Also busy conspiring, from their positions in Paris, were members of the staff of Erwin von Witzleben, commander in chief of the western army groups, who was promoted to field marshal after the French campaign. Two members of this group, Major Alexander von Voss and Captain Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, hoped to have Hitler shot by sharpshooters during the repeatedly postponed parade of German troops down the Champs-Elysées. Schwerin was also determined to kill Hitler with a hand grenade upon his first visit to the western front. But Hitler never went to Witzleben’s headquarters, and the parade down the Champs-Elysées was finally canceled once and for all on July 20, 1940, partly to spare the feelings of the French population and partly because Göring could not guarantee safety from British air attacks.
The Nazi regime exploited the victory over France and the distractions it afforded to advance its special agenda with less outside interference than ever before. In the sections of Poland under his administration, Governor General Hans Frank undertook a mammoth “security operation” in May involving widespread mass executions. These activities, he said, had been “intentionally” delayed until the world “lost interest in events in the government general.”9
In the summer of 1940 the civilian opposition began to gather strength, a development that cannot be ascribed solely to the silence of the generals and their withdrawal into apolitical pride over their great victory in France. Civilians like Goerdeler, Beck, Hassell, and Moltke were no less impressed by the military accomplishments of the Third Reich, but at the same time they were increasingly certain of the regime’s imminent collapse. Thanks perhaps to their greater remove from military events and their ability to think politically, they were convinced that Hitler had been carried away by his own successes and was hopelessly overextending Germany’s resources.
It is an indication of this growing confidence that in the very hour og Hitler’s greatest triumph, when he stood at the pinnacle of his power, Goerdeler was writing a paper predicting the quick end of the Nazi dictatorship. The Führer would prove incapable, Goerdeler argued, of ruling the conquered territories “in such a way that the honor and freedom of the peoples living there are preserved.” He concluded with Baron von Stein’s celebrated words of October 1808 urging Friedrich Wilhelm III to resist Napoleon: “The only salvation for the honest man is the conviction that the wicked are prepared for any evil.… It is worse than blindness to trust a man who has hell in his heart and chaos in his head. If nothing awaits you but disaster and suffering, at least make a choice that is noble and honorable and that will provide some consolation and comfort if things turn out poorly.”10
By this time Goerdeler had indisputably become the central figure in the civilian opposition. Although he was always surrounded by some controversy, he had established over the years an extensive network of like-minded friends, including business people, government officials, professors, clergymen, and labor leaders. To be sure, individual members who objected to his “open risk taking” or, like Julius Leber, to his “illusions” about foreign policy, were always dropping out of the network. Others were put off by his peculiar combination of antimodernism and social progressiveness, practicality and naive idealism. Generally, though, Goerdeler managed to conciliate the many sharp differences of opinion within the network and succeeded in steadily increasing its members.
As a result Goerdeler was unanimously considered not only the hub of the civilian opposition but its driving force as well; he pushed ahead tirelessly, insisting on action and fostering confidence among the conspirators. In the end it was his indomitable spirit in the face of any adversity that most distinguished him from his associates, who were prone to feelings of hopelessness and dejection. It is still hard to say whether his curiously restricted view of people and the world around him stemmed from his ability to reduce problems to their most basic terms, a skill that all his associates found praiseworthy, or from the natural simplicity of a man who trusted all too readily that reason would ultimately prevail. Many saw in the former mayor of Leipzig a strange combination of city-hall pragmatism and Prussian enlightenment, seldom encountered in such arid purity. Darker, more complex phenomena were beyond his comprehension. The philosopher Theodor Litt, who was teaching in Leipzig at the time and had contacts with the Goerdeler group, remarked: “Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him that was somber, unresolved, or enigmatic. He therefore assumed that his fellow human beings needed only enlightenment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways… . The eerie tangle of good and evil, the seductive ambivalence of certain kinds of mental gifts, the power of unacknowledged prejudices and secret desires, the entire shadowy area in which the inner lives of so many are played out-there was no room for any of this in his view of humanity.”11
Even before the victory over France, Goerdeler had quickly turned out a series of memoranda for his colleagues from which he then distilled a coherent overview of the positive aims of the resistance. The outline of the new order that resulted from this effort, entitled “The Aims,” was finished in early 1941 and reflected not only his own ideas but, even more important, those that emerged in the course of comprehensive discussions with Beck; Johannes Popitz, the Prussian minister of finance; former trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser; and many others. Later Goerdeler also drew on a group of Freiburg professors, including Walter Eucken, Constantin von Dietze, and Adolf Lampe, the founders of the social market economy, as well as historian Gerhard Ritter and others, who had come together out of disgust for the regime after Kristallnacht. To understand the political aims of the conservative resistance, one must also consider a draft of a constitution produced in early 1940, apparently under the leadership of Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz, which had an unmistakable authoritarian and statist cast and from which Goerdeler in all likelihood distanced himself. There were always clashes and shifts of opinions within these constantly changing opposition circles, which were only labeled a “group” in retrospect. Even among national-conservative opponents of the regime, there existed a broad range of thoughts and ideas about the new order that would emerge. This so-called group was therefore much more heterogeneous and riven by contradiction and contrast than a simplifying label would suggest.12
Despite their clashing views, however, all the opposition groups, the conservative “notables” to the various left-wing factions, were indelibly marked by their common experience of the totalitarian dictatorship that erupted in the midst of the democracy of Weimar and by the inability of the political parties, whether on the left or the right, to deal with this disaster. Virtually all opposition circles tended to blame this breakdown on the unyielding antagonism among the parties, which was played out in terms of nineteenth-century slogans and popular platitudes that no longer bore a resemblance to reality. The opponents of the Nazis turned their attention to the structures that had encouraged this disunity. Sweeping critiques of modern civilization had long been fashionable in Germany, and they certainly played a role as well, with their indictments of “mass society,” “urbanization,” the original sin of “secularization,” and the spreading “materialism” that undermined all sense of higher purpose. The fact that even Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who certainly did not move in conservative circles, spoke of a “trend toward mob tastes at all social levels” demonstrates the prevalence of the aversion to modernity implicit in these critiques.13 Like most other people of his political persuasion, he interpreted National Socialism as an expression, albeit an extreme one, of such modernist tendencies.