Harnack

Donner’s biography of Mildred Harnack, who was executed by the Nazis in 1943, uses archives, interviews, diaries and other sources to present a textured account of her life as a resister.

At its center is Donner’s great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, an American woman executed by the Nazis for leading an underground resistance group in Germany during World War II.

This book about Mildred Harnack, an American woman sentenced to death by the Nazi regime in 1943, is a family history too: Donner is Harnack’s great-great-niece.

Equal parts biography, history and thriller, this book tells the story of the author’s idealistic but doomed great-great-aunt, Mildred Harnack, who, between 1932 and 1942, helped build a network of objectors in Berlin who hoped to stop the Nazis.

“It would make a wonderful novel,” he told a collaborator of Harnack’s while deciding the man’s punishment, “if it weren’t so sad.”