Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  On the evening of May 9, 1940, Oster gave Sas the code word for the imminent German attack in the West: “Danzig.” Sas hastened to the embassy to forward this information. The Ministry of War in The Hague hesitated, however, calling the embassy back to express its doubts, and ultimately seemed unwilling, out of fear of the Germans, to give orders for the mobilization of troops. The reaction in Belgium was no different. Consequently, when the invasion finally began in the early hours of May 10, the German units took their opponents so much by surprise that “Fortress Holland” fell within five days and Belgium soon thereafter. German units poured into France, using what Churchill called a “scythe cut”—a strategy developed by Erich von Manstein in the face of opposition from the OKH and substituted by Hitler at the last minute for the traditional strategic plan, which the Führer disparaged as “that old Schlieffen thing” (a reference to the attack on France in World War I). Within just a few weeks, the Germans overwhelmed the still slightly superior Allied forces, and on June 14 they marched through the Porte Maillot into the heart of Paris. On the same day, Guderian’s panzer units reached the Swiss border and broke into the Maginot Line from the rear. This line had not only dominated French strategic thinking but also had misled France into the deceptive, self-absorbed sense of contentment that now proved so fatal.

  On June 17 the French government made its “melancholy deci­sion” to capitulate. Four days later Hitler reached the apex of his career: In the forest of Compiègne, where the terms of the armistice had been dictated to the Germans on November 11, 1918, a French delegation now signed the surrender. With his sense for high drama, the Führer invested the occasion with all the signs of symbolic reparation. The railroad car in which the historic ceremony had been held Twenty-two years earlier was retrieved from the museum in which it had been displayed. In the little clearing, a German flag was draped over the granite monument, whose inscription stated that at this place “the criminal pride of the German empire” had finally been broken. Hitler had sworn in countless speeches never to rest until the humiliation of November 11, 1918, had been erased. Finally his goal had been achieved. The “deepest disgrace of all times,” according to the text of the truce, was expunged.

  The outburst of joy that this triumph prompted in Germany far surpassed that surrounding any of Hitler’s other successes, despite the fact that the decision to launch the western war had seemed senseless and obstinate to many when it started. Many lingering res­ervations, as well as new doubts about the Nazis, were allayed that day-or even transmuted into respect and admiration. The victorious generals, having gorged on titles, Knight’s Crosses, and grants for distinguished service to the state,” as Gisevius remarked bitterly, had little desire to recall their dire predictions about the offensive and felt forced to acknowledge that Hitler had perceived the weaknesses of the Western powers much better than they.7 In the years that fol­lowed, it was these brilliant successes, much more than opportunism or personal weakness (although they also existed), that generated the mysterious confidence in Hitler’s genius that always seemed to resurface despite setbacks.

  For the German opponents of Nazism, the victory in France brought profound discouragement. Their only, albeit paradoxical, consolation lay in the fact that Hitler did not crown his triumph with serious peace initiatives; he savored it greedily but only for a short time before turning to new ventures. At some point, they thought, even Hitler’s luck must turn and Germany’s strength be exhausted. As if taking his leave from the cause that had so consumed him over the years, Canaris said that the resistance had “shrunk to fewer than the five fingers on one hand.”8

  The Security Service (SD) reports on the mood of the general population in the second half of June 1940 speak of unprecedented social consensus. According to them, church groups were still making “defeatist” statements, but even the Communists had ceased their oppositional activities, thanks in large part to the Hitler-Stalin pact. The surviving remnants of the Social Democratic Party had dis­integrated into nothing more than apolitical circles of friends who met to reminisce about the days when their cause had seemed to be the wave of the future. Occasionally they produced leaflets to stir fading memories. Those party leaders who had remained in Germany had withdrawn into their private lives or joined the various civilian resistance groups, which offered at least intellectual opposition to the regime.

  Recognizing that it was nearly impossible to mount a broad-based coup, the plotters resorted to assassination attempts. In May 1940 Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg resigned as regional commissioner in Silesia and joined his reserve regiment, because he believed that he could serve the resistance more effectively from within the army. Together with Eugen Gerstenmaier, a theologian and member of the Kreisau Circle, he attempted to form a commando unit to undertake Hitler’s assassination. They failed, however, to assemble the nearly one hundred people required, and their plans were frustrated by transfers, orders to travel on official business at inopportune times, and Hitler’s unpredictable changes of location.

  Also busy conspiring, from their positions in Paris, were members of the staff of Erwin von Witzleben, commander in chief of the west­ern army groups, who was promoted to field marshal after the French campaign. Two members of this group, Major Alexander von Voss and Captain Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, hoped to have Hitler shot by sharpshooters during the repeatedly postponed parade of German troops down the Champs-Elysées. Schwerin was also determined to kill Hitler with a hand grenade upon his first visit to the western front. But Hitler never went to Witzleben’s headquarters, and the parade down the Champs-Elysées was finally canceled once and for all on July 20, 1940, partly to spare the feelings of the French population and partly because Göring could not guarantee safety from British air attacks.

  The Nazi regime exploited the victory over France and the distractions it afforded to advance its special agenda with less outside inter­ference than ever before. In the sections of Poland under his administration, Governor General Hans Frank undertook a mam­moth “security operation” in May involving widespread mass execu­tions. These activities, he said, had been “intentionally” delayed until the world “lost interest in events in the government general.”9

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  In the summer of 1940 the civilian opposition began to gather strength, a development that cannot be ascribed solely to the silence of the generals and their withdrawal into apolitical pride over their great victory in France. Civilians like Goerdeler, Beck, Hassell, and Moltke were no less impressed by the military accomplishments of the Third Reich, but at the same time they were increasingly certain of the regime’s imminent collapse. Thanks perhaps to their greater remove from military events and their ability to think politically, they were convinced that Hitler had been carried away by his own suc­cesses and was hopelessly overextending Germany’s resources.

  It is an indication of this growing confidence that in the very hour og Hitler’s greatest triumph, when he stood at the pinnacle of his power, Goerdeler was writing a paper predicting the quick end of the Nazi dictatorship. The Führer would prove incapable, Goerdeler ar­gued, of ruling the conquered territories “in such a way that the honor and freedom of the peoples living there are preserved.” He concluded with Baron von Stein’s celebrated words of October 1808 urging Friedrich Wilhelm III to resist Napoleon: “The only salvation for the honest man is the conviction that the wicked are prepared for any evil.… It is worse than blindness to trust a man who has hell in his heart and chaos in his head. If nothing awaits you but disaster and suffering, at least make a choice that is noble and honorable and that will provide some consolation and comfort if things turn out poorly.”10

  By this time Goerdeler had indisputably become the central figure in the civilian opposition. Although he was always surrounded by some controversy, he had established over the years an extensive net­work of like-minded friends, including business people, government officials, professors, clergymen, and labor leaders. To
be sure, individ­ual members who objected to his “open risk taking” or, like Julius Leber, to his “illusions” about foreign policy, were always dropping out of the network. Others were put off by his peculiar combination of antimodernism and social progressiveness, practicality and naive idealism. Generally, though, Goerdeler managed to conciliate the many sharp differences of opinion within the network and succeeded in steadily increasing its members.

  As a result Goerdeler was unanimously considered not only the hub of the civilian opposition but its driving force as well; he pushed ahead tirelessly, insisting on action and fostering confidence among the conspirators. In the end it was his indomitable spirit in the face of any adversity that most distinguished him from his associates, who were prone to feelings of hopelessness and dejection. It is still hard to say whether his curiously restricted view of people and the world around him stemmed from his ability to reduce problems to their most basic terms, a skill that all his associates found praiseworthy, or from the natural simplicity of a man who trusted all too readily that reason would ultimately prevail. Many saw in the former mayor of Leipzig a strange combination of city-hall pragmatism and Prussian enlightenment, seldom encountered in such arid purity. Darker, more complex phenomena were beyond his comprehension. The phi­losopher Theodor Litt, who was teaching in Leipzig at the time and had contacts with the Goerdeler group, remarked: “Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him that was somber, unresolved, or enigmatic. He therefore assumed that his fellow human beings needed only enlight­enment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways… . The eerie tangle of good and evil, the seductive ambivalence of certain kinds of mental gifts, the power of unacknowl­edged prejudices and secret desires, the entire shadowy area in which the inner lives of so many are played out-there was no room for any of this in his view of humanity.”11

  Even before the victory over France, Goerdeler had quickly turned out a series of memoranda for his colleagues from which he then distilled a coherent overview of the positive aims of the resistance. The outline of the new order that resulted from this effort, entitled “The Aims,” was finished in early 1941 and reflected not only his own ideas but, even more important, those that emerged in the course of comprehensive discussions with Beck; Johannes Popitz, the Prussian minister of finance; former trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser; and many others. Later Goerdeler also drew on a group of Freiburg professors, including Walter Eucken, Constantin von Dietze, and Adolf Lampe, the founders of the social market economy, as well as historian Gerhard Ritter and others, who had come together out of disgust for the regime after Kristallnacht. To understand the political aims of the conservative resistance, one must also consider a draft of a constitution produced in early 1940, apparently under the leadership of Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz, which had an unmistakable authoritarian and statist cast and from which Goerdeler in all likelihood distanced himself. There were always clashes and shifts of opinions within these constantly changing opposition circles, which were only labeled a “group” in retrospect. Even among national-conservative opponents of the regime, there existed a broad range of thoughts and ideas about the new order that would emerge. This so-called group was therefore much more heter­ogeneous and riven by contradiction and contrast than a simplifying label would suggest.12

  Despite their clashing views, however, all the opposition groups, the conservative “notables” to the various left-wing factions, were indelibly marked by their common experience of the totalitar­ian dictatorship that erupted in the midst of the democracy of Weimar and by the inability of the political parties, whether on the left or the right, to deal with this disaster. Virtually all opposition cir­cles tended to blame this breakdown on the unyielding antagonism among the parties, which was played out in terms of nineteenth-century slogans and popular platitudes that no longer bore a re­semblance to reality. The opponents of the Nazis turned their at­tention to the structures that had encouraged this disunity. Sweeping critiques of modern civilization had long been fashion­able in Germany, and they certainly played a role as well, with their indictments of “mass society,” “urbanization,” the original sin of “secularization,” and the spreading “materialism” that under­mined all sense of higher purpose. The fact that even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who certainly did not move in conservative circles, spoke of a “trend toward mob tastes at all social levels” demonstrates the prevalence of the aversion to modernity implicit in these critiques.13 Like most other people of his political persuasion, he interpreted National Socialism as an expression, albeit an ex­treme one, of such modernist tendencies.

  Virtually all the internal opponents of Nazism believed that it had originated in the miseries of the Weimar Republic. Even former supporters of democracy were convinced that Germany must dispense with political systems based on parties and adopt instead a rigidly structured, if not authoritarian regime. In their search for a minimal political and moral consensus, without which they believed no state could survive, they frequently flirted with Utopian, “conflict-free” no­tions that were disturbingly reminiscent of the Nazis’ own ideology of a “people’s community.” Yet wherever their ideas led them, the mem­bers of these civilian opposition groups were united in their desire to bring the Nazi tyranny to a quick end and to reorganize social and political life from top to bottom.

  Much criticism has been directed at the German resistance’s persistent skepticism toward democracy, its desire to return to older ethical systems and human values that were eternally valid and only in need of a contemporary form of expression. Hannah Arendt, for instance, saw the German resistance as nothing more than a continua­tion of the antidemocratic opposition to the Weimar Republic. After the collapse of the republic, which was, she stated, partially brought on by their efforts, resistance leaders paradoxically invoked Hitler as well, in order to advance what Arendt viewed as their own reactionary objectives. Others have seen a connection between the resistance and the so-called conservative revolution, that restless movement of radi­cal intellectuals from all sides of society who were united only in their distaste for the democratic order.14

  It is true that resistance groups of all kinds, and not just national conservatives, considered the “Weimar experiment” a hopeless failure and basically differed only in the conclusions they drew from it. Significantly, there was not a single well-known proponent of the defunct republic in these various circles despite the profusion of views their members held.15 It would be historically inaccurate to pin the resis­tance down to this initial position. Close examination reveals numer­ous conflicts, some of them never resolved, and continuous confrontations that led to fresh insights. The resistance was neither static nor monolithic. Its peculiarity and perhaps even its glory lay in the openness and intellectual ferment it created as its members moved, often with much soul searching, from their original views, which tended to be narrow and highly conditioned by a particular social and political background, to broader visions.

  Carl Goerdeler himself can be taken to illustrate this phenomenon. There is every reason to believe that he was closely involved in the draft constitution put forward by Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz, both senior officials in earlier governments, in early 1940. Under this plan, a three-person council would assume executive power after the Nazi dictatorship had been overthrown, with Beck as its leader, and a constitutional council would be formed to restore “the majesty of the law.” Although the draft constitution clearly stated that this regime, quasi-dictatorial at best, would only be temporary, no termination date was specified and no mention was made of elec­tions.

  Goerdeler’s counterproposal illustrated his unmitigated but perhaps misguided faith in reason, he suggested holding a plebiscite us soon as possible so as to give the new regime a solid popular base. His friends firmly rejected this proposal on the grounds that the corrupting effects of the Hitler years woul
d still be felt for a considerable period so that it would be foolish to submit the new order to the peoples will too hastily. Once again, however, Goerdeler was dissuaded from an authoritarian approach by his stubborn belief in the good judgment of humankind. He continued to insist, despite well-founded doubts on all sides, that if the truth about the Nazis could be freely spoken for “only twenty-four hours” their myopic followers would suddenly see the light. The same kind of reasoning led Goerdeler to argue that the NSDAP should not be prohibited under the new order.

  Differences of opinion about the transitional regime remained. The political scientist Jens Peter Jessen and the lawyer Carl Langbehn, who advised the conspirators on their plans, added a sharply worded clause to the draft providing for a time limit on the state of emergency. The conspirators generally agreed, however, that all criminal acts committed under the Nazi regime should be severely punished: the “sword of justice,” as Goerdeler later wrote, adding to the typical bombast of the times his own touch of the country pastor, must “mercilessly strike down those who have corrupted the fatherland into a caricature of a nation.” Mere membership in Nazi organizations would not be punishable under this plan, though, and anonymous denunciations would be inadmissible in court. The conspirators also planned a law to rectify past injustices, especially toward Jews. A dubious feature of this law, however, was a set of provisions that recognized the citizenship of Jews whose families had long been established in Germany but that called for every effort to be made to enable more-recent Jewish immigrants “to found a state of their own.”

  The modifications that the conspirators’ thinking underwent over the years is also evidenced in the fate of a plan Goerdeler and some of his advisers originally advanced to restore the monarchy. They were by no means royalists; rather, their intent was to establish an institu­tion that would be universally accepted and remain above the fray of daily political life as the British and Dutch monarchies were. It seems that tactical considerations also played a role in their proposal: the conspirators hoped thereby to win the support of conservatives, espe­cially within the officer corps. In the course of many lengthy debates, various names were considered as possible pretenders to the throne, but in the end the entire subject was dropped when it met with passionate opposition from Helmuth von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle.