Libertas Viktoria "Libs" Schulze-Boysen (née Haas-Heye; 20 November 1913 – 22 December 1942) was a German noblewoman and resistance fighter against the Nazis. From the early 1930s to 1940, she attempted to build a literary career, first as a press officer and later as a writer and journalist. Initially sympathetic to the Nazis, she changed her mind after meeting and marrying Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. As an aristocrat, Schulze-Boysen had contact with many different people in different strata of German society. Starting in 1935, she utilized her position to recruit left-leaning Germans into discussion groups which she hosted at her and Harro's apartment, where they sought to influence their guests. Through these discussions, resistance to the Nazi regime grew, and by 1936, she and Harro began to actively resist the Nazis. During the early 1940s, whilst working as a censor for the German Documentary Film Institute, Schulze-Boysen began to document atrocities committed by the Nazis from photographs of war crimes forwarded by soldiers of the Sonderbehandlungen task force to the Film Institute.
By 1940, the couple came into contact with other Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance groups and collaborated with them. The most important of these was run by Arvid Harnack. From April 1941, their underground resistance group became an espionage network that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. That organisation became known as the Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle") by the Abwehr. Schulze-Boysen was fully aware of her husband's espionage activities and became one of his most active agents, working as a courier, a writer of seditious pamphlets and a recruiter for the group. When Harro was not present she deputised as the leader of the group. When her husband was arrested in August 1942 by the Gestapo, she made a valiant attempt to destroy evidence of their work and warn other members of the group, but it was to no avail. Schulze-Boysen was arrested in September 1942, a month after her husband Harro, and both were executed on the same day in Plötzensee Prison.
Schulze-Boysen was born in Paris, the youngest of three children. Her father was the Heidelberg-born Otto Ludwig Haas-Heye (1879–1959), couturier to the aristocracy, and her mother was a noted pianist, Countess Viktoria Ada Astrid Agnes zu Eulenburg (1886–1967). Libertas's parents married in Liebenberg Castle on 13 May 1909 and lived for a time in London and Paris. They were Protestants who believed in providing a religious foundation for their children. Despite her upbringing, Libertas never became overtly religious, although many of her early poems and later letters show Christian roots. Her sister was Countess Ottora Maria Douglas-Reimer (1910–2001), who married Count Carl Douglas (1908–1961), a Swedish diplomat. The couple had four children: Count Gustav Archibald Sigvart Douglas (1938–2023), a stockbroker, Princess Elisabeth Christina Douglas (b. 1940), Rosita Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (b. 1943), an artist, and their youngest son, Carl Philipp Morton, (1945- ) a civil engineer. Libertas's older brother, Johannes Haas-Heye (1912 - 2008), was a journalist and diplomat.
Her mother was known as "Thora"—spelled "Tora"—and came from an old Prussian noble family. She was the youngest of the eight children of the Prussian diplomat and composer Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg and his Swedish wife, Countess Augusta Constantia Ulrike Charlotte Sandels. Philipp zu Eulenburg was a close friend of Kaiser William II, German Emperor. Eulenburg and William II were allegedly lovers. This allegation was published as a series of articles by influential journalist Maximilian Harden in the Berlin newspapers between 1907 and 1909. It ran so long that it became known as the Eulenburg affair.
In 1921, when Libertas was eight years old, her parents divorced (unusual at the time) and her grandfather died. Libertas spent part of her childhood at Eulenburg's country estate, Liebenberg Castle (near Berlin). She was taught initially by a governess.
In 1922, she began attending a school in Berlin while living with her father, who headed the fashion department of the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Later, a co-worker of her father (artist Valerie Wolffenstein) supervised her during a summer in Switzerland in 1924, where Libertas learned to draw. Between 1926 and 1932, Schulze-Boysen was sent to be educated at boarding schools in Paris, London and Switzerland.
In 1932, Schulze-Boysen completed her Abitur at a girls' finishing school in Zurich, followed by a 9-month stay in Ireland and the United Kingdom. After returning in January 1933, Schulze-Boysen attended a Nazi torchlight procession that marched past the Reich Chancellery. Though not totally understanding the new and powerful German Youth Movement, she was impressed enough with them to join the Nazi Party with member number 1 551 344, in March 1933, and at the same time the League of German Girls (German: Bund Deutscher Mädel).
In May of the same year, Schulze-Boysen moved to Berlin after being hired by the motion picture company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) as a press officer. The position consisted of writing reviews to inform the media and public about new cinematic releases. During the spring of 1933, the film studio had sacked all its Jewish employees, leaving it short-staffed and making openings for non-Jewish workers. Initially, Libertas worked on press copy for the American films Sons of the Desert and Dancing Lady, both of which were immediate successes. In May 1933, when the studio started to feel the effects of Nazi censorship, it was forced to drop Herman Mankiewicz's screenplay The Mad Dog of Europe, a film meant to illuminate the worsening treatment of Jews in Germany at that time. Mankiewicz would later go on to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane.
In April 1934, Libertas met Harro Schulze-Boysen while they were both sailing on the Wannsee. Harro Schulze-Boysen had been the publisher of the left-liberal magazine Der Gegner (English: "The Opponent") between 1932 and 1933. It was closed down when he was arrested by the Sturmabteilung in April 1933. He was badly beaten and lost half his ear, and was only released due to the influence of his mother. Besides the mutilation of his ear, the attack left Harro with damaged kidneys. His Jewish friend Henry Erlanger, who was arrested at the same time, did not survive the beating.
Harro was in the habit of bringing his work friends from Der Gegner together with his other friends and colleagues for social evenings in his apartment, during which they discussed philosophical and political questions of the day. To protect themselves from persecution, the couple surrounded themselves with a group of politically incorruptible friends who were left-leaning anti-fascists, among them artists, pacifists and communists.
In October 1934, the couple moved in together to an apartment in Hohenzollerndamm, in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin. On 15 January 1935, Schulze-Boysen left to join the Reich Labour Service for female youth (Freiwilligen Arbeitsdienst für die weibliche Jugend) for six months' voluntary work near Glindow, close to Potsdam. On 18 July 1935, she completed her six months of voluntary service, she returned to work at MGM. Her lack of enthusiasm for her voluntary service was such that she decided to write a book that was brutally honest, that described the daily fight for assertion, the status of women in the community and the fight for ideals. She submitted the manuscript to the writer Ernst von Salomon, a family friend who worked at the Rowohlt publishing house for review. Salomon believed it was good enough to publish, but had doubts as to whether the Reich Labour Service would allow it. Rowohlt wanted to publish it for precisely for that reason. Libertas intended to submit the manuscript for review to the Reich Labour Service, but whether that actually happened, is unknown. Salomon heard nothing further on that point. The nature of her work at MGM—the tedious cycle of film promotion and censor work—made Libertas restless.