Social Democratic minister Rudolf Hilferding, whom he helped escape Germany after the Nazis seized power. His close bonds with Hilferding may explain why he leaned toward a policy of strong governmental control of the economy, which recommended him to some of the younger members of the Kreisau Circle despite his reputation as a “reactionary old Prussian.” Having made friends with Hans Oster in 1935, Popitz had become deeply involved in the resistance to Hitler even before the war; indeed as a sign of protest against the persecution of Jews, he submitted his resignation as minister to Goring in November 1938, explicitly requesting that Hitler be informed of the reasons. He never received a response, however, and in the end remained in office.
Popitz was also acquainted with Carl Langbehn, who had joined the opposition in the late 1930s. It turned out that Langbehn knew Himmler personally both as a lawyer and as a neighbor in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. Through this connection Popitz now contacted the powerful chief of the SS, who had recently been appointed minister of the interior. They met on August 26. In a conversation conducted with Machiavellian cunning, in which he skirted the edge of the abyss more than once, Popitz suggested that no one but Himmler could resolve the desperate situation that had befallen the regime both at home and at the front. Such a suggestion was not totally devoid of promise, as the clear-headed, coolly calculating SS leaders had themselves already begun to entertain serious doubts about whether Germany could win the war and to wonder how their interests might best be served. Popitz avoided referring directly to “overthrowing” Hitler, although that was his ultimate aim, instead making oblique references to “lightening the burden” the Fuhrer had to bear. In general Popitz gained the impression that Himmler had long doubted that Germany could win the war. At the end of their conversation the two agreed to meet again soon.
This second meeting never took place. The next month Langbehn was arrested after his contacts with the Allies through Swiss intermediaries were exposed. Popitz found himself increasingly marginalized within the civilian resistance despite the leading role he had played until this point. His daring initiative was, of course, an act of desperation, predicated on the belief that Himmler could be elbowed aside after he had served his purpose. That idea seemed an eerie echo of the illusions of the spring of 1933, when it was thought that Hitler could be controlled once in power. But Popitz’s greater error was his failure to realize that the SS leader did not act independently and exercised only delegated authority. Furthermore, he overlooked how damaging it would have been for the opposition to be maintaining contact, for whatever reason, with a man who was widely believed to epitomize Nazi terror. Gerhard Ritter was not far off track when he described Popitz as the type of intellectual who has “pure intentions but few sure political instincts.” It was this shortcoming that gave rise to the general feeling within resistance circles that Popitz had overstayed his welcome in the role o leader. At any rate, Goerdeler felt that Popitz had gone too far and, after hesitating at first, decided that he didn’t want to hear so much as a word about the conversation with Himmler At Stauffenberg’s urging Goerdeler, too, abandoned the finance minister. The circle had been “blown apart,” Hassell wrote in late February. “Everything is going to hell.”38
What tore this “band of brothers” apart more than anything else were their repeatedly dashed hopes for an assassination. In February Goerdeler wrote to Beck complaining about Stauffenberg’s failure to keep his promises and proposing to revive his own pet project of a bloodless coup. Through a number of intermediaries Goerdeler managed to contact Chief of General Staff Kurt Zeitzler to request that Hitler arrange an interview with Hitler or even a debate between them to be broadcast over the radio, during which Goerdeler intended to “eliminate” the Fuhrer by prompting him to give up or resign. When this initiative failed, Goerdeler wrote Zeitzler an epistle of more than twenty pages outlining his ideas. Fortunately, Goerdeler’s staff did not forward it.39
Such initiatives aroused only scorn and contempt from Stauffenberg, and though they were a genuine expression of Goerdeler’s irrepressible confidence and courage, they only served to widen the gulf between the two men. Differences in age and temperament figured, of course, in their disagreements, but so did the fact that Goerdeler was a skillful, cosmopolitan bureaucrat, and Stauffenberg an impatient and still young man of action. The deeper reason for the discord was that Stauffenberg, conscious of the key role he was playing and encouraged by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, the former regional commissioner in Silesia, drew increasingly close to Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber, without concerning himself with how much Goerdeler “suffered from his distant attitude,” in the words of one contemporary. “Again and again Goerdeler complained, They’re trying to cut me out. They don’t tell me anything anymore.”40
Stauffenberg was indeed becoming convinced that Leber would make “the better chancellor,” although Leber himself, along with Wilhelm Leuschner and the trade unionist Jakob Kaiser, believed that the persistence of the stab-in-the-back myth from World War I made it inadvisable to place a Social Democrat or a labor leader “all too visibly in the front rank of those responsible” immediately following the removal of Hitler. Moreover, although Stauffenberg was closer to Leber on domestic policy, he knew that in foreign affairs he had more m common with Goerdeler, who had developed an eleven-point program that he wanted to present to the Allies, still believing, even in the summer of 1944, that a negotiated peace was possible. This program stipulated that Germany would retain its 1914 borders, as well as Austria and the Sudetenland, and that it might even secure the return of parts of South Tyrol.41
Julius Leber took a much more sober view. He thought that unconditional surrender was inevitable, and therefore adopted an ever-cooler attitude toward Goerdeler. The main points of contention reveal how pronounced the divisions within the resistance had become. Leber, for instance, who was no friend of conservatives, came quite close to advocating the strong authoritarian state that Jessen, Hassell, and Popitz envisaged for the transition period; he agreed with them that “a dictatorship cannot be put on a democratic footing over night.”42 Meanwhile, for this very reason, the conservatives distanced themselves from Goerdeler, whose blind faith in democracy and sympathy toward the trade unions made them distrust him as the leader of a strong interim regime. In foreign policy Trott may have shared many of Goerdeler’s opinions, but Moltke and most of the Kreisau Circle did not. They continued to see Goerdeler as a man linked to business circles that would not be sufficiently accepting of a government that, in Yorck’s words, “included the working class and even left-wing Social Democrats.” And so, little by little, the resistance tore itself apart in controversies that bore little connection to the real world until everyone alternately agreed and disagreed with everyone else in one way or another, and the majority support for Goerdeler that had existed a year before was now gone. Indeed, the Gestapo agents who interrogated the conspirators after July 20 were not far wrong when they concluded that the attempts of the diverse resistance circles “to build a united front” had produced “a political monstrosity,” and that the conspirators were united “only in a negative sense, in their rejection of National Socialism.”43 The ties that bound them had in fact been broken.
This state of affairs was not overly apparent in the early summer of 1944, however, because at that point the dominant concern continued to be foreign policy-specifically, how the Allies would respond to a coup. Most opponents of the Nazi regime still found it hard to accept that they did not have a shred of hope. Even Stauffenberg harbored illusions about a negotiated peace, hurrying off to seek solace from Trott after some particularly sobering conversations with Leber. And when an embittered Trott returned from a trip abroad convinced that there was “no genuine desire on the part of the British and Americans to reach an understanding”—especially since the demand for unconditional surrender first expressed in the Casablanca declaration had just been underscored at the Teheran Conference-dreams of a separate peace with the Soviet Union surged briefly to the fore.
The resistance based its hopes on Stalin’s well-known comment of February 1942 that although individuals like Hitler might come and go, the German people would remain. If the Soviet dictator was hinting at some disagreement with the intransigent policy of the Western powers, he took a step further in this direction in the summer of 1943 when he began approaching the German opposition through their contacts in Stockholm and through the National Committee for a Free Germany established in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, by German prisoners of war and emigrants. Like the attempts to forge ties in the West, however, these contacts were soon undermined by distrust and suspicion. Heretofore the activities of the Communist-inspired groups led by First Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack had gone virtually unnoticed by the rest of the resistance, despite a few personal ties between them. The group known collectively as the Red Orchestra (after its Gestapo nickname) consisted of both hard-core Communist ideologues on one side and a motley assortment of dreamers and visionaries on the other. Their arrest in August 1942 aroused little more than feelings of empathy among the rest of the resistance, which cared little for their use of political theory to mask the many concrete similarities between Hitler and Stalin. The leftists’ continued embrace of the old dream of a historic mission shared by the “profound” German and Russian cultures, as opposed to the “superficial” Western cultures, further alien
