Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

The failure of the attack on Hitler and the conspirators’ lack of opportunity to make their declaration to the people prevented Goerdeler’s idea from ever being put to the test. But as the writer Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary following a conversation with Cäsar von Hofacker, Hitler would certainly have emerged the victor in a battle of the airwaves. 36His psychological hold over the people, al­though loosening, was still very real, however much the reasons be­hind it had changed. The masses had lost most of their faith and admiration but still had a dark, fatalistic feeling that their destiny was inextricably bound up with his. The ominous propaganda of the last months of the war and fear of the advancing Red Army drove them into the Führer’s arms despite their mounting disgust with the brutal­ity of the regime and with the cowardice, venality, and egotism of its officials. Though they felt suffocated by the pressures of police-state surveillance, informers, and terror, they clung to vague hopes that, as so often in the past, the Führer would find a way to avert catastrophe. On June 16, 1944, the first of his much-heralded “reprisal weapons,” V-1 rockets, were launched against London. Immediately following the events of July 20, a Norwegian newspaper reporter observed the general mood in Germany: “The masses are apathetic; they neither see nor hear and therefore remain totally inert… . They neither weep nor celebrate nor rage.” 37

And so the German resistance remained what it had always been: an expression of feelings that may well have been widespread but that only a tiny minority was prepared to act on. Ironically, the social isolation of the resistance continued even after the war, for as the end drew near, Nazi propagandists and Allied spokesmen joined forces in a de facto coalition to belittle the accomplishments of the resistance and disparage its motives. In the House of Commons Churchill de­scribed the events of July 20 as a murderous internecine power struggle and in Moscow Rudolf Herrnstadt celebrated the failure of what he termed the final attempt of “the gentlemen’s clubs, the reactionar­ies” to grab power. 38

These altitudes did not change much even after the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. The resistance found no more acknowledg­ment or comprehension after the war than it had under the Nazis themselves, whether in Germany or abroad. On the first anniversary of the execution of Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a church funeral was held but it had to be announced as a service for a “fallen soldier.” The family of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg experi­enced great difficulty in asserting their rights to his estate, as did the dispossessed families of other conspirators. For a long time the occu­pation authorities forbade or placed limitations on publications about the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries were first pub­lished in Switzerland and then in Sweden, while both Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s Offiziere gegen Hitler (Revolt Against Hitler) and Rudolf Pechel’s Deutscher Widerstand (The German Resistance) were on the index of books forbidden by the Allies. 39

Denial and dismissal were common everywhere. When the celebrated English military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart attempted to portray the background to the 1938 coup attempt in a London news­paper, publication was prevented by the government. In American prisoner-of-war and internment camps, officers who had participated in the resistance were locked up indiscriminately with generals and SS men who were still pro-Nazi. The theory of the unity of Führer and Volk continued to be upheld. Those who had risked everything in their struggle against the Nazis were held prisoner by the Allies for years-in many cases even longer than their Nazi foes.

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

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.