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May 23 - June 22, 2025
She was American—
Mildred Harnack. In 1932, she held her first clandestine meeting in her apartment—a small band of political activists that grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin by the end of the decade.
She was emaciated, her lungs ravaged by tuberculosis she’d contracted in prison.
The judges believed her. The sentence she received was considered mild: six years of hard labor in a prison camp. Two days later, Hitler overrode the verdict and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.
Harnack stood up courageously under Gestapo torture and revealed nothing,”
1989, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down, that a trove of documents stashed in an East German archive came to light. Several years later, Russia permitted historians a peek at foreign intelligence files, and in 1998, under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the CIA, FBI, and U.S. Army began to release records once classified as top secret, a process that continues to this day. We now have a more nuanced understanding of the underground resistance in Germany, but factual inaccuracies persist. Details about Mildred Harnack are scant and frequently incorrect.
Within spitting distance of the University of Berlin is Opernplatz, a large public square.
Next year, students in a Nazi fraternity will burn twenty-five thousand books here, throwing them into a massive bonfire at the center of the square.
circulating a list of authors deemed deviant, impure, “un-German.
In 1928, the Nazi Party got less than 3 percent of the vote in a Reichstag election. In 1930, it got 18 percent.
The Nazi Party gets 37 percent of the vote. For the first time in history, it’s the largest party in the Reichstag. The Social Democratic Party trails behind, with 22 percent. The Communist Party trails even further, with 15 percent. The remaining 26 percent is divided among a squabbling hodgepodge of parties. Every imaginable point of view is represented.
On the heels of the Nazi Party’s victory, Hitler commands President Hindenburg to name him chancellor of Germany. President Hindenburg refuses.
Mildred reads Mein Kampf. Hitler’s book has been published in two volumes, the first in 1925, the second in 1926. In 1932, it isn’t read widely in Germany—not yet. An English translation hasn’t been published yet either.
a 1931 article reported a “secret plan” for “the solution of the Jewish question.” An unnamed Nazi source had leaked a detailed list of restrictions that would be imposed on Jews if the Nazi Party got its way; there was also a plan “to use the Jews in Germany for slave labor.”
Schutzstaffel—or simply the SS.
They’re an elite corps of officers in a private paramilitary force run by the Nazi Party. The
Censorship is forbidden in Germany.
produce the Weimar Constitution, granting both men and women the right to vote, the right to religious freedom, and the right “to express opinions freely in word, writing, print, image, or otherwise.”
Germans reading books—classics and dime-store novels and thick tomes on history and philosophy. A broad range of newspapers too, from tabloids to pamphlets, representing a spectrum of political opinions. Communist newspapers like Die Rote Fahne intermingle with newspapers for Social Democrats (Vorwärts), conservative German Nationalists (Die Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung), and Nazis (Völkischer Beobachter
In Berlin alone, there are
ninety
daily newspapers to ch...
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Gone is Emperor Wilhelm II, whose family had ruled Germany since the eleventh century and who was related to an assortment of other monarchs scattered across Europe, including his grandmother Queen Victoria
fragile democracy.
Mildred also runs what she calls an English club. Any student can join.
January 30, 1933. Hitler has just been appointed chancellor of Germany.
Plötzensee Prison, Berlin February 16, 1943
January 30, 1933, are torches—twenty thousand of them. It’s a Nazi victory parade.
Militant League for German Culture—a Nazi lobby group founded four years ago that agitates against aspects of Weimar culture it deems corrupt, including anything produced by Jews.
Arvid’s cousin Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a rebellious twenty-six-year-old Lutheran pastor in Berlin. Today, he speaks into the microphone with the grave authority of a man twice his age. Historians will come to recognize his speech as one of the first public acts of defiance against Hitler.
Chancellor Hitler is “polite and calm” and receptive to others’ opinions, even when they conflict with his own.
The Berliner Tageblatt has no confidence in Hitler’s ability to outwit “the foxy capitalist Hugenberg.”
Two days after his first cabinet meeting, Hitler convenes a second. He greets the dark-suited ministers seated around the table, his manner as cordial as ever. He informs them that the current Reichstag has been dissolved and the next election will be held in March.
Hitler aims to destroy the parliamentary democracy,
abolish the Reichstag, and grant himself dictatorial powers, but he doesn’t tel...
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That evening, Chancellor Hitler delivers his first radio address. The ministers stand behind him in a unified show of support.
Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick will draft legislation that will enable Hitler to assume totalitarian control over the economy and all other aspects of the political and cultural landscape.
he will create the Gestapo,
Chancellor Hitler will invalidate the Weimar Constitution, destroy Germany’s parliamentary democracy, and engineer its complete and total transformation into a dictatorship. All this, in just six months.
Greta is now a core member of the Circle.
To win them over, the government must control all media.
puts Joseph Goebbels in charge of it.
Goebbels has proven himself to be one of Hitler’s most devoted acolytes.
Germany’s celebrated free press is no more. Hundreds of newspapers are banned, and Jewish-owned publishing houses are forced out of business.
Germany’s theater and film industries are purged of all Jewish writers, actors, producers, and directors.
Germans living in the most remote regions of the country could be reached, even the destitute and uneducated, even the apolitical. All it required was getting radios into their hands.
Goebbels gleefully ordered manufacturers to produce a radio that everyone could afford.
payable in installments.
The People’s Radio was designed with a limited range to ensure that only German stations could be heard.
On February 20—two and a half weeks after Hitler is appointed chancellor—twenty-four of Germany’s leading industrialists sit around a long, rectangular table.
