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Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra

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Initially,Shareen Brysac's Resisting Hitler attracted me because of my long-term fascination with German history, Holocaust Studies in particular.This book opened a whole new world to me! Brysac's sensitive portrayal of Mildred Harnack's tragic and extremely heroic story literally brought tears to my eyes.I'd never heard of her, nor of the "Red Orchestra"--a Nazi Resistance group little known in the U.S.Brysac's gripping tale is supported by copious research in archives, including those only recently opened to the scrutiny of scholars.I strongly suggest this biography to those interested in having a fresh look at a much written about period in German history, and to anyone who appreciates a well written book--both informative and exciting.

Resisting Hitler, by Shareen Brysac

When criminals gain control of governments, average citizens mostly pretend not to notice. Each thinks to himself something like, "How could I possibly pass judgment on our august leaders?" In a state ruled by force there are no competing politicians left to whom they can shift their allegiance. By default, then, they allow themselves to be used by the regime to prove that it has popular acceptance.

Not so my great-aunt Mildred Fish Harnack, whose resistance against the Third Reich has been a vivid legend in our extended family for half a century. Her story gradually became known to a widening circle of interested people, including Shareen Brysac, who finally taking the initiative, researched the case exhaustively with its myriad details, and assembled from them a powerful, vivid mosaic.

Like the Diary of Anne Frank, it is a tragic story imbued with the sense of inevitability that comes from everyone knowing the ending -- and yet it is joyous, because through Brysac, we cannot help being deeply inspired by the example of Mildred and the scores of her fellow resisters in the Red Orchestra, including her husband Arvid Harnack. They all knew they were taking a mortal risk, but as serious intellectuals who cared deeply about -- and even helped to create -- the best in German culture, they knew the truth of Socrates' dictum that "the unexamined life is not worth living." And so they lived their lives to the hilt.

By telling Mildred's story, which is by extension and implication the story of every person willing to put their life on the line to resist tyranny, Brysac has enriched my life, and all our lives. I have been inspired by Mildred for 50 years. Now let the rest of the world be inspired too.

A first class research by Brysac finally puts to rest the conflicting histories of the Red Orchestra (Rotte Kapella): the white-washing done by the FDR (former Federal Republic of Germany) vs. the pro-communist embellishments of the DDR (former East Germany).

The author's exhaustive research (de-classified Stasi and KGB archives, interviews with survivors, US Army documents) finally does justice to the only American in the German Resistance who was executed (Mildred Fish-Harnack) and also allows the readers to reach a balanced view about who the Red Orchestra was.

The reader will also become acquainted with how life was in Germany (particularly Berlin) during the 30's and early 40's through the lives of Mildred Fish-Harnack and her husband Arvid Harnack. Since the Harnacks were highly educated, came from esteemed families, and had influential friends in elitist Berlin society the reader also gets a glimpse of how divergent the views of various Germans and Americans were towards the Berlin regime.

In conclusion, it is sad to see how a heroic German-American (Mildred Fish-Harnack) and an independent thinking German intellectual (Arvid Harnack) who spoke-out against, resisted, and even sabotaged the evil regime of Hitler met such a drastic end due to the follies and reckless acts of Stalin's regime.

I wish there were more history books like this one written out there:
* impeccable research
* excellent prose (and thus easy to read)
* semi-autogiographical
* great lessons to draw about WWII, society, economy, and contemporary events.

I wanted to read this book because I am interested in WWII espionage, but only the last third of the book really deals with this, and the actual espionage is sketchy at best. The first third recounts Mildred's early years in Wisconsin (and her life just isn't that interesting) up to her marriage to Arvid Harnack. She has a hard life with him after they move back to his native Germany. They never have any money and for fun read Goethe to each other and their friends. The author tends to glorify Mildred, but she is made human, perhaps unwittingly, in recollections by her friends during a visit to her homeland after Hitler is in power. She reveals herself to be full of insecurties by making references to her own beauty and by looking down her nose at the hicks she grew up with. Much is made of Mildred's beauty throughout the book, but it must not be the kind that reveals itself in pictures, since she looks rather plain. Arvid comes across as unlikeable, humorless, controlling and provincial in his own way, while Mildred is a gentle soul who really should have been a literature professor at an American university instead of getting tangled up in her husband's underground activities for the Red Orchestra. But she is loyal and her love for him leaves her no other choice. The book comes alive in the section about Martha Dodd and the Schulze-Boysens, who all did their share of clumsy, though well-meaning espionage for the Russians. Both Arvid and Mildred are highly intelligent and cultured, but neither of them seem to have a lick of common sense, which leads to their eventual arrest by the Gestapo. The author has done a remarkable, exhaustive amount of research and the book is well-written. A problem, though, is the amount of names thrown at you, and frequently someone is referred to and you have no idea who he is until you look in the index and see he was mentioned 200 pages earlier. All in all, this is a portrayal of a woman who really didn't have that much to do with espionage but was punished because she was Arvid Harnack's wife. But somehow I don't think she would have had it any other way.

I was prompted to read this fascinating and exceptional biography after reading Erik Larson's current best seller, In the Garden of Beasts, the tale of US Ambassador William Dodd and his family's four years in Berlin during Hitler's rise to absolute power. Specifically, I was interested in learning more about Martha Dodd, the Ambassador's spoilt, audacious, romantic, free-spirited, promiscuous, political naïve daughter who was infatuated with the Nazis and then the Soviets, disclosed her father's and Embassy secrets to the Soviets and upon her return to the US continued to spy for Stalin and the Soviets.
Shareen Blair Brysac has provided a well written, well researched account of key players in the Red Orchestra, the Communist dominated resistance and spy ring that was active from 1933 through 1942. Ms. Brysac tracks the evolution of the resistance group through the lives of Mildred Fish Harnack, an American academic, and her husband Arvid, a lawyer and economist. Martha Dodd was a friend of Mildred's and she was targeted by Mildred and the Soviets because of her father and her involvement with members of the Nazi elite. The book is the product of nearly 10 years of in-depth research involving detailed interviews with survivors, numerous first-hand accounts and both longstanding and newly released US, German and Russian archives. It is a sad and ultimately tragic tale of two very intelligent and courageous individuals, who were committed to resisting Hitler and the Nazis in an environment that is still terrifying in its brutality and fanaticism.
Mildred and Arvid and tens of other members of their circle were ultimately betrayed by the ineptness of their Soviet handlers, who sent detailed personal contact information about their agents in ciphers that were broken by Gestapo and military intelligence units. Most paid for this mistake with their lives. Mildred was ultimately executed after the direct intervention of Hitler, who over-ruled the initial sentence of 6 years imprisonment and ordered a new trial and a death sentence.
The courage and boldness of these members of the academic and government elite who resisted Hitler is sufficient justification for retelling their tragic story. However, Brysac argues that Mildred has been ignored in the West because of her links to the Soviets and is in a sense a victim of the Cold War. She points out that Arvid provided valuable financial, economic and military intelligence to the US via a mysterious American Treasury Agent/spy Donald Heath, who was attached to the US Embassy in Berlin and this should have led to a more even-handed treatment of Mildred and Arvid.
The problem I have with Brysac's thesis is that while Mildred and other members of the Red Orchestra were courageous and bold resisters to Hitler, they were also naïve proponents of the equally totalitarian and inhumane Soviet system. Two critical gaps in Brysac's story are the reactions of Mildred and Arvid to the Stalin purges in 1937-8 and the Hitler-Stalin Pact that supplied Hitler with easy access to critical raw materials and led directly to the dismemberment of Poland and WWII. Certainly Chamberlin and the appeasers in the West played a role, but there were two critical years where the Soviets enabled Hitler and Brysac provides little evidence that the members of the Red Orchestra were funneling intelligence to the British and Western Democracies. In addition, the largely unsympathetic treatment of Mildred Fish Harnack in the US can largely be explained by the fact that Martha Dodd, a Harnack resource, and her husband, Alfred Stern, were active agents for Stalin who enabled the sharing of US military and nuclear secrets. Mildred Fish Harnack and her husband were ideological enemies to free market democracies as is illustrated by the career of Greta Kuckhoff, one of the few survivors of the Red Orchestra, who became a significant player in East Germany's highly repressive regime. Many ideologically driven spies are courageous and gifted, but to argue that they should be heralded is asking too much when their goals are to undermine our democracy. Brysac seems to discount the real threat Stalin represented to Western democracies before and after the War and the essential similarities in the way the Nazis and the Soviets treated dissidents.
Despite these shortcomings, this is a truly outstanding book and an essential companion to Larsen's In the Garden of Beasts.

Mildred Fish Harnack's name has cropped up in much of my recent reading on the Third Reich. She was a college student at the University of Wisconsin when she met and fell in love with a German student. Once married, they moved to Germany to further their education. Like many intellectuals of the period, she and her husband were attracted to the Communist movement in the USSR. As the 30s go on, Mildred sees Communism as preferable to Nazism, especially as the fear of the German state increases. Her husband was part of a group working for the Communists, hence the Red Orchestra. He was executed by the Nazis, and Mildred was the only American woman to face such a death.

Most interesting, perhaps, is that the condemned would not receive the vindication they believed was their due for many years. Three survivors demanded a trial of the judge (Manfred Roerer) known as a vicious and savage judge. While Roerer might ordinarily have been tried for crimes against humanity, by 1949 he was released, and it was clear that punishing those who helped the Communists was more important than punishing Nazis.

The author presents a compelling case against the whitewash of this travesty of justice. It makes for interesting reading.

This book contains much more than a description of one woman's efforts at wartime resistance. It is a remarkable depiction of the intellectual and social life of the liberal and sometimes left-leaning intelligentsia in Madison, Wisconsin, and as well as of the liberal upper class in Germany in the period from the turn of the 20th century to 1945. The material ranges from vivid social commentary,historical narrative, and thriller, to final tragedy and its aftermath. The writing style is lucid and the footnotes copious. This book conbines the virtues of being a good read and a highly informative social history. I recommend it strongly.

This book gives you the story of the Harnacks and their group through the documents they left behind and the testimonies of those who knew them. The author does not try to fill in the gaps with fiction, and fthis is the way history should be written: based on extensive research, rich in data, and prudent in inference.

Even though it was ineffective, German resistance to the Nazis is an important subject for the insights it offers on the challenges of opposing a totalitarian regime. Large bookstores outside of Germany typically carry one shelf of books about the 2,000-year history of that country, of which 90% are about the 12 years of the Third Reich, almost all focused on the sociopaths in power. You get biographies of Hitler, the diaries of Goebbels, the memoirs of Albert Speer,... Yes, villains are fascinating, like Darth Vader with his Nazi helmet, but the people who died reminding the world that there was more to Germany deserve some attention.

A detail in this book that struck me is the euphemism for torture in Gestapo reports, which translates to "sharpened interrogation." Sounds familiar?

This is a poorly written and confused description of an otherwise compelling story. Of all the books I've read on the Red Orchestra this is by far the worst. The author's girlish and endless fascination with how pretty Mildred was and with Martha Dodd's sex life had no bearing on the story of this group of resistors. Brysac needed a better editor if not a better education.