On April 18, 1945, twelve days before Hitler's suicide, American troops had reached the small town of Ausbach in Saxony. There, any attempt at resistance by the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS was laughable: most of the German soldiers had been transferred south or had fled to surrender to the Allied troops. That did not stop the local Nazi leadership from arresting nineteen-year-old student Robert Limper for distributing anti-Hitler leaflets, organizing a mock trial, and proceeding to execute him.
The regime-imposed terror continued to function until the very last day, even when maintaining it was manifestly contrary to the interests of its perpetrators. However, terror was not the only thing that persisted. So did the resigned submission or loyalty of the majority of German society that for twelve years applauded the racist and aggressive policy of the NSDAP government.
With Soviet troops only a few meters from the center of Berlin, the consensus that had supported Hitler was maintained to the end. It is true that the dictator's charismatic leadership and popularity began to plummet in the winter of 1942, after the defeat at Stalingrad, but German society - which had burned the bridges when it became co-responsible for the terrible crimes committed in its name – continued to cooperate with the objectives of Nazism until the very moment of the capitulation.
Although there were exceptions. People who did not accept this state of affairs and, facing fierce repression – with the almost certain prospect of torture, the concentration camp and death – said enough and took action. The frequent darkness of our days, the excellent non-fiction work by Canadian Rebecca Donner, tells of the moral stature of those who followed this path, an exciting story like the best thriller that is also a spy novel and a historical essay built on from letters, photographs and all kinds of documents. This is the biography of his ancestor Mildred Harnack, her husband Arvin and the group of anti-Nazi resistance groups El Círculo, which, after Hitler came to power in 1933, did not sit idle: it went into hiding to try to unmask its fellow citizens. the lies and crimes of the regime and to contribute to its end.
They were very few and it would be unfair to judge them by their results, although these were not insignificant. They managed to help a large number of Jews escape, planned acts of sabotage and spied on the allies, providing them with vital information. One of the most chilling episodes in the book recounts how Arvin Harnack managed to obtain irrefutable evidence for Stalin of the start of the Barbarossa operation in June 1941 and how he – refusing to give them credit – dispatched the memorandum with the obscene comment: “You can send your 'source' to fuck his mother”.
They fought as they could and Nazism distinguished them with a savage persecution. In 1935, Hitler reinstated the death penalty by beheading that had been suspended during the years of the Weimar Republic. In 1936 alone, twelve thousand people were arrested for distributing or possessing anti-Nazi leaflets, of which, in that same year, the resistance had managed to distribute 1,600,000. The astonishing thing is that Mildred, Arvin, and the young men of The Circle managed to survive until 1943, when the Gestapo's paw fell upon them. Mildred was sentenced to six years in prison, but Hitler himself overturned the verdict and demanded her execution. She was soon beheaded. She had just translated a poem by Goethe that spoke of the frequent darkness of our days and of hope when she rested her head on the block.
