Rudolf von Scheliha

After the war, he began studying law in Breslau. During May 1919 he moved to the University of Heidelberg, where he joined the Corps Saxo-Borussia in 1919.[3] There Scheliha came in contact with republic-friendly and anti-totalitarian circles; He was elected to the AStA for the Association of Heidelberg Associations, where he vehemently opposed the anti-Semitic riots by the student body with other corps students.

Following his exam in 1921, he was first clerk at the Court of Appeal. In 1922 he joined the Foreign Office and took over in the following years tasks in the diplomatic missions of Prague, Constantinople, Angora, Katowice and Warsaw. In 1927 he was appointed Legation Secretary. In the same year he married Marie Louise von Medinger. The couple had two daughters, Sylvia, born in 1930 and Elisabeth (1934-2016 in Adliswil).[4]

A few months after Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, Scheliha became a member of the Nazi Party as a diplomat. In 1935 von Scheliha took part in the Nuremberg Rally.[5]

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. There he made contact with Polish nobles and intellectuals, which he was able to maintain in part after the beginning of the Polish campaign on 1 September 1939 and so could use for news about Nazi crimes abroad.

In 1937, Scheliha who by this time had risen to become the First Secretary at the German embassy in Warsaw began working for the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.[6] His first case officer, if not recruiter was Rudolf Herrnstadt, a journalist for the left-wing Berliner Tageblatt. As Herrnstadt was Jewish, contact with Rudolf von Scheliha would become increasingly difficult so an intermediary was needed who wouldn't be recognised. Ilse Stöbe, a communist who was a secretary to Theodor Wolff in the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, agreed to act as a cutout. Herrnstadt passed the documents that von Scheliha supplied to the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw via Stöbe until September 1939.[7]

Scheliha's motivation for espionage were entirely financial as he had a lifestyle beyond his salary, was an inveterate gambler with gambling debts and he 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 he needed.[6] Scheliha was well paid for his work, and in February 1938, a Soviet agent deposited $6,500 U.S. dollars in his bank account in Zurich, making him the best paid Soviet agent in the world.[6] It was due to intelligence sold by Scheliha that the Soviet Union was very well informed about the state of German-Polish relations in 1937-39 and that starting in October 1938 that the Reich wanted to reduce Poland down to a satellite status.[6]

Starting in March 1939, Scheliha sold documents to the NKVD showing that since Poland refused to sign the Anti-Comintern pact, that Germany was planning on invading Poland later that year.[6] Most crucially, Scheliha provided the Soviets with documents showing that the 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 (modern Gdansk, Poland) as the Danzig issue was merely a pretext for a war, and Ribbentrop was afraid if talks began, the Poles might give in.

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

Scheliha secretly made a collection of documents on the atrocities of the Gestapo, and in particular on murders of Jews in Poland, which also contained photographs of newly established extermination camps. In June 1941 he showed this dossier to the Polish intelligence agent who was a member of the anti-nazi group, the "Muszkieterowie" ("Musketeers"), Countess Klementyna Mankowska, who visited him in Berlin in order to make known these details of the Polish resistance movement and the Allies.[8]

In the autumn of 1941, Scheliha also invited his Polish friend Count Konstantin Bninski to Berlin under the pretext that he would write propaganda texts for the Foreign Office against Polish resisters. The German diplomat and historian Ulrich Sahm considers it probable in his 1990 biography that Scheliha passed on to Bninski on this occasion, material containing a comprehensive documentation of German occupational crimes and Polish resisters. Co-written with fellow German diplomat, Johann von Wühlisch, it was completed in January 1942 and was written under the title The Nazi culture in Poland, recorded on microfilm and smuggled to Britain under high personal risk of 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, the school and the university system, the dark role of the Institute of German Ostarbeiter as the driver of cultural rescheduling, the relocation and sacking of libraries, the devastation of monuments, looting of archives, museums and the looting of the private collections of Polish nobility as well as the subversion of Polish theatre, music and the press and the destruction of other cultural institutions under the forced rule of the Nazi Party.[8] The Polish government-in-exile published the document as a novel in 1944-1945.[8] Around the same time von Scheliha was in contact with Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow[9] who was also becoming increasingly anti-Fascist as he witnessed the murder of Jews and would later take part in the 20 July plot.[10]

In February 1942, Scheliha ended his attempts to propose and issue exiled poles as helpers for German propaganda. 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 to the Allies. He also sent reports on the Final Solution, including the construction and operation of more extermination camps and Hitler's order to exterminate the European Jews.[11] As part of the February trip to Switzerland he banked part of his espionage earnings. It is calculated that he paid about fifty thousand dollars for his services, but it was believed by the Germans who captured him that most of this money was consumed in domestic expenses but at least some of it was banked.[12] Von Scheliha made further trips to Switzerland in September and October 1942.

The extent of Soviet intelligence interest in Von Scheliha is show in May 1942 when Bernhard Bästlein assisted Erna Eifler, Wilhelm Fellendorf and Heinrich Koenen who were Soviet agents who had parachuted into Germany with a Wireless Telegraphy sets and were instructed to find Ilse Stöbe so as to re-establish communications with von Scheliha.[13] Koenen's mission was to pass all the material collected by von Scheliha and Stoebe and pass it to the Soviet intelligence but was arrested in Berlin on 26 October 1942.[12] Unbeknownst to both Stöbe and von Scheliha, the Gestapo had already started arresting members of the Rote Kapelle in August 1942. Stöbe was arrested on the 12 September 1942. Von Scheliha was arrested on 29 October 1942 in the personnel chief of the Foreign Office, shortly after returning from Switzerland.[1]