About this item

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Berlin and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment - a small band of political activists that grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and wrote leaflets denouncing Hitler's regime, slipping them into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a concentration camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution.



About the Author

Rebecca Donner

I was born in Canada and during childhood lived in a number of different places - Japan, Michigan, Virginia, and California. My love of books has remained the one constant in my life. is my third book, a fusion of biography, WWII espionage thriller, and scholarly detective story. I interweave letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors' testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into an epic story about an American woman who was a leader in Berlin's underground resistance to Hitler.



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