Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra - Hardcover

Brysac, Shareen Blair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195132696 ISBN 13: 9780195132694

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2000

Synopsis

This gripping and heartbreaking narrative is the first full account of an American woman who gave her life in the struggle against the Nazi regime. As members of a key resistance group, Mildred Harnack and her husband, Arvid, assisted in the escape of German Jews and political dissidents, and for years provided vital economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. But in 1942, following a Soviet blunder, the Gestapo arrested, tortured, and tried some four score members of the Harnacks' group, which the Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra. Mildred Fish-Harnack was guillotined in Berlin on February 16, 1943, on the personal instruction of Adolf Hitler--she was the only American woman to be executed as an underground conspirator during World War II. Yet as the war ended and the Cold War began, her courage, idealism, and self-sacrifice went largely unacknowledged in America and the democratic West, and were distorted and sanitized in the Communist East. Only now, with the opening of long-sealed archives from Germany, the KGB, the CIA, and the FBI, can the full story be told.
In this superbly told life of an unjustly forgotten woman, Shareen Blair Brysac depicts the human side of a controversial resistance group that for too long has been portrayed as merely a Soviet espionage network.

About this title

About the Author

Shareen Blair Brysac is co-author with her husband, Karl E. Meyer, of the acclaimed Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. A former producer for CBS News, she is the recipient of several Emmys and the Peabody Award. Currently, she is a contributing editor for Archaeology Magazine.

Reviews

Brysac's aim is not to provide a biography in the usual sense but to share tantalizing insights into the espionage efforts of Mildred Fish-Hamack, the only American woman executed in Nazi GermanyAunder Hitler's personal ordersAas an underground conspirator and co-leader, with her German husband, Arvid Harnack, of the leftist resistance group the Nazis dubbed the Red Orchestra. It is also Brysac's aim to vindicate Mildred and Arvid, long believedAbecause Arvid had assumed a position in the Third Reich (as a cover) and so little information was available until recentlyAto have "gone Nazi." Using Mildred's own letters and those from the daughter of FDR's ambassador, a friend in Berlin, as well as the recollections of survivors who knew her, newspaper articles and intelligence documents from Germany, Russia and the U.S., Brysac (co-author with Karl E. Meyer of Tournament of Shadows), concedes that her book is filled with inconsistencies and contradictions (a by-product of memories more than half a century old), but she offers a gripping narrative. Unfortunately, her presentation leaves some questions unanswered: for example, it is not clear how much of the couple's spying actually aided the U.S. or the Soviets, whose political vision the they embraced, although the Nazis blamed the Red Orchestra for the German defeat at Stalingrad, considered the turning point in the war. Yet Brysac presents a compelling tale of anti-Nazi resistance along with a colorful and vivid portrait of Fish-Harnack. This title should get attention in major book review media, and students of espionage, of WWII and general readers intrigued by the tale of a long-forgotten heroine will seek it out. 10-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Flowing out of exhaustive archival research, including various recently declassified intelligence files, this account provides a balanced historical appraisal of an American woman executed by the Hitler regime, whose motives for espionage were regarded warily by all in whose files her fate was recorded: the Russians, Americans, and Germans. Mildred Harnack assisted her husband, a wartime German economics official, in spying for the Soviet espionage ring in Berlin called The Red Orchestra. Legendary in the war's cloak-and-dagger literature, members of Die Rote Kapelle died for no immediate advantage to the anti-Nazi cause, for their reports predicting the German invasion of the USSR, accurate as they turned out to be, were dismissed by Stalin as disinformation. And after the war, amid the cold war, the crimson tincture of Die Rote Kapelle colored views of Marxist anti-Nazis such as Mildred Harnack, views that separated her from the pantheon of resisters, such as the Bonhoeffers. Brysac has ably reconstructed, on their own terms, the lives of intellect and action led, and lost, by Mildred and her husband, Arvid. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Brysac, an Emmy Award-winning producer, writer, and director of CBS documentaries, has painstakingly compiled personal interviews, letters, and historical documents into a balanced narration of the life of Mildred Fish-Harnack and her times. The book chronicles the story of several "Aryan elite" Germans, dubbed the Red Orchestra by the Nazis, who organized resistance to Hitler's regime. They included the Wisconsin-born Fish-Harnack, a teacher and scholar; her husband, Arvid Harnack, an economics minister in the Reich; and numerous friends and family (many of whom were later executed). Additionally, newly discovered information of this groups' Berlin activities are detailed here due to recently released documents from the KGB, FBI, and CIA. Although other books have been written about the Red Orchestra (notably, The Red Orchestra: The Soviet Spy Network Inside Nazi Europe), none has concentrated solely on the actions of the Berlin network. By detailing the life of Fish-Harnack, whose guillotining in 1943 made her the only American woman executed for treason during World War II, Brysac is able to put a very human face on these troubled times. With a supporting cast of Fish-Harnack's friends such as Martha Dodd, Brysac has developed a scholarly analysis of this forgotten group. Containing a lengthy bibliography, notes section, and index, this work is recommended for academic libraries.DMaria C. Bagshaw, Lake Erie Coll., Painesville, OH
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0195132696
• ISBN 13: 9780195132694
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512