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Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler

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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.

This book turned out to be far broader in scope and richer in analysis than I had anticipated. The title refers to a large resistance group of ultimately more than a hundred individuals who engaged in opposing the Nazi government before and during World War II. Yes, there was an active and important German resistance movement, although we seldom hear about it, and the author explains why this is so. This resistance group was far different from the well known July 20, 1944 Valkyrie assassination attempt on Hitler; it was more akin to the White Rose group made up of university students who circulated fliers and pamphlets attacking the government and paid with their lives for their trouble. The Red Orchestra group was older, made up of a wide variety of individuals from intellectuals to artists, bureaucrats and even a few military officers.Some but not all of the members were deeply integrated into the German Communist party and funneled information to the Soviet Union. Their main activities involved distributing fliers, attaching posters, maintaining archives of atrocity photographs, and sending out military information to the Allies' intelligence agencies--ironically, this crucial intelligence was often ignored.

The author utilizes a highly effective method of analysis: beginning in 1927-1929, she traces the lives of individual members of the group. This reminds us that history is really made up of individual stories, and allows us to understand not only what was going on in Germany but what sparked the dangerous decision to oppose the government in this way. At the same time, this book is at times a real "page turner" and the suspense builds as to how long the group can continue to function without being detected. Most of the members were apprehended and executed--these folks were true heroes. Why have we heard little if anything about them? As the author explains near the end of the book, at the end of the war the United States was gripped with fear of either open warfare with the Soviets or being subverted. Since many of the Red Orchestra group had Communist ties and provided information to Soviet intelligence, and given the division of Germany into zones including the Soviet zone, it hardly seemed a good time to publicize the brave deeds of the group. So, they remained an obscurity until this fine book brought their achievements back to life.

The narrative is supported by 27 pages of notes, 15 pages of exceptionally helpful photographs, and a select bibliography. In addition to published sources, the author also researched achives, family papers, and internet sources, as well as conducting some important interviews. At around 380 pages the book moves quickly as the suspense builds. It is gratifying to see at last a major book focused on these heroic individuals--they have resided in obscurity far too long.

A work by a journalist--not an historian--on the ill-fated effort by a loosely organized group of Germans to undermine Hitler's evil regime.

I think the author, Anne Nelson, is wrong in her statements regarding German and Russian communism. Reading this book, one would think that only Stalin caused all the havoc, not the system devised by Lenin. Even after Stalin's death, East Germany's ills are laid to the feet of Walter Ulbricht--not the system itself. In this way, those communists in the Red Orchestra, especially the survivor Greta Kuckhofff, come off without a blemish. (Kuckhoff made the choice of leaving West Berlin for East Berlin after the war. There she worked for that soul-killing regime.)

An example (p. 301) of the mindset of the author: "The cold war that stirred into existence in postwar Berlin was an early chill of McCarthyism."

Maurice Bowra of Oxford is mentioned (p. 161) as the "malicious don". I recommend "Maurice Bowra: A Life" by Leslie Mithchell for those wishing a more balanced appraisal of this good and liberal man.

I'd never heard of Red Orchestra prior to Anne Nelson's book. The White Rose resistance of Munich, yes, but I was unaware of this Berlin-based group. Maybe resistance to Nazism was more widespread than I'd thought. Red Orchestra spreads this heartening message, while pointing out how ineffective resistance is. You can't help but admire those who have the strength of character to do the right thing. At the same time, this book makes one wonder about the futility of it all. What good results from gestures against totalitarian regimes? The image of a mosquito biting an elephant comes to mind.

Maybe those who resist inflict greater pain than their numbers would suggest. Dictators crack down, and crack down hard, against the conscientious few. They do this because they're scared. Hitler was afraid that resisters might discover the weak spot that would cause the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards. If anything caused Hitler to lose sleep at night it was probably resisters, and there's value in that. Personally, I don't think I'd have the courage to do what members of Red Orchestra did, but it is comforting to know that there are people out there who do.

Anne Nelson has written an invaluable, detailed book about one of the groups involved with resisting the Nazi regime from within Germany. She affectionately but soberly follows her subjects from the pre-crash Twenties to the Cold War, chronicling their passions, fears, intrigues, and eventual ends. Along the way, Nelson nicely chronicles the descent of Germany into fascism, and especially how it feels for open-minded, liberal-thinking people to see their nation slide ominously into oppression, fear, and hatred. Eventually they feel they must do something to fight it, despite the terrible risks to their lives. Interestingly, some of these people are embedded right in the Nazi machinery.

Some of the other reviews here appear to be hoping for a different book. This is not a cloak-and-dagger espionage/sabotage chronicle, or a history of military coup attempts against Hitler's life. This is not an historian's analysis of Stalinism versus Fascism. Nelson's focus is on her unlikely resistance fighters, who hail mostly from the intellectual, socially liberal circles of Weimar Republic cities (and even Wisconsin!). There are artists here, giants of German theater and film, writers, professionals, aristocrats. There are also blue-collar workers, Communists and Socialists, Jews, Christian dissenters, and conservatives leery of the strident claims of Hitler and Goebbels.

Nelson is sympathetic to the pre-war liberalism and avant-garde sensibility of her heroes, but she doesn't shrink from criticism of the forces that they befriend, such as Stalin's Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Just as in other events at that time (such as the Spanish Civil War), people with liberal democratic principles found themselves with many foes: the overtly hostile forces of racist fascism, the misleadingly supportive Soviets and their minions, and the indifferent and suspicious governments of Western Europe and America. Nelson also covers the post-war era, when the lives and actions of the Red Orchestra were wildly distorted and exploited by both sides of the Cold War, as well as by their countrymen in the two divided Germanies.

Here is something of the citizenry's reactions as a modern Germany succumbed to totalitarianism, a tragic history on a human, relational scale.

The received wisdom of the Holocaust is that all the Jews went passively to their deaths like so many sheep and all Germans either committed heinous war crimes or stood passively by and allowed them to happen. There is also the notion that only Jews died in concentration camps. Then, if you're like me and find history fascinating, you read more and learn about the Warsaw Ghetto and Sobibor and partisan groups of all kinds (even Jewish ones). You learn about the resistance movements in various places (and the very real consequences to taking part in them). The literature (both fictional and non-fictional) is rich and worthwhile. Yet this is the first time that I've really understood that there as an active resistance inside Germany. Yes, I knew that the communists and trade unionists and social democrats and lots of anything else that can be imagined were purged pretty much throughout the time leading up to the war and during the war itself. Yes, I knew that there were a number of different conspiracies to assassinate Hitler. What I didn't know about was the Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra) and the gripping story of their courageous resistance from within the highest echelons of German society and the horrible price they paid for it.

Nelson's book documents this group in intricate well-researched detail using as many primary sources as she could get her hands on. Often characterized as Soviet spies, the group was actually filled with artists and intellectuals who passed along information to the Soviets, but who also organized and participated in various resistance efforts in their community. The horror of it all is that it was the sheer ineptitude of the Soviets that ultimately got them caught and executed. The sheer enormity of the risks these people took for so very little gain was both inspiring and terribly tragic. The cast of characters is large, but Nelson does a great job of telling this story. I'd like to say that the aftermath of their sacrifice was justice for the people who perpetrated their deaths, but those individuals were protected by the US in a misguided attempt to fight the demons of communism.

Lastly, I was struck by the information that over a period of twelve years almost 3,000,000 Germans were in and out of concentration camps and penitentiaries for political reasons. About 800,000 were arrest for overt anti-Nazi acts; of these, only 300,000 were still alive after the war so about 500,000 died resisting the Nazi government.

The thirties and the run up to the War and the War itself are crucial to understanding the world today. So much of history repeats itself again and again - the more information we have, the more nuanced our view, the more prepared we will be to fight fascism wherever it occurs.

The author could not have contrived a more moving final paragraph. It was a very beautiful moment and the only way one could end this shattering narrative.

This book has made a huge impression on me. As much as I have, over the years, admired the military men, clerics and aristocrats of the July 20th 1944 group (in particular von Moltke, whom Ms Nelson correctly identifies as a political visionary), it's difficult for me to grasp the courage, tenacity and resolve of this amazingly heterogeneous group of individuals. I look around me at my cosseted society in peacetime New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century-- the gumchewing, gossiping Prada mothers and the Wall Street wonders and the kids with their gizmos and acquired vocabulary of distanced irony-- and wonder if we all possess the dormant potential for such action or if those people in Berlin at that time were truly unusual that way. They were so brave and so purposeful.

I suppose that Germany's loss was our gain, with that huge influx of incredible creative personalities that for fifty years populated the Upper West Side and places like Eclair on 72nd Street.

"Red Orchestra" strikes me as a double tragedy. As tragic as these people's experience under Reich was, the loss of the Rote Kapelle's history to the political agendas of East and West made difficult reading as well. What a marvelous thing Anne Nelson has done in marshaling all that research into an unvarnished tribute to their work.

I was a teenager during WWII and as with the holocaust, knew nothing about it until the war was over and the Jews so liberally wrote about it, talked about it and kept it alive. Although there were many movies about the fall of Berlin and the race between the Soviets and the U.S. to take Berlin, there were few movies or books that revealed German resistance by Germans or German Jews in Berlin. This book was a real revelation to me and when reading it, I was not interested in the nuances or politics of it, but in the human interest of these few individuals, knowing the terrible dangers and consequences they faced, yet felt compelled to fight Nazism in their small way. I would recommend this book to everyone as it displays human courage even when it might be for nought.