As the war progressed their combined undercover political faction, developed from a resistance organisation into an espionage network from a small cadre of close friends, that began to collaborate with Soviet intelligence.

In July 1931, during a stay in France, Schulze-Boysen met French intellectuals associated with the magazine Plans, which sought the establishment of a Europe-wide collective economic system and whose influence resulted in him being reorientated politically to the left, though he still maintained his contacts with the nationalists.

As time went on, he increasingly distanced himself from the views of the Young German Order as he realised that the daily struggle in Germany should primarily be directed against the emerging fascism and all reactionaries.

He tried to develop an independent German youth movement with the "Gegner-Kreis",[10] which included Robert Jungk, Erwin Gehrts, Kurt Schumacher and Gisela von Pöllnitz and began to organize Enemy Evenings in Berlin cafés.

In February 1932, Schulze-Boysen, in coordination with his French partners of Plans, organized the Treffen der revolutionären Jugend Europas or Meeting of Europe's Revolutionary Youth.

[12] In the search for alternatives to crisis-ridden Western Europe, he became more interested in the Soviet system, which was influenced by his disappointment with the national and conservative parties in Germany, who in his opinion did not fight the nascent Nazis enough.

In March 1932, he wrote his first article, "Der Neue Gegner" (English: "The New Opponent") that defined his concept of publication goals, stating: "Let us serve the invisible alliance of thousands, who today are still divided.

As early as February 1933 the Gestapo had rated the actions of the magazine as "radical" in an official communication, and in April 1933, the offices of Der Gegner were destroyed by the Sturmabteilung in a raid and detained all those present.

[16] In May 1933, his father organized a pilot training course for him at the German Aviation School in Warnemünde as a sea observer to remove his son from the political front line in Berlin.

He published the magazine Wille zum Reich under a pseudonym and dealt with cultural policy issues but with the goal of undermining the Nazi movement with its own themes.

From 10 April 1934 onwards, he was employed as an auxiliary officer in the fifth department,[4] in the section Foreign Air Powers of the Ministry of Aviation (German: Reichsluftfahrtministerium) (RLM) in Berlin.

[18] To protect himself from further persecution,[further explanation needed] Schulze-Boysen surrounded himself with a group of politically incorruptible friends who were left-leaning anti-fascists, among them artists, pacifists and Communists.

[22] Haas-Heye was an impulsive woman of great personal ambition: [23] she held evening discussions at her house, where she sought to influence her guests on behalf of Schulze-Boysen.

She was fully aware of his activities in the resistance and supported the group by taking part in writing pamphlets, acting as a courier and helping to establish social contacts.

John Rittmeister's wife Eva was a good friend of Liane Berkowitz, Ursula Goetze, Friedrich Rehmer, Maria Terwiel and Fritz Thiel who met in the 1939 abitur class at the secondary private school, Heil'schen Abendschule at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg.

[29] When he learned that Schulze-Boysen's political activities from the Weimar Era "would offer no guarantee of a positive attitude towards the National State", Göring replied that "the old calibre of new appointments should be accepted" and sent him on an aviator course.

[30] The atelier that he and Libertas had purchased together in Charlottenburg as their wedding apartment gradually became a popular meeting place for people who wanted to maintain social interactions with one another.

[33] During the summer of 1936, Schulze-Boysen had become preoccupied by the Popular Front in Spain and through his position at the Reich Aviation Ministry, had collected detailed information of the support that Germany was providing.

It was an action from "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Luftwaffe general Helmuth Wilberg to study and analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Condor during the Spanish Civil War.

[16] The unit also directed the German relief operations that consisted of volunteers, weapons and ammunition for General Francisco Franco's FET y de las JONS.

[15] On his 30th birthday on 2 September 1939, Schulze-Boysen had talked with German industrialist Hugo Buschmann, with whom he had agreed to receive literature on the Russian Revolution, Lenin, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky.

Schulze-Boysen was primarily concerned with questions of what alternatives there were to the capitalist system of the Western European countries, and he considered writing his thesis on the Soviet Union during his studies.

Schulze-Boysen invalidated the concerns that Buschmann had regarding the literature handover by remarking, "I regularly receive Pravda and Izvestia and have to read them because I am a rapporteur on Russian issues.

Schulze-Boysen pleaded for mutual collaboration between the two countries and believed that German communism would emerge as an independent political doctrine, while he anticipated a role for the Soviet Union in Europe.

[68][69] On 15 February 1942, Schulze-Boysen led the group to write the six-page pamphlet called Die Sorge Um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk!

Co-authored by Rittmeister,[70] the master copy was arranged by the potter Cato Bontjes van Beek, a friend of Libertas, and the pamphlet was written up by Maria Terwiel on her typewriter.

[75] Massive photo panels depicting Russian Slavs as subhuman beasts who lived in squalid conditions and pictures of firing squads shooting young children and others who were hung were shown at the exhibit.

The unit had been tracking Red Orchestra radio transmissions since June 1941 and in December they raided a house in Brussels where Wenzel was transmitting that was found to contain a large number of coded messages.

[81] When Wilhelm Vauck, principal cryptographer of the Funkabwehr, the radio counterintelligence department of the Abwehr received the ciphers from Wenzel, he was able to decipher some of the older messages.

[86] On 15 December 1942, Harro and Libertas, along with many close friends including the Harnacks, the Schumachers, Hans Coppi, John Graudenz and Horst Heilmann, were tried in the Reichskriegsgericht, the highest military court in Nazi Germany.