Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen was a left-wing German publicist and Luftwaffe officer during World War II. As a young man, Schulze-Boysen grew up in prosperous family with two siblings, with an extended family who were aristocrats. After spending his early schooling at the Heinrich-von-Kleist Gymnasium and his summers in Sweden, he part completed a political science course at the University of Freiburg, before moving to Berlin on November 1929, to study law at the Humboldt University of Berlin. At Humboldt he became an anti-Nazi. After a visit to France in 1931, he moved to the political left. When he returned, he became a publicist on Der Gegner, a left-leaning political magazine. In May 1932, he took control of the magazine, but it was closed by the Gestapo in February 1933.

Erwin Gehrts 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 by the Abwehr and an informer to Harro Shulze-Boysen, passing secrets from the air ministry.