Only a minority freed themselves from this quandary by deciding to resist actively. The majority, even of those senior officers who disliked the regime or privately expressed their outrage at it, grew resigned early on and adopted the posture of morally neutral specialists in military affairs. No less a figure than Franz Halder said after the war that he was “astonished beyond belief at the suggestion that people “who were duty-bound by a specific oath to a particular kind of obedience” could be expected to support the coup.12
Of course, many who thought of themselves purely as “professional soldiers” supported the regime and were even devoted to it, at first often out of an illusory self-interest and later out of subservience and a need to conform. In his diary, Hassell bitterly parodied the attitude of a leading general with this jingle: “Turn your collar up and say, ‘I’m a soldier and must obey!’ ”13 But far from being an exception, that attitude was much closer to the norm. In that light the history of the Hitler years amounted to a depressing series of evasions and gestures of abject submission, broken only occasionally by halfhearted protests.
As always in times of rapid political and social change, the period was marked by opportunism and shortsightedness, aggravated in this case by the continuing disintegration of the traditional value system, a process begun with the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, if not earlier. To explain such a breakdown solely in terms of individual frailty, however, is to ignore the deeper reasons for the failure of the vast majority of German officers to resist the Nazis. For these, one must turn to the explanations that the participants themselves advanced.
Chief among them is the myth that the German army had a tradition of nonintervention in politics, a leitmotif that runs through numerous apologia written after the war. The authors of these accounts complain that their critics want to have it both ways, accusing the army of having intervened in politics during the Weimar Republic and under Kaiser Wilhelm and then claiming that it had not done so under Hitler. General Fritsch’s pathetic lament in the turbulent days following his dismissal—“I just wasn’t cut out for politics!”—aptly sums up the attitude of these apologists.14
Their argument misses the point. The Reichswehr was far from apolitical; it frequently interfered in politics to defend its own interests. Many of the concessions it made to Hitler were in fact motivated by political calculation. In any event, critics of the army do not focus so much on its failure to intervene as on its inadequate powers of moral discernment. In return for short-term influence and the right to be “sole bearer of arms,” the Reichswehr abandoned basic principles and traditions. The Röhm affair, the silent acceptance of the murders of Schleicher and Bredow, and the army’s precipitous order-issued voluntarily from within its own ranks-that every soldier swear a personal oath to Hitler were all part of a concerted attempt to win influence, an effort on which the army staked more and more in return for less and less. The Fritsch affair determined the final outcome; all that remained was to play out the hands.
It was not until the Fritsch affair, or until the outbreak of war, at the latest, that most officers adopted the pose of apolitical professionals. They were motivated less by resigned acceptance of Hitler’s victory over them than by an active desire to evade the code of standards and rules by which war is traditionally waged. More often than can be justified, the army was deaf to appeals for humane assistance in areas under its control, especially when it came to the actions of the Einsatzgruppen. Insofar as the army considered its tolerance of SS atrocities a final concession to Hitler for which it deserved to be rewarded, it would only be disappointed once again: the last thing Hitler wanted Nazi officers to be was protean. In 1941, shortly before the campaign against the Soviet Union, he excoriated Reichenau for being “pliable,” in contrast to a foe like Hammerstein, who at least remained true to his hatred for Hitler and to his own worldview. Later the Führer commented that he often bitterly regretted not having purged his officer corps the way Stalin did.15 The excesses of Hitler’s retaliation after July 20 can probably be ascribed not least of all to his desire to compensate for the purge he failed to carry out earlier.
Nothing illuminates Hitler’s continuing rancor toward the officer corps more than his appointment on July 20, 1944, of its most deadly rival, Heinrich Himmler, as the new commander of the reserve army, a well-calculated gesture of contempt. Himmler immediately set about reorganizing the German army into a National Socialist “people’s army.” He banned all references to the theory that the state rested on twin pillars, the Nazi Party and the army, a theory in which Blomberg and Reichenau had placed great stock. The German people did not consist of pillars, Himmler explained, and the army merely “carried out the functions of the party.” The army had been thoroughly degraded, yet more was to come.16 By the end of the war, the Waffen-SS had mushroomed to over seventeen divisions.
Another reason for the unwillingness of many officers to engage in any sort of resistance was their profound aversion to revolt against the state. That feeling was greatly reinforced by fear for the soldiers under them, who were already being badly beaten at the fronts and whose ability to defend themselves might well be further weakened by a coup. There is no question that many officers were tormented by the pressures placed on them and by concerns about justifying their actions. In this, they had much in common with the conspirators. As can be seen in the example of Tresckow, even officers who were absolutely determined to stage a coup were troubled by the fact that everything they were contemplating would inevitably be seen by their troops as dereliction of duty, as irresponsible arrogance, and, worst, as capable of triggering a civil war.
Scarcely less inhibiting, even to many of the conspirators themselves, was the idea of murdering the head of state. One could point, as Stauffenberg did, to the immense number of fatalities incurred every day in Hitler’s war and to his slaughter of entire populations. Psychologically, however, there is a great difference between the murder of one person and the killing of many, a difference difficult to comprehend and perhaps essentially symbolic in nature.17 Virtually none of the plotters was able to overcome these inhibitions, and in all likelihood not even Stauffenberg was prepared to dispatch Hitler “as if he were a mad dog,” as Gersdorff put it. The indecision over what to do with Hitler that marked the conspiracy of September 1938 and was even more acutely evident in November 1939 reflects the scruples the conspirators had to overcome.
The same problem plagued the planning for July 20, influencing events in almost imperceptible ways. The conspirators’ euphemistic reference to the murder of Hitler as the “initial spark” tended to minimize the importance of the act, making it seem a mere prelude when in fact it was the key event. Perhaps that is why the conspirators devoted much less time and attention to planning the action at the Wolf’s Lair than to the deception and surprise attacks of Operation Valkyrie. Not every detail of the assassination attempt could be foreseen, of course, but even so at noon on July 20, 1944 Stauffenberg found himself forced to make many more hasty last-minute decisions than were really necessary. The questions that continually puzzle observers-Why didn’t Haeften arm the bomb? Why wasn’t Stauffenberg adequately informed about the reduced power the bombs would have in a wooden hut? Why was the second bomb left unused and simply thrown out of the car on the way to the airfield?-are best answered with reference to the unconscious aversion to the murder of a head of state.