Liddell himself was not convinced. MI5 knew from intelligence sources that Moscow had instructed the KPD to do nothing that would provoke the Nazis to eliminate it. A communist street demonstration was plausible, he thought, but not more. It appeared to him, as to many others, that the Nazis had outmaneuvered the KPD and manufactured the fire in the Reichstag as an excuse to crack down and eliminate opposition.
Liddell’s specific interest lay in files on the Communist International. How did the Comintern operate in Western Europe and the colonies? One of Berlin’s police officials was dubious Liddell would learn much from the SA’s haul. The communists had prepared for suppression over the previous year during Papen’s chancellorship and destroyed documents. Liddell wasn’t ready to concede that point. In his report “The Liquidation of Communism, Left-Wing Socialism, and Pacifism in Germany,” he advised MI5 to keep “constant personal contact. . . . In their present mood, the German Police are extremely ready to help us in any way they can.”
* * *
—
Klaus had no footprint in Berlin; he was largely unrecognized, but his name was known. The police president in Kiel had sent an alert to the Gestapo in Berlin. His name was on their wanted list, and they had an idea of where to find him.
Klaus had an aunt in Berlin, Frau Rossmann, who lived with her husband in the wealthy suburb of Zehlendorf. The Gestapo paid her a visit, and she dutifully handed them an address that Klaus had left with her after he arrived in the city. The address was a fake. Klaus and Gerhard both knew that their father’s conservative family wasn’t dependable.
Ten miles and a world away, Klaus and Gerhard were hiding out with Emil’s close friend Arthur Rackwitz, the minister who had taken in Gerhard after his asthma attack in Leipzig. Like Emil, Rackwitz was a Lutheran minister, a Social Democrat, and a pacifist. Early on he had heard Emil give a lecture that drew him into the Religious Socialists, a group Emil had co-founded. Unlike Emil, when the SPD slanted toward establishment politics, he turned to the communists.
Rackwitz’s combined rectory and church was a large stone edifice in Neukölln, a working-class district on the south side of the city. The blocks of five-story apartment buildings with flat, plain stuccoed facades and small shops tucked into the first floors hugged narrow cobblestoned streets. The underground Communist Youth organization headquartered there filled the neighborhood with young, bold resistance fighters. It was one of many such in an outer “red” ring around the city. These suburbs had given the communists a plurality in Berlin in national elections.
The church’s bell tower rising far above the neighborhood was a beacon for the oppressed. It harbored not only the likes of Klaus and Gerhard but the families of those in concentration camps. Gestapo agents knew Rackwitz’s politics, obvious from his being a minister in Neukölln. They transcribed his Sunday sermons but initially left him—and his rectory’s dispossessed—alone.
* * *
—
The Nazis’ lethal attack on the communist headquarters at the end of February, the Reichstag fire, and the myth of a communist revolution served the Nazis’ campaign narrative for the Reichstag election on March 5. The party of Hitler desperately wanted an outright majority to prove their supremacy, but 50.1 percent was not an easy goal with six major parties fielding candidates.
Hitler’s simple and fiery message—short on details, long on emotion—spewed from the radio, and listeners heard what they wanted to hear: “The night of the awakening nation,” “Economic flowering,” “Save the soul.” The demonized opposition, figuratively—sometimes literally—bound and gagged, could do little.
Under gray and rainy skies, March 5 was a quiet Sunday and a quiet Election Day for Berlin. The press reported little opposition. No hammer and sickle flags in working-class districts; a sole Weimar flag forcibly removed by Göring’s special auxiliary police; communist “sandwich-board men” carrying posters around a few working-class polling places; Social Democrats standing outside some taverns. Trucks and motorcycles sped around the city carrying gangs of auxiliary police armed with truncheons and revolvers, sometimes rifles. They arrested 341 people. In Neukölln and other red neighborhoods, police and the auxiliary force patrolled with carbines slung over their shoulders. The Fuchses presumably isolated themselves in Arthur Rackwitz’s rectory with like-minded friends, of which there were many.
It was a certainty that the Nazi Party and Hitler would prevail. The celebration began early. In mid-afternoon, twenty thousand Stahlhelme marched onto Unter den Linden through the Brandenburg Gate, ecstatic throngs cheering and saluting in the drizzle, to honor President Hindenburg.
When the polls closed at 6:00 p.m., the Nazis had received only 43.4 percent of the forty million votes cast. A great disappointment to their claims of legitimacy, but with the 8 percent for their coalition partner, the German National People’s Party, they crossed the magic line of majority anyway.
The primary source of the increase of 5.6 million votes for the Nazis over the previous November was new voters rather than a shift from other parties. “It is these hitherto neutral and politically inexperienced people who have made this election such a success for the Nazis,” wrote one reporter. Promises of economic gain and fears of an “indescribably horrible Bolshevik revolution” lured the dazzled “non-voters” to the polls.
Beyond Berlin, where many read only nationalist propaganda newspapers, there was relief. “Yes,” one German said, “the old order is back again, and we were in dire need of it.” Beggars vanished; work camps took shape; the youth had jobs for the first time. An American Quaker traveling through Germany in the summer of 1933 who knew the country and the language summed up what he saw and felt:
For in the last analysis the Hitler achievement is one of mass morale. He has been working a field left very much to weeds by our great industrial organizers, and there is evidence that he has discovered how to achieve results. The question as to the efficiency of his methods or of their ethical defense is an entirely separate one.
The Nazis and their supporters hailed their victory as a “revolution.” The press qualified it as “so-called.” To those who risked death to fight it, it was all too real.
The Nazis’ brutality quickly devastated the top and mid-level ranks of the communists. Bruised and battered bodies, dumped wherever, piled up around Berlin. One newspaper noted, “Few passers-by in Berlin have failed to see something of these things.” The auxiliary police dragged victims from their homes and tortured them in their private barracks. They stripped them and horsewhipped them, broke their fingers, left them for dead, men and women, young and old. The Gestapo found Ernst Thälmann, arrested and tortured him, threw him in a concentration camp, and eventually murdered him.
The communist leadership had already set up bases in neighboring countries. Those who could escaped: a sailboat to Denmark, a hike through secluded fields into France, or a climb over the mountains and forests into Czechoslovakia.
The mid-level staff who stayed in Germany struggled to evade the Gestapo. The meager circle coordinated with Moscow and gained information deemed valuable for the anticipated Nazi collapse. Those in the underground, most in their twenties like Klaus and Gerhard and committed to the fight, threaded their way through the Gestapo’s traps until caught. As MI5’s Guy Liddell predicted, the communist counterrevolution failed to materialize.
In Kiel, Emil saw left-wing leaders attacked, killed, or beaten and sent to concentration camps “without bourgeois Germany and its leading churchmen ‘noticing’ it.” Warned that Nazi students planned to attack him, he moved up the coast to a lighthouse until the director of his academy, a swastika now hanging from the window, dismissed him.
Emil had little to fall back on because, like most Germans, he had seen his savings evaporate amid the economic crises of the Weimar era. He hoped for a visa that would enable him to relocate to Birmingham, England, to teach at the Woodbrooke Qua
ker Centre. Not wanting to leave Elisabeth in Kiel, he asked her to go with him, but she refused, feeling a need to stay and share her friends’ difficulties. He continued to press, and seeing his anxiety, she finally agreed to meet him there. He then packed up and went to his sister’s in Berlin. The city was being torn apart, but a patina of old-fashioned normalcy covered the wealthier areas, such as Zehlendorf, where he found refuge. Over the weeks, Berlin’s decadent, self-indulgent, and socialist underbelly had evaporated, and the horrors on the streets weren’t so obvious. The relieved, “good” citizens went about their lives; the “bad” citizens silently disappeared.
* * *
—
The election and tensions of life in the underground, along with a bout of asthma, had left Gerhard drained and sick in body and mind. Desperately needing a refuge, he and his girlfriend, Karin, made the daylong train ride southeast to the Riesengebirge, a low mountain range between Bohemia and Silesia. The waterfalls, glaciers, and fresh air promised peace and a cure.
But Karin, just twenty and almost four years younger than Gerhard, was quickly summoned by her concerned parents back home to Greifswald and away from Gerhard.
He returned alone to Berlin to take control of the Red Student Group’s activities in Berlin and to the north. Before the “coup d’état,” as they put it, the Gestapo estimated that the RSG, of which Gerhard and Klaus had folded one of its branches into their Free Socialist Student Group in Kiel, had 500 members in twenty groups throughout Germany; 150 were in Berlin. It was funded largely by the KPD, although the group wasn’t specifically for communists. Now it drew from the Berlin underground, teeming with brash and zealous young men and women, leftist students who risked their lives to contest the Nazi takeover.
A few other groups, like Der Rote Stoßtrupp (the Red Shock Squad), filled with the radical fringe of the SPD, were relatively large. Most, though, were small cells of maybe a dozen students. Klaus’s girlfriend Lisa, who had come to be with him, joined one of these groups. The students—now former students if they were Jewish—flung aside the historic enmities between the old-line leaders of the SPD and the KPD, whom the Nazis had largely eliminated. Gerhard’s job was to recruit such idealistic and impassioned students, and the most fertile ground was the University of Berlin, where Klaus had registered to study math and physics as an excuse for being in Berlin if the Gestapo grabbed him. The party ordered Klaus not to take the courses or to be in a group because the Nazi students had infiltrated everything.
Gerhard relied on his brother to be his liaison with Germany’s renowned technical university, the Technische Hochschule, in the affluent neighborhood of Charlottenburg to the west. Known as the TH, this institution epitomized the Nazis’ dream university. It had had no official socialist student organization since the early 1920s, mainly because such a group could never have survived. It did have an informal but dedicated group of fifteen to twenty communist students, the Red Students’ Club, but soon after the Reichstag fire, at the beginning of March, the TH expelled most of them. The vast majority of the thirty-five hundred future engineers and scientists were rabid fascists. With blind allegiance, they eagerly denounced communists and Jews, teachers and students. The Nazis used it as a backdrop for their performances. The May edition of the student newsletter declared,
German Students! For more than a decade, the German youth have fought a state that, born from treason and cowardice, brought our Volk to a time of decay in our political, economic, and cultural lives. Today, the bearers of that state lie defeated on the ground. The German youth have won. . . . Heil Hitler!
This was dangerous territory for someone trying to infiltrate for the resistance. Klaus described life as “cautiously living illegally.” His challenge was how to recruit students without getting caught.
For those on the streets who carried or distributed antifascist literature, avoiding capture for three months was considered success. If arrested with literature considered subversive, a student without a police record might get a beating and a term of a year or two in a concentration camp—the harshness dependent on the brutality of the guards. For someone with Klaus’s record, arrest meant torture. Later, it could bring charges of high treason and a possible death sentence, usually by beheading, guillotine-style. For protection, everyone had a code name. Gerhard’s was Hans; Klaus’s didn’t survive. Since most of the students knew one another’s real names, under torture the code names were quickly cracked.
Klaus found a few communist students at the TH whom he could deploy to recruit others. These students would ask seemingly harmless questions in seminars to stimulate conversation. If another student followed up after class, the recruiter would have a cautious discussion, then introduce the prospect to Klaus.
Meeting became an art, with Klaus seeing not more than two cell members together at various local taverns. He spoke in a low voice and kept an eye open for eavesdroppers. Everyone knew that Nazi block watchers hung around to question tavern owners about suspicious discussions. Whatever Klaus learned, he channeled back to Gerhard, who passed it on in weekly meetings with a KPD functionary or used it for political reports in newsletters and flyers.
Since newsletters and flyers were the weapons (not guns and knives), jobs ranged from writing articles—if the person had a typewriter and a safe apartment—to producing literature, distributing it, or carrying materials and instructions to liaisons. Klaus supplied students with flyers to place surreptitiously on tables in common areas or leave on a street corner. The resisters believed deeply as an act of faith that even in the face of overwhelming might, their messages would awaken people to rise up.
* * *
—
In mid-April, Emil traveled to Frankfurt for a meeting of Quakers and found “a gathering of deeply shocked people.” From there, he visited friends in Eisenach. One day, strolling down the street, he saw Frau von Bardeleben, a member of his former parish, and they chatted. Seeing the swastika on her lapel, he asked if she had joined the party. She answered, “Certainly, these people just want what you’ve always said in your sermons.” Provoked, he described how the government had fired him in Kiel. She asked if he believed the communists had started the Reichstag fire. The word of a criminal, who started the fire and confessed to be a communist, he said, shouldn’t condemn a whole party. He was just being objective. He made the analogy to a state representative from Cologne who was mistreated by the SA. Their actions shouldn’t condemn all SA.
They parted amicably, and she invited him to visit, which—wisely—he did not. Instead, he went back to Berlin, and she reported him to the police.
Wary of the police but needing a visa for Birmingham, Emil went to the Quaker Center for advice. A director, an American named Gilbert MacMaster, suggested he apply for his travel documents in Kiel, but Emil hesitated out of fear. A week later, MacMaster heard that Klaus wanted to speak with him. Emil had been arrested for spreading atrocity tales that harmed the welfare of the government. Clutching the New Testament, he was taken from his sister’s house to the infamous redbrick Alexanderplatz police station known as the Rote Burg, or red fortress.
MacMaster and two other Quakers set out to see him. His cell was too small for visitors, so they saw him in an official’s office. He seemed healthy; he hadn’t been beaten. His main request was a copy of the English version of The Journal of George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, which they sent the next day along with other books.
Emil felt desperate: “The whole horror of what lived in me had happened.” As always in times of anguish, he heard Christ’s voice in the solitude. And then he wondered, “Why did so very many, very clever and orthodox theological thinkers, scholars, pastors and leaders of churches not recognize evil?” His answer: “They were worshippers of nation and lovers of armies first, and afterwards Christians.” For five weeks the police moved Emil from prison to prison, then suddenly released him. Through the efforts of a close friend of
Rackwitz’s, he would remain free until his trial date. The guards set him out on the sidewalk together with a heavy sack of his books and other personal possessions. With no money or idea where he was, he wandered around for a few minutes until he collapsed. A stranger found him a taxi that took him to his sister’s house in Zehlendorf.
After recovering, Emil traveled to Kiel to clean out his apartment. He was there when through the door rushed Elisabeth and her boyfriend, Guschi Kittowski. They had sailed to Copenhagen in the family’s collapsible boat and returned when she heard Emil was in prison.
The young couple hid with friends until midsummer, when the police swept up Elisabeth and Guschi in a “cleansing” that targeted university students. The court sent Guschi to a new concentration camp in Moorlager, a bitter, windy place along the river Ems off the coast of the North Sea.
Elisabeth languished in the women’s jail in Kiel, marching around a courtyard a few minutes a day. The police made no formal charges because they had no evidence of specific activities. Emil was allowed to visit once a month, and he brought her paper and pencils for drawing. Emil’s Quaker friend Gilbert MacMaster tried to visit but was turned away. If she cleared up the issue of why she had returned, the police told him, they would release her.
In Berlin, Emil saw Klaus and Gerhard regularly. One of them would phone his sister’s and, assuming there were listeners on the line, ask vaguely, “Herr Professor, do you want to go for a walk?” They would meet in a prearranged spot close by at Lake Wannsee.
Emil bought a small piece of land from a friend in Bad Freienwalde, a spa town northeast of Berlin near the Polish border, as well as a one-room cabin—located elsewhere—from his sister’s husband. Klaus and Gerhard disassembled it, loaded the parts onto a truck, and drove it to Emil’s recently acquired parcel.
Atomic Spy Page 7
