Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack (24 May 1901 – 22 December 1942) was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany.

Harnack came from an intellectual family and was originally a humanist.

He was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance.

After starting an undercover discussion group based at the Berlin Abendgymnasium, he met Harro Schulze-Boysen, who ran a similar faction.

Like numerous groups in other parts of the world, the undercover political factions led by Harnack and Schulze-Boysen later developed into an espionage network that supplied military and economic intelligence to the Soviet Union.

The group was later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Abwehr.

In 1919 he became a member of the Freikorps, a volunteer militia.

From 1919 to 1923 he studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University, the University of Graz, and the University of Hamburg; he became a Doctor of Law in 1924.

He completed postgraduate studies in economics in Hamburg and the London School of Economics before being awarded a Rockefeller scholarship to study at the University of Wisconsin.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Harnack was influenced by the industrial economist and labor historian John R. Commons, and saw him as a mentor.

In 1926, Harnack met American literary historian Mildred Fish, also a graduate student at the Wisconsin University, after Harnack wandered into the wrong lecture hall.

After a brief friendship and romance, they were engaged on 6 June 1926 and married on 7 August 1926.

The couple met Margaretha "Greta" Lorke, a German student of sociology, at a Friday evening gathering organized by Commons in Madison.

A friendship that lasted for many years developed between Mildred and Lorke, the latter being drawn into an intimate group of Wisconsin radicals known as the Friday Niters Club.

According to a fellow student and member of the group, Hazel Briggs Rice, the Friday Niters Club members considered themselves to be liberal Progressives.

Lorke later married Adam Kuckhoff.

The Harnacks' Friday Niters Club was a preface to their involvement in what became known as the Sacco and Vanzetti case, which became a cause célèbre.

Many in the group protested the planned execution of the pair, and Arvid petitioned the governor to create a committee to investigate the controversy.

The trial radicalised the Harnacks.

At the end of the semester in March 1928, Arvid returned to Germany, as his fellowship had ended, while Mildred stayed for another year to complete her studies before moving to Germany on 2 June 1929, at which point the couple lived in the small university towns of Jena and Giessen.

In 1931, Arvid was promoted to his second doctorate, a Doctor of Philosophy from University of Giessen with a thesis titled: Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten ("The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States") that dealt explicitly with the history of the American workers' movement.

The thesis was sponsored by Friedrich Lenz, who founded the Giessen School of National Economics.

The Harnacks, like many of their literary counterparts, shared an interest in the Soviet Union.

They decided to set up a study group in the autumn of 1931, along with Lenz.

At the height of the Great Depression, Harnack's hope was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between the East and West.

Lenz believed that only an alliance with the Soviet Union would relieve Germany of the constraints of the Treaty of Versailles, re-establish the country's position, and return it to great nation status.

Harnack founded the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft ("Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), or ARPLAN, with Lenz in 1931.

It was an organisation of writers and academics that met once a month to discuss the Soviet planned economy.

Harnack became secretary of the group and Lenz became the president.

The first meeting took place on 3 and 4 January 1932.

The study group had around 50 members.

Some of the more prominent members were the economist Emil Lederer, the sociologist and historian Alfred Meusel, the politician Otto Hoetzsch, the political scientist Klaus Mehnert, the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, the Marxist historian Hermann Duncker, the playwright, historian Karl August Wittfogel, the politician Ernst Niekisch the publicist Hans Ebeling (Publizist), the philosopher Ernst Jünger and politician Count von Ernst Graf zu Reventlow.

Also among them was the leading Soviet economist and diplomat Sergei Bessonov, who at the time was a member of the Russian trade delegation, and Alexander Hirschfeld, who was Arvid's contact at the Soviet embassy in Berlin.

At the time, the Harnacks were also members of the Association of Intellectual Workers (Bund der Geistesarbeiter), a communist front organisation.

He and his American-born wife, Mildred Fish, were executed by the Nazi regime in 1942 and 1943, respectively.

Harnack's family were prominent and academically gifted Protestant Germans from the Baltic region.

His father was literary history professor Otto Harnack and his mother was Clara Harnack (née Reichau), an artist.

Reichau was the granddaughter of Justus von Liebig, one of the principal founders of organic chemistry.

Harnack's siblings were Falk Harnack, his elder brother; Inge Harnack; and Angela Harnack, a violin teacher.

Harnack was the nephew of theologian Adolf von Harnack.