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

1. THE RESISTANCE THAT NEVER WAS

Essential to the history of the German resistance is the sense of powerlessness that defined it from the outset. How Adolf Hitler managed in a single stroke and seemingly effortlessly to seize power and construct an unconstrained totalitarian system is a question that has been raised frequently since the end of his twelve-year rule. But this question was also on the minds of Germans who lived through that period. Contrary to what most of the Nazis’ defeated foes later claimed, it was not primarily by means of ruthless violence that Hitler rose to power, although terror and intimidation were certainly always present. Enabling factors far more complex were grasped relatively early on by astute observers of the Weimar Republic on the left as well as the right, who spoke not so much about how Hitler had over­whelmed the republic but about how the republic had caved in. The self-induced paralysis and shortsightedness of the democratic forces clearly played as great a role in the debacle as Hitler’s tactical and psychological skills or his ability to seize the historical moment.

First of all, Hitler did not emerge out of nowhere to claim power. Rather, he worked away patiently in the background for years, over­coming many obstacles and awaiting the day when he could tout himself as Germany’s “savior” from a parliamentary system entangled in countless intractable problems. The political parties of the Weimar Republic had long been set in their ways, embroiled in ideological disputes, and they were concerned much more with securing advantage for their members than with meeting the needs of the country. Years before, they had forfeited responsibility for forming govern­ments and passing legislation to the president, who governed by emergency decree. It was precisely Hitler’s promise of a return to parliamentary rule that induced Hindenburg, after long hesitation, to ask the Nazi leader to form a cabinet. Thus, on the morning of Janu­ary 30, 1933, Hitler became chancellor of a new coalition government with the conservative German National People’s Party.

No one could explain at the time how it had come to this. Hitler himself spoke of a “miracle” and interpreted his appointment as an “act of God.”¹ Barely three months earlier he had suffered his first serious setback at the polls, losing over two million votes. Just two months earlier he had narrowly succeeded in holding his splintering party together with a dramatic appeal concluding in threats of suicide. Scarcely four days earlier, President Hindenburg had assured the army commander in chief, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, that “he would not even consider making that Austrian corporal the minister of defense or the chancellor.” The extraordinary reversal was brought about by ambition, a thirst for revenge, and what one con­temporary observer saw as a “mixture of corruption, backstairs in­trigue, and patronage.”²

As if foreshadowing what was to come, Hitler’s adversaries permitted him to outmaneuver them on the very day he was appointed. As evening fell on January 30 a few lingering parliamentarians sat to­gether in the Reichstag. Still confused by the events of that morning, they had lost themselves in a lengthy discussion of the likely conse­quences when, from the darkness of the neighboring Tiergarten, movement and noise became perceptible, as if a great procession were under way. Outside, people streamed past the Reichstag in groups of varying sizes, heading toward the Brandenburg Gate. “Young people, all young people,” remarked Social Democratic Party (SPD) deputy Wilhelm Hoegner of Bavaria as they passed on their way to a torch-light parade whose flickering lights illuminated not only the broad expanses around the Brandenburg Gate but also Unter den Linden and Wilhelmstrasse, casting a red glow on the skies above. Thousands of uniformed, hastily gathered marchers swept through the streets, while crowds of onlookers stood and watched. “But we just slipped away into the darkness,” Hoegner later wrote, “crushed and wearied by the ferment of those days.”³

The events in Berlin were echoed in dozens of other cities. Count Harry Kessler, a prominent diplomat, recalled “an atmosphere like pure Mardi Gras”: Crowds, parades, bands, and flags filled the streets, though nothing more dramatic had happened than a change of government, like many others in the past. But there was undeni­ably a sense that a new era had dawned. A feeling of anticipation swept the nation, filling some with dread and others with hope. Hitler picked up on this mood in his radio address on the evening of Febru­ary 1. Striking a moderate, statesmanlike tone, he recited the many hardships the people had known: the “betrayal” of November 1918, the “heartrending division” in the land, the hate and confusion. He described the self-inflicted “paralysis” of the multiparty state and held out the prospect of German society “coming together as one.” He spoke of dignity, honor, tradition, family, and culture. He assured the nation, which felt reviled by the entire world and humiliated by the victorious powers, that he would restore the pride of old. At the end he appealed for divine blessing.

The majority of the population, however, remained uneasy about Hitler. Too much had been said in rabid speeches, and too much had been done in bloody street fights for his words to calm those who felt hostile toward or even just wary of the new leader. Furthermore, the much-maligned Weimar Republic was not without supporters. It had faithful champions among all the parties of the center, in particular among the Social Democrats and the trade unions. In the Reichsbanner, an elite paramilitary defense troop formed in February 1931, and the Iron Front, an alliance of the Reichsbanner, the SPD, and the unions that was formed the following November, the republic had two militant, prodemocratic organizations working to defend it against assault from the left or right. The Iron Front alone had three and a half million members, of whom 250,000 belonged to so-called protective formations, trained armed units that regularly carried out field exercises. Both of these organizations now awaited a signal to take action against a government that-with its party’s million-strong militia, the Sturmabteilung or SA-they saw as threatening a coup of its own.

But the signal never came, no matter how much the local organizations and their individual members pressed their political leaders. Weakness, fear, and a sense of responsibility played their parts in this, of course. Even more decisive, however, were Hitler’s tactics, which quickly undermined the willingness of the republic’s supporters to take action. They had always assumed that the Nazi leader would stage a coup and had prepared themselves exclusively for this eventu­ality. But Hitler’s experiences during his long rise to power, especially the well-remembered failed putsch of November 1923, had per­suaded him that it was best not to be seen seizing control through overtly violent means. Having risen to chancellor through constitu­tional channels, he was not about to stigmatize himself as a revolu­tionary. The considerable forces still arrayed against him in the democratic fighting organizations; the cautious attitude of the majority of citizens, who remained hesitant amid all the stage-managed displays of jubilation; the respect Hitler felt compelled to show the president and the armed forces, the Reichswehr–all these factors forced him to continue ostensibly observing the rule of law while doing all he could to seize the reins of power. Later it would be said that the republic did not fight but simply froze helplessly-and then crumbled-in the face of these unexpected tactics.

Hitler’s opening gambit in the struggle for power not only confused his avowed enemies but tended to reassure the wary in all social classes and organizations, overcoming or considerably reducing the apprehension they had always felt about him. A coup achieved through legal channels was something thoroughly unknown. The clas­sical literature on resistance to tyrants, stretching back to the days of the ancient Greeks, dealt exclusively with violent seizures of power; there was no talk of silent takeovers through outwardly democratic methods, of obeying the letter of the law while mocking its spirit. By leaving the facade of the constitution in place, Hitler hopelessly con­founded the public’s ability to judge the legality of the new regime, to choose whether as good citizens they should feel loyal to it or not. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, radical change was under way.

The paradoxical idea of a legal revolution dumbfounded not only Hitler’s opponents but his allies as well. The civil service was similarly perplexed but took comfort in the basically legal nature of the up­heaval, despite its obvious excesses. Thankful to be spared the inter­nal divisions and conflict that a revolution might have brought, the civil service willingly placed itself and its expertise at the disposal of the new government. As a result the Nazis eased smoothly into con­trol of the entire apparatus of state. Indeed, since the days of the kaisers, civil servants had tended toward antidemocratic sentiments, but it was primarily the appearance of legality that won them over to the new regime or at least prevented any doubts from arising about the propriety of what the Nazis were doing. It is particularly signifi­cant that both the emergency decree (suspending virtually all major civil liberties) issued on February 28, 1933, the day after the Reichs­tag fire, and the Enabling Act wresting legislative authority from the Reichstag and conferring it on the government were crafted by loyal civil servants with no particular affection for the Nazi Party. The bureaucracy responded in the same acquiescent way to subsequent legislation, which led step by step to the demolition of the entire constitutional order.

The tactic of a “legal revolution” was complemented by another clever move, namely the depiction of the Nazi seizure of power as a “national revival.” After all the humiliations of the Weimar Republic, many members of the middle class and other Germans understood this to signal a kind of liberation. The Nazis’ single-minded pursuit of power did not, therefore, raise much protest and was even cheered as a sign of the nonpartisan resurgence of a country that had been di­vided against itself for too long and was finally gathering its strength. This confusion of the Nazi lust for power with the revival of Germany itself, encouraged by incessant, stage-managed festivities and the ex­citement generated by various plebiscites, led to a shift in mood that gradually enabled Hitler to shed any pretense of legality and boldly claim a right to govern in his own name.

Hitler’s opponents were never allowed so much as a moment to catch their breath, consider their options, or prepare a counterattack. The new chancellor immediately set his sights on the innermost sancturns of power, working with stunning speed but with a highly effec­tive overall plan to seize key positions one after the other or else to drain them of their importance so that little more than hollow shells remained. The opposition was left off-balance, discouraged, and de­moralized. To fathom the speed and vigor of this operation one need only look at Italy, where it took Mussolini nearly seven years to accu­mulate the kind of power Hitler amassed in only a few weeks. Even then the monarchy still lay outside Mussolini’s orbit, providing Italians with a legitimate alternative-whatever its weaknesses-for which there was no equivalent in Germany.

One cannot fully comprehend the ease with which Hitler seized power, however, without giving some consideration to the weariness of the nation’s democratic forces after fourteen years of political life in an unloved republic that seemed fated to stumble from one crisis to the next. Most of the leading figures in the republic, men who shortly before had appeared so stalwart, simply packed their bags and vanished in a state of nervous exhaustion-Otto Braun, for example, the “Red Tsar of Prussia”; his minister of the interior, Karl Severing, who presided over the best-equipped police force in the Reich; the leaders of the Reichsbanner, and many others. Men who had always insisted that they would yield only to force melted before any heat at all was applied. It seemed as if the Weimar Republic never overcame the impression that it was somehow just a temporary phenomenon. Born of sudden surrender and tainted from the outset by the moral condemnations heaped upon Germany, it never gained the broad loyalty of the population. Their contempt only increased with the virtual civil war that raged during its early years, the inflation of 1923, which impoverished much of the traditionally loyal middle class, and finally the Great Depression, when confusion, mass misery, and polit­ical drift destroyed any claim the young republic might have had to being the kind of orderly state Germans were accustomed to. This series of disasters contributed enormously to the impression that such a republic would not long endure.

The feeling that major change was needed was not confined to the Weimar Republic, with the particular handicaps under which it strug­gled. Throughout the Western world a rising tide of voices decried parliamentary democracy as a system without a future. Such convictions were particularly widespread in nations with no indigenous his­tory or tradition of civil constitutional government. All across Europe, in countries where liberal democracy had emerged only a few years earlier to the cheers of the throngs, its funeral was now announced and its tombstone readied. Feeding on this burgeoning mood, Hitler convinced millions that he represented the birth of a new era. His display of total confidence in his mission heightened his attractiveness to a fearful, depressed people without hope or sense of purpose.

And how could the Führer’s opponents expect to counter such a powerful appeal? Divided among themselves, unable to muster their strength, and long plagued by feelings of impotence, many simply gave up in the spring of 1933, convinced that they had been defeated not only by an overpowering political foe but by history itself. This abstract way of thinking, inherent in the German intellectual tradition and therefore all the more easily adopted, advanced the Nazi cause by lending Hitler’s conquest of power an air of grave inevitability. A higher principle seemed to be at work, against which all human resis­tance would be in vain.

Such feelings were encouraged by a numbing barrage of propaganda-an art at which the Nazis realized they were far superior to any of their opponents. This was not the least of the reasons why, from the very outset, Hitler strained his governing coalition to the limit by demanding new elections to the Reichstag (only four months had passed since the last elections, in November 1932). An electoral campaign, after all, would allow his propaganda experts to display their prodigious talents to the full, especially now that he controlled the resources of the state. More than anyone else, the Nazis recog­nized the power of the new medium of radio and immediately set about seizing control of it. As the state radio network was in the hands of the government, they managed to ensure that all electoral speeches delivered by cabinet members were broadcast. The commentary for Hitler’s appearances was provided by Goebbels himself. This master propagandist usually began on a solemn, dignified note, drawing on pseudoreligious imagery as he built to a fervid climax: “The people are standing and waiting and singing, their hands raised in the air,” he once intoned while waiting for the Führer to arrive. “All you see are people, people, people… the German Volk that for fourteen long years has waited and suffered and bled. The German Volk that now is rising, calling and cheering for the Führer, the chancellor of the new Reich.”⁴

The Nazis’ opponents had little to offset the verve and drama of shows like this. In early February the Social Democrats, the Iron Front, and the Reichsbanner responded to the spectacular Nazi parade of January 30 by organizing a mighty demonstration of their own in the Lustgarten in Berlin. Thousands came, but the speeches reeked so of the timidity, indecision, and impotence of the old-time leaders that the crowd listened apathetically before finally slinking away, disappointed and downhearted, as if from some kind of fare­well. What a contrast with the self-assured, boisterous, optimistic gatherings of the Nazis, which reverberated in the mind for days afterwards! The difference lay not only in the rhetoric. Even more telling were all the symbols of a break with the past and an exciting new beginning. Columns of troops marching in close formation, bril­liant pageantry, and oceans of flags contrasted with the aimlessness and anxiety of the Weimar years and transformed politics into liturgy and grand ritual.

At the same time, the Nazis did not hesitate to employ force to achieve their ends, beginning in Prussia, by far the largest of the states. Prime Minister Hermann Göring was given a free hand under an emergency decree issued on February 6 and immediately began to evict politicians and public servants from office. In less than a month the police chiefs of fourteen large cities were dismissed, along with district administrators, rural prefects, and state officials. The pattern was much the same at every level of government: masses of Nazi party members would take to the streets in a staged popular uprising that the authorities claimed they could no longer contain. Public se­curity was then declared in jeopardy, and government officials or SA leaders, usually with no administrative experience, were appointed on a “temporary” basis to replace the people dismissed from their posi­tions. In this way, first uncooperative mayors were forced out and then, one after the other, the prime ministers of all the German states.

On February 22, Göring appointed units of the SA, the SS (the Schutz-Staffel, Hitler’s private army), and the nationalistic Stahlhelm movement to positions as assistant police. There ensued a wave of beatings, arrests, and shootings as well as raids on private homes, party offices, and newspapers. The socialist streak within Hitler’s brown-shirted SA surfaced in the guise of “anticapitalist” acts of ter­ror against banks and the directors of stock exchanges. Special SA “capture squads” ferreted out “enemies of the state,” blackmailing, beating, and torturing them in bunkers and Heldenkellern (“hero cel­lars”). There were fifty of these torture chambers in Berlin alone.⁵ At about this time, the first Gestapo chief, Rudolf Diels, moved his headquarters into a former school of applied arts at 8 Prinz-AlbrechtStrasse, which would soon become one of Germany’s most notorious addresses. Diels assisted the SA in arresting political opponents of the regime. Soon the jails were filled to overflowing, and prisoners had to be held in specially constructed holding areas that became known as “concentration camps.”

The vast majority of the population, which was not directly affected by these illegal activities, accepted them with almost unbelievable equanimity in view of the gaping holes in the Nazi veneer of legality. This widespread apathy is at least somewhat explained by the demoralization of what had by then been more than three years of continuous depression and widespread poverty, not to mention the daily routine of going from unemployment office to shelter to soup kitchen. Moreover, people had grown accustomed over the years to unruliness and violence in the streets and were not overly shocked by the activities of the SA gangs. The public had long been fed up with anarchy on the streets. It yearned for a return to law and order and tended to interpret the SA’s activities as a sign of go­vernment vigor that had been sorely lacking during the death throes of the Weimar Republic. Many people construed Nazi vio­lence as the last means of achieving the sort of profound change in which the only hope of salvation lay. When the multiparty political system was eliminated, it was not missed by a population that had grown accustomed over the previous years to strong presidential powers and a government little influenced by objections raised in parliament.

The lack of effective resistance to Hitler can also be attributed to the divided feelings that Hitler quickly learned to manipulate and exploit. Everything he did, including his surprise lunges for power and arbitrary acts, was planned in such a way that at least part of the population would have good reason to feel thankful to him. Often people were left feeling torn, as can be seen in records of contemporary reactions, which were often far more uncertain, vacillating, and contradictory than is commonly believed. Many Germans found their hopes raised one moment and dashed the next. Their fears, too, rose and fell.

This Nazi tactic was well suited to a sharply divided society in which many irreconcilable interests and ideologies clashed. The fruits could be seen in the almost immediate crackdown on Communists, whose persecution and arrest, often outside the judicial system, was greeted with relief by many people, despite their doubts about the justice and legality of it all. Similarly torn feelings surfaced at the time of the boycott of Jewish shops and department stores on April 1, 1933, even though the conditions were admittedly different. And again, in the summer of 1934, the public viewed with ambivalence the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler’s purge of the SA, which seemed to suggest that the Führer shared the public’s mounting disgust with SA hooliganism but which also showed, to the horror of many, his will­ingness to eliminate anyone who crossed him.

Hitler’s road to power was thus paved with a mixture of legality, anarchy, and arbitrary strikes at specific targets. The lack of strong public reaction to the numerous excesses and acts of violence was also related to the always widespread need to conform. There was a pro­found yearning for order, too, and a desire to identify with the state. In times of sweeping social change, opportunism and eagerness for advancement also figure prominently, hence the masses of new Nazi supporters who suddenly emerged from the woodwork in the first few weeks after Hitler came to power and who were referred to ironically as Märzgefallene (“those who fell in March”).

Finally, one of the most striking features of the first six months of Nazi rule was the general eagerness to share in the sense of belonging and in the celebration of the fraternal bond among all Germans. Even intellectuals seemed to grow tired of the stale, stuffy air in their studies and to long to join the historic movement “down on the streets,” sharing in the warmth and personal closeness of the “national revival.” Among the curious platitudes making the rounds and gaining ever more converts was the cry that one should not “stand off aside” but “join the ranks” as the nation blazed a new trail. No one could say where this trail might lead, but at least it was away from Weimar.

Such were the tactical and psychological ploys that Hitler used to accumulate power. Also instrumental were what Fritz Stern calls the “temptations” of National Socialism: promises of a national rebirth, revision of the Treaty of Versailles, and a strong state.⁶ All this was accompanied by Hitler’s sonorous evocations of tradition, Germany’s cultural roots, and its Christian values, each of which he repeatedly invoked in his rhetorical flights.

The Nazi movement was also surrounded by an aura of socialist ideas, which formed part of its appeal. Although the Weimar Repub­lic had broken sharply in many ways with the Reich of the kaisers, it had clung to the past more closely than it should have. The republic paid dearly throughout its short life for failing to enact a social revolu­tion in the wake of the postwar turmoil between 1918 and 1920 and for continuing to bear the legacies of the Germany of old. Many of the members of the conservative bourgeoisie also nursed unfulfilled desires for reform and a feeling that society desperately needed a thorough revamping. The vague but clearly radical program of the Nazis was interpreted as offering hope for the satisfaction of certain demands, such as greater social mobility, new economic opportuni­ties, and social justice. Like all other mass movements, the Nazi movement owed at least some of its dynamism and vigor to this wide­spread desire for change.

These aspects of the Nazi movement were widely noted, and they appealed to the sentimental socialism of the German people. Despite its enormous contrasts with the traditional left, the Nazi brand of socialism stemmed from the same social and intellectual crisis of the first half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, the Nazi movement was not rooted, as traditional socialism was, in the humanist tradition.

But it did aim to create an egalitarian society and a sense of fraternity among its members, to be achieved through what it called the Volksgemeinschaft, or community of the people. National Socialism rejected freedom, but the mood of the day placed more emphasis, in any case, on a sense of belonging and a place in the social order. The Nazis promised security and an improved standard of living, espe­cially for working people and the petty bourgeoisie. The results in­cluded housing projects, community work programs, and the “beauty of work” plan, as well as social welfare programs ranging from subsi­dies during the winter months and “Nazi welfare” to the leisure cruises for workers organized by the Kraft durch Freude (“Strength through Joy”) organization.

The Nazi brand of socialism was particularly attractive because of its appeal to nationalism. This, and virtually only this, was what concealed the real nature of the Nazi revolution, encouraging the mistaken but widespread view, at the time and later, that National Socialism was essentially a conservative movement. In reality it was egalitarian and destructive of traditional structures. However, in wrap­ping its radical core in a layer of German nationalism, it seemed not only to assert the long-neglected national interest, but also to meld the general desire for change with the equally strong need to preserve the familiar. People wanted a new, modernized Germany but they also feared it, and the cultivation of ritualistic Germanic theater, folklore, and local customs provided a comfortable setting for a radical break with the past. It was the combination of apparent conservatism with promises of change, the tempering of the one with the other, that brought National Socialism a level of popularity that Marxism’s inter­national socialism, with its adamant insistence on progress, could never achieve. Hitler’s appeal to Germany’s traditionally leftist work­ing class cannot be understood if these factors are ignored-as they so often have been-or dismissed as mere demagoguery.

Increasingly convinced of the hopelessness of any opposition and hard pressed by the persecution and prohibitions they faced, many opponents of the Nazis-especially those on the left-decided to leave Germany. In so doing, however, they were abandoning the workers to their fates, as Carlo Mierendorff, later one of the leaders of the resistance group known as the Kreisau Circle, pointed out at the time. “They can’t just all go to the Riviera,” he replied when concerned friends advised him to flee.⁷ Opponents of the Nazis who remained in Germany had only two options: they could attempt to influence the course of events from within the system, enduring all the illusions, self-deceptions, and unwelcome involvements that al­most inevitably accompany such a double life, or they could accept social exclusion and often personal isolation, turning their backs on the “miracle of a unifying Germany,” as the Nazis’ self-laudatory pro­paganda described the emerging sense of community and revival.

Many people who felt torn by this dilemma have described what it meant for them. Wilhelm Hoegner, the future prime minister of Ba­varia, recalled wandering through the streets of Munich feeling that all of a sudden they had become hostile and threatening.⁸ Helmuth von Moltke’s mother felt profoundly uprooted, as if she “no longer belonged to the country.”⁹ Others have spoken of losing old friends, of an atmosphere of suspicion, of spying neighbors and the rapid disintegration of their social lives even as the alleged brotherhood of all Germans was being celebrated in delirious parades and pseudo-religious services, mass swearings of oaths and vows under domes of light, addresses by the Führer, nightly bonfires on hills and moun­tains, secular chants and hymns. All this fervor was fueled by the intense sensation that history was in the making. For the first time since the rule of the kaisers, Germans seemed to be living in a coun­try which celebrated both leadership and political liturgy.

In the week leading up to the March 5 Reichstag elections, the Nazis pushed both national exaltation and unbridled violence to new heights. Goebbels proclaimed March 5 the “Day of the Awakening Nation” and orchestrated nationwide mass demonstrations and pa­rades, processions and carefully staged appearances. The brilliance and ubiquity of these events left the Nazis’ coalition partner, the German National People’s Party, completely overshadowed. Mean­while, the other parties were subjected to every kind of sabotage and disruption, while the police sat idly by in accordance with their in­structions. By election day fifty-one anti-Nazis lay dead and hundreds had been injured. The Nazis themselves counted eighteen dead. On the eve of the election Hitler appeared in the city of Königsberg. Just as he was ending his rapt appeal to the German people—“Hold thy head high and proud once more! Now thou art free once again, with the help of God”—a hymn could be heard swelling in the background, and the bells of the Königsberg cathedral pealed during the final stanza. Meanwhile, on the hills and mountains along Germany’s borders, “bonfires of freedom” were lit.

Nazi expectations of overwhelming victory at the polls and at least an absolute majority in the Reichstag were to be dashed, however. Despite all they had done to intimidate their opponents, the National Socialists increased their vote by only about six points, to 43.9 percent of the total. The other parties suffered only minor losses. Having failed to win an absolute majority, the Nazis were forced to continue relying on the German National People’s Party, together with whom they had a scant majority of 51.9 percent of the vote. Angered at the results, Hitler complained to his cronies on the evening of the elec­tion that he would never be free of that German National “gang” as long as Hindenburg was alive.¹⁰

As the election results showed, many Germans were still unwilling to embrace the Nazis and their new era-far more unwilling, indeed, than Nazi propagandists would admit. Many citizens reacted to the election with curiously mixed feelings: enthusiasm for the new regime alternated with anxiety; hope for more jobs gave way to renewed doubts; confusion was resolved by the sense of pride the Nazis so skillfully evoked. Occasionally, especially on the far left, entire street-fighting organizations such as the Communist Rotfrontkämpferbund switched sides, joining ranks with those who had been their bitter enemies only days before. On the right, many non-Nazi groups has­tened to “get in line” or even disband before being forced to do so. All this is well documented, but far less is known of the countless opponents of the regime who simply “disappeared” during the first weeks and months of Nazi rule. Police records show that by mid-October 1933 about twenty-six thousand people had been arrested, while many more vanished without legal formalities into the hastily constructed concentration camps that were spreading across the land. According to official figures, some three million people were incarcerated for political transgressions during the twelve years of Nazi rule; another statistic, however, shows that only 225,000 people were actu­ally brought to trial in political cases during the first six years.¹¹

Our picture of these years would not be complete without mention of how all established political formations, on both the left and the right, melted away without resistance. Nothing so reveals the exhaustion of the Weimar Republic as the pathetic end of its political parties and organizations. Even Hitler was astonished: “Such a miserable collapse would never have been thought possible,” he said in Dortmund in early July 1933.¹² Prohibitions, seizures of buildings, and confiscations of property that a short time before would have brought Germany to the verge of civil war now elicited only shrugs. A “Potsdam Day” ceremony on March 21, 1933, celebrated the inauguration of the new parliament with a review of troops, organ music, and gun salutes. Former chancellor Heinrich Brüning commented that when he joined a column of deputies headed for the garrison church, where the ceremony took place, he felt as if he were being taken “to the execution grounds.”¹³ There was more truth to this than he realized.

It could even be said that Brüning and his companions had sentenced themselves to their fate. They were not single-handedly responsible for the decline of the republic, even if they had hastened its demise through their weakness and blindness; the republic had had to face far too many opponents at home and abroad throughout its short life and was hardly blessed by good fortune. But the men who served it in high office were thoroughly lacking in judgment when they failed to recognize the extreme danger that Hitler posed to the German republic and to themselves and failed to take any measures of self-defense.

The Weimar leadership had been seeking to evade responsibility since 1930, with the SPD leading the way, attempting to recover its status as the “glorious opposition of old” while pointing ever more urgently to the mounting “threat to democracy.”¹⁴ In December 1932 Major General Kurt von Schleicher, who immediately preceded Hitler as chancellor, made a final stab at saving the republic, but that effort foundered, undermined by the cold indolence of the leaders who, while talking passionately of their commitment to democracy, abandoned the nation to its fate. Even after Hitler gained control of the “fortress,” as the republic was often called, they failed to recognize what was right before their eyes. When news arrived that Hitler had been named chancellor, Rudolf Breitscheid, the Social Demo­cratic leader in the Reichstag, clapped with joy that Hitler would now show himself for what he really was. He did, of course, and Breit­scheid met his end in Buchenwald. Julius Leber, who would become a leading figure in the resistance, commented disdainfully at the time that he, like everyone else, was looking forward finally to seeing “the intellectual foundations of this movement.”¹⁵

The miscalculations of those on the right, a result of arrogance and a lack of political instinct, were even more appalling. Their ideological affinities with the Nazis, their assumption of commonality on national issues, and their aversion to both democracy and Marxism led many to conclude that Hitler was just a radical version of themselves. The vast majority believed that conservative interests were safe in Hitler’s hands despite his distastefully rough, vulgar manner. In their conde­scending way, they assumed that they would soon be able to take this demagogue in hand and tame him. They confidently imagined they could restrict him to delivering speeches, staging Nazi circuses, and venting his “architectural spleen,” while they steered the ship of state. Although it should have been obvious to anyone who looked beneath the nationalistic, conservative surface, what the right failed to com­prehend was the revolutionary essence of Nazism, bent on destroying the traditional bonds, loyalties, and outmoded social structures that the right-wing parties were so eager to restore. Hitler was no mere rabble-rouser whose popularity conservatives could exploit to solve their old problem of being a self-appointed ruling class without a following. It would be some time before they understood this. By 1938 Hjalmar Schacht, whom Hitler had reappointed to his old posi­tion as president of the Reichsbank, was overheard commenting to a table companion, “My dear lady, we have fallen into the hands of criminals. How could I ever have imagined it!”¹⁶

Hitler’s right-wing coalition partners owed their sense of security to two factors: their “strongmen” in the cabinet-Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen and Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the German na­tionalists-and the army, which they envisioned would soon clamp down on the rowdyism and lawlessness that they saw as the only blemish on the Nazi revolution. The supreme commander of the armed forces was, after all, none other than that conservative stalwart President Paul von Hindenburg. The right-wing parties were cer­tainly not misguided in claiming him and the clout of his office as their own; they failed, however, to consider the frailty of the old man. He may still have cut a fine figure, but he was by this point little more than a majestic-looking marionette, easily manipulated by self-serving interests lurking in the background.

Hitler fully intended to take advantage of the weakness and tractability of the president, and success was not long in coming. Papen was inordinately proud of a concession he had obtained that stipulated he be present whenever Hitler met with Hindenburg. The president, however, soon informed Papen that this arrangement betrayed a dis­trust that his “dear young friend,” as he sometimes called Hitler, could not long be expected to endure. Hitler managed to get his way time after time in the selection of the cabinet by playing his conserva­tive coalition partners off against each other. On the afternoon of January 29, for instance, the day before he became chancellor, he let it be known in preliminary discussions that he would be prepared to accept as minister of defense the outgoing chancellor, his old and hated foe General Schleicher. But at literally the last minute, he abruptly changed course, managing with the help of Hindenburg and Papen to slip General Werner von Blomberg into the post. Impulsive in and easily influenced, Blomberg was given to flights of fancy, earning among his army comrades the nickname “the rubber lion.” Hitler went back on other agreements as well: he insisted, despite a previous understanding, that a Nazi be appointed Prussian minister of the interior; most importantly, he managed, once again with Papen’s help, to push Hugenberg into agreeing in principle to new elections on March 5, 1933, though Hugenberg remained extremely reluctant and was still resisting in the president’s antechamber until just before the swearing-in ceremony. All these steps were further moves toward disarming and quashing the conservative forces.

Even before the new government had taken power, the conservatives’ plan to “tame” Hitler had begun to look shaky. Papen was warned of this repeatedly but maintained that the doomsayers were in error: “You’re wrong,” the vice-chancellor stormed, “we have his solid commitment.” Papen even went so far as to boast that he would soon have Hitler backed so tightly into a corner that he would “squeak.”¹⁷ Instead, Papen was blindsided by the new chancellor, who toured the country making triumphant appearances, a performance that the vice-chancellor could hardly hope to match. Although Papen must have realized by this time that Hitler was not about to be tamed, he still failed to perceive that he had gotten himself into the untenable politi­cal position of opposing both the democratic, constitutional state and Hitler’s mounting autocracy. The haughty simplemindedness of the conservative members of the cabinet was on full display in their ea­gerness to see the constitution set aside, even though it was the foun­dation of their own power and security. They looked forward just as eagerly to the passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, which freed Hitler from the last remaining constraints of constitutional law and cleared the way for him to seize virtually unlimited power. By late June 1933 the German National People’s Party was forced to dissolve despite its insistence on its rights as a coalition partner in the “cabinet of national revival.” Its powerful leader, Alfred Hugenberg, was made to resign from the government by Hitler, in contravention of all the Führer’s earlier assurances.

The venerable Social Democratic Party met an equally pathetic end. “A signal will come,” the party’s leader, Otto Wels, had assured restless members who were eager to rise up against Hitler. As time passed, though, it became increasingly apparent that no one had any idea where the signal would come from and what it would mean.¹⁸ The SPD leadership had no ready response either to Hitler’s acces­sion to power or once he was in office, to his tactics. It was especially in the tactical arena that it utterly failed to match him. Some of the befuddled SPD leaders, still enmired in theories of class struggle, continued to see Hugenberg as the real foe and Hitler as a mere front man or “agent of the reaction.” The SPD leadership was inundated with demands that it organize resistance activities, but instead it sought to calm the waters by pointing to the guarantees in the constitution, though the constitution was clearly being disassembled. From January 30 on, the SPD issued repeated statements that it would not be the first to overstep the bounds of legality. This seemed to be a threat to fight fire with fire, but such hints were far too mild to make much of an impression on Hitler; indeed, they did not even move him to scorn. The chief effect of the statements was to demoralize the party rank and file, which could not help noticing the leadership’s lack of backbone and its readiness to capitulate. In February and March 1933 the first wave of resignations from party organizations began, presumably registering members’ fear, disappointment, or acceptance of the inevitable. In May many of the SPD’s local associations voluntarily disbanded, anticipating in their confusion and sense of isolation the ultimate dissolution and prohibition of the SPD itself on June 22.

The once mighty trade unions came to similar if not even more pitiful ends. As early as the end of February 1933, union leaders had already abandoned the SPD’s principled opposition to the regime in an attempt to preserve their “influence over the structuring of social life,” not to mention their union halls, hostels, and charitable institutions.¹⁹ In March they began signaling their allegiance to the new authorities and even issued declarations of loyalty despite the harass­ment and arrest of union leaders all across Germany. True to form, Hitler correctly perceived these attempts to appease him as signs of weakness. The reliability of his instincts was confirmed shortly there­after by the union leadership itself. When Hitler acceded to the old union demand, which had never been granted by the Weimar Repub­lic, to make May 1 a national workers’ holiday, union leaders sum­moned their members to participate in the official ceremonies, and the world was treated to the spectacle of unionized blue- and white-collar workers marching in parades beneath swastika flags and listening bitterly but with forced applause to the speeches of their triumphant foes. This humiliating experience did more than anything else to break the will to resist among millions of organized workers. Just one day later, on May 2, union halls were occupied, their prop­erty was confiscated, and union members were swallowed into the newly established Nazi workers’ organization, the German Labor Front.

The Communist Party, too, disappeared with barely a whimper, in an atmosphere of quiet terror, flight, and quick reversals of old alle­giance. Right up to the brink of Hitler’s “new age,” it had stood its ground as a powerful foe not only of the Nazis but of the entire established order. For years the Nazis had fed on fears that the Com­munist movement sowed among the middle classes and had wel­comed them as they fled its predictions of catastrophe. The image Hitler liked to project of himself as a savior was based largely on the great showdown that he sought with the Communists, and he saw the struggle to which he now dedicated all the powers of the state as only the prelude to a worldwide battle for supremacy.

But the Communist opponent, like other opponents, failed to materialize. Rosa Luxemburg’s famous question of 1918, “Where is the German proletariat?” once again went unanswered. Seemingly unimpressed by either the persecution and flight of its leading members or the mass desertions among the rank and file, which began immediately upon Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the Communist Party persisted in its dogmatic belief that its most dangerous enemy was the Social Democrats. Fascism and parliamentary democracy were viewed as the same at bottom, and Hitler only a puppet of powerful interests. A resolution passed by the executive committee of the Comintern on April 1, 1933, insisted in rigid, ideological fashion that Hitler would sooner or later open the gates to the dictatorship of the Communist Party. “We’re next,” was the steadfast Communist refrain of those weeks, as well as “Hitler regiert-aber der Kommunismus marshiert!” (“Hitler rules but Communism is on the march!”) The party still had not come to its senses by the summer of 1933, when it announced that it’s main task was to “train our fire more heavily than ever” on the Social Democrats.²⁰

The Communists paid dearly for their blindness. The party evaporated without any sign of defiance, act of resistance, or even parting message to its militants. Its officials were arrested and its subsidiary organizations crushed. Those members who escaped became fugi­tives. Some look to plotting in nameless conspiracies that were usually quite local in nature. It is true that many Communists sacrificed their lives resisting the Nazis long before military, church, or conservative circles got into the act. But the Communist Party itself was responsi­ble for the isolation in which its members found themselves and from which they never escaped; it was responsible as well as for the impotence of their “silent revolt,” which has faded, therefore, from memory.²¹ Over the years, Communist resistance cells occasionally approached other resistance groups, Social Democrats in particular, with offers to join forces, but the distrust sown between 1930 and 1934 never dissipated and these feelers were generally ignored. When one such offer was actually listened to and considered, it resulted in one of the most devastating setbacks in the history of the German resistance, as we shall see.

The crushing of left-wing parties and the trade unions left the working class without an organizational framework. Individuals who resolved to continue the struggle found themselves alone or in league with just a few close friends. Many working-class leaders were imprisoned. Others withdrew into their private lives and a few went underground. But most left Germany to live in exile, continuing to send messages home, encouraging and advising those who remained be­hind. It soon became clear, however, that very few of the former rank and file were still listening. The sharp decline in unemployment, the improving economy, and the social programs of the new regime had produced a sense of general well-being, even pride, among the work­ing class. Memories of their socialist days, especially given the disap­pointments toward the end, faded fast. The enormous self-confidence of the Nazis in their handling of labor is suggested by the release from concentration camps in 1937 and 1938 of three once popular labor leaders-Julius Leber, Carlo Mierendorff, and the last acting chairman of the General German Trade Union Federation, Wilhelm Leuschner.

Not only did the Social Democrats, Communists, and German Nationals accept their fate quietly, so did all other political parties, leagues, professional organizations, and civic associations, though they often had long, proud histories. The Protestant Church alone success­fully resisted Nazi co-optation, albeit at the price of constant disputes and schisms. It succeeded because the regime made the mistake of openly attacking it too soon, having assumed that it would fall easily into line because so many of its pastors leaned toward the German Nationals. The church rallied its forces and asserted its indepen­dence at a synod held in Barmen in May 1934. Barely two years later, however, Protestant unity broke down; the majority formed a purely religious wing and, motivated by the Lutheran tradition of deference to authority, sought an arrangement with the state, while the remainder continued the struggle, emphasizing their rejection of the totalitarian and neo-pagan proclivities of the regime. The central figure in this minority wing was Pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been a submarine captain in the First World War. Niemöller was arrested on July 1, 1937, and sentenced, after a show trial, to seven months’ imprisonment. At Hitler’s express orders, he was then rear-rested and incarcerated as a “personal prisoner of the Führer” in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until April 1945.

Relations between the Nazi regime and the Catholic Church developed in virtually reverse order. At first the church was quite hostile and its bishops energetically denounced the “false doctrines” of the Nazis. Its opposition weakened considerably, however, when, at Papen’s initiative, the Nazis undertook negotiations with the Vatican and successfully concluded a concordat on July 20, 1933. In the fol­lowing years, the chairman of the Conference of Bishops, Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, developed an ineffectual protest system that sat­isfied the demands of the other bishops without annoying the re­gime.²² Only gradually did the Catholic Church find its way back to a firmer brand of resistance in the efforts of individual clerics such as (Cardinal Preysing of Berlin, Bishop Galen of Münster, and Bishop Gröber of Freiburg, although even their work was attenuated by internal disputes and tactical disagreements. The regime retaliated with occasional arrests, the withdrawal of teaching privileges, and the seizure of church publishing houses and printing facilities.

Resistance within both churches therefore remained largely a matter of individual conscience. In general they attempted merely to assert their own rights and only rarely issued pastoral letters or declarations indicating any fundamental objection to Nazi ideology. More than any other institutions, however, the churches provided a forum in which individuals could distance themselves from the regime. Be­cause the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, or conformity to the party line and codes of behavior, encountered such forceful opposition from the churches, Hitler decided to postpone a showdown until after the war.

The various militant wings of the old parties, the independent youth organizations, and universities fared no better than the official political groups: they, too, were dissolved or co-opted without much sign of resistance. Any remaining assertions of autonomy were soon muted by countless qualms, attempts to appease the new ruling party, and timidity masquerading as respect for the law. The heavy-handed metaphors that the Nazis so loved-the images Goebbels concocted of storms sweeping Germany, of emptying hourglasses, of faces rising to meet the dawn-may not have been aesthetic triumphs but they hit their mark precisely. In just a few feverish weeks a highly hetero­geneous society with innumerable centers of power and influence, independent institutions, and autonomous bodies was reduced to “mere, uniform, obedient ashes.”²³ The Gleichschaltung process was completed on July 14, 1933, with a burst of new laws, the most important of which declared the National Socialist German Workers’ Party-the Nazis-to be the only legal political party.

There was that day no sense of break or rupture; it simply marked the legal end of the Weimar Republic. Feelings of regret were few. Peo­ple felt, often for very different reasons, that the republic had meant nothing or very little to them. There was even a sense of relief that it was finally all over. The republic, basic civil rights, the multiparty system, and democratic restraints on the exercise of political power were all firmly relegated to the past. Barely five months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, those days seemed very remote indeed. Robert Musil wrote at the time that he felt that “the things that were abolished did not really matter very much to people anymore.”²⁴ The future did not lie there, whatever direction it might take. Perhaps the future did indeed lie with Hitler’s new order, which as it expanded and gained converts suddenly seemed to have some rational argu­ments on its side as well.

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.²⁵ Some 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.”²⁶ Others 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.²⁷ They 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.”²⁸ In 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.”²⁹ The 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.