Alternatives to Hitler: German Resistance under the Third Reich

320 Pages·2003·1.65 MB·English

ALTERNATIVES TO HITLER

HANS MOMMSEN
ALTERNATIVES
TO HITLER
GERMAN RESISTANCE
UNDER THE
THIRD REICH
Translated and annotated by
Angus McGeoch
Introduction by
Jeremy Noakes
Published in 2003 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
www.ibtauris.com
Originally published in 2000 as Alternative zu Hitler – Studien zur Geschichte des
deutschen Widerstandes.
Copyright © Verlag C.H. Beck oHG, Munchen, 2000
Translation copyright © I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd, 2003
The translation of this work has been supported by Inter Nationes, Bonn.
The right of Hans Mommsen to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1 86064 745 6
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
Project management by Steve Tribe, Andover
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin
Contents
Introduction by Jeremy Noakes 1
1. Carl von Ossietzky and the concept of a right to resist
in Germany 9
2. German society and resistance to Hitler 23
3. The social vision and constitutional plans of the
German resistance 42
4. The Kreisau Circle and the future reorganization of
Germany and Europe 134
5. Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and the
Prussian tradition 152
6. German anti-Hitler resistance and the ending of
Europe’s division into nation-states 181
7. Julius Leber and the German resistance to Hitler 194
8. Wilhelm Leuschner and the resistance movement of
20 July 1944 205
9. Carlo Mierendorff’s ‘Socialist Action’ programme 218
10.Adolf Reichwein’s road to resistance and the
Kreisau Circle 227
11.The position of the military opposition to Hitler in
the German resistance movement 238
12.Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews 253
Notes 277
Bibliography 303
Index 305

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Between 1933 and 1945 tens of thousands of Germans were
actively involved in various forms of resistance to the Nazi regime
and many thousands suffered death or long periods of incarceration
in prison or concentration camp as a result. Among these actions
were a series of concerted efforts to overthrow the regime between
1938 and 1944. They were undertaken by a number of partially
inter-linked circles, consisting mainly of army officers, senior civil
servants, clergy and individuals formerly associated with the labour
movement. Their actions culminated in the unsuccessful attempt
to assassinate Hitler by planting a bomb in his military
headquarters in East Prussia on 20 July 1944. Though the bomb
went off, Hitler survived. It is these efforts and the people
associated with them that have been the main focus of interest,
both for historians and the wider public, because they represented
the form of resistance most likely to succeed in destroying Nazism;
these men had thought longest and hardest about the alternatives
to Hitler and it is they who form the subject of this book. However,
we should not forget that there were many other resisters,
unconnected with these conspiracies, such as the simple
Württemberg carpenter, Georg Elser, who very nearly killed Hitler
with a bomb in a Munich beer hall in November 1939. They
showed equal courage and commitment in their resistance.
Ever since the defeat of Germany in 1945, the question of re-
sistance by Germans to the Nazi regime has provoked controversy
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both within Germany itself and in the rest of the world. Outside
Germany the Resistance has, on the whole, not had a very good
press. ‘Too little, too late and for the wrong reasons’ might be a
fair summary of how it has generally been viewed. Yet such a per-
ception, although not without an element of truth, both seriously
underestimates the difficulties facing any resistance to the Third
Reich from within and grossly oversimplifies and misconceives
the complex and varied motives of those who became involved.
Within Germany politicians in both the successor states of the
Third Reich, the Federal Republic in the West and the German
Democratic Republic in the East, tried to exploit aspects of the
Resistance to legitimise their respective regimes and, in the process,
the history of the resistance became caught up in the Cold War.
The East argued with some justification that the Communists had
been the earliest, most consistent and most persecuted of the
resisters, glossing over the party’s ambiguous behaviour during
the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939–1941. They also
pointed out the extent to which many of the ‘bourgeois’ resisters
had occupied various positions within the regime and had come
to resist only rather late in the day. By contrast, some in West
Germany tried to denigrate the Communist resisters by arguing
that, since they were seeking to establish a totalitarian dictatorship
in Germany, there was little to distinguish them from the Nazis,
and hence their resistance was politically and morally flawed.
Moreover, in response to foreign accusations of the collective guilt
of the Germans, the Federal Republic claimed that it was the true
heir of that ‘other Germany’ which in the dark days of the Third
Reich had sustained Germany’s true humane values. However, for
most Germans of that generation, who had succumbed in various
ways and in varying degrees to the temptations of Nazism, the
heritage of the resistance remained deeply problematic. It gave
rise to a general unease and even outright hostility among some
who regarded the resisters as traitors for plotting against their
nation’s rulers in time of war. It is only comparatively recently,
aided by the ending of the Cold War and above all by the change
of generations, that Germans have been able to achieve a balanced
perspective on the resistance through a deeper understanding of
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its flaws, certainly, but above all of the daunting personal challenges
faced by those who took part in it. In this process of a nation’s
coming to terms with the resistance German historians have played
a key role and none more so than Professor Hans Mommsen.
Behind this book is almost 40 years’ research into the history of
the German resistance. Professor Mommsen’s major contribution
has been his thorough and sensitive elucidation of the ideas and
plans for a post-Nazi Germany, elaborated by the various
individuals and groups within the resistance. Mommsen was
criticised in some quarters for demonstrating that these ideas and
plans had little in common with the notions of Western liberal
democracy that came to be accepted, first in the Bonn republic
and then, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the whole of
reunited Germany. Yet he was right to point out the need to
understand the ideas and actions of the resisters within the
historical context in which they were operating. It was a situation
in which liberal democracy, whose roots in Germany were shallow
at best, appeared to have been comprehensively discredited, not
just in Germany – through the failure of the Weimar Republic –
but in much of the rest of Europe as well.
In this situation the resisters sought alternatives to Nazism
within existing German political and cultural traditions. Their
diagnosis of the problem focussed on the alleged ‘massification’
(Vermassung), atomisation and alienation produced by an indus-
trialised and urbanised society operating under unbridled capital-
ism and fragmented by a political system (parliamentary democ-
racy) driven by divisive and selfishly motivated political parties.
They saw this as a systemic crisis that required a fundamental
transformation of German politics, society and culture. They
sought a ‘third (German) way’ between western liberal democracy
and eastern ‘Bolshevism’. Some of them had initially welcomed
the Nazi takeover in 1933 with its rhetoric of a ‘national revival’
and its promise to reunite Germany in a ‘national community’, as
offering precisely the kind of fundamental social and cultural trans-
formation required to produce a German revival. And the follow-
ing years saw them forced to undergo a painful learning process
through which they came to view Nazism no longer as the solu-