Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

All that united the resistance were a few fundamental maxims: a refusal to participate in the violence, mindlessness, and injustice on all sides; a strong sense of right and wrong; and, as one member of Tresckow’s circle observed, a desire “somehow simply to survive with a sense of decency.” 6In October 1944 Helmuth von Moltke wrote to his two sons from his prison cell: “I have struggled all my life- beginning in my school days-against the narrow-mindedness and arrogance, the penchant for violence, the merciless consistency and the love of the absolute, that seem to be inherent in the Germans and that have found expression in the National Socialist state. I have also done what I could to ensure that this spirit-with its excessive nationalism, persecution of other races, agnosticism, and material­ism-is defeated.” 7Hans Oster, writing to his own son from prison, expressed similar sentiments, though couched in simpler terms remi­niscent of an earlier era; the important thing, he wrote, is to remain “to your last breath the decent sort of fellow you were taught to be in the nursery and in your training as a soldier.” 8

Their clear sense of conscience and morality lent the conspirators an uncompromising, categorical outlook that was the source of much of their inner strength. But coupled with their fondness for abstract theorizing and elaborate intellectualism, it tended to impede action. Well after they had finally decided to resort to violence-indeed on the afternoon of July 20-they nevertheless renounced the use of firearms in army headquarters so as not to besmirch the righteousness of their cause; this was an expression more of their romantic impracticality and their inconsistency than of their high moral purpose. Eugen Gerstenmaier, who had always favored killing Hitler, turned up at army headquarters carrying both a revolver and a Bible, as if hoping to demonstrate the compatibility of religious faith and tyrannicide. He urged the conspirators to take up arms as a visible sign of their determination, arguing that rebels who failed to go the limit were not rebels at all but sacrificial lambs. 9

But lofty moral principles had in fact come into play much earlier. For instance, General Alexander von Falkenhausen was not admitted into the inner circle of conspirators because he had a mistress. Simi­larly, Helldorf was kept at arm’s length because of misgivings about his moral fiber, and it was possibly for this reason that he was left without instructions on July 20. Although Rommel certainly had res­ervations of his own about the conspiracy, the rebels made little at­tempt to win him over, because he clearly had little sympathy for their strict moral imperatives, ethics, and concern with matters of conscience. Nor were they swayed by the fact that Rommel was the only public figure with sufficient authority to challenge Hitler. They would permit no outsider to taint the purity of the new beginning they were proposing. Throughout the struggle there were similar moral gestures, including the determination of the Stauffenberg brothers to turn themselves over to the courts for judgment if the coup proved successful. 10

None of the leading participants felt at ease with the role of conspira­tor. Born and raised in secure circumstances with a solid core of values and beliefs, extensive social ties, and firm loyalties, they had known only sheltered existences, and they had difficulty even com­prehending what Hitler had done to their ostensibly reliable world. Ernst von Weizsäcker, asked if he had a pistol in case worst came to worst, replied, “I’m sorry, but I was not brought up to kill anyone.” 11For a while, most of the conspirators concealed or simply endured their torn loyalties. Henning von Tresckow, for example, threw him­self into planning troop movements for the invasion of Czechoslova­kia at a time when he had already urged that forceful measures be taken against the SS and the Gestapo. Such inconsistencies grew in­creasingly hard to live with, however, and eventually compelled the opposition to confront the fact that fighting for their country meant advancing the very brutality they despised.

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!’ ” 13But 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. 15The 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.