An Honourable Defeat (24 page)

‘The social structure of the active Opposition was comparatively homogenous,’ notes the German historian Hans Mommsen.

Its members were predominantly upper class and regarded themselves — unlike the ‘dilettante regime’ which they combated — as personally qualified to assume a leading role. There was no significant distinction between bourgeois and socialist. Reichwein, Mierendorff and Haubach were not merely typical Social Democrat intellectuals, Leber was the complete opposite of a socialist official, and Leuschner and Maass had succeeded in discarding inhibitions of class as a result of their political activities and their experience under National Socialism...With the exception of Leuschner, there was no one in the Opposition who could be regarded as a typical representative of the Weimar Republic.

One forward-looking younger member of the Resistance who significantly held himself aloof from the Kreisau Circle was Hans von Dohnanyi. He held that Goerdeler’s and Moltke’s constitutional plans were illusory, unhistorical and not remotely realistic for the future. Fear of democracy on account of the failure of the Weimar Republic made for ultra-theoretical and impracticable plans.

Kreisau itself was a small village, but the locals, who were sur-prised that their ‘squire’ (Moltke) and his family were not Nazis, would never have dreamt of betraying them. The only thing Freya ever got when she said ‘Good Morning’ rather than ‘Heil Hitler’, was a crisp and admonitory ‘Heil Hitler’ in return. The long flow of letters from Moltke — though he was always careful not to mention Resistance matters even obliquely — was equally easy to watch over and protect from informers or spies. The postmistress in Kreisau was dependable and, both at Berlin and Kreisau, the recipients of letters knew exactly when the post would arrive. (Despite the vengeful bombing strategy of Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, which involved the selection of civilian targets, the German postal service operated with miraculous efficiency until 1945, when central Berlin was reduced to a pile of rubble.)

The first of the three major meetings at Kreisau took place in May 1942. Among those present was the thirty-nine-year-old clergyman Harald Poelchau, who was later to fulfil a role which was sad and ironical — as chaplain in Tegel Prison and Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, where most of the principal conspirators were either beheaded or hanged between August 1944 and April 1945. In a letter to Freya written in May 1943, Moltke arranges for a hundredweight of peas to be sent from his little estate to Poelchau, to help him feed his flock of ‘U-boats’ (Jewish and political fugitives in hiding).

The meeting discussed such important matters as rebuilding the constitution, reform of the education system, and the relationship between Church and State. It begat a number of essays and, ultimately, a series of draft constitutions, based on a pyramid of power sharing by elected representatives in a one-party state. Despite the left-wing sympathies of several members of the Circle, the voices of the Social Democrat politicians who joined the Circle later, and the relative youthfulness of the participants, there was no time here for a democracy along multi-party lines. It is curious now to read the constitutional plans of the Kreisau Circle — they seem to come from a distant age. However, such plans were theoretical, and would have been adapted if faced with the possibility of implementation. No doubt if the 20 July 1944 coup had succeeded, and Julius Leber become Chancellor with Stauffenberg’s backing, a more hardheaded democratic process would have emerged.

Though succeeding Mierendorff as the political conscience of the Circle, the practical working-class Leber had little time for their theorising and suspected them of being fundamentally undemocratic. He attended meetings only occasionally and one suspects that very shrewdly he was using contacts in the Circle for his own ends — much, one suspects, as the equally practical Stauffenberg would when he ‘joined’ the group later in the war.

The second session was held that October, following intensive individual discussions between the socialists Mierendorff, Leuschner and Maass, and the Jesuits Rosch and Delp, which touched on finding common ground between Christian and socialist trade unions. Fundamental state and social questions were discussed. It was followed by the third and final major discussion at Whitsun, 1943, which tackled the themes of foreign policy and the punishment of war crimes. By that time, the war was clearly lost, and the thoughts of the Kreisauers were turning more towards the idea, already mooted by Goerdeler and Beck, of a European Community which might possibly have Germany as its centre.

Earlier in the year, in January, there had been a famous confrontation at Wartenburg’s Berlin apartment in Hortensienstrasse between the ‘young’ conspirators of the Kreisau Circle, and the ‘old’ members grouped around Goerdeler, including Hassell and Jens Jessen.

Beck chaired the meeting, which lasted until 1a. m., and became heated. Moltke even accused Goerdeler of trying to find a solution along the lines of Kerensky, the Russian revolutionary who paved the way for, and was then deposed by, Bolshevism. Essentially the Goerdeler group supported the restoration of traditional trade unions (Goerdeler and Leuschner were great friends) whereas the Kreisauers, disaffected by what they perceived as worker/manager divisiveness, favoured co-operative works councils. Both sides agreed in the matter of individual responsibility, but the Kreisauers laid greater emphasis on the importance of the community. The Kreisauers were less nationalistic than the Goerdeler group, and more realistic about what kind of frontiers Germany might expect to have to make do with in the event of any peace settlement. The Kerensky jibe stemmed from fear that Goerdeler, if put in power, might not be radical enough. It may also be that he was regarded as too old, and too rooted in nineteenth-century thinking, by the younger Kreisauers.

The two sides parted friends, sitting down to pea soup and cold meat when the arguments were over, though Gerstenmaier remembered that Goerdeler had been condescending, and that Moltke had been prickly with Trott zu Solz and himself, the original engineers of the meeting. The fact was that both sides shared a common disadvantage: they were locked inside the Reich. Men like Gisevius, living in Switzerland, had a much clearer view of the march of world events.

In 1941, Beck and Goerdeler had produced a massive essay called ‘The Goal’. A statement of their belief and their view of the function of a State, it began with a long analysis of German history and German political development, culminating in Bismarck’s ‘Golden Age’, as they saw it. It looked to Britain with admiration for the way it had developed and run its Empire, and suggested that this was because the English, living within the scope of the Gulf Stream, were a people more blessed by nature than the Germans. At the same time, ‘The Goal’ looked forward to a federation of European nations under German leadership ‘within ten or twenty years’. This idea might not have appealed to the Allies in 1941.

Eleven points followed, pleading the case for the restoration of German colonies and 1914 frontiers, requesting agreement on multilateral disarmament, and warning against the Japanese as potentially ‘dangerous competitors’. International agreement was called for on the establishment of a Jewish state, possibly in Canada or South America. Clearly from this and other provisos it was desirable from Goerdeler’s point of view to remove Jews from Germany; but on the other hand the authors made no attempt to duck responsibility for the atrocities which had already been carried out against the Jews by Hitler. Otherwise, as far as domestic politics were concerned, a plan was laid out by which human rights and freedoms would be guaranteed. Certain restrictions, such as quite a mature age, are laid on the right to vote, and some of Goerdeler’s references to the innate superiority of what he calls ‘the white race’ strike a modern ear as odd, but, taking such points in their historical context, the document is a fundamentally good blueprint for a benign, conservative rule.

Moltke’s first constitutional draft, also composed in 1941, was far more historical and theoretical than Goerdeler’s, which is couched in very urgent language. Indeed, what is most striking about Moltke’s work is that he does not seem to have been motivated by circumstances to take a more urgent line. He seems detached, even fatalistic. But this would concur with the Kreisau Circle’s initial line of
laisser
aller
, something which Moltke clung to longer than his associates. He was never wholly persuaded that the assassination of Hitler was the only solution. Nor, interestingly, was Goerdeler. Another Kreisauer, Hans-Bernd von Haeften, a Foreign Office official, took the severest line in opposing an attempt on Hitler’s life. He succeeded in dissuading his younger brother Werner from making an attempt himself — on religious grounds. The headstrong Werner, who was Stauffenberg’s ADC, did however accompany and abet Stauffenberg in the attempt on 20 July 1944.

A later essay by Beck and Goerdeler, ‘The Way’, appeared in 1944. Significantly, their fellow contributors included Julius Leber, Wilhelm Leuschner, and the Catholic trade unionist Jakob Kaiser. This was a historical review in three parts, Imperial Germany, Republican Germany, and Totalitarian Germany, which attempted to trace what had gone wrong. It offered more generous explanations for the failure of the Weimar Republic, blaming the French for too harsh an interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles and the crippling burden of reparation payments; but in one sense ‘The Way’ is an indication of how hard the Resistance was still trying to justify its own existence to itself.

By 1943 Moltke was living with the Wartenburgs, his own flat having been bombed. He may have reflected sadly on this. In December 1940 he’d read in
The
Times
of London (the Abwehr got all foreign papers) that the Inner Temple law courts where he had studied as a young man had been bombed: ‘The bomb hit the dining hall where I used to eat...In the photograph I even recognised one of the Inner Temple waiters...’
[69]

The war weighed deeply on this sensitive and intelligent man. Two extracts from his letters written in the autumn and early winter of 1941 indicate both his state of mind and what induced it:

In one place in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes, 1700 men and 240 women from amongst the inhabitants have been executed. That is the ‘punishment’ for a [partisan] attack on three German soldiers...[he goes on to list further atrocities in France and Greece] and that is child’s play compared with what is happening in Poland and Russia. How can I learn of such things and still sit at table in my warm flat, drinking tea? Am I not making myself an accessory by doing so? What would I say if someone asked me later: And what did you do during that time?...Since Saturday they’ve been rounding up the Berlin Jews; they’re picked up at 9.15p.m. and
locked in a synagogue overnight. Then they’re sent, with only what they can carry, to Litzmannstadt [Lodz] and Smolensk. A female acquaintance of [Karl Otto] Kiep saw a Jew collapse on the street. As she went to help him, a policeman stopped her, gave the prone body a kick, so that he rolled into the gutter, then he turned to the lady with what appeared to be the vestiges of shame and explained: ‘We’re only obeying orders, ma’am.’

In the second extract he mentions ‘a nerve clinic where SS men are cared for whose minds have collapsed through having to shoot women and children’, and Bishop Preysing later remembered Moltke telling him of an incident on a tram. There was a nurse on the tram and she was very drunk. Moltke helped her off at her stop. She said to him, ‘I expect it horrifies you to see me like this.’

He replied, ‘No, not horrified; but I’m sorry to see someone like you in such a state.’

She told him, ‘I work in an SS hospital, and there the sick, the men who cannot shut out what they have done and seen, cry out all the time, “I can’t do it any more! I can’t do it any more!” If you have to listen to that all day, you reach for the bottle at night.’

*

1941 was the year when the European War became a World War. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 and later, in December, after the Japanese bombed the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, he also declared war on the United States. He had been rebuffed by Churchill, underestimated the strength of the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, and been forced to withdraw Operation Sealion the previous autumn. But by the end of 1940 the dictator was supervising preliminary plans for Operation Barbarossa — the conquest of Russia. Never mind that this was where Napoleon had come unstuck; Napoleon had neither the technology of a modern army at his disposal, nor Hitler’s genius. The technique of Blitzkrieg which had served him so well so far would do so again. He would knock out Leningrad (St Petersberg), make a quick advance to Moscow and take it, and neutralise major industrial centres such as Stalingrad (Volgograd). The country would be paralysed, all her vast natural resources would be in his power, and he would be invincible. Besides, his own ideology taught that the Russians were mere sub-humans with no fight in them. His agrarian scientists were already planning how the rich wheatfields of the Ukraine could be better utilised and farmed by a whole new generation of German colonists.

Before he could move, however, he suffered setbacks at home. Mussolini made disastrous attempts at taking Greece and Egypt, and had to be bailed out by the terms of their treaty. Hitler could not afford to lose Italian support yet, however useless it was turning out to be. To make matters worse, Yugoslavia refused to allow German troops transit through to Greece, so the Yugoslavs had to be taken over too, thereby using up more valuable manpower. Nevertheless, four panzer groups, commanded by Guderian, Hoepner, Hoth and Kleist, were ready to roll by June. Either Stalin’s Intelligence had been seriously faulty or he refused to heed warnings; either way, the surprise element of the attack was entirely successful.