Helmut Roloff (9 October 1912 – 29 September 2001) 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 (Rote Kapelle). Covered by comrades who persuaded their interrogators that his contact with the group had been unwitting, he was spared execution and released. In post-war West Berlin, Roloff taught at the Academy of Music (Hochschule für Musik Berlin). After serving as the school's director, he retired in 1978.

Roloff was born in university and garrison town of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt where his father, Gustav Roloff, was a professor of history (a student of European colonial policy and the continental balance of power). His mother, Elisabeth, was musically gifted and introduced her son to the piano, but he first pursued studies in law.

After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, as a regular guest in the home of the Leipzig jurist Leo Rosenberg, Roloff witnessed the effects of the newly licensed harassment of Jewish people. He began to think of music as a career in which he would not be as directly compromised by the law's corruption. Meanwhile life for Roloff and his parents was becoming impossible in Giessen. On the day of the first Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, 1 April 1933, his father conspicuously walked with a Jewish colleague through the centre of town. But in the university Roloff recalls "a great rush as the sheep willingly joined the SA [...] I don't think there was a single one of my friends and acquaintances who didn't join". In 1936 the family moved to the greater anonymity of Berlin.

In 1935 Roloff graduated from the Hochschule für Musik (HfM, today the Universität der Künste Berlin, Fakultät 3), from which Jewish teachers such as Leonid Kreutzer, Emanuel Feuermann, and Arthur Schnabel had already been dismissed and expelled. Roloff studied with Richard Rössler and later, in 1938, privately with Wladimir Horbowski who introduced him to the Mendelssohn family. 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 Roloff describes as a "totally Jewish building". Arrests and deportations began in 1939, precipitating the suicide of a neighbour. Roloff insists that "If people say they didn't know about such things, that's not true. People knew. Many in Berlin, the big city, knew that the Jews were being corralled at Grunewald Station and taken east".

The music historian Fred K. Prieberg observes that in the Third Reich two thirds of musicians, many of them before 1933, "thought it opportune to join the NSDAP in a hurry" (a higher percentage than for physicians, otherwise thought to be, next to lawyers for whom there was little choice, the most Nazified of the professions). Roloff was among the exceptions, not only in refusing party membership but also in deciding he had to do something against the regime.

His first encounter with talk of organised resistance was in 1937 when he befriended, recently released from detention, a Protestant pastor called Weckerling from the dissident Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche).

In the winter of 1941, Roloff was introduced by the dentist and music lover Helmut Himpel to a resistance group in Berlin centred around the couples Adam and Greta Kuckhoff, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack. On 17 September 1942, the Gestapo, who had had his associates under surveillance, searched Roloff's family apartment. Under a piano they found a locked suitcase that Himpel, following the earlier arrest of Harro Schulz-Boysen, had given him for safekeeping a few days before. It contained a Soviet-supplied (but functionless) short-wave radio transmitter.