History is a fickle mistress and follows curious rules. She has a predilection for questions whose answers always leave something unexplained. She can be seduced by high drama, by splendour and mischief, by the rise and fall of powers and people. When Voltaire was asked why he had chosen to write about Charles XII, he replied that the king had been great, mysterious and mad; that was the stuff of history. On the other hand, history feels contempt for the unfortunate losers, for the causa victa of which Cato was so fond, rather than the causa victrix. History does not care about them; although the story of the defeated can often tell us more about a time than the story of those who seem to be the victors.
This may explain why the German resistance has never been accorded an appropriate place in history. It was neither great, nor mysterious, nor mad. It consisted of a handful of people in a hopeless situation who undertook what self-respect, morality and their country demanded. Even now, Germany grants them little more than grudging respect. Elsewhere, few people know that the German resistance existed and those who do know often question its motives.
But the fact remains that on 20th July 1944, a bomb planted by a dashing, highly decora-ted young colonel, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, exploded in Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. Hitler survived and we are left with the kind of spectacular event to which history usually succumbs. There were indeed a number of books about the assassination attempt; but then it disappeared, drowned by the momentum of the events which followed.
Fifteen or more attempts to kill Hitler are known to have been made between 1938 and 1945. At least five should have been successful. But they all failed because of unforeseeable circumstances, technical failures, sudden changes in timing, Hitler's feral instinct for sensing danger.
The history of the German resistance is a depressing subject, not only because it seems as if Hitler was in league with "fate," but also because, for all the respect the conspirators command, they were more scrupulous and diffident than they should have been in revolt against a regime of terror. This has shrouded the attempted coup, its objectives and, ultimately, the participants themselves, in an undeservedly diffuse light. The tiny glimmer which fell on them was obscured by the shadow which Hitler cast over his time-and was finally blotted out completely.
The reasons why the resistance fell into oblivion in Germany are not difficult to understand, at least in the early postwar years. Too many Germans had voted for Hitler (although he never obtained a majority in any free election); too many had had reason to be grateful to him, at least in the beginning; too many had cheered first his achievements at home and then his military successes; too many had followed him to catastrophe without a murmur of protest. Now that the fever of those years has passed, nobody should be allowed to claim the privilege of having seen things more clearly or judged events with greater moral sensitivity. Although German public opinion rejected the principle of collective guilt, it insisted that Germany had been collectively led astray. Nobody should claim particular integrity, least of all the members of a doomed class of aristocratic officers whose names seemed so prominently connected with the German resistance.
We now know that the activities against the regime were not limited to the members of an old military elite. Such men stepped into the limelight only in the final dramatic act, as if in a farewell scene. Opponents of the regime came from various backgrounds: civil servants, clergymen, trade unionists, lawyers and professors. The officers were only the armed wing of the plot: they were to retreat to second place after overthrowing Hitler; and hand over political leadership of the country to civilians.
The reasons why the British image of the German resistance was distorted are different, although there are similarities. In Britain, too, the memory is clouded by misunderstanding, suspicion and broken friendships. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett is a case in point. Even after the outbreak of war he had maintained close relations with Adam von Trott, one of the leading figures in the German resistance. But Wheeler-Bennett later forgot the evenings spent together, the horse rides and the discussions which led to a memorandum to the British government; he even pretended not to have known Trott. When questioned by those who knew the truth he had to correct himself, but in the second volume of his autobiography, published in 1975, he chose not to mention his links with Trott.
The German resistance pinned all its hopes on Britain. Its members felt that Britain was literally closer than the US, not to mention the Soviet Union. They also thought that they had more in common with Britain and that it would therefore show more understanding. These hopes became apparent in that strange pilgrims' procession of 1938 and 1939, when a dozen or so emissaries of the opposition travelled to London, each "with a noose around his neck," as one of them said in the opening sentence of a meeting with Sir Robert Vansittart. They asked that the British government take a decisive stance against Hitler: a few strong words or merely an unyielding gesture to make clear to the German dictator the gravity of the situation he was provoking.
But the emissaries to Britain met with astonishment, unease and open rejection. The atmosphere at one meeting was described as "icy." It was obvious that German entreaties conflicted with the policy of appeasement. When the British military attach? in Berlin reported that the German general staff officer Ulrich-Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld believed that Hitler regarded the Munich agreement as nothing more than "a scrap of paper," a senior official in the Foreign Office wondered whether this "incredible, dishonourable disloyalty" did not disguise a "Machiavellian lie." When Schwerin himself came to London shortly afterwards and reiterated the request for some kind of signal, his visit was regarded as "bloody cheek." A mountain of distrust stood in the way. It is one of the most deadly ironies of history that in the late 1930s, Hitler's word had more credibility in London than that of his opponents. All the endeavours of the resistance broke on this wall of suspicion. Indeed, the gap grew wider still. The increasingly desperate efforts continued into the summer of 1944. They were only abandoned after the mass arrests following 20th July 1944.
Adam von Trott exemplifies the hopelessness of the many attempts to form a united front against Hitler. Yet he was well-qualified to succeed. Quite apart from inheriting Anglo-Saxon sympathies from a distinguished American forebear, he had spent perhaps the best years of his life as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. During that period he had gained an insight into the British way of life and the political forces of the country. Trott was self-assured and fearless; he could be dangerously impulsive. Although he loved to take gambles, he had strong convictions. Combined with his charm, these qualities endowed him with an unusual gift for making friends. In Oxford he soon numbered Stafford Cripps, Richard Crossman, David Astor, Isaiah Berlin, Lord Lindsay and Maurice Bowra among them. They all opened doors to new connections.
Trott was at Oxford when Hitler came to power in January 1933. He had never left his friends in any doubt about his disgust for the Nazi party. A letter from a friend reveals that on the evening of 30th January he had already spoken with foresight of the difficulties which this "terrible misfortune" would present for him on a personal and a professional level. But the process of alienation started instantly. It found expression in the equation of "Germans" and "Nazis," which an indignant Trott fought to the last.
Like many Germans, Trott thought that Hitler was a passing phase. To deny every legitimate German interest simply because it was advocated by Hitler was, he argued, just another form of surrender to this man. So Trott continued confidently to uphold his position, putting up with the accusation that he was falling in with the German dictator's revanchist line and swallowing the ill feeling that this created among his British friends. They were baffled that he seemed to ignore the chasm which Hitler had opened up between Germany and the other nations.
Trott failed to realise that his views were not suited to those times. One of his German friends has spoken of Trott's "strong romantic vein"; we may detect it in his sweeping views, undeterred by the circumstances. Trott maintained close links with the opposition forces in Germany. Conversations among these kindred spirits reinforced his view that Hitler was only an interlude and that his apparent dominance only concealed the real problem: the need to reach a peace agreement which would finally settle the disputes raised by the calamitous Treaty of Versailles.
The origin of the so-called Trott controversy centred on whether it was possible to be an unrelenting opponent of Hitler and an advocate of German interests at the same time. A letter Trott wrote to his Oxford friend Diana Hubback in March 1933, only a few weeks after Hitler had come to power, is another example of his foresight: "What personally I fear most in the world is that the development of things here [in Germany], painful enough in itself, will estrange my few friends in your country to an extent harmful to relations which are still very dear to me."
For a time personal relationships were soured by nothing more than estrangement; but after 1939 they were increasingly undermined by the growing political tensions. Trott had always believed that, if friendship meant anything, friends should be able to understand the apparent dilemma in which he found himself as both a patriot and an opponent of Hitler. He now discovered how wrong he had been. Only a few friendships, such as those with Stafford and Isobel Cripps and David Astor, withstood the turbulences of the times.
In early June 1939, Trott spent a week in England. The mere fact that he had come with permission from Walter Hewel, Hitler's link with the German foreign office, was regarded with deep disapproval. At Cliveden, the country house of the Astors, he was given the opportunity to talk to Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, and Lord Lothian, soon to be British ambassador to the US. The conversation lasted four hours. Trott tried to prevail on the British to adopt a firmer line against the Reich. This was the only way to win time and possibly prevent the war which Hitler was pursuing. But Trott had to conceal that this delay was also essential for the opposition in Germany. While many officers agreed that Hitler was a disaster, they felt bound by the oath of allegiance and the principle whereby terms such as "mutiny and revolution" do not appear "in the dictionary of a German officer." Moreover, the many groups who watched Hitler's policies with horror had different objectives and varying degrees of resolve. It would take time to coordinate these strands.
Trott was encouraged by his conversation with Halifax. He may even have hoped to create a collaboration between London and the German opponents to Hitler. But that proved to be a delusion. Halifax probably never considered putting the carefully calculated appeasement policy at risk for such reverie. He had listened attentively, however, leading the inexperienced Trott to take what he said literally and to believe that he could detect an interest, when the foreign secretary was merely following the polite conventions of diplomacy. Halifax later could have used the same words to Trott as he used to Theo Kordt, in whom he had raised the same false expectations a year earlier: "Sorry! We were not in a position to be as open with you as you were with us."
The foreign secretary was, however, sufficiently impressed by the conversation at Cliveden to arrange for Trott to have a private meeting with the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain. (It was an unusual gesture to receive this young man of less than 30 at No. 10.) But the meeting ended in disappointment. Chamberlain had remained cool, distant and uncomprehending. "He [Trott] returned discouraged," David Astor noted, "saying that Mr Chamberlain was nice but 'like a man already half-dead.' He found it hard for Mr Chamberlain to grasp his unorthodox hints that he, the British prime minister, should seek to encourage potentially disaffected Germans to oppose their regime."
Other meetings revealed the extent of the suspicion in which Trott was held. When Trott spoke of winning time he was suspected of trying to obtain further concessions to Hitler. But Trott could only let very few people into his secret. One of them may have been Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham. Trott had known him since his Oxford days and greatly admired him. He took him into his confidence, at least partially. On one visit to Bowra, Trott told him about his unofficial links with the German foreign office and some of Hitler's opponents in the military, on whom he placed high hopes. Unable to share Trott's enthusiasm, Bowra came straight to the point and asked dryly what these groups thought of Hitler's territorial gains and whether, in the event of a successful coup, they would be prepared to return all the lands which had been occupied or annexed.
It is difficult to piece together what happened next. The evidence suggests that Trott gave an unfortunate reply. He seems to have tied himself up in intellectual knots and become agitated. This was partly because he did not actually represent any of the groups he had mentioned; he was on a sounding-out mission of his own. But he may not have given sufficient consideration to the outrage which prevailed after Hitler's occupation of Prague. At any rate, from all that Trott told him, Bowra seems only to have deduced that, while the German opposition wanted to oust Hitler, it was intent on keeping what he had snatched. We do not know whether it occurred to Trott to make the obvious objection that, given the chaotic or possibly even civil war-like circumstances following a coup, the new government would ensure its own downfall if it started off by renouncing everything with a sweeping gesture. In this light, surely only the restitution of Czechoslovakia could be indisputable.
Bowra saw his worst fears confirmed. His irritation seemed to make him forget all that he had ever known about Trott's passionate opposition to the Nazi regime. But in order to picture the scene accurately we must also grasp Trott's state of mind: the pressure under which he was operating, the constant awareness of danger and the need to obfuscate and change his mask from one conversation to the next. Before the visit had really begun it was already over. Bowra showed Trott the door. The bond was broken; as if to prove it, Bowra wrote to an influential friend in Washington to warn him about Trott, knowing that Trott was about to travel to the US to canvass for the cause. The letter not only destroyed any hope of serious talks, but also resulted in Trott's every step being watched by the FBI during his stay. Bowra remained irreconcilable for a long time. Even after the war he told an Oxford friend that "Trott was one of the few Nazis to have been hung." It was not until he came to write his memoirs 20 years later that he took back his bitter accusations.
From his clash with Bowra, if not before, Trott was surrounded by whisperings alleging him to be a "spy" or a "Nazi agent." He himself seemed to encourage these reproaches. On 22nd September 1939 he set off for America by ship. This time he had obtained official permission from the German foreign office. Many months before the Institute of Pacific Relations had invited him to a conference in Virginia Beach, and in mid-September it had again urged him to come. But the fact that the trip took place three weeks after war had broken out hardened the mistrust in which Trott was held. He was unable to reveal to anyone his real purpose: to sound out the possibilities for ending the war, which the dissident "circle of friends" in the German foreign office saw as a precondition for removing Hitler.
Moreover, the trip had a personal meaning of a different kind for Trott; it forced him to come to a decision about his future. The question was: should he return to Germany or not? After all, he still did not have a job. He had only obtained a satisfactory mark in his law finals because his open criticism of Hitler's regime was known to the examining board. Nevertheless his connections gave him reason to hope for a position in the foreign service, his preferred choice.
Emigration was the other option. Trott still had many friends in England. Furthermore, he had renewed old connections and made new ones during his travels in the US. His personality had left an impression everywhere. His many abilities, and his grasp of world affairs were not even disputed by the friends he had lost. Whether in England or the US, he could expect to find a suitable position.
The question he had to resolve was whether to return to "the big prison," as Julius Leber called the Germany of those years, or whether to observe the course of German events from outside. He was aware of the consequences in either case. Emigration meant security, freedom of movement, exerting useful influence, but it also meant being depressingly remote. Going back to Germany would involve high risk, combined with a sense of fulfilling a special responsibility towards his country. Bearing in mind Trott's "romantic vein," that was precisely where temptation lay. He knew that one could either devote oneself to adventure and in so doing forfeit any sense of purpose; or one could sacrifice oneself to duty and pay for it by bowing to a life of strict monotony. Going back to Germany combined both the one and the other: adventure and a sense of purpose.
Trott had no trouble coming to a decision. He may not even have realised that he was doing so. Years before, he had written to his friend, Sheila Grant-Duff, that the ?migr? life was "humiliating," adding that she was wrong in assuming that, should he return to Germany, fear would make him "silent and compliant." He thought her prediction, that "prison" was the "right place" for him, far more accurate.
Trott now told several friends that there were enough ?migr?s. He had met a number of them in the US: Heinrich Br?ning, the chancellor of the late Weimar years; Paul Scheffer, the journalist; and Kurt Riezler, the last secretary of the cabinet of the Kaiserreich. The sense of loss, impotence and eerie silence which surrounded them, the suspicion and accusations of treachery which never left them, were not his thing. When friends implored him not to risk his life light-heartedly, Trott replied that it was impossible to avoid doing so. If Germany was to return into the community of nations it would need people who had held out in their own country, engaged in toppling the regime and using their expertise to prepare for the future order. Speaking to a select circle in the US, he outlined with his usual recklessness a "revolution" of people from all classes and ranks, from the military to the workers. Many individuals, he now argued, would be required to set that revolution in motion.
When he joined the German foreign office in 1940, Trott found himself walking a tightrope. His friend Josias von Rantzau helped him to get his position as research assistant, more or less bypassing Ribbentrop. Having joined the party at about the same time, Trott went so far as to wear the Nazi badge in the office. There were many who took these steps amiss and claimed that he had been unmasked at last. They failed to see that this masquerade belonged to the many subterfuges to which opponents of a totalitarian state had to resort. In Germany, too, Trott was under constant suspicion. Leading a double life was the price. The conspirators felt that worries about their personal integrity merely betrayed false anxieties and did not live up to the moral requirements of these dark times.
Naturally, all who conformed in this way laid themselves open to suspicion; they had to face up to the fact that they could not oppose the regime without being part of it. The "other Germany" had to take its place in Hitler's Germany. By then the whole world could have known how close-knit the surveillance network was under that dictatorship. Trott counted on the understanding of those at least who were familiar with his views and knew how unyielding he was. But this was just another illusion.
From now on, old misgivings surfaced whenever Trott's name appeared on one of the messages which sometimes reached London during the war. The double life to which he had condemned himself led him to make a number of mistakes. Even Richard Crossman, who remained friendly towards him, wrote in 1942 about a memorandum from Trott that however "ingenuous," the document was "unaware of its intellectual and political dishonesty." On reading this, Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, commented that Trott was not untypical of a number of Hitler's opponents who "have never quite been able to bring themselves to pay the price of their convictions and resign from the service of the Nazi regime." But Stafford Cripps put him right. He pointed out that Trott had "paid the far higher price in risk in refusing to join the Nazi regime, but going back to Germany to fight for the things which he believed to be right."
But these were the words of a friend who understood the nerve-wracking tension which opponents of the regime within Germany had to endure. Almost all the official statements are devoid of any such understanding. Here is another note from Eden. He did not intend to respond to "these people," the foreign secretary wrote, "until they come out into the open and give some visible sign of their intention to assist in the overthrow of the Nazi regime." Eden's comment amounts to an exhortation to suicide as a precondition for a rapprochement. Every foray since 1938 had been stopped by the same rigid stance. London demanded visible action before considering help. The opposition needed a gesture of support in order to back up their plans. It was a vicious circle.
Trott's fellow conspirators never doubted his commitment. He was one of the leaders of Count Helmut von Moltke's "Kreisauer Kreis" which held him in the highest esteem. Using his position in the foreign office as a cover, he travelled constantly to Sweden, Switzerland, Italy in his effort to forge links between the resistance and the front against Hitler. His many attempts to break through Churchill's wall of "absolute silence" ended in failure, but he remained undeterred. His concern was to salvage something of the political and moral substance of his country from impending disaster. The bleaker the outlook, the more desperately he threw himself into this task.
Roosevelt's call for "unconditional surrender" in early 1943 hit him and the whole opposition movement hard. Nevertheless he was not ready to give up. Instead, he summoned up what strength he had left. Not until the very end did he concede that he had failed completely. In the summer of 1944, on his last visit to Switzerland, he confided to his friend Willem A Visser't Hooft, the Dutch secretary general of the World Council of Churches, that he was "bitterly disappointed, shattered even"; any further efforts now seemed futile. A series of passport photographs from that period show a man prematurely aged, his face sallow, his features drained of life. A member of the British mission in Bern who met him then described him as being a "shadow of himself." She called him a "broken man." Trott told her that he was expecting to be arrested on his return to Germany. He rejected the idea of fleeing then, as he was to do later, not least because of his wife and children.
At the beginning of July 1944, shortly after Trott's final visit to Sweden, the BBC reported that a former "German Rhodes Scholar" had put out "peace feelers" in Stockholm. Solicitous friends saw to it that the lethal report was not included in the official German press file. But it was not long before British war propaganda committed a fatal indiscretion of a similar kind. In the immediate aftermath of 20th July, when the suspects were keeping their heads down and praying that their friends would remain steadfast during the Gestapo interrogations, the BBC "repeatedly broadcast the names of people who, it claimed, had also taken part in the coup." A triumphant Roland Freisler, the president of the People's Court, was even able to show the accused a British leaflet, pouring scorn on the conspirators in the very tone adopted by Goebbels' propaganda.
It may not be surprising that the British press was united in expressing satisfaction over the failure of the attempt "to replace the swastika with the jackboot," as the Daily Telegraph wrote on 22nd July. John Wheeler-Bennett's behaviour, however, seems odd. He argued that the failed assassination attempt and the elimination of the resistance served British interests: "The Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as 'good' Germans after the war. It is to our advantage that the purge should continue." It is difficult to disagree with Patricia Meehan's remark that "after the failure of the 20th July became known, the press in the west lined up solidly behind Hitler in condemning the conspirators." In other words: not only should the Nazis go to hell, but "the other Germany" should fare no better.
The government did not take a very different line, as we know from Churchill's famous remark. On 2nd August he reported to the House of Commons that "the highest personalities in the German Reich are murdering one another." Today we are often perplexed by such expressions of hatred towards those who fought for a common aim at so great a personal risk. But we cannot ignore the resentment which had built up over the years; neither must the effects of psychological warfare be forgotten. The political strategy of the Allies also played its part. Their long-term objective was to reach a final settlement in central Europe. Once they had decided that they would act in unison with the Soviet Union, any German opposition, whatever its motives or aims, was an irritant. This may explain why, in his war memoirs, Churchill failed to acknowledge the conspirators of 20th July, despite his fondness for chivalrous gestures.
Thus matters rested for some time. Many British accounts either failed to mention the resistance, played down its significance, or cast suspicion on its motives. There has been a gradual change. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer caused the first break in the silence. Like Trott, he had maintained close links with England. The respect the church accorded him as a result of his martyrdom benefited some of his co-conspirators. Since then, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, the ?migr? historian Hans Rothfels in his book The German Opposition to Hitler: An Assessment, Terence Prittie, Michael Balfour, Klemens von Klemperer and others have tried to counter the prejudice that there was no German resistance to speak of, and that what we know as such was merely a cleverly disguised form of the eternal German thirst for conquest.
Some confrontations are unavoidable, particularly where strong emotions are involved. A great deal of idealistic exuberance was at play on the German side, as well as self-deception and an element of political na?vety. Werner von Trott was not entirely wrong in describing his younger brother Adam as a "latter day Don Quixote." He had tried in vain to make clear to the world that the Germans themselves belonged to the "suppressed peoples." Trott and his friends saw more clearly than many of their foreign counterparts that Hitler was not only aiming for a new European order; he had declared war on the whole world, on its traditions of freedom, justice and human values. If these were to be preserved, narrow national interests and power politics of the old school were no longer permissible. If Hitler was everyone's enemy, then everyone had to join forces against him.
Trott and his friends had not held this view from the outset; it crystallised during their endless debates. As so often, intellectual rigour went hand in hand with practical weakness. Many misjudgements have distorted the memory of these men, but to doubt their strength of character and courage is the gravest misjudgement. Sheila Grant Duff called her book about her friendship with Adam von Trott The Parting of the Ways, implying that she and the world for which she stood chose the path of morality and conscience, while Trott strayed from it by returning to Germany. But the real question is: in which direction did morality and conscience point a German of that time? When Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited the US in 1939 he found himself in similar circumstances. People from all sides urged him to turn his back on Germany. Soon after his arrival he noted in his diary: "I am quite clear in mind that I must return."
Both men knew what awaited them on their return to Germany. They would be lonely outsiders. The constant threat of death condemned them to silence and they would never have an opportunity to defend themselves against their accusers. Few witnesses have spoken up for the resistance and few sentences have survived to describe the debates of the "Kreisauer Kreis," the urgent pleas of Stauffenberg and Tresckow, the thoughts of Haeften, Moltke, York and Leber. Trott's final memorandum-he said he had put his heart into it-has also been lost. Even the minutes of the hearings in the People's Court, where the conspirators were able to proclaim the principles which had governed their actions for the last time, have only survived as fragments; some were manipulated by the censor.
This silence from the original sources has prolonged the isolation which surrounded the resistance from its beginnings. In fact, it has contributed to what might be called its second defeat. Commemorating the name of Adam von Trott in a meeting room at Balliol College is thus an act of justice.
