Such differences of opinion, and in general the peculiar babble of voices presumably speaking for the German opposition, should make it clear that it was not a bloc. To treat it as if it were a single concept is inaccurate; it was a loose assemblage of many groups objectively and personally antagonistic and united only in antipathy for the regime. Three of these groups emerge with somewhat sharper contours: (1) The Kreisau Circle, called after Count Helmuth James von Moltke’s Silesian estate. This was chiefly a discussion group of high-minded friends imbued with ideas of both Christian and socialist reform. As a civilian group its opportunities were limited, and it practiced revolt only in the sense of intellectual encouragement. “We are being hanged because we thought together,” von Moltke wrote in one of his last letters from prison, with a note of almost happy pride at the power of the spirit thus attested by his death sentence.4 (2) Then there was the group of conservative and nationalist notables gathered around Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff. These men, not yet cognizant of the meaning of Hitler’s policies, were still claiming a leading role for a Greater Germany within Europe. It has seriously been questioned whether they even offered any real alternative to Hitler’s imperialistic expansionism. So strong was their leaning toward an authoritarian state that they have been called a continuation of the antidemocratic opposition in the Weimar Republic. Moltke spoke tersely of the “Goerdeler trash.”5 (3) Finally there was the group of younger military men such as von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, and Olbricht, with no pronounced ideological affiliations, although for the most part they sought ties with the Left and in contrast to Beck and Goerdeler did not look to a rapprochement with the Western powers, but with the Soviet Union.
In terms of background, a strikingly large number of the conspirators belonged to the Old Prussian nobility. There were also members of the clergy, the academic professions, and high-ranking civil servants. On the whole, those oppositionists who were now beginning to urge action were people originally from the conservative or liberal camp, with a sprinkling of Social Democrats. The Left was still suffering from the effects of the persecution, but it, too, with characteristic ideological rigidity, feared any alliance with army officers as a “pact with the devil.” Among the many participants in the opposition there was, significantly, not a single representative of the Weimar Republic; that republic did not survive even in the Resistance. But members of the lower middle class were also conspicuously absent, and also businessmen. The former showed the “little man’s” dull constancy to a course once taken and his inability to enter into any commitments beyond the personal realm. The latter remained fixated upon the traditional German alliance between industrial interests and power politics. Business always came to heel when the state whistled. That meant an economy capable of unusual performance; but it also led by many involved paths all the way to the defendants’ benches in the Nuremberg trials of industrialists. Finally, there were scarcely any workers in the Resistance. Their opposition was greater than historians have so far noted, but it was still far less than their role of grand historic antagonists to Fascism called for. Fundamentally, they offered no real resistance on a realistic basis at all but, rather, a series of demonstrations, mute and planless, as if they were stunned from their defeat of 1933 and from the fading of all dreams about the power and importance of the proletariat.6 All these groups, moreover, were intimidated by the events of the war; they were exhausted and had experienced a failure of nerve. What can really be called opposition came “from above.”
It remained isolated. In February, moreover, von Moltke was arrested and the Kreisau Circle broken up. Shortly afterward, the Abwehr was subjected to a merciless investigation, so that discovery of the conspiracy had to be daily reckoned with. Goerdeler and Beck, repeatedly wavering, made a last attempt in April, 1944, to act before time ran out. They sent an offer to the United States to throw open the Western front after the coup d’etat and permit Allied parachute units to land in the territory of the Reich. But once again they received no reply. Their only course now was to place the elimination of the regime on the plane of moral argument, independent of all strategic and political considerations. Several of the conspirators seem to have taken the view that the top leadership should see the disaster through to the end and experience their just retribution.
It was chiefly Stauffenberg who now took over. He established new connections and recruited new conspirators. In spite of the Allied formula of unconditional surrender, in spite of the danger of a new stab-in-the-back legend, in spite of the possible charges of tardiness and opportunism, he pushed straight through all inhibitions and steered toward assassination and a coup. The scion of an old family of South German nobility, related to the Yorck and Gneisenau families, he had in his youth associated with the Stefan George circle. Legend has it that on January 30, 1933, he placed himself at the head of an enthusiastic crowd in Bamberg, to hail the beginning of the new regime. That happens not to be true, but he certainly watched with moderate approval the regime’s revolutionary tendencies and Hitler’s early successes.
He made a distinguished career as an officer attached to the General Staff. The 1938 pogroms against the Jews first aroused doubts in him; and in the course of the war, as he observed the occupation in the East and what was being done to the Jews there, he developed into a principled opponent of the Nazi government. He was thirty-seven years old and had lost his right hand, two fingers of his left hand, and an eye in the North African theater. Stauffenberg provided an organizational frame for an undertaking that had bogged down in mental maneuverings. He replaced obsolete notions, which trapped many military men in an inextricable tangle of clashing principles, with something akin to revolutionary resolve. “Let’s get to the essence,” he once began a conversation with a new conspirator. “With all the means at my disposal I am practicing treason.”7
Time was pressing. In the spring the conspirators had succeeded in winning over none other than Rommel, the field marshal, who enjoyed great popularity. Around the same time Himmler remarked to Admiral Canaris that he had definite knowledge that a revolt was being planned by certain groups in the Wehrmacht; he, Himmler, would strike at the proper moment. Moreover, the Allied invasion was expected at any time, and it could be assumed that this would scotch all the conspirators’ subsidiary political aims. It would also provide the tradition-bound older officers with a new alibi.