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

Gertrud and several other women hide in the forest for two days. In an essay Gertrud writes decades after the war, when she is seventy-two, she doesn’t mention the rapes.

Approximately 130,000 women were imprisoned at Ravensbrück between 1939 and 1945. The number who died there is estimated to be between 30,000 and 90,000. Women were shot, starved, poisoned, and flogged to death. Nearly all who were subjected to medical experiments died. Roughly 6,000 were gassed. An accurate tally is impossible.

Eventually, she finds a place to live. She has no possessions, not a single cup. She left Ravensbrück with nothing except the soiled dress on her back and two folded pieces of paper: Arvid’s last letter to Mildred.

The last letter Harriette received from Mildred was dated August 14, 1942; the envelope has a Swiss postmark. Harriette doesn’t consider herself a sentimental type, but now and then she indulges in the ritual of slipping the letter out of the envelope and reading it, her eyes resting on the last line: Despite our being separated, let’s not be worried and anxious.

Harriette is worried and anxious, no doubt about it, but what overtakes her these days is rage. Rage at Mildred for running off to Germany. Rage at Jane for following in her footsteps. In 1944, Jane goes missing. She is somewhere in Germany—in enemy territory—with her three little boys. Harriette tries to fathom what has happened and imagines the worst.

Harriette has lost her own daughter, not to mention three grandchildren, and it’s all Mildred’s fault. All of it.

A reporter for the Baltimore Sun stationed with the U.S. Army near the Czech border encounters Jane on April 18, 1945, and writes a story under the headline MARYLAND GIRL, 3 BABIES FLEE REICH, REACH YANKS. A former Maryland girl and her three small children, the youngest a year-old baby, are sleeping in a small town here tonight, after a 300-mile flight by horse and wagon across central Germany, through the lines of the retreating German Army into the territory occupied by American troops of the 90th Infantry Division. “I came to Germany to visit my mother’s sister, Mrs. Mildred Harnack,” Jane tells the reporter.

So—Jane is safe. The absurdity of finding that out from the Baltimore Sun is not lost on Harriette.

A few weeks later, on June 10, 1945, a letter arrives from the Red Cross. At last. Harriette opens the envelope. It’s addressed to her husband, even though Fred hadn’t written any of the letters to the Red Cross. “Dear Sir,” it begins. The letter goes on to describe what happened to Mildred. Harriette is so overcome by emotion that she can barely make it past the first paragraph. Harriette’s rage is as all-encompassing as her grief.

She orders the family to get rid of Mildred’s letters, photographs, and anything else they have in their possession that might remind them of her. It is imperative, she tells her brother, that “any documentation relative to that particular era be destroyed in its entirety since the sooner that sad episode be put behind us & forgotten once & for all, the better for all concerned.” When Christmas comes again, Harriette knows this much: she has once more found her strength. Harriette dies in 1987 at the age of ninety-four, blissfully unaware that roughly fifty years earlier, her own mother, Georgina Fish, had stashed a bundle of Mildred’s letters in the attic.

CIA director Allen Dulles would later observe that resistance groups in France and other German-occupied countries received large-scale support from powerful allies. Arms and supplies were smuggled to them, they maintained more or less organized liaison with foreign powers, or with their own governments in exile, which could give them assistance, help them organize, inform them, instruct them, render them financial aid, and last but most important, give them the hope and moral support that kept alive their faith in ultimate deliverance. Dulles admitted, “The West did not take too seriously the pleas of those anti-Nazi Germans who tried to enlighten it.”

At Christmas, Dietrich composes an essay that he gives to Hans von Dohnányi and their coconspirator within the Abwehr, Major General Hans Oster: We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.… Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough?

On April 9, 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnányi are hanged. Klaus Bonhoeffer is shot. Ernst von Harnack is hanged. Justus Delbrück dies in prison. Tresckow commits suicide. Canaris, Oster, Stauffenberg, and roughly five thousand others—including the families of the plotters and people with the remotest connections to them—are executed.

Falk is ordered to put on a Wehrmacht uniform and fight in Greece, where he deserts his unit and joins the Greek People’s Liberation Army. He and a friend establish a resistance organization called the Antifaschistische Komitee Freies Deutschland—the Anti-Fascist Committee for a Free Germany—that recruits German soldiers defecting from their units. When the war is over, Falk Harnack returns to Germany on foot.

Men guilty of war crimes in Hitler’s regime are not prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials; they are courted by Allied intelligence.

Kopkow convinces his British captors that he can deliver to them valuable information about Soviet espionage, including “Russian plots against British interests.” MI6 agents fake Kopkow’s death—hypoxia due to a bad case of pneumonia—and give the Nazi a new identity as the manager of a textile factory, christening him “Peter Cordes.”

The same month that Kopkow is taken into British custody, U.S. troops capture Manfred Roeder. The chief prosecutor of the Red Orchestra trial is on the verge of being indicted as a war criminal when agents at the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) intervene, whisking Roeder away to a top-secret location and disguising his identity with the code name Othello. CIC Special Agent Benjamin Gorby is convinced that Roeder possesses “a wealth of information” that could be valuable to the United States, which faces a new enemy now that the Allies have defeated Germany: the Soviet Union.

Hitler’s Bloodhound insists that he isn’t a criminal. The criminals are Mildred Harnack and the other members of the Red Orchestra, a sprawling Communist network that is “still alive and active” in numerous countries—including the United States. Special Agent Gorby wants names. Who, in particular, is still alive and active? Roeder rattles off a list that includes Greta Kuckhoff.

The agents feign sympathy and urge Greta to tell them all about her friends in the underground resistance who so valiantly fought the Nazi regime. Greta’s “confidence was soon obtained,” one of the agents later reported. The CIC produces a quantity of paperwork about the German widow they hope will lead them to a sprawling network of Communist spies, tapping her phone and dispatching agents to shadow Greta around Berlin when she takes Ule to school or goes to work.

The authorities overseeing the Nuremberg Trials are astonished by what the CIC has done. Manfred Roeder “could well qualify as Public Enemy No. 1 in any German democracy,” observes the deputy director of the Evidence Division, castigating the U.S. intelligence agency for recruiting a “notorious, unscrupulous, opportunistic Nazi.”

The War Crimes Group of the U.S. Army drops Mildred Harnack’s case. “Mildred Harnack was in fact deeply involved in underground activities aimed to overthrow the government of Germany,” an officer writes in a memo. He concludes that her execution was “justified.”