To be clear, Adolf Hitler didn't direct a dictatorial finger across the Atlantic Ocean toward a random teacher on U.S. soil and demand her assassination. Rather, Mildred Fish-Harnack had the terrible fortune of being on German soil when Hitler came to power. As the story goes, she was fired from her teaching job at the University of Berlin after only about a year and a half, and upon leaving she got involved in an underground, anti-Nazi resistance movement called the "Red Orchestra," per The New York Times. Eventually, the Gestapo discovered a Red Orchestra radio transmission, which led to Fish-Harnack's arrest and eventually execution. As the University of Wisconsin-Madison says, Fish-Harnack was the only American citizen executed on orders from Hitler himself — at least indirectly.
Some sites like How Stuff Works overstate the case and portray Fish-Harnack as a comic book-like action figure, stating that she "led a German resistance that enraged Hitler." The German site Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand states things more realistically. After Fish-Harnack got kicked out of the University of Berlin she took up teaching night classes in the city. Some of her students were politically minded, and she passed along democratically-leaning documents like speeches from U.S. President Roosevelt through her dissident network. Both Fish-Harnack and her husband Arvid did this until she completed her doctorate in 1941, the year World War II started. She and Arvid got arrested the next year.
[Featured image by И.М. Бондаренко via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled]
