Op-Ed Contributor to the New York Times
When the Red Orchestra Fell Silent
By
SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC
Published: February 15, 2013
On Feb. 15, 1943, a green police wagon left Charlottenburg Women’s
Prison in Berlin, making its way through streets pockmarked by Allied
bombs to the infamous execution center at
Plötzensee.
The handcuffed prisoner, a 40-year-old American woman, scholar,
journalist, lecturer, teacher and translator named
Mildred Fish Harnack,
was led to a first-floor death cell. She was beheaded the next day.
Then, for many years, Mildred’s reputation — like those of many who
resisted Hitler in Germany before and during World War II — became
hostage to the Cold War. In the West she was depicted as a Soviet spy,
in the East as a Marxist saint. But she was neither, and only after the
Berlin Wall came down and secret files were declassified was Mildred’s
humanity restored, as poignantly defined by her final hours.
She spent them translating lines of Goethe into English and receiving a
welcome visit from Harald Poelchau, the prison pastor who had borne
witness to the execution of a thousand resisters — including men and
women belonging to the
Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group or those caught in the failed July 20
conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
They discussed the Bible, then Goethe, and finally Poelchau described
her husband’s brave end three days before Christmas. Arvid Harnack’s
petition to see Mildred before his execution had been denied. During his
final hour, Arvid asked if the chaplain could recite “Prologue in
Heaven” from Faust. And as Poelchau prepared to leave, Arvid asked him
to join in singing the chorale, “I Pray to the Power of Love.”
In his last letter to his wife, Arvid wrote that “despite everything,”
he looked back on a life in which “the darkness was outweighed by the
light” largely because of their marriage. He recalled that their
“intense work” meant that their life was never easy.
After Hitler’s rise to power, the couple had founded an underground
group that
- helped imperiled Jews,
- assisted forced laborers,
- documented
and archived Nazi acts of violence, especially in occupied areas in the
East,
- and distributed anti-Hitler pamphlets.
Mildred used her work as an English instructor to
- recruit resisters to
travel abroad to assist potential émigrés.
Mildred had met Arvid, a German student in the United States on a
Rockefeller Fellowship, while a graduate student at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison. Following their marriage, the couple in 1929
settled in Germany, where they gathered a study group of artists,
writers, academics and government officials. After 1933, this literary
salon became a network of resisters, and in 1940, Arvid Harnack
established contacts with Soviet intelligence. The group, subsequently named “Red Orchestra” by the Gestapo to
underscore its ties to Soviets, was led by Arvid, by then an official in
the Economics Ministry, and by Lt. Harro Schulze-Boysen, a member of
Hermann Goering’s staff.
For nine months, the group provided vital military information to Moscow
in the run-up to the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. During the
same period, Arvid Harnack met regularly with the first secretary of
the American embassy, Donald Heath, for long walks in Berlin’s parks and
forests, using their wives as cover. Thus Arvid kept Washington
informed on the state of the Third Reich’s economy, its trade
agreements, rearmament and war plans.
On two trips to the United States in 1938 and 1939, Arvid Harnack (with
Heath’s help) met with Treasury officials and passed information about
German assets in the United States.
After the Germans intercepted a radio communication, 120 persons were
arrested by the Gestapo. Mildred and Arvid were arrested on September 7,
1942. After a secret trial, Arvid was sentenced to death. Mildred
received a sentence of six years hard labor for “the preparation of high
treason and espionage.” Hitler heard this after the German defeat at
Stalingrad and refused to confirm the sentence. She was retried and
sentenced to death.
Mildred’s last words, before she was executed on Feb. 16, 1943, were: “And I have loved Germany so much.”
For many years after the war, resisters remained suspect in West
Germany, unwelcome reminders that opposition had been possible. Members
of the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group were dismissed as Soviet spies. By
contrast, East Germans celebrated them as anti-fascist heroes who lent a
measure of legitimacy to the Soviet-imposed regime.
After German reunification in 1990, I was able to obtain intelligence
files from the United States, Russia and several East German archives,
and to interview relatives and survivors. German scholars and I were
able to piece together material that allowed a more nuanced account of
the activities of the group. The “Red Orchestra” group came to be known
as the “Harnack-Schulze-Boysen” group.
Two streets in Berlin and in Giessen — where Mildred received her
doctorate — were named after her; memorial plaques dedicated to both
Harnacks have appeared on public buildings in the German capital.
In 2007, the German artist Franz Rudolf Knubel, with the help of
students of the
Mildred Harnack High School in Berlin,
created a
memorial exhibit inspired by Mildred’s translations of Goethe. The
exhibit was shown in Berlin and other German cities, as well as at the
Hillel Foundation in Madison and at Milwaukee’s Jewish Museum. In 2011,
Wisconsin Public Television aired a
one-hour documentary film about her.
Sept. 16, the date of her birth, has been designated Mildred Harnack Day in Wisconsin.
Many letters by members of the group have now been published. They
include Schulze-Boysen’s final letter to his parents. “It is common in
Europe for spiritual seeds to be sown with blood,” he wrote. “Perhaps we
were simply a few fools; but when the end is this near, one perhaps has
the right to a bit of completely personal historical illusion.”
Shareen Blair Brysac is the author, among other works, of “Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra.”
