The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Resistance was also mounting in the west, and particularly in France, where the Maquis now numbered scores of thousands of men and women, engaged in sabotaging German military installations in preparation for the invasion of France across the English Channel. Elaborate deception measures mounted by British and American intelligence services persuaded the German commanders that the invasion would come in Norway or near Calais or some other seaport. Over a million British, American, French, Canadian and other Allied troops were assembled in southern England under the general command of US general Dwight D. Eisenhower. On the night of 5-6 June 1944, more than 4,000 landing craft and over 1,000 warships convoyed the troops across the Channel while three airborne divisions began parachuting down behind the German defences. With the German navy effectively out of action, the German air force seriously weakened by losses in the preceding months and German forces dispersed over other areas and lacking the crack divisions concentrated on the Eastern Front, resistance was weaker than expected. Pulverized by naval and aerial bombardment, German defences were overwhelmed by the force of the landings, and except on Omaha Beach the resistance was quickly overcome. By the end of 6 June 1944, 155,000 men and 16,000 vehicles had been safely landed by the Allied operation. Prefabricated ‘Mulberry harbours’ were towed in and assembled, and more Allied forces landed and joined up from their five beachheads before the German army could rush in sufficient reinforcements to repel them. The capture of Cherbourg by 27 June 1944 provided them with a seaport, and huge quantities of men and equipment began to come over. German reinforcements were rushed to the front and began to put up stiff resistance, but the German commanders, Rundstedt and his subordinate Rommel, had no effective strategic plan for dealing with the invading forces, who now began to fight their way slowly across Normandy. This was now a war on two fronts.247

  Hitler reacted predictably by blaming this situation on the generals. They were constantly plying him with pessimistic assessments of the situation, he raged, and demanding withdrawals and retreats instead of staying put and fighting to the last. On 1 July 1944, worn out by the constant arguments with the Leader, Chief of the Army General Staff Kurt Zeitzler broke down, and simply abandoned his office. Hitler had him drummed out of the army in January 1945 and denied the right to wear a uniform. General Heinz Guderian was appointed his replacement on 21 July 1944. In the west, Field Marshal von Rundstedt was sacked two days later, along with Hugo Sperrle, the air force commander who had made a name for himself in the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, but was now blamed by his Leader for failing to mount an effective airborne defence against the Allied invasion. Field Marshal Günther von Kluge was appointed to replace Rundstedt. On the Eastern Front, Field Marshal Ernst Busch was sacked because of the catastrophic defeat of his Army Group Centre in Operation Bagration, and replaced by Field Marshal Walter Model, one of the few senior officers whom Hitler held in continuing high esteem. As he left the Berghof for the last time on 14 July 1944 to return to his field headquarters at the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ in Rastenburg, Hitler’s contempt for so many of his generals was becoming even more open than before.248

  III

  The military catastrophes of the spring and early summer of 1944 led to an upsurge of resistance not only in occupied Europe but also in the German Reich itself. Already, the defeats of the previous year had spread disillusion with the regime. The devastating effects of the bombing weakened the authority of the regime still more. Nevertheless, open acts of resistance or defiance were still rare. Individual acts of defiance were met with arrest, trial and not infrequently execution. Collective resistance was difficult in the extreme. Social Democratic and Communist resistance organizations had been crushed by the Gestapo by the mid- 1930s and the leading figures in both parties were either in exile or in prison or concentration camp. Not only the more restrictive police regime of the war years but also the Nazi- Soviet Pact had a dampening effect on the will of former labour movement activists to organize any kind of oppositional activity before June 1941. And the euphoria created by the stunning military victories of 1939 and 1940 was shared by many in the working class, including former Social Democrats. As a precaution, too, the Gestapo arrested and incarcerated a number of former Communist functionaries on the invasion of the Soviet Union in case they should start a campaign of subversion. It was only in 1942, after the defeat of the German army before Moscow, that clandestine Communist resistance groups began to emerge again, in strongholds of the industrial working class like Saxony, Thuringia, Berlin and the Ruhr. Some of them were able to establish contact with the exiled party leadership in Moscow, but it was only intermittent, and in general there was little central co-ordination. The Communists managed to put out some leaflets urging opposition to the Nazis and even advocating acts of sabotage, but in general they achieved relatively little before they too were smashed by the Gestapo. The most spectacular action was undoubtedly that mounted by a group of young Jewish Communists and their sympathizers, led by Herbert Baum, who, as we have seen, managed to blow up part of an anti-Soviet exhibition staged by Goebbels in Berlin, though without causing any serious damage or any casualties. They too were quickly betrayed to the Gestapo; thirty were arrested and tried by the People’s Court; fifteen of them were executed.249

  Since the mid-1930s, the official party line from Moscow had emphasized the need for Communists to collaborate with Social Democrats in a ‘popular front’. But this tactic faced severe difficulties on both sides. The Social Democrats justifiably suspected the clandestine Communist groups of being under far more intensive surveillance than they were themselves, and the dangers of collaboration were dramatically illustrated on 22 June 1944 when a meeting in Berlin between the Social Democrats Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein and a group of Communist functionaries resulted in the arrest of all those involved. As far as the Communists were concerned, it was more than likely that when the war was over the Social Democrats would re-emerge as their major rivals for the allegiance of the industrial working class, so that any co-operation could only be strictly tactical and temporary and should not involve concessions to a likely future political enemy. Within the concentration camps, and above all in Buchenwald, Communists formed their own groups, which could at times achieve a limited degree of prisoner self-management. The appointment of Communists as capos and block leaders was encouraged by the SS camp management, who saw the Communists as reliable and effective in this role. For their part, the Communist prisoners tried to maintain solidarity amongst themselves and protect their comrades, devolving difficult and dangerous work on to other categories of prisoner such as the ‘asocials’ and criminals. Through maintaining good relations with the SS they also hoped to improve conditions generally in the camp and so benefit all the inmates in the long run. In such a situation there were only limited prospects of meaningful co-operation with Social Democratic or other political prisoners. Solidarity within the Communist group was all-important. This precarious strategy, trying to strike a balance between ideological purity on the one hand, and self-protection through collaboration with the SS on the other, was to lead to widespread and sometimes bitter controversy after the war.250

  One exceptional group with Communist connections, though subject neither to Communist discipline nor to Stalinist ideology, had managed to survive since early on in the Third Reich. This was known by the Gestapo as the ‘Red Orchestra’ (Rote Kapelle), though it was in fact a series of overlapping and functionally rather different clandestine groups. Beginning late in 1941, German military counter-espionage in Brussels and Paris began to uncover an extensive network of Soviet intelligence agents. It had links to a resistance circle in Berlin, grouped around a civil servant in the Reich Economics Ministry, Arvid Harnack, and an attach’ in the Air Ministry, Harro Schulze-Boysen. Harnack was a Marxist economist who believed in a peaceful, socialist Germany, while Schulze-Boysen was a radical nationalist revolutionary who had been arrested and tortured by the Nazis in 1933 but then released o
n good behaviour. Some of their followers were members of the Communist Party, but the group was essentially independent of any central direction from Moscow. Women played a particularly prominent role in it, notably Harnack’s American wife Mildred Harnack-Fish, a literary historian, and Schulze-Boysen’s wife Libertas, who gained a critical view of Nazi propaganda through her work in the film section of the Propaganda Ministry. In order to give himself ‘cover’, Harnack joined the Nazi Party in 1937. The group helped political fugitives to escape from Germany, distributed leaflets not only to Germans but also to foreign forced labourers, and took up contact with both the US and the Soviet embassies, whom they kept informed about the crimes of Nazism. The Soviets were impressed enough to supply them with radio equipment, and they managed to convey some information on the war economy to the Russians, but Stalin refused to believe the group’s warning of an imminent invasion in June 1941. Their leaflets became longer and more ambitious, including one written by Schulze-Boysen warning percipiently that Hitler would suffer the same fate in Russia as Napoleon had done. However, their clandestine radio messages to the Russians were intercepted by German military counter-intelligence. This led to Schulze-Boysen’s arrest on 30 August 1942 and Harnack’s on 7 September 1942. Other arrests followed, eventually numbering more than 130. After a series of rapid trials, more than fifty members of the group were executed, including both the Harnacks and the Schulze-Boysens. On Hitler’s personal insistence, the death sentences were carried out by hanging.251

  The so-called ‘Red Orchestra’ was not the ring of Soviet spies portrayed in subsequent Nazi propaganda but a home-grown resistance movement whose contacts with Soviet intelligence were made on its own terms. It was far from being the only left-wing group of this kind, though it was larger than most. One of the most remarkable was a tiny, little-known but tightly knit organization called the ‘League: Community for Socialist Living’. Formed in the early 1920s by the adult education lecturer Artur Jacobs, it set up a number of centres where it held discussions, offered dance and movement classes, and tried to build a lifestyle that crossed class boundaries and transcended the egotism of the individual. Some of its members were Communists; others were Social Democrats; a good number had no party affiliation at all. In any case its members, as it were, left their party cards at the door when they entered the League’s premises. From the very beginning they identified antisemitism as the core of Nazi ideology, and in 1933 the League and its members went underground and began helping Jews to escape arrest and, from 1941, deportation. Here its small size - there were never more than a few hundred members even at the height of its popularity in the 1920s - and the close personal ties that had grown up between its members helped the League stay intact and to carry on its work undetected by the Gestapo. Its members organized false identities for Jews in hiding, ferried them secretly from one location to another, and helped them evade the attentions of the Gestapo. From the point of view of the League’s members, this was a way of keeping the spirit of social and racial equality alive in the face of Nazi persecution. In this way, they provided a practical alternative to the usual activities of left-wing resistance groups, which focused on the largely futile attempt to rouse popular opinion against the Nazis.252

  The milieu from which the League emerged in the 1920s, in which small groups of various political hues tried to build new lifestyles of one kind or another, also gave rise, at a greater distance, to a far better-known resistance movement, the self-styled ‘White Rose’, some of whose members had been involved in the autonomous youth movement of the Weimar years. Any initial enthusiasm they might have had for the Nazi regime was quickly dispelled by its racism and its antisemitism, its restrictions on personal freedom, and above all the extreme violence it unleashed on the Eastern Front in 1941-2. While they were studying medicine at Munich University, some of the young men who played a key role in forming the group had been sent to work in the army medical service on the Eastern Front. The group gradually expanded to include not only Kurt Huber, a Munich professor who acted as a kind of mentor to many of its members, but also friends, colleagues and students in other university towns from Freiburg to Stuttgart, and especially Hamburg. Leading members included the Scholl siblings, Hans and Sophie, as well as a number of other Munich students, Alexander Schmorell, Christoph Probst and Willi Graf. Some of them tried to take up contact with Falk Harnack, brother of the key figure in the ‘Red Orchestra’ network, though he did not respond to their overtures. As it expanded, the group became bolder, typing, cyclostyling and posting to a wide and more or less random range of recipients a series of six leaflets in quantities ranging from just a hundred up to several thousand. Their aim, like that of traditional left-wing resistance groups, was to rouse popular opinion so that the masses would rise up and bring an end to the war by overthrowing Hitler and his regime. They roundly condemned the mass murder of the Jews and the Polish elites, and pilloried the apathy of the German people in the face of the Nazis’ crimes. After Stalingrad they began daubing graffiti on the walls of public buildings in Munich (‘Hitler Mass Murderer’, ‘Freedom’ and so on). On 18 February 1943, however, Hans and Sophie Scholl were observed by a university porter scattering copies of their latest leaflet in the courtyard. He reported them to the Gestapo, and they were arrested. Despite their refusal under torture to betray the other members of the group, the police soon identified and arrested Probst and the rest of the ‘White Rose’ activists. Hitler wanted a quick trial. Probst and the Scholls were brought before the People’s Court on 22 February 1943, found guilty of treason and beheaded; Huber, Schmorell and Graf were condemned on 19 April and also executed. Ten others were given prison sentences. The Hamburg group continued to distribute the leaflets but it was also eventually discovered by the Gestapo; the last of its members was arrested in June 1944. Copies of the final leaflet reached the British via Sweden, and the Royal Air Force dropped hundreds of thousands of copies over Germany in the spring of 1943.253 Thus the message of the ‘White Rose’ did not go unread.

  For the most part, however, moral and political critics of the regime sat tight, hoping for better times, and keeping their beliefs to themselves. It is impossible to say with any certainty how widespread such behaviour was. One example can be found in the diary of Erika S., born in Hamburg in 1926, into a formerly Social Democratic family. Her journal mixed in unselfconscious juxtaposition with her own daily cares her moral outrage at the larger damage she thought the war was causing. ‘Ah,’ she wrote on 4 June 1942, ‘if only this unholy war were soon at an end! Nothing to eat and then these many cruel murders, it’s too terrible, especially when you think of all the victims and those left behind. Nobody knows how many young people have already had to sacrifice their lives for Hitler’s devilish cause, it’s no longer anything but one huge campaign of murder.’254 Such sentiments were doubtless shared by her father, who was taken into custody by the Gestapo on more than one occasion, the last time on 23 August 1944. Undaunted by this final arrest, Erika sat down and wrote a letter to Himmler, assuring him that her parents had ‘brought me and my 14-year-old brother up in a completely National Socialist way’. She reminded the SS chief that she was a member of the League of German Girls and had joined the Nazi Party the previous April. So she could not understand why her father had been taken into custody. After waiting in vain for a reply, she went to the nearest Gestapo office to pursue her quest. The officers were polite, but made no concessions. ‘It just can’t be borne any longer,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘how one is treated in Germany. And all the same, one still does everything to avoid attracting attention.’255

  IV

  None of this was ever likely to achieve the overthrow of the Nazi regime. Only one group was in a position to do this, and that was the military resistance that had originally emerged in 1938 among senior army officers concerned about what they saw as Hitler’s rashness in risking a general European war by the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when Germany was unprepared for one. The victo
ries of 1939-40 seemed to prove them wrong.256 Only a few, such as the former Ambassador to Italy, Ulrich von Hassell, remained convinced of what he called the criminal irresponsibility of the regime and were appalled at the destruction it was visiting upon Eastern Europe. Hassell found it intolerable, as he wrote in his diary on 8 October 1940, that ‘the Jews are systematically being exterminated, and a devilish campaign is being launched against the Polish intelligentsia with the express purpose of annihilating it’.257 Other Foreign Ministry officials, including State Secretary Ernst von Weizs̈cker, Adam von Trott zu Solz and Hans-Bernd von Haeften, had long shared Hassell’s views. Hassell regularly discussed this and other issues with a small number of like-minded civilians who had occupied senior positions in government and administration, notably Carl Goerdeler, the former Price Commissioner and ex-Mayor of Leipzig, and Johannes Popitz, Prussian Minister of Finance. The group included the former Chief of the Army General Staff Ludwig Beck, who was one of the few senior military figures who were not bowled over by the military triumphs of the first phase of the war; others who had once contemplated arresting Hitler and installing a military regime, like Franz Halder, no longer went beyond grumbling about Hitler’s conduct of the war even when the going began to get tough in 1941, as we have seen. Like the vast majority of senior officers, Halder supported the concept of a crusade against the Soviet Union and considered the harshest measures justified. The circle around the head of the Military Intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm von Canaris, and his chief of staff, Hans Oster, had also been concerned for some time about Hitler’s reckless military ambition. But they bided their time, considering it was pointless trying to undertake anything while popular support for Hitler was so high. The group also included the young theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had been an inspirational figure in the Confessing Church but missed its main confrontation with the Nazi regime in the mid-1930s because he had been serving as a pastor in London. Bonhoeffer had been drafted into Military Intelligence in 1940, and soon began working with the oppositional group there.258