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

"An astonishing true story of courage, love, and betrayal, told with the verve of a thriller. Freedland is a master at weaving spellbinding entertainments drawn from forgotten corners of history."—Mick Herron, bestselling author of Slow Horses

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist, a tale of resistance, courage, and betrayal.

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 at the table is someone poised to betray them 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 headmistress. What unites every one of them is a shared loathing for the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler, and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance: from meeting in the shadows to rescuing Jews to plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer’s rule. How did this group of brave, principled people, 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 heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history, which raises an enduring question: What kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?