Рудольф фон Шелиха: немецкий аристократ и участник сопротивления нацизму

German resistance fighter

Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha (31 May 1897 – 22 December 1942) was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti Nazi who was linked to the Red Orchestra. He fought in the World War I, an experience that defined his politics. He joined the German Foreign Office, was trained to be a diplomat and was sent to the embassy in Warsaw. In the years leading up to the war, Von Scheliha was placed in a position of trust in the Foreign Office. In 1934, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence because of financial necessity while he served in Warsaw, where he passed documents to the Soviet intelligence. In the years leading up to the Second World War, he became a committed opponent of the Nazi regime and of its anti Semitic policies. He became the director of an information department in the embassy in September 1939, which was established to counter enemy propaganda. As part of his position, photographs of atrocities against Jews and other people passed through his department and were used for propaganda. Appalled at what he saw, he began to resist and built a portfolio of the worst images over several years. In January 1942, the portfolio was smuggled to London. In June 1941, the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union caused his line of communication to the Soviets to be cut off. Soviet intelligence tried several times to reinitiate communications with him but were unsuccessful. In May 1942, Soviet intelligence sent an agent, Erna Eifler, to make contact with von Scheliha in Berlin, but she was captured. Von Scheliha was executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison on 14 December 1942.

Rudolf von Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia (now Cieśle, Oleśnica, Poland), as the son of the Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. His mother was a daughter of Prussian Finance Minister Johann von Miquel. His younger sister, Renata von Scheliha, was a classical philologist. Rudolf married Marie Louise von Medinger, the daughter of a large landowner and industrialist. The couple had two daughters: Sylvia, born in 1930, and Elisabeth, born in 1934. Sylvia became an engineer, and Elisabeth received a doctorate in chemistry, with the latter surviving to 2016 and dying in Adliswil.

He served as an army officer in World War I and volunteered after his graduation in 1915. Scheliha volunteered at the same regiment, the Cavalry Rifle Regiment, Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, in which his father and uncle had served; its officers were drawn from the nobility. On 8 August 1918, he was shelled in a ditch with two brothers, who were blown up, and one brother died months later from his injuries. He was elected to the AStA, the Association of Heidelberg Associations, where he vehemently opposed the students' anti Semitic riots. After his examination in 1921, he became first clerk at the Court of Appeal in 1922. In February 1922, von Scheliha joined the regional office of the Foreign Office in Hamburg.

From 1932 to 1939, von Scheliha was a member of the German embassy in Warsaw. In September 1939 he was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office that had been created to counter foreign press and radio news propaganda on the German occupation in Poland. His appointment allowed him to verify the veracity of foreign reports and to interview Nazi officials. He also helped Poles and Jews flee abroad. He became aware of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich under the Nazi regime and made contact with Polish nobles and intellectuals. Working either in an official capacity or through a friend, he helped many people escape from Poland and in some cases provided money for travel costs. He remained capable of establishing several partial contacts after the beginning of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and used them to disseminate news concerning Nazi crimes abroad.

In 1937, Lon Scheliha, who had risen to become the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw, began working for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. His first case officer, if not recruiter, was Rudolf Herrnstadt, a journalist for the left wing Berliner Tageblatt. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, contact with von Scheliha became increasingly difficult, and an intermediary who would not be recognised was needed. Ilse Stöbe, a communist who was a secretary to Theodor Wolff for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, agreed to act as a cutout. Until September 1939, Herrnstadt passed the documents to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw that Scheliha had supplied through Stöbe. Scheliha's motivation for espionage were entirely financial, as he had a lifestyle beyond his salary, was a long time 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. Mankowska wrote that she was led into a large well furnished room and that Von Scheliha presented a large thick folder, which described the gassing of Jews and other people. In the autumn of 1941, Von Scheliha 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 von Scheliha then passed material to Bninski that contained a comprehensive documentation of crimes during the German occupation, in addition to members of the Polish resistance. Co authored with the fellow German diplomat Johann von Wühlisch, it was completed in January 1942 and was titled The Nazi Culture in Poland. The document was recorded on microfilm, was smuggled to Britain at a high personal risk to those involved, and is considered one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the early Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the war. after he had witnessed the murder of Jews. He would later take part in the 20 July Plot. 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. At the same time, he closed the small Polish research department foreign office for fear of its members' lives. He was then in despair and realised his powerlessness. 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 had been consumed in domestic expenses although at least some of it had been banked. 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, Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany in May 1942 with wireless telegraphy sets and been instructed to find Ilse Stöbe to re establish communications with Von Scheliha. Eifler failed to contact Stöbe, who was then in Dresden. Eifler was arrested on 15 October and Fellendorf a short while later. Another Soviet agent, Heinrich Koenen, was dropped on 23 October to make another attempt to contact Stöbe and von Scheliha. Koenen was on a mission was to pass all material that had been collected by von Scheliha and Stöbe to Soviet intelligence, but he was arrested in Berlin on 26 October 1942. 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 released on 6 November 1943. In the last days of the war, she fled with her daughters to Niederstetten via Prague. In Haltenbergstetten Castle, the former castle of the principality of Hohenlohe Jagstberg, the family lived in a cellar mainly on mushrooms, berries and fruit.

In West German historiography, von Scheliha was seen until 1986 as not a resistance fighter but a spy for the Soviet services. In the process, the acts of interrogation and the 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 Reichskriegsgericht, 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. Von 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. 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, which overturned the 1942 verdict. 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. 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. Von Scheliha's name leads the list. On 9 July 2014 Ilse Stöbe received the same honour at the Foreign Office. In Neuallermöhe, a street was named in memory of von Scheliha on 5 May 1997. There is a street in Gotha named 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.