All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler

Rebecca Donner, the author and a distant relative of Mildred Harnack, reconstructs the life of an American woman who built the largest underground resistance network in Berlin during the Nazi era. Drawing on declassified intelligence files, family letters, and interviews, Donner weaves together two narratives: one following Mildred from her impoverished childhood in Milwaukee to her execution in 1943, and the other following Don Heath, the 11-year-old son of an American diplomat who served as Mildred's courier in wartime Berlin.

The book opens with a prison questionnaire dated February 16, 1943, identifying Mildred as an "accomplice in treason." Donner then introduces Don, who in December 1939 carried a blue knapsack through Berlin to Mildred's apartment, where she tutored him in literature while slipping coded papers into his bag for delivery to his father, Donald Heath Sr. Heath held a position at the U.S. embassy and worked as an unofficial intelligence agent for the Treasury Department.

Mildred was born on September 16, 1902, in a Milwaukee boardinghouse to Georgina Fish, a self-taught stenographer, and William Fish, an unreliable horse trader who died alone in an empty barn in 1918. After attending high school in Washington, DC, Mildred enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she met Arvid Harnack, a German student who wandered into the wrong lecture hall. They married on a dairy farm and moved to Germany in 1929.

By 1932, Mildred was teaching American literature at the University of Berlin, openly connecting novels about poverty to Germany's crisis and the rise of the Nazi Party. After being dismissed, she took a position at the BAG, a night school for working-class adults, where she lectured on Emerson and Gandhi, sang American protest songs, and asked students whether Hitler should be chancellor. She began holding secret political meetings in her apartment, forming a group she called the Circle.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor. Within months, the Reichstag fire provided a pretext for suspending all civil liberties, and the Enabling Act granted him dictatorial powers. Mildred expanded the Circle, recruiting factory workers, writers, lawyers, professors, and students. She developed a technique of pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer to test potential recruits. Members distributed anti-Nazi leaflets and helped Jews escape Germany. Mildred also befriended Martha Dodd, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador, who would later be recruited as a Soviet spy.

Arvid adopted a strategy of infiltrating the Nazi government from within. He obtained a position at the Ministry of Economics, handling classified documents about Germany's war preparations, and joined the Nazi Party to complete his cover. In 1935, Soviet intelligence recruited him. Moscow Center, the Soviet intelligence headquarters, assigned him the code name Balt, though Arvid refused to accept money or sign an oath of loyalty. That September, the Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and banned marriages between Jews and non-Jews. Mildred helped Jews escape, including editor Max Tau, whom she assisted in reaching Norway.

In early 1937, Mildred visited America for the first time in seven years. Family and friends found her transformed: jumpy, severe, constantly glancing over her shoulder. Her brother-in-law urged her to stay, but Mildred replied, "I hold Arvid's head in my hands," and returned to Germany. Her mother, Georgina, died in February 1938. In summer 1939, Arvid traveled to Washington to warn officials that Hitler must be stopped, but they dismissed him.

Donald Heath Sr. was dispatched to Berlin in late 1937 as an unofficial intelligence agent for Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, when mobs destroyed 267 synagogues and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, Arvid became one of Heath's key sources, insisting that appeasement would not restrain Hitler. In November 1939, the Heaths decided to use Don as Mildred's courier. Don wore a stolen Hitler Youth uniform and sang the Nazi anthem as a warning signal during clandestine meetings.

In September 1940, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, restored contact with Arvid through agent Alexander Korotkov. Arvid, now code-named Corsican, reported that Germany would be ready for war with the Soviet Union by early 1941. His network had grown after merging with a resistance group led by Harro Schulze-Boysen, an officer in the Reich Air Ministry. Together, they sent weekly intelligence reports to Moscow warning of the imminent invasion. Stalin dismissed every warning. On June 22, 1941, 3 million German troops attacked the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa.

Moscow Center sent radio transmitters to Berlin, but they malfunctioned. In desperation, the NKVD sent a GRU (Soviet military intelligence) agent carrying a memo that contained the real names and addresses of Arvid, Harro, and resistance leader Adam Kuckhoff, a catastrophic blunder. In July 1942, German cryptologists cracked the Soviet cipher, giving the Gestapo all three addresses.

Mildred, who received her PhD in November 1941, had been cultivating Herbert Gollnow, an Abwehr (German military intelligence) lieutenant in her English class, as an intelligence source. During private tutoring sessions, she coaxed him into revealing Hitler's plans to invade the Caucasus for its oil. She wrote her final letter to her family on August 14, 1942, smuggled out through Switzerland.

In early September, Mildred and Arvid fled to the Baltic coast, planning to escape by boat to Sweden. Before they could leave, Gestapo officers arrested them and drove them 500 miles back to Berlin. One hundred nineteen people were arrested in total. During months of imprisonment, Mildred endured brutal interrogation. Libertas Schulze-Boysen, Harro's wife, betrayed dozens of coconspirators by whispering their names during interrogations.

On December 15, 1942, Mildred entered the Reich Court-Martial. Prosecutor Manfred Roeder pressed her with questions, but Mildred lied convincingly, naming no names and claiming the meetings concerned American novels. The judges sentenced her to six years. Arvid received a death sentence and was hanged at Plötzensee Prison on December 22, after writing a farewell letter to Mildred recalling their engagement at Picnic Point in Wisconsin.

Hitler overrode Mildred's verdict and ordered her execution. At a second trial on January 13, 1943, Gollnow testified that Mildred had extracted military secrets from him through "sexual bondage." She was sentenced to death. Her cellmate at Charlottenburg prison, Gertrud Klapputh, a young resistance fighter, described their final weeks: doing exercises in their cramped cell, writing Goethe verses with a stolen pencil, singing American songs. Mildred asked Gertrud to smuggle out Arvid's farewell letter.

On February 16, 1943, prison chaplain Harald Poelchau, secretly a resistance member, visited Mildred in her cell at Plötzensee Prison. She was translating Goethe poems with a pencil stub. He smuggled in an orange and a photograph of her mother. On its back, Mildred wrote: "The face of my mother expresses everything that I want to say at this moment." That evening, she was beheaded by guillotine.

After the war, the Allies recruited Nazi war criminals rather than prosecuting them. British intelligence faked the death of Gestapo officer Horst Kopkow and gave him a new identity. The U.S. Army dropped Mildred's case, with an officer concluding her execution was "justified." Gertrud survived the Ravensbrück concentration camp and kept Arvid's farewell letter hidden throughout. In 1952, she wrote to Arvid's mother describing the "beautiful and difficult hours" she had shared with Mildred.

The book closes in 1946, when 18-year-old Don returned to a bombed-out Berlin. He stood outside Mildred's former apartment and remembered her final instruction: "Don't forget."