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Welcome to Brain Stuff, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum here.

There are some stories from history that are well reported in their own times, to the point that they wind up achieving legend status,

more or less immediately in the aftermath of the events. Other stories, for a variety of reasons,

may be no less dynamic, but settle unnoticed, until something brings them to the surface.

Today, let's talk about Mildred Harnack, a young woman from Wisconsin, who wound up living in Berlin during World War II with her German husband, Arvid.

Mildred became the only American to serve as a leader in the underground German resistance against Adolf Hitler.

She paid the ultimate price for her

opposition. She was sentenced to six years of hard labor for the crimes of treason and espionage,

but then Hitler personally ordered her death in 1943. Instead of being hailed as a freedom

fighter back home, Mildred and her compatriots were falsely

painted as communist spies working for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Mildred's own family

burned her letters for fear being labeled as communist sympathizers. But now, over 80 years

after her execution, Mildred's remarkable story is being told,

thanks in large part to her great-great-niece won Rebecca Donner.

Donner is a writer who published an award-winning biography of Harnack in 2021, titled

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, for which she drew on remaining family documents

and conducted extensive archival research in four countries. So, how did a literature professor

from Milwaukee come to stand up to Hitler and the Third Reich? Mildred and Arvid Harnack met and fell in love as graduate students

at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. A week after Mildred received her master's degree,

...