he was afraid to expose himself to a third person, but finally accepted the decision. Just before the imminent invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939, Herrnstadt fled to the Soviet Union at the end of August.
Information department In September 1939, von Scheliha moved back to Berlin when he was appointed director of an Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Informationsabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes) that had been created to counter foreign press and radio news propaganda on the German occupation in Poland. Three months later in January 1940, von Scheliha was promoted to director of the "Observation and Combating Polish Propaganda Provocations" ("Beobachtung und Bekämpfung der polnischen Hetzpropaganda") section of the Information department. The position gave him to the foreign press. The appointment allowed him to verify the veracity of foreign reports of German atrocities and to interview Nazi officials. He thoroughly investigated every report he received and would protest against what were in effect Nazi war crimes in Poland.
Resistance