24 Facts About Helmut Roloff

Helmut Roloff was a German pianist, recording artist, teacher and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.

In September 1942 Roloff was arrested in Berlin in the roundup of an anti-Nazi resistance group allegedly at the centre of a wider European espionage network identified by the Abwehr under the cryptonym the Red Orchestra.

In post-war West Berlin, Helmut Roloff taught at the Academy of Music.

Helmut Roloff was born in university and garrison town of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt where his father, Gustav Helmut Roloff, was a professor of history.

Helmut Roloff began to think of music as a career in which he would not be as directly compromised by the law's corruption.

In 1935 Helmut Roloff graduated from the Hochschule fur Musik, from which Jewish teachers such as Leonid Kreutzer, Emanuel Feuermann, and Arthur Schnabel had already been dismissed and expelled.

Helmut Roloff studied with Richard Rossler and later, in 1938, privately with Wladimir Horbowski who introduced him to the Mendelssohn family.

Helmut Roloff found a teaching position, alongside Horbowski, at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory and began to give concerts.

The family's Berlin apartment was in what Helmut Roloff describes as a "totally Jewish building".

Helmut Roloff was among the exceptions, not only in refusing party membership but in deciding he had to do something against the regime.

Roloff's arrest was reported in The New York Times as part of a "big clean up in Berlin": "the majority of the person arrested were intellectuals, lawyers, actors and artists, and among them the well-known German musician, Helmut Roloff, who was taken into custody just a few hours before he was due to give a large concert in a hall sold out in advance".

Helmut Roloff dropped this leaflet in mail boxes across the district of Dahlem.

Helmut Roloff recalled that it offered a "very strong critique of the Nazis":.

Helmut Roloff never regarded himself, whether by sympathy or affiliation, a communist.

Helmut Roloff rarely spoke of his wartime experience until he was extensively interviewed by his son Stefan beginning in 1998.

Under totalitarian conditions resistance is generally too individual a decision, Stefan Helmut Roloff's concludes, for the groups that form to adhere to any one ideological line.

Helmut Roloff was appointed professor in 1950, full professor in 1953, and director of the school in 1970.

Helmut Roloff worked as a concert pianist and piano teacher throughout his life.

Helmut Roloff championed the modernists denied performance during the Third Reich.

Six months from the end of the war, Berliner Rundfunk broadcast Helmut Roloff playing Sergei Prokofiev.

In 1990, Helmut Roloff received the Order of the Sacred Treasure, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government for his contributions to Japanese music, including teaching Takahiro Sonoda, Toyoaki Matsuura and other Japanese pianists.

Helmut Roloff died in his home in Berlin on 29 September 2001.

Helmut Roloff was survived by his wife Inge Roloff, his sons Stefan Roloff, Ulrich Roloff, and Johannes Roloff.

Stefan Helmut Roloff wrote a wartime biography of his father and of the Red Orchestra, published by the Ullstein Press in 2004.