CHAPTER 19
HITLER was hated by many Germans before the war began and, like Mussolini, he acquired fresh enemies when his wars turned to failures. There were plots against him before the war and more plots during the war. At first the conspirators aimed to displace him; later they came to believe that assassination was the only way to get rid of him. At first they were anti-Nazis of one kind or another; later they included Nazis who wanted to take his place or simply to save their own skins. The plots usually involved the army, since only the army had the organized power needed for a successful coup, but towards the end they involved also the SS which had grown into a separate and considerable armed force (the Waffen SS). Others, anti-Nazis or Nazis, might intrigue but only the leaders of the army or the SS had any hope of overthrowing, Hitler’s régime and taking control of the state.
Hitler’s alliance with the army was crucial to his capture of power and to the prosecution of his external policies. He devoted a great deal of his political skill and his personal charm to this alliance. He was successful in the short run but even before war broke out he had become disappointed with the officer corps and distrustful of it; the build-up of the Waffen SS was a consequence of this disappointment and distrust. In its early days the Nazi Party had appealed to a number of German officers because they despised the civilian Weimar republic or were bored by it and were attracted by Hitler’s promises of a better place for the army in a Nazi Germany and by Hitler’s genuine personal interest in military matters. Hitler took care to moderate the radical strains in the Nazi Party which were likely to antagonize the preponderantly conservative officer corps and he traded on the political simplicity of a class which saw politics in black and white terms and was looking only for the most suitable partners with whom to fight socialism and communism. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, who became Minister for War when Hitler became Chancellor, had deluded himself into thinking that the Nazi Party was based on military virtues and military values and he saw no danger in letting Hitler gradually extend his influence by indoctrinating the services with Nazi propaganda. A handful of officers, notably General von Reichenau and Rommel, were openly enthusiastic about the party and its leader, although this enthusiasm began very soon to turn to disenchantment and then hostility. Others, like the Commander-in-Chief, Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, had reservations. Fritsch was appointed Commander-in-Chief by Hindenburg in 1934. He came from a civilian, not an army, background, but he had proved to be a brilliant officer. In character he was extremely reserved, inclined to self-doubt and – adopting the army tradition – non-political in the sense of not wanting to have anything to do with politics and not understanding much about it. He was not Hitler’s choice for the post and he made Hitler uneasy.
Hitler’s alliance with the army had been cemented in 1934 by the destruction of the SA and by the Soldiers’ Oath but it was not followed by the wholehearted partnership which Hitler had hoped for. The army played along with Hitler without letting him feel that he was one of them. Hitler explained his aims and attitudes to selected groups of officers on more than one occasion and at great length, but their response was not enthusiastic. The more he made it clear to them that the army’s role was to conquer Lebensraum in the east, the more sceptical and chilling did they become. Hitler did not understand that, like most professionals, the generals were conservative and cautious, nor did he appreciate the persistence of pro-Russian feeling inculcated by Seeckt’s post-war policy of collaboration and by the respect learned on the eastern front in the First World War. By 1938, having sacrificed the SA to the army, he was finding the army an unsatisfactory tool. He decided to change its leadership and an outlook which seemed to him altogether too defensive and spiritless.
Two years earlier the SS had tried to tempt him into a plot against the army but he had refused to be drawn. Now, tempted a second time, he accepted the bait. Blomberg had just married a second wife. Hitler himself attended the wedding although the new Marschallin had been only a secretary. After the marriage the SS informed him that she had a police record as a prostitute. Hitler, who was easily shocked about some things as well as easily angered, agreed that Blomberg must go. He resigned, recommending Goering (as Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe) as his successor, but Hitler dismissed the idea with the offhand remark that Goering was too lazy and abolished Blomberg’s post. In its place he created a new Combined Services Staff (OKW) under General Keitel, weak in character and not particularly strong in intellect, through whom he proposed to exercise closer personal control over the services. This step was unpopular with the army.
Hitler also got rid of Fritsch. Fritsch was framed by the SS. He was accused of being a homosexual, which he was not. The SS dug out some police files concerning a certain Frisch who was. Fritsch resigned but his brother officers insisted that he should be given a trial. The case collapsed; the SS had to spirit away the now inconvenient Frisch who would have given the game away under cross-examination; and Fritsch was acquitted.
He was, however, only partially rehabilitated. In September 1939 he was wounded in the course of a patrol near Warsaw and died, apparently not unwillingly. The army was perturbed by the Blomberg episode and revolted by the Fritsch case but it did nothing beyond presenting a memorandum to Hitler against the creation of the OKW. Fritsch was succeeded by General Walther von Brauchitsch, an officer with a high professional reputation but only moderate strength of character: his wife, who nagged him, was a fervent Nazi.
By this time the officer corps as a whole had seen more of Hitler and the Nazis and come to like them much less. The army had acquiesced in and to some extent welcomed Hitler’s rise to power because it was right-wing and anti-communist and looked forward to certain professional advantages from the new régime. It was also anti-semitic, though not so obscenely so as the Nazis; it wanted to be decently anti-semitic. But Nazi behaviour in power and the Nazi programme, especially Hitler’s readiness to risk wars which the generals thought they could not win, disgusted and alarmed many officers who had not thought overmuch about the sort of people the Nazis were. By 1938 this was clear to all but the most determinedly blind. But it was not clear what should be done about it. The German army had no tradition of coups and did not know how to set about them. Its officers had exacting moral standards and a high sense of their duty to their country and they had come to believe that Hitler was a disaster. But they were by temperament neither political activists nor conspirators and they continued to serve Hitler while hating him. Hitler had every reason to distrust them but equally he had much reason not to fear them. They abhorred treason, particularly the graver form of treason which action against the head of state entailed. (Treason had two forms in Germany: the lesser Landesverrat, the betrayal of state secrets, and high treason or Hochverrat, involving action against an individual or a group.) Given their training and upper-class origins it is not surprising that few of them reached the conviction that treason was right; or that those who did so reached it only with extreme difficulty. They hated Hitler for being a murderer but did not want to be murderers themselves.
There were, however, exceptions and one of them was the Chief of Staff of the army, General Ludwig Beck. Beck was a quiet and industrious officer, a man with a wider culture than most of his fellows, much respected, perceptive and high-principled. He lacked, however, the talents of the successful man of action. In August 1938 he was retired by Hitler who may or may not have known that Beck was plotting against him. Beck had concluded that Hitler’s foreign policies were insane and were leading to a war for which Germany was unprepared. Hitler must therefore be removed. As Chief of Staff Beck had ready access to all senior officers and he was also in touch with a number of civilians who thought like he did – including Ulrich von Hassell, an aristocrat and former Ambassador in Rome who was dismissed by Ribbentrop in 1937, and Carl Goerdeler, a former mayor of Leipzig. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Armed Forces Intelligence Service (the Abwehr), Major-General Hans Oster, one of Canaris’ principal subordinates, and other members of his department were also in the plot. This group tried in the summer of 1938 to get the British government to make an outspoken attack on Hitler whereupon army officers would arrest him on the grounds that he was leading his country into a suicidal war. But the British government did not speak out and Chamberlain’s policies seemed to show that Hitler was running no risk of war and was far from insanely endangering Germany. Beck and his friends, appalled by Chamberlain’s visit to the Führer at Berchtesgaden and conscious that German opinion after Munich was more likely to support Hitler than a group of conservative generals and diplomats, half of them retired, relapsed into impotence. This episode is characteristic. The British government believed that the foreign policies of the Beck group would not be very different from Hitler’s (a judgement with some degree of truth in it) and concluded that there was therefore little to choose between it and Hitler (a wildly false conclusion). The conspirators’ argument was that a British move would make all the difference, while the British response was to ask why the conspirators could not get on with the job without it. Even the more resolute army officers such as Beck looked for a first move by somebody else.
This military-civilian conservative opposition to Hitler was not the only one. There was intense and sometimes vocal opposition by students and among the clergy: many hundreds of priests, Roman Catholic and Protestant, were sent to concentration camps and killed. There was also opposition among former politicians from the middle-class world of the Weimar republic and among socialists from its dissolved trade-unions. Communist opposition was mostly of a different kind and consisted of spying for the USSR. The Rote Kapelle, a widespread, if overrated, communist network which penetrated even the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, succeeded in circulating an anti-Nazi periodical in six languages among foreign workers in Germany and later operated throughout much of occupied and neutral Europe. But the value of the information which it provided was not great, and it was destroyed in 1942 by the combined resources of the Abwehr, the SD, the Gestapo and the Chi-Stelle (the German code and cipher establishment at Potsdam).
Finally, there were groups of younger men, mostly belonging to the upper classes but radical or socialist rather than conservative and actively inspired by Christianity. They too objected to assassination on principle and toyed at first with schemes for arresting Hitler and putting him on trial. But they were more adept in conference than in conspiracy and their scruples complemented the efficiency of the secret police. Their interests were diffuse. They discussed plans for a post-war federation of European nations under an elective, revolving European presidency, as well as debating the removal or murder of Hitler. They took enormous personal risks which led many of them to the torture chamber and the scaffold. Although they shared the primary aim of the Beck group – getting rid of Hitler – they did not want the same kind of post-Nazi Germany. They distrusted Goerdeler, who was the conservatives’ first choice for Chancellor but who appeared to them reactionary, incautious and over sanguine, and they proposed instead Martin Niemöller, an eminent Protestant divine and exnaval officer who was in a concentration camp. Prominent in this set were Count Helmuth von Moltke, the pivot of the Kreisau circle, which was a small discussion and action group; Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, an exuberant, widely travelled and widely read young Roman Catholic; Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a mildly conservative Prussian lawyer serving in a staff post in the army; and Adam von Trott zu Solz, a man of unusual physical and intellectual distinction, a socialist and a Christian with special links with Great Britain from his years at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Trott’s dilemma and fate were characteristic of his time. Deeply troubled about the right course for a patriotic and democratic Germany he decided, upon leaving Oxford, to temporize and postpone a decision between self-exile and returning to Germany to fight tyranny. After a spell as a lawyer in Germany he obtained, with the help of the chairman of the Rhodes Trustees, Lord Lothian, a semi-academic post in China. In order to secure the chance to return to Germany and enter the public service (which he ultimately did) he sent a number of reports containing anti-British judgements, but in the course of reinsuring his position on the German side he forfeited the trust of many of his British friends, who concluded that they had been duped. When therefore, after the outbreak of war, Trott tried to use his British and American connections in order to get allied support for anti-Nazi plots inside Germany he failed; so strong was the prejudice against him that even Sir Stafford Cripps, a friend who knew his true worth and had become a senior Minister in the British government, was forced by Eden (relying on reports in the Foreign Office about Trott’s activities and on statements by some of his erstwhile friends) to desist from attempts to get his colleagues to take the German opposition groups seriously.
These groups were in truth relatively ineffective, although they were not, as many people in London believed, spurious, more German than anti-Nazi and so not to be trusted. Within Germany the Gestapo probably knew a great deal about their various activities but did not think it necessary to do much more than keep an eye on them, at any rate until after the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944. In 1941 General von Witzleben, one of the more determined anti-Nazis, was dismissed from his post as Commander-in-Chief in the west on the eve of Barbarossa – possibly a precautionary move. In November 1939 two British Intelligence officers in Holland who believed that they were in touch with plotters in the German army were lured across the German border and seized. These officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens, had been outwitted by the SD and had been having interviews with an SD officer, Walter Schellenberg, who was posing as an emissary of a group of disgruntled German officers. Schellenberg had had four meetings with Best and Stevens in Holland and had established a regular radio link with them and he was preparing to go to London to pursue his game there when he was ordered, much to his annoyance, to go instead back to Holland and kidnap Best and Stevens. On 8 November, the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, there had been a bomb incident in Munich and Hitler may have believed that this incident, although probably arranged by the Gestapo in order to enable it to spring a few traps, was a genuine attempt on his life in which British Intelligence was involved.
With the outbreak of hostilities plotting within the army became more difficult. The army officer’s congenital reluctance to plot was greatly strengthened by war, which made treason peculiarly heinous, and the worse the war went – the nearer the dreaded Russians came – the more untimely did revolt seem. In addition war scattered the officers who might have concerted effective action. Brauchitsch and Beck’s successor as Chief of Staff, Franz Haider, a capable but stolid Bavarian, listened to plotters, swayed this way and that, but could not bring themselves to do more than not give them away. The plotters hoped for a military reverse which would serve as a prelude to overthrowing Hitler. The Abwehr tipped off the Danes and the Dutch about the impending invasions of their countries, and others hoped that something would go wrong with the campaign in France. There were attempts to suborn senior commanders – Bock, Rundstedt, Kluge, Manstein, Guderian – who showed where their sympathies lay by not reporting these moves and showed also their own temper and perplexities by doing nothing else. Goerdeler displayed his lack of judgement by persisting in his belief that the generals could be made to act, and the Beck group discussed whether to try to rope some senior Nazis into an anti-Hitler conspiracy. Goerdeler was prepared to accept Goering as an interim Chancellor but Beck did not like the idea. At this time the group’s aim was to get rid of Hitler, open negotiations with Great Britain and France and end the war. The emphasis was on the restoration of peace and Christian morality – but without the restoration of Czechoslovakia; parts of Hitler’s conquests in Czechoslovakia and Poland were to be retained and the Anschluss was to be undisturbed.
The war made cracks in the Nazi Party. The first to show were in the troubled mind of Rudolf Hess who, on 10 May 1941, arrived in Scotland out of the blue. He had flown from Munich in a Me. 110 fitted with extra tanks and after failing to find the landing ground he was looking for had parachuted to earth and twisted his ankle. He was rescued by a farmer to whom he gave a false name and he asked to be taken to the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met when the Olympic Games were held in Germany in 1936 and whom he knew to be commanding a Fighter Command sector in southern Scotland. Hess was, like a number of Nazi leaders from Hitler downwards, an Auslandsdeutscher or expatriate German. He had been born in Alexandria, where he lived until he was fourteen. As a young man of twenty he had served in the First World War and at the end of it, unemployed and somewhat feckless although anything but destitute, he ran into Hitler and was immediately enthralled. He took part in Hitler’s Munich putsch and shared Hitler’s cell after the fiasco, thus earning a minor part in the composition of the most celebrated prison book since Boethius and Bunyan – Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Shortly after becoming Chancellor, Hitler nominated Hess as his deputy in the Nazi Party and in March 1939 he was declared second in line of succession to the chancellorship (Goering came first). He was therefore a very elevated Nazi, close to Hitler and intimately involved over many years in the enormities of the Nazis within Germany. He was also a hypochondriac and a devotee of astrology and his wife was a member of the miscalled Oxford Group – later renamed Moral Rearmament – founded and led by Dr Frank Buchman, who had on one occasion thanked God for Adolf Hitler.
Hess was not clever like Goebbels or devious like his party successor Martin Bormann, no heavy-weight but entirely loyal to Hitler. Like too many of the senior Nazis Hess liked to try his hand at foreign policy, a pastime which provoked angry scenes with Ribbentrop (whom later he had to sit next to in the dock at Nuremberg), and in 1941 he evolved a plan for getting Great Britain to make common cause with Germany against the USSR. He tried to get in touch with Hoare in Madrid and with the Governor of Gibraltar, and after failing in these endeavours he decided to go himself to Great Britain, where he imagined there to be an alternative anti-communist and anti-Churchill government waiting to come into existence. Since he left a letter explaining his motives to Hitler it is reasonable to assume that Hitler, who flew into a rage on learning of his flight, had no foreknowledge of it, but it is not possible entirely to discount the view that Hess was the bearer of an official peace proposal. In Great Britain Hess’s arrival was treated as a bizarre phenomenon and a propagandist opportunity (reduced, however, by Goebbels’ promptness in giving the news of the flight before the British did) but not as a serious political event; the Russians on the other hand may have taken Hess’s escapade more seriously, given their abiding fears of a western alliance (including Germany) against the USSR. Hess’s position as deputy to the Führer was filled by Bormann, a protégé of Hitler who made himself indispensable by being always around, a mean-spirited man who came to be specially feared and disliked by the other party chiefs. Hess remained in detention in Great Britain until he was taken to Nuremberg at the end of the war to stand his trial on charges of complicity in murder and other crimes. There was some doubt about his sanity, but doctors in Great Britain and at Nuremberg declared him to be sane enough to stand trial (although an amnesiac) and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The doubts about his mental state saved him from being hanged and his lingering longevity – he lived until 1987 as the sole prisoner of Spandau gaol in Berlin – gave him fame of a different sort.
More significant was the discontent of Himmler, who began to see the writing on the wall after the failure of the Russian campaigns of 1941. Goering’s star had fallen with the defeat of the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and the bombing of German cities, but Himmler’s was rising with the wartime expansion of the Waffen SS into a considerable pretorian army. This expansion got under way in 1942 as Hitler’s distrust of the regular army grew. The Waffen SS, so named in 1940, had grown out of the small but independent SS Verfügungstruppe which Hitler had created as a military (not a police) force as early as 1935. He had shown his affection for it by donning its uniform when he appeared before the Reichstag in 1939 to tell Germany and the world that Germany and Poland were at war and he had given it special tasks and opportunities in one campaign after another. He also gave it the best equipment, but its expansion from 1942 onwards perforce diluted its ethnic and ideological purity and even its prized standards of physical aptness and it became a mixed force which included even Slavs and Indians. Himmler, who thus found himself at the head of a personal army of eventually thirty divisions and so a power in his own right, began about 1942 to weigh the advantages of negotiating with the western powers instead of pursuing a war on two fronts which was coming to look more and more like defeat on two fronts. (Later on Himmler’s doubts were greatly stiffened by the disclosures of Cicero, a German spy who, for £20,000, stole secret documents from a safe in the bedroom of the British Ambassador in Ankara. At the time of the Teheran conference these documents showed, among many other things, that Hitler’s and Ribbentrop’s reliance on the collapse of the East-West alliance was unfounded.)
In May 1942 the Bishop of Chichester, Dr George Bell, who happened to be in Stockholm on ecumenical business, was approached by German Christians who asked him to impress on the British government the reality of German resistance to Hitler. Their plans envisaged the overthrow of Hitler by the SS, followed by the overthrow of the SS by the army. The Bishop reported these matters to Eden at the Foreign Office but without effect. The approaches in Stockholm coincided with other feelers put out in Spain and Turkey and the British government suspected that, wittingly or unwittingly, the Bishop’s Christian friends were being used by the Nazis to initiate discussions designed to lead to a compromise peace which would leave the Nazis in power in Germany and in possession of much of their ill-gotten gains – or at least designed to sow discord between the western allies and the USSR.
In January 1943 at Casablanca Roosevelt suggested and Churchill hesitantly agreed that they should declare that the only acceptable conclusion of the war was the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy and Japan. Roosevelt got this idea from the State Department (which later became lukewarm or cooler towards it). He wanted at first to leave out Italy but it seemed simpler to include it. The phrase ‘unconditional surrender’, with its echoes of General Grant’s ultimatum to General Buckner in Fort Donelson in 1862, sprang readily to the mind of every American but there were also more immediate reasons for adopting it: memories of the end of the First World War and of Germany’s later claim that it had never really been defeated; the need of the two western leaders to find something ringing to proclaim at a moment when they could not foresee any very powerful military action against Germany for the immediate future; and their need to assure Stalin that they would negotiate no separate peace with Germany and to prevent him from doing so.
The most pressing aim of the declaration was to hold the Grand Alliance together at a time when Stalin was disappointed and angry and when both Japan and Italy were working for a separate peace between Germany and the USSR? a policy which Ribbentrop was known to favour. In retrospect the overriding importance of this aim still cannot be gainsaid. To risk letting the alliance fall apart implied either that the western allies could win on their own or that they could find another ally. Neither during the war nor since has it been seriously argued that the western allies could defeat Germany if the German armies were released from their commitments in the east. The only alternative ally that has been suggested is the anti-Nazi Germans. But there was too little reason to suppose that Hitler was going to be overthrown by an internal revolt or that Nazism would be eliminated if Hitler were murdered. The anti-Nazi Germans were no substitute for the USSR. Nor would a victory over the Nazis with the help of the German army cut down the disturbing power of the German state and the German threat to European stability and freedom which had been among the causes of the war.
The declaration on unconditional surrender, whatever its strategic necessities, may nonetheless have done something to consolidate German opinion and discourage Hitler’s enemies at home. Although it was intended to proclaim an uncompromising opposition to Nazism, Fascism and Japanese militarism and not any intention to eliminate the German, Italian or Japanese states, still less their peoples, it inevitably acquired wider and fiercer connotation. Yet in fact the declaration did not quench German opposition to Hitler. The army plotters were becoming convinced of the necessity for Hitler’s assassination rather than a coup aimed at no more than his removal from office. First in a senior staff post at army headquarters and then as Chief of Staff at Army Group Centre on the Russian front General Henning von Tresckow was working to put conspirators in key positions. He also tried to win the active support of the Commander-in Chief of the Army Group, Field Marshal von Kluge, but Kluge could not make up his mind and consequently a plan to shoot Hitler when he visited the headquarters in March 1943 had to be abandoned. Instead a bomb, secreted in a bottle of Cointreau, was put on board the aircraft carrying Hitler back from Smolensk to Germany. But the bomb failed to go off. At least five more attempts on Hitler’s life were made in the latter months of 1943, all of them equally unsuccessful because the determination and daring of the conspirators were not matched by technical efficiency.
There was then a pause before the famous and nearly successful attempt on 20 July 1944, when Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg carried a bomb in a briefcase into the Führer’s conference room in his headquarters in East Prussia, placed it beneath the table and left to fly to Berlin where Beck, Witzleben and other officers were waiting to take over the capital and the government. But Hitler had not been killed – he was only slightly hurt and was able to show Mussolini the workings of Providence a few hours later – and the group in Berlin, who might have achieved something all the same, did nothing for the two hours during which Stauffenberg’s aircraft was in the air and out of contact. On landing, Stauffenberg announced that Hitler was dead but a few telephone calls proved that he was not. The telephone lines between Berlin and East Prussia had not been cut – a vital slip on the part of the conspirators. There was confusion in Berlin, arrests and counter-arrests, with the established order quickly coming out on top. Beck shot himself. Stauffenberg and three others were executed at once. Then the shootings stopped and a longer and more comprehensive hunt began. In the east Tresckow committed suicide by walking east into no man’s land. In Germany the principal result of this ill-fated scheme was the slaughter by the SD over the next six months of many fine men whom post-war Germany could ill afford to lose.
From 1938 to 1944 the conspirators against Hitler had sought outside help, especially from Great Britain, because they believed that without it they must fail. Denied it in 1938 they desisted for a while. Later, driven by a desperate patriotism, they acted without it and failed. By 1944 the worst horrors of the war had been perpetrated and, had they succeeded then, they would have done no more to it than shorten its final phase. Some uneasy questions remain. Were they right in their belief that outside help was essential? Probably they were, for they were never more than a small band attacking the centres of power of an exceptionally well-armed, well-disciplined and well-informed organization – the Nazi Party and police at the controls of the German state. Potentially the conspirators represented a powerful counterforce, for they had brains and devotion and the concurrence of some men in positions of power. But they failed to make the all-important step from conspiracy to success in action and there is something to be said for the argument that the missing additive could have been supplied by the British. This is a very serious argument, for it amounts to saying that the British missed a chance, first, of averting war and then of shortening it. To this argument there is no certain conclusion. What is certain is that the conspirators failed to impress the outside allies whom they needed. For this they were, partly and negatively, themselves to blame. They were a diverse group, at times a number of groups, and their schemes seemed imprecise and variable, their effectiveness doubtful. It was not always clear what sort of help they wanted. But there was failure on the other side too. Plotters start at a disadvantage because most governments, even governments which share their aims, are congenitally opposed to plotting. The characteristic members of a British or American government have some difficulty in making mentally common cause with conspirators of any kind and are inclined to underrate them. There was a lack of imagination, a failure to understand the drive which animated the conspirators, the counterpart of the failure of conservative ruling classes to understand Fascism.
And finally there was an aversion not only to plotters but also to Germans. Many of those caught up in the war fought it with good spirit and a clear conscience because they hated Nazism and wanted to destroy it, but anti-Nazism would never have started the war. In order for there to be a war for the destruction of Nazism there had to be a war about something else. The signal to start a war, or to accept a war challenge by an enemy, is given by governments and no government in the thirties asked itself whether it should go to war to destroy Nazism. What governments did ask themselves was whether they would have to go to war to stop Hitler – by which they meant stopping the territorial expansion of the German state. So the war, when it came, was a war against Germany. The part of Hitler’s programme which provoked it was not the beliefs and practices of Nazism but the infringement of frontiers by Germany. The German conspirators against Hitler were the natural allies of anybody fighting Nazism but they were not the natural allies of a state at war with – or contemplating having to fight – Germany. The common ground between the German anti-Nazis and the enemies of the German state was not as large or as open as it seemed to those for whom the struggle was about righteousness rather than territory. In the last analysis the conspirators failed to find outside allies because, besides being anti-Nazi, they were also German. They were therefore doomed to be the bravest but the least effective of Hitler’s serious enemies.
Hitler died in the end by nobody’s hand but his own. From 1943 all his principal subordinates were thinking of how to end a war which could not be won. He himself was not. Once he had lost all chance of ending it on his own terms he gave little thought to ending it at all. He became obsessed with continuing it and, regardless of the true state of affairs, conducted increasingly hopeless operations by issuing nonsensical orders to armies which were shrinking to the size of divisions. His principal associates did not share his monomaniacal delusions. They tried, first by persuasion and then by conspiracy, to make peace with one part of the Grand Alliance or another. To a man like Ribbentrop who had signed the Russo-German treaty of 1939 a second essay in Realpolitik on these lines was tempting; he was supported by professional diplomats who had favoured such an alignment since the early 1920s and by the Japanese who tried in September 1943 (on the eve of the fall of Mussolini) and again in the spring and autumn of 1944 to end the Russo-German conflict. (But Ribbentrop later became disenchanted with the Russians and offered to arrange a conference with Stalin at which he would shoot Stalin with a specially designed fountain pen.) From the German point of view a peace or truce on the eastern front would release all Germany’s forces for new victories in the west and re-open the flow of food and other materials with which the (then unravaged) USSR had supplied Germany before Barbarossa. During the winter of 1943–4 German emissaries were taking soundings in Stockholm, probably with the knowledge but not necessarily with the endorsement of Himmler, but such prospects as they might have had were eliminated by the German belief that Germany was still successful enough to lay down conditions, such as the establishment of an independent Ukraine.
But if Ribbentrop wanted to make peace with the USSR Goebbels, who neglected no opportunity to denigrate Ribbentrop, took the opposite view and developed a lively concern for the preservation of western civilization against the barbarous east – at the same time equating the Nazi with the Anglo-American view of what that civilization stood for. The invasion of Normandy strengthened the ranks of those who wanted a separate peace in the west, since they saw the impossibility of fighting on two fronts and the certainty of defeat in the east unless they surrendered in the west. The success of Overlord meant that Germany no longer had the slightest hope, without western help, of preventing the Russians from doing to Germany what the Germans had done to them. To prevent this retribution even Hitler should be discarded. Himmler, who had been fully informed about anti-Nazi plotting from 1943 at the latest but preferred not to take action, was toying with the idea of an alliance between the army and the SS for the removal of Hitler and the installation of himself as Chancellor in a new government consisting of a few Nazis and representatives of the military and the civilian oppositions to Hitler. His Waffen SS had grown to a force of a million men with the best equipment. (The other irregular army, Goering’s twenty-two Luftwaffe Field Divisions, was of poor quality; its failures hastened Goering’s decline.) Himmler wrongly supposed that the western allies would accept the substitution of himself for Hitler as an adequate consummation of the war in the face of the Russian menace and he entered into clandestine correspondence with the western allies through intermediaries in Sweden, Switzerland and Italy. These schemings played a minor part in the surrender of the German forces in Italy and in Hitler’s barren last-minute switches of posts in the Third Reich.
Judgement on the German opposition to Hitler is not easy. Before the war, and during it, this opposition was ineffectual but it has been argued that the allies, Great Britain in particular, were partly to blame. Anti-Nazi conspirators existed in influential positions in the armed forces and the secret services and by September 1938 they had brought themselves to accept that Hitler’s intention to conquer the whole of Czechoslovakia constituted a sufficient threat to German interests to warrant a coup against him and the dishonouring of their oaths of loyalty to him. A day for a putsch was fixed but one condition remained to be fulfilled. The conspirators wanted some assurance that the western powers would applaud and, if necessary, intervene. But the signal that they got was the wrong one: at Munich, Great Britain and France proclaimed in effect that they preferred to deal with Hitler and try to restrain him. This is not surprising, since governments are conditioned to deal with other governments, not with private plotters. Their appraisal of the effectiveness of the anti-Nazi activists was low, even scornful, and in looking for ways to avert war they put no faith in the hazards of a domestic German coup. What is surprising is that they found, and apparently sought, no way of encouraging the putsch without aborting the meeting at Munich in which their hopes for preserving peace principally reposed. Doing one thing with the right hand and another with the left is a common diplomatic technique. In this instance the western allies did not think it worthwhile.
After war had broken out only mutiny at high levels in the armed forces or the assassination of the Führer could have altered the course of events but the psychological and practical obstacles to either coup were formidable. There was plotting by some generals but it amounted to little more than risky talk. There were a number of assassination plans but not even Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt on 20 July 1944 came to anything. Again it has been argued that, particularly after the German disaster at Stalingrad, leading figures in the Abwehr made potentially fruitful overtures to the western allies who refused to take them seriously. These overtures were intended to elicit western support for a military coup against Hitler and his régime, leading to a separate peace with the west which would scupper both Nazism and a Russian victory over Germany. Alternatively it has been alleged that these approaches were not so much ignored as sabotaged within the British secret services, so that they never reached the right ears. That Admiral Canaris, General Oster and others in the Abwehr and elsewhere hated Hitler and desired a separate peace is evident enough. How far they disclosed their hopes to western contacts is less clear and what is not clear at all is how the British and American governments would have reacted if they had formally debated the conspirators’ intentions. There is no evidence that they ever did so. The prevailing mood was deeply sceptical about all anti-Nazi Germans, and even had they felt it expedient – and found a way – to support such plots they were, to say the least, ambivalent about a separate peace involving the betrayal of their eastern ally. The anti-Nazi Germans wanted to save Germany, the allies to vanquish it.