Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen (; Schulze, 2 September 1909 – 22 December 1942) was a left-wing German publicist and Luftwaffe officer during World War II. As a young man, Schulze-Boysen grew up in prosperous family with two siblings, with an extended family who were aristocrats. After spending his early schooling at the Heinrich-von-Kleist Gymnasium and his summers in Sweden, he partly completed a political science course at the University of Freiburg, before moving to Berlin in November 1929, to study law at the Humboldt University of Berlin. At Humboldt, he became an anti-Nazi. After a visit to France in 1931, he moved to the political left. When he returned, he became a publicist on Der Gegner (English: "The Opponent"), a left-leaning political magazine. In May 1932, he took control of the magazine, but it was closed by the Gestapo in February 1933.
In May 1933, Schulze-Boysen trained as a pilot and started working in the Ministry of Aviation. In the summer of 1934, he met the aristocrat Libertas Haas-Heye and married her in July 1936. The couple held regular dinner parties and evening-picnics that became formal meetings where many people from different stratas of society met and who were confessed anti-Nazis. By 1936, their house in Charlottenburg had become a popular meeting place and by 1937 the group began to resist. During the Spanish Civil War, Schulze-Boysen began collecting details of the Wehrmacht's involvement in the war from the ministry. He arranged for the documents to be passed to the Soviet embassy by Gisela von Pöllnitz. As he was promoted in the Ministry, Schulze-Boysen collected information that he used to write savage indictments of the Nazi plans. Their first leaflet was "Der Stoßtrupp" ("The Shock Troop") that criticised the plan for the invasion of Sudetenland. At the time, the documents were taken abroad.
At the beginning of the war, Schulze-Boysen met Arvid Harnack who was the leader of another political faction and they started to work together. As the war progressed their combined undercover political faction, developed from a resistance organisation into an espionage network from a small cadre of close friends, that began to collaborate with Soviet intelligence. The espionage network, led by Schulze-Boysen lasted slightly longer than a year, from just before June 1941 to August 1942 before a blunder by Soviet intelligence exposed their names and addresses to the German Funkabwehr, which resulted in the arrest of many members of the group, including Schulze-Boysen who was arrested on 31 August 1942 and executed later the same year.
Early life Schulze-Boysen was born in Kiel as the son of decorated naval officer and Marie-Luise (née Boysen). On his paternal side he was the grandnephew of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and on the maternal side, the German economist and philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies. In 1913, the family moved to Berlin when his father received a posting. He had two siblings: a sister Helga, and a brother, Hartmut (1922-2013).
In 1913, Schulze-Boysen attended primary school and later the Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gymnasium in the district of Schmargendorf in Berlin. From 1920, he regularly spent his summer holidays with the Hasselrot family in Sweden. In 1922 his father was transferred to Duisburg, and Harro followed him in the autumn. As a student at the Steinbart Gymnasium in Duisburg, he participated in the underground struggle against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and was temporarily imprisoned by the French and Belgian occupying forces. To get him out of this political firing line, his parents organized a slightly longer stay in Sweden. Harro's trip to England in 1926 had inspired comparison and reflection. He had found that his experiences in the country did not match the perception of England within Germany.
In 1927 he wrote his first major newspaper report about a scandal in Duisburg to erect a monument to the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck. On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, Schulze-Boysen gave a commemorative speech at the school. His political involvement in high school was perceived as unusually intense. He passed the Abitur with the overall rating "good". His dexterity was particularly emphasized in the written and oral expression. At the time his spiritual attitude was in agreement with the values and traditions of the family. From then on, he appeared in public and in written statements with the double name Schulze-Boysen.
Political awakening In April 1928 he studied law and political science at the University of Freiburg and later Berlin, without finishing. In the same period he joined the Studentenverbindung Albingia and the Young German Order, a paramilitary organisation that influenced him ideologically at the time. Its goal was to ethically revive the "comradeship from the trenches of the First World War" as a model for the Volksgemeinschaft to be developed. It rejected any form of dictatorship from the ideological left or right.
In the summer of 1929 he participated in an academic fencing club at the university and a course from the Hochsee-Wehrsportverein high sea defense sailing club in Neustadt. In November he moved to the Humboldt University of Berlin to continue his studies in law and joined its International Students' Association. In 1930, Schulze-Boysen supported the intellectual-nationalist group called the Volksnationale Reichsvereinigung ("People's National Reich Association"). During this period, Schulze-Boysen was also a member of the National Socialist Black Front. For the first time during this period he dealt intensively with Nazi ideology and searched for the causes of the sudden victory of the Nazi Party in Reichstag elections in March 1933. He studied the Nazi Party's programme and read Mein Kampf in search of answers, describing it as a "jumble of platitudes" and commenting: "There's nothing here but nonsense". It became clear to him that a further gain in votes by the Nazis would lead to a sharp intensification and polarization in society.
As a publicist In July 1931, during a stay in France, Schulze-Boysen met French intellectuals associated with the magazine Plans, which sought the establishment of a Europe-wide collective economic system and whose influence resulted in him being reorientated politically to the left, though he still maintained his contacts with the nationalists. As time went on, he increasingly distanced himself from the views of the Young German Order as he realised that the daily struggle in Germany should primarily be directed against the emerging fascism and all reactionaries.
In 1932 and 1933, he published the left-liberal political magazine Der Gegner (English: "The Opponent"), that sought an alternative between capitalism and communism. It was founded in 1931 by Franz Jung and modelled on the Plans magazine. The poet Ernst Fuhrmann, the artist Raoul Hausmann, the writers Ernst von Salomon and Adrien Turel and the Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch, among others collaborated in writing the magazine. Their aim was to build a unified front of young people against the "liberal, capitalist and nationalist spirit" in Europe. For the French, Schulze-Boysen was the actor for Germany in this field. He tried to develop an independent German youth movement with the "Gegner-Kreis", which included Robert Jungk, Erwin Gehrts, Kurt Schumacher and Gisela von Pöllnitz and began to organize Enemy Evenings in Berlin cafés. "There was hardly an opposition youth group with which he did not keep in touch with." At the end of 1931, he took a leave of absence from his studies because he had come to the conclusion that the contents discussed here had nothing to do with the daily political disputes. In February 1932, Schulze-Boysen, in coordination with his French partners of Plans, organized the Treffen der revolutionären Jugend Europas or Meeting of Europe's Revolutionary Youth. A total of about 1,000 young people attended the meeting and he formulated the political goals for the German delegation. In view of the crisis in Germany, these consisted of the abolition of the capitalist system and also the assertion of Germany's own role without foreign diktat and interference.
In the search for alternatives to crisis-ridden Western Europe, he became more interested in the Soviet system, which was influenced by his disappointment with the national and conservative parties in Germany, who in his opinion did not fight the nascent Nazis enough. In March 1932, he wrote his first article, "Der Neue Gegner" (English: "The New Opponent") that defined his concept of publication goals, stating: "Let us serve the invisible alliance of thousands, who today are still divided." In April 1932, he wrote a letter to his mother that stated his goal was the intellectual reconciliation of the young generation. Essentially his politics were driven by the idea of a united youth fighting the older generations.
In May 1932, an investigation was opened against Jung and the office premises of the Der Gegner were sealed. Schulze-Boysen took over the business as the new editor and gave the publication a new name, Gegner (English: "opponent"), but with the same network of the most diverse political camps. At the depths of the crisis, he saw a clear opportunity to implement a new policy approach: "Opponents of today – comrades of tomorrow". He had become the leading head and the centre of the "enemy circle". Schulze-Boysen considered the seizure of power by Adolf Hitler to be probable at that time, but believed that he would soon be overthrown by a general strike. After the seizure of power by the Nazis and the Reichstag fire in Berlin, Schulze-Boysen helped several friends and colleagues who were being threatened to escape abroad. As early as February 1933 the Gestapo had rated the actions of the magazine as "radical" in an official communication, and in April 1933, the offices of Der Gegner were destroyed by the Sturmabteilung in a raid and detained all those present. The editorial staff were deported to a special camp of the 6th SS-Standarte. Schulze-Boysen himself was severely abused and detained for several days. The Sturmabteilung tortured his Jewish friend and colleague Henry Erlanger before his eyes, who died shortly afterwards. It had become clear to him, as a self-confessed anti-Nazi that he had to find new ways to implement his convictions. A chance encounter in the street led to Schulze-Boysen meeting the sculptor Kurt Schumacher, who had been working on Gegner with him. This was the beginning of the intellectual discussion group that would change into a direct-action, anti-fascist resistance group.
Military In May 1933, his father organized a pilot training course for him at the German Aviation School in Warnemünde as a sea observer to remove his son from the political front line in Berlin. The place was far away from Berlin and provided enough opportunity to allow Schulze-Boysen to reflect on his past and enable him to prepare plans for the future. Before his departure, he advised his friends and colleagues to look around Nazi Germany and to go into the institutions of the Nazi regime. He read books that the rulers appealed to and tried to return with due caution to his published work. In the spring of 1934, this resulted in an opportunity through a contact with the publisher Erich Röth. He published the magazine Wille zum Reich under a pseudonym and dealt with cultural policy issues but with the goal of undermining the Nazi movement with its own themes.