Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack grew up in an academic family. After completing his school-leaving examinations early due to the war, he joined a Freikorps volunteer unit in 1919. As a law graduate, he received a Rockefeller scholarship to continue his studies 1926-1928 in Madison, Wisconsin. Here he met his future wife, Mildred. In 1931 Harnack completed his PhD in Giessen on the pre-Marxist labour movement in the USA. In summer 1932 he travelled to the Soviet Union with a delegation of the society for the study of Soviet-Russian planned economy (ARPLAN), which he had founded. After 1933, Harnack ran a seminar attended initially by young workers, who were later joined by the writer Adam Kuckhoff, his wife Greta, and for a time the religious socialist and former Prussian Culture Minister Adolf Grimme, entrepreneur Leo Skrzypczynski and others. Harnack’s aim was to enable the participants to understand Nazism’s political and economic context and prepare them for the time after the Nazi regime’s fall. He forged contacts with Nazi-critical employees of government offices. He talked to representatives of the American and Soviet embassies, relaying his impressions of the political and economic situation in Germany. Employed at the US Department of the Ministry of Economics from 1935, he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937 and rose to become a senior government adviser (Oberregierungsrat) in 1942. From 1940, Harnack cooperated with Harro Schulze-Boysen, whom he had met in 1935. In early 1941 they informed a staff member of the Soviet embassy about Germany’s preparations for a military attack on the Soviet Union. In early 1942 Harnack completed a study on the state of monopoly capital under Nazism, “Das nationalsozialistische Stadium des Monopolkapitals”, which was widely read in resistance circles in Berlin and Hamburg. On 7 September 1942 Harnack was arrested, and on 19 December condemned to death by the Reichkriegsgericht, the highest military court under the Nazis. He was murdered on 22 December 1942, on Hitler’s orders, in Berlin-Plötzensee.