Arvid Harnack

Arvid Harnack (24 May 1901 in Darmstadt – 22 December 1942 in Berlin) was a German jurist, economist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany.

Harnack was the son of literary history professor Otto Harnack, the elder brother of Falk Harnack, Inge Harnack and Angela Harnack as well as the nephew of theologian Adolf von Harnack. From 1919 to 1923, he studied law in Jena (at the Friedrich Schiller University), Graz, and Hamburg and became a Doctor of Law in 1924.

From 1926 to 1928, he studied economics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in the United States, where in 1926 he married the literary historian Mildred Fish. In 1929-1930 he became a Doctor of Philosophy in Gießen, producing as his thesis Die vormarxistische Arbeiterbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten ("The Pre-Marxist Workers' Movement in the United States"). Along with the Gießen economist Friedrich Lenz (1885–1968), he founded the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft zum Studium der sowjetischen Planwirtschaft ("Scientific Working Community for the Study of the Soviet Planned Economy"), or ARPLAN in 1931. Harnack was made First Secretary of this group, which counted about 50 members. At the height of the Great Depression, the capitalist system had clearly broken down, and the Soviet model seemed to them to be an interesting alternative. Scientists, but also ardent revolutionary nationalists like Klaus Mehnert and Ernst Jünger and communist intellectuals like George Lukacs and Karl August Wittfogel took part in sessions. Harnack's hope, apparently, was that Germany could serve as a spiritual and economic bridge between East and West. The first meeting of the group took place on 3 and 4 January 1932. In August and September of the same year a three-week trip to the Soviet Union was organized with the help of the Soviet embassy in Berlin. The soviet economy was observed in Moscow, Leningrad, Odessa, Kiew and in the Dnieper region. Trips to the United States in 1937 and 1939 would follow, during which Harnack unsuccessfully tried to create a basis of communication with Washington.

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