The quick disappearance of the resistance from public memory was all the more striking in that it seemed to run counter to the sentimental German fondness for lost causes. This penchant was apparently outweighed by the equally traditional deference to authority and by the feeling that the resistance betrayed the fatherland in its hour of need. Germans have found it useful at times to resurrect the resistance in order to disprove the theory of collective guilt, but they have generally adopted Field Marshal Kluge’s dismissive view of it as nothing more than a botched coup attempt.
Some writers have even suggested that the opposition decided to act only when it was clear Germany would go down to defeat-and solely for self-seeking reasons. The view that the old aristocracy, dismayed at its waning power, hoped at the last minute to mask its long collusion with the Nazis and thereby retain its privileges, property, position, and influence soon gained currency. Even a superficial knowledge of the resistance shows how misguided and biased that argument is. Probably the most promising of all the plots against Hitler was conceived as early as 1938, in response to his preparations to invade other countries. Furthermore, the planning within Army Group Center for the second attempt on Hitler’s life took place before Stalingrad and the great turning point in the war.
The truth is in fact the virtual opposite of what these writers alleged. In view of Hitler’s string of political and military triumphs, which were setbacks for the opposition, it is remarkable how tenaciously the resistance continued to plot against him. Apart from Halder, the same men who opposed Hitler in the early days opposed him in the end, their ranks swelled by many new recruits. There is ample reason to conclude that, in the early postwar years at least, disdain for the resistance could be traced to the attitudes of a generation of passive Nazi sympathizers and their descendants, who were not eager to have their own failings highlighted by comparison with the heroism of a group of aristocrats and professional soldiers-a group that had supposedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.
These attitudes stemmed to a certain extent from a fundamental misunderstanding that was created or at least encouraged by some of the early memoirs published by members of the resistance. Today it is well known that-although these accounts seem to imply otherwise-neither the resistance movement as a whole nor the attempt on July 20, 1944, to kill Hitler and stage a coup represented a short-term undertaking by a band of army officers. Many groups, some closely connected to these officers and others linked more indirectly, contributed to the dramatic events of that day. The lists of projected cabinet members of the interim government, which survive in varying versions all convey the breadth and social pluralism of the resistance, as well as the leading role to be played by civilians.2 There was never any dispute about the latter point, according to the written sources, which attest to numerous debates and differences of opinion over virtually everything else. The officers who participated in the September conspiracy of 1938, from Oster to Halder and Witzleben, agreed that the officer corps was merely the organized and armed vanguard of the operation and would retreat into the background as soon its work was completed.
Moreover, the motivation of the members of the resistance was not at all a desire to preserve the privileges of social rank. Certainly many of the conspirators saw themselves as members of a social elite, with particular responsibility for providing leadership. That conviction facilitated their decision to oppose the regime and deepened their resolve as the Nazis continued to trample on all traditional principles of law and order. It was not, however, their dominant impulse. Nor can their opposition to the Nazis be said to have sprung solely from a sense of moral outrage, as is often claimed. In reality, the rebels were driven by an array of motives that in most cases arose from professional frustrations and quickly broadened to general political disenchantment. Their motives were further reinforced by moral, religious, or nationalistic convictions, which varied in intensity from one person to the next.
In their interrogations or in their testimony before the People’s Court, twenty of the accused conspirators from the various groups- whether civilian or military, national-conservative, middle class, or socialist-mentioned the persecution of the Jews as the primary motive for their opposition.3 Others emphasized the elimination of civil rights, the arbitrary, dictatorial style of the government, and the assault on the churches. The basic conviction uniting those who acted out of religious belief was best expressed by Hans-Bernd von Haeften, when he stated before the People’s Court that Hitler was “a great perpetrator of evil.” Gerstenmaier called this remark “the key to the entire resistance,” from which all the rest flowed as a Christian duty.4
Those whose resistance was motivated primarily by nationalist concerns were the most torn. Their dilemma stemmed not only from the fact that Hitler shared their nationalism-in however exaggerated a form-but that for a long time his achievements reflected their desires. From the annexation of Austria to the victory over France, notes and reports written at the time by people like Hassell, Stieff, and Schulenburg attest to their divided sentiments: horror at the disgrace heaped on Germany and its good name through incessant criminal acts and yet pride in the growing power and increasing influence of the fatherland. “There is no doubt,” wrote Ulrich von Hassell in October 1940, “that if this system emerges victorious, Germany and Europe are headed for terrible times. But if Germany is defeated, the consequences are simply unimaginable.”5
The kinds of resistance were as varied as the motives, ranging from quiet disapproval and withdrawal to efforts on behalf of the persecuted and finally to active opposition to the Nazi regime, which itself took many forms. Easiest to understand are those people who strongly disapproved of the Nazis from beginning to end, particularly political opponents such as Leber, Mierendorff, the Kreisauers, Hammerstein, and Oster. Somewhat more complicated are those like Mertz von Quirnheim, Jens Peter Jessen, and Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, whose early enthusiasm for the Nazis turned to disappointment, anger, and finally, bitter rejection. Yet another strand is represented by Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary in the Foreign Office, who traveled a slippery path between conformity and accommodation on the one hand and resistance on the other, with all the attendant illusions and entanglements one might expect. Other cases are stranger, like that of Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, a rather coarse, boorish man who rose-for good reason-within the ranks of the SA. More unfathomable still was the transformation of SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, who as chief of criminal police in Reich Security Headquarters was one of the architects of the totalitarian police state and later served as commander of Einsatzgruppe B who found his way into resistance circles in the late 1930s after becoming closely acquainted with Oster. No case is the same as the others; each must be looked at in a different light, and all are overshadowed by the darkness of those years.
These brief examples show that the conspirators, though frequently bound together by personal ties and occasionally by ties between the various groups, had no real common denominator or unifying idea, not even a collective name. Far from representing a tightly knit social elite hoping to regain its lost preeminence, the opposition to Hitler consisted of a motley collection of individuals who differed greatly in their social origins, habits of thought, political attitudes, and methods of action. Even the term resistance was not used until after the war, and to say that someone “joined” the resistance is misleading. People who were hostile to the regime found their way to one another through friendships, chance encounters, and in some instances persistent searches. Sometimes they remained active in the circles they discovered; at other times they dropped out. They were buffeted by the hazards of war, and they forged new connections whenever circumstances permitted. The extreme diversity of their views is illustrated by the fact that even close friends and philosophical allies could not agree on so basic an issue as whether Hitler should be assassinated.
All that united the resistance were a few fundamental ma
xims: a refusal to participate in the violence, mindlessness, and injustice on all sides; a strong sense of right and wrong; and, as one member of Tresckow’s circle observed, a desire “somehow simply to survive with a sense of decency.”6 In October 1944 Helmuth von Moltke wrote to his two sons from his prison cell: “I have struggled all my life- beginning in my school days-against the narrow-mindedness and arrogance, the penchant for violence, the merciless consistency and the love of the absolute, that seem to be inherent in the Germans and that have found expression in the National Socialist state. I have also done what I could to ensure that this spirit-with its excessive nationalism, persecution of other races, agnosticism, and materialism-is defeated.”7 Hans Oster, writing to his own son from prison, expressed similar sentiments, though couched in simpler terms reminiscent of an earlier era; the important thing, he wrote, is to remain “to your last breath the decent sort of fellow you were taught to be in the nursery and in your training as a soldier.”8
Their clear sense of conscience and morality lent the conspirators an uncompromising, categorical outlook that was the source of much of their inner strength. But coupled with their fondness for abstract theorizing and elaborate intellectualism, it tended to impede action. Well after they had finally decided to resort to violence-indeed on the afternoon of July 20-they nevertheless renounced the use of firearms in army headquarters so as not to besmirch the righteousness of their cause; this was an expression more of their romantic impracticality and their inconsistency than of their high moral purpose. Eugen Gerstenmaier, who had always favored killing Hitler, turned up at army headquarters carrying both a revolver and a Bible, as if hoping to demonstrate the compatibility of religious faith and tyrannicide. He urged the conspirators to take up arms as a visible sign of their determination, arguing that rebels who failed to go the limit were not rebels at all but sacrificial lambs.9
But lofty moral principles had in fact come into play much earlier. For instance, General Alexander von Falkenhausen was not admitted into the inner circle of conspirators because he had a mistress. Similarly, Helldorf was kept at arm’s length because of misgivings about his moral fiber, and it was possibly for this reason that he was left without instructions on July 20. Although Rommel certainly had reservations of his own about the conspiracy, the rebels made little attempt to win him over, because he clearly had little sympathy for their strict moral imperatives, ethics, and concern with matters of conscience. Nor were they swayed by the fact that Rommel was the only public figure with sufficient authority to challenge Hitler. They would permit no outsider to taint the purity of the new beginning they were proposing. Throughout the struggle there were similar moral gestures, including the determination of the Stauffenberg brothers to turn themselves over to the courts for judgment if the coup proved successful.10
* * *
None of the leading participants felt at ease with the role of conspirator. Born and raised in secure circumstances with a solid core of values and beliefs, extensive social ties, and firm loyalties, they had known only sheltered existences, and they had difficulty even comprehending what Hitler had done to their ostensibly reliable world. Ernst von Weizsäcker, asked if he had a pistol in case worst came to worst, replied, “I’m sorry, but I was not brought up to kill anyone.”11 For a while, most of the conspirators concealed or simply endured their torn loyalties. Henning von Tresckow, for example, threw himself into planning troop movements for the invasion of Czechoslovakia at a time when he had already urged that forceful measures be taken against the SS and the Gestapo. Such inconsistencies grew increasingly hard to live with, however, and eventually compelled the opposition to confront the fact that fighting for their country meant advancing the very brutality they despised.
Only a minority freed themselves from this quandary by deciding to resist actively. The majority, even of those senior officers who disliked the regime or privately expressed their outrage at it, grew resigned early on and adopted the posture of morally neutral specialists in military affairs. No less a figure than Franz Halder said after the war that he was “astonished beyond belief at the suggestion that people “who were duty-bound by a specific oath to a particular kind of obedience” could be expected to support the coup.12
Of course, many who thought of themselves purely as “professional soldiers” supported the regime and were even devoted to it, at first often out of an illusory self-interest and later out of subservience and a need to conform. In his diary, Hassell bitterly parodied the attitude of a leading general with this jingle: “Turn your collar up and say, ‘I’m a soldier and must obey!’ ”13 But far from being an exception, that attitude was much closer to the norm. In that light the history of the Hitler years amounted to a depressing series of evasions and gestures of abject submission, broken only occasionally by halfhearted protests.
As always in times of rapid political and social change, the period was marked by opportunism and shortsightedness, aggravated in this case by the continuing disintegration of the traditional value system, a process begun with the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, if not earlier. To explain such a breakdown solely in terms of individual frailty, however, is to ignore the deeper reasons for the failure of the vast majority of German officers to resist the Nazis. For these, one must turn to the explanations that the participants themselves advanced.
Chief among them is the myth that the German army had a tradition of nonintervention in politics, a leitmotif that runs through numerous apologia written after the war. The authors of these accounts complain that their critics want to have it both ways, accusing the army of having intervened in politics during the Weimar Republic and under Kaiser Wilhelm and then claiming that it had not done so under Hitler. General Fritsch’s pathetic lament in the turbulent days following his dismissal—“I just wasn’t cut out for politics!”—aptly sums up the attitude of these apologists.14
Their argument misses the point. The Reichswehr was far from apolitical; it frequently interfered in politics to defend its own interests. Many of the concessions it made to Hitler were in fact motivated by political calculation. In any event, critics of the army do not focus so much on its failure to intervene as on its inadequate powers of moral discernment. In return for short-term influence and the right to be “sole bearer of arms,” the Reichswehr abandoned basic principles and traditions. The Röhm affair, the silent acceptance of the murders of Schleicher and Bredow, and the army’s precipitous order-issued voluntarily from within its own ranks-that every soldier swear a personal oath to Hitler were all part of a concerted attempt to win influence, an effort on which the army staked more and more in return for less and less. The Fritsch affair determined the final outcome; all that remained was to play out the hands.
It was not until the Fritsch affair, or until the outbreak of war, at the latest, that most officers adopted the pose of apolitical professionals. They were motivated less by resigned acceptance of Hitler’s victory over them than by an active desire to evade the code of standards and rules by which war is traditionally waged. More often than can be justified, the army was deaf to appeals for humane assistance in areas under its control, especially when it came to the actions of the Einsatzgruppen. Insofar as the army considered its tolerance of SS atrocities a final concession to Hitler for which it deserved to be rewarded, it would only be disappointed once again: the last thing Hitler wanted Nazi officers to be was protean. In 1941, shortly before the campaign against the Soviet Union, he excoriated Reichenau for being “pliable,” in contrast to a foe like Hammerstein, who at least remained true to his hatred for Hitler and to his own worldview. Later the Führer commented that he often bitterly regretted not having purged his officer corps the way Stalin did.15 The excesses of Hitler’s retaliation after July 20 can probably be ascribed not least of all to his desire to compensate for the purge he failed to carry out earlier.
Nothing illuminates Hitler’s continuing rancor toward the officer corp
s more than his appointment on July 20, 1944, of its most deadly rival, Heinrich Himmler, as the new commander of the reserve army, a well-calculated gesture of contempt. Himmler immediately set about reorganizing the German army into a National Socialist “people’s army.” He banned all references to the theory that the state rested on twin pillars, the Nazi Party and the army, a theory in which Blomberg and Reichenau had placed great stock. The German people did not consist of pillars, Himmler explained, and the army merely “carried out the functions of the party.” The army had been thoroughly degraded, yet more was to come.16 By the end of the war, the Waffen-SS had mushroomed to over seventeen divisions.
Another reason for the unwillingness of many officers to engage in any sort of resistance was their profound aversion to revolt against the state. That feeling was greatly reinforced by fear for the soldiers under them, who were already being badly beaten at the fronts and whose ability to defend themselves might well be further weakened by a coup. There is no question that many officers were tormented by the pressures placed on them and by concerns about justifying their actions. In this, they had much in common with the conspirators. As can be seen in the example of Tresckow, even officers who were absolutely determined to stage a coup were troubled by the fact that everything they were contemplating would inevitably be seen by their troops as dereliction of duty, as irresponsible arrogance, and, worst, as capable of triggering a civil war.
Scarcely less inhibiting, even to many of the conspirators themselves, was the idea of murdering the head of state. One could point, as Stauffenberg did, to the immense number of fatalities incurred every day in Hitler’s war and to his slaughter of entire populations. Psychologically, however, there is a great difference between the murder of one person and the killing of many, a difference difficult to comprehend and perhaps essentially symbolic in nature.17 Virtually none of the plotters was able to overcome these inhibitions, and in all likelihood not even Stauffenberg was prepared to dispatch Hitler “as if he were a mad dog,” as Gersdorff put it. The indecision over what to do with Hitler that marked the conspiracy of September 1938 and was even more acutely evident in November 1939 reflects the scruples the conspirators had to overcome.
Plotting Hitler's Death Page 33