Rudolf Roessler

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Rudolf Rössler (also Rudolf Rössler ) (born November 22, 1897 in Kaufbeuren ; † December 11, 1958 in Switzerland ) was a German theater critic, publisher and owner of a news agency (alias: Lucy ) who sent secret information to the during the Second World War Soviet Union and, after 1945, forwarded military news about the occupying powers in the West and material about the Allied measures in Germany to the Czech and Swiss intelligence services (Bureau Ha).

Life

Officially

Rudolf Rößler is said to have officially been the son of a Bavarian forest official. He completed his training in Augsburg and was recruited for military service during the First World War . After the war he started to work as a journalist; first as a reporter in Augsburg and then as a literary critic in Berlin .

Indeed

In fact, Rößler, who was by no means born as Rößler, was a Sudeten German and one of those K. u. K. General staff who were lying on the street in 1918. The so-called Rößler, who was born in Bohemia, is one of those former K. u. K. were officers of German nationality, with whose help the fortunes of war of Czechoslovakia turned against Hungary in Slovakia. When Prague then dismantled the rescuers from the emergency, he got into the Sudeten German resistance movement and from there into the Sudeten German Legion in Saxony . He then slipped from political conspiracy into secret service conspiracy with the consistency that is so characteristic of the fate of agents.

He was friends with many artists and writers who were persecuted by the Nazis and thus became an opponent of the Nazis himself. In June 1933 he left his position as dramaturge and managing director of the Bühnenvolksbund e. V. and from his work as director of the Bühnenvolksbundverlag GmbH . As a result, he also lost his functions as chairman of the supervisory boards of Südwestdeutsche Bühne GmbH , Frankfurt, Schlesische Bühne GmbH , Breslau, Ostpreussische Bühne GmbH , Königsberg, and other theaters. In addition, his voluntary public work as a member of the Film Inspectorate and as a member of the art committee at the Berlin Police Headquarters was banned. His literary work in Germany, which consisted primarily of his activity as the editor of the theater magazines Das Nationaltheater and Deutsche Bühnenblätter and as the editor and author of the dramaturgical series Schauspiel der Gegenwart and as editor and publisher of the theater literature he had built up in the Bühnenvolksbundverlag since 1928, was thereby ended .

He then left Germany and moved to Lucerne , where he ran the small publisher Vita Nova . To this end, he expanded his circle of acquaintances in Germany to a network with which he was able to obtain information about the actual situation in Germany despite the Nazi media monopoly.

Among other things, he is said to have given the Soviet leadership details about the Citadel operation , a decisive battle on the Eastern Front in the Kursk Arc. With this legend, revanchist circles tried again and again to justify a new edition of the stab- in-the- back legend for the Second World War, although Der Spiegel had already proven in 1972 that: “Wherever Roessler entertained informants in Germany - they could not have been in key military positions. This was proven above all by his inaccurate reports before the Battle of Kursk in July 1943. "

The source of his information, which was given under the code name "Werther", remained unclear for a long time. According to Rößler's declarations after the war, they came from high-ranking military officials who were anti-Nazi and whom he knew from pre-war times. Colonel-General Alfred Jodl , Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff , testified at the Nuremberg Trial that reports were more likely in Moscow than on his desk. Another explanation is that Roessler was actually serving the British government to use Ultra to transmit German radio messages decrypted by the British to Moscow, without the latter being able to see that the British could read the German encrypted secret traffic. In fact, through their espionage in Britain, the Soviets knew that the British could do just that.

From 1938/1939 Rößler had contact through Hans Bernd Gisevius to the circles of the military opposition in Germany around Hans Oster and from 1940 also to Elizabeth Wiskemann from the press department of the British legation in Bern. Rößler got in touch with Hans Hausamann through Xaver Schnieper , which led to a regular connection and work for Rößler for the intelligence collection point 1 of the Swiss military intelligence service in Lucerne.

Rößler continued his activities after the Second World War. He delivered information from West Germany to the East. For this reason he was arrested in 1953 and brought to justice for continued intelligence service against foreign states . The Federal Criminal Court, the highest Swiss instance, sentenced him to one year in prison on November 5, 1953. After his release, he was a broken man and soon died.

People of the "Red Chapel"

Fonts

  • The theaters of war and the conditions of warfare. Vita Nova Verlag, Lucerne 1941.
  • Play 1929/30. Bühnenvolksbundverlag, Berlin 1930.
  • Play 1928/29. Bühnenvolksbundverlag, Berlin 1929.

literature

  • Pierre Accoce, Pierre Quet: A Man Called Lucy. Coward-McCann, New York 1967.
  • Alexander Foote : manual for spies. Leske Verlag, Darmstadt 1954.
  • Max Huber:  Rößler, Rudolf. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-428-11202-4 , pp. 751 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Peter Kamber: Secret Agent. BasisDruck, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86163-097-5 . ( Internet attachment , PDF; 4.2 MB).
  • Peter Kamber: Csatorna Berlinbe - Rachel Dübendorfer, Christian Schneider és Rudolf Roessler. [Canal to Berlin - Rachel Dübendorfer, Christian Schneider and Rudolf Roessler.] In: Abel Hegedüs, János Suba (ed.): Tanulmányok Radó Sándorról. A Budapest 2009. nov. 4-5-én rendezet konferencia elöadásainak szerkesztett anyaga. [Studies on Alexander Radó. Edited versions of the lectures at the scientific conference held in Budapest on November 4-5, 2009]. HM Hadtörténeti Intézet és Múzeum [War History Institute and Museum of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense], Budapest 2010, pp. 45–73.
  • Peter Kamber: Rudolf Roessler. Secret Messages for Peace. Radio essay, Süddeutscher Rundfunk, January 29, 1996.
  • Peter Kamber: Espionage that wasn't: The Cold War and the Rössler / Schnieper criminal case. In: Basler Magazin (magazine of the Basler Zeitung ), No. 26, July 2, 1994, p. 6f.
  • Anthony Read, David Fisher: Operation Lucy: Most Secret Spy Ring of the Second World War. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1981, ISBN 0-698-11079-X .
  • Xaver Schnieper: Mobilizing Conscience. Portrait sketch of Rudolf Rössler. In: Free Central Switzerland. Social democratic daily newspaper for the cantons of Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Obwalden, Nidwalden and Zug, No. 123, May 28, 1966.
  • LUCY CONTRA OKH . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1954, pp. 20 ( Online - Mar. 17, 1954 ).
  • SWISS CONFEDERATION CONTRA LUCY . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1954, pp. 29 ( Online - Mar. 31, 1954 ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Swiss Confederation versus "LUCY" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 14 , 1954 ( online - Mar. 31, 1954 ).
  2. ↑ Werther never lived . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 1972 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Roessler, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German theater critic, publisher
DATE OF BIRTH November 22, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaufbeuren
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 1958
Place of death Switzerland