An Honourable Defeat
Read An Honourable Defeat Online
Authors: Anton Gill
Tags: #History, #Military, #World War II, #World, #Jewish, #Holocaust
Copyright © Anton Gill 1994
The right of Anton Gill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1994 by William Heinemann Ltd.
This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
This book is dedicated to all those Germans who risked and gave their lives for the sake of humanity and freedom, because they would not accept the Nazi dictatorship, and to all those who resist dictatorship today.
Chapter One – The End of the Republic
Chapter Two – The Big Battalions
Chapter Three – A Fortress Strong
Chapter Six – The End of Germany
Chapter Seven – In the Shadows
Chapter Nine – Protest of Youth
Chapter Ten – Resistance in the East
Chapter Eleven – Breaking Point
Chapter Twelve – A Hero Enters Late
Only a few Germans resisted the Nazi regime. But what is Resistance? Is it participating in a plan to overthrow a government and kill its leader, is it writing ‘Down with Hitler’ — or whoever the leader might be — in chalk or paint on a wall, or is it everything between those two extremes? In Germany under Hitler’s regime, the penalty for the second offence, and less than that, was death. Under such circumstances, it is difficult to set a limit to what Resistance is. German historians are obsessed by the significance of the word, as well they might be in a country where those who conspired against Hitler are celebrated in street-names in liberal cities like Berlin, but ignored elsewhere. The biographer Wolfgang Venohr writes: ‘The chief conspirator of 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg, isn’t popular in his own country. Katarina Lazarova, a Slovak writer and anti-fascist fighter in those days, told me in an interview: “If he had been my countryman, we would have erected monuments to him, would have bound wreaths, written histories, poems, songs...”’
[1]
Several relatives of conspirators whose names are famous told me that to carry such a surname was a disadvantage in postwar Germany — a fact which bears out the conspirators’ fear at the time that by killing Hitler before the war was definitively lost they might create a myth around the monster, along the lines of: ‘If only Hitler had been spared we might have won the war after all.’ It is certain that at no stage could the conspirators, at whatever level they were working, count on the absolute support of the populace or even the Army. But we who have never lived in a police state, who can criticise the government in letters to the paper or on an open postcard to a friend, who can speak our minds freely on the telephone, can have no idea of what it is like to work against a regime whose hold on power depends on fear and informers, on mistrust and deception, on children reporting parents and parents denouncing children. We have not even had the experience of living in a country occupied by such a power — like France — and yet even there, where the patriotic and political issues were clear cut, where every Axis soldier was an enemy, only 2 per cent of the adult population were involved in the Resistance at any level.
In Germany, the issues were never clear cut. Unlike the First World War, there was no enthusiasm for the Second. Hitler ran the country into massive debt very quickly, and rejoicing at his solution of the unemployment problem was soon dampened by the straitened circumstances — both physical and ethical — under which the Nazis forced people to live. The depression of the late twenties and the thirties was universal, yet other countries resolved their material problems without becoming totalitarian states, and Germans were aware of this. But even those who resisted Hitler still had to live and work within German society. Those who had jobs in the Army, the Intelligence Service and the Foreign Office had to do their duty as Germans at the same time as they obeyed their consciences by working against the evil government. They had to remind themselves that by betraying that government they were not betraying their country. They had to accept that defeat was necessary and desirable for Germany — a
sine
qua
non
of its moral rebirth. But it was hard to accept. At the same time, they had to work under the enormous pressure of the fear of denunciation, and to cope for years with a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence. These pressures became greater according to the degree of responsibility, executive power and, therefore, effectiveness, of the conspirator; and the Resistance to Hitler necessarily took the form of a revolution from above. The Nazis were quick to stamp out or drive into exile their most powerful political opponents, and the political underground lacked the means of expressing itself other than through pamphleteering and limited acts of sabotage. The Army, with its strongly forged infrastructure and its practical power, was the only organisation with the potential capacity to overthrow the government. But the Army was managed traditionally by the ruling class.
Hitler found his fatal moment in German history. Germany was — and still is — a very young democracy. It was only united as a federation of states in 1871, and military and monarchist traditions survived well after the defeat of 1918 and the departure of the Kaiser. The Weimar Republic’s first politicians led the world in democratic principles but never developed enough stability of government for the Republic itself to survive. They were constantly attacked by conservative and popular elements for having ‘stabbed the Army in the back’ by surrendering (in fact it was the Army that surrendered), and for signing the Treaty of Versailles. The Treaty, designed to have the maximum humbling effect on Germany, demanded considerable loss of territory, the establishment of a Polish corridor to the Baltic coast which separated East Prussia from the body of the Fatherland, and required the Germans to have a standing army of no more than 100,000 men. The Imperial Army never got over this humiliation, and those who survived within it were no friends of the civilian Social Democrats who had taken power in 1919. Never mind that Germany had imposed far harsher terms on Russia by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, rearmament and the re-establishment of Germany as the central and leading power of Europe were at the forefront of conservative German minds. They looked back to Bismarck with nostalgia, and the succession of tottering coalitions which governed them between 1919 and 1933 gave them no reason to feel optimistic.
Nevertheless, it was from within the Army that the main Resistance to Hitler came, as a handful of determined officers perceived the evil towards which the Führer was leading the country. The German Air Force was a new service and more or less entirely a Nazi creation, though a word should be said in favour of Colonel-General Ernst Udet, a First World War ace and the Luftwaffe’s administrative chief. Never a Nazi, he was forced to commit suicide in 1941, after it had been established that the Air Force could not maintain a war on multiple fronts, and that warplane production for such a fight was impossible. Udet became the scapegoat, carrying the blame for Göring’s mismanagement.
[2]
The Navy, which had been the great revolutionary force at the end of the First World War, provided only a handful of men to the Resistance, and its commanders, first Raeder and later Dönitz, were completely loyal to Hitler. In any case, the problems posed by trying to present a unified front against Hitler were great enough in the Army; they would have been impossible to overcome in a service whose forces were spread across the world.
As Hitler imposed his own ideas of command on the Armed Forces, the department known as Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW) — Overall High Command of the Armed Forces — came into being. Under it were the three High Command Offices of the Army, Navy and Air Force — the OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), the OKM (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine) and the OKL (Oberkommando der Luftwaffe). Only the first of these plays a significant part in this story. Within it were the Army General Staff Office, concerned with operations, intelligence, administration and so on; and the Allgemeines Heeresamt (AHA) — the General Army Office, concerned with supplies, publications and budgets. From the ranks of these two offices, whose members, crucially, had no direct command of troops, the majority of the members of the military Resistance came.
[3]
The two other official organisations which were of central importance to the Resistance were the Foreign Office and the Abwehr. Nazi administration was extraordinarily complicated — it seemed to grow organically, almost whimsically, reflecting the various individual ambitions and intrigues of the leaders — Himmler, Heydrich, Göring and Goebbels. At the centre of the web sat Hitler, using his demonic criminal genius to divide and rule. Thus it was that the foreign minister, Ribbentrop, established his own office, ‘the Ribbentrop Bureau’, which was run independently of the Foreign Office under its Secretary of State, Ernst von Weizsäcker, a courageous man who fought the Party from within, and under whose aegis contacts abroad were maintained and developed.
The Abwehr was made up of several departments dealing with military intelligence and counter-espionage, among other duties. It reported to the OKW and was responsible for liaison between the OKW and the Foreign Office. It was not a Party organisation, and until spring 1943 and even for some time thereafter it was a vital centre of Resistance.
Towards the end of the war, the Abwehr was integrated into the vast secret intelligence and police organisation called the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) — the Chief Office of State Security, among whose many branches (there were seven departments comprising 180 sub-departments) were the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) — the Security Service — and its most notorious executive arm, the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) — the Secret State Police. The other main organ of the Nazi terror system was the SS, Hitler’s ‘private army’, led by Himmler.
This in turn had two main divisions: the Waffen SS, or fighting units; and the Totenkopfverbände — the Death’s Head Brigades, which ran the concentration camps.
These then were the principal battle lines for one of the most difficult and dangerous struggles in modern history. However, the validity and even the existence of the Resistance have been disputed. Bad luck dogged the conspirators’ attempts to remove Hitler, and on three occasions nothing but a perverse Fate saved his life. For a variety of reasons, some inexcusable but others perfectly understandable, the Allies refused to help them. As the war dragged on they became increasingly isolated, and at the end they knew that they would fail — if not to kill Hitler, then to destroy his regime and thereby save Germany and Germany’s honour. But for the sake of that honour they persisted.
In reading their history it is important to understand the conspirators and their political aspirations in the context of their period. Few of them survived their failure; if they had, they would have seen a postwar world and a postwar Germany quite different from the one they had imagined and planned. But the wheel has turned again since 1945. Germany is reunified and powerful; Europe is unstable and in economic disarray; nationalism has raised its head once more. Humanity never learns the lessons of history, and so perhaps the conspirators’ ideas are not as remote as all that. I think Schopenhauer has written truly: ‘However much the plays and the masks on the world’s stage may change, it is always the same actors who appear. We sit together and talk and grow excited, and our eyes glitter and our voices grow shriller: just so did
others
sit and talk a thousand years ago: it was the same thing, and it was the
same
people
: and it will be just so a thousand years hence. The contrivance which prevents us from perceiving this is
time
.’
[4]