Plotting Hitler's Death

11. THE WAGES OF FAILURE

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.

Some writers have even suggested that the opposition decided to act only when it was clear Germany would go down to defeat-and solely for self-seeking reasons. The view that the old aristocracy, dis­mayed at its waning power, hoped at the last minute to mask its long collusion with the Nazis and thereby retain its privileges, property, position, and influence soon gained currency. Even a superficial knowledge of the resistance shows how misguided and biased that argument is. Probably the most promising of all the plots against Hitler was conceived as early as 1938, in response to his preparations to invade other countries. Furthermore, the planning within Army Group Center for the second attempt on Hitler’s life took place be­fore Stalingrad and the great turning point in the war.

The truth is in fact the virtual opposite of what these writers alleged. In view of Hitler’s string of political and military triumphs, which were setbacks for the opposition, it is remarkable how tena­ciously the resistance continued to plot against him. Apart from Halder, the same men who opposed Hitler in the early days opposed him in the end, their ranks swelled by many new recruits. There is ample reason to conclude that, in the early postwar years at least, disdain for the resistance could be traced to the attitudes of a generation of passive Nazi sympathizers and their descendants, who were not eager to have their own failings highlighted by comparison with the heroism of a group of aristocrats and professional soldiers-a group that had supposedly been consigned to the dustbin of history.

These attitudes stemmed to a certain extent from a fundamental misunderstanding that was created or at least encouraged by some of the early memoirs published by members of the resistance. Today it is well known that-although these accounts seem to imply otherwise-neither the resistance movement as a whole nor the attempt on July 20, 1944, to kill Hitler and stage a coup represented a short-term undertaking by a band of army officers. Many groups, some closely connected to these officers and others linked more indirectly, contrib­uted to the dramatic events of that day. The lists of projected cabinet members of the interim government, which survive in varying ver­sions all convey the breadth and social pluralism of the resistance, as well as the leading role to be played by civilians.² There was never any dispute about the latter point, according to the written sources, which attest to numerous debates and differences of opinion over virtually everything else. The officers who participated in the September con­spiracy of 1938, from Oster to Halder and Witzleben, agreed that the officer corps was merely the organized and armed vanguard of the operation and would retreat into the background as soon its work was completed.

Moreover, the motivation of the members of the resistance was not at all a desire to preserve the privileges of social rank. Certainly many of the conspirators saw themselves as members of a social elite, with particular responsibility for providing leadership. That conviction facilitated their decision to oppose the regime and deepened their re­solve as the Nazis continued to trample on all traditional principles of law and order. It was not, however, their dominant impulse. Nor can their opposition to the Nazis be said to have sprung solely from a sense of moral outrage, as is often claimed. In reality, the rebels were driven by an array of motives that in most cases arose from profes­sional frustrations and quickly broadened to general political dis­enchantment. Their motives were further reinforced by moral, religious, or nationalistic convictions, which varied in intensity from one person to the next.

In their interrogations or in their testimony before the People’s Court, twenty of the accused conspirators from the various groups- whether civilian or military, national-conservative, middle class, or socialist-mentioned the persecution of the Jews as the primary motive for their opposition.³ Others emphasized the elimination of civil rights, the arbitrary, dictatorial style of the government, and the assault on the churches. The basic conviction uniting those who acted out of religious belief was best expressed by Hans-Bernd von Haeften, when he stated before the People’s Court that Hitler was “a great perpetrator of evil.” Gerstenmaier called this remark “the key to the entire resistance,” from which all the rest flowed as a Christian duty.⁴

Those whose resistance was motivated primarily by nationalist con­cerns were the most torn. Their dilemma stemmed not only from the fact that Hitler shared their nationalism-in however exaggerated a form-but that for a long time his achievements reflected their desires. From the annexation of Austria to the victory over France, notes and reports written at the time by people like Hassell, Stieff, and Schulenburg attest to their divided sentiments: horror at the dis­grace heaped on Germany and its good name through incessant crim­inal acts and yet pride in the growing power and increasing influence of the fatherland. “There is no doubt,” wrote Ulrich von Hassell in October 1940, “that if this system emerges victorious, Germany and Europe are headed for terrible times. But if Germany is defeated, the consequences are simply unimaginable.”⁵

The kinds of resistance were as varied as the motives, ranging from quiet disapproval and withdrawal to efforts on behalf of the perse­cuted and finally to active opposition to the Nazi regime, which itself took many forms. Easiest to understand are those people who strongly disapproved of the Nazis from beginning to end, particularly political opponents such as Leber, Mierendorff, the Kreisauers, Hammerstein, and Oster. Somewhat more complicated are those like Mertz von Quirnheim, Jens Peter Jessen, and Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, whose early enthusiasm for the Nazis turned to disap­pointment, anger, and finally, bitter rejection. Yet another strand is represented by Ernst von Weizsäcker, the state secretary in the For­eign Office, who traveled a slippery path between conformity and accommodation on the one hand and resistance on the other, with all the attendant illusions and entanglements one might expect. Other cases are stranger, like that of Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, a rather coarse, boorish man who rose-for good reason-within the ranks of the SA. More unfathomable still was the transformation of SS Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe, who as chief of criminal police in Reich Security Headquarters was one of the architects of the totalitarian police state and later served as commander of Einsatzgruppe B who found his way into resistance circles in the late 1930s after becoming closely acquainted with Oster. No case is the same as the others; each must be looked at in a different light, and all are overshadowed by the darkness of those years.

These brief examples show that the conspirators, though frequently bound together by personal ties and occasionally by ties between the various groups, had no real common denominator or unifying idea, not even a collective name. Far from representing a tightly knit social elite hoping to regain its lost preeminence, the opposition to Hitler consisted of a motley collection of individuals who differed greatly in their social origins, habits of thought, political attitudes, and methods of action. Even the term resistance was not used until after the war, and to say that someone “joined” the resistance is misleading. People who were hostile to the regime found their way to one another through friendships, chance encounters, and in some instances persistent searches. Sometimes they remained active in the circles they discovered; at other times they dropped out. They were buffeted by the hazards of war, and they forged new con­nections whenever circumstances permitted. The extreme diversity of their views is illustrated by the fact that even close friends and philo­sophical allies could not agree on so basic an issue as whether Hitler should be assassinated.

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.”⁶ In 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.”⁷ Hans 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.”¹¹ For 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!’ ”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.

Many highly placed officers were also dissuaded from joining the opposition by their vivid memories of Hitler’s amazing string of tri­umphs both before the war and in its early years. They belonged to a generation that had known nothing but defeat and humiliation, from the First World War to Versailles to the never-ending insults of the Weimar Republic. They were therefore all the more impressed by Hitler’s victories, scored time and again in flagrant defiance of the warnings and advice of experts. Hitler’s uncanny success did much to undermine the officers’ confidence in their own judgment, espe­cially as they had been trained and were accustomed, like military strategists in all other countries, to think strictly in terms of out­come.

A number of officers were also cool toward the resistance because, by the time war broke out, the notion of Hochverrat, or betrayal of the head of state, had become conflated with the odious crime of Landesverrat, betrayal of one’s country, for which there was abso­lutely no tolerance within the army. The complete isolation of Hans Oster, notwithstanding the personal respect accorded him, was a case in point. Even Stauffenberg remarked at the beginning of the Russian campaign that a putsch was unthinkable in time of war.¹⁸ Halder expressed similar sentiments, and it is no accident that he helped plan coups only before the war or, in the case of the 1939 plot, at a time when it seemed the conflict could still be prevented from escalating into a world war.¹⁹

These were the dilemmas facing men like Rundstedt, Leeb, Sodenstern, and Kluge as they decided how they would respond to the impending assassination attempt and coup. They were by no means typical Nazi generals and they did not betray the conspirators, but neither did they provide encouragement or support. “Just do it!” is how General Heusinger responded on a number of occasions to requests from Tresckow’s circle to join the conspiracy.²⁰ Like many others, Heusinger himself preferred to withdraw into a posture of more or less blind-or at least silent-obedience. A considerable number of these officers were capable of realizing that adherence to abstract ideals about a soldier’s duty would ultimately bring catastro­phe on Germany and some, including Manstein and Bock, were ex­pressly told as much by colleagues in the opposition. Most of them, however, continued to shrug their shoulders and seek solace in ratio­nalizations, all the while nurturing the hope that disaster would ulti­mately be avoided, as it had been so many times in the past.

There were also those who, though they did not join the resistance, found the conflict of values unbearable and sought escape in death. This is the only way that Gerd von Tresckow’s insistence on incrimi­nating himself can be understood. The commanding general at Cher­bourg, Erich Marcks, was acting on a similar impulse when he headed into the front lines, telling those around him that a soldier’s death was the best a man could meet. Field Marshal Walter Model served the regime loyally for many years, but in mid-April 1945, while com­manding his army group in the Ruhr valley, he was suddenly seized by the conviction that he had been serving a false master and a false cause; in despair, he committed suicide. His successor, Albert Kesselring, returned to business as usual; he inaugurated his command by complaining to his general staff that nowhere on his journey through the army area had he seen a hanged deserter, a sure sign of ineffec­tive military leadership.²¹

A final reason for the reluctance of most officers to assist the resistance was its lack of support among the general population, a state of affairs continually lamented by voices in the army ranging from Chief of General Staff Halder to General Wagner. The upper echelons of the military were staffed largely by men of high social rank who had little truck with the common people, and in the wake of the Reichenau and Fritsch affairs, nothing so impressed them as Hitler’s ability to sway the masses and make himself their wildly acclaimed spokesman. An attempt was made to use Wilhelm Leuschner’s net­work of former trade union members to bring the opposition message to the people, but this single initiative was not enough to break the social isolation of the rebels. Inquiries conducted primarily by Julius Leber and Alfred Delp in late 1943 indicated that most industrial workers remained loyal to the regime, even as the war ground on. Security Service reports on the mood of the people in the days follow­ing July 20 concluded that Hitler was increasingly popular even in such traditionally “red” areas as Berlin’s Wedding, a heavily working-class district.²² Although the resistance had for years been concerned with the problem of how to reach the general population and en­lighten it as to the criminality of the Nazi regime, a satisfactory solu­tion was never found.

This was one of the main differences between the resistance in Germany and its counterparts in the occupied countries. These groups, too, represented only tiny minorities (not until after the war did everyone claim membership, as national pride demanded). Nev­ertheless they built genuine, viable resistance movements, which, un­like the opposition in Germany, could count on support from the general population. They had an infrastructure, bases, and battle-ready units. They also had a clear and simple purpose: to drive the enemy from the motherland. There were no torn loyalties, broken oaths, or concerns about treason, no need to engage in esoteric debates about the new order to be instituted after the Nazis were driven out. In short, the resistance movements in the occupied countries found moral, political, or nationalist justifications within themselves.

In addition, they enjoyed psychological and material support from the Allies. When Anthony Eden told Bishop George Bell in the summer of 1943 that the German resistance, in contrast to the movements elsewhere, had never demonstrated a thoroughgoing de­termination to oppose the regime, Bell responded that the others had been promised liberation in return for their efforts while the Ger­mans were offered nothing more than unconditional surrender.²³ Al­though the clear aim of all resistance movements was the overthrow of Nazi rule, for the Germans that meant surrendering their home­land to bitter foes, not only from the West but also, and much more terrifying, from the East. It is hard not to appreciate the psychological torment of those Germans who abhorred Hitler and were horrified by his crimes yet knew what Stalin had proved capable of, from the Red Terror to mass murders in the forest of Katyn.

The view toward the West was different, but as we have seen, there was never a meeting of minds between the German resistance and the American and British governments. The objections raised by Eden were undoubtedly justified. But the psychological warfare waged by the West, the most important manifestation of which was the bombing campaign, has been rightly deplored.²⁴ Contrary to ex­pectations, it did not demoralize the German people but rather tended to rally them around the Nazis in a gesture of defiance that benefited the regime at a time when it had grown increasingly con­cerned about the atmosphere of anxiety, apathy, and war weariness following the reversals of the winter of 1942-43. Paradoxically, the Allied bombing campaign only succeeded in driving the people back into the arms of the regime, as they heeded the instinct to stand together in times of mortal danger. Meanwhile the opposition grew even more isolated.

Thus, the decision to join the resistance also meant, for a German, withdrawal from the social mainstream and personal loneliness. It meant the rearrangement of one’s entire life and reliance on the few people who shared one’s views. Long-term friendships were severed and relations with the outside world were necessarily tainted by suspi­cion, deception, and duplicity. Deciding to resist the Nazis meant placing one’s family and friends in serious danger. Writing to his British friend Lionel Curtis in June 1942, Moltke described the awk­ward lengths to which he and all the other conspirators had to go in their daily lives. Oster and Tresckow never once dared to meet or to speak directly, for example, despite the countless questions they had to resolve or clarify.²⁵

All these special circumstances gave the resistance its highly individualistic, insular character. Postwar analyses have blamed the bourgeoisie, the army, the churches, the traditional curriculum in the schools, and various other social factors for the Germans’ failure to resist the Nazis more resolutely. In actual fact, no institution, no ideological current from either the left or the right, no tradition, nor any social class proved sufficient to confer on its members or adher­ents immunity from Nazi blandishments. Resistance was entirely a matter of personal character, whether it occurred in the bourgeoisie, the unions, or the army. The conspirators’ social background or intel­lectual training provided them at most with support against occasional doubts or the temptation to give up. The German resistance has thus quite properly been called a “revolt of conscience.”²⁶

The large role played by personal determination and individual strength of character turned out, ironically, to be one of the reasons the resistance failed. It explains the lack of a unifying ideology, the disagreements, and the characteristic indecision. One person’s views were apt to raise the hackles of someone else, whose convictions would in turn be denounced by still others. The ensuing rounds of discussion and debate soon degenerated into arguments over basic philosophies that demanded to be resolved, everyone seemed to be­lieve, rather than simply papered over with easy compromises. The result was the inaction that in retrospect makes the German resis­tance look like nothing more than a passionate debating society. Moltke’s elation at Freisler’s conclusion that Moltke did nothing, ar­ranged nothing, and planned no violent acts-that he merely thought-remains one of the keys to understanding the resistance. German philosophy is often said lo be rather removed from reality, and this characterization certainly holds true for the German resis­tance. All the discussion papers, draft constitutions, cabinet lists, and endless debates about a new order were at least partially an escape from the practical needs of the moment. Only a few conspirators avoided the temptation to indulge in theorizing. Indeed, it seems likely that if Stauffenberg had not appeared on the scene the conspir­ators would have spent the rest of the war discussing with great pro­fundity the many insurmountable problems impeding them.

Closer examination also reveals that a deep melancholy settled over the conspirators as a whole (excluding, of course, the indomitably optimistic Goerdeler). Even Tresckow was said to suffer from it; Yorck was described at one point as having been “very serious and sad the last few weeks,” and Trott observed just before the assassination attempt: “If this colossus Hitler falls, he will drag us all into the abyss.”²⁷ At some deeper level, the conspirators all seemed to realize that their chances of success were small. The assassination of Hitler would not necessarily liberate Germany from Nazi tyranny. All it would do for certain was free German soldiers from their loyalty oaths and possibly rouse some senior officers from their moral slum­ber. But those results would not necessarily have been any more decisive than the successful launch of Operation Valkyrie. The real struggle would have only then begun, and its outcome would by no means have been certain. Goerdeler’s objections to violence were based not only on moral principles but on practical political consider­ations as well: he feared it might lead to civil war, thereby destroying the last of the conspirators’ hopes; to defeat on the battle fronts, especially in the East; and to chaos and lawlessness. Finally, Germany might be forced to surrender unconditionally, a result he hoped to the end to avoid.

Goerdeler may well have understood the uncertain consequences of Hitler’s assassination better than those who advocated it. Stauf­fenberg, however, thought in different terms. Determined to over­throw the Nazi regime, he knew that there was no realistic alternative to violence. He felt it was absurd to attempt, as Carl Langbehn and Johannes Popitz had, to turn the Nazis against one another or to undermine the system from within. No less unrealistic, to his mind, was Goerdeler’s hope that a public debate with Hitler would trigger a broad popular uprising. If there were no alternatives worth discuss­ing, then the only way to break out of the conspirators’ “little debat­ing circle,” as Stauffenberg called it, was clearly to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup.

Like Goerdeler, Stauffenberg was still confident that an anti-Nazi government would be able to work out an arrangement with the Al­lies and avoid unconditional surrender. Julius Leber sought in vain to disabuse him of this illusion. In a paper apparently written by Stauffenberg himself and left behind in army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse on July 20, the hope was expressed that Germany would remain a “significant factor in the constellation of powers” and that the Wehrmacht would be an “effective instrument” in bringing about negotiations “on an equal footing” with the Allies.²⁸ The tenacity with which Stauffenberg clung to this misconception has often been noted. Perhaps, as some commentators have speculated, he needed it as much as he needed his moral outrage in order to take action.²⁹ After all, any clearheaded assessment of the situation could only have led to the conclusion that events should be allowed to play themselves out to the bitter end. The historian Gordon Craig regards the German conspirators as incurable “romantics,” and his characterization is probably apt, even in respect to Stauffenberg. But the critical under­tone of that judgment denies them the dignity of their efforts, how­ever desperate, impulsive, and irrational they may have been.

The particular heroism of the German resistance resides precisely in the hopelessness of the conspirators’ position, in what one historian calls the “last hurrah of a lost cause.”³⁰ Utterly without support or encouragement from within or without, they carried on the struggle even though, by the end, no national or tangible political interest could be advanced. Thus the assassination attempt of July 20 was launched in the spirit of Tresckow’s words to Stauffenberg: “coûte que coûte”—do it “whatever the cost.” Stauffenberg surely knew that the political goals he was serving by killing Hitler were now a mere fan­tasy. To the Allied demand for unconditional surrender he and his friends responded with an equally unconditional determination to act, motivated at this point by only the most abstract and general ideals: the dignity of humankind, justice, responsibility, self-respect. It is revealing that all discussion of the “right psychological moment,” which had played so prominent a role in the debates of previous years, had long since ceased.

In the end success or failure no longer mattered very much. All that remained was to make a dramatic gesture disavowing Hitler and everything his regime stood for. Tresckow’s words to Stauffenberg have become the most memorable phrase of the resistance because they convey this idea in its most forceful form and express the need for action regardless of the political or practical consequences.

The July 20 attack was, therefore, primarily a symbolic act. Those who point disparagingly to the hopelessness of the conspirators’ undertaking or the inadequateness of their planning fail to see the real significance. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the decision to attack was a decision for martyrdom. Schulenburg made this explicit late in the evening of July 20 when the idea of taking flight came up again: “We must drain this cup to the dregs,” he said to Hans Fritzsche, “we must sacrifice ourselves.”³¹

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