Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra

513 Pages·2000·3.76 MB·English

by  Shareen Blair Brysac

RESISTING HITLER
ALSO BY SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC
Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in
Central Asia (with Karl Meyer)
Resisting Hitler
Mildred Harnack
and the Red Orchestra
SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2000
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2000 by Shareen Blair Brysac
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
Copyright 1934, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940 by Maxwell
Perkins as Executor of the Estate of Thomas Wolfe.
Copyright renewed © 1968 by Paul Gatlin.
Reprinted with permission.
All photographs are from the Gedenkstatte Deutscher Widerstand
except for p. 15 (courtesy of Bercie Frohmann); p. 33 (courtesy of Neal Donner);
p. 91 (courtesy of Fred Sanderson); and p. 189 (courtesy of Rudolf Heberle).
Library of Congress Catatoging-in-Pubhcation Data is available
135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Karl,
partner on the quest
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
I Plotzensee i
2 Transfiguration 7
3 Chum 15
4 Nonconformist 3 3
5 A Radical Marriage 49
6 Scholar 67
7 Comrade 91
8 Pilgrim 115
9 Hostess 133
10 Literary Figure 167
II Stranger 189
12 Resister 221
13 Spy? 255
14 Prey 291
15 The Woman in Cell 25 327
16 Stalingrad's Scapegoat 355
17 Epilogue 381
Postscript 395
Glossary and Abbreviations 399
Notes 401
Archives Consulted 451
Bibliography 453
Acknowledgments 475
Index 481
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PREFACE
I first heard of Mildred Fish-Harnack through a chance encounter
morethanadecadeago.Theoccasionwasadinnerforacolleague
who was researching a film on the tragic and futile July 20 plot
to kill Adolf Hitler. As we talked, my husband, Karl Meyer, men-
tioned that his family had known an American who joined the
German resistance and was beheaded in 1943. My colleague had
not heard of Mildred. Nor had I, the unusual circumstancesofher
death notwithstanding. She was the only American woman exe-
cuted on Hitler’s orders during the Third Reich. She was killed in
secret and in wrath. Her death came in the wake of the German
defeat at Stalingrad, justly considered the turning point in World
War II. The Nazi high command believed that she and her hus-
band, Arvid, bore much of the blame for the disaster.
Karl in turn had heard of her from his mother, Dorothy, who
was now in her nineties, and in questioning her, this is what I
learned. Mildred Fish was born in Milwaukee of pioneer Yankee
stock. In the 1920s she entered the University of Wisconsin and
there befriended Dorothy and her husband, Ernest L. Meyer, a
columnist for the Madison Capital Times. Strikingly handsome,
Mildred was the belle of the campus literati when she met Arvid
Harnack, a German student who had come to Madison to study
labor history on a Rockefeller fellowship. They canoed and hiked
around Lake Mendota with the Meyers, they sipped bootleg wine
and took part in student dramatics, and they wed. In due course,
Arvid returned to Germany and Mildred followed, for the first
time meeting her scholarly and artistic in-laws: the Harnacks and
their cousins, the Delbru¨cks and the Bonhoeffers who were a kind
IX