Red Orchestra Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Red Orchestra was a Soviet espionage ring in the Nazi-occupied Europe during the first years of World War Two.The name reputedly came from Germans; they were able to determine that Moscow NKVD center dubbed their radio transmitters as "music boxes" and agents as "musicians" and begun to call the network Rote Kapelle — Red Orchestra.
Red Orchestra was coordinated by then-NKVD agent Leopold Trepper. He organized underground operations in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland and travelled extensively. The network became so successful, even infiltrating the German military intelligence service Abwehr, that the Nazis set up the "Red Orchestra Special Detachment" (Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle) to try to destroy it.
However, Trepper built on foundation of various other pro-communist agents like Harro Schulze-Boysen, intelligence officer for the German ministry of Air and Arvid Harnack in the German ministry of economics. Their associates included Alexander Erdberg; Adam Kuckhoff, theater producer and his wife Margarete Harnack who worked for the race policy department of Alfred Rosenberg; Horst Heilmann, codebreaker in the Wehrmacht communications division; Gunther Weisenborn, German national radio system official; Herbert Gollnow, in German military counterintelligence; and aircraft manufacturer Johann Graudens who reported on Luftwaffe airfields.
Belgian-born socialite Suzanne Spaak joined the Red Orchestra's Parisian network, after being appalled by the conduct of the Nazi occupiers. Agents' motivations were not always ideological; Rudolf von Scheliha spied for money to maintain his opulent lifestyle. Gestapo intercepted the message of two NKVD agents coming to help him and arrested his assistant. Both were shot on December 22, 1942.
Red Orchestra reported on things like German troop concentrations in the Soviet Union, air attacks, aircraft production and fuel shipments. In France, they worked with underground French Communist Party. They managed to tap the phone lines of Abwehr in Paris.
Eventually Abwehr triangulated the radio transmission of Red Orchestra agent Johann Wenzel in Belgium and arrested him. He agreed to turn double agent and informed on the leaders of the network. Based on his information Germans arrested Schulze-Boysen and his wife on August 30, 1942 and Harnack and his wife in September. Many agents broke under torture and Germans were able to wipe out the network. Trepper was captured and forced to play a double agent until he escaped into the French underground where he worked until the liberation of Paris.
Red Orchestra operations had been eliminated by the spring on 1943. Most agents were executed, including Suzanne Spaak at Fresnes Prison just thirteen days before liberation came in 1944.
Red Orchestra is also the name of a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004.
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