who was the Mildred harnack?
Hitler gave the order to execute Mildred Harnack. She was born in Milwaukee and travelled to Germany to obtain a PhD when she was 26. She witnessed Germany's quick transition from democracy to Nazi dictatorship while studying for her graduate degree in Berlin. She and her husband Arvid started meeting in their apartment undercover. She worked on the writing of flyers that criticised Hitler and urged revolution, helped Jews flee, planned acts of sabotage, and recruited working-class Germans into the resistance.
"Mildred Harnack gave their opposition group, which included women to a majority, the moniker "the Circle." Members of the group included Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and Atheists, as well as factory and office employees, students and professors, journalists, and artists.
On September 7, 1942, the Gestapo detained Mildred Harnack and named her organisation the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra). Mildred and the other members of the group were subjected to daily interrogations and torture, according to postwar testimonies and papers smuggled out of a Berlin women's prison.
A panel of 5 judges sentenced Mildred Harnack to 6 years in a prison camp, but Hitler overturned the decision and ordered her execution. "Mildred Harnack and 75 of her German coconspirators were forced to undergo a mass trial at the highest military court in Nazi Germany.
Mildred translated Goethe poems in her final hours before being put to death in a jail cell. One of these is referenced in the title of my book, ALL THE FREQUENT TROUBLES OF OUR DAYS. The collection of poems was hidden in the folds of a prison chaplain's robe.
According to all available documents, Mildred Harnack was the lone American in the leadership of the German resistance to Hitler when she was strapped to a guillotine and executed on February 16, 1943 in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
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