American Resistance Member Is Honored in Berlin

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/world/europe/american-resistance-member-is-honored-in-berlin.html

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BERLIN — The man in the floppy hat and khaki vest was on his knees, pounding two small, brass-plated bricks into the wet sidewalk. One bore the name Arvid Harnack, the other of Mr. Harnack’s wife, Mildred Fish-Harnack — the only American civilian to be executed on the direct order of Adolf Hitler.

On Friday afternoon, more than 50 people huddled under umbrellas for the commemoration ceremony on the front step of Genthinerstrasse 16, the Harnacks’ last address before being arrested by the Nazis for working with the resistance.

The man hammering the stones into place was Gunter Demnig, a German artist who has spent years installing more than 43,000 of these so-called Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” into the sidewalks of 16 countries across Europe, making them one of the largest decentralized memorials to victims of the Third Reich. Some 5,000 of them are in Berlin alone.

Some of the people who attended were Ms. Fish-Harnack’s great-nieces, others were cousins or second cousins. The United States ambassador to Germany, John B. Emerson, also delivered remarks.

“She couldn’t turn her back on Germany,” said Jilly Allenby-Ryan, the grandchild of Mr. Harnack’s sister. She was reading aloud from a letter her grandmother had written to remember Ms. Fish-Harnack after her death. “She wasn’t without fear, but she was brave,” Ms. Allenby-Ryan continued.

A University of Wisconsin alumna who married a young German graduate student, Ms. Fish-Harnack moved to the eastern German city of Jena in 1929, only months before Black Tuesday and the dawn of the global financial crisis that would eventually propel Hitler and his Nazi party out of obscurity and into Parliament.

In 1931, Ms. Fish-Harnack got a job lecturing on American literature at Berlin University at the same time that Albert Einstein was on the faculty there, according to the Web site of Wisconsin Public Television, which produced a documentary about Ms. Fish-Harnack. But the position was short lived. Fifteen months later the university had fired her for not being “Nazi enough.”

Unsettled by the swell in far-right extremism in German society, Ms. Fish-Harnack and her husband joined the resistance group Rote Kapella, or Red Orchestra, with which they worked until being captured by the Nazis on Sept. 7, 1942, while on vacation at the Baltic Sea. Mr. Harnack was hanged three days before Christmas that year; Ms. Fish-Harnack was guillotined two months later. Her execution marked the only time an American civilian was murdered at Hitler’s direct behest, according to historians at the ceremony and information from the United States Embassy in Berlin.

At one point during the afternoon, Neela Härting, 79, pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper to show to Ms. Allenby-Ryan, her cousin. It was a photocopy of a black-and-white picture of a 25-year-old Mr. Harnack dated Sept. 20, 1925.

“They would not want to be remembered as heroes or victims,” Ms. Allenby-Ryan would later say. “But as people.”