I recently read two books about resistance to fascism:

Norman Ohler, Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (2020) Trans. Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarborough (2020)

Justus Rosenberg, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (2020)

I learned from both, but I didn’t learn what I most wanted to, namely, why do some people resist when most do not? Both books privilege historical detail over theoretical analysis. Still, the experiences recounted in these texts are interesting; setting them down, I found I had a lot to say, so I have divided this post into two parts. Notes on Norman Ohler’s Bohemians are below; those on Justus Rosenberg’s The Art of Resistance will follow.

The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis is better than its grandiose title—which contains at least two errors. First, and most importantly, Germany didn’t resist the Nazis. Second, yes Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye—the lovers of the title—were remarkable people, and it’s weird how little has been written about them so far. But they didn’t lead in any established or organized way. The inside flap is a bit more circumspect, calling them the leaders of “Germany’s largest anti-Nazi resistance group,” but this too obscures what Ohler is at pains to show: the resistance in question succeeded (if it even did, definitely an open question) because it never cohered. The “movement” Schulze-Boysen and Haas-Heye “led” was shaped like a rhizome, not a root or branch, that is, it was an association of more or less like-minded individuals many of whom never knew each other.

For that reason, Ohler references a lot of people in the book—I couldn’t always keep track of the minor players. The book works best as a two-handed biography of Schulze-Boysen and Haas-Heye. They definitely merit the attention.

Harro Schulze-Boysen was born in 1909 in Kiel, where his father served as a naval officer. The family’s most famous relative was Harro’s great-uncle Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, who built Kaiser Wilhelm’s navy. (I’ll follow Ohler’s direction and call Harro and Libertas by their first names: much easier!) Harro’s father, Erich-Edgar, was an old-school conservative, “almost otherworldly in his rigor.” He would tell his son not that he could cry but that he should (to show feelings), but that he should never shed more than a single tear (to demonstrate composure). Erich-Edgar wanted to raise “free-thinking conservatives”; Harro, his eldest son, was certainly the former, though increasingly less the latter. Yet his father’s teachings remained engrained: Harro would be tortured several times in his life, leading, in the beginning, to chronic pain and, at the end, to his death, but he forbore it with shocking stoicism.

Harro was a serious person. He moved to Berlin as a young man and began to study law and political science. Before long, though, he drifted from his studies, preferring to spend his time writing and editing a publication called Der Gegner (the opponent, the adversary). In 1932 he became its publisher and transformed the journal into a social movement highlighted by Gegner evenings in cafes and bars across Germany. At these public debates people of different political beliefs were encouraged to air their beliefs, listen to arguments, and move beyond party lines. Like many others, Harro saw Weimar Germany on the verge of splintering; unlike many, quoting Abraham Lincoln (“A house divided cannot stand”), he sought to keep it together through independent thinking.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Harro was excited, not because he supported the Nazis (he had read Mein Kampf in the late 20s and dismissed it as nonsense) but because he assumed the coalition would soon fall, allowing the energy unleased by the Nazis to be harnessed to create “a genuine social revolution.” If only he had been right. As the Nazis consolidate power and suppress dissent, the Gegner came under scrutiny. On April 26, Harro and his number two, Henry Erlanger, were arrested by the newly-empowered SS. The friends were beaten and tortured, forced to run lap after lap around a prison yard. Erlanger, whose father was Jewish, died from the beatings; Harro had a swastika carved into his thigh by an SS thug, a reminder he would carry with him for the rest of his life. (Along with lifelong kidney problems; Ohler is grimly eloquent on the consequences for Harro’s ruined body.) By the time Harro was eventually released—thanks to the heroic efforts of his mother, who came to Berlin and, trading on her family’s military connections, browbeat the SS into giving Harro up—he had given up on the idea of common ground and different viewpoints. Instead he nurtured hatred for the Nazis and vowed revenge for Henry’s death.

To do so, Harro was willing to play the long game. He now believed that only a Trojan horse mentality would defeat the regime. He would “appear outwardly unsuspicious in order to change the system from within.” He abandoned journalism and signed up for the German Air Traffic School. (As part of the Versailles Treaty, Germany wasn’t allowed to have an air force; the school was a thinly disguised way to flout international law.) Harro was a good pilot—he said that only in the air did he feel free of rage—but he gave it up when the Gestapo, who had been hectoring him to sign a false report saying Henry committed suicide, told him point-blank that plane crashes are easy to arrange. In a sign of his newfound tactical prudence, he signed on as a lowly clerk at the newly-reconstituted Air Ministry in 1934 with the hope of being promoted to a position in which he might learn state secrets.

In the meantime, something much more consequential happened to him that summer. Sailing with some friends (Berlin is surrounded by lakes and waterways), he met a girl sunbathing in a two-piece suit—an outfit that had been banned since 1932. This, of course, was Libertas; for both, it was love—and lust—at first sight. The latter is important to their story: the injuries he’d suffered at the hands of the SS made sex difficult for Harro; later in their marriage, Libertas would look elsewhere for sexual satisfaction, with Harro’s reluctant approval. He eventually had an affair as well. These relationships mattered, Ohler argues, because the couple valued sexual fulfillment without regard to procreation. (Totally at odds with Nazi ideology, obviously.) Harro and Libertas and their bohemian friends were for free love, creativity, expressiveness, openness. As Ohler puts it, their resistance

proceeds from life itself; [it is] the natural impulse, unstoppable in some people, to profess unconventionality, to be unconventional.

An interesting way of putting it—professing isn’t the same as being, and Ohler’s clear implication is that his subjects walked a walk that others could only talk. But if the impulse is so natural, why wouldn’t everyone have been like them? Are others just “better” at stopping natural impulses? (More self-control, more highly repressed, take your pick.) This would be a very Freudian/Lawrentian, and thus fittingly early 20^th-century, way of thinking about repression. But whose sentiments are we getting in this passage? Ohler’s? Harro and Libertas’s? I was sometimes frustrated with the book’s uncertain voice. (There is no note to this page, for example.) Tellingly, this is one of only a handful of times when Ohler offers anything close to an analysis of his material. He almost never tells us anything about the nature of resistance, or, perhaps more appropriately, of this resistance. And when he does, it’s hard to tell if he’s making his own argument, or if he’s simply transcribing their beliefs.

But back to the girl on the boat. Born in Paris in 1913, Libertas Haas-Heye grew up on her family’s estate, Schloss Liebenberg, fifty kilometers north of Berlin. Her family was even more well-connected than Harro’s. Kaiser Wilhelm had been her maternal grandfather’s closest friend—in fact, had been his lover, a fact eventually revealed in all the newspapers of Europe. The Fürst, as her grandfather was titled, was made to stand trial, rather like Oscar Wilde, but unlike the writer the Fürst was eventually declared unfit to stand trial for health reasons and the trial was adjourned. The stain, however, never quite left the family, a state exacerbated when Libertas’s parents, rather unusually for the time, divorced in the early 1920s.

Her father, a fashion designer and art professor, made the rounds of glamorous cities and resorts. Her mother holed up at the Schloss, isolating herself from the world. Libertas, uprooted many times as a child, had been educated at boarding schools across Europe, which, Ohler speculates, turned her into a person always ready to charm, always seeking to fit in. That tendency, plus the family’s desire to put scandals behind them, might explain their turn to fascism. The head of the family and manager of the estate, Libertas’s uncle, had supported Hitler even before his ascent to power. Libertas herself joined the party in March 1933, though professed herself uninterested in politics. Later that year she moved to Berlin and got a job with MGM’s press department (the film companies needed lots of workers, because they had just fired their Jewish employees). But she wanted to make films, not publicize them. Before long she realized her job wouldn’t lead her to the director’s chair. And she found herself unable to attend university because the Nazis had passed a law lowering the number of students. On the day she accompanied a friend—who happened to know Harro as well—for a day’s sailing on the Wannsee she was, Ohler concludes, at loose ends.

Harro and Libertas were young, good looking, unconventional. (They were, for example, completely uninterested in the gender norms of the time. Neither wanted kids; Harro liked that she worked.) In the months that followed, they bought a car, weekended at Liebenberg, lived communally with friends. But such carefree unconventionality was hard to sustain. Their families put pressure on them to marry. Besides, being together for so long without marrying attracted the wrong kind of attention at Harro’s work. They were married in the summer of 1936, went away on honeymoon, seemed the perfect rising Aryan couple. Libertas even sweettalked Göring into giving her husband a promotion when the Reich Aviation Minister attended a stag hunt at Liebenberg. All this time, though, Harro was collecting information—in 1936, he learned about plans to send German fighter planes to support Franco in Spain, but the English journalist he passed the secret on to didn’t want to know about it—and biding his time. After Harro’s promotion, the couple rented a big apartment that would become a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. The held raucous parties every other Thursday, at which they would cautiously sound people out on their feelings about the regime.

Gradually, they organized a series of resistance actions: some were more minor than others, but even the most innocuous was risky. Harro, Libertas, and their friends sang French songs, took photos of battleships (Libertas got caught and was picked up by the Gestapo; it almost ended badly), and wrote pamphlets they mailed anonymously to likeminded souls (one was titled Concern for Germany’s Future is Spreading Among the People). In an especially audacious plan, they covered the advertisements for a big propaganda exhibit with stickers reading “War Hunger Lies Gestapo” (Harro had the bright idea of asking men and women to work together, so the graffiti artists could disguise the stickering by making out). Most seriously, they got in touch with the Allies and passed on information to them. Harro managed to contact a Soviet agent based in Brussels, who provided him with a radio transmitter. But most of their messages failed to get through, because the machines were notoriously hard to work. Which was too bad, because Harro and Libertas knew a lot.

Already in the fall 1940, the German command was making plans to invade the Soviet Union. In January 1941, Harro saw photographic evidence of reconnaissance flights over Leningrad. A few weeks earlier, he had noticed that all Russian books (including Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky) had been withdrawn from the Air Ministry library. (I am amazed not that the regime decided the books were propaganda, but that the Air Ministry had a library containing Tolstoy.)

Harro had the more prominent position, but Libertas learned the more terrible things. In the summer of 1940, the Ministry of Propaganda formed the Germany Documentary Film Institute, aimed at producing 10-minute shorts extolling the war effort to be screened before feature films. Impressively for someone who had taken the unusual and dangerous step of renouncing her party membership, Libertas got the job of approving or denying these projects. She was a censor—but an unusual one, sidelining projects that she deemed too close to the party line (always using finances as an excuse) and encouraging any she thought had even the slightest subversive potential. But soon she was reviewing more than propaganda films. For reasons neither Ohler nor other researchers can explain, her office began to receive photos sent willingly by soldiers on the Eastern front which clearly showed atrocities against Jews. Libertas pilfered many of the photos and assembled them into scrapbooks which she hid in the apartment. (They were later destroyed by the SS.)

Then their luck ran out, done in by the carelessness of others. The radio assistant of the Russian agent in Brussels was arrested and, under torture, revealed their codes. Among the messages the Gestapo were able to decipher, one, which the agent had foolishly not destroyed, included Harro and Libertas’s address. A formal (secret) investigation was launched into First Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen, that rising star in the Luftwaffe. A friend of Harro’s—a co-conspirator—worked in the encryption office and frantically sought to warn Harro the minute he learned of the investigation. What followed was a deadly game of telephone tag. The man left a message for Harro, but happened to be away from his desk when Harro returned the call. Worse luck, the leader of the investigation happened to answer the phone. Worst of all, Harro happened to give his own name. After that, things happened fast—first Harro was arrested, then a few days later Libertas, and finally other members of the “organization” the Nazis had come to call “The Red Orchestra” (under the mistaken impression the participants were all communists; in fact, pretty much none of them were).

The resisters were tortured, mentally and physically. They held out through terrible suffering, at least for a time. It didn’t help that Libertas had unknowingly spilled secrets to a secretary who pretended to be sympathetic. Ohler describes an amazing scene, during the ensuing trial, when the conspirators are able to be together for the first time since their arrest—during a lunch break when the guards connive to give them some time together—and they collectively decide together to forgive Libertas, even though her indiscretions have hurt their cause.

In the end, the bohemians of Ohler’s title are convicted and sentenced to be executed. They write moving letters to their parents; Libertas one to Harro. Harro writes a poem that he arranges to have the kapo of his cellblock, a former bricklayer, hide in the wall, asking him to recover it after the war and send it to his parents. Which actually happens. The poem concludes:

The world will be our judges/Not the judges of today. (Harro’s italics)

That judgment has been mixed, though. After the war, the “Red Orchestra” was celebrated by the East German government as a home-grown ring of spies working under the leadership of Moscow to destroy fascism from within. (This ignores the reality that the carelessness of Moscow’s agent basically got them killed.) The West Germans were uninterested. Harro’s brother, who became a diplomat, even asked Helmut Kohl to acknowledge the dead man’s actions, but he received nothing more than a dismissal: the real legacy of resistance, the brother was sententiously told, was a state devoted to the rule of law. (Ohler points out that Harro would have agreed.) West German reticence stemmed from a belief that the group were in fact in league with the Soviets, but surely also was connected to the fact that many of the people who persecuted Harro, Libertas, and the others were rehabilitated, avoided trial, or traded between east and west. Many of them ended up working for secret services in the US, UK, and Germany. In sum, the legacy of the “gang” was nothing but misrepresentation all around—a typical irony.

Ohler has done fine work in telling this exciting, tragic story in a compelling way. I’m impressed how elegantly he has organized the book: it is as tightly structured as the thriller it could have been. Readers of Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin will find a similar inexorable, terrible narrative here. Ohler has a light touch with his own writerly persona—almost too much so, as I’ve suggested in my complaint about the uncertainty regarding his own point of view—but the book’s impetus was clearly personal. The summer he was twelve, newly shaken by what he had recently learned in school, Ohler asked his grandfather what he had done during the war. The man, who had worked for the Reichsbahn, the state railway, reluctantly tells a story about a train he once saw, on a tour of duty in northern Bohemia. The long freight train was shunted to the side outside a little station. He felt uneasy about the train. He walked alongside its silent cars; suddenly a tin cup was lowered on a strong from an opening near the roof of one of the cars into a nearby snow bank. Just as suddenly, the cup, now filled with snow, was pulled up until a small hand reached out to grab it. There were people in there! The train, grandfather learned, was going somewhere called Theresienstadt; he’d never heard of it. His bad feeling only grew when some SS men came and ran the grandfather off. He told himself the people must have been prisoners of war and willed himself to forget what he’d seen. I was scared, he tells Ohler. After a while the man goes into his house and returns with an envelope, which he wordlessly hands to his grandson. Inside is his party membership. Please. Take it. I can’t have it in the house anymore.

The envelope turned into this book: a man lying to himself in Bohemia begat a story resurrecting rebellious bohemians. Ohler has the good sense not to claim this is a fair trade, or that restitution has been achieved. But he’s written a valuable book. I’m unconvinced his grandfather was the kind of person to have been proud of that—nor was he in a position to be, in my opinion. But it’s a good thing Ohler has done. After Harro and the others were hanged, Hitler vowed the Nazis would wipe even the memory of their names from the earth; for many years they effectively did so. The Bohemians begins to right that wrong.