The true story of the extraordinary life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of the largest underground resistance group in Berlin who was executed on Hitler’s direct orders. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Berlin and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in … holding secret meetings in her apartment–a small band of political activists that grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and wrote leaflets denouncing Hitler’s regime, slipping them into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a concentration camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.
Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German Resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.
Fusing elements of biography, political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.more
historical-figures, historical-places-events, historical-research, history-and-culture, biography, Wisconsin, Germany, politics, resistance-efforts, espionage, expats*****
This is not exactly an unbiased review because I have spent most of my life in Milwaukee and am a history geek.
However, this book of diligent research is flawlessly written and contains photos of people and more. There have been countless reviews written by others that are more detailed so there is no need for me to go over that ground again. It has to be read to truly appreciate both the biography and the intense effort taken to provide the information to be assembled into a book that truly lives up to the hype.
I requested and received a free temporary ebook from Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley. Thank you!
I am devastated. I am enlightened. I am in awe.
Rebecca Donner has taken a buried life and resurrected it in a narrative nonfiction that grabbed my attention and didn’t let go. Do
Donner is the great-great niece of her subject, Mildred Harnack, an American who traveled to Berlin to study and teach. At University of Wisconsin she fell in love with a fellow student, the German Arvid. They moved to Berlin during a time of great freedom. Mildred runs the English club where the talk is all political.
“Life is good,” Mildred writes. But it is January, 1933 and Hitler’s rise to power is just beginning.
Mildred’s passion was for equality and justice for the common man. The American Literature she taught to German Students books that shared her values. As the Nazis rose to power, Mildred and Arvid became a part of the Resistance. Arvid masqueraded as a loyal Nazi government worker, slipping confidential information into the Soviet Union. Mildred’s club became a salon for the resistance.
They were outed by an inexperienced pianist who used their real names instead of code names. The entire Circle was arrested, tortured, imprisoned, and after a kangaroo court trial, beheaded. Because they had been in communication with the Soviets, the United States had little interest in Mildred’s fate, and what information was made public was slanted and incorrect.
Mildred was an amazing woman, strong in her convictions, even when starving, even in solitary confinement and battling TB, up to her last moments which were spend translating Goethe into English with a pencil stub while shackled in a cold cell.
Donner sets Mildred’s story against the rise of Hitler. Those in power thought he was a fool, a crackpot who could be controlled. But Hitler systematically dismantled every check and balance in government, told grand lies to rally the people, affirming his desire for peace while planning for war. It is a terrifying look at history and a warning of how easily one person can topple a government.
I knew that Neville Chamberlain was fooled by Hitler. I had not known that Stalin was also duped, signing a non-aggression pact with Germany while Hitler built up his war machine to attack the Soviet Union.
Famous people appear in the story. There is Arvid’s cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor famous for his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler. He was arrested because of his relationship to Arvid. Mildred was friends with the American Ambassador to Berlin’s daughter, Martha Dodd. Martha fell in love with men easily, even Nazis and Soviet spies. She had a relationship with Thomas Wolfe when he returned to Germany to spend the profits from his books that had sold so well there. The Nazi forbade money to leave the country! And, Mildred was a big fan. Later, Wolfe wrote “I Have a Thing To Tell You,” speaking of the changes he had seen in Germany, writing, “What George began to see was a picture of a great people who had been psychically wounded and were now desperately ill with some dread malady of the soul. Here was an entire nation, he now realized, that was infested with the contagion of an ever-present fear.”
Donner’s book is a stand-out not just for Mildred’s powerful story, but also for the scholarship and research that supports it, and for being a mesmerizing tale that is as emotionally impactful as a novel while making history understandable and relevant.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.