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Mildred Elizabeth Harnack (; September 16, 1902 – February 16, 1943) was an American literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved to Germany in 1929, where she began her career as an academic. Mildred Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. Mildred Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin in 1931.
In 1932, Mildred and her husband Arvid began to resist Nazism. Mildred nicknamed the underground resistance group they established "the Circle." Mildred and Arvid became friends with Louise and Donald Heath, who was First Secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, and to whom Mildred and Arvid passed intelligence from Arvid's position at the Reich Economics Ministry. Between 1935 and 1940, the couple's group intersected with three other anti-fascist resistance groups. The most important of these was run by Luftwaffe lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that collaborated with Soviet intelligence to defeat Hitler. This Berlin anti-fascist espionage group "the Circle" was later named the Red Orchestra ( Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. The couple were arrested in September 1942 and executed shortly after.
On June 22, 1925, she was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Humanities. Her senior thesis was "A Comparison of Chapman's and Pope's Translations of the Iliad with the Original". She stayed for further study and was awarded a Master of Arts degree in English on August 6, 1925.
While Mildred was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she met Arvid Harnack, a graduate student from Germany who was studying under a Rockefeller Fellowship. After a brief love affair, they were engaged on June 6, 1926, and wed on August 7, 1926 in a ceremony at her brother's farm near the village of Brooklyn, Wisconsin. On September 28, 1928, Arvid Harnack returned to Germany. Between 1928 and 1929, Mildred Fish-Harnack taught English and American literature at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
A fellow student of Mildred Harnack's at the University of Wisconsin was Clara Leiser. A professor who exerted an influence over her was William Ellery Leonard, who advised her when she was writing her senior thesis. Leonard was a non-conformist who believed in the Emersonian principle that "nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of one's own mind". He subjected Fish-Harnack to a grueling scrutiny that shaped her intellectual outlook. For Fish-Harnack, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were the two greatest advocates of American literature. While at Madison, the couple met Greta Kuckhoff, a German student of sociology who had been invited to study in the U.S. A lifelong friendship developed between Mildred and Greta. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff.
On February 1, 1931, Mildred Harnack began studying at the University of Berlin on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Harnack was invited to hold a public lecture called "Romantic and Marital Love in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne" at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, which allowed her to work as an assistant lecturer and lector on English and American literature. She taught courses on Emerson, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw. (2025). 9783869564074, Universitätsverlag Potsdam. ISBN 9783869564074 Mildred Harnack was popular with her students and over three semesters enrollment in the course tripled.
Harnack was an active member of the American expatriate community in Berlin. She went to dances at the American Student Association and was a member of the American Women's Club in Bellevuestraße, later serving as its president. (2020). 9781328566232, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9781328566232 The Harnacks socialized with American journalists and diplomats at the American Church in Nollendorfplatz, a popular meeting place for American ex-pats.
In 1932, Fish-Harnack lost her position as a lecturer in American literature at the University of Berlin. At the time, the German Americanist and ardent Nazi Friedrich Schönemann had returned from leave in America to work in the English department. Fish-Harnack never hid her leftist political views during lectures. In May 1932, the funding that enabled Mildred to teach at Friedrich-Wilhelm University was canceled. (2025). 9783869564074, Universitätsverlag Potsdam. ISBN 9783869564074 The couple was forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln due to the Nazis' presence. The couple had leased the apartment from a relative of the writer Stefan Heym; in his postwar novel Nachruf, Heym stated he found the Harnacks to be a genial academic couple with a determined outlook on the Nazis.
In the same year, Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, with the help of the Soviet embassy, organized a three-week study trip (from August 20 to September 12, 1932) to the Soviet Union for 23 members of ARPLAN including Arvid. Mildred hoped to go, but due to a scheduling conflict decided to make her own way there by booking the trip using Intourist and flying back early. Fish-Harnack's career as a scholar was saved when a family friend who was also president of American Student Union, Warren Tomlinson, suggested she take over his position as lecturer at the Berlin municipal evening high school. On September 1, 1932, Fish-Harnack began lecturing at the Heil'schen Abendschule Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene" or BAG) at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg, an evening high school for adults to prepare for the Abitur. Fish-Harnack was popular with her students, for many of whom her courses were their first introduction to American Literature. She socialised with her students and discussed economic and political ideas from the United States and the Soviet Union in an open and frank manner. One of her students, Karl Behrens, became friends with the Harnacks and eventually one of their most ardent recruits.
During the 1930s, the Harnacks kept in close contact with the Bonhoeffer family. Fish-Harnack, seeking additional income, launched a lecture series that was held in Klaus Bonhoeffer and Emmi Bonhoeffer's home.
On June 13, 1933, Fish-Harnack met Martha Dodd when she and other members of the American Women's Club met at the Lehrter train station to welcome Dodd's father and American ambassador, William. Dodd became Fish-Harnack's friend in Berlin, and her manuscript, In Memory, found in her Prague apartment attic in 1957, stated:
The years of our acquaintance were the most significant of my life. Our work, our experiences, in these courageous tragic years of fulfillment and disappointment are closely interwoven. Everything we thought about. What we loved. Hated. What we fought for. We shared with each other. We, all of us, my husband were in the German underground from 1933 to 1943. I'm the only one left.In a letter Fish-Harnack wrote to her mother in October 1935, she described Dodd as a talented writer of literary criticism and short stories with "a real desire to understand the wider world... Therefore, our interests combine and we will try to work something out together." Fish-Harnack and Dodd edited a book column together in the English-language newspaper Berlin Topics. The Harnacks began to host a Saturday literary salon on Hasenheide where political views among editors, publishers, and authors were freely expressed; the attendees included publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, and Rowohlt's son Heinrich Marie Ledig-Rowohlt; translator Franz Frein; physician and writer Max Mohr; authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff, and Ernst von Salomon; journalist Margret Boveri; critic Erich Franzen; and Mildred's students, such as writer Friedrich Schlösinger. In Dodd's book Through Embassy Eyes, she mentioned a report by an American publisher who had visited the Fish-Harnacks in 1934, who stated:
He was expecting a lively exchange of views and engaging conversations that evening—definitely more appealing than that to which we were used in diplomatic circles. Instead, I only saw suffering and need. People whose spirit was broken. I saw pathetic cowardice. A lying in wait and tension, which was triggered by the visits by the secret police. The last of the meager remnants of free thought.In 1934, the couple moved to the third floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten.
In the mid-1930s, Fish-Harnack's work began to be noticed and she became a published writer. In 1934, Fish-Harnack wrote an essay, "The Epic of the South", which was published in Berliner Tageblatt. In 1935, she wrote an essay, "Ein amerikanischer Dichter aus großer Tradition" (), on William Faulkner for the magazine Die Literatur. This type of critical analysis was no longer tolerated and could have ended her teaching career. On May 27, 1934, Fish-Harnack accepted an invitation from Ledig-Rowohlt, Dodd, and Dodd's boyfriend Boris Vinogradov to visit the German writer Hans Fallada in Carwitz, whose book Little Man, What Now? was published the previous year in the USA and had been a bestseller. Fallada was one of the few German writers who failed to obey the Nazi state. After 1935, Fish-Harnack did not publish any literary criticisms, essays, or newspaper articles, as the increasing presence of the Nazi regime made any writings a "rubber stamp for official views".
In 1936, her German translation of Irving Stone's biography of Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, was published. She continued to work as a translator for publishing houses. In January 1937, Fish-Harnack visited the United States, and stayed with Leiser in New York for two weeks, which was the last time that Leiser saw Fish-Harnack. Leiser found Fish-Harnack changed, from the open and trusting person she had known into someone who seemed distant and superior, a side-effect of the deceit necessary to hide her true feelings in Germany. Fish-Harnack's high school friend Mady Emmerling found Fish-Harnack to be overly cautious, frightened, and reserved, all indicative of having lived in the Nazi state for four years. Fish-Harnack had become used to assuming a persona, or passing, to fool the Nazi state. Many of her friends assumed from her bearing that she had become a Nazi. Immediately after staying with Leiser, Fish-Harnack went on a campus lecture tour that included Haverford College, New York University, University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin, whose theme was "The German Relation to Current American Literature". Leonard attended the lecture at Madison and was unwilling to endorse Fish-Harnack's lecture when she asked for a written recommendation. However, at Haverford, Douglas V. Steere, who did not know her, found her presentation to be "vivid and full of charm". She visited her relatives during the tour and left in the spring to return to Berlin.
Later in 1938, Fish-Harnack worked on her doctoral dissertation, entitled "Die Entwicklung der amerikanischen Literatur der Gegenwart in einigen Hauptvertretern des Romans und der Kurzgeschicht" (), and was awarded her doctorate at the University of Giessen on November 20, 1941. In 1938 she received a job offer from the Rütten & Loening publishing house in Berlin as a consultant for American novels. (2025). 9783869564074, Universitätsverlag Potsdam. ISBN 9783869564074 The same year, Fish-Harnack joined the Daughters of the American Revolution and became a local representative in Berlin. In October 1939, she applied for the Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships but was refused. In 1941 she was hired as an English-language professor at the Foreign Studies Department of the Friedrich Wilhelm University, which was run by SS Major Franz Six.
On March 3, 1938, William Dodd was replaced by Hugh Wilson. Joining him as First Secretary and monetary attaché at the U.S. Embassy was Donald Heath. In 1937, Fish-Harnack met Louise Heath, Donald Heath's wife, at the American Women's Club in Bellevuestraße. The Harnacks became friends with the Heaths. When the war started the Heaths fled to Norway, but when they returned, Louise requested that Fish-Harnack tutor her son, Donald Heath, Jr., in American literature. The two couples spent weekends and occasional holidays together. At times Harnack and Donald would meet in the countryside to exchange intelligence, but it became increasingly dangerous. Between December 1939 and March 1941, Donald Jr., couriered between Fish-Harnack and the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
During the 1930s, the Harnacks came into contact with other resistance groups and began to cooperate with them. The most important of these was a group run by Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe lieutenant and descendant of an old German military family who had known Harnack since 1935, but was reintroduced to him sometime in late 1939 or early 1940 through Greta Kuckhoff; the Kuckhoffs had known the Schulz-Boysens since 1938 and started to engage them socially in late 1939 or early 1940 by bringing Fish-Harnack and Libertas Schulze-Boysen together while on holiday in Saxony. Of the meeting Greta Kuckhoff wrote,
I saw it clearly before my eyes. From then on our work not only implies the risk of losing our freedom, from now on death was a possibility.Harro and Libertas were part of a bohemian group of friends that met twice a month in fun meetings in contrast to the Harnacks' austere study meetings. The initial meeting of the women gave rise to a licentious image of the group that persisted for decades after the war, based primarily on Gestapo and Abwehr reports. In his 1967 book, L'orchestre rouge, Gilles Perrault states that Fish-Harnack and Libertas were lesbians. However, industrialist Hugo Buschmann, who was an informant and Harro's close friend, stated that the group lived dangerously, but there was no evidence for Perrault's conclusion.
On September 17, 1940, the Harnacks met the third secretary member of the Soviet embassy, Alexander Korotkov, and Arvid Harnack decided to resume passing classified information about Hitler's regime to the Soviet Union in order to undermine it. According to lawyer Wolfgang Havemann, from that point forward Fish-Harnack endured a persistent fear of being discovered.
On December 19, after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht ("Reich Military Tribunal"), Mildred Harnack was initially sentenced to six years in prison, but Adolf Hitler refused to endorse the sentence and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a death sentence on January 16, 1943. (2025). 9783869564074, Universitätsverlag Potsdam. ISBN 9783869564074 She was Decapitation by guillotine on February 16, 1943. While she was imprisoned, Fish-Harnack translated the poem Vermächtnis () by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Her last words were purported to have been "Und ich habe Deutschland auch so geliebt" ("And I, too, so loved Germany"). She was the only American executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler..
After her execution, her body was released to the Charité Anatomical Institute and Humboldt University anatomy professor Hermann Stieve to be dissected for his research into the effects of stress, caused by awaiting execution, on the menstrual cycle. After he was finished, he gave what was left to a friend of hers, who had the remains buried in Berlin's Zehlendorf Cemetery. She is the only member of the Berlin-based anti-fascists whose burial site is known.
When she learned of the execution, Clara Leiser wrote the unfinished poem "To and from the guillotine" in remembrance of her friend.
Arvid's brother Falk Harnack, also a resistance fighter, was able to escape and survived the Second World War as an ELAS partisan in Greece.
Canadian-born writer Rebecca Donner is the great-niece of Mildred Harnack, and published in 2021 a book (2025). 9780316561693, Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316561693 on her life, largely taken from the letters that her grandmother had given her when she was sixteen, with the aim of making a book out of them.
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