39 Facts About Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance.

Arvid Harnack and his American-born wife, Mildred Fish, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942 and 1943, respectively.

Arvid Harnack's family were prominent and academically gifted Protestant Germans from the Baltic region.

Arvid Harnack's father was literary history professor Otto Harnack and his mother was Clara Harnack, an artist.

Arvid Harnack completed postgraduate studies in economics in Hamburg and the London School of Economics before being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study at the University of Wisconsin.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Harnack was influenced by the industrial economist and labor historian John R Commons, and saw him as a mentor.

In 1926, Arvid Harnack met American literary historian Mildred Fish, a graduate student at the Wisconsin University, after Arvid Harnack wandered into the wrong lecture hall.

Many in the group protested the planned execution of the pair, and Arvid Harnack petitioned the governor to create a committee to investigate the controversy.

In 1931, Arvid Harnack was promoted to his second doctorate, a Doctor of Philosophy from University of Giessen with a thesis titled: Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten that dealt explicitly with the history of the American workers' movement.

At the height of the Great Depression, Arvid Harnack's hope was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between the East and West.

Arvid Harnack founded the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft, or ARPLAN, with Lenz in 1931.

Arvid Harnack became secretary of the group and Lenz became the president.

In 1933, Arvid Harnack was appointed advisor at the Reich Ministry of Economics, before becoming a senior civil servant in 1938, and worked on payment balances and foreign exchange questions about trade.

Over time, Arvid Harnack gathered detailed knowledge of the German economy, and when he was promoted to senior civil servant, he was legitimately able to form contacts with American trade counterparts at the American embassy.

Arvid Harnack was good friends with lawyer and academic Carl Dietrich von Trotha, and knew lawyer Horst von Einsiedel since 1934.

The group met to discuss and disseminate communist theories that included material Arvid Harnack was able to copy from the ministry.

On 8 August 1935, three months after Arvid Harnack joined the trade ministry, he met with Hirschfeld in a meeting that lasted three hours.

Arvid Harnack agreed to be an informer and was given the codename Balt, assigned a control officer, Alexander Belkin, and given a mission to increase his sources by building a network of contacts.

Arvid Harnack provided details of secret trade agreements to Soviet intelligence.

In 1935, Arvid Harnack met Harro Schulze-Boysen for the first time, but Arvid Harnack decided not to meet again due to their different temperaments.

Arvid Harnack's job was to recruit sympathetic informers that could provide that type of information.

The Harnacks became friends with the Heaths, but Arvid was resistant to Donald's proposal at first; by 1938 he started providing him with intelligence.

Arvid Harnack had previously met Grimme at the funeral of Adolf von Arvid Harnack on 10 June 1930.

Grimme was a religious socialist who belonged to the Covenant of Religious Socialists of Germany, so Arvid Harnack used considerable effort to convince him to become a communist.

In May 1937, Arvid Harnack joined the Nazi Party with the number 4153569.

In 1940, Arvid Harnack came into contact with other resistance groups and began to cooperate with them.

Several reasons were given as to why Arvid Harnack decided to become a spy, including a need for money, being ideologically driven, and possibly blackmail by Russian intelligence.

Korotkov considered Arvid Harnack a moral person, and that while he reported to his Soviet directors, he felt the Soviet Union "was a country whose ideals he felt connected to".

Arvid Harnack often told his friends of his aversion to the Soviet Union and once told Grimme that Germany would "need a fist not to become a puppet of the Soviet Union".

On 26 September 1940, Arvid Harnack provided Erdberg with his first intelligence report that reported the Nazi state was in the planning stages for a war against the Soviet Union.

In mid-April 1941, in an attempt to increase the influx of intelligence, the Soviets ordered Korotkov to create a Berlin espionage operation and Arvid Harnack was asked by Korotkov to run it.

Arvid Harnack refused to be contacted in that manner and agreed only to collect and encipher the material in his own apartment, but the transmission would take place somewhere else.

Arvid Harnack distributed the money to his agents: Behrens received 5000 marks, Leo Skrzipczynski received 3,000, Grimme received 2,000, and Rose Schloesinger received 1,000.

Arvid Harnack acted as the intermediary when transmitting reports, which were delivered from several people, including Schulze-Boysen, and were encyphered and passed to Hans Coppi for transmission.

In 1941, Arvid Harnack sent the Soviets information about the forthcoming invasion.

In 1942, Arvid Harnack produced a study called "Das nation ialistische Stadium des Monopolkapitalismus", published in Die innere Front, which described the Gestapo as a tendentious and antigovernment economic treatise, and was read as far as Munich and Hamburg.

From January to August 1942, Arvid Harnack was forced to pass his intelligence via courier.

Arvid Harnack arranged with the Communist Party in Hamburg via Bernhard Bastlein to pass the reports through contacts in Flensburg and Denmark to the Soviet embassy in Stockholm.

Arvid Harnack was beheaded by guillotine, and her body was released to Hermann Stieve, anatomy professor at Humboldt University, to be dissected for research.