World War II Resistance Fighter. Although born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she was raised learning German customs and the German language. While attending the University of Wisconsin, she met and fell in love with a German exchange student, Arvid Harnack. The couple was married in 1926, and two years later moved to Germany, where they developed a deep passion for social injustice and spoke out freely on the matter. Their activism caught the attention of the Nazis, but the couple continued speaking out on issues of concern. At the start of World War II, this couple helped develop "The Red Orchestra," an underground resistance group that began publishing anti-Nazi material, helped political dissidents escape Germany, and began transmitting information to Russia to help the Allied cause. In 1942, the group was discovered and arrested. Her husband, Arvid, was found guilty of treason and executed on Christmas Eve, 1942. His wife was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a concentration camp. Later, however, Adolph Hitler, wanting to make an example out of the American woman, urged the court to review her case. She was sentenced to death on January 16, 1943, without any new evidence. One month later, she was beheaded at the Plotzensee Prison. She was the only female American executed inside the German Reich for opposing Hitler. She is honored annually on the date of her death in her home state by Wisconsin schoolchildren. A school was named in her honor in Berlin, and she is remembered at the memorial in Berlin's former political prison Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror). A cenotaph for her and her husband was erected in the city cemetery in Zehlendorf, Berlin, Germany.
World War II Resistance Fighter. Although born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she was raised learning German customs and the German language. While attending the University of Wisconsin, she met and fell in love with a German exchange student, Arvid Harnack. The couple was married in 1926, and two years later moved to Germany, where they developed a deep passion for social injustice and spoke out freely on the matter. Their activism caught the attention of the Nazis, but the couple continued speaking out on issues of concern. At the start of World War II, this couple helped develop "The Red Orchestra," an underground resistance group that began publishing anti-Nazi material, helped political dissidents escape Germany, and began transmitting information to Russia to help the Allied cause. In 1942, the group was discovered and arrested. Her husband, Arvid, was found guilty of treason and executed on Christmas Eve, 1942. His wife was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a concentration camp. Later, however, Adolph Hitler, wanting to make an example out of the American woman, urged the court to review her case. She was sentenced to death on January 16, 1943, without any new evidence. One month later, she was beheaded at the Plotzensee Prison. She was the only female American executed inside the German Reich for opposing Hitler. She is honored annually on the date of her death in her home state by Wisconsin schoolchildren. A school was named in her honor in Berlin, and she is remembered at the memorial in Berlin's former political prison Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror). A cenotaph for her and her husband was erected in the city cemetery in Zehlendorf, Berlin, Germany.
Bio by: Bigwoo
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