The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Others contend, second, that the most important motive for joining the conspiracy was to save Germany from an overall military defeat. This argument carries some weight, and it certainly holds for officers like Rommel, who seemed to “jump on the bandwagon” at the eleventh hour in summer 1944. In other cases, we just don’t know. The scarcity of sources does not allow us, for example, to assess the motives of conspirators such as Jaeger or Klausing; even the motives of Witzleben, a key figure, aren’t completely clear. However, the source material does help us assess the motives of some leading conspirators. We know that many, if not most, were active when Germany’s defeat was not yet on the horizon, which is hard to reconcile with the theory that the conspiracy was attempted only to save Germany from defeat.

  Yet it was certainly part of the motivation for others besides Rommel. This concern about the impact of defeat to Germany often morphed into a concern for the impact of the war more generally. Ulrich von Hassell wrote in his diary that it was still imperative to oppose the Nazi regime even after the conquest of France. Dr. Carl Goerdeler had similarly written in one of his last memoranda:

  During the war’s first two years, Hitler proceeded from triumph to triumph. My colleagues and I were not fooled. After the sad scene [of the French surrender] in Compiègne Forest, . . . we knew that each new victory would whet [Hitler’s] appetite for power, as well as feed his lack of proportion . . . and we sought with all our might to do everything to minimize the disaster, to save precious human lives from all nations, and to halt as quickly as possible the destruction of the last reserves [of Europe’s peoples] and the desolation of priceless cultural assets.2

  Recall that Stauffenberg was certain of a German victory at the start of Operation Barbarossa. Then remember his remark that the conspirators should use the momentum of the victory over the Russians to put an end to the Nazi regime. As the massacres proliferated, he decided that the regime had to be overthrown immediately, without waiting for the ultimate victory. “It is true that [the defeat at] Stalingrad had a significant psychological effect on many, but, contrary to the common wisdom, this was not the driving force behind the July 20 conspirators,” wrote Rudolf von Gersdorff, Henning von Tresckow’s right-hand man. “The decision was made because of the [conspirators’] confrontation with the brutality in Russia, the persecution of the Jews, the atrocities in the concentration camps, and the other crimes of the Nazi policy of force.” Similar sentiments were voiced by Axel von dem Bussche, who began to oppose the regime after witnessing the massacre of Jews in Ukraine.3

  A third common argument holds that individuals, especially Tresckow and his friends, joined the resistance because of their objection to Hitler’s military strategy in late 1941.4 This argument is likewise difficult to credit. It is hard to find examples of men and women who betrayed their countries, risked their lives, and even put their families at risk simply because they disagreed with some of the government’s political or military decisions, which they otherwise perceived as legitimate. In 1940, many British officers and high officials opposed Churchill’s decision to keep on fighting, and some of them were certain that he was leading their country into disaster. Yet none of them conspired against His Majesty’s government. Likewise, in the United States, more than a few officers thought that certain decisions made by the top generals were bad, but none of them suggested assassinating President Roosevelt. Military motives alone cannot explain why the German conspirators, officers who grew up in a tradition of strict obedience, risked their lives in armed opposition to the government. The evidence shows clearly that they were motivated by moral concerns, according to their own definition of the term, and that they saw Hitler’s internal, foreign, and war policies as deeply immoral.

  In fact, the decisive question is not whether the conspirators’ motives were moral but, rather, what morality meant for them. As was noted long ago by Quentin Skinner, it is a serious mistake to assume that the meaning of a given term is identical across generations, social circles, and even within the lifetime of an individual.5 Indeed, what the German resistance fighters understood by the word morality was very different from its generally accepted meaning in Germany today. Some of them, for example, believed that several of the principles of National Socialism, for instance, the Volksgemeinschaft, were essentially moral and that it was only in the way they were executed that they became immoral.6 At the time, hardly any of them could imagine morality as separate from patriotism. In their view, nothing could be more moral than saving German civilians and soldiers, German territory, and even German power. The conspirators saw themselves as loyal soldiers truly serving their fatherland by fighting the government. As the final downfall drew near, they became even more anxious to save their country and accelerated the preparations for their coup d’état.

  Gersdorff argued that the primary impetus for him and his associates was the horror they felt witnessing the crimes committed by the regime. Yet he also wrote, on the next page, that the rebels could not have risked the collapse of the eastern front. If that were to happen, Germany would be conquered by the Russians and Europe overrun by “millions of Slavs and Asiatics.”7 The morality he and his associates understood, then, was inseparable from their feelings about their country, their existential fears, and even the racial prejudices so typical of their time. Certainly acts that seem, in retrospect, purely moral were also bound up with the conspirators’ views about what was best for Germany. Resistance fighters like Hans von Dohnanyi who worked to save Jews sincerely believed that they had to perform these compassionate labors in the service of Germany. Goerdeler and Hassell, as we have seen, spoke out passionately against the massacres of civilians not only out of sympathy with the victims but also because they wished to prevent Germany from being forever blemished by these crimes.8

  In other words, contrary to the simplistic dichotomy prevalent in the resistance literature, the conspirators made no distinction between patriotic and military motives on the one hand, and moral imperatives on the other.9 Most did not view saving the German people as any less a moral duty than halting the slaughter in the concentration camps. They acted not according to “pure morality” but, rather, in the name of a system of political and military values and goals. These internal forces of conscience were cemented by their real-life experiences. As the historian Klaus-Jürgen Müller has observed,

  The morality that motivated the resistance fighters was not an abstract, theoretical morality detached from actual life experience. These were moral impulses that grew out of concrete experiences and visceral judgment. Anyone who seeks to ascribe to them only pure and abstract moral motives . . . detracts from the magnitude of their inner struggle and the inner development they went through before deciding in principle to resist the regime. It would not be realistic to argue that they, from the start, planned only a “revolt of conscience,” disconnected from the facts and from the circumstances in the field. Such an argument does not do justice to their historical distinction.10

  Evidence for the overlap between patriotism and morality can be found in the writings of almost all major conspirators who left documentation. However, in most cases, patriotism was merely one component of their moral system. Most conspirators were not exclusively patriots who cared only about their own people. Indeed, several also empathized with the non-German victims of Hitler: Poles, Russians, French, Jews, and others.11

  Dr. Carl Goerdeler wrote how tormented he was, almost in the physical sense of the word, by the suffering of starving POWs, exterminated Jews, and Slovenians cruelly expelled from their homes. Already in 1938, he viewed Kristallnacht as a good enough reason to rule out reconciliation with the Nazi regime.12 In the diary of Ulrich von Hassell, who expressed strong sympathy with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, there is similar evidence attesting to the same concerns.13 Stauffenberg indicated that the “treatment of the Jews,” in addition to Hitler’s military folly, moved him to join the conspiracy. The extermination of Jews was “yet another good reason to get
rid of the mass murderer [Hitler].”14

  Tresckow and his friends, particularly Gersdorff, served at the eastern front while genocide and mass murder raged around them. That’s why Tresckow called Hitler not only “the archenemy of Germany but the archenemy of all humanity.” Hans Oster, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Wilhelm Canaris, Hans von Dohnanyi, and others risked their lives to save Jews. Axel von dem Bussche was ready to sacrifice his life upon his encounter with the murder of the Jews in Dubno, Ukraine. From the relatively little information we have on Beck and Olbricht, it seems that their cases were similar. The very concept of national interest was thus linked, for most of the conspirators, with questions of morality. A government that slaughtered innocent civilians and ruled cruelly and tyrannically struck at the national interest in the most fundamental sense, even if, for the time being, it was victorious in war.

  A somewhat different example, disturbing but thought-provoking, can be found in the diary of Hermann Kaiser. His anti-Semitism and racism are evident throughout the diary, but he never endorsed murder or violent persecution. He valued morality no less than Goerdeler, Hassell, or Tresckow. “Morality,” he wrote, “is the most profound basis for the work of the statesman.”15 Generally, it is not easy to reconstruct his thoughts or motives from the diary, because his way of reporting was so cryptic. He often wrote about the state of affairs at the front, and was truly distressed by the military developments. Sick and anxious, Kaiser poured his heart into the diary, confessing his misery and long, sleepless nights. “Dead tired, but I did not sleep all night,” he wrote in 1943. “The fate of the fatherland is depressing me.”16 The suffering of his German brethren in the air raids moved him deeply.

  Atrocities against Russians, Poles, French hostages, and of course Jews are frequently mentioned in the diary. In one case, Kaiser wrote that Goerdeler had reported on the killing of Jews by poisonous gas and, in another, on a massacre of Romanian Jews.17 As far as Kaiser’s telegraphic style can be understood, it is obvious that he disapproved of these atrocities. In general, they strengthen the feeling of misery pervading his journal.18 However, Kaiser’s journal sometimes displays his set of moral priorities and his definition of morality. When reporting that Nazi ruffians were desecrating crucifixes in rural areas throughout the Reich, he poured forth his rage:

  I could not overcome my humiliation and outrage, and said in a loud voice: this is not a spiritual struggle, just criminal violence . . . Cowardice rules here, and lack of courage and fear to speak the truth. I would have hunted the fellows who desecrated these crucifixes in pairs [zu paaren treiben]. It is so sad that there are Germans able to sin against the Christian religion, going back for centuries in our tradition . . . There is nothing in their hearts . . . only crude violence and viciousness. In my opinion, the basis of every government is justice and freedom of conscience. Whoever violates these principles pushes his nation into the abyss. Whoever challenges them, destroys himself.19

  Other conspirators, to be sure, were also extremely distressed by the Nazi struggle against Christianity. But for Goerdeler, Hassell, and Bonhoeffer, to take only three prominent examples, murder of unarmed civilians was an integral part of Germany’s dechristianization. Kaiser was no less devout, and no less anxious about moral degradation, but an attack on the external symbols of religion outraged him more than the massacre of people.

  Yet another example—that of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin—demonstrates the same kind of complexity. Kleist, as we have seen in chapter 3, was perhaps unique among conservative conspirators in his unrelenting opposition to National Socialism from even before 1933. He refused to donate so much as one mark to the Nazi Party or to fly the swastika flag over his castle. Even when sentenced to death after July 20, 1944, he took pride in his “betrayal,” proclaiming it “the will of God.” Furthermore, Kleist’s opposition to the regime, more than that of other conspirators, was formulated in clearly moralistic terms. He defined the Nazis as worshippers of Ba’al and Ashera, and the resistance fighters as biblical heroes. In short, his was a textbook example of resistance based on moral grounds.

  And yet, considering the usual equation between moral resistance and determination to stop the Holocaust, one may be surprised that the latter was not so high on Kleist’s agenda. “I believe that Kleist did not know too much about the extermination of the Jews,” testified Schlabrendorff after the war. “He was generally familiar with the facts, but not with the details. In addition, this question was not as prominent for him as it has become for us nowadays. For him, the moral and political momentum always took precedence.”20 That is an interesting point: the Holocaust seemed to play a much larger part in the motives of resistance fighters such as Goerdeler or Stauffenberg, who cooperated with the regime up to a point, or for people, such as Tresckow, Gersdorff, and Bussche, who witnessed the genocide firsthand. In such cases, it is only natural to highlight the crimes as a justification for moral indignation and resistance against the regime. But for a man like Kleist, who had always seen Nazism, root and branch, as absolute evil, there was no need to get into the details of its crimes. Obviously, absolute evil will perform abominations. Only the big picture, the “moral and political momentum,” matters. We can therefore see how different people invoked morality as something that underlay their resistance, but attached very different meanings to it.

  We can also see how differing moral considerations clashed within the conspiracy itself. A typical example is the internal debate in the conspiracy on the efforts of Dohnanyi, Oster, and Canaris to save Jews in operations such as U-7. Dohnanyi, who viewed these rescue operations as a “duty to Germany,” convinced Oster and Canaris to finance and cover them. Oster gave the order to move funds, but the actual transactions were made by Hans Gisevius, who lived in Switzerland and functioned as the banker of the conspiracy. Did Gisevius feel that he was fulfilling a moral duty by abetting rescue operations? In fact he opposed them, not because he was anti-Semitic but because he felt that such large transactions might expose the conspiracy to Nazi authorities.21 It is easy to condemn Gisevius, but he was essentially right. U-7 led to the exposure of the Abwehr cell and nearly to the complete obliteration of the resistance. Still, fourteen men, women, and children were saved from death. Was the price worth it? Gisevius and Fritz Arnold, the leader of the group of survivors, passionately debated the issue years after the event. In any case, it is clear that the conflict here was not between morality and opportunism but, rather, between different sets of moral values.

  It is even more difficult to explain the resistance activities of officers whose behavior during the war was outright criminal. How shall we decipher the story of Count Wolf von Helldorff, the police commandant of Berlin? Virulently anti-Semitic, violent, and corrupt to the bone, this SA officer was directly responsible for a pogrom before 1933 and extorted money from German Jews long afterward.22 Helldorff told the Gestapo that he agreed with the principles of National Socialism but not with their implementation, especially not with the judicial arbitrariness and the struggle against the church.23 There is no additional reliable information on his motives.

  It is also difficult to explain the motives of Arthur Nebe, a commander of a murder squad (Einsatzgruppe) on the eastern front, for joining the conspiracy against Hitler. His friends from the resistance, above all Gisevius, argued after the war that he had joined the Einsatzgruppen only to feed the resistance with inside information, and that he helped the conspirators save as many people as he could. The evidence does not support this claim, indicating that Nebe was as cruel and murderous as his SS associates. It is tempting to agree with Nebe’s biographer Ronald Rathert that this SS officer was nothing but an opportunist who joined the conspiracy in order to “safeguard his life by a double game.”24 After all, how can conventional logic explain the involvement of a mass murderer in the German resistance to Hitler except as an opportunist?

  Still, we should eschew the easy answer. As has been noted, joining the conspiracy was extremely dangerous, hardly th
e best way to save oneself. True, unlike regular army commanders, a mass murderer like Nebe could realistically expect a British or American death sentence. If he had joined the conspiracy in 1944, when the war was already lost, one could just about explain his choice as an attempt to avoid the American scaffold by taking the risk of stepping onto a Nazi one. However, Nebe joined the conspiracy in 1938, well before the war, and remained committed throughout. Why? One can assume that patriotic considerations were involved, but the truth is that we have no reliable evidence. Until more documents are found, Arthur Nebe will have to remain a riddle.

  It was not only the SS that was implicated in Nazi crimes; the Wehrmacht was, too. Therefore, conspirators who served in the east had to deal with daily moral dilemmas. They weren’t professional murderers like Nebe, yet many could not escape responsibility.

  “The military obedience,” Gen. Ludwig Beck wrote, “finds its limits when . . . knowledge, conscience, and responsibility forbid following an order.”25 “What good are our tactical and other capabilities,” asked Henning von Tresckow, “when the critical questions remain open? . . . We remain resolute in our claim that our fight is for the very existence of the fatherland, but are we permitted to ignore the fact that we are doing this in the service of a criminal?”26 Tresckow indeed disobeyed the Commissar Order and spared a Russian prisoner who, under its terms, should have been executed.27 He and others realized that insubordination became a duty when the orders were unconscionable. But their disobedience was selective rather than comprehensive. According to Gersdorff, Tresckow believed that the army must be kept intact after the coup and, in addition, felt a strong responsibility for the safety of his troops: bad military leadership costs lives. “The German Resistance Movement was not a profession to which one could devote oneself exclusively,” remarked Fabian von Schlabrendorff. “We were Germans. We were in the middle of a war. We had to protect our country against the enemy by force of arms.”28 He and his comrades lived double lives: they served in the Wehrmacht and at the same time in an anti-Nazi shadow army.