Born to a modest merchant family in Milwaukee/Wisconsin in 1902, Mildred Fish met German Rockefeller scholar Arvid Harnack while studying literature at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Moving to his native Germany in 1929 and teaching American literature in Berlin, Mildred’s life became absorbed by wider events taking place around her. Friends of U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd’s daughter Martha as well as figures central to the German resistance movement, Mildred joined her husband and a circle of intimates in resisting the Nazi regime—among other ways by spiriting information to the U.S. and Soviet governments. Their brave struggle against the spreading darkness, however, cost them their lives when betrayed by Soviet blundering. Her husband having been hanged in December 1942 from meat hooks at Ploetzensee, a detention and execution center outside Berlin, Mildred was guillotined in February 1943—the only American executed by Hitler’s command. Mildred Harnack-Fish
