An Honourable Defeat (23 page)

Other members of the group included Nikolaus von Halem, Herbert Mumm von Schwarzenstein and the former diplomat in America, Karl Otto Kiep. Kiep was a very important man in the Resistance. Now holding the rank of major in the Reserve, he headed the Foreign Policy Desk in the Overall Command of the Armed Forces (OKW), and was a link between Overall Command and Weizsäcker’s group in the Foreign Office. The SoIf Circle, though relatively harmless in itself to the Nazis, had members whose contacts elsewhere were of the first importance to the Resistance.

The Gestapo informer responsible for exposing it was Dr Paul Reckzeh of the Charité Hospital. He had got an introduction to Frau von Thadden through a mutual acquaintance of known anti-Nazi views who lived in Switzerland. She in turn invited him to accompany her to a meeting of the Solf Circle on 10 September 1943, at which he heard enough to encourage him to have phone taps put on each of those present. He also offered to deliver a letter for Frau von Thadden to Professor Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze, a German who had emigrated to Switzerland soon after the Nazis came to power. He was connected to the World Council of Churches there, an organisation which the Gestapo correctly believed to have contacts with the Resistance.

Very soon after this, a prominent member of another Resistance group, the Kreisau Circle, von Moltke, was tipped off about the phone tapping order and passed the warning on. Once the Gestapo realised that this had happened, they moved in and made their arrests.

Nearly all the participants were executed during the purge that followed 20 July 1944, though by then already in prison. As will be seen, the repercussions of the breaking of the SoIf Circle had even wider implications for the Resistance.

The Kreisau Circle was a much more important part of the Resistance than the SoIf Circle. It was so called by the Nazi Security Service during their investigation of it after 20 July 1944. The name comes from the estate of Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, one of the group’s leaders. It is now Krzyzowa in Poland.
[65]

The name the Gestapo gave it is misleading, for it gives the impression of an organised, coherent group, with definite aims. This is not true. The circle, which met formally at Kreisau only three times, was a large, loosely knit group of people who came mainly from the young landowning aristocracy, the Foreign Office, the Civil Service, the old Social Democratic Party and the Church. Its membership shifted and changed, and for a long time its leaders were averse to taking action of any kind against Hitler, preferring instead to let him run his course — a matter which they considered inevitable — while in the meantime they discussed what sort of Germany they would rebuild after his equally inevitable fall. Its most useful practical function was as a forum where members of different Resistance centres who also belonged to it could exchange ideas and information. It may also be described as the cradle of the government of the New Germany that might have been if the 20 July 1944 Plot had succeeded.
[66]

There were perhaps twenty core members of the circle, and they were all relatively young men. Half were under thirty-six and only two were over fifty. The young landowning aristocrats had left-wing ideals and sympathies — within reason — and created a welcome haven for leading Social Democrats who had elected to stay in Germany, and survived several years in camps like Dachau. Men like the journalist-turned-politician Carlo Mierendorff, and, after his death, Julius Leber, were the political leaders of the group, and their ideas struck lively sparks off older members of the Resistance like Goerdeler. Church contacts included Bishops Preysing and Wurm.

At the heart of the group sat two young aristocrats, Helmuth James von Moltke and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, both descendants of famous early nineteenth-century Prussian generals. They have been described respectively as the head and the heart of the circle, and certainly it was with the arrest of Moltke early in 1944, following his attempt to warn the Solf Circle that it had been infiltrated, that the Kreisauers fell apart.

Moltke was a thirty-two-year-old lawyer when the war broke out, and he joined the International Law sector of the Abwehr. Throughout the war years he wrote from Berlin to his wife Freya almost daily, and the correspondence, saved by a miracle from the Gestapo, now forms one of the most delightful and interesting records of that time.
[67]
He was a very tall man, even taller than von Trott, at six foot seven. He enjoyed cooking, and he shared cultural interests with the friends he made in Berlin before the Nazis came to power: Benoit Brecht, Carl Zuckmayer, the architect Adolf Loos, Arnold Schönberg and Rudolf Serkin. His mother, Dorothy Rose Innes, was the daughter of the South African Minister of Justice. Moltke spent some time there before the war, spoke English fluently, and dabbled in journalism, contributing articles to such papers as the
Chicago
Daily
News
, for which he was assistant Berlin correspondent for a time before 1933 .

He was opposed to Nazism from the start, and spent long parts of 1934 and 1935 looking for jobs abroad. Later he was to use his English contacts in yet another vain attempt to persuade the British to collaborate with the Resistance. He never once wore a uniform, and, with Canaris, he fought hard against the mishandling of Russian prisoners of war and against the use of the
Einsatzgruppen
behind the front line in the East. Through his office he did his best to help Jews in occupied territories. He met the more right-wing Peter von Wartenburg in 1940. Three years his senior, Wartenburg, who was a cousin of Stauffenberg, had originally had a certain sympathy for the Nazis, but quickly became disaffected, and as early as 1937 became the centre of a series of discussions held by a circle of friends which became known to the Gestapo as the ‘Counts’ Group’. Also a lawyer, Wartenburg worked for the Overall High Command in the Economics Division, Eastern Theatre of War.

The first meetings of the group — often no more than two or three people at a time attending — were held in Moltke’s tiny Berlin flat. Among the earliest members were Adam von Trott zu Solz, whom Moltke had met in London in 1937, and Adolf Reichwein. Reichwein was a philosopher, teacher, educationalist and traveller of prodigious intellect who was later to associate himself closely with Julius Leber, the man whom Stauffenberg wished to see become Chancellor. Reichwein was in Berlin working at the Folklore Museum, a post he had been allowed to take up after the Nazis had obliged him (as a socialist) to resign from his teaching job in Halle. Once in Berlin, he was able to build up his own network of socialist Resistance contacts, and it was through him that the left-wing journalists Carlo Mierendorff and Theodor Haubach joined the Kreisau Circle. The other important left-winger in the group was the trade unionist Wilhelm Leuschner, who by reason of his seniority (he was born in 1890) was given the nickname ‘Uncle’.

Leuschner had already been in the camps, arrested after the German Trade Union Congress was shut down in 1933. The chairman collapsed under the harsh treatment dealt out to him and Leuschner, his deputy, was nominated to take over by his fellows on the executive committee while they were all still in custody and did not know what the future held. He was ordered to accompany Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi German Labour Front which replaced the trade unions, to Geneva, to place Ley’s credentials before the International Labour Organisation. He agreed to do this on condition that his colleagues be released, which they were, but once there, he refused to say anything at any meeting. Offstage, as it were, Leuschner told his foreign colleagues exactly what the situation was at home, and Ley got a frosty reception. Leuschner was arrested the moment he recrossed the German frontier. He was released in 1934 before the next meeting of the ILO, as the Nazis wished to avoid adverse publicity relating to him.

Back in Berlin, he was able to take over a small factory in a working-class district which manufactured beer barrel taps.

This business gave him a good pretext for travelling all over Germany, visiting in particular the inns which local unionists had used as meeting places. He further got an exclusive licence for using a special non-corrosive type of non-ferrous metal. Screws made of this rapidly became important for types of naval and air armaments, enabling him to invoke the help of the Armed Forces if anyone threatened to interfere with his production
.
[68]

Leuschner’s ‘cover’ was similar to that used by Leber, who had also been through the camps before the war and now lived in Berlin running a small coal haulage business. Both men were arrested in the purge following 20 July 1944 and later executed, but their contribution to the ideas factory of the Kreisau Circle was inestimable, and they are two of the most important men lost to postwar German politics. Their names appeared constantly on potential Cabinet lists drawn up by the Resistance.

Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg was a member of the Circle, and he provided a very important link with two Munich Jesuits, Augustin Rösch and Alfred Delp. Delp’s role was to sound out for Moltke the possibilities in the Catholic community of support for a new, post-Nazi Germany.

Another great friend of Guttenberg, Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, had great-grandparents in common with Schulenburg. Like him, he had joined the Party, but never from conviction. His aim from the outset had been to oppose the regime. He knew Haushofer, and in 1920 at the age of eighteen he had been given riding lessons by Oster. It was through Oster that Schwerin obtained a staff posting with the Brandenburg Division in Berlin in 1943 — a division earmarked for use in any subsequent coup.

Representing the evangelical side of the Church was Eugen Gerstenmaier. Dr Gerstenmaier was perhaps a less spiritual man than Father Delp, though by extreme adroitness in his defence at the trial after his arrest he convinced Roland Freisler that his very unworldliness exonerated him from the death penalty.

Unable for political reasons to get a university teaching post after his doctorate, Gerstenmaier became an official in the foreign affairs department of the Evangelical Church in Berlin and then worked in the Information Section of the Foreign Office. He was in close contact with the Ecumenical Council in Geneva, and with the World Council of Churches and its president, W. A. Visser’t Hooft, both of which organisations provided channels of commu-nication to the outside world. He was one of the earliest members of the Church to recognise the necessity of killing Hitler, and in 1940 worked out a plan, with Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, either to arrest Hitler or shoot him at a victory parade in Paris on 20 July 1940. Hitler did not, however, take part in that parade, making only a single brief visit to the French capital in the early hours of one morning. Exactly four years later, in the confusion and disappointment that reigned in the Armed Forces administrative headquarters in Bendlerstrasse as it became clear that the coup had failed, Gerstenmaier pushed the participating Army officers hard to see it through, carrying a Bible in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Schulenburg also belonged to the Kreisau Circle, though he regarded its ‘discussion group’ mentality with scepticism. His view was that Hitler should be removed and an interim military government set up; then the work of constructing a new administration could begin. He was right, in that the long political-philosophical papers produced by the Circle look very like ‘escape into theory’, using up energy and intellect that might have been better employed developing concrete plans. Even Moltke, at the centre of the Circle, wrote to his wife in August 1942 that a ninety-minute speech by the liberal former head of the State Committee of German Youth Organisations (now subsumed within the Hitler Youth), Hermann Maass, had sent several of his listeners to sleep — though he added that Maass had shown what a firm understanding he had of the workers’ movement. In fairness to the Circle, they saw themselves, at least initially, less as a Resistance group than as an underground political Opposition. In any case under Nazi law they were committing high treason.

Schulenburg’s early attraction to the Nazi Party had been born of disaffection with the shambling and ineffective Weimar Republic, whose dying days he experienced when he was in his late twenties. But he quickly saw what lurked behind the Nazi mask, and by 1937 he had joined Wartenburg’s ‘Counts’ Group’. Wartenburg was godfather to Schulenburg’s only son.

Schulenburg was police vice-president of Berlin from 1937 to 1939, and in 1940 he joined the famous Infantry Regiment 9 in Potsdam. Near the Front in the east in 1940 and 1941, he witnessed Jews being killed wholesale in the little Polish town of Brest-Kujawsk, and noted dead Jews lying in the gutters of Bialystok. A year later he was on Manstein’s staff in the Crimea, when, during the assault on Sebastopol, he heard a report of the mass machine-gunning of Jews behind the lines. He complained to Manstein about it, and the Field Marshal replied irritably, ‘Schulenburg, I’m in the middle of a major artillery battle — these matters must wait.’ In the context it is interesting to remember that Manstein was an adopted child. His own family name was Lewinski, and a tradition persists that he was the great-grandchild of a rabbi. In an Order of the Day posted as late as 11 November 1944 he stressed the need to ‘suppress the Jews, the spiritual carriers of the Bolshevik terror’ as harshly as possible.

Schulenburg subsequently served in various administrative departments in Berlin, and was thus able to serve the Resistance as an information gatherer and go-between. One of his most significant achievements in Infantry Regiment 9 was the recruitment of young officers to the cause: at least three of them, Ludwig von Hammerstein (son of Kurt), Ewald Heinrich von Kleist (son of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin) and Axel von dem Bussche, were to play highly significant roles later on. He also established close links with the commander of 23 Division in Potsdam, Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, who as we have already seen was involved with the Resistance under Witzleben. Schulenburg’s friend Casar von Hofacker, who was also a cousin of Wartenburg and Stauffenberg, later became the contact man between the Resistance in Berlin and the Army Group in Paris under Stülpnagel. A very large number of contacts within the Resistance at this level was based on family ties and friendships formed at school, cadet school or university.