Andrew Nagorski - Hitlerland

Chandler’s wife, Laura, died in Berlin in 1942, and Douglas was captured by the Americans in Bavaria in May 1945. Sent back to the United States the following year, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His daughter later wrote to Truman Smith asking him if he would testify on his behalf. “Truman wrote her he was sorry for her but that he could not testify on behalf of anyone who had betrayed his country,” Kay Smith recalled. But the loyal daughter kept lobbying for her father, appealing to President Kennedy in July 1963. On August 5, Kennedy commuted Chandler’s sentence. After his release, Chandler spent the final period of his life on Tenerife in the Canary Islands, leaving the country he had betrayed behind.

It wasn’t just the American propagandists who were choosing sides in the rapidly escalating war. Mildred Harnack, who had grown up in Wisconsin and then met and married the German exchange student Arvid Harnack, had remained one of the closest American friends of Martha Dodd during her time in Berlin. Like Martha, she had become fascinated by the Soviet Union, seeing it as an alternative to the Nazi dictatorship she lived in. Even the Nazi-Soviet Pact didn’t seem to undermine her faith that Stalin’s system was a genuine alternative to Hitler’s. By the late 1930s, she and her husband were part of a loose network of resisters intent on doing what they could to undermine the Nazi regime. Later, the Gestapo would dub this network the Rote Kapelle, the Red Orchestra.

Understandably, the growing dangers for anyone pursuing such a course may have prompted Mildred to submit applications in October 1939 to both the Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowship programs. If she had been accepted by either, she presumably would have returned to the United States to work on a book about American literature, her field of study. But the Guggenheim committee considered her “a beginner,” and she failed to get either fellowship.

One of Mildred’s jobs before the war was to hunt up English-language books for a German publisher, which allowed her to travel around Europe. During those trips, she may have helped Jews and others to escape from Germany, although the evidence is patchy. Her husband Arvid worked in the Economics Ministry, which also allowed him to travel and contact foreigners. He became particularly friendly with Donald Heath, a first secretary at the U.S. Embassy, and Mildred tutored his son. Heath began sending reports to Washington about how the Germans assessed their economic capabilities based on someone he identified as a “confidential” or “well-placed” source. After the war, Heath told his family that Arvid was that source.

Shareen Blair Brysac, Mildred Harnack’s biographer, points to Arvid’s ties with Heath as evidence that he thought of himself as “a German patriot” who was willing to work with the United States as well as the Soviet Union—in other words, anyone who would help topple Hitler’s regime. “Harnack never regarded himself as an agent of a foreign power, nor did he follow Soviet orders,” she wrote.

But Brysac documented how a Soviet agent, Alexander Korotkov, visited the Harnacks on September 17, 1940. He thus reestablished a Moscow connection that had been broken when the Harnacks had decided it was too dangerous to maintain their earlier Soviet ties in Berlin. Korotkov wrote to Moscow that Arvid had agreed to send reports, not because he considered himself an agent but because the Soviet Union was “a country with whose ideals he feels connected and from which he awaits support.” On September 26, 1940, as Germany’s fighters and bombers were fighting and losing the Battle of Britain, Harnack sent his first intelligence report, warning Moscow that by the beginning of the following year Hitler was planning to launch an attack on the Soviet Union.

It was a warning that Harnack and other members of the Red Orchestra, which included Luftwaffe intelligence officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, repeated on several occasions—and Stalin refused to believe. The resisters kept taking huge risks in gathering and sending more information as the Gestapo closed in on them. They also weren’t helped by their Soviet handlers, who were guilty of major security lapses in their own radio transmissions. In late August and early September 1942, the German authorities rounded up the Red Orchestra members and anyone suspected of ties to them, arresting an estimated 139 people, including the Harnacks.

All the chief participants in the group were tried for treason. Arvid was among those immediately sentenced to death. Mildred was initially treated with more sympathy by the judges, who chose to view her as a woman who had been led astray by her German husband. She was sentenced to six years in prison and six years’ “loss of honor.” The first round of executions took place on December 22, 1942, with hanging as the chosen instrument of death for Arvid, Schulze-Boysen and two others. Afterward, the guillotine was used on four more members of the group.

In the end, Mildred wasn’t spared either. She was put on trial again. The new charge was that she had seduced an Abwehr lieutenant to steal state secrets, which offered a lurid justification for the death sentence that promptly followed. The only American woman executed by the Gestapo, Mildred Harnack uttered these final words before she was guillotined in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on February 16, 1943: “And I have loved Germany so much.”

Most Americans who still remained in Germany in 1940 and 1941, of course, were neither traitors nor resistance fighters. But the diplomats and journalists, like the Roosevelt Administration back home, were increasingly open in choosing sides as well. The success of the Royal Air Force in winning the Battle of Britain, which forced Hitler to abandon Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of England, had cheered the Americans in Berlin who had watched Hitler’s military machine score one victory after another up till then. Although the diplomats and journalists had different roles to play, they often acted on the implicit assumption that they supported a common cause. Colonel John Lovell, a military attaché at the Berlin embassy, easily enlisted some of the American correspondents to monitor the numbers on the collars and shoulders of soldiers they saw coming through Berlin. “When a new number showed up we would report it to John,” recalled Harsch of the Christian Science Monitor.

Since Lovell knew which units had been deployed on the Western Front, he assumed that when their soldiers began appearing in Berlin this was a signal that these units were moving east. Harsch had moved from the Adlon Hotel to a house known as the Cercle Français, which had been taken over by the American Embassy and where Lovell and several other staffers were living. One evening in December, the colonel invited Harsch to a dinner for the military attachés of Germany’s eastern and southeastern neighbors. After a French dinner that included a rare endive salad, Lovell asked his guests to come to the library, where he spread out a map of Eastern Europe. He then offered his estimates on where German troops were deployed and their battle readiness, and invited his guests to do the same. He added that these forces could move either east or south, but he believed they were more likely to move east—against the Soviet Union.

The attachés from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece offered minor modifications in some cases, but largely agreed with Lovell’s assessment. They also agreed that it looked like the German forces were getting ready to move east. The Soviet attaché then went to the map and acknowledged that his estimates on deployments were almost exactly the same. But he claimed that the German military machine would probably turn south next. Still, he warned that if they did turn against his country “it will not be a Sunday promenade.”