Ever since it had become apparent that strength was departing from Hitler’s colossus, resistance had been stirring everywhere in Europe. In many cases it was centered in the Communist parties, but it also sprang from leagues of military officers, from the Catholic Church, or from groups of intellectuals. In some countries, such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and even France, it became organized in paramilitary formations, calling themselves the Home Army or the Fighting Forces of the Interior, to wage an embittered and bloody war against the occupation troops. The Germans answered the growing number of assassinations and acts of sabotage with summary executions of hostages, in which the death of a single guard might often be paid for by twenty, thirty, or even more victims. The revenge of SS Division Das Reich upon the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and its 600 innocent inhabitants marked the climax of this merciless guerrilla war. Tito’s famous breakthrough operation on the Neretva, or the Warsaw uprising of the summer of 1944, were battlelike actions that became legends of the European Resistance.
Simultaneously, oppositional forces reappeared also inside Germany. In the past years they had been undone first by Hitler’s diplomatic, then his military successes, and after the victory over France had reached the nadir of discouragement. But now the changing fortunes of the war brought out all the repressed doubts that had been present since the beginning of the Hitler regime, alongside of the cheering and jubilation. After Stalingrad, and once more after the defeats of the winter of 1943–44, the prevalent mood in Germany for considerable spells of time was compounded of fear, war weariness, and apathy. It was a mood that spurred the efforts of the opposition, since there was at last some hope of a response. After the many disappointments of earlier years the oppositionists were afraid that the rapidly approaching military defeat would once more, and forever, rob them of their chance to act. This concern enormously strengthened their resolution. But it also provides grounds for the charge, which has been repeatedly voiced, that the German opposition opportunistically resolved to topple the regime only when it was already falling. All that happened, it has been argued, is that a few nationalists roused themselves to act because they were more eager to save the country’s power than its morality.
We cannot judge this matter without taking into account the difficulties the opposition faced in 1944. Some time before, the Gestapo had blown the cover of the “Central Bureau,” Oster’s office, and arrested its chief members. Admiral Canaris had been largely frozen out, and General Beck temporarily incapacitated by a severe illness. Moreover, Mussolini’s fall had given Hitler a good scare and prompted him to still greater wariness. He tried more than ever before to keep his movements secret. His staff had instructions to conceal scheduled appointments even from the highest persons in the leadership, such as Göring and Himmler. On the rare occasions that he did appear in public he usually changed the program at short notice, sometimes only minutes before he was due to appear. Even in his own headquarters he used to wear the heavy, armored cap that came down over his ears. In his radio address of September 10, 1943, dealing with the events in Italy, there was a distinctly threatening note in the way he called upon his “field marshals, admirals, and generals” to show their loyalty to him and dash the enemy’s hopes of finding in the German officers corps “traitors like those in Italy today.”
The dilemma faced by the active opponents of the regime in Germany was computed of a complicated complex of inhibitions of a traditional order. While throughout the European Resistance, national and moral duty coincided almost completely, in Germany these norms clashed sharply, and for a good many of those who opposed the regime the contradiction was insoluble. Throughout all their years of plotting and planning, many leading members of the opposition, particularly the military men, were unable to overcome entirely that last emotional barrier. What they were projecting still seemed to them treason, a renewed “stab in the back.” Unlike the European Resistance, what they could initially expect from their liberating act was not liberty but defeat and surrender to an implacable enemy. And it would take an arrogant moralist to belittle the conflict of those who, despite their hatred of Hitler and their horror of the crimes he instigated, nevertheless could not forget the crimes of Stalin, the atrocities of the “Red Terror,” or the great purges, as well as the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre.
Such scruples also marked the unending discussions whose gravity can be appreciated today only by an act of historical empathy. How binding was an oath taken to one who had committed perjury? How far did the duty of obedience extend? Above all, there was the question of assassination, which some saw as essential and as the only consistent, grand act of resistance, whereas others, whose moral integrity cannot be called into question,2 rejected the idea to the very end. But both groups were isolated within their own country, surrounded by a gigantic intelligence apparatus and always vulnerable to denunciation. In addition, the dependence of all their plans upon the course of events was a perpetual brake upon action. Every victory of Hitler’s diminished the chances for an internal coup; every defeat weakened the opposition’s stance with regard to the Allies, whose support was indispensable.
Given these circumstances, the history of the German opposition is a saga of scruples, contradictions, and mix-up. The sources sometimes lead one to think that a good many of the doubts that plagued the opposition were inspired by a mania for creating problems, thus dodging the obligation to act. Other scruples served one group among the higher officers as an excuse for their own moral rigidity. But even considering all this, there remains in all the statements and activities of the German opposition an unmistakable note of deep despair. This evidently sprang not so much from the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the brutal regime as from the inner impotence of people who had recognized the anachronistic, crippling nature of their values, but were nevertheless unable to give those values up. Significantly, such men as Generals Beck, Halder, and von Witzleben, or Admiral Canaris, much as they despised Hitler, had to conquer a thousand resistances within themselves before they could resolve to act, and after the first failure in the autumn of 1938 they never again summoned up the momentum. It took the entry of a number of young officers, less hampered by preconvictions, to supply new energy to an enterprise that had run down from the weight of its arguments and counterarguments. One of them, Colonel von Gersdorff, recognized this contrast. He has described how carefully Field Marshal von Manstein, in the course of a talk, excluded himself from the circle of the conspirators. At last, after a pause for reflection, he broke the silence by asking: “Then you want to kill him?!” And received the terse reply: “Jawohl, Herr Feldmarschall, like a mad dog!”
From the spring of 1943 on, there was a series of attempts at assassination. Not one came off, either because of technical failure, or Hitler’s knack for scenting danger, or because some seemingly incredible chance intervened. Two explosives that Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff had placed in the Führer’s plane in the middle of March, 1943, after Hitler had visited the headquarters of Army Group Center, failed to explode. A week later von Gersdorff planned to blow himself up, together with Hitler and all the leaders of the regime, during a tour of the Berlin Arsenal. This project came to nothing because Hitler suddenly cut the visit to ten minutes, so that the time fuse could not be set off. Colonel Stieff planned to set off a bomb during a military conference in the Führer’s headquarters; this failed because the bomb exploded prematurely. A young infantry captain named Axel von dem Bussche volunteered in November to sacrifice himself: while showing new army uniforms, he would leap upon Hitler, seize him, and at the same time set off the explosion. But on the day before this plan was to be carried out, an Allied bomb destroyed the uniforms. When in December von dem Bussche appeared with a new set of samples, Hitler suddenly decided to go to Berchtesgaden. By so doing he frustrated both this attempt and another planned for December 26 by a colonel who wanted to carry a time bomb into the Führer’s headquarters in his briefcase. This was
the first appearance on the scene of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Shortly afterward von dem Bussche was severely wounded, whereupon another officer put himself at the disposal of the conspirators: Ewald Heinrich von Kleist. For reasons never explained Hitler did not appear at the presentation planned for February 11. An attempt by Cavalry Captain von Breitenbuch to shoot Hitler down during a conference at the Berghof failed because the SS guard, allegedly on orders from Hitler himself, refused the captain admittance to the great hall. A number of other projected assassinations ended similarly.
The conspirators were no more successful in their efforts to gain foreign backing for their operation and to obtain certain assurances from the Western powers in case of a successful coup d’etat. Their repeated tries to make contact by all sorts of routes invariably went wrong. Granted, the reluctance of the Allied statesmen was far from incomprehensible. Why should they tie their own hands when victory was at last within sight? Moreover, they were justifiably concerned about affronting the Soviet Union, and with the elation that sprang from certainty of victory they were incapable of grasping the involved politico-moral conflicts of the German conspirators. Moreover, there was in Roosevelt, Churchill, and several of their advisers an unmistakable hostility toward the very type of person who now came forward to offer himself as the pillar of a new system, but who seemed only to represent the system of the day before yesterday: “militarists,” “Prussian Junkers,” “the General Staff.”
Nor was this feeling on the part of the Western powers mollified when in 1943 none other than Heinrich Himmler for a moment bobbed up on the periphery of the opposition. Disturbed by Hitler’s seemingly morbid obstinacy and urged on by several of his own followers, he had obtained a medical affidavit that apparently described Hitler’s general condition as pathological. Thereupon, though constantly vacillating, he had allowed Walter Schellenberg, chief of the foreign service of the SD, to utilize go-betweens in Spain, Sweden, and America to sound out the possibilities of a compromise peace without and against Hitler.3
Meanwhile several conservative plotters were attempting to play off the key figures of the regime against one another and simultaneously extend the opposition’s connections into the realms of the SS, the police forces, and the Gestapo. On August 26, 1943, a meeting between Johannes Popitz, Prussian Secretary of the Treasury, and Heinrich Himmler provided the opposition with information on the acute qualms even among the regime’s top leaders. But then the threads broke, almost simultaneously in all directions. Among the foreign countries, England in particular took a strong stand against all efforts at a premature peace settlement. Domestically, the leading members of the opposition themselves became involved in fierce controversy. Undoubtedly Popitz and the advocates of the resistance by intrigue who were playing along with Himmler and the SS intended to outwit their partners after the success of the planned coup, and re-establish legal conditions. This was nothing but a stupid revival of the conservatives’ old illusions in the spring of 1933 that they would be able to “tame” Hitler. But in addition it was a failure to realize that even the most temporary alliance with one of the infamous members of the regime would utterly compromise the meaning and ethics of the opposition. In the course of one dispute in the headquarters of Army Group Center several of the younger officers indignantly told Admiral Canaris that in the future they would refuse to shake hands with him if a planned contact with Himmler were actually undertaken.
Such differences of opinion, and in general the peculiar babble of voices presumably speaking for the German opposition, should make it clear that it was not a bloc. To treat it as if it were a single concept is inaccurate; it was a loose assemblage of many groups objectively and personally antagonistic and united only in antipathy for the regime. Three of these groups emerge with somewhat sharper contours: (1) The Kreisau Circle, called after Count Helmuth James von Moltke’s Silesian estate. This was chiefly a discussion group of high-minded friends imbued with ideas of both Christian and socialist reform. As a civilian group its opportunities were limited, and it practiced revolt only in the sense of intellectual encouragement. “We are being hanged because we thought together,” von Moltke wrote in one of his last letters from prison, with a note of almost happy pride at the power of the spirit thus attested by his death sentence.4 (2) Then there was the group of conservative and nationalist notables gathered around Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff. These men, not yet cognizant of the meaning of Hitler’s policies, were still claiming a leading role for a Greater Germany within Europe. It has seriously been questioned whether they even offered any real alternative to Hitler’s imperialistic expansionism. So strong was their leaning toward an authoritarian state that they have been called a continuation of the antidemocratic opposition in the Weimar Republic. Moltke spoke tersely of the “Goerdeler trash.”5 (3) Finally there was the group of younger military men such as von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, and Olbricht, with no pronounced ideological affiliations, although for the most part they sought ties with the Left and in contrast to Beck and Goerdeler did not look to a rapprochement with the Western powers, but with the Soviet Union.
In terms of background, a strikingly large number of the conspirators belonged to the Old Prussian nobility. There were also members of the clergy, the academic professions, and high-ranking civil servants. On the whole, those oppositionists who were now beginning to urge action were people originally from the conservative or liberal camp, with a sprinkling of Social Democrats. The Left was still suffering from the effects of the persecution, but it, too, with characteristic ideological rigidity, feared any alliance with army officers as a “pact with the devil.” Among the many participants in the opposition there was, significantly, not a single representative of the Weimar Republic; that republic did not survive even in the Resistance. But members of the lower middle class were also conspicuously absent, and also businessmen. The former showed the “little man’s” dull constancy to a course once taken and his inability to enter into any commitments beyond the personal realm. The latter remained fixated upon the traditional German alliance between industrial interests and power politics. Business always came to heel when the state whistled. That meant an economy capable of unusual performance; but it also led by many involved paths all the way to the defendants’ benches in the Nuremberg trials of industrialists. Finally, there were scarcely any workers in the Resistance. Their opposition was greater than historians have so far noted, but it was still far less than their role of grand historic antagonists to Fascism called for. Fundamentally, they offered no real resistance on a realistic basis at all but, rather, a series of demonstrations, mute and planless, as if they were stunned from their defeat of 1933 and from the fading of all dreams about the power and importance of the proletariat.6 All these groups, moreover, were intimidated by the events of the war; they were exhausted and had experienced a failure of nerve. What can really be called opposition came “from above.”
It remained isolated. In February, moreover, von Moltke was arrested and the Kreisau Circle broken up. Shortly afterward, the Abwehr was subjected to a merciless investigation, so that discovery of the conspiracy had to be daily reckoned with. Goerdeler and Beck, repeatedly wavering, made a last attempt in April, 1944, to act before time ran out. They sent an offer to the United States to throw open the Western front after the coup d’etat and permit Allied parachute units to land in the territory of the Reich. But once again they received no reply. Their only course now was to place the elimination of the regime on the plane of moral argument, independent of all strategic and political considerations. Several of the conspirators seem to have taken the view that the top leadership should see the disaster through to the end and experience their just retribution.
It was chiefly Stauffenberg who now took over. He established new connections and recruited new conspirators. In spite of the Allied formula of unconditional surrender, in spite of the danger of a new stab-
in-the-back legend, in spite of the possible charges of tardiness and opportunism, he pushed straight through all inhibitions and steered toward assassination and a coup. The scion of an old family of South German nobility, related to the Yorck and Gneisenau families, he had in his youth associated with the Stefan George circle. Legend has it that on January 30, 1933, he placed himself at the head of an enthusiastic crowd in Bamberg, to hail the beginning of the new regime. That happens not to be true, but he certainly watched with moderate approval the regime’s revolutionary tendencies and Hitler’s early successes.
He made a distinguished career as an officer attached to the General Staff. The 1938 pogroms against the Jews first aroused doubts in him; and in the course of the war, as he observed the occupation in the East and what was being done to the Jews there, he developed into a principled opponent of the Nazi government. He was thirty-seven years old and had lost his right hand, two fingers of his left hand, and an eye in the North African theater. Stauffenberg provided an organizational frame for an undertaking that had bogged down in mental maneuverings. He replaced obsolete notions, which trapped many military men in an inextricable tangle of clashing principles, with something akin to revolutionary resolve. “Let’s get to the essence,” he once began a conversation with a new conspirator. “With all the means at my disposal I am practicing treason.”7
Time was pressing. In the spring the conspirators had succeeded in winning over none other than Rommel, the field marshal, who enjoyed great popularity. Around the same time Himmler remarked to Admiral Canaris that he had definite knowledge that a revolt was being planned by certain groups in the Wehrmacht; he, Himmler, would strike at the proper moment. Moreover, the Allied invasion was expected at any time, and it could be assumed that this would scotch all the conspirators’ subsidiary political aims. It would also provide the tradition-bound older officers with a new alibi.
Hitler Page 104
