The Red Orchestra

V. E. Tarrant

Description

A fascinating account of one of the most successful spying operations of World War II

Long recognized as one of the most successful (and ruthless) spy networks in history, the Red Orchestra was a group of Soviet cells that operated throughout Germany and occupied Europe until late 1943. The Germans knew of its existence as early as 1941. Yet, it was only after two years of dogged detective work, lucky breaks, interrogation, and betrayals that they were able to silence the Red Orchestra for good. By that time the damage had been done and the Third Reich was facing extinction. Now, The Red Orchestra offers readers a unique opportunity to learn the complete story of Russia's hidden war against Nazi Germany. Vividly recreating a shadowy world of intrigue and espionage in war-torn Europe, The Red Orchestra introduces all the major players and describes spectacular feats of espionage performed right under the Germans' noses.

• Contains new research based on original sources
• A real-life spy story containing all the drama and suspense of the best spy fiction
• The first book to explore all three sectors of the spy operation: the Grand Chef's Western circuit in France, Belgium, and Holland; Die Rote Drei in Switzerland; and the Berlin network

V. E. TARRANT (South Wales, Great Britain) is a military and naval historian and author of several books on World War II.

Sujets

• Histoire
• WW2
• Segunda Guerra Mundial
• Military
• World War II
• Nazi Germany
• History
• Seconde Guerre mondiale

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 février 1996
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620459072
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Red Orchestra
The Red Orchestra
V. E. TARRANT

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
N EW Y ORK C HICHESTER B RISBANE T ORONTO S INGAPORE
Copyright 1995 by V. E. Tarrant
First published in the United States by John Wiley Sons, Inc. 1996
All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in Canada. Published in the UK by Arms Armour Press, an imprint of Cassell plc, London.
Reproduction or transmission of any part of this work beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act without the permission of the copyright owners is unlawful. Requests for permission or further information should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting or other professional services. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available on request from John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ISBN 0-471-13439-2
Edited and designed by Roger Chesneau/DAG Publications Ltd.
Printed and bound in Great Britain.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my wife Val - a little saint on The Way
Contents
Preface
1 Strange Bleeps in the Ether
2 The Abwehr Takes up the Hunt
3 Omens in the East
4 The Atr bates Raid
5 Piepe s Pyrrhic Victory
6 The Gentlemen of the Gestapo
7 The Search for The Cobbler
8 The Laeken Raid
9 Wenzel s Double Game
10 Martyrdom in Breendonk
11 The Russian Adviser
12 The Demise of Hilda
13 Coup de Gr ce in Brussels
14 Case Blue
15 Moscow s Fatal Blunder
16 Treachery in the Funkabwehr
17 Rebel with a Cause
18 Crossing the Rubicon
19 A Confusion of Aims
20 Choro Calling Moscow
21 Treason en Gros
22 Last Echoes in Berlin
23 Swift and Severe Punishment
24 The Men in Top Hats and Tails
25 Set-Back in Paris
26 The Marseilles Connection
27 Wo ist Gilbert?
28 The Road to Kropotkin Square
29 The Road to Brussels
30 The Road to Paris
31 The Road to Perdition
32 Last Echoes in Brussels and Paris
33 The Great Game
34 The Hungarian Mapmaker
35 Pakbo
36 Geneva Calling Moscow
37 Code-Name Lucy
38 The Priceless Source
39 The Ultra Myth
40 Zitadelle
41 The Long Shadow of the Gestapo
42 Last Echoes in Switzerland
43 The Price of Freedom
44 The Rewards
Appendix: Code-Names and Cover-Names
Glossary
Source Notes
Bibliography
Index
Maps
Occupied countries
Brussels
Berlin
The Swiss sector
Preface
This is the story of a loosely connected group of Soviet spy apparats (networks) which operated in Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied France, Belgium and Holland and neutral Switzerland during the Second World War and which were collectively known as Die Rote Kapelle - the Red Orchestra.
The Red Orchestra was not only one of the strangest spy apparats in the history of espionage, it was also one of the most effective, playing a vital part in the eventual destruction of the vile scourge of Nazism. Its agents and informers included Russians, Polish Jews, Frenchmen, Belgians, Dutchmen, Hungarians, Swiss, Germans and Englishmen. Although the Red Orchestra was a GRU ( Glavno Razvedyvatelno Upravlenie , or Soviet Military Intelligence) apparat , its members included people from diverse political persuasions, ranging from committed Communists to right-wing conservatives, and from many different social classes, from aristocrats right across the spectrum to the proletariat. They included amongst their ranks professional GRU agents, businessmen, publishers, factory workers, civil servants, writers, artists, students, prostitutes, ordinary soldiers, a fortune teller and a group of high-ranking, strategically placed German officers who provided the Red agents with the day-to-day decisions and planning made by Hitler and the German High Command relating to the course of the war on the Russian Front. This diverse collection of men and women, who in normal circumstances would have had very little in common, were united by a single common denominator - a hatred of Nazism.
The German counter-intelligence agencies became aware of the existence of the Red Orchestra shortly after Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and thus began a hunt for the Red agents by the Abwehr (Military Intelligence) and the Gestapo (Secret State Police) which lasted for over two years. During this time, by dint of slow, painstaking detective work, lucky breaks, the application of intensified interrogation (the euphemism for torture) and betrayal, the German sleuths slowly prised open the Red Orchestra. But by the time the investigation had been brought to a successful conclusion the German forces on the Eastern Front had been defeated, thanks in the main to the information sent to Moscow by the Red Orchestra.

Occupied Countries
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the following publishers for permission to quote from the copyright material indicated: Century Publishing, from Costello and Tsarev s Deadly Illusions ; Oxford University Press, from David Dallin s Soviet Espionage; Libraire Artheme Fayard, Paris, from Gilles Perrault s L Orchestre Rouge ; Hodder Stoughton, from Read and Fisher s Operation Lucy, and Albin Michel, Paris, from Leopold Trepper s Le Grand Jeu
1. Strange Bleeps in the Ether
At 3.15 in the morning of Sunday 22 June 1941 a gigantic radial lightning flash, followed a split second later by a deep thunderous roar, rippled along the German-Russian frontier as thousands of heavy-calibre guns simultaneously belched forth fire and steel. This massive bombardment heralded an onslaught by more than three million German troops, who poured over the Bug and Niemen rivers to invade the Soviet Union. Four days later, at 3.58 a.m. on Thursday 26 June, while Hitler s panzers were smashing through the forward Russian defences, a German long-range radio monitoring station sited at Kranz on the Baltic coast of East Prussia intercepted a Morse code message being tapped out on the key of a clandestine short-wave radio transmitter. The operator who intercepted this message had tuned in to the frequency employed by partisans of the Norwegian Resistance, who made nightly contact with London, usually relaying a short message consisting of no more than ten to a dozen cipher groups. But the call-sign the operator intercepted on the morning of 26 June was entirely different from those used by the Norwegians: KLK from PTX KLK from PTX KLK from PTX. 2606.03.3032 wds. No. 14 qbv. This strange call-sign was followed by a message composed of thirty-two five-figure cipher groups, ending with the Morse signature AR 503.85. KLK from PTX. 1
During the course of the next four nights the Kranz station intercepted further messages from the PTX pianist (as an enemy radio operator was termed in German counter-espionage parlance), and when the nature of these messages was reported to lieutenant-Colonel Hans Kopp, commanding officer of the Funkabwehr (Signals Security), whose headquarters was situated on the Matth ikirchplatz in central Berlin, he ordered the radio monitoring stations in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe to pay special attention to the PTX transmissions: Essential discover PTX schedule. Night frequency 10,363 kilocycles. Day frequency unknown. Priority la . 2
As the PTX transmitter had burst into life only a few days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, Kopp was apprehensive that the recipient of the PTX messages might well be housed in Moscow and that the enciphered messages were the result of information gleaned by a Soviet spy ring at work somewhere in the Reich or the occupied territories. During the course of the next two months the monitoring stations intercepted some 250 messages tapped out on the key of the PTX transmitter, but attempts to discover the location of the clandestine set by taking cross-bearings on the source of the signals produced inconclusive results: all that the radio experts could suggest was that PTX was operating from somewhere in an area covering southern Holland, Belgium and north-eastern France. As it was essential to locate the city or town in which the pianist was holed up before a hunt by German counter-espionage agents could be mounted, such an imprecise report was as good as useless: they may as well have suggested the North Pole!
In the meantime, however, a far more disturbing report landed on Kopp s desk. Early in July the monitoring stations at Kranz and Breslau, while searching the air waves for further PTX transmissions, intercepted messages from a second transmitter which was employing the same five-figure cipher as the PTX pianist. In addition, it was noted that the schedules and frequencies employed by this second pianist were closely related to the modus operandi of PTX, which strongly suggested that the two pianists belonged to the same espionage apparat. Moreover, attempts by the monitoring stations to pin-point the location of this second transmitter by cross-bearings had produced far more positive and alarming results: it was housed somewhere within a radius of less than five miles from Funkabwehr headquarters in the very heart of Hitler s capital! To make matters worse, the Funkabwehr codes and cipher evaluation analysts had come to the conclusion that the cipher employed by both pianists was of Russian origin, which presented Kopp with the unpalatable certainty that a Soviet spy ring was at work in Germany.
Kopp reacted to this discovery as though he had received a violent electric shock, for on the eve of the invasion of Russia the counter-espionage agencies in the Reich has assured Hitler that Germany had been swept clean of Communists and Soviet underground agents. Indeed, the campaign to smash the German Communist Party - in its day, the most powerf