LETTERS Stating the facts
Sir: May I join Richard Lamb (Letters, 2 November) in demolishing the ill-informed and wrong-headed views of Andrew Roberts about the German resistance (Danger! new myth ahead', 26 October)?
If Hitler had been killed, says Mr Roberts, he would have been succeeded by Himmler, 'who controlled the SS'. But the army vastly outnumbered the SS, and Roberts obviously knows nothing about the plan worked out by the Judge Advocate- General of the army, Carl Sack. There was in force a catch-all offence of weakening the defensive power of the Reich, for which the death penalty could be imposed. From the anti-Nazi point of view, Hitler was lead- ing Germany into an abyss and therefore all who ardently supported him were guilty of this offence.
Under Sack's plan, the army would have arrested all SS officers, Gestapo men and Nazi party officials of the rank of Kreisleiter upwards. After drumhead courts-martial they would have been shot forthwith. The SS fighting units would then have been incorporated into the army.
`An assassinated Hitler', says Roberts, `would have provided the ideal Dolch- stosslegende (stab-in-the-back myth) once Germany was inevitably defeated in 1945.' When I worked in occupied Germany as a political intelligence officer, I knew one of the few surviving Berlin plotters, Colonel Wolfgang Muller. His publication Gegen eine neue Dolchstosslegende, of which Mr Roberts is obviously ignorant, disposed effectively of any such suggestion.
The German public in 1944, enlightened about Hitler-inspired atrocities in Poland and Russia, and hearing all the wavering generals now released from their oath of allegiance and speaking out, would never have cast the army in the role of stabber. And Roberts's notion that revanchism `would have resonated in Germany to this day' is downright mad.
Lindsey Platt
3 Sherwood Avenue, Fallowfield, Manchester
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