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May 23 - June 22, 2025
Esthonia isn’t a woman or a cat; it’s a treasury bond. And kittens doesn’t mean baby cats; it means interest.
codes to communicate.
you say, Now I have to go to prayer, it means you’re planning to listen to an illegal foreign broadcast on your Blaupunkt radio.
Some prisons allow families to bring clothing and food. Letters can be sewn into the hems of pants and dresses.
Thousands of women are in prison now, their numbers steadily increasing. Many found liberation a decade ago, during the years of the Weimar Republic, taking jobs as secretaries, journalists, factory workers, lawyers, physicians, professors. Now they are arrested
Arvid’s cousin Ernst von Harnack has been arrested. Until recently, he was mayor of the town of Merseburg. Ernst has upheld the Harnack tradition of challenging dogma, drawing around him a swirl of controversy by arguing vociferously against the Nazi Party; it’s the reason he was ousted from his job. Now he’s under suspicion as an enemy of the state after voicing his support for several Social Democrats and union leaders who have been incarcerated and tortured in concentration camps. The family is horrified. No one knows if Ernst will be sent to a concentration camp and tortured too.
fills the lonely hours with work.
“Many in the group which formed over the years were young, joyous people, full of energy and enthusiasm,” recalled one of them, a Jewish writer named Günther Weisenborn whose books were banned in 1933.
You have to accustom yourself to half-truths and deceptions,
foreword that expresses gratitude for the changes society has undergone since Hitler
His editor hates the foreword. It’s “too ingratiating,” he insists. Take it out. Ernst Rowohlt is an industry titan in Germany, president of Rowohlt Verlag, a publishing house that continues to print books by Jewish authors and keep Jewish editors on staff. He is not easily deterred.
He has reached a point in his career where he can’t afford to take chances.
Storm Troopers searched his farmhouse for three hours. They found no evidence of anything but threw him in prison anyway. He languished there for ten days.
she asked Rudolf why he’d given up. His
Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Gö
The pulse of fear can be felt throughout Germany.
a third option: shoot the opposition.
Röhm is the leader of the Storm Troopers. He has three million men under his command,
the SS, which has a measly fifty thousand men.
June 30, 1934, Ernst Röhm is arrested and thrown in jail. The next morning, two SS officers enter his cell. Suicide, they explain, is within his rights. They give him a gun. Röhm accepts the weapon—a loaded Browning—but refuses to kill himself. So they shoot him dead.
The killing spree goes on for three days. It will come to be known as the Röhm Purge.
the Night of the Long Knives.
the strain of living in Germany is beginning to take its toll.
The role of president has been abolished. The role of vice-chancellor is a thing of the past. Adolf Hitler is now the supreme, sole leader of Germany.
will be five years before one of them suspects that Arvid Harnack is in the resistance.
Born in 1851, Adolf von Harnack was a prolific theologian who helped draft a section of the Weimar Constitution after the First World War. He scandalized the fusty, dusty factions of the church with his provocative teachings. Nothing was taboo, he insisted; every word in the Bible should be subject to scrutiny. Uncle Adolf (as Arvid called him) lived in Grunewald, a suburb of Berlin dense with birch trees and prosperous families, in a three-story house on Kunz-Buntschuhstrasse that was large enough to accommodate a wife and seven children.
memorial was held at the Harnack House, erected the previous year with funds provided by the state of Prussia to serve as a meeting place for esteemed scientists, artists, ambassadors, and public intellectuals. A guest book over the years boasted the names of several Nobel Prize winners: the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore; the German physicists Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg. Here, in a stately hall named after Goethe, Einstein presented his theory of relativity for the very first time. How much has changed since then—and how rapidly. On February 4, 1935, high-ranking
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March 16, 1935, Hitler announces a new law: all German males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five will be required to serve in the military.
The law is a blatant violation of the Treaty of Versailles,
Germany’s emperor, Wilhelm II—who delivered the order to fire the first shot—abdicated and fled to the Netherlands, where he ensconced himself in yet another splendid castle. The castle had a fleet of dutiful servants, a charming view of the countryside,
Germany’s new democratic government struggled to come up with the sum and attempted to solve the problem by simply printing more money.
wheelbarrow of money couldn’t buy a single newspaper.
People with pensions or bank accounts lost nearly all their money.
tycoons amassed even larger fortunes.
They were also among the industrialists who wrote big checks to support the Nazi Party immediately after Hitler took power in 1933—and who stand to profit
To be an American in Berlin is to turn a blind eye to atrocity.
Most American expats Mildred meets in Berlin are largely untouched by what’s going on around them.
The Germans sitting at a nearby table and the Polish waiter pouring water into their goblets have no such luxury; listening to Ellington—Negermusik—would bring the Gestapo to their door.
On the evening of May 21, 1935, Hitler delivers a speech in the Reichstag. It’s a full house. The entire diplomatic corps is in attendance. Ambassadors from France, England, Italy, Japan, and Poland sit in the front row. Ambassador Dodd sits in the third row. The American journalist William Shirer watches it all from the section of seats allotted to the press, noting the “six hundred or so sausage-necked, shaved-headed, brown-clad yes-men, who rise and shout almost every time Hitler pauses for breath.”
“Germany wants peace!” Hitler hollers.
His thirteen-point proposal convinces not only Germans that he’s telling the truth but also people in other countries, including those he will invade.
halls of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, tales of Martha Dodd’s escapades have been making the rounds.
confidential,”
between 1932 and 1933, Stalin had engineered the murder of millions of Ukrainians. The
fact that all those Storm Troopers were slaughtered was shocking enough; it was even more incomprehensible that Hitler had ordered the murder of high-ranking men in his own regime, including Ernst Röhm, supposedly his closest friend. “Hitler surely couldn’t shoot all people who opposed him,” she’d thought then.
Boris has vanished. The Soviet embassy booted him from Berlin practically overnight.
Adam Kuckhoff.
He’s working on a second novel now. Its subject is provocative: Germany has started a vicious, bloody war, and the protagonist must decide whether he will be a patriot or a rebel. Most likely, the book will be banned.
checks the apartment for wires.
neighbor’s attic,
