From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Red Orchestra was a Soviet espionage ring in the Nazi-occupied Europe during the first years of World War Two.
The name reputedly came from Germans; they were able to determine that Moscow NKVD center dubbed their radio transmitters as "music boxes" and agents as "musicians" and begun to call the network Rote Kapelle - Red Orchestra.
Red Orchestra was coordinated by then-NKVD agent Leopold Trepper. He organized underground operations in Germany, France, Netherlands and Switzerland and traveled extensively.
However, Trepper built on foundation of various other pro-communist agents like Harro Schulze-Boysen, intelligence officer for the German ministry of Air and Arvid Harnack in the German ministry of economics. Their associates included Alexander Erdberg; Adam Kuckhoff, theater producer and his wife Margarete Harnack who worked for the race policy department of Alfred Rosenberg; Horst Heilmann, codebreaker in the Wehrmacht communications division; Gunther Weisenborg, German national radio system official; Herbert Gollnow, in German military counterintelligence; and aircraft manufacturer Johann Graudens who reported on Luftwaffe airfields.
Agent's motivations were not always ideological; Rudolf von Scheliha spied for money to maintain his opulent lifestyle. Gestapo intercepted the message of two NKVD agents coming to help him and arrested his assistant. Both were shot December 22 1942.
Red Orchestra reported on things like German troop concentrations in Soviet Union, air attacks, aircraft production and fuel shipments. In France, they worked with underground French Communist Party. They managed to tap the phone lines of Abwehr in Paris.
Eventually Abwehr triangulated the radio transmission of Red Orchestra agent Wenzel in Belgium and arrested him. He agreed to turn double agent and informed on the leaders of the network. Based on his information Germans arrested Schulze-Boysen and his wife in August 30 1942 and Harnack and his wife in September. Many agents broke under torture and Germans were able to wipe out the network. Trepper was captured and forced to play a double agent until his escape to French underground until the liberation of Paris.
Red Orchestra operations had been eliminated by the spring on 1943. Most agents were executed.
