Betrayed, tortured and sent to the guillotine27
Her crime was defying the Nazis, her sentence death. But as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, Mildred Harnack was almost forgotten... until her story was reclaimed by her great-great niece
ON THE morning of December 15, 1942, a 40-year-old woman entered a courtroom in Berlin. She had endured the previous three-and-ahalf-months behind bars, first in the basement of Gestapo headquarters, then in solitary confinement at a nearby women’s prison.
She was unmistakably ill. She had contracted tuberculosis while incarcerated, and her emaciated limbs bore evidence of torture. She cut an unusual figure at the Reich Court-Martial – or Reichskriegsgericht. Typically, defendants were Germans in the military charged with insubordination or desertion. A scholar of American literature, she had devoted a decade to Berlin’s underground resistance.
The chief prosecutor, Manfred Roeder, had been handpicked by one of Hitler’s most loyal lackeys, Luftwaffe Commander-inChief Hermann Göring. The trial lasted four days. She was found guilty of treason and sentenced to six years at a prison camp. When Hitler was informed about the verdict he demanded her execution.
On February 16, 1943, she was brought in shackles to a guillotine at Plötzensee Prison and beheaded.
Her death certificate noted the time of death and her name: Mildred Harnack.
She was my great-great aunt. When I was 16, my grandmother gave me a bundle of Mildred’s letters and urged me to tell her story. I promised her I would.
In the years that followed, I researched British, American, and Soviet-era intelligence files and pored over the letters, datebooks, diaries, memoirs, and testimonials that Mildred’s friends and co-conspirators had left behind.
Mildred spent the last hours of her life translating poems by Goethe. The prison chaplain smuggled out Mildred’s translations under the folds of his robe. The title of my new book about Mildred, All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days, is a line from one of these poems.
MILDRED Fish was born to impoverished parents in Wisconsin, America, on September 16, 1902. Neither had gone to college, but in 1921 their daughter decided to enrol at the University of Wisconsin, which offered free tuition to state residents. There, she joined a group of student revolutionaries called the “Friday
Niters” who advocated for women’s and working-class labourers’ rights.
In 1926, she received a Master’s degree and married Arvid Harnack, a German graduate student studying American labour reform who was also a member of the Friday Niters. In 1929 at the age of 26, Mildred crossed the Atlantic and enrolled in a German PhD programme. While lecturing about literature at the University of Berlin, she was alarmed at the popularity of the Nazi party on campus. She and Arvid began holding clandestine meetings in her apartment, inviting students and colleagues who were similarly alarmed.
The group was diverse. Some members had Communist sympathies; some were Centrists and Social Democrats; Jews, Catholics, factory workers and aristocrats were also represented. From the early 1930s on to the Second World War, the group’s acts of resistance progressed from discussions to producing anti-Nazi leaflets that called for revolution.
Mildred recruited working-class Germans into the group and facilitated the escape of Jews by obtaining visas through her contacts at the US Embassy in Berlin.
Her resistance group worked with at least three other Berlin-based underground networks, forming an interlocking chain.
Mildred’s American passport enabled her to travel more freely than her German coconspirators to England, France, Switzerland, Denmark and Norway and form connections with contacts in the resistance. Meanwhile, Arvid landed a high-ranking job at the Ministry of Economics, granting him access to secret reports and memos concerning Hitler’s operational and military strategies.
The couple passed this intelligence to Hitler’s enemies, using for a time a young American boy. Don Heath Jr’s father, Donald R. Heath, was a diplomat at the US Embassy in Berlin.
Aghast at the complacency among his American colleagues toward the Nazi regime, Heath wished to help the German resistance and had a confidential arrangement with key figures in the US State Department, including Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith, to obtain intelligence from Berlin.
When Hitler invaded Poland, launching the Second World War, most American diplomats put their children on a steamer back to America, but Heath and his wife, Louise, kept their son in Berlin. From December 1939 to June 1941, between the ages of 11 and 13, Don Heath Jr was Mildred’s courier, his blue knapsack carrying information to his father, who instructed him to take a different route to Mildred’s apartment building each time he visited her. On Sunday after
noons, Mildred and Arvid met with the Heaths in the Spreewald, southeast of Berlin. Under the guise of a picnic, they exchanged information while Don Heath Jr played the role of lookout, whistling when he spotted anyone approaching on the tree-lined path.
Mildred’s connection to the US Embassy was severed in June 1941, when Heath was abruptly transferred to Santiago, Chile.
When Germany declared war on America in December, following the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mildred as a US citizen could have returned home. Bravely she chose to stay and continue her resistance to the Nazis.
THAT YEAR Mildred began enciphering reports that her co-conspirators sent to Moscow via short-wave radio transmitters. The reports included top-secret intelligence that Arvid Harnack and Harro SchulzeBoysen, a senior lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, had obtained about Hitler’s plans to invade the Soviet Union.
Stalin ignored the reports. He had ignored similar warnings sent from sources in Britain and the United States. Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
Four days later, agents in German military intelligence intercepted an enciphered message sent from Moscow to a Soviet agent codenamed “Kent”.
The message included Mildred and Arvid’s home address as well as the names and addresses of several of their co-conspirators. On August 26, 1941, the agents intercepted a second message. A year later, a team of 15 German cryptologists cracked the code and the Gestapo pounced.
On August 31, 1942, after the arrests of two of their resistance colleagues, Mildred and Arvid fled Germany intending to escape to Sweden.
An SS officer, Horst Kopkow, drove 500 miles in pursuit of them, arresting them in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. In total, 119 members of the group were arrested. The Nazis gave them a name: “The Red Orchestra”. The couple were thrown into the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.
It quickly filled to capacity with men and women from their resistance group and arrangements were hastily made for other prisons to accommodate the spillover.
Later Mildred was dispatched to the Charlottenburg women’s prison, where she spent months in solitary confinement. Kopkow, the SS officer who had arrested Mildred, assigned a sadistic Nazi, Walter Habecker, to interrogate and torture her.
Ultimately, Harnack and 75 of her German co-conspirators were executed.
The women were decapitated by guillotine, and men in the group were either hanged or shot.
Mildred’s body was delivered to the Anatomical Department at the University of Berlin where it was dissected to investigate the effects of acute stress on her reproductive organs.
Other women in the underground German resistance were also subjected to this desecration. Shortly before Arvid Harnack was hanged, he wrote a farewell letter to Mildred.
The letter has survived; a prisoner smuggled it out. “Despite the pain, I look back gladly on my life,” he wrote. “The bright outshone the dark. And our marriage is to the greatest degree the reason for this.”
AFTER THE Second World War, British and US intelligence agencies recruited highranking German officials in the Nazi regime, regarding them as key sources of information about Soviet espionage.
Among them was Horst Kopkow, the SS officer who had arrested Mildred Harnack and presided over her torture.
Captured by British troops, he was swiftly recruited by MI6 agents who believed he had valuable information about “Russian plots against British interests”. Incredibly, MI6 faked his death and gave him a new identity as “Peter Cordes”.
The US Counterintelligence Corps – a predecessor of the CIA – took an interest in Manfred Roeder, who had prosecuted Mildred and other members of the underground resistance – later visiting Plötzensee Prison to watch Mildred’s beheading.
In 1947, Roeder was on the verge of being indicted for war crimes at Nuremberg when the CIC spirited him away to a topsecret location and gave him the code name “Othello”.
According to all available records, Mildred Harnack was the only American in the leadership of the German underground resistance during the Nazi regime. In the decades that followed Mildred’s execution, she was nearly erased from history.
Her gravestone may be seen at Zehlendorf Cemetery in Berlin. Books chronicling Hitler and the Germans who supported him leave little room for the stories about those who opposed him. I wrote All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days to pay tribute to my great-great-aunt Mildred and her German co-conspirators and ensure that their courageous acts will not be forgotten.
● All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days by Rebecca Donner (Canongate, £16.99) is out now. Call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832. Free UK P&P for orders over £20