On this day, as we watch Elon Musk celebrate his work to push the AfD party into restoring Nazi power over Germany, we remember eighty-four years ago the Gestapo arrived in Preil, an Prussian fishing village, and arrested Mildred Fish-Harnack and her husband Arvid.
The couple were on their holiday.
She was from Milwaukee. At the University of Wisconsin she edited the literary magazine and taught in the English department, where in 1926 she met Arvid Harnack, a Rockefeller fellow who had come to study labor economics with John R. Commons. They married that August. She joined him in Germany in 1929, taught American literature at Berlin University, and finished her doctorate at Giessen at the end of 1941.
The Harnacks built one of the earliest resistance circles in Berlin out of an economics study group. With Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Adam and Greta Kuckhoff they documented Nazi crimes, printed leaflets, moved people out of the country, and passed intelligence on war preparations to the American embassy and to Soviet contacts. Arvid gave advance warning of Barbarossa.
The Gestapo later filed all of their work against Hitler under one name, Rote Kapelle.
The Nazis had found them via radio. In July 1942 German military decryption read a Moscow transmission from the previous summer that carried Berlin addresses. Schulze-Boysen was arrested at the Air Ministry on August 31.
The Harnacks had only a week left.
The Reichskriegsgericht sentenced Arvid to death on December 19, 1942 and hanged him at Plötzensee three days later.
Mildred received six years. Hitler stepped in and invalidated the judgment on December 21 and ordered a kangaroo trial, which delivered the death sentence on January 16, 1943. She was beheaded at Plötzensee on February 16, 1943, the only American woman executed on his direct order.
She spent her final months translating Goethe into English. The last poem was finished on the day she died.
Her last recorded words: “Und ich habe Deutschland so geliebt.”
See the German Resistance Memorial Center biography and my 2012 post on the arrest.
