Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler [Rauer Buchschnitt] [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Anne Nelson's book "The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler" is one of the most engaging books I have read about this well-documented and painful period in our recent history. The book follows the fates of a group of friends and acquaintances living in Berlin who support each other's efforts, no matter how audacious or diminutive, to resist the Nazi takeover of Germany starting in the pre-war 1930s. Although this is without doubt a historical text, the narration reads more like a novel than a history book. Against a backdrop of suspense, we are drawn into the daily world of these underground resisters as they battle against Hitler and the Third Reich. Ms. Nelson's writing style is both unpretentious and captivating. One develops an intimacy with the real-life characters over the course of the book. The extraordinary collection of photographs which accompany the book (some formal, but many candid) literally bring the reader face-to-face with these courageous people. In the end, one can't help but to cheer on their anti-fascist actions and grieve their personal losses. A page turner, to say the least!

The author of "The Red Orchestra," Anne Nelson, does some heavy lifting. In order to give fuller meaning to the stories of individual Berliners who were part of a loosely knit group of Nazi resisters, she adroitly traces the history of the Nazi movement from its inception, through the war and even into the postwar period. Her subjects -- writers, actors, bureaucrats, laborers - are revealed through primary sources. This is decidedly not historical fiction; the author fleshes out the stories of individual resisters using letters, diaries, official records and oral histories. The book is highly readable and compelling. Perhaps the book's most important message, which is not directly expressed by the author, is about the perils of fascism, in any age. Truth-seeking individuals and institutions, in particular journalists, artists, writers and the courts as well, must be protected from government meddling and control.

Red Orchestra tells the story of an anti-Nazi resistance group based in Berlin. While the story has been told elsewhere - and perhaps by more qualified historians - when Anne Nelson came across the Berlin memorial to the Resistance in 1999 she was surprised. The internal civilian German resistance to the Nazis was almost unknown in the West (largely for reasons of Cold war politics). Nelson wanted to write the story for an American audience, in particular.

The so-called Red Orchestra (or Rote Kapelle) was a group of overlapping circles. This book focuses on the group that centered on Arvid Harnack, a high-ranking German government economist, his American wife Mildred, Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe intelligence officer, John Sieg, a Communist and former journalist, and Adam Kuckhoff, a well-known playwright. The focal point for Nelson's story is Greta Kuckhoff - no doubt in large part because Greta survived to tell her story. (My interest in the book was originally piqued by sn interview with the author on Wisconsin Public Radio. It turns out that Greta attended the University of Wisconsin in the 1920's where she met Arvid Harnack and his future wife Mildred Fish. Mildred's birthday is officially observed in all Wisconsin public schools.).

The group at times engaged in both political resistance activities (for example, printing and distributing newspapers relating news of German atrocities on the eastern front) and intelligence work mostly for the Soviets (The British and American governments were not much interested, although individuals did make some contact with the group). Harnack and Schulze-Boysen were well-positioned to obtain important economic and military information and the risks they ran were consistent with their information's value. How much the group accomplished is open to debate. For example, Stalin had ample warnings, including information from Schulze-Boysen that the Germans were going to invade, but refused to believe it. In any event, Soviet intelligence proved to be fatally inept.

The book raised existential questions for me: what would I have done in their situation? Was it worth the risk of one's life to vandalize a public anti-Jewish exhibit? Surely they recognized the futility of their efforts to provide information to at least some of the German people. But, what is the meaning of life, the purpose of living, if one does nothing but play it safe? Life is sweet when one considers the alternative, however.

This group differed from other resistance groups in that it was neither organized to perform a military coup nor was it made up mostly of Communists and workers. These were middle-class to upper-class people with relatively comfortable lives. In that sense they risked more.

Nelson relates their story in a somewhat disjointed way. Granted that there were a dizzying number of people involved in many different ways, but she does only a middling job of sorting it out for the reader. She also seems to want to deemphasize the Communist beliefs of some of the members. Nelson gives the impression that Greta Kuckhoff was a reluctant Communist. While Kuckhoff did object to the East German government's "Leninist objectification" of her group she also rose to an important position in that government.

I hope I am not giving away too much to tell you that things end badly for the group with torture and gruesome death by being hung from a meat hook. One thing I did not anticipate (but perhaps should have), was the trouble the survivors ran into when the war ended and the Cold War began. The former Nazi prosecutor Manfred Roeder managed to avoid severe punishment by shopping his supposed ability to identify German Communists, including Greta. For many years, the resistors were portrayed by some in West Germany as traitors who put German soldiers at risk. Widows of the resistors were denied government pensions while widows of Gestapo received theirs. East Germany, on the other hand, wanted to portray all resistors as Communists motivated by the class struggle.

I highly recommend this book (with its flaws) to anyone who is unfamiliar with the story of German resistance. Nelson also mentions a couple movies, The Murderers Are Among Us, which is available on Amazon and Netflix, and a documentary, Die Rote Kapelle by Stephen Roloff, which is not, but should be. Roloff is the son of one of the members of the Red Orchestra.