All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

by Rebecca Donner

The scene is one “which had not been witnessed in the Western world since the late Middle Ages,” writes the American journalist William Shirer. He watches the fire crackle horrifically, the p...

Teenagers race through neighborhood streets putting up posters with pots of paste, spreading the word. Each poster lists twelve decrees, including MAINTAINING PURITY OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE IS UP TO YOU! YOUR VOLK HAS ENTRUSTED YOU WITH THE FAITHFUL PRESERVATION OF LANGUAGE. And OUR MOST DANGEROUS ADVERSARY IS THE JEW AND ANYONE WHO DOES HIS BIDDING. And THE JEW CAN THINK ONLY IN JEWISH TERMS. WHEN HE WRITES IN GERMAN, HE TELLS LIES. ANY GERMAN WHO WRITES IN GERMAN BUT WHOSE THINKING IS UN-GERMAN IS A TRAITOR!

Teenagers in the underground resistance race through the streets and campuses, pasting up posters of their own that also list twelve decrees, including ALL ANTI-SEMITIC STUDENTS ARE ASSHOLES! And ASSHOLES DO NOT BELONG AT THE UNIVERSITY, THEY BELONG IN THE SHITHOUSE. And EVERY DECENT HUMAN BEING IS ASHAMED TO SAY THAT THIS IS THE GERMAN WAY.

Dietrich writes a manifesto that urges the German Lutheran Church to reject the Aryan clause. He finds a printer who turns the manifesto into leaflets. Dietrich and a few like-minded pastors distribute the leaflets to clergy, nail the leaflets to trees. The leaflets do nothing. The German Lutheran Church stands by its support of the Aryan clause.

The treaty—officially known as a concordat—grants Catholics various rights in Nazi Germany, including the freedom to worship. In return, Catholic bishops must take the following oath of allegiance: I swear and promise before God and on the Holy Gospel, as befits a bishop, loyalty to the German Reich.

With the stroke of a pen, the Vatican grants moral legitimacy to Hitler.

Now that Hitler has the Catholics, he pursues the Protestants. He consolidates the various splinters into a single Reichskirche—Reich church—and recommends the appointment of a somewhat obscure, fiercely anti-Semitic pastor as bishop. On September 27, 1933, by a unanimous vote at a meeting of the National Synod, the church leadership approves Bishop Ludwig Müller, a man who wears a cross on his breast and a swastika in his heart.

Arvid can’t apply for a position at the Justus Liebig University or the University of Berlin or indeed any university in Germany. His area of expertise—U.S. labor movements and Soviet political theory—is too controversial. He could be branded as “politically unreliable,” just as Lenz was.

Later, Don’s father sits him down and reminds him that the sons and daughters of diplomats are, more often than not, rich. Some are obscenely rich, the scions of oil magnates and railroad barons and newspaper moguls. Back in the States, the Great Depression is going on, but you wouldn’t know it by the way the diplomats here carry on. Wealth does things to people, his father says, makes them cockeyed.

Hitler brags—absurdly—that the Third Reich will last “a thousand years.” Mildred and Arvid and everyone else in the Circle still believe it will collapse within a year, two years, three years tops. Germans just need to keep the pressure on and resist.

Sometimes Mildred speaks to people in a way that’s deliberately “ambiguous,” choosing her words carefully, waiting to learn what they think, how they feel. She doesn’t interrogate people so much as coax information from them.

“It was fascinating,” her friend writes, “to watch her subtle approach to people whose sympathy she wanted to enlist in the underground.

She writes about Arvid, about the wonder of loving a man who looks at the world the way she does, a man “who also longs to put his fingers feelingly into life.” She writes until she exhausts her powers of expression.

Martha somehow can’t help herself; she has fallen in love with a Nazi.

Rudolf Diels confides in Martha, telling her all about the Nazis he knows, about their “intrigues and inter-party struggles and hatreds.” He seems to enjoy terrifying her. The American embassy is bugged, he tells her. So is your home. The telephones are tapped, the servants are spies, nothing is secret.

Martha finds herself in “a nervous state that almost bordered on hysterical.” 3. Mildred seems entirely unfazed.

Martha’s head spins. Somehow, Mildred accepts the shocking possibility that their homes are bugged the same way she has accepted the news that books were burned in pyres across Germany—as a fact that must be dealt with.

Tonight, she will lecture about an author from South Carolina named Julia Peterkin, the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize. Most likely, no one in the room has heard of Julia Peterkin, much less read her 1928 novel Scarlet Sister Mary,

Mildred wants the people in this room to understand how Jim Crow laws affect every aspect of daily life. Schools and churches, buses and drinking fountains, restrooms and restaurants—everywhere you look in the South, you see “Colored” signs, “Whites Only” signs, a constant reminder of the racial segregation that is enforced by acts of violence committed by ordinary American citizens, uniformed police, and the white-hooded vigilantes of the Ku Klux Klan. The parallel with Germany is obvious. Signs are cropping up in Berlin and across the country: “Jews Are Not Wanted Here,” “Jews Prohibited,” “Jews Forbidden in This Town.”

One strategy she uses is to say the opposite of what she means. She’s horrified to see Hitler Youth marching in a May Day parade, but in a letter to her mother, Mildred writes: How beautiful it was. Thousands, thousands, and thousands of people marched in order singing and playing through the majestic streets.… Well, it is a very beautiful, serious thing—serious as death—and I hope it will never be perverted again! Think this over, for I want you to understand me.

She fills the lonely hours with work. There are always lectures to prepare, and she’s hopelessly behind on her dissertation, a nagging concern; she really should be done by now.

She reads a book, writes a letter. She lies on the floor, does some sit-ups. Boils water for tea. The longer Arvid stays at the office, the more she worries he has been arrested. Then, at last: the soft metal scratching of a key in the lock. Relief. He’s home.

They leave leaflets in piles in phone booths, public restrooms, parks, train stations. They mail them to perfect strangers, finding addresses by flipping through the Berlin phone book. They can’t go to a post office with a pile of envelopes without inviting suspicion, so they divide the large piles into smaller ones and take turns dropping them into mailboxes all around Berlin.

The leaflets urge Germans to resist, resist, resist.

Relentless Nazi brutality invigorates their conviction that they must fight back steadily, diligently, without hesitation. They set up safe houses and help Jews escape Germany. They forge ration cards, identity cards, exit papers. In ...

To join the Circle means you have to invent excuses for abrupt absences, disappear into the night without an explanation. You have to accustom yourself to half-truths and deceptions, to lying again and again, even to those you love. You become wary, distrustful. You watch your acquaintances for signs that they are Gestapo informants. Stories about children reporting their parents begin to circulate. The Circle’s members turn into anxious people, paranoid people.

The bitter pill is making him ill, or so it seems to Rowohlt, who knows many authors who have remained in Germany and many authors who have fled. Authors in the first category say they’re waiting for Hitler’s regime to collapse, and in the meantime they’ll keep a low profile, retreat into the comfort of family, avoid ruffling Nazi feathers. Authors in the second category believe authors in the first category are bootlicking fools.

Their friendship suffered a setback after Mildred discovered that Martha was dating the chief of the Gestapo. Since then, Martha seems to have come to her senses. Her obsession with the sinisterly handsome Rudolf Diels was, she admits, a childish mistake. Mildred accepts this dramatic turnaround with coolheaded approval.

Boris speeds on, undaunted. He refuses to put up the convertible’s top, to the delight of his passengers. They lift their faces to the pelting rain, laughing. By the time they reach Carwitz, they are thoroughly drenched.

I don’t need you to explain, she could respond, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know. But she keeps silent. She will let him say what he needs to say.

“So, yes,” he concludes, “I believe you can still write in Germany if you observe the necessary regulations and give in a little. Not in the important things, of course.” “What is important and what is unimportant?” Mildred asks. Another drag. A rising cloud of smoke.

At one point, she asked Rudolf why he’d given up. His face turned scarlet. Then he went quiet. Mildred won’t recruit him into the Circle. No one knows this had been her ulterior motive—not Heinrich, not Martha, not Martha’s new Russian lover.

One man is missing from the well-lighted office. His name is Ernst Röhm. He has been Hitler’s political ally and close friend for fourteen years. When Hitler was an upstart politician giving speeches in beer halls, Röhm was there, protecting him, recruiting followers. Everyone else has to address Hitler as Mein Führer. But Röhm calls him Adolf.

Hitler and Röhm—Adi and Ernst—are joined at the hip. Everyone knows it. And many—including the three men in the well-lit office—resent it.

Röhm is the leader of the Storm Troopers. He has three million men under his command, seven and a half million if you count recruits from the Steel Helmets, a veterans’ ...

As head of the SS, Himmler feels outmanned. So does Heydrich; the Gestapo will never approach Röhm’s numbers. Göring, too, chafes at Röhm’s popularity. Even Hitler is growing uneasy. What would happen if Röhm decided to turn against him, spearhead a revolution?

On June 30, 1934, Ernst Röhm is arrested and thrown in jail. The next morning, two SS officers enter his cell. Suicide, they explain, is within his rights. They give him a gun. Röhm accepts the weapon—a loaded Browning—but refuses to kill himself. So they shoot him dead.

Hitler’s speech is broadcast on the radio. He raves about a gang of traitors who had been conspiring to overthrow the government with the help of another, unnamed country. He alludes darkly to his friend Röhm, claiming he was plotting to assassinate him.

Let it be known that no one can threaten Germany’s existence—which depends on its internal law and order—and escape unpunished! And let it be known that if you raise your hand to strike this country, you will face certain death!

Now is a different time. A bloody massacre has occurred in broad daylight. Countless people have been shot in the back, in the face, in the chest, their bodies dumped into ditches or stuffed into caskets and delivered to their wives. In some cases, wives were murdered too. Gangsters. Germany is being governed by gangsters.

Mole is Don’s age. He’s too young to join his older brother in the army, but if he is drafted one day, he’ll go. He’ll have no choice. But I won’t shoot you, he tells Don. I won’t shoot you either, Don tells his friend.

Their fathers fought on opposite sides in the Great War. Don and Mole wonder if their fathers would be friends now. The idea is so unfathomable that they laugh, picturing it.

A good memory is essential in espionage, though Don won’t know what espionage means for many years.

Arvid assures Mildred that bureaucrats miss important details as often as they discover them, and an impressive lineage opens doors in a fascist dictatorship as well as it does in a capitalist democracy.

Compulsory military service is forbidden, but Hitler hopes that the world will overlook what he’s done, especially when he steps up to a microphone and assures everyone he wants peace. On March 17, he says, Germans don’t want war. We want to be peaceful and happy.

On May 1, he says, Germans want nothing else than peace with the rest of the world.

On August 28, he says, We have declared a hundred times that we wish for peace.

While Wilhelm II guzzled wine from gold goblets beneath a massive chandelier, ordinary Germans had to suffer the consequences of the treaty, which aimed to weaken their country so it would never again pose a threat to the world.

(It took Germany more than ninety years—until October 2010—to pay off the debt.)

Germany’s new democratic government struggled to come up with the sum and attempted to solve the problem ...