She wept, overcome with pain and anger and frustration. She had come so close to eluding her tormentors without ever leaving their prison. They would never give her another chance.
Many nights Greta dreamed of playful, sunny romps through the Tiergarten with Ule, only to wake in the morning to the sound of her own weeping.
Would she ever see her precious son again? She was permitted a few letters a week, but no visitors—not that she would want her little boy to see her in that wretched place. Her mother assured her that Ule was healthy and content, but he missed her and Adam very much and asked about them often. His grandmother told him that his Mutti and Papa were traveling on important business and would be home soon. Despondent, Greta wondered how long he would believe it.
Soon after her arrest, an SS officer had informed her that Adam had been captured in Prague a few hours after she had been brought to Alexanderplatz. With every heartbreaking letter, Adam’s mother asked if Greta had any news of him, for he had not written to her. She had gone to Gestapo headquarters begging to see him, only to be turned away. Greta had received no word from him either, although from time to time her interrogators would taunt her with horrifying descriptions of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8. She knew that Adam, Arvid, and the others held captive there had been beaten and tortured, and that after several days of torment, Adam had finally confessed. She was devastated to learn that he had given up John Sieg and Adolf Grimme, but she knew he had held out as long as he could in hopes that a delay would give his friends time to escape. Unfortunately, as the Gestapo men told her with mock sorrow, he had not held out long enough. John Sieg was dead, Adolf Grimme was in theHausgefängnisalong with Mildred and Libertas, and their wives languished in the Alexanderplatz prison the same as Greta, the same as most of the resistance women, except those few who had eluded capture.
Greta did not understand why her two dear friends were confined to theHausgefängniswith the men instead of at Alexanderplatz or the women’s prison in Charlottenburg. Was it because Libertas was the granddaughter of a prince and Mildred was an American? That defied logic. Shouldn’t their status merit preferential treatment, not confinement to hell on earth? There was something else at work, something Greta had not yet worked out, keeping Mildred and Libertas apart from the other resistance women.
Alexanderplatz was not comfortable by any means, but from the ominous details Greta had gathered, it was humane compared to theHausgefängnis.Originally built as a men’s military prison, it had been converted when the Reich’s mass arrests had created serious overcrowding problems at other facilities. The women had the entire fifth floor to themselves, and they were treated less harshly than the men confined to the lower levels. They were allowed to receive letters and packages of food and other necessities. They were permitted small gatherings and were allowed to sing and converse. The prisoners often stayed up late into the night talking, fending off loneliness and despair with quiet companionship. Those fortunate enough to receive sewing kits or knitting baskets from friends on the outside were allowed to occupy themselves with knitting warm scarves or darning socks, both for themselves and other prisoners, even for men they knew held elsewhere in the compound.
Throughout that grim autumn of pursuits and arrests, Greta met many of her comrades for the first time. For security, most members of the resistance had known only the five or six people within their immediate circle, although those like Greta who participated in overlapping circles knew more. It was disconcerting to pass acquaintances in the prison halls and discover that they had unknowingly been members of the same resistance network all along.
As the long, lonely, agonizing weeks passed, Greta became particularly close to Elizabeth Schumacher, whom she had known fairly well for years, and Marta Wolser Husemann, a young Communist actress whom she had only just met. They often talked late into the night, wondering aloud about their husbands and families, and discussing their impending trials, which they assumed were imminent although they had been told almost nothing. They reminisced about life before the Reich, which appeared to them in the warm, rosy glow of the unattainable past, a time they had not realized while they were living it would prove to be the best of their lives. They sustained one another’s hopes even when hope was futile. Together they dared to imagine a future when they would be able to reunite with their loved ones far from the cold, forbidding walls of the prison.
Perhaps that would never come to pass, but if wishful thinking got them through the days, Greta would willingly surrender herself to it.
As the days grew shorter and the nights colder, the fifth floor of the prison became increasingly uncomfortable. Greta, Elizabeth, and Sophie Sieg were called out for interrogations more frequently than the others, but when they compared notes afterward, they could discern no pattern to the investigation other than the Gestapo was convinced of their guilt, and that Hitler seemed furious that so many members of their resistance group belonged to the political and intellectual elite. Treachery from Jews and Communists he could understand and expect, but betrayal by people like the Harnacks and Schulze-Boysens, who stood to benefit significantly from the triumph of the Reich, utterly infuriated him. That was a personal affront, unfathomable, unforgivable.
One afternoon in late November, Greta was brought in for yet more questioning. She calmly and plainly responded to the same questions she had heard hundreds of times before, careful to keep her facts straight, to tell the same stories precisely as she had throughout the previous two months. But this time, the Gestapo officer regarded her with a new avidity, nodding smugly after each response.
“You should be more forthcoming, Frau Kuckhoff,” he admonished her.
“I’ve told you everything I know,” she replied, careful to show the proper deference.
“Not everything.” His voice rang with triumph. “Your husband, Harro Schulze-Boysen, and Arvid Harnack have already confessed to collusion with agents of the Soviet Union, so those simple, condemning facts are no longer in dispute. You are aware that military espionage is classified as high treason?”
Stricken, Greta nodded.
“And you understand that the penalty for high treason is death?”
She tried to speak but could not. She nodded again.
“That much is settled,” the officer said. “Your husband will be tried, he will be found guilty, and he will die. The only question is whether you will die with him.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
December 1942–January 1943
Mildred
In early December, Mildred was informed that she was being transferred to the women’s prison at Kantstrasse 79 in Charlottenburg. Desperate for one last glimpse of Arvid, she looked frantically down corridors and through open doorways as the guards escorted her from theHausgefängnisupstairs to the exit, but although she saw Adam from a distance, Arvid was nowhere to be found. Fighting back despair, blinking from the sudden brightness as she was led outside, she turned her face to the winter sky and inhaled deeply, shivering in her coarse prison garb, drawing in as much of the thin sunshine and fresh air as she could before the guards opened the back of a green police van and thrust her inside.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she made out a small blond woman sitting on one of the benches, her shoulders slumped in profound dejection, her hair tousled and matted, her head buried in her hands. “Libertas?” Mildred asked hesitantly.
The woman immediately straightened. “Mildred?” she exclaimed. “Oh my God, Mildred! You’re alive!”
As the van started up, they embraced unsteadily, tumbling down upon the bench and clinging to each other as if they were drowning. Tearfully Libertas asked Mildred if she had seen Harro; Mildred shook her head and asked if Libertas had seen Arvid. She had, but only once, in mid-October, walking in the exercise yard, thinner but unbowed.
Quickly, talking over each other in their urgency, they shared their news. Mildred described how she and Arvid had been apprehended in Preila, and Libertas confirmed what Mildred had already guessed, that when Harro had disappeared from his office in late August, the courier mission had been a ruse to conceal his arrest. That same day, the mail carrier in the Schulze-Boysens’ apartment building had warned Libertas that the Gestapo had been monitoring their letters. Terrified, fearing the worst for her husband, Libertas had frantically destroyed evidence at her home and in her Kulturfilm office. She had hastily packed a suitcase and had spent the next few days first with one friend, and then another, afraid to return home. Finally, convinced that the Gestapo was watching her at every moment, she had boarded a southbound train for the Black Forest where Harro’s brother had a vacation home. She had intended to catch her breath and plan her escape to France or Switzerland, but the SS had captured her on the train.
Both women gasped as the van came to a sudden halt.
“I didn’t mean to betray anyone,” Libertas said desperately, clutching Mildred’s arm. “I was trying to help. She pretended to be my friend. I didn’t know, I swear I didn’t know—”
“Who?” Mildred asked, bewildered. “What didn’t you know?”
The door swung open and guards reached in to haul them out. Instinctively the women clung to each other, but the guards wrestled them out of the van and onto the pavement, where they were quickly separated. Mildred was led away first, stumbling through the prisoners’ entrance while Libertas wept and shrieked her name, her voice abruptly silenced when the door slammed between them.
