Move Fast: A Guest Post by Jonathan Freedland

By Jonathan Freedland / October 29, 2025 at 12:01 am

The true story behind a catastrophic betrayal. Jonathan Freedland details the real story of the brave rebels who defied Hitler in 1943 and the devastating consequences they faced for their sacrifice. Read on for an exclusive essay from Jonathan on writing The Traitors Circle.

Hardcover $29.00 ~~$32.00~~

The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany-and the Spy Who Betrayed Them

By Jonathan Freedland

In Stock Online

Hardcover $29.00 ~~$32.00~~

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist, an extraordinary true story of resistance, heroism and betrayal.

It’s a question few thought they’d ever ask, at least about their own country. But now you hear it often and in some unexpected places. That question is: how do you stop a once democratic country sliding towards authoritarianism and even tyranny? Put another way, when faced with a leader determined to concentrate ever more power in his own hands, and to brand all dissent as treachery, what can any one person do?

In the last three years, I’ve been immersed in an astonishing, real-life episode from the past that might provide something like an answer. That story comes from a different time and a different place – one much darker than anything seen before or since – but the lessons it offers reverberate, perhaps especially loudly today.

It begins with a tea party, one Friday afternoon in Berlin in September 1943. Around the table sat a group of high society Germans, drawn from the aristocracy and the elite. Invitations had gone out to an ambassador’s widow; several government officials, current and former; a pioneering headmistress, a doctor, a diplomat and not one but two countesses. What this group of men and women, young and old, had in common was a shared determination to oppose Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Or at least that’s what they thought they had in common. Because there was something they did not know: that among the guests who sat down together that day was someone they believed was one of their own, who they saw as a kindred spirit – but who was, in fact, about to betray all the rest to the Gestapo. The consequences of that single act of betrayal would prove fateful – and fatal.

This is the story I tell in my new book, The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany – and the Spy Who Betrayed Them. It’s a dramatic tale of unlikely rebels, men and women who never imagined they would take on a mighty and terrifying regime – but who did just that. So what guidance might we extract from the experience of those people for the admittedly different situation that confronts so many today?

Here’s one lesson: even small acts count. Not every act of resistance has to shift the tectonic plates. For example, one of the two countesses, Lagi Solf, had a habit of venturing out into Berlin carrying two heavy bags of shopping. Why? She did it so that if she should run into someone in the street, who would greet her with the requisite Hitler salute, she would have no hands free to reciprocate the gesture.

Here’s another: if you can’t change everything, then at least help one individual. The other countess in my story did that: Maria von Maltzan turned her apartment into an unofficial sanctuary, a hiding place, for German Jews as they sought to evade capture and certain death. She did not topple Hitler, but she saved dozens of lives.

But if there’s one lesson that endures ahead of all the others it’s this: move fast. The descent into authoritarianism can happen very, very quickly. There isn’t time to pause or see how things play out. If you want to save democracy and your country – and yourself – act right now.

Jonathan Freedland is the author of The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany – and the Spy Who Betrayed Them published by Harper, $32