Even before 1938, the German resistance had begun seeking foreign help.
By Jeff Pines
During World War II, on July 20, 1944, Col. Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler during a staff meeting inside Hitler’s East Prussian headquarters. He placed a bomb beneath the conference table, excused himself from the staff meeting and raced to the airfield to rush back to Berlin. Von Stauffenberg was certain Hitler would be killed. He was wrong, and it cost him his life and the lives of his co-conspirators.
To mark the 50th anniversary of this event, the Library and the German government sponsored a symposium “Neither Glorify nor Disparage: An Assessment of the German Resistance to Hitler.” Held on July 20, the symposium accompanied the exhibition “Against Hitler: German Resistance to National Socialism, 1933- 1945,” on view until Sept. 3 in the Madison Gallery.
The symposium panel consisted of Beate Ruhm von Oppen, a tutor of history at St. John’s College in Maryland, who had served in British intelligence during the war; Robert Wolfe, the deputy director of Captured German Records at the National Archives, who was part of the American Occupation Force in Germany immediately after the war; Sybil Milton, senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Museum; Dr. Immo Stabreit, German ambassador to the United States; and Armin Mruck, a professor of history from Towson State University in Maryland, who could not attend (his paper was read by Margrit B. Krewson, German/Dutch area specialist in the European DIvision, who organized the symposium with Mr. Wolfe).
The symposium participants discussed many aspects of German resistance, including the work of Stauffenberg’s group, which has sometimes been dismissed as a band of aristocratic, opportunistic officers who, after realizing the Germans would lose the war, decided to kill Hitler to gain better terms from the Allies.
Almost all the panelists contested this view. Professor von Oppen, in his paper, “A Half-Century of Assessments of the German Resistance,” noted that several of the plotters were motivated by humanitarian concerns. For example, Lt. Axel von dem Bussche, after witnessing a Nazi massacre of Jews, volunteered to blow himself up with Hitler. Hans von Dohnanyi, another conspirator, documented atrocities of the Nazi regime as early as 1938 and also helped Jews escape to Switzerland. The Nazis then sent him to a concentration camp and executed him in April 1945, facts for which Mr. Wolfe cited in his paper, “Clandestine Resistance to a Totalitarian Regime: The Perils of Contemporary Documentation.”
“The army leadership planned to arrest the government if Hitler ordered an invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Instead, the British gave him the Sudeten [province of Czechoslovakia] and another political triumph,” the ambassador said.
Moreover, even before 1938, the German resistance had begun seeking foreign help.
From Professor Mruck’s paper, “American Reaction to Overtures from the German Resistance,” Ms. Krewson read, “As early as the late summer of 1937, the German resistance sought support from the United States and other countries. Dr. Carl Goerdeler went on a government-authorized fact-finding mission to the United States. He had two purposes, [officially] to inform the Nazi government of the strength of western democracies, thus strengthening Germany’s peace party, and [unofficially] to establish personal contact with influential personalities who might help the resistance.”
Because the representatives of the German resistance often arrived as representatives of Nazi Germany, Americans were naturally suspicious of their being Nazi agents, Dr. Mruck said. Adam von Trott zu Solz, another anti-Nazi (who was later executed), met with members of the Roosevelt administration, but was not taken seriously.
A friend, Dr. Mruck said, chided him for not successfully conveying his anti-Nazi sentiments to the State Department. Von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life is the most famous, but hardly the first. In 1939 Johann Georg Elser, working alone, exploded a bomb at a Nazi Party meeting. Unfortunately, Hitler had left the meeting early.
Four years later, plotters made two attempts to assassinate Hitler. Both attempts were foiled, the first by an Allied air raid, the second because the bomb failed to explode. Hitler escaped unaware that anyone was plotting against him. Von Stauffenberg’s attempt followed in 1944.
Mr. Wolfe offered several reasons for the delay in mounting another assassination attempt. Of course, Hitler was very well protected, but “there was difficulty of communication among conspirators in a police state where everyone was under constant surveillance,” Mr. Wolfe said. There was also “the heinous Nazi practice of taking kith and kin hostage,” and it was almost unthinkable for a soldier to breach his “unconditional oath of loyalty to the head of state,” he added.
Not only was the resistance slow in getting organized, but it also remained small. Dr. Milton attributed this to a German desire for conformity and the “ruthless and systematic nature of Nazi surveillance and repression that eliminated most possibilities of domestic opposition.
“By June 1933 the political opposition was driven underground and paralyzed by mass arrests,” she said.
The remaining opposition was never able to dent the general passivity and even popular support for Nazi policies within the Reich. Like political resistance, helping Jews was a criminal offense in Nazi Germany, Dr. Milton explained in her paper, “With a Touch of Compassion.” Once the war began, she said, resistance to the Nazi regime was considered treason.
Just as political opponents were jailed, Jews were also arrested openly, without any significant resistance from non- Jews. However, a small number of people resisted the Nazis by hiding and helping Jews.
“As the war ground on, Germans began to realize they had been duped by Hitler. They also realized they had failed morally because they had lacked the courage to stop him,” Ambassador Stabreit said.
Had the July 20 plot succeeded, he continued, millions of Nazi victims and, in particular, Jews would have lived.
For those who did choose to resist, he said, “it is hard to imagine how isolated they must have felt, having been rejected by the Allies and labeled traitors [by fellow Germans].”
Originally published by the Library of Congress, 09.05.1994, to the public domain.
