Rudolf von Scheliha

After the war, he studied law in Breslau. In May 1919, he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia during that year and came in contact with Republican and anti-totalitarian circles;[3] He was elected to the AStA, the Association of Heidelberg Associations, where he vehemently opposed the anti-Semitic riots by the students.

After his examination in 1921, he became first clerk at the Court of Appeal; in 1922, he joined the Foreign Office and, in following years, took over tasks in the diplomatic missions of Prague, Constantinople, Angora, Katowice and Warsaw. In 1927, he was appointed to the position of legation secretary and married Marie Louise von Medinger, the daughter of a large landowner and industrialist.[4][5] The couple had two daughters: Sylvia, born in 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.[6][7]

A few months after Adolf Hitler's appointment as Reichskanzler in January 1933, von Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party as a diplomat. In 1935, von Scheliha participated in the Nuremberg Rally.[8]

From 1932 to 1939, he was a member of the German embassy in Warsaw. He became aware of the atrocities committed by the Third Reich under the Nazi regime and made contact with Polish nobles and intellectuals; he remained capable of establishing several partial contacts after the beginning of the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, utilising them to disseminate news concerning Nazi crimes abroad.

In 1937, von Scheliha, who had risen to become the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw, began working for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.[9] His first case officer, if not recruiter, was Rudolf Herrnstadt, a journalist for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, contact with von Scheliha became increasingly difficult and an intermediary who would not be recognised was needed. Ilse Stöbe, a communist who was a secretary to Theodor Wolff for the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt, agreed to act as a cutout. Herrnstadt passed the documents that von Scheliha supplied to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw by Stöbe until September 1939.[10]

Scheliha's motivation for espionage were entirely financial, as he had a lifestyle beyond his salary, was a long-time gambler with gambling debts and liked to keep several mistresses at once. He found that selling state secrets to the Soviet Union was the best way of providing the additional income that he needed.[9] Scheliha was paid well for his work; in February 1938, a Soviet agent deposited US$6,500 in his bank account in Zurich, making him the best paid Soviet agent in the world.[9] It was from the intelligence sold by Scheliha that the Soviet Union became very well-informed about the state of German-Polish relations in 1937–1939 and that in October 1938, the Reich wanted to reduce Poland to a satellite state.[9]

In March 1939, von Scheliha began to sell documents to the NKVD, which revealed that since Poland refused to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact, Germany planned to invade Poland later that year.[9] Most crucially, Scheliha provided the Soviets with documents showing that German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had ordered the German ambassador to Poland, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, not to engage in talks about the status of the Free City of Danzig; Ribbentrop was afraid that if talks began, the Poles might abandon their claim, which was needed to be a pretext for war.

In September 1939, von Scheliha was appointed director of an information department in the Foreign Office, created to counter foreign press and radio news propaganda about the German occupation in Poland.[11] His appointment allowed him to verify the veracity of foreign reports and to interview Nazi officials.[11] In that position, he would often protest to Nazi agencies against German war crimes in Poland. He also helped Poles and Jews flee abroad.

Von Scheliha secretly made a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo, 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 the Polish intelligence agent Countess Klementyna Mankowska, who was a member of the anti-Nazi group, the Muszkieterowie ("Musketeers"), and visited him in Berlin to make the details known to the Polish Resistance and the Allies.[12]

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 considered it probable in his 1990 biography that von Scheliha then passed material to Bninski containing 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 was recorded on microfilm and smuggled to Britain, with a high personal risk to those involved. It is considered one of the most detailed contemporary accounts of the early Holocaust in Eastern Europe during the war.[2] The document describes the persecution of the church, 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 Polish nobility; the subversion of Polish theatre, music and the press; and the destruction of other cultural institutions under force by the Nazi Party.[12] The Polish government-in-exile published the document as a novel in 1944 to 1945.[12] Around then, von Scheliha was in contact with Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow who was also becoming increasingly antifascist,[13] as he witnessed the murder of Jews and would later take part in the 20 July plot.[14]

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. That spring, he travelled to Switzerland 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. He also sent reports on the Final Solution, including the construction and the operation of more extermination camps and Hitler's order to exterminate European Jews.[15]

As part of the February trip to Switzerland, he banked part of his espionage earnings. It is calculated that he was paid about $50,000 for his services, but it was believed by the Germans who captured him that most of the money was consumed in domestic expenses, but at least some of it was banked.[16] Von Scheliha made further trips to Switzerland in September and October 1942.

The extent of Soviet intelligence interest in von Scheliha was shown in May 1942 when Bernhard Bästlein assisted Erna Eifler, Wilhelm Fellendorf and Heinrich Koenen, Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany with wireless telegraphy sets and had been instructed to find Ilse Stöbe to re-establish communications with von Scheliha.[17] Koenen's mission was to pass all the material collected by von Scheliha and Stoebe to Soviet intelligence, but he was arrested in Berlin on 26 October 1942.[16]

Unknown to both Stöbe and von Scheliha, the Gestapo had already started to arrest members of the Red Orchestra in August 1942. Stöbe was arrested on 12 September 1942, and von Scheliha was arrested on 29 October 1942 in the office of the personnel director of the Foreign Office shortly after he had returned from Switzerland.[1]