Nein!: Standing up to Hitler 1935–1944
Paddy Ashdown
From the bestselling and prize-winning author Paddy Ashdown, a revelatory new history of German opposition to Hitler from 1935 – 1944In his last days, Adolf Hitler raged in his bunker that he had been betrayed by his own people, defeated from the inside. In part, he was right. By 1945, his armies were being crushed on all fronts, his regime collapsing with many fleeing retribution for their crimes. Yet, even before the war started, there were Germans very high in Hitler’s command committed to bringing about his death and defeat.Paddy Ashdown tells, for the first time, the story of those at the very top of Hitler’s Germany who tried first to prevent the Second World War and then to deny Hitler victory. Based on newly released files, the repeated attempts of the plotters to warn the Allies about Hitler’s plans are revealed. Key strands to the book’s narrative lie with the actions of Abwehr head Admiral Wilhelm Canaris to frustrate Hitler’s policies once the war had started; the plots to kill Hitler and, finally the systematic passage of key German military secrets to London, Washington and Moscow through MI6, the OSS (fore-runner to the CIA) and the “Lucy Ring” Russian spy network based in Switzerland. From 1943 onwards, concerted efforts were made to strike a separate peace with the West to shorten the war and prevent eastern Europe falling under the Soviet yoke.What is revealed is that the anti-Hitler bomb plots, which have received so much attention are, in fact only a small part of a much wider story; one in which those at the highest levels of the German state used every means possible – conspiracy, assassination, espionage – to ensure that, for the sake of the long-term reputation of their country and the survival of liberal and democratic values, Hitler could not be allowed to win the war. It is a matter of record that the European Union we have today and the nature and central position of Germany within it, is, in very large measure, the future envisaged by the plotters and for which they gave their lives.
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Copyright (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
Copyright © Paddy and Jane Ashdown Partnership 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008257040
Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008257057
Version: 2018-08-28
Dedication (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
To Hans Oster, preux chevalier
Contents
Cover (#u6705e939-36ac-50e0-92ff-719e9acff5a5)
Title Page (#ub9fb994b-7580-51a5-96e5-517d0cf5c203)
Copyright (#u112b67d1-4f16-56fd-aa64-7ecfef6397eb)
Dedication (#ue832513d-a4e5-5b3f-931d-77008e6b8350)
List of Illustrations (#u4d9b9301-9e61-5b25-b511-19ce50926a85)
Epigraphs (#u155cd20a-bb66-5099-bab9-ba9383cebda8)
Introduction (#u5afd39cc-c465-530a-9e1f-30c30cf938cb)
Main Dramatis Personae (#u65cdf031-9e22-59b7-9c96-be9ac52ade92)
Map: Berlin’s administrative district (#u6aa5a719-9b99-5465-8f1a-ab5c4eef6fae)
Map: Germany, 1944 (#u59bc8f96-d358-5fdf-8ecf-4d7790dd509e)
Prologue (#u04b6b4ba-d672-5ade-9a6b-8ea7259e3c5f)
1 Carl Goerdeler (#u90de0639-372a-507d-98b6-3a40598ecdb0)
2 Ludwig Beck (#ueab27d20-9a5c-54ba-a3c2-f3b153ac1fe8)
3 Wilhelm Canaris (#uf14a9ec3-3d6a-566c-9992-2184274fbc01)
4 Madeleine and Paul (#u403f1f11-e4e7-5009-b8f3-08fe70533885)
5 Germany in the Shadow of War (#uea59aefe-f3c0-562e-8edc-c9591b9ac49c)
6 The Emissaries (#u10d6b551-fb36-5c46-82bb-15fb01000898)
7 ‘All Our Lovely Plans’ (#uc4b41460-b6bd-5c8b-97e4-37ff416eaf5b)
8 March Madness (#u2405eb65-607c-55a1-bc52-c29112cf7504)
9 The March to War (#u3e58935d-1e9f-50c9-b256-8b60f0d2e970)
10 Switzerland (#ufe9e2e18-d73b-5d21-bd8e-bc520adf487e)
11 Halina (#u8f7e1d2b-c5ff-5eef-adb2-698b98189318)
12 Sitzkrieg (#u0263d489-cbd3-590f-948e-3f19bdc58428)
13 Warnings and Premonitions (#uf39f2f5a-a3d2-5e61-b961-252cb52f9c4f)
14 Felix and Sealion (#u4b339667-1f49-5cec-a915-bfec3b8d1ef3)
15 The Red Three (#u0b7a5fab-e083-5b56-b054-88b9584c6540)
16 Belgrade and Barbarossa (#u93c58d41-25f4-546f-80e8-61cfb6977911)
17 General Winter (#u6001ddcb-7a84-5608-921e-0fbcf2db1914)
18 The Great God of Prague (#u03637046-d74c-5de1-b6b4-0b479b9777dc)
19 Rebound (#u6a86c267-1f05-5fff-9ee1-7511bcc8b560)
20 Codes and Contacts (#u266ae768-d9a6-56ca-9aaf-73a3c628d45e)
21 Of Spies and Spy Chiefs (#u007ec335-fefb-58f1-80e5-407e92b82297)
22 Mistake, Misjudgement, Misfire (#uf1d77df9-e220-5925-a91c-94b27b596633)
23 The Worm Turns (#ue9add2be-74c2-58ad-a10c-574e48c3d9bc)
24 The End of Dora (#u0619d1b1-f19e-529e-a428-a6e923e14e7b)
25 Enter Stauffenberg (#u35a7b7f5-20c4-5a2b-8df6-8b9c6096ec9e)
26 Valkyrie and Tehran (#u1ecd5994-5e9b-55c6-a18b-750e65a16992)
27 Disappointment, Disruption, Desperation (#uded293a6-8cbb-57fd-9edf-36561273b61b)
28 The Tip of the Spear (#ufb376b89-e984-5b65-a43c-6449a67c7507)
29 Thursday, 20 July 1944 (#ufac2c245-ed9e-541c-b9da-6405e48b947f)
30 Calvary (#u29331e33-0a5e-5002-9c53-03cd637e69ae)
31 Epilogue (#u0ef06c47-4794-5ec7-8a13-8d02600408b5)
32 After Lives (#u3b0854cf-85aa-5b52-af82-db063d048d8f)
Afterword: Cock-up or Conspiracy? (#u808e718f-dde4-5a3f-9943-5ea93371ee8c)
Reader’s Note (#u1ee77a9c-5736-52b2-9a62-02872b48aa08)
Picture Section (#u2c291d38-830f-5f66-a830-91d34e0a1c65)
Acknowledgements (#u7bfad213-d69b-526a-98af-f177f09d23f6)
Bibliography (#ufd8c4640-cbf8-598b-a894-3e0a51b36efc)
Notes (#u6a2b1265-5a95-56b8-9176-7ac2280da713)
Index (#uba982ea7-7268-5cde-9986-49c82366597c)
Also by Paddy Ashdown (#udbaa39b7-cfa3-5851-96ae-066187904134)
About the Author (#u60ef9de0-3b69-51c2-bbd6-6e284f7afbfc)
About the Publisher (#uf277f083-7dcb-58b8-8fda-83f3a5a0fcaf)
Illustrations (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
Carl Goerdeler. (Papers of Arthur Primrose Young, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick: MSS.242/X/GO/3)
Wilhelm Canaris. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Ludwig Beck. (Ullstein bild Dtl: Getty Images)
Henning von Tresckow. (Ullstein bild Dtl: Getty Images)
Hans Oster. (AfZ: NL Hans Bernd Gisevius/6.7)
Erwin von Lahousen. (ÖNB)
Hans Bernd Gisevius. (SZ Photo/Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Robert Vansittart. (Scherl/Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
Stewart Menzies and his wife Pamela. (Evening Standard/Stringer/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)
Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich, September 1938. (Keystone/Stringer/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)
Paul Thümmel, Agent A54. (UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)
Madeleine Bihet-Richou.
Ursula Hamburger (‘Sonja’).
Ursula with her children, Nina, Micha and Peter Beurton. (Courtesy of Michael Hamburger and Peter Beurton)
Leon ‘Len’ Beurton. (Courtesy of Peter Beurton)
Halina Szymańska. (Courtesy of Marysia Akehurst)
Alexander Foote. (CRIA/Jay Robert Nash Collection)
Rachel Duebendorfer. (The National Archives, ref. KV2/1619)
Allen Dulles. (NARA 306-PS-59-17740)
Rudolf Roessler. (CRIA/Jay Robert Nash Collection)
Sándor Radó with his Geopress staff.
Sándor and Helene Radó with their two sons, June 1941. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)
‘De Favoriet’, the Jelineks’ shop in The Hague, c. 1939.
Bernhard Mayr von Baldegg, Alfred Rosenberg and Max Waibel.
The Wolfsschanze map room after Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt, 20 July 1944. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group: Getty Images)
Stauffenberg, Puttkamer, Bodenschatz, Hitler, Keitel, 15 July 1944. (Photo12/UIG via Getty Images)
Goerdeler on trial. (Keystone/Hulton Archive: Getty Images)
The Tirpitzufer, c.1939.
‘La Taupinière’, c. 1937.
Alexander Foote’s flat in Lausanne.
Halina Szymańska’s fake French passport.
Foote’s radio.
Station Maude, Olga and Edmond Hamel’s radio.
Halina Szymańska’s false passport. (Courtesy of Marysia Akehurst)
The Radó family’s apartment building at 113, rue de Lausanne in Geneva. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)
The Hamels’ radio shop in the Geneva suburb of Carouge, c.1939. (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde)
Epigraphs (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
From W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’
‘The only salvation for the honest man is the conviction that the wicked are prepared for any evil … It is worse than blindness to trust a man who has hell in his heart and chaos in his head. If nothing awaits you but disaster and suffering, at least make the choice that is noble and honourable and that will provide some consolation and comfort if things turn out poorly.’
Baron vom Stein, urging Friedrich Wilhelm III to oppose Napoleon in 1808
Introduction (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
This book is about those at the very top of Hitler’s Germany who tried to prevent the Second World War, made repeated attempts to kill him, did all they could to ensure his defeat, worked for an early peace with the Western Allies, and ultimately died terribly for their cause.
Most of my books have been about individual events, or people. The canvas of this one, by contrast, encompasses every sector of German society during the war; international statesmanship – or lack of it – in capitals from Berlin, to London, to Washington, to Moscow; battles fought from the shores of the Volga to the shadow of the Pyrenees; and spy rings plying their trade in Geneva, Zürich, Paris, Amsterdam, Istanbul and beyond.
Now that I have written it, I am a little surprised to find that a work I thought would tell the history of the Second World War through different eyes turns out also to be a story on the subject to which I return again and again: how human beings behave when we are faced with the challenges of war – and especially how, when confronted by great evil and personal jeopardy, we decide between submission and resistance: between loyalty and betrayal.
Is it ever possible to be both traitor and patriot? Is it treachery to betray your state if to do otherwise is to betray your humanity? Even if treachery changes nothing, must you still risk being a traitor in the face of great evil, if that is the only way to lighten the guilt that will fall on your children and your future countrymen? How do people make these choices? How do they behave after they have made them?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer – himself one of those murdered for his role in the anti-Hitler resistance – said: ‘Responsible action takes place in the sphere of relativity, completely shrouded in the twilight that the historical situation casts upon good and evil. It takes place in the midst of the countless perspectives from which every phenomenon is seen. Responsible action must decide not just between right and wrong, but between right and right and wrong and wrong.’
So it is, exactly, here. There are no blacks and whites, just choices between blacker blacks and whiter whites. There are no triumphal personal qualities, and no triumphant outcomes. Just flawed individuals who, at a time of what Bonhoeffer referred to as ‘moral twilight’, felt compelled to do the right thing as they saw it. That is a lesser triumph than we might wish for in dangerous times, but it was then – and is now – probably the only triumph we can reasonably expect.
This story is, at its heart, a tragedy. Like all great tragedies it involves personal flaws, the misjudgements of the mighty, and a malevolent fate. There is individual pity and suffering, and a deal of personal stupidity, here.
But – and herein lies the history – since these were human beings of consequence, their personal decisions affected lives and events far beyond their circle and their time.
The two central historical questions posed by this book are stark: did the Second World War have to happen? And if it did, did it have to end with a peace which enslaved Eastern Europe?
My purpose is not to provide definitive answers, but rather to present some facts which are not generally known – or at least not taken account of – and place these against the conventional view of the origins, progress and outcomes of World War II.
In reading this book you may be struck, as I was in writing it, by the similarities between what happened in the build-up to World War II and the age in which we now live. Then as now, nationalism and protectionism were on the rise, and democracies were seen to have failed; people hungered for the government of strong men; those who suffered most from the pain of economic collapse felt alienated and turned towards simplistic solutions and strident voices; public institutions, conventional politics and the old establishments were everywhere mistrusted and disbelieved; compromise was out of fashion; the centre collapsed in favour of the extremes; the normal order of things didn’t function; change – even revolution – was more appealing than the status quo, and ‘fake news’ built around the convincing untruth carried more weight in the public discourse than rational arguments and provable facts.
Painting a lie on the side of a bus and driving it around the country would have seemed perfectly normal in those days.
Nevertheless, I have found myself inspired in writing this story. It has proved to me that, even in such terrible times, there were some who were prepared to stand up against the age, even when their cause was hopeless, and even at the cost of their lives.
I hope that you will find that inspiration here, too.
Main Dramatis Personae (#u304a70c9-83ff-5920-824c-1be6daf92965)
Anulow, Leonid Abramovitsch – Alias ‘Kolja’ – Soviet ‘Rezident’ in Switzerland before Radó
Attolico, Bernardo – Italian ambassador in Berlin
Bartik, Major Josef – Head of Czech intelligence 1938
Beck, General Ludwig – Chief of staff of the German army until dismissed by Hitler in 1938. The army leader of the anti-Hitler plot
Bell, George – Anglican theologian and bishop of Chichester
Beneš, Edvard – Czech president 1935–38
Beurton, Leon Charles – Known as Len. Friend of Alexander Foote. Radio operator Dora Ring
Bihet-Richou, Madeleine – Lover of Erwin Lahousen. French secret services
Blomberg, Field Marshal Werner von – Commander-in-chief of the German army until dismissed by Hitler in 1938
Bock, Field Marshal Fedor von – Von Tresckow’s uncle. Commander of Army Group Centre
Bolli, Margrit – Alias ‘Rosy’. Rote Drei radio operator
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich – Theologian, German pastor and key plotter
Bonhoeffer, Dr Karl – Father of Dietrich. Took part in the September 1938 plot
Bosch, Robert – German industrialist. Founder of the Bosch industrial empire. Supporter of Goerdeler
Brauchitsch, Field Marshal Walther von – Commander-in-chief of the German army up to the defeat at Moscow in 1941
Cadogan, Sir Alexander – Head of the British Foreign Office
Canaris, Erika – Wife of Wilhelm
Canaris, Wilhelm – Head of the German Abwehr until his dismissal in 1944
Chojnacki, Captain Sczcęsny – Polish intelligence spy-master based in Switzerland
Ciano, Galeazzo – Italian foreign minister
Colvin, Ian – Central European correspondent of the London News Chronicle. Arranged von Kleist-Schmenzin’s visit to Britain in 1938
Daladier, Édouard – French prime minister
Dansey, Sir Claude – Deputy head of MI6 and founder of the ‘Z Organisation’. Known as ‘Colonel Z’
Dohnányi, Hans von – Lawyer in the Abwehr and a key conspirator
Donovan, Major General William ‘Wild Bill’ – Head of the US intelligence agency (OSS)
Duebendorfer, Rachel – Alias ‘Sissy’. ‘Dora Ring’ agent
Dulles, Allen – OSS representative in Bern
Eden, Anthony – British foreign secretary
Farrell, Victor – MI6 head in Geneva
Fellgiebel, General Fritz Erich (known as Erich) – Chief of the German army’s Signal Establishment and a key plotter
Foote, Alexander – Alias ‘Jim’. Radio operator, ‘Dora Ring’
Franck, Aloïs – Paul Thümmel’s Czech spy-handler
François-Poncet, André – French ambassador in Berlin at the time of Munich
Fritsch, Colonel General Werner von – Commander-in-chief of the German army until his dismissal on trumped-up charges of homosexuality in January 1938
Gabčik, Josef – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent
Gersdorff, Rudolf-Christoph von – Henning von Tresckow’s staff officer; volunteered to assassinate Hitler by suicide bombing on 21 March 1943
Gibson, Colonel Harold ‘Gibby’ – Head of the MI6 station in Prague
Gisevius, Hans Bernd – The ‘eternal plotter’ in the Abwehr. Key early conspirator and Canaris’s conduit to Halina Szymańska
Goerdeler, Anneliese – Carl Goerdeler’s wife
Goerdeler, Carl – Key early plotter. Ex-mayor of Leipzig
Groscurth, Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth – Canaris’s liaison officer with the army at Zossen
Guisan, General André – Head of the Swiss army
Haeften, Lieutenant Werner von – Von Stauffenberg’s adjutant
Halder, Colonel General Franz – German chief of staff under von Brauchitsch
Halifax, Lord Edward – British foreign secretary under Chamberlain and a key appeaser
Hamburger, Ursula – Née Kuczynski. Code name ‘Sonja’. Soviet spy who arrived in Switzerland in 1936
Hamel, Olga and Edmond – ‘Dora Ring’ radio operators
Hassell, Ulrich von – German ambassador in Italy before the war. Liaison between Beck and Goerdeler
Hausamann, Captain Hans – Founder of the Büro Ha, a private intelligence bureau in Switzerland
Heinz, Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich – Leader of the commando who were to kill Hitler in 1938
Henderson, Sir Nevile – British ambassador in Berlin before 1939
Hoare, Sir Samuel, MP – One of Chamberlain’s leading appeasement supporters
Hohenlohe von Langenberg, Prince Maximilian Egon – Freelance spy. Friend of Dulles, Canaris and Himmler
Jelinek, Charles and Antoinette – Owners of ‘De Favoriet’ bric-à-brac shop in The Hague
Keitel, Field Marshal Wilhelm – Chief of the German armed forces high command
Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von – German emissary of the opposition to Hitler; saw Churchill in London in August 1938
Kluge, Field Marshal Günther von – Commander of Army Group Centre. Reluctant plotter
Kordt, Erich – Head of Ribbentrop’s office in Berlin
Kordt, Theo – Brother of Erich. Official at the German embassy in London
Kubiš, Jan – Operation Anthropoid Czech agent
Lahousen, Major General Erwin von – Head of the Austrian Abwehr and then senior officer in the German Abwehr. Close to Canaris and a key plotter. Lover of Madeleine Bihet-Richou
Manstein, Field Marshal Erich von – Commander of Army Group South and mastermind of the Kursk offensive
March, Juan – Mallorcan businessman and prime mover in Spain – contact of Canaris and MI6
Masson, Roger – Head of Swiss intelligence
Mayr von Baldegg, Captain Bernhard – Staff member of Swiss army intelligence; Waibel’s deputy head
Menzies, Sir Stewart – Head of MI6
Mertz von Quirnheim, Colonel Albrecht – Friend of Stauffenberg; involved in the 20 July 1944 plot
Moltke, Count Helmuth von – Founder of the ‘Kreisau Circle’
Morávec, Colonel František – Head of the Czech intelligence service
Morávek, Václav – Resistance leader in Prague
Mueller, Josef – Canaris’s spy in the Vatican
Navarre, Henri – Madeleine Bihet-Richou’s French intelligence ‘handler’
Niemöller, Martin – Anti-Hitler Lutheran pastor
Olbricht, General Friedrich – Key plotter. Involved in the 20 July coup
Oster, Colonel Hans – ‘Managing director’ of the attempted 1938 coup. Head of Z Section in the Tirpitzufer
Pannwitz, Heinz – SD officer in charge of finding the ‘Dora Ring’
Payne Best, Captain Sigismund – MI6 officer captured at Venlo
Puenter, Dr Otto – ‘Dora’ agent – also in touch with MI6
Radó, Sándor – Head of the ‘Dora’ spy network
Ribbentrop, Joachim von – German ambassador to London and later Hitler’s foreign minister
Rivet, Colonel Louis – Head of French military intelligence (SR)
Roessler, Rudolf – Codename ‘Lucy’. Private purveyor of intelligence in Switzerland
Sas, Gijsbertus Jacobus – Dutch military attaché in Berlin; contact of Oster and Waibel
Schacht, Hjalmar – German minister of economics and president of the Reichsbank
Schellenberg, Walter – Heydrich’s protégé and mastermind of Venlo
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von – German lawyer. Liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Beck in Berlin
Schneider, Christian – Alias ‘Taylor’. Swiss businessman. Cut-out supplying information from Roessler to the Dora Ring
Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner von der – Pre-war ambassador to Moscow and senior resistant
Schulte, Edouard – German businessman and one of Chojnacki’s agents
Sedláček, Karel – Alias ‘Charles Simpson’. Czech intelligence officer in Bern
Stauffenberg, Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von – Architect and perpetrator of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot
Stevens, Major Richard – MI6 officer captured at Venlo
Suñer, Serrano – Spanish foreign minister
Szymańska, Halina – Wife of the Polish military attaché in Berlin before the war. Channel for Canaris to pass information to Menzies
Thümmel, Paul – Many aliases. MI6 agent A54. Important spy in the early part of the war
Timoshenko, Marshal Semyon – Commander of Soviet forces at Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk
Tresckow, Henning von – Chief of staff of Army Group Centre; a key plotter
Trott zu Solz, Adam von – German lawyer, diplomat and active resister
Vanden Heuvel, Count Frederick – Head of MI6 in Bern after 1941
Vansittart, Sir Robert – Head of the pre-war British Foreign Office
Waibel, Captain Max – Swiss intelligence officer
Weizsäcker, Ernst von – Head of the German Foreign Office and key plotter
Wilson, Sir Horace – Personal adviser to Chamberlain. Appeasement supporter
Witzleben, General Erwin von – Commander of the Berlin garrison and de facto leader of the September 1938 coup
Young, A.P. – One of Vansittart’s ‘spies’ in contact with Goerdeler
Zaharoff, Basil – Director of Vickers and notorious arms dealer
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Prologue (#ulink_e4a184dc-804d-5899-97b0-37c80c5385fb)
To the millions whose votes helped make Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, he was the hero who would rescue them from the humiliations of the Versailles Treaty and the shaming chaos that followed.
John Maynard Keynes, who attended the 1919 peace conference, condemned Versailles afterwards in unforgiving and uncannily prophetic terms: ‘If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.’
Keynes was not the only person to understand that in the punitive conditions imposed by Versailles lay the seeds of another explosion of German militarism. Others referred to it as ‘the peace built on quicksand’.
Under Clause 231 of the Treaty, the ‘War Guilt’ clause, Germany was deprived of all her colonies, 80 per cent of her pre-war fleet, almost half her iron production, 16 per cent of coal output, 13 per cent of her territory (including the great German-speaking port of Danzig) and more than a tenth of her population. To add to these humiliations, the victorious Allies also planted a deadly economic time bomb beneath what was left of the German economy. This took the form of war reparations amounting to some $US32 billion, to be paid largely in shipments of coal and steel.
In 1922, when Germany inevitably defaulted, French and Belgian troops occupied the centre of German coal and steel production in the Ruhr valley. Faced with the collapse of the domestic economy, the German government sought refuge in printing money, with the inevitable consequence of explosive runaway inflation. In 1921 a US dollar was worth 75 German marks. Two years later, each dollar was valued at 4.2 trillion marks. By November 1923, a life’s savings of 100,000 marks would barely buy a loaf of bread.
In the months immediately following the Armistice, an armed uprising inspired by Lenin and the Russian Revolution ended in 1919 with the removal of the kaiser and elections for Germany’s first democratic government, christened the Weimar Republic after the city in which its first Assembly took place. It all began in a blaze of hope, but soon descended into squabbling and dysfunctionality. Unstable, riven with shifting coalitions, burdened with war reparations, incapable of meeting the challenges of the global depression, the new government, along with politicians of every stripe and hue, soon became objects of derision and even hatred. Compromise was seen as failure, easy slogans replaced rational policies, the elite were regarded with suspicion, and the establishment was deluged with accusations of corruption and profiteering.
A new myth – that of the ‘stab in the back’ – began to be promulgated by the German right. This blamed ‘the politicians’ for the defeat of 1918 and the Versailles humiliations that followed. It was claimed that the German army was undefeated, but had been betrayed by the politicians in Berlin who signed the Armistice. It was not long before the Jews were added into the mix, which swiftly mutated into an international conspiracy aimed at the destruction of Germany and its people. The ‘stab in the back’ legend became so deeply imbedded in the German pre-war psyche that it would restrain Hitler’s domestic opponents, and influence the Allies’ terms for peace, right up until the end of the coming war.
Between 1924 and 1929 the German economy stabilised, thanks in large measure to US loans. A period of great artistic renaissance followed. Berlin, reverberating to the talents of Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, Marlene Dietrich and the artists and architects of the Bauhaus movement, became the cultural capital of the world.
No sooner was hope reborn than it was broken again on the wheel of a second economic crisis, this time brought about by the Wall Street crash of October 1929. By 1932, with unemployment standing at six million, those, including dependants, directly affected by loss of work amounted to 20 per cent of the German population.
Revolt was once again in the air. Running battles broke out in the streets between communists and Hitler’s stormtroopers. A German commentator on these years wrote, ‘In [these] times, principles are cheap and perfidy, calculation and fear reign supreme.’
These were perfect hothouse conditions for the growth of the most radical forms of extremism. Driven by a mystic and misshapen belief in the moral rebirth of Germany, unencumbered by doubt, unheeding of convention, fed on hate, armoured with conspiracies and slogans and led by a messianic leader who combined charisma with an astonishing ability to move the masses, the Nazi Party’s time had come. In the 1928 elections, the National Socialist Democratic Party – known by its shortened version, ‘Nazi’ – was no more than a tiny fringe party winning only 2.6 per cent of the vote. Just four years later, in July 1932, Hitler’s party secured 13.7 million votes, making it, with 37 per cent of the national vote, by far the largest party in the German Reichstag. A second national election in November of that year saw a drop in the Nazi vote. Nevertheless, after a period of parliamentary stalemate, the ageing German president Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933, believing that this was the best means to control him. ‘We’ve engaged him for ourselves,’ said former chancellor Franz von Papen, one of the grandest of the grandees in German politics. ‘Within two months we will have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeak.’
By these miscalculations the nation of Beethoven and Schiller, of Goethe and Schubert, was given over, lock, stock and barrel to the most primitive, destructive and primeval force for barbarism that Europe had seen since the Dark Ages.
While most of the elite saw Hitler as a harmless eccentric who they could control and who would not last for long, many ordinary Germans, even those who did not vote for him, believed that he might represent a new start and should be given a chance – after all, many argued, things couldn’t get worse, could they?
All of them had misjudged their man.
Adolf Hitler was remarkable in many ways. He was always thinking the unthinkable; always proposing the objectionable; always choosing to shock, rather than to comfort; always rejecting the constraints of convention; always preferring myth and mission to reality; always taking people by surprise with his undiluted radicalism; always trusting his own inner voice in preference to facts and other people’s opinions. ‘I confront everything with a tremendous ice-cold lack of bias,’ he once declared. Because a thing should be, it would be – that was Hitler’s doctrine. On the altar of this absolutism, bolstered by his much-vaunted ‘triumph of the will’, Hitler would lay waste to half of Europe.
But it was not these manic qualities which made Adolf Hitler different. What distinguished him from the many other fascist leaders of his age, and from the myriad self-declared prophets of history, was his genius for political action – he was a mythmaker with a practical understanding of power and how to use it to achieve his ends.
It was this, more than anything else, which caused friend and foe alike to look upon him with a wonder which produced adulation, fear and intrigued curiosity, depending on where you stood in relation to his power.
Foreign capitals, blindly hoping to ‘tame the beast’ who would not be tamed, proposed the usual well-tried European inducements of agreements, pacts, bribes and appeasements in the vain hope of containing the uncontainable. The whole of Europe was mesmerised – paralysed too – by what had happened in Berlin. A German observer in Paris noted among the French ‘a feeling as if a volcano has opened up in their immediate vicinity, the eruption of which may devastate their fields and cities any day. Consequently they are watching its slightest stirrings with astonishment and dread. A natural phenomenon which they are forced to confront … helplessly. Today Germany is again the great international star that appears in every newspaper, in every cinema, fascinating the masses with a mixture of fear and reluctant admiration … Germany [under Hitler] is the great, tragic, uncanny, dangerous adventurer.’
Inside Germany, it did not take long for those who disagreed with Hitler to find out that things could get worse – very much worse.
The first underground opposition to the Nazis grew out of a combination of political groupings which had stood against him in the elections – chiefly the communists and the Social Democrats.
Tainted by their association with the failures of the Weimar Republic, and in the case of the communists by their refusal to join an alliance against Hitler during the economic crises of 1930–33, Hitler’s democratic opponents were easily outmanoeuvred and broken by his ruthless pursuit of power.
Like so many others at home and abroad, Germany’s conventional parties failed to recognise the uniqueness of Hitler’s demonic nature, and presumed that his revolution was just another episode in the normal rhythms of the democratic cycle. ‘Harsh rulers don’t last long,’ said the chairman of the last great Social Democratic Party rally in Berlin in 1933.
A terrible price would soon be paid for this apathy.
On 22 March 1933, just seven weeks after Hitler became chancellor, the first concentration camp opened its gates to admit two hundred political prisoners to an old gunpowder and munitions factory which SS leader Heinrich Himmler had chosen at Dachau, sixteen kilometres from Munich. The camp, with its gates bearing the infamous legend ‘Arbeit macht frei’ – Work will make you free – would remain a byword for torture, every kind of inhumanity and mass extermination, until it was overrun by American troops in the last year of the war. By the end of 1933, 20,000 of Hitler’s political opponents were either in jail or doing their best to survive under the most brutal conditions in Dachau and other concentration camps, now popping up across Germany.
Despite violent anti-communist purges, which started very soon after Hitler became chancellor, communist cells began to reseed themselves in factories and workplaces. Mostly these numbered no more than six or eight people, connected by a sophisticated courier system to other cells, the identities of whose members they often did not know. These networks extended into other European countries, where they were especially active in German émigré communities. In due course, after a brief period of quiescence during the Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and despite being energetically pursued by Hitler’s secret state police, the Gestapo, the German communist underground network would turn to sabotaging the war effort and spying, not least through the great Russian wartime spy network which operated throughout occupied Europe, nicknamed by Himmler’s security structures die Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra).* (#ulink_4201c713-d4db-5ac6-abce-97e8ef6ced81)
What was left of Hitler’s political opposition went underground. Among the German resistance’s early supporters were numerous activists in the social democrat cause and many in the trade union movement.
Opposition to Hitler was not confined to the workers. Although some German industrialists and financiers, such as Alfred Krupp, found good commercial reasons to support Hitler, a number of others, like the great engineering industrialist Robert Bosch in Stuttgart, courageously provided active succour to the opposition.
With the communists, liberals and social democrats forced underground, it was left to some elements of the German Church to nurture popular opposition to National Socialism. The Barmen synod of May 1934 in Wuppertal brought together Lutherans who openly condemned the materialism and ungodliness of National Socialism, attracting tens of thousands from all over Germany to an open-air demonstration at which they voiced their opposition to what was happening. In the St Annen-Kirche in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, the middle class thronged to hear ‘the fighting pastor’ Martin Niemöller preach his incendiary sermons against all the Nazis stood for. In southern German cities like Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich, Christians marched in the streets in support of Lutheran bishop Theophil Wurm and his colleague Hans Meiser, bishop of Munich, both of whom had been placed under house arrest for inciting public disturbance. An anti-Nazi tract written by Helmut Kern, a Lutheran pastor from Nuremberg, sold 750,000 copies in short order – the highest circulation for a religious tract since those of Luther himself.
Hitler, despite his by-now unchallenged dominion over the instruments of the German state, shrank from open warfare with the mass ranks of the German Churches, Protestant and Catholic. But he tried every other means to suppress the dissent. Niemöller was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, from which he did not emerge until the war was over. Troublesome pastors were conscripted en masse into the army, the Church’s work with the young was curtailed, teaching permits were withheld for those lecturing in theology at German universities, and permission was refused for the publication of all pamphlets except those acceptable to the Nazi regime. Hitler’s supporters even managed to infiltrate the Church elections of July 1933 to such an extent that he was able to enforce the anti-Semitic ‘Aryan Law’, removing all pastors who were ‘tainted’ by descent from Jewish or half-Jewish forebears.
On 14 March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued a powerful encyclical attacking the new wave of ‘heathenism’ in such strong terms that it became a call to arms against the Nazis. What followed was an open and violent counterattack on the monasteries, led by Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. In a purge reminiscent of Henry VIII, some were commandeered for military bases, others were banned from accepting new entrants or holding religious processions. Between 1933 and 1945 thousands of brave pastors and friars were to be found among the inmates of the concentration camps, where many of them lost their lives as martyrs for their beliefs.
Although Hitler was finally able to stem ‘the mischief-making of the Church’, religion and religious activists, including the great pastor, theologian and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer, played a huge part in providing the inspiration, moral underpinning and manpower for the anti-Hitler resistance.
Scattered amongst these organised and semi-organised structures of the German resistance were a number of individuals who, as the excesses and horrors of Nazism became more and more evident, started to wage their own private and lonely struggles against the Nazi state. Among these were the Württemberg carpenter Georg Elser, who, acting entirely alone, missed assassinating Hitler with a bomb by a hair’s breadth because of fog at Munich airport; Otto and Elise Hampel, who distributed over two hundred anti-Hitler messages around Berlin and died under the guillotine as a result, and the students of the White Rose Circle who, led by their tutor, met the same fate for distributing pamphlets around Munich.
These remarkable individuals – Auden’s ‘ironic points of light’ – ignited brief beacons of moral courage in the darkness. But they did not – could not – alter the course of the war.
As they, and many we do not know of, changed their stance from supporting Hitler to actively opposing him, others in the most senior echelons of the Nazi state were tracing similar paths towards their own individual epiphanies.
Chief among these were three men: a civilian who could have been chancellor in Hitler’s place; a general who many believed was destined to lead his armies; and the head of his foreign intelligence service.
* (#ulink_28d32358-6202-52af-a3fc-881af2a344c6) Literally ‘the Red Chapel’. In this usage the word ‘Kapelle’ is meant to indicate that it is a secret organisation. The translation of ‘Kapelle’ as ‘orchestra’ is capricious and confusing. ‘Ring’ would have been better.
1
Carl Goerdeler (#ulink_2534d764-de02-5ea6-ae8f-1c4088c8aa1d)
Late-evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian windows of the dining room of the National Liberal Club in London. It fell on a damask tablecloth laid with silver and porcelain in a secluded alcove set slightly apart from the other tables. The wooden panels all around glowed a deep mahogany, and the air resonated with the low murmur of diners enjoying themselves, despite the stern gaze of William Gladstone’s twice-life-size statue at the far end of the room.
The six men at the alcove table were not cheerful. They were sombre, quiet-voiced, and listening carefully to one of their number, an imposing figure with boyish good looks, startling light-grey eyes, heavy eyebrows and a forceful personality. The fifty-two-year-old Carl Goerdeler was a serious man who was used to being taken seriously. Ex-lord mayor of the great German city of Leipzig, until recently a key official in the government of Adolf Hitler and a sometime candidate for chancellor of Germany, Goerdeler was a dinner guest whom it was easier to listen to than to converse with.
Born on 31 July 1884 in the west Prussian town of Schneidemuehl, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the son of a district judge, had been a brilliant student at school, a brilliant law graduate at Tübingen University, and by all accounts a brilliant practising lawyer before finding his metier as an economist and senior official in German local government. He soon proved a talented and effective administrator, whose grasp of economics, incorruptible personality and ability to charm were quickly recognised. In 1912, at the age of just twenty-eight, Goerdeler was unanimously elected as principal assistant (effectively deputy) to the mayor of the Rhenish town of Solingen in western Germany. His military service on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First World War ended with a period as the administrator of a large swathe of territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus which had been occupied by Germany under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918. Here he added a reputation for humanity and compassion to his other recognised virtues.
The Armistice in November 1918 changed everything for Goerdeler, and for Germany. Like most Germans, he felt that his country’s emasculation in the Versailles settlement inflicted a deep shame and injustice on his Fatherland. It was in these post-war years that Goerdeler the nationalist and patriot began to take form. The brutal amputation of Danzig from the ‘motherland’, in order to give newly-enlarged Poland a corridor to the sea, especially offended his sensitivities, both as a German and as a Prussian. He maintained a vocal opposition to this Versailles humiliation long after most other civil and military leaders had accepted the necessity to move on. This was as admirably fearless as it was tactically stupid. It was also an early example of a stubborn refusal to compromise when Goerdeler considered his cause just, which would become a leitmotif of his life until the very end.
By now Goerdeler’s political views had solidified. He was by upbringing a devout Lutheran, and by political conviction a conservative with an attraction to constitutional monarchism. He was authoritarian, patriotic, consumed by a belief in the power of political ideals and democracy (but only to the point where these did not interfere with efficient government). Economically, he believed in financial rectitude; in his dealings with others he was punctilious, in his personal habits he was frugal, and in his personal life he was guided by an unyielding moral code which even extended to refusing entry into his family home to those who had been divorced. One of his friends, and a future fellow plotter against Hitler, wrote: ‘Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him which was sombre, unresolved or enigmatic. He therefore assumed his fellow human beings needed only enlightenment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways.’
These qualities would have made Carl Goerdeler a great man in any stable age, but they rendered him a hopelessly naïve utopian in the cruel age of turbulence and revolution in which he had to live his life.
After a period as the deputy mayor of Königsberg on the Baltic coast during the 1920s, Goerdeler was elected Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) of Leipzig in 1930, just two months before his forty-sixth birthday. Now he was a big figure on the national stage. At the time he took over the Leipzig administration, Germany was midway through its second great economic convulsion, following the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. In December 1931, with unemployment rocketing, Goerdeler accepted an invitation from President Hindenburg to join his government as Reichskommissar (State Commissioner) for price control. His deft handling of this delicate role earned him widespread acclaim. When Hindenburg’s chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, resigned in May 1932, Goerdeler was widely thought of as his successor. But the political turmoil which ensued did not produce a man of rectitude and order – it produced instead Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.
Carl Goerdeler
Goerdeler did not at first oppose Hitler. He saw the new chancellor as potentially an enlightened dictator, who with the right advice could be a force for good and for order after the upheavals and failures of the Weimar years.
It did not take long for the scales to fall from the lord mayor of Leipzig’s eyes.
On 1 April 1933, when the city’s Jewish businesses were threatened by Nazi stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA) during Hitler’s ‘day of national boycott’, it required an appearance by the mayor in full ceremonial dress, backed by the police, to save the situation from descending into violence and calamity. There followed several instances when Goerdeler had to intervene personally to save Jewish enterprises from the consequences of Hitler’s policy of sequestrating Jewish assets and businesses in order to ‘Aryanise’ the German economy.
There was worse – much worse – to come. On 30 June 1934 Hitler launched the internal putsch which history has come to know as the Night of the Long Knives. The ostensible purpose of this act of national bloodletting was to exterminate the paramilitary SA, which Hitler saw as a growing threat to his power. But the killings extended into a general orgy of score-settling with enemies of the Nazi regime. Among the eighty-five killed were the army general who was Hitler’s immediate predecessor as chancellor, the personal secretary of another chancellor, and several Catholic political leaders. It was now plain to all that Hitler’s government was prepared to behave illegally, unscrupulously, murderously, and completely without reference to either moral or legal codes. This was a turning point for many.
But not, despite all his moral rectitude, for Carl Goerdeler.
On 5 November 1934, barely four months after the Night of the Long Knives, Goerdeler accepted an offer from Hitler to become, for the second time, Germany’s commissioner for price control. His decision to serve Hitler at this time was one he would find difficult to explain later. Why did he do it? The answer provides keys to two of the most puzzling paradoxes of Goerdeler’s complex personality. Alongside an all-consuming conviction of what was right and wrong, including a willingness to accept any personal sacrifice rather than to submit, he also possessed an almost childlike ignorance about the true nature of evil. Because of this, despite his worldly wisdom in matters of politics, government and the economy, he completely overestimated his ability to persuade bad men to do good things, by talking sensibly to them.
The truth was that Goerdeler accepted Hitler’s post because he believed he could change him. His chosen weapons for doing this were a stream of long (in some cases very long) memoranda and papers on the economy, directed at the chancellor. These were read either skimpily or not at all. Following a succession of turf battles and disagreements on public policymaking, the inevitable rupture between the two men occurred in 1936, when Goerdeler lost all power and influence in Hitler’s circle.
This was the moment for which the lord mayor’s Nazi enemies in Leipzig had been waiting.
In early November that year, the Oberbürgermeister was invited to speak at the German-Finnish Chamber of Commerce in Helsinki. At the time Goerdeler was under attack by the local Leipzig Nazi leader because of his refusal to remove the statue of Felix Mendelssohn, the great German-Jewish composer, from its position outside the city’s concert hall. Pointing out the statue to a visitor, the Oberbürgermeister complained: ‘There is one of my problems. They [the Brownshirts] are after me to remove that monument. But if they ever touch it I am finished here.’ To his daughter Marianne he seems to have indicated that what really affronted him was an outrageous attack not so much on a Jew, as on German culture: ‘All of us listened to Mendelssohn’s songs with great pleasure and sang them as well. To deny Mendelssohn is nothing, but an absurd, cowardly act.’
Before leaving for Helsinki, Goerdeler extracted promises from Hitler and Himmler that they would personally ensure the safety of the statue in his absence. Nevertheless, the local Nazis pulled it down while he was away. Returning to Leipzig in a fury, Goerdeler issued an ultimatum that the missing statue should be replaced forthwith. When it wasn’t, in typical Goerdeler style, he resigned. It should be noted that his resignation was far more a protest against the loss of his authority than against anti-Semitism, for his position on the Jews at this time was at best ambivalent. Even so, for this act of principle against tyranny and of protest against an outrage to German culture, Carl Goerdeler became an overnight hero to many across Germany who saw him as having sacrificed his public career rather than lend his name to a shameful deed.
As the bearer of all that was good and great about German culture, order and respect for the law, Goerdeler, who never liked to be without a mission for long, now decided that personal responsibility and conscience demanded that he should henceforth dedicate his superhuman energy, ability and moral purpose to a single end – the removal of Adolf Hitler.
His first task was to warn the world about the true nature of the German dictator and the threat that he posed. But how? Goerdeler was, after all, not only without a job, but also without a passport, which had been confiscated by a local Gauleiter.
What he needed for his new mission was money, and his passport back.
The money came from Robert Bosch, the head of the Bosch industrial empire and leader of a small group of Stuttgart democrats who were hostile to Hitler. Bosch appointed Goerdeler (who had already turned down a post with Alfred Krupp, a man of very different political views) as financial and international adviser to his firm, so providing him with both a reason to go abroad and a comfortable salary to live on.
Goerdeler got his passport back from an unexpected source – Hermann Göring. Göring, who was in charge of the German rearmament programme at the time, was becoming increasingly concerned about the possibility of a future war. Cleverly playing on this (and probably also on Göring’s desire to build up his own private information network) Goerdeler proposed that he should undertake a foreign tour, and report back on opinion in Western capitals. Göring jumped at the idea, arranging for the return of Goerdeler’s passport and instructing his new emissary as they parted that he should always remember on his travels to conduct himself ‘as a patriot’.
The would-be wanderer left Berlin on 3 June 1937, at the beginning of a series of foreign trips which over the next two years would take him to Belgium, Britain (twice), Holland, France (twice), Canada, the USA, Switzerland (twice), Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.
His message was always the same. Hitler was evil; his government had done evil things, and would do many more; he had neither moral restraint nor human scruple; his aim was war, and if he was left unchallenged, war would be inevitable. The only way to avoid this was for the Western powers to be firm in opposing him – ‘call black, black and white, white’ as he put it. Any equivocation or appeasement would be regarded by Hitler as weakness, and would further inflame his megalomania. If standing firm against Hitler was the policy of the Western powers, Goerdeler promised, he and his friends would get rid of him from inside Germany – even at risk of their lives.
It must have been startling for the quiet English gentlemen sitting around the dining table in the comforting normality of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall to realise that they were being warned of an impending putsch designed to remove Hitler and change the government of Germany.
Standing in the darkness on the pavement outside the club after they had waved their guest goodbye in a London taxi, one of the company said to their host, ‘He has decided with commendable courage to go forth and fearlessly condemn the Hitler regime, regardless of what the personal consequences may be’.
Goerdeler’s fellow diners that night were not in themselves in any way remarkable. They consisted of an ex-World War I fighter pilot, an industrialist, a renowned German educationalist and a middle-ranking civil servant. They had been brought together for the occasion by Arthur Primrose Young. Young (he preferred to be known as ‘A.P.’, in preference to anything which included Primrose) was a senior industrialist and a member of a small group who acted as occasional gatherers of intelligence for Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office and close adviser to Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary. Every word that was said that night would be reported back. Vansittart was the invisible seventh diner at the table on this ordinary July evening in 1937.
Most permanent under secretaries at the British Foreign Office are unobtrusive, background men, whose voices are seldom heard. But Sir Robert Vansittart – widely known in Whitehall as ‘Van’ – was different. Knowledgeable, clever and very well informed, he was so influential over Eden that the foreign secretary was often maliciously referred to behind his back as ‘His Master’s Voice’ – the point of the barb being that ‘Van’ was the foreign secretary’s master, not the other way round.
Vansittart was, in short, anything but quiet and unobtrusive. His frequently-voiced concerns about the rise of Hitler were so contrary to the appeasement policy of His Majesty’s Government of the time that one of prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s close advisers referred to him as ‘an alarmist, [who] hampered all attempts of the Government to make friendly contact with the dictator states’.
A few days later, Goerdeler had a meeting with Vansittart, no doubt as a result of Young’s report on the National Liberal Club dinner. Afterwards, Van wrote a memorandum to Eden for circulation to the cabinet. In it he underlined Goerdeler’s warnings, referring to the visiting German as ‘an impressive, wise and weighty man [who by coming to Britain is] putting his neck in a halter’.
Vansittart’s minute got no further than Eden’s desk. It did not accord with the prevailing government policy of appeasement, and would therefore, the foreign secretary judged, not be welcomed by his cabinet colleagues.
The minute still exists in Van’s private papers. On it, in Vansittart’s hand, are written the words: ‘Suppressed by Eden’.
2
Ludwig Beck (#ulink_9a758605-c18b-574e-af8c-276f428abe89)
If there was a soldier in the German army who embodied the antithesis of all that Hitler and the Nazi Party stood for, it was Ludwig Beck.
And yet, he was not one of life’s natural rebels. He was too intellectual, too thoughtful, too careful, too considered and too punctilious (that word again) to be a great plotter – and far too straightforward to be a successful conspirator.
And that was his problem. Like Carl Goerdeler, Ludwig Beck was a man made for a different age than the one in which he found himself.
Also like Goerdeler, Beck at first welcomed the arrival of Hitler and the Nazis on the German scene. In the autumn of 1930 he famously defended young officers in his unit who were court-martialled for being members of the Nazi Party, contrary to the rules of the time which prohibited army officers from political activity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Beck, whose Lutheran faith had incorporated a degree of anti-Semitism since the days of Luther himself, announced, ‘I have wished for years for the political revolution, and now my wishes have come true. It is the first ray of hope since 1918.’
Ludwig August Theodor Beck was born the son of a gifted metallurgical engineer on 29 June 1880 in Biebrich, then a small village on the opposite bank of the Rhine from Mainz. As a middle-class Prussian brought up in the long afterglow of the victories of the Franco-Prussian War and the ensuing unification of Germany, and living little more than a stone’s throw from Frankfurt, where the treaty which sealed these triumphs was signed, the young Beck’s career would probably have been decided from the moment he was born – he was to be a soldier.
What followed was an education in the classic Prussian military tradition. This produced officers of high professional ability, who regarded a commitment to their country as synonymous with loyalty to their regiment and to the brotherhood of their fellow officers. For these men the Prussian military code, characterised by the motto ÜbImmer Treu und Redlichkeit* (#ulink_b16a3c36-c6f2-523f-979d-bfc95cf6f2d9) (Always practise loyalty and sincerity), was more than a slogan – it was a way of life that they were sworn to follow and protect. Later this sense of loyalty and brotherly solidarity among the officer corps would protect even plotters against the German state from discovery by the security services.
Ludwig Beck’s moral compass, founded on Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit, was different from that of Carl Goerdeler – but its pull was no less strong.
Tall, angular, thin, Beck’s physical appearance closely mirrored his personality. He had the look of an ascetic, with what one colleague described as ‘facial skin so tight as to seem ghoulish, especially on the rare occasions when he smiled’. Another noted his ‘tense, sensitive, finely chiselled face with slightly sunken, rather sad eyes’. To his contemporaries Beck seemed a solitary figure, set slightly apart from the crowd, as though close human contact was strange and uncongenial to him. A committed and practising Lutheran, for Beck, austerity, rectitude and restraint were the guiding principles of his life and the cornerstone of his religious beliefs.
Beck the young officer was no moustachioed, boneheaded Prussian militarist of the sort beloved of cartoonists and popular legend. He was what was known in the Germany of the time as an ‘educated officer’. Like Frederick the Great he was keen on music, and played the violin well. Widely read, knowledgeable and engaged in all aspects of German cultural life, he was fluent in English, an admirer of French culture and, unlike most in the Prussian officer class, engaged freely with politicians. Intellectually disciplined, he was widely recognised as a man of refinement and integrity; in later life he would earn the nickname ‘the philosopher general’.
But Ludwig Beck had his flaws too – they were the flaws which can often weaken the soldier who has more intellect than is needed for the job. He was a man of thought rather than of action, who weighed every step so carefully that he could sometimes miss the fleeting opportunity whose lightning exploitation is the true test of the great commander. One contemporary put it more prosaically: ‘Everyone who knew him, knew he could not be persuaded into a cavalry charge.’ Men looked up to Beck not for his battle-readiness, but for his deep spiritual and intellectual qualities, and for his unshakeable integrity.
Ludwig Beck
By the time the First World War came, Ludwig Beck was an experienced thirty-four-year-old professional soldier, widely regarded as a man on the way up. He spent most of the first three years of the war as a staff officer on the Western Front, earning a reputation for diligence and an extraordinary capacity for hard work. He worked such long hours at the front that he was forced to give up his beloved violin. In May 1916 he took a few days’ leave from the front to marry Amalie Pagenstecher, the daughter of a Bremen merchant and, at twenty-three, twelve years Beck’s junior. Nine months later the couple had a daughter, Gertrud. Then, in November 1917, tragedy struck when Amalie suddenly died. Beck arranged for Gertrud’s care and swiftly returned to his duties at the front line. After the war ended he took over his daughter’s upbringing himself, throwing himself into the task with typical dedication and energy.
A period commanding an artillery regiment in present-day Baden-Württemberg followed, before Beck was posted to the Department of the Army in Berlin in 1931. He arrived in the capital just in time to have a ringside seat for the final stages of the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of Adolf Hitler.
Beck’s job was to lead a team tasked with producing the German army’s new operations manual, the Truppenführung, which first appeared in 1933. A modified version of this widely acclaimed work is still in use in the German Federal Army of today. In 1932 Beck was promoted to lieutenant general, and in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor, he was made head of the army department. By this time the army department had effectively become the German general staff, despite an explicit prohibition against the creation of such an organisation in the Versailles Treaty. Beck threw himself into his new task with his usual ferocious energy. He rose each morning at 5.30 and rode from six to eight, before being driven to army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse at 8.30. He worked in his office overlooking the courtyard from 9 a.m. until seven in the evening, when he returned home to dine. After dinner he did paperwork for a further three hours, before retiring to bed punctually at midnight.
These long hours were not spent only on military matters. By this stage of his life Beck was fully engaged in his second great love – politics.
It did not take him long to realise that his hope that Hitler would be a necessary and passing evil after the chaos of the Weimar years was to be confounded. Like Goerdeler and many others, Beck and his army colleagues were horrified by the lawlessness and bloodletting of the Night of the Long Knives, especially when one of the army’s own, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, and his wife were cold-bloodedly murdered in their home.
Three weeks later, an attempted putsch by Austrian Nazis to overthrow their government, in which Hitler’s hand was clearly visible, failed disastrously.
To Beck, who had close contacts in the German Foreign Office, the failed coup confirmed what he had feared for some time: that the long-term consequence – and probably intent – of Hitler’s foreign policy was war. Shortly afterwards, he wrote a memo to his superiors warning that premature foreign adventures would ultimately result in a ‘humiliating retreat’.
Beck, however, went further than predictions. Basing his arguments on religious and moral convictions similar to those of Goerdeler, he asserted, in a way that foreshadows the Nuremberg trials of more than a decade later, that legitimate action by the state and its servants in the army had to be based on morality. To prevent modern conflict becoming total war, he wrote, what was needed was ‘a policy with moral bases which knows to retain its supremacy on the foundation of a new moral idealism in the state itself and in its relations with other nations’. It goes without saying that if such a moral context for state policy and action was what Beck hoped for, he must have known that it could never be found in Hitler and his associates.
On 2 August 1934, a month after the Night of the Long Knives, the death occurred of the eighty-six-year-old President Paul von Hindenburg, the only person whose status and position could act as a counterbalance to Hitler’s growing command of the German state. A little over two weeks later, in a referendum called the day before the old president’s death, 89.9 per cent of Germans voted to combine the offices of president and chancellor, conferring absolute power on Adolf Hitler. All civil servants and members of the armed forces were now required to attend mass rallies and swear an oath of personal allegiance to Hitler (rather than, as previously to ‘the People and Fatherland’): ‘I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life for this oath.’ Beck, who claimed to have been unaware of the full form of the oath until he arrived at the ceremony, declared to a friend afterwards, ‘This the blackest day of my life.’ Later, in a classic Beck afterthought, he confided to another, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that he ‘could never rid himself of the awful thought that at the time he should not, perhaps, have given his oath’.
Very few felt as Beck did. The average officer in the Wehrmacht was delighted by the new mood of militarism in Germany, by the respect the army appeared to receive from Hitler and by the physical consequence of this: increased budgets for the latest arms and equipment, and a massive expansion in numbers. True, some were concerned that the flood of new recruits – especially members of the Hitler Youth, for whom the notion of Üb Immer Treu und Redlichkeit was as alien as it was quaint – would alter the nature of the German army. Most officers consoled themselves with the thought that the army would change the newcomers before they changed the army; and anyway, since the man to whom they had just sworn absolute fealty clearly needed them, what had they to fear?
Beck was one of very few who understood that the imposition of Hitler’s Führerprinzip (the leader principle), with its demand for absolute obedience, meant the destruction of the normal checks and balances of a democratic state. His answer to this threat was for the army, as Germany’s strongest and most revered institution, to play its role as the essential counterweight needed to keep the state on a safe course. In a normal democratic state, he suggested, military action was tasked and constrained by the political leaders. But if this balance was broken or dysfunctional, the roles should be reversed, and it should become the responsibility of the army to set its own limits for the politicians. ‘It is not what we do,’ he wrote to one of his subordinates in 1935, ‘but how we do it which is so bad. [It is a] policy of violence and perfidy.’ National confidence in Germany’s most illustrious arm, its military, depended, Beck asserted, on the army’s refusal to allow itself to be used as the tool of a foreign policy built on naked adventurism. The army, in short, had a duty to act as the emergency brake on political folly or evil.
Beck was now on territory which was dangerously close to rebellion. Writing to his superior Werner von Fritsch in January 1937, he insisted, ‘All hope is placed in the army. The Wehrmacht will never permit adventure – for able and clever men are its head. Total responsibility rests [on us] for future developments. There is no escaping that.’
It did not take long for Beck to be cruelly disabused of these elaborate niceties.
Hitler’s long-term intentions had for some time been strongly hinted at for those with ears to hear. As early as May 1935, Beck, as chief of staff, had been ordered to start planning for Operation Schulung, an ‘imaginary’ invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the first months of 1937, responding to the mood in Hitler’s Chancellery, Beck began considering how he would implement an order to bring Austria into the German fold.
On 5 November 1937, Hitler finally made plain what had so far only been implied. In a long monologue delivered at a secret meeting with his key military leaders, the chancellor announced that his intention was indeed to go to war with his neighbours: ‘The first German objective … should be to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia simultaneously … the descent upon the Czechs [should be carried out] with lightning speed [and might take place] as early as 1938.’ Hitler stressed that he was not predicting a short conflict – his long-term aim, he warned, was to acquire more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) for Germany’s population by 1943.
Any hope that the army would act as Beck’s hoped-for ‘emergency brake’ on what was now plainly revealed as Hitler’s headlong dash to war vanished in the early months of 1938, when the German army suffered a double blow to both its prestige and its power. It began with a carefully engineered ‘scandal’ which on 27 January ended the career of the then minister of war and commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg. Eight days later the head of the army, Colonel General Fritsch, the man to whom Beck had written a few weeks earlier asserting that the army would never permit ‘adventure’, was forced to resign because of an alleged, but entirely manufactured, homosexual encounter with a male prostitute in a backstreet close to a Berlin railway station. The army, in which Beck had invested ‘all hope’, stood silently by and uttered not a squeak of protest at these public crucifixions of two of its most respected officers, or at the step-by-step emasculation of its power and position which ensued. On 4 February, Hitler, seeing this weakness, seized direct personal control of Germany’s military machine, declaring, ‘I exercise henceforth immediate command over the entire armed forces.’
Following the Fritsch affair and Hitler’s takeover of the army, whispered talk began to circulate about the possibilities of taking direct action. Carl Goerdeler lobbied some generals to initiate a coup d’état by using the army to seize Gestapo headquarters. But Ludwig Beck had not yet crossed the Rubicon. Asked at a meeting about this time if he had any comment on the recent events, he responded that the question was improper: ‘Mutiny and revolution are words which will not be found in a German soldier’s dictionary.’
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Beck, still failing to understand the true nature of Hitler’s demonic will, continued to believe that he could divert the coming war by persuasion and legal means.
Again, he was soon proved wrong.
Hitler swiftly consolidated his mastery of the German machine by appointing his most loyal acolyte, Wilhelm Keitel, as chief of the newly created high command of the armed forces, and Joachim von Ribbentrop as his new foreign minister. Then, following the annexation of Austria in March, he convened a secret meeting with his generals on 30 May, and proclaimed: ‘It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future.’
For Beck, this was the last straw. In a minute to his superior, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, he wrote: ‘The Führer’s remarks demonstrate once again the total insufficiency of the existing military hierarchy at the highest level … If the lever is not applied here soon … the future fate … [of] peace and war and with it the fate of Germany … can only be seen in the blackest colours.’
Now at last Ludwig Beck understood that all attempts to alter Hitler’s ‘unalterable resolve’ were in vain. If war was to be prevented, the time had come, the philosopher general concluded, to pass from protests to the preparation of coups and assassinations.
* (#ulink_10147bdb-eb30-5c50-9551-226ca40188de) The motto is taken from a song of this title that from 1797 to 1945 was played every hour by the bells of Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the burial place of Frederick the Great. The words, by the eighteenth-century poet Ludwig Hölty, were set to the tune of Papageno’s song ‘Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen’ from Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The motto became closely associated with Prussian values and the creed of Freemasonry.
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