There was much less unanimity among the Kreisauers on the consequences of their program. To be sure, they agreed that the old idea of dominant powers in Europe should be abandoned, that there should be no more territorial claims escalating into life-and-death issues, that a new understanding of national interest, the state, and national sovereignty must emerge. Once again Moltke proved to be the most radical member of the circle, advocating nothing less than the elimination of the nation-state and the reorganization of Europe into a multiplicity of regions that were historically and culturally related. In this he was returning to the idea of small self-governing units and applying it to Europe as a whole. These autonomous regions would exercise only limited powers, with the traditional jurisdiction of sovereign states transferred to a single European entity.
Most of Moltke’s associates did not share his radical vision of a federated Europe. Adam von Trott, the circle’s “foreign minister,” saw the national characters that the European countries had developed in the course of history as a feature of the old continent that merited preservation. For much the same reason, he opposed the idea of simply squeezing Germany into a “Western” constitutional tradition, despite his high hopes for what Anglo-German cooperation could achieve. He shared, though, the conviction of almost all the members of the circle that the age of the nation-state had passed and that some measure of sovereignty would have to be surrendered to a Federal European state if the survival of the various nations of Europe was to be ensured.
These ideas were obviously not fully thought out, but they pointed the way to the future. They attracted support for their own sake, not only because they were categorically opposed to Hitler’s approach of conquest and subjugation but also because their vision of the future stood in stark opposition to the nationalistic fervor of the times. This vision, like all the other plans and designs of the German resistance, eventually faded from memory, and during the actual process of European unification after the war it was not even mentioned. For this very reason, however, it deserves to be recalled now.
It is hardly surprising that the “notables” around Goerdeler viewed the pan-European ideas of the Kreisau Circle as little more than idealistic or eccentric fantasies. They had grown up at time when Germany was rising into the ranks of the great powers of the world and to them concepts as nation-states, great-power status, zones of influence, and national interest were like the laws of physics-they could not simply be abolished. Virtually all the members of the Goerdeler group thought that at least the “greater German territories” should remain within the Reich. This has given rise to accusations that there were strong underlying similarities with the regime-or even that the national-conservative opposition was simply striving to realize Hitler’s aims without Hitler.
As far as the first revisionist interpretation is concerned, there is some truth to this accusation. When Hitler pointed time and again to the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles as the grounds for his demands, people like Beck, Goerdeler, and Hassell could only nod in agreement, all the more so as his arguments were widely shared abroad, especially in Britain. Those who most strenuously indict the Goerdeler group, however, ignore an essential distinction: although the national conservatives generally agreed with Hitler’s border claims, they did not agree with his methods. Ludwig Beck, for instance, said as early as 1938 that war was not only militarily absurd but anachronistic, and he attempted to resist, though perhaps not forcefully enough. At about the same time, Goerdeler called Hitler a “national bandit” for risking Germany’s honor and reputation on one adventure after another.25
The inconsistencies within the conservative position therefore became all the more apparent with the outbreak of the war. Although Goerdeler repeatedly called for peaceful cooperation in Europe after Hitler and a renewal of the League of Nations, the papers he wrote after the conquest of France spoke unabashedly of “German leadership” on the continent. Among other contradictory positions, he assured the Western powers that Poland would be restored but he insisted on Germany’s eastern frontiers of 1914. Hermann Graml has demonstrated convincingly that the “notables” clung to the familiar. They could only imagine, for instance, a unification of Europe and a distribution of power that would resemble the unification of Germany under Prussia.26
The conservatives’ reflexive belief in the concept of the great powers, so deeply rooted in their psyches, began to disappear, however, by the end of 1941-and not just because of the spread of the war to the Soviet Union and the entry soon thereafter of the United States. More important was the mounting awareness of the destruction wrought by arbitrary German policies in southeastern Europe after the Reich smashed Czechoslovakia and extended its dominance deep into the Balkans. Most important of all were the rampant reports of massive crimes in the East, which cast a pall over all talk of the “Reich’s mission to bring order and peace.”
Despite the persistent disagreements between the two main civilian opposition groups, contacts were gradually established. Ulrich von Hassell played an especially important role in this regard. Although he was always uneasy with the utopianism of the Kreisau Circle, he shared many of its objections to Goerdeler and believed that the two most important resistance groups should not waste their strength nursing differences when they were in such extreme danger. The rest of the work necessary for a rapprochement was accomplished thanks to his skill as a negotiator. There were also contacts between Yorck and Jessen, Schulenburg and Goerdeler, and Popitz and Gerstenmaier. After strained preliminary negotiations, the two groups met for the first time on January 8, 1943, in Yorck’s house, with Beck serving as chairman. They made little progress in narrowing the differences between them, partly because Goerdeler “trivialized all attempts to get to the heart of matters,” as Moltke noted with great exasperation. But in the end a majority of the Kreisau group supported the selection of Goerdeler as chancellor of a transitional government, despite some complaints that the decision represented a dangerous “Kerensky solution.”27
Now, under the influence of the Kreisau Circle, the national-conservative resistance moved even more quickly to drop its insistence that Germany play a leadership role in the new Europe. By mid-1943 Goerdeler himself had discarded a number of hitherto cherished notions. With all the impulsive exuberance of his nature, he began to speak of a European “peace confederacy” that no nation would dominate and in which “inner-European borders” would play “an ever-diminishing role.”
Similarly, the ideas of the Kreisau group were colored by its increasingly close contacts with the Goerdeler people. There is no convincing evidence, however, for the accusation raised from time to time that the Kreisauers became infected with old nationalist ideas. It is true that Adam von Trott began insisting somewhat more determinedly on a “reasonable peace plan” for post-Hitler Germany and warning against the ruinous consequences of a second Versailles. But an unbiased observer would have to acknowledge that both the Kreisau Circle and the Goerdeler group, as well as Oster, Leber, Gisevius, and many other opponents of the regime, rejected nationalism much more strongly than most of their contemporaries did, even if they were less than sure-footed as they ventured onto new terrain.