Iron Kingdom

by Clark, Christopher

  But despite these friendly signals – there were encouraging noises from Hitler and a second meeting with Goering in the summer of 1932 – the idea was unceremoniously dropped after the seizure of power. Hitler had encouraged the Kaiser’s hopes only because he wanted to strengthen his credentials as the legitimate successor to Prussia-Germany’s monarchical tradition. The moment of truth came on 27 January 1934, when Hitler ordered the breaking up of celebrations in honour of the Kaiser’s seventy-fifth birthday. The fate of the restoration movement was sealed a few days later by new legislation outlawing all monarchist organizations. The royal SA-man Prince August William was placed under house arrest during the Röhm Putsch and thereafter ordered to refrain from political utterances of any kind. Gradually, the regime erased the memory of monarchy in Prussia and Germany, prohibiting the display of imperial images and memorabilia, while paying the former royal family a substantial retainer to ensure that it caused no trouble.107 Among those who strongly objected was Count Ewald von Kleist-Wendisch-Tychow, regional chief of the Corporation of the German Nobility (Deutsche Adelsgenossenschaft) in Eastern Pomerania. In January 1937 he dissolved his section of the corporation, declaring that the regime’s refusal to restore the Prussian-German Crown was ‘not compatible with the traditions and honour of the nobility’.108

  Characterizing the relationship between the Hitler regime and the Prussian traditional and functional elites is difficult. There has to date been no systematic study of attitudes and conduct within the German regional nobilities throughout the life of the Third Reich. But one thing is clear: the conventional picture of the landed nobility haughtily withdrawing to the splendid isolation of their estates and waiting for the Nazi storm to pass is misleading. There was hardly a single East-Elbian noble family that did not have at least one party member. The ancient lineage of the Schwerins supplied no fewer than fifty-two members, the Hardenbergs twenty-seven, the Tresckows thirty, the Schulenburgs forty-one, of whom seventeen had already joined the party before 1933. Many nobles were attracted to the NSDAP because they saw an alliance with the Hitler movement as the key to securing their traditional social leadership role on new terms.109 But others joined because they found the party’s ideology and ambience congenial – the attitudinal gap between noble circles and the National Socialist movement was narrower than has often been supposed.

  There was also broad support within the Prussian nobility for the foreign policy objectives of the new regime – especially revision of the Versailles Treaty and the retrieval of lands transferred to the Poles. The paucity of Prussians within the leadership echelons of the NSDAP initially had an off-putting effect on some families – according to one assessment there were only seventeen Prussians among the 500 top Nazi cadres in 1933.110 But as the focus of the party’s activity – and its electoral base – shifted northwards, these misgivings often faded. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg was initially suspicious of the NSDAP because he saw it as an essentially south-German movement, but he later embraced it as ‘a new form of Prussiandom’ – here again that usefully obfuscating abstraction.111

  The officer corps of the Reichswehr, in which the sons of Junker families still formed a substantial group, was initially sceptical of the Nazi movement but shifted after the March elections of 1933 towards a policy of alliance with the new leadership. Many senior officers were reassured by Hitler’s reprisals against the brownshirts in the Röhm Putsch of 31 June 1934. The commencement of the rearmament programme and the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1935 also helped to cement relations. A characteristic example of this transition was the inspector of weapons training in Berlin, Lieutenant-General Johannes Blaskowitz, who hailed from Peterswalde in East Prussia and had been educated in the cadet schools of Köslin and Berlin-Lichterfelde. In 1932, Blaskowitz had warned his regiment during an exercise that ‘if the Nazis make any false moves, [we] will proceed against them with maximum force, and [we] will not shrink even from the bloodiest conflict.’112 By the spring of 1935, however, he was speaking a different language. In a speech for the opening of a monument to the fallen of the First World War, Blaskowitz, the son of a Pietist East Prussian pastor, hailed Adolf Hitler as the man sent by God in Germany’s hour of need: ‘God’s help gave us our Leader, who has gathered all the forces of national life into one powerful movement [… ] and who has yesterday restored the military sovereignty of the German people and thereby fulfilled the testament of our dead heroes.’113

  Prussians were, needless to say, deeply implicated in the atrocities committed by the SS and Security Police and by the German Wehrmacht, whose claim to a ‘clean’ wartime record has been comprehensively exploded. But being Prussian was not by any means a precondition for enthusiastic service in the regime’s cause. Bavarians, Saxons and Württembergers also served with zeal and distinction in all branches of the regime’s activity. The battalion of policemen whose mass shootings of Jewish men, women and children are so harrowingly documented in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men were not Prussians, but natives of traditionally liberal, bourgeois, Anglophile Hamburg.114 The Austrians, those historical and cultural antipodes of the Prussians, were strikingly over-represented in the upper echelons of the Nazi machinery of mass murder – Odilo Globocnik, overseer of the death camps, Arthur Seyβ-Inquest Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands, Hans Rauter, the SS and police official who deported 100,000 Dutch Jews to the East, Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibor (later transferred to Treblinka), were just a few of the more prominent Austrians implicated in the Holocaust.115 Such observations do nothing whatsoever to diminish the role played by Prussians in the criminal activities of the Third Reich, but they do undermine the view that Prussian values or habits of mind were in themselves a special qualification for zealous service.

  59. The deportation of Jews from Memel, in what had once been Prussian Lithuania. In their campaign to murder German and European Jewry, the Nazi regime destroyed one highly distinctive strand of the Prussian heritage.

  Prussians – and especially representatives of the traditional Prussian elites – also figured prominently within the ranks of the German national conservative resistance. Many of the old Pomeranian Pietist families – among them the Thaddens, Kleists and Bismarcks – supported the Confessing Church that emerged to resist the regime’s attempt to re-sculpt German Christianity.116 The active military resistance was, to be sure, never large enough to account for more than a very small fraction of men under arms. Yet it is significant that of the conspirators of 20 July 1944, two-thirds came from the Prussian milieu, and many from old and distinguished military families. Among those arrested immediately after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life was the former deputy police president of Berlin, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, descendant of a family whose sons had served for centuries as officers of the Brandenburg-Prussian army. Another was the jurist and officer Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg, a direct descendant of the Yorck who had walked across to the Russians at Tauroggen in December 1812. Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, another prominent Prussian conspirator, was the scion of an old East-Elbian military family who had been chosen by the conspirators to take over the supreme command of the Wehrmacht after the assassination of Hitler. He was arrested on 21 July and subjected to weeks of torture and humiliations at the hands of the Gestapo. On 7 August 1944, still bearing the marks of his ill-treatment, he was brought before the People’s Court, where he stood holding up his beltless trousers and enduring the insults of Roland Freisler, Hitler’s hanging judge. He was hanged in the execution facility at Piötzensee the following day.117

  No single unit of the German Wehrmacht was more deeply implicated in resistance activity than the Potsdam IX Infantry Regiment, a Prussian traditional regiment (it was the official successor to the I Prussian Foot Guards) with strong ties to the Potsdam Garrison Church. This was the regiment of Major-General Henning von Tresckow, who in March 1943 smuggled a package of explosives on to a plane carrying Hitler back to Be
rlin (the parcel failed to explode and was retrieved without incident at the other end). After collaborating closely with Stauffenberg and the other military conspirators, Tresckow blew himself up with a hand grenade on 21 July 1944. Captain Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche of the IX Regiment undertook to strap explosives to his body and destroy Hitler in a suicide bombing during a demonstration of new uniforms in 1943, but was refused leave to attend by his commanding officer on the eastern front. Lieutenant Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin agreed to take von dem Bussche’s place, but the planned demonstration was cancelled and the opportunity never arose. Other IX Regiment officers directly involved in the July plot included the son of former Chief of Staff Ludwig Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, Captain Hans Fritzsche of the Potsdam Reserve and Lieutenant Georg Sigismund von Oppen, whose family ran an estate in Altfriedland, fifty kilometres to the east of Berlin. Hammerstein-Equord, Oppen and Fritzsche returned to regimental headquarters in time to escape notice and survived the reprisals that followed the assassination attempt, largely because Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg refused even under torture to reveal their names to the Gestapo. Several other members of the regiment were executed or committed suicide during the wave of reprisals that followed the collapse of the July plot.118

  The motives for resistance varied. Many of the key figures had passed through a phase of infatuation with the Hitler movement and some had even become implicated in its crimes. Some were disgusted at the mass murder of Jews, Poles and Russians, others had religious reservations; some sought the restoration of the monarchy, though not necessarily of William II, whose flight to Holland had neither been forgotten nor forgiven. Prussian themes insinuated themselves into the resistance at many levels. The Kreisau Circle, for example, a network of mainly conservative civilian and military resisters centred on the Moltke estate at Kreisau in Silesia, were sceptical of the virtues of democracy (which, as they saw it, had failed to protect Germany against the advent of Hitler) and looked to the unelected upper chamber of the old Prussian Landtag as the model for an authoritarian alternative to modern parliamentary politics.119 Many of the resisters clung to the idea of Prussia as a vanished better world whose traditions were being perverted by the taskmasters of the Third Reich. ‘True Prussiandom can never be separated from the concept of freedom,’ Henning von Tresckow told a family gathering when his two sons were confirmed at the Garrison Church in the spring of 1943. Uncoupled from the imperatives of ‘freedom’, ‘understanding’ and ‘compassion’, he warned, the Prussian ideals of self-discipline and the fulfilment of duty would degenerate into ‘spiritless soldiery and narrow bigotry’.120

  The historical imagination of the Prussian elite resistance was anchored in the mythical memory of the wars of liberation. The figure of Yorck, who risked the charge of betrayal and treason to walk across the snow to the Russians at Tauroggen, was a recurring example.121 When Carl Goerdeler, perhaps the most senior civilian associate of the military resistance, composed a memorandum urging the army to rise up against Hitler in the summer of 1940, he ended the document with an extended quotation from Baron Stein’s letter of 12 October 1808 urging Frederick William III to show his hand against Napoleon: ‘If nothing but misfortune and suffering can be expected, then it is better to take a decision that is honourable and noble and offers comfort and solace, should things end badly.’122 In later years he compared the defeats of North Africa and Stalingrad to the salutary disasters at Jena and Auerstädt.123 A particularly striking example comes from an exchange between the resister Rudolf von Gersdorff, author of an aborted suicide bombing of Hitler in the spring of 1943, and Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. When Manstein reproached Gersdorff for his seditious views, reminding him that Prussian field marshals did not mutiny, Gersdorff cited Yorck’s defection at Tauroggen.124

  For the resisters Prussia became a virtual homeland, the focal point for a patriotism that could find no referent in the Third Reich. The charisma of this mythical Prussia was not lost upon the non-Prussians who moved within resistance circles. The Social Democrat Julius Leber, an Alsatian who grew up in Lübeck and was executed on 5 January 1945 for his part in the conspiracy against Hitler, was among those who looked back in admiration at the years when Stein, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst re-established the state ‘in the citizen’s consciousness of freedom’.125 There was an energetic polarity between the Prussia of Nazi propaganda and that of the civilian and military resistance. Goebbels used Prussian themes to drive home the primacy of loyalty, obedience and will as indispensable aids in Germany’s epic struggle against her enemies. The resisters, by contrast, insisted that these secondary Prussian virtues became worthless as soon as they were severed from their ethical and religious roots. For the Nazis, Yorck was the symbol of an oppressed Germany rising up against foreign ‘tyranny’ – for the resisters he represented a transcendent sense of duty that might even, under certain circumstances, articulate itself in an act of treason. We naturally look more kindly on one of these Prussia-myths than on the other. Yet both were selective, talismanic and instrumental. Precisely because it had become so abstract, so etiolated, ‘Prussiandom’ was up for grabs. It was not an identity, nor even a memory. It had become a catalogue of disembodied mythical attributes whose historical and ethical significance was, and would remain, in contention.

  THE EXORCISTS

  In the end, it was the Nazi view of Prussia that prevailed. The western allies needed no persuading that Nazism was merely the latest manifestation of Prussianism. They could draw on an intellectually formidable tradition of anti-Prussianism that dated back to the outbreak of the First World War. In August 1914, Ramsay Muir, a distinguished liberal activist and holder of the chair of modern history at the University of Manchester, published a widely read study that claimed to examine the ‘historical background’ of the current conflict. ‘It is the result,’ Muir wrote, ‘of a poison which has been working in the European system for more than two centuries, and the chief source of this poison is Prussia.’126 In another study published early in the war, William Harbutt Dawson, a social liberal publicist and one of the most influential commentators on German history and politics in early twentieth-century Britain, pointed to the militarizing influence of the ‘Prussian spirit’ within the otherwise benign German nation: ‘this spirit has ever been a hard and immalleable element in the life of Germany; it is still the knot in the oak, the nodule in the softer clay.’127

  Common to many analyses was the notion that there were in fact two Germanies, the liberal, congenial and pacific Germany of the south and west and the reactionary, militaristic Germany of the north-east.128 The tensions between the two, it was argued, remained unresolved within the Empire founded by Bismarck in 1871. One of the most sophisticated and influential early analysts of this problem was the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen. In a study of German industrial society published in 1915 and re-issued in 1939, Veblen argued that a lopsided process of modernization had distorted German political culture. ‘Modernism’ had transformed the sphere of industrial organization, but had failed to effect ‘an equally secure and disturbing lodgement in the tissues of the body politic’. The reason for this, Veblen diagnosed, lay in the survival of an essentially pre-modern Prussian ‘territorial state’. The history of this state, he suggested, amounted to a career of more or less uninterrupted aggressive war-making. The consequence was a political culture of extreme servility, for ‘the pursuit of war, being an exercise in the following of one’s leader and execution of arbitrary orders, induces an animus of enthusiastic subservience and unquestioning obedience to authority.’ In such a system, the loyal support of popular sentiment could be maintained only by ‘unremitting habituation [and] discipline sagaciously and relentlessly directed to this end’, and ‘by a system of bureaucratic surveillance and unremitting interference in the private life of subjects’.129

  Veblen’s account was light on empirical data and supporting evidence, but it was not without theoretical sophistication. It aimed not only
to describe but also to explain the supposed deformations of Prussian-German political culture. It was supported, moreover, by an implicit conception of the ‘modern’ in the light of which Prussia could be deemed archaic, anachronistic, only partially modernized. It is striking how much of the substance of the ‘special path’ thesis that would rise to prominence in German historical writing of the late 1960s and 1970s is already anticipated in Veblen’s account. This was no accident – Ralf Dahrendorf, whose synoptic study Society and Democracy in Germany (1968) was one of the foundational texts of the critical school, drew heavily on the American sociologist’s work.130

  Even the rather cruder accounts that passed for historical analyses of modern Germany during the Second World War often preserved a sense of historical perspective, rather than settling for generalizations about German ‘national character’. Since the seventeenth century, one writer observed in 1941, the ‘old German spirit of conquest’ had been ‘deliberately developed more and more and along the lines of that mentality which is known as “Prussianism” ’. The history of Prussia had been ‘an almost uninterrupted period of forcible expansion, under the iron rule of militarism and absolutist officialism’. Under a harsh regime of compulsory education, in which teachers were recruited from the ranks of former non-commissioned officers, the young were instilled with ‘the typical Prussian obedience’. The rigours of school life were succeeded by a prolonged period in barracks or on active military service. It was here that ‘the German mind received its last coat of varnish. Anything that had not been done by the schools was achieved in the army.’131