Red Orchestra, Anne Nelson
Red Orchestra, Anne Nelson
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Red Orchestra
The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler

Author: Anne Nelson

Narrator: Anne Nelson

Unabridged: 13 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/21/2009

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

This riveting account of German resistance is based on years of research by the distinguished journalist Anne Nelson. This is a beautiful and moving portrait of ordinary but heroic figures—an untold story of a circle of Germans and German-Americans in Berlin who took a principled stand against Hitler and the Holocaust. They expressed their opposition by infiltrating the Nazi ministries, distributing samizdat literature to break through the information blockade, and trying to help the Allied forces achieve a military victory.

The narrative is constructed around the life of Greta Kuckhoff, an "ordinary woman" educated at the University of Wisconsin, who returned to Germany only to see it sink into a fascist nightmare. The book relates the history of her resistance circle against an explanation of how Germany's civil society was systematically eroded.

Greta and her friends grapple with questions of ongoing concern today. How can a citizen balance the tensions between patriotism and ethics? How can civic duty be defined in a period when peaceful protest fails? How do government restrictions and the concentration of media ownership compromise democratic expression?

About Anne Nelson

Anne Nelson is an acclaimed journalist, playwright, and lecturer. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New Harmony Dramatists Fellowship. Her articles have been published widely, and she is the author of The Guys, one of the first major plays to address the September 11 attacks. She also served as a war correspondent in El Salvador and Guatemala from 1980 to 1983, and her articles appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. Her first book, Murder Under Two Flags: The United States, Puerto Rico, and the Cerro Maravilla Cover-up, was made into a feature film.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Michael on March 07, 2013

A wonderfully researched book that brings to life on its pages the people that resisted the Nazi's from the inside. These people risked everything to expose the evils of the Nazi party; the moral and ethical dilemmas they faced are laid bare on the pages. It gives a view of life in Berlin and the pa......more

Goodreads review by Jim on October 19, 2011

RED ORCHESTRA, by Anne Nelson Anne Nelson, who wrote the play I did last spring, THE GUYS, has revealed in this book a facet of her wide-ranging persona I was not initially aware of when I worked with her in April. I knew she was a renowned war correspondent, playwright, human-rights reporter, and pr......more

Goodreads review by Kate on February 23, 2014

When we think of Germany under Hitler, we often think of Germans as being either enthusiastic supporters of Nazism, or passive bystanders who did nothing to stop him. This fascinating non-fiction account of the Berlin Underground shows that there were, in fact, many Germans who risked everything to......more

Goodreads review by Ali on June 30, 2012

For me, this was a profoundly important book. Because it reverses the common lessons about human nature taken from Germany - that governments are saviours, and people are weak brutes who secretly revel in the persecution of their neighbours. This is about those who walk into almost certain torture a......more

Goodreads review by Caitlin on January 02, 2018

The received wisdom of the Holocaust is that all the Jews went passively to their deaths like so many sheep and all Germans either committed heinous war crimes or stood passively by and allowed them to happen. There is also the notion that only Jews died in concentration camps. Then, if you're like......more

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