in linking their resistance circles. “He remembers Arvid well,” Adam told Greta afterward. “Harro’s more than willing to collaborate with our group, but how do we convince Arvid?”
“Leave that to me,” Greta replied.
She invited Mildred and Libertas to join her for a week’s holiday in Saxony. Anyone who observed them would have seen three good friends enjoying a girls’ week away from their husbands, hiking, swimming, sunbathing, and dining together, happy and carefree. But alone on the forested trails or behind the locked doors of their hotel rooms, they discussed in carefully imprecise terms their work, the reach of their resistance circles, and their contacts. Mildred and Libertas took to one another quickly, and after several quiet, lengthy, intense discussions, Greta convinced them that their groups should join forces. When they parted at the end of the week, Mildred agreed to urge Arvid to meet with Harro again to discuss the possibilities.
A few days after the women returned to Berlin, their husbands met at the Harnacks’ apartment. Greta waited impatiently at home with Ule, unable to settle down either to work or play. When Adam returned home nearly an hour later than expected, she flew to the door as soon as she heard his key in the lock.
Holding a finger to his lips, he entered the apartment, closed the door, and locked it behind him. “Arvid consents,” he said, a broad grin spreading across his face. “Greta, the things Harro knows, the information he has access to—this could change everything for us.”
Sighing with relief, Greta flung her arms around him and kissed his cheek. Her hopes soared as she considered the many ways their stronger, more extensive resistance network would allow them to undermine the Nazi regime and help the Jews.
But even as she allowed herself to dream, a voice in the back of her thoughts murmured caution. A bigger network meant increased danger of discovery or betrayal. Bolder risks could mean greater rewards, or swift and more severe punishments.
They might not know which lay ahead of them—or what crept up on them from behind—until it was too late.
Chapter Forty-nine
July–September 1940
Mildred
On the afternoon of July 6, a brass band and a massive crowd met Adolf Hitler’s heavily guarded private train when he returned to Berlin from the forest of Compiègne. Thousands of exultant Germans bearing flowers and swastika flags lined the mile-long drive from the Anhalter Bahnhof to the Chancellery, shouting, cheering, weeping, working themselves into frantic hysteria as the Führer’s car sedately passed. Before it walked young women clad in the white blouses and blue skirts of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, strewing so many flowers in the vehicle’s path that the gray street was entirely covered in colorful blossoms, the crushed petals releasing their fragrance until the warm summer air was thick with their perfume.
Eleven days later, an even larger spectacle greeted the victorious troops upon their return to the capital. A public holiday had been declared, grandstands had been erected on Pariserplatz, and Goebbels had issued a statement urging the German people to offer a “tumultuous welcome for your sons, husbands, fathers and brothers who won the great victories in Poland and France.” Mildred perceived an implicit threat in the directive, but when the troops marched through the city—hardened by battle, proud in victory, strong, tanned, disciplined—the spectators’ unrestrained jubilation seemed fiercely genuine.
As the military paraded through the Brandenburger Tor and goose-stepped before the review stand, tens of thousands of jubilant Germans lined the streets, weeping for joy, shouting themselves hoarse, tossing flowers, bursting into spontaneous song. Church bells that had not been confiscated and melted down for their copper rang and rang, filling the sun-drenched skies with a song of triumph and warning.
Observing the scenes as if from across a vast chasm, Mildred was both repulsed and astounded. The German people seemed to believe that the war was essentially over, that their loved ones would soon be released from military service, that rationing would cease as material goods from conquered nations flowed into the Reich—metal ores, grain, silk stockings, chocolate. And while it was true that Germany was still officially at war with Great Britain, the British troops had been soundly thrashed. In their retreat they had left acres of arms and equipment behind at Dunkirk, materiel they could not swiftly replace. Surely their surrender was both inevitable and imminent.
The following evening, in an address to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House broadcast around the world, Hitler warned Great Britain that only by accepting his peace