Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933-45

CHRONOLOGY

1933

Jan. 30 Hitler appointed chancellor

Feb. 3 Hitler meets with commanders of the Reichswehr for the

first time

Feb. 27-28 Reichstag fire. Government issues emergency decree “to

protect the people and the state”

March 5 Reichstag elections. Nazis receive 43.9 percent of the vote

March 21 Potsdam Day celebrations, intended to show unity of

Prussianness and National Socialism

March 23 Enabling Act passed

Apr. 1 Boycott of Jewish businesses

Apr. 7 Act to Restore a Professional Public Service passed

May 2 Trade unions disbanded and German Labor Front founded

June-July Political parties dissolved

July 20 Concordat with Vatican signed

1934

April 24 People’s Court established

June 30 Night of the Long Knives. Liquidation of SA leaders and

other political opponents begins

Aug. 2 Hindenburg dies. General Werner von Blomberg orders

Reichswehr to swear loyalty to Hitler. Hitler granted unlimited power as “Führer and chancellor”

1935

Jan. 2 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris takes over as chief of Military

Intelligence

March 4-5 Synod of the Confessional Church decides to de­nounce Nazi racial theories and the “new heathens” from the pulpit. Seven hundred pastors arrested

March 16 Reintroduction of universal conscription

Aug. on Wave of arrests directed against socialist resistance group Beginning Anew

Sept. 15 Nuremberg laws enacted

Oct. Wave of arrests by the Gestapo. By May 1936, over seven thousand seized for political reasons

1936

March 7 German troops march into the demilitarized Rhineland

May 26 Campaign against monasteries and convents. Morals charges brought against 276 members of religious or­ders for alleged homosexuality

May 28 Whitsun declaration of the Confessional Church condemns Nazi racial policies

Aug. The Socialist Front in Hannover, one of the largest northern German resistance groups, headed by Wer­ner Blumenberg, broken up by Gestapo

Nov. Gestapo arrests members of the left-wing socialist organization Red Fighters

1937

Jan. 30 Enabling Act extended for four years. Hitler withdraws Germany’s signature from the discriminatory clauses of the Treaty of Versailles

March 14 Papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With Deepest Anxiety) condemns Nazi policy toward the church. Mass arrest of clergymen, expropriation of church publishing houses and presses

July 1 Pastor Martin Niemöller arrested and sent to a concentration camp

Nov. 5 Hitler announces war plans to the military leadership and the foreign minister. Immediate targets: Austria and Czechoslovakia

Dec. Large-scale operation mounted in many major cities against left-wing resistance organizations

1938

Feb. 4 Dismissal of Blomberg and Army Commander in Chief Fritsch. Hitler creates the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW) under Wilhelm Keitel. Walther von Brauchitsch named commander in chief of the army. Hitler himself takes over as supreme commander of the entire armed forces (Wehrmacht)

March 12 Annexation of Austria

March 13 Law proclaiming the Anschluss passed

May 30 Directive from Hitler announcing the invasion of

Czechoslovakia

Aug. 18 Chief of General Staff Ludwig Beck resigns in protest of Hitler’s aggression. Franz Halder appointed as suc­cessor

Summer Conspiracy of civilian and military resistance groups launched. Main participants are Halder, Hans Oster, and Erwin von Witzleben

Sept. 28 Oster and Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz’s plan for a task force to invade the Chancellery and kill Hitler fails

Sept. 29 Munich conference grants Sudetenland to Germany

Oct. 21 Hitler issues secret orders to prepare “to eliminate the rest of Czechoslovakia”

Nov. 9 Kristallnacht, a “spontaneous” pogrom against Jews. Police forbidden to intervene

1939

March 15 Entry into Czechoslovakia. Under pressure from Ger­many, Slovakia declares its independence

April 3 Hitler issues directive to prepare for the invasion of Poland

May 23 Hitler explains invasion plans to his generals

Summer Civilian and military resistance circles plan to remove Hitler from power to prevent war. Opposition groups around Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack form the Red Orchestra

Aug. 23 Hitler-Stalin pact divides Poland and Eastern Europe into spheres of interest

Sept. 1 Outbreak of the Second World War with invasion of Poland

Sept. 21 Reinhard Heydrich issues guidelines for the Einsatzgruppen in occupied Poland

Sept. 27 Warsaw surrenders

Oct. 9 Hitler announces his intention to launch an invasion in the West by November 12

Oct.-Nov. Preparations made for Erich Kordt’s attempt to assas­sinate Hitler with a bomb

Nov 8. Acting alone, Georg Elser fails to kill Hitler in Mu­nich

1940

April 9 Beginning of operation that will lead to occupation of Denmark and Norway

May 10 Beginning of the campaign in the West. Capitulation of Holland (May 15) and Belgium (May 28) and truce with France (June 22)

Dec. 18 Directive from Hitler for Operation Barbarossa: “Before the end of the war against England,” the Wehrmacht is to defeat the USSR in “a quick campaign”

1941

March 30 Hitler declares to his generals that the Russian cam­paign will be a “struggle of annihilation”

Spring Henning von Tresckow organizes a group of conspirators within Army Group Center

May 13 Hitler cancels the jurisdiction of the military courts over the areas of the Soviet Union that will be occu­pied. Illegal acts against Soviet civilians no longer punishable; crimes against the occupying Germans to be punished extrajudicially

June 6 Commissar Order calls for the liquidation of political commissars in the Soviet Union

June 22 Beginning of the Russian campaign. The three army groups are followed by four Einsatzgruppen of secu­rity police and the SD

Nov.-Dec. The Russian winter destroys Hitler’s plans for blitz­krieg against the Soviet Union

Dec. 19 Hitler dismisses Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch and assumes supreme command of the army himself

1942

Feb. The revolutionary left-wing resistance organization led by Beppo Romer and Robert Uhrig is broken up in Berlin. Forty-five death sentences issued

March 22 Pastoral letter of Catholic bishops on the “Struggle against Christianity and the Church”

Spring The resistance organization Revolutionary Socialists broken up in Bavaria and Austria

Aug. 20 Roland Freisler named president of the People’s Court

Sept. 24 Franz Halder replaced as chief of general staff by Kurt Zeitzler

Fall Gestapo breaks up the Red Orchestra

Nov. 22 The Sixth Army (some 250,000 troops) cut off near Stalingrad

1943

Jan. 24 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill announce at the Casablanca Conference (Jan. 14-26) their demand for “unconditional surrender”

Feb. 2 Capitulation of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad

Feb. 18 Flyers distributed in Munich by White Rose, a student resistance group with Catholic and youth-organization roots

March 13 Attempt by conspirators in Army Group Center to blow up Hitler fails

March 21 Colonel Rudolph-Christoph von Gersdorff s assassination attempt in the Berlin Zeughaus fails

April 5 Arrest of Hans von Dohnanyi, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Josef Müller, and other members of the resistance group within Military Intelligence. Hans Oster’s activ­ities are curtailed

July 12-13 Establishment of the National Committee for a Free Germany in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow

Summer Friedrich Olbricht, Tresckow, and Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg begin to rework the Valkyrie plans for a coup

Oct. 1 Stauffenberg assumes his position as chief of staff in the General Army Office under General Olbricht

Nov. 28- Teheran Conference. Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill

Dec. 12 agree in principle on the division of Germany

1944

Jan. 19 Helmuth von Moltke and members of the Solf Circle arrested

Jan.-March Captain Axel von dem Bussche, Lieutenant Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, and Cavalry Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch all fail in various plans to assassinate Hitler

Feb. 12 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris relieved of his duties. Hitler orders the creation of a “unified German secret information service” under Himmler

June 6 Allied invasion of Normandy commences

June 22 Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein meet in Berlin with members of the outlawed central committee of the German Communist Party. Beginning of the Soviet offensive on the eastern front in the area of Army Group Center

July 4-5 Adolf Reichwein and Julius Leber arrested

July 11 Stauffenberg plans to assassinate Hitler at Führer headquarters on the Obersalzberg

July 15 Stauffenberg plans to assassinate Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, Führer headquarters in Rastenburg

July 20 Stauffenberg sets off a bomb in the conference barracks at Rastenburg. Hitler survives. Coup attempt in Paris canceled when plans fail at army headquarters in Berlin. Late that night Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, and Werner von Haeften are executed in the army courtyard on Bendlerstrasse. A wave of arrests begins

Aug. Beginning of trials before the People’s Court and the first executions

1945

Feb. 4-11 Yalta Conference

April 25 American and Soviet troops meet near Torgau on the Elbe

April 30 Hitler commits suicide

May 8 Germany surrenders unconditionally