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

With all his precautions, he’s still worried about eavesdroppers.

Hitler’s “peace” speech was a sham, a dog-and-pony show, the work of an inveterate liar. The documents Arvid has seen tell the truth, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that peace plays no role in Germany’s future. Hitler, he says, is “preparing for war.”

Hjalmar Schacht became president of the Reichsbank in 1923 and was credited with rescuing Germany from hyperinflation, which brought him international acclaim as the nation’s “financial wizard.” Schacht resigned in

Schacht has put Arvid in charge of American-German trade relations. In this role, Arvid is required to strengthen his social ties with diplomats at the U.S. embassy. It is a perfect camouflage.

term for what Arvid is: a Rindersteak—beefsteak—Nazi. Nazi brown on the outside, lefty red on the inside.

He regularly attends meetings of the Deutscher Klub, where he befriends military officers and industrialists who stand to profit tremendously if Hitler starts a war.

The two men find a place where they can talk freely. Hirschfeld warns Arvid that his work in the Circle is putting him at risk. It’s far too dangerous to agitate so openly against Hitler.

treated as a spy. He will whisper secrets into Moscow’s ear as a representative of the anti-fascist underground, nothing more. He will not accept money. He will not sign an oath of loyalty to Soviet intelligence. Many men find Arvid admirably uncompromising. Belkin probably isn’t one of them. An oath of loyalty is integral to the relationship between spy and spymaster. Without one, the risks to Moscow Center are pronounced. Still, whatever objections Belkin may have don’t deter him from sending an enciphered memo to Moscow Center under the code name Kadi to confirm he has successfully recruited his target: Arvid Harnack, senior official in the Ministry of Economics.

Moscow Center opens a case file and gives Arvid his own code name: Balt.

beheadings are back. Hitler’s regime has revived this gruesome punishment, which was effectively banned during the Weimar Republic. 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. Gröpler’s contract with the Reich Ministry of Justice states that he is responsible for bringing his own chopping block, bench, and ax to the beheadings, all of which he carries out with theatrical precision in the prison courtyard. Usually in attendance are several court officials, a representative from the state attorney’s office, a member of the clergy, a physician, an official from Plötzensee, and a cluster of witnesses, who all watch Gröpler stride into a bright spotlight wearing a black top hat, a black tailcoat, and spotless white gloves. Three young men—Gröpler’s assistants—lead the prisoner to the bench and position the chopping block under the prisoner’s head. The state prosecutor reads aloud the death sentence and a court official gives the directive: “Executioner, do your duty.” Gröpler raises his ax and brings it down.

In 1935, seventy-nine men and nine women are beheaded by Grö

Beheadings at Plötzensee aren’t a secret. Lurid details are splashed across the pages of German newspapers and mak...

Many German women in the resistance will be executed in a manner that is equally barbarous: by guillotine.

Resistance takes two forms: passive and active. Passive acts of resistance are called Resistenz. Refusing to fly Germany’s new flag—a giant swastika—is one example. Refusing to say “Heil Hitler” is another.

Some find a substitute expression. Saying Grüss Gott—God bless you—is a useful way to dodge Heil Hitler.

Active acts of resistance are called Widerstand. Help a Jewish friend escape Germany, and you are performing an act of Widerstand. Write a leaflet that criticizes Hitler’s regime, slip one into someone’s mailbox or coat pocket, smuggle some into a train station, and you are engaging in Widerstand. These crimes are punishable by a year or two in a concentration camp.

Through the pops and squeals, she can hear a BBC program. President Roosevelt is giving a speech. Mildred scribbles furiously. She translates what she’s written into German, types the words onto sheets of paper that are then transformed into leaflets. The Circle smuggles them into Berlin’s factories, leaving them in small piles for workers to discover.

On September 15, 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor is passed. Sex between Jews and non-Jews is now illegal. It is also illegal for Jews to marry non-Jews.

On the same day, the Reich Citizenship Law is passed. It explicitly excludes Jews from citizenship in Germany.

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

Over a fourteen-month period in 1935 and 1936, 2,197 people in underground resistance groups in Berlin are arrested.

Over twelve thousand people across Germany are arrested in 1936 for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets.

1936, the Gestapo collects 1,643,200 leaflets denouncing the Nazi regime. The number is noted meticulously in their records,

An ordinary citizen who finds a leaflet in her mailbox can report the offense to the local police station. The Gestapo relies on citizens like this to assist in policing neighborhoods and rooting out the resistance. As the number of snitches and gossips and snoops and denouncers increases, the Gestapo develops a classification system, distinguishing between an Informationsperson (information person), a Wahrmann (truth man), a Gewährsmann (informer), a Gegnermann (opponent man), a Zuverlässigerperson (reliable person), and an Auskunftmann (information man). At the top of the hierarchy are elite informers called Vertrauensmänner (men of confidence), designated as “VM” in Gestapo reports. VM are paid Gestapo spies who write their reports in code and deposit them in designated postboxes. Often, they masquerade as Hitler’s enemies. In the language of espionage, they are moles. The most skillful VM penetrate a resistance group’s inner core and befriend its members, earning their trust, learning their secrets, reporting it all to the Gestapo.

Nowhere but Berlin would you find Hitler’s ministry men and SS thugs intermingling with American, French, and Russian diplomats.

Every neighborhood has a Nazi “block warden.”

There are over two hundred thousand block wardens right now, a number that will soon grow to two million.

The primary objective of the Four-Year Plan is to prepare Germany for war.

Wilhelm Utech endures a string of interrogations at the concentration camp he has been hauled to. Distributing leaflets is a crime that suggests he’s in a resistance group, but the SS guards assigned to beat the truth out of him fail. After he is released, he finds Mildred and assures her that he revealed nothing about the Circle. The brutality he experienced while incarcerated has convinced him that they should use whatever weapons are required to fight Hitler.

two generals strongly objected to Hitler’s desire to start a war in Europe. In February 1938, the two generals are ousted from their posts. One is defamed as a homosexual, and the other is accused of marrying a prostitute. Hitler then declares himself the supreme commander of the armed forces and announces a massive reorganization of Germany’s military leadership. Fourteen generals are forced to retire. In their place, Hitler installs generals who swear allegiance to their new supreme commander.

Oster conspiracy.

there are conservative military officers at the heart of the Third Reich who oppose Hitler.

Boris has no intention of marrying Martha, of course. He has been married twice already, the first time to a woman named Tatiana, the second to Vassa, his current wife.

She points out that her father “has great influence” over President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull and reveals that he won’t be ambassador for much longer as “he personally wants to quit.” She would be more than willing to push for whichever man Moscow Center hopes to see as the next U.S. ambassador in Berlin

The Great Purge averages one thousand murders a day between 1936 and 1938. Because executions are carried out at night and mass graves are hidden, most of the population remains blissfully ignorant of Stalin’s killing spree.

Few are better acquainted with Stalin’s fickle, vengeful heart than the Dwarf, who demonstrated his devotion to the Communist dictator by spraying mercury on the curtains of his own office and blaming it on Genrikh Yagoda, then director of the NKVD. Yagoda was arrested, charged with treason, and dragged before a panel of judges at the last of three so-called Moscow Show Trials in March 1938, when the mercury-tainted curtains were presented as conclusive evidence that Yagoda was a German spy plotting to poison the Dwarf and perhaps Stalin too. After the judges pronounced a guilty verdict, Yagoda was shot in the head. The Dwarf was all too happy to take Yagoda’s place as the new director of the NKVD.

Martha meets with her control officer, who instructs her to sneak into her father’s office, read his reports to President Roosevelt, and write “a brief summary” of the contents. Her Soviet handlers are particularly interested in “information about Germany, Japan, and Poland.”

Boris returns to Moscow and checks into room 925 at the Moskva Hotel, which faces the Kremlin. He is arrested, tortured, and deposited in a prison cell. On August 28, 1938, he is sentenced to death by a Soviet military court, dragged to a secret NKVD mass-execution site, and shot.

Ambassador Dodd resigns. His four and a half years in Berlin have worn him down. Since 1934, Dodd has been telling the State Department that Hitler poses a threat to Germany and the world, and he is outraged that his warnings have had little to no effect on American foreign policy. Dodd knows he is unpopular among his State Department colleagues

Stalin issues orders for more mass murders. The Dwarf presides over thousands of executions, then thousands more. Soon, the Dwarf himself comes under suspicion, and he is arrested in the spring of 1939. Later, he is shot in the head.

The political situation in Germany was complicated in previous years. Now, in August 1939, it makes no sense. In a maneuver that stunned not only Arvid and Mildred and the Circle but everyone else on the planet, the Soviet Union and Germany join forces.

Stalin’s and Hitler’s foreign affairs ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, who smile for the cameras, no hatchets in sight. Under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin and Hitler are no longer bitter enemies. Communism and Fascism shake hands.

Donald Heath

stressing the need for comprehensive information about the German government, specifically economic intelligence.

He wanted to find out whether Hitler was preparing for war and how he planned to finance it.

The treasury secretary wanted his own personal spy.

On the brink of a second world war, the United States was the only global power without a centralized intelligence agency.

Hjalmar Schacht is president of the Reichsbank, Germany’s central bank. Until recently, Schacht was also head of the Reich Ministry of Economics. Praised in international newspapers as a wizard of international finance, Schacht was credited with rescuing Germany from hyperinflation, and in the mid-1930s he became Hitler’s darling. Since then, the most powerful economist in Germany has grown disillusioned with the Führer and resigned from the Reich Ministry of Economics on December 8, 1937.

Heath and Schacht meet for lunch at the Hotel Adlon,