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 siblings, with an extended family who were aristocrats.

In 1913, the family moved to Berlin when his father received a posting.

In 1913, Schulze-Boysen attended primary school and later the Heinrich-von-Kleist-Gymnasium in the district of Schmargendorf in Berlin.

From 1920, he regularly spent his summer holidays with the Hasselrot family in Sweden.

He had two siblings: a sister Helga, and a brother, Hartmut (1922-2013).

In 1922 his father was transferred to Duisburg, and Harro followed him in the autumn.

As a student at the Steinbart Gymnasium in Duisburg, he participated in the underground struggle against the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 and was temporarily imprisoned by the French and Belgian occupying forces.

To get him out of this political firing line, his parents organized a slightly longer stay in Sweden.

Harro's trip to England in 1926 had inspired comparison and reflection.

He had found that his experiences in the country did not match the perception of England within Germany.

In 1927 he wrote his first major newspaper report about a scandal in Duisburg to erect a monument to the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

In April 1928 he studied law and political science at the University of Freiburg and later Berlin, without finishing.

In the same period he joined the Studentenverbindung Albingia and the Young German Order, a paramilitary organisation that influenced him ideologically at the time.

Its goal was to ethically revive the "comradeship from the trenches of the First World War" as a model for the Volksgemeinschaft to be developed.

After spending his early schooling at the Heinrich-von-Kleist Gymnasium and his summers in Sweden, he part completed a political science course at the University of Freiburg, before moving to Berlin on November 1929, to study law at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

At Humboldt he became an anti-Nazi.

After a visit to France in 1931, he moved to the political left.

When he returned, he became a publicist on Der Gegner (English: "The Opponent"), a left-leaning political magazine.

In May 1932, he took control of the magazine, but it was closed by the Gestapo in February 1933.

In May 1933, Schulze-Boysen trained as a pilot and started working in Ministry of Aviation.

In the summer of 1934, he met the aristocrat Libertas Haas-Heye and married her in July 1936.

The couple held regular dinner parties and evening-picnics that became formal meetings where many people from different stratas of society met and who were confessed anti-Nazis.

By 1936, their house in Charlottenburg had become a popular meeting place and by 1937 the group began to resist.

During the Spanish Civil War, Schulze-Boysen began collecting details of the Wehrmacht's involvement in the war from the ministry.

He arranged for the documents to be passed to Soviet embassy by Gisela von Pöllnitz.

As he was promoted in the Ministry, Schulze-Boysen collected information that he used to write savage indictments of the Nazi plans.

Their first leaflet was "Der Stoßtrupp" ("The Shock Troop") that criticised the plan for the invasion of Sudetenland.

At the time, the documents were taken abroad.

At the beginning of the war, Schulze-Boysen met Arvid Harnack who was the leader of another political faction and they started to work together.

As the war progressed their combined undercover political faction, developed from a resistance organisation into an espionage networks from a small cadre of close friends, that began to collaborate with Soviet intelligence.

The espionage network, led by Schulze-Boysen lasted slightly longer than a year, from just before June 1941 to August 1942 before a blunder by Soviet intelligence exposed their names and addresses to the German Funkabwehr, which resulted in the arrest of many members of the group, including Schulze-Boysen who was arrested on 31 August 1942 and executed later the same year.

Schulze-Boysen was born in Kiel as the son of decorated naval officer Erich Edgar Schulze and Marie-Luise (née Boysen).

On his paternal side he was the grandnephew of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and on the maternal side, the German economist and philosopher Ferdinand Tönnies.

On the occasion of the 80th birthday of the Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, Schulze-Boysen gave a commemorative speech at the school.

His political involvement in high school was perceived as unusually intense.

He passed the Abitur with the overall rating "good".

His dexterity was particularly emphasized in the written and oral expression.

At the time his spiritual attitude was in agreement with the values and traditions of the family.

From then on, he appeared in public and in written statements with the double name Schulze-Boysen.