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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
October-November 2025 51
Be careful with history
The Red Orchestra‘s heroic and
doomed opposition to Hitler could
be a template for resistance but
goes unrecognised in the West
By Joe O’Byrne
A
fter the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the Iron Curtain, there was a
justifiable euphoria that led to
unwisely grand pronounce-
ments, none more so than in
Francis Fukuyama’s book ‘The End of His-
tory and the Last Man’. Fukuyama
infamously predicted that, with the end of
the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, man-
kind had experienced an ideological
revolution whereby Western liberal democ-
racy would become the final form of human
government. For a long time that has
seemed hopelessly naïve.
What we are seeing is a resurgence of the
politics of authoritarianism in many
countries. In Germany, in the recent
elections, the AfD, the Alternative für
Deutschland, received 20.8 per cent of the
vote, and if recent polls are to be believed,
it is now the biggest party in that country.
The AfD has been classified by German
intelligence as a right-wing extremist party,
and a danger to the democratic state. The
party is populist and anti-immigrant, and
has a significant neo-Nazi base.
What is most shocking to the democratic
order is the authoritarian shift in American
politics under Trump. America’s post-WW2
ideology was rooted in its contribution to
the defeat of Fascism in Europe, and the
change in policy under Trump represents a
significant shift in the world order.
In Ireland, too, we are not immune to
these developments; we have witnessed
the growth of forces that are trying to usurp
the tricolour and the 1916 Proclamation in
the name of an ‘Ireland for the Irish’, and
trying to grow an anti-immigrant movement
using an extremely narrow reading of the
Proclamation.
A word I have heard very frequently in
recent times is ‘resistance’, particularly
from people in the United States. Resistance
comes in many forms. I have recently
published a novel titled ‘The Red
Orchestra in Blue’, the story of a
resistance group in Berlin. In the
1930s the Red Orchestra was a
bohemian group of intellectuals
whose meetings often involved
picnics or sailing, book readings and
Marxist discussions. But when it
mattered they turned to resistance.
In the 1930s, many of the great
artists, such as Bertolt Brecht,
Marlene Dietrich, Thomas Mann
and Max Beckmann, were able to
go into exile, but many who were
younger and had no established
reputation found themselves trapped
in the Nazi state, and chose to do what they
could to undermine it.
One member of the Red Orchestra, Harro
Schulze-Boysen, a Lieutenant in the
Luftwae, the German air force, worked
directly under the nose of Hermann Göring.
Schulze-Boysen had begun his resistance
to the Nazi regime as a very young man in
the early 1930s and sought promotion in
the Luftwae to allow him to gain access to
war planning. The group used various
means to spirit this information out of the
country.
The Red Orchestra had used radio
communications to transmit information to
the Russians, so after WW2 and during the
Cold War, they were adopted by East
Germany as heroes, whereas in the West
they were considered to be spies. The story
of the Red Orchestra has been seldom told.
Better known is the Stauenberg plot,
which has been filmed a number of times,
including in the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie.
But there is one fundamental dierence
between the Red Orchestra and the
Stauenberg circle. They were ordinary
people, committed to ending the Nazi
regime from the outset. The Stauenberg
circle were mainly army people who had
prosecuted the war on behalf of Hitler, but
to whom it became clear the war was lost.
They acted on 20 July 1944 — late.
History did not end after the fall of the
Iron Curtain. What began was a new phase
of history. And what we are witnessing now
is a resurgence of political ideas that have
their roots in the 1930s. ‘The Red Orchestra
in Blue’ is about a group of people who
believed in humanity. Harro and Libertas
Schulze-Boysen, Elisabeth and Kurt
Schumacher, Hans and Hilde Coppi, and
many others involved in the Red Orchestra
were executed before the end of the war.
Their fate is evidence that heroism is not
necessarily recognised by history. Their
lives and their deaths are a warning. Resist
early, organise broadly, be culturally aware,
and expect little recognition — do it because
it is right.
Joe O’Byrne’s ‘The Red Orchestra in Blue’ is
published by Betimes Books —
https://betimesbooks.com
OPINION
