Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

One must remember that the people who looked with such equanimity on the demise of the Weimar Republic had no conception of what they were getting into or of the horrendous despotism, criminal­ity, and deprivation of rights that awaited them under a totalitarian regime. Most thought that they would soon find themselves, after a draconian transitional period, living under an authoritarian govern­ment running a strict, well-organized state. The total failure to grasp what was at stake can be seen in the comments of one leading Social Democrat after Hitler first came to power. Even after having listened daily to terrifying reports about the fates of old political comrades who had been beaten or seized by SA raiding parties, arrested, and dragged off to concentration camps, the worst that he could imagine scarcely surpassed the persecution of socialists under Bismarck. “We took care of Wilhelm and Bismarck and we’ll take care of today’s reactionaries as well!” he confidently informed his audiences in cam­paign speeches. 25Some believed that Hitler’s star would eventually burn out. At the SPD’s last mass rally in Berlin, Otto Wels assured his listeners that “harsh rulers don’t last long.” 26Others expected Hitler would soon meet his comeuppance in foreign affairs, when the great powers of Europe turned on him.

Although the Weimar Republic was dead, its ambiguous legacies lived on. With the benefit of time and despite the stunning setbacks of 1933, people here and there began to find the courage and determination to resist. Only now did it become apparent, however, how burned out and useless the rubble of Weimar was. Scattered resistance cells sprouted across the land, but they found themselves un­willing or unable to build on alliances from an earlier period. Communist offers to work with the Social Democrats met, for exam­ple, with deep suspicion-yet another legacy of the past. The resistance to Hitler therefore had to be built anew, on fundamentally different foundations. The deep enmity between the various political camps toward the end of the republic left the budding resistance fractured into small circles and cells, which often had no contact with one another despite physical proximity. They all agreed that it was essential to resist but most were reluctant to join forces. The old tensions continued to affect relations among them as late as 1944 and even flared up after the war both in scholarly and in more politically driven disputes over the history of the resistance.

The memory of Weimar also shaped the conspirators’ conceptions of the political order they hoped to institute. None of the surviving plans hold up liberal democracy as a desirable model. Some historians have severely criticized this failing, but in so doing they have tended to forget the experiences of the conspirators, who hoped to present the German people with “credible” alternatives to the Nazi regime and felt unable, wherever they stood on the political spectrum, to include the Weimar system among them. 27They argued that among other things Weimar had fostered the rise of Hitler. Carl Goerdeler, a leader of the civilian resistance, spoke of the “curse of parliamentar­ism,” which almost always placed “party interests above the good of the nation.” 28In endless debates, whose intensity and poignancy are mirrored in the surviving documents, the members of the resistance devoted enormous efforts to developing evermore cumbersome and peculiar political models that wavered between restoration of the past and social utopianism; only occasionally is there evidence of a truly forward-looking idea.

The ease with which Hitler triumphed in Germany, the string of international political victories that the European powers soon per­mitted him, and the omnipresence of his secret police combined to convince anti-Nazis that there could be no question of a mass upris­ing or general strike like the one staged thirteen years earlier to thwart the Kapp putsch. There was also little hope for a coup from above by powerful elites in society and the government bureaucracy, so quickly and thoroughly had Hitler penetrated all social organiza­tions.

One institution, however, had managed to preserve most of its traditional autonomy and internal cohesion: the army. As Hitler him­self said at the time, half indignant and half impressed, it was “the last instrument of state whose worldview has survived intact.” 29The army alone also possessed the means to overthrow a regime so obsessed with security. Its great dilemma was that any coup it staged would put an enormous strain on long-standing loyalties and would necessarily threaten the continued existence of the state, to which it was deeply committed by tradition and professional ethic.

Nevertheless, whenever individuals or small groups came together to discuss conspiracy against the state, regardless of their background or concerns, their gaze turned almost inevitably to the military. Equally inevitably, for the reasons outlined above, all thought of resis­tance became part of a vicious circle, which determined the events of the next few years.

In the early evening of February 3, 1933, only four days after bcoming chancellor, Hitler hurried to 14 Bendlerstrasse to pay a first formal call on the leaders of the Reichswehr. The military commanders were reputed to be remote, secretive, and arrogant, and Hitler had gone to the meeting with some trepidation, because he knew they would play a key role in both his immediate schemes to seize power in Germany and his more long-range plans for expansion abroad.

Hitler understood well that many of the younger officers sympathized with him and his movement, albeit in a rather vague way. They felt that the Weimar Republic had suffered in both its internal and foreign dealings from a lack of courage and resolve, and they looked now to Hitler to cast off the Treaty of Versailles, restore the prestige of the army, improve their chances for personal advancement and promotion, and bring about real social change. Hopes for a renewal so sweeping that it could be deemed a revolution were common, especially among the younger officers who later joined the resistance. Henning von Tresckow, for instance, campaigned for the Nazis in the officers’ mess in Potsdam as early as the late 1920s, dismissing detractors as hopelessly reactionary. Soon after the Nazis seized power Al­brecht Mertz von Quirnheim had himself transferred to the SA. Helmuth Stieff and many others also threw in their lot with the new cause. There is apparently no truth, however, to the tale that an enthusiastic Stauffenberg placed himself at the head of a crowd surging through Bamberg in celebration of Hitler’s nomination as chancellor. 1

Senior officers took quite a different view, though the Weimar Republic had always seemed alien to them as well. They had high hope’s that an authoritarian regime would not only wash away the “shame of Versailles” but also help reconcile the state and the army, thereby returning to them the influence they had once wielded in the corridors of government. Hitler’s talk of party and army as the “twin pillars” on which the National Socialist state rested seemed to imply that they would regain the political leverage they had lost under the republic. Senior officers also imagined themselves powerful enough to determine the bounds of their own authority, within which Hitler would be prevented from interfering. But even so, they had serious reservations about the Nazis’ rowdy, anarchistic behavior, their undis­guised contempt for the law, the terrorism of the SA, and last but not least, the personage of the Führer himself, whose vulgar, hucksterish ways prompted one senior officer to say what they all more or less felt: Hitler was “not a gentleman but just an ordinary guy.” 2