BOOKS OF THE DAY
Delayed Action
To the Bitter End. By H. B. Gisevius. (Cape. 18s.) The von Hassell Diaries, 1938-1944. (Hamish Hamilton. 15s.)
THE conditions of life in a terrorist State are almost unimaginable to Englishmen ; both Gisevius's account and Hassell's Diaries do some- thing to convey the atmosphere in which people were compelled to live in Nazi Germany, and both help to explain why there was no organised resistance while there was a fairly constant, if disjointed, opposition leading up to the ill-fated attempt of July loth, 1944.
Gisevius goes in for creating atmosphere at the cost of being " colourful and careless." He does perhaps succeed in this way in making one feel the bitterness with which the better elements in Germany followed Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Hitler. There is certainly no doubt that long before*Chamberlain the British attitude unwittingly facilitated the consolidation of the Nazi regime ; every time one went to Germany after 1933 the most upright Germans would pour ont their bewilderment over the concessions made to Hitler which had been withheld from the democratic rulers of the Reich. And when it came to the Czech crisis a plot against Hitler, which might have saved us the miseries of six years of war, was wrecked because British politicians had more confidence in Hitler than in his opponents. While Gisevius makes much of all this, Hassell was, however, a contented friend and admirer of Sir Nevile Henderson, In reading Gisevius one asks oneself whether history is really made more palatable when it is confused by flashi- ness and vanity and distorted by inaccuracy. For the author takes no trouble to check up on the gossip of the moment ; for instance, it is not true that when Mussolini proposed the Munich Conference he telephoned personally to his Ambassador in Berlin. Since this sort of thing is categorically stated it makes one feel sceptical about the rest of the book.
One of the most extraordinary scenes in history took place at the Obersalzberg on August 22nd, 1939, when Hitler spent a large part of the day haranguing his generals over the attack upon Poland which he had fixed for the end of that week and drenching them in Nietzschean exhortations to brutality. A written record of this per- formance had been forbidden, but Canaris, the head of the German counter-espionage service, sitting in an inconspicuous corner, wrote down all he could. " The very next day he read the most important passages to us," though the document was lost in the =fusion of later years. Gisevius should, therefore, be one of the best sources as to what Hitler actually poured out on that frenzied day. It is a pity that the translators have cut out part of what Gisevius has to say and notably the Fiihrer's savage outburst about any Schweine- hund who by attempting mediation should come between him and his war.
The over-simplifiers have claimed that the only opposition to Hitler came from the Prussian Junker class, who resented the Fiihrer as an Austrian, an upstart and an innovator. This is extremely mis- leading. But it is true that during the war the most coherent oppositional group was composed of Gamins and a number of his colleagues in the Abwehr. It seems all the stranger that men who occupied such key positions were so ineffectual. The Communist workman, Elser, acting alone, came as near success as they did when he placed his bomb in the Munich Hof briiukeller ready for the celebration of November 9th, 1939. Here Gisevius, who was able to study the police records, is probably a reliable guide, and corrects the conclusions to which people jumped at the time as to.
S.S. complicity or SA. revenge. •
Ulrich von Hassell met a terrible death with exquisite courage, and the English translation of his Diaries does well to reproduce the photograph which shows him at his trial. His noble end cannot, unfortunately, alter the fact that he, like Gisevius, belonged to circles which were largely responsible for the Nazi regime. Schacht had been enthusiastically in favour of putting Hitler into power, and Popitz, too, had joined the Nazi Government. As for Gisevius's. friend, Helldorf, he had had a notoriously vicious past and been responsible for some of the worst excesses of the early days of. National Socialism. Hassell himself not unnaturally raised his eye- brows over Helldorf's late repentance. It is regrettable that the British public should be initiated into the history of the opposition to Hitler by people who had originally hoped to make use of. him and whose political outlook was at best Bismarckian. Hassell, for instance, was quite indifferent to the injustice of the frontiers of. 1914 which he wished to restore.
What is being forgotten is that there was a small minority of Germans who set their face against Hitler twenty years ago, that is, as soon as it was possible to know what he signified. Some of these people stood on the Left, like Carl von Ossietzky and Mierendorff, who became concentration-camp victims from the beginning of Hitler's rule. Some of them were liberals like Albrecht von Bern- storff; who resigned a good diplomatic position immediately instead of waiting until he was dismissed. And some stood on the Right, like von Schlabrendorff and Rudolf Pechel. The latter, editor of the Deutsche Runcisehau, used this review to practise resistance along Lettres Persanes lines, describing the tyrannies of distant epochs in order to criticise the tyranny of Hitler ; he was financially sup- ported by the firm of Bosch until he; too, was subjected to the torments of the concentration camp. It is a pity that his book, Deutscher Widerstand, has not been translated, though it is not entertaining but a mere statement of fact. It should at all events be noted that Pechel protested against Gisevius's book when it was first published in Switzerland, for he held that with his Gestapo connections Gisevius had no right to speak for the real oppositionals who had never trusted him. It is not uninteresting that the English translation of Gisevius omits the paragraph in praise of Pechel which
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