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Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) was the name that German military counterintelligence agents, referring to Morse code operators as musicians, gave to a Europe-wide Soviet intelligence network that was active in 1941 and 1942. Anne Nelson focuses upon a part of it, a Berlin group of artists, journalists, intellectuals, and blue-collar workers who became closely linked through their "antifascist," vaguely Marxist but politically heterodox convictions, and through their personal lives. She combines collective biography with a narrative of events, describing the growth, mostly through social contacts, of the group from around 1930 to its destruction in 1942.
Principal characters are playwright Adam Kuckhoff and sociologist Greta Kuckhoff née Lorke; economist Arvid Harnack and English-professor Mildred Harnack née Fish; factory worker and journalist John Sieg; air force intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen and film producer Libertas Schulze-Boysen née Haas-Heye. There were also another journalist, an actress, a sculptor, a graphic artist, a lawyer, a dentist, and a card-carrying Communist Party blue-collar worker. The Harnacks had family ties to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother Klaus, Hans von Dohnanyi, Rüdiger Schleicher, and Justus Delbrück, all of whom were later involved in what became the Tresckow-Stauffenberg conspiracy. Mildred Harnack née Fish was an American from Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Schulze-Boysen had spent time in England and Scotland, his great-uncle was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz; Greta Lorke had spent years in Madison, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin, as had Arvid Harnack who also visited the Soviet Union.
Their first concern was opposition to Hitler's National Socialist regime and agitation to remove it. Nelson vividly describes the terrorism of the regime, the imprisonments, beatings, murders, and the barbaric mistreatment and despoliation of the Jews; and she brilliantly portrays the group's understanding of Hitler as a menace to Europe and mankind. As early as May 1933, Soviet intelligence agents established...