They had status, safety and power — and still chose to defy Hitler

Jonathan Freedland didn’t set out to write a guidebook to resistance. He was researching the story of Rudolf Vrba, the young Jewish escapee from Auschwitz who became the subject of his 2022 book, “The Escape Artist.” Freedland stumbled upon something odd: Heinrich Himmler, in an August 1944 speech, casually referred to a “reactionary cabal … prattling over tea,” now safely in Gestapo custody.

Tea?

In September 1943, a small group that included aristocrats, a diplomat, a pioneering educator and an intelligence officer gathered in a Berlin drawing room — not to gossip, but to quietly defy the Nazi regime. What they didn’t know: one among them was an informant. Their story, Freedland realized, was less a footnote than a thriller — a drawing-room mystery where the stakes were life and death.