All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days

- Blurb -

Born and raised in America, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD programme in Berlin and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment - a small band of political activists that grew into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage and wrote leaflets denouncing Hitler' s regime. On the outbreak of the Second World War she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court she was sentenced to six years at a concentration camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On 16 February 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded. Fusing elements of biography, political thriller and scholarly detective story, Harnack' s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner brilliantly interweaves family archives, original research, exclusive interviews with survivors, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, enthralling story, reconstructing the moral courage and previously untold story of an enigmatic woman nearly erased by history.