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

Hitler pledges to eliminate left-wing opponents and destroy trade unions.

Less than a month after Hitler is appointed chancellor, an arsonist lights a match in the Reichstag.

from Holland,

At approximately midnight, a mass arrest begins.

The next morning, Hitler uses the fire as a pretext to declare a national emergency, pressuring President Hindenburg to sign a decree that suspends indefinitely all seven sections of the Weimar Constitution guaranteeing basic civil liberties to Germans.

The decree abolishes freedom of speech and freedom of the press. No longer can Germans attend rallies and march in demonstrations against the Nazi government, as the decree abolishes the right to assembly. Letters and telephone calls can now be monitored by the Nazi government,

Storm Troopers, the Gestapo, and anyone else with a badge can raid any home w...

DECREE OF THE REICH PRESIDENT FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE PEOPLE AND STATE

Six days ago, Hitler gutted the Weimar Constitution. He did it legally, right under everyone’s nose, without bullets or blood. Germans have lost nearly all their rights—all but one. They still have the right to vote. Germany is still a democracy, not a dictatorship.

Germans show up at the polls in droves. The voter turnout is 89 percent.

Otto Wels, leader of the Social Democrats. Many of his friends and colleagues were arrested after the Reichstag fire. He speaks, according to Shirer, “quietly and with great dignity.”

The Reichstag members cast their votes: 441 in favor, 84 against. This gives the Nazis far more than a two-thirds majority. In a spectacle of cowardice and political opportunism, the politicians support Hitler and pass a new law. Hitler calls it the “Law to Remove the Distress of People and Reich.” It will come to be known as the “Enabling Act.” In five short paragraphs, it guts what remains of the Weimar Constitution and transforms Germany into a dictatorship. And it’s all done legally.

Women during the Weimar era were granted too many rights, Goebbels tells the crowd.

It’s essentially impossible to find a condom in Berlin or anywhere else in Germany. Contraception was readily available in major cities by the end of the Weimar Republic. Vending machines dispensed condoms in men’s public restrooms. Clinics provided free condoms. Now they’re illegal.

Hitler tells the Nazi Women’s League that a woman’s world is “her husband, her family, her children, and her home.” He criticizes the concept of “women’s emancipation,” insisting that it “is merely an invention of the Jewish intellect.”

Across Germany, women lose their jobs. Over nineteen thousand women in leadership positions at the ministries and in regional and local government offices are immediately fired. Women lawyers are dismissed from firms. Women physicians are ousted from clinics. Restaurant owners are threatened by police if they don’t sack their waitresses and replace them with men.

new quota restricts the number of women who can enroll in a German university to 10 percent.

The curriculum in German high schools is revamped. Girls are required to take classes in cooking, cleaning, and mending.

The Law for the Encouragement of Marriage is passed. If two people get married, they can receive a state loan of 1,000 Reichsmark—equivalent to one-fifth of a worker’s annual income—as long as the wife promises to “immediately leave” her job. If she gives birth to one baby, the couple receives a credit of 250 Reichsmark; if she has a second baby, 500 Reichsmark; if she has a third, 750 Reichsmark. The entire loan is forgiven the day her fourth baby is born.

Newspapers carry stories about German gynecologists facing criminal charges. Gynecologists may receive the death penalty if they are found guilty of terminating an unwanted pregnancy, but only if the woman is Aryan, “racially pure.”

Wilhelm Utech is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp. His crime is distributing leaflets that criticize Hitler’s regime.

He is interrogated and beaten. For a year he languishes there.

On April 1, 1933, there is a national boycott of all Jewish businesses. Storm Troopers and SS men stand outside the stores’ entrances, forbidding anyone to go in. On April 7, 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service excludes Jews and the “politically unreliable” from becoming professors, teachers, or judges. The Law on the Admission to the Legal Profession forbids Jews to become lawyers. On April 25, 1933, the Law Against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities limits the number of Jewish students allowed to receive public education. No more than 5 percent of the students in a school or university may be Jewish. 2. On July 14, 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring legalizes forced sterilization of people deemed mentally ill or physically disabled.

crime to criticize the Nazi government.

you are a German under protective custody, you have no legal remedies at your disposal. No lawyers can intervene, because you are not technically under arrest.

Himmler is thirty-two.

Pure German blood is a must.

Sachsenhausen.

the

twenty-seven main camps

to the camp begins. A lethal gas, Zyklon B, is used to murder

Hitler targets political opponents first.

twenty thousand political prisoners by March 1933. By the end of the year, over two hundred thousand Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists have been put in “protective custody”

swastikas on cigarette packages, coffee cans, cake pans. Every day, Nazi propaganda disseminates misinformation and false promises. Every day, Hitler wins more German hearts

it’s all happening so fast.

Nazi fraternity that burns all these books mobilizes members in thirty-four universities to stage identical book burnings that night.

At an international ecumenical conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pushes for a resolution to condemn the German Lutheran Church’s support of the Arierparagraph—Aryan clause—which first appeared

Clergymen from the United States, France, Great Britain, and other countries discuss Dietrich’s resolution.

The German Lutheran Church stands by its support of the Aryan clause.

The Vatican signs a treaty with the Nazi government. It begins: His Holiness Pope Pius XI and the president of the German Reich, moved by the common desire to consolidate and promote the friendly relations existing between the Holy See and the German Reich and wishing to regulate lastingly, in a manner satisfying to both parties, the relations between the Catholic Church and the state for the entire territory of the German Reich, have decided to conclude a solemn agreement.

inside the Castle Church in Wittenberg, listening to Bishop Müller blabber on about the glories of Hitler.

October 1933, Dietrich decides to leave Germany. He accepts a job as a pastor in London.

Arvid can’t apply for a position at the Justus Liebig University or the University of Berlin or indeed any university in Germany. His area of expertise—U.S. labor movements and Soviet political theory—is too controversial.

“The Pre-Marxist Labor Movement in the United States.” The

Thirty percent of students at the American School are Jewish.

Verboten in Germany

Communist Party—Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, or KPD—goes underground and produces leaflets that agitate for the overthrow of Hitler’s regime. After the Gestapo shuts down a slew of basement printing operations run by KPD cells in Germany, production is moved to secret facilities in France, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Between 1933 and 1935, the KPD produces over a million leaflets a year.

In 1934, the Gestapo seizes 1,238,202 leaflets; in 1935, 1,670,300.

American embassy is bugged, he tells her. So is your home. The telephones are tapped, the servants are spies, nothing is secret.

Mildred’s writing is becoming increasingly vague.