The nearest run thing
Richard Lamb
PLOTTING HITLER'S DEATH: THE GERMAN RESISTANCE TO HITLER 1933-1945 by Joachim Fest, translated by Bruce Little Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 419 The 20 July 1944 attempt by Stauffen- berg to kill Hitler was depicted by Churchill in the Commons as 'a murderous internecine power struggle with the highest personalities in the German Reich murder- ing one another'; Hitler described the con- spirators as 'a very small clique of ambitious officers'. As a result, it seemed at the time to be a flash-in-the-pan effort by one man.
Evidence of a conspiracy emerged during the Nuremberg Trials, but it was not until the publication in English in 1970 of Pro- fessor Peter Hoffmann's book, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, that it was established beyond doubt that a strong German opposition had existed with thou- sands of links with the army, the civil ser- vice and elsewhere. After the publication of the official documents in the Public Record Office under the 30-year rule, several books in English have revealed how the British government was in touch with the plotters.
Now Joachim Fest has written a vivid and gripping account of the brave Germans who plotted Hitler's downfall in order either to prevent or end the war. Using mainly German sources, he brings to light many hitherto unknown facets of the dra- matic saga, and shows how the opposition might so easily have ended the war in 1944.
There is controversy over how serious were the intentions of the conspirators to topple Hitler in September 1938 to prevent the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Fest pro- duces strong evidence that the top German generals, Haider, Witzleben and Beck, were about to seize Hitler with a small commando force and either execute him or put him on trial, when, to their horror, they learnt that Chamberlain was flying to Berchtesgarten to see Hitler and barter away Czechoslovakia. Their plot was put on hold but reactivated after the Hitler- Chamberlain negotiations broke down at Godesberg, only to be finally aborted when Chamberlain persuaded Mussolini to organise the ill-fated Munich conference which gave Germany the Sudetenland and the Czechoslovakian border fortifications. This demolishes the arguments of certain revisionist British historians who defend Munich as wise statesmanship.
With his victories in Poland, France, Yugoslavia and Greece, Hitler became so popular in Germany that the Resistance was hamstrung. However, by 1943 after the Axis surrender in Tunisia and the Russian victories it was obvious to thinking Germans that the war was lost. The plot- ters of 1938 were able to recruit thousands of anti-Nazis to their cause although they were operating under terrible difficulties because of the Gestapo. It was a setback for them when at Casablanca in January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt declared that only the unconditional surrender of Ger- many would be accepted. Fest laments that the Foreign Office refused to distinguish between the Nazis and the German people, and ignored attempts by the plotters to find out what peace terms the Allies would offer a non-Nazi government while Germany still had some bargaining power.
He records with indignation that when Bishop Bell of Chichester was given details of the plot by Germany's most respected church leaders in Sweden Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, minuted: 'I see no reason to encourage this pestilential priest.' Fest would have been even more indignant if he read in the Foreign Office files how Adam Trott, the most charismatic of the opposition leaders and a close friend of Stafford Cripps and David Astor, was rejected out of hand when he made an approach through the impeccable Dr Viss- er't Hooft of the World Council of Church- es, or Sir John Wheeler-Bennett's minute after the plot had failed: 'We are better off . . . than if the plot of 20 July had succeed- ed and Hitler had been assassinated.' Per- haps worse was a post-war minute by a distinguished diplomat after General Haider had revealed to American inter- rogators details of the plot and questions were being asked in Parliament: 'The best thing would be to discredit Haider in the course of an interrogation of our own.'
Fest is convincing in his argument that if Britain had encouraged the conspirators by offering generous terms for an alternative government more generals and influential Germans could have been recruited and the plot would have had a greater chance of success. Still, 20 July was a close call. If the bomb had killed Hitler instead of wounding him General von Kluge would have surrendered to Montgomery in Normandy. With Hitler alive the plotters in Berlin faltered and the Nazis quickly reasserted their iron rule with dire conse- quences for the good Germans. Here is a fine read which makes one wring one's hands over the lost opportunity.
Richard Lamb's book, The Ghosts of Peace, about the Italian and German Resistance, is available from Michael Russell.
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