Why the Only American Killed on Hitler’s Direct Order ‘Couldn’t Turn Her Back on Germany’

Mildred Fish-Harnack grew up wanting to be a writer, not someone passing secrets between countries during World War II. In time, she could have become a well-known poet and scholar, if not for what she considered a greater purpose -- becoming part of a Nazi resistance movement to fight the oppression and brutality imposed by Adolf Hitler.

When Fish-Harnack was guillotined on Feb. 16, 1943, she became the only American killed on a direct order from the German dictator.

“Well, it’s not a question of how dangerous it is,” Fish-Harnack said roughly a year before World War II broke out in Europe in 1939. “I’ve got work to do. I’m not going.”

Mildred Fish was born in 1902 and grew up in Milwaukee, a city with one of the largest concentrations of German immigrants in America. Fish’s family did not have German roots, but she learned to speak, write and read the language as a child, skills that proved quite useful to her in adulthood.

While pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1926, a student wandered into a class she was teaching, apparently lost. German graduate student Arvid Harnack introduced himself, apologizing for the intrusion; a relationship between Fish and Harnack quickly blossomed, and after their marriage, they moved to Germany in 1929.

The Harnacks relocated overseas at a time when the world economy was teetering. The Great Depression was felt everywhere, but Germany was dealing simultaneously with the devastating economic carryover from World War I, crumbling beneath a monstrous reparations bill, a hyperinflation of its currency, an inability to sell most of its products abroad and its borrowing millions of dollars from the United States.

The dire financial conditions contributed to Hitler’s rise to power, which greatly concerned the Harnacks. The couple held favorable views of communism, and Fish-Harnack clung strongly to her beliefs, sometimes at a cost; in the spring of 1932, she lost her faculty position because she was not “Nazi enough,” per a 2013 New York Times article.

The loss of employment did little to deter Fish-Harnack. Along with her husband, she visited Moscow in early 1933; while there, they met with a top official in the Soviet interior ministry, and Arvid -- an economist working for the German government -- agreed to become a Russian agent. During their absence, Hitler was appointed German chancellor.

“She shared his turbulent life, waited for him for nights on end, filled with fear and anxiety,” Inge Havemann, Arvid’s sister, said in the documentary “Wisconsin’s Nazi Resistance: The Mildred Fish-Harnack Story.” “She even ran through the back city streets to meet him. She became an active member of her husband’s resistance group, to which she dedicated her life.”

As the government grew more tyrannical, civil rights were trampled and concentration camps formed, the Harnacks joined a group of resistance fighters that the Gestapo dubbed “the Red Orchestra.” The anti-Nazi coalition of roughly 150 people worked clandestinely from 1933 to 1942, and two officials inside Hitler’s government -- Arvid Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen, who worked for the Reich Ministry of Aviation -- were among its leaders.

As part of the Red Orchestra, Fish-Harnack translated American news reports into German for anti-Nazi leaflets and sought to recruit other members. She assisted Jews in attempting to flee from Hitler’s regime, reportedly procuring visas for some of them, and served as a courier as intelligence was slipped to the U.S. and Soviet embassies in Berlin.

The Red Orchestra tried to warn the Soviets of Germany’s impending invasion of their country, information that Joseph Stalin basically ignored. After the Germans invaded Stalingrad on Aug. 23, 1942, though -- beginning a nearly six-month battle that resulted in the deaths of 1.1 million Soviet troops -- the Soviets desperately sought more intel.

When reaching out to an intermediary in Brussels to relay a message to the Red Orchestra, they incomprehensibly included the real names and addresses of their contacts, according to “The Mildred Fish-Harnack Story.” That urgent plea was intercepted by German intelligence, leading to the subsequent arrests of more than 120 Red Orchestra members. The Harnacks were apprehended on Sept. 7, 1942, while vacationing on the Baltic Sea.

“Hitler was shocked,” Stefan Roloff, whose father was a resistance fighter, said in the documentary. “Hitler thought he had the entire nation behind himself. He was sure of that, and when he saw the diversity of this group -- the oldest person arrested was 86 years old, the youngest was 16, 40% women, every walk of life …”

Arvid Harnack, who tried to shield his wife from blame, was convicted of high treason and espionage and died by hanging on Dec. 22, 1942. Fish-Harnack initially was ordered to do six years of hard labor before Hitler demanded a new trial, culminating in a death sentence.

By the time the 40-year-old American was executed at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin, she had suffered greatly. Five months of imprisonment and countless hours of interrogation had turned Fish-Harnack’s hair white and sapped her strength to the point where she could not stand on her own. She tried to kill herself by swallowing pins and displayed signs of losing her mind, according to Shareen Blair Brysac, author of “Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra.”

“She couldn’t turn her back on Germany,” one of Harnack’s relatives wrote shortly after Fish-Harnack’s death, per the New York Times article. “She wasn’t without fear, but she was brave.”

The last words that Fish-Harnack ever spoke were a simple declaration: “And I have loved Germany so much.” She said them in German, a language she learned during the care-free days of her youth.

Want to Know More About the Military?

Be sure to get the latest news about the U.S. military, as well as critical info about how to join and all the benefits of service. Subscribe to Military.com and receive customized updates delivered straight to your inbox.