The Heart-Wrenching Story of Mildred Harnack
The Only American Civilian Ever Executed by Adolf Hitler
Don’t let the soft eyes and delicate smile deceive you. Mildred Harnack was a fighter. Till the very end. She was a fighter willing to face frightening odds and ultimately death itself to oppose everything that came with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Not the type of thing young Mildred would have ever thought of growing up in Wisconsin, so far removed from the bloody entanglements of twentieth-century Europe. She was born in a boardinghouse in Milwaukee in 1902 and raised by a strong-willed woman named Georgina Fish who believed in the power of education. Graced with natural beauty and intellect, Mildred attended and later gave lectures at the University of Wisconsin. There she reveled in a free-thinking world, set on one day becoming a prominent writer and linguist.
On that Madison campus in 1926 she also met and fell in love with a bookish Philosophy graduate student from Germany named Arvid Harnack. The couple shared passions for literature and nature — the works of poets like Johann Goethe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and leisurely picnics and trips through the green hills and countryside surrounding Madison.
They also nurtured a mutual talent for bringing like-minded people together, hosting weekly meetings of progressive artists and intellectuals in Mildred’s apartment where they shared and exchanged thoughts about life and literature.
The Land of Goethe
Mildred and Arvid were married in 1929 and shortly thereafter Mildred agreed to move back to Harnack’s native Germany. All was well in their young married lives until January of 1933 when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power. With that ascension came an ever-growing succession of hateful rhetoric, intimidating torchlight parades, and vicious street violence against anyone who dared oppose Hitler.
Then there were the ever-increasing calls by the Nazis for racial purity and defense of the state against so-called undesirables — namely Jews — by any means possible. Throughout the land of Goethe, freedom was disappearing and the rights of the state were running roughshod over the rights of the individual.
Germany was fast becoming a dangerous place to be.
As far as their day-to-day lives were concerned, Mildred started teaching English Literature at the University of Berlin and Arvid went on to take a civil service job within the government’s Ministry of Economics.
But within their cramped Berlin apartment and its ominously thin walls, the Harnacks spoke quietly about answering to their conscience and opposing Hitler in any way possible. Part of that fight, they decided, would be recruiting and mobilizing as many fellow resistors as possible. Harking back to their Madison days, they began hosting meetings with friends and students. It was a risky business.
Every day they had to be careful who they talked to, who they corresponded with, who they let into their home. Because while there were anti-Nazi sympathizers out there, so were battalions of state security agents — the Gestapo — and citizen informants willing to turn anyone in to curry favor and prove themselves as good, loyal Nazis.
Having weighed the risk, Mildred started translating speeches by Churchill and Roosevelt — speeches banned by the Nazis — and secretly placing them in public places for people to see. She helped others create and distribute leaflets critical of Hitler. Forging identity cards and ration cards was next, necessary steps that protected and aided in the smuggling of Jewish intellectuals out of Germany.
Every one of these acts would be considered high treason — punishable by the most garish death imaginable. In 1935 alone, the Nazis executed by guillotine seventy-nine men and nine women who had been found guilty of acts against the state.1
Getting Out
With his sights set on aiding the collapse of Hitler’s reign, Arvid began making contacts through his job in the Ministry of Economics with agents from the Soviet Union — Hitler’s declared arch-enemy. Stalin’s spies were only too happy to receive classified economic secrets of the Third Reich. As for Arvid and Mildred, they saw it in terms of supporting the Soviet Union being the best way to help defeat Hitler.
But the more the Harnacks succeeded in pressing their clandestine attack, the more exposed and vulnerable they became. By early 1942 the world was at war and the Gestapo was more determined than ever to root out any and all enemies from within. They even came up with a name for the ring of Russian collaborators: Der Rote Kapelle, or “The Red Orchestra.”
Time was running out. On September 5, 1942, the Harnacks fled to Lithuania with plans to escape to neutral Sweden smuggled aboard a fishing boat. But only one day before they were to get on that boat the Gestapo decoded a message naming Arvid and Mildred as being part of the Red Orchestra, and with that they moved in.
No assumption of innocence, no defense lawyers to speak of, no contact allowed with anybody. All the conspirators of the Red Orchestra were rounded up and shared the same fate: arrest, forced confessions, then sham trials and final sentence.
Mildred and Arvid were subjected to brutal interrogation, all the while kept in solitary confinement within the foreboding, century-old walls of Plötzensee Prison outside of Berlin. Mildred was denied visitors. No books. No word from or about her husband. Her health deteriorated and she contracted tuberculosis, making it a challenge just to get up on her feet and move around every day. Within a matter of months her blond hair turned gray and her face grew gaunt and pale.
In December of ’42, a prison guard told Mildred that her husband was dead. Based on his tortured confession that he did collaborate with the Russians, Arvid had been found guilty of high treason, declared a traitorous enemy of the Third Reich, and executed by hanging.
A small ray of hope appeared when a Nazi tribunal sentenced Mildred to six years of hard labor for treason and espionage. Hardly a lenient punishment, but at least her life might be spared.
And it may have been, were it not for a standing order that all sentences relating to members of the Red Orchestra be reviewed by the Führer himself. When Adolf Hitler was informed of the ruling on Mildred Harnack, he immediately ordered otherwise. Still reeling from the Nazi surrender at Stalingrad days earlier, Hitler fumed that no American woman who collaborated with the Bolsheviks was going to get off that easy.
The Führer demanded a retrial, but the message was implicitly clear. The court reconvened and quickly sentenced Mildred to death.
On February 16, 1943, the prison chaplain at Plötzensee entered cell 25 and saw Mildred shackled and hunched over, writing in a book he had smuggled in earlier for her. (The chaplain was later identified as a member of the resistance.) It was a book of poems by Johann Goethe. Mildred was translating one of his poems into English.
In all the frequent troubles of our days
A God gave compensation — more his praise
In looking sky — and heavenward as duty
In sunshine and in virtue and in beauty. 2
Minutes later an SS guard came to get her, and with silent dignity she followed him to a back room where the guillotine was waiting.
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Shortly after the war ended, a woman named Marie Luise von Scheliha recounted her years-long experience as a political prisoner at Plötzensee. She recalled one peculiar incident when a fellow inmate, a gray, weakened woman with her hair pulled back in a bun approached her during their ten-minute exercise period — the only time prisoners ever saw daylight, or other inmates. Talking was strictly forbidden.
Nonetheless, this woman took the risk, stepped over to von Scheliha, and whispered, “I am in cell 25. Don’t forget me when you get out.” 2
Guards pulled the prisoner away before she could give her name. Years later, when shown a photograph, von Scheliha positively identified the woman who had so desperately feared being forgotten.
It was Mildred Harnack.
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1 Rebecca Donner, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), p. 207.
2 ibid., p. 437.
3 Shareen Blair Brysac, Resisting Hitler — Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 342.
