Stauffenberg was indeed becoming convinced that Leber would make “the better chancellor,” although Leber himself, along with Wilhelm Leuschner and the trade unionist Jakob Kaiser, believed that the persistence of the stab-in-the-back myth from World War I made it inadvisable to place a Social Democrat or a labor leader “all too visibly in the front rank of those responsible” immediately following the removal of Hitler. Moreover, although Stauffenberg was closer to Leber on domestic policy, he knew that in foreign affairs he had more m common with Goerdeler, who had developed an eleven-point program that he wanted to present to the Allies, still believing, even in the summer of 1944, that a negotiated peace was possible. This program stipulated that Germany would retain its 1914 borders, as well as Austria and the Sudetenland, and that it might even secure the return of parts of South Tyrol.41
Julius Leber took a much more sober view. He thought that unconditional surrender was inevitable, and therefore adopted an ever-cooler attitude toward Goerdeler. The main points of contention reveal how pronounced the divisions within the resistance had become. Leber, for instance, who was no friend of conservatives, came quite close to advocating the strong authoritarian state that Jessen, Hassell, and Popitz envisaged for the transition period; he agreed with them that “a dictatorship cannot be put on a democratic footing over night.”42 Meanwhile, for this very reason, the conservatives distanced themselves from Goerdeler, whose blind faith in democracy and sympathy toward the trade unions made them distrust him as the leader of a strong interim regime. In foreign policy Trott may have shared many of Goerdeler’s opinions, but Moltke and most of the Kreisau Circle did not. They continued to see Goerdeler as a man linked to business circles that would not be sufficiently accepting of a government that, in Yorck’s words, “included the working class and even left-wing Social Democrats.” And so, little by little, the resistance tore itself apart in controversies that bore little connection to the real world until everyone alternately agreed and disagreed with everyone else in one way or another, and the majority support for Goerdeler that had existed a year before was now gone. Indeed, the Gestapo agents who interrogated the conspirators after July 20 were not far wrong when they concluded that the attempts of the diverse resistance circles “to build a united front” had produced “a political monstrosity,” and that the conspirators were united “only in a negative sense, in their rejection of National Socialism.”43 The ties that bound them had in fact been broken.
This state of affairs was not overly apparent in the early summer of 1944, however, because at that point the dominant concern continued to be foreign policy-specifically, how the Allies would respond to a coup. Most opponents of the Nazi regime still found it hard to accept that they did not have a shred of hope. Even Stauffenberg harbored illusions about a negotiated peace, hurrying off to seek solace from Trott after some particularly sobering conversations with Leber. And when an embittered Trott returned from a trip abroad convinced that there was “no genuine desire on the part of the British and Americans to reach an understanding”—especially since the demand for unconditional surrender first expressed in the Casablanca declaration had just been underscored at the Teheran Conference-dreams of a separate peace with the Soviet Union surged briefly to the fore.
The resistance based its hopes on Stalin’s well-known comment of February 1942 that although individuals like Hitler might come and go, the German people would remain. If the Soviet dictator was hinting at some disagreement with the intransigent policy of the Western powers, he took a step further in this direction in the summer of 1943 when he began approaching the German opposition through their contacts in Stockholm and through the National Committee for a Free Germany established in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, by German prisoners of war and emigrants. Like the attempts to forge ties in the West, however, these contacts were soon undermined by distrust and suspicion. Heretofore the activities of the Communist-inspired groups led by First Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack had gone virtually unnoticed by the rest of the resistance, despite a few personal ties between them. The group known collectively as the Red Orchestra (after its Gestapo nickname) consisted of both hard-core Communist ideologues on one side and a motley assortment of dreamers and visionaries on the other. Their arrest in August 1942 aroused little more than feelings of empathy among the rest of the resistance, which cared little for their use of political theory to mask the many concrete similarities between Hitler and Stalin. The leftists’ continued embrace of the old dream of a historic mission shared by the “profound” German and Russian cultures, as opposed to the “superficial” Western cultures, further alienated the other factions. As a result not even the loosest of ties were forged, especially as Moscow itself was apparently not interested in developing this group into a cell or even a center of political resistance. Rather, the inner circle of the Red Orchestra was used as an intelligence-gathering service for the Soviet Union.
Thus the question of establishing contacts with the Soviet Union arose at this point only as a tactical ploy to elicit more interest from the Western powers. But the resistance soon dropped this plan too. One of the strongest pieces of evidence against Stauffenberg’s alleged Communist sympathies is that he turned down the appeals of the National Committee for a Free Germany with the comment, “I am betraying my government; they are betraying their country.”44 Stauffenberg not only supported the attempts of men like Goerdeler, Trott, and Gisevius to reach some kind of understanding with the Western powers but later joined in those efforts himself. Although the Gestapo was eager after July 20 to find some evidence of collusion between the conspirators and the Soviet Union or one of its agents, they failed to find any.
There was yet another aspect to this question-namely, the resistance’s connections with the Communist underground. Only isolated remnants had survived the shocking announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact, so that it was difficult to determine their strength. The uncertainty prompted Leber to respond positively to various Communist overtures. Although there was still no question of including the Communists in the conspiracy, there was talk of an “opening to the left,” and of determining how the Communist leadership would react to a coup.
After much argument, a discussion of the issue was finally held in Yorck’s house on June 21. There were violent differences of opinion. Leuschner opposed any sort of rapprochement, insisting that the Communist apparatus had been infiltrated by the Gestapo. The Kreisauers Theodor Haubach and Paulus van Husen were also dead set against establishing any contacts. Only Adolf Reichwein advocated “a kind of socialist solidarity,” the outgrowth of his “almost embittered socialism.” The reticence of many of the participants was greatly reduced, however, when Leber reported that he had been contacted by “two well-known Communists” and pointed out that “he had shared a bunk with the two men in a concentration camp for five years.” Although the misgivings abated, it is still not clear whether they were totally dispelled. Stauffenberg, at any rate, seems to have favored a meeting.45