Just before Christmas 1944, Albrecht Haushofer had been delivered to the Gestapo prison in the Moabit district of Berlin. In solitary confinement, fettered hand and foot, he awaited a show trial with a predetermined outcome. After a while he was allowed some sheets of paper and a pencil. He began to write sonnet after sonnet describing his days and nights in prison, shared with comrades of the Resistance who were one after another taken away to the hangman. From Moabit his mind soared out to the world he had known and loved: the lands near and far he had visited, the men and women who meant...