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

Elisabeth von Harnack talks about her doctoral dissertation and presents her research on “The Hull House and Chicago Social Work.”

With few exceptions, the men who are running the government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.

The People’s Radio was designed with a limited range to ensure that only German stations could be heard. Turning the dial to a station broadcasting from London was an exercise in frustration, the whistling static a reminder that the Nazi government didn’t want its citizens to hear news from other countries.

How does a dictator overthrow a democracy? Bullets and blood, usually. Violent revolution, military coup. Hitler does it differently.

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.

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.

Women who aren’t fired are encouraged to give up their jobs to make room for unemployed men. Goebbels mounts a vigorous propaganda campaign against so-called double-earners—families in which a husband and wife both hold jobs.

The words arrested and imprisoned are no longer used. Protective custody—Schutzhaft—is the term that the Nazi government prefers.

Neither will Dietrich’s grandmother, who defied the April 1 boycott to buy a quarter pound of butter. When a Storm Trooper guarding the entrance of the store warned her not to buy butter from a Jew, the ninety-one-year-old woman rapped her cane against his jackboots and strode in, declaring, “I shall buy my butter where I always buy it.”

“I feel that in some way I don’t understand, I find myself in radical opposition to all my friends,” he writes, admitting that he has become “increasingly isolated with my views of things.” He concludes, “All this has frightened me and shaken my confidence.”

Writers who didn’t would never see their books published in Germany.

To be an American in Berlin is to turn a blind eye to atrocity. Wolfe isn’t the only one. Most American expats Mildred meets in Berlin are largely untouched by what’s going on around them.

From the Nazi point of view, the supple necks of the weaker sex must be treated differently, and a blade kills more quickly than a rope. It is the Nazis’ special perversity to make such a distinction, to view head-chopping as more humane than hanging.

No bullets are fired that day. The maneuver is a kind of performance, a powerful piece of theater. Hitler has alerted the world that Germany won’t be crippled by a punishing treaty any longer. He’s gambling that he’ll get away with it. He does.

This is a pattern that repeats again and again. As 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. An illustrative memo written by an official at the British Foreign Office asks: “Are the stories which reach us of dissident groups in Germany genuine?”

Büchert affects a casual tone. He tells Wolfgang he has never been assigned a case like this. It would “make a wonderful novel,” he says, “if it weren’t so sad.”

CIA director Allen Dulles would later observe that resistance groups in France and other German-occupied countries received large-scale support from powerful allies. Arms and supplies were smuggled to them, they maintained more or less organized liaison with foreign powers, or with their own governments in exile, which could give them assistance, help them organize, inform them, instruct them, render them financial aid, and last but most important, give them the hope and moral support that kept alive their faith in ultimate deliverance. Dulles admitted, “The West did not take too seriously the pleas of those anti-Nazi Germans who tried to enlighten it.”