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

Fabian von Schlabrendorff,

During the fourth stage I was bound in a twisted fashion by means of a special shackling process such that my body could move neither backward nor sideways. Then the detective sergeant and the lance corporal beat me with heavy clubs from behind so that I fell forward with each blow; and as my hands were tied behind my back, my face and head hit the ground with full force. During this procedure all participants expressed their enjoyment in the form of derisive shouts. The first round of torture ended in a fainting spell. None of the violent measures described here induced me either to confess anything, or to betray any of my like-minded friends.

An admiral who serves as one of Hitler’s aides observes that Göring feels “humiliated” by the whole ordeal. It’s beyond Göring’s comprehension that an underground resistance group in Germany includes “officers and aristocrats.” Hitler, too, is shocked that the members of this resistance group include “the elite.”

During a total of twenty-five interrogations, Libertas whispers the names of everyone she knows in the Circle, Gegner Kreis, Tat Kreis, and Rittmeister Kreis. Miss Breiter dutifully dashes up to the third floor and reports the names to SS Hauptsturmführer Kopkow, admitting later that she “was all excited.” Kopkow is astonished. Many of these names he’s never heard before. He promptly reports the news to Göring, who sees to it that Miss Breiter receives five thousand Reichsmark and a personal thank-you note from Himmler.

Sometime later, the granddaughter of Philipp Friedrich Alexander, prince of Eulenburg and Hertefeld and count of Sandels, sits down in her prison cell to compose a letter to her mother. “I,” Libertas writes, “out of selfishness, have betrayed friends.”

Gestapo officials compile confiscated Kassiber and transcripts of interrogations in binders to be used as evidence against the prisoners in court. By December 1942 there are thirty bulging binders. Nineteen separate trials are planned for a group of seventy-five Germans and one American woman.

The Abwehr, the Gestapo, and Hitler himself are under the impression that the Red Orchestra is a large, unified network of seasoned spies in Moscow, Paris, Geneva, Brussels, and Berlin. It is not. Many of the prisoners in the basement of Gestapo headquarters are mystified when they learn they are defendants in a mass trial intended to prosecute a Soviet spy ring.

Rose Schlösinger, locked in her cell, writes another Kassiber. Her heart is broken: Bodo is dead. She heard about his death the day before the anniversary of their engagement, the news traveling in furtive whispers from the Eastern Front to the corridors of the Alexanderplatz prison. I unfortunately can’t even explain what thoughts and feelings this news elicited in me.… So much misfortune is piling up on me that I have to numb my heart so that I can bear it all. Bodo Schlösinger didn’t die in battle; he died by his own hand. Shortly after he heard that the Gestapo had arrested everyone in the Circle, including Rose, he walked into a farmhouse in the Russian countryside and shot himself.

Erika von Brockdorff writes a Kassiber— I’ve never lived life as intensely as in the past year… I want to write about the dream I had —and slips it to a prison guard.

The guard is Anneliese Kuehn, who will give a statement after the war about her encounters with these women.

One day during a body search, Erika von Brockdorff tells Anneliese that an SS guard attempted to rape her. Hearing this, Anneliese is stung by compassion. She begins to watch Erika and her friends in the resistance more closely, noticing that they “did everything in their power to stay in communication.” Sometimes they throw Kassiber out the window to prisoners in the yard. Sometimes they pass Kassiber to each other through a ventilation flap. “I realized with deep respect that these resistance fighters did not give up their struggle even under the very hard conditions of their imprisonment,” Anneliese remembered.

Judge Kraell may have a poor opinion of the prosecutor who has earned the nickname “Hitler’s Bloodhound,” but the two men share a common belief: both Kraell and Roeder regard opposition to Hitler as a horrific crime, especially in wartime. German citizens have a legal obligation to be loyal, in their view, even if Germany has transformed from a parliamentary democracy into a fascist dictatorship. Even if the fascist dictator is murdering millions who fall into a category the Führer considers undesirable.

Nationalism is a fallacy

Twelve men and women are scheduled to appear before the court on the morning of December 15, 1942. Among them are Mildred and Arvid Harnack and Libertas and Harro Schulze-Boysen. The mass trial will resume in early January 1943 and continue until all seventy-six defendants are prosecuted. Hitler will receive daily reports. For the first time in history, the judges of the Reich Court-Martial won’t have the final word. All verdicts and sentencing must be approved by the Führer.

Mildred’s coconspirators will write about Manfred Roeder in Kassiber. In this way, news about their prosecutor spreads from cell to cell, prison to prison. He is known for strutting and crowing during a defendant’s testimony. Oda Schottmüller will describe him as “an indescribably conceited rooster.” Erika von Brockdorff will call the mass trial a “witch hunt.”

Mildred and Arvid can’t speak a single word to each other, much less fall into each other’s arms. The rules set forth for the mass trial at the Reich Court-Martial forbid communication between defendants. After three months of ceaseless isolation and intermittent torture, all Mildred and Arvid can do is gaze at each other.

When it’s Mildred’s turn, she rises from the wooden chair and approaches the stand. He hammers her with questions. She fixes him with a level gaze and lies. No, she can’t name names or point fingers. No, she doesn’t know anything about acts of espionage. No, the meetings she held weren’t treasonous; they were strictly focused on the discussion of American novels.

Axel von Harnack sends a telegram to Falk: BOOK OUT OF STOCK BUT SIX PICTURES Book means Arvid; out of stock means death sentence; picture means Mildred. The coded message tells Falk that Arvid received a death sentence and Mildred received six years’ imprisonment.

In the trials to come, nearly all members of the Circle, Gegner Kreis, Tat Kreis, and Rittmeister Kreis will receive death sentences.

It’s snowing when Gertrud Klapputh arrives at Charlottenburg prison. She is twenty-nine years old. She grew up in Leopoldshall, a destitute village where her father worked in the salt mines. She has been in the underground resistance since she was twenty-one, when she renounced Nazi Germany and declared herself an exile.

The six pages of the file present a dry, meticulous recitation of offenses. She distributed illegal leaflets. She consorted with Communists. She was a member of the Communist prisoners’ aid group Rote Hilfe—Red Aid—and participated in treasonous activities under the alias “Hertha.” In 1940, the Gestapo hauled her back to Berlin and threw her in prison for six months. Ten months after her release, the Gestapo arrested her again.

Rumors spread from cell to cell in whispers. This is how she learns that Mildred is an American anti-fascist in strict solitary confinement. Gertrud is intrigued. Every day during the Bear Dance, she scans the circle of women, looking for Mildred. Now and then, their eyes meet. “We could only exchange glances,” Gertrud wrote.

“Mildred possessed a great treasure,” Gertrud remembered, “a pencil.” At some point during her four-day trial, Mildred spotted this treasure and snatched it. She tells Gertrud she has been sentenced to six years’ hard labor. Soon she will be transferred to a work camp. Until then, she wants to make the best use of her time.

The “studying” Mildred and Gertrud do is an improvisation. They have no books. But Gertrud gets her hands on a scrap of paper, and Mildred joyfully retrieves her pencil from the hole where she’s hidden it. “She wrote down Goethe verses for me,” Gertrud remembered.

I also learned American songs from her.… She learned songs and poems from me as well. She loved to hear best: “Oh valleys wide, oh heights!”

The last glimpse Mildred had of Arvid was in the courtroom after their sentences were pronounced. Arvid caught her eye and “beamed,” elated that her life had been spared. She held his gaze as long as she could, expressing with her eyes her anguished love.

Perhaps Arvid’s verdict will be appealed, she tells Gertrud. Perhaps another, more capable lawyer will replace Schwarz and argue convincingly for a stay of execution. Perhaps the war will end before Arvid’s execution is carried out. Perhaps the resistance will succeed in assassinating Hitler. Mildred convinces herself that these possibilities, however remote, are worth clinging to.

But sometimes Mildred loses hope. Sometimes she is “sad and sometimes close to despair.”

Shortly before eight p.m. on December 22, 1942, Arvid was hanged, along with six other men in the Red Orchestra case, including Harro Schulze-Boysen, Hans Coppi, and Kurt Schumacher. Arvid spent the last hour of his life in his prison cell writing a letter to Mildred. She has the letter now; Schwarz gave it to her. She has read it countless times, and still she can’t quite believe Arvid is dead. It’s not possible. She can’t be a widow.

Göring “exploded” when he learned that Mildred wasn’t given a death sentence. The word imprisonment drove him into an apoplectic fit, a court officer recalled in a postwar interrogation. He screamed that he “had been commissioned by the Führer” to “cauterize this abscess,” and swore that Hitler would overturn her sentence. The next day, Hitler swiftly rejected Mildred’s verdict and ordered her execution.

“Then came the greatest bit of bad luck,” Gertrud remembered. I had to leave Mildred.… I had come to care for Mildred so, like a very dear good sister. And she needed me right then most urgently. On January 15, 1943, Gertrud is transferred out of Charlottenburg. She doesn’t know where she’s going. Mildred asks her to smuggle out Arvid’s farewell letter.

On February 12, 1943, a prisoner named Irmgard Kamlah joins the others in the prison yard as they walk in pairs around its perimeter. Years later, she wrote about this day in a letter. I heard the officer accompanying us say to the supervising guard, with a glance at Mildred, “You know, no talking and she has to walk alone.”

On February 8, 1937, a team of men at Bruchsal Prison dismantled the Mannhardt guillotine, distributed the parts into an assortment of wooden crates, and loaded them onto a truck bound for Berlin. The truck trundled northeast. It passed the Rhine River, where Mildred loved to swim when the weather was warm. It passed Jena, where Mildred spent her first year in Germany, sequestering herself for hours in the university library to research her dissertation. It passed the Thuringian Forest and the Harz Mountains, where Mildred hiked with Arvid on Sundays, their rucksacks stuffed with sandwiches and books.

Harald Poelchau was hired to be a prison chaplain on April 1, 1933. He was twenty-nine, the son of a pastor. A year later, he witnessed his first execution. I had already experienced sleepless nights leading up to the dreaded day.… Before I knew it, the executioner threw the prisoner to the ground, pressed his neck against a block of wood and immediately beheaded him with a hand ax. I did not look. I was overcome with nausea and tried desperately to regain control of myself.

He enters cells with the full approval of prison director Paul Vacano, who has not the slightest idea that Chaplain Poelchau, who works under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice, is a member of the resistance.

On February 16, 1943, Chaplain Harald Poelchau enters Gefängnis III and finds Mildred shackled in her cell, bent over a book.

The book, he sees, is a volume of Goethe’s poems. In her hand is a pencil stub. She’s translating the poems into English. The margins of the book are filled with her handwriting. On page 74, Mildred has written: 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.

Her hair has thinned to wisps. She is emaciated. Her breathing is labored, her lungs ravaged by tuberculosis. Her shoulders hunch forward, her spine following the curve of a question mark. Chaplain Poelchau sits down beside her. From the pocket of his robe he withdraws the orange and the photograph. It’s a picture of Georgina Fish. Mildred peers at it wordlessly. She finds her pencil stub and writes a note on the back: The face of my mother expresses everything that I want to say at this moment. This face was with me all through these last months.

After receiving her medical degree, Dr. Margarete von Zahn-Harnack opens a clinic in Berlin where she goes on to treat patients for over thirty years. During this time she will speak of her former professor in glowing terms, believing that he had “put his life in danger” by saving Mildred from dissection. Margarete won’t know until the late 1980s that Dr. Hermann Stieve lied to her. He didn’t save anyone from dissection.

Women in the resistance provide a steady supply of bodies. When speaking to students and lab assistants, Dr. Stieve refers to them as “bodies of criminals.” He has negotiated a special arrangement with the director of Plötzensee Prison, who accommodates his request for the bodies of executed women to be delivered straight to his laboratory.

The number of medical journals that publish Dr. Stieve’s research increases as his supply of bodies increases. He becomes a recognized authority on plötzlich Tod—sudden death—and how the extreme stress brought on by imprisonment and execution affects the female reproductive tract. In his laboratory he has a large collection of human uteri preserved in jars, some in various stages of pregnancy. In 1943, Dr. Stieve receives the decapitated body of a woman who recently gave birth at a delivery ward inside Barnimstrasse prison. She is Hilde Coppi, number 53, age 34.

Absolutely vile

An accurate tally of the deaths at concentration camps is impossible. Available evidence indicates that two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe—or six million Jews—were murdered.

The prisoners at the concentration camp wear striped smocks with felt triangles sewn onto their left shoulders. At a glance, the SS guards know why you’re here. Red triangles are for Communists, Social Democrats, and other political enemies; green are for common criminals; lilac are for Jehovah’s Witnesses; and black are for so-called asocials—lesbians and prostitutes. Yellow triangles are for Jews, who are divided into subcategories. If you are a Jew who is also a Communist, you wear a yellow triangle over a red background. If you are a Jew who is also a lesbian, you wear a yellow triangle over a black background.

She is twenty-nine years old. Will she survive to see thirty? Thirty-one? She doesn’t know whether she’ll survive until morning. She has smuggled Arvid’s letter in here and stashed it somewhere she hopes the guards won’t look. She promised Mildred she’d keep the letter safe. She will go to great lengths to keep a promise.

The team of SS physicians who conduct these experiments work under the guidance of Dr. Karl Gebhardt, Himmler’s personal physician. Dr. Gebhardt is not considered a psychopath or a quack in the medical community. He is chair of the department of orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin and runs a prestigious hospital called Hohenlychen, where he established the very first sports medicine clinic in Germany. Dr. Gebhardt is president of the German Red Cross.

“I felt great pain,” remembered a woman named Wladislawa, one of the very few who survived the experiments.

Sometimes a rabbit awakens in a strange room with a leg missing. She is unaware that SS physicians are conducting a bone-grafting experiment, the amputated leg “carefully wrapped up in sterile gauze” and swiftly transported to Hohenlychen hospital, where another team of SS physicians endeavor to attach it to a legless German soldier. “Everyone was shocked by these experiments,” a Ravensbrück survivor remembered, “and terrified the same might happen to them.”

It is likely that Gertrud inspires deep resentment among the prisoners at Ravensbrück who aren’t Kapos and have none of these privileges. The Kapo system is a way to contain costs by exploiting prisoners for free labor, but it serves a more insidious function as well. As the Nazi who oversaw Auschwitz, SS Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, put it: The more there are rivalries, the more battles between the prisoners, the easier it is to control the camp. Divide and rule—that is the principle not only of high politics but also in a concentration camp.

Dorothea Binz tours the grounds on her bicycle, her black cape aflutter. The prisoners know she arrived at Ravensbrück just a few years ago, when she was nineteen, and worked briefly as a maid. Her sadism was especially valued, and she was swiftly promoted to her current position. One of the prisoners at Ravensbrück writes a poem: “A beautiful blonde” You are so beautiful, With shining eyes and locks of hair, But if we could, we would tear the insides of your soul And strangle your bloodthirsty heart. Do you remember the girl you were whipping, Jacqueline? How you stomped on Wanda, the Polish girl? How you tortured the Russian girl Veronicka? You and the dog.

There are no official estimates of how many women were raped in the liberation of Ravensbrück. Many didn’t survive long enough to tell anyone. Those who did survive were reluctant to talk.