Activities of the Resistance

After 1939 Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen extended their contacts to men and women in different professions and functions. In doing so they obtained information on many areas of life and continually approached new sympathizers with a wide variety of social backgrounds and political attitudes. Harnack and Schulze-Boysen also had contact to representatives from the American and Soviet embassies in Berlin. They informed them about the Wehrmacht's preparations for attack when they realized that Hitler was planning a war for hegemony in Europe. However, Beria and Stalin contemptuously ignored the warnings from Berlin. In the summer of 1941 the Soviet embassy provided Harnack and Schulze-Boysen with two radio transmitters for maintaining contact, but the group was unable to operate them because of technical problems. Only one test message with the words "Thousand greetings to all friends" was radioed from Berlin to Moscow. In the winter of 1941-42, Harnack and Schulze-Boysen were forced to recognize the futility of their attempts at radio transmission. They started publicizing information on National Socialist crimes of violence, warning of the consequences of a war defeat for Germany's independence, and calling for passive and active resistance.