An Honourable Defeat (26 page)

The two couples found they had much in common, and were convinced that only a total military defeat could bring about the end of National Socialism. Like Boysen, Harnack was sensitively placed in the Nazi hierarchy. He was a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Economics and had even joined the Party in 1937 to further the interests of his secret cause.

Boysen, who had the rank of lieutenant, had been working for the Press Office of the Air Force, but now transferred to the department dealing with reports sent in by German air attaches abroad. He passed information contained in the reports on to the Russians via the Trade Delegation, which gave his organisation three radio transmitters early in 1941, foreseeing the need for other means of communication after hostilities had broken out between the USSR and Germany. The Red Orchestra had only one radio operator, however, and he was not skilled; nor were the transmitters very reliable.

The Security Service soon picked up their signals, but it took another nine months to break their code. By the end of August 1942 the Gestapo was ready to close in, and made a clean sweep. Fifty-five members of the group, including nineteen women, were executed. At no time do the Harnacks or the Boysens seem to have hesitated about the nature of their role as spies for the Russians. Emotionally and intellectually they were committed to the Communist cause, and their aim was to bring down the Nazi regime and replace it with a German Soviet. They never accepted any payment from the Russians for their work. Harnack envisaged, even before Hitler came to power, that Germany would have to choose between East and West, and that in every respect — social, political and ethical — the East offered the right solutions, and Mildred shared this point of view. In the death cell at Plötzensee he wrote in a letter of farewell: ‘I believe in the rise of mankind!’ Boysen’s most important pamphlet, written soon after the beginning of the war with Russia, was headed: ‘The Care for Germany’s Future is in the Hands of the People’. It was signed ‘Agis’ — the name of the son of a king of Sparta who tried to deliver Greece from the Macedonians with the aid of the Persians.

The Boysens were executed in December 1942, the Harnacks in January 1943. The large number of executions was insisted upon by Göring, who was furious that such a conspiracy should have been based in the Air Ministry. Manfred Roeder, the prosecuting counsel, refused to hand over the bodies of the Boysens at the request of Harro’s mother.
[70]

*

Meanwhile, with their entry into the war, the Americans had set up a bureau of the Office of Strategic Services in Berne, Switzerland, under Allen Dulles. An English colleague remembers his arrival:

He was a man of extraordinary personality and panache. When he arrived in Berne he announced publicly: ‘I’ve been sent here by the President to find out what the fucking Krauts are up to, and so if anyone knows what the fucking Krauts are up to they had better call on me at 23 Dufortstrasse. They’ll be assured of a warm welcome...’ The Swiss hated him, but he got away with it, and they collected very important information.

Dulles kept his door open not only to Gisevius and other representatives of the Resistance, but also to SS agents representing Himmler, who from 1942 was sending out peace feelers on his own account.

The official American line, however, was to close its doors, and this was a stumbling block to the Resistance in Berlin. When it became clear that America would enter the war soon, they approached the head of the Associated Press Bureau, Louis P. Lochner. Lochner had known Hermann Maass for years. He was also friendly with Prince Louis Ferdinand. During his time in the USA, Louis Ferdinand had become friends with President Roosevelt, and Lochner also knew Roosevelt personally. Lochner therefore seemed an ideal and sympathetic ambassador to represent the Resistance to Roosevelt.

One evening in November 1941, Lochner was invited, under conditions of great secrecy, to meet a selection of leading figures of the Resistance. Among them were Jakob Kaiser, Klaus Bonhoeffer, Otto John and Justus Delbrück, a member of the Abwehr and another brother-in-law of the Bonhoeffers. Lochner was due to return to the States soon anyway, and the ad hoc committee which he met asked him to convey to Roosevelt the character, make-up and aims of the Resistance as soon as he possibly could. They also sought Roosevelt’s opinion on what form of government he would like to see take shape in Germany after the fall of Hitler. A secret radio link was arranged.

Lochner was happy to take on this mission but, before he could leave, hostilities between the USA and Germany broke out officially and he was interned. He did not get back to America until June 1942, by which time the fortunes of the war had changed dramatically, and the Allies were beginning to sense the tide turning. He still tried to fulfil his promise, but without success; Roosevelt would not see him. After several unsuccessful attempts to gain an audience, he was finally told that the information he had was not wanted and that he had better stop trying to push it.

The USA already had a good deal of intelligence about the Resistance as a result of Adam von Trott’s visit in 1939. Dulles’s Berne office was set up in November 1942 and subsequently provided a rich supply of information. But these sources were unofficial. Roosevelt may well have been interested in doing a side deal with the Resistance, but his hands were tied. The official Allied line was that the Germans, having started a second war of world domination within twenty-five years of the first, had to be put squarely in their place. Most importantly, if Stalin had learnt of any deal being done between the Americans and the Resistance, he might well have exposed it to Hitler and concluded a separate peace with the Führer. The Germans were not yet conclusively beaten in Russia but, even if they had been, Roosevelt still needed Stalin on his side in the battle against Japan. The atom bomb was in the future.

*

Contact was also being maintained with other interested parties abroad by the members of the central Resistance. Von Trott, together with Eugen Gerstenmaier and Hans Schönfeld, an official of the Ecumenical Council in Geneva, drafted a memorandum addressed to Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Lord Privy Seal, whom Trott knew through his son, a contemporary at Oxford.

The memorandum pointed out the huge waste of life and resources represented by the war, repeated that the only way to avert absolute catastrophe was to get rid of the Nazi regime, and on behalf of the Resistance within Germany, appealed for the solidarity of the rest of the world. The message was relayed to Britain via the World Council of Churches, and found favour with Cripps, but it cut no ice with Churchill or his Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. Germany was still powerful at the time, and not yet losing. The Resistance had never shown itself capable of undermining the regime.

Nevertheless, representations continued to be made wherever a sympathetic ear could be found. In April 1942 Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmuth von Moltke had travelled to Norway under the auspices of Abwehr work. By now Bonhoeffer was forbidden to publish, but the Security Service still allowed him to travel. Their purpose was to effect the release of Bishop Eivind Berggrav, who had managed to persuade Norwegian priests to resign
en
masse
in protest at the German occupation and Nazi activities. Bonhoeffer and Moltke persuaded the local authorities that Berggrav’s imprisonment would lead only to greater discontent among the population, making it harder to control. The Bishop was released, and the two Germans were able to give him secret encouragement in continuing his fight. Bonhoeffer, particularly, saw that the Church in Norway had committed itself to the very fight he had hoped the Confessing Church would have engaged in.

Following this excursion, Bonhoeffer determined to meet the English Bishop of Chichester, George Bell. He knew Bell from his own English days, and the Abwehr had long been aware that a visit to Sweden by the Bishop, to renew his contacts with the Church there, was scheduled for May. Also hastening to meet Bell was Dr Schönfeld, who did so in Stockholm on 26 May, when he reconfirmed the content of the memorandum sent to Cripps and stressed the need for British support of the Resistance. He gave Bell a written report to take home. A few days later, Bonhoeffer — again travelling under the protection of the Abwehr — managed to meet Bell in Sigtuna. The two independent approaches made a strong impression on Bell, who was already sympathetic to the cause of the Resistance. He persuaded Bonhoeffer to give him a list of the names of the leaders of the Resistance movement, and as soon as he returned home he used Schönfeld’s note and Bonhoeffer’s information to draw up a report for Eden.

The resulting memorandum was a very full summary of the position and aims of the Resistance, together with a note of the peace terms they proposed. The Resistance had added the warning that, if the Allies refused to enter into negotiations at all, the Army would fight to the bitter end in defence of Germany, if not of the regime. Bell also passed on information he had received about a secret plan for a coup being considered by Himmler, which, if effected before the Resistance could act, might nevertheless be used as a stepping stone by the Resistance: there was no question of Himmler’s being allowed to remain in power any more than Hitler.

This was delivered in mid-June. In the course of the next month Eden consulted Stafford Cripps, who remained positive and enthusiastic. Bell also saw Cripps, but the two men could not move Eden. On 17 July the Foreign Secretary sent a note to Bell in which he said, ‘I have no doubt that it would be contrary to the interest of our nation to provide either of them [Schönfeld and Bonhoeffer] with any answer whatsoever.’ Eden was still suspicious of the clergymen’s true motivation; but he was also seriously blinkered, and his unimaginative stubbornness was a contributory factor in the extension of the war.

Bell did not give up the fight. He invoked Churchill’s own speech of 13 May 1940, in which he had spoken of Hitler’s regime as a ‘monstrous tyranny’ — surely Britain’s duty was to support those who opposed it? Eden replied that no one could believe in the Resistance until it had taken active steps to remove Hitler. So far the Resistance had given ‘little proof of its existence’. The Bishop then pointed out that, after all, the German Resistance faced a fight of rather a different quality from that of the French or the Yugoslays, for example. Their liberation as Germans was not guaranteed. The Anglo-American Atlantic Charter of 1941 had implied that Germany and its allies would be crushed along with the Nazis. This was a far cry from the earlier stance of Chamberlain, that the fight was not with all Germans, but with the Nazi Party and its followers.

Although Bell carried the fight as far as the House of Lords, he did not succeed in changing the government’s stance. The Resistance once again had to face its problems alone.

Chapter Nine – Protest of Youth

Today, the main square outside the University of Munich is called Geschwister-Scholl-Platz. The name commemorates a small group of students who, operating independently, managed to create one of the few single protests of great significance outside the main body of the Resistance, in the town which had, throughout the mid-thirties, advertised itself on tourist brochures as ‘The Birthplace of the Party’.

Hans and Sophie Scholl were the second and fourth of the five children of Robert Scholl, the liberal and independent mayor of the little town of Forchtenberg on the River Kocher to the east of Heilbronn. He was a big, warm-hearted man, rarely without a cigar smoking away below his luxuriant moustache. Hans and Sophie were born in 1918 and 1921, and in those days Forchtenberg’s only contact with the outside world was a yellow post-coach that connected it with the nearest railway station. The children loved it, but Robert had ambitions for his town. He managed to get the railway extended to Forchtenberg, and had a community sports centre and a warehouse built. These improvements were not without their critics: Robert was far too progressive for some, and in 1930 he was voted out of office. The family moved first to Ludwigsburg and then to Ulm, where they settled. Robert, who had a tendency to live beyond his means, rented a large apartment for his family on the Cathedral Square. He set himself up as a business and tax consultant.

The five children, Inge, Hans, Elisabeth, Sophie and Werner, were free to enjoy, as compensation for the loss of the countryside, the large palace park nearby. Hans, according to his brother-in-law, was more like his father — impulsive, generous and extrovert. Sophie, no less strong a personality, had her mother’s quiet sensitivity. What she shared with Hans was an absolute sense of human rights, something which all the children had inherited from their father, who exerted a strong but benign influence on them. Sophie also developed a mystical feeling for nature. She loved dancing. She was a good pianist and she could have become a professional artist — her drawings for
Peter
Pan
, for example, glow with life; but when she went to university in Munich she opted to read the unusual combination of biology and philosophy.

The happy family life did not end with Hitler’s seizure of power. The arrival of National Socialism was the first impact of politics on the children’s thought. Hans was fifteen, Sophie, twelve.

Inge Aicher-Scholl was sixteen. She remembers that on 30 January 1933 the radio and the newspapers were full of the news, Now everything will be better in Germany. Hitler is at the tiller.’
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We heard a great deal spoken about the Fatherland, of comradeship, the union of the Germanic people and love of the homeland. It impressed us, and we listened eagerly when such things were talked about on the streets or in school — for indeed we loved our homeland...And everywhere we heard that Hitler wanted to help the homeland back to greatness, happiness and security. He would see to it that everyone had a job to go to and enough to eat. He wouldn’t rest until every single German enjoyed independence, freedom and happiness...

The children were keen to join the Hitler Youth, and their parents, though they had given them a liberal upbringing, did not forbid it. But never for an instant had Robert been fooled by Hitler, and he said to them, ‘Have you considered how he’s going to manage it? He’s expanding the armaments industry, and building barracks. Do you know where that’s all going to end?’ The children argued that Hitler had solved the problem of unemployment, and pointed to the new motorways being built throughout the land. Robert wondered aloud if material security would ever make happy a people which had been robbed of its right to free speech.

At first his arguments fell on deaf ears. His children were enthusiastic members of the Hitler Youth and its female branch, the League of German Girls. They became group leaders. Only Sophie was a little less enthusiastic than the others. She was already worried by the fact that her Jewish schoolfriends could not join. She listened more attentively to her father’s arguments. He and Hans, on the other hand, were barely on speaking terms some of the time.

But then Hans attended the 1935 Party Rally at Nuremberg. He had been selected to carry the flag of Ulm-Standort at the Rally — a great honour. But he came back a changed man. He did not say much at first, but gradually new ideas emerged. The endless, senseless drilling, the hate-filled aggressive speeches, the stupid conversation, the vulgar jokes — a concentration of all this at Nuremberg had finally focused his mind on what Nazism really meant.

There had been signs of Hans’s disaffection before this. He was annoyed when he was told that the Hitler Youth was not interested in his collection of international folksongs — foreign, especially Russian, songs were strictly forbidden. And the special flag of his group was forbidden too — all groups were expected to carry a swastika banner. When finally his twelve-year-old standard bearer was threatened by a senior Hitler Youth official for refusing to give up the group flag, Hans hit the official. That was the end of the Hitler Youth for him. Soon afterwards he heard that a young schoolteacher had been picked up by a gang of SA and spat upon
to
order
; the schoolteacher’s crime was failure to join the Party. Gradually, news of the concentration camps seeped through.

Sophie was quick to pick up his mood. The first cracks had appeared in the cement which bound their allegiance to Hitler. Hans began to show more of an interest in another kind of youth group — the dj.1.11 , so-called because it had been founded as
Deutsche
jugend
on 1 November 1929. The dj.1.11 was now illegal — all youth groups and organisations had been banned under the Nazis or amalgamated with the Hitler Youth — but it still existed underground. Its spirit was the open-minded, liberal, easy-going one of the Weimar Republic at its best. Its members would organise hitch-hiking expeditions as far as Finland and Sweden, or travel south to Calabria and Sicily. It represented cosmopolitanism, not nationalism. Its members did not wear uniforms or salute each other. They read ‘illegal’ books — works by George Bernard Shaw (who the Nazis thought was a Jew on account of his red hair), Stefan Zweig and Paul Claudel. It was for culture and against militarism, for the individual and not the mob. Sophie might have joined it too, but for the fact that it was open only to boys from the age of twelve upwards. Nevertheless, she and her oldest sister Inge caught its mood.

One day in late November 1937 there was a ring at the door of the Scholls’ apartment and two men from the Gestapo stood there. The secret police had had the dj .1.11 group under observation for some time and now they were ready to pounce. The men said they were there to search the flat and arrest the children. With great presence of mind, Frau Scholl told them that they could do so by all means, but that, if the gentlemen would excuse her, she had to go to the baker’s. The policemen didn’t object — women in the Third Reich were consigned to three areas of life: church, kitchen and children. Even female Nazi leaders were never given much status or publicity by the regime.

Frau Scholl left the flat and went up to the attic floor where Hans’s and Werner’s — the younger brother was also a determined anti-Nazi — bedrooms were to be found. Quickly she packed any potentially incriminating literature into a basket and took it round the corner to trusted friends. The Gestapo search turned nothing up, and the officials took Inge, Sophie and Werner — the three children who were at home at the time — away with them. Sophie was released almost immediately, but Inge and Werner were taken to Stuttgart and detained for a week, interrogated about what they might know of Ernst Niekisch and his
Widerstand
(Resistance) magazine, and about dj.1.11. They managed to play dumb, and were finally released. Hans, who had been arrested subsequently, was held for five weeks. Luckily for him he had been conscripted by then, and his sympathetic commanding officer had him released, telling the Gestapo that as Hans was a soldier, he was in the Army’s jurisdiction, not theirs.

The Scholls — who were a well-known family in the smallish town of Ulm — failed to stay out of trouble. Werner had taken an early decision to leave the Hitler Youth. It was a gesture of solidarity towards his friend Otl Aicher (who later married Inge Scholl), who had refused to join it and as a result was not allowed to take his final school examinations, thus cutting off any hope of university. Aicher later remembered how Werner had tied a swastika scarf round the eyes of the bust of Justice in front of the Ulm Law Courts.

Werner was a keen photographer, and most of the surviving pictures of Sophie were taken by him. He died on the Russian Front, aged twenty-one.

At a meeting of the League of German Girls to discuss suitable material for home reading, Sophie suggested Heinrich Heine, the brilliant nineteenth-century revolutionary German poet who was also a Jew. Replying to appalled objections at her suggestion, she said, ‘The person who doesn’t know Heine, doesn’t know German literature.’ Robert Scholl himself was later arrested and imprisoned briefly for anti-Nazi activities.

The children read a great deal: Socrates, Aristotle, St Augustine, Pascal; Maritain and Bernanos. The influence of these thinkers went deep, strengthening their resolve against the regime. The question was what to do, and how to do it? Meanwhile, for Sophie, school continued. She met Fritz Hartnagel, a career soldier four years her senior, and they went for tours in the country occasionally in his father’s car, together with her older sister Elisabeth. For the innocent Sophie friendship with Hartnagel began to turn into something more. But it never quite became love. After the war Hartnagel married Elisabeth. They still live in Stuttgart, where before his retirement he was a judge.

If she was moving away from Nazism through the late thirties, Sophie Scholl turned actively against it as a result of two experiences:
Kristallnacht
, which she lived through in Ulm, and the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939. She extracted a promise from each of her male friends that they would never fire their guns, but she was well aware of how unrealistic such a promise was. She wrote to Hartnagel with uncharacteristic bitterness:

You’ll have your hands full from now on. I just can’t accept that now people will be in peril of their lives because of other people. I can’t accept it and I find it horrifying. Never tell me that it’s for the sake of the Fatherland.

Her subsequent letters express increasing disgust and anger at the war. ‘I think I know you and that you’re not much in favour of this war,’ she wrote to him later. ‘So how can you spend your time training people for it?’ And in September 1940 she wrote a letter of which Beck and Oster would have approved:

For me the relationship between a soldier and his people is roughly like that of a son who swears to stand by his father and his family through thick and thin. If it turns out that the father harms another family and then gets hurt as a consequence, must the son still stick by him? I can’t accept it. Justice is more important than sentimental loyalty.

Hartnagel himself remembers:

It was striking to see with what incisiveness and logic Sophie saw how things would develop, for she was warm-hearted and full of feeling, not cold and calculating. Here is an example: in winter 1941-42 there was a big propaganda campaign in Germany to get the people to give sweaters and other warm woollen clothing to the Army. German soldiers were at the gates of Leningrad and Moscow in the middle of a winter war for which they weren’t prepared...Sophie said, ‘We’re not giving anything.’ I had just got back from the Russian Front...I tried to describe to her how conditions were for the men, with no gloves, pullovers or warm socks. She stuck to her viewpoint relentlessly and justified it by saying, ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s German soldiers who are freezing to death or Russians, the case is equally terrible. But we must lose the war. If we contribute warm clothes, we’ll be extending it.
’
[72]

After matriculation from school in 1940 she took a one-year course in kindergarten supervision, in the hope of avoiding State Work Duty — a kind of civil national service which all would-be students had to fulfil. But not only did the authorities refuse to accept the kindergarten training as a replacement for the State Duty, but with the acceleration of the war in 1941 they added to it State War Work. For another year, therefore, Sophie endured barrack life and manual labour before she could finally start her course at Munich University. She travelled there from Ulm early in May 1942. It was just before her twenty-first birthday — her last.

Hans was at the station to meet her. He was reading medicine at the university — the semesters alternating with service at the Front. Through him she quickly gained an entrée to university life. Among the first people she met was Professor Carl Muth, whose library Hans had been cataloguing. Muth was a pillar of the literary Resistance. His Roman Catholic magazine
High
Land
had been banned finally in June 1941, having managed for eight years never once to mention Hitler’s name. By now Hans had read the sermons of Bishop Galen. He had not given up his own ideas of making some kind of stand against the regime, and had become markedly politicised. From his writing it is clear that had he lived he would have chosen politics, not medicine, as his career.

He was already at the centre of a group of young medical students — Willi Graf, Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell — who had decided to launch a leaflet campaign against the war, encouraging passive Resistance to the regime. They were joined by the popular philosophy lecturer Kurt Huber, who had already attracted the suspicion of the Nazis. He was considerably older than the others, but had no wish to lead the group. He guided his younger comrades’ thoughts, and edited the last two of the six leaflets they produced. His lectures were always packed, because he managed to introduce veiled criticism of the regime into them.