An Honourable Defeat (4 page)

But early in June the SPD was banned. Otto Wels was among those who set up the SPD in exile (SOPADE), initially in Prague. By the end of July there was only one Party in Germany, and that was the ruling National Socialist German Workers’ Party: the Nazis.

It was not long after this that Hitler turned his attention to the Jews. Anti-Semitism was nothing new in Germany, or indeed in Europe, nor was it uncommon, although no one in 1933 had an inkling of the horror the Nazis would soon unleash. The Jews made up a small proportion of Germany’s population, but their contribution to the country was very high in proportion to their numbers. Pro rata, there were more leading Jewish doctors, lawyers and bankers than from any other group. In the First World War, again pro rata, more Jews had given their lives for Germany and received high decorations for bravery. The contribution of Jewish Germans to twentieth-century art and science is famous. Most Jewish Germans were assimilated, saw themselves as Germans first and Jews second, and were deeply patriotic. Their sense of patriotism proved fatal for many, because they would not try to leave until it was too late.

Resentment of the Jews persisted and thrived in periods of economic stress and high unemployment. No matter that the Jews in Germany suffered just as much from poverty and unemployment as their fellow countrymen; this, too, was nothing new. In the fourteenth century people believed that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death, though just as many Jews died from it as did others. But the nineteenth century had seen a fresh spawning of anti-Semitic literature, and the young Hitler had fed on this greedily. Out of the ruin of the First World War, in which he had fought bravely as a corporal (earning the Iron Cross, First Class — a rare honour for an NCO), and the collapse of Imperial Germany, he spun the myth of a world Marxist-Jewish conspiracy, a myth in which he believed passionately and relentlessly right up until his final hour.

It was still too early for him to root the Jews out of Germany. At first he had no plans to kill them: he would have been content to expel them, if any other country had been prepared to take them, and for a time a plan to convert the island of Madagascar, which would have been conquered for the purpose, into a vast Jewish ghetto, was on the Nazi table. In the early thirties he still needed the infrastructure of business the Jews ran. Jewish factories made SA uniforms and swastika flags; Jewish investment aided the German economy — and rearmament cost money. Even so, the Führer evidently needed to make an early stand, and his ability to recognise and exploit the worst aspects of human nature led him to the conclusion that the Germans needed a scapegoat, convenient and recognisable, for their woes. His own obsessive hatred, coupled with his confused ideas of racial ‘purity’, led him immediately to the Jews.
[15]

The first of April 1933 was declared National Boycott Day. SA men, their uniforms still in these early days looking pretty home-made, stood on guard outside Jewish businesses bearing placards, often, curiously, in English as well as German: ‘Germans! Protect Yourselves! Don’t Buy At Jewish Shops!’ It was not a huge success from the Nazi point of view. Most of the major department stores in Berlin were Jewish-owned, and among those who ignored the boycott, shopping as she always did at the Kaufhaus des Westens, was Julia Tafel Bonhoeffer, the ninety-year-old grandmother of Klaus and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were to become pillars of the civilian and church Resistance respectively.

The next significant single action Hitler took was to destroy the trade unions. These had been living an uneasy existence since the outlawing of the Communist Party. There were several Social Democrat and Christian Unions, among which were some which hoped to survive by coming to an accommodation with National Socialism. But the policy of
Gleichschaltung
allowed no exceptions. The Nazis inaugurated a German Labour Front under one of Hitler’s more repulsive henchmen, Dr Robert Ley, an alcoholic wife-beater who finally dispatched his wretched spouse with a revolver. The Front’s function was to replace the unions. On I May, Hitler supplanted the traditional left-wing and labour celebrations with his own Nazi version of them. The following day, SA brigades seized all trade union property and newspapers. Another potential source of Resistance had been crushed. Thousands of trade unionists now joined Communist leaders already in the concentration camps. By the end of the year their ranks would be swollen by fresh waves of political prisoners.

Intellectual opposition and freedom of thought were the Nazis’ next targets: throughout Germany on 10 May town squares bore witness to a spectacle not seen since the Middle Ages: the burning of prohibited books. All Jewish and Communist writers were banned, including the works of such great contemporary writers as Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig and Erich Kästner. Artists and scientists were similarly persecuted — a Nazi School of Physics sprang up to disprove Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (for Einstein was a Jew) — and, though some remained in Germany in ‘internal exile’, this action heralded the start of the great exodus of intellectuals which was to impoverish Europe and enrich America.

Not that all this went unchallenged. The outlawed and exiled Communist and Social Democratic Parties established an illegal underground press and pamphleteering network which continued vigorously until 1939 and even in a reduced form during the war, although conditions after 1940 and the improved efficiency of the Gestapo made such actions as, for example, smuggling material into Germany far more difficult then.

I have mentioned the vexed question of what actually constitutes Resistance, and it may be worth adding here that the smallest act against the Nazi government required enormous bravery. As time passed, so more savage did the punishments for transgression become. At Plötzensee, the Berlin prison which was the Calvary of so many of those involved in the 20 July Plot of 1944, many others, no less brave than the conspirators, were guillotined or hanged by executioner Friedrich Wilhelm Röttger. The accounts of their trials, their pleas for clemency and the record of their deaths may still be seen:

Emmi Zehden, executed at 1p.m. on 9 June 1944, aged forty-four. A member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. She helped three young men avoid their call-up. Her punishment was death by the guillotine. Sentence took seven seconds to carry out. Like everyone sentenced by the Nazi courts of crimes against the state, she had to bear the cost of her own trial and execution.

Karl Robert Kreiden from Düsseldorf. A musician. While lodging in Berlin during a concert tour he tried to persuade his landlady, one Frau Ott-Monecke, to join the Resistance. He described Hitler as a brute, and told Frau Ott-Monecke, a convinced National Socialist, that she had better change her ideas. She informed on him and he was tried on 3 September 1943, executed on 7 September, aged twenty-seven.

Otto Bauer, a fifty-six-year-old businessman, unguardedly said on a train in June 1942 that Germans only had two alternatives: to kill Hitler or be killed by him. He was overheard by a married couple who reported him. He was beheaded on Thursday, 16 September 1943 for fomenting discontent and unrest.

Erich Deibel. On 29 April 1940 he drew the symbol of the SPD — three arrows — on the wall of the lavatory in his factory, adding the words: ‘Hail Freedom!’ On 22 July the following year he chalked up: ‘Workers! Help Russia! Strike! Up With the Communist Party of Germany!’ and drew the red star and the hammer and sickle. He also allegedly listened to broadcasts from the BBC. Accused of sabotage and treason, he was executed on 15 August 1942.

All the reports of these trials are cold, factual, official and peppered with outraged exclamation marks — a feature of Nazi documents. They are sobering reading.

Yet despite the threat of summary trial and certain execution, many hundreds of thousands of Germans continued to listen to foreign broadcasts, read and distribute dissident literature, meet and discuss forbidden political questions, shelter Jews and political outlaws. They may represent a tiny minority in a population of seventy million, but these acts of individual courage demonstrate, as much as the organised military Resistance to Hitler, that the Nazis never fully crushed the spirit of freedom in Germany, nor wholly seduced the German people.

The most common and widespread opposition to Hitler from the beginning took the form of illegal pamphleteering, though no one was under any illusions for long that this would be a means of bringing the Nazis down. It was rather an attempt to keep hope alive, together with protecting the principles of free speech and thought. The most important early disseminators of such literature belonged to the Leninist group Neu Beginnen, which took its name — ‘A Fresh Start’ — from its principal pamphlet, and to the Roter Stosstrupp, or Red Shock Troop.

Neu Beginnen was founded by Walter Löwenheim, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Miles’. It started life in 1929 as a breakaway SPD group which also recruited members from the Communist Party. Aware from a very early stage of the danger posed by the rise of National Socialism, the new group organised itself in secrecy, and by 1932 had built up an extensive network within Germany. It thus had a great advantage over all other organised Resistance in that it already had experience of working under cover. Its manifesto was printed in Karlsbad in 1933 and distributed — as most illegal literature was — under the guise of a permitted work. Masquerading as
Schopenhauer
:
On
Religion
the manifesto managed a distribution of 5000 copies in Germany and also attracted attention abroad by virtue of American, British and French editions.
[16]
Initially supported by the SPD in Exile, Neu Beginnen fell victim to internal political wrangling and, when the SPD withdrew subsidy, the pamphlet campaign dried up. German left-wing politicians in the West had little room to manoeuvre and could only sit out the Nazi storm.

The Roter Stosstrupp was a Berlin-based group which produced a newspaper carrying the same name from early in 1933. The group had its origins in the uniformed wing of the SPD, the Reichsbanner Black-Red-Gold, named after the colours of the flag of the Weimar Republic. The change of name to ‘red’ indicated a strongly leftward shift in the illegal organisation. It operated effectively only until the end of 1933, and was never under any illusions about its ability to overthrow the government.

A third early publication which managed to sidestep Nazi censorship was
Blick
in
die
Zeit
— ‘A Look at the Times’ — which appeared from June 1933 to August 1935. It sought to protect freedom of speech and to counteract the blanket effect of the official Nazi newspaper, the
Volkischer
Beobachter
, by printing not only edited reports of a given event by all the German papers, but by the foreign press as well. It was closed down by the Gestapo in 1935. At about the same time any latitude still allowed to the German press in general was withdrawn, and foreign newspapers would soon cease to be available even in Berlin. 1935 saw the end of the period of massive anti-Nazi pamphleteering as a wave of arrests mopped up the underground organisations of the Communist Party, the Social Democrats and the trade unions. But by then the first stirrings were coming from the one organisation which would ever have a real chance of performing a successful
coup
d’état
— the Army.

Chapter Two – The Big Battalions

The Army and the Civil Service were the two pillars of the community in Germany. While the Civil Service remained generally loyal to Hitler — or rather, to the new regime, which it served without regard to what it represented ethically or morally — the Army’s attitude to Nazism, and especially to its leader, was more complex.

The Army had always been the mainstay of Germany. A long Prussian tradition of militarism, and the military successes of the late nineteenth century which had led to the unification of the country, made the Army into a kind of state within the state. A small incident — hardly that — which occurred in the very early thirties illustrates well how deeply Army values had penetrated German thinking (though the old clichés about German love of order and uniforms are evident, and also worth bearing in mind). At a film studio where a war film was being made the ‘extras’ canteen presented the following sight at the end of the first morning’s shooting: officers and NCOs at the head of each table, with other ranks below the salt.
[17]
Respect for the Army and its pecking order lasted well into the Nazi era. Many are the stories of a German aristocrat or senior officer in the power of the Gestapo who managed to extricate him- or herself by ‘pulling rank’.

The Army had sustained a severe blow when the Treaty of Versailles had reduced it to a fraction of its former self, but it had managed to keep all its traditions and essential strengths intact. Most important of these was the Officer Corps — a kind of freemasonry of soldiers who shared the same background, interests and politics — which ensured that whatever happened the Army would look after its own. Part of the tragedy of the German Army taken as a whole is that it put itself and its future before that of its country, not realising that one was dependent on the other; or perhaps believing that, after all, there would always be a moment when the Army could step in and restore order by taking temporary control until a new civilian government could be arranged under the Army’s benevolent protection. Nineteenth-century thinking thrust a long spur into twentieth-century Germany.

The hundreds of thousands of unemployed soldiers and, more importantly, officers — that is, career soldiers — who sought a living in Germany after 1918 formed a dangerous core of right-wingers who felt betrayed by the country they had served. They elicited much public sympathy, especially from the upper and middle classes and the government could not control the large private armies, or Freikorps, which grew up. Nor did the Allied signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, having their own postwar troubles, have the power or the inclination to enforce it with regard to Germany’s internal affairs. In any case Germany, with its heavy burden of reparation, seemed set to be preoccupied with its own problems for a very long time to come. Furthermore, since the Rhineland, Germany’s major industrial area, was occupied by the French, there seemed little chance of the German werewolf re-emerging.

Among the masses of drifting soldiery was Hitler himself, a man who had responded positively and romantically to the military life, and who spent the last weeks of the 1914-18 war in a military hospital having been half-blinded during a British gas-attack. He experienced the collapse of Imperial Germany with a terrible intensity. Having believed at first that the revolution was a flash in the pan, he had the truth brought home to him on 10 November 1918 as ‘the most terrible moment of my life’:

Summoned to a meeting by the hospital pastor, the patients learned that a revolution had broken out, that the House of Hohenzollern had fallen and a republic had been proclaimed in Germany. Sobbing gently to himself — thus Hitler described the ‘old gentleman’ — the pastor recalled the merits of the ruling house, and ‘not an eye was able to restrain its tears’. But when the pastor began to tell them that the war was now lost and that the Reich was throwing itself unconditionally upon the mercy of its previous enemies — ‘I could stand it no longer. It became impossible for me to sit still one minute more. Again everything went black before my eyes: I tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. Since the day I had stood at my mother’s grave I had not wept...But now I could not help it.
’
[18]

Though they would not have expressed themselves so extravagantly, most of the German High Command would have sympathised with this view. When Hitler came to power they welcomed his policies — especially when it came to rebuilding the Army. Several of the most prominent members of the Resistance — Carl Goerdeler, Artur Nebe, Graf Helldorf, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg — either joined the Party or worked for it. There was scarcely an officer at Potsdam on that raw March day in 1933 who did not invest his unreserved hope in the new Chancellor. True, he was not a Prussian — nor even a German. True, he was not from the right class — but then scarcely a Chancellor among Hitler’s twenty predecessors had been: the first President of the Weimar Republic had been a saddler! But Hitler had the Army’s interests at heart, and it was prepared to give him a chance.

One officer not taken in however was Colonel-General Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, Commander-in-Chief and a close friend of the Chancellor Hitler had succeeded, Kurt von Schleicher. Hammerstein, who held liberal political views, may have acted from motives of personal loyalty and friendship when he sought to prevent Hitler’s seizure of power at the eleventh hour early in January. But those cannot have been the only reasons, and Hammerstein must stand as the first Establishment figure to express Resistance sympathies by action. He must certainly have cast a cold eye on the proceedings in Potsdam two months later. In his memoir of the events, Fabian von Schlabrendorff contends that only the consideration that Hindenburg stood behind Hitler, and that Hindenburg still commanded enormous esteem in Germany and the outside world, prevented him from pressing his action home. It is possible that Hammerstein placed too much trust in his old commander’s political integrity to act. Hammerstein’s son Ludwig, however, says that his father and Schleicher were deeply disappointed at Hindenburg’s behaviour in 1933, and that later he regretted privately not taking the risk of a coup. But it would have been next to impossible to undertake anything against Hitler immediately after 30 January 1933, for the simple reason that no Resistance had formed. Hammerstein would have had to have a very convincing reason for ordering the Army to take control of the country, and Hitler might not have hesitated, in the event, to use his millions-strong SA to protect his position.

Hitler was well aware of being an outsider, and attempted to provide himself with at least some of the social graces.

‘We children never met Hitler,’ says Ludwig von Hammerstein,

but he came to visit my father at home early on — in 1928, I think, when we were living in Hardenberg Strasse. They sat on the balcony and talked. The connection with Hitler came through the piano makers, Bechstein. Bechstein had been a friend of my father’s since before the First World War. Frau Bechstein was a great admirer of Hitler, and she taught him how to behave in society, when to kiss a lady’s hand, how to address people, the proper way to hold a knife and fork, and which cutlery to use for what food. She was always giving dinner parties for Hitler to meet her influential conservative friends. My father’s opinion of the man was that ‘he talks too much and too confusedly’, and he gave him the cold shoulder.

Still, Hitler wanted Army contacts, and Army support. He wooed General von Hammerstein, going so far as to give him a free subscription to the Nazi newspaper, and standing next to him at Bechstein’s funeral a few years later. Hammerstein remained an active supporter of the Resistance until his death, though his view gradually changed to the more fatalistic one that Germany would have to be completely defeated to ensure Hitler’s fall and the complete extirpation of National Socialism in the country. Events have proved that not even the crushing defeat of 1945 has sufficed to kill the weed completely.

Ultimately, control of the Army was Hitler’s aim, but he was astute enough to know that he could not just go in and take it. In the early days, he was not secure enough in his power, either in the country or within his own Party. Gregor Strasser, his chief rival and a man who believed more sincerely than Hitler in the ‘socialist’ element of the Party’s manifesto, had his own supporters among the German Establishment; and the old National Conservatives, among them Schleicher, still dreamt of destroying the National Socialists by splitting them in two. Then there was the question of the SA.

Under his old comrade Ernst Röhm, the SA had grown into a vast and well-organised national force with the potential to fulfil Röhm’s ambition for it of becoming a People’s Army, which would absorb the old Reichswehr. At the same time Heinrich Himmler, another long-time Nazi, was developing various secret police organisations, including the black-uniformed SS, or Schutz-Staffel — the Protection Brigade — formed as another private army but owing direct loyalty and allegiance to Hitler personally. Röhm’s ideas were old-style Nazi, concerning a cultural revolution affecting life in Germany at every level. Hitler had moved beyond that stage and was thinking now in more imperial terms — for himself as much as for the country he had adopted and taken over. The Führer may never have trusted the Army, but he did not want to see the SA swamp it and thus put him in the position of losing the initiative to Röhm — as the SS was still a relatively small force. Hitler also already had plans for war and he needed experienced officers to fight for him.

For its part, the Army viewed the rise of the SA with a mixture of disdain and dismay. However, though it strove to maintain its traditional position above politics, the time was approaching when it would have to declare some sort of stance. Since it could not possibly be for the SA, it had to be either for Hitler or against him. This Hitler knew. No less influenced by traditional thinking than any other of his conservative contemporaries (Hitler did not have one original thought), he was impressed by the Army and feared it. It was because of this that he worked hard to make it his own. By 1939 he had increased its size to 1,400,000. The Officer Corps grew from 4000 in 1935 to 24,000 in 1939. In the early days it was less easy for Hitler to feed National Socialists into such a diehard conservative body of men, but as time went on, and as Hitler Youth members grew to manhood, he was able to dilute the old guard so effectively as to make the former Imperial Army into an Army of the Third Reich after his own plan. This Army had more senior officers — generals and field marshals — than Germany had ever had before, and an even higher percentage of them came from the Nazi fold as the Third Reich progressed. Hitler was liberal with decorations — he awarded so many Iron Crosses that by 1944 almost one third of the Wehrmacht had been decorated — but equally he hired and fired his officers with no reference to Army administration, traditions, or to the General Staff. By then, though, the Army had no room to manoeuvre against the man who had made himself its absolute master.

As we shall see, the Army, with a few notable exceptions, did not possess a High Command that was very capable — either in terms of political astuteness or moral courage — of withstanding Hitler. Steeped in military tradition and often coming from families who had provided soldiers for centuries, they had a hidebound outlook, and, at best, even if their patriotism was not in doubt, even if they occasionally dared to question Hitler’s decisions on military matters, they could be self-serving. The Führer’s ability to suborn the top brass with bribes is an example of this, and it was a policy he continued with a high degree of success throughout his rule. Not all his generals were corrupt, many fought bravely — incredibly bravely — and well for their country, and some simply chose not to enter the political debate at all, restricting themselves to their soldierly duty. In this they were not unlike the majority of their countrymen, who allowed Hitler to succeed by not daring to protest; and in this they were no different from human beings under any dictatorship. But those in key positions at the outset — when Hitler could have been stopped most effectively — proved to have feet of clay.

The Minister of Defence from 1933 to 1938, succeeding to the post left vacant by Schleicher, was Colonel-General Werner von Blomberg. A man possessed of Wagnerian good looks, though not of mighty intellect, his courage was undisputed; but his record as Hitler’s War Minister (as he was called officially from 1935) was such as to earn him the nickname of ‘Rubber Lion’. Blomberg’s chief fault was to believe that Hitler would restore to the Army all its former power and glory. Once he had given his loyalty to Hitler, he was able, by virtue of his position, to block any influence the anti-Nazi Kurt von Hammerstein had enjoyed through his friend. Hammerstein resigned at the end of 1933 and was followed by Blomberg’s appointee, Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, who assumed his duties February 1934.

Fritsch was a Prussian nobleman and came from a military family. He had kept his hands clean of National Socialism, but he had not criticised it either. For the present, everyone felt safe with him as Commander-in-Chief. For Hitler, he was an improvement on the unsympathetic Hammerstein, and Hitler still had to move cautiously in his plans to take over control of the Army. Fritsch was not devious, nor was he interested in politics. He would carry out his orders unquestioningly. Those on the Right who opposed Hitler (the National Conservatives and the Schleicher faction) felt that at least Fritsch was not a Nazi either, and could be ‘turned’ if the moment to overthrow Hitler presented itself.

Von Schleicher had not been idle since Hitler had taken over the reins of power, and gathered about him was a small number of generals prepared to move their troops against the SA, arrest Hitler and have Hindenburg declare a state of emergency. The excuse for this was the coup anticipated from the SA in view of the mounting tension between them and the Army. This tension had been growing throughout 1933 and had reached snapping point by the late spring of 1934, when the power of the SA was alarming the most lugubrious conservative opposition. By now, of course, Hitler had neutralised any other opposition in Germany, and it is of interest to remember that Blomberg and Fritsch had accepted their appointments from a man whom they knew to have unconstitutionally outlawed the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, to have dissolved trade unions and all other political parties, and to have taken oppressive measures against the Jews.