After much agonizing, Arvid joins the Nazi Party, becoming member number 4153569. His cover is, at last, complete.
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, p. 226
This Wicked Game
January 12, 2022 at 11:45 pm (Books, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Arvid Harnack, COVID Reading, history, Mildred Harnack, nonfiction, reading lists, spies
Sentence of the Day, 2nd Wednesday of 2022
January 12, 2022 at 9:55 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Berlin, COVID Reading, heroes, history, nonfiction, reading lists, resistance, World War II
“I have put my revenge in cold storage.”
— Harro Schulze-Boysen, after his release from a concentration camp
All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, p. 217
Ernst von Salomon “ran into him on a crowded sidewalk in Berlin. Harro’s face was so disfigured that Ernst didn’t recognize his friend at first. “His features were very different,” Ernst reflected years later in a memoir. “He had lost half an ear and his face was covered with inflamed wounds that had scarcely healed.”
His crime? “Preparations for high treason.” He “published an anti-Nazi underground newspaper called Gegner (Opponent). “SS officers raided the office and smashed the printing press.” At the time of his first arrest, in 1935, he was 26.
Self finds out from Wikipedia that he was executed in 1942. He was 33.
ATFTOOD, pp. 155 – 156
January 12, 2022 at 1:41 am (Books, Lists, Surprises, Women Writers)
Tags: Berlin, COVID Reading, history, horror, Mondays, nonfiction, reading lists, World War II
When Donner gives us the ages of Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, and Hermann Goring — self’s jaw drops to the floor. Heinrich Himmler, “leader of the SS and architect of the concentration camp system” is thirty-three. THIRTY-THREE! Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Gestapo, is thirty.
The oldest, Goring, is forty-one.
omg. Rank amateurs, all three. The Night of the Long Knives was their rehearsal.
- In Munich, a man is playing cello in the study of his apartment while his wife prepares dinner and their three children, ages nine, eight, and two, play a game. The doorbell rings. Four SS officers march in and arrest him. Later, they shoot him and deliver his casket to his wife with an apology. The man wasn’t who they thought he was. They’d confused Willi Schmid, a music critic, with Willi Schmidt, a Storm Trooper.
Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 