by Max Hastings
Robert Bart was trapped because he could not resist seeing his wife and son. Unbeknown to Moscow, the Gestapo kept the families of all missing political suspects under surveillance: Bart’s desertion to the Russians had been assumed. His wife fell sick, and in August 1942 languished in a clinic on Berlin’s Nollenstrasse. The Soviet agent took the understandable but insane risk of visiting her. He was betrayed by a nurse, and arrested at the clinic on 9 September. Almost immediately thereafter he began to transmit to Moscow under SD control. He later claimed to have given an agreed Morse warning on 14 October, which an inexperienced Centre operator failed to notice – exactly as happened when SOE wirelesses in Holland became part of another Abwehr radio game. Centre obligingly responded by providing details of the procedure for meeting ‘Breitenbach’. In mid-December 1942 Willy Lehmann, now fifty-eight years old and surely a weary man after his protracted secret service, was telephoned at home one night to hear Moscow’s coded introduction of the caller as ‘college Preuss’ – ‘colleague Preuss’. Lehmann presumably gave the appropriate response: ‘Come and see me in my office.’ This signified a rendezvous at 5 p.m. next day on the pavement of Kantstrasse, between two cinemas of which one was named the Olympia. The contact procedure was to approach Lehmann and ask directions to his street. He was supposed to reply that he lived there, and would walk the man to it.
The rendezvous was duly made by a young Gestapo man named Olenhorst. Lehmann was arrested and interrogated, no doubt exhaustively, then secretly executed a fortnight later, and his body cremated. His wife, who knew nothing of his work for the Soviets, was told that he had perished while on a mission; the Gestapo was probably anxious to conceal the fact that one of its own had been a traitor. Lehmann’s fate was confirmed only in May 1945, when an NKVD team found documentation mentioning his demise in the ruins of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Bart survived the war and surrendered to the Americans, who promptly handed him over to the Russians. He was executed by firing squad on 23 November 1945, though he enjoyed the doubtful satisfaction of being rehabilitated by the Red Army’s chief military prosecutor in 1996.
Zoya Rybkina records that she and her husband in Stockholm were subjected to bitter recriminations from Centre following the collapse of the Orchestra; in the course of a trawl for scapegoats that straddled half Europe, it was suggested that Schulze-Boysen and the rest had been betrayed by the Swedish businessman whom they had recruited to carry codes to Berlin. ‘Kin’ was recalled to Moscow in the summer of 1943, and for months his wife was obliged to continue serving the NKVD’s Stockholm station while ignorant of whether he had been shot. She wrote: ‘Centre kept sending telegrams enquiring about cases that “Kin” had been in charge of, and I couldn’t understand why.’ She herself returned to Moscow in March 1944, where she found that her husband’s entire Jewish family, save one younger brother, had perished at German hands. After protracted investigations and months under fantastic suspicion of having thrown in their lot with British intelligence, both Rybkin and his wife were rehabilitated and restored to favour as colonels in the Lubyanka.
Exposure of the Rote Kapelle had two important consequences for Hitler’s regime. First, it represented a victory for the RSHA, whose men closed the net while the Abwehr remained oblivious. Second, it severely damaged the standing of Göring, whose ministry was shown to be riddled with communist traitors: the Reichsmarschall had given away the bride at the Schulze-Boysens’ wedding. If the failure of the Luftwaffe in the air was a more important cause of Göring’s fall from grace, the Rote Kapelle affair was a subordinate one. In Russia, ‘the fat man’ would have been shot. As for the Allied cause, much has been made of the Abwehr’s destruction of SOE’s and MI6’s Dutch networks (described below), but the fate of Moscow’s Red Orchestra was a far graver matter, because its sources had access to more important secrets. Between them the Rote Kapelle, ‘Lucy’ Ring and Trepper networks claimed 117 informants: forty-eight in Germany, thirty-five in France, seventeen in Belgium, seventeen in Switzerland. Leopold Trepper himself for some months escaped arrest, though his informants in France, Belgium and Holland were swept up. The veteran spy was seized only on 24 November, in a Paris dentist’s waiting-room. Thereafter he appears to have talked freely to the Germans, apparently without need for recourse to violent methods; he even dispatched invitations for informants to attend rendezvouses at which they were arrested. All the Russians’ codes fell into the hands of the SD.
The victorious Germans dealt swiftly and ruthlessly with their home-grown traitors. Harro Schulze-Boysen had been arrested at the Air Ministry on 31 August 1942. A week later, Harnack and his wife Mildred were seized while on holiday. The condemned prisoner Florestan sings in Beethoven’s Fidelio, ‘My heart is at peace for I have done what is right,’ and Harnack seems to have cherished the same sentiment. While Florestan was saved at the last, however, the Berlin spies were not. On 22 December 1942, six men and three women, members of the Red Orchestra, were guillotined at Plötzensee jail. On the same day Schulze-Boysen and Harnack, together with the former’s wife Libertas, suffered contrivedly lingering deaths by hanging. Harnack wrote in a last letter to Mildred that ‘despite everything’, he looked back on a life ‘in which the darkness was outweighed by the light’. All their bodies were dispatched for anatomical dissection, in order that the remains should be unidentifiable.
The Gestapo retained 116 other Rote Kapelle prisoners, of whom almost half were executed once protracted interrogations had been completed. Among these was the American Mildred Harnack. She was initially sentenced to a mere six years’ hard labour, but Hitler intervened personally to insist upon a retrial at which she was condemned to death. She spent some of her last hours with Pastor Harald Pölchau, a prison chaplain who solaced hundreds of Hitler’s political victims; she asked him to recite the ‘Prologue in Heaven’ from Faust, before herself singing, ‘I pray to the power of love’. Her last, wondering words before being beheaded on 16 February 1943 were: ‘And I have loved Germany so much.’ She was just forty, and her fair hair had turned white during her months of confinement. She must have felt a far, far journey from Wisconsin.
So much sentiment has been lavished upon the men and women of the Red Orchestra that it deserves to be noticed that their espionage activities rendered them equally liable to capital punishment under British or American jurisdiction. But the courage with which they worked against Hitler commands the respect of posterity, for all their illusions about the Soviet Union they sought to serve instead. Cynics may ask: what rendered Harnack, Schulze-Boysen and their comrades morally superior to such British and American traitors as Kim Philby and Alger Hiss? To be sure, they resisted one tyranny, but they chose to serve another that was equally repellent. Any answer to that question must be subjective, but it seems incomparably easier to justify treason against a murderous dictatorship than against a democracy governed by the rule of law.
Anatoli Gourevitch wrote in his memoirs about the days following his arrest in November 1942: ‘Then opened the darkest period of my life, and that of Margaret.’ The Germans at first treated the couple with remarkable courtesy as they travelled north from Marseilles. They were fed in restaurants and generously plied with wine. Initial exchanges with their captors took the form of conversations rather than interrogations. At night during the long car journey they were allowed to share a bedroom, though their clothes were removed and they were denied knives and forks at the breakfast table. They gave the escort money to buy the cigarettes Gourevitch smoked incessantly as he strove to decide what to confess or to deny. After three days on the road the little party found themselves once more in Belgium, at the fort of Breendonk, where Gourevitch and Margaret were placed in separate cells. Their food continued to be excellent, however, and the questioning was civil. Hans Giering, leader of the Red Orchestra investigation, was joined by an Abwehr officer, Harry Pipe, whom the Russian found thoroughly informed about his activities. Gourevitch persuaded the Germans that he
needed translation of their questions, to buy time to devise responses. He later admitted that he was disorientated by his captors’ affable demeanour and considerate conduct.
While parts of the GRU man’s memoir of his experiences seem credible, the narrative of events following his arrest contains irreconcilable inconsistencies and obvious implausibilities. He, and afterwards Trepper, were treated generously not because the Gestapo discovered virtue in humanity, but because torture proved unnecessary. It will never be known how far their revelations, as distinct from those of other GRU agents and wireless-operators, were responsible for the Gestapo’s round-up of their informants. All later blamed each other. The Germans told Gourevitch that Makarov – ‘Chemnitz’ – had named him as chief of Soviet intelligence in Belgium. When the GRU man denied this, Giering ordered guards to fetch another captured Moscow agent, ‘Bob’ – Hermann Isbutski – who was brought forth from his cell a broken man, plainly the victim of torture. He immediately identified Gourevitch, who was stunned by the encounter. The interrogations continued for hours on end, though Giering provided plentiful food, coffee and even brandy. After about a week, the German produced two devastating documents: first, Moscow’s instruction for ‘Kent’ to travel to Berlin to meet Harro Schulze-Boysen; second, his subsequent report to Centre. It was plain, said the Russian, that the Gestapo held decrypts of some of his wireless messages, retrieved from one of the operators.
He was allowed a meeting with Margaret, late at night, and found her shattered by her experiences, which is unsurprising since Gourevitch claimed that she had no previous knowledge of his espionage activities, nor even that he was not the Uruguayan ‘Vincente Sierra’. An order arrived at Breendonk: Gourevitch and Barcza were to be taken forthwith to Berlin. Next day they set off at high speed, the two prisoners seated between armed guards. The car scarcely halted until it drew up outside a huge, grey building in Hitler’s capital: this was 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Gestapo headquarters. The Russian was taken to a cell, while his companion was removed to a women’s prison on Alexanderplatz. Although Gourevitch’s memoirs say nothing about his terrors, the weeks that followed must have been replete with them. He met Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller, and was shown the evidence of his dealings with the Red Orchestra. He was confronted with Ilse Stöbe, whom he had failed to meet on his earlier trip to Berlin, but who was now ravaged by torture, her appearance ‘terrifying’. An interrogator sought to suggest that the Schulze-Boysens were sexually depraved, and produced photographs of Libertas naked to support his case. Gourevitch was told that Leopold Trepper was now held in Fresnes prison, and was cooperating. He himself remained in solitary confinement in the cells of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse for more than a month. One morning as he was being escorted to the latrine he passed Harro Schulze-Boysen. Neither man gave any hint of recognition. The Russian said that his former dining companion showed no visible signs of having been tortured: ‘I did not know that he had only a few days to live.’
At the end of December 1942, Gourevitch was taken back to Paris. He was to become a participant with Trepper in a Gestapo radio game with Moscow, which continued through many months that followed. He himself was briefly held in Fresnes, then transferred to Hans Giering’s headquarters in the Rue des Saussaies. Gourevitch afterwards claimed that he resisted for some months German blandishments actively to join the Funkspiel. It is a matter of record that Trepper’s transmitter began to operate under German control on Christmas Day 1942, while that of Gourevitch came to life on 3 March 1943, but the latter can only have been allowed to leave Berlin for Paris once the Germans were confident of their dominion over him.
A few months later the entire ‘turned’ Soviet team was moved into a spacious house on the Boulevard Victor Hugo in Neuilly, outside Paris. Trepper and Gourevitch alike occupied spacious quarters with the best of food, able to wash and iron their own clothes. In July 1943, advanced throat cancer obliged Giering – who died in the following month – to resign his post in favour of Heinz Pannwitz. In September Trepper escaped while on an escorted shopping trip into Paris, without apparently causing much concern to his jailers, who had by then extracted from him all they were ever going to. He successfully resumed contact with Georgie de Winter, and the two remained in hiding with the assistance of the so-called ‘Spaak’ Resistance group. The Germans so far relaxed Gourevitch’s captivity that he returned to Paris, where he was permitted to cohabit with Margaret Barcza; she produced a son named Sacha in mid-April 1944. The Sonderkommando which presided over this cosy arrangement was a strangely ill-assorted group that included a pretty young English girl named Tonia Lyon-Smith, whose status puzzled visitors: she mended clothes and made tea, and was never allowed out of the building unescorted, but it later emerged that she had become the mistress of Gestapo interpreter Karl Gagel. Her story was pathetic: the daughter of a British Army officer, at the age of fourteen she had been caught in Brittany in 1940 with her nanny and teddy bear when the Germans overran France. Thereafter she spent some time in an internment camp, then roamed the country for a while before taking temporary residence with the Spaak Resistance group. She appears to have had some contact with Trepper and Georgie de Winter on the run, and indeed wrote a letter to a friend asking her to house de Winter – which the Germans found on the American girl when she was captured. The British later suspected Lyon-Smith of revealing Spaak group secrets when she herself fell into Gestapo hands in mid-1943, a charge she denied for the rest of her life. Her experience is yet another of the countless small mysteries contained in the story of the Trepper ring.
It will never be known how far Pannwitz’s indulgence towards Gourevitch reflected the depth of the latter’s collaboration, or the former’s concern for his own future. According to the GRU man, the Gestapo officer recognised that the war was lost, and had become desperate to avoid Western Allied captivity because he had led Nazi retribution for the 1942 murder by SOE-trained Czechs of Reinhard Heydrich, including the massacre of the inhabitants of Lidice. Gourevitch persuaded the German that he would receive a warm welcome in Moscow, and no doubt believed that he could improve his own prospects by returning home with a senior Gestapo officer as a personal trophy. Gourevitch sustained a close relationship with Pannwitz until they retreated to Germany before Paris was liberated, returning only in May 1945. Meanwhile Leopold Trepper remained safely in hiding until the Allies overran his refuge in September 1944.
After the break-up of the Red Orchestra, the ‘Lucy’ Ring became Moscow’s only means of access to Berlin’s high places. Unfortunately, however, just as unauthorised sexual passions had caused complications for Trepper and Gourevitch, so they did also for the Swiss spies. Alexander Radó suddenly decided that he was in love with the wireless-operator Margrit Bolli, who was half his age. With almost insane indiscretion, he began visiting her every day. To facilitate their meetings he himself stayed in Geneva while renting a flat for his family in Bern.
This story descended into black farce when the girl decided that she was in love with someone else – a handsome young hairdresser named Hans Peter, who was a plant codenamed ‘Romeo’, controlled from the German consulate by Abwehr officer Hermann Hensler. The Trepper network’s men in German hands had identified Radó, and the Germans set about closing down both the agent and his contacts. Bolli was so bewitched by her ‘Romeo’ that she invited him to dally in the flat where she kept her transmitter. The Swiss police had hitherto shown a stubborn reluctance to act against the ‘Lucy’ Ring, but its activities had now become too conspicuous to remain ignored. On 27 October 1942, Edmond and Olga Hamel were arrested. They managed to hide their transmitter, and were eventually released, but their days in Moscow’s service were ended. The Abwehr succeeded in reading some of the GRU’s Swiss messages during 1942, which revealed a string of agents’ codenames. On 16 March 1943 the besotted Bolli sent an en clair wireless signal to ‘Romeo’, which further assisted German intelligence. The Abwehr now had Radó and most of the Ring under intensive surveillance, and e
xerted immense diplomatic pressure on the Swiss to arrest them.
From June 1943 onwards, Alexander Foote knew that he too was being watched by ‘the doctor’ – local police. He told Moscow that he could not safely transmit more than twice a week, but the GRU with characteristic ruthlessness insisted that he should maintain a much more intensive schedule, which made the direction-finders’ task easy. Early on the morning of 20 November there was a dramatic rush of men into his flat. One of them presented a pistol and cried in German, ‘Hände hoch!’ For a ghastly moment Foote feared that his visitors were from the Abwehr. It usually suited the warring nations that there should be no violence between their respective agents in Switzerland, but there could always be a first time. The Englishman was one of the few local spies who carried a gun, a .32 automatic: ‘it gave me moral comfort at some of my more difficult rendezvous’. But now that Foote was cornered, it never occurred to him to try to shoot his way out.
He experienced a surge of relief when he found that he was merely in the hands of the Swiss police, whose interceptors had pinpointed his transmitter. Before being taken away he managed to swallow some messages and names concealed inside a torch. He afterwards claimed not to have disliked the prison to which he was committed: ‘For the first time for years I was able to relax completely.’ He was permitted to wear his own clothes and eat food brought in from outside. On 8 September 1944 he was released, though his role in the ‘Lucy’ Ring was at an end.
One by one, Moscow’s other agents in Switzerland were removed from circulation. Among them was Anna Mueller, a veteran Soviet informant whom Alexander Foote described as ‘a motherly old soul who looked – and I have little doubt, in the past, had acted as – a superior charwoman’. Mueller was the cut-out between the network and a corrupt official in the Swiss passport office. She was lured to Germany by a phoney message saying that her sister-in-law in Freiburg was sick, discovered too late that it was sent by the Gestapo, and spent the rest of the war in a concentration camp. Foote noted dryly that the GRU never paid her a single mark or franc in recompense for her sufferings for the socialist cause.
