Free Red Orchestra by Anne Nelson

facility called Columbia-Haus, an obsolete military prison. At the beginning of the takeover, Communist, Social Democrat, and trade unionist victims had been hauled into
Wilde Lager
(“wild camps”), improvised in warehouses, pubs, and cellars. But these were soon filled, and Columbia-Haus was reopened to provide additional facilities for torture and interrogation. Although the Harnacks were probably not aware of it, some of the trucks that sped past their apartment carried people they knew, such as Paul Massing, an agricultural economist and member of Arvid's Soviet study group. Massing was beaten and interrogated at Columbia-Haus, then sent to the Oranienburg concentration camp for five months' solitary confinement. 11 The Harnacks, distressed by the daily “traffic,” began to look for new rooms once again.
    Mildred, fired from her position at the university, was now teaching literature at a night school for working-class adults. Once again, she quickly won the respect and affection of her students, although theywere sometimes taken aback by her American spontaneity. (Sometimes she livened things up by leading the class in American folk songs.) She filled the rest of her time with occasional lecturing, writing, and hosting literary teas, and began to publish reviews and essays in the Berlin daily press. There was no problem writing about most topics in American literature, as long as they didn't stray into the areas of German controversy. Arvid, for his part, did his best to disappear into the role of a colorless legal bureaucrat.
    Mildred and Arvid's friend Greta followed the crisis from a distance. In March, just after the Reichstag fire, she had traveled to London. There she received a letter from her old flame, Adam Kuckhoff. She read it, her “heart pounding,” on the steps of the British Museum. Most of her friends had discouraged her from returning to Germany, she recalled, telling her that “it would be wiser to wait for at least a few months. I would be naïve to think that I could continue my study of sociology (as if I believed it!).”
    But Adam's letter carried a different message. Adam had written: “Come—I'm waiting for you.” 12 Her friends' warnings were quickly dismissed, and she decided to return.
    But Greta received another letter in April, this one from her father: “Yesterday we read in the newspaper about the professors' leaves of absence. Frankfurt-am-Main alone had six listed. Unfortunately Professor Mannheim was among them.” 13
    This was bad news. Sociologist Karl Mannheim had retained Greta as his secretary and librarian the year before, eager to mine her knowledge of academic developments in the United States. The professor was in the process of laying the intellectual foundation for the sociology of knowledge, but he was also a Hungarian Jew, and was summarily dismissed once the Nazis took power. 14
    Greta's return to Frankfurt was tense. Her academic program was closed down and her typewriter had been confiscated. Her landlady trembled when Greta told her that she was going to see the Nazis to get her typewriter back.
    The new officials were expecting her. They had some questions.
    “Where is your airplane?” they demanded, waving a flyer bearing Greta's signature that they had found posted in the sociology department.The paper gave the details for a “flying group” meeting on nearby “Zeppelin Street.” Greta could only laugh, explaining that their study group met “on the fly” in different locations. Fortunately, the Nazis laughed, too. But the incident reminded Greta that in the new Germany, casual misunderstandings could have dangerous consequences. 15
    There was nothing to hold her in Frankfurt, and Adam was in Berlin. Greta returned to the capital, where she would spend the rest of her life. Soon after she arrived she encountered Arvid Harnack. She was certain it was not a coincidence. Arvid was putting together a discussion circle, or
Kreis,
made up of opponents