Join Michael in his conversation with Jonathan Freedland about his new non-fiction book The Traitors Circle, The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them which tells the story of a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite who shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance.
Jonathan is a British journalist who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and presents the BBC Radio 4 contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland has published twelve books: three non-fiction works under his own name and nine novels, eight of them under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.
Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.
They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador’s widow and a pioneering head mistress. What unites every one of them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance: meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule. Or so they believe.
How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap?
Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich’s cruelest men, they showed a heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history that raises the question: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?
