The Traitors Circle

The Traitors Circle is a work of narrative nonfiction that tells the true story of a group of elite Germans who secretly opposed the Nazi regime, only to be exposed by a spy who infiltrated an afternoon tea party in wartime Berlin.

The book opens on 12 January 1944, when coordinated dawn raids swept across Nazi Germany. Officers of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, arrested Hanna Solf, widow of former ambassador Wilhelm Solf and a prominent Berlin hostess, at a cottage in Bavaria along with her daughter Lagi. That same morning, agents seized Elisabeth von Thadden, a former headmistress, at a Red Cross post in occupied France, and apprehended Arthur Zarden, a former secretary of state, and his daughter Irmgard in Berlin. Authorized by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization, the arrests targeted members of the German aristocracy whose fates had converged four months earlier at a tea party where a supposed ally secretly reported their words to the Gestapo.

The narrative traces how each figure responded to Hitler's rise to power in January 1933. Wilhelm Solf, watching Nazi storm troopers march beneath his windows, declared the moment "the end of Germany." His wife Hanna transformed their Berlin home into a salon where diplomats and dissenters spoke freely, forming the Solf Circle. Countess Maria von Maltzan, a young aristocrat from Silesia, began smuggling anti-regime information out of Germany for a Jesuit priest, repeatedly outwitting the Gestapo. Elisabeth von Thadden, who had founded an elite boarding school near Heidelberg, initially accommodated the regime but grew disillusioned as the Nazis persecuted Jews and attacked Christianity. Otto Kiep, Germany's consul general in New York, risked his career by publicly honoring Albert Einstein at a 1933 dinner, then spent years agonizing over how to oppose a regime he served. Meanwhile, Herbert "Leo" Lange, born into poverty, joined the SS in 1933, beginning an ascent that would make him a central figure in industrialized mass murder.

Through the 1930s, these individuals built parallel lives of resistance. The Solfs helped Jews flee Germany through diplomatic contacts and forged papers. Elisabeth admitted Jewish pupils to her school until a Gestapo investigation forced its closure in 1941. Maria turned her Berlin apartment into a refuge for Jews, staging the fake suicide of her Jewish lover, Hans Hirschel, so police records listed him as dead while he hid in her flat. Otto Kiep joined an anti-Hitler cell within the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service, alongside the young lawyer Helmuth James von Moltke.

Lange, by contrast, spent these years perfecting the technology of genocide. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, his detachment used gas vans to murder thousands of disabled patients before shifting to the mass killing of Jews. In December 1941, he established Chełmno, the first dedicated Nazi extermination camp. By 1942, Lange had returned to Berlin as deputy head of a Gestapo counterintelligence section.

In summer 1943, Lange recruited a young doctor named Paul Reckzeh as a secret agent. Reckzeh traveled to Switzerland posing as a resistance sympathizer, where he secured a letter of introduction to Elisabeth von Thadden from Bianca Segantini, a family friend. He appeared at Elisabeth's Berlin flat on 9 September 1943 and was invited to a tea party the next day.

The gathering on 10 September brought together Elisabeth, the Zardens, Otto Kiep, diplomat Hilger van Scherpenberg, anti-Nazi activist Fanny von Kurowsky, Hanna Solf, and others. The guests discussed the war with unusual candor. Otto declared that "unless a miracle happens," he saw "black for Germany." Hanna said of Hitler, "When we get him, we'll put him against a wall." Reckzeh offered to carry letters to Switzerland, and several guests gave him material to deliver. Maria von Maltzan, who had planned to attend, stayed away after an instinctive warning.

Fears about Reckzeh were confirmed when word reached Moltke, through intermediaries inside the Research Office, the Nazis' eavesdropping apparatus, that Lange had requested phone taps on all attendees. Moltke warned Otto, and the group froze Reckzeh out. When Lange saw his targets go silent, he secured Himmler's authorization for the January arrests.

Arthur Zarden did not survive to face trial. On 18 January, after a week of interrogation, he threw himself from a window at the Gestapo building. Otto, deceived by an SS officer's assurances, revealed that Moltke had warned him about Reckzeh, triggering Moltke's arrest. The remaining prisoners were sent to Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp for women, where Lange subjected them to months of brutal interrogation. Hanna Solf endured nightly sessions lasting up to 14 hours. When Lange threatened to execute her mother, Lagi responded, "I am sorry; then you have to execute my mother." Elisabeth suffered a breakdown under the weight of guilt for having introduced Reckzeh but never incriminated anyone.

The trial took place on 1 July 1944 before Roland Freisler, the notorious president of the People's Court. Reckzeh testified as star witness. Elisabeth and Otto were sentenced to death. Van Scherpenberg received two years for failing to report what he heard. Kurowsky and Irmgard Zarden were acquitted. Hanna Solf's case was separated, possibly due to Japanese diplomatic intervention.

Later that month, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's 20 July assassination attempt against Hitler failed, triggering mass arrests of some 7,000 people. The conspirators' papers named Otto as their prospective press chief, linking the tea-party case to the wider plot. Otto was tortured and forced to sign a false confession. On 26 August 1944, he was hanged on a butcher's hook at Plötzensee prison. Elisabeth spent her final weeks reading scripture and writing farewell letters with striking calm. On 8 September, she was beheaded by guillotine.

Throughout this period, Maria continued her resistance. In August 1944, she led some 20 Jews to a stopped train outside Berlin, where they were hidden in sealed freight cars bearing Swedish diplomatic seals and transported to Sweden.

The Solfs faced a second indictment, but their trial was postponed repeatedly. On 3 February 1945, an American air raid killed Freisler and destroyed the case files. In April, discharge certificates obtained by an anti-Nazi lawyer secured Hanna and Lagi's release from Moabit prison. Hanna, weighing approximately 90 pounds, walked free through a devastated Berlin on the eve of the Reich's collapse.

The book traces the post-war fates of survivors and betrayer alike. Maria married Hans Hirschel, later battled drug addiction, and rebuilt her life as a veterinarian. Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial authority, recognized her as Righteous among the Nations, an honor for non-Jews who saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust, for rescuing at least 60 people. Hanna Solf testified at Nuremberg and died in 1954, her health destroyed by imprisonment. Paul Reckzeh, convicted in East Germany in 1950, was pardoned after less than two years and fled to East Germany in 1955 to avoid a West German arrest warrant. When his daughter Barbara attempted to escape to the west in 1978, evidence strongly suggests Reckzeh betrayed her to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. After reunification, Irmgard Zarden sent Reckzeh postcards demanding to know whether he could sleep at night, but the statute of limitations prevented reopening his case. He died in Hamburg in 1996, aged 82, having never faced justice.