also made much of the rift that was bound to occur in the enemy’s “unnatural coalition.” But, characteristically, he was not prepared even to consider the possibilities of a separate peace with one side or the other. In December, 1942, and once again in the summer of 1943, the Soviet Union had indicated through its representatives in Stockholm that it was willing to negotiate with Hitler over a separate peace. By fall of that year, in growing fear that the Western powers were playing for a war of exhaustion between Germany and Soviet Russia, the U.S.S.R. cautiously mentioned terms. She offered restoration of the Russo-German borders of 1914, a free hand in the Straits question, and extensive economic ties. The Russians kept their deputy Foreign Minister and former ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, in Stockholm for an exchange of views from September 12 to 16. But Hitler rejected all negotiations. He regarded the Soviet contact as a mere tactical maneuver; and in fact to this day it has remained unclear how serious Moscow’s intentions were. But Hitler’s intentions remained obsessively and rigidly determined by the decision once taken. With a shrug Hitler told his Foreign Minister, who was for responding to the peace feelers: “You know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today, I’d attack her again tomorrow—I just can’t help myself.” To Goebbels he remarked in the middle of September that the time for such contacts was “totally unsuitable”; he could negotiate with some prospect of success only after a decisive military victory.95
Up to this point decisive military victories had only whetted his appetite for ever more decisive military victories. But a turning point was no longer conceivable. By this time the god of war, as Jodi remarked, had long ago turned away from the German side and moved into the enemy camp. In 1938, at the time the great architectural projects were being conceived, Albert Speer had set up an account to finance the vast buildings for the world capital of Germania. Now, at the end of 1943, he quietly liquidated the account, without mentioning it to Hitler.
VIII. CATASTROPHE
Oppositions
Kill him!
At the beginning of 1944 the assault upon Fortress Europe began in earnest, forging Hitler to the defensive on all fronts. In the south the Western powers pressed forward as far as Central Italy. Their technological advantage, based for the most part on superior radar, enabled them to wage almost total air warfare, while the German side was forced temporarily to cease submarine attacks. In the East, meanwhile, the Russians were racing toward the battlefields on which the German armies had won their first great victories in the summer of 1941. Though his defensive lines were wavering and breaking everywhere, Hitler merely continued to repeat his formula of resistance to the last man, thus once again revealing that his talents as a generalissimo covered only offensive situations. The speed of the retreat kept him from carrying out his aim of leaving the enemy nothing but “a totally scorched and destroyed land.”1 But the landscape itself was the scene of a ghostly drama. Oil-soaked iron grids had been set up above gigantic fires, and members of “Squad 1005” worked feverishly and silently around these. Their assignment was to locate the innumerable mass graves of nearly three years of rule, to exhume the corpses, and to eliminate all traces of the massacres. Gigantic clouds of black smoke rose up from these cremation sites. The regime was abjuring its visions and reducing them to an
Ever since it had become apparent that strength was departing from Hitler’s colossus, resistance had been stirring everywhere in Europe. In many cases it was centered in the Communist parties, but it also sprang from leagues of military officers, from the Catholic Church, or from groups of intellectuals. In some countries, such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and even France, it became organized in paramilitary formations, calling themselves the Home Army or the Fighting Forces of the Interior, to wage an embittered and bloody war against the occupation troops. The Germans answered the growing number of assassinations and acts of sabotage with summary executions of hostages, in which the death of a single guard might often be paid for by twenty, thirty, or even more victims. The revenge of SS Division Das Reich upon the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and its 600 innocent inhabitants marked the climax of this merciless guerrilla war. Tito’s famous breakthrough operation on the Neretva, or the Warsaw uprising of the summer of 1944, were battlelike actions that became legends of the European Resistance.
Simultaneously, oppositional forces reappeared also inside Germany. In the past years they had been undone first by Hitler’s diplomatic, then his military successes, and after the victory over France had reached the nadir of discouragement. But now the changing fortunes of the war brought out all the repressed doubts that had been present since the beginning of the Hitler regime, alongside of the cheering and jubilation. After Stalingrad, and once more after the defeats of the winter of 1943–44, the prevalent mood in Germany for considerable spells of time was compounded of fear, war weariness, and apathy. It was a mood that spurred the efforts of the opposition, since there was at last some hope of a response. After the many disappointments of earlier years the oppositionists were afraid that the rapidly approaching military defeat would once more, and forever, rob them of their chance to act. This concern enormously strengthened their resolution. But it also provides grounds for the charge, which has been repeatedly voiced, that the German opposition opportunistically resolved to topple the regime only when it was already falling. All that happened, it has been argued, is that a few nationalists roused themselves to act because they were more eager to save the country’s power than its morality.
We cannot judge this matter without taking into account the difficulties the opposition faced in 1944. Some time before, the Gestapo had blown the cover of the “Central Bureau,” Oster’s office, and arrested its chief members. Admiral Canaris had been largely frozen out, and General Beck temporarily incapacitated by a severe illness. Moreover, Mussolini’s fall had given Hitler a good scare and prompted him to still greater wariness. He tried more than ever before to keep his movements secret. His staff had instructions to conceal scheduled appointments even from the highest persons in the leadership, such as Goring and Himmler. On the rare occasions that he did appear in public he usually changed the program at short notice, sometimes only minutes before he was due to appear. Even in his own headquarters he used to wear the heavy, armored cap that came down over his ears. In his radio address of September 10, 1943, dealing with the events in Italy, there was a distinctly threatening note in the way he called upon his “field marshals, admirals, and generals” to show their loyalty to him and dash the enemy’s hopes of finding in the German officers corps “traitors like those in Italy today.”
The dilemma faced by the active opponents of the regime in Germany was computed of a complicated complex of inhibitions of a traditional order. While throughout the European Resistance, national and moral duty coincided almost completely, in Germany these norms clashed sharply, and for a good many of those who opposed the regime the contradiction was insoluble. Throughout all their years of plotting and planning, many leading members of the opposition, particularly the military men, were unable to overcome entirely that last emotional barrier. What they were projecting still seemed to them treason, a renewed “stab in the back.” Unlike the European Resistance, what they could initially expect from their liberating act was not liberty but defeat and surrender to an implacable enemy. And it would take an arrogant moralist to belittle the conflict of those who, despite their hatred of Hitler and their horror of the crimes he instigated, nevertheless could not forget the crimes of Stalin, the atrocities of the “Red Terror,” or the great purges, as well as the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre.
Such scruples also marked the unending discussions whose gravity can be appreciated today only by an act of historical empathy. How binding was an oath taken to one who had committed perjury? How far did the duty of obedience extend? Above all, there was the question of assassination, which some saw as essential and as the only consistent, grand act of resistance, whereas others, whose moral integrity cannot be called into
