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May 23 - June 22, 2025
a member of Gegner Kreis signed a confession that incriminated Günther. Today he found out that Kurt blurted his name while being tortured by Habecker. If Kurt doesn’t retract his statement, Günther will face execution.
Arvid’s torturer is Habecker, the same man who has been torturing Mildred. Habecker will go on to torture many others in the resistance. Nearly all of them will be executed. One
clubs from behind so that I fell forward with each blow; and as my hands were tied behind my back, my face and head hit the ground with full force. During this procedure all participants expressed their enjoyment in the form of derisive shouts. The first round of torture ended in a fainting spell.
The next day I was unable to get up, so I could not even change my underwear, which was soaked with blood. Although I had always been perfectly healthy up to then I suffered a serious heart attack later in the day.
Mildred is in strict solitary confinement. Arvid is given pencils and paper. He is allowed to write and receive letters. Axel sends him works by Plato, Hegel, and Adam Smith. He is writing a new book, one that puts forth an economic theory that synthesizes all his previous theories.
Mildred is given none of these privileges: no pencils, no paper, no letters, no books.
Some families of prisoners are permitted to do the prisoners’ laundry. Other prisons in Berlin adopt this policy as well. Decisions regarding which families are permitted to do a prisoner’s laundry are made according to the whims of a prison’s administration.
Mildred and Libertas are transferred from the basement prison at Gestapo headquarters to the Charlottenburg women’s prison, where they are handcuffed in separate solitary cells.
Berliners walking past the prison may not even know it’s there.
Every morning they are transported in a police wagon to Gestapo headquarters f...
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she’s questioned by a police officer who refrains from torturing her. Libertas is lucky. Still, she doesn’t understand why, given her family connection to Göring, the office...
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Göring is apoplectic. He was a guest at Libertas and Harro’s wedding. He oversaw Harro’s promotion to Oberleutnant—the highest lieutenant officer rank in the Luftwaffe—and he is painfully aware that he granted Harro access to highly confidential military intelligence. An admiral who serves as one of Hitler’s aides observes that Göring feels “humiliated” by the whole ordeal. It’s beyond Göring’s comprehension that an underground resistance group in Germany includes “officers and aristocrats.” Hitler, too, is shocked that the members of this resistance group include “the elite.”
During a total of twenty-five interrogations, Libertas whispers the names of everyone she knows in the Circle,
He promptly reports the news to Göring, who sees to it that Miss Breiter receives five thousand Reichsmark and a personal thank-you note from Himmler.
sits down in her prison cell to compose a letter to her mother. “I,” Libertas writes, “out of selfishness, have betrayed friends.”
of Libertas’s betrayals blazes through the women’s prisons.
The group has a name now: the Rote Kapelle—Red Orchestra.
Radio transmitters are “pianos”; their operators are “pianists.
The trial will be held at the highest military court in Nazi Germany, the Reichskriegsgericht—Reich Court-Martial. A panel
far, all the lawyers they have contacted flatly refuse to have anything to do with
Mildred and Arvid. Privately, they convey their sympathies, but they’re much too afraid to stick their necks out
granted no more than a cursory glance at the eight-hundred-page indictment. The Nazi authorities refused to give him a copy of the pages that pertain to Mildred and Arvid. In fact, he wasn’t allowed to jot down a single note.
How can Schwarz defend Mildred and Arvid with any degree of competence if he doesn’t have a firm grasp of the charges against them?
Mildred get into a tussle with a prison guard. It is rumored that she injured him.
Mildred is permitted to write a single letter.
She hasn’t held a pencil in months.
Mildred doesn’t know that the Gestapo raided Woyrschstrasse 16 several days ago and confiscated all their belongings or that an SS officer will soon move in to their former home with his wife and children.
Breakfast is a hunk of dry bread, a cup of lukewarm water the color of dirt—what passes for coffee here, made from boiled grain. She chews and swallows and coughs. Her lungs are sore from all the coughing. The mattress is stuffed with wood chips and straw. Bedbugs and lice crawl over her skin and scalp. Mice scamper across the stone floor.
There is no toilet, just a bucket in the corner of her cell.
Bodo Schlösinger didn’t die in battle; he died by his own hand. Shortly after he heard that the Gestapo had arrested everyone in the Circle, including Rose, he walked into a farmhouse in the Russian countryside and shot himself.
Mildred Harnack and her coconspirators are charged with treason.
German criminal law recognizes two types of treason: treason against the government (Hochverrat) and treason against the country (Landesverrat). A defendant found guilty of treason against the government is usually punished with a prison sentence of three to five years. A defendant convicted of treason against
the country is punished w...
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In
the mass trial of the Red Orchestra, Hitler’s Bloodhound has a single objective: to sentence every one of the accused to death.
December 15, 1942. Among them are Mildred and Arvid
Hitler will receive daily reports. For the first time in history, the judges of the Reich Court-Martial won’t have the final word.
Erika von Brockdorff will call the mass trial a “witch hunt.”
There are no Kassiber documenting Mildred’s impressions of Manfred Roeder. Locked in solitary confinement, forbidden to write or speak, she could not communicate her thoughts to anyone.
Mildred walks into a courtroom. Moments ago, in the hallway, she met her lawyer, Schwarz, for the first time.
He can’t even sit near her.
parody of justice will be enacted.
The trial lasts four days.
Arvid received a death sentence and Mildred received six years’ imprisonment.
The six pages of the file present a dry, meticulous recitation of offenses. She distributed illegal leaflets. She consorted with Communists. She was a member of the Communist prisoners’ aid group Rote Hilfe—Red Aid—and participated in treasonous activities under the alias “Hertha.” In 1940, the Gestapo hauled her back to Berlin and threw her in prison for six months. Ten months after her release, the Gestapo arrested her again.
Rumors spread from cell to cell in whispers. This is how she learns that Mildred is an American anti-fascist in strict solitary confinement.
Mildred is a suicide risk. This is why, after three months of solitary confinement, she was given a cellmate.
She tells Gertrud she has been sentenced to six years’ hard labor.
“After we got up in the morning we did exercises, as much as the extremely narrow room allowed,” Gertrud wrote.
They have no books. But Gertrud gets her hands on a scrap of paper, and Mildred joyfully retrieves her pencil from the hole where she’s hidden it. “She wrote down Goethe verses for me,” Gertrud remembered.
