Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra
Shareen Blair Brysac
Language: English
Pages: 512
ISBN: 0195132696
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This gripping and heartbreaking narrative is the first full account of an American woman who gave her life in the struggle against the Nazi regime. As members of a key resistance group, Mildred and her husband, Arvid Harnack, assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942, following a Soviet blunder, the Gestapo arrested, tortured and tried some four score members of the Harnack's group, which the Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra.
Mildred Fish-Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on February 16, 1943, on the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler--the only American woman executed as an underground conspirator. Yet as World War II ended and the Cold War began, her courage, idealism and self-sacrifice went largely unacknowledged in America and the democratic West, and were distorted and sanitized in the Communist East. Only now, with the opening of long-sealed archives, can the full story be told.
Resisting Hitler is based on extensive interviews with Fish-Harnack family, friends and associates; it draws on personal correspondence and formerly classified German and Soviet KGB files and recently released CIA and FBI dossiers. It describes the life of a Wisconsin girl whose intelligence and beauty captivated a visiting scholar, Arvid Harnack, a member of a distinguished German academic family. It explores for the first time the complex familial connections of the Harnacks, Delbrücks and Bonhoeffers, twelve of whom were executed for resistance acts. And it details Mildred's friendship with Martha Dodd, daughter of FDR's ambassador to the Third Reich, whose affair with a Soviet diplomat led to his death.
Moments before her death, Mildred said, "I have loved Germany so much." In this superbly told life of an unjustly forgotten woman, Shareen Blair Brysac depicts the human side of a controversial resistance group that for too long has been portrayed as merely a Soviet espionage network. The extraordinary story of Mildred Fish-Harnack's ten dramatic years of resisting the Nazi regime also reminds today's readers of the hard moral choices that beset opponents of a ruthless totalitarian dictatorship.
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Zaturenska, who was the Lit’s ‘‘real Russian.’’ A precocious poet, Marya published in national magazines while still in her teens. She often contributed poems on Russian themes—‘‘elegies over John Reed’’ and a poem about the Russian writer and painter Marie Bashkirtsev. A decade later, her poetry won the Pulitzer and his, the Bollingen Prize. By 1922, the year Mildred joined the staff, the passionate 42 | nonconformist editors of the wartime years had been replaced by ‘‘hairdresser, interior.
Scholar The Harnack family at Jena. From left to right, Clara, Falk, Angela, Inge, Mildred, Johannes Auerbach, Arvid. In front are Inge’s two boys. This page intentionally left blank N owadays the North German Lloyd docks in Manhattan are overgrown and abandoned, no longer witness to the noisy midnight departures that were an integral part of travel by sea. Imagine then a Monday night, June 2, 1929, when 2,000 travelers on the North German Lloyd liner the SS Berlin were jostled by a tidal.
Things?’’ Arvid replied, ‘‘If you would be in favor of my regime, I would have you work with me. If you were neutral and kept quiet, I would let you alone.’’ He then added, perhaps half-jokingly but with a hint of chilling ruthlessness, ‘‘if you worked against me, I would shoot you!’’ Mildred reported to her mother that his royal highness took this well and promised to support Arvid’s administration even though his grandfather had been the Tsar of Russia.46 It is 11:30 in the morning on June 15,.
The magazine described Mildred as ‘‘the only American-born woman to be executed by the Gestapo’’ and as ‘‘a patron saint of resurgent German liberalism.’’ The story mentioned the Harnacks’ visits to the United States in 1937 when acquaintances scorned the couple, interpreting their silence as pro-Nazi loyalty. The article refers to the anti-Nazi Red Orchestra by name, although nowhere 12 | transfiguration does the article state that they beamed the transmissions of their secret radios at the.
She says firmly, she will not see me. I plead. I will call her several times over the next few days. She is ‘‘too sick,’’ ‘‘too tired,’’ and finally she ‘‘just doesn’t want to talk about the old times in Berlin.’’ She does tell me that she met Mildred at the Lehrter train station in Berlin, ‘‘with the American Women’s Club, she was a member. They met us when we arrived in Berlin. My father was arriving to take up his post as ambassador. I must have met her then.’’ Maybe she could solve one mystery.