Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack (; 24 May 1901 in Darmstadt – 22 December 1942 in Berlin) was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an extraodinary intellectual family and was originally a humanist, strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the appearance of the Nazis. After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze-Boysen who ran a similar faction. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network, that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. The group was later called the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") by the Abwehr. He and his American-born wife, Mildred Harnack, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942.
Life.
Harnack's family were prominent and academically gifted Protestant Germans from the Baltic region. His father was literary history professor Otto Harnack and his mother was Clara Harnack née Reichau, an artist. Reichau was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig, one of the principal founders of organic chemistry. Harnack's siblings were Falk Harnack, his elder brother, Inge Harnack and Angela Harnack, a violin teacher. Harnack was the nephew of theologian Adolf von Harnack.
In 1919 he became a member of the Freikorps, a volunteer militia. From 1919 to 1923 he studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University, Graz, and Hamburg and became a Doctor of Law in 1924. He completed postgraduate studies in economics at Hamburg and the London School of Economics before being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study at University of Wisconsin. At Madison, Harnack was influenced by the industrial economist and labor historian John R. Commons, seeing his as a mentor.
In 1926, Harnack met American literary historian Mildred Fish, also a student at Wisconsin University, after Harnack wandered into the wrong hall. After a brief friendship and love affair, they were engaged on 6 June 1926 and they married on 7 August 1926. While still at Madison, the couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology, who had been invited to study in America. It was at a Friday evening gathering organized by John R. Commons, that Greta met Arvid and Mildred. A friendship developed between Mildred and Greta that lasted for many years. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff. Kuckhoff was drawn into an intimate group of Wisconsin "radicals" known as the "Friday Niters Club". According to fellow student, Dorothy Meyer a member of the group, they considered themselves the elite. The Harnacks "Friday Niters Club" was to be a preface to their involvement in what then became known as the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The simple, albeit controversial conviction of two Italian anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had rebounded to become a Cause célèbre. Harnack petitioned the governor to create a committee to investigate the controversy. The trial had the effect of transforming the Harnacks, in essence radicalising them. Many in the group protested the planned execution of the pair.
In March 1928, at the end of the semester, Harnack returned to Germany as his fellowship had ended while Mildred stayed for another year to complete her studies. On June 2, 1929, Mildred Harnack moved to Germany. In 1929, the couple were living in the small university towns of Jenna and Giessen. In 1931, Harnack was promoted to his 2nd doctorate, a Doctor of Philosophy at University of Giessen with a thesis titled: "Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten" ("The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States") that dealt explicitly with the history of the American worker's movement. The thesis was sponsored by Friedrich Lenz, who founded the Giessen School of National Economics.
The Harnacks, like many of their counterparts, shared an interest in the Soviet Union. They decided to set up a study group in the autumn of 1931, along with Friedrich Lenz. At the height of the Great Depression, Harnack's hope was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between East and West. Lenz believed that only an alliance with the Soviet Union would relieve Germany of the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles and re-establish the country's position and return it to great nation status.
ARPLAN.
Harnack founded the "Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft" ("Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), or ARPLAN in 1931. This was an organisation of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy. Harnack became Secretary of the group and Lenz became the President. The first meeting of the group took place on 3 and 4 January 1932. The study group had around 50 members. Among them was the leading Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, who at the time was a member of the Russian trade delegation and Alexander Hirschfeld who was Harnack's contact at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. At the time, the Harnack's were also members of the Association of Intellectual Workers ("Bund der Geistesarbeiter"), also a communist front organisation. They were seen by Moscow as places that could recruit "people of good will" or "people of influence" but not necessarily party member's. According to Georgi Dimitrov, the head of Communist International, they were organisation's that enabled them to extend their influence to people that were difficult to reach. Communist or KPD members would stay in the background, in meetings that were open to all, but orientate the discussion to gain influence. The real purpose of organisations like ARPLAN was to draw people of influence who supported a pro-Soviet agenda in relation to German policy. Bessonov was under instruction to recruit suitable German technocrats for visits to the Soviet Union and extract useful information for the Soviet trade legation.
Salon.
In January 1932, Mildred lost her position teaching English. In May 1932, the couple were forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln, due to the presence of Nazis. The couple had leased the apartment from the writer Stefan Heym. In his postwar novel, "Nachruf" Heym stated he found the Harnack's to be a genial academic couple, but who had a determined outlook on the Nazis. The Harnack's hosted a Saturday Salon at Hasenheide where intellectual discussion among editors, publishers, and authors was freely expressed and where Harnack would lecture on Political economy and Marxism. Amongst those who attended was the writer , the publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, Heinrich Marie Ledig-Rowohlt, the translator Franz Frein, physician and writer Max Mohr, authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff and Ernst von Salomon, the journalist Margret Boveri and the critic Erich Franzen and Mildred's students like the writer Friedrich Schlösinger.
A three-week study trip encompassing the period from 20 August to 12 September 1932 to the Soviet Union was organized with the help of Bessonov and the Soviet embassy, for twenty-three members of ARPLAN The Soviet economy was observed in Moscow, Leningrad, Odesa, Kiew, and in the Dnieper region. There have been allegations that Harnack was recruited by Soviet intelligence, during the trip. In "David Dallins", "Soviet Espionage" he describes the trip as the "turning point" in Harnack's life. He was asked bluntly by senior Comintern leaders to spy for the Soviet Union and Harnack consented. This allegation was again repeated in 1994 by KGB Deputy Director Pavel Sudoplatov. although it was not recorded in Harnack's own records. Even though the group travelled through Ukraine and as academics, many of the group took notes, including Harnack, the group failed to notice the vast famine that was unfolding in front of them. When Arthur Koestler made the same trip at the same time, he documented a ragged army of starving people in almost every station. Koestler believed that the Harnacks' mentality was driven by the fact that they knew that the propaganda effect put on by the Soviets existed and that although they knew the standard of living in the west was much higher than the Soviet Union, they judged that Soviet citizens were much better off under Stalin than they were under the Czar.
Career change.
By the end of 1932, a scientific career was no longer an option for Harnack in his strictly planned economic orientation at the universities, which were now national socialist, and he was no longer eligible for the careers of the National Socialist. His thesis on "The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States" could no longer be published. In the same year he began delivering illegal training courses for former members of the Marxist Workers School (MASCH) and at the Berliner Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene"), an evening high school for adults that taught a curriculum that was suitable for attendees to obtain the Abitur, and offering university admission. while Mildred started teaching English literature also at the same school.
After Hitler's rise to power and the Reichstag fire in early 1933, the Harnacks hastened to lower their profile. They decided to dissolve ARPLAN the following month, March 1933. The membership list was destroyed and many members fled abroad. Lenz was attacked at Giessen University by the SS and his house was raided. In September he was dismissed from the university due to being "politically unreliable".
Resistance.
In 1933, Harnack was appointed to the position of scientific advisor at the Reich Ministry of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsministerium). Harnack eventually achieved the rank of senior civil servant (Oberregierungsrat) in 1938 and worked on balance of payments and foreign exchange questions in the context of trade. As chief of trade policy, Harnack was part of many decision making processes involving a very large number of people, including contacts in the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). Over time, Harnack garnered a detailed knowledge of the German economy, and when he was promoted to senior civil servant, he was legitimately able to form contacts with the American trade counterparts at the American embassy.
The same year, he also finished his legal qualifications in Jena, successfully completing the junior law examination.
With the writer Adam Kuckhoff, and his wife, Greta, the Harnacks assembled a discussion circle that debated political perspectives on the time after the National Socialists' expected downfall or overthrow.
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Harnack were good friends with the lawyer and academic Carl Dietrich von Trotha. Harnack knew Horst von Einsiedel, also a lawyer, since 1934.
In 1934, the couple moved to the 3rd floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten. The house was destroyed in the war and is now known as 14 Genthiner Straße.
By 1935, Harnack was employed as a lecturer on foreign policy at the University of Berlin.
On 8 August 1935, three months after Harnack joined the trade ministry, he met with the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, Alexander Hirschfeld in a meeting that lasted three hours. During the meeting, Hirschfeld informed Harnack that his position in the trade ministry could provide useful information that could be used to defeat the Nazis, and offered to establish a system to convey the documents to Moscow. Harnack agreed to be an informer and was give the codename "Balt", assigned a control officer, Alexander Belkin and assigned a mission to increase his sources by building a network of contacts. However, Hirschfeld requested that Harnack break of all relation's with the KPD and to avoid working for the resistance, but he decided not to comply Harnack was never interested in becoming a Soviet agent, he considered himself a communist and would supply information to anybody who would take part in anti-fascist operations that helped to destroy the Nazi's According to KGB sources, between 1935 and 1938 Harnack supplied information relating to the German currency, German investments abroad and details of the German foreign debt. Harnack also provided details of secret trade agreements to Soviet intelligence. During that period, Harnack circulated the same information to other groups.
In 1935, Harnack had his first contact with the fervent anti-nazi Harro Schulze-Boysen, however due to their different temperaments, Harnack decided not to meet again.
At the end of 1937 and formally on 3 March 1938 William Dodd was replaced with ambassador Hugh Wilson. Joining him as the First Secretary and monetary attaché at the U.S. Embassy was Donald Heath. US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. felt that the Berlin embassy needed a treasury attaché who could ferret out German economic information. So Heath became an intelligence agent in the office of coordination at the embassy (a forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services). His job was to recruit sympathetic informers, that could provide that type of information. Mildred met Louise Heath, Donald Heath's wife, at the American Women's Club in Bellevuestrasse in 1937. Mildred and Arvid became friends with Donald Heath and his wife Louise Heath. Initially Harnack was resistant to the overtures of Heath but by 1938 was providing him with intelligence. At the start of World War II, Louise Heath and her son, Donald Heath Jr. fled to Norway and returned several months later when they realised it would be safe. When they returned, Louise Heath requested that Mildred tutor her son in American Literature. The two couples began to regularly spend weekends together and occasionally holidayed together. At other times Harnack and Heath would meet in the countryside to exchange intelligence, but it was becoming increasingly dangerous. Between December 1939 and March 1941, Donald Heath Jr. couriered between Harnack and the American embassy. He would also deliver food from Denmark and Italy as well as medicine for the Harnack's. After the war, Heath acknowledged to both his family and the Harnack family, that Arvid Harnack was his source for German economic intelligence.
In 1937, the former Prussian minister of culture and religious socialist Adolf Grimme was brought into the group through his college friend, Adam Kuckhoff. and playwright Günther Weisenborn. Harnack had met Grimme previously at the funeral of Adolf von Harnack on the 10 June 1930.
On 26 January 1937, a new civil service law gave Nazi officials the power to sack tenured civil servants. Walther Funk, the manager of Harnack at the Ministry, persuaded him to join the Nazi party to protect himself, to become what was known as a "Hamburger", i.e. Nazi brown outside, Moscow red inside. In May 1937, Harnack joined the Nazi party with number: 4153569.
The lawyer Wolfgang Havemann, the son of Gustav Havemann, became a frequent visitor to the Harnacks group discussions after 1938.
In mid-August 1939, Harnack returned from a trade mission to Washington, to secure copper and aluminum supplies.
Harnack/Schulze-Boysen Group.
In 1940, Harnack had access to other resistance groups and began to cooperate with them. The most important of these was a group run by Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and descendant of an old German military family, who had known Harnack since 1935, but was reintroduced to him sometime in late 1939 or early 1940 through Greta Kuckhoff. The Kuckhoffs had known the Schulz-Boysen's since 1938 and started to engage them socially in late 1939 or early 1940 by bringing Mildred and Libertas together while on holiday in Saxony.
On the 17 September 1940, Arvid and Mildred met the third secretary member of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Korotkow who used the alias "Alexander Erdberg" while meeting the couple in their Tiergarten apartment. Korotkov was a Soviet intelligence agent who had been operating clandestinely in Europe for much of the 1930s as an employee of the foreign intelligence service of the Soviet People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) but had been dismissed during Stalin's purges, but managed to work back into the service via help from his friend Lavrentiy Beria. Initially wary and suspicious of the uninvited guest, Korotkow proposed to Harnack a second meeting at the Soviet Embassy in Berlin, where Korotkow could verify his bona fides and prove to Harnack that he was not a decoy. Korotkow finally convinced Harnack, who was reluctant to agree. Several reasons have been advanced as to why Harnack decided to become a spy, including a need for money, being ideologically driven, and possibly blackmail by Russian intelligence. It was known that Harnack had planned an independent existence for his friends. According to a statement by Korotkow discovered after the war, he thought Harnack was not motived by money nor ideologically driven but that he was specifically building an anti-fascist organisation for Germany, as opposed to an espionage network for Russian intelligence. He considered himself a German patriot.
In mid-April 1941, in an attempt to increase the influx of intelligence, the Soviets ordered Korotkow to create a Berlin espionage operation and Harnack was asked by Korotkow to run it. Korotkow was instructed by Soviet intelligence to provide a person in Berlin that could be contacted via radio, in the event of war. Harnack refused to be contacted in that manner and agreed only to collect and encipher the material in his own apartment, but the transmission would take place somewhere else. In June 1941, on approval from Harnack, Korotkow delivered a wireless transmitter to Greta Kuckhoff during a meeting at an underground railway station. The device was mounted in a case, had a range of 600miles but the battery only lasted two hours. The aim of the operation was to organise the Harnack group into an independent network with direct contact with Soviet intelligence. In May, two further shortwave radio transmitters were delivered by diplomatic pouch. One was battery powered. The second one was dismantled, in a manner that enabled its fitting to a suitcase. It needed an electrical supply to operate. However, when Adam Kuckhoff's tested the first transmitter, it failed to work so it was returned the following week. On 1 July 1941, Korotkow and the Soviet embassy staff, along with many other Soviet citizens left Germany on a train.
In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group intensified its leaflet propaganda. At the same time, the group started to collect military intelligence in a careful, systematic manner that could be used to overthrow the Nazis. Members of both groups were convinced that only by the military defeat of the Nazis could Germany be liberated and that by shortening the war, perhaps millions of people could be saved. Only in that way would Germany be able to be saved as an independent state at the centre of Europe. 
In 1941, Harnack sent the Soviets information about the forthcoming invasion. That same year, he published the resistance magazine, "Die innere Front" ("The Inner Front"). At about the same time, he received information from Rudolf von Scheliha about the Final Solution.
Discovery.
The discovery of the illegal radio transmissions by Soviet agent Johann Wenzel by the German radio counterintelligence organization Funkabwehr and his capture by the Gestapo on 29–30 June 1942 eventually revealed the members of the group and led to the arrest of the Harnacks. Wenzel decided to cooperate after he was tortured. His exposure of the radio codes enabled Referat 12, the cipher bureaux of the Funkabwehr, to decipher Red Orchestra message traffic. The unit had been tracking Red Orchestra radio transmissions since June 1941 and found Wenzels house in Brussels was found to contain a large number of coded messages. When Wilhelm Vauck, principal cryptographer of the Funkabwehr, the radio counterintelligence department of the Abwehr received the ciphers from Wenzel, he was able to decipher some of the older messages. On 15 July 1942, Vauck managed to decrypt a message dated 10 October 1941 that gave the locations of the Kuckhoff's and the Schulze-Boysen's apartments.
When Vauck decrypted this message, it was forwarded to Reich Main Security Office IV 2A, where they identified the people living at the three addresses. The three couples were put under surveillance on 16 July 1942. There was a member of Schulze-Boysen's group working in Referat 12 in Vauck's team: Horst Heilmann, who was supplying Schulze-Boysen with intelligence. Heilmann tried to contact Schulze-Boysen but was unsuccessful and left a message with him to phone him back. Schulze-Boysen returned the call, but Vauck answered the phone and when he requested the name of the caller to take a message and was met with Schulze-Boysen, the deception was revealed and the group exposed.
Trial and death.
On 7 September 1942, Arvid and Mildred Harnack were arrested by the Gestapo, while on a short holiday to the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.
Arvid Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the "Reichskriegsgericht" ("Reich Military Tribunal"), and was put to death three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. He and his co-conspirators were hanged from meat hooks by piano wire, a method designed to prolong their suffering. Mildred Harnack was originally sentenced to six years in prison, but Hitler swiftly cancelled the sentence and ordered a new trial, which pronounced the desired death sentence. She was beheaded by guillotine. The Harnacks' bodies were released to Hermann Stieve, anatomy professor at Humboldt University, to be dissected for research. A cenotaph was installed for them after the war by Arvid's brother Falk Harnack, a member of the White Rose resistance group, at Zehlendorf Cemetery.