Lucy Spy Ring/ Red Orchastra
Rudolf Roessler was not only the leader of the Lucy spy ring , but he was a member of the Red Orchastra. This excerpt, taken from the national archives, explains exactly what the Red Orchastra was and what they stood for: "The Red Orchestra is perhaps one of the best known espionage cases of the Second World War. The U.S. Army's Investigative Records Repository (IRR) file on the Soviet espionage network, being released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, contains documents related to an investigation of the Red Orchestra case during the early postwar period. It is clear from the contents of the file that Allied intelligence officers were interested, not in possible Gestapo misdeeds (use of torture) in eradicating the Red Orchestra, but rather in what information about Soviet military intelligence practices might be gleaned from German files and from interrogating those Germans involved with the case." This next excerpt describes the relationship of the Lucy Spy Ring to the Red Orchastra: "The Lucy Ring, perhaps the most important branch of the Red Orchestra, possessed some impeccable sources of information. These sources included Lieutenant General Fritz Theile, a senior officer in the Wehrmacht's communications branch, and Colonel Freiherr Rudolf von Gersdorff, who eventually became intelligence officer of Army Group Center on the eastern front. The Lucy Ring provided Soviet leader Josef Stalin with extraordinarily accurate information on Nazi intentions vis-à-vis operations on the German eastern front. The Germans apparently knew of the existence of a Soviet spy ring operating in fairly high levels of the Reich Government administration as early as 1941. However, like many counterespionage cases, it was only after two years of painstaking investigation that the case was finally broken.
