Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  When the brothers set up the device away from the windows and walls adjoining other apartments, and the BBC came in as clearly as if it were broadcast from Wilhelmstrasse, Mildred impulsively kissed Falk on the cheek to thank him. “Now it will be so much easier to tune in to foreign broadcasts,” she said. “It will help our group’s work and our morale to get news we can trust, untainted by the Ministry of Propaganda.”

  “Be careful on the streets never to reveal how much you know,” Falk cautioned. “Goebbels is waging his own private war against radio crime. A single slip of the tongue could betray you to an informant.”

  Mildred knew her brother-in-law did not exaggerate. Earlier that spring, a friend in the American press corps had told her of an incident the Nazi censors had forbidden him to include in his radio broadcast. The Luftwaffe had informed the mother of a German pilot that her son’s plane had been shot down over France and that he was missing and presumed dead. A few days later, unbeknownst to the grieving mother, her son’s name was included in a weekly BBC broadcast listing the names of Germans recently captured by the British. The next day, the mother received eight letters from friends and acquaintances assuring her that her son was alive but held prisoner in England. No doubt the mother rejoiced, but soon thereafter she reported all eight friends to the SS, and they were promptly arrested for listening to foreign radio broadcasts.

  “Prime Minister Churchill delivered this speech to the House of Commons in June after the Dunkirk evacuation.” Reaching into a pocket concealed in the lining of his suit jacket, Falk took out a few sheets of folded paper and handed them to Mildred. “It wasn’t recorded, but afterward the BBC read portions of it over the air. I thought you might want to translate it for one of your newsletters, in case anyone doubts the British resolve.”

  Unfolding the pages, Mildred seated herself and read the transcript, which began with Mr. Churchill’s vivid, harrowing account of the battles in France and Belgium that had culminated in the British and French retreat and evacuation at Dunkirk. She was not surprised to discover a very different version of events from the Nazis’ official account. More than 335,000 troops had been safely brought to England, where they were preparing to defend their island home. “We shall go on to the end,” Churchill had vowed. “We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

  Two days later, on July 22, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax delivered Great Britain’s response to Hitler’s offer of a compromised peace: a firm, unequivocal refusal.

  Hitler had flown into a rage at the news, Arvid learned from ministry colleagues who had witnessed the scene, but his anger quickly found an outlet. As the conquered nations of Europe were brought into the bureaucratic management of the Reich, propaganda campaigns against their stubborn enemy across the Channel intensified. Whereas before the Nazi press had refused to address the subject of civilian casualties, the papers and radio waves now crackled with outraged reports of Royal Air Force raids on Bremen, Hamburg, Paderborn, Hagen, and Bochum, attacks that, the Nazis claimed, indiscriminately killed defenseless civilians.

  “Does Goebbels really expect the German people to believe the British are targeting peaceful, sleepy villages and not the tank factories and military installations on their outskirts?” asked Mildred, incredulous.

  “If the Führer says it’s true, it must be true, however preposterous,” came Arvid’s sardonic reply.

  Since July, the Luftwaffe had been bombing the British Isles, concentrating its attacks on shipping lanes and strategic ports on the coast, but as Harro Schulze-Boysen informed them, with the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer, the focus shifted to achieving superiority over the Royal Air Force by attacking airfields, command posts, and aircraft factories. The British responded by attacking Nazi military targets in northern Germany and its conquered territories, dropping leaflets as well as bombs. But to Mildred—and apparently to most Berliners, since life in the capital went on as usual—the danger seemed real but distant.

  Harro had warned Arvid that the Luftwaffe was preparing for a more intense campaign, and in mid-August the Germans launched a massive air campaign against Great Britain. It was unsettling to listen to verboten foreign radio broadcasts and learn of the destruction of British airfields and factories, each loss a setback the Allies could scarcely afford, each seeming to add years to the duration of the Reich.

  Then, early in the morning of August 24, Mildred and Arvid tuned in the BBC and learned that beleaguered Portsmouth in Hampshire had again been bombed, leaving one hundred dead and three hundred injured. As if that shocking death toll were not enough for one night, twelve German bombers, ostensibly on a mission to destroy oil tanks and aircraft factories in the London suburbs, had instead dropped their bombs on the financial district and Oxford Street in the West End, a place devoid of military targets in the heart of the city.

  Mildred turned to Arvid, horror-stricken, her hand upon her abdomen in an instinctive and futile gesture to protect her unborn child. He understood her unspoken question. “Whether it was a navigation error or a deliberate attack on civilians, Churchill will retaliate,” he said somberly. “We should expect the worst.”

  That night, the shriek of air raid sirens jolted them from sleep. Swiftly they dressed in the darkness, snatched up their evacuation bags, and fled downstairs to the bomb shelter. For hours they huddled in the darkness among strangers, straining their ears for the distant rumble of bombs exploding elsewhere in the city, flinching at the relentless pounding of antiaircraft fire, frighteningly near. “We’re safe,” one anxious, trembling woman repeated over and over as the hours passed in stark terror. “Göring promised the RAF could not reach us.”

  It was nearly half past three o’clock before the all-clear sounded and they were allowed to drag themselves back upstairs and collapse exhausted into bed to steal a few hours of sleep before morning.

  The next day, lightheaded from lack of sleep, Mildred and Arvid nonetheless rose at the usual hour, compelled to find out how badly the city had been damaged. As expected, Nazi radio announcers condemned British perfidy and reported a tangle of contradictions, in one breath jeering that the hapless, ineffectual RAF had been driven off by the superior German military, and in the next denouncing them for slaughtering helpless German women and children asleep in their beds.

  Reluctant to leave Mildred alone on such a fraught morning, Arvid gave her a lingering kiss at the door, placing his hand gently upon her abdomen and urging her to take care. After he departed for the ministry, she ventured out and discovered that the city apparently had suffered only minimal damage, although it was difficult to be sure, since the authorities had roped off several streets to prevent anyone from approaching as the rubble was cleared away.

  Although Mildred thought they had gotten off lightly compared to the citizens of Warsaw, Paris, and London, the people of Berlin reeled from shock and disbelief. Mildred understood why. From the moment the war had begun, Göring had assured them that no enemy planes would ever break through the antiaircraft defenses encircling the capital. When the sirens had gone off the night before, thousands of citizens had not even bothered to take shelter, so wholeheartedly had they trusted the Reichsminister’s assurances. In the morning word quickly spread that not only had the Royal Air Force easily swept through the skies above Berlin, but German gunners had not brought down a single British plane.

  The myth of Berlin’s invulnerability had been shattered by a single raid. When Arvid returned home from work that evening, he told Mildred that Hitler was furious, Göring humiliated. “The leaders of the Wehrmacht vow that it will never happen again,” Arvid said. “I don’t know anyone who believes it.”

  They went to bed early that night, despe
rate to catch up on lost sleep. But shortly after midnight, the air raid sirens wailed again, jolting them out of bed and sending them racing downstairs for the shelter. The night passed in sleepless terror, and in the morning they learned that ten people had been killed and twenty-nine wounded, Berlin’s first civilian casualties of the war. The papers raged against the brutality of the RAF, denouncing the “cowardly British air pirates” for acting on Churchill’s personal orders to “massacre the population of Berlin.”

  “Fine bit of hyperbole, that,” said Arvid wearily, pushing aside the paper as he rose to get ready for work. Suddenly he halted, frowning as he studied her face. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’m just tired,” she said, smiling to reassure him. “Like everyone else in Berlin.”

  “Don’t work yourself too hard today,” he said, stroking her hair back from her face and kissing her softly. “Get some rest.”

  She promised him she would, and in the afternoon when weariness overcame her, she climbed into bed and slept for three hours.

  That night and the next, the air raid sirens remained silent, but on September 1, the pealing wails again roused Mildred and Arvid from bed to hastily dress and stumble bleary-eyed and dazed down to the shelter. Then two quiet nights granted them unbroken sleep, but on September 4 the sirens shrieked again at promptly fifteen minutes past midnight, a time Mildred had already learned to dread. For two hours British bombers roared high above Berlin while the German antiaircraft guns frantically thundered back. The next day, rumors spread that the German gunners could not find the British planes because they were coated with invisibility paint. Another more credible story making the rounds proved true: A bomb had fallen upon the Tiergarten, killing a policeman.

  Night after night the air raids came. In public speeches, Hitler angrily declared that if the British continued to attack Germany’s cities, he would raze their cities to the ground. Mildred knew from the BBC that the Luftwaffe was already attempting exactly that. Despite Hitler’s claims to the contrary, German bombers had been targeting the center of London for more than two weeks.

  The days passed in a blur of sleeplessness and terror. Mildred rested when she could, but her nerves were on edge. The sleep she managed to find during the sunlit hours was restless and haunted by nightmares, and even on the nights the sirens were silent, she found herself bolting awake shortly after midnight, heart pounding, straining her ears for the piercing shriek that warned of impending attack, the distant low rumble of bombs as they struck in the distance, the pounding of the rooftop guns.

  Then, one night in early September, she woke not to sirens or from nightmares but to pain, a sudden, relentless cramping so intense it took her breath away. When she tried to sit up in bed, her hand brushed the bedcovers and came away warm and damp.

  “Arvid,” she called out, her voice breaking with grief and terror. “Arvid, help me.”

  Not this, she thought frantically as Arvid woke and saw the blood and ran to a neighbor’s apartment to phone for an ambulance.

  She knew before the doctors confirmed it that she had lost the child. She imagined that she had felt the tiny soul leaving her, letting go with a gentle, wistful sigh as if to say it had already learned enough of the world to know it dared not linger.

  She wept until she had no more tears left. She nodded mutely when the doctors assured her that she was in good health, if a bit underweight, and that once she regained her strength, there was no reason why they should not try again to conceive. No reason, Mildred thought, except that she had tried and failed for many years with nothing to show for it but disappointment and heartbreak.

  After she was discharged from the hospital, Arvid urged her to recover her health at some quiet retreat in the countryside. When she demurred, Falk and Inge chimed in too, until eventually, exhausted and grieving, she consented.

  She spent her thirty-eighth birthday at a spa in Marienbad, taking the cure of the celebrated mineral springs, finding comfort for her broken heart in easy walks through forests and gardens, soothing her sorrow with the poetry of Goethe. The food was fresh, plentiful, and nourishing, and at night her sleep was undisturbed by sirens and bombs.

  In the last week of September, Mildred returned to Berlin, healing but carrying a sorrow so deep and constant it felt infused into her very bones. Arvid offered tender embraces and loving words and evaded her questions about the resistance work he had carried out in her absence.

  “Don’t shut me out,” she finally told him, thinking of Greta. She wanted to work. She needed purpose. If she could not nurture her own child, at least she could make the world better for other women’s children.

  Acquiescing, Arvid told her about several curious and foreboding reports he had seen in the Economics Ministry and the Luftwaffe’s ongoing merciless pounding of London. Then he hesitated. “There’s something else,” he said, taking her hand. “While you were away, I had an interesting visitor—the third secretary of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Erdberg.”

  “An alias and a cover, I assume.”

  Arvid nodded. “He claimed to be a friend of Alexander Hirschfeld, and he wants me to help him as I once helped Hirschfeld.”

  “Hirschfeld was a trusted friend long before he asked you to provide him with intelligence,” Mildred pointed out. “How do you know this Erdberg can be trusted? You haven’t heard from the Soviets in years, not since Stalin’s purge began. Why would Moscow contact you now?”

  For the same reason any other nation wanted intelligence from the Reich, Arvid explained, because Hitler could not be trusted and his unchecked ambition threatened to engulf the continent. Arvid had investigated Erdberg thoroughly and had confirmed that he was not an agent provocateur. Mindful of the purges that had claimed the lives of friends and acquaintances who once worked at the Soviet embassy, at first Arvid had declined, but eventually he had agreed to help them. Disinterested idealism was his only motive. He refused their offers of payment, and made it clear that he did not share their ideology. His only desire was to bring down Hitler and the Reich. If providing intelligence to the Soviets would help him accomplish that goal, then he would do it.

  Mildred muffled a sigh. Once again, Arvid was not seeking her permission, but informing her of the way things would be. “Be careful,” she said. She hoped this Alexander Erdberg would prove worthy of his trust.

  At the end of September, as bombs hammered London and the British relentlessly attacked German ports in order to delay the invasion of the British Isles, Arvid provided his new Soviet contact with his first intelligence report.

  In defiance of the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, and contrary to the prevailing opinion that Hitler would never risk a two-front war, Nazi high command was secretly devising a plan to attack the Soviet Union.

  Chapter Fifty

  October 1940–January 1941

  Sara

  As a courier, Sara often did not know the contents of the documents she carried between members of the resistance circle, but one October afternoon, Arvid invited her to read his latest intelligence report before she delivered it to a secluded dead drop in the University of Berlin library.

  “If you’re caught with this, the punishment will be severe,” Arvid said as he handed her the typewritten page. “You deserve to know why you’re risking your life.”

  Her heart thudded at the reminder of the danger, but of course she read the report. She would suffer the consequences either way, so she might as well satisfy her curiosity.

  An officer of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht had told Arvid that by early 1941, Germany would be prepared to go to war with the Soviet Union. The campaign’s objective was to advance to a line from the port of Archangel in northern Russia to the port of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Creating a vassal state from captured territory would bring most of the Soviet population and economic resources under control of the Reich. As an important preliminary measure, the German military would occupy Romania. The officer had hinted that prep
arations for the incursion into that country would require a postponement of the invasion of Great Britain.

  Sara’s thoughts raced as she slipped the report into a secret pouch in her old student satchel. In late September, Germany, Italy, and Japan had signed a pact agreeing to assist one another if any of the three were attacked by a country not involved in the current conflicts. One article specifically stated that the Tripartite Pact did not affect the political status existing between any of their countries and the Soviet Union, but Hitler’s invasion plans revealed how tenuous relations between Germany and the USSR truly were. If Stalin knew Hitler already intended to betray him, he might abandon the nonaggression pact of 1939, which, unbeknownst to him, Germany had already violated. The Soviets would almost certainly cut off the steady flow of raw materials from the Soviet Union into Germany rather than sustain the production of war materiel that might be turned against them. Perhaps—however improbable it seemed—the Soviets might even form an alliance with Great Britain in order to defeat Germany.

  Sara knew the Harnacks had already provided copies of the report to their contacts at the embassies of the Soviet Union and the United States, but she had no idea who would come for the copy she left at the dead drop. Could it be someone she had known from her student days, a former classmate or professor? It seemed so long ago that she had studied there, that she had dreamed of earning her doctorate and winning a fellowship to study in the United States. Her life had turned out nothing like she had imagined it when she passed through the front gates of the university on her first day as a student, so thrilled, so hopeful, so full of anticipation for all that she would learn and do.

  By now the students she had studied with had all moved on, graduated or forced out like herself. There were only a handful of people who might recognize her on campus, but she blended in so well that it was unlikely anyone would notice her. And if someone did suspect she was a Jew wandering about where she was forbidden, she would show them the false identity papers the Kuckhoffs had procured for her. They showed that she was Annemarie Hannemann, a student from Frankfurt, with all the rights and privileges accorded to any other Aryan citizen of the Reich.