Resistance Women
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Reunited with her son and mother, Greta settled her family in the eastern half of the divided capital and began working as a social worker for the municipality of Berlin. In August 1961 the Berlin Wall went up, separating her from the West.
In East Germany, where the Rote Kapelle were respected and hailed as heroes, Greta was honored for her wartime resistance activities, but she emphasized that she was not interested in receiving accolades for following her conscience. She did, however, wonder what everyone else had been doing while she and her friends were risking their lives. It should be made clear, she wrote in 1947, that others too “ought to have taken part in the struggle—there would have been fewer victims. . . . [E]very citizen must be challenged, so that he will finally see clearly it wasn’t a question of the victims, but a matter of clever, well-thought-out deeds. A little less fear, a little more love of life in a few hundred thousand and the war wouldn’t have been possible or would have been over sooner.”
In addition to writing a memoir and preserving her husband’s literary legacy, Greta succeeded in business and politics, becoming president of the East German national bank and vice president of the German Council of Peace. She died in Wandlitz in Brandenburg on November 11, 1981, at the age of seventy-nine.
Even after Mildred and Arvid were arrested, other members of their extended family continued their resistance work. Arvid’s cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer had returned to Germany, where his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnányi—organizer of the thwarted 1938 conspiracy to oust Hitler—arranged for him to work for military intelligence. Under the cover of assignments and travel abroad for the Abwehr, Bonhoeffer worked as a courier for the resistance, and with Dohnányi arranged for many German Jews to escape to Switzerland. He was arrested in April 1943 and held in military prisons, Buchenwald, and Flossenbürg concentration camp until his execution in April 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated by United States infantry troops and one month before Germany surrendered. Dohnányi, arrested on the same day as Bonhoeffer, was held in Sachsenhausen until his execution in early April 1945.
Arvid’s brother Falk Harnack, a member of the White Rose resistance group based in Munich, was arrested and tried along with other members of the cell in April 1943. Astonishingly, he was found not guilty and was released, unaware that the Gestapo intended to observe him in hopes that he would unwittingly lead them to additional members of the Rote Kapelle. Still an active-duty soldier, in August 1943 he was sent to the Greek front, but in December Himmler, frustrated and angry that he had betrayed no one, ordered his arrest. Alerted by a sympathetic superior officer, Falk fled, joined the Greek partisans, and fought the Nazis until the end of the war, when he returned to Berlin and joined Greta’s efforts to see Manfred Roeder prosecuted for war crimes. He became a director and screenwriter, one of the most important in postwar Germany. He died in Berlin in September 1991.
Sara Weitz is a fictional character inspired by the young Jewish women of the Rote Kapelle. I would have preferred to include a historical figure, but I needed my four narrators to interact with one another, and I was unable to find the perfect person who also would have known Greta, Mildred, and Martha. Since it was absolutely essential to me to include this important perspective, I created Sara, drawing upon the experiences of young women whose wartime activities were similar to those depicted in the novel.
Although Sara and her family are fictional, their friends the Panofskys were very real, and they did safely escape to Great Britain. In 1944, Hans Panofsky—the boy Mildred and Martha had observed playing with his sister, Ruth, in the garden of Tiergartenstrasse 27a in 1933—enlisted in the British army and fought the Nazis. After the war, he studied at the London School of Economics, and in 1948, Hans, his father, sister, and stepmother emigrated to New York, where Hans earned a BS in sociology and a master of library science degree from Columbia University. After earning other advanced degrees from Cornell and the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, he became a professor in the new Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Hans enjoyed a long, distinguished career, and he and his wife, Gianna, were involved with civil rights organizations including Amnesty International and the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. After his beloved wife’s death, Hans moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to be closer to family. I often wonder if he walked the same paths along Lake Mendota and through the University of Wisconsin Arboretum that Mildred and Arvid had loved so dearly.
After leaving Berlin and Boris Vinogradov in 1937, Martha Dodd Stern remained intrigued by communism and stayed in contact with Soviet intelligence from a distance. As she contemplated working with them in an official capacity, she continued to pursue her literary goals. In 1942, she published her second book, Ambassador Dodd’s Diary, a collection of her father’s letters and journal entries, edited with her brother. In 1945, she fulfilled a longtime dream by publishing a novel, Sowing the Wind, the story of a once kindhearted World War I flying ace corrupted by Nazism. That same year, she and her husband, Alfred, adopted an infant son. In 1953, Martha and Alfred’s interest in communism and leftist causes brought them to the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When they were subpoenaed to testify, they took their son and moved to Mexico City. Four years later, after an American counterspy testified that Martha and Alfred were part of a Soviet spy network, they were indicted on espionage charges; in response, they fled to Prague. As the years passed and Martha witnessed communism in practice rather than in theory, she became disillusioned with the system, and its lingering appeal vanished entirely during the Prague Spring of 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. In 1979, a U.S. federal court reluctantly cleared her and her husband of all charges of espionage due to the lack of evidence and the death of witnesses, but as much as she longed to return to the United States, age and infirmity had made travel too arduous. She died in Prague on August 10, 1990, at the age of eighty-two, four years after the death of her husband. To the last she staunchly believed that helping the Soviet Union against the Reich had been the morally responsible thing to do, at a time when most of the world stood idly by, reluctant to intervene as Europe hurtled toward disaster.
Mildred Fish Harnack’s family back in the United States did not learn about her unhappy fate until months after her execution. The first indication that something dreadful had happened surfaced on May 16, 1943, when a concerned neighbor showed Mildred’s sister Marion an article from the Milwaukee Journal reporting that the husband of Mrs. Harnack, “a former Milwaukeean,” had been executed for treason and that all of her property had been confiscated by the German Reich. “The official announcement did not make clear whether Mrs. Harnack, wife of an official in the German ministry for economy, also was implicated in a sensational conspiracy which still awaits clarification,” the reporter ominously noted. Mildred’s eldest sister, Harriette, appealed to the Vatican for their help in getting in touch with Mildred, but in September 1943 the family received a reply from the Apostolic Nunciature of Berlin informing them that “Mrs. Harnack died in the beginning of this year.”
In the first few decades after the war, despite the University of Wisconsin’s efforts to honor their courageous alumna, Cold War tensions compelled the United States government to bury her story because they considered Mildred and Arvid to be Communist sympathizers—due in no small part to Manfred Roeder’s self-serving falsehoods. Only in more recent decades, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the release of the Harnacks’ KGB and FBI files, have their contributions and those of all the members of the Rote Kapelle resistance circle become better known. Since 1986, Mildred’s birthday, September 16, has been designated Mildred Harnack Day in Wisconsin public schools, and she is honored for her bravery, persistence, and willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight against totalitarianism.
In more than a dozen separate trials between December 1942 and July 1943, the Reichskriegsgericht convicted seventy-seven members of the Rote Kapelle. According to Gestap
o records, at a time when the Reich vigorously strove to limit women’s roles in society to Kinder, Kirche, Küche, nearly half of the Rote Kapelle were women. Although most of the strategic decisions were made by the group’s male leaders, Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, the women assumed responsibility for recruiting members, organizing meetings, collecting intelligence, acting as couriers, translating, copying, distributing leaflets, concealing radios and other illicit equipment, sheltering fugitives, and many other activities that put their lives at risk, often to a greater extent than their male counterparts. Of the forty-five members of the Rote Kapelle who were sentenced to die, nineteen were women—courageous women from all walks of life, not trained spies or armed soldiers, but ordinary and extraordinary women who committed all that they had and all that they were in the struggle against fascism so that evil would not triumph over the earth.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Maria Massie, Rachel Kahan, Alivia Lopez, Leah Carlson-Stanisic, Elsie Lyons, Carolyn Bodkin, Juliette Shapland, and Tavia Kowalchuk for their contributions to Resistance Women and their ongoing support of my work. Geraldine Neidenbach, Heather Neidenbach, and Marty Chiaverini were my first readers, and their comments and questions about several early drafts of this novel proved invaluable, as always. Nic Neidenbach generously shared his computer expertise to help me in crucial moments.
I am indebted to the Wisconsin Historical Society and their librarians and staff for maintaining the excellent archives on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison that I relied upon for my research. Many thanks to David Null, University Archivist, for directing me to the Mildred Harnack Project archives at UW. Additional sources that informed this book include:
Shareen Blair Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Martha Dodd, Through Embassy Eyes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1939).
William E. Dodd Jr. and Martha Dodd, eds. Ambassador Dodd’s Diary 1933–1938 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1941).
Greta Kuckhoff, Vom Rosenkranz zur Roten Kapelle: Ein Lebensbericht (Berlin, Verlag Neues Leben, 1972).
Eric Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin (New York: Random House, 2011).
Roger Moorhouse, Berlin at War (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
Anne Nelson, Red Orchestra (New York: Random House, 2009).
William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941).
I also consulted several excellent online resources while researching and writing Resistance Women, including the archives of digitized historic newspapers at the Library of Congress (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov), Genealogybank.com (http://genealogybank.com), and Newspapers.com (http://www.newspapers.com); the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org); the University of Wisconsin Libraries Campus History Project “Honoring Mildred Fish Harnack” (https://www.library.wisc.edu/archives/exhibits/campus-history-projects/honoring-mildred-fish-harnack/), and Wisconsin Public Television’s Wisconsin’s Nazi Resistance: The Mildred Fish-Harnack Story (https://wpt.org/nazi-resistance/main).
Most of all, I thank my husband, Martin Chiaverini, and our sons, Nicholas and Michael, for their enduring love and tireless support. I love you a million billion. I love you infinity.
About the Author
JENNIFER CHIAVERINI is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous acclaimed historical novels, including Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, and the beloved Elm Creek Quilts series. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, she lives with her family in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
resistance women. Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Chiaverini. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-284111-7
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284110-0
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