Mildred expected the trial to unfold like the mass trials she had observed with Clara Leiser and Greta years before, but this was a military court, and the pretense of impartiality had been stripped away. She felt increasingly disheartened and afraid as she realized that none of the rights granted to defendants in an American courtroom existed here. As the prosecuting attorney, Roeder directed the proceedings, and he had already submitted to the chamber an indictment for each defendant as well as a report of the evidence. Dr. Schwarz and Dr. Behse, the defense attorneys, were not permitted to examine the evidence, nor were they allowed to consult or advise their clients. There would be no witnesses called for the defense, and when the defendants were questioned, they could respond with only a simple yes or no.
After those dire revelations came another that flooded Mildred with anguish and frustration: the official account of how their resistance network had been discovered. Their downfall had not come about due to Harro’s recklessness, or Mildred’s recruitment efforts, or Arvid’s refusal to abandon resistance work in favor of gathering intelligence, or Greta’s determination to help her Jewish friends. Instead they had been brought down by Soviet carelessness, a series of mistakes that had led the Gestapo right to them like a branching path of falling dominoes.
In August 1941, when Moscow had radioed the disastrously imprudent message with their names and addresses to Kent at his station in Brussels, the Germans had intercepted the transmission, just as Mildred and her friends had feared. Although the Abwehr had been unable to decipher the code, they had been alerted to the presence of a Soviet intelligence outpost somewhere in the region and had monitored the airwaves vigilantly thereafter. Three months later, upon returning to Brussels from Berlin, Kent had radioed Harro’s lengthy, detailed reports to Moscow, broadcasting for hours at a time, seven nights in a row, ignoring every safety protocol in order to get the crucial intelligence to Moscow as swiftly as possible. Nazi counterintelligence operatives had easily homed in on the conspicuous signal, had recorded the coded messages, and within a month had traced the broadcast back to its source: the lair of the Rote Kapelle, Red Orchestra, named for the illicit “music” they had broadcast to enemies of the Reich.
In December 1941, a year earlier almost to the day, Abwehr agents had raided the Brussels outpost, seizing compromising materials and capturing a young Polish cipherer, Sophie Poznanska, as well as the Belgian housekeeper. Poznanska had committed suicide in prison rather than betray her comrades, but the terrified housekeeper had given her interrogators the titles of three books that she had often seen on Poznanska’s desk. On May 17, the Abwehr had found a copy of Der Kurier aus Spanien in a used bookstore, and by the middle of July they had decoded Moscow’s incautious transmission. The Abwehr had immediately placed the Harnacks, the Kuckhoffs, and the Schulze-Boysens under surveillance, watching and waiting, monitoring visitors, mail, and phone calls, patiently observing the suspects and gathering evidence in hopes of capturing the entire network. Eventually they had pounced.
By the time the first day of hearings was over, Mildred felt exhausted, heartsick, utterly lost, and the trial had only just begun. Parting from Arvid was sheer anguish, but at least she knew she would see him again in the morning.
Until then, she had his letter, which she read as soon as she returned to the lonely solitude of her cell.
My most beloved heart,
If in the last months I have found the strength to be inwardly calm and composed, and if I face what is to come with calm composure, it is due above all to the fact that I feel a strong attachment to the good and beautiful things in this world, and that toward the whole earth I have the feeling that inspires the song of the poet Whitman. As far as people are concerned, it has been those close to me, and especially you, who have embodied these feelings for me.
Despite all the hardships, I am happy to look back on my life so far. The light outweighed the dark, and our marriage was the greatest reason for this. Last night, I let my thoughts roam through many of the most wonderful moments of our marriage, and the more I thought about them, the more I recalled. It was as if I were looking into a starry sky, in which the number of stars increases