by Danny Orbach
But what about legal, “civilized” anti-Semitism, which was well accepted in wide circles of the German conservative right and beyond? The proposals of Hassell and Goerdeler differed also in their respective solutions to the notorious “Jewish question.” Both agreed that Hitler’s Jewish victims must be compensated, but their opinions regarding Jews’ civil status differed greatly.
Surprisingly, Hassell’s proposal was the more liberal of the two. According to his memorandum, immediately after the downfall of the regime, all laws enacted by the National Socialist Party and its affiliate organizations would be nullified, “especially the Jewish laws.”5 That definition included, of course, the notorious Nuremberg Laws. The new regime would safeguard the rights of the Jewish minority and ensure full civil equality.
The position taken by Goerdeler was certainly less liberal, but it was more complex, and in certain respects more farsighted. As we have seen in previous chapters, Goerdeler was a sworn enemy of National Socialist anti-Semitic persecution. He denounced all expressions of racist violence, especially Kristallnacht, and even implored the British to refuse to negotiate with Hitler until he stopped persecuting Polish-German Jews. During the war, he was horrified about the transport of German Jews to the extermination camps in the east. He wrote,
On January 19 and 27 [1942] . . . Jews from Leipzig were again evacuated. Outside it was freezing, minus 15 to 20 Celsius. The Jews had to hand their woolen clothes over . . . They were loaded into open trucks, men, women and children . . . In the transport there was a 64-year-old woman whose brother, a professor in the University of Leipzig, had been severely wounded in the last war and won a medal for extraordinary courage . . . They were sent to the east in cattle trucks . . . It horrifies the soul, when one imagines the hearts of fathers and mothers, seeing their children freezing and starving before their own eyes. I cannot imagine any German with a heart, who does not understand that such horrors must bring revenge upon our people . . . Such intended inhumanity is unprecedented in the annals of human history.6
As a reaction to these “unprecedented horrors,” already under way when “The Goal” was written, Goerdeler desperately tried to remedy the problem at its root, providing a solution that would ensure such things never happened again. He proposed “a general reform of the status of the Jews in the entire world.” As a die-hard nationalist with pro-Zionist sympathies, he believed that the only solution for the Jewish people was national independence: establishing in Palestine, or parts of Canada and South America, a Jewish state in which citizenship would be automatically granted to all Jews in the world. Such a state would allow the Jewish people to lead a normal, sovereign life, like any other nation on earth, and would protect world Jewry from anti-Semitic regimes, pogroms, and riots, not only by giving sanctuary but also insofar as the Jews would have diplomatic power and a sovereign presence at the League of Nations. This was far from being unreasonable. As is argued by the jurist Fritz Kieffer, in the prewar years even the Third Reich hesitated to violate the rights of Jews with foreign passports, out of fear of reprisals by their governments.7 It was, therefore, the mere citizenship of Jews in anti-Semitic countries which turned them into an “internal problem” for these countries and denied them effective protection. A Jewish state was, according to Goerdeler, the only real, enduring solution.
In an influential article written in 1984, historian Christoph Dipper wrote that Goerdeler planned to cancel the citizenship of most German Jews. This article, though often quoted uncritically by other scholars, is based on an erroneous reading of Goerdeler’s writing. In fact, Goerdeler never called for the expulsion of Jews, nor for the sweeping withdrawal of their citizenship. Though, in principle, Jews were supposed to be citizens of “their” state, in practice, around 80 percent of German Jews would keep their current citizenship: everyone whose family became naturalized with the emancipation decree of 1871 (and not before the emancipation, as Dipper suggested) and those who had converted to Christianity, in addition to all Jewish veterans of the Great War and their direct descendants. The rest would be considered citizens of a foreign country (the Jewish state) and would be able to stay and work in Germany just like any other foreigner.8
It is no wonder that Goerdeler considered himself pro-Zionist. In fact, when touring Palestine and other Middle Eastern countries with his son, his warmest praises were reserved for the Yishuv, the Jewish-Zionist community in Palestine. “The vegetable fields and fruit orchards of the Jews,” he wrote, “are among the most fertile I have seen in the Levant and North Africa . . . The town of Tel Aviv is especially interesting, and is planned according to modern principles. It has neat shopping streets, good shops, a nice beach and handsome villas . . . The streets are clean and covered with asphalt.” He especially appreciated Jewish technological innovation, for example, in irrigation canals, and the combination of advanced scientific research and physical labor. He also praised the kibbutzim, the Hebrew education system, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.9
The proposals of Goerdeler and Hassell enjoyed some currency in the conservative circles of the resistance, but no less important was the work of a special think tank, established separately around 1940. It was called the Kreisau Circle, after the estate of its founder, Count Helmuth James von Moltke. This unusual resistance fighter, identified later as the mysterious “Hans” whom Dorothy Thompson referred to in her radio broadcasts, was an international lawyer and a scion of one of the most important Prussian noble families. His great-uncle Gen. Helmuth von Moltke was the famed Prussian strategist of the Franco-Prussian War. Another relative was the German chief of staff in the early days of the Great War. Helmuth James was born in 1907 and inherited the estate in Kreisau, Upper Silesia, which had been given to his great-uncle as a present from the kaiser. He took charge of the estate while still young and immediately began working on a plan to settle its debts. He was successful as a lawyer, landlord, and economist.
A liberal and generous man, though at times cool and haughty, Moltke was admired by many of his German and international acquaintances—so said his two British friends Michael Balfour and Lionel Curtis. Their account has a touch of hagiography about it, common in many postwar reminiscences, but it is still both touching and valuable:
It often appeared as though the ordinary pleasure of life meant little to him: he never smoked, seldom drank, and generally seemed indifferent to what he was eating . . . Unsparing of himself, he looked critically on people reluctant to make a similar effort . . . but his slightly dour concentration on the subject in hand was moderated by a lively sense of humour, puckish rather than cynical: no matter how much Helmuth loathed the things for which his opponents stood, he was much more likely to laugh at them than lose his temper . . . Underlying all of his strength of character and intellect was a deep love for the simple things of life, flowers and the country-side, his home, his children, his friends.10
An unusual left-leaning liberal among Prussian landlords, Moltke was also a supporter of the Weimar Republic. Unlike many others, he chose to give away most of his lands to peasants, as he believed that in modern times land should belong to its cultivators. During the 1920s, he was mainly disturbed by social problems, especially the poor conditions in Silesian working-class neighborhoods, and joined an initiative of the jurist Eugen Rosenstock. Together with other friends, some of whom became members of the Kreisau Circle, he helped to create summer camps for young Silesians of all classes, combining physical labor, liberal education in law, history, economics, and culture, and a variety of musical and recreational activities.
Prof. Adolf Reichwein, one of the lecturers in the Silesian summer camps, was to fulfill a major role in the Kreisau Circle and the German resistance as a whole. He was a Social Democratic Christian intellectual, tall, with fiery red hair. As an avid supporter of the republic, he joined the Social Democratic Party. In the late twenties, he traveled around the globe, building his reputation as a scientist, scholar, educator, and adventurer. As part of his j
ourneying, he crossed the United States and Canada in an old Ford car, reached Lapland and the North Pole, and traveled on to East Asia, where he was deeply influenced by Chinese philosophy and mysticism. As a declared rival of the Nazi regime, he was fired from the university in one of the post-1933 purges, but he rejected a tempting offer of an academic teaching post in Istanbul. Unlike many others, he did not want to find shelter abroad, preferring to fight the Nazi regime from within.11
In 1933, the educational work of Moltke, Reichwein, and others came to an abrupt end. The new regime was now unwilling to tolerate humanistic educational initiatives, and the summer camps of Silesia were dissolved. Unlike many other Germans, Moltke had no illusions about the new regime. Upon hearing a friend say, “It is good that the Nazis took over, because soon they will get tired of government and will be replaced,” he became enraged. He advised other friends, mainly Jews, to leave Germany as soon as possible. “Get out! Get out!” he told them emphatically. “This man [Hitler] will do everything as he wrote in his book [Mein Kampf].” That was a frighteningly accurate prophecy, but not many people took it seriously at the time.12
Moltke’s resistance to the Nazi regime increased with the passing years: the Night of the Long Knives; the persecution of churches, Jews, and the left; the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht, all reinforced his original belief: Hitler was implementing his master plan as laid out in Mein Kampf. Moltke did his best to help. More and more of his time was devoted to assisting Jews who were trying to emigrate from Germany, and he even went to the Viennese Gestapo to help two of them.13 In the late 1930s, along with his wife, Freya, he weaved a dense network of resistance fighters—noblemen, intellectuals, high officials, and labor-union leaders. Moltke’s group was in contact not only with Beck, Goerdeler, and Oster but also with the Western Allies and anti-Nazi underground movements in Holland, Denmark, France, and Norway. That was the group that the Gestapo later nicknamed the Kreisau Circle.
In 1938, Moltke stumbled upon the German resistance network by contacting Hans von Dohnanyi and, through him, Hans Oster. The latter recruited him as a legal adviser to the Abwehr, the usual cover for resistance activities. As part of his new duties, Moltke was able not only to subvert criminal orders, save victims, and reduce the severity of war crimes, but also to be in touch with leading oppositionists. He didn’t take part in planning the 1938 coup, but he knew something of it. His group, though connected with the German resistance, all the while maintained its own separate, independent network.14
In fact, Moltke was less interested in coups than in what he perceived as more basic, underlying problems with the anti-Nazi cause. As is mentioned in chapter 5, General Halder had complained that the conspirators never planned anything substantial for the “day after,” and merely asked the soldiers to “clean the room” like “housemaids.” Moltke would have agreed with this complaint. For him, planning for a future Germany was an absolute necessity, regardless of whether the Nazi regime was overthrown by the conspirators or by military defeat. In the first years of the war, he was very skeptical and ambivalent about the mere idea of a coup, though he never ruled it out completely and was ready to cooperate with its initiators.
A breakthrough in the plans occurred when Moltke met a distant relative, Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, destined to be his closest friend and associate in the Kreisau Circle. He discovered that Yorck, too, had formed a small group of anti-Nazi activists, with a mind to plan for the future of Germany. Now, the two small groups united into a single network.15 All members were naturally well aware that they stood in mortal danger. From the regime’s point of view, their intellectual activity constituted high treason punishable by death.
Moltke and Yorck divided the twenty-odd members of their network into small groups and gave them research tasks, such as church-state relations, economics, law and constitution, local government, security, foreign policy, and prosecution of war criminals. At times, external experts were consulted, but they were not told about the project as a whole. The groups met separately, once a month or more often, in Moltke’s estate at Kreisau or in Yorck’s place at Klein-Oels. There were also three important plenary meetings of the entire circle in May 1942, October 1942, and June 1943.
The few surviving testimonies on the meetings at the Kreisau estate tell us something about the clandestine, mysterious atmosphere that prevailed. When members came to the meetings, they didn’t stop at the Kreisau railway station but rather at an obscure little station in the nearby countryside, built long before for a visit of Emperor William II. Understandably, they did not want to cross the village, where they would be exposed to the curious eyes of the locals. Moltke waited for his guests at the little station and led them through lanes, forests, and lakes to the “mountain house,” a small abode near the castle used by him, Freya, and their children. Even inside the house, security precautions were tight. In the dining room, only social matters could be discussed; politics was for the locked conference hall alone. Moltke, it seems, couldn’t trust even his servants. In this curious atmosphere, surrounded by the lush landscape of rural Silesia, the Kreisauers imagined Germany’s future.
The state they imagined was a federation of small and large communities with considerable authority for self-government, united by a loose federal structure to maintain justice, order, freedom, and the rule of law. In many respects, this was similar to the plan of Carl Goerdeler. Just as in his plan, the citizens’ influence inside their communities would be greater than their power over the federal government. Eligible voters—every citizen twenty-one years old or older—would elect their representatives to the council of the region (Kreis). These councils would elect representatives to the state parliament (Landtag), and only the Landtag deputies would elect the Reichstag, the highest legislative body of the Reich. The parliament in every state would elect senators (Landesverweser), and the members of the Senate (Reichsrat) would elect the head of state (Reichsverweser) for a term of twelve years. The Reichsverweser would have wide powers: to appoint and demote the prime minister and other cabinet members, and to ratify laws with his signature.
Unlike Goerdeler, the Kreisau Circle saw the “Jewish question” as an issue of German citizenship that must be resolved inside Germany, not internationally, according to principles of liberalism and civic equality. The draft constitution explicitly maintained that “all laws and acts discriminating against an individual for reasons of belonging to a certain nation, race or creed are void. All discriminating bylaws deriving from such acts are to be cancelled as well.”16 The new government would denounce racism and racial thinking and, just as Goerdeler had planned, would compensate the victims of National Socialism—both Jews and others. A special emphasis was put on educational reform. New textbooks would be written as quickly as possible, but even before they were ready, all existing National Socialist textbooks would be removed from the curriculum.
In matters of foreign policy, the Kreisau plan departed radically from both Goerdeler and Hassell, and was certainly less colored by realpolitik. Far from being based on nationalism, the Reich policy would strive to limit the sovereignty of the nation-state and would integrate Germany in a new federal structure, a “United States of Europe.” All Nazi leaders would be removed from power, and the war criminals among them would be tried before an international tribunal of six judges: three from Allied countries, two from neutral countries, and one from Germany. That structure was intended to frame the future war-crimes trials as an endeavor of international justice, rather than as petty revenge against the German people.17
Planning for the future of Germany was a common, even a fundamental, activity of the German resistance up to 1942 and even beyond. However, Goerdeler, Beck, and Hassell were also trying to work toward a coup d’état. In the Kreisau case, things were more ambiguous. Theoretical discussions, interesting and important as they were, may seem to an ex post facto observer somewhat detached from reality. Until 1942, Moltke and his friends were flying on the wings of tho
ught, dealing with theoretical questions and building networks of imagination, while the war was raging before their eyes. Moltke himself abhorred violence of all kinds, at least until 1942. In 1940, most members of his circle held similarly pacifist views. Some of them worked with Goerdeler and were ready to contribute their talent to the post-Nazi state, but their Christian idealism prevented them from joining the coup plans until later.18
In addition to Julius Leber and Fritz von der Schulenburg, both of whom always advocated a violent coup, Peter Yorck was gradually being won over toward a more violent, activist line. Unlike Moltke, he saw himself not as a citizen of the world but as a Christian and a German in body, heart, and soul. As a nobleman, he felt it was his duty to resist the wickedness and crimes of the Nazi regime. “I am not and could never be a Nazi,” he said many years later to his National Socialist judge, when accused of resistance to the “National Socialist concept of justice, that the Jews have to be uprooted.” “The vital point running through all of these questions,” he said, “is the totalitarian claim of the state over the citizen to the exclusion of his religious and moral obligations toward God.”19 Yorck obtained information on the “final solution” and distributed it to both the Kreisau Circle and the main network of the German resistance. The extermination of the Jews probably convinced him that the Nazi regime must be resisted by force, even by deadly violence.
Moltke, as we shall see later, was drifting tortuously toward this view as well. Meanwhile, he helped to save Jews, supported European undergrounds, undermined criminal orders, and served the conspiracy as a diplomat, using his excellent contacts with British and American notables. Like Oster, he was willing to assist the Allies in their war effort against Germany. “We are ready to help you to win both the war and the peace,” he assured a British contact in 1942.20
