Norman Ohler - The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germanys Resistance Against the Nazis

Copyright 2020 by Norman Ohler

Translation copyright 2020 by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ohler, Norman, author. | Mohr, Tim, translator. | Yarbrough, Marshall, translator.

Title: The Bohemians : the lovers who led Germanys resistance against the Nazis / Norman Ohler ; translated from the German by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough.

Other titles: Harro & Libertas. English | Lovers who led Germanys resistance against the Nazis / Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057794 (print) | LCCN 2019057795 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328566300 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328566232 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Schulze-Boysen, Harro, 19091942. | Schulze-Boysen, Libertas, 19131942. | Anti-Nazi movementGermanyHistory. | GermanyHistory19331945. | World War, 19391945Secret ServiceSoviet Union. | Military intelligenceSoviet UnionHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC DD 247. S 379 O 4513 2020 (print) | LCC DD 247. S 379 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/430922dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057794

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057795

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Cover photograph: German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin

Author photograph Joachim Gern

v1.0620

Excerpts of unpublished letters accessed through the Red Orchestra Collection at the German Resistance Memorial Center and the archives at the Institute for Contemporary History. Used in English translation by kind permission of E. Schulze-Boysen.

ENDPAPERS: Map of Berlin 1942 Pharus-Plan. Used by permission.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS: All images reproduced by permission of the German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin, with the following exceptions: , Bundesarchiv.

For the kids

It would make an amazing story if it werent so illegal.

A GESTAPO OFFICER

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize how it really was. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

WALTER BENJAMIN ,Theses on the Philosophy of History

When I was about twelve years old, I was sitting in the garden of my grandparents house, set in a valley on the outskirts of a small city in southwest Germany, near the border with French Lorraine. In March 1945 the town, which was also the place of my birth, was leveled by the British and Canadian Royal Air Force, with more than 90 percent of the baroque buildings destroyed. My grandmother and grandfather fared the same as almost everyone else: nothing of their home survived the hail of bombs. So my grandfather built a new house after the war out of rubble, with his own hands. He dubbed it Haus Morgensonne, or the House of the Morning Sun, and the gravel road that led there he named Wiesengrund, or Meadowland, and it was later labeled as such on official maps.

We often played a board game called Mensch rgere Dich Nicht (Man, Dont Worry), similar to Sorry, in the garden of the House of the Morning Sun. Before the dice were rolled my grandfather usually said, Play hard but fair! This directive scared me a bit, even though I had nothing against fair play and he wasnt particularly serious about playing hard, since, after all, we were only trying to have as much fun as possible while passing the time. But on this particular afternoon, fair or unfair, I refused to roll the dice until he told me a story about the war. Wed seen a documentary that morning at school about the liberation of a concentration camp, the piles of eyeglasses, the emaciated faces, cutting effectively to shots of jubilant Germans hailing Hitler. Not a single pupil was allowed to leave the room before the film was over.

So I wanted to know whether my grandfather had anything to do with all of it. At first he shook his head and wanted to start playing the game. But I took the two ivory-colored dice and looked at him searchingly. Mottled sunlight shone through the leaves of the apple tree and cast a pattern of light and shadow on the yellow game board. He explained he had been working for the Reichsbahn, the German railway. That wasnt news to me, and I pressed him to tell me something interesting, something concrete.

Lost in thought, he stared at the evergreen trees that lined the edge of the meadow. Then he coughed. Finally he slowly and casually said that hed been a true and avid railroader because hed always loved the reliability and precision of the railroads. And that he could never have imagined what was going to happen. I immediately asked: What happened? Hesitantly, he told me that hed been working as an engineerdid I know what an engineer was? Even though I didnt really know exactly, I nodded. During the war, he continued, hed been transferred to the northern Bohemian town of Brx, a hole at the junction of the Aussig-Komotau, Pilsen-Priesen, and Prague-Dux lines.

One winter evening, as fresh snow covered the black double lines of the tracks, as well as the meadow, the trees, and the frozen Eger River, an arriving train was shunted onto a siding, my grandfather said with a halting voice, a long freighter with stock cars that had to let a munitions transport pass. Wheels screeched as they crossed the shunting switch, calls rang out, a long whistle. Steam billowed and dissipated. The stock cars were uncoupled. Silence descended on the white-covered valley again.

But something wasnt right. My grandfather felt it; his railroader instincts told him. After a while he left his little station house and approached the siding. The only thing audible was the gurgling water of the Eger flowing beneath its frozen surface. Uneasy, he walked along the entire row of cars. Just as he went to turn away, something moved in one of the narrow ventilation slits on the upper half of a sliding door on one of the cars. A tin cup on a string was lowered from the opening, clanged against the wood of the side of the car, got stuck on the door handle, broke free, and then dangled slowly down and dipped into the snow next to the tracks. A moment later the string tightened and pulled the filled vessel back up. A childs handonly a childs hand would fit through the slitappeared above and grabbed hold of the cup.

People, not livestock! People in the stock cars, even though this was contrary to the transportation regulations! What a mess. You just didnt do that sort of thing at the Reichsbahn. He went back to his station house to try to get some information about where the train was heading. Theresienstadt. The name meant nothing to him. A small place a few kilometers north of Bauschowitz, last station at the border of the protectorate. He went back out again to have another look at the cars, but two sentries in black uniforms came hustling toward him, machine pistols at the ready: SS. Grandfather turned around and walked quickly back. A gruff call followed him threateningly.

Its war, he thought, peeking out of the steamed windows of the overheated station house a short while later. With trembling fingers, he buttered himself a piece of onion bread. Must have been prisoners of war, Russians. But he knew this wasnt true. The train had come from the west. The hand was a childs. He also knew he wasnt going to do anything. I was scared of the SS.

He told me this in the sun-flooded garden of his yellow house, and even though I loved him, because he was my grandfather, whom Id only ever called just Pa, I hated him and he could feel it. We began to play the board game.