Erwin Gehrts

Erwin Gehrts (18 April 1890 in Hamburg – 10 February 1943 in Plötzensee Prison) was a German conservative socialist, resistance fighter against the Nazi regime, journalist and colonel in the Luftwaffe. Trained as a teacher, Gehrts was conscripted as a flying officer during World War I. During the interwar period, he became a journalist. However, with the emergence of the Nazi states, his newspaper, the Tägliche Rundschau, was banned. Finding work with the Luftwaffe, he became disillusioned with the Nazis. He became associated with a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") by the Abwehr and an informer to Harro Shulze-Boysen, passing secrets from the air ministry.

Life

The son of a merchant, Gehrts grew up before the period known as "Wilhelminism". As a youth he became a member of the Wandervogel achieving the rank of Lieutenant. Gehrts was editor-in-chief until 1932, when he worked as a journalist for the Tägliche Rundschau newspaper in Berlin. In 1941-1942 Gehrts came into direct contact with the resistance group around Schulze-Boysen that would later be called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Gehrts became an informer to Schulze-Boysen, supplying him with all the documents that he received in his capacity as a staff officer on the General Staff of the Luftwaffe. Schulze-Boysen incorporated much of this information into his own reports, that were sometimes passed to Arvid Harnack to be written into his own reports, then couriered to Soviet intelligence. His wife, Erika Gehrts exerted significant effort in her endeavours for a more lenient sentence.