Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  Moltke was tried on January 9-10, 1945, along with Alfred Delp, Eugen Gerstenmaier, and a few other friends from the Kreisau Cir­cle. Moltke’s connection with the events of July 20 was actually more circumstantial than direct, though he had associated with a number of the rebels. Immediately after the attempted assassination and coup he remarked, “If I had been free, this would not have happened,” a reference to the fact that he had already been arrested by that time. At his trial he continued to insist that he was opposed to any acts of violence.

  Despite his negligible role in the coup, Moltke exemplifies better perhaps than any other opposition figure the deep ambivalence of the German resistance. The records of his trial have been lost, like so many others, but on January 10 and 11, shortly after his trial, he wrote two letters to his wife that were spirited out of his cell by Poelchau, the chaplain. They contain far more than just personal comments. An entire intellectual climate emerges in the love of philosophizing, the distaste for practical action, and the religiously inspired joy at the prospect of death. As one of the early chroniclers of the German resistance commented, Moltke’s letters can only be read “with horror and admiration.”31

  The letters begin with an extensive description of his trial, at which Kreisler sought to portray not Goerdeler but the Kreisauers—“these young men”—as the actual “engine” behind the coup. Moltke em­phasizes repeatedly that he not only agreed with that assessment but was absolutely delighted by Freisler’s decision to drop all specific allegations related to practical preparations for the coup in order to focus on the real crimes: “defeatist” thought and adherence to the Christian and ethical principles to which Moltke and his friends wanted society to return.

  “Ultimately,” says Moltke in the first of these long letters, “this concentration on the religious aspect corresponds with the inner na­ture of things and shows that Freisler is a good political judge after all. It gives us the inestimable advantage of being killed for something that (a) we really have done and (b) is worthwhile.” He continues, “It is established that we never wanted to use force; it is established that we did not make a single attempt to organize anything, did not prom­ise a single person a future post-though the indictment said other­wise All we did was think-and really only Delp, Gerstenmaier, and I…And it is before the thoughts of these three isolated men, the mere thoughts, that National Socialism now so trembles that it wants to exterminate everything that is infected by them. If that isn’t a compliment of the highest order! After this trial we are free of all the Goerdeler mess; we are free of all practical questions. We are to be hanged because we thought together. Freisler is right, right a thou­sand times over. If we are to die, then let it be for this… . Long live Freisler!”

  These few lines distill both what was memorable about the Ger­man resistance but what, at the same time, constituted its greatest weakness and the most compelling reason for its failure. The “Goerdeler mess” about which Moltke writes so disparagingly was in fact nothing other than a practical relation to the world, to people, and to the forces at work-in a word, to reality. Virtually all the opposition groups, though some more than others, liked to think of themselves as above the concerns of the grimy everyday world, and that attitude seriously compromised their ability to accomplish anything, especially as the Nazis did not respect the distinction but viewed thought and action as one. On the final judgment against Moltke one contemporary who had read the letters commented curtly, “He did more than just think.”

  In his second letter, dated January 11, 1945, Moltke returned to his earlier line of reasoning: “Of that entire gang only Freisler recognized me, and of that entire gang only he understands why he must kill me… . The key to the trial lay in the words ‘Christianity and National Socialism have one thing in common, Count von Moltke, and only one: we both demand the whole person.’ Did he realize what he was saying? Just think how wonderfully God prepared this, his most unworthy vessel. At the very moment when I was in danger of being drawn into active preparations for the putsch-when Stauffenberg came to see Peter [Yorck] on the evening of the 19th [of January 1944]-I was taken away, so that I could, and will continue, to remain free of any connection with violence.”

  Such shifts in tone from factual narration to pious contemplation are already present in the opening, primarily descriptive passages of the letters, but they become more frequent in the more personal parts that follow, until finally spiritual meditations, biblical references, and verses from songs build to a kind of exuberant longing for death that leaves no room for sorrow and farewell, only a sense of divine mission, fulfillment, and the grace of God. Moltke notes on a number of occasions that he feels “exalted and uplifted,” even though those around him seem “quite shocked.” Toward the end he writes, “I have wept a little, not out of sadness or melancholy, not because I would like to undo what I have done, but because I am thankful and moved by this sign from God. It is not given to us to see him face to face, but we must feel deeply moved when we suddenly realize that he has gone before us our entire lives, a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and that all at once he is allowing us to glimpse this truth. Now nothing more can happen.”

  On January 12, 1945, Moltke’s death sentence was handed down. He was executed eleven days later, on January 23, together with nine other prisoners. Shortly thereafter, on February 3, just as Freisler was launching the proceedings against Fabian von Schlabrendorff, air raid sirens began to howl. In the heaviest aerial attack on Berlin of the entire war, one bomb hit the building on Bellevuestrasse where the People’s Court was in session. A falling beam struck Freisler on the head as he clutched the files on Schlabrendorff. Otherwise no one was injured. A passing doctor was summoned from the street, but he could only confirm that Freisler’s wounds were fatal. (Ironically, the doctor turned out to be the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, whom Freisler had condemned to death the previous day.) Schlabrendorff’s trial had to be postponed, and when he was brought before the court again in mid-March he was acquitted on a technicality: he had been tortured, in violation of the law.32

  Some other of the conspirators managed to cheat death as well, including almost all of Tresckow’s friends in Army Group Center, among them Philipp von Boeselager, Rudolph-Christoph von Gersdorff, and Eberhard von Breitenbuch. Several members of the Kreisau Circle-Horst von Einsiedel, Carl Dietrich von Trotha, Otto von der Gablentz, the Jesuit priest Augustin Rösch, and others-also survived. Eugen Gerstenmaier dodged a death sentence by playing the role of the naive theologian baffled and bewildered by the world of politics; so convincing was he that Freisler condemned him to only seven years in prison. Hans Bernd Gisevius managed to escape to Switzerland, thanks to his foreign connections and especially the in­tervention of Allen W. Dulles, the head of the Office of Strategic Services. Erich Kordt was a safe distance away at a diplomatic posting in China, and Theo Kordt was in Switzerland. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz was well-acquainted with life underground and numbered among the very few, including Jakob Kaiser and the Hammerstein brothers, Kunrat and Ludwig, who managed to survive the war in hiding. Hans von Boineburg was assigned to an army punishment detail, as was Harald Momm, the colonel who had called for a bottle of champagne in Krampitz on hearing news of the attack on Hitler.33 Less fortunate was Arthur Nebe, who finally went underground on July 24. Making use of all the evasive ruses at his command, he feigned suicide, leaving fake farewell letters behind. He managed to escape detection until January 16 but was finally arrested, brought before the courts, and executed in March 1945. That same month, so close to the end of the war, Friedrich Fromm was convicted on a charge of cowardice and, in what was viewed as an act of leniency, sentenced to be shot by a firing squad. The execution was carried out on March 12, 1945, in Brandenburg prison.

  One month later, as the Red Army girded itself for the final assault on Berlin, Hitler’s campaign for revenge was still going strong. The jails were filled to overflowing with political opponents who either had been condemned or
were awaiting trial. On April 14 Himmler ordered that none of these prisoners were to survive the war. Earlier, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller had told Moltke’s wife, Freya, “We won’t make the same mistake as in 1918. We won’t leave our internal German enemies alive.”34

  By this point, however, events were beginning to overtake Himmler, Müller, and the Gestapo in general. On April 21-the same day that an agitated Hitler called General Karl Koller, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, to Inform him that the heart of Berlin was under artillery bombardment-eleven men who had not yet been sentenced were released. One of them sought, on the spur of the moment, to obtain the release of other prisoners as well. On April 23 his efforts resulted in the freeing of prisoners incarcerated at Moabit prison. The SS, however, had taken charge of liquidating the Gestapo prison on Lehrterstrasse. Here, too, twenty-one inmates facing lesser charges had already been released, among them the lawyer Hans Lukaschek and Kraft von Palombini, who had sheltered Goerdeler. Some of the remaining inmates were informed that they would be released after transfer to headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. They were herded together by SS guards and marched off down Lehrterstrasse in a light rain at about one o’clock in the morning. When they reached the corner of Invalidenstrasse, the guards ordered the prisoners to proceed across a field of rubble. The command “Ready, fire!” rang out and the prisoners fell, all of them shot in the neck. Among those murdered in this fashion were Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels, and Albrecht Haushofer.35

  The next day some of the remaining inmates were released and the others were turned over to the judicial authorities. After midnight, however, another SS detachment appeared, took away Albrecht von Bernstorff, Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg, and the trade union leader Ernst Schneppenhorst, and murdered them. When day broke, the rest of the prisoners managed to persuade the warden that it was in his own best interest to let them go before the Russian troops arrived. At around six in the evening, the last political prisoners were released from Lehrterstrasse, including Justus Delbrück of Military Intelli­gence, Professors Gerhard Ritter, Adolf Lampe, and Theodor Steltzer. They fled as the battle for Berlin began in earnest.

  * * *

  In the debates that had raged within the resistance for years, Goerdeler had always argued that the first task of the resistance and the one that had the best chance of success was simply to inform the German people about the crimes of the regime: the fact that the Nazis had set out to provoke war, their enormous corruption, the disgraceful practices of the Einsatzgruppen, the mass murder com­mitted in the concentration camps. Such outrage would be provoked, he imagined, that Hitler and his accomplices would be swept from office.

  The failure of the attack on Hitler and the conspirators’ lack of opportunity to make their declaration to the people prevented Goerdeler’s idea from ever being put to the test. But as the writer Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary following a conversation with Cäsar von Hofacker, Hitler would certainly have emerged the victor in a battle of the airwaves.36 His psychological hold over the people, al­though loosening, was still very real, however much the reasons be­hind it had changed. The masses had lost most of their faith and admiration but still had a dark, fatalistic feeling that their destiny was inextricably bound up with his. The ominous propaganda of the last months of the war and fear of the advancing Red Army drove them into the Führer’s arms despite their mounting disgust with the brutal­ity of the regime and with the cowardice, venality, and egotism of its officials. Though they felt suffocated by the pressures of police-state surveillance, informers, and terror, they clung to vague hopes that, as so often in the past, the Führer would find a way to avert catastrophe. On June 16, 1944, the first of his much-heralded “reprisal weapons,” V-1 rockets, were launched against London. Immediately following the events of July 20, a Norwegian newspaper reporter observed the general mood in Germany: “The masses are apathetic; they neither see nor hear and therefore remain totally inert… . They neither weep nor celebrate nor rage.”37

  And so the German resistance remained what it had always been: an expression of feelings that may well have been widespread but that only a tiny minority was prepared to act on. Ironically, the social isolation of the resistance continued even after the war, for as the end drew near, Nazi propagandists and Allied spokesmen joined forces in a de facto coalition to belittle the accomplishments of the resistance and disparage its motives. In the House of Commons Churchill de­scribed the events of July 20 as a murderous internecine power struggle and in Moscow Rudolf Herrnstadt celebrated the failure of what he termed the final attempt of “the gentlemen’s clubs, the reactionar­ies” to grab power.38

  These altitudes did not change much even after the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. The resistance found no more acknowledg­ment or comprehension after the war than it had under the Nazis themselves, whether in Germany or abroad. On the first anniversary of the execution of Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a church funeral was held but it had to be announced as a service for a “fallen soldier.” The family of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg experi­enced great difficulty in asserting their rights to his estate, as did the dispossessed families of other conspirators. For a long time the occu­pation authorities forbade or placed limitations on publications about the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries were first pub­lished in Switzerland and then in Sweden, while both Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s Offiziere gegen Hitler (Revolt Against Hitler) and Rudolf Pechel’s Deutscher Widerstand (The German Resistance) were on the index of books forbidden by the Allies.39

  Denial and dismissal were common everywhere. When the celebrated English military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart attempted to portray the background to the 1938 coup attempt in a London news­paper, publication was prevented by the government. In American prisoner-of-war and internment camps, officers who had participated in the resistance were locked up indiscriminately with generals and SS men who were still pro-Nazi. The theory of the unity of Führer and Volk continued to be upheld. Those who had risked everything in their struggle against the Nazis were held prisoner by the Allies for years-in many cases even longer than their Nazi foes.

  In the summer of 1947 the American military administration released Hitler’s former army adjutant General Gerhard Engel and a number of general staff officers from prisoner-of-war camps. Mean­while General Gersdorff, who had undertaken in March 1943 to set off a bomb and kill both Hitler and himself, continued to be held. When he questioned the rationale, he was informed by the camp commandant that “General Engel has demonstrated throughout his military career that he always carries out his orders. He will not engage in any resistance to us in civilian life either, and therefore he poses no threat. You, on the other hand, have shown that you follow your own conscience on occasion and consequently might not obey our orders under certain circumstances. People like you or General Falkenhausen [who also continued to be held prisoner] are therefore dangerous to us. For this reason, you will remain in custody.”40

  * * *

  To the many images of the resistance that have been handed down to us, we must add that of Carl Goerdeler sitting alone in his cell in the basement of Reich Security Headquarters. Early in 1945 he made another attempt to break the silence that was beginning to envelop all that he and his fellow conspirators had thought and striven for. In the last of the many papers he wrote, he seems finally to confront the possibility that he took the wrong approach and that everything he had done to prevent Hitler from leading Germany to catastrophe had been in vain. He places hopes in friends who had in fact long since been executed, records a few memories, addresses Germany’s youth and future generations, and finally breaks off his musings in the middle of a sentence filled with desperate thoughts about an “indif­ferent God,” the triumph of evil, and the obliteration of goodness, guilt, and righteousness. “Like the psalmist I quarrel with God,” he writes, “and this struggle decorates the bare walls of my tiny cell, filling the emptiness with my i
maginings and my memories.” In the end, he could not continue, finding no answer to the thought to which his mind constantly returned: “Can this be the Last Judgment?”41

  11. THE WAGES OF FAILURE

  No sooner had it collapsed than the German resistance-its thoughts and deeds, its strenuous efforts, its high hopes and crushing disappointments-was almost entirely lost to memory. The stunning events of July 20 overshadowed the movement as a whole, and it has hardly become any better known in the intervening years. Its traces vanished, quickly and inconspicuously, in prison cells, killing fields, concentration camps, execution grounds, and unknown burial sites. It is noted, to be sure, on Germany’s informal calendar of memorial events, as a ceremony is held annually in the courtyard of the former army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. Little about it penetrates the public mind, however, and it has never earned more than grudging respect. It remains, in the words of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an obscure “episode” of the war.1

  Curiously enough, Hitler’s description of the conspirators as a “very small clique of ambitious officers,” a characterization trum­peted by Nazi propagandists, has proved remarkably resilient. By the time of the attack on Hitler all that the conspirators really hoped was that the memory of the resistance would live on. But even this was not to be, thanks both to Allied policy and to Germany’s postwar psychological climate of mass repression, born of guilt and a desire to forget.