Thread by @RRRDonner

#OTD My great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack was beheaded on Hitler’s direct order. Born in Milwaukee, she was 26 when she moved to Germany to pursue a PhD. As an American grad student in Berlin, she saw Germany swiftly progress from democracy to fascist dictatorship 1/9

Mildred Harnack and her husband Arvid began holding secret meetings in their apartment. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution 2/9

Mildred Harnack nicknamed their resistance group “the Circle.” The group was diverse: its members were Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, atheist. They were factory workers and office workers, students and professors, journalists and artists. Over 40% were women 3/9

Both Mildred and Arvid Harnack passed top-secret intelligence about Hitler’s operational and military strategies to the Soviet Union and the United States 4/9

An American boy named Don Heath was Mildred’s courier between 1939-1941. His father was a diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin who had a confidential arrangement with Henry Morgenthau Jr., George Messersmith & Sumner Welles to obtain intelligence
from key sources in Berlin 5/9

The Gestapo arrested Mildred Harnack on Sept 7, 1942 and gave her group a name: the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). Postwar testimonies and notes smuggled out of a Berlin women's prison describe the daily interrogations and torture that Mildred and others in the group endured. 6/9

Mildred Harnack and 75 of her German coconspirators were forced to undergo a mass trial at the highest military court in Nazi Germany. A panel of 5 judges sentenced her to 6 years at a prison camp but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution 7/9

Before her execution Mildred spent the last hours of her life in a prison cell translating poems by Goethe. The title of my book ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS is a line from one of them. A prison chaplain smuggled out the book of poems under the folds of his robe 8/9

On February 16, 1943 at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, Mildred Harnack was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded. According to all available records, she was the only American in the leadership of the German resistance to Hitler 9/9