[2] He studied at the United National Academy for Free and Applied Arts ("Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst") in Berlin-Charlottenburg where he was taught by the sculptor Wilhelm Gerstel.
[4] In 1939 he linked up with Hans Coppi who around this time became a member of the so-called Rote Kapelle (inaccurately but conventionally translated into English as "Red Orchestra") resistance group.
Erika von Brockdorff would later put her Berlin apartment at the disposal of Coppi for use as a radio communication centre, connecting with Moscow, as a result of which she was arrested and, on 13 May 1943, executed.
He was found guilty of "preparing to commit high treason" and sentenced to a four year prison term before being transferred to serve in a punishment battalion.
[1] His daughter later recalled that following her mother's death, in the Soviet zone (later East Germany), she and her father "enjoyed many advantages, because [surviving] members of [what the Nazis had disparagingly termed] the "Rote Kapelle" ("Red Orchestra") were celebrated as antifascist heroes.
[1] In 1953 Brockdorff became the first editor in chief of the magazine Bildende Kunst, a publication produced jointly by the National Commission for the Arts ("Staatliche Kommission für Kunstangelegenheiten") and by the state approved National Association of Visual Artists ("Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR"), an organisation to which those wishing to pursue a career in the visual arts were in effect obliged to belong.
[1] His successor, who took over with effect from Issue 3 of the newly launched publication, was another surviving anti-Nazi resistance activist, the cartoonist and caricaturist Herbert Sandberg who, despite a discretely satirical approach, managed to stay in the post till 1957.