All The Frequent Troubles Of Our Days

I heard about All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days - The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler (#1,043) on the radio.  The author, Rebecca Donner, is a relative of Mildred Fish Harnack, the subject of this book.  I wondered why I had never heard of Mildred or her story before.  

There are several reasons, really, which Rebecca Donner discloses here.  Some of the information about her was Classified by the American government until just recently, and most of the letters, photographs and family records were purposely destroyed after Mildred's execution by her sister Harriette, who encouraged other family members to do the same.  Mildred's original sentence to six years of hard labor for her clandestine activities by the German Court during the War was personally overridden by Hitler himself.  He ordered her execution by beheading instead.  What kind of a person could provoke so much personal animus and yet remain unfamiliar to most of her countrymen?

Mildred met her future husband Arvid Harnack while she was lecturing at the University of Wisconsin in her home state.  Arvid was in the States pursuing his doctorate on American Labor Unions, and soon was pursuing Mildred as well.  They married and returned to Germany so that she could earn her own doctorate at the University of Berlin.  Their arrival there coincided with the rise of Hitler, and they both became embroiled in efforts to stop him.  All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days documents how they did this, with the aid of a young American boy, son of an Embassy employee, as their courier.

Equal parts fascinating and horrifying, Mildred herself had powerful connections, but didn't come across as particularly sympathetic to me in her Communist leanings.  By the time of her death, she had well and truly left America behind, and American Intelligence was happy to return the favor.  They concluded her execution was "justified".  That said, no one deserved to suffer the fates she and her comrades in the cause to overthrow Hitler endured.  The swift turnaround from a democratic society to a police state happened so easily and so quickly in Germany; could it happen here?