THE BOHEMIANS

The story of a valiant group of resisters who stealthily undermined the Nazi regime.

Drawing on a trove of unpublished and archival documents from the German Resistance Memorial Center, the Institute for Contemporary History, and German, British, Russian, and American national repositories, screenwriter, novelist, and journalist Ohler creates a taut, absorbing tale of anti-Nazi resistance. Told in the present tense, the narrative conveys a sense of immediacy and encroaching terror. Central to the history are Harro Schulze-Boysen and his wife, Libertas, an attractive bourgeois couple, “apparently ‘Aryan’ through and through,” who become the vortex for a daring movement. Harro began as an idealistic publisher of the Gegner, a prominent journal dedicated to raising consciousness about threats to society from the rise of Nazism. “A people divided by hate…cannot get up again,” Harro wrote in one piece. He felt optimistic that Hitler would fail and that Germans’ enthusiasm for the Nazis could be directed “toward a genuine social revolution.” After he was arrested and tortured for his activities, however, Harro was forced to adopt a new strategy: “to appear outwardly unsuspicious in order to change the system from within.” To further that strategy, he enlisted in the air force. Libertas, a publicist for MGM and a member of the Nazi Party, radically changed her “immature, Nazi-oriented worldview” after falling in love with Harro, soon becoming a valued, if sometimes erratic, member of their “social network,” which spread and surfaced, focused in part on printing and disseminating pamphlets and flyers. Harro, whose military position put him “at a nexus of information of the German war machine,” had a vital role in producing documents with which to “flood the country with sensitive information about how the war is going and bring about a popular revolt.” Ohler capably recounts the intrepid activities, alliances, and betrayals that led to sweeping arrests and executions.

Sharply drawn characters enliven a tragic history.