At the core of this gripping study is a tea party that took place in Berlin on 10 September 1943. Present were critics of the Nazi regime, dissidents who, from a Nazi perspective, were all traitors to the Third Reich. The host was Elisabeth von Thadden, a former headmistress and devout Christian, now working for the Red Cross. Other attendees included Otto Kiep, an outspoken ex-diplomat, lately employed by German counter-intelligence; Arthur Zarden, a former senior civil servant at the Treasury who had been married to a Jew; and Hanna Solf, widow of a German ambassador to Japan, who had hosted a salon at her home since the 1930s where influential critics from the political world could meet and exchange views in private. At von Thadden’s tea party the conversation was similarly critical of the Nazis, but unfortunately not private. For alongside the dissidents, there was one extra guest, a doctor, whom she had invited at the last minute. He was a Gestapo spy, code-named ‘Agent Robby’. The information he extracted from the tea party set in motion a series of events which culminated the following year in arrests, trials in the People’s Court and gruesome executions.

While historians have previously explored elements of this story through the lives of some of those involved, Jonathan Freedland’s account is the first to combine the various threads. As a bestselling novelist and an incisive journalist who has highlighted the dangers of fascism, Freedland is expertly equipped to narrate this ‘traitors circle’ from the 1940s. With short chapters and a sense of constant foreboding, the book is a page-turner. In its pacy style, it resembles Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s novel The Passenger (written in 1938 and rediscovered to acclaim in 2021); its sheer paranoia evokes Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin. But in contrast to Fallada’s story of small-scale working-class resistance, Freedland’s is one about dissidents who all hailed from aristocratic backgrounds or well-established positions in German high society. As such, they often had access to the corridors of power and tended to be overlooked by the Nazi machinery of surveillance. 

Most interesting are the courageous women who went beyond their roles as teachers, carers or wives and performed small acts of resistance. Until 1940, Elisabeth von Thadden, having grown up on a huge Pomeranian landed estate, had run her own boarding school for girls near Heidelberg. She was committed to