Resistance Women

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Greta fixed her gaze on the file as Libertas opened it, suddenly apprehensive. “The Nazis document their deeds to the point of obsession. Why would they forbid this?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Libertas turned photos faceup on her desktop, one after another, snapshots from the front—soldiers holding pistols to other men’s heads, torturing victims bound to chairs, smiling arm in arm as they stood before open graves filled with bloody corpses, pulling bayonets from victims whose faces were still contorted in pain, one horror after another after another—

  Greta staggered back, pressing a hand to her mouth, dizzy with nausea. “My God,” she breathed, when she could speak. “Those poor people! How can you bear it?”

  “Most days I can scarcely hold myself together.” Libertas’s voice was strangely flat as she gathered up the photos and returned them to the file. “I spared you the pictures of murdered children, the dead babies.”

  “How—” Greta’s breath caught in her throat. “How did you manage to get these?”

  “Most were given to me by the soldiers themselves—young, gray-haired, and every age in between.” Shaking her head, Libertas gathered up the photos and returned the file to the cabinet. “They’re eager to brag about their adventures at the front when a pretty young thing flutters her eyelashes and acts impressed. They pull out their photos, and with a little flattery, a little flirtation, I convince them to let me make copies. We have all the necessary equipment—” She gestured vaguely toward the wall separating them from the rest of the department. “They assume—even though such photos are officially verboten—that I want them for the Kulturfilm archives or for a Reich propaganda film.”

  “Instead you’re creating your own archive.”

  “Yes.” Sparing a glance for the door, Libertas drew closer. “At first, I used it to discourage young people from joining Nazi organizations by showing them the sort of atrocities they would be expected to perform. Now I’m documenting war crimes.”

  Someday, when the nightmare was over, the Nazis would be brought to justice, and Libertas resolved to make sure the prosecutors had irrefutable evidence of their offenses. For every photograph and reel of film she gathered, she collected names, addresses, and testimony, although the officers she spoke with would never give that name to it. She simply asked questions in a conversational tone about where they had been, what they had done, and why. As soon as she was alone, she wrote it all down, every incriminating detail.

  Greta marveled at her foresight, but she was compelled to warn her friend of the potential danger, the dire consequences she would face if her archive were discovered. “I know the risks,” Libertas said, a tremor in her voice, defiance and fear. “I have to do this. If I don’t, who will? The only way I can get through the days is by promising myself that someday these monsters will be brought to justice.”

  Someday, Greta silently echoed, willing that day to come swiftly, knowing it would not unless Germany lost the war.

  By late November, thanks to concurring intelligence from Luftwaffe headquarters and the Economics Ministry, their resistance circle knew that the German military had been unable to sustain its advance into the Soviet Union. As the seasons changed, the Wehrmacht’s trucks and tanks had become bogged down in thick mud, and winter snows were imminent. With supply lines strained to the limit, food and fuel reserves were running dangerously low. Hitler had expected to be in Moscow before the first snows fell, but now German soldiers on the front lines were digging in for an arduous winter campaign clad in nothing heavier than the uniforms they had worn when the invasion began in June. Most Germans, absorbed in the steady stream of propaganda issuing from the Reich press, had no idea how their sons, husbands, and brothers at the front suffered.

  Somehow, even as winter descended, heavy and ominous, the German army struggled on into December, only to come to an abrupt halt barely ten miles from Moscow as the muddy roads turned to ice. Temperatures plummeted to −35°C. Tanks, trucks, and artillery became useless as the oil froze within their mechanisms. Quartermasters had prioritized munitions above food and clothing, so the well-armed, poorly clad soldiers suffered from hunger, frostbite, and despair.

  Then, on December 6, Harro risked a phone call from his office at Luftwaffe headquarters to tell Adam and Greta that the Soviet Union had launched a massive counterattack against the icebound German army. One hundred Soviet divisions punched into the center of the invaders’ lines. Their forces included eighteen fresh divisions with seventeen hundred tanks and fifteen hundred airplanes brought in as reinforcements from the east—at no small risk, since this rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable to an invasion from its longtime rival Japan. When the newly strengthened Red Army fiercely assaulted the Germans along a two-hundred-mile front, they drove the invaders 240 kilometers back from Moscow. Hitler, furious that his demands to fight to the death for every last inch of ground had not been obeyed, fired the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht and appointed himself in the disgraced officer’s place, but this did not turn the tide of the battle.

  Greta and Adam did not trust the Nazi propaganda machine to give them accurate reports of the counterattack, so they spent the day with the Harnacks, listening to the BBC on their verboten shortwave.

  Late the next afternoon they returned, bringing supper and wine and flowers as a token of their thanks. Mildred had spent the day following reports on the shortwave, and over supper she shared what she had learned. Afterward they gathered around the shortwave and tuned in the BBC, turning up the volume as high as they dared. Although the reports of the Soviet counterattack were still preliminary, it seemed evident that the German army had not been able to muster a strong defense and was still falling back.

  Suddenly, just before half past seven, an announcer broke in with a news bulletin.

  “Japan’s long-threatened aggression in the Far East began tonight, with air attacks on United States naval bases in the Pacific,” the Englishman said, his voice crisp and urgent. “Fresh reports are coming in every minute. The latest facts of the situation are these: Messages from Tokyo say that Japan has announced a formal declaration of war against both the United States and Britain. The Japanese air raids have been made on the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines. Observer reports say that an American battleship has been hit, and President Roosevelt has told the army and navy to act on their secret orders.”

  Stunned, Greta looked first to Adam, and then to Mildred and Arvid. She saw her own shock and disbelief reflected in her friends’ faces.

  The illusion that distance would keep the United States safely isolated from the war in Europe had been shattered. The Americans were in it now. They no longer had the privilege of choice.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  December 1941–May 1942

  Mildred

  The day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan.

  Four days after the attack, on the morning of December 11, Chargé d’Affaires Leland Morris, the highest-ranking American diplomat remaining in Berlin, was summoned to the office of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who read him Germany’s formal declaration of war. A few hours later, from the balcony above the Piazza Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini declared that Italy would join the war “on the side of heroic Japan” against the United States. Soon thereafter, appearing before the Reichstag, Hitler asserted that the Tripartite Pact obliged the Reich to join Italy in the defense of their mutual ally Japan, and he accused the United States of severely and continuously provoking Germany by violating all rules of neutrality to the benefit of the Reich’s adversaries from the moment hostilities had broken out in Europe. He had wanted to avoid war with the United States, but the perfidious Americans had given him no choice.

  Several hours after, following unanimous votes of approval in the House and the Senate, the United States declared war on Germany and Italy.

  As soon as Mildred heard the news, she put on her warmest coat and hat, pocketed an
electric torch with a blue filter, and made her way to the American embassy. She counted several friends among the minimal staff still in residence, and she hoped to see them one last time, to learn as much as she could and to bid them farewell. But when she arrived, she found the building surrounded by storm troopers, and no one was allowed to enter. Inside, she knew, the diplomats were burning files and destroying assets they could not allow to fall into Nazi hands. As twilight descended, she stood witness, heart aching, as her fellow Americans were led out the front gates, loaded onto a military truck, and taken away.

  She summoned up her courage and approached a storm trooper who stood somewhat apart from the others, smoking a cigarette. “I beg your pardon,” she asked, “but do you know where they’re taking the Americans?”

  Her accent was flawless after so many years in Berlin, and she knew from his indulgent smile that he mistook her for a German. “You have nothing to fear from them, Fraulein. They’ll be locked up tight at an internment camp at Bad Nauheim until they can be exchanged for the German diplomats stranded in Washington.”

  Mildred thanked him and left, eager to reach home before the utter darkness of the blackout engulfed the city.

  She knew Arvid, Harro, and the others were exultant that the United States had entered the war at last. She too was relieved, although she was dismayed by the circumstances that had brought it about. And yet she also felt bereft and abandoned as the last traces of an official American presence disappeared from Berlin, as if she had been cut off from her homeland in one decisive, irreparable stroke. She knew, logically, that this was not so. She still exchanged letters with friends and family back home—heavily censored letters, but better than none at all.

  As she climbed aboard the streetcar, she smiled to herself and pressed a hand to her abdomen, still flat to conceal the secret she had not yet divulged to the folks back home. She had told no one but Arvid, Inge, and Greta that she was again expecting a child, and had sworn them to secrecy. It was still too early and she had been disappointed too many times before to share the good news more widely. And it was good news, even though times were grim and the future uncertain. She longed for a child, and she was already thirty-nine. She and Arvid could not afford to wait.

  Perhaps now that the United States had entered the war, peace and prosperity might return sooner than they expected. Mildred dared hope this might be so, but according to the Reich press, by entering the war, the Americans had only sealed their own doom. The Nazi propaganda machine worked overtime to convince the German people that the United States and its “mongrel people of Jews, Negroes, and immigrants” would be crushed beneath the superior Aryan race, their defeat both decisive and inevitable.

  Such proclamations rallied the spirits of the majority of Germans, but among Berliners Mildred detected something else beneath the quiet, proud stoicism with which they managed the daily business of work, family, air raids, ration cards, and disappearing neighbors. An undercurrent of profound disquiet manifested in a sidelong scowl at headlines while passing a newsstand or a refusal to smile and nod along with a transparently false radio broadcast played over loudspeakers in a public square. The war with the Soviet Union had declined in popularity as families lost loved ones to bullets, disease, and exposure. Now the United States joining the Allies seemed to kindle a widespread, unspoken fear of the worse hardships and deprivations the coming years might bring.

  The German people’s faith in their indomitable military was badly shaken when Hitler called upon the citizens of the Reich to donate warm clothing for their soldiers on the Russian front. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was given the unenviable task of announcing the collection drive, which he did in a radio broadcast on the evening of December 20. Appealing to the Christmas spirit of generosity and gratitude, he declared that considering all that the military had accomplished and sacrificed on their behalf, the German people surely could not enjoy the festive season knowing that brave soldiers were unequipped to withstand the rigors of winter cold. “As long as a single object of winter clothing remains in the Fatherland,” he proclaimed, “it must go to the front. It would be an exaggeration if I talked of sacrifices at this time. What the homeland has suffered in the war are only inconveniences compared to what our front soldiers have borne daily and hourly, over two years.” He read off a lengthy, detailed list of items most urgently needed, everything from boots and earmuffs to blankets and gloves, wrapping up with a statement from the Führer urging universal participation.

  Goebbels’s announcement spurred donations, but also provoked seething anger. For years citizens of the Reich had been told that their military was the strongest, bravest, most disciplined, best-trained, and best-equipped fighting force in the world. Now, as the entire world plunged into war and enemies faced them on multiple fronts, they learned that their sons, husbands, and brothers were suffering through the brutal Russian winter without so much as hats and gloves.

  “Perhaps this will prompt the German people to wonder what other lies their government has told them,” Arvid said as he and Mildred packed their suitcases before setting out to spend the holidays with family in Jena. Mildred hoped so, but with suspicious neighbors denouncing one another to the Gestapo for the smallest offenses, sometimes only out of anger, or revenge, or to settle petty scores, a widespread protest against the war seemed beyond imagination.

  The New Year began with little hope that 1942 would bring peace, prosperity, or anything else one usually wished for on the holiday. For all the hardships the German people endured, the Jews suffered far worse as the fate of their departed friends remained uncertain and still more constraints upon their lives were imposed. Jews were forbidden to sell their personal property without official permission from the Reich. They were banned from all public baths and forbidden to buy firewood, newspapers, and periodicals. The pace of deportations increased, but the Jews were now marched to the Grunewald station at night, presumably to reduce the number of witnesses. Instead of passenger carriages, the deportees were now crowded into cars used to transport goods or cattle. Sara and Natan had observed a pattern in the most recent transport lists, which seemed overwhelmingly comprised of the elderly and the bedridden. As the Gestapo cleared out hospitals and sanatoriums for the aged, Arvid and Natan surmised that the Nazis wanted to keep healthy young Jews in Berlin so they would be available for conscripted labor, but Mildred and Sara worried that the Nazis were targeting the old and the sick because they were helpless and weak, less likely to fight back and reduce the efficiency of the deportation process. Perhaps both possibilities were true.

  What had become of the deported Jews after they left Berlin remained an ominous question. At first, some Jews had sent letters to friends in the capital from ghettos in Litzmannstadt, Minsk, Kaunas, and Riga to say that they had arrived safely but desperately needed food and warm clothes, but before long the flow of letters slowed to a trickle and then ceased. Why would the deportees be forbidden to write home? Complaints and strategic information could be censored. Why cut off communications entirely?

  By the middle of February, Mildred knew of no one who had heard from a departed Jewish friend in weeks, and letters sent to the resettlement sites were often returned stamped “Addressee Deceased” or “Address Unknown.” Rumors swept through Berlin like snow crystals carried aloft in the cold February winds, whispering that the Jews had died in typhus epidemics or had been murdered outright. The rumors were as ephemeral as snow crystals too, for few Berliners remarked upon their absent neighbors at all. Many people were no doubt afraid to say anything rather than risk appearing disloyal to the Reich. Others were glad to be rid of the Jews and to benefit from the redistribution of the property they had left behind—vacated homes given as rewards to party members, furs and jewels sold in special shops at a fraction of their value. It seemed to Mildred, however, that the vast majority of Germans responded to the plight of the Jews as they had for more than a decade, with profound indifference. As long as they and theirs were
exempt from persecution, why should they care what happened to strangers?

  Their unfathomable lack of empathy and compassion rendered Mildred heartsick, bewildered, and afraid.

  In mid-February, Harro came across documents at Luftwaffe headquarters that chillingly, meticulously revealed a sudden and drastic worsening of Reich policy toward the Jews. According to a conference transcript Harro glimpsed on a superior officer’s desk, on January 20, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and thirteen other high-ranking officials had met at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Harro could not have stolen a copy of the transcript without raising the alarm, but he studied it swiftly, intently, when it was left briefly unattended on his superior officer’s desk. What he saw was enough to convince him that within the past year, Adolf Hitler had authorized a plan to deliberately and methodically annihilate eleven million European Jews. The purpose of the Wannsee Conference had not been to debate whether such a heinous program of mass murder should be undertaken, for that had already been decided, but how to implement it.

  As horrifying as Harro’s conclusions were, nothing he described contradicted what the Nazis had done elsewhere to Communists, to labor unionists, to Polish politicians, to Soviet prisoners of war, to Jews in the conquered territories of Eastern Europe. And yet somehow, Mildred could not quite believe it—that was to say, she knew it was true, and yet her brain rejected it as impossible. Representatives from the highest levels of the Nazi Party and the Reich government had convened in a Wannsee villa in order to create a bureaucracy to commit genocide. They had probably sipped coffee and passed around neatly typed documents filled with charts and graphs and statistics, all very rational and logical—and yet every man at that table had to be completely mad or irredeemably evil to engage so readily in preparations for mass murder.