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Rudolf von Scheliha

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Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha
BornMay 31, 1897 (1897-05-31)
Silesia
DiedDecember 22, 1942(1942-12-22) (aged 45)
Berlin, Plötzensee Prison
Cause of deathcapital punishment, hanging
EducationUniversity of Breslau, University of Heidelberg
Occupation(s)Diplomat, resistance fighter
EmployerForeign Office
Known forCreated a comprehensive library of German occupation crimes, on the atrocities of the Gestapo.
Political partyNazi Party
SpouseMarie Louise von Medinger
ChildrenSylvia, Elisabeth

Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha (31 May 1897 – 22 December 1942) was a German calvary officer and later diplomat who would become a resistance fighter linked to the Red Orchestra. In 1934, von Scheliha was recruited by Soviet intelligence while he served in Warsaw and was motivated by his need for money. In the years leading up to the war, von Scheliha was placed in a position of trust in the Foreign Office, which enabled him to pass documents to Soviet intelligence and to build up a large collection of documents that detailed Nazi atrocities.

He attempted to pass the documents to the Allies via contacts in Switzerland. In June 1941, at the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was left with no means to contact the Soviets, who tried several times unsuccessfully to reinitiate communications and planned to blackmail him.

He was executed by the Nazis during World War II.[1]

Early life

Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia (now Cieśle, Gmina Oleśnica, Poland), as the son of a Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. His mother was a daughter of Prussian Finance Minister Johann von Miquel. His sister, four years younger, was the classical philologist Renata von Scheliha.[2]

He served as an army officer in World War I, volunteered after his graduation in 1915 and was honoured for his efforts with both Iron Crosses and the Silver Wound Badge.[2]

In 1927, von Scheliha married Marie Louise von Medinger,[3] the daughter of a large landowner and industrialist.[4] They had two daughters: Sylvia and Elisabeth.[5] Sylvia became an engineer and Elisabeth received a doctorate in chemistry.[5]

Career

Until 1933

After the war, he began studying law in Breslau. During May 1919 he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia in 1919.[6] There Scheliha came in contact with republic-friendly and anti-totalitarian circles; He was elected to the AStA for the Association of Heidelberg Associations in which he vehemently opposed the anti-Semitic riots by the students with other corps students.

After his examination in 1921, he was first clerk at the Court of Appeal. In 1922, he joined the Foreign Office and took over in the following years tasks in the diplomatic missions of Prague, Constantinople, Angora, Katowice and Warsaw. In 1927, he was appointed as legation S secretary. The same year he married Marie Louise von Medinger. The couple had two daughters, Sylvia, born in 1930 and Elisabeth (1934-2016 in Adliswil).[7]

1933 to 1942

A few months after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party as a diplomat. In 1935 von Scheliha took part in the Nuremberg Rally.[8]

From 1932 to 1939, he was a member of the German embassy in Warsaw. He became aware of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich under the Nazi regime. He made contact with Polish nobles and intellectuals, which he partly able after the beginning of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and so could use for news about Nazi crimes abroad.

In 1937, Scheliha who had risen to become the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw, began working for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.[9] His first case officer, if not recruiter, was Rudolf Herrnstadt, a journalist for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, contact with Rudolf von Scheliha would become increasingly difficult and so an intermediary was needed who would not be recognised. Ilse Stöbe, a communist who was a secretary to Theodor Wolff for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, agreed to act as a cutout. Herrnstadt passed the documents that von Scheliha supplied to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw by Stöbe until September 1939.[10]

Scheliha's motivation for espionage were entirely financial, as he had a lifestyle beyond his salary, was an inveterate gambler with gambling debts and liked to keep several mistresses at once. He found that selling state secrets to the Soviet Union was the best way of providing the additional income that he needed.[9] Scheliha was well paid for his work, and in February 1938, a Soviet agent deposited US$6,500 in his bank account in Zurich, making him the best paid Soviet agent in the world.[9] It was from the intelligence sold by Scheliha that the Soviet Union was very well informed about the state of German-Polish relations in 1937-1939 and that in October 1938, the Reich wanted to reduce Poland to a satellite state.[9]

In March 1939, Scheliha started to sell documents to the NKVD that showed that since Poland refused to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany planned to invade Poland later that year.[9] Most crucially, Scheliha provided the Soviets with documents showing that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered the German ambassador to Poland, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, not to engage in talks about the status of the Free City of Danzig, as the Danzig issue was merely a pretext for a war, and Ribbentrop was afraid if talks began, the Poles might give in.[citation needed]

In September 1939, Scheliha was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office that was created to counter foreign press and radio news propaganda about the German occupation in Poland.[11] That allowed him to verify the veracity of foreign reports and to interview Nazi officials.[11] In that position, he would often protest to Nazi agencies against German war crimes in Poland. He also helped Poles and Jews to flee abroad.

Von Scheliha secretly made a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo, particularly on the murders of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of the newly-established extermination camps. In June 1941, he showed the dossier to the Polish intelligence agent who was a member of the anti-Nazi group, the "Muszkieterowie" ("Musketeers"), Countess Klementyna Mankowska, who visited him in Berlin to make the details known to the Polish Resistance and the Allies.[12]

In the autumn of 1941, Scheliha also invited his Polish friend Count Konstantin Bninski to Berlin under the pretext of writing propaganda texts for the Foreign Office against the Polish Resistance. The German diplomat and historian Ulrich Sahm considered it probable in his 1990 biography that Scheliha then passed on to Bninski material containing a comprehensive documentation of crimes during the German occupation and Polish resisters. Cowritten with fellow German diplomat Johann von Wühlisch, it was completed in January 1942 and was written under the title The Nazi clCulture in Poland, recorded on microfilm and smuggled to Britain with a high personal risk to those involved. It is considered one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the early The Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the war.[2] The document describes the persecution of the church, the school and the university system; the dark role of the Institute of German Ostarbeiter as the driver of cultural rescheduling; the relocation and the sacking of libraries; the devastation of monuments; the looting of archives, museums and the private collections of Polish nobility; the subversion of Polish theatre, music and the press; and the destruction of other cultural institutions under force by the Nazi Party.[12] The Polish government-in-exile published the document as a novel in 1944 to 1945.[12] Around then, von Scheliha was in contact with Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow[13] who was also becoming increasingly antifascist, as he witnessed the murder of Jews and would later take part in the 20 July Plot.[14]

In February 1942, von Scheliha ended his attempts to name and send out exiled Poles as helpers for German propaganda to stop endangering them and himself. That spring, he travelled to Switzerland and provided Swiss diplomats with information on Aktion T4, including sermons by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen on the murders of the mentally ill. He also sent reports on the Final Solution, including the construction and the operation of more extermination camps and Hitler's order to exterminate European Jews.[15]

As part of the February trip to Switzerland, he banked part of his espionage earnings. It is calculated that he was paid about $50,000 for his services, but it was believed by the Germans who captured him that most of the money was consumed in domestic expenses but that at least some of it was banked.[16] Von Scheliha made further trips to Switzerland in September and October 1942.

The extent of Soviet intelligence interest in von Scheliha was shown in May 1942, when Bernhard Bästlein assisted Erna Eifler, Wilhelm Fellendorf and Heinrich Koenen, Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany with wireless telegraphy sets and had been instructed to find Ilse Stöbe to re-establish communications with von Scheliha.[17] Koenen's mission was to pass all the material collected by von Scheliha and Stoebe and to Soviet intelligence, but he was arrested in Berlin on 26 October 1942.[16]

Unknown to both Stöbe and von Scheliha, the Gestapo had already started to arrest members of the Red Orchestra in August 1942. Stöbe was arrested on 12 September 1942, and von Scheliha was arrested on 29 October 1942 in the office of the personnel director of the Foreign Office shortly after he had returned from Switzerland.[1]

Arrest and death

Suspected by the Gestapo for his critical attitude, he was charged by the Second Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht of being a member of the Red Orchestra and sentenced to death on 14 December 1942 for "treason".[1] On 22 December 1942, he was executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison [2][18]

His wife, Marie Louise, was arrested on 22 December 1942 and taken to the women's prison in Charlottenburg. There, she was repeatedly interrogated and threatened but was released on 6 November 1943. In the last days of the war, she fled with her daughters via Prague to Niederstetten. In Haltenbergstetten Castle, the former castle of the principality of Hohenlohe-Jagstberg, the family lived in a cellar mainly on mushrooms, berries and fruit.

Reappraisal

Commemorative plaque, Frankfurter Allee 233, in Lichtenberg

In West German historiography, Scheliha was seen until 1986 as not a resistance fighter but a spy in Soviet services. In the process, the acts of interrogation and Gestapo records continued to be uncritically classified as "sources" to which former Nazi prosecutors such as Manfred Roeder and Alexander Kraell, the former president of the Second Senate of the Reichskriegs Court, contributed after 1945.

On 20 July 1961, the Foreign Office in Bonn commemorated eleven of its employees, who were executed as resistance fighters, with a plaque, including Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz and Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg. Scheliha was not mentioned because he continued to pass on information to the Soviet Union, which was considered a betrayal.

Only recent research on the Red Orchestra, especially the biography by Ulrich Sahm, has revised the assessment.[19] In response, the Cologne Administrative Court ruled in October 1995 that Scheliha had been sentenced to death not for espionage but in a sham trial for his opposition to Nazism, and it overturned the 1942 verdict.[20]

On 21 December 1995 at the Foreign Office, in a ceremony with State Secretary Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, an additional board with the inscription Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942 was attached.[21]

On 18 July 2000 in a ceremony at the new Foreign Office in Berlin, both panels were brought together and the names listed in the sequence of death dates. Scheliha's name leads the list.[21] On 9 July 2014 Ilse Stöbe received the same honour at the Foreign Office.[21]

In Neuallermöhe, a street was named in memory of von Scheliha on 5 May 1997. In Gotha is Schelihastraße, but the street is named after the Oberhofmeister Ludwig Albert von Scheliha, who owned a large garden plot on the street on which the Protestant church stands today.

Von-Scheliha-Straße in Hamburg-Neuallermöhe

Literature

  • Isphording, Bernd; Keiper, Gerhard; Kröger, Martin; Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Auswärtiges Amt. Historischer Dienst. (2012). Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871-1945 (in German). Vol. 4. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh -. ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3.
  • Sahm, Ulrich (1990). Rudolf von Scheliha, 1897-1942 : ein deutscher Diplomat gegen Hitler [A German diplomat against Hitler]. Munich: Beck. ISBN 3-406-34705-3.
  • Rosiejka, Gert (1986). Die Rote Kapelle : "Landesverrat" als antifaschist. Widerstand [The Red Chapel. "Treason" as anti-fascist resistance. With an introduction by Heinrich Scheel] (in German) (1st ed.). Hamburg: Ergebnisse-Verl. ISBN 3-925622-16-0.
  • Kegel, Gerhard (1984). In den Stürmen unseres Jahrhunderts : ein deutscher Kommunist über sein ungewöhnliches Leben [In the storms of our century. A German communist about his unusual life] (in German). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
  • Wiaderny, Bernard (2003). Die Katholische Kirche in Polen (1945-1989) : eine Quellenedition [The Catholic Church in Poland (1945-1989): A source edition] (in German) (1. ed.). Berlin: VWF, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung. ISBN 978-3-89700-074-2. (Lars Jockheck: Rezension. In: sehepunkte. 3, 2003, Nr. 4.)
  • Conze, Eckart; Frei, Norbert; Hayes, Peter; Zimmermann, Moshe (2010). Das Amt und die Vergangenheit : deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik [The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany] (in German) (2. Aufl ed.). Munich: Blessing. ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2.
  • Ruchniewicz, Krzysztof (1999). "Rudolf von Scheliha – Niemiecki dyplomata przeciw Hitlerowi". Zbliżenia Polska-Niemcy (in Polish). 1 (22). Wrocław: 119.
  • Matelski, Dariusz (1999). Niemcy w Polsce w XX wieku [Germany in Poland in the 20TH century] (in Polish) (Wyd. 1 ed.). Warsaw: Wydawn. Nauk. PWN. ISBN 9788301129316.
  • Johannes Hürter (2005), "Scheliha, Rudolf von", Neue Deutsche Biographie (in German), vol. 22, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, p. 646; (full text online)
  • Wolfgang Wippermann: Widerstand für Polen und Juden – Rudolf von Scheliha. [Resistance for Poles and Jews – Rudolf von Scheliha] In: Sebastian Sigler (Hrsg.): Corpsstudenten im Widerstand gegen Hitler. Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-428-14319-1 pp. 191–215.

References

  1. ^ a b c "Rudolf von Scheliha". Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. German Resistance Memorial Center. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
  2. ^ a b c d Sahm, Ulrich (1990). Rudolf von Scheliha, 1897-1942 : ein deutscher Diplomat gegen Hitler [A German diplomat against Hitler]. Munich: Beck. ISBN 3-406-34705-3.
  3. ^ Frauke Geyken (9 May 2014). Wir standen nicht abseits: Frauen im Widerstand gegen Hitler. C.H.Beck. p. 27. ISBN 978-3-406-65903-4. Retrieved 30 July 2020.
  4. ^ Eckelmann, Susanne (19 December 2018). "Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942". LEMO. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  5. ^ a b Hürter, Johannes (2005). "Scheliha, Rudolf von". Neue Deutsche Biographie 22. Online version: Deutsche Biographie. p. 646. Retrieved 30 July 2020.
  6. ^ Kösener corps lists 1996, 140 , 1312
  7. ^ Isphording, Bernd; Keiper, Gerhard; Kröger, Martin; Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Auswärtiges Amt. Historischer Dienst. (2012). Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871-1945 (in German). Vol. 4. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh -. p. 56. ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3.
  8. ^ Eckelmann, Susanne (19 December 2018). "Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942". Deutsches Historisches Museum (in German). Berlin: Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum. Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  9. ^ a b c d e Andrew, Christopher & Gordievsky, Oleg, The KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev, New York: Harper Collins, 1990 page 192.
  10. ^ Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 232. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  11. ^ a b Eckelmann, Susanne (19 December 2018). "Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942". LEMO. Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  12. ^ a b c Kienlechner, Susanne (23 June 2007). "The Nazi Kultur in Poland Rudolf von Scheliha und Johann von Wühlisch. Zwei deutsche Diplomaten gegen die nationalsozialistische Kultur in Polen" [The Nazi culture in Poland Rudolf von Scheliha and Johann von Wühlisch. Two German diplomats against National Socialist culture in Poland.]. Zukunft braucht Erinnerung (in German). Arbeitskreis Zukunft braucht Erinnerung. Retrieved 21 April 2019.
  13. ^ Mildred Harnack und die Rote Kapelle in Berlin. Universitätsverlag Potsdam. 25 October 2017. p. 137. ISBN 978-3-86956-407-4. Retrieved 29 July 2019. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authors= ignored (help)
  14. ^ Fest, Joachim (1997). Plotting Hitler's Death. London: Phoenix House. p. 236. ISBN 978-1-85799-917-4.
  15. ^ Ueberschär, Gerd R. (2006). Für ein anderes Deutschland : der deutsche Widerstand gegen den NS-Staat 1933-1945 [For another Germany: The German resistance against the Nazi state in 1933-1945] (in German) (Originalausg ed.). Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. p. 139. ISBN 3-596-13934-1.
  16. ^ a b Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 152. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  17. ^ Kesaris, Paul. L, ed. (1979). The Rote Kapelle: the CIA's history of Soviet intelligence and espionage networks in Western Europe, 1936-1945. Washington DC: University Publications of America. p. 29. ISBN 0-89093-203-4.
  18. ^ Kienlechner, Susanne; The Nazi Kultur in Poland. Rudolf von Scheliha und Johann von Wühlisch. Zwei Deutsche Diplomaten gegen die nationalsozialistische Kultur in Polen.
  19. ^ Rohkrämer, Martin (November 1991). "Rudolf von Scheliha, 1897-1942 by Ulrich Sahm - Review". Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte (in German). 2 (1). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (GmbH & Co. KG): 558–560. Retrieved 29 July 2020.
  20. ^ Isphording, Bernd; Keiper, Gerhard; Kröger, Martin; Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Auswärtiges Amt. Historischer Dienst. (2012). Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes, 1871-1945 (in German). Vol. 4. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh -. p. 6. ISBN 978-3-506-71843-3.
  21. ^ a b c "Speech by Foreign Minister Steinmeier at the ceremony in honour of Ilse Stöbe at the Federal Foreign Office on 10 July 2014". Federal Foreign Office. 10 July 2014. Retrieved 21 April 2019.
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