Harro Schulze-Boysen | |
|---|---|
 Harro Schulze-Boysen at his work desk | |
| Born | Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze 2 September 1909 |
| Died | 22 December 1942 (aged 33) |
| Nationality | German |
| Citizenship | German |
| Occupation(s) | Publicist and later Luftwaffe officer |
| Movement | Member of the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") |
| Spouse | Libertas Haas-Heye |
Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen (German: [ˈha.ʁoː ˈʃʊl.t͡sə ˈbɔɪ̯sn̩] ; né Schulze, 2 September 1909 – 22 December 1942) was a left-wing German publicist and Luftwaffe officer during World War II. As a young man, Schulze-Boysen grew up in prosperous family with two siblings, with an extended family who were aristocrats. After spending his early schooling at the Heinrich-von-Kleist Gymnasium and his summers in Sweden, he part completed a political science course at the University of Freiburg, before moving to Berlin in November 1929, to study law at the Humboldt University of Berlin. At Humboldt he became an anti-Nazi. After a visit to France in 1931, he moved to the political left. When he returned, he became a publicist on Der Gegner (English: "The Opponent"), a left-leaning political magazine. In May 1932, he took control of the magazine, but it was closed by the Gestapo in February 1933.
In May 1933, Schulze-Boysen trained as a pilot and started working in Ministry of Aviation. In the summer of 1934, he met the aristocrat Libertas Haas-Heye and married her in July 1936. The couple held regular dinner parties and evening-picnics that became formal meetings where many people from different stratas of society met and who were confessed anti-Nazis. By 1936, their house in Charlottenburg had become a popular meeting place and by 1937 the group began to resist. During the Spanish Civil War, Schulze-Boysen began collecting details of the Wehrmacht's involvement in the war from the ministry. He arranged for the documents to be passed to Soviet embassy by Gisela von Pöllnitz. As he was promoted in the Ministry, Schulze-Boysen collected information that he used to write savage indictments of the Nazi plans. Their first leaflet was "Der Stoßtrupp" ("The Shock Troop") that criticised the plan for the invasion of Sudetenland. At the time, the documents were taken abroad.
At the beginning of the war, Schulze-Boysen met Arvid Harnack who was the leader of another political faction and they started to work together. As the war progressed their combined undercover political faction, developed from a resistance organisation into an espionage networks from a small cadre of close friends, that began to collaborate with Soviet intelligence.[1] The espionage network, led by Schulze-Boysen lasted slightly longer than a year, from just before June 1941 to August 1942[1] before a blunder by Soviet intelligence exposed their names and addresses to the German Funkabwehr, which resulted in the arrest of many members of the group, including Schulze-Boysen who was arrested on 31 August 1942 and executed later the same year.[2]
- ^ a b Kesaris 1979, p. 140.
- ^ Harro Schulze-Boysen & GDW.