The Plot to Kill Hitler

by Patricia McCormick

  “GERMANY AWAKE,” A POPULAR NAZI ANTHEM

  Germany, awake from your nightmare!

  Give foreign Jews no place in your Reich!

  We will fight for your resurgence!

  Aryan blood shall never perish!

  All these hypocrites, we throw them out.

  Judea, leave our German house!

  If the native soil is clean and pure,

  We united and happy will be!

  We are the fighters of the NSDAP.

  True Germans in heart, in battles firm and tough.

  To the Swastika, devoted are we.

  Hail our leader, hail Hitler to thee!

  A few months later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and christened himself the Führer, the supreme leader.

  TWELVE

  SPEAKING OUT AGAINST THE FÜHRER

  1933

  It was just after rush hour, when housewives were in their kitchens listening to the radio as they made dinner. Husbands were at cafés and coffeehouses enjoying a drink before going home. All across Germany, people were tuned in to hear a speech that was billed as a look at how the younger generation viewed leadership.

  An unknown voice, soft, somewhat high-pitched, came on the radio. It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a twenty-six-year-old theology grad student. Just two days after Hitler was named Supreme Leader, Bonhoeffer denounced the idea of a leader who called himself a führer. Anyone who claims to be the supreme leader is ultimately what he called a “mis-leader,” he said. And those who give total allegiance to a führer “will in the end be destroyed by him.”1

  Before he could finish, his speech was cut off.

  The abrupt and eerie silence made listeners wonder: Had Hitler’s men cut the power to the microphone? Or had Bonhoeffer run overtime on his speech? To this day, no one knows. But the question lingered: What would happen to a person who speaks out against the Führer?

  The answer came a few days later. On February 27, 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, a young communist, was accused of setting fire to the Reichstag, the government headquarters building. He said he’d acted alone, but Hitler claimed that the fire was part of an attempt to overthrow the government, a coup organized by a large group of his political enemies.

  The day after the arson, Hitler convinced the president to suspend the constitution, giving himself sweeping emergency powers, claiming a threat to the country.

  He suspended the parts of the constitution that guaranteed civil liberties. Hitler’s men were now able to read the private letters of citizens, listen in on their phone calls, and search their houses at any time. Storm troopers roamed the streets, arresting and beating anyone who opposed Nazi party policies. Hitler also used the “emergency” to round up political opponents. His government then imposed the Malicious Practices Act, making it a crime to criticize his regime. And in a scenic little Bavarian town, the first concentration camp was established. The town was Dachau.

  CONCENTRATION CAMPS

  The first concentration camps were work camps, designed to hold political prisoners and so-called social deviants. Later, the Nazis created a system of camps specifically designated for the extermination of Jews and other minority groups.

  Shortly after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933, the Nazis set up camps to hold prisoners they considered enemies of the state: people who had simply spoken critically of the regime. They also imprisoned people they called “asocials”: homosexuals, homeless people, and petty criminals. Prisoners were confined under harsh conditions and with no regard for legal norms such as arrests or trials. Soon they were put to work to manufacture ammunition and aircraft parts as Germany prepared for war. Often, they were arrested and disappeared with no word to their relatives. Many were literally worked to death.2

  By 1942, the Nazis were rounding up all those with so-called non-Aryan blood—specifically, Jews and Roma people, who were then called Gypsies. These people also often died from overwork, starvation, disease—but many were systematically murdered in gas chambers. Nearly six million Jews and two hundred thousand Roma died in concentration camps.

  THIRTEEN

  THE ARYAN PARAGRAPH

  1933

  When Bonhoeffer arrived at his parents’ home, his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, was waiting for him in the foyer. Quickly, he pulled Dietrich into the study and closed the door. Dohnanyi, who was now a lawyer at the Supreme Court, had some disturbing—and secret—information. This would be the first of many occasions when Dohnanyi, because of his position in the government, would have access to inside information about the workings of the Nazi regime.

  Any day, he whispered, Hitler’s government would propose an amendment to the constitution called the Aryan Paragraph. All government employees would have to be of pure “Aryan” stock. Anyone of Jewish descent would be fired. Pastors with Jewish blood, including Bonhoeffer’s friend Franz Hildebrandt would be forced out of the ministry—into a separate church.

  THE ARYAN PARAGRAPH

  The Aryan Paragraph first appeared in the innocuous-sounding Law for the Restoration of Professional Civil Service. It stipulated that only those of Aryan descent, without Jewish parents or grandparents, could hold government jobs. Soon, it was extended in the Law against the Overcrowding of German Schools and Universities to deny education and teaching jobs to those of Jewish descent. Next it was broadened to ban even those married to “non-Aryans” from working for the government. Eventually, Jews were barred from jobs in the public health system, publishing, entertainment, and agriculture. Institutionalized anti-Semitism culminated in the Reich Citizen Laws, stripping those without so-called Aryan blood of their citizenship.

  Dietrich had seen the effects of “separate but equal” in the United States, and even though he was just a junior lecturer at Berlin University, he knew he had to speak out. The rest of the country might have fallen under Hitler’s spell, but Bonhoeffer thought that the clergy, men who had taken solemn vows to love and care for their fellow man, would take a stand against such blatant injustice. This, after all, was why he had become a minister, as he’d told his brothers back when he was thirteen—not to retreat from the issues of the day but to affect them.

  As church leaders gathered to debate the Aryan Paragraph, Bonhoeffer asked for an opportunity to speak. He was only twenty-seven, but he was already known for his opposition to Hitler. As he spoke, the clerics fidgeted in their seats.

  Bonhoeffer said that his fellow clergymen had a responsibility to question the government when it was in the wrong. This was a bold statement when Hitler’s men were routinely arresting and torturing anyone who spoke against the Führer. Then Bonhoeffer went further.

  The church, he said, has an obligation to “assist the victims” of government wrongdoing—“even if they do not belong to the Christian community.”1 He didn’t say so, but everyone knew he was talking about the Jews. At that, some of the ministers in the meeting got up and walked out.

  But Bonhoeffer had more to say. It was not enough to simply “bandage the victims under the wheel”2 of the government, he said. The church had a duty to jam a stick in the wheel itself. He was calling on his fellow pastors to stop Hitler in his tracks.

  Millions of lives might have been saved if Germany’s Christian leaders had listened to the young preacher. But no one heeded his words. When the meeting ended, Bonhoeffer was snubbed by most of the others in attendance. A few days later, he was called in by his superior and told that any further criticism would be treated as treason.

  While Bonhoeffer made a moral plea to the clergy, Hitler appealed to their desire for power. He told church leaders that he would restore the moral order that Germany was lacking. He also suggested that he would restore them to a place of political influence that they had lost since the days of the kaiser. He announced that his government would make Christianity “the basis of our collective morality.”3 All they had to do was swear allegiance to him and to the Aryan Paragraph.

  Finally,
church leaders gathered to vote on Hitler’s demand. As storm troopers stood guard, a lone voice cried out in opposition. It was Bonhoeffer. But he was drowned out by jeering and catcalls. The church approved the Aryan Paragraph and installed Hitler’s choice as their leader. Soon, they would hang swastikas behind their altars and pledge their loyalty to Hitler, crying “Sieg Heil” as they raised their arms in the famous Nazi salute. One minister declared, “Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.”4

  Swastikas now adorned every avenue of Berlin. Even Magdeburg Cathedral, an ancient cathedral in the heart of the country, flew the Nazi banner. The swastika, said one preacher there, was “the symbol of German hope. Whoever reviles this symbol is reviling our Germany. . . . The swastika flags round the altar radiate hope—hope that the day is at last about to dawn.”5

  SA and SS formations marching on May 1, 1936, in the Lustgarten in front of the Berlin Cathedral

  FOURTEEN

  COMMITTING TREASON

  1933

  A line of storm troopers stood elbow to elbow blocking the entrance to the famous Kaufhaus des Westens, Berlin’s largest department store. Nearby, pairs of soldiers patrolled the area with cans of paint, smearing the windows of Jewish-owned stores with a yellow Star of David. It was April 1, 1933, the day Hitler had declared a boycott of businesses owned by Jews. Anyone who defied him would be arrested.

  Outside the department store, an elegant ninety-one-year-old grandmother in a white lace blouse approached the line of storm troopers. She would shop wherever she liked, she told the soldiers when they tried to stop her. And she strode past them.

  That woman was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s grandmother, Julie.

  THE BOYCOTT

  Soon after Hitler took office, his storm troopers handed out pamphlets that read “Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!”1 Hitler said the boycott was a way of punishing the press, which he said was owned by Jews spreading malicious lies about the Nazi party. Germans were forbidden from shopping in Jewish-owned stores or they risked being arrested themselves.

  That night, Bonhoeffer, along with his brother Klaus, arrived at their parents’ home to meet with a pair of Dietrich’s friends visiting from New York. Paul and Marion Lehmann noticed a change in their friend. He wasn’t the carefree young man he’d been two years earlier; he was deeply distraught by the treatment of the Jews in Germany and felt he had to do something. The Lehmanns also noticed that every now and then, Klaus tiptoed to the door of the room where they were sitting to make sure none of the servants was listening in.

  Before the Lehmanns left, Dietrich and Paul composed a letter to Rabbi Stephen Wise, the influential Jewish leader Bonhoeffer had met when he was at Union Theological Seminary in New York. They told Wise what was happening to Jews in Germany in the hopes that he would alert President Franklin Roosevelt. Under Hitler’s new Malicious Practices Act, any contact with a foreign organization was illegal. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had just committed treason.

  An incident in the coming weeks, though, would test his courage. It happened when his sister Sabine asked him to conduct her father-in-law’s funeral. Sabine’s husband, Gert, had converted to Christianity, but her father-in-law was Jewish. Dietrich was torn. He’d already been reprimanded by church elders after opposing the Aryan Paragraph; if he spoke at Gerhardt’s father’s funeral, would he get in more trouble?

  Bonhoeffer went to his superior for advice. He reminded Bonhoeffer that Lutheran canon law prohibited ministers from officiating at funerals of the “unbaptized.” If Bonhoeffer conducted the funeral, he said, it would create an uproar. He told him to decline his sister’s request. It was a decision Dietrich Bonhoeffer would regret until the day he died.

  His family didn’t chide him, but his conscience did. “How could I have been so horribly timid?” he wrote to his sister a few days later. This is “something now that can never be made good,” he said. “I must simply beg you to forgive my weakness.”2

  Before long, Sabine and Gert would face an even greater crisis. This time, Dietrich wouldn’t let them down.

  FIFTEEN

  BONFIRE OF HATRED

  1933

  When Dietrich Bonhoeffer walked onto the university campus, he now had to pass under a giant swastika banner flying from the front entrance. Just about every one of his students wore the bronze Nazi badge on their lapels. And most of his colleagues had placed pictures of the Führer on their desks. Why hadn’t he joined the Nazi party? they asked. He muttered an excuse. He knew now that he was working inside a nest of Nazi sympathizers; he couldn’t trust any of his coworkers with his real feelings.

  As he wrote to one friend, “If I no longer say anything about conditions here it is because, as you know, there is no privacy of post.”1

  His mother began to worry about him, saying he’d become sullen and withdrawn. As his country—and now his church—embraced Hitler, Bonhoeffer daydreamed about the quiet, uneventful life he’d once hoped to have. And he thought again of going to India to bring Gandhi’s ideas of peaceful resistance back home.

  But by now Bonhoeffer had become a prominent figure in the church debate about the fate of the Jews. And he felt he had to stay in Germany to work within the church to convince the clergy that what Hitler was doing was wrong.

  In April, the Aryan laws were expanded again; Jews were barred from working as lawyers and doctors at state-run institutions. In May, they were banned from working as university professors and notaries. In June, Jewish dentists would be fired from their jobs at state-run facilities. By fall, the ban would be extended to cover the spouses of “non-Aryans.” And in September, Jews would be banned from film, theater, literature, and the arts.

  One morning that fall, when Sabine’s husband, Gert Liebholz, arrived on campus to give a lecture, he saw a line of students in Nazi brownshirts barring the entrance to the classroom, their jackboots straddling the threshold. “Leibholz must not lecture; he is a Jew,” they said. “The lectures are not taking place.”2 Soon, word had spread all throughout the university town that Gert had “Jewish blood.” Friends began to avoid the couple. Their daughters were shunned at school. Then Gert was fired.

  THE ARYAN LAWS, 1933

  •April 1—Boycott of Jewish stores begins.

  •April 7—Jews are banned from practicing medicine or law in state agencies.

  •April 25—Limits are put on the number of Jewish children who can attend school.

  •May 6—Jews are banned from teaching at universities.

  •May 10—Students burn thousands of “un-German” books.

  •June—Jewish dentists are banned at state institutions.

  •September—Spouses of “non-Aryans” are banned from state employment.

  •September—Jews are barred from working in theater, film, and literature.

  Adolf Hitler receiving the Nazi salute from a group of children, 1936

  HITLER YOUTH

  This paramilitary group was designed to indoctrinate children ages fourteen to eighteen into the Nazi philosophy and to recruit future members of the SS, the elite Nazi military guard. The members of the group held large rallies and performed in athletic contests. They were also used to break up church groups and spy on Bible study classes.

  The young people enrolled in these groups, Hitler said, would be “a violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth.”3 All young Germans were required to join; if they didn’t, their parents could be arrested.

  On May 10, 1933, thousands of students carrying torches poured into streets in towns all across Germany. They fanned out across the country, singing Nazi songs and chanting slogans against what they called “the un-German spirit.”4 Hitler’s men arrived to whip them into a fury of hatred. At the stroke of midnight, they threw thousands of books into piles and lit an enormous bonfire. It was a grand “cleansing”5 of “un-German” books—including works by Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. Also destroyed were the works of Heinrich Heine, a Jewish writer who had penned these
fateful words nearly a hundred years earlier: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”6

  Book burning during the rally “Against the Un-German Spirit,” organized by German students along with members of the SA and SS, on the Opera Square opposite Berlin University, May 10, 1933

  SIXTEEN

  A NAZI CHURCH

  1933

  Adolf Hitler, a baptized Catholic, had once described Jesus as “our greatest Aryan hero.”1

  But now he decided that Christianity, which preached “meekness and flabbiness,”2 was not in keeping with Nazi ideals of “ruthlessness and strength.”3 There was also too much emphasis on the crucifixion, which was “defeatist and depressing.”4 Germans needed a more “positive”5 religion.

  This new religion that Hitler had in mind would get rid of the Old Testament (which he considered too Jewish) and replace the Bible with his manifesto, Mein Kampf. The National Church would take down all crosses, crucifixes, and images of saints and replace them with the “only unconquerable symbol, the swastika.”6

  MEIN KAMPF

  In this autobiographical book, which translates to My Struggle, Hitler described what he called “the Jewish peril,” his theory of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. According to him, there are two evils in the world: Communism (which he said was responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I) and Judaism. He declared that Germany needed new territory to realize the historic destiny of the German people; this need for lebensraum (living space) explained why Hitler would eventually expand Germany’s borders by invading Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia.