Mildred Harnack. Executed by Order of Adolf Hitler, 1943. WWII

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Blog Created: 12-18-2022

Last Updated: 12-19-2022

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Mildred Elizabeth Harnack (née Fish; 16 September 1902 – 16 February 1943) was an American teacher, literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved with him to Germany, where she began her career as an academic. Fish-Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. In 1930, the couple moved to Berlin and Fish-Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin. In the early 1930s, the couple became increasingly interested in the Soviet communist system. Harnack established a writers' group that studied the Soviet planned economy, and the couple were able to arrange a visit to the Soviet Union during August 1932 and by 1933 they were fully committed to Soviet ideology. Through contacts at the American embassy, Fish-Harnack became friends with Martha Dodd, who became a part of her salon where they discussed current affairs. In 1936, Fish-Harnack's translation of Irving Stone's biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published.

In 1938, the couple began to resist Nazism. They became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the embassy, and to whom Harnack passed economic intelligence from his position at the Reich Trade Ministry. By 1940, the couple came into contact with other anti-fascist resistance groups and cooperated with them. The most important of these was run by German air force officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence. Fish-Harnack became a resistance fighter as a member of a Berlin anti-fascist espionage group, "the Circle", later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.

Photo taken of Mildred in 1926.

Life ~

Mildred Elizabeth Fish was born and raised on the west side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her parents were William Cook Fish, who was frequently unemployed between gigs as an insurance salesman, butcher, and horse trader, and Georgina Fish (née Hesketh), a self-taught stenographer and typist. Mildred had three siblings, Harriette (the eldest), and twins Marbeau (aka "Bob") and Marion. As a young woman, she learned to speak, write, and read German. She initially attended West Division High School (now Milwaukee High School of the Arts). Following the death of her father, Mildred's family moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland. Mildred attended Western High School her senior year. She managed to pack a lot in one year, playing on both the basketball and baseball teams, serving as editor for The Trailblazer, and playing the role of Princess Angelica in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, the senior class play. and she finished her last year at Western High School. In 1919, she began studying at George Washington University and remained there for two years, using family savings to pay tuition.

In 1921, she matriculated at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. During her first year, she worked for the Wisconsin State Journal as a film and drama critic to support herself. She stayed at a rooming house popular with journalists and writers, but left after facing some mild prejudice, which caused her to change her major from journalism to humanities, then later to English literature. In 1922, she became a staff writer for the Wisconsin Literary Magazine.

On 22 June 1925, Fish was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. Her senior thesis was "A Comparison of Chapman's and Pope's Translations of the Iliad with the Original". She stayed for further study and was awarded a Master of Arts degree in English on 6 August 1925.

In 1926, Fish studied and worked as a lecturer on German literature at the Milwaukee State Normal School (now the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee). In the same year, she met the jurist Arvid Harnack, a Rockefeller Fellow from Germany. Harnack had received his doctorate in law in 1924 and completed postgraduate studies in Hamburg and the London School of Economics before receiving a Rockefeller scholarship to study in the U.S. After a brief love affair, they were engaged on 6 June 1926, and wed on 7 August 1926 in a ceremony at her brother's farm near the village of Brooklyn, Wisconsin, after which Mildred used the hyphenated "Fish-Harnack" as her married name. On 28 September 1928, Harnack returned to Germany as his fellowship had ended. From 1928-29, Fish-Harnack taught English and American literature at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Arvid Harnack.

A fellow student of Harnack's was the poet Clara Leiser, who became a life-long friend and confidante. The professor who exerted the most influence over Fish-Harnack at Madison was William Ellery Leonard, who advised her when she was writing her senior thesis. Leonard, a non-conformist who believed in the Emersonian principle that "nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of [one's] own mind", had an abiding love of German culture. He subjected Fish-Harnack to a grueling scrutiny that shaped her intellectual outlook. For Fish-Harnack, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were the two greatest advocates of American literature. While at Madison, the couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology who had been invited to study in the U.S. A lifelong friendship developed between Mildred and Greta. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff.

Education ~

On 2 June 1929, Fish-Harnack migrated to Jena in Germany, where she spent her first year living with the Harnack family. In the same year, Fish-Harnack received a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service that enabled her to start working on her doctorate on American literature at the University of Jena, but she found the University of Giessen to be most welcome. Fish-Harnack's doctoral supervisor was Walther Fischer, who judged her to be an excellent lecturer and described her in a 1936 recommendation as showing great "tact", by which he meant Fish-Harnack's tactful approach to the Nazis' increasing incursion into the university in 1931 and 1932. By the time Fish-Harnack arrived in Giessen, more than half the student population were vocal in their support of the Nazis and therefore opponents of several faculty members. Amongst those under suspicion were philosophy professor Ernst von Aster—a Marxist—and economist Friedrich Lenz. Aster's wife, Swedish novelist Hildur Dixelius, became a good friend of Fish-Harnack and eventually became a house guest at Fish-Harnack's Berlin home.

Mildred, circled, in a 1912 school photo. Photo; Courtesy of Eric Carlson.

In the autumn of 1930, Fish-Harnack moved from Giessen to Berlin to be with her husband. On 1 February 1931, she was admitted to study at the University of Berlin on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Fish-Harnack was invited to hold a public lecture called "Romantic and Marital Love in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne" at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, which allowed her to work as an assistant lecturer and lector on English and American literature. She taught courses on Emerson, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw. Fish-Harnack was popular with her students and over three semesters the enrollment to the course tripled.

Although Fish-Harnack spent most of her time with her German family, she was an active member of the American expatriate community in Berlin. She went to dances at the American Student Association and was a member of the American Women's Club in Bellevuestrasse, later serving as its chairwoman. The Harnacks were popular at the American Church in Nollendorfplatz where they attended services.

Career ~

During their time in Berlin, the Harnacks witnessed the Weimardämmerung, the unraveling of the German republic. They became interested in the Soviet Union and communism, seeing them as a solution to the rampant poverty and unemployment that Germany suffered during the Great Depression. They were of particular interest for Harnack, whose mother had struggled during the hyperinflation of the 1920s after the loss of her husband while she was still a child. Their interest in capitalism waned, and they both believed that the economic system was ideologically bankrupt; they looked to the Soviet Union's new experimental five-year plans, believing the system could provide work for the masses. In 1931, Arvid established the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft (ARPLAN, "Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), a group of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy.

In 1932, the Berlin university had financial difficulties and Fish-Harnack lost her position as a lecturer in American literature. At the time, the German Americanist and ardent Nazi Friedrich Schönemann had returned from leave in America to work in the English department. Fish-Harnack never hid her leftist political views during lectures, and as a Marxist encouraged her students to use Karl Marx as a "practical solution to the evils of the present". In May 1932, the funding that enabled Mildred to teach at Friedrich-Wilhelm University was canceled. The couple were forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln due to the Nazis' presence. The couple had leased the apartment from a relative of the writer Stefan Heym; in his postwar novel Nachruf, Heym stated he found the Harnacks to be a genial academic couple with a determined outlook on the Nazis.

Nazi war poster 1930s.

In the same year, Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, with the help of the Soviet embassy, organized a three-week study trip (from 20 August to 12 September 1932) to the Soviet Union for 23 members of ARPLAN including Arvid. Mildred hoped to go, but due to a scheduling conflict decided to make her own way there by booking the trip using Intourist and flying back early. Fish-Harnack's career as a scholar was saved when a family friend who was also president of American Student Union, Warren Tomlinson, suggested she take over his position as lecturer at the Berlin municipal evening high school. On 1 September 1932, Fish-Harnack began lecturing at the Heil'schen Abendschule Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene" or BAG) at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg, an evening high school for adults to prepare for the Abitur. Fish-Harnack was popular with her students, for many of whom her courses were their first introduction to American Literature. She socialised with her students and discussed economic and political ideas from the United States and the Soviet Union in an open and frank manner. One of her students, Karl Behrens, became friends with the Harnacks and eventually one of their most ardent recruits.

By 1933, the Harnacks had adopted a left-wing ideology and were committed to the Soviet Union. On 1 January and 4 February 1933, Fish-Harnack wrote to her mother that she believed that the Soviet Union was the couple's best hope for a better world. In 1933 and 1934, the Harnacks kept in close contact with the Bonhoeffer family. Fish Harnack, seeking additional income, launched a lecture series that was held in Klaus and Emmi Bonhoeffer's home. In June 1933, she joined the National Socialist teachers' organization, as required by law.

Salon ~

On 13 June 1933, Fish-Harnack met Martha Dodd when she and other members of the American Women's club met at the Lehrter train station to welcome Dodd's father and American ambassador, William. Dodd became Fish-Harnack's closest friend in Berlin, and her manuscript, In Memory, found in her Prague apartment attic in 1957, stated:

"The years of our acquaintance were the most significant of my life. Our work, our experiences, in these courageous tragic years of fulfillment and disappointment are closely interwoven. Everything we thought about. What we loved. Hated. What we fought for. We shared with each other. We, all of us, my husband were in the German underground from 1933 to 1943. I'm the only one left."

The two friends had a similar literary outlook. In a letter Fish-Harnack wrote to her mother in October 1935, she described Dodd as a talented writer of literary criticism and short stories with "a real desire to understand the wider world... Therefore, our interests combine and we will try to work something out together." Fish-Harnack and Dodd edited a book column together in the English-language newspaper Berlin Topics. The Harnacks began to host a Saturday literary salon on Hasenheide where political views among editors, publishers, and authors were freely expressed; Fish-Harnack lectured on political economy and Marxism. The attendees included publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, and Rowohlt's son Heinrich, Marie Ledig-Rowohlt; translator Franz Frein; physician and writer Max Mohr; authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff, and Ernst von Salomon; journalist Margret Boveri; critic Erich Franzen; and Mildred's students, such as writer Friedrich Schlösinger. By autumn 1934, the meetings became less frequent and eventually disbanded altogether. In Dodd's book Through Embassy Eyes, she mentioned a report by an American publisher who had visited the Fish-Harnacks in 1934, who stated:

"He was expecting a lively exchange of views and engaging conversations that evening—definitely more appealing than that to which we were used in diplomatic circles. Instead, I only saw suffering and need. People whose spirit was broken. I saw pathetic cowardice. A lying in wait and tension, which was triggered by the visits by the secret police. The last of the meager remnants of free thought."

In 1934, the couple moved to the third floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten. The house was destroyed in the war and is now known as 14 Genthiner Straße.

Literary figure ~

The most important writer in Fish-Harnack's life was Thomas Wolfe. She found that his ability to shape memories from his early life to produce an autobiographical novel was reflected in her own desires for her own novel. She had read Wolfe's first book, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1933, lectured on the writer at the American Women's Club in 1933, and produced a further lecture in 1934 that was presented at the Bonhoeffers'. On 5 August 1934, Fish-Harnack published the essay "Drei junge Dichter aus USA. Thorton Wilder, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner" in the Berliner Tageblatt. On 8 May 1935 the Harnacks attended the American embassy in Berlin for tea, along with the Kuckhoffs. Fish-Harnack had a rare chance to meet Wolfe, who came to Germany to promote his book with his publisher, Ledig-Rowohlt. The tea party was also attended by John Sieg. Tau, a Jewish German-Norwegian writer and close friend of the Harnacks who attended the tea party, had to leave Germany after Kristallnacht; it is unclear which of the Harnacks organised his escape.

In the mid 1930s, Fish-Harnack's work began to be noticed and she became a published writer. In 1934, Fish-Harnack wrote an essay, "The Epic of the South", which was published in Berliner Tageblatt. In 1935, she wrote a essay, "Ein amerikanischer Dichter aus großer Tradition.", on William Faulkner for the magazine Die Literatur. This type of critical analysis was no longer tolerated and could have ended her teaching career. On 27 May 1934, Fish-Harnack accepted an invitation from Ledig-Rowohlt, Dodd, and Dodd's boyfriend Boris Vinogradov to visit the German writer Hans Fallada in Carwitz, whose book Little Man, What Now? was published the previous year in the USA and had been a bestseller. Fallada was one of the few German writers who failed to obey the Nazi state. After 1935, Fish-Harnack did not publish any literary criticisms, essays, or newspaper articles, as the increasing presence of the Nazi regime made any writings a "rubber stamp for official views".

In 1936, her German translation (with the assistance of her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law Inge) of Irving Stone's biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published. She continued to work as a translator for publishing houses. In January 1937, Fish-Harnack visited the United States to promote the book, and stayed with Leiser in New York for two weeks, which was the last time that Leiser saw Fish-Harnack. Leiser found Fish-Harnack changed, from the open and trusting person she had known into someone who seemed distant and superior, a side-effect of the deceit necessary to hide her true feelings in Germany. Fish-Harnack's high school friend Mady Emmerling found Fish-Harnack to be overly cautious, frightened, and reserved, all indicative of having lived in the Nazi state for four years. Fish-Harnack had become used to assuming a persona, or passing, to fool the Nazi state. Many of her friends assumed from her bearing that she had become a Nazi. Immediately after staying with Leiser, Fish-Harnack went on a campus lecture tour that in Haverford College, New York University, University of Chicago, and Madison, whose theme was "The German Relation to Current American Literature". Leonard attended the lecture at Madison and found it lacking in substance; he was unwilling to endorse Fish-Harnack's lecture when she asked for a written recommendation. However, at Haverford, Douglas V. Steere, who did not know her, found her presentation to be "vivid and full of charm". She visited her relatives after the tour and left in the spring to return to Berlin.

Later in 1938, Fish-Harnack worked on her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Die Entwicklung der amerikanischen Literatur der Gegenwart in einigen Hauptvertretern des Romans und der Kurzgeschicht" (transl. "The development of contemporary American literature in some of the main representatives of the novel and the short story"), and was awarded her doctorate at the University of Giessen on 20 November 1941. In 1938 she received an job offer from the Rütten & Loening publishing house in Berlin as a consultant for American novels. In the same year, Fish-Harnack joined the conservative Daughters of the American Revolution and became a local representative in Berlin. In October 1939, she applied for the Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships in the hopes of leaving Germany with a documented legitimate reason, but was refused. With the war, the demand for English-language fiction disappeared, so in 1941 she worked as an English-language tutor at the Foreign Studies Department of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, which was run by SS Major Franz Six.

Resistance ~

Leading up to and during the war, Red Orchestra tried to recruit new members, which was difficult due to the ratio of informers to proper recruits in the general populace. The group devised a method to vet potential recruits that would start with inviting them to a meeting, with the approach of making the potential recruit believe the group were Nazis, and lead the person to reveal their political attitude to Nazism through conversation. Harnack lent books to the potential recruit as a test of their intellect, as there was little chance of winning such people over if they did not understand politics. At one meeting, Fish-Harnack held a lecture on Kim by Rudyard Kipling to help the recruits understand colonialism.

On 3 March 1938, William Dodd was replaced by Hugh Wilson. Joining him as First Secretary and monetary attaché at the U.S. Embassy was Donald Heath. In 1937, Fish-Harnack met Louise Heath, Donald Heath's wife, at the American Women's Club in Bellevuestrasse. The Harnacks became friends with the Heaths. When the war started the Heaths fled to Norway, but when they returned, Louise requested that Fish-Harnack tutor her son, Donald Heath, Jr., in American literature. The two couples spent weekends and occasional holidays together. At times Harnack and Donald would meet in the countryside to exchange intelligence, but it became increasingly dangerous. Between December 1939 and March 1941, Donald Jr., couriered between Fish-Harnack and the American embassy; he visited the Harnacks every day, with either a message for Fish-Harnack from his mother or a message for Harnack from his father. He also delivered food from Denmark and Italy, as well as medicine for the Harnacks.

In 1940, the Harnacks came into contact with other resistance groups and began to cooperate with them. The most important of these was a group run by Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and descendant of an old German military family who had known Harnack since 1935, but was reintroduced to him sometime in late 1939 or early 1940 through Greta Kuckhoff; the Kuckhoffs had known the Schulz-Boysens since 1938 and started to engage them socially in late 1939 or early 1940 by bringing Fish-Harnack and Libertas Schulze-Boysen together while on holiday in Saxony. Of the meeting Fish-Harnack wrote:

"I saw it clearly before my eyes. From then on our work not only implies the risk of losing our freedom, from now on death was a possibility."

Harro and Libertas were part of a bohemian group of friends that met twice a month in fun meetings in contrast to the Harnacks' austere study meetings. The initial meeting of the women gave rise to a licentious image of the group that persisted for decades after the war, based primarily on Gestapo and Abwehr reports. In his 1967 book, L'orchestre rouge, Gilles Perrault states that Fish-Harnack and Libertas were lesbians. However, industrialist Hugo Buschmann, who was an informant and Harro's close friend, stated that the group lived dangerously, but there was no evidence for Perrault's conclusion.

On 17 September 1940, the Harnacks met the third secretary member of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Korotkov, and Harnack decided to become a Soviet agent. According to lawyer Wolfgang Havemann, from that point forward Fish-Harnack endured a persistent fear of being discovered that she tried to ameliorate by becoming a workaholic.

Discovery ~

The discovery of the illegal radio transmissions by Soviet agent Johann Wenzel by the German radio counterintelligence organization Funkabwehr and his capture by the Gestapo on 29–30 June 1942 eventually revealed the members of the group and led to the Harnacks' arrest. His exposure of the radio codes enabled Referat 12, the cipher bureau of the Funkabwehr that had been tracking Red Orchestra radio transmissions since June 1941, to decipher Red Orchestra message traffic. Wenzel's apartment in Brussels was found to contain a large number of coded messages. When Wilhelm Vauck, principal cryptographer of the Funkabwehr, received the ciphers from Wenzel, he was able to decipher some of the older messages. On 15 July 1942, Vauck decrypted a message dated 10 October 1941 that gave the locations of the Kuckhoffs' and Schulze-Boysens' apartments.

Mildred's Gesapo Mugshots.

Arvid's Gesapo Mugshots.

Arrest and death ~

On 7 September 1942, the Harnacks were arrested by the Gestapo at the seaside village of Preila on the Curonian Spit.

Harnack was sentenced to death on 19 December after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht ("Reich Military Tribunal"), and was executed three days later at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. Fish-Harnack was initially given six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on 16 January 1943. She was beheaded by guillotine on 16 February 1943. While she was imprisoned, Fish-Harnack translated the poem Vermächtnis (transl. "Bequest") by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Her last words were purported to have been "Ich habe Deutschland auch so geliebt" ("I loved Germany so much as well"). She was the only American woman executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.

guillotine.

Mildred was executed by direct orders from Hitler.

After her execution, her body was released to Humboldt University anatomy professor Hermann Stieve to be dissected for his research into the effects of stress, such as awaiting execution, on the menstrual cycle. After he was finished, he gave what was left to a friend of hers, who had the remains buried in Berlin's Zehlendorf Cemetery. She is the only member of the Berlin-based anti-fascists whose burial site is known.

When Leiser learned of the execution, she wrote the unfinished poem "To and from the guillotine" in remembrance of her friend.

U.S. government response ~

The United States government for decades concealed from the public Harnack's story because of her Communist sympathies. The Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army acknowledged her work leading a large group secretly fighting the Nazi regime but concluded that she deserved her punishment, considering her execution "justified."

Memorials ~

A cenotaph for the Harnacks stands in the Zehlendorf cemetery in Berlin, Germany.

Mildred Fish Harnack Day is observed by schools in the U.S. state of Wisconsin.

In 2006, a street in Berlin's Friedrichshain neighborhood was renamed Mildred Harnack Street (Mildred-Harnack-Straße).

A school named in honor of Harnack in Berlin is located on Schulze-Boysen-Straße, a street named for fellow members of the Red Orchestra Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Harro Schulze-Boysen.

A public school complex in her hometown of Milwaukee was named in honor of Mildred Fish-Harnack in 2013.

Mildred's alma mater, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, hosts the annual Mildred Fish-Harnack Human Rights and Democracy Lecture in her memory, which was established in 1994.

In 2019, the city of Madison, Wisconsin, dedicated a sculpture to Harnack in Madison's Marshall Park.

In 2013, Stolpersteins for the Harnacks were laid in front of 14 Genthiner Straße 14 in the Tiergarten on 20 September 2013 in the presence of US Ambassador John B. Emerson.

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December 1921. Mildred with her nephew, baby Bob. Son of her brother Marbeau Fish. (Photo courtesy of Howard Fish).

Mildred, 1928 (Photo-German Resistance Memorial Center).

Mildred at age 14 in1916. (Photo courtesy of Eric Carlson).

As her execution date approached, it was obvious that Mildred had lost weight.

Mildred's husband, Arvid Harnack was also executed.

Arvid and Mildred.

Dietrich Bonnoeffer (1943) was a distant cousin of Arvid Harnack and a good friend.

Mildred with her family.

Mildred (top row, second from left). With family and friends. 1917.

Mildred and Arvid Harnack in Wisconsin, 1926. Courtesy Donner family.

Mildred and Harry Turney-High, 1925. She was engaged to him until 1925 when he broke her heart. Within a year, she married Arvid Harnack. (Photo-LuAnn Darnell).