Helmut Roloff (9 October 1912 – 29 September 2001) was a German pianist, recording artist, teacher and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

In September 1942 Roloff was arrested in Berlin in the roundup of an anti-Nazi resistance group allegedly at the centre of a wider European espionage network identified by the Abwehr under the cryptonym the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle).

After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, as a regular guest in the home of the Leipzig jurist Leo Rosenberg, Roloff witnessed the effects of the newly licensed harassment of Jewish people.

[1] In 1935 Roloff graduated from the Hochschule für Musik (HfM, today the Universität der Künste Berlin, Fakultät 3), from which Jewish teachers such as Leonid Kreutzer, Emanuel Feuermann, and Arthur Schnabel had already been dismissed and expelled.

[2] His first encounter with talk of organised resistance was in 1937 when he befriended, recently released from detention, a Protestant pastor called Weckerling from the dissident Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche).

[1] In the winter of 1941, Roloff was introduced by the dentist and music lover Helmut Himpel to a resistance group in Berlin centred around the couples Adam and Greta Kuckhoff, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack.

[1] Moved to Spandau Prison, Roloff found ways of coordinating his testimony with Himpel and with his cell neighbour, the Communist journalist John Graudenz.

[1] Over the following months, 49 members of the group (19 women and 30 men) including Himpel, his fiancé Maria Terwiel, and Graudenz, were executed by hanging or beheading at Plötzensee Prison.

Among other anti-Nazi material copied on Maria Terwiel's typewriter, Roloff, Himpel, Graudenz and others posted to people in important positions, passed to foreign correspondents, and distributed across Berlin, was Bishop von Galen's sermon condemning the Aktion T4 euthanasia program[7] and a polemic entitled "Fear for Germany's future grips the people" (Die Sorge um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk).

Roloff recalled that it offered a "very strong critique of the Nazis":[1] A class of ridiculous but destructive swindlers and braggarts, alienated from the people, now directs the life of the nation.

Yet the conscience of all true patriots revolts against the whole present exercise of German power in Europe [...] In the name of the Reich, the most horrible tortures and brutalities are being committed against civilians and prisoners.

As late as 1969, the testimony and records of Gestapo, and of the Reich Military Tribunal (Reichskriegsgericht), officials informed a series on the "history of the Red Orchestra espionage ring" in the weekly Der Spiegel.

These had been ineffective in persuading Stalin of their reports in June 1941 of preparations for a German invasion,[14] and proved their undoing: the Abwehr intercepted contact details for Adman Kuckoff and for the Schulz-Boysons radioed by Moscow to an agent in Brussels.

The Red Orchestra was largely a Cold-War myth tying together disparate groups of resisters and dissidents neither directed by the Soviets nor co-ordinated among themselves.

[12][15] Among the individuals associated in the activities of the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen network (counting perhaps a hundred, twice the number executed) there was a "pluralism" of political and philosophical viewpoints ("weltanschauliche Pluralität").

[10] Under totalitarian conditions resistance is generally too individual a decision, Stefan Roloff's concludes, for the groups that form (in the "catacombs") to adhere to any one ideological line.