The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  But at what cost? Tresckow and his associates took an active part in antipartisan warfare, which was often used as a cover for German atrocities. We have already seen that Gersdorff and Tresckow protested against Nazi war crimes. Gersdorff came out publicly against anti-Semitic propaganda and the murder of Jews. Tresckow denounced the Commissar Order and the massacre in Borisov. At least in one case, he tried to thin out the number of the SS units in his theater of operations. But, contrary to the story told by Count Boeselager after the war, these efforts were ineffective and hardly saved anyone.29 Criminal orders passed through Tresckow, and he often had to pass them on or even sign off on them with his initials. On June 28, 1944, for example, only three weeks before July 20, Tresckow signed, in his capacity as the chief of staff of the Second Army, one of the orders of Operation Hay (Aktion Heu). This operation set out to collect orphaned Russian children from the front and send them to forced labor in Germany. Although the operation was neither initiated by Tresckow nor controlled by him, he was still responsible for the command he signed. The story of Operation Hay shows that even the most resolute conspirator was inevitably implicated in the war of extermination in the east.

  The only way for Tresckow to keep his conscience clear was to resign. But could he then orchestrate the attempts to assassinate Hitler? If an attempt had been successful, the rescue of all victims would have been well within reach, and Tresckow would probably have been considered one of the greatest heroes of the Second World War. Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted that doing one’s duty in a time of moral twilight often requires taking guilt upon oneself. Tresckow did just that.

  An even more morally complicated case is that of Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the commander of the Seventeenth Army in Russia and afterward the military governor of France. His responsibility for war crimes in both Russia and France was more grave and direct than Tresckow’s. Even if there is disagreement over the extent and gravity of Stülpnagel’s personal culpability, he indisputably took part in war crimes. He passed on to the Seventeenth Army every one of Hitler’s criminal orders, and himself issued racist and anti-Semitic orders of the day. Stülpnagel’s army marched through Galicia, a province with a large Jewish population, and the SS’s Einsatzgruppen committed mass murders in the territory under his control. But even historians who judge Stülpnagel severely acknowledge that tens of thousands of Jews were murdered in zones controlled by other armies, for example, those of Reichenau and Manstein, on an order of magnitude greater than in the zone under Stülpnagel’s command. Even more importantly, most of the Jews murdered in the Seventeenth Army’s territory were killed after Stülpnagel had given up this command. The slaughter of Jews increased dramatically under his replacement, Gen. Hermann Hoth.

  Some conclude from this that, although Stülpnagel had command responsibility for war crimes, he, unlike most other commanders in his position, did not willingly cooperate with the murderers of the SS. Others argue, with a paucity of clear evidence, that Stülpnagel resigned his post because he was fed up with and disgusted by the war crimes he was compelled to take part in.30 Whatever the case, it’s clear that, on the one hand, in his capacity as military governor of France, Stülpnagel ruled harshly and, among other things, ordered the execution of hostages. As in Russia, he viewed his country’s military requirements as trumping all moral considerations. On the other hand, it seems that at the same time he tried, through back channels, to disrupt the deportation of the country’s Jews, or at least to slow it down. Evidence on that count can be found in an official document that Heinrich Himmler wrote when the blind Stülpnagel was sent off to the hangman in his hospital bed. The SS chief wrote that “the military governor’s hostile attitude [to the SS] hindered the deportation of France’s Jews.” Stülpnagel’s children claim that their father sharply opposed both the deportations and the genocide policy as a whole.31

  Did Stülpnagel really have no choice but to commit war crimes? If he loathed doing so, why did he not resign his commission when he saw what it required of him? There is no conclusive answer to that question, but we do know that had he resigned, he could not have worked to topple the regime. We also know that he remained a loyal member of the conspiracy throughout, and that he acted bravely in Paris at the price of his life.

  Nearly all the members of the German resistance chose to remain in the army and to oppose Hitler as best they could instead of standing aside or voicing their outrage, as the German exiles in London and Washington did. Many of them, unlike Stülpnagel and others, managed to avoid involvement in war crimes. However, they, too, felt torn at having to cooperate with a regime they detested, and the psychological conflicts they confronted daily took a heavy toll. Axel von dem Bussche, for example, didn’t think that his resistance activity atoned for his service in a criminal army. After the war, every time he encountered a Jew or an Israeli, he felt a profound sense of shame for having served in the Wehrmacht.32 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the clergyman who worked in the Abwehr, expressed similar feelings. The powerful Christian image of Pilate washing his hands as an act of shedding responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus profoundly affected these men. It helps explain Bonhoeffer’s sense of personal guilt: “We became silent witnesses to iniquitous acts. We have washed our hands in much water. We learned the art of dissimulation and ambiguous speech . . . We were worn down and even grew cynical as a result of excruciating conflicts. Are we of any use anymore?”33

  Until now, this chapter has focused on the conspirators’ sense of morality, the link between morality and patriotism, and the dilemma of “opposition from within.” Now, we must ponder the meaning of the second word in the phrase “moral motives.” Motives is a word often used so casually that we hardly even think about its meaning. This question, rarely asked in the resistance literature, is the key to understanding who, among the multitude of people in the Wehrmacht and beyond, was most likely to become a conspirator in the first place.

  Scholars have suggested a number of factors, among them the Prussian military tradition, religious faith, and humanistic education. But were these elements sufficient unto themselves to form a motive for resistance? Can, for example, the Prussian ethos be taken as the ideological platform of the German resistance movement? Was it the antithesis of Nazism? True, Tresckow, a proud scion of a Prussian noble family that had provided the Prussian army with twenty-one generals over three centuries, became an indomitable foe of the Nazis.34 Still, many German officers felt a powerful allegiance to the values of this tradition and yet remained loyal to the regime. Moreover, many of the conspirators had no stake in this warrior heritage.

  What about religious faith? It is true that nearly all of the resistance fighters were religious—almost all the July 20 plotters, including many of the left-wingers among them, as well as Elser and the members of the Kreisau Circle. All were Christians and felt themselves bound by Christian values. Some nonreligious conspirators actually became believers during their years of fighting the Nazi regime. Reverence for God could thus be seen as the most powerful engine of the resisters. Faith in what they saw as higher values and the possibility of a better world pushed them through their day-to-day travails. When it was time to sacrifice their lives, their faith helped them hold up heroically under interrogation and torture, and face the People’s Court and the gallows. “I stood before [People’s Court president] Freisler as a Christian, a Christian and no more,” said Count Moltke, giving religion its rightful place in the chronicles of the German resistance.35 As he stood before the Nazi judge, Moltke saw himself not as a member of the German underground arraigned before a tyrant’s emissary but, rather, as a believing Christian surrendering his life to Satan’s legions, one more link in a long chain of Christian martyrs.

  But even religion does not satisfy the motive question. Germany was home, as Klaus von Dohnanyi wrote about his father’s involvement in the U-7 rescue operation, “to plenty of believing Christians who never did for their neighbors what my father did for the ‘seven.’”36
The German churches, Catholic and Protestant, were by and large loyal to Hitler. As a God-fearing Christian, Henning von Tresckow was stunned time and time again by the abject cowardice of most religious Germans, both Protestants and Catholics. “I don’t understand,” Tresckow told his wife, “how people who are not fierce opponents of this regime can be considered Christians. A truly devout Christian must also be a devout resister.”37 In other words, although most of the conspirators had in common an intense faith in God, religion was certainly not sufficient by itself to make a German stand up to the Nazis.

  This leaves no definitive answer to what led these people to oppose Hitler. Perhaps it comes down to the elements composing the motive, the aggregate of psychological processes and factors pushing one across the Rubicon into the shadowy world of revolutionary conspiracy. It may well be difficult to define the elusive mix that constitutes such an imperative. The best I can do is to suggest three necessary components: its foundation, substance, and impetus.

  The foundation upon which the conspirators’ morality was built was empathy. These were men and women who profoundly felt and cared about other people’s feelings and lives. Their empathy rendered them unable to disregard the atrocities they witnessed and their country’s plunge into defeat. Built around this foundation was a system of values—what I call substance—whether Christian faith, patriotism, socialism, Prussian military tradition, humanism, or some other set of principles. Finally, the impetus was provided by exceptional courage.

  Each of these components was a necessary condition for making resistance possible. A person emotionally indifferent to the fate of others would never risk his or her life to save them, even if he or she claimed to subscribe to a moral code of one sort or another. The value system itself is no less important than the framework within which it operates, because each conspirator’s set of values, whatever its origin, provided him or her with the inner justification needed to act. Tresckow underlined this when he wrote in his diary, “Every ideal, whether or not based on reality, gives a person a purpose, strength to go on living and to move forward.”38 No less vital was the impetus; only exceptional bravery could move him to act on his values, even at the risk of death. These three necessary conditions seem to have been met in almost all of the conspirators, no matter what their other differences were.

  21

  Networks of Resistance

  TO UNDERSTAND THE German resistance to Hitler, it is hardly enough to discuss its most prominent individuals and their motives. Apart from the unusual case of Georg Elser, military resistance to Hitler was a group rather than an individual activity. Groups have dynamics all their own, which are based on the connectivity and interaction between their members.

  In this book, the network structure of the German resistance movement, guided by the rule of revolutionary mutation, has been discussed at length. We witnessed the birth of the network in 1938, based on the interaction between salesmen, connectors, and brokers. In its lifetime, the movement went through three main phases: the dense little clique of 1938, the connected cliques of Tresckow (1942–43), and finally Stauffenberg’s centralized “wheel conspiracy” (1943–44). Now, we turn to discussing the influence of each of these phases on the functioning of the resistance, its initial achievements, and its ultimate failure.

  Many historians and others contend that this failure was inevitable. If that is so, they might ask, why bother discussing the movement’s strengths and weaknesses? Hitler was not assassinated, Germany kept on following him, and the Second World War raged till the bitter end. The conspirators’ failure was inevitable, and its methodology is moot.

  Obviously, this book is founded on the premise that, their failure notwithstanding, we have much to learn from the conspirators’ thoughts and actions, their triumphs and errors. The cliché learned by every student of history that “historians do not ask counterfactual questions” is inaccurate at best. It would be more right to say that historians, generally speaking, don’t ask counterfactual questions explicitly. But counterfactual scenarios trail every explanation like a shadow. If, for example, we blame the result of the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt on Stauffenberg’s failure to activate the second bomb, we imply that if he had done it, the result would have been different. Counterfactual scenarios are therefore merely attempts to openly discuss what is more commonly just hinted at.

  Not a few historians assume that everything that comes into being has to happen because of “long-range” processes: cultural, demographic, economic, and so on. Evan Mawdsley, for example, argues that all events after September 1939 were inevitable: Hitler had to fail to invade Britain, then he had to invade Russia, and from that moment his defeat was inexorable.1 Mawdsley consistently rules out every alternative option in order to prove that events had to unfold just as they did. These attempts, interesting and brilliant as they may be, smack of intellectual indolence: no matter how reality plays out, someone will always explain that it just had to be that way. Ironically, convincing deterministic explanations can always be found to explain opposite outcomes. Yet reality is not a straight highway; it is a convoluted, narrow road, full of junctions and contingencies. At any given moment, a different choice could bring about an altogether different outcome.

  Historians tend to ignore luck and randomness, but they are crucial influences whenever we reach a junction or historical contingency. Hitler left a speech early in 1939 and thus escaped Georg Elser’s attempt; Tresckow’s bomb malfunctioned in March 1943; a sergeant peeped into Stauffenberg’s dressing room and prevented him from activating the second bomb; and, most famously, Colonel Brandt decided to move Stauffenberg’s briefcase to the other side of the table. In every one of these examples, Hitler was saved by sheer luck.

  Nevertheless, history is more interesting than this, because even when luck or randomness does influence the outcome of events, structural factors and short- and long-range processes might affect the probabilities and odds of each outcome.

  In trying to understand the strong and weak points of the network structure of the German resistance movement, we should examine the advantages and disadvantages of each phase, its prospects and dangers. To do this, we must take into account three main measures: the security of the network (namely, its ability to remain hidden from the security services); its revolutionary autarky (in other words, its ability to rely on insiders rather than outsiders); and, finally, control (how well the leaders could govern the network). I would argue that revolutionary autarky is inversely proportional to security and control. That is, as networks become more powerful and self-sufficient, they become less secure and harder to control. In this chapter, we shall see how these parameters affected the resistance in 1938, 1942–43, and 1944, respectively.2

  The Berlin Clique: 1938

  The Berlin clique, created around 1938 by Oster, Gisevius, and Goerdeler, had several substantial advantages over the subsequent configurations of the conspiracy. First of all, it was very safe. Most of its members knew each other well and had strong ties of solidarity. These dense ties created a cozy, warm atmosphere, which eased somewhat the emotional and mental pressure of resisting. The surviving testimonies show that questions over whether a certain clique member could be trusted were hardly raised at all. The group’s small scale significantly increased control: three charismatic, resourceful connectors were enough to effectively manage communication throughout the network. Problems of communication with remote actors were also minimal, because most members were concentrated in Berlin.

  Even with all these advantages, the Berlin clique had a serious problem in revolutionary autarky, and this problem significantly decreased the probability of its success. In order to reach its goal—namely, a coup d’état—it couldn’t count on clique members alone. The minuscule size of the network, which gave rise to increased security and control, was the main obstacle here: the clique members were not numerous enough to organize a coup all by themselves. True, they still had commanders with troops, such as Witzle
ben, Liedig, and Heinz, but, except for Hoepner, no loyal allies were deployed in the provinces. In case of a coup, therefore, Berlin could have been quickly isolated by loyalist forces. The only solution to this problem was winning the cooperation of Halder and Brauchitsch, who could presumably mobilize the entire army. However, these senior commanders were not clique members, and their commitment was either limited (Halder) or nonexistent (Brauchitsch).

  In any case, dependence on top-brass officers was highly problematic from the revolutionary point of view. Such officers, as the history of the resistance clearly shows, were very hard to win over to rebellious schemes. Among the top commanders of the Wehrmacht, the conspirators won consistent support only from Canaris and Witzleben, and were never able to obtain support from the powerful army-group leaders in the east. Halder, as we have seen, supported the conspiracy in principle but was not really committed to its success. Again and again, he backed off at the last moment and left the conspirators in the lurch.

  Many historians see Halder’s “cowardice” as the root of the issue, but the reality is not so simple. Halder was certainly not a resolute man, but the problem might have been more structural than personal. Consider, for example, the interaction between Halder and Beck. When the latter was chief of staff, Halder tried to persuade him to do something against the regime, and failed. Later, Beck, then a retired civilian, tried to push, and Halder applied the brakes. More than the character of the person, the requirements of the job were the root of the problem. Top commanders, field marshals, chiefs of staff, and commanders of big units such as army groups tended to be more circumspect, less adventurous, and more conscious of the burden of their responsibility.3 For that reason, the leaders of the resistance were usually junior commanders and staff officers, whose burden of responsibility was relatively lighter.