Class Notes

Month by month throughout the U.S., millions of college graduates follow the careers of their classmates in their alumni bulletins. For the most part the notices are terse and wholesome: "Mary Smith, '42, had a daughter last month." But last week members of the class of 1925 read a different kind of story in the Wisconsin Alumnus. Pieced together from details unearthed by investigators for the U.S. Military Government in Germany, it told what had happened to their classmate Mildred Fish.

Mildred was a teacher at Wisconsin when she met Arvid Harnack, a German graduate student. They were married in 1930 and left for Germany, where Arvid got a job in the Economics Ministry. When the Nazis came to power Arvid held on to his job, but he and Mildred together joined the underground. Then in 1942 Mildred's family in the U.S. received a hastily scrawled postcard. "Don't write," it said. "Never forget me." Soon afterward Harnack was executed by strangulation at the end of a foot-long rope.

He died firmly believing that his wife would be released after six months in jail. But Adolf Hitler conceived a better idea for the only American surely in his power. At the Fuehrer's personal order Mildred was beheaded. She was only 40, but weeks of torture, said a prison chaplain who saw her killed, had aged her by 20 years.

When Mildred's body was sent off to a laboratory for dissection, a German friend recognized it. He had it cremated and sent the ashes to Arvid's sister.

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