by Danny Orbach
3
The Officer, the Mayor, and the Spy
THE INVESTIGATION AGAINST Fritsch and the proceedings of the court-martial moved some younger, stauncher supporters of the general to rally to his defense. Naturally, some of these people were critical of the regime, especially of the arbitrary, dirty games of the SS and the Gestapo.1 One of them was more than critical. A senior officer in the Amt Ausland/Abwehr, the military secret service, Lt. Col. Hans Oster was a closet anti-Nazi. The Fritsch affair gave him the perfect opportunity to unite like-minded people—from the army, the bureaucracy, the foreign ministry, and the conservative establishment—to fight for a legal, legitimate cause: to prove Fritsch’s innocence, reinstate him as the commander in chief of the army, and lay bare the crimes of the Gestapo.2
Oster, a rising star of German military intelligence, was born in 1887, the son of a Dresden pastor. He was educated from an early age as a devout Protestant Christian, and as a staunch patriot and royalist he chose to embark on a military career. He was decorated for bravery during the Great War and, like many others, was disgusted by the democratic revolution of 1918–1919. He agreed to serve the republic, or the “frail, multi-party state” as he called it, only with great reluctance.3 In the army, Oster was known as a talented, handsome officer, a good cello player, a lover of the equestrian arts, and a gregarious womanizer.
In January 1933, when the National Socialists took over the country, Oster was mired in his own affairs. A few days beforehand, on December 31, the army had discharged him because of a relationship he had had with the wife of a well-known professor. With his promising career in tatters, Oster spent several months hunting for work in vain. Salvation eventually came from unexpected quarters. Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, a senior officer in the Abwehr and an old friend, answered Oster’s desperate pleas and petitioned for his case. The supreme command refused to reinstate him to active service, but thanks to Canaris he was appointed a civilian adviser in the secret service. Now, he was responsible for counterespionage and for monitoring subversive activity in government ministries. From this vantage point, Oster recognized the full extent of the terror, violence, and corruption in the new Nazi regime. He witnessed with disgust the persecution of the Jews and the “struggle” against the church. “I feel responsible before God for the Jews of Germany,” he allegedly told a friend.4 His religious sentiments were only part of the story. After his good friend the intelligence officer Ferdinand von Bredow was murdered by the Nazis in the Night of the Long Knives ( June 1934), he started personally hating Hitler and his “gang of brigands.”5
By 1938, Oster was growing in prominence in the Abwehr, and he was able to make small, gradual steps toward the implementation of his old dream: the establishment of a clandestine opposition movement. In his first two years of service, his commanders had looked down on him as an untrustworthy type who was forging connections for his own ends and flirting with the secretaries in the hallways. But in 1935, his luck changed.6 His old friend and confidant Adm. Wilhelm Canaris became the new Abwehr chief and appointed Oster director of the Central Division—number two in the hierarchy of the Abwehr. The demoted officer was also reinstated to active service and eased back into uniform. Canaris ordered that nothing would be done in the Abwehr without Oster’s knowledge.7
Oster was quick to use his new power to weave a network of contacts both in the Abwehr and throughout the military and civilian elites. No one was more skilled at pushing his way into prominent circles. Ever watchful for dangers and opportunities, he shared his real sentiments only with a handful of trusted friends. One of these men, who became Oster’s eyes and ears in the Nazi security service, was Hans Bernd Gisevius—a Gestapo agent turned staunch enemy of the Nazi regime.
Gisevius was a schemer whose fingerprints could be seen all over the early anti-Nazi opposition. “His appearance was as stiff as the collar he wore,” write Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman. “A man of towering height, he looked like a caricature of a senior Prussian civil servant. He was so ostentatious in his behavior that few chose to believe at first that this strange creature was a bona fide secret agent. Some thought him a buffoon; others, an impostor putting on an elaborate act. Many believed he was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi trying to hoodwink the Swiss and the allies.”8 His behavior gave the impression that he was a clown or a pompous windbag, who couldn’t really be involved in illegal activity. Under the cover of this partly natural and partly fabricated persona, Gisevius gave a great service to the crystallizing opposition. He became an anti-Nazi secret agent and one of Oster’s closest friends.
Contrary to what he wrote in his memoirs, Gisevius began his career as an adherent of National Socialism. Before Hitler’s rise to power, he was a nationalist student leader, quick to lend his support to the new government. He won a coveted post in the Prussian police and elbowed his way up the hierarchy through ploys and manipulations. After several months, he was transferred to the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. However, his stormy character and taste for schemes had made him unpopular in influential circles, and he was quick to make enemies in the Gestapo and beyond. Slowly, his power started to wane. In 1934, the head of the Gestapo delivered the coup de grâce, ordering him transferred to a marginal job at the Prussian Ministry of the Interior.
Gradually, Gisevius had turned against the Nazi regime in toto. The hatred he felt for the Gestapo leaders who marginalized him spread to the SS, Himmler, and finally the Führer himself. And contrary to the impression of many, his actions were not those of a mere selfish opportunist: as a Gestapo official he became privy to the full extent of Nazi terror, and though he could not care less about the fate of the Communists, he was troubled by the persecution of the Jews and nonconformist clergymen. Oster, who became known to him during his time at the Gestapo, had him transferred to the Abwehr in 1938 as a special civilian adviser (Sonderführer). Gisevius used his new job and contacts in the police top brass to supply Oster with secret information from inside the system. From then on, he became an important member in the Oster circle and developed a radical oppositionist ideology: the Nazi regime had to be crushed by any means. If violence and murder were necessary, so be it. “A friend described him as a gangster fighting for a good cause,” write Laqueur and Breitman. “Very self-centered, a strong proclivity toward conspiracy led him to plot not only against the Nazis but also sometimes against his own side.”9 It is quite possible that through Gisevius’s mediation, Oster came to meet a third key figure, former lord mayor of Leipzig Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler.
Goerdeler had nothing of Oster’s cunning and sleekness, nor of Gisevius’s predilection for schemes and manipulations. With his gray hair, great height, and irritating tendency to preach, he came across as a humorless bureaucrat tied heart and soul to the establishment. This persona seems incongruous with his decision to go in for illegal opposition. Nevertheless, he went all the way from reluctant cooperation with Hitler to unrelenting resistance. For many high-placed civilians and officers, he became the resistance embodied. What could have moved such an upright person to cross the line so emphatically?
Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was born in Schneidemühl, a village in the then German province of Posen (now in Poland). After graduating in law and economics, he served in the Great War as an officer in the reserves. Then, he embarked on a successful municipal career in several localities, including the important urban center of Königsberg. In 1931, he reached the climax of his career, serving simultaneously as lord mayor of Leipzig and Reich price commissioner. In the stormy years preceding the Nazi takeover, President Hindenburg even considered appointing him a chancellor.
Goerdeler devoted much of his energy and attention to the town of Leipzig. There he was known as a diligent mayor with authoritarian tendencies. In 1933, he supported Hitler’s rise to power and willingly worked with the new government, but his relations with the local Nazis were already unsteady. Conflicts arose, for example, over Goerdeler’s refusal to fly the swastika flag over the town h
all or to change “Jewish” street names. He did harbor prejudices against German Jews, but (as his daughter told the author of this book) he supported the “clean” anti-Semitism of the Nuremberg Laws, because he thought they would restrain the party “radicals” from practicing anti-Semitic violence. As early as April 1933, to protest the boycott of Jewish shops, he “went in formal dress to a Jewish quarter of his city to protect Jews and their businesses, and he used the city police to free Jews who had been detained and beaten by SA storm troopers.”10
Step by step, though, municipal-council Nazis undermined Goerdeler’s position. Nazi anti-Semitic legislation, such as the prohibition of Jews’ using public swimming pools and other communal bathing facilities, applied also in Leipzig, and Deputy Mayor Haacke’s pressure presumably forced Goerdeler to endorse this bylaw.11 He was also troubled by the persecution of the church, the aggressive foreign policy, and what he saw as irresponsible fiscal policy. The lord mayor, whose authority was slipping from his hands, became increasingly embittered.
In 1936, Goerdeler was heading to the point of no return. The American historian Harold C. Deutsch, then a young journalist, recounted the following meeting in Goerdeler’s office:
[Goerdeler said that] the foremost German problem today is the re-establishment of ordinary human decency. To his amazed visitor he then rapidly detailed a formidable list of iniquities he perceived in Hitler’s Germany, mentioning also some of his troubles with the local Nazis. Rising at the end to conduct his visitor to the door, he passed a large window looking out on the space before the city hall. Pointing in the direction of the famous Gewandhaus, before which stood a statue of Mendelssohn, he said: “There is one of my problems. They [the brownshirts] are after me to remove that monument. But if they ever touch it I am finished here.”12
Many future members of the resistance had similar “here and no further” moments. For Goerdeler, the monument issue was a matter of principle. He saw himself as the real protector of German Kultur and was disgusted by the National Socialist disregard for the tradition he cherished. The monument was also a matter of principle for the local Nazi leaders. After all, for how long could the party tolerate a mayor who rejected the fundamentals of its policy, particularly on the “Jewish question”? Members of the municipal council even complained about Goerdeler’s wife, “who is known as a Jew-lover throughout the town, and is even not ashamed to drive an official vehicle to go shopping in Jewish shops.”13 Deputy Mayor Haacke wrote to the authorities that Goerdeler was estranged from virtually all aspects of National Socialist ideology. In particular, he could not understand the party’s hatred of German Jews:
The Mendelssohn monument affair clearly reflects Dr. Goerdeler’s approach to the Jewish Question. As my letter indicates, Goerdeler made things enormously difficult whenever [it was demanded] to change a Jewish street name. Even if he is now using the monument as a pretext for resigning, I am sincerely convinced that the reasons for [that step] go much deeper . . . He came to understand that the days of his worldview were numbered due to the growing success of National Socialism, and drew the final conclusion.14
The monument was removed in November 1936 when Goerdeler was away at a conference in Helsinki. Haacke used the opportunity to get rid of the statue in order to “spare the lord mayor the unpleasant decision.”15 When Goerdeler returned, he promptly resigned from his post: “Thus I decided without hesitation not to take responsibility for the desecration of culture [Kulturschande]. All of us listened to Mendelssohn’s songs with great pleasure and sang them as well. To deny Mendelssohn, is nothing but an absurd, cowardly act . . . I still hope to go back to serving the nation, when its atmosphere is purer and cleaner. By my resignation I protested against the removal of the Mendelssohn monument in front of the entire world.”16
One year after his resignation, Goerdeler had finally joined the cause of Oster and Gisevius, with whom he was well acquainted. This strange trio—the secret service colonel, the former Gestapo official, and the retired lord mayor—became a rallying point for the remnants of the German opposition. Together they formed the first network of resistance in the German army, which was destined to undergo dramatic structural shifts and waves of expansion and collapse from 1938 to 1944.
The first incarnation of their network is called a “clique” in network-analysis theory, defined as “an informal association of people among whom there is a degree of group feeling and intimacy and in which certain group norms of behavior have been established.”17 Gisevius’s memoirs indicate that most or all members were friends or close acquaintances who met often. Rules of compartmentalization (every member knowing only the minimum required to carry out his tasks) were all but nonexistent: only in rare cases did members withhold information from their coconspirators. Division of labor was also minimal, and the roles of the founders and members were vaguely defined, if at all. However, even in this early incarnation of the movement, one can follow some patterns that characterized it to the very end.
The first and most important guiding pattern defined here is the rule of revolutionary mutation. As the Gestapo later observed, “The recruitment of new members and confidants was mostly done on the basis of previous ties of friendship and acquaintance.”18 This corresponds to the observation of network analyst David Knoke that networks of insurgency are usually created on the basis of existing legal networks. In this way, Knoke has written, “an insurgency can more easily attach these loyalties to the movement itself. Rather than arduously building new commitments from scratch, activists can persuade potential supporters that the movement organization offers a natural expression of their current solidary sentiments . . . Recruitment to any social activity requires a preceding contact with a recruiting agent, more often a social intimate than an impersonal actor.”19
To keep their revolutionary effectiveness, such networks have to be relatively autonomous and protected from the suspicious eyes of the security services. Under the conditions of National Socialist Germany, they were able to exist in half-autonomous social “islands,” such as certain segments of the working class, the high bureaucracy, the conservative right, and above all the army. The Gestapo investigators were again on the mark when they observed that the rise of a military resistance movement was possible only because the officer corps had historically seen itself as autonomous from the “civilian authorities” and subject only to “its own rules.” More importantly, the SS and the Gestapo were not allowed to quickly penetrate it or interfere in its internal affairs.20 Even though many officers were National Socialist by conviction and their numbers increased over the years, most hesitated to “inform” on their “comrades” to the civilian police. Without such an autonomous tradition, the efforts of Oster and company to recruit new members at the officer corps would almost certainly have landed them in prison.
Inside these autonomous islands of the bureaucracy, nobility, conservative right, and officer corps, there existed complicated networks of kinship, marriage, and social ties, many of them based on joint schooling or military service. The solidarity in these networks was strong enough to limit the extent to which “strangers” could penetrate them. Most of the networks were never involved in opposition to the Nazi regime, but a tiny portion went through a process of revolutionary mutation in the opening months of 1938. Under the auspices of Oster, Gisevius, and Goerdeler, they morphed from social networks into conspiratorial ones.
One of the main venues for this mutation was a prestigious Berlin club named the Free Society for Scholarly Entertainment, popularly known as the Wednesday Society (Mittwoch Gesellschaft). This venerable social institution had its roots in the nineteenth century and held strictly observed rules of scholarly elitism. Only a handful of people, each of them a respected expert in his field, were allowed to join the club. The assembly met every second Wednesday at the house of one of its members. The host had to give a lecture in his field of expertise, which was recorded in the protocol. After each lecture, there was ample time for disc
ussion and socializing. The Wednesday Club was never a resistance group as such, and some of its members, like the race scientist Eugen Fischer, were virulent Nazis.
However, the general atmosphere in the club was critical toward the system, and several of its prominent members, among them Ludwig Beck and Ulrich von Hassell, ended up in the inner circle of the German resistance. Generally speaking, the club was an ideal venue for revolutionary mutation: it was strictly private, strangers were not allowed into meetings, and criticism of National Socialist ideology was tolerated. Most importantly, the strong solidarity between members decreased the risk of denunciation. Goerdeler, who was not a club member but a friend of many who were, found it an especially promising recruitment ground.21
Goerdeler, Oster, and Gisevius fulfilled different functions in the fledgling clandestine network. Goerdeler and Oster were “salesmen,” to borrow the typology of Malcolm Gladwell. Namely, they moved to mutate preexisting social networks, to import the idea of resistance, to inflame it, and to keep it intact. Just as in other social networks, those created by salesmen were maintained by “connectors,” people with unusual social skills and contacts in various social circles who were able to disseminate the subversive ideas of the salesmen. Gisevius and Oster were certainly important connectors in the early resistance, though Goerdeler also fulfilled that role to some extent. At this early stage, anyway, the roles were far from being clearly defined.22
In winter 1938, the network was mainly intended to undermine the SS by defending General Fritsch.23 That esteemed cause won some qualified support from Chief of Staff Gen. Ludwig Beck. At this stage, he was not even close to being a resistance fighter, and wanted only to help his friend and commanding officer. True, during the Fritsch crisis he came to distrust the Nazi leadership, but to stage a coup d’état would have run contrary to everything sacred in the Prussian military tradition. “Conspiracy and mutiny do not exist in the lexicon of the German officer,” Beck allegedly told General Staff officer Franz Halder, in response to Halder’s proposal to organize a violent reprisal against the Gestapo.24