Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle
Its remit was to discover and arrest members of the Red Orchestra in Germany, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy during World War II.
Instead they wore suits and ties to work to enable them to operate clandestinely, with the demeanour of businessmen[8] In August 1943, the Sonderkommando moves to the Boemelburg hotel at 40 Bd Victor-Hugo in Neuilly-sur-Seine in Paris.
[14] The house was raided by the Abwehr on 12 December 1941[15] where they found Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich's transmitter and arrested radio operators Mikhail Makarov and his assistant Anton Danilov.
[12] On the 30 July 1942, the Funkabwehr identified a further house at 12 Rue de Namur, Brussels and raided it[16] As well as arresting Soviet agent and radio specialist Johann Wenzel, two messages that were waiting to be enciphered were discovered in the house that contained details of such startling content, the plans for Case Blue, that Henry Piepe immediately drove to Berlin from Brussels to report to German High Command.
Walter Schellenberg, recorded details in his memoirs of an agreement that came about between Fritz Thiele, Wilhelm Canaris, Heinrich Müller and himself in the summer of 1942, to establish a "special commission" to investigate the problem.
[18] German counter-intelligence spent months assembling the data[19] and finally Wilhelm Vauck, a cryptanalyst in the Abwehr succeeded in decrypting around 200 of the captured messages.
[5] After the arrest of Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich, a small independent Gestapo unit, known as the "Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle" was established in Paris, France in November 1942.
They correspond to the truth and I make them the subject of my judicial hearing today"[25] The interrogation by Werner Krauss, Heinrich Scheel and Günther Weisenborn were the exception to the standard process as they largely dictated their confession.
Rajchmann in turn betrayed Soviet agent Konstantin Jeffremov who was arrested on 22 July 1942 in Brussels in a sting operation, while attempting to obtain forged identity documents for himself to enable him to escape.
She admitted the existence of Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich and his probable location, as well as exposing several members of the Trepper espionage network in France.
[42] As part of the routine investigation, Harry Piepe discovered that the firm Simexco in Brussels was being used as a cover for Soviet espionage operations by the Trepper network.
In the meeting Piepe showed the two photographs that had been discovered at the house at 101 Rue des Atrébates, to the commanding officer who immediately identified the aliases of Leopold Trepper and Anatoly Gurevich.
[49] Between late 1940 and July 1942, Peper worked first for Gurevich and then Jeffremov as courier who operated between Johann Wenzel in Brussels and Anton Winterink in Amsterdam.
[58] In Berlin, the Gestapo had been monitoring the movements and tapped the telephone calls of the couples, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen as well as Greta and Adam Kuckhoff, along with Arvid and Mildred Harnack since July 1942.
[59] Horst Heilmann had phoned Harro Schulze-Boysen[60] and Waldemar Lentz[61][c] to warn them that they were likely being watched and this hastened the start of the Gestapo operation to arrest the group.
[59] He was placed in "house arrest" (Hausgefängnis) and taken to Gestapo HQ at 8 Prinz Albrecht Street where he was interrogated by Kriminalkommissar Johannes Strübing [de].
[59] Strübing used the typical gamut of Gestapo techniques for interrogation that included physical threats, blackmail, flattery, the presentation of fake and real evidence of wrongdoing and torture.
[59] Breiter used deceit to convince Schulze-Boysen that she was hostile to her superiors and that Göpfert didn't have any serious evidence against her and due to her family connections with Hermann Göring, her life would be safe.
[70] For example, when Hannelore Thiel[d] was arrested on 16 September 1942, the search found an amplifying device for a Volksempfänger radio, a KPD pamphlet Organisiert den revolutionären Massenkampf gegen Faschismus und imperialistischen Krieg ("Organize the revolutionary mass struggle against fascism and imperialist war") as well as several books that included Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
[77] Giering and Piepe decided to contact the Organisation Todt in Paris for help to determine if they could provide a way to identify where Trepper was located, instead of approaching Simex directly.
[79] Giering obtained a signed certificate of cooperation from Otto von Stülpnagel, the military commander of occupied France and visited the Todt offices.
[77] The director of the Todt offices in Paris was shown the photograph found in the Atrebates raid and immediately confirmed that the man was Monsieur Gilbert, the alias that Trepper was using in his dealings with Simex.
[78] Giering and Pipe decide to try a simple ruse to trap Trepper by posing as Mainz businessmen seeking to buy 1.5million marks worth of industrial diamonds, using a well-prepared and well-researched back story.
While he was being interrogated, he was read a report that detailed how all his family, 48 members in total, including his mother, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins had been sent to the gas chamber and it was now considered judenrein by the Germans.
When Germaine Schneider arrived in the late summer 1942 it was decided she would teach wireless telegraphy to the agents on site[119] and established a radio transmitter on Fourvière Hill, close to 16 Rue des Anges where she lived.
[123] The radio repair technician Otto Schumacher who was the last to arrive in Lyon, fled to Paris with his wife Helene Humbert-Laroche when the arrests began.
He started by trying to convince Giering that it was important that he met with French resistance fighter and PCF agent Juliette Moussier, while he was in custody to prove to Soviet intelligence that he was still free and enable the funkspiel operation to continue.
[130] By speaking Yiddish, Trepper was able to relay secret instructions to Katz, simply to tell Moussier that he had a report and needed to pass it to Jacques Duclos for transmission to Soviet intelligence, without the Sonderkommando guards, translator or Giering knowing what he was doing.
[h][142] In June 1943, Soviet GRU officer Ivan Bolchakov conducted an analysis of the received messages from December 1942 and found that 23 out 63 were of sufficient quality and only 4 were considered valuable.
[158] As the months past, Giering became ill with throat cancer[160] and his deputy, Gestapo officer Kriminalkommissar Heinrich Reiser, took over the Parisian command in June 1943.
