Red Orchestra

Listeners can expect a large collection of true anecdotes told by Germans and foreigners living through the scourge of National Socialism under Adolf Hitler. So great was the revulsion to Hitler's government that an underground resistance--called the Red Orchestra by the Gestapo--developed. Author and narrator Anne Nelson tells the stories of the famous and not-so-famous in the movement. Her German has an accent identifiable as American; it blends seamlessly with her English. Nelson's taciturn voice, a purring monotone, only strays once from her natural one as she shouts an angry quote. Both this work and Nelson's performance reassure listeners that many Germans so hated their Austrian fŸhrer that they were willing to risk their lives and families to subvert his dictatorship. J.A.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

February 16, 2009
In this inspiring account, noted journalist and playwright Nelson documents the wartime journey of Greta Kuckhoff, a young German, and her valiant colleagues who formed a potent resistance to the Hitler regime in its glory days. When Kuckhoff returned home from America in 1929 after university study, she joined with a band of young Communists, leftist Jews and other German antifascists to thwart the rise of Hitler at the risk of torture and death. Nelson explains in telling detail about the Nazis’ tight grip on power after the 1933 Reichstag fire, eliminating all political foes, including Jews and other “non-Aryan” types, yet the Kuckhoffs, Mildred and Avrid Harnack, and other members of the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle
) fought fascist censorship, slid their people into Nazi ministries, helped Jews to flee and provided the Allies with vital information to aid the war effort. Nelson’s riveting book speaks proudly of Greta, Mildred and all of the nearly three million Germans who resisted Hitler’s iron will, and gives the reader a somber view of hell from the inside.