The German Resistance

History has been kind to the anti-German resistance in most of Nazi-occupied Europe. In part, of course, this is a consequence of Allied propaganda during the war itself. In the struggle for `hearts and minds', much was to be gained by stressing the rôles of Free French, Free Polish, Free Czech and other forces fighting alongside those of Britain, the Empire as it then existed, and the United States. There were also vested interests, both during the war and afterwards, in stressing the activities of partisan organisations in occupied France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece and, after September 1943, northern Italy — activities ranging from smuggling Allied airmen to safety and transmitting messages to co-ordinating air raids, engaging in sabotage and conducting large-scale guerrilla operations. In the English-speaking world, even the most cursory account of the war will accord some notice to the work of the underground resistance; and there can scarcely be a cinema-goer or television viewer who has not seen at least one film revolving around resistance activities, from Scandinavia to the Balkans and Greece. Nor must one forget the actions of partisans within the former Soviet sphere of influence, and within the former Soviet Union itself.

The German Resistance, or `Widerstand', has received altogether less attention from serious historians, and virtually no popular attention whatever. For most people, the Third Reich looms as a single sinister monolithic entity — the entire German population standing mesmerised, in docile thrall to Hitler's spell. In some quarters, it may even come as a surprise that a German resistance existed at all. Although there will generally be a vague awareness of the abortive plot to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, for most non-historians, this will figure only as it was depicted at the time by the Nazis themselves and by Allied propaganda — a single doomed flash-in-the-pan attempt at a coup d'état improvised, in slapdash and amateurish fashion, by a few disgruntled high-ranking officers. Even among the better-informed, the plot of 20 July is seen as nothing more than an ad hoc and bungled endeavour to remove Hitler personally, rather than a manifestation of a coherent, longstanding, widespread and well-organised resistance movement.

In fact, a subterranean and organised German resistance had existed since before 1938 — before Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia and the notorious conference in Munich which, according to Neville Chamberlain, promised `peace in our time'. This resistance consisted of senior military officers and civil servants, and international diplomats, jurists, intellectuals and men of letters. Some of these were among the most august and influential names in Germany. Hjalmar Schacht, President of the Reichsbank and former Minister of Economics, was involved, as well as Julius Leber, refugee of concentration camps and chief spokesman for German socialism. There were Carl Gördeler, former Mayor of Leipzig, Ulrich von Hassell, former German ambassador to Italy, and Adam von Trott zu Solz, one-time Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and probably the most brilliant mind in the German Foreign Office. Eminent jurists like Counts Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and Helmuth James von Moltke — cousins of the Stauffenberg family and founders of the intellectual `Kreisau Circle' — took part, as did Pastor Dietrich Bonhöffer, the internationally distinguished teacher, lecturer, scholar and theologian.

Among the military, the list is equally impressive. It starts with Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, beloved former Chief of the General Staff, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chief of Military Intelligence, and goes on to involve at least eight senior commanders, including two other former Chiefs of the General Staff, two field marshals and the military governor of France, as well as numerous junior officers.

Although the true number can never be known, one historian records at least forty-six significant attempts on Hitler's life between 1921 and 1945. In 1933 alone, there were ten which the police regarded as both genuine and serious. Some of the projected assassination schemes were wildly flamboyant and romantically dramatic — a battalion of German and Cossack paratroops, for example, dropping into the airport near Berchtesgaden, storming the headquarters and capturing the Führer, who would no doubt have been shot while trying to escape. Others were more realistic and, in other circumstances, might well have succeeded. And quite apart from plans to remove Hitler by violent means, there were numerous other plots for deposing the National Socialist régime and seizing power. A few of these are worthy of note.

On 11 March 1938, the `Anschluss' of Austria occurred. German troops marched into Vienna, and the original domains of the once-proud 600-year-old Habsburg empire were annexed to the Greater German Reich. Hitler then turned his designs to Czechoslovakia, a country which, unlike Austria, was not going to submit peaceably. Under its Chief of Staff, Ludwig Beck, the German high command was alarmed at the prospect of a major European war. Even apart from the moral issues, and the guilt Germany would incur for such aggression, the country was militarily unprepared for a large-scale conflict. If at first Beck's opposition was based on simple expediency, it soon became a matter of duty and honour:

History will indict these commanders of blood guilt if, in the light of their professional and political knowledge, they do not obey the dictates of their conscience. The soldier's duty to obey ends when his knowledge, his conscience and his sense of responsibility forbid him to carry out a certain order.

Towards the end of July 1938, Beck prepared a statement to Hitler:

The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, together with his most senior commanding generals, regret that they cannot assume responsibility for the conduct of a war of this nature without carrying a share of the guilt for it in face of the people and of history. Should the Fü4hrer, therefore, insist on the prosecution of this war, they hereby resign from their posts.

While most of the high command shared Beck's objections to war, few of them possessed his integrity and preparedness to act on his principles. Lacking the requisite unanimity of support from his subordinates, Beck resigned alone on 18 August, to be succeeded by General Fritz Halder. Halder was no more cordial to Hitler, whom he described as a `criminal', a `madman' and a `bloodsucker'. At the same time, he worried that any attempted coup might rend the whole of Germany and culminate in outright civil war. Despite the risk, he proceeded to plot a coup with other highly placed individuals, including Beck and Ernst von Weizsäcker, the father of Germany's present-day president.

Any premature movement or re-deployment of the army would, it was recognised, attract attention and give the game away, but if Hitler actually ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the army would have to move in any case. Hitler's own orders, it was therefore decided, would set the army into motion — not towards an advance into Czechoslovakia, but towards an overthrow of the régime and a seizure of power. Among the units assigned to a key rôle in the projected enterprise was the 1st (Light) Division under Lieutenant-General Erich Hoepner, who had been initiated into the clandestine plans. One of Hoepner's most trusted subordinates, and friends, was the 31-year-old Captain Claus von Stauffenberg. Among the others associated with the undertaking were Stauffenberg's brother, Berthold, his uncle, Nikolaus von Üxküll, and two of his cousins, Cäsar von Hofacker and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg. When Stauffenberg emerged from hospital in 1943, he was no stranger to anti-Hitler conspiracy; he had been privy to the network of opposition within the military for five years.

The `cover story' for the coup in 1938 — the official reason or `excuse' for the army's seizure of power — was to be an alleged plot by the SS to usurp control of the country. This, it was felt, would ensure the allegiance of military personnel of all ranks. Such, already, was the animosity felt towards the SS by the army, and that animosity was only to intensify.

Many of the 1938 plotters wanted only to arrest Hitler and place him on trial. This would have precluded his being transformed into a martyr, and would also have pre-empted any accusations of a `stab in the back'. Since 1933, one of the conspirators had secretly been collecting and collating material for a legal indictment. But there was also talk of having the Führer officially declared insane by a panel of doctors. And despite a number of objections, there evolved a contingency plan for assassination, on the grounds that `tyrannicide had always been looked upon as a moral commandment'. According to Hans-Bernd Gisevius, then serving in the Ministry of the Interior:

Not every attempt at a coup d'état can be judged by the same ethical standards. I am speaking of a situation in domestic and foreign politics which already was rife with murder and injustice, which was moving towards the bloodbath of a war. At stake was much more than the peace and security of one single country. The interests of millions of innocent people were more imperative than the requirements of justice — requirements which the tyrant himself had unfailingly violated.

A `raiding party' of armed officers was accordingly formed, quietly assembled and `held ready in certain Berlin apartments'. When the coup was launched, this `raiding party' was to descend on the Chancellery, ostensibly to arrest the Führer. In fact, `more drastic measures' had been prepared: the `raiding party' was `determined to provoke an incident and shoot Hitler in the process'. A new German government would then be formed and a democratic constitutional monarchy established, the crown being conferred on one of two grandsons of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In the meantime, high-level diplomatic moves had been initiated through the Foreign Office. Secret emissaries were dispatched to France and to Britain, whose support was deemed to be of paramount importance. Throughout the autumn, consultations were conducted in secret with British officials. On 15 September, Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, arrived at Berchtesgaden to discuss the escalating Czech crisis with Hitler. So far as the projected coup was concerned, everything was in place: Chamberlain would remain adamant in the face of Hitler's voracious demands, Hitler would in turn refuse to back down and, with the prospect of war looming, the conspirators would have grounds on which to act. Instead Chamberlain gave way to Hitler, accepting that the Sudetenland — the German-speaking enclave of Czechoslovakia — should be ceded to the Reich. The conspirators were thrown into `consternation' and `confusion'. `In their view the British statesman had been doing homage to a gangster and thus had let them down.'

For the moment there was still hope. In his statements, Chamberlain had said more than he was authorised to say and had to return to London for Parliamentary ratification. Under clandestine pressure from the conspirators themselves, Britain placed her fleet on alert — though it is hard to see how this can have been much consolation to a landlocked Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia herself mobilised. France recalled her reservists. International tension intensified, and it looked as if the renewed threat of war would at last give the conspirators the sanction they required.

On 27 September, Hitler mobilised certain divisions near the Czech border. On the 28th, the `raiding party' bent on Hitler's removal readied themselves for their assault on the Chancellery, the doors of which, in accordance with their plan, had been left open. But on the very next day, there occurred the infamous Munich Conference, in which Chamberlain and the French Premier Daladier capitulated to Hitler's demands, thereby removing the last obstacle to his advance, unchallenged and unmolested, into Czechoslovakia. Without the threat of war to validate their undertaking, the conspirators were stripped of all justification for action. `So,' the historian Peter Hoffmann observed, `the ground was cut from under the feet of the most promising attempt to overthrow Hitler', and, `The Munich Conference and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers administered to the anti-Hitler opposition a blow from which it could not recover.' At the Nuremberg trials after the war, General Halder was asked directly: `If Chamberlain had not come to Munich, would the plan have been executed and Hitler deposed?' He replied that the plan would indeed have been carried out.

It is, of course, easy to second-guess history, but it is difficult to imagine a moment of indecision and irresolution with more tragic consequences. Had Chamberlain remained firm at Munich, it is often asserted, Hitler would have backed down. In fact, Hitler would not have backed down, but, by virtue of not doing so, he would almost certainly have been deposed and very probably eliminated — and this would have been even more beneficial to humanity and to twentieth-century history. In their policy of `appeasement', Chamberlain and Daladier have more to answer for than is generally believed.

Of all the plots against Hitler, that of 1938 stood probably the greatest chance of success and came closest to effective realisation. It was also the last occasion on which senior officers of the high command, including a presiding Chief of the General Staff, would have the willpower, the unanimity and the opportunity to work in such close concert. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, German successes in the field, and the stranglehold of the SS and Gestapo at home, ensured a support and a docility among the populace that made a full-scale coup increasingly difficult to contemplate. Yet even before Stauffenberg's appearance on the scene, attempts on the Führer's life continued.

In September 1939, immediately after the outbreak of war, Colonel-General Kurt von Hammerstein tried desperately to engineer one such assassination. Hammerstein was a former Commander-in-Chief of the army, who, on the inauguration of hostilities, was entrusted with one of the German armies on the French front. He was involved in no organised conspiracy, gave no thought to wider political repercussions; but his hatred for Hitler was more than a decade old, pre-dating even the Nazis' rise to power. Acting virtually alone, he tried repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — to lure Hitler to his headquarters. `I would have rendered him harmless once and for all,' Hammerstein subsequently said, `and even without judicial proceedings.' The military historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett writes that, had Hitler only come within Hammerstein's reach, the general `would have dealt faithfully and adequately with him'. Shortly before his death from cancer in 1943, Hammerstein stated: `A nation that has lost every feeling for right and wrong, good and evil, that commits such crimes, deserves to be destroyed ...'

The following month, after the successful conclusion of the Polish campaign, General Halder himself tried again, hoping to neutralise the Führer before shooting actually started with Britain and France. The speed and one-sidedness of the victory in Poland had made it more difficult to muster support than in 1938. Nevertheless, Halder was able to draw on most of the individuals involved in the previous year's plot. Among his new co-conspirators were the Panzer, commander Heinz Guderian and the young Henning von Tresckow (later to become one of Stauffenberg's closest associates and colleagues). Plans were laid to arrest and, in all likelihood, assassinate not just Hitler, but most of the Nazi Party hierarchy as well. The Kaiser's grandson, Prince Louis-Ferdinand, secretly declared his readiness, if called upon, to serve. Clandestine links were established with the Vatican. The 9th Infantry Regiment of Potsdam — among whose young officers were Axel von dem Bussche and Ewald von Kleist, two of Stauffenberg's subsequent collaborators — was placed on alert and assigned a key rôle in the undertaking.

Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. A bomb which had nothing to do with the conspiracy was planted in a Munich beer hall on 8 November. There followed a clampdown on the availability of explosives, making it impossible for the conspirators to obtain the supplies they needed. Worse still, they were unable to obtain the support of Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army, who had just had a row with Hitler and been badly intimidated. Without Brauchitsch's co-operation, action was unthinkable. Halder panicked, called off the projected coup and ordered the destruction of all records. For the next few weeks, he carried a loaded revolver in his pocket on every visit to the Chancellery, intending to shoot Hitler personally, but he could never muster the resolve to perform the act. At one point, he even talked about employing a contract killer, but it was too late for that.