page_title: Rudolf von Scheliha
section_title: Reappraisal
hierarchical_section_title: Rudolf von Scheliha / Reappraisal
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gedenktafel, Frieda Stöbe, Ilse Stöbe und Kurt Müller, Frankfurter Allee 233, Berlin-Lichtenberg, Deutschland English: Memorial plaque, Frieda Stöbe, Ilse Stöbe and Kurt Müller, Frankfurter Allee 233, Berlin-Lichtenberg, Deutschland
context_page_description: Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha was a German cavalry officer and later diplomat who would become a resistance fighter linked to the Red Orchestra. In 1934, von Scheliha was recruited by Soviet intelligence while he served in Warsaw and was motivated by his need for money. In the years leading up to the war, von Scheliha was placed in a position of trust in the Foreign Office, which enabled him to pass documents to Soviet intelligence and to build up a large collection of documents that detailed Nazi atrocities.
  He attempted to pass the documents to the Allies via contacts in Switzerland. In June 1941, at the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was left with no means to contact the Soviets, who tried several times unsuccessfully to reinitiate communications and planned to blackmail him.
  He was executed by the Nazis during World War II.
context_section_description: In West German historiography, Scheliha was seen until 1986 as not a resistance fighter but a spy in Soviet services. In the process, the acts of interrogation and 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 Reichskriegs Court, 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. 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, and it 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. 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. In Gotha is 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.
caption: Commemorative plaque, Frankfurter Allee 233, in Lichtenberg
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