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May 23 - June 22, 2025
Heath has coaxed from the president of the Reichsbank enough information to write his first report for Morgenthau.
Aladar Weigal, the Hungarian driver assigned to transport Donald to the embassy. Aladar doubles as a butler when Louise hosts a social event at home. He has already told her that he’s required to report to the Gestapo once a month and tell them all he has seen and heard at Innsbrucker Strasse 44.
Across Germany, 267 synagogues and 7,500 Jewish-owned stores are destroyed. Ninety-one Jews are murdered.
Kristallnacht marks the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. What it is the beginning of, no one at the U.S. embassy in Berlin can fathom. Consuls and diplomats pass each other in the halls, tongue-tied and shaken to the core. Ambassador Hugh Wilson is “recalled for consultations to Washington,” as the official line goes, which everyone at the embassy knows is a euphemism for got the hell out. He never returns. Scrambling to fill the void, the State Department gives Consul Prentiss Gilbert a hasty promotion to chargé d’affaires, a notch below ambassador. Gilbert dies of heart
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Appeasement won’t restrain Hitler. Arvid emphasizes this point again and again in his conversations with Heath.
The Embassy has received reliable information that the German Embassy in London has been informed by Chamberlain that Great Britain is prepared to release to the Reich most of the Czech gold reserve which was on deposit in London.… This news is surprising to Reich officials who look on it with somewhat amused disdain. They interpret it as an indication that Chamberlain is still inclined to gestures of “appeasement” and a belief that financial enticements can be used to buy off the Reich.
early as 1937, emissaries from the German resistance attempted to make contact with the U.S. and British governments and warn them about the threat Hitler poses to the rest of the world. But statesmen in the West remain profoundly skeptical that a German resistance actually exists.
The voluminous archives at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library don’t tell us that in the summer of 1939, Donald Heath informed Chargé d’Affaires Kirk that he had received intelligence indicating that “Nazi military aggression would shortly occur,” or that Kirk gave him a “pitying” look and said, “My dear Don, even somebody as stupid as myself… knows
1940. For fifty-seven consecutive nights, the Luftwaffe bombs London,
more than a year, Britain will fight Germany alone.
October 31, 1940. Germany loses the Battle of Britain.
They follow up their nonaggression pact with a trade agreement, making them partners in both war and business. Stalin sends Hitler wheat, cotton, rubber, iron, nickel, tin, platinum, cobalt, and crude oil. In exchange for these strategic raw materials, Hitler sends Stalin artillery and warplanes, including Germany’s brand-new Junkers Ju 88 combat aircraft and Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighter planes, as well as an assortment of turbines, generators,
has already murdered millions of his own people in the Soviet Famine of 1932–33 and the Great Purge of 1936–38. Many of his best spies are among those whose bodies are buried in mass graves in Moscow and its outskirts. Stalin promised Hitler that he wouldn’t spy on Germany, a condition of the cozy handshake, but Stalin has no intention of keeping his promise.
From now on death was near us.”
Göring didn’t pay a dime for his country estate; the Nazi government footed the bill in full.
She goes from post office to post office, buying only twenty stamps at a time (buying more could invite suspicion), and mails the leaflets to strangers.
mailed to “representatives of the press, the Catholic Church and the intelligentsia.” Employees of Goebbels’s Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda are also among the recipients.
underground newspaper called Der innere Front (the Internal Front).
expose I. G. Farben as a war profiteer,
They encourage workers in German armament factories to sabotage the production of bombs and ammunition.
Open Letters to the Eastern Front is another series of leaflets.
“Sometimes we went out at night on ‘poster actions,’ pasting up on walls and buildings posters calling for the end of the war,”
Spring brings to Moscow Center a slew of intelligence reports that Hitler is planning to invade the Soviet Union.
Stalin ignores the warnings,
Stalin receives other warnings, from Britain, the United States, and a Soviet spy in Tokyo named Richard Sorge (code name Ramsay), but he’s convinced that Western democracies are slyly trying to sow discord between dictatorships and goad him into distrusting Hitler.
The Soviet air force—the largest in the world right now—is so unprepared that their pilots are still in bed, asleep, when the Luftwaffe drops the first incendiary bomb.
Operation Barbarossa comes as such a shock to Stalin that three hours after the invasion begins he persists in believing that Hitler had nothing to do with
last, exactly four days after Operation Barbarossa begins, Hans Coppi succeeds in sending a test message—and it’s an exuberant one, perhaps because he’s a newlywed in love: “A thousand greetings to all friends.”
cryptologists
Moscow is seized by panic. Stalin orders the government to evacuate to Kuibyshev, five hundred miles east of Moscow.
she gave birth to their first in the dark, during an air raid.
The Battle of Moscow begins auspiciously
temperature plummeting below zero,
without jackboots or gloves suffer from frostbite. Frostbite gives way to gangrene. Field surgeons amputate limbs.
December 7, 1941,
would take two weeks to extinguish the flames—
Heydrich’s boss, Himmler, isn’t here today. He is occupied with numerous wartime tasks, including the development of a mobile gas van that can asphyxiate up to forty people at a time.
The Gestapo has three addresses now. Arvid and Mildred Harnack’s. Adam and Greta Kuckhoff’s. Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen’
Lithuanians welcomed German soldiers marching in lockstep through their streets, viewing them as liberators. No longer. The
Tomorrow, a fishing boat will take Mildred and Arvid to Sweden. The Harnacks know several people who have escaped this way. It is a dangerous journey. German vessels patrol the Baltic Sea. Even if their small boat manages to evade them, there are air patrols to worry about. But she and Arvid will take their chances. They cannot go back to Berlin. The Gestapo is closing in on them.
Mildred and Arvid are locked in a vehicle that speeds south from Preila to Berlin, a five-hundred-mile trip.
led down
a flight of stairs to the basement. Arvid is shoved into one cell,
week goes by.
Over the next few months, Nazi officials will use the Gestapo Album to keep track of everyone the Gestapo arrests in the resistance.
When Greta Kuckhoff is led in handcuffs into an interrogation room, she is surprised by how ordinary it looks,
Preparations for a mass trial are under way, and confessions extracted during interrogations will be admitted as evidence, but neither Greta nor anyone else knows this right now.
Nine days after she is arrested, Mildred spends her fortieth birthday in the basement of Gestapo headquarters.
Sometimes the interrogation room is ice cold. Sometimes it’s blazing hot. Sometimes Günther is tortured.
Later, in his prison cell, John Sieg hangs himself. His friend Herbert Grasse throws himself out a fifth-floor window.
