Hans Coppi Jr. (born November 27, 1942) is a German historian. His parents, Hilde and Hans Coppi, were active in the German Resistance and were both executed by the Nazis.
Hans Coppi Jr. (born November 27, 1942) is a German historian. His parents, Hilde and Hans Coppi, were active in the German Resistance and were both executed by the Nazis.
Coppi was born at Barnimstraße Women's Prison in Berlin. [1] His parents were arrested on September 12, 1942, in Schrimm (now Śrem, Poland). His paternal grandparents, maternal grandmother and one uncle were also arrested around this time. At the time of his parents' arrest, his mother was hochschwanger, literally "highly pregnant". [2] His father was convicted and executed shortly after his birth. Coppi's father was allowed to see him in his mother's arms one last time before being executed. [3] His mother attempted to get clemency, but it was denied by Adolf Hitler in July 1943. She was allowed to nurse her son until shortly before her execution on August 5, 1943, at Plötzensee Prison, when Coppi was just eight months old. [1] [2] [3] Coppi grew up with his grandparents. [3]
After studying economics in college, Coppi worked at an East German foreign trade company for machine tools as a party secretary of the ruling SED party. From 1984 to 1987, he was employed by the Berlin district leadership of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). After a year of study abroad in Moscow, he went to the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen Research Center at the Academy of Sciences in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Writing his dissertation on Harro Schulze-Boysen, he got his doctorate at the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1992. He has spent considerable time devoted to the study of the Red Orchestra and the German Resistance. [3]
Although his parents are often identified as having been members of the Red Orchestra, Coppi himself says the term is a "catch-all" term the Nazis used to derogatorily refer to all Widerstand groups and it was used even after 1945 to defame them as Soviet spies. [3]
From 1990 to 1994, he was a researcher at the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin. From 1997 to 2002, he was the project director for the development of electronic archival resources at the Sachsenhausen Memorial. Coppi has been a freelance contributor at the German Resistance Memorial Center since 2003 and since 2004, the state chairman of the Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime in Berlin.
Coppi was an honored guest at a Brussels program commemorating the 65th anniversary of the December 13, 1941, 2:30 a.m. arrests in Brussels of members of the Red Orchestra. [3] At that event, Coppi said,
After 1945, the members of the Abwehr, Gestapo and Reichskriegsgericht were never held accountable for their crimes against humanity. On the contrary, they were in demand as interlocutors for western intelligence agencies and made sure that those they had sentenced to death and killed in detention were once again defamed as spies and traitors. —Hans Coppi in Brussels, December 13, 2006 [3]
Coppi is married to the gallery owner, Helle Coppi. [4] He has three daughters and lives in Berlin.
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.
Wilhelm Guddorf was a Belgian journalist and resistance fighter against the Third Reich. Guddorf was a leading member of a Berlin anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Guddorf was the editor of the Die Rote Fahne newspaper.
Hans-Wedigo Robert Coppi was a German resistance fighter against the Nazis. He was a member of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo.
Betti Gertrud Käthe Hilda Coppi, known as Hilde Coppi, was a German communist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Nazi period.
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.
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.
Kurt Schumacher was a German sculptor and Communist member of the German Resistance fighter who was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo. He was married to the painter and graphic designer, Elisabeth Schumacher who was also an anti-fascist.
John Sieg was an American-born German Communist railroad worker, journalist and resistance fighter, who publicized Nazi atrocities through the underground Communist press and fought against National Socialism in the German Resistance. He was a key member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo.
Ilse Frieda Gertrud Stöbe was a German journalist and anti-Nazi resistance fighter. She was born and died in Berlin.
Heinrich Scheel was a German left-wing historian and longtime vice president of the East German Academy of Sciences and professor of modern history at Humboldt University of Berlin. Scheel was notable for putting forward a theory of the German radical at the time of the French revolution, in an attempt to determine an alternative tradition in Germany. Scheel was most notable for being a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime, during World War II. He was a member of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Nazi regime.
Horst Heilmann was a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. He was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that formed around Harro Schulze-Boysen. This group and many others were bundled together and later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Heilmann was also a student and a wireless operator who worked at the Referat 12 that was in the Inspectorate 7/VI.
Wolfgang Kreher Johannes "John" Graudenz was a German journalist, press photographer, industrial representative and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. Graudenz was most notable for being an important member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that would later be named by the Gestapo as the Red Orchestra and was responsible for the technical aspect of the production of leaflets and pamphlets that the group produced.
Gisela von Pöllnitz was a German journalist, communist, and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. During the Nazi regime, she was a notable member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group around Harro Schulze-Boysen, later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Throughout her life von Pöllnitz had a lung condition that progressively worsened after being arrested several times by the Gestapo. On her final arrest by the Gestapo she contracted tuberculosis after 5 months in custody. Her physician Elfriede Paul arranged a sanitarium in Switzerland, but she never recovered.
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.
Wilhelm "Willy" Schürmann-Horster was a German actor, dramaturge, and director who was marxist and dedicated communist, and who became a resistance fighter against the Nazis. As a young man, Schürmann-Horster trained as an actor at the Düsseldorf Drama School. During the 1920s he worked in various acting troupes in theatres in the Rhineland. By the mid 1930s, he had become a communist and in 1934 and 1935 he was arrested for political agitation but acquitted for lack of evidence. After moving to Berlin in 1937, he met and became friends with Cay and Erika von Brockdorff. Through them, a discussion group of like-minded friends was formed who openly discussed current affairs and Schürmann-Horster became their spokesman. Through contacts in the group, connections were made with a resistance organisations that was run by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack in 1940. Although Schürmann-Horster wasn't a physical resistance fighter in the cast of Harro Schulze-Boysen, he was a intellectual opponent of the Nazis who displayed his convictions on the stage and as a result never took part in any of the operations that his friends undertook. After falling ill in 1941, Schürmann-Horster moved to Konstanz where he worked as a dramaturge at the Grenzland Theatre. In October 1942, he was arrested and sentenced to death for "high treason", "dissemination of illegal writings" and "aiding and abetting the enemy" by the 2nd of the Volksgerichtshof. He was executed in Plötzensee Prison on 9 September 1943. He was described by his close friend, the communist trade unionist Rudy Goguel in the daily newspaper Südkurier as
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