Lehrterstrasse in a light rain at about one o’clock in the morning. When they reached the corner of Invalidenstrasse, the guards ordered the prisoners to proceed across a field of rubble. The command “Ready, fire!” rang out and the prisoners fell, all of them shot in the neck. Among those murdered in this fashion were Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rudiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels, and Albrecht Haushofer.35
The next day some of the remaining inmates were released and the others were turned over to the judicial authorities. After midnight, however, another SS detachment appeared, took away Albrecht von Bernstorff, Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg, and the trade union leader Ernst Schneppenhorst, and murdered them. When day broke, the rest of the prisoners managed to persuade the warden that it was in his own best interest to let them go before the Russian troops arrived. At around six in the evening, the last political prisoners were released from Lehrterstrasse, including Justus Delbruck of Military Intelligence, Professors Gerhard Ritter, Adolf Lampe, and Theodor Steltzer. They fled as the battle for Berlin began in earnest.
In the debates that had raged within the resistance for years, Goerdeler had always argued that the first task of the resistance and the one that had the best chance of success was simply to inform the German people about the crimes of the regime: the fact that the Nazis had set out to provoke war, their enormous corruption, the disgraceful practices of the Einsatzgruppen, the mass murder committed in the concentration camps. Such outrage would be provoked, he imagined, that Hitler and his accomplices would be swept from office.
The failure of the attack on Hitler and the conspirators’ lack of opportunity to make their declaration to the people prevented Goerdeler’s idea from ever being put to the test. But as the writer Ernst Junger wrote in his diary following a conversation with Casar von Hofacker, Hitler would certainly have emerged the victor in a battle of the airwaves.36 His psychological hold over the people, although loosening, was still very real, however much the reasons behind it had changed. The masses had lost most of their faith and admiration but still had a dark, fatalistic feeling that their destiny was inextricably bound up with his. The ominous propaganda of the last months of the war and fear of the advancing Red Army drove them into the Fuhrer’s arms despite their mounting disgust with the brutality of the regime and with the cowardice, venality, and egotism of its officials. Though they felt suffocated by the pressures of police-state surveillance, informers, and terror, they clung to vague hopes that, as so often in the past, the Fuhrer would find a way to avert catastrophe. On June 16, 1944, the first of his much- heralded “reprisal weapons,” V-1 rockets, were launched against London. Immediately following the events of July 20, a Norwegian newspaper reporter observed the general mood in Germany: “The masses are apathetic; they neither see nor hear and therefore remain totally inert… . They neither weep nor celebrate nor rage.”37
And so the German resistance remained what it had always been: an expression of feelings that may well have been widespread but that only a tiny minority was prepared to act on. Ironically, the social isolation of the resistance continued even after the war, for as the end drew near, Nazi propagandists and Allied spokesmen joined forces in a de facto coalition to belittle the accomplishments of the resistance and disparage its motives. In the House of Commons Churchill described the events of July 20 as a murderous internecine power struggle and in Moscow Rudolf Herrnstadt celebrated the failure of what he termed the final attempt of “the gentlemen’s clubs, the reactionaries” to grab power.38
These altitudes did not change much even after the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. The resistance found no more acknowledgment or comprehension after the war than it had under the Nazis themselves, whether in Germany or abroad. On the first anniversary of the execution of Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a church funeral was held but it had to be announced as a service for a “fallen soldier.” The family of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg experienced great difficulty in asserting their rights to his estate, as did the dispossessed families of other conspirators. For a long time the occupation authorities forbade or placed limitations on publications about the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries were first published in Switzerland and then in Sweden, while both Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s
Denial and dismissal were common everywhere. When the celebrated English military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart attempted to portray the background to the 1938 coup attempt in a London newspaper, publication was prevented by the government. In American prisoner-of-war and internment camps, officers who had participated in the resistance were locked up indiscriminately with generals and SS men who were still pro-Nazi. The theory of the unity of Fuhrer and
In the summer of 1947 the American military administration released Hitler’s former army adjutant General Gerhard Engel and a number of general staff officers from prisoner-of-war camps. Meanwhile General Gersdorff, who had undertaken in March 1943 to set off a bomb and kill both Hitler and himself, continued to be held. When he questioned the rationale, he was informed by the camp commandant that “General Engel has demonstrated throughout his military career that he always carries out his orders. He will not engage in any resistance to us in civilian life either, and therefore he poses no threat. You, on the other hand, have shown that you follow your own conscience on occasion and consequently might not obey our orders under certain circumstances. People like you or General Falkenhausen [who also continued to be held prisoner] are therefore dangerous to us. For this reason, you will remain in custody.”40
To the many images of the resistance that have been handed down to us, we must add that of Carl Goerdeler sitting alone in his cell in the basement of Reich Security Headquarters. Early in 1945 he made another attempt to break the silence that was beginning to envelop all that he and his fellow conspirators had thought and striven for. In the last of the many papers he wrote, he seems finally to confront the possibility that he took the wrong approach and that everything he had done to prevent Hitler from leading Germany to catastrophe had been in vain. He places hopes in friends who had in fact long since been executed, records a few memories, addresses Germany’s youth and future generations, and finally breaks off his musings in the middle of a sentence filled with desperate thoughts about an “indifferent God,” the triumph of evil, and the obliteration of goodness, guilt, and righteousness. “Like the psalmist I quarrel with God,” he writes, “and this struggle decorates the bare walls of my tiny cell, filling the emptiness with my imaginings and my memories.” In the end, he could not continue, finding no answer to the thought to which his mind constantly returned: “Can this be the Last Judgment?”41
11. THE WAGES OF FAILURE
No sooner had it collapsed than the German resistance-its thoughts and deeds, its strenuous efforts, its high hopes and crushing disappointments-was almost entirely lost to memory. The stunning events of July 20 overshadowed the movement as a whole, and it has hardly become any better known in the intervening years. Its traces vanished, quickly and inconspicuously, in prison cells, killing fields, concentration camps, execution grounds, and unknown burial sites. It is noted, to be sure, on Germany’s informal calendar of memorial events, as a ceremony is held annually in the courtyard of the former army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. Little about it penetrates the public mind, however, and it has never earned more than grudging respect. It remains, in the words of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an obscure “episode” of the war.1
Curiously enough, Hitler’s description of the conspirators as a “very small clique of ambitious officers,” a characterization trumpeted by Nazi propagandists, has proved remarkably resilient. By the time of the attack on Hitler all that the conspirators really hoped was that the memory of the resistance would live on. But even this was not to be, thanks both to Allied policy and to Germany’s postwar psychological climate of mass repression, born of guilt and a desire to forget.
The quick disappearance of the resistance from public memory was all the more striking in that it seemed to run counter to the sentimental German fondness for lost causes. This penchant was apparently outweighed by the equally traditional deference to authority and by the feeling that the resistance betrayed the fatherland in its hour
