8/31/2023 0 Comments Paper flipboard![]() ![]() He personally ordered that Mildred be executed, as well. Many were hung, including Arvid, while others were beheaded.īut Hitler, fuming after Germany's defeat at Stalingrad, wanted to send a message to would-be communist conspirators. Arvid and several other members of the Circle were executed in December 1942. Mildred was found guilty and sentenced to six years in a hard labor camp. They were forced to stand trial before a five-judge panel of Nazi judges. Donner says that several prisoners committed suicide rather than face Habecker's brutal treatment. Mildred and several others were tortured by a sadistic Nazi interrogator named Walter Habecker in hopes they'd give up information about the resistance. They even discussed acts of sabotage against the German government.īy 1940, the Circle was the largest resistance group in Berlin, Donner says, and by 1942 more than 100 members were risking their lives to undermine the Nazis while constantly watching their backs for the Gestapo, Hitler's ruthless secret police. Mildred and the other members of the Circle used their connections at foreign embassies to help Jews escape the murderous antisemitism of the Nazi regime. ![]() "At the end of each lesson, she'd slip a piece of paper into his knapsack, which he'd bring back to his father at the embassy," Donner says. She tutored a young boy, Don Heath, who was the son of an American diplomat at her apartment twice a week for two years. Mildred did the same spy work for the Americans (the U.S. ![]() Arvid had connections to the Soviet Union, and he used his government position to collect intel on Hitler's operation and secretly pass it to the Soviet embassy in Berlin. "They changed their strategy and decided to undermine the regime from within."Īrvid, Mildred's husband, posed as a loyal Nazi and got a job at the Ministry of Economics. "Fighting a dictator with paper was a poor weapon," Donner says. But by the mid-1930s, Mildred and the other members of the Circle realized they needed to take even greater risks. Anyone caught with an underground leaflet would be thrown in prison or incarcerated at a concentration camp, Donner says. ![]()
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