By Rebecca Donner
Mildred Harnack was left out of history until Rebecca Donner set the record straight.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days tells the true story of the life and death of Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Nazi Germany.
Rebecca Donner, Mildred Harnack’s great-great-niece, wrote All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (Little, Brown and Company, 2021) about Harnack’s heroic resistance to the Nazis in Berlin. Born in Milwaukee, Harnack enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and saw the Nazis rise to power. She recruited Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted sabotage, and wrote leaflets denouncing Hitler. She was caught as she was trying to escape to Sweden. A Nazi military court sentenced her to six years in a prison camp. However, Hitler himself overruled this sentence and ordered her to be executed. On February 16, 1943, Harnack was beheaded by guillotine. Donner did extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the United States, as well as in her family archive, and wrote a remarkable work of narrative nonfiction. The book combines biography, political thriller, and a scholarly detective story, using letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, and survivors’ testimony, as well as declassified intelligence documents.