The Traitors Circle
The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"An astonishing true story of courage, love, and betrayal, told with the verve of a thriller. Freedland is a master at weaving spellbinding entertainments drawn from forgotten corners of history."—Mick Herron, bestselling author of Slow Horses
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist, an extraordinary true story of resistance, heroism and betrayal.
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador’s widow and a pioneering head mistress. What unites every one of them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance: meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule. Or so they believe.
How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap?
Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich’s cruelest men, they showed a heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history that raises the question: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As journalist Jonathan Freedland effectively demonstrates in this thrilling history of World War II espionage, some Germans risked everything to challenge the Nazis. A small birthday party in 1943 Berlin masked a meeting among some of the city’s elites and intellectuals who reviled Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Unfortunately, the Nazi secret police had already infiltrated their ranks. Freedland tells us about many participants in Germany’s resistance, profiling some who’d been part of the country’s former nobility, and others who were actively serving in the military. But he doesn’t gloss over the tragic failure of this resistance effort, describing how Hitler’s forces dismantled the spy ring and arrested or executed its members with ruthless efficiency. This is an engrossing chronicle of an often-overlooked arm of the Nazi resistance movement.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dramatic study, Guardian columnist Freedland (The Escape Artist) explores the secretive world of upper-crust anti-Nazi activists in the Third Reich. The focus is on a 1943 Berlin tea party held by one such activist, Elisabeth von Thadden, the aristocratic head of a girls' school (where she eschewed "Heil Hitler" salutes). Guests included Otto Kiep, a Foreign Ministry official who was part of a clandestine government anti-Nazi ring, as well as Paul Reckzeh, a young doctor who applauded other guests' musings about overthrowing Hitler—only to later make a report to his Gestapo handlers. Fellow anti-Nazi government officials leaked the report to Kiep, who warned others about Reckzeh's allegiances, but not in time to save the tea partiers, most of whom were tortured and executed. The author also recaps the extraordinarily cinematic deeds of Countess Maria von Maltzan, a friend of von Thadden's who luckily skipped the party: she sheltered Jewish fugitives, harangued SS officers over their investigations, hid in a tree to evade searchlights and guard dogs, and shot a man in a Berlin sewer. Freedland makes his narrative into a tense cat-and-mouse game, pitting sadistic Nazi apparatchiks and their unsavory minions against prey whose considerable resources, privileged sense of entitlement, and sheer moxie give them a fighting chance. It's a thrilling account of the struggle against Nazism at its most up-close and nerve-wracking.
