MANSTEIN: Then you want to kill him?
ME: Yes, Herr Field Marshal, like a mad dog!
At this point Manstein leapt up and ran excitedly around the room shouting, “Count me out! That would destroy the army!”
ME: You said yourself that Germany will go down to defeat unless something is done. The army isn’t the main concern. It’s Germany and the German people.
MANSTEIN: First and foremost, I’m a soldier…
When, after a bit more discussion, I conceded that it was pointless to carry on, I remembered a modest proposal that Kluge had asked me to convey.
ME: Field Marshal Kluge also asked me to inquire whether you would agree to become chief of the army general staff after a successful coup.
Manstein bowed slightly and said, “Tell Field Marshal Kluge that I appreciate the confidence he shows in me. Field Marshal Manstein will always be the loyal servant of a legally constituted government.43
As it turned out, Manstein had had a similar conversation just a little earlier, in the days following the capitulation in Stalingrad. Visiting Count Lehndorff at his castle in East Prussia, Tresckow had met a lieutenant colonel on the general staff named Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and had described to him several vain attempts to win Manstein over. Stauffenberg himself wanted to give it a try, and Tresckow arranged for him to meet Manstein. But then, too, the field marshal merely dodged the issue. In response to Stauffenberg’s reproaches about the impending disaster and the responsibility of highly placed officers to consider the entire picture, Manstein recommended only that Stauffenberg have himself transferred to a general staff position at the front, in order to escape “the unpleasant atmosphere at Führer headquarters.” Manstein subsequently told close associates that he had had a “very brilliant conversation” with Stauffenberg, “but he wanted me to believe that the war was lost.”
Of their meeting, Stauffenberg remarked that, whatever Manstein’s answers were, they “were not the answers of a field marshal.”44
7. STAUFFENBERG
By 1943 the situation had grown more ominous-and not just at the battle fronts. Almost all the resistance groups sensed a gathering storm. Rumor had it that another Night of the Long Knives was in the offing.1 Both Ulrich von Hassell and Hans von Dohnanyi were tipped off that they were being shadowed everywhere they went. In early March Colonel Fritz Jäger, who played a key role in Olbricht’s coup plans, was arrested on allegations that he was “conspiring.” Schulenburg also found himself in difficulty after he was reported to have said that he was on the lookout for reliable, young officers for a putsch. Admiral Canaris, too, was feeling the pressure, and when he was asked by a friend from his Freikorps days to save a Dutch Jew from deportation by claiming the man was needed by Military Intelligence-a favor he had occasionally extended in the past-he felt compelled to refuse. Himmler, he said, had informed him that “he knew full well that leading circles in the army were considering plans for a coup. But it would never come to that. He would intervene.” Furthermore, Himmler professed to know who was “actually behind it”—and mentioned Beck and Goerdeler.2 When the first blow fell, however, it was not on these men.
On April 5, 1943, senior judge advocate Manfred Roeder suddenly turned up at Military Intelligence on Tirpitzufer, accompanied by criminal secretary and SS UntersturmFührer Franz Xaver Sonderegger. They asked to be taken to Canaris, to whom they presented papers authorizing both the arrest of special officer Hans von Dohnanyi and a search of his office. He was suspected, they informed Canaris, of numerous currency violations, corruption, and even treason. Stunned, Canaris neither objected nor contacted his superior officer, Wilhelm Keitel, though the search order violated all Military Intelligence secrecy regulations. Without a word he led the two agents to Dohnanyi’s office, which was located immediately adjacent lo Hans Oster’s.
Canaris had been warned more than once, most recently that very morning, that trouble was brewing. And in almost every case the fingers pointed at Brigadier General Oster. His anxiety growing, Canaris had ordered that his closest associate immediately dispose of any incriminating documents. Whether Oster failed to realize the urgency of the warning or was simply too busy meeting endlessly with Olbricht, Beck, Gisevius, Schlabrendorff, and Heinz is not known; in any event he did not carry out his orders. In the course of their search Roeder and Sonderegger caught Dohnanyi trying to remove some papers from files that were being seized. When he was prevented from doing so, Dohnanyi was heard whispering “The notes!” to Oster, who also attempted to remove them. As the indictment later stated, Oster was “immediately asked to explain himself and required to produce the notes.” Roeder ordered Oster out of the room and reported to his superiors what had happened. As a result, Oster was placed under house arrest, and a few days later he was dismissed from his position at Military Intelligence. Shortly thereafter Canaris called a meeting of department heads and “officially informed them of orders to avoid any contact with Oster.”3
This was a terrible blow to the resistance-the worst it had suffered so far. In Schlabrendorff s words, it “lost its managing director.” Gisevius spoke of a “psychological shock” that stunned everyone and left a “conspiratorial vacuum.” Oster explained his admittedly foolish act by saying that he had assumed at first that Dohnanyi meant certain notes coded “U7,” referring to a Military Intelligence operation to spirit Jews out of Nazi-occupied Europe by disguising them as agents. At least as disorienting as Oster’s removal was the fact that, for the first time, the previously inviolable inner sanctums of Military Intelligence had been invaded. To add to the grim news, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested the same day, as were Dohnanyi’s wife, Christine, in Sakrow, near Berlin, Josef Müller in Munich, and another Military Intelligence employee in Prague.
The papers for whose sake Dohnanyi and Oster had risked so much were actually totally unrelated to the U7 operation. They were hardly less compromising, however, and they prompted Roeder to announce triumphantly after reading them, “I’m going to clean up that shop!”4 Most important, one of the seized “notes” contained references to an issue that was becoming of great concern to almost all opponents of the regime, arising repeatedly in the course of their discussions-namely, the relations between the German resistance and the Allies and the possibility of negotiating a last-minute peace agreement.
* * *
Since the spring of 1942 the opposition had debated whether the Allies would be willing to negotiate a peace treaty after a coup in Germany and whether that would even be desirable. Some members of the Kreisau Circle in particular opposed any attempts to negotiate such a treaty. With their decidedly religious cast, they felt that Hitler and his minions should be dispatched, metaphorically, to the inferno that had spawned them. But most of the opposition figures agreed, though they might differ on the details, that it was their duty to save as much of the “substance” of Germany as possible from political and moral corruption and now, in the midst of the unprecedented Allied bombing campaign, from outright physical destruction. This group therefore insisted that everything possible be done to contact the Allies. They feared that time was running out: Germany’s remaining bargaining power was quickly evaporating as its military strength declined and the ever more dominant Allies forged ahead.
This was the crux of the matter, the issue that many believed would make or break the resistance. If the leverage Germany still had, however weak it might be, could not be used to negotiate a peace treaty, then the resistance might as well avoid the extremely dangerous, if not suicidal, risk of a coup attempt and simply watch the regime go down in flames. The opposition’s foreign policy experts-primarily Ulrich von Hassell but also Adam von Trott and others-decided after much deliberation that in view of all the Nazis’ broken promises, violence, and crimes, there was no certainty that an “acceptable peace” could be negotiated, but that at the very least it remained a possibility.5
Such a hope was inconceivable unless the Allies were prep
ared to distinguish between Hitler and the German people. The conspirators based the plans for their own uprising entirely on the belief that this distinction existed and on the need to emphasize it for the benefit of everyone, so as to expose the falsity of the Nazi propaganda campaigns that depicted the Führer and the Volk as one. It is true that that hope for a negotiated peace revived many of the opposition’s shattered illusions and unrealistic aspirations, but despite the criticism that has in hindsight been levied against it, the resistance did have a legitimate basis for the way it proceeded. Neither the keenness nor the morality of its opposition to the regime is diminished by the fact that it continued to take the national interest into account. One could even say that those who combined their moral outrage at Hitler with an awareness of the political disaster he was heaping on Germany understood more thoroughly than anyone else the nature of the regime and the possibilities of taking action against it.
From a practical point of view, this meant they needed to be clear about the prospects facing a German government once the Nazis had been overthrown. Realizing that many concessions and guarantees would inevitably be extracted from Germany, the members of the resistance wanted to find out what the Allies’ maximum demands might be and to ensure that they themselves would be recognized, in theory at least, as equal partners in a European peace plan. What they did not want was to become the managers of a “liquidation commission” that simply carried out the dictates of the Allied powers. The opposition fully realized that such a situation would leave it standing “right in the middle of all the filth,” in the dramatic words of one member.6
The resistance continued to pin its hopes on London, despite the misunderstandings, exasperation, and devastating setbacks that had characterized its overtures in the late 1930s. In focusing on this relationship, the German resistance considerably overestimated Britain’s role and influence in the Allied coalition; for quite some time London had not had the power to sign agreements of its own with anyone. Most of the conspirators felt, however, that Britain was somehow closer to them-and not just geographically. In comparison with the other two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain seemed to stand for a less foreign, more European world. Just as opposition emissaries had traveled to the British capital in the late thirties, they now sought to pave the way for talks with London through British posts in neutral countries.
Theo Kordt had already attempted to do so at the outset of the war, having been dispatched by the Foreign Office to Bern, Switzerland, for precisely that purpose. All his efforts came to naught, however, as did those of Josef Wirth, the former German chancellor, who had emigrated to Switzerland; Carl Jacob Burckhardt; Willem Adolf Visser’t Hooft, the secretary-general of the provisional World Council of Churches in Geneva; and many others. In May 1941 Goerdeler passed along to the British government a peace plan approved by Brauchitsch; the cabinet declined even to acknowledge it. The British middleman informed his German contact that he had been forbidden to accept any such documents in the future.
Another series of attempts to establish contact had been under way in Stockholm since the early 1940s and revolved largely around Theodor Steltzer, a key member of the Kreisau Circle. In May 1942 Bishop George Bell of Chichester met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his fellow clergyman Hans Schönfeld in Stockholm. Without knowing anything about the plans of the other, the two Germans had both decided to go to Sweden when they learned that Bell would be there. They told him about the opposition and the Kreisauers’ ideas for peace and expressed the hope that some token of encouragement might be offered. Bell was quite well acquainted with Bonhoeffer, who had been a pastor in the German church in London during the 1930s, and knew that he was one of the leading figures in the Confessional Church in Germany. A man of radical religious conviction, Bonhoeffer had repeatedly insisted that Hitler had to be “exterminated” regardless of the political consequences. At a secret church conference in Geneva in 1941 he had gone even further, announcing that he prayed for the defeat of his country because that was the only way Germany would be able to atone for the crimes it had committed.7 Schönfeld, on the other hand, brought only one question: Would the Allies adopt a different stance toward a Germany that had liberated itself from Hitler than they would toward a Germany still under his rule? Bell forwarded a report to the British Foreign Office, but Anthony Eden wrote back only to say he was “satisfied that it is not in the national interest to provide an answer of any kind.” When Bell approached the British Foreign Office again, Eden noted in the margin of his reply, “I see no reason whatsoever to encourage this pestilent priest!”8
One year later Helmuth von Moltke went to Stockholm for a week, taking with him some information about the White Rose and one of its leaflets, as if he felt impelled to prove the seriousness of his opposition to the Nazi regime. Eugen Gerstenmaier, the theologian, and Hans Lukaschek, a lawyer who had joined the Kreisau Circle, also traveled to Stockholm, as on a number of occasions, did Adam von Trott, whose words sounded a desperate appeal for help: “We cannot afford to wait any longer,” he pleaded to a Swedish friend. “We are so weak that we will only achieve our goal if everything goes our way and we get outside help.”9
But there was to be no help or any sign of encouragement, just a deep, persistent silence. The Allies did not even trouble themselves to reject the various attempts to contact them; they simply closed their eyes to the German resistance, acting as if it did not exist. Men like Bonhoeffer, Trott, Gerstenmaier, and Steltzer felt united with the Allies in their abhorrence for their common “archenemy” and their realization of the danger that he posed. They therefore imagined themselves closely affiliated with the Allied struggle against this monstrous tyranny, which, in Churchill’s words, had never been surpassed in the “dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.” This was an illusion for which the conspirators would pay with countless humiliations. Perhaps they were ahead of the times in their moral internationalism, which had met with such deep incomprehension in the conversations of 1938-39. At any rate, the sense of common ground on which they based their appeals was not shared by the British, who could never free themselves of the suspicion that they were dealing with a bunch of traitors, or Nazis in disguise. The phenomenon of committing “treason” for high moral or philosophical purpose, which has become so characteristic of the twentieth century, was an enigma to them.
The extensive postwar literature justifying Britain’s policy of distancing itself from the German resistance revives the very arguments on which the prewar attempts to make contact foundered. It points as well to the general lack of success with which the resistance did indeed seem cursed. Three further reasons are often adduced: with Winston Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, Britain focused all its energy on the military effort, leaving no time for complicated political initiatives and prompting Churchill to call for “perfect silence”; in addition, the British were concerned that entering into negotiations with Germans, even anti-Nazi Germans, would jeopardize their alliance with the Soviet Union; finally London wished lo avoid the error that the Allies had made after the First World War, when they forged commitments that later gave rise to demagogues like Hitler. Even if every possible allowance is made for these motives, however, something is still left unexplained-especially since the messages from the German emissaries provide no justification whatsoever for the most frequently mentioned concern, namely, the much-feared fracturing of the Allied coalition.
The real reasons for the attitude of the British probably lay in their lack of flexibility, their hostility, their blindness, and a political obtuseness that for all intents and purposes represented “an alliance with Hitler,” to quote Hans Rothfels.10 If a policy consisting of periodic cautious gestures of support had been pursued-which was, in fact, all that the German opposition now wanted-it might well have been possible gradually to drive a wedge between the Nazi regime and the people. Instead, Allied policy drove them into each other’s arm
s. In early 1942 Goebbels noted in his diary with unmistakable satisfaction that this time the enemy had not set forth “any Wilsonian Fourteen Points” to sow unrest and confusion among the German public.11
Attitudes hardened even more after the United States entered the war in December 1941, and it was precisely the memory of Wilson’s Fourteen Points that made America so unapproachable. The ill-fated promises of yesteryear seemed to be all that Roosevelt had learned and remembered from his nation’s involvement in European affairs. The crude and narrow inference he drew was that even the most noncommittal conversation with Germans must be rejected, regardless of who they were or what the discussions were about. When an American correspondent in Berlin, Louis P. Lochner, returned to Washington in June 1942 with a secret code that German friends in the resistance had given to him in the hope of establishing a permanent link with U.S. government officials, the administration rejected the approach, saying that these contacts had put it in an “awkward” position.12
This attitude was strengthened with the Casablanca declaration of January 24, 1943, when Roosevelt vowed in Churchill’s presence that the Allies would “continue the war relentlessly” until they achieved “unconditional surrender.” The cold-shoulder approach to the resistance was thus given the seal of official strategy by both governments. Its effect would be to achieve the opposite of what Adam von Trott had said was the “primary purpose” of his last visit to the United Stales, namely, “to ensure that the planned war of annihilation does not drive those elements that have just begun to join forces against Hitler into the hands of the National Socialists.” A furious Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin said he would like to see both Hitler and Roosevelt roast, each in his own vat in hell.13
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