“Germany is experiencing very dark hours. Everyone is aware of the threat, but most of them bury their heads in the sand,” he wrote. American Mildred Harnack From Berlin, where she moved with her German husband Arvid in 1932, to her mother. Ten years later, Hitler He personally ordered that his head be cut off.. Charged with “treason” executed on the guillotine On February 16, 1943, in Plötzensee prison after months of torture. Crimes: Joining a resistance network against Nazism, helping Jews escape, plotting sabotage, and spying for the Soviets and Allies. II. World War.
Harnack’s figure had been virtually forgotten by then. Canadian author Rebecca Donner (Vancouver, 1971) began to delve into his muted family background and pull the strings on the story of who his great-grandmother’s sister was. What emerged from his overwhelming research through letters, testimonies, and documents from the Russian, German, British, and American archives “The often darkness of our days” A powerful and award-winning “no-fiction novel” (Libros del Asteroide / Ara Llibres) presupposes the author, who is also a contextual chronicle of the rise and consolidation of Nazism.
The title evokes a verse by Goethe, whose English translation Mildred Harnack wrote in pencil in a book while she was living her last minutes. chained in a moist cell, emaciated and devastated by tuberculosis that he was contracted to prison. This copy was surreptitiously taken by the visiting priest before he shaved his hair, examined his mouth for gold filling, and attached wooden clogs to climb onto the pier.
The Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan
Born into a humble family in Milwaukee in 1902, Mildred was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin when she met German student Arvid Harnack. They soon married and in 1929 went to live in a Germany where they witnessed the rise of Hitler’s popularity. Reading Mein Kampf, he wrote a letter to his mother, thinking that neither the Germans nor the Americans would understand. how “dangerous” was the future Führer and noting that HE Nazi Party “He believes he is morally superior and, like the Ku Klux Klan, is running a hate campaign against Jews.”
Donner remembers how the Nazi Party won less than 3% of the vote in the Reichstag elections in 1928, 18% in 1930, and 37% in 1932, with propaganda promising the poor and unemployed in a country in crisis. “work, freedom and bread” under the swastika.
“Perverted, Impure” Books
He was fired in 1932 as a translator and professor of American literature at the University of Berlin. His political views were disliked: One day a student asked, “Should Hitler be chancellor?” in 1933. But his students bid him an emotional farewell, standing up and covering the table with flowers. Next year, The Nazis would burn 25,000 books by authors deemed “heretical, impure, and anti-German” in a nearby square. Everything Mildred recommends to her students.
From the end of 1932, she and her husband, who got a job in the Ministry of Economy (which gave her access to strategic documents), began to hold secret meetings and organize a resistance network, the Circle (which the Nazis called the “Circle”). The Red Orchestra, which in 1940 became the largest anti-Nazi group in Berlin). In 1933, the Nazis encouraged denunciations and released the illegal detentions of left-wing dissidents, communists, social democrats, and others, and sent over 120,000 political prisoners to Dachau, the first concentration camp created by Hitler.
Donner, author of the “Sunset Terrace” novel and the “Burnout” comic, first heard of Mildred when she was 9 years old when she was visiting her great-grandmother. He measured his height on the kitchen wall, where there were other markings, one of which “very thin and frail” caught his eye. Between angry and upset, her great-grandmother admitted that she was her sister. Years later, she would discover that she held a grudge against herself for going to Germany and getting involved in what she believed was a “communist conspiracy” that could harm the family. Hence the silence and forgetfulness. Donner’s grandmother will be instrumental in breaking him. The writer told her the truth when she was 16, gave her some letters she had kept from Mildred, and told her about an 11-year-old boy named Don who was a courier for her spy aunt.
Donner found that boy, Donald Heath Jr., when he was an old man in California, where he bought notebooks that told the author’s story that paralleled his book. Don was the son of a US diplomat from the US embassy in Berlin, who came under the auspices of the future CIA. In some photographs, the young man, imagining that he was doing it with real bullets against Goebbels and Hitler, took lessons from Mildred, who was also a friend of his mother, Louise Heath. But he knew that in his blue backpack, he was hiding messages and classified information addressed to the Allies between the resistance network from Nazism and his family. Meanwhile, Moscow contacted Arvid, whom Russian intelligence codenamed Corso, to obtain Circle’s cooperation against the Nazis.
“Top secret” case
This is one of the reasons why, after the war, US Counterintelligence hid the investigation of the case as “top secret” in favor of new winds blowing towards the Cold War. Donner explains that some of the Nazis who escaped court after being recruited by the Allies to aid them against communism played a role in Mildred’s arrest and execution, and that Mildred lied about being part of a large communist network. spies still alive in the United States. Despite this, the leaks reached the press, and ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ recalled Mildred’s role in the face of torture and the anti-Nazi resistance.
A sadistic Gestapo torturer
The Harnacks were arrested in Lithuania in 1942 as they attempted to flee on suspicion of being targeted by the Gestapo. Various testimonies reveal that he fell into his hands. Walter Habecker, the torturer known for his sadism, but she just made up lies from him.
Circle detainees were subjected to a Reich military tribunal with the nicknamed prosecutor. “Hitler’s Hound” He was chosen by one of his lieutenants, Hermann Göring. All insurgents, including Arvid, were sentenced to death and executed; Except for Mildred, who was sentenced to six years of forced labor in a concentration camp.
However, the Führer was angered by the light punishment and gave orders to Göring. “catch an abscess”: He reversed the sentence and ordered that his head be cut off.