An Honourable Defeat (22 page)

Returning by train from Warsaw to Berlin at the end of his first tour of duty to the camps, he fell in with Baron von Otter, the thirty-five-year-old secretary to the Swedish Legation, and told him the whole story of what he had seen, begging him to report it to the Swedish Government and to the Allies. Von Otter was sceptical: Gerstein had no proof, no photographs, and he was wearing the uniform of an SS Obersturmführer (lieutenant). For a referee, Gerstein gave him the name of Otto Dibelius, a leading cleric in Berlin who was closely associated with the Confessing Church. Von Otter duly made a report to his government, but it was suppressed because the Swedes did not want to damage their trade relations with Germany.

Gerstein did not stop at von Otter. He was convinced that once the German people knew what was going on, and especially where the clothes handed out to the poor as part of Hitler’s annual Winter Aid campaigns came from, they would spontaneously rise against their Nazi masters, but it was to no avail. He could not even get a rumour started. Nor did an approach to Diego Cesare Orsenigo, the pro-Nazi Papal Nuncio, meet with any more success. Nevertheless he continued, doggedly, obsessed with what he had seen. Confidence in a British reaction to the news relayed via von Otter faded: Gerstein had hoped the RAF might drop leaflets over Germany. By the end of 1942 the Allies certainly knew from other sources of the existence of the camps and their purpose, but did nothing.

Gerstein, who with his clean-cut features looked the model SS man, even acted the part. His camouflage was almost too good. To observers at Auschwitz he appeared ‘brutal’, and ‘a very typical SS officer’. Under the surface, he was falling apart. The stress of the double game, common to all the conspirators, was telling on him, but he had to bear it alone, and bear it he did, still telling anyone he thought he could trust, and who might be able to relay the information abroad, about what he was seeing every day in the camps. His consistent failure never deterred him; this was a mission he was locked into. From 1943 to 1944, the height of its operational period, he was in charge of deliveries of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz from the German pest control company which manufactured it.
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He continued his efforts at sabotage, but in the end his position made it impossible for him not to aid the system. As a lieutenant, he could not even dent the massive machinery of death, as the horrific statistics of the camps show.

By the winter of 1944-45 he was desperately ill — but by then the work of the camps had been done. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were dismantled that winter and the camp evacuated in January.

March 1945 found Gerstein with his family in Tübingen, a pretty university town south of Stuttgart. He managed to surrender to the French a month later, who treated him well until he came under suspicion of complicity in the Final Solution and was transferred to Cherche-Midi, where he was kept in conditions of harshness and squalor for which the French prison system at its worst was notorious.

After his death he was condemned by the Tübingen Denazification Court in 1950, not so much for his complicity as for his inability to have effected a better Resistance. He was not rehabilitated until 1965.

*

While Gerstein was fighting his lonely and doubtful battle, much of the time of other larger groups of the Resistance during the war was spent in discussion, and of planning for the future when the war (as most Resistance leaders realised) would be lost and the time came to rebuild Germany. Such planning served a dual purpose: Germans are great theorisers, and this was the time when many intellectuals started to develop their constitutional plans for the new state which would emerge. The planning was also therapeutic, a means of escape from the awfulness of having to accept that Hitler, despite every effort, had succeeded in every one of his aims, and was now more firmly in the saddle than ever. He had not, after all, lost popular support and, for those who disagreed with him, the growing number of concentration camps waited. At the same time the efficiency and scope of the various police forces in the service of the state grew.

One way in which the Resistance could still operate practically was through its unceasing contacts abroad. The group within the Foreign Office was still able to travel to neutral countries; Gisevius was in place in Zurich, where Canaris had organised a position in the consulate for him. The other group in a position either to facilitate foreign travel or act as couriers was that inside Lufthansa. Dr Otto John was a lawyer who worked as a legal adviser to the company, and he was in close association with the head lawyer, Klaus Bonhoeffer, brother of Dietrich.

Klaus Bonhoeffer was quite unlike his brothers and sisters. He was physically much darker, more south European in his looks. His godson Klaus, the son of Hans von Dohnanyi, remembers him as a ‘jovial man, who loved the Mediterranean, and was full of life’. His passion was travelling, and he visited all the countries of Europe; but his favourite place was France. Its language and its culture were spiritually his own.

He was against Hitler from the very beginning, pointing out that such tyrannies as his should be nipped in the bud, but the setbacks of the Resistance did not shake him. Above all he was in a unique position as a middleman between his brother-in-law Dohnanyi in the Abwehr, his brother Dietrich in the Confessing Church, and the Lufthansa group.

To close the family circle, Otto John’s brother Hans worked for Dr Rüdiger Schleicher, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Aviation, and head of the Institute for Aeronautical Law at Berlin University. Schleicher was another of the Bonhoeffers’ brothers-in-law. Otto John had worked with the group around Canaris and Oster in the Abwehr since before the war, and went on two missions to Madrid in the course of 1943 to establish contact with the Americans. One of these concerned another colleague at Lufthansa, Prince Louis Ferdinand.

Prince Louis Ferdinand was the second son of Crown Prince Wilhelm, and a grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who died in 1941 at Doorn, near Arnhem in Holland, where he had spent most of his years in exile following his flight from Germany in 1918. There were various monarchist Resistance groups, including one in the south which proposed to put one of the Bavarian Wittelsbach kings back on the throne, but the most serious contenders for the role of constitutional monarch in a resurrected, post-Nazi Germany came from the old and dominant Royal Family of the Hohenzollerns. Early on, a group within the Resistance made up of Oster, his associate Friedrich Heinz, the deputy police chief Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, and, for a time at least, Goerdeler, had considered the idea of replacing the National Socialist regime with a constitutional monarchy along British lines. However it is likely that they would have adopted the more democratic system of proportional representation, despite the difficulties this had created for the Weimar Republic, rather than the ‘first past the post’ system used in Britain, whereby a Party can form a government without the mandate of the majority of the people.

At first their choice fell on Prince Wilhelm, the older son of Crown Prince Wilhelm. He seemed to have every noble quality, but he was also — which was an advantage — unadventurous, and lacked personal ambition. Equally, he was modern in his outlook, and a supporter of democracy. Unfortunately, Prince Wilhelm lost hope of a restoration of the monarchy after war had broken out. He was killed on active service in France on 26 May 1940, and his heroic death made such an impression on the public that 50,000 people attended his funeral in Potsdam. Such popularity raised the hopes of the Resistance, but at the same time it so terrified Hitler that he forbade any member of any of the old reigning houses to serve in the Armed Forces from then on.

Beck was the most respected leading member of the Resistance, and his name had been written down as the potential President of a new democratic republic in which Goerdeler would be Chancellor; but neither man had popular appeal. After the death of Prince Wilhelm, the thoughts of the Resistance turned to his younger brother.

Louis Ferdinand, like Wilhelm, had excellent credentials: he had been brought into the Resistance at the age of thirty in 1937 by Otto John, in whose department at Lufthansa he worked, and whose protégé he was. He had contact with Dohnanyi and the Bonhoeffers, but also with Kurt von Hammerstein, Goerdeler, the Catholic Resistance conspirators Josef Wirmer, a lawyer; Jakob Kaiser, of the Catholic Trade Union Movement; and Justus Delbrück, the brother of Karl Bonhoeffer’s wife Emmi and another Resistance worker in the Abwehr. Louis Ferdinand was also a progressive liberal, and had strong connections in the USA where he had worked for Ford in Detroit for five years. Personal opinions of him are hard to pin down. Goerdeler’s biographer Gerhard Ritter speaks coolly of ‘a man to whom life seems in the main a kind of sport’, but others are much more generous. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, one of the earliest chroniclers of the Resistance, who had the opportunity to interview many of the surviving participants soon after the war, positively glows in his praise.

He certainly had qualities to bind the various disparate elements of the Resistance together, from progressive liberals and left-wingers to young aristocrats, conservative senior officers and older politicians. But, alas, this was to prove another blind alley. When Louis Ferdinand asked his father’s permission to be put forward as potential head of state, and his father refused it, the young man acquiesced to his wish. It was 1943 by then. All was clearly lost. There was nothing more for it but a long slog to the end, and many Germans, not least in the ranks of the Resistance, were becoming fatalistic.

Among the Catholic conservatives in the Abwehr who supported Louis Ferdinand was Karl Ludwig Freiherr von and zu Guttenberg. Guttenberg’s contribution to the Resistance was the production of a literary magazine,
White
Pages
, which survived from 1934 until 1943.

The purpose of
White
Pages
was to keep the human spirit of the Resistance going, to remind people that there was another Germany — the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Hegel and Schopenhauer, of Bach and Beethoven. Contributors were all critical of the regime, but in their articles, especially those which dealt with elements of German history, they were able to give vent to their criticism without fear of trouble from the Gestapo. This was not a unique idea — several academics had escaped into their work in this way, producing papers so erudite that they went right over the Nazi censors’ heads. There was an anti-Nazi group of philosophers in Frankfurt which was left alone throughout the war for this reason. Not that all Nazis were stupid, but at the street level of policing they left much to desire. There is one story of a Gestapo raid on an academic’s house: during it, one of the policemen noticed a book on archaeology lying on a table. Picking up only the ‘arch’ part of the word, he bellowed: ‘Ah! So you’re an anarchist too!’ Nazi rule was yob rule.

White
Pages
appeared as a monthly subscription magazine (the list of its subscribers was destroyed by the Gestapo after 20 July 1944), and during its life Guttenberg not only ensured that no reference to National Socialism ever appeared in it, but that it pushed anti-Nazi opinion to the limit without openly expressing it. This it did in what appear to be delicate, but were in fact very brave, ways. For example, in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ section, published letters were not signed off with the prescribed ‘Heil Hitler’, but with ‘Yours faithfully’ or ‘Yours sincerely’. Such things were more than enough to lead to difficulties with the printer, but Guttenberg could charm the birds from the trees.

Contributors included Ulrich von Hassell and Klaus Bonhoeffer. For a young officer like Axel von dem Bussche, who was later to make his own bomb attempt on Hitler, the magazine was a turning point. He was introduced to it by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. Beck and Goerdeler were on the consultative board of the magazine, whose meetings served as cover for conspiratorial discussions. Guttenberg himself never contributed a line, though he was an intelligent young aristocrat with a great interest in journalism. His real strength was the spoken word, and his flair was for creating contacts, many of which grew from the seeds of university friendships. In his own close circle were Nikolaus von Halem and Herbert Mumm von Schwarzenstein, who were to be involved with Beppo Römer in their own misguided attempt on Hitler’s life.

With the outbreak of the Second World War,
White
Pages
became a quarterly, to conform (as did all other magazines) with paper rationing. This restriction however was a help, since the editorial staff were being reduced by conscription anyway. Guttenberg himself was recruited into the Abwehr by Canaris in 1940, and from there continued to use his network of contacts in the service of the Resistance. He was especially close to the group around Goerdeler and Beck. But he continued to run
White
Pages
, which closed in January 1943 only because of the acute paper shortage in Germany. When it did so, the wave of letters he received was a tribute to his achievement. All the magazine’s readers felt themselves bereft, and much lonelier in the Nazi world without it. It was a loneliness Guttenberg himself was soon to feel. Oster temporarily posted him to Agram (Zagreb) for his own safety. From the spring of 1943 onwards he led the life of an exile. He was arrested in the great purge following 20 July 1944, and was murdered with many friends by the SS as the bombs fell on Berlin at the end of April 1945.

Among the groups of intellectuals who tried to keep the spirit of free expression alive, and who would have subscribed to
White
Pages
, one of the most prominent was the Solf Circle. It took its name from Hanna (Johanna) Solf, the widow of a former ambassador to Japan. His memory was held in such high regard by the Japanese that they interceded with Hitler to spare his widow’s life after the ‘teatime discussion group’ she belonged to had been infiltrated and betrayed to the Gestapo in September 1943. The group met regularly for tea at the Berlin homes of either Frau Solf or her friend, Elisabeth von Thadden. Its purpose was to find out humanitarian ways of countering the regime. Elisabeth von Thadden was a Christian educational reformer who, when her girls’ school near Heidelberg was closed down by the Nazis in 1941, joined the Red Cross. In the course of her work with it she learnt that the Gestapo were destroying letters sent home by German prisoners of war, on Hitler’s orders, on the grounds that they might undermine morale. In fact the Nazi top brass wanted to keep alive the myth created by themselves that the Russians took no prisoners.