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September 2 - September 24, 2022
Germany, if given the chance, could become a prototype for countries around the world to follow, a model of fairness, decency, and equality. This is Mildred’s adamant belief.
In college, Mildred awakened to the idea that the political left provided an answer to the problem of poverty. What began at UW as a spirited debate with the Friday Niters soon hardened into a heartfelt conviction that the rich in America were too rich, the poor too poor. “If capitalism keeps on the path it is going,” she wrote, “the coming years will bring the enormous wealth of a very few and the misery and want of the common people.”
Russia, it seemed, offered hope. Lenin’s writings on the need for equality between the sexes brought Mildred to her feet. When students visited the apartment, she’d dash to her bookshelves for his dog-eared books and read passages aloud. Lenin railed against the “old, bourgeois humiliation of women.” How much more enlightened these proclamations were than the Nazi view, which held that women should limit the scope of their activities and concern themselves with only three things: Kinder, Küche, Kirche—children, kitchen, church.
She explained that Lenin was a leftist revolutionary who had led a revolt against the monarchy in 1917, ending centuries of imperial rule. No longer was land the sole property of wealthy aristocrats. Land was returned to the peasants, and Lenin was hailed by many as a hero. Mildred hoped her mother—who was living on a shoestring and always would, who had suffered a life of toil and still did, and who undoubtedly felt unvalued throughout it all—would view Lenin as a hero too. Georgina didn’t.
She worried that Mildred had been swept away by a tide of some sort or had wandered off on a wayward path. She especially didn’t understand why Mildred was writing so much about Reds.
Study, thought, and experience had convinced Mildred that Germany suffered from the same moral ailment as America. Men in power thought “only of the individual and the soul of the well-to-do” and ignored the poor. So: fascism must be fought—capitalism too.
9 Aug 1937 It’s been terribly hot here the last few days. They say it comes from America, like women smoking on the streets & wearing shorts and raising whoopee at midnight in beer parlors. What an idea most of them have of Americans, anyway! Irresponsible children with too much money and an awful accent, who make too much noise and wear too much makeup.… Please when I get home don’t give me any boiled potatoes—please!
Jane Esch
One plan will take precedence over the others. Justus Delbrück will join Ernst von Harnack, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Klaus Bonhoeffer, and Hans von Dohnányi in a 1944 conspiracy to assassinate Hitler.
Jane will meet them all—Justus, Ernst, Dietrich, Klaus, and Hans—but she won’t know they are in the resistance. She remains blissfully unaware that there is such a thing as a resistance.
Then she sits in a room. She is the sole American. The other chairs are filled by Europeans who think of themselves as anti-fascists or comrades or revolutionaries participating in what they regard as an international struggle against fascism. Hitler isn’t the only threat. Fascism is on the march throughout Europe right now. Mussolini is tyrannizing Italy, and Franco is massacring civilians in the Spanish Civil War. Democracies seem to be toppling everywhere; iron-fisted dictators rule the day.
Arvid is evolving right before Mildred’s eyes. The cautious graduate student she married is metamorphosing into a bolder man. He even buys a motorcycle.
They intend to assassinate Hitler when he invades Czechoslovakia, which they predict will happen any day now. Already, Hitler has positioned troops along the Czech border and is threatening to attack unless the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia is surrendered to Germany. The conspirators urge the British government to oppose Hitler’s land grab. But Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain attempts to negotiate with Hitler instead, hoping to avoid armed conflict. In a September 27 BBC radio broadcast, Chamberlain describes Hitler’s warmongering in Czechoslovakia as “a quarrel in a faraway country
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Mildred is moved to take greater risks. At one meeting of the Circle, Mildred tells members to look for ways to support the anti-fascists in Spain and sabotage German military aid. If they obtain enough explosives, they can blow up key communications centers.
Spain was the tragic prel
Finally, in the kitchen, Mildred confides that she had a miscarriage. “Her sorrow astonished me,” Franziska recalled later in a letter, “because I believed that she intentionally had no children because of her political work.”
The stream of letters Mildred used to send home slows to a trickle. She has no one to confide in anymore, not really.
Martha’s willingness to spy on her own father and guide his decisions impresses the NKVD leadership so thoroughly that Stalin himself is alerted about her recruitment in a memo marked “TOP SECRET For your eyes only.”
The Great Purge averages one thousand murders a day between 1936 and 1938. Because executions are carried out at night and mass graves are hidden, most of the population remains blissfully ignorant of Stalin’s killing spree.
In Moscow, he will be questioned, but Boris tells Knick he’s not worried. He’s a loyal Communist, he fought in the Red Army; his interrogators would never conclude that he’s an enemy of Russia. The two men converse in Russian; Knick is nearly fluent. Knick puts it to Boris straight: “If you have reason to believe that you have been falsely denounced, will you go back or will you choose exile in the West?” Exile, in Boris’s mind, is not an option. Nor is refusing to return to Moscow, where the Dwarf is waiting for him.
Boris returns to Moscow and checks into room 925 at the Moskva Hotel, which faces the Kremlin. He is arrested, tortured, and deposited in a prison cell. On August 28, 1938, he is sentenced to death by a Soviet military court, dragged to a secret NKVD mass-execution site, and shot.
Mildred is guarded. Lowering her voice, she tells Martha that the Circle has widened. Years later, Martha will write about their conversation. Mildred is “rarely demonstrative,” but later that night, when they are walking in the Tiergarten after their dinner, Mildred kisses Martha on the cheek—“quickly”—and walks away.
Ambassador Dodd resigns. His four and a half years in Berlin have worn him down. Since 1934, Dodd has been telling the State Department that Hitler poses a threat to Germany and the world, and he is outraged that his warnings have had little to no effect on American foreign policy. Dodd knows he is unpopular among his State Department colleagues and suspects that for many months Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles has been working behind the scenes to eject him as ambassador.
One day Martha receives an envelope in her mailbox. It’s from Boris. I love you, I’m full of you, I dream of you and us. Martha reads the sentence over and over again, deeply moved. “It was a sad, sad letter,” she will write many years later, “and a very loyal one (I still have it) and was his farewell I guess to me and to life. They say he was shot after this.” Martha will never suspect that the letter was written by a spy pretending to be Boris after Boris was shot.
Martha continues to spy for Moscow Center. In years to come, she will grow accustomed to thinking of herself as a member of the German resistance, equating spying on her own father with aiding the resistance. After the war, in a passage that is as self-dramatizing as it is untrue, she will write, “We, all of us… were in the German underground from 1933 to 1943. I am the only one left.”
The mental gymnastics are absurd
The Dwarf presides over thousands of executions, then thousands more. Soon, the Dwarf himself comes under suspicion, and he is arrested in the spring of 1939. Later, he is shot in the head.
No honor among murderers
The Russian embassy in Berlin is eerily empty. Among Arvid’s contacts there, five out of nine have been executed.
Stalin’s conviction that Trotskyite enemies and foreign spies are out to get him utterly paralyzes his intelligence operations. At precisely the time in history when Stalin needs accurate, high-level intelligence about Hitler, he murders all the spies who could provide it.
A Yale-educated diplomat named Hugh Wilson is the new ambassador in Berlin, and he is nothing like Dodd, who always made his hatred of Hitler plain. Ambassador Wilson believes that the American press is “Jewish controlled” and praises Hitler as “the man who has pulled his people from moral and economic despair.”
The political situation in Germany was complicated in previous years. Now, in August 1939, it makes no sense. In a maneuver that stunned not only Arvid and Mildred and the Circle but everyone else on the planet, the Soviet Union and Germany join forces.
When the First World War broke out he fought in the infantry in France and resolved to change his life if he was fortunate enough to survive. Whether due to fortune or fate—he couldn’t decide which—he did. Newly discharged, he dropped gallantly to one knee and promised a girl from Topeka that he’d be an ambassador one day. Get up off the ground, Louise Bell declared. They married. Within a month, they were living in Romania, where Heath had talked his way into a job with the U.S. State Department as vice-consul.
On the brink of a second world war, the United States was the only global power without a centralized intelligence agency. The gathering of foreign intelligence, what there was of it, was relegated to the diplomats and attachés.
Louise Heath is schooled in the art of diplomacy and knows full well that the best way to reach an unreachable man is through his wife.
In Berlin an American walking down the Kurfürstendamm, one of the city’s principal thoroughfares, saw a mob haul a Jew out of a store, knock him down, and trample on him until his shrieks stopped.
In the poorest Jewish streets near Alexanderplatz, kitchen cabinets and other furniture of Jewish inhabitants were heaved out of windows, chinaware was spilt all over the street. The furniture was piled together and bonfires were lit.
Across Germany, 267 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish-owned stores are destroyed. Ninety-one Jews are murdered. Innumerable Jewish women are raped. An estimated twenty thousand to thirty thousand Jewish men are arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
Of course, the teenager hadn’t been trained by an organization, nor was Kristallnacht “spontaneous.” It was masterminded by Goebbels and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Gestapo, who saw in the teenager’s crime a convenient pretext to instigate violence.
Kristallnacht marks the end of one thing and the beginning of something else.
“Refugees were to be found in every nook and cranny of [the building], many of them begging to be allowed to spend the night,” remembered one of Heath’s colleagues at the U.S. embassy in Berlin, Consul William Russell. There was no European country which would admit a German or a Polish Jewish refugee unless he could first show that he was registered with the American Consulate for an immigration visa. There were times when the crowds got too much for us—especially the time they pushed through two heavy glass and brass doors.
Arvid knows all about the massive profits I. G. Farben is making thanks to his confidential source Turk, who sees all the balance sheets. The chemical conglomerate is currently producing vast quantities of synthetic fuels, oils, rubber, and plastic as Hitler prepares for war.
Appeasement won’t restrain Hitler. Arvid emphasizes this point again and again in his conversations with Heath.
Arvid mentions his source at I. G. Farben who knows all about the company’s hidden assets in America. The moment Hitler starts this war—not if he does, but when—these assets must be seized by the U.S. government. Arvid is especially adamant on this point.
But it’s no use. Arvid returns to Germany with the conviction that the men in the Treasury Department didn’t take him seriously.
This is a pattern that repeats again and again. As early as 1937, emissaries from the German resistance attempted to make contact with the U.S. and British governments and warn them about the threat Hitler poses to the rest of the world. But statesmen in the West remain profoundly skeptical that a German resistance actually exists.
The voluminous archives at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library don’t tell us that in the summer of 1939, Donald Heath informed Chargé d’Affaires Kirk that he had received intelligence indicating that “Nazi military aggression would shortly occur,” or that Kirk gave him a “pitying” look and said, “My dear Don, even somebody as stupid as myself… knows there’s not going to be any war.”
The archives don’t inform us that State Department officials rejected Arvid Harnack’s offer to deliver confidential information about Hitler’s preparations for war, or that they believed he was lying when he insisted that he was in the resistance.
So many stories remain untold.
She scribbles notes in her diary: On September 5: “horrible bombings in Warsaw.” On September 14: “rumors of Russian mobilization.” On September 24: “Warsaw finally taken.” On September 29: “Warsaw really taken now.”
“Mad rush all day,” Louise writes in her diary. “Great silence on train—no one spoke.… Rumors of heavy bloodshed in Czechoslovakia.
Nov 4
No matter which route he takes to Mildred’s apartment, he passes the charred remains of a burned-down synagogue. The memory of Kristallnacht is impossible to erase.
Don misses his friends at the American School. In a photograph taken of his class last year, he stood with his arm slung around the shoulder of another boy, who is Jewish. That boy is gone now.
The war will start soon, Don overhears Mildred say. She is in the living room with his parents, and Arvid is with her. It’s late at night. This is the only time of day Mildred and Arvid visit—after Mamzelle the cook has left.
