Harnack, Mildred Fish b. September 16, 1902; Milwaukee, Wisconsin d. February 16, 1943; Berlin-Plotzensee, Prussia
The only U.S. civilian the Nazi government executed during World War II. She was also the only female U.S. citizen to die at the direct command of Adolf Hitler. Mildred Fish graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she edited the Wisconsin Literary Magazine.
William Ellery Leonard influenced her initial interest in German literature, but her love of Germany was only engendered after meeting her eventual husband, the distinguished German economist Arvid Harnack, who was in Madison on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for a postdoctoral program. The two met fortuitously on campus and engaged in a radical literary circle during their courtship. Mildred was an honor student and already a leading literary light in Madison when Arvid undertook his postgraduate studies with economist and reformer John R. Commons.After their marriage, Arvid returned to Berlin to pursue his career in government, while Mildred spent a year teaching at Goucher College in Baltimore. At age twenty-six, she won a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to study for her doctorate at the University of Jena. The couple was reunited in Germany, ultimately moving to tumultuous Berlin in 1929. Arvid gained a position in his government’s Ministry of Economics, but both became intrigued with radical Socialist politics. They immersed themselves into the extended Har- nack family circle, which included the in-
tellectual Bonhoeffer and Delbrueck clans. Their intellectual interaction also reached people who shared an interest in the “great experiment” to the east—the development of the Soviet Union—espe- cially after a trip to the USSR. While her husband, an internationally recognized scholar and economist, obtained a key position in the Reich Ministry of Economics, Mildred worked as a writer, as a translator of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and as a teacher for British and American families in Berlin.
She published a number of articles, translated the works of American authors—Irving Stone among them—into German, and completed her doctoral dissertation by 1939. Maintaining contact with her family throughout the 1930s, Mildred chose to stay with her husband, and when he was denied another Rockefeller Foundation fellowship shortly before the war broke out, their fates were sealed.Both Harnacks joined the group the Nazi government called the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). It consisted primarily of their circle of friends but became an espionage ring that reported to Soviet agents even before World War II. They helped German Jews and political dissidents escape the tyranny of the Third Reich and provided economic and military intelligence to both Washington and Moscow. Arvid actually collected information through the network for the Soviets, while Mildred remained on the periphery, yet drew suspicion because of her connection with the resistance group. Their apartment was also a site for anti-Nazi discussions and instruction. She developed a close friendship with the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Germany, Martha Dodd, who during her father’s posting in Berlin engaged in colorful social relationships within the international set. Discovered in 1942 because of careless reporting by a Soviet agent in the Netherlands, Red Orchestra members were arrested, tortured, and given summary trials. They were executed by hanging in the Plotzensee Prison. Mildred Harnack was sentenced initially to six years in prison, but upon reviewing the verdict, Hitler demanded that she be tried again. Her second trial—this time for treason, not as an accomplice—was scheduled for a few weeks after her husband’s execution. She was sentenced to death. Her final brutal months in prison affected her health; she was ill and nearly starved. Shortly after news of the defeat of the Sixth German Army at Stalingrad reached Berlin, Mildred Fish Harnack was transported from a women’s confinement facility to the infamous Plotzensee Prison where here husband had been executed.
Mildred was beheaded on February 16, 1943, on Hitler’s direct order.While in West Germany the Red Orchestra was not recognized as a resistance group but branded as a Russian espionage ring, the East German government celebrated the Red Orchestra as a resistance group and issued a postage stamp in 1964 to honor the Harnacks. In 1976 the Mildred Harnack Secondary School was dedicated in East Berlin. The University of Wisconsin has published memorials and her former high school in Milwaukee has a scholarship in her name.
Gareth A. Shellman
See also Bonhoeffer, Dietrich; U.S.-German
Intellectual Exchange
References and Further Reading
Brysac, Shareen Blair. Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra. New York: Oxford University, 2000.
Graml, Hermann, Hans Mommsen, Hans- Joachim Reichhardt, and Ernst Wolf. The German Resistance to Hitler. Berkeley: University of California, 1970.
Hoffmann, Peter. The History of the German Resistance 1933—1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1977.