Eva Rittmeister (born 5 July 1913 in Zeitz, died 19 July 2004) was a German paediatric nurse, later office worker who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. [1] During World War II, Rittmeister became involved a Berlin-based resistance group that later became known as the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle").
Eve Rittmeister née Knieper was the daughter of a merchant. [1] After school, Rittmeister initially trained as a paediatric nurse, then worked as an office worker. [1] Several sources indicate, however, that she was an actress. [2] [3]
In 1939, Rittmeister married John Rittmeister who was a neurologist and psychoanalyst [1] and fifteen years older than her, aged 40. John Rittmeister considered her "life-affirming", who often enriched his life by relieving his chronic depression. [4]
To prepare for her Abitur in 1940, Rittmeister attended the Heil'schen Abendschule Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene") (BAG) at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg. While there she met a number of people that would eventually become close friends including Ursula Goetze, Liane Berkowitz, Fritz Thiel and Friedrich Rehmer. [5] They gradually formed a group of young people that met to discuss ideological, humanist and political views that gradually led to their opposition to Nazis. [1] [6] [5]
In December 1941, Eva and her husband met Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife, the aristocrat Libertas Schulze-Boysen. [7]
On 26 September 1942, Eva and her husband were arrested by the Gestapo while at home. [8] Eva was temporarily released but re-arrested on 5 January 1943. Her husband was sentenced to the death penalty by the 2nd Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht "for preparation for high treason and enemy favouritism". [9] During the same trial Eva was sentenced to three years in prison "for listening to enemy transmitters". [8] On 13 May 1943, John Rittmeister was executed by the guillotine in Plötzensee Prison. [8] Eva was released in April 1945 by the Red Army [1] and survived the end of the war. [8]
In 1979, Rittmeister received the John F. Rittmeister Medal from the Gesellschaft für Ärztliche Psychotherapie (GÄP) (East German Society for Medical Psychotherapy) of the GDR in recognition of her special services to psychotherapy and social psychiatry. [10] [11] The medal was awarded to 21 people, only three of whom were women. In addition to Eva Rittmeister, the medal was awarded to the German psychotherapists Irene Blumenthal and Leipzig professor Christa Kohler
The Red Orchestra, as it was known in Germany, was the name given by the Abwehr Section III.F to anti-Nazi resistance workers in August 1941. It primarily referred to a loose network of resistance groups, connected through personal contacts, uniting hundreds of opponents of the Nazi regime. These included groups of friends who held discussions that were centred on Harro Schulze-Boysen, Adam Kuckhoff and Arvid Harnack in Berlin, alongside many others. They printed and distributed prohibited leaflets, posters, and stickers, hoping to incite civil disobedience. They aided Jews and resistance to escape the regime, documented the atrocities of the Nazis, and transmitted military intelligence to the Allies. Contrary to legend, the Red Orchestra was neither directed by Soviet communists nor under a single leadership. It was a network of groups and individuals, often operating independently. To date, about 400 members are known by name.
Liane Berkowitz was a German resistance fighter and was most notable for being a member of the Berlin-based pro-Soviet resistance group that coalesced around Harro Schulze-Boysen, that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Arrested and sentenced to death, she was executed shortly after she gave birth to a daughter in custody.
Eva-Maria Buch was a resistance fighter against the Nazi régime in Germany associated with the Red Orchestra resistance group.
Arvid Harnack was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an intellectual family and was originally a humanist. He was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance. After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze-Boysen, who ran a similar faction. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. The group was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. He and his American-born wife, Mildred Fish, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942 and 1943, respectively.
Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen was a left-wing German publicist and Luftwaffe officer during World War II. As a young man, Schulze-Boysen grew up in prosperous family with two siblings, with an extended family who were aristocrats. After spending his early schooling at the Heinrich-von-Kleist Gymnasium and his summers in Sweden, he part completed a political science course at the University of Freiburg, before moving to Berlin on November 1929, to study law at the Humboldt University of Berlin. At Humboldt he became an anti-Nazi. After a visit to France in 1931, he moved to the political left. When he returned, he became a publicist on the "Der Gegner", a left-leaning political magazine. In May 1932, he took control of the magazine, renamed as the "Gegner" but it was closed by the Gestapo in February 1933.
Libertas "Libs" Schulze-Boysen, born Libertas Viktoria Haas-Heye was a German Prussian noblewoman, who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. From the early 1930s to 1940, Schulze-Boysen attempted to build a literary career, first as a press officer and later as a writer and journalist. Initially sympathetic to the Nazis, she changed her mind after meeting and marrying Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. As an aristocrat, Schulze-Boysen had contact with many different people in different strata of German society. Starting in 1935, she utilized her position to recruit left-leaning Germans into discussion groups which she hosted at her and Harro's apartment, where they sought to influence her guests. Through these discussions, resistance to the Nazi regime grew, and by 1936, she and Harro began to actively resist the Nazis. During the early 1940s, whilst working as a censor for the German Documentary Film Institute, Schulze-Boysen began to document atrocities committed by the Nazis from photographs of war crimes forwarded by soldiers of the Sonderbehandlungen task force to the Film Institute.
Elisabeth Schumacher was a German artist, photographer, and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was a member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Third Reich. Schumacher trained as an artist, but as her father was Jewish, who died in battlefield during World War I, she was classified as half-Jewish or Mischling, so worked as a graphic artist, before joining the resistance efforts.
Maria "Mimi" Terwiel was a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was active in a group in Berlin that wrote and distributed anti-Nazi and anti-war appeals. As part of what they conceived as a broader action against a collection of anti-fascist resistance groups in Germany and occupied Europe that the Abwehr called the Red Orchestra, in September 1942 the Gestapo arrested Terwiel along with her fiancée Helmut Himpel. Among the leaflets and pamphlets they had copied and distributed for the group were the July and August 1941 sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen which denounced the regime's Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia.
Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe was a German journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. She was born and died in Berlin.
Heinrich Koenen was a German engineer, anti-fascist resistance fighter and agent of the Soviet military intelligence service GRU, known as a "scout".
Ursula Goetze was a Berlin student and resistance fighter, who participated in political opposition to the Nazi government in Germany. In May 1942, following involvement in a leafleting campaign, she was arrested and, some time later, sentenced to death. She died by decapitation with a guillotine.
Marta Husemann was a German actress and anti-Nazi Resistance fighter in the Red Orchestra.
John Friedrich Karl Rittmeister, often also abbreviated John F. Rittmeister, was a German neurologist, psychoanalyst and resistance fighter against Nazism. Rittmeister was a humanist and socialist who based his opposition to the Nazi state on moral grounds. He was known as a communist member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr.
Friedrich Rehmer was a German factory worker and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. While attending an evening school in Schöneberg, Rehmer met a group of friends that included Ursula Goetze, Otto Gollnow, Hannelore Thiel, Liane Berkowitz, John Rittmeister and Werner Krauss. In December 1941, he became part of an anti-fascist network after meeting Harro Schulze-Boysen through Wolfgang Rittmeister, brother to John Rittmeister. The network was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Rehmer was executed in 1943.
Fritz Thiel was a German precision engineer and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. He became part of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group during World War II, that was later named the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Thiel along with his wife Hannelore were most notable for printing stickers using a child's toy rubber stamp kit, that they used to protest The Soviet Paradise exhibition in May 1942 in Berlin, that was held by the German regime to justify the war with the Soviet Union. The group found the exhibition both egregious and horrific; one exhibited photograph showed a young woman and her children hanged side by side. Thiel was executed for his resistance action.
Helmut Himpel was a German dentist and resistance fighter against Nazism. He was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Himpel along with his fiancé Maria Terwiel were notable for distributing leaflets and pamphlets for the group. Specifically this included the July and August 1941 sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen. The 2nd leaflet the couple posted, on Aktion T4 denouncing the murders of the sick by euthanasia, induced Hitler to stop the euthanasia murders and find other ways to do it.
Walter Husemann was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. As a young man, Husemann trained an industrial toolmaker, before training as a journalist. He became interested in politics and joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). With the arrival of the Nazis in 1933, he became a resistance fighter and through his wife, the actor Marta Husemann, he became associated with an anti-fascist resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. Along with John Sieg whom he met in the KPD and Fritz Lange, Martin Weise and Herbert Grasse he wrote and published the resistance magazine, The Internal Front Die Innere Front.
Heinz Strelow was a German journalist, soldier and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.
People of the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organisation is a list of participants, associates and helpers of the Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization, which was one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance organisations that came into existence during World War II in Germany. It was formed in Berlin and had contacts to many other regions that hosted industrial manufacturing. It is therefore also referred to in the literature as the operational leadership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). However, it was not only communists among the groups of the Saefkov Jacob Bästlein organisation. The 506 known persons included about 200 before 1933 to the KPD, 22 to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) or to the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAP) and around 200 were non-party; one in four was a woman. 160 men and women were unionized before 1933, more than 60 of them in the German Metal Workers' Union (DMV). The local or region is indicated for the people who worked outside Berlin and Brandenburg.
Die Innere Front was a series of clandestine and illegal leaflets that were created by hectograph and distributed by a group of communist resistance fighters from the Neukölln area of Berlin that were associated with the Red Orchestra during World War II. The leaflet was produced twice-weekly and written in five languages, with each version having the byline "Campaign for a new free Germany". Communist Party of Germany (KPD) members that included the American journalist John Sieg along with the German printer Herbert Grasse, established the production of the leaflet from December 1941 onwards. It is considered the main organ of the Red Orchestra as many of them contributed to it.