An Honourable Defeat (20 page)

A squad would arrive at a town or village and round up the people they sought, sometimes assisted by the local police. They would then take them to the outskirts, or to a nearby wood or open land. The victims would then be forced to dig a pit, which would become their grave after they had been shot.
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These atrocities sometimes took place under the very noses of the Regular Army, and not all senior officers did as Field Marshal Ernst Busch, who merely instructed his ADC to ‘draw the curtains’. For some, witnessing such horror was enough to make them withdraw their support for Nazism. And yet, in this ghastly world, one of the principal members of the police Resistance, Artur Nebe, was none the less obliged to take command of such a group for a period in order to maintain his Nazi credibility. He led Task Force B from June to November 1941 in Russia. Statistics for the four main groups between June 1941 and April 1942 are available:

Task Force A: 250,000 deaths

Task Force B: 70,000 deaths

Task Force C: 150,000 deaths

Task Force D: 90,000 deaths

Nebe himself always contended that he kept his killings down to a minimum and that, if anyone else had been in command, the rate would have been very much higher. The number he himself claimed to have been responsible for was 45,467. His colleague Otto Ohlendorf, commanding Task Force D between June 1941 and June 1942, suggested ingenuously at his own postwar trial that Nebe had exaggerated to Himmler even the relatively low figures that he gave, in order to draw credit upon himself. Nebe also claimed later to have tried to avoid the posting altogether, and get himself transferred to the International Police Commission, but that Beck and Oster persuaded him not to move away from his important position inside the RSHA (State Security Head Office, comprising the Security Service and the Gestapo) to which the police were attached. This may be true: we have seen what personal moral compromises Beck and Oster were prepared to make in pursuit of an ultimate good. But Nebe remains a shadowy figure whose usefulness to the State may even have equalled his service to the Resistance. He was the leading investigator in both the Fritsch and the Elser cases, and his first Gestapo assignment (as early as 1933) was to try to arrange the liquidation of Gregor Strasser. Few papers have been either left behind or yet discovered about him, and the one eyewitness account of him, a biography,
Where’s
Nebe
?, is by his close personal friend and associate, Hans Bernd Gisevius, who is not known for absolute accuracy or impartiality, who was for a time in the Gestapo himself and doubtless had to make compromises, and whose portrait of Claus von Stauffenberg is a masterpiece of character assassination.
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German historians I talked to remain unsure about Nebe but are inclined not to give him the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, after his arrest following the 20 July 1944 attempt, he endured two months of torture without giving anyone away before they executed him.

Blaskowitz’s protests against the atrocities in Poland were smothered by Keitel, but Groscurth had obtained a secret, detailed report from the general, which he used when on an official tour of inspection to the western commanders in mid-December 1939. Though they were outraged by what they heard, it was still not enough to sway them into action. Meanwhile, as the western offensive continued to be delayed, so the German Army grew stronger. The arms factories did not cease to produce the weapons of war, though among the population standards of living began to decrease and Führer worship had distinctly lost its edge.

The early part of 1940 saw the Resistance in the doldrums. Despite all their efforts, their emissaries abroad had made little progress and at home the generals were as intractable as ever. A typically German fatalism was engendered in some, a sense that Hitler was the country’s lot and had to be borne until destiny saw fit to remove him. At least there was comfort in the fact that, historically, no such reign of terror had lasted very long. Seven years had gone by since Germany had been plunged into dictatorship, and now a war of similar length seemed inevitable.

But such a prospect was intolerable to most. A visit by the American Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, was scheduled for the first week in March. This gave the Resistance a glimmer of hope. Perhaps even now American diplomatic intervention would bring a solution for peace.

It would be nice to believe that Sumner Welles’s visit was due at least in part to the efforts in America of the young Adam von Trott zu Solz, who had by now worked for several months tirelessly in the interests of the Resistance, but it is unlikely.
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He was the son of an old Hessian family so ancient that they had given their name — Trott — to the wood which grew near their castle of Solz. Adam was born in 1909 at nearby Imshausen, which he loved, and which was his home all of his short life. He came from a solid line of public servants, and had one American grandmother. He was very tall (six foot four), and his rapidly receding hairline made him look older than he was, but he was a handsome man and he had a smile which Christabel Bielenberg, wife of his best friend Peter, thought he should not be allowed to use on any unattached woman without accepting the consequences.

Trott grew up speaking all but fluent English and looked set to embark on a career in the family tradition of public service, but after taking his final university examinations in Germany he elected instead to go to Oxford, where he had spent a term in the late twenties and where he now returned as a Rhodes Scholar, going up to Balliol College in autumn 1931. Balliol was then still a powerhouse for British intellectuals, and Adam made many friends who were later to become either famous or influential. They became contacts in his work for the Resistance and some, like David Astor, who went on to be editor of the British Sunday newspaper the
Observer
, did not fail him. Three who did were the academics Maurice Bowra and A. L. Rowse, both of whom stabbed him in the back after hostilities had broken out, and the future politician Richard Grossman.

Trott was still at Oxford when Hitler seized power, news which affected him deeply, as David Astor remembered:

Trott’s first reaction, as I recall, was gloom, tempered by challenge. I remember a walk in the country when I told him that if he defied the Nazis they wouldn’t answer him with arguments. I tripped him up and pushed him to the ground to suggest what they would do...
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Trott returned to Germany at last in August 1933, breaking off his Rhodes Scholarship two-thirds of the way through, and after brief spells in Hamburg and Berlin settled back in Hessen, where he took up a career in public law. It quickly became clear to him that the process of law as he understood it was on the brink of fundamental disruption by the Nazis, and all his worst fears about them were confirmed. However his misgivings were balanced by his natural (and deep) patriotism, and he could accept the good qualities of Nazi social policy, especially as it affected the rural life which surrounded him:

Children were taught how to wash themselves and how to brush their teeth; parents were taught that milk was more wholesome for babies than beer; the peasants as a whole, who had been living on a diet of starch...were taught to grow vegetables which up to then had been enjoyed only in towns
.
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Although he did not join the Party, and remained true to his anti-Nazi stance, Trott bridled slightly at the anti-German posture taken by some of his British friends. This friction led to misunderstanding and in some cases alienation which would not help him in his missions to Britain on behalf of the Resistance, but which were perhaps insignificant against the backdrop of growing tension of the time. Meanwhile he continued with his work in the law, and prepared a selected critical edition of the works of Heinrich von Kleist, a famous German author who died in 1811. The edition got into some trouble with the authorities, as Trott had sought to use the angle of the selection and some of his commentary as covert criticism of the regime. Nevertheless the book was published, but not before Trott had moved to Berlin where he met, and was greatly influenced by, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a descendant of Heinrich von Kleist. He worked in the office of the lawyer Paul Leverkühn, who later became head of the Abwehr in Istanbul. Among others in Berlin, he met Hans von Dohnanyi, Klaus Bonhoeffer and Louis P. Lochner, the American head of the Associated Press Bureau in the capital.

Work, however, was not going well, and it is likely that Trott felt himself to be in limbo. He may also have felt stifled in Germany, and despite his new contacts and his antipathy to the regime, he had not yet fully committed himself to the Resistance. He had always been attracted by travel, and he still had one year of his Rhodes Scholarship to go. He decided to use it while he still had the opportunity, and elected to go to China, travelling via the USA and Canada, in 1937-38, taking a teaching post at Yenching University in Peking. It is possible that he may have considered staying abroad, though his future behaviour bears out that he was as fatally drawn to Germany and to fighting the enemy from within as Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In any event he returned late in 1938, having at least had the benefit of distance from which to view the problem of Hitler’s Germany, and to consider how he might serve his country without serving the present State.

Through a cousin, Hubertus von Weyrauch (who had introduced Ian Colvin to Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin), Adam von Trott zu Solz got to know Walter Hewel, an intimate of Hitler’s who now served as the dictator’s liaison officer with the Foreign Office. Hewel was pro-British and against war, and agreed to send Trott to Britain both to sound out his excellent British contacts and to prepare a confidential report for the Führer on the morale and general mood in England. At the same time, Trott strengthened his personal links with the German Foreign Office.

He made three trips to England in the spring and early summer of 1939, staying mainly at the Astors’ homes at Cliveden in Hampshire and St James’s Square, London. However, he was playing a dangerous double game, and not only from the German point of view. His visits, though made on his own initiative, had been organised with Hewel’s help, and looked at least semi-official. It was no wonder that his former friends looked on him askance, and his troubles were compounded by his inability to express the difference between his ambitions for his country and his association with the Third Reich. Nevertheless, on his return he was able to draw up a report (which was translated into Nazispeak for Hitler’s benefit by Trott with the help of Dohnanyi and his friend Peter Bielenberg) aimed at pretending to be positive while discomfiting the Führer. It presents Britain as determined to fight, confident of American solidarity, and totally opposed to the forcible annexation of neighbouring lands and the violation of neutrality.

The report had no effect on Hitler, but by the autumn Trott was engaged in a similar mission to America, under the auspices of attending a conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations at Virginia Beach. Here again he was well endowed with contacts. He knew the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian, from his Oxford days, and he had the backing and collaboration of the eminent German journalist Paul Scheffer and the former German Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, both now in exile. At first things went well. Scheffer wrote a memorandum, to be presented under Trott’s name, which took the form of a request to the Allies to outline clearly and publicly their war aims. Germany should not be made to feel unduly threatened, or the atmosphere for a successful coup could not be created; but if the country were made to feel that, after the collapse of Nazism, it would be accepted and made welcome as an equal in the commonwealth of nations, and not stigmatised as the eternal ne’er-do-well, then the Resistance would be able to go to work with confidence.

This document was presented to George Messersmith, the Assistant Secretary of State in the State Department. At first Messersmith was enthusiastic, and he certainly recommended Sumner Welles to read the memorandum. But then the old doubts began to appear: if Trott were permitted to leave and return to Germany freely, how far could he be trusted? FBI agents were set to tail him. Then Felix Frankfurter got hold of a copy of the memorandum. Frankfurter had also known Trott since Oxford, and had been warned by Maurice Bowra that he was not a man to be trusted. Frankfurter, a member of the Supreme Court and a Zionist, was not further endeared to Trott by the ‘sound but tactless advice’ he received from him that Jews should keep a low profile in anti-Nazi propaganda.
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By the time Trott left for Germany in January 1940, he had not quite mortgaged all trust — Messersmith told Alexander Kirk at the US Embassy in Berlin to keep channels to him open — but none of his missions can be regarded as successful, and Trott was aware of this himself. After America joined the war in 1941, he was regarded as a Nazi double agent by the US authorities. In Germany, he was looked upon with equal suspicion, and was not able to take a job in the Foreign Office until June 1940, despite all Weizsäcker’s efforts to get him on board. Once there, however, he was able to continue his Resistance activities unabated.

At the beginning of March 1940, Hitler presented a new proposition to the Armed Forces. This time he was to take complete control himself, however, and manage the operation through Overall High Command, ignoring Army High Command.

For some time he had been brooding about Stalin’s attack on Finland. It was very possible that the Allies might take aiding the Finns as a pretext for entering Norway. Once there, they could attack Germany from the north, and from there they could also hamper the supply route of Swedish iron-ore to Germany. On the other hand, if the Germans took it, the fjords could be used as naval bases. Denmark would provide air bases for the Luftwaffe, and provide a bridge to Norway, at the same time securing the Baltic.