Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Mildred nodded soberly. “Yes, I know.”

  “I won’t allow it.” Greta shook her head as she furiously wiped a plate dry. “I won’t let them make him into a little Nazi automaton, worshipping Hitler and singing cheerful tunes about blood and soil.”

  “Ule has eight years before he would be old enough. God help us all if Hitler is still in power then.”

  “Exactly, which is why the resistance needs every one of us. Not just the men. Everyone who is willing and able, including mothers. Including me.” Scowling, Greta draped the dishtowel over her shoulder while Mildred scrubbed the last pan. “I’m the only mother in our circle, and so they treat me differently than they treat you, or Sophie Sieg—”

  “Greta—”

  “I get up before dawn and stay up late for my resistance work. I never neglect Ule, not one moment.”

  “Of course you don’t. No one would ever accuse you of that. But Greta, listen—” Mildred hesitated, rinsed the soap from her hands, and plucked the dishtowel from Greta’s shoulder to dry them. “You’re not going to be the only mother in our circle for long.”

  “You mean Sophie—”

  Mildred shook her head, eyes shining.

  “Mildred, you?” Greta exclaimed, and when Mildred nodded, Greta embraced her. “How wonderful! How far along?”

  “Six weeks.” Mildred’s face glowed with joy. “I know it’s still early, which is why we haven’t told anyone yet. Except you.”

  Suddenly Greta’s words came rushing back to her. “Mildred, you mustn’t worry that the men will put you aside once you become a mother. They can’t afford to lose you, not with your contacts among the Americans.”

  “They can’t afford to lose you either, even if they don’t always realize it.”

  Greta smiled, heartened by her friend’s encouragement, delighted beyond measure that Mildred’s long-cherished dream to have a child was at last coming true. She would not think of spoiling her friend’s happiness with cautions about how difficult it was to raise children in the Reich, not only because of rationing and shortages and the pervasive fear that at any moment this strange Sitzkrieg, the “phony war,” would suddenly burst forth like a long-held breath into all-out warfare, with British bombs laying waste to Berlin as Germany’s bombs had done to Warsaw. It was the poisonous influence of Nazi propaganda and scenes of arbitrary violence Greta feared most, and the older Ule grew, the more difficult it would be to shield him.

  With the return of fair weather, Greta had resumed taking Ule on outings to the Tiergarten for fresh air and sunshine. She had hidden her dismay as he had admired older boys marching past in their crisp uniforms of the Hitler Youth, singing songs in praise of the Führer and banging upon drums. Whenever Ule saw other little children waving small swastika flags, he begged Greta for one of his own. “We don’t have a ration coupon for a new flag,” she usually told him, which was true, but only because no coupon was needed.

  One lovely spring evening after Greta and Adam had taken Ule for a walk around the neighborhood, savoring the longer days that allowed them more time to enjoy the outdoors between supper and the blackout, Ule had brought his hand out from behind his back and proudly showed them a swastika flag he had found lying on the sidewalk. “It was lost,” he said, his voice sweet with happiness. “I found it, Mama.”

  “I see,” she said noncommittally, sickened by the sight of her innocent boy waving about that symbol of hatred and cruelty. When her eyes met Adam’s over their son’s head, she knew he shared her anger, her disgust and frustration. But what could they do? If they took the flag from him and he told his friends, and their parents overheard, they could be reported.

  Then Adam stooped down beside Ule, pretending to admire the flag. “It’s a bit on the small side. Why don’t you go outside and plant it in the garden so it can grow into a larger one?”

  Ule’s face had lit up. He had fetched his toy pail and shovel, seized Adam’s hand, and pulled him to the door to go outside and bury the flag. Greta had watched them go, impressed by her husband’s cleverness—although until they returned, she had paced through the apartment half in a panic that a vigilant neighbor would witness the scene and promptly call the Gestapo.

  But she saw no reason to trouble Mildred with such worries. It would be years before the Harnacks’ child would walk and talk and covet other children’s swastika flags. Greta had to believe Hitler would be gone by then.

  Greta’s determination to persist in resisting the Reich any way she could strengthened as spring passed and the German army marched on Europe. On April 9, Nazi forces occupied Norway and Denmark—for their own good, the Reich insisted in an official statement, to protect their freedom and independence from the Allies, who were determined to “spread the war” and would never respect the two countries’ declared neutrality. Rejecting the Nazis’ unsought, unwanted, dubious protection, the Norwegians put up a fight, but eventually were forced to surrender.

  The Sitzkrieg was over. Nothing was phony about the war now.

  A month later, at dawn on May 10, the German army invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. In his order to the troops, Hitler proclaimed, “The battle beginning today will decide the future of the German nation for the next thousand years.” Police forces in Luxembourg fought back against the German troops, but by noon their capital city was overrun. Four days later, the Dutch army capitulated. The Belgians fought on with their British and French allies a fortnight longer, until King Leopold surrendered on May 28.

  Then German tanks rolled into France, capturing Paris, driving Allied troops so far back that British and some French troops were forced to make a desperate evacuation across the Channel at Dunkirk, resorting to a civilian fleet of British commercial ferries, fishing boats, and leisure craft to rescue hundreds of thousands of men. Many tens of thousands more remained behind, with no choice but to surrender to the German army.

  On June 21, in a clearing in the forest of Compiègne, the precise spot where nearly twenty-two years before the armistice that ended the Great War had been signed, Adolf Hitler presented his armistice terms to France. In the preamble to the document, he declared that he had not chosen the site out of revenge, but merely to right an old wrong. Even if that were true, it made no difference to the French. Their humiliation was complete.

  A three-day public holiday was declared throughout the Reich to celebrate the fall of Paris. There were massive parades, proud speeches, grand processions. Church bells rang and flags waved. Hitler’s popularity soared. Germany had confronted Great Britain and France on the field of battle and emerged triumphant. The unbridled jubilation in the streets of Berlin sickened and angered Greta so much that unless she had absolutely no choice but to go out, she stayed at home with the windows closed and the radio tuned to the BBC.

  But as the holiday ran its course and she witnessed the surging pride and newly invigorated confidence of devoted Nazis and everyday Germans alike, she felt her resolve hardening. The beleaguered resistance had to intensify their efforts. There was no time to nurse wounds, to sit at home dazed from shock that the Allies had been so swiftly and thoroughly overwhelmed.

  Their resistance circle had to expand in size and scope, and Greta knew where to begin.

  Earlier that spring, she and Adam had attended a dinner party at the home of Herbert Engelsing, an executive producer at the Tobias Film Company and a prominent figure in the German film industry. His work gave him entree into the highest levels of the Nazi hierarchy, where he mingled with men like Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring, drawn to him because they recognized the power of the movies and celebrity to influence public opinion. Engelsing and his half-Jewish wife, Ingeborg, owed their marriage to Göring, who had personally given Hitler their request for a dispensation to marry. “I’ll decide who’s a Jew and who’s not,” Göring had said after he emerged triumphant with the Führer’s permission for them to wed. Göring probably would not have been so helpful had he known that
Engelsing used his position and influence to help Jews and other enemies of the Reich.

  At the dinner party at the Engelsings’ luxurious home in the Grunewald, Greta and Adam were introduced to another couple, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen. A Luftwaffe officer serving in the intelligence division of Göring’s Air Ministry, Harro was tall, vigorous, and handsome, fluent in five languages, the scion of a celebrated military family. His wife was a vivacious, sensual, stunningly attractive aristocrat, educated at the finest Swiss finishing schools, the granddaughter of a Prussian prince. When they first met, Greta had liked Harro immediately but had found Libertas’s youthful exuberance and flirtatiousness annoying. She had felt a sharp sting of envy when Libertas passed around photos of Schloss Liebenberg, the imposing ancestral estate where she had grown up, to recommend it as a shooting location for one of Engelsing’s films. That feeling had given way to surprise when she learned that despite Libertas’s privilege and wealth, she held down a job as a press agent with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Berlin office.

  Greta listened intently as Libertas described blistering phone calls her office had received from various Reich officials outraged by a recent MGM film, The Mortal Storm. Set in 1933 Germany, the picture starred Margaret Sullavan as a beautiful German Jew who breaks off her engagement to a Nazi officer when she realizes how abhorrent his political views truly are. She falls in love with an antifascist childhood friend played by James Stewart, and the two eventually attempt to flee Germany. “Goebbels is furious and he’s making threats,” Libertas said airily, but with an underlying note of worry. “I’m bracing myself for another deluge after Escape comes out later this fall. Robert Taylor plays an American trying to rescue his actress mother from a Nazi concentration camp. It will send Hitler and Göring into apoplexies. Many of the cast and crew refuse to have their names in the credits to protect their relatives in Europe from retribution.”

  “That’s show business,” said Harro sardonically.

  As the evening passed, Greta observed the couple closely, certain that they were strongly opposed to the Reich. Given Harro’s position in the Air Ministry, she would not have expected this, but it was intriguing.

  She took Adam aside for a quick private chat. “What do you think of the Schulze-Boysens?” she murmured. “Do you think we could be friends?”

  “Arvid mentioned Harro to me once, long ago,” he replied in an undertone. “About five years ago, one of your friends from Wisconsin urged Arvid to work with him, but although Arvid was impressed, he decided Harro was too reckless.”

  “Of course Arvid would think so,” said Greta, exasperated. “Anyone not as excessively cautious as himself is reckless. Anyway, times have changed. What might have seemed too reckless five years ago may be exactly what we need today.”

  At home later that night, while Ule slept soundly in the other room, Greta and Adam mulled over whether they should bring Harro Schulze-Boysen into their confidence. He had been fighting fascism for years, so they had every reason to believe he was still on their side, leading a resistance cell of his own. Harro undoubtedly would be a valuable ally. The intelligence he could obtain from the Air Ministry would complement and verify what Arvid learned in the Ministry of Economics. As for Arvid’s original objections, perhaps he could teach Harro caution, focus, and discipline, and in return, Harro could invigorate their circle with his confidence and daring.

  The next day, Adam approached Harro to gauge his interest in linking their resistance circles. “He remembers Arvid well,” Adam told Greta afterward. “Harro’s more than willing to collaborate with our group, but how do we convince Arvid?”

  “Leave that to me,” Greta replied.

  She invited Mildred and Libertas to join her for a week’s holiday in Saxony. Anyone who observed them would have seen three good friends enjoying a girls’ week away from their husbands, hiking, swimming, sunbathing, and dining together, happy and carefree. But alone on the forested trails or behind the locked doors of their hotel rooms, they discussed in carefully imprecise terms their work, the reach of their resistance circles, and their contacts. Mildred and Libertas took to one another quickly, and after several quiet, lengthy, intense discussions, Greta convinced them that their groups should join forces. When they parted at the end of the week, Mildred agreed to urge Arvid to meet with Harro again to discuss the possibilities.

  A few days after the women returned to Berlin, their husbands met at the Harnacks’ apartment. Greta waited impatiently at home with Ule, unable to settle down either to work or play. When Adam returned home nearly an hour later than expected, she flew to the door as soon as she heard his key in the lock.

  Holding a finger to his lips, he entered the apartment, closed the door, and locked it behind him. “Arvid consents,” he said, a broad grin spreading across his face. “Greta, the things Harro knows, the information he has access to—this could change everything for us.”

  Sighing with relief, Greta flung her arms around him and kissed his cheek. Her hopes soared as she considered the many ways their stronger, more extensive resistance network would allow them to undermine the Nazi regime and help the Jews.

  But even as she allowed herself to dream, a voice in the back of her thoughts murmured caution. A bigger network meant increased danger of discovery or betrayal. Bolder risks could mean greater rewards, or swift and more severe punishments.

  They might not know which lay ahead of them—or what crept up on them from behind—until it was too late.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  July–September 1940

  Mildred

  On the afternoon of July 6, a brass band and a massive crowd met Adolf Hitler’s heavily guarded private train when he returned to Berlin from the forest of Compiègne. Thousands of exultant Germans bearing flowers and swastika flags lined the mile-long drive from the Anhalter Bahnhof to the Chancellery, shouting, cheering, weeping, working themselves into frantic hysteria as the Führer’s car sedately passed. Before it walked young women clad in the white blouses and blue skirts of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, strewing so many flowers in the vehicle’s path that the gray street was entirely covered in colorful blossoms, the crushed petals releasing their fragrance until the warm summer air was thick with their perfume.

  Eleven days later, an even larger spectacle greeted the victorious troops upon their return to the capital. A public holiday had been declared, grandstands had been erected on Pariserplatz, and Goebbels had issued a statement urging the German people to offer a “tumultuous welcome for your sons, husbands, fathers and brothers who won the great victories in Poland and France.” Mildred perceived an implicit threat in the directive, but when the troops marched through the city—hardened by battle, proud in victory, strong, tanned, disciplined—the spectators’ unrestrained jubilation seemed fiercely genuine.

  As the military paraded through the Brandenburger Tor and goose-stepped before the review stand, tens of thousands of jubilant Germans lined the streets, weeping for joy, shouting themselves hoarse, tossing flowers, bursting into spontaneous song. Church bells that had not been confiscated and melted down for their copper rang and rang, filling the sun-drenched skies with a song of triumph and warning.

  Observing the scenes as if from across a vast chasm, Mildred was both repulsed and astounded. The German people seemed to believe that the war was essentially over, that their loved ones would soon be released from military service, that rationing would cease as material goods from conquered nations flowed into the Reich—metal ores, grain, silk stockings, chocolate. And while it was true that Germany was still officially at war with Great Britain, the British troops had been soundly thrashed. In their retreat they had left acres of arms and equipment behind at Dunkirk, materiel they could not swiftly replace. Surely their surrender was both inevitable and imminent.

  The following evening, in an address to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House broadcast around the world, Hitler warned Great Britain that only by accepting his peace terms would they av
ert their own destruction. He openly taunted Winston Churchill, who had replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, for presuming to fight on when the most likely outcome was the complete annihilation of their empire.

  Mildred saw no reason why any sensible person would believe anything Hitler said. Even as he spoke of peace, German bombers flew over England and fighters strafed British ships at sea. Hitler’s peace would be an untenable détente that would leave him in control over formerly sovereign nations, the conquerer of Europe. It would mean the enslavement of millions and the deaths of millions more.

  Great Britain had not yet responded to Hitler’s dubious peace offer when Arvid’s younger brother Falk visited them from Munich, where he was involved with the student resistance movement. He had brought along a heavy wooden crate, and when he pried off the lid, Mildred gasped to see a wonderful assortment of fresh vegetables—greens, tomatoes, summer squash, cabbages, peppers—that Mutti Harnack had grown in her garden at the sanatorium.

  “Mutti said to tell you that these vegetables are for you and her grandchild,” Falk told Mildred, smiling. “She admires your generosity to the less fortunate, but you’re under strict orders to eat more than you give away.”

  “I agree with our mother,” said Arvid, putting an arm around Mildred’s shoulders as he peered into the crate. “You need to eat more.”

  “We all need to eat more,” she pointed out, having already made up her mind to divide up the bounty with Sara and Natan. She did not change her mind even after Falk unpacked the crate and she discovered that it contained fewer vegetables than she had assumed, because beneath them Falk had concealed a wonderful, dangerous gift: a powerful shortwave radio.