The Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle)

Rote Kapelle began as a German filing label. In counterintelligence slang a Kapelle, a band, was an operation against clandestine transmitters, and the radio operators were its musicians. The Abwehr's Brussels office opened a case under that name in 1941 against a Soviet station it had detected in Belgium, and the name stuck to everything the case later touched^2,5.

What it touched was two very different things. One was a set of Soviet military intelligence networks in Belgium, the Netherlands and France. The other was a loose circle of friends in Berlin who opposed Hitler and, in 1941 and 1942, passed military information to Moscow^1,4.

The western networks

In 1938 the Fourth Department of the Red Army staff, later the GRU, sent Leopold Trepper, a veteran Communist who had worked for Soviet intelligence since 1930, to Brussels to build commercial cover for networks in France and the Low Countries. With an old associate, Léon Grossvogel, he set up an export business tied to a Brussels raincoat firm, and later trading companies called Simexco in Brussels and Simex in Paris^1,5. Anatoly Gurevich, known in Moscow's traffic as "Kent," ran the Belgian group after Trepper moved to Paris in 1940. A separate officer, Konstantin Jeffremov, ran another net in Belgium, and Johann Wenzel and Anton Winterink operated radios in Belgium and the Netherlands^1,5.

German radio intelligence picked up the Brussels transmitter in June 1941. Direction-finding teams narrowed the search to the Etterbeek district, and early on 13 December 1941 the Abwehr raided a house at 101 rue des Atrébates, arresting the radio operator, a cipher clerk and a courier; Mikhail Makarov walked in the next day and was taken too¹. Trepper himself called at the house, showed papers good enough to be released, and warned Gurevich, who fled to France¹.

The courier, Rita Arnould, became an informant. Her help with the book the network used for its cipher let German cryptanalysts read part of the backlog of intercepted messages⁵. Arrests followed through 1942: Wenzel at another Brussels transmitter in July, Jeffremov and Winterink the same summer, Gurevich in Marseille in November^1,5. The Germans traced Trepper through Simex and arrested him in a Paris dentist's chair late in 1942; a German report quoted in CIA's history gives 5 December, while most later accounts give 24 November^1,5.

The Berlin circle

In Berlin, Arvid Harnack, an economist in the Reich Economics Ministry, and his American wife Mildred, and Harro Schulze-Boysen, an officer in the Air Ministry, and his wife Libertas, stood at the center of several overlapping groups. By 1940–1941 they connected more than 150 people: students, artists, journalists and civil servants, many of them women, who distributed leaflets, helped people in danger and documented Nazi crimes⁴.

Harnack had been talking to a Soviet trade official known as Alexander Erdberg for years. CIA's history dates his formal recruitment to the turn of 1940–1941, and Schulze-Boysen's to early 1941¹. Both passed warnings of the coming invasion of the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941; one such report, presented to Stalin on 17 June, was dismissed as disinformation⁵. Their careers as agents lasted little more than a year¹.

The Berlin circle fell because of Moscow's own traffic. Radio messages sent to Brussels in 1941 had named Kuckhoff and the Schulze-Boysens and given their Berlin addresses; once German cryptanalysts could read them, the Gestapo had a list^1,5. Horst Heilmann, a young member who worked in a German cipher office, tried to warn Schulze-Boysen and failed. Schulze-Boysen was arrested at the end of August 1942, and the Harnacks and dozens of others in the weeks that followed¹.

Trials and playbacks

The Reich Court Martial tried the Berlin defendants in secret from December 1942. On 22 December, eleven were executed at Plötzensee Prison, among them both Schulze-Boysens and Arvid Harnack; the eight men were hanged and the three women beheaded¹. Mildred Harnack, first given six years, was retried on Hitler's order and executed on 16 February 1943¹. In all, more than fifty members of the Berlin groups were put to death⁴.

In the west, the Germans kept several captured transmitters on the air and sent controlled messages to Moscow, a radio deception the Germans called a Funkspiel and a close cousin of the double-agent game. Trepper's set went back on the air from Paris on 25 December 1942, and Gurevich's playback ran until 3 May 1945⁵. Trepper escaped from German custody in September 1943¹.

Afterlives

The western Allies showed little interest in prosecuting the Germans who had tortured Red Orchestra prisoners. Army counterintelligence instead questioned Roeder and others in the late 1940s for what they knew about Soviet methods². In the Soviet Union the networks went unmentioned for two decades; when Moscow did raise the subject in the mid-1960s, a CIA reviewer noted, it presented the Berlin group as antifascist resistance and said nothing about the GRU networks in France, Belgium, the Netherlands or Switzerland³.

The Swiss end of the story, the "Rote Drei," had its own legend, told on the The Lucy spy ring page.

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