GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER
by Peter Hoffman
Professor of History at McGill University
author of The History of German Resistance
Hitler won the support of only a third of the German electorate in free elections in 1930-1932. But in January 1933, after two years of political turmoil, the president, Field Marshal von Hindenburg, appointed him as chancellor when Hitler deceived him with a promise to form a majority coalition government. Instead, Hitler immediately abolished the constitutional guarantees of civil rights and established a dictatorship with a terrorist secret state police, the Gestapo.
Hitler knew to expect hostility from his own people once they realized that he was sacrificing them for his world-power ambitions. He planned a new chancellery to be built as a fortress that was to protect him against the population.
During Hitler´s twelve-year reign (1933-1945) the special courts (Sondergerichte) killed 12,000 Germans, the courts-martial killed 25,000 German soldiers, and "regular" justice killed another 40,000 Germans. Tens of thousands other Germans were murdered without judicial process in concentration camps and prisons. About 3 million Germans were held for political reasons in concentration camps or penitentiaries for longer or shorter periods.
The popular resistance was heroic, but largely ineffective. Most of the liberal and conservative politicians of the republic were lying low to avoid concentration camp. Many socialists who had not fled the country spent years in concentration camps, as did communists. Some communist underground cells survived Gestapo persecution and the demoralization from the Soviet-German Pact of 1939. Some church men, Dietrich Bonhoeffer among them, spoke out against the crimes of the regime; prominent clergymen were ignored, others imprisoned. In November 1937 the foreign minister, the war minister and the commander-in-chief of the army opposed Hitler's war plans, but by February 1938 they had lost their posts. The chief of the general staff of the army tried to win the new commander-in-chief of the Army and the commanding generals for a collective refusal to obey Hitler if he decided to go to war. He failed and was forced to resign in August 1938.
When the war came in 1939 Bonhoeffer, like others, knew that protests were ineffective. He joined and supported the underground conspiracy to overthrow the dictator.
In the course of the years from 1939 to1943 socialists, Christian liberals and moderate conservatives among Hitler's opponents agreed that, while they must restore the rule of law and parliamentary government, they must also prevent a revival of the traditional political parties whose narrow self-interests had contributed to the fall of the Republic.
The mass murder of the Jews, of civilian populations in German-occupied countries, of prisoners of war, of the mentally infirm, of Jehova's Witnesses, priests, ministers of the church, Sinti, Roma and other minority groups were as much a motive for resistance as the approaching ruin of Germany. An underground coalition of politicians, trade union leaders, former diplomats, civil servants, Lutheran and Catholic clergymen, lawyers, and a few army officers sought to win over the only generals who had the power to overthrow Hitler and his SS and police forces. The conspirators were unsuccessful; Hitler went from victory to victory.
When German forces suffered major defeats in 1943 and 1944, the generals still remained loyal to their supreme Führer. The conspirators resolved to infiltrate Home Army Command, kill Hitler, claim he had been murdered by his own SS, and mobilize the Home Army "to maintain order", thereby taking over government authority.
Other resistance groups were operating at the same time, without contact with the main conspiracy. In 1942 and early in 1943 a group of Munich University students, Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, attempted to start a mass uprising through distribution of leaflets of the "White Rose" citing the murder of the Jews and calling on the population to resist. They were arrested, tried and decapitated; no mass movement followed.
A number of communist resisters continued to spread underground propaganda to sabotage the war industry. Others worked in the war organization of the Soviet military intelligence service (Rote Kapelle). In 1942 this group was broken up by counter-intelligence forces. More than a hundred arrests and many executions ensued.
A conspiratorial center in the Army counter-intelligence organization – Abwehr - was tolerated and encouraged by the agency's own chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. It included Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans von Dohnanyi, Joseph Müller, and Hans Oster. The group laid plans to seize power internally, and they sent out emissaries to solicit support from Britain and the United States. But their attempts in March 1943 to assassinate Hitler and to seize power in Germany failed. At the same time they were helping some Jews to escape the gas chambers by sending them abroad under the pretext of being Abwehr agents (which they were not). The Gestapo investigated the group's financial transactions, shutting down the conspiracy. On April 5, 1943 Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi and Joseph Müller were arrested.
Since the summer of 1942 Major Claus von Stauffenberg, on his own initiative, had been trying to move senior commanders to overthrow Hitler. In August 1943 Stauffenberg, a Lieutenant-Colonel in Home Army Command, joined an existing conspiracy and, together with Brigadier Henning von Tresckow, resumed efforts that had been halted by the arrests of April 5. He had no internal or external support of any kind, but he felt that Germany faced certain defeat, foreign occupation and its probable dismemberment. Unable to find an officer with access to Hitler who was prepared to kill him, Stauffenberg took the desperate decision to act as both assassin and coup leader.
To do this he would have to travel three-hundred miles to Hitler's headquarters, kill him, and then return to Berlin to lead the coup. Stauffenberg's elder brother Berthold was heared to say of the situation, "The most terrible thing is knowing that we cannot succeed and yet that we have to do it, for our country and our children."
On 20 July 1944 Claus von Stauffenberg made his attempt to assassinate Hitler. But Hitler survived because Stauffenberg couldn't bring enough explosives into Hitler's briefing room. He managed to return to Berlin to lead a coup, but Hitler countermanded the conspirators' orders. The coup collapsed and Stauffenberg was shot. About two-hundred conspirators were hanged.
The investigations and trials revealed much about Bonhoeffer´s and Dohnanyi´s involvement, but the two resisters were not tried until the last days of the war, when they were subjected to a questionable court-martial, and hanged.
The reasons for resisting Hitler varied from political and economic concerns to fundamentally ethical motivations. In the end the dominant motivation was ethical. On the basis of the testimony of some 700 conspirators who were arrested after 20 July 1944, a Gestapo report to Hitler summed up: 'The whole incomprehension of the ideas of National Socialism on the part of the conspirators is manifest particularly in the Jewish Question. All the experience of the years before 1933 and (our) fact-based enlightenment efforts … about the Jewish Question have passed by this group of persons without a trace [...] They obstinately adhere to liberal views which would grant to Jews the same position as to any German."
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