Helmut Roloff (9 October 1912 – 29 September 2001) was a German pianist, recording artist, teacher and
resistance fighter
A resistance movement is an organized effort by some portion of the civil population of a country to withstand the legally established government or an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability. It may seek to achieve its objectives ...
against the Nazi regime. In September 1942 Roloff was arrested in Berlin in the roundup of an anti-
Nazi
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in ...
resistance group allegedly at the centre of a wider European espionage network identified by the
Abwehr under the cryptonym the
Red Orchestra (''Rote Kapelle''). Covered by comrades who persuaded their interrogators that his contact with the group had been unwitting, he was spared execution and released. In post-war
West Berlin
West Berlin (german: Berlin (West) or , ) was a political enclave which comprised the western part of Berlin during the years of the Cold War. Although West Berlin was de jure not part of West Germany, lacked any sovereignty, and was under mi ...
, Roloff taught at the Academy of Music (''Hochschule für Musik Berlin''). After serving as the school's director, he retired in 1978.
Early life, witness to Nazi persecution
Roloff was born in university and garrison town of
Giessen
Giessen, spelled Gießen in German (), is a town in the German state (''Bundesland'') of Hesse, capital of both the district of Giessen and the administrative region of Giessen. The population is approximately 90,000, with roughly 37,000 univer ...
in
Hesse-Darmstadt
The Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt (german: Landgrafschaft Hessen-Darmstadt) was a State of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by a younger branch of the House of Hesse. It was formed in 1567 following the division of the Landgraviate of Hesse betwee ...
where his father, Gustav Roloff, was a professor of history (a student of European colonial policy and the continental balance of power). His mother, Elisabeth, was musically gifted and introduced her son to the piano, but he first pursued studies in law.
After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, as a regular guest in the home of the
Leipzig
Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...
jurist
Leo Rosenberg, Roloff witnessed the effects of the newly licensed harassment of Jewish people. He began to think of music as a career in which he would not be as directly compromised by the law's corruption. Meanwhile life for Roloff and his parents was becoming impossible in Giessen. On the day of the first
Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses () in Germany began on April 1, 1933, and was claimed to be a defensive reaction to the anti-Nazi boycott, which had been initiated in March 1933. It was largely unsuccessful, as the German population conti ...
, 1 April 1933, his father conspicuously walked with a Jewish colleague through the centre of town. But in the university Roloff recalls "a great rush as the sheep willingly joined the
SA ..I don't think there was a single one of my friends and acquaintances who didn't join". In 1936 the family moved to the greater anonymity of Berlin.
In 1935 Roloff graduated from the
Hochschule für Musik
A music school is an educational institution specialized in the study, training, and research of music. Such an institution can also be known as a school of music, music academy, music faculty, college of music, music department (of a larger ins ...
(HfM, today the
Universität der Künste Berlin
The Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK; also known in English as the Berlin University of the Arts), situated in Berlin, Germany, is the largest art school in Europe. It is a public art and design school, and one of the four research universiti ...
, Fakultät 3), from which Jewish teachers such as
Leonid Kreutzer
Leonid Kreutzer (13 March 1884 in St. Petersburg – 30 October 1953 in Tokyo) was a classical pianist.
Life and career
Kreutzer was born in St. Petersburg into a Jewish family. He studied composition under Alexander Glazunov and piano under Anna ...
,
Emanuel Feuermann
Emanuel Feuermann (November 22, 1902 – May 25, 1942) was an internationally celebrated cellist in the first half of the 20th century.
Life
Feuermann was born in 1902 in Kolomyja, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Kolomyia, Ukraine) to ...
, and
Arthur Schnabel had already been dismissed and expelled.
Roloff studied with
Richard Rössler and later, in 1938, privately with
Wladimir Horbowski who introduced him to the
Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include sym ...
family.
Roloff found a teaching position, alongside Horbowski, at the
Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and began to give concerts.
The family's Berlin apartment was in what Roloff describes as a "totally Jewish building". Arrests and deportations began in 1939, precipitating the suicide of a neighbour. Roloff insists that "If people say they didn't know about such things, that's not true. People knew. Many in Berlin, the big city, knew that the Jews were being corralled at
Grunewald Station and taken east".
Wartime resistance
The music historian
Fred K. Prieberg observes that in the
Third Reich
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
two thirds of musicians, many of them before 1933, "thought it opportune to join the
NSDAP
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...
in a hurry" (a higher percentage than for physicians, otherwise thought to be, next to lawyers for whom there was little choice, the most Nazified of the professions). Roloff was among the exceptions, not only in refusing party membership but also in deciding he had to do something against the regime.
His first encounter with talk of organised resistance was in 1937 when he befriended, recently released from detention, a Protestant pastor called Weckerling from the dissident
Confessing Church
The Confessing Church (german: link=no, Bekennende Kirche, ) was a movement within German Protestantism during Nazi Germany that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi German ...
(''Bekennende Kirche'').
In the winter of 1941, Roloff was introduced by the dentist and music lover Helmut Himpel to a resistance group in Berlin centred around the couples
Adam and
Greta Kuckhoff,
Harro and
Libertas Schulze-Boysen
Libertas "Libs" Schulze-Boysen, born Libertas Viktoria Haas-Heye (20 November 1913 in Paris – 22 December 1942 in Plötzensee Prison ) was a German aristocrat and resistance fighter against the Nazis. From the early 1930s to 1940, Libs attem ...
and
Arvid and
Mildred Harnack. On 17 September 1942, the
Gestapo
The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe.
The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...
, who had had his associates under surveillance, searched Roloff's family apartment. Under a piano they found a locked suitcase that Himpel, following the earlier arrest of Harro Schulz-Boysen, had given him for safekeeping a few days before. It contained a Soviet-supplied (but functionless) short-wave radio transmitter.
Roloff's arrest was reported in ''The New York Times'' (6 October 1942) as part of a "big clean up in Berlin": "the majority of the person arrested were intellectuals, lawyers, actors and artists, and among them the well-known German musician, Helmut Roloff, who was taken into custody just a few hours before he was due to give a large concert in a hall sold out in advance".
Taken to Gestapo headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Roloff was held shackled for two weeks in a basement cell. During his interrogations, he insisted that he had thought the case contained apples or other illegal gifts of food from Himpel's patients. He was whispered encouragement by an officer Roloff suspected of having been a regular policeman: "You've presented your case quite well. Now stick with it".
Moved to
Spandau Prison
Spandau Prison was located in the borough of Spandau in West Berlin. It was originally a military prison, built in 1876, but became a proto-concentration camp under the Nazis. After the war, it held seven top Nazi leaders convicted in the Nurem ...
, Roloff found ways of coordinating his testimony with Himpel and with his cell neighbour, the Communist journalist
John Graudenz. On 26 January 1943 Roloff was released. Himpel's last words to him were "You will become a great pianist".
Over the following months, 49 members of the group (19 women and 30 men) including Himpel, his fiancé
Maria Terwiel, and
Graudenz, were executed by hanging or beheading at
Plötzensee Prison
Plötzensee Prison (german: Justizvollzugsanstalt Plötzensee, JVA Plötzensee) is a juvenile prison in the Charlottenburg-Nord locality of Berlin with a capacity for 577 prisoners, operated by the State of Berlin judicial administration. The d ...
.
Among other anti-Nazi material copied on Maria Terwiel's typewriter, Roloff, Himpel, Graudenz and others posted to people in important positions, passed to foreign correspondents, and distributed across Berlin, was
Bishop von Galen's sermon condemning the ''
Aktion T4
(German, ) was a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany. The term was first used in post- war trials against doctors who had been involved in the killings. The name T4 is an abbreviation of 4, a street address o ...
'' euthanasia program and a polemic entitled "Fear for Germany's future grips the people" (''Die Sorge um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk'').
Roloff also dropped this leaflet in mail boxes across the district of
Dahlem. Written by Harro Schulze-Boysen with assistance from
John Sieg, it was signed "AGIS". Roloff recalled that it offered a "very strong critique of the Nazis":
A class of ridiculous but destructive swindlers and braggarts, alienated from the people, now directs the life of the nation. In times of direst need for Germany, these people lead a life of comfort. Yet the conscience of all true patriots revolts against the whole present exercise of German power in Europe ..
In the name of the Reich, the most horrible tortures and brutalities are being committed against civilians and prisoners. Each day of war brings unimaginable pain and suffering. Each day increases the bill we will have to pay in the end ..What can the individual do to bring his will to bear? Each must seek, wherever he can, to do the exact opposite of what this present regime demands of him.
Recipients were urged to "send this letter out into the world as often as you can! Pass it on to friends and workmates!" and were assured: "You are not alone! Start fighting of your own accord, then in groups. TOMORROW GERMANY WILL BE OURS!"
Roloff and his group had also tried to provide practical assistance to Jews still living in Berlin. They secured personal papers and supplied forged documentation.
The "Red Orchestra"
Roloff never regarded himself, whether by sympathy or affiliation, a communist (his wife Inge described him rather as a "lifelong conservative"). That, nonetheless, was the suspicion of the western-sector Allies. They noted that he maintained contacts in the Soviet sector of Berlin, and had been a guest of the Polish military mission.
The post-war view of the Harnack/Schulz-Boysen network remained very much that which had been drawn by their interrogators. As late as 1969, the testimony and records of Gestapo, and of the Reich Military Tribunal (''Reichskriegsgericht''), officials informed a series on the "history of the Red Orchestra espionage ring" in the weekly ''Der Spiegel.'' Under a picture of German eastern-front military graves, it asked whether "hundred of thousands of soldiers" had been "betrayed by the Red Orchestra?"
The East German regime reinforced the view of the group as a Communist cell by manipulating the group's history to fit their own agenda, specifically to reinforce the German-Soviet friendship and to legitimise their own espionage activity as anti-fascist.
Roloff rarely spoke of his wartime experience until he was extensively interviewed by his son Stefan beginning in 1998. Although he had not been party to it, his group had engaged in military espionage (three months before their arrests, Graudenz and
Harro Schulze-Boysen
Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen (; Schulze, 2 September 1909 – 22 December 1942) 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 sibli ...
had tried to communicate to the British that the Germans had broken their naval communications code),
and they had had Soviet contacts. These had been ineffective in persuading
Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretar ...
of their reports in June 1941 of preparations for a German invasion, and proved their undoing: the ''
Abwehr'' intercepted contact details for Adman Kuckoff and for the Schulz-Boysons radioed by
Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
to an agent in
Brussels
Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...
.
Stefan Roloff's subsequent research confirmed what others have found. The Red Orchestra was largely a Cold-War myth tying together disparate groups of resisters and dissidents neither directed by the Soviets nor co-ordinated among themselves.
Among the individuals associated in the activities of the Harnack/Schulz-Boysen network (counting perhaps a hundred, twice the number executed) there was a "pluralism" of political and philosophical viewpoints ("''weltanschauliche Pluralität"'').
Under totalitarian conditions resistance is generally too individual a decision, Stefan Roloff's concludes, for the groups that form (in the "catacombs") to adhere to any one ideological line. The resister is not by nature a follower.
In 2009 the German
Bundestag
The Bundestag (, "Federal Diet") is the German federal parliament. It is the only federal representative body that is directly elected by the German people. It is comparable to the United States House of Representatives or the House of Common ...
unanimously agreed to vacate all war-time convictions of
treason
Treason is the crime of attacking a state authority to which one owes allegiance. This typically includes acts such as participating in a war against one's native country, attempting to overthrow its government, spying on its military, its diplo ...
under National Socialism and to rehabilitate their victims.
Post-war career
After the end of the war in 1945, Roloff found a position in the re-established Berlin Academy of Music (''Hochschule für Musik Berlin'') in Charlottenburg. He was appointed professor in 1950, full professor in 1953, and director of the school in 1970. In 1975 the school was incorporated in the Berlin University of Arts (''Universität der Künste Berlin'') of which Roloff, on his retirement in 1978, was made an honorary senator.
Roloff worked as a concert pianist and piano teacher throughout his life. He championed the modernists denied performance during the Third Reich. Six months from the end of the war,
Berliner Rundfunk
The Berliner Rundfunk (BERU) was a radio station set in East Germany. It had a political focus and discussed events in East Berlin. Today it is a commercial radio station broadcast with the name "Berliner Rundfunk 91.4".
History
The Berliner ...
broadcast Roloff playing
Sergei Prokofiev
Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev; alternative transliterations of his name include ''Sergey'' or ''Serge'', and ''Prokofief'', ''Prokofieff'', or ''Prokofyev''., group=n (27 April .S. 15 April1891 – 5 March 1953) was a Russian composer, ...
. From the summer of 1947 he led seminars in contemporary music at the new
International Institute for Music in Darmstadt beginning with performances of
Paul Hindemith
Paul Hindemith (; 16 November 189528 December 1963) was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the ' ...
and
Manuel de Falla
Manuel de Falla y Matheu (, 23 November 187614 November 1946) was an Andalusian Spanish composer and pianist. Along with Isaac Albéniz, Francisco Tárrega, and Enrique Granados, he was one of Spain's most important musicians of the first ...
. But above all Roloff cultivated the classical-romantic repertoire.
For
Deutsche Grammaphon he recorded
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classic ...
,
Mendelssohn
Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include sym ...
,
Mozart,
Weber and
Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (; 31 January 179719 November 1828) was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short lifetime, Schubert left behind a vast ''oeuvre'', including more than 600 secular vocal wor ...
.
In 1990, Roloff received the
Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government for his contributions to Japanese music, including teaching
Takahiro Sonoda, Toyoaki Matsuura and other Japanese pianists.
Helmut Roloff died in his home in Berlin on 29 September 2001. He was survived by his wife Inge Roloff, his sons
Stefan Roloff (artist and film maker),
Ulrich Roloff (flutist), and
Johannes Roloff (pianist).
Stefan Roloff wrote a wartime biography of his father and of the Red Orchestra, published by the Ullstein Press in 2004. His film documentary, ''The Red Orchestra'', was nominated for Best Foreign Film 2005 by the US Women Critics Circle.
References
Bibliography
* Kater, Michael H. (1997) ''The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their music in the third reich''. New York & Oxford, 1997; Oxford University Press. . Pages 224-5
* Nelson, Anne (2009). ''Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler''. Random House Publishing Group. p. 331. .
*
Fischer-Defoy, Christine (1996) ''KUNST MACHT POLITIK. Die Nazifizierung der Kunst- und Musikhochschulen in Berlin.'' (S. 298), Hochschule der Künste, Presse und Informationsstelle, Berlin (Lizenz des Elefanten-Press-Verlags),
* Gert Rosiejka (1996) ''Die Rote Kapelle, „Landesverrat“ als antifaschistischer Widerstand.'' ergebnisse-Verlag, Hamburg, .
*
Stefan Roloff (2004) ''Die Rote Kapelle. Die Widerstandsgruppe im Dritten Reich und die Geschichte Helmut Roloffs.'' Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 2004 .
External links
Die Rote Kapelle - The Red Orchestra(film website)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Roloff, Helmut
1912 births
2001 deaths
Red Orchestra (espionage)
German classical pianists
Male classical pianists
20th-century classical pianists
20th-century German musicians
People from Giessen
20th-century German male musicians