A Homegrown Hero

Mildred Fish while a student at the University of Wisconsin. (UW Archives photo)

                       

Shortly after I graduated from high school, I took a trip to Europe. Among the places we visited was the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

There were many things to disturb anyone about the place: the sign that said, “People were hanged from these beams,” the towers that were everywhere and the buildings that were the real thing, not part of a movie set.

Yet the thing that haunted me most from that trip wasn’t from the camp itself. It was afterward, when we grabbed some sandwiches at a shop, sat in a beautiful park in the Bavarian town called Dachau and ate lunch just a few miles away from where so many horrors took place.

“How could they not have known?” I thought to myself of the people who lived there, and it has bothered me for decades since. I was horrified to think that people accepted what was going on and the naïve, youthful optimist in me couldn’t imagine that people were so awful as to not do something about it.

So it was with great relief about humanity that, decades later, I learned about Mildred Fish-Harnack and the Red Orchestra. Not only was there a relief that indeed there were average citizens in Germany trying to undermine the Nazis, but also pride that one of them was a native of Wisconsin.

Mildred Fish-Harnack, a Milwaukee native, was the only American woman executed under the direct orders of Hitler during World War II. She was originally sentenced to 10 years in prison; Hitler instead ordered her guillotined.

It was only relatively recently that I learned about Mildred, her husband Arvid, whom she met at UW, and another German woman who also attended the University of Wisconsin, Greta Kuckhoff. I was given the book “Red Orchestra” almost by happenstance and eventually interviewed its author, Anne Nelson. Nelson’s book references the Wisconsin connections to this group, as they met to discuss issues of the day while students in Madison and reconnected in Berlin years later.

Their vast network, including Arvid Harnack working at the Reich’s Economic Ministry, tried to get word out to the Allies about Nazi plans. Ultimately they were found out and many of them were executed, although Greta Kuckhoff served her sentence and survived to old age.

It’s a story few know about because, among many reasons, they gave information to the Soviets as well as Americans and the name Red Orchestra was given to the resistance group by the Nazis who had branded them Communists. In the post-World War II world it was worse to be a Communist than it was to be a Nazi and the story of the Red Orchestra was nearly lost to history. When the University of Wisconsin’s alumni magazine did a story on the university’s connection to these brave souls in 1949, it triggered an FBI investigation of the school as potentially harboring Communist sympathies.

Slowly, their story has come to light. In the 1980s, the Wisconsin legislature declared Sept. 16 as Mildred Fish-Harnack Day in the state. The hope of that declaration was that on each Sept. 16, Mildred’s birthday, schoolchildren would be taught something about her and the work of her companions.

World War II and the Holocaust continue to fascinate people, and deservedly so. Much of the fascination stems from the madness of Hitler and the horrific things that happened. But I also think part of the fascination stems from people wondering about themselves, what they would have done in a similar situation.

Would I have turned in my Jewish neighbors? Would I have tried to escape? Would I have given information to other countries? Would I have tried to help? Would I have stood up against what I believe is so wrong?

In this day and age, when people will throw their own co-workers under a bus to ensure job security, those are tough questions to answer.

In the Sherlock Holmes mystery “The Sign of Four,” Sherlock offers an observation from British philosopher Winwood Reade as to what makes mysteries both easy and difficult to solve.

“While the individual man is an insoluable puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty,” Holmes says. “You can never foretell what one any one man will do but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.”

So that’s what it comes down to for all of us: to be an insoluable puzzle or a mathematical certainty.

If only, my dear Watsons, it were as elementary as it sounds.

. . .

This post was originally written to coincide with the broadcast of a Wisconsin Public Television documentary, "Wisconsin's Nazi Resistance: The Mildred-Fish Harnack Story." It can be viewed online at http://video.wpt.org/video/2243188017/

Two books have been written on the subject. “Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler” by Anne Nelson and “Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra” by Shareen Blair Bysac.

In Berlin, there is now a German Resistance Memorial Center. Part of that center is the former Plotzensee prison where Mildred Fish-Harnack, her husband and fellow resistance members were executed.

The University of Wisconsin Archives has a webpage dedicated to the life of Mildred Fish-Harnack.