About Mildred Harnack

While she was growing up, Rebecca Donner visited her great-grandmother’s house on a regular basis. Every time she did, she and her brother would stand against the kitchen wall and have their heights marked in pencil – joining generations of children.

When she was 9, Rebecca noticed a very faint “M” on the among all the marks. She asked her great-grandmother who M was. She replied, “Oh, that’s Mildred,” and that was that for years.

Years later, after her great-grandmother died, her grandmother told her that Mildred was Mildred Harnack, an “American spy in World War II who was caught and executed in 1943 on a direct order from Hitler.” That fascinated Mildred – as it would any of us – but college, career, and life got in the way of asking her for more details.

Rebecca was a writer and film maker going into a new project when her grandmother asked her to “write about MIldred.” Every writer on the planet is constantly told they should write about a relative and while Rebecca was intrigued by the spy in her family she had to doubt there was enough for a book in it. Beside, she could always get details from her grandmother later.

Her grandmother was killed in a boating accident and that may have been the end of things except for a trip Rebecca took to Berlin in 2008. She remembered that her grandmother had been in touch with people at the German Resistance Memorial Center and thought she’d do a quick visit on the off chance there might be something about MIldred.

There was and it wasn’t hard to find at all – the first two rooms were devoted to MIldred. An enormous exhibition. Mildred was the centerpiece of the musuem.

Rebecca spent the next years doing research on Mildred, going through archives in the U.S., Germany, and Russia. The result is her best-selling book, All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days. Mildred’s story is a tremendously important one and it almost never got told in the United States.

The one thing that’s missing is her grandmother’s stories.

Don’t put off getting your family’s stories. Immortalize them.

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