How a novelist cracked the real-life story of her Nazi-fighting ancestor

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How a novelist cracked the real-life story of her Nazi-fighting ancestor
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How a novelist cracked the real-life story of her Nazi-fighting great-great-aunt.

uniform for a disguise, the 11-year-old boy would carry coded notes in his blue knapsack. If he suspected trouble, he would whistle a Nazi party anthem as a warning.

Speaking via video from her home in Brooklyn, Donner — who grew up in Santa Monica — moves across her office, crowded with research materials, to retrieve a large white binder containing copies of Mildred’s letters. Donald Heath Jr. and author Rebecca Donner in 2016. Heath, the son of an American intelligence operative, had been a courier working with Donner’s great-great aunt, the American spy Mildred Harnack.And what a story. Many accounts of Mildred and Arvid Harnack describe him as a scholar and her as “an English teacher” or “housewife,” but this is inaccurate. Arvid Harnack did have a PhD, but he essentially worked as a bureaucrat in the Reich Ministry of Economics.

Donner says she was careful not to speak for Mildred or presume to understand her motives. However, “In reading the letters she wrote to her mother, I have the sense that she was at times quite lonely as an American woman in Berlin,” especially once the American Embassy was cleared out and few fellow Americans were left in the city. “That’s when she turned to espionage for the Americans.

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