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.

His new book, “The Traitors Circle,” tells that story. Subtitled “The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany — and the Spy Who Betrayed Them,” it celebrates an unlikely group of dissenters who, “when their country was in the grip of a terrible darkness … risked everything to break ranks and say no.” But because it arrives at a fraught political moment, it is also about the present, when many — certainly on the left — are asking how to push back when they see democratic norms being broken.

Freedland’s book joins a growing shelf of recent books urging resistance to autocracy. They include Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” M. Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen,” Timothy Ryback’s “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” and Anne Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy.” Most write that the United States is not Germany in 1933 and Trump is no Hitler, but warn about the ways democracies can surrender to or slowly devolve into autocracy. The small concessions. The rationalizing. The insistence that the institutions will hold, or the strongman can’t get away with........

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