Helmut Roloff

Helmut Roloff (9 October 1912 – 29 September 2001) was a German pianist, recording artist, teacher and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, as a regular guest in the home of the Leipzig 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, 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".

The music historian Fred K. Prieberg observes that in the Third Reich two thirds of musicians, many of them before 1933, "thought it opportune to join the NSDAP 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.

In 1935 Roloff graduated from the Hochschule für Musik (HfM, today the Universität der Künste Berlin, Fakultät 3), from which Jewish teachers such as Leonid Kreutzer, Emanuel Feuermann, and Arthur Schnabel had already been dismissed and expelled.

In 1936 the family moved to the greater anonymity of Berlin.

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 (Bekennende Kirche).

Roloff studied with Richard Rössler and later, in 1938, privately with Wladimir Horbowski who introduced him to the Mendelssohn 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".

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 and Arvid and Mildred Harnack.

In September 1942 Roloff was arrested in Berlin in the roundup of an anti-Nazi 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, Roloff taught at the Academy of Music (Hochschule für Musik Berlin).

On 17 September 1942, the Gestapo, 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, 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.

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 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 [...]

After serving as the school's director, he retired in 1978.

Roloff was born in university and garrison town of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt 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.