page_title: Red Orchestra (espionage)
section_title: Name
hierarchical_section_title: Red Orchestra (espionage) / Name
caption_attribution_description: Diagram of the various groups of the Rote Kapelle
context_page_description: 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 circles, connected through personal contacts, uniting hundreds of opponents of the Nazi regime. These included circles of friendship and discussion centred around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid Harnack in Berlin, alongside many others. They printed and distributed illegal leaflets, posters, and stickers hoping to incite civil disobedience; helped Jews and opposition escape the regime; documented the crimes of the Nazi regime; and forwarded military intelligence to the Allies. Contrary to legend, the Red Orchestra was neither directed by Soviet communists nor under a single leadership but a network of groups and individuals, often operating independently. To date, about 400 members are known by name.
  The term was also used by the Gestapo to refer to an unassociated Soviet intelligence networks, working in Paris and Brussels, that were built up by Leopold Trepper on behalf of the Main Directorate of State Security. Trepper ran a series of clandestine cells for organising agents.
context_section_description: The name Rote Kapelle was a cryptonym that was invented for a secret operation started by Abwehrstelle Belgium (Ast Belgium), a field office of Abwehr III.F in August 1941 and conducted against a Soviet intelligence station that had been detected in Brussels in June 1941. Kapelle was an accepted Abwehr term for counter-espionage operations against secret wireless transmitting stations and in the case of the Brussels stations Rote was used to differentiate from other enterprises conducted by Ast Belgium.  
  In July 1942, the case of the Red Orchestra was taken over from Ast Belgium by section IV. A.2. of the Sicherheitsdienst. When Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich was arrested in November 1942, a small independent unit made up of Gestapo personnel known as the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was formed in Paris in the same month and led by SS-Obersturmbannführer (Colonel) Friedrich Panzinger.
  The Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the counter-espionage part of the Schutzstaffel (SS), referred to resistance radio operators as "pianists", their transmitters as "pianos", and their supervisors as "conductors".
  Only after the funkabwehr had decrypted radio messages in August 1942, in which German names appeared, did the Gestapo start to arrest and imprison them, their friends and relatives. In 2002, the German filmmaker Stefan Roloff, whose father was a member of one of the Red Orchestra groups, wrote:
  Due to their contact with the Soviets, the Brussels and Berlin groups were grouped by the Counterespionage and the Gestapo under the misleading name Red orchestra. A radio operator tapping Morse code marks with his fingers was a pianist in the intelligence language. A group of "pianists" formed an "Orchestra", and since the Morse code had come from Moscow, the "Orchestra" was communist and thus red. This misunderstanding laid the foundation upon which the resistance group was later treated as a serving espionage organization in the historiography of the Soviets, until it could be corrected at the beginning of the 1990s. The Organization construct created by the Gestapo, Red Orchestra has never existed in this form. In his research, the historian Hans Coppi Jr., whose father was also a member, Hans Coppi, emphasised that, in view of the Western European groups
  A network led by Leopold Trepper of the 'Red Orchestra' in Western Europe did not exist. The different groups in Belgium, Holland and France worked largely independently of each other.
  The German political scientist Johannes Tuchel summed up in a research article for the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand.
  The Gestapo investigates them under the collective name, Red Orchestra and wants it to be judged above all as a spy organization of the Soviet Union. This designation, which reduces the groups around Harnack and Schulze-Boysen on contacts to the Soviet intelligence service, also later shapes the motives and aims, later distorting their image in the German public.
caption: Diagram of the various groups of the Red Orchestra
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