“Yes.” Sparing a glance for the door, Libertas drew closer. “At first, I used it to discourage young people from joining Nazi organizations by showing them the sort of atrocities they would be expected to perform. Now I’m documenting war crimes.”
Someday, when the nightmare was over, the Nazis would be brought to justice, and Libertas resolved to make sure the prosecutors had irrefutable evidence of their offenses. For every photograph and reel of film she gathered, she collected names, addresses, and testimony, although the officers she spoke with would never give that name to it. She simply asked questions in a conversational tone about where they had been, what they had done, and why. As soon as she was alone, she wrote it all down, every incriminating detail.
Greta marveled at her foresight, but she was compelled to warn her friend of the potential danger, the dire consequences she would face if her archive were discovered. “I know the risks,” Libertas said, a tremor in her voice, defiance and fear. “I have to do this. If I don’t, who will? The only way I can get through the days is by promising myself that someday these monsters will be brought to justice.”
Someday, Greta silently echoed, willing that day to come swiftly, knowing it would not unless Germany lost the war.
By late November, thanks to concurring intelligence from Luftwaffe headquarters and the Economics Ministry, their resistance circle knew that the German military had been unable to sustain its advance into the Soviet Union. As the seasons changed, the Wehrmacht’s trucks and tanks had become bogged down in thick mud, and winter snows were imminent. With supply lines strained to the limit, food and fuel reserves were running dangerously low. Hitler had expected to be in Moscow before the first snows fell, but now German soldiers on the front lines were digging in for an arduous winter campaign clad in nothing heavier than the uniforms they had worn when the invasion began in June. Most Germans, absorbed in the steady stream of propaganda issuing from the Reich press, had no idea how their sons, husbands, and brothers at the front suffered.
Somehow, even as winter descended, heavy and ominous, the German army struggled on into December, only to come to an abrupt halt barely ten miles from Moscow as the muddy roads turned to ice. Temperatures plummeted to −35°C. Tanks, trucks, and artillery became useless as the oil froze within their mechanisms. Quartermasters had prioritized munitions above food and clothing, so the well-armed, poorly clad soldiers suffered from hunger, frostbite, and despair.
Then, on December 6, Harro risked a phone call from his office at Luftwaffe headquarters to tell Adam and Greta that the Soviet Union had launched a massive counterattack against the icebound German army. One hundred Soviet divisions punched into the center of the invaders’ lines. Their forces included eighteen fresh divisions with seventeen hundred tanks and fifteen hundred airplanes brought in as reinforcements from the east—at no small risk, since this rendered the Soviet Union vulnerable to an invasion from its longtime rival Japan. When the newly strengthened Red Army fiercely assaulted the Germans along a two-hundred-mile front, they drove the invaders 240 kilometers back from Moscow. Hitler, furious that his demands to fight to the death for every last inch of ground had not been obeyed, fired the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht and appointed himself in the disgraced officer’s place, but this did not turn the tide of the battle.
Greta and Adam did not trust the Nazi propaganda machine to give them accurate reports of the counterattack, so they spent the day with the Harnacks, listening to the BBC on theirverbotenshortwave.
Late the next afternoon they returned, bringing supper and wine and flowers as a token of their thanks. Mildred had spent the day following reports on the shortwave, and over supper she shared what she had learned. Afterward they gathered around the shortwave and tuned in the BBC, turning up the volume as high as they dared. Although the reports of the Soviet counterattack were still preliminary, it seemed evident that the German army had not been able to muster a strong defense and was still falling back.
Suddenly, just before half past seven, an announcer broke in with a news bulletin.
“Japan’s long-threatened aggression in the Far East began tonight, with air attacks on United States naval bases in the Pacific,” the Englishman said, his voice crisp and urgent. “Fresh reports are coming in every minute. The latest facts of the situation are these: Messages from Tokyo say that Japan has announced a formal declaration of war against both the United States and Britain. The Japanese air raids have been made on the Hawaiian Islands and the Philippines. Observer reports say that an American battleship has been hit, and President Roosevelt has told the army and navy to act on their secret orders.”
Stunned, Greta looked first to Adam, and then to Mildred and Arvid. She saw her own shock and disbelief reflected in her friends’ faces.
The illusion that distance would keep the United States safely isolated from the war in Europe had been shattered. The Americans were in it now. They no longer had the privilege of choice.
Chapter Fifty-five
December 1941–May 1942
Mildred
The day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the United States declared war on Japan.
Four days after the attack, on the morning of December 11, Chargé d’Affaires Leland Morris, the highest-ranking American diplomat remaining in Berlin, was summoned to the office of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who read him Germany’s formal declaration of war. A few hours later, from the balcony above the Piazza Venezia in Rome, Benito Mussolini declared that Italy would join the war “on the side of heroic Japan” against the United States. Soon thereafter, appearing before the Reichstag, Hitler asserted that the Tripartite Pact obliged the Reich to join Italy in the defense of their mutual ally Japan, and he accused the United States of severely and continuously provoking Germany by violating all rules of neutrality to the benefit of the Reich’s adversaries from the moment hostilities had broken out in Europe. He had wanted to avoid war with the United States, but the perfidious Americans had given him no choice.
Several hours after, following unanimous votes of approval in the House and the Senate, the United States declared war on Germany and Italy.
As soon as Mildred heard the news, she put on her warmest coat and hat, pocketed an electric torch with a blue filter, and made her way to the American embassy. She counted several friends among the minimal staff still in residence, and she hoped to see them one last time, to learn as much as she could and to bid them farewell. But when she arrived, she found the building surrounded by storm troopers, and no one was allowed to enter. Inside, she knew, the diplomats were burning files and destroying assets they could not allow to fall into Nazi hands. As twilight descended, she stood witness, heart aching, as her fellow Americans were led out the front gates, loaded onto a military truck, and taken away.
She summoned up her courage and approached a storm trooper who stood somewhat apart from the others, smoking a cigarette. “I beg your pardon,” she asked, “but do you know where they’re taking the Americans?”
Her accent was flawless after so many years in Berlin, and she knew from his indulgent smile that he mistook her for a German. “You have nothing to fear from them,Fraulein. They’ll be locked up tight at an internment camp at Bad Nauheim until they can be exchanged for the German diplomats stranded in Washington.”
Mildred thanked him and left, eager to reach home before the utter darkness of the blackout engulfed the city.
She knew Arvid, Harro, and the others were exultant that the United States had entered the war at last. She too was relieved, although she was dismayed by the circumstances that had brought it about. And yet she also felt bereft and abandoned as the last traces of an official American presence disappeared from Berlin, as if she had been cut off from her homeland in one decisive, irreparable stroke. She knew, logically, that this was not so. She still exchanged letters with friends and family back home—heavily censored letters, but better than none at all.
As she climbed aboard the streetcar, she smiled to herself and pressed a hand to her abdomen, still flat to conceal the secret she had not yet divulged to the folks back home. She had told no one but Arvid, Inge, and Greta that she was again expecting a child, and had sworn them to secrecy. It was still too early and she had been disappointed too many times before to share the good news more widely. And itwasgood news, even though times were grim and the future uncertain. She longed for a child, and she was already thirty-nine. She and Arvid could not afford to wait.
Perhaps now that the United States had entered the war, peace and prosperity might return sooner than they expected. Mildred dared hope this might be so, but according to the Reich press, by entering the war, the Americans had only sealed their own doom. The Nazi propaganda machine worked overtime to convince the German people that the United States and its “mongrel people of Jews, Negroes, and immigrants” would be crushed beneath the superior Aryan race, their defeat both decisive and inevitable.
Such proclamations rallied the spirits of the majority of Germans, but among Berliners Mildred detected something else beneath the quiet, proud stoicism with which they managed the daily business of work, family, air raids, ration cards, and disappearing neighbors. An undercurrent of profound disquiet manifested in a sidelong scowl at headlines while passing a newsstand or a refusal to smile and nod along with a transparently false radio broadcast played over loudspeakers in a public square. The war with the Soviet Union had declined in popularity as families lost loved ones to bullets, disease, and exposure. Now the United States joining the Allies seemed to kindle a widespread, unspoken fear of the worse hardships and deprivations the coming years might bring.
The German people’s faith in their indomitable military was badly shaken when Hitler called upon the citizens of the Reich to donate warm clothing for their soldiers on the Russian front. Propaganda Minister Goebbels was given the unenviable task of announcing the collection drive, which he did in a radio broadcast on the evening of December 20. Appealing to the Christmas spirit of generosity and gratitude, he declared that considering all that the military had accomplished and sacrificed on their behalf, the German people surely could not enjoy the festive season knowing that brave soldiers were unequipped to withstand the rigors of winter cold. “As long as a single object of winter clothing remains in the Fatherland,” he proclaimed, “it must go to the front. It would be an exaggeration if I talked of sacrifices at this time. What the homeland has suffered in the war are only inconveniences compared to what our front soldiers have borne daily and hourly, over two years.” He read off a lengthy, detailed list of items most urgently needed, everything from boots and earmuffs to blankets and gloves, wrapping up with a statement from the Führer urging universal participation.
Goebbels’s announcement spurred donations, but also provoked seething anger. For years citizens of the Reich had been told that their military was the strongest, bravest, most disciplined, best-trained, and best-equipped fighting force in the world. Now, as the entire world plunged into war and enemies faced them on multiple fronts, they learned that their sons, husbands, and brothers were suffering through the brutal Russian winter without so much as hats and gloves.
“Perhaps this will prompt the German people to wonder what other lies their government has told them,” Arvid said as he and Mildred packed their suitcases before setting out to spend the holidays with family in Jena. Mildred hoped so, but with suspicious neighbors denouncing one another to the Gestapo for the smallest offenses, sometimes only out of anger, or revenge, or to settle petty scores, a widespread protest against the war seemed beyond imagination.
