In the summer of 1947 the American military administration released Hitler’s former army adjutant General Gerhard Engel and a number of general staff officers from prisoner-of-war camps. Meanwhile General Gersdorff, who had undertaken in March 1943 to set off a bomb and kill both Hitler and himself, continued to be held. When he questioned the rationale, he was informed by the camp commandant that “General Engel has demonstrated throughout his military career that he always carries out his orders. He will not engage in any resistance to us in civilian life either, and therefore he poses no threat. You, on the other hand, have shown that you follow your own conscience on occasion and consequently might not obey our orders under certain circumstances. People like you or General Falkenhausen [who also continued to be held prisoner] are therefore dangerous to us. For this reason, you will remain in custody.”40
To the many images of the resistance that have been handed down to us, we must add that of Carl Goerdeler sitting alone in his cell in the basement of Reich Security Headquarters. Early in 1945 he made another attempt to break the silence that was beginning to envelop all that he and his fellow conspirators had thought and striven for. In the last of the many papers he wrote, he seems finally to confront the possibility that he took the wrong approach and that everything he had done to prevent Hitler from leading Germany to catastrophe had been in vain. He places hopes in friends who had in fact long since been executed, records a few memories, addresses Germany’s youth and future generations, and finally breaks off his musings in the middle of a sentence filled with desperate thoughts about an “indifferent God,” the triumph of evil, and the obliteration of goodness, guilt, and righteousness. “Like the psalmist I quarrel with God,” he writes, “and this struggle decorates the bare walls of my tiny cell, filling the emptiness with my imaginings and my memories.” In the end, he could not continue, finding no answer to the thought to which his mind constantly returned: “Can this be the Last Judgment?”41
11. THE WAGES OF FAILURE
No sooner had it collapsed than the German resistance-its thoughts and deeds, its strenuous efforts, its high hopes and crushing disappointments-was almost entirely lost to memory. The stunning events of July 20 overshadowed the movement as a whole, and it has hardly become any better known in the intervening years. Its traces vanished, quickly and inconspicuously, in prison cells, killing fields, concentration camps, execution grounds, and unknown burial sites. It is noted, to be sure, on Germany’s informal calendar of memorial events, as a ceremony is held annually in the courtyard of the former army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. Little about it penetrates the public mind, however, and it has never earned more than grudging respect. It remains, in the words of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an obscure “episode” of the war.1
Curiously enough, Hitler’s description of the conspirators as a “very small clique of ambitious officers,” a characterization trumpeted by Nazi propagandists, has proved remarkably resilient. By the time of the attack on Hitler all that the conspirators really hoped was that the memory of the resistance would live on. But even this was not to be, thanks both to Allied policy and to Germany’s postwar psychological climate of mass repression, born of guilt and a desire to forget.
The quick disappearance of the resistance from public memory was all the more striking in that it seemed to run counter to the sentimental German fondness for lost causes. This penchant was apparently outweighed by the equally traditional deference to authority and by the feeling that the resistance betrayed the fatherland in its hour of need. Germans have found it useful at times to resurrect the resistance in order to disprove the theory of collective guilt, but they have generally adopted Field Marshal Kluge’s dismissive view of it as nothing more than a botched coup attempt.
Some writers have even suggested that the opposition decided to act only when it was clear Germany would go down to defeat-and solely for self-seeking reasons. The view that the old aristocracy, dismayed at its waning power, hoped at the last minute to mask its long collusion with the Nazis and thereby retain its privileges, property, position, and influence soon gained currency. Even a superficial knowledge of the resistance shows how misguided and biased that argument is. Probably the most promising of all the plots against Hitler was conceived as early as 1938, in response to his preparations to invade other countries. Furthermore, the planning within Army Group Center for the second attempt on Hitler’s life took place before Stalingrad and the great turning point in the war.
The truth is in fact the virtual opposite of what these writers alleged. In view of Hitler’s string of political and military triumphs, which were setbacks for the opposition, it is remarkable how tenaciously the resistance continued to plot against him. Apart from Halder, the same men who opposed Hitler in the early days opposed him in the end, their ranks swelled by many new recruits. There is ample reason to conclude that, in the early postwar years at least, disdain for the resistance could be traced to the attitudes of a generation of passive Nazi sympathizers and their descendants, who were not eager to have their own failings highlighted by comparison with the heroism of a group of aristocrats and professional soldiers-a group that had supposedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.
These attitudes stemmed to a certain extent from a fundamental misunderstanding that was created or at least encouraged by some of the early memoirs published by members of the resistance. Today it is well known that-although these accounts seem to imply otherwise-neither the resistance movement as a whole nor the attempt on July 20, 1944, to kill Hitler and stage a coup represented a short-term undertaking by a band of army officers. Many groups, some closely connected to these officers and others linked more indirectly, contributed to the dramatic events of that day. The lists of projected cabinet members of the interim government, which survive in varying versions all convey the breadth and social pluralism of the resistance, as well as the leading role to be played by civilians.2 There was never any dispute about the latter point, according to the written sources, which attest to numerous debates and differences of opinion over virtually everything else. The officers who participated in the September conspiracy of 1938, from Oster to Halder and Witzleben, agreed that the officer corps was merely the organized and armed vanguard of the operation and would retreat into the background as soon its work was completed.
Moreover, the motivation of the members of the resistance was not at all a desire to preserve the privileges of social rank. Certainly many of the conspirators saw themselves as members of a social elite, with particular responsibility for providing leadership. That conviction facilitated their decision to oppose the regime and deepened their resolve as the Nazis continued to trample on all traditional principles of law and order. It was not, however, their dominant impulse. Nor can their opposition to the Nazis be said to have sprung solely from a sense of moral outrage, as is often claimed. In reality, the rebels were driven by an array of motives that in most cases arose from professional frustrations and quickly broadened to general political disenchantment. Their motives were further reinforced by moral, religious, or nationalistic convictions, which varied in intensity from one person to the next.
In their interrogations or in their testimony before the People’s Court, twenty of the accused conspirators from the various groups- whether civilian or military, national-conservative, middle class, or socialist-mentioned the persecution of the Jews as the primary motive for their opposition.3 Others emphasized the elimination of civil rights, the arbitrary, dictatorial style of the government, and the assault on the churches. The basic conviction uniting those who acted out of religious belief was best expressed by Hans-Bernd von Haeften, when he stated before the People’s Court that Hitler was “a great perpetrator of evil.” Gerstenmaier called this remark “the key to the entire resistance,” from which all the rest flowed as a Christian duty.4