Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) was the name that German military counterintelligence agents, referring to Morse code operators as musicians, gave to a Europe-wide Soviet intelligence network that was active in 1941 and 1942. Anne Nelson focuses upon a part of it, a Berlin group of artists, journalists, intellectuals, and blue-collar workers who became closely linked through their “antifascist,” vaguely Marxist but politically heterodox convictions, and through their personal lives. She combines collective biography with a narrative of events, describing the growth, mostly through social contacts, of the group from around 1930 to its destruction in 1942.

Principal characters are playwright Adam Kuckhoff and sociologist Greta Kuckhoff née Lorke; economist Arvid Harnack and English-professor Mildred Harnack née Fish; factory worker and journalist John Sieg; air force intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen and film producer Libertas Schulze-Boysen née Haas-Heye. There were also another journalist, an actress, a sculptor, a graphic artist, a lawyer, a dentist, and a card-carrying Communist Party blue-collar worker. The Harnacks had family ties to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother Klaus, Hans von Dohnanyi, Rüdiger Schleicher, and Justus Delbrück, all of whom were later involved in what became the Tresckow-Stauffenberg conspiracy. Mildred Harnack née Fish was an American from Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Schulze-Boysen had spent time in England and Scotland, his great-uncle was Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz; Greta Lorke had spent years in Madison, Wisconsin, at the University of Wisconsin, as had Arvid Harnack who also visited the Soviet Union.

Their first concern was opposition to Hitler's National Socialist regime and agitation to remove it. Nelson vividly describes the terrorism of the regime, the imprisonments, beatings, murders, and the barbaric mistreatment and despoliation of the Jews; and she brilliantly portrays the group's understanding of Hitler as a menace to Europe and mankind. As early as May 1933, Soviet intelligence agents established contact with Harnack; both Harnack and Schulze-Boysen willingly provided vital information about the German economy and armaments. They tried equally to inform the Americans through the Embassy in Berlin, but the Americans had no intelligence organization to speak of; although Embassy First Secretary Donald Heath sent Harnack's information back to Washington for a time, it had little, if any, effect. Stalin, on the other hand, had numerous competent Soviet intelligence agents executed in the 1930s purges. The Soviets distrusted people who were not actually communists and who insisted on continuing their resistance work and agitation while they were also engaged in intelligence gathering and transmission (pp. 187, 197). From 1939 to 1941 Stalin believed Hitler would attack Britain and refused to accept any information and facts that pointed in another direction. After Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the method of communication between western Europe and Moscow had to be by radio, but the Berlin group could not get the sets the Russians supplied to work. In a strict sense, Nelson's group was never a part of the Rote Kapelle since they did not succeed in their attempts at radio transmission. Finally, they were betrayed by Soviet “professionals” who neglected elementary precautions and transmitted the Berliners' names and addresses to the Brussels network headquarters by radio, using a code that the Germans broke; an agent sent from Moscow in October 1941 collected a treasure trove of intelligence from Schulze-Boysen in Berlin and transmitted it from Brussels in marathon sessions for hours on each of seven consecutive nights, which gave the Germans time to locate the signal and record the contents of the messages. The Germans were aware of a wide network of spies and struck only at the end of the summer of 1942 when they could unravel it.

Nelson used mostly good secondary sources and also family papers and recently available sources through the work of other authors. The reliability of Greta Kuckhoff's memoirs, published in the GDR with heavy intervention by the East German authorities (p. 324), is unclear. Prosecution and trial records (in Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf) as in the case of the communist underground leader, Wilhelm Knöchel, during 1942-1943 were not used; the holdings of the German Agency for Stasi files are not in Nelson's list of sources.

The wider operations of Soviet and American wartime intelligence and German military counterintelligence are not included in this work. The legal aspects of the group's actions are touched upon, though the legal complexities of treason are not explored. German law distinguishes “high treason” (Hochverrat), treason against the national government; and treason against the country (Landesverrat). A criterion for Landesverrat was, before and after 1933, intent to harm the interests of the German Reich (Reichsgesetzblatt I 1934, pp. 341-342). Unlike Hochverrat, Landesverrat was dishonorable; most of the conspirators in the July 20, 1944, plot deprecated it. When President Friedrich Ebert was labeled a traitor in the 1920s for having led a munitions workers' strike during World War I, however, the Reichsgericht in 1931 accepted that Ebert had intended to take over the strike leadership in order to end it to avert harm to the interests of the German Reich (Entscheidungen des Reichsgerichts in Strafsachen 65, 1931, pp. 422-433). Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster had the same intent in revealing planned dates for the German offensive in the west in 1939 and 1940 to the Dutch Military Attaché in Berlin. The Berlin group of the Rote Kapelle equally aimed at averting harm from Germany and the persecuted. German courts of law during the Hitler dictatorship, of course, showed little interest in such intent on the part of the regime's enemies.

This carefully researched, remarkably empathetic, and insightful book has some unfortunate errors, a few of which should be noted. It was President Hindenburg's appointment of the National Socialist leader as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, not the March 5, 1933, “elections that brought Hitler to power” (p. 87). Helmuth James von Moltke led his own resistance group, later called the Kreisau Circle; he was not “a member of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's resistance circles” (p. 125). Contrary to Nelson's view that the Americans “were still trying to steer clear of war” in summer and fall 1941 (p. 228), President Roosevelt told Churchill during their meeting in Placentia Bay in August 1941 (as Martin Gilbert in Churchill VI, p. 1,168, quotes Churchill) that “he would wage war, but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative,” and that “he would look for an ‘incident’ which would justify him in opening hostilities.”

Nelson's book was “born of a human rights perspective”; she modestly calls it a “good-faith effort in making sense of this complicated tale” with the material she could find (p. 339). But in some respects her work is exemplary, as a balanced addition to existing literature for English- and German-language readers (a German translation, Die Rote Kapelle. Die Geschichte der legendären Widerstandsgruppe, Munich: C. Bertelsmann, was published in 2010). This moving account of the convictions, motivations, lives, and deaths of the Berlin group of intellectuals and working-class resisters supersedes the biased and distorting cold-war accounts, the eastern version of which presented the Rote Kapelle as a purely communist-directed organization, while in the west the view of the group as contemptible traitors prevailed. Nelson presents a balanced account of the Berlin group's heterodox antifascism, its priorities and actions, and its involuntarily limited involvement in the transmission of intelligence to Moscow.