Rudolf von Scheliha

Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha
Born	31 May 1897 (1897-05-31) Silesia, German Empire
Died	22 December 1942(1942-12-22) (aged 45) Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, Nazi Germany
Cause of death	Execution by hanging
Nationality	German
Education	University of Breslau, University of Heidelberg
Occupation(s)	Diplomat, resistance fighter
Employer	Foreign Office
Known for	Created a comprehensive library of German occupation crimes, on the atrocities of the Gestapo.
Political party	Nazi Party
Spouse	Marie Louise von Medinger
Children	Sylvia, Elisabeth

Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha (31 May 1897 – 22 December 1942) was a German aristocrat, cavalry officer and diplomat who became a resistance fighter and anti-Nazi who was linked to the Red Orchestra.

He fought in the World War I, an experience that defined his politics. He joined the German Foreign Office, was trained to be a diplomat and was sent to the embassy in Warsaw. In the years leading up to the war, Von Scheliha was placed in a position of trust in the Foreign Office. In 1937, he was recruited by Soviet intelligence, while he served in Warsaw, where he passed documents to the Soviet intelligence. In the years leading up to the Second World War, he became a committed opponent of the Nazi regime and of its anti-Semitic policies.^[1]

In September 1939, he became the director of an information department in the embassy , which was established to counter enemy propaganda. As part of his position, photographs of atrocities against Jews and other people passed through his department and were used for propaganda. Appalled at what he saw, he began to resist and built a portfolio of the worst images over several years. In January 1942, the portfolio was smuggled to London.^[2]

In June 1941, the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union caused his line of communication to the Soviets to be cut off. Soviet intelligence tried several times to reinitiate communications with him but were unsuccessful. In May 1942, Soviet intelligence sent an agent, Erna Eifler, to make contact with Ilse Stöbe in Berlin,^[3] but she was captured.

Von Scheliha was executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison on 14 December 1942.^[4]

Rudolf von Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia (now Cieśle, Oleśnica, Poland), as the son of the Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. His mother was the Marie Luise von Scheliha née Miquel^[5] who was a daughter of Lord Mayor of Frankfurt and Prussian Finance Minister Johann von Miquel.^[6] His younger sister, Renata von Scheliha,^[7] was a classical philologist.

In 1927, Rudolf married the noblewomen Marie Louise von Scheliha (1904–2003) née von Medinger, the daughter of a large landowner and industrialist.^[8][9] The couple had two daughters: Sylvia, born on 14 November 1930, and Elisabeth, born in 1934. Sylvia became an engineer, and Elisabeth received a doctorate in chemistry, with the latter surviving to 2016 and dying in Adliswil.^[10][11]

He served as an army officer in World War I and volunteered after his graduation in 1915. Scheliha volunteered at the same regiment, the Cavalry Rifle Regiment, Guard Cavalry Rifle Division, in which his father and uncle had served; its officers were drawn from the nobility.^[12]

On 8 August 1918, he was shelled in a ditch with two brothers, who were blown up, and one brother died months later from his injuries.^[12] Scheliha was buried; when he was rescued, his hair had turned grey, and he was suffering from shell shock.^[12] His parents were shocked at the change but he never spoke of his experiences.^[12]

He was honoured for his efforts by both Iron Crosses and the Silver Wound Badge.^[9]

After the war, he studied law in Breslau.^[13] In May 1919, he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia that year and came in contact with republican and anti-totalitarian groups.^[14] He was elected to the AStA, the Association of Heidelberg Associations, where he vehemently opposed the students' anti-Semitic riots.^[15]

von Scheliha first worked for von Maltzan in the department of East European affairs in the Hamburg Foreign Office

After his examination in 1921, he became first clerk at the Court of Appeal in 1922. In February 1922, von Scheliha joined the regional office of the Foreign Office in Hamburg.^[4] After six months, he was promoted to attaché.^[4] He began to work in the department responsible for East European affairs in the office of Undersecretary of State Adolf Georg von Maltzan in Berlin.^[4] In December 1924, he was promoted again and was admitted to the diplomatic service.^[4] Over the following years, von Scheliha took over tasks in the diplomatic missions of Prague, Constantinople, Angora and Brno. In 1927, he was appointed to the position of legation secretary.^[4] In 1929, von Scheliha was appointed to the position of vice-consul at the Germany embassy in Katowice. At the time he tried to solve several intractable problems in the relations between Germany and Poland that had reached a new low, by maintaining an open house where he invited members of the Polish elite to talk to embassy staff.^[16] He hoped the convivial environment combined with common shared values would lead to an improvement in relations.^[16]

In July 1933, a few months after Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichskanzler, von Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party, a requirement as a diplomat, resulting in him participating in the Nuremberg Rally.^[17] At the time, he didn't understand the threat of fascism that the Nazi Party posed.^[16]

From 1932 to 1939, von Scheliha was a member of the German embassy in Warsaw. In October 1932, he joined the embassy staff as a Legation Secretary.^[10] While in Warsaw, Von Scheliha became part of a group of left-leaning, liberal anti-nazis that met regularly. By 1936, these included his colleagues the ambassador Hans-Adolf von Moltke who he was on first name terms, the press-secretary Hans Graf Huyn [de],^[18] the Polish writer Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, poet Julian Tuwim, the actress Ida Kaminska, Polish foreign minister Josef Beck.^[19] His close friends were the Polish Countess Klementyna Mańkowska and Count Konstantin Bninski (1889-1972) and the German journlist Immanuel Birnbaum [de] who was the foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and Vossische Zeitung.^[20] Also amongst his peers was Rudolf Herrnstadt, the foreign correspondent for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt^[20] who had moved to Warsaw in 1931 and Ilse Stöbe, the foreign correspondent for the Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper who had moved there in 1935.^[19] The couple were Soviet GRU agents.^[21][22][23]

Ambassdor von Moltke had recruited von Scheliha for the Warsaw post as both were members of the Corps Saxo Borussia in Heidelberg as students

The Polish writer and essayist Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz was a close friend of von Scheliha.

The Polish poet Julian Tuwim was also a close friend of von Scheliha.

The Polish foreign minister Josef Beck attended the same embassy parties as von Scheliha.

Rudolf Herrnstadt was GRU agent who was the rezident in Warsaw. He tricked von Scheliha into becoming an informer.

Ilse Stöbe was part of Herrnstadt's espionage cell in Warsaw, as a courier. When Herrnstadt fled to Moscow at the start of the war, she returned to Berlin and became the main rezident.

Von Scheliha work was principally looking after diplomatic guests of the embassy and ensure the correct protocol was followed.^[24] After the signing of the German–Polish non-aggression pact in January 1934, the embassy faced a continual stream of new guests whose visits were organised by Von Scheliha.^[24] Amongst these were Hermann Göring who came to hunt and the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.^[24] In 1936, Von Scheliha arranged a visit for Hitlers lawyer Hans Frank and along with his wife Marie, escorted Frank and his family around the sights of Kraków.^[25] When the Poland was invaded, Frank became the Governor-General of the vast occupied territories and was responsible for the mass-murder of Jews and the Polish intelligensia.^[25]

In August 1936, Von Scheliha and his wife escorted several Polish dignitaries to the 1936 Summer Olympics before going on holiday to East Prussia.^[25] He planned to try and warn several members of the Prussian nobilty about Hitler.^[25] A friend of his sister Renata, Momme Mommsen [de] also a philologist, described how "He wanted to appeal to the conscience of the nobility on the large estates". Von Scheliha tried to describe to the nobility how they would be committing "partial suicide" if they became part of the regime. Mommsen stated, "It is unnecessary to speak about the accuracy of this prophecy. But it is worth remembering how much determination and courage it took to travel around the country with such a slogan".^[26] Mommsen noted how brave Von Scheliha was but also careless as he threw caution to the wind, even in Warsaw and put himself in danger with his convictions.^[27]

Both Herrnstadt and von Scheliha had similar political views on the Nazis, a deep hostility, but had different views on the Soviet Union as von Scheliha was opposed to communism, but both knew that Hitler was going to start a war.^[20] When Herrnstadt had to leave his newspaper in 1936 due to the Reich Editors law for being Jewish,^[28] it became impossible for Moltke to defend him.^[13] Only von Scheliha out of the embassy staff remained in contact but their meetings were secret.

In 1937, while his career progressed with a promotion to Councillor II Class,^[10] during the summer, Herrnstadt used subterfuge to trick Von Scheliha into becoming an informant. Herrnstadt did this by disguising the delivery location of any received intelligence, i.e. to show the reports weren't going to the Soviet Union.^[29][20] In 1937, he travelled to England and through a comintern agent Ernest David Weiss and his sub-agent Ilse Steinfeld, a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt who worked for The Guardian, he met the German legation councillor Hermann von Stutterheim (1887–1959)^[30] of the German embassy in London.^[a][31] When he returned to Warsaw, he informed Von Scheliha that had met a contact in England, who was an "intermediary" for the secret service who was interested in the political situation in Poland. He further informed him that he was authorised to act for this intermediary.^[31] This finally convinced Von Scheliha by mid-September to begin supplying embassy reports.^[b] Until September 1939, Herrnstadt passed the documents to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw through the cutout Stöbe.^[32] It is still not known however, whether von Scheliha knew that the reports he was passed to Herrnstadt were being sent to Soviet intelligence.^[33]

In September 1939, von Scheliha moved back to Berlin when he was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office (Informationsabteilung des Auswärtigen Amtes) that had been created to counter foreign press and radio news propaganda on the German occupation in Poland.^[17] His appointment allowed him to verify the veracity of foreign reports of German atrocities and to interview Nazi officials.^[17] He throughly investigated every report he received and would protest against what were in effect Nazi war crimes in Poland.^[34][35]

When von Scheliha learned of the atrocities committed by the govenor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, he became his implacable enemy.

von Scheliha protested to Reinhard Heydrich several times during the autumn of 1939, due to the atrocities resulting from the Intelligenzaktion.

In November 1939 after Sonderaktion Krakau, the arrest of 184 Polish academic staff, a war crime, von Scheliha protested to Reinhard Heydrich.^[36] Following international pressure, many of the academic staff were released but many died in German concentration camps.^[36] He had several further dealings with Heydrich to protest the imprisonment of his friend, the Austrian Consul General in Munich Victor Jordan. He had warned the Austrian Foreign Ministry about the planned German invasion of Austria and the call was monitored, leading to his arrest. Von Scheliha secured his release on 23 December 1940.^[36] As well as being critical of Kliest, when reports of the brutality of Hans Frank appeared in the foreign press, von Scheliha became his most implacable enemy^[36] and began to resist.^[37]

Von Scheliha also helped Poles and Jews flee abroad. Working either in an official capacity or through a friend, he helped many people escape from Poland and in some cases provided money for travel costs.^[38] Amongst these was Princess Teresa Sapieha-Rozanski a member of the Polish Muszkieterzy (organizacja) [pl] resistance organisation.^[39] In 1940, von Scheliha helped her to emigrate to Italy.^[39] She survived the war.

Von Scheliha secretly began making a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo in 1939, particularly on the murders of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of the newly established extermination camps. In June 1941, he showed the dossier to a Polish intelligence agent, Countess Klementyna Mankowska, who was a member of the anti-Nazi group the Musketeers for which she worked as a courier.^[40] Mankowska visited him at the Foreign Office in Berlin to make the details known to the Polish resistance and to the Allies.^[41] Mankowska wrote that she was led into a large well-furnished room and that Von Scheliha presented a large thick folder, which described the gassing of Jews and other people.^[40] The last of the archive documents were written in January 1942 and passed to Polish resistance in February 1942.^[42] The fact that he stopped adding to the archive at that point is an indication that that it became too dangerous.^[42]

In August 1941, Von Scheliha learned of the murder of Polish mathematician and former Prime Minister of Poland Kazimierz Bartel in 27 August 1941 from Reuters.^[43] He immediately protested to the Reich Security Main Office and requested further information from Gerhard Kegel [de],^[c] who worked as a trade envoy in trade policy department in Moscow.^[43] The murder spurred Von Scheliha to make a list of 22 Polish intellectuals that he wanted to place under police protection to ensure their protection.^[43] Von Scheliha wanted to save them and to stop enemy propaganda from reporting they had been killed. He hoped to recruit them as allies so they would report abroad on Nazi atrocities in Poland and at the same act as mouthpieces for German propaganda, in effect making the indispensable to the Nazi state.^[43] Amongst those on list was the art historian Mieczysław Gębarowicz, the librarian and historian Edward Kuntze (librarian) [pl], the bibliologist and philospher Aleksander Birkenmajer, Bishop Andrey Sheptytsky, historian of economics Franciszek Bujak and peadiatrician Franz Groër [pl].^[45] Von Scheliha added Countess Irene Poninski, the wife of Count Konstantin Bninski after the family fled to Lemberg in 1940.^[46] Von Scheliha submitted the list to the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on 7 October 1941 with the assurance that all the folk on the list were willing to describe Soviet atrocities to aid in the formation of German propaganda, thereby keeping them alive.^[43] However, from the perspective of the Polish resistance Von Scheliha who can be attributed to the resistance "may have gone the furthest... but was largely an anonymous helper, even if his existance was known".^[47]

The murder of Kazimierz Bartel, led von Scheliha to try and save other members of the intelligensia.

The commerical specialist Gerhard Kegel was an associate of Rudolf Herrnstadt

The art historian Mieczyslaw Gebarowicz

Kuntze, the prewar director of the library of the Jagiellonian University

The bibliologist and philospher Aleksander Birkenmajer was arrested as part of Sonderaktion Krakau.

Bishop Andrey Sheptytsky protested to Himmler about the Holocaust in Ukraine

In the autumn of 1941, Von Scheliha invited his Polish friend, Count Konstantin Bninski, to Berlin under the pretext of writing propaganda texts for the Foreign Office against the Polish resistance. The German diplomat and historian Ulrich Sahm [de] considered it probable in his 1990 biography that von Scheliha then passed material to Bninski that contained a comprehensive documentation of crimes during the German occupation, in addition to members of the Polish resistance. Co-authored with fellow German diplomat Johann von Wühlisch, it was completed in January 1942 and was titled The Nazi Culture in Poland. The document that was recorded onto microfilm, was smuggled to Britain at a high personal risk to those involved, and is considered one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the early Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the war.^[39] The document describes the persecution of the church, the school and the university system; the dark role of the Institute of German Ostarbeiter as the driver of cultural rescheduling; the relocation and the sacking of libraries; the devastation of monuments; the looting of archives, museums and the private collections of the Polish nobility; the subversion of Polish theatre, music and press; and the forcible destruction of other cultural institutions by the Nazi Party.^[41]The Polish government-in-exile published the document as a novel from 1944 to 1945.^[41] During that period, von Scheliha was in contact with Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow, who was also becoming increasingly antifascist.^[48] after he had witnessed the murder of Jews. He would later take part in the 20 July Plot.^[49]

In February 1942, von Scheliha ended his attempts to name and send out exiled Poles as helpers for German propaganda to stop endangering them and himself. At the same time, he closed the small Polish research department foreign office for fear of its members' lives.^[50] He began to despair and realised his powerlessness.^[50] That spring, he travelled to Switzerland, where his sister lived^[50] and provided Swiss diplomats with information on Aktion T4, including sermons by Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen on the murders of the mentally ill.^[51] He also sent reports on the Final Solution, including the construction and the operation of more extermination camps, and on Hitler's order to exterminate European Jews.^[52]

Von Scheliha made further trips to Switzerland in September and October 1942. On his final trip he warned Carl Jacob Burckhardt of the International Committee of the Red Cross about the Final Solution.^[5] Burckhardt in turn informed the American consul in Geneva which was the first news of the Nazi extermination camps reaching the allies.^[5]

The extent of Soviet intelligence interest in von Scheliha was shown in May 1942, when Bernhard Bästlein assisted Erna Eifler, Wilhelm Fellendorf, Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany in May 1942 with wireless telegraphy sets and been instructed to find Ilse Stöbe to re-establish communications with Von Scheliha.^[3] Eifler failed to contact Stöbe, who was then in Dresden.^[53] Eifler was arrested on 15 October and Fellendorf a short while later. Another Soviet agent, Heinrich Koenen, was dropped on 23 October to make another attempt to contact Stöbe and von Scheliha. Koenen was on a mission to pass all material that had been collected by Stöbe to Soviet intelligence, but he was arrested in Berlin on 26 October 1942.^[54]

Shortly after von Scheliha had returned from Switzerland, Stöbe was arrested on 12 September, followed by von Scheliha on 29 October in the office of the Foreign Office's personnel director.^[4]

Suspected by the Gestapo for his critical attitude, he was charged by the Second Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht of being a member of the Red Orchestra and sentenced to death on 14 December 1942 for "treason for money" (Landesverrat gegen Geld).^[4] On 22 December 1942, he was executed by hanging in Plötzensee Prison.^[55][41]

His wife, Marie Louise, was arrested on 22 December 1942 and taken to the women's prison in Charlottenburg. There, she was repeatedly interrogated and threatened but released on 6 November 1943. In the last days of the war, she fled with her daughters to Niederstetten via Prague. In Haltenbergstetten Castle, the former castle of the principality of Hohenlohe-Jagstberg, the family lived in a cellar mainly on mushrooms, berries and fruit.^[56][57]

In West German historiography, in particular by the German historians Hans Rothfels, Peter Hoffman and the Dutch historian Ger van Roon [de], von Scheliha was not seen as a resistance fighter^[58] but as a spy for the Soviet services. In the process, the acts of interrogation and the Gestapo records continued to be uncritically classified as "sources" that were adopted by journalists and historians, to which former Nazi prosecutors such as Manfred Roeder^[59] and Alexander Kraell [de], the former president of the Second Senate of the Reichskriegsgericht, contributed after 1945.^{[60][61][62][63]}

In 1952, Von Schelihas widow Marie Louise von Scheliha applied for compensation but was refused as her husband was not classified as a resistance fighter, but as a traitor.^[64] The Foreign Office adopted this attitude^[64] and for more than 50 years it refused to recognise Von Scheliha due to the findings of the 1942 Gestapo investigation.^[65] This was illustrated on 20 July 1961, when 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. Von Scheliha was not mentioned because he continued to pass on information to the Soviet Union, which was considered a betrayal.^[66] In 1956, Marie Louise von Scheliha petitioned the West German president Theodor Heuss who granted her a "revocable maintenance contribution amounting to the legal widow's daily needs".^[64] The size of the contribution left her impoverished at the same time as widows of Nazis prosecutors had received full pension rights.^[64] In 1993, Von Scheliha made a request to the Württemberg State Office for a full pension benefits and was again refused as Rudolf von Scheliha has been subject to a "proper trial".^[64]

From the mid-80's onwards, the retired diplomat Ulrich Sahm campaigned to rehabilitate von Scheliha.^[67] It wasn't until 1990, that von Scheliha was rehabilitated in the eyes of historians with the publication of Sahm's meticulously researched book, "Rudolf von Scheliha 1897–1942. Ein deutscher Diplomat gegen Hitler" (Rudolf von Scheliha 1897-1942: A German diplomat against Hitler).^[68] Sahm reframes von Scheliha as a "daring and honourable resistance fighter".^[58] The release of the book was the likely basis^[67] for the 8th Chamber of Cologne Administrative Court [de] (reference number 8K 5055/94), to rule on 25 October 1995 that Scheliha had been sentenced to death not for espionage but in a sham trial for his opposition to Nazism, which overturned the 1942 verdict and legally rehabilitated von Scheliha.^[69] The court ruled that von Scheliha has acted out of ideological motives, not for monetary reasons, i.e. "Scheliha had been persecuted because of his political opposition".^[65] According to witness statements and Sahm's historical research^[65] it was proved that von Scheliha did not even know that the information he had passed on to Ilse Stöbe and Rudolf Herrnstadt had been passed on to the Soviet Union.^[70] This proved that it was inconceivable that he committed "paid treason".^[67]

On 21 December 1995 at the Foreign Office, in a ceremony with State Secretary Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz [de], attached an additional board with the inscription "Rudolf von Scheliha 1897–1942".^[71] On 18 July 2000 in a ceremony at the new Foreign Office in Berlin, both boards were brought together and the names listed in the sequence of death dates. Von Scheliha's name leads the list.^[71] On 9 July 2014 Ilse Stöbe received the same honour at the Foreign Office.^[71]

In Neuallermöhe, a street was named in memory of von Scheliha on 5 May 1997. There is a street in Gotha named 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.

• Massacre of Lwów professors

• Rosiejka, Gert (1986). Die Rote Kapelle: "Landesverrat" als antifaschist. Widerstand [The Red Orchestra. "Treason" as anti-fascist resistance. With an introduction by Heinrich Scheel] (in German) (1st ed.). Hamburg: Ergebnisse-Verl. ISBN 3-925622-16-0.
• Kegel, Gerhard (1984). In den Stürmen unseres Jahrhunderts: ein deutscher Kommunist über sein ungewöhnliches Leben [In the storms of our century. A German communist about his unusual life] (in German). Berlin: Dietz Verlag.
• Wiaderny, Bernard (2003). Die Katholische Kirche in Polen (1945-1989): eine Quellenedition [The Catholic Church in Poland (1945-1989): A source edition] (in German) (1. ed.). Berlin: VWF, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung. ISBN 978-3-89700-074-2.
• Conze, Eckart; Frei, Norbert; Hayes, Peter; Zimmermann, Moshe (2010). Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik [The Office and the Past: German Diplomats in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany] (in German) (2. Aufl ed.). Munich: Blessing. ISBN 978-3-89667-430-2.
• Ruchniewicz, Krzysztof (1999). "Rudolf von Scheliha – Niemiecki dyplomata przeciw Hitlerowi". Zbliżenia Polska-Niemcy (in Polish). 1 (22). Wrocław: 119.
• Matelski, Dariusz (1999). Niemcy w Polsce w XX wieku [Germany in Poland in the 20TH century] (in Polish) (Wyd. 1 ed.). Warsaw: Wydawn. Nauk. PWN. ISBN 978-83-01-12931-6.
• Wippermann, Wolfgang (2014). "'Widerstand für Polen und Juden – Rudolf von Scheliha". In Sigler, Sebastian (ed.). Corpsstudenten im Widerstand gegen Hitler [Resistance for Poles and Jews – Rudolf von Scheliha]. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. pp. 191–215. ISBN 9783428143191.

• Literature by and about Rudolf von Scheliha in the German National Library catalogue
• "Rudolf von Scheliha". Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. German Resistance Memorial Center. Retrieved 21 April 2018.
• Blasius, Rainer (9 September 2004). "Kleiner Beamter in der Ahnengalerie des Widerstands" [Small official in the ancestral gallery of the resistance]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved 21 April 2019.
• Kühner, Claudia (20 December 2012). "Von den Nazis ermordet und nach dem Krieg weiter verunglimpft" [Murdered by the Nazis and further vilified after the war] (in German). Tamedia AG. Tages-Anzeiger. Retrieved 21 April 2019.