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

She says, Tell me what you think, not what you think you should think. She is unlike any teacher he has ever had.

She reaches a wide boulevard: Unter den Linden.

Now, in 1932, the paper runs a story about “Cell G,” a secret death squad within the ranks of the Nazi Party that murders Hitler’s opponents. The journalists at the Münchener Post, known to readers as a mouthpiece of the Social Democratic Party, take Hitler seriously, even as many others don’t.

macadam

I’m the kid that’s all the candy, I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy

Berlin, it is said, has more bridges than Venice, more statues than Rome, and more theaters than Athens.

Georg von Schnitzler, a board member of I. G. Farben, the world’s largest chemical conglomerate;

This, then, is the rationale for Dachau. It’s called a concentration camp because all the individuals who threaten the security of Germany are concentrated here.

Is it “sense or nonsense”? Martha can’t decide.

Germans flocked to buy his novel—it’s called Little Man, What Now?—with whatever coins they could scrounge. By March 1933, it had sold forty-two thousand copies in Germany. He published it under a pseudonym: Hans Fallada.

By 1935, the death penalty is mandated for forty-seven crimes and recommended for 2,539 others.

Beheadings are carried out at a prison in Berlin called Plötzensee. The executioner there is Karl Gröpler, a sixty-five-year-old man who makes a modest living as the owner of a laundry.

These two laws will come to be known as the Nuremberg Laws.

The very word lecture is off-putting to the Fish family. Lecture. Like she’s telling people what to do. Lecture. Like she’s all hoity-toity.

What is known is this: Georgina Fish is holed up in a small room in a town called Wauwatosa, a stone’s throw from Milwaukee.

Home! MJP 2-28-2022

Wauwatosa

On February 22, 1938, Georgina Fish takes her last breath.

What began as Stalin’s vengeance against political enemies (real or—as is more frequently the case—imagined) is spilling over into the civilian population. They are dragged into forests and shot. Over forty thousand residents of Leningrad are murdered in 1937—a number that reaches sixty thousand in 1938. More than half a century later, their bones will be exhumed from a mass grave, nearly all bearing a single bullet hole in the back of the skull.

The Great Purge averages one thousand murders a day between 1936 and 1938.