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.
Life
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 University of Wisconsin, 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. The Harnacks' Friday Niters Club was a preface to their involvement in what became known as the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which became a cause célèbre. Many in the group protested the planned execution of the pair, and Arvid petitioned the governor to create a committee to investigate the controversy. The trial radicalised the Harnacks.
At the end of the semester in March 1928, Arvid returned to Germany, as his fellowship had ended, while Mildred stayed for another year to complete her studies before moving to Germany on 2 June 1929, at which point the couple lived in the small university towns of Jena and Giessen. In 1931, Arvid was promoted to his second doctorate, a Doctor of Philosophy from University of Giessen with a thesis titled: Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten ("The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States") that dealt explicitly with the history of the American workers' movement. The thesis was sponsored by Friedrich Lenz, who founded the Giessen School of National Economics.
The Harnacks, like many of their literary counterparts, shared an interest in the Soviet Union. They decided to set up a study group in the autumn of 1931, along with Lenz. At the height of the Great Depression, Harnack's hope was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between the East and West. Lenz believed that only an alliance with the Soviet Union would relieve Germany of the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles, re-establish the country's position, and return it to great nation status.
ARPLAN Harnack founded the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft ("Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), or ARPLAN, with Lenz in 1931. It was an organisation of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy. Harnack became secretary of the group and Lenz became the president. The first meeting took place on 3 and 4 January 1932. The study group had around 50 members. Some of the more prominent members were the economist Emil Lederer, the sociologist and historian Alfred Meusel, the politician Otto Hoetzsch, the political scientist Klaus Mehnert, the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, the Marxist historian Hermann Duncker, the playwright and historian Karl August Wittfogel, the politician Ernst Niekisch, the publicist , the philosopher Ernst Jünger and politician Count von Ernst Graf zu Reventlow.
Also among them was the leading Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, who at the time was a member of the Russian trade delegation, and Alexander Hirschfeld, who was Arvid's contact at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. At the time, the Harnacks were also members of the Association of Intellectual Workers (Bund der Geistesarbeiter), a communist front organisation. They were seen by Moscow as able to recruit "people of good will" or "people of influence" but not necessarily party members. According to Georgi Dimitrov, the head of Communist International, the organizations allowed them to extend their influence to people that were difficult to reach. Communist or KPD members stayed in the background in meetings that were open to everyone, but controlled the discussion to gain influence. The real purpose of organisations like ARPLAN was to draw influential people who supported a pro-Soviet agenda in relation to German policy. Bessonov was ordered to recruit suitable German technocrats for visits to the Soviet Union and extract useful information for the Soviet trade legation.
Salon In January 1932, Mildred lost her position teaching English literature at the University of Berlin. In May 1932, the couple were forced to move to 61 Hasenheide in Neukölln due to the presence of Nazis, which they leased from Stefan Heym. In his postwar novel, Nachruf, Heym stated he found the Harnacks to be a genial academic couple who had "resolute views" on the Nazis. The Harnacks hosted a Saturday salon at Hasenheide where intellectual discussion among editors, publishers, and authors was freely shared, and where Harnack lectured on political economy and Marxism. Amongst those who attended were publishers Samuel Fischer, Ernst Rowohlt, and Heinrich Marie Ledig-Rowohlt; translator Franz Frein; physician and writer ; authors and playwrights Adam Kuckhoff, Max Tau, Otto Zoff, and Ernst von Salomon; journalist Margret Boveri; critic ; and some of Mildred's students, including .
23 members of ARPLAN, including Harnack, went on a three-week study trip to the Soviet Union from 20 August to 12 September 1932, which was organised with the help of Bessonov and the Soviet embassy. They observed the Soviet economy in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Kiev, and the Dnieper region. There were allegations that Harnack was recruited by Soviet intelligence during the trip. David Dallin describes the trip as the turning point in Harnack's life, and that Harnack agreed to spy was for the Soviet Union when he was bluntly asked by senior Comintern leaders. This allegation was repeated in 1994 by the KGB's deputy director, Pavel Sudoplatov, though it was not recorded in Harnack's own records. Even though the group travelled through Ukraine as academics and took notes, it failed to notice the famine before them; when Arthur Koestler went there around the same time, he documented starving people in almost every station. Koestler believed that the Harnacks' mentality was driven by the influence of Soviet propaganda, and that although they knew the standard of living in the West was much higher than the Soviet Union, they judged that Soviet citizens were much better off under Stalin than they were under the czar.
Career change By the end of 1932, Harnack could not pursue an academic career, as the universities overwhelmingly supported Hitler, and he was no longer eligible for a career as a National Socialist. His thesis on "The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States" could no longer be published. In the same year, he instructed illegal training courses for former members of the Marxist Workers School (MASCH) and at the Berliner Abendgymnasium ("Berliner Städtische Abendgymnasium für Erwachsene"), an evening high school for adults seeking to obtain the Abitur and university admission. Mildred also taught English literature at the same school. While at the Abendgymnasium, Harnack met KPD member and design engineer Karl Behrens, one of Mildred's students, who became one of Harnack's closest comrades-in-arms in the resistance.
After Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the Reichstag fire in early 1933, the Harnacks kept a low profile; they decided to dissolve ARPLAN in March 1933. The membership list was destroyed and many members fled abroad. Lenz was attacked at Giessen University by the Schutzstaffel, his house was raided, and he was dismissed from the university in September due to being "politically unreliable".
Resistance
Early stages In 1933, Harnack was appointed advisor at the Reich Ministry of Economics (Reichswirtschaftsministerium), before becoming a senior civil servant (Oberregierungsrat) in 1938, and worked on payment balances and foreign exchange questions about trade. As chief of trade policy, Harnack was part of many decision-making processes involving a very large number of people, including contacts in the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt). Over time, Harnack gathered detailed knowledge of the German economy, and when he was promoted to senior civil servant, he was legitimately able to form contacts with American trade counterparts at the American embassy. The same year, he also finished his legal qualifications in Jena, and successfully completed the junior law examination.
With the Kuckhoffs, the Harnacks assembled a discussion circle that debated political perspectives on the time after the Nazis' expected downfall. Between 1928 and 1929, Adam Kuckhoff headed the cultural-political magazine Die Tat ("The Deed"). At that time, he became acquainted with the communist John Sieg, who was previously a reporter on the communist newspaper, Die Rote Fahne. Harnack was good friends with lawyer and academic Carl Dietrich von Trotha, and knew lawyer Horst von Einsiedel since 1934. The group met to discuss and disseminate communist theories that included material Harnack was able to copy from the ministry.
In 1934, the couple moved to the third-floor apartment at 16 Schöneberger Woyrschstraße, close to the Tiergarten. The house was destroyed in the war and is now known as 14 Genthiner Straße.
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.