Rudolf Roessler (German: Rößler; 22 November 1897 – 11 December 1958) was a Protestant German and a dedicated anti-Nazi. During the interwar period, Roessler was a lively cultural journalist, with a focus on theatre. In 1934, Roessler became stateless by Germany and as a political refugee, moved to Lucerne in Switzerland. There he established a small anti-Nazi publishing firm known as Vita Nova that published Exilliteratur by fellow exiled writers. Late in the summer of 1942, Roessler ran the Lucy spy ring, an anti-Nazi espionage operation that was part of the Red Three while working for Rachel Dübendorfer through the cut-out . Roessler was able to provide a great quantity of high-quality intelligence, around 12,000 typed pages, sourced from the German High Command of planned operations on the Eastern Front, usually within a day of operational decisions being made. Later in the war, Roessler was able to provide the Soviet Union with intelligence on the V-1 and V-2 missiles. During the Cold War, Roessler reactivated his network and he spied on NATO countries in Western Europe under orders from the military intelligence services of the Czechoslovak Republic, until he was arrested by the Swiss authorities and convicted of espionage in 1953.
Early life Roessler was born on 22 November 1897 in Kaufbeuren, Kingdom of Bavaria. His father was Lutheran Bavarian Forestry official Georg Roessler and his mother was Sophie née Kleemann. He was the youngest of five children. Roessler graduated from in Augsburg at the age of 17.
Military career When he was eighteen, Roessler was drafted into the 120th (2nd Württemberg) Infantry "Emperor William, King of Prussia" regiment of the Imperial German Army in Ulm in 1916. On 28 April 1916, he was convicted following court martial under German military law of going AWOL from his unit and sentenced to 5 months and 15 days in military prison; an appeal against this was unsuccessful. Roessler was pardoned to serve at the front on 15 July. First he was commanded to the Battle of the Somme, one of the most costly battles of World War I on the Western Front. After the failed British breakthrough attempts came to an end, Roessler took part in trench warfare on the slightly dented German front from 27 November to 21 December. After serving at the front, he developed a lengthy stomach and intestinal illness near Arras and was admitted to the Denain and Tegel hospitals for treatment.
From 25 May to 12 July 1917, Roessler's unit was deployed to an area south of Ypres, that was under continuous British artillery bombardment from 21 May to 7 June. From 20 July to 10 August 1917 the unit was located in the Upper Alsace. Roessler then fought in the Third Battle of Ypres from 19 August to 10 September 1917. From 11 September to 12 November, Roessler took part in the fighting along the Hindenburg Line. On 13 November, his unit moved north. There he was removed from fighting near Hooglede on 6 December and taken to a hospital near Deinze. In January and February 1918, Roessler fought in the trenches in Flanders. His stomach and intestinal disease had not healed and he was admitted to a military hospital in Ghent on 28 February 1918, recuperating for more than a month. On 15 March 1919, he was discharged from the army.
Roessler was left with a lasting negative opinion of how the war was fought in 1916 and 1917 and the methods with which the lives of frontline soldiers were being wasted for the survival of what he increasingly saw as a power-hungry elite.
Civilian career After the end of the war, he studied theology in Augsburg. Roessler, a liberal conservative, became a pacifist and eventually an opponent of Nazism. He started working as a trainee journalist at the , a German daily newspaper which was one of the most important Catholic newspapers in Germany until it was banned by the Nazis in 1935. In 1922, Roessler founded the Augsburger Literary Society along with Bertold Brecht and others and became its chairman. Many prominent writers joined the society including Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Graf Keyserling and Fedor Stepun. In the same year he was promoted to editor, a position he held for a year.
In 1924, Roessler moved to work at the Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily newspaper printed in Bavaria as a correspondent in Augsburg. From 1925, Roessler contributed copy to the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Kölnische Zeitung and the Vossische Zeitung newspapers. From 1925 to 1927, he was editor of Form und Sinn ("Form and Sense"), a journal for art and intellectual life. Hans Carossa and Hermann Hesse published articles in this short-lived journal. On 15 July 1926, in an essay entitled Das Glaubensbekenntnis der Dichter (The Poets' Creed), Roessler himself approvingly reviewed the recently published work Das Gute (The Good) by the then well-known Basel philosopher Paul Häberlin. In it, Häberlin asserted the unity of goodness, beauty and truth in God's creation. Roessler adopted this point of view.
Stage People's Association
In 1927, Roessler became associated with the Christian-conservative (Stage People's Association) in Berlin, which from 1919 to 1933 attempted to increase the number of people attending theatre, to ensure the advancement of German theatre stage people. The Bühnenvolksbund wanted to revive Christian plays such as Christmas, Passion, and other mystery plays. Theatres were to be encouraged to include such plays in their repertoires. However, these efforts were never successful as membership fees, even when combined with state subsidies, were insufficient to enable the organisation to maintain a stable financial position.
In 1928, Roessler became executive director and a playwright for the association, as well as head of the Bühnenvolksbund publishing house. For the next two years, Roessler edited the magazines Form und Sinn and, from August 1932, the Deutsche Bühnenblätter, a theatre magazine, and was co-editor of the Bühnenvolksbund Das Nationaltheater ("The National theatre", a magazine). In 1930, he co-wrote Thespis : das Theaterbuch ("Thespis: the Theatre Book"), which summarised theatre production in Germany from 1924 to 1929, with German art historian , German writer Walter Hollander, and Austro-German writer, poet, and art critic Theodor Däubler. Roessler was also chairman of the supervisory board of the stage companies Südwestdeutsche Bühne GmbH Frankfurt, Schlesische Bühne GmbH Breslau, and Ostpreußische Bühne GmbH Königsberg.
Impeachment and expulsion In 1932, the Militant League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur, KfdK) began to found its own theatre visitors' association and to persuade at least some of the middle-class members of the Stage People's Association to join the Nazi association. Roessler opposed the ethnic politicization of theatre and the attempt to subordinate art to mass taste. Rather, he believed that art should influence mass taste. From the KfdK's point of view, this was an arrogant liberal and conservative idea. After the Reichstag elections on 5 March 1933, the Nazis quickly began to dissolve the Stage People's Association and transfer the local groups and their members and the regional associations into the ethnic Reich Association of the German Stage (Reichsverband Deutsche Bühne). The Stage People's Association at the Reich level was to be dissolved.
On 5 May 1933, the chairman of the KfdK, Hans Hinkel, who later became the third managing director of the Reich Chamber of Culture, placed Roessler on leave and prohibited him from continuing to exercise his directorship, effectively expelling him. On 8 May, the KfdK took over Roessler's desk. Roessler and Brünker (Roesslers deputy) fought for an interim injunction against the removal before the Berlin district court. The Prussian Prime Minister Hermann Göring then told the press that he would no longer tolerate the KfdK's attacks but would punish them. The KfdK actually brought back the furniture that had been taken away. However, he later withdrew the financial assets of the Stage People's Association, which were essentially funded by members' contributions.
As a result, the Stage People's Association became insolvent and the ethnic Reichsverband Deutsche Bühne e.V filed an application with the Mitte district court on 29 May 1933 to open bankruptcy proceedings because of an outstanding invoice from a typewriter supplier in the amount of 1,170 RM. On 15 June 1933, bankruptcy proceedings were opened and from then on, Roessler was without income. In 1934, an investigation was initiated against Roessler and the Sturmabteilung appeared to search his office. In May 1934, Roessler left Germany as a political refugee and emigrated to Lucerne Switzerland with his wife Olga, with the help of his friend, the Swiss librarian and Marxist Xaver Schnieper, who Roessler had met during his studies in drama in Germany.
Vita Nova
In January 1934 and while still in Berlin, he co-founded the Vita Nova Verlag ("New Life Publisher") publishing house at 36 Fluhmattstrasse in Lucerne, Switzerland along with the Catholic bookseller Josef Stocker and the business women Henriette Racine. Stocker had been encouraged to help co-found the publishing firm by Jesuit priest and theological philosopher Otto Karrer, with the introductions arranged by Schnieper. Vita Nova was an anti-Nazi publishing house that primarily published German writers in exile. The company published some fifty brochures and books that attacked both Nazism and Stalinism, contrasting them with the Christian values of the older Germany and Russia. The small firm also published works that were critical of Francoist Spain. Indeed, the firm provided the only real publishing house in Western Europe for exiled Christian, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox writers and playwrights to publish their work. Amongst the most notable were Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier and the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster.
Roessler used the pseudonym, "R. A. Hermes” to publish his own work at Vita Nova. From 1940 to 1941, Roessler wrote and published a 94-page memorandum using his Hermes pseudonym that was titled Die Kriegsschauplätze und die Bedingungen der Kriegführung (Memorandum on the war situation after the Battle of Britain) that discussed how partisans forces needed to be formed in countries that had been conquered, otherwise the country had to be dominated by forces in place. He described how Germany would fail to take this lesson into account, particularly in Poland and the Soviet Union, where the campaigns would be designed as a war of annihilation between two races and two world views.
Expatriation On 20 May 1935, the German consulate in Basel refused to issue Roessler with a new passport and he was informed privately that he was being deported, i.e. made stateless. The Nazi regime finally revoked his German citizenship in 1937. The expatriation of Roessler and his wife was officially announced in the German newspaper, No. 96 of 28 April 1937. The reason the consulate provided for the decision was that Roessler had violated loyalty to the Reich and the people and damaged German interests. In 1940, Roessler managed to obtain a Czechoslovak passport for himself and his wife, which was issued to him by the consulate in Marseille of the no longer existing Czechoslovak Republic. In the event of a German occupation of Switzerland, he wanted to make it possible for him to leave the country.