Rebecca Donner

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 show more 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. show less

Can I rate a book as 4 stars if I haven't finished it? Well, I did. Rebecca Donner does an excellent job of presenting the almost unbelievable story of her Gr Gr Aunt, Mildred Fish Harnack from WI who was executed in 1943 by Germany for her work in the resistance. I've read other books about this group and time, but this does such a great job of presenting the time period where the Nazi Party comes to power and manged to take over a country that had more rights for women and workers than show more most others and make it what it became. It was really hard reading that at this time, hence I didn't finish it. May need to own it though so I can finish it some time. show less

Milwaukee-born Mildred Harnack (nee Fish) met Arvid Harnack in 1926 when both were students at the University of Wisconsin. Arvid was a German student studying on a fellowship in Madison. After a brief engagement, they married, and in 1928, Mildred moved to Germany to live with her husband. Based in Berlin, she spent a number of years working as a professor and translator, and, along with Arvid, involved herself in political activism. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, they began to show more recruit other like-minded individuals into an underground resistance group. Led by Mildred and her husband, they remained active from 1932 to 1942 when its members were finally rounded up and arrested by the Gestapo.

Over the years, the group distributed pamphlets urging resistance against the Nazi government, gathered intelligence to share with the American and Russian spy agencies, and helped Jews to escape Germany. To do so, members of the group (including Arvid) took jobs in different German agencies where they stole information to help bring down the regime. Mildred did the same by tutoring German soldiers needing to learn English for their duties. During this time, she also actively provided information to the American embassy in Berlin.

Rebecca Donner is the great-great-niece of Mildred, and because of this connection, she had access to her family letters. To flesh out the story of Mildred’s activities in Germany, Donner hunted down the letters, notes and memoirs from the collaborators working in the Resistance group. She also plumbed the archival records of the German, Russian, and U.S. governments. And what a fantastic story she tells, one of great courage against overwhelming odds of discovery. After the members were arrested in 1942, they underwent torture and were later put on trial, with most receiving death sentences. Mildred was beheaded by guillotine in 1943.

Mildred Harnack’s story is not well known in this country. One reason for this is that the United States government took pains to bury it, under the impression that both Mildred and her husband were Communist agents. Donner includes individual photographs of the members of the group taken after their arrest. While haunting, they are a testimony to their bravery in a country where opposing the Nazis was more than likely a death sentence. This book not only acknowledges Mildred’s Resistance activities, but honors them. show less

American expat Mildred Harnack and her husband, German economist Arvid Harnack, formed a Nazi resistance movement in Berlin and paid with their lives. Drawing from Mildred’s letters, various interviews, and archival documents, Donner pieces together an account of the rise of the Nazi party and the beginning of the Second World War. The use of present tense adds intensity to the narrative. While this approach feels fresh, it also lacks some context of parallel events and personalities who show more were unknown to Mildred. As Mildred’s great-great-niece, Donner had access to Mildred’s letters and other family material not previously available to other researchers. show less