Given that spirit, accusations of treason and disloyalty weighed relatively lightly on the conspirators, and concerns about the success of their mission could no longer hold them back. A few days before the coup attempt Tresckow confided to a friend that “in all likelihood everything will go wrong”; asked if the action was necessary nevertheless, he replied simply, “Yes, even so.”32 That is the key without which nothing can be understood. The purpose of July 20 was the gesture itself; it was its own justification. The conspirators believed that failure would not detract from the idea behind the attack. Some seem to have believed that failure would actually cast their actions in an even purer light. As Stieff replied when asked what had driven him to do what he had done, “We were purifying ourselves.”33
It is fitting that the conspirators had their great moment in court, when, free of the burden of reality, they could focus on their thoughts, principles, and beliefs. They utilized fully the few opportunities that the raging Freisler allowed them. Despite his efforts at humiliation, they managed to prevent the regime from using the trials as a crowd-pleasing spectacle. Public reports of the trials were quickly cut back and then stopped entirely in what was probably the most searing propaganda defeat the regime had ever suffered.
The German resistance has been called a unique phenomenon because it sought, in an era still imbued with nationalistic fervor, to oppose the policies of its own government-and at a moment when that government was enjoying one victory after another. To counter those triumphs, the resistance could offer only its conviction that no amount of success justified the government’s crimes.34 Also remarkable was the evolution that the thinking of many members of the resistance was forced to undergo in extremely trying circumstances: despite the considerable power of tradition, conservatives and others began to question and ultimately to abandon such narrow concepts as the nation-state, a process that never advanced, however, beyond the initial stages. But the laudatory early accounts of the resistance tended to ignore the sympathy that many opponents of the regime originally felt for Hitler, or at least for some of his aims, and depicted these men as timeless heroes, divorced from their times. These accounts miss the drama that shapes so many of the conspirators’ lives. More to the point, they make the participants stranger and even more remote than they may already have seemed.
The aura of failure that surrounded the German resistance from the outset continued after its demise. As we have seen, some of the conspirators, especially those in the Kreisau Circle, entertained the idea of a united Europe, but they can hardly be said to have laid its foundations, since no one built on their work or even referred to it. If the resistance had any legacy at all, it was the aversion to totalitarianism that characterized all political parties in the early days of the German Federal Republic, regardless of their other differences. Although this sentiment was a reaction to the entire experience of the Hitler years, it was the resistance that did most to bolster and legitimize it.
Among the enduring lessons of the failed resistance is that it is virtually impossible to overthrow a totalitarian regime from within. Even the events in the Communist world in 1989-90 do little to challenge this point. The most promising act of resistance was actually undertaken before the fact, when Kurt von Hammerstein, the chief of army command, went to see Hindenburg on the morning of January 26, 1933, to voice his grave misgivings about Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. All the later plans, deeds, and sacrifices of the resistance may have represented moral victories, but politically they were condemned to failure.
The question has periodically been raised as to what would have happened if either the July 20 assassination attempt or the coup had succeeded. The sobering-and virtually unanimous-consensus is that nothing would have changed. The Allies would not have altered their aims, abandoning their demand for unconditional surrender, nor would they have modified the decision made later at Yalta to occupy and divide Germany. It is also unlikely that the myth that Germany had been sabotaged from within would yet again have arisen, as many feared it would. There is little reason to share Goerdeler’s optimism that, if he and his colleagues had gained access to the radio waves “for just twenty-four hours” and freely proclaimed the truth about the Nazis, a wave of indignation would have swept the Reich. Even less justified was his hope that Hitler could then have been deposed without violence. There is, however, at least a grain of truth to Goerdeler’s version of events: although many individuals have published defenses of their activities during the Hitler years, no significant attempt has ever been made to exculpate the Third Reich itself. Public horror over the depth and extent of its crimes-the thing Goerdeler always counted on-has not permitted such forgiveness. The Nazi regime, like totalitarian governments everywhere, proved unable to generate a sustaining mythology, except among the few diehards whose fate was linked to Hitler.
In the final analysis, the German resistance cannot be measured by the futility of its efforts or by its unfulfilled hopes. Although it had very little influence on the course of history, it nevertheless radically changed how we view those years. History consists not only of those dates and great events we commemorate but also, and perhaps more tellingly, of deeds motivated by self-respect and moral commitment. Beck, Schulenburg, Goerdeler, and others believed that the issue of whether the Nazi regime was ultimately brought down from without or overthrown from within would have an enormous effect on Germany’s reputation and reacceptance into the ranks of civilized nations.35 On a moral plane, failing in the attempt is as worthy as succeeding.
The importance of the resistance cannot seriously be challenged. Opinions continue to vary on almost every facet of it: its alliances, its view of society, its illusions, its passivity, and the resolve it finally mustered. The main questions about it, though, were raised early on. The day after the attack on Hitler, Emmi Bonhoeffer returned to Berlin to find her husband, Klaus, and her brother, Justus Delbrück, clearing the wreckage of a neighbor’s house. When they sat down to rest amid the ruins, she asked whether the two men could draw any lesson at all from the failure of the plot. There was a momentary pause while they weighed their answer. Finally Delbrück responded in a way that captured the pathos and paradox of the resistance: “I think it was good that it happened, and good too, perhaps, that it did not succeed.”36
NOTES
Preface
1. Among the major titles discussed here are Hans Bernd Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende (Zurich, 1954); Helmuth Groscurth, Tagebücher eines Abwehroffiziers, 1938-1940 (Stuttgart, 1970); Ulrich von Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher 1938-1944: Aufzeichnungen vom Andern Deutschland, ed. Friedrich Hiller von Gaertingen, rev. and exp. ed. (Berlin, 1988); and Hans Rothfels, Deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler Eine Würdigung, exp. ed. (Tübingen, 1969). See also A Note on the Texts at the end of this volume.
2. Alexander Stahlberg, Die verdammte Pflicht: Erinnerungen, 1932-1945 (Berlin and Frankfurt, 1994), 456ff.
3. Karl Dietrich Bracher, Das deutsche Dilemma: Leidenswege der politischen Emanzipation (Munich, 1971), 158.
4. Peter Hoffmann lists a large number of these organizations in Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat: Der Kampf der Opposition gegen Hitler, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1979), 34ff, 226ff. The motives, goals, and activities of some of them, however, remain virtually unknown.