Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule - Softcover

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Gordon Thomas was a political and investigative journalist in the United Kingdom. A leading expert on intelligence and espionage, his books include the acclaimed Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. He died in 2017.

Greg Lewis is a BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist. He has produced more than sixty documentaries for television and radio in the UK. He is the coauthor, with Gordon Thomas, of Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE.

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1

Meetings in Madison

The little group huddled together, clapped their gloved hands, and pulled their winter hats down over their ears. Smoke rose from the fire where the pork chops sizzled. There was an argument about cooking them slowly, not allowing them to burn; then more laughter, which echoed along the frozen shore of Lake Mendota.

Some of the boys vied for the attention of the newcomer, a twenty-five-year-old with wispy blond hair and keen gray-green eyes. A little shy, she was exceptionally bright, dreamed of being a writer, and could argue long and hard her strong feminist ideals. Her name was Greta Lorke, and they were all a little fascinated with her; and having worked so hard to get to the United States, she was intrigued by them, too.

The daughter of a metalworker and a seamstress, Lorke had grown up in a tenement house in the eastern German industrial town of Frankfurt an der Oder, where her parents, Georg and Martha, rented out rooms to make ends meet. The couple made many sacrifices to ensure she had the best education, and she thanked them for the work ethic, Catholic conscience, and sense of justice that they had gifted her. An American friend had suggested she come to the United States, discover life in America, and extend her theories of economics. She had saved hard, and when she arrived in America, she was bowled over by it: Whereas German universities were staffed by stuffy, old-fashioned men, in Madison many of the academics were young and eager to treat students as equals. For Lorke, seeing a professor sit on the floor of their student house, sipping coffee and asking them their opinions on economic theory, was a dizzying revelation.

It was no surprise that, despite memories of the Great War, she had found a warm welcome in Madison, Wisconsin. Many students were from nearby Milwaukee, where three out of four people were of German descent, and there was a fascination with Europe, an interest in how it was healing after the battles of the previous decade. Lorke told her new friends that she had lived in Berlin and seen up close the horrors of poverty. While studying economics at the University of Berlin, she had worked in an orphanage in the working-class area of Neukšlln. The children she worked with were disfigured by rickets, disease, and hunger. Seeing such poverty had a massive effect on Lorke. Lorke felt that the "old order" of not just Germany but most of Europe-the monarchs, aristocrats, and church leaders-had failed the people. That system did not work, and she looked for something that might replace it. It was 1927, and the world had readjusted after the war. It was time for the people to have their say.

The group stopped chatting to greet two new friends, who were skating on the frozen lake. Both were tall, and even though they wore bulky winter clothing, Lorke could see that they made a handsome couple. She recognized immediately the man's strong German accent, but it was the woman who interested her the most, and they quickly began to talk.

Born in 1902, three months before Lorke, Mildred Fish-Harnack had grown up close to a district of Milwaukee that housed the cityÕs large German community. Although not of German extraction herself, she had always felt close to German culture. The youngest daughter of William and Georgina Fish, she did not have a particularly happy home life. Her parents were hopelessly mismatched. William tried and failed in business, preferred his horses and dog to his children, and was devoted to Wild West stories. Georgina was the family rock. A convert to Christian Science, she told her children never to be afraid and instilled in them a strong sense of confidence and a commitment to the truth. After the Fishes separated, William struggled to cope alone, and in 1918, he was found dead in a barn where he had been sleeping during a blizzard.

Georgina moved her family to Washington, where she took a job as a stenographer. Mildred spent her teenage years immersed in poetry and playing sports, at which she excelled. She dreamed of being a journalist and in 1921 enrolled at the university in Madison, where as well as studying she worked as a drama and film critic for the Wisconsin State Journal and joined a group of poets and radicals on the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. The magazine was satirical, liberal, and highbrow, and it sold on newsstands as far away as New York. Working for it made Mildred feel like a writer. After her graduation in 1925 she stayed on at the university to work as an English teacher. One day, a German student walked into her classroom by mistake and was bowled over by her poise and appearance. He felt an instant kinship. "I felt as if Mildred was a member of my family," he later recalled.

The visitor's name was Arvid Harnack. A year older than Mildred, he was the eldest child of a family of theologians and history professors in Darmstadt, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse. Like Mildred, Harnack was blond, blue-eyed, and tall. He was also hardworking, self-confident, and arrogant. Already a doctor of law with a fiercely bright brain for economic theory, he had arrived in Madison as a student paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation-a scholarship given to only four students in the whole of the United States.

Standing in Mildred's classroom, he apologized for his poor English and she for her German: They agreed to meet and practice each other's languages. Romance blossomed over canoe rides and picnics during which they talked about their love of poetry and literature, of Goethe and Whitman. In reflective moments they talked of their fathers. Like Mildred, Harnack had lost his father when he was a teenager. Otto Harnack, who suffered severe depression, had drowned himself in a river.

The couple's courtship was brief and intense, with Mildred aware that one day Harnack planned to return to Germany and work for the Ministry of Labor. Georgina Fish approved of Mildred's German boyfriend, and in August 1926, Mildred and Harnack were married. A free spirit, ahead of her time, she hyphenated her surname to Fish-Harnack.

Greta Lorke had none of the self-confidence that HarnackÕs privileged background had instilled in him, and she was acutely conscious of their differences in Òclass,Ó but she felt no such inhibition toward Mildred Fish-Harnack and a strong friendship quickly developed.

Energized by both women's interest in economics and progressive politics, Harnack introduced them to John R. Commons, a distinguished professor and renowned labor historian whose proposals became a rallying call for trade union leaders. Commons invited them all to be regulars at his exclusive weekly party at the campus, known as the "Friday Niters Club," where discussions took place on liberal ideas about social and economic policy. His invitation was an acknowledgment of the three students' intellectual standing. Commons and his students debated liberal and progressive ideas around state unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and income tax, and many would go on to be key personnel in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal administration. Harnack said in the meetings that those who owned the means of production continued to make money during war, depression, or hyperinflation. Working people needed more power.

During Harnack's two and a half years in the United States, Commons became a mentor to the German, who wrote a study of the pre-Marxist working class in North America, which was later published in Germany. Inspired by Commons, Harnack met and interviewed workers who had been imprisoned after a coal strike in Colorado.

The open atmosphere at Commons's...