The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them

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. (Oct.)