Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra

by Shareen Blair Brysac

Overview

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 Harnack and her husband, Arvid, 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 Harnacks' 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--she was the only American woman to be executed as an underground conspirator during World War II. Yet as the war 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 from Germany, the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI, can the full story be told. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195351026
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2000
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Shareen Blair Brysac is co-author with her husband, Karl E. Meyer, of the acclaimed Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. A former producer for CBS News, she is the recipient of several Emmys and the Peabody Award. Currently, she is a contributing editor for Archaeology Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

The inspired life and tragic death of the only American woman to be executed on Hitler's command. Mildred Harnack and her husband Arvid were members of the Nazi resistance group known as the Red Orchestra, which provided intelligence to the US and Russia during WWII. As members of the German opposition, their decade of work has been largely hidden from history until now. Brysac (Tournament of Shadows, not reviewed) examined Mildred's correspondence with her mother and friends, interviewed surviving acquaintances, and combed through a wealth of previously classified German, Soviet, and American documents in the course of her research: the result is a careful and intricately detailed account of the Harnacks and dozens of the political activists, diplomats, and academics they knew. The study begins, however, as an intimate biography, tracing the youth of a beautiful girl raised in Wisconsin, recording her passions for literature and drama, considering the poetry she wrote in friends' yearbooks and the fiction she wrote about herself. In 1926, at the University of Wisconsin, Mildred fell in love with German academic Arvid Harnack. They soon married and moved to Berlin, where she continued her graduate studies in philosophy, American literature, and translation. Brysac does a good job recreating the literary and academic atmosphere of 1920s Berlin and stresses the influence of neighboring Russia on the German capital's political climate. Arvid's socialist tendencies grew, Mildred sympathized with his political views, and both developed strong interests in Soviet life, politics, and economics. Although many of the exploits described here cannot be documented, theauthorreveals how the Harnacks' lives were transformed, how they helped Jews and political dissidents escape Germany, and how they maintained their outward appearance while working as spies in the German underground. They were captured by the Gestapo, imprisoned, tortured, and put to death in 1943 at the order of Hitler. A sensitive and in-depth portrait of two"good Germans" who have remained unrecognized for over half a century.

Kirkus Reviews

"How [Mildred Harnack] got from middle America to Berlin in the 1930s is the fascinating story Brysac tells in Resisting Hitler."—The New York Times Book Review

"[This] well-researched, fair-minded and moving account of the Harnacks and their fate should go a long way toward restoring the reputations of these idealistic and heroic resisters."—Los Angeles Times

"A beautifully written, enthralling and moving book...Answers provided in Shareen Blair Brysac's superb biography illuminate important aspects of both German and American history of the period."—Times Literary Supplement

"A balanced narration of the life of Mildred Fish-Harnack and her times...Brysac is able to put a very human face on these troubled times."—Library Journal

"Among the millions of Hitler's victims was a young woman from Wisconsin who married a German, joined the resistance, played an important role in the Soviet spy network known as the Red Orchestra, was caught and on Hitler's personal order was executed—by guillotine. So much was known about the faith and sacrifice of Mildred Fish-Harnack when the war ended; now, more than half a century later, Sherry Brysac with tireless research and a gift for vigorous narrative has brought this sad and inspiring story brilliantly to life. Secret operations have rarely been recorded with the passion and detail they receive in Resisting Hitler. No one who reads it will soon forget the courage of this woman who risked and lost her life to do the decent thing."—Thomas Powers, author of Heisenberg's War: The Secret History Of The German Bomb and The Man Who Kept The Secrets: Richard Helms & The CIA

"In telling Mildred Fish-Harnack's neglected life story, Shareen Brysac extends our knowledge of German anti-Nazi resistance, and of the landscape of Nazism in general. She also illuminates a great deal of German and American intellectual and cultural history. This is an extraordinarily valuable study."—Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide

"The twists and turns of wartime politics and espionage provide a gripping background for the tragic life of this doomed American woman in Nazi Germany. It is a fine contribution to contemporary history and biography."—Deirdre Bair, biographer of Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Samuel Beckett

"By detailing the life of Fish-Harnack, whose guillotining in 1943 made her the only American woman executed for treason during World War II, Brysac is able to put a very human face on these troubled times."—Library Journal

"Brysac does a good job recreating the literary and academic atmosphere of 1920's Berlin and stresses the influence of neighboring Russia on the German capital's political climate...A sensitive and in-depth portrait of two 'good Germans' who have remained unrecognized for over half a century."—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher