had envisaged in early 1942 ‘a European federation of states under German leadership within 10 or 20 years’ if the war could be ended and a ‘sensible political system’ put in place.30 In summer 1943, despite the drastic deterioration of Germany’s military situation, Goerdeler’s incorrigible optimism still led him to put forward as his foreign-political aims: the restoration of the eastern borders of 1914 (meaning, of course, keeping the Polish Corridor, reacquired by Germany through such immeasurable barbarism); retention of Austria and the Sudetenland, along with Eupen-Malmedy and the South Tyrol (which even Hitler had not annexed); negotations with France over Alsace-Lorraine; undiminished German sovereignty; no reparations; and economic union in Europe (outside Russia).31
As regards the nature of a post-Nazi regime, the notions of the national conservatives, disdaining the plebiscitary and demagogic characteristics of what they saw as populist mass politics, were essentially (despite differences of emphasis) oligarchic and authoritarian. They favoured a restoration of the monarchy and limited electoral rights in self-governing communities, resting on Christian family values — the embodiment of the true ‘national community’ which the Nazis had corrupted.32
Among the most striking features of Goerdeler’s lack of realism was his conviction, when it was put to him that Hitler would have to be forcefully removed from the scene, that he could be persuaded by reasoned argument to step down.33 His expectation of an unbloody coup even led him to the idea of suggesting that he could eliminate Hitler through open debate if the military could provide him with the opportunity to address the Wehrmacht and the people.34 It was as well that the letter, composed in May 1944, containing such a remarkable suggestion was sent back by Stieff and never passed to Chief of Staff Zeitzler.35
The notions of Goerdeler and his close associates, whose age, mentality, and upbringing inclined them to look back to the pre-1914 Reich for much of their inspiration, found little favour among a group of a younger generation (mainly born during the first decade of the twentieth century) which gained its common identity through outright opposition to Hitler and his regime. The group, whose leaders were mainly of aristocratic descent, came to be known as ‘the Kreisau Circle’, a term coined by the Gestapo and drawn from the estate in Silesia where the group held a number of its meetings. The estate belonged to one of its central figures, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, born in 1907, trained in law, a great admirer of British traditions, a descendant of the famous Chief of the General Staff of the Prussian army in Bismarck’s era.36 The ideas of the ‘Kreisau Circle’ for a ‘new order’ after Hitler dated back in embryo to 1940, when they were first elaborated by Moltke and his close friend and relative Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, three years older, also trained in law, a formative figure in the group, and with good contacts to the military opposition. Both had rejected Nazism and its gross inhumanity from an early stage. By 1942–3 they were drawing to meetings at Kreisau and in Berlin a number of like-minded friends and associates, ranging across social classes and denominational divisions, including the former Oxford Rhodes Scholar and foreign-policy spokesman of the group Adam von Trott zu Solz, the Social Democrat Carlo Mierendorff, the socialist pedagogical expert Adolf Reichwein, the Jesuit priest Pater Alfred Delp, and the Protestant pastor Eugen Ger-stenmaier.
Unlike the Goerdeler group, the Kreisau Circle drew heavily for its inspiration on the idealism of the German youth movement, socialist and Christian philosophies, and experiences of the post-war misery and rise of National Socialism. Moltke, Yorck, and their associates — unlike the Goerdeler group — had no desire to hold on to expectations of German hegemony on the continent. They looked instead to a future in which national sovereignty (and the nationalist ideologies which underpinned it) would give way to a federal Europe, modelled in part on the United States of America. They were well aware that major territorial concessions would have to be made by Germany, along with some form of reparation for the peoples of Europe who had suffered so grievously under Nazi rule. They saw an international tribunal to deal with war criminals as a basis for weaning the German people from its attachment to National Socialism. And they looked to a strong international organization to preserve equal rights for all countries of the world. Their concept of a new form of state rested heavily upon German Christian and social ideals, looking to democratization from below, through self-governing communities working on the basis of social justice, guaranteed by a central state that was little more than an umbrella organization for localized and particularized interests within a federal structure.37
Such notions were inevitably utopian. The ‘Kreisau Circle’ had no arms to back it, and no access to Hitler. It was dependent upon the army for action. Moltke, who opposed assassination, and Yorck, quite especially, pressed on a number of occasions for a coup to unseat Hitler. By 1943, Moltke’s distrust of the German military leadership on account of its complicity in so much of the Nazi barbarism led him to advocate American military support for a new oppositional German government. Allied troops were to be parachuted into German cities to back a coup.38
Such an illusory hope still left out of the equation the initial step: how to remove Hitler, and who should do it. This, rather than Utopian visions of a future social and political order, was the primary issue that continued to preoccupy Tresckow and his fellow officers who had committed themselves to the opposition. The problem became, if anything, more rather than less difficult during the summer and autumn of 1943. Any expectation that Manstein might commit himself to the opposition was wholly dashed in the summer. ‘Prussian field-marshals do not mutiny,’ was his lapidary response to Gersdorff’s probings.39 Manstein was at least honest and straightforward. Kluge, by contrast, blew hot and cold — offering backing to Tresckow and Gersdorff, then retreating from it.40 There was nothing to be gained from that quarter, though those in the opposition continued to persist in the delusion that Kluge was ultimately on their side.
There were other setbacks. Beck was meanwhile quite seriously ill. And Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg — a lawyer by training, who after initially sympathizing with National Socialism and holding a number of high administrative positions in the regime, had come to serve as a liaison between the military and civilian opposition — was interrogated on suspicion that he was involved in plans for a coup, though later released.41 Others, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer, were also arrested, as the tentacles of the Gestapo threatened to entangle the leading figures in the resistance. Even worse: Hans von Dohnanyi and Hans Oster from the Abwehr were arrested in April, initially for alleged foreign currency irregularities, though this drew suspicion on their involvement in political opposition. The head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, a professional obfuscater, managed for a time to throw sand in the eyes of the Gestapo agents. But as a centre of the resistance, the Abwehr had become untenable. By February 1944, its foreign department, which Oster had controlled, was incorporated into the Reich Security Head Office, and Canaris, dubious figure that he was for the opposition, himself placed under house arrest.42
Tresckow, partly while on leave in Berlin, was tireless in attempting to drive on the plans for action against Hitler. But in October, he was stationed at the head of a regiment at the front, away from his previously influential position in Army Group Centre headquarters. At the same time, in any case, Kluge was injured in a car accident and replaced by Field-Marshal Ernst Busch, an outright Hitler-loyalist, so that an assassination attempt from Army Group Centre could now be ruled out.43 At this point, Olbricht revived notions, previously entertained but never sustained, of carrying out both the strike against Hitler and the subsequent coup, not through the front army, but from the headquarters of the reserve army in Berlin.44 Finding an assassin with access to Hitler had been a major problem. Now, one was close at hand.
Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg came from a Swabian aristocratic family. Born in 1907, the youngest of three brothers, he grew up under the influence of Catholicism — though his family were non-practising — and of the youth movement. He became particularly attracted to the ideas of the poet Stefan George, then held in extraordinary esteem by an impressionable circle of young admirers, strangely captivated by his vague, neo- conservative cultural mysticism which looked away from the sterilities of bourgeois existence towards a new elite of aristocratic aestheticism, godliness, and manliness.45 Like many young officers, Stauffenberg was initially attracted by aspects of National Socialism — not least its renewed emphasis on the value of strong armed forces and its anti-Versailles foreign policy — but rejected its racial antisemitism and, after the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of early 1938, was increasingly critical of Hitler and his drive to war. Even so, serving in Poland he was contemptuous of the Polish people, approved of the colonization of the country, and was enthusiastic about the German victory.46 He was still more jubilant after the stunning successes in the western campaign, and hinted that he had changed his views on Hitler.47
The mounting barbarity of the regime nevertheless appalled him. And when he turned irredeemably against Hitler in the late spring of 1942, it was under the influence of incontrovertible eye-witness reports of massacres of Ukrainian Jews by SS men. Hearing the reports, Stauffenberg concluded that Hitler must be removed.48 As some of his critics pointed out, it was, compared with others, somewhat late in the
