45 Facts About Mildred Harnack

Mildred Elizabeth Harnack was an American literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime.

Mildred Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis.

Mildred Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin in 1931.

Mildred Harnack Elizabeth Fish was born and raised on the west side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Mildred Harnack's parents were William Cook Fish, who was frequently unemployed between gigs as an insurance salesman, butcher, and horse trader, and Georgina Fish, a self-taught stenographer and typist.

Mildred Harnack had three siblings, Harriette, and twins Marbeau and Marion.

Mildred Harnack attended West Division High School.

Mildred Harnack played on the basketball and baseball teams, served as editor for The Trailblazer, and played the role of Princess Angelica in William Makepeace Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, the senior class play.

Mildred Harnack finished her last year at Western High School.

Mildred Harnack stayed at a rooming house popular with journalists and writers, but left after facing some mild prejudice, which caused her to change her major from journalism to humanities, then later to English literature.

Mildred Harnack's senior thesis was "A Comparison of Chapman's and Pope's Translations of the Iliad with the Original".

Mildred Harnack stayed for further study and was awarded a Master of Arts degree in English on August 6,1925.

Between 1928 and 1929, Mildred Fish-Harnack taught English and American literature at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Mildred Harnack subjected Fish-Harnack to a grueling scrutiny that shaped her intellectual outlook.

On June 2,1929, Mildred moved to Jena in Germany, where she spent her first year living with the Harnack family.

On February 1,1931, Mildred Harnack began studying at the University of Berlin on a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Mildred 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.

Mildred Harnack taught courses on Emerson, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Hardy, and George Bernard Shaw.

Mildred Harnack was popular with her students and over three semesters enrollment in the course tripled.

Mildred Harnack was an active member of the American expatriate community in Berlin.

In 1932, Fish-Mildred Harnack lost her position as a lecturer in American literature at the University of Berlin.

In May 1932, the funding that enabled Mildred Harnack to teach at Friedrich-Wilhelm University was canceled.

Mildred Harnack 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-Mildred Harnack was popular with her students, for many of whom her courses were their first introduction to American Literature.

Mildred Harnack socialised with her students and discussed economic and political ideas from the United States and the Soviet Union in an open and frank manner.

Fish-Mildred Harnack, seeking additional income, launched a lecture series that was held in Klaus and Emmi Bonhoeffer's home.

On June 13,1933, Fish-Mildred 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.

Mildred Harnack found that his ability to shape memories from his early life to produce an autobiographical novel was reflected in her own desires for her own novel.

Mildred Harnack had read Wolfe's first book, Look Homeward, Angel, in 1933, lectured on the writer at the American Women's Club in 1933, and produced a further lecture in 1934 that was presented at the Bonhoeffers'.

Fish-Mildred Harnack had a rare chance to meet Wolfe, who came to Germany to promote his book with his publisher, Ledig-Rowohlt.

In 1934, Fish-Mildred Harnack wrote an essay, "The Epic of the South", which was published in Berliner Tageblatt.

Mildred Harnack continued to work as a translator for publishing houses.

In January 1937, Fish-Mildred Harnack visited the United States, and stayed with Leiser in New York for two weeks, which was the last time that Leiser saw Fish-Mildred Harnack.

Leiser found Fish-Mildred 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-Mildred Harnack had become used to assuming a persona, or passing, to fool the Nazi state.

Immediately after staying with Leiser, Fish-Mildred 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".

Mildred Harnack visited her relatives during the tour and left in the spring to return to Berlin.

Mildred Harnack lent books to the potential recruit as a test of their intellect, as there was little chance of winning such people over if they did not understand politics.

At one meeting, Fish-Mildred Harnack held a lecture on Kim by Rudyard Kipling to help the recruits understand colonialism.

On December 19, after a four-day trial before the Reichskriegsgericht, 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.

Mildred Harnack was beheaded by guillotine on February 16,1943.

Mildred Harnack was the only American executed on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler.

Mildred Harnack is the only member of the Berlin-based anti-fascists whose burial site is known.

Canadian-born writer Rebecca Donner is the great-niece of Mildred Harnack, and published in 2021 a book 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.

However, while investigators described her actions as "laudable", they concluded that Mildred Harnack's execution was technically not in violation of international law since she was a spy and had received a trial.