An Honourable Defeat (11 page)

But there was another much simpler reason why Fritsch’s fate had been eclipsed. With the inspired timing of his prewar years, Hitler had chosen 12 March 1938 to annex Austria.

This was a move which had long been on the agenda. In 1936, only two years after his predecessor had been bloodily murdered by Nazis in an abortive coup, the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, signed an agreement of friendly co-operation with Hitler. In one sense this was temporising, for there were only seven million Austrians as opposed to sixty-six million Germans. To strengthen his position, Schuschnigg also created ties with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Romania, but this move infuriated Hitler, who ordered a Nazi putsch in January 1938. It came too soon, and misfired, but a month later Hitler forced Schuschnigg to appoint the Austrian Nazi leader, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, to his government as Minister of Public Security. The Austrian Chancellor could see what was coming and tried to organise a referendum for 13 March on the subject of Austrian independence. However Hitler pre-empted this by getting the Nazis in Austria to stir up trouble, upon which Seyss-Inquart asked the Germans to step in to restore order. Hitler followed up this manoeuvre immediately with a visit to Braunau, his birthplace, where he stood by his parents’ graves. The Austrians greeted the ‘Anschluss’ rapturously. Subsequently 75 per cent of the SS would be drawn from this country.

Hitler had scored another triumph. No one abroad objected — there were even statements of approval in the British press, and no one bothered about the reservations Czechoslovakia might have had. At home, few, even among those opposed to Hitler, really took exception to this unification of the German-speaking peoples. The question of legality, and the fact that Schuschnigg was thrown into Dachau concentration camp, were matters to be glossed over. But Hitler was showing that he meant to do as he said. His position was becoming as entrenched as his determination. Those close to the centre of power saw that, unless action was taken soon, a disastrous war could not be averted. And now, finally, the forces of Resistance began to crystallise.

Chapter Five – Annus Fatalis

The leader of the civilian Resistance was Carl Goerdeler. He was born in 1884 in Schneidemühl in north-eastern Germany (the town is now in Poland and is called Pila — it lies just to the west of Bydgoczsz). The son of a dynasty of professional local government officials and civil servants, and a lifelong conservative, he followed in the family tradition and became deputy mayor of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia) and subsequently mayor of Leipzig. An economist, he served as Price Commissioner to the government in 1931, and was reappointed to this post by Hitler in 1934. He was, however, against self-sufficiency and massive rearmament. His biographer and friend Gerhard Ritter points out the crucial difference between him and Hitler:

In his general political theory Goerdeler undeniably tended to authoritarianism; he mistrusted parliamentary government as understood by the western democracies, and in cultural matters he took a frankly conservative position, as was customary in the German Nationalist Party (of which he was a member). But the authority of the national government which he wished to strengthen was to depend not on brute force but on general confidence; it was to be strictly bound by law — though able, to be sure, to carry out unpopular measures required by the higher interests of the state
.
[34]

Thus Goerdeler was first a supporter of Hitler and later a fierce opponent.

He had become mayor of Leipzig in 1930. From the first his open, optimistic and sometimes almost overbearingly charismatic character boosted his political and national status. He was even in the running for Chancellor during the last days of Weimar, despite his support of unpopular ‘squeeze’ techniques to control the economy. Goerdeler was no friend of the Weimar Republic, whose extremely liberal constitution had made effective rule almost impossible. In the early days of Hitler’s regime, the dictator was quite amenable to Goerdeler’s political ideas, and Goerdeler played a leading role in the formulation of the new uniform code for local government which became law on 30 January 1935. In the early days Hitler promised him ‘anything he might ask, and even placed his private aeroplane at his disposal’. It is interesting that Goerdeler accepted the post of Price Commissioner in November 1934 — well after the dictator had shown his true nature in no uncertain terms. But Goerdeler had sought advice from high Army circles, doubtless discussing the move with Kurt von Hammerstein, if not with Blomberg, before accepting the appointment, which lasted until his resignation the following April. Goerdeler had held the same post under Chancellor Brüning in 1932, and perhaps his decision to take it up again is best explained by what Gerhard Ritter has described as ‘his unbounded energy, his insensitivity to the demonic powers of evil, and his optimistic belief in his own capacity to do good by talking sensibly to people’.

Goerdeler was never a fellow-traveller, and he left as soon as he saw that he could not use his position to influence the Führer for good. His subsequent criticism of the regime from outside (like Beck, Goerdeler was a compulsive and prolific writer) irritated Hitler. Goerdeler had also declined to join the Party, and while his position as mayor was reconfirmed for another twelve years when his first term of office expired in 1936, it was clear that tensions were such between him and the official line that he would be lucky to last another twelve months.

Matters came to a head late in 1936. By now he was not only out of national office, but, Göring having taken over control of the country’s short-term economic affairs in a Four Year Plan, the knives were out for him.

During that year he travelled in Scandinavia, and in Sweden first made the acquaintance of the banker Jakob Wallenberg
[35]
whose friendship would stand him in such good stead later. In November he was in Helsinki, to give a lecture to the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce. During his absence the Nazis struck.

Goerdeler had been a consistent opponent of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic laws — there is a well-known story of his deliberately visiting his regular Jewish tobacconist on Boycott Day — and he had long withstood pressure from the local Leipzig Nazis to remove a statue of Felix Mendelssohn
[36]
from outside the Gewandhaus Concert Hall. On his return from Finland he found that his Nazi deputy had had the statue taken down. Goerdeler told this man — Haake — that, in view of his having gone against precise orders, either the statue would be replaced or he, Goerdeler, would resign.

Goerdeler was hugely popular in Leipzig, but that did not save him. His resignation duly went in and was accepted. The Nazis gained nothing by it, except perhaps proving once again that the German masses were eminently coercible. The mayor’s duties ceased at the end of March 1937, but he did not lose out materially. He was able to retain his official pension, and he was immediately offered a job as an economic adviser — in reality an honorary post — by the elderly liberal industrialist and opponent of Hitler, Robert Bosch of Stuttgart.

Bosch was a vigorous white-bearded man. A Swabian democrat, he was a bitter personal enemy of Hitler on account of the Führer’s politics, and he was always an active opponent of the regime. He helped Jews and theology students to escape persecution, and was allied with Bishop Theophil Wurm. He also supported Rudolf Pechel’s opposition magazine
Deutsche
Rundschau
. Bosch was protected from the Nazis by his standing, age (he was seventy-two when they first came to power), industrial clout and wealth. Goerdeler became financial adviser to the Bosch company as well as its representative to the Berlin authorities. It was at this time that he met Hans Bernd Gisevius in Berlin, the Resistance lawyer with whom he was to form a strong bond of comradeship. Bosch was immensely generous in financing the opposition, mainly from his private fortune, and even during the war he put his foreign connections at the service of the Resistance. He stood in contrast to Goerdeler, the Prussian conservative, but their alliance was another example of men of differing legitimate political views joining together against a common brutal enemy which threatened them both.

This splendid man also provided Goerdeler with the means to fund his own anti-Nazi activities, but he was not the only one to offer help. Friedrich Krupp,
[37]
one of the Ruhr industrial dynasty, who by now had realised what a fatal error he had made in backing Hitler, had offered Goerdeler a job if needed as early as 1935, but now, since Hitler signalled distinct disapproval, he transmuted the job offer into an ex gratia payment large enough to cover any travel expenses Goerdeler might have, and indeed the former mayor was soon to embark on an energetic series of journeys abroad warning anyone who would listen of the dangers of Hitler’s foreign policy. There remained the problem of acquiring a passport, but help came from the (at first sight) unlikely source of Göring. Göring was in fact and as usual hedging his own bets, so there was never any question of Goerdeler’s collaborating with Göring against Hitler.

Goerdeler visited London in July 1937, following a journey to Belgium. From London he went to Holland, and then to France, Canada and the United States. He was in Paris in December. He returned to London the following March to lecture, and was in France later that spring. Then, as pressure mounted towards the end of 1938 — the most fateful year in the history of the Third Reich — he visited Switzerland, Italy, Romania (whose oil supply Hitler coveted and subsequently got), Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. He travelled to France and Algeria, in spring 1939, and in the early summer visited Britain, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Switzerland.

From each country long reports on the impressions gained were sent to Krupp, Bosch, Göring and Schacht [Hjalmar Schacht was Minister of Economics until 1937 and president of the State Bank (Reichsbank) until 1939 — he had joined the Resistance by the outbreak of war] and also to generals von Fritsch, Beck, Halder [Beck’s successor as Chief of Staff in 1938] and Georg Thomas [Head of Army Economics Section and involved in the conspiracy] with whom he had long been in touch. At first the reports even went to the Reich Chancellery where Hitler’s secretary, Captain Wiedemann, received them and promised to pass them on. Their purport was that peace depended mainly on the attitude of the German government. There were no signs of offensive action on the part of other countries; indeed the western democracies were ready for an economic and political understanding. There did however exist very definite limits of tolerance to German claims and plans of expansion. If these limits were overpassed, the danger to Germany could be fatal. His political impressions were buttressed by solid economic arguments
.
[38]

Unfortunately, by marching into Austria, Hitler undermined any good Goerdeler might have done the cause of peace. None the less Goerdeler’s own political and territorial ambitions for Germany were not so terribly far from Hitler’s. His bald statement of them to the Allies did not help the case of the Resistance either. One of the features of the conservative Resistance was its inability to grasp how little bargaining leeway Germany had until very late in the day; even in 1944 Stauffenberg was hoping that a peace could be agreed by which Germany retained Austria, the Sudetenland and German Poland, and Goerdeler would have concurred. One should also bear in mind the naivety of the Resistance members; especially in the early days. Oster was indiscreet. Goerdeler, unlike most of his fellows, would think nothing of visiting Beck (to the latter’s horror) openly and in broad daylight at his home, when both were subject to security surveillance. Both Beck and Goerdeler committed their thoughts to paper extensively, and kept all their documents. Oster’s aide Dohnanyi compiled a huge dossier on Nazi crimes, intended to be used in trials against them after the fall of the regime. Ulrich von Hassell kept a copious diary in which the names of the conspirators were only very thinly disguised. Oster’s code name, for example, was
Hase
. In German,
Ostern
means Easter, and
Hase
a hare. The
Osterhase
is our Easter bunny!

Goerdeler was kept under observation by the Gestapo, but had enough powerful protectors to keep one step ahead of them until the very end. Thus, although representing conservative views, his role in the Resistance was not paradoxical. It was a different case with the more extreme right-wingers, such as Johannes Popitz. Popitz, by virtue of his position as Prussian Finance Minister, belonged to the higher echelons of the National Socialist State. He also held the Party Golden Badge — awarded to the first 100,000 members of the NSDAP. Like Beck’s, his conversion to the anti-Nazi camp was a gradual one, and even when it had been completed he preferred to remain within the system in order to fight it, though he offered his resignation to Göring after the infamous national night of attacks against the Jews in November 1938 — the so-called
Kristallnacht
. He was an early helper of those Social Democrat colleagues who were now forced to become fugitives.

It was through Goerdeler and Hans Oster that Popitz found an entrée to the civilian Resistance, and he became a supporter of all the plans for a coup. Closely associated with him was Professor Jens Jessen, a right-wing economist who had also been attracted to the Nazis at the outset. Jessen was a member of the Wednesday Club, as were Popitz, Ludwig Beck and Ulrich von Hassell, the Ambassador to Italy. The four men were involved in drafting early plans for the constitution of a new, albeit authoritarian, post-Nazi state.

By mid-1943, after the débâcle of Stalingrad, when only the most fanatical Nazis saw any hope of the war’s still being won, Popitz, disillusioned at last by the failure of the Resistance to remove Hitler by direct means, decided on a plan of his own, operating from within. He was on good terms with Carl Langbehn, a lawyer who had been engaged in opposition work for Hassell and who was also close to Himmler. Through Langbehn, Popitz learnt just how much Himmler already knew about Resistance movements. Himmler had been putting out peace feelers of his own, unknown to Hitler, and had stayed his hand where the Resistance was concerned as part of his plan to remove Hitler if and when it became necessary and save his own skin by assuming power and negotiating a peace with the enemy. In view of this, Popitz had Langbehn arrange a meeting with Himmler for 26 August 1943. This took place, and although Himmler was reserved, future meetings on the delicate subject were not ruled out.

But Germany in the late summer of 1943 was a place where spies spied on spies, where everyone in any position of power had to watch his back, and where the stability of the government depended increasingly on the spread of personal insecurity. The secret scheme became known to the Security Service, from which even Himmler, its controller, was not immune. Langbehn was arrested and sent to the concentration camps. Himmler was able to distance himself from the plot, but Popitz, though left alone for the moment, knew that he was a marked man. Finally arrested in November 1944, he was executed at Plötzensee at the end of that month.

Popitz was working in relative isolation. Ernst von Weizsäcker, another leading Resistance figure who worked as a principal servant of the Nazi State, was, like Admiral Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr, responsible for a team of conspirators. After Hitler had appointed Joachim Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister in 1937, Weizsäcker was given the post of State Secretary to the Foreign Office. He was never a sympathiser with the regime, but like Popitz he believed that it was better to work against it from within and try to limit its evils than to tackle it from the outside. His most important contribution, similar to that of Canaris, was to provide a ‘safe area’ in which conspirators could operate, but the latter’s work was of greater significance than his.