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

Be careful, Berliners say. Nazi informants are everywhere. Watching. Listening. With neighbors, watch what you say. And with friends? You never know. Alliances shift. Your friend could become your enemy. Your enemy could become your friend.

Meanwhile, some stores in Berlin display pyramids of canned goods that are not for sale, intended to present the illusion “that there were unlimited supplies in the Reich.”

As food shortages worsen, Berliners tell bad jokes: What’s the difference between India and Germany? In India one man starves for everybody. In Germany everybody starves for one man.

Could be said for may tyrants

What he knows is that his father doesn’t like Kirk, and Kirk doesn’t like his father, though you wouldn’t see it if you watched the two of them together, smiling and nodding and clapping each other on the back. His mother doesn’t like Kirk either, but it’s harder for her to hide what she feels. When Louise Heath is in Kirk’s presence, distaste sours her face as though she just bit down on a lemon seed. Kirk refuses to live in just any old mansion. Months go by before he finds one that passes muster. Louise slips a photograph of it into an envelope and sends it to her family in Topeka. “Mr. Kirk’s residence here,” she writes with frank sarcasm, “has only forty rooms.”

Three days later, on September 26, 1940, Arvid sends Korotkov his first intelligence report. It’s a bombshell. Korotkov immediately sends an enciphered message to Moscow Center, alerting his superiors that an officer in the High Command of the Wehrmacht has told Corsican that by the beginning of next year Germany will be ready for war with the Soviet Union.

Later, when Greta is alone with Ule, she wraps her arms around him. “I needed to hold my child tightly,” she remembered. “I could see very clearly: From now on death was near us.”

When Libertas was twenty-two, Göring invited her to an extravagant hunting party at Carinhall, where she watched princes and foreign dignitaries join the self-appointed hunting master of the Reich in chasing after stags with rifles. Libertas had been a member of the Nazi Party then. She had a change of heart when she fell in love with Harro. Now, Libertas considers herself as committed to the resistance as he is.

Göring is entirely unaware that Harro despises him. Indeed, Göring’s fondness for Libertas’s husband is so widely known among Luftwaffe lieutenants that Harro can walk out the door with top-secret blueprints and bombing-target maps without anyone raising an eyebrow.

Over the next two years, members of the Circle, Gegner Kreis, Tat Kreis, and Rittmeister Kreis collaborate to produce a slew of leaflets with titles like What Is a Majority? Why the War Is Lost Freedom and Violence Revealing Certificate of the North-German Industry About the Circumstances Leading to the War Call to the Workers of the Mind and the Fist Not to Fight Against Russia Call for All Professions and Organizations to Oppose the Government Organize the Revolutionary Battle of the Masses

Cato Bontjes van Beek lives here. At twenty, she is among the youngest members of Rittmeister Kreis. Her ambition is to be a pilot. A sprinkling of freckles dot her nose and cheeks. Before joining Rittmeister Kreis, Cato smuggled food to Jews in hiding. One day she watched SS officers drag her Jewish neighbors—a young mother, father, and their five-year-old son—out of their apartment. She never saw them again.

Annie used to be a journalist; now she is a fortune-teller. The Germans who show up at her door with palms outstretched include military officers. She traces the lines of their palms with her fingertip, murmuring predictions. Some officers long for a lover. Some are worried about the war. She coaxes them to tell her where they will be stationed, what they plan to do. The officers don’t know that Annie has stashed two mimeograph machines in the apartment or that the details they disclose will find their way into the leaflets that she will reproduce on the machines.

Writer Günther Weisenborn gets a job at Grossdeutscher Rundfunk, a German broadcasting network. In a memoir, he describes how he “took home copies of the speeches of foreign statesmen which we received in the Broadcasting Company as secret material.” He and his wife, Joy, copy the speeches in the evening using two typewriters. In the morning, another member of Gegner Kreis picks up the typed pages, which are then transformed into leaflets.

Open Letters to the Eastern Front is another series of leaflets. The eighth in the series features a gruesome photograph of a two-year-old Russian girl who was murdered on her family’s farm along with her mother, father, six-year-old brother, and infant sister. Libertas found the photograph at Kulturfilm and hopes it will move readers to denounce the atrocities committed by German soldiers invading the Soviet Union. She also interviewed German soldiers on leave who admit to witnessing war crimes; their statements are incorporated in the text of the leaflet.

Arvid agonizes over the decision. He’s a German anti-fascist, not a spy for Stalin. Still, if he is too dogmatic—a conclusion others in the Circle have previously reached—he may end up undermining his own objective.

A line has been crossed. Since 1935, Arvid has insisted to his Soviet handlers that he’s a German anti-fascist, not an agent. He will engage in espionage only when it helps him achieve his aims in defeating Hitler. Never before has he accepted money from Moscow Center. There’s no denying it now. Arvid’s conversion is complete: he is officially a spy.

In the six months before Germany attacks the Soviet Union, Stalin is deluged with warnings from Arvid and Harro, such as: Plans for bombing the most important objectives are being drawn up. The plans for raiding Leningrad, Vyborg, and Kiev have just been completed. Photographs of cities and industrial targets are being regularly processed by the Luftwaffe staff. The German air attaché in Moscow scouts the location of the Soviet electric power station personally in his car by driving around the area where the generating stations are located.

Stalin ignores the warnings, dismissing Arvid’s and Harro’s reports as disinformation. Stalin receives other warnings, from Britain, the United States, and a Soviet spy in Tokyo named Richard Sorge (code name Ramsay), but he’s convinced that Western democracies are slyly trying to sow discord between dictatorships and goad him into distrusting Hitler.

While German panzer divisions and warplanes prepare to invade his country, Stalin greets every scrap of intelligence Moscow Center sends him as false, the fantastical construction of liars, double agents, or enemies conspiring to defeat him.

Remarkably, the only person the Russian dictator trusts is Germany’s dictator. The nonaggression and trade pacts have strengthened their bond. St...

Inside is a phrase book that is being distributed to German soldiers to prepare them for an upcoming invasion, with phonetic translations for Russian phrases like: Hands up! And I’ll shoot! And Are you a Communist?

The intelligence they have passed on to Moscow Center is the most urgent and compelling evidence yet that Hitler will attack the Soviet Union very soon, in just a few days. Fitin does his best to explain, but Stalin is unmoved. He is particularly fixated on intelligence from Harro about a Luftwaffe order of battle. His fury stirs him to obscenity. Stalin scrawls across the report: “You can send your ‘source’ from the staff of the German air force to fuck his mother.”

Six days later, on June 22, 1941, Hitler invades the Soviet Union.

Within a week, more than six hundred thousand Red Army troops are captured or killed—mostly killed. As one German soldier puts it, “The Russian is a tough opponent. We take hardly any prisoners, and shoot them all instead.”

Within several months, an Einsatzgruppen commander sends his first battlefield report to Berlin, boasting that his men have murdered 229,052 Russian Jews. Two reports follow in quick succession: an additional 140,467 have been eliminated. Among them are 34,000 men, women, and children from Kiev who are marched to a beautiful ravine called Babi Yar, ordered to strip off their clothing, and shot.

Operation Barbarossa comes as such a shock to Stalin that three hours after the invasion begins he persists in believing that Hitler had nothing to do with it. He still thinks that their trade agreement is in full force. Trainloads of Russian rubber, iron, and other raw materials chug toward Germany as German troops slaughter Russians.

The idiocy of Stalin

At the age of eighteen, Anatoly Markovich Gurevich read Soviet writer N. G. Smirnov’s espionage thriller Diary of a Spy and resolved to follow in the footsteps of its fearless and nimble protagonist, a British agent named Edward Kent. When Gurevich joined the ranks of Soviet intelligence, he signed all his secret cables with the code name Kent. He is a spy who has named himself after a fictional spy.

Moving a transmitter is a dangerous undertaking. Courage and ingenuity are essential. Women in the Circle walk down the sidewalks of Berlin in broad daylight, pushing transmitters in baby carriages beneath blankets and toys.

Rose joined the Circle just a few years ago, after she married Mildred’s BAG recruit Bodo Schlösinger. Rose lives alone with their baby now—Bodo has been drafted—and works during the day as a secretary in a factory. At night, after she puts her baby to bed, she enciphers intelligence reports.

On November 20, 1941, Mildred receives her PhD. She has been a graduate student in Germany for over a decade, writing her dissertation in fits and starts, dizzied by all that swirls around her. The title of her dissertation is “The Development of Contemporary American Literature in Some of the Main Exponents of the Novel and Short Story.”

The first day of class she strides to the lectern, gripping her leather satchel. So much has changed since she taught here last. What does she think now, seeing rows of Nazis staring at her?

Jane is beginning to suspect that Mildred is keeping a secret from her. One morning while nursing her infant son, Jane asks Otto whether he thinks Mildred is some sort of spy. Otto purses his lips and, in a theatrical performance of skepticism, resolutely shakes his head.

Mildred misses Don. The Heaths left Berlin in June, right before Operation Barbarossa. There was no warning. One morning Don showed up for a lesson and said it would be his last. He hugged her hard. Mildred rocked him back and forth. Perhaps she hoped to console herself as much as the thirteen-year-old boy sobbing in her arms.

Gollnow is nothing like Mildred’s students from the BAG. He has a mediocre mind and a boastful soul, but Mildred can use both qualities to her advantage. Gollnow’s position in the Abwehr gives him access to top-secret intelligence about Germany’s military tactics in the Soviet Union. How easy it is to fill his cup with peppermint tea and ask him, under the guise of an English lesson, to talk about himself. To say: Tell me what you do. Tell me how you do it. Tell me, in English.

The weakness worsens. The pain in her abdomen sharpens. This isn’t hunger, she realizes. Mildred undergoes an emergency surgical procedure. She was alone when she walked into the clinic, and she is alone when she awakens from anesthesia. A nurse informs her that she had been pregnant but it was an ectopic pregnancy. The surgical procedure has long-lasting consequences: thick scar tissue in her fallopian tube will prevent her from ever having a baby.

By the end of the week, they have deciphered three words. On July 14, 1942, they crack the cipher wide open. 5. The Gestapo has three addresses now. Arvid and Mildred Harnack’s. Adam and Greta Kuckhoff’s. Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen’s.

Do Mildred and Arvid suspect they are under surveillance? The final letter Mildred writes to her family is dated August 14, 1942. Otto Donner smuggles it from Germany to Switzerland, where he posts it to Chevy Chase, Maryland. The envelope Harriette opens bears a Swiss postmark. The letter is carefully worded: May we all remain as healthy as possible so that we may see each other again with great happiness. Despite our being separated, let’s not be worried and anxious. Two weeks later, Mildred and Arvid flee Germany.

The Baltic Sea is most beautiful during a slender margin of time, the breath between dusk and night. Mildred kicks off her sandals and heads toward a dune. This delights Arvid. He rolls up his trousers and races after her. Egmont says they are crazy. Anneliese shakes her head in a pantomime of disapproval, then flings an arm around Egmont’s shoulder and in good humor trudges up the dune.

The smell of rain. It mixes with the brackish tang that comes in great gusts over the water. Anneliese says they should head back immediately or they’ll get soaked. A flash of lightning. A thunderclap. The rain comes down in sheets, soaking them to the bone. The four of them scramble down the dune and run to the Zechlins’ cottage, laughing.

“How wonderful to be so free in nature, free at last from all the intrigues,” Arvid told Egmont on the dunes. “I am looking forward to the days ahead.”

Egmont Zechlin’s essay is the only eyewitness account of Mildred and Arvid’s arrest. Zechlin focuses most of his attention in the essay on Arvid, recording what he said, how he said it, going so far as to imagine what Arvid was thinking. We are left to imagine what Mildred was thinking.

Mildred rises, setting one bare foot, then the other, on the concrete floor. The difference between morning and night is nearly indistinguishable here in the basement, but if it were suddenly bathed in light, she would see the faces of all her friends.

Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen are here. Greta and Adam Kuckhoff are here. Hans and Hilde Coppi are here. So are Mildred’s BAG recruits Karl Behrens and Wilhelm Utech. All the links in the chain connecting the Circle, Gegner Kreis, Tat Kreis, and Rittmeister Kreis are here, including Rose Schlösinger, Elisabeth Schumacher, Cato Bontjes van Beek, Erika von Brockdorff, Oda Schottmüller, and Elfriede Paul. Some of the women Mildred has never met face-to-face; she knows them by their deeds alone—the one who hid a radio transmitter in her apartment, the one who was a courier, the one who enciphered intelligence reports, the one who held meetings in her clinic after hours, the one who made leaflets, the one who distributed them.

Over the next few months, Nazi officials will use the Gestapo Album to keep track of everyone the Gestapo arrests in the resistance. Notes scrawled in black ink under Mildred’s photographs identify her as an American, a Communist, a wife.

Some prisoners stare into the camera with barely concealed expressions of grief. Some, like Hilde Coppi, stare into the camera with defiance. Hilde is seven months pregnant.

After her first interrogation—it lasts thirteen hours—Greta is dispatched back to Alexanderplatz, where she collapses in her cell. The ceiling is riddled with cracks. In the morning light, Greta sees there are words on the ceiling. A former prisoner has scratched a message: Geduld ist die Haupttugend eines Revolutionärs (Patience is the highest virtue of the revolutionary).

Some blurt out their friends’ names at their very first interrogation. Some break down after their second, or fifth, or tenth interrogation. Some refuse to name names. For such cases, Himmler has granted Kopkow permission to employ more persuasive tactics than intimidation, lies, threats, and blackmail, sanctioning the use of verschärfte Vernehmung—severe interrogation.

They move silently, in groups of four. For ten precious minutes a day, they are permitted to see daylight. “Some women lift their arms as if drowning,” Marie Luise remembered. Some “spread their arms like dancers in the fresh air.” One moves swiftly toward Marie Luise. Her hair is pulled back in a bun the color of dirty straw. Her gaze is arresting. “I’m in cell 25,” she whispers. “Don’t forget me when you get out.” What is your name? Marie Luise wants to ask, but Mildred is already gone, lost among the others.

It’s then that Axel realizes Mildred was arrested too. Axel sees Mildred fairly frequently. She loves to ensconce herself in the Berlin State Library and work on her dissertation. Sometimes they have lunch together in the library cafeteria. He thinks of her “clear, radiant eyes,” the way she fixes her gaze on him, listening intently. He conjures an image of how she carries herself, striding into a room with an air of “noble” purpose. It pains him to imagine Mildred in prison.

Other prisoners overhear the knocks. Some learn Günther’s knock language. Some develop their own. They knock to pass on information about their interrogations. They knock to warn about prison guards and stool pigeons. They knock to share news about the world, report battles won and lost. They knock to defy their captors, tell a joke, make a friend, pick a fight, howl their anguish. They knock to hear another human being knock. Late at night, a symphony of knocks can be heard.

Arvid’s torturer is Habecker, the same man who has been torturing Mildred. Habecker will go on to torture many others in the resistance. Nearly all of them will be executed.