Арвид Харнак: Жизнь и борьба в нацистской Германии

German jurist, economist, and resistance fighter in Nazi Germany (1901–1942)

Arvid Harnack (; 24 May 1901 – 22 December 1942) was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an intellectual family and was originally a humanist. He was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance. After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze Boysen, who ran a similar faction. Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze Boysen later developed into an espionage network that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union. The group was later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr. He and his American born wife, Mildred Fish, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942 and 1943, respectively.

Harnack's family were prominent and academically gifted Protestant Germans from the Baltic region. His father was literary history professor Otto Harnack and his mother was Clara Harnack (née Reichau), an artist. Reichau was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig, one of the principal founders of organic chemistry. Harnack's siblings were Falk Harnack, his elder brother; Inge Harnack; and Angela Harnack, a violin teacher. Harnack was the nephew of theologian Adolf von Harnack. In 1919 he became a member of the Freikorps, a volunteer militia. From 1919 to 1923 he studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University, the University of Graz, and the University of Hamburg; he became a Doctor of Law in 1924. He completed postgraduate studies in economics in Hamburg and the London School of Economics before being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study at the University of Wisconsin. In Madison, Wisconsin, Harnack was influenced by the industrial economist and labor historian John R. Commons, and saw him as a mentor. In 1926, Harnack met American literary historian Mildred Fish, also a graduate student at the Wisconsin University, after Harnack wandered into the wrong lecture hall. After a brief friendship and romance, they were engaged on 6 June 1926 and married on 7 August 1926. The couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology, at a Friday evening gathering organized by Commons in Madison. A friendship that lasted for many years developed between Mildred and Lorke, the latter being drawn into an intimate group of Wisconsin radicals known as the Friday Niters Club. According to a fellow student and member of the group, Hazel Briggs Rice, the Friday Niters Club members considered themselves to be liberal Progressives. Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff. Harnack became secretary of the group and Lenz became the president. By 1935, Harnack was employed as a lecturer on foreign policy at the University of Berlin. On 8 August 1935, three months after Harnack joined the trade ministry, he met with Hirschfeld in a meeting that lasted three hours. During the meeting, Hirschfeld informed Harnack that his position in the trade ministry could provide useful information that could be used to defeat the Nazis, and offered to establish a system to convey the documents to Moscow. Harnack agreed to be an informer and was given the codename Balt, assigned a control officer, Alexander Belkin, and given a mission to increase his sources by building a network of contacts. However, Hirschfeld requested that Harnack break off all relations with the KPD, and to avoid working for the resistance, but Harnack refused; he was never interested in becoming a Soviet agent, considered himself a communist, and would supply information to anybody who would take part in anti fascist operations that helped to destroy the Nazis. According to KGB sources, between 1935 and 1938 Harnack supplied information about German currency, German investments abroad, and details of the German foreign debt. He also provided details of secret trade agreements to Soviet intelligence. During that period, Harnack circulated the same information to other groups. In 1935, Harnack met Harro Schulze Boysen for the first time, but Harnack decided not to meet again due to their different temperaments. At the end of 1937, and formally on 3 March 1938, U. S. ambassador William Dodd was replaced by Hugh Wilson. Joining him as First Secretary and monetary attaché at the U. S. Embassy was Donald Heath. U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. felt that the Berlin embassy needed a treasury attaché who could ferret out German economic information, so Heath became an intelligence agent in the office of coordination at the embassy (a forerunner of the Office of Strategic Services). His job was to recruit sympathetic informers that could provide that type of information. Mildred met Louise Heath, Donald's wife, at the American Women's Club in Bellevuestrasse in 1937. The Harnacks became friends with the Heaths, but Arvid was resistant to Donald's proposal at first; by 1938 he started providing him with intelligence. At the start of World War II, Louise and Donald Heath Jr. fled to Norway before returning several months later. When they returned, Louise asked Mildred to tutor her son in American literature. The two couples began to regularly spend weekends together and occasionally went on vacation together. At other times Arvid and Donald met in the countryside to exchange intelligence, but it became increasingly dangerous. Between December 1939 and March 1941, Donald Jr. couriered between Harnack and the American embassy, delivered food from Denmark and Italy, and gave medicine to the Harnacks. After the war, Donald acknowledged that Arvid was his source for German economic intelligence. In 1937, former Prussian minister of culture and religious socialist Adolf Grimme was brought into the group through Kuckhoff and playwright Günther Weisenborn. Harnack had previously met Grimme at the funeral of Adolf von Harnack on 10 June 1930. Grimme was a religious socialist who belonged to the Covenant of Religious Socialists of Germany, so Harnack used considerable effort to convince him to become a communist. On 26 January 1937, a new civil service law gave Nazi officials the power to sack tenured civil servants. Walther Funk, Harnack's manager at the Ministry, persuaded him to join the Nazi Party to protect himself, and become what was known as a Hamburger (i. e. Nazi brown outside, Moscow red inside). In May 1937, Harnack joined the Nazi Party with the number 4153569. Harnack's nephew, Wolfgang Havemann, became a frequent visitor to the group discussions after 1938.

On 6 October 1969, Harnack was posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner. This honour has been proven to be erroneous, as it mistakenly interpreted Red Orchestra as a communist spy network working for the Soviets. This interpretation of the resistance group, based on original slander by the Gestapo, was used in a similar way in the West, in which the rebels were not honoured there, but persecuted as traitors until the 1970s. In Magdeburg, a street called Harnackstraße is named after the Harnacks, as well as similar named streets in Lichtenberg, Berlin; and Reudnitz, Leipzig. In Jena, a street known as the Arvid Harnack Straße is named after him. In the courtyard location at Unter den Linden 6 of the Humboldt University of Berlin is a memorial stone. In Neukölln, Berlin, in the Hasenheide, on the corner of Lilienthalstraße, a plaque commemorates the Harnacks and Heym. Stolpersteins for the Harnakcs were laid in front of 14 Genthiner Straße 14 in the Tiergarten on 20 September 2013 in the presence of US Ambassador John B. Emerson.