Includes bibliographical references (pages 487-544) and index.

Part biography, part political thriller, part scholarly detective story that draws on letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, and other documents, this true story chronicles the life and brutal death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany.

Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings with a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. 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 she was sentenced to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded. Harnack's great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to reconstruct the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.--,Adapted from dust jacket

National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, 2021

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