The resistance continued to pin its hopes on London, despite the misunderstandings, exasperation, and devastating setbacks that had characterized its overtures in the late 1930s. In focusing on this relationship, the German resistance considerably overestimated Britain’s role and influence in the Allied coalition; for quite some time London had not had the power to sign agreements of its own with anyone. Most of the conspirators felt, however, that Britain was somehow closer to them-and not just geographically. In comparison with the other two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain seemed to stand for a less foreign, more European world. Just as opposition emissaries had traveled to the British capital in the late thirties, they now sought to pave the way for talks with London through British posts in neutral countries.
Theo Kordt had already attempted to do so at the outset of the war, having been dispatched by the Foreign Office to Bern, Switzerland, for precisely that purpose. All his efforts came to naught, however, as did those of Josef Wirth, the former German chancellor, who had emigrated to Switzerland; Carl Jacob Burckhardt; Willem Adolf Visser’t Hooft, the secretary-general of the provisional World Council of Churches in Geneva; and many others. In May 1941 Goerdeler passed along to the British government a peace plan approved by Brauchitsch; the cabinet declined even to acknowledge it. The British middleman informed his German contact that he had been forbidden to accept any such documents in the future.
Another series of attempts to establish contact had been under way in Stockholm since the early 1940s and revolved largely around Theodor Steltzer, a key member of the Kreisau Circle. In May 1942 Bishop George Bell of Chichester met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his fellow clergyman Hans Schönfeld in Stockholm. Without knowing anything about the plans of the other, the two Germans had both decided to go to Sweden when they learned that Bell would be there. They told him about the opposition and the Kreisauers’ ideas for peace and expressed the hope that some token of encouragement might be offered. Bell was quite well acquainted with Bonhoeffer, who had been a pastor in the German church in London during the 1930s, and knew that he was one of the leading figures in the Confessional Church in Germany. A man of radical religious conviction, Bonhoeffer had repeatedly insisted that Hitler had to be “exterminated” regardless of the political consequences. At a secret church conference in Geneva in 1941 he had gone even further, announcing that he prayed for the defeat of his country because that was the only way Germany would be able to atone for the crimes it had committed.7 Schönfeld, on the other hand, brought only one question: Would the Allies adopt a different stance toward a Germany that had liberated itself from Hitler than they would toward a Germany still under his rule? Bell forwarded a report to the British Foreign Office, but Anthony Eden wrote back only to say he was “satisfied that it is not in the national interest to provide an answer of any kind.” When Bell approached the British Foreign Office again, Eden noted in the margin of his reply, “I see no reason whatsoever to encourage this pestilent priest!”8
One year later Helmuth von Moltke went to Stockholm for a week, taking with him some information about the White Rose and one of its leaflets, as if he felt impelled to prove the seriousness of his opposition to the Nazi regime. Eugen Gerstenmaier, the theologian, and Hans Lukaschek, a lawyer who had joined the Kreisau Circle, also traveled to Stockholm, as on a number of occasions, did Adam von Trott, whose words sounded a desperate appeal for help: “We cannot afford to wait any longer,” he pleaded to a Swedish friend. “We are so weak that we will only achieve our goal if everything goes our way and we get outside help.”9
But there was to be no help or any sign of encouragement, just a deep, persistent silence. The Allies did not even trouble themselves to reject the various attempts to contact them; they simply closed their eyes to the German resistance, acting as if it did not exist. Men like Bonhoeffer, Trott, Gerstenmaier, and Steltzer felt united with the Allies in their abhorrence for their common “archenemy” and their realization of the danger that he posed. They therefore imagined themselves closely affiliated with the Allied struggle against this monstrous tyranny, which, in Churchill’s words, had never been surpassed in the “dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.” This was an illusion for which the conspirators would pay with countless humiliations. Perhaps they were ahead of the times in their moral internationalism, which had met with such deep incomprehension in the conversations of 1938-39. At any rate, the sense of common ground on which they based their appeals was not shared by the British, who could never free themselves of the suspicion that they were dealing with a bunch of traitors, or Nazis in disguise. The phenomenon of committing “treason” for high moral or philosophical purpose, which has become so characteristic of the twentieth century, was an enigma to them.
The extensive postwar literature justifying Britain’s policy of distancing itself from the German resistance revives the very arguments on which the prewar attempts to make contact foundered. It points as well to the general lack of success with which the resistance did indeed seem cursed. Three further reasons are often adduced: with Winston Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, Britain focused all its energy on the military effort, leaving no time for complicated political initiatives and prompting Churchill to call for “perfect silence”; in addition, the British were concerned that entering into negotiations with Germans, even anti-Nazi Germans, would jeopardize their alliance with the Soviet Union; finally London wished lo avoid the error that the Allies had made after the First World War, when they forged commitments that later gave rise to demagogues like Hitler. Even if every possible allowance is made for these motives, however, something is still left unexplained-especially since the messages from the German emissaries provide no justification whatsoever for the most frequently mentioned concern, namely, the much-feared fracturing of the Allied coalition.
The real reasons for the attitude of the British probably lay in their lack of flexibility, their hostility, their blindness, and a political obtuseness that for all intents and purposes represented “an alliance with Hitler,” to quote Hans Rothfels.10 If a policy consisting of periodic cautious gestures of support had been pursued-which was, in fact, all that the German opposition now wanted-it might well have been possible gradually to drive a wedge between the Nazi regime and the people. Instead, Allied policy drove them into each other’s arms. In early 1942 Goebbels noted in his diary with unmistakable satisfaction that this time the enemy had not set forth “any Wilsonian Fourteen Points” to sow unrest and confusion among the German public.11
Attitudes hardened even more after the United States entered the war in December 1941, and it was precisely the memory of Wilson’s Fourteen Points that made America so unapproachable. The ill-fated promises of yesteryear seemed to be all that Roosevelt had learned and remembered from his nation’s involvement in European affairs. The crude and narrow inference he drew was that even the most noncommittal conversation with Germans must be rejected, regardless of who they were or what the discussions were about. When an American correspondent in Berlin, Louis P. Lochner, returned to Washington in June 1942 with a secret code that German friends in the resistance had given to him in the hope of establishing a permanent link with U.S. government officials, the administration rejected the approach, saying that these contacts had put it in an “awkward” position.12
This attitude was strengthened with the Casablanca declaration of January 24, 1943, when Roosevelt vowed in Churchill’s presence that the Allies would “continue the war relentlessly” until they achieved “unconditional surrender.” The cold-shoulder approach to the resistance was thus given the seal of official strategy by both governments. Its effect would be to achieve the opposite of what Adam von Trott had said was the “primary purpose” of his last visit to the United Stales, namely, “to ensure that the planned war of annihilation does not drive those elements that have just begun to join forces against Hitler into the hands of the National Socialists.” A furious Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin said he would like to see both Hitler and Roosevelt roast, each in his own vat in hell.13