Morbid Fact Du Jour For September 8, 2011
Today’s Resistant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Mildred Harnack was born in Milwaukee in 1902. Through a chance encounter while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mildred met a German exchange student named Arvid Harnack who was studying economics on a Rockefeller Fellowship. The two fell in love and were married at Mildred’s brother’s farm near Brooklyn, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1926. Arvid returned to Germany in 1928 in search of work and Mildred followed in 1929. By 1930 the couple was settled in Berlin, where Mildred worked as a lecturer and studied for her doctorate at the University of Berlin while Arvid took a government job.
The Harnacks were well known for hosting literary and cultural discussion circles with other Berlin intellectuals and students, many of which had socialist affiliations. As the Nazi Party’s dominance grew, these discussions turned toward ways in which to foment a more structured resistance, giving rise to a group the Gestapo would later nickname the Red Orchestra. In the early 1940s, Arvid began to pass sensitive government information to the Soviet, British, and American embassies. Mildred served as a recruiter and communicator for the group, and may have passed information to the United States as well. In the fall of 1942, German counterintelligence decoded the Red Orchestra’s radio communications and the Harnacks were implicated.
Arvid was tried and condemned to death by hanging; he was executed at Berlin’s Plotzensee Prison on December 22, 1942. The executioner used a short rope to ensure slow strangulation. Mildred was forced to watch. At her own trial she was sentenced to six years in prison. Hitler himself ordered a retrial. This time the sentence was death. On February 16, 1943, at 6:00 p.m., she was executed by guillotine. Her last words: “And I have loved Germany so.”
Culled from: Wisconsin Academy and In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin
I just finished reading “In the Garden of Beasts” by Erik Larson and though it wasn’t a particularly morbid book, it was a very absorbing read. I’ll write up a full review soon.
