Who Was The German Resistance?
Past Is Past
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a history post. I’m kind of mentally/psychically offloading some of the research I did recently for my World War II-themed novel.
Best,
Sam
WHO WAS THE GERMAN RESISTANCE?
I remember being a World War II-obsessed kid, getting to the July 20th plot against Hitler and sort of skipping over it. Probably I was just annoyed about the break in all the battles. But I think, also, that it confused my moral sensibilities. We hated Nazis, right? But now we were supposed to understand that some Germans — and senior figures in the armed forces no less — were basically alright? In addition to that, there was the sense of opportunism — July, 1944 was very late in the war. If the resistance really wanted to be heroes and kill Hitler, it seemed as if they should have done it much sooner.
So it was a surprise to me to revisit this period in a more serious way, to discover that there really was an active resistance to Hitler from as early as about 1938, that it ran across different branches of the armed forces, that they were under few illusions of what Hitler represented, and that they came achingly close to killing him several times.
This seems also to have been a surprise to the Allies after the war. They tended to take with a grain of salt the claims of German officers — many of them their prisoners — that, actually, they had resisted but in deep secret. And that very understandable skepticism continues throughout historical accounts of the war.
But they were organized, and they kept their organization secret for an astonishingly long time, and they did try. Henning von Tresckow, probably the most impressive figure in the resistance, attempted two consecutive attempts on Hitler’s life in early 1943. Tresckow, then a Major General with Army Group Center, placed a bomb disguised as a cognac bottle on Hitler’s plane as Hitler returned from a visit to the Army Group’s headquarters in Smolensk. Tresckow, one of the most successful generals of the war, had thoroughly tested his device. His aide Schlabrendorff, who was given the unfortunate task of retrieving the unexploded bomb, could conclude only that the detonator was “one of the few duds to slip through all the manufacturing inspections.” Undeterred, von Tresckow then dispatched his staff officer Gersdorff to try to blow up Hitler during his tour of captured Soviet equipment, but Hitler, who was scheduled for half an hour in the exhibit, passed through it in minutes, faster than the shortest-possible setting for Gersdorff’s detonator. (I have some skepticism of Gersdorff’s account of this story — whether he actually wore the bomb — but it’s very clear that Tresckow sent him.)
After that, Hitler made no more public appearances and spent all his time in his Wolf’s Lair and Bunker, making assassination attempts prohibitively difficult — although Stauffenberg succeeded in detonating a bomb in Hitler’s presence in July, 1944 and killed several of his aides. But then, as with the previous attempts, some “guardian devil,” in Hans Bernd Gisevius’ phrase, seemed to preserve Hitler’s life.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris is, for me, the most striking of the figures in opposition to Hitler. He was the feared head of the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency, and given credit for many of the more daring German escapades in the ‘30s and in the early period of the war. But Canaris turned decisively against Hitler sometime during his territorial annexations and conducted his resistance in secret at almost unimaginable risk. “He was damned brave and damned unlucky,” said his British counterpart, Mi6 head Stewart Menzies, after the war.
It is wildly unclear which activities Canaris was engaged in, but his biographers attribute at least some of the following to him.
He tipped off the British that Hitler’s bid for the Sudetenland was basically a bluff and that they could halt him by standing firm — a position that was voided with Neville Chamberlain’s decision to meet with Hitler at Munich. “What, he visit that man?” Canaris exclaimed in deep disgust.
He planted information in early 1939 that Germany was preparing to invade the Netherlands in a (successful) attempt to shift British policy towards the bellicose.
He protested strenuously and at personal risk against Nazi atrocities in Poland.
He tipped off Franco to oppose any invasion of Gibraltar in 1940 or any attempt to enter the war on the Axis side — an intransigence that may well have saved the British Empire and that led Hitler, after his meeting with Franco, to exclaim that he would rather have his teeth pulled than go through that again.
He may well have orchestrated the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (at least this is what his biographer Michael Mueller believes) — with the British killing Heydrich in order to help keep Canaris and the Abwehr in place.
He smuggled a large number of Jews out of Axis Europe under the threadbare excuse that he was using them as spies.
He funneled some unknown amount of intelligence to the Allies — enough so that he was registered as an agent with the OSS and was (I’m convinced) behind the Lucy spy ring, which was the critical conduit of German military information to the USSR.
He may well have been the source of the detonators that were used in the 1943 assassination attempts.
Canaris was an inscrutable and fascinating figure. “Very rarely, and only through a small chink, one saw his true character, clear as a bell, the ethical and tragical depths of his personality,” wrote the diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker. He had been a U-boat captain during World War I, was highly involved in the post-war Freikorps, may well have had a part in the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, played a significant part in Germany’s secret rearmament program in the 1920s (procuring weaponry from such unlikely sources as Spain, Japan, and the USSR), and from 1935 ran the Abwehr with a cunning and professionalism that impressed and intimidated his Nazi counterparts.
Although he had encouraged the capture of the Rhineland and had been a chief plotter in Germany’s support of Franco in Spain, he had by the late 1930s become convinced that Nazism was an evil — and that the best use of himself was to oppose it from the inside even if that meant his own destruction. “If I go, Heydrich takes over and then we are all lost. I must sacrifice himself,” he told his Abwehr predecessor.
But the tragedy of Canaris is never so evident as in his attempts to open up channels of communication with the Allies. This, really, is one of the deepest secrets of the war — and it seems impossible to get a full understanding of how extensive these talks were. There was evidently back-channel communication with the British. Allen Dulles, who would later head the CIA, communicated extensively with Canaris’ deputy Gisevius in Zurich. Meanwhile, Canaris had also opened up a channel of communication with the Soviets via Stockholm. The idea in all of these talks was that the resistance would dispose of Hitler and the Allies would forego their policy of ‘unconditional surrender,’ allowing Germany to retain its armed forces and negotiating with a military government that would develop out of the resistance.
There were, clearly, problems with this plan on the side of the German resistance — they didn’t manage to kill Hitler; and they probably underestimated the loyalty of the armed forces to Nazism — but there were challenges also in dealing with the Allies. In 1958, George Earle, who had been a Republican governor of Pennsylvania and served during the war as a special emissary to the Balkans, published a poignant account describing how, in Istanbul in 1943, he received an unexpected visitor, who first locked all the doors and windows of the room before addressing him. “My agents ascertained the location of your quarters. They assume I am checking on you. However, I have something quite different in mind,” Canaris said.
He conveyed the resistance’s offer of a negotiated settlement. Earle duly wrote to Washington and eventually received the reply, “All such applications for peace should be referred to the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower” — which was, as Earle drily noted, “in diplomatic language, the final runaround.” Not long afterwards, Earle received a phone call. “I am the gentleman who called you unannounced two months ago. Has there been any progress in the matter we discussed?” the caller said. “No,” said Earle, “no progress.” “I am very sorry to hear that,” said the caller and hung up.
To Earle, a confirmed Republican, the episode with Canaris was a proof of Roosevelt’s perfidy. “FDR’s Tragic Mistake” the article was called. But, of course, circumstances were somewhat more complicated. In the end, Canaris and the resistance never demonstrated their ability to actually assassinate Hitler or to seize control of Germany — and it must have felt premature to Roosevelt or to whomever in Washington saw Earle’s missives to drop the doctrine of unconditional surrender and to work out peace deals with unproven operatives within the German military and intelligence structure.
Still, the figures of the resistance give off a fascinating light. Canaris kept a diary through the war — meant to be a record of the entirety of the Nazi crimes. That diary, which was unearthed in the aftermath of the July 20 plot and resulted in a death sentence for Canaris, is one of the great missing documents of the Nazi period. Canaris, like most of the other figures of the resistance, died brave and horrible deaths. Canaris was stripped naked and hung from a butcher’s hook at Flossenbürg concentration camp (a grisly, medieval execution that the Nazis reserved for traitors). Tresckow committed suicide. Stauffenberg, facing a firing squad, called out with his last breath, “Long live sacred Germany.” Those who survived — like Canaris’ associates Lahousen and Gisevius — went on to be key witnesses detailing Nazi crimes at Nuremberg.
Had they succeeded — had Hitler’s plane exploded somewhere in the sky between Smolensk and Minsk in March, 1943; had Gersdorff managed to kill Hitler and the entirety of the Nazi command in a single stroke — history would look very different. A coup followed by a quick Allied occupation of Europe was conceivable. The worst of the Holocaust could have been avoided. Many millions of lives would have been saved. There would have been no need for the fire bombing of Germany and, likely, no need for the further development of the atomic bomb. According to Earle, the United States bears some of the responsibility for that — the doctrine of unconditional surrender, as articulated by Roosevelt early in 1943, left the German resistance with very little room for maneuver; and the US was less than receptive to the peace feelers they did receive. But, more than that, it seems to be a matter of fate — Hitler’s ‘guardian devil’ keeping him alive on the flight to Minsk, hustling him through the exhibit of captured Soviet equipment, compelling his aide Brandt to move the case containing Stauffenberg’s bomb behind a table leg. To Canaris, with his very deep religious sensibility, the ultimate failure of the resistance was no great surprise. “It is not possible to deceive history with a small trick,” he told a close confederate even while working assiduously to achieve exactly such a trick. “After all these crimes there must be expiation.”
Fascinating! As someone said (it was you!), we're still living in the post WW2 world.
I never knew the story of Canaris. Thanks Sam.
If these are your notes, I can’t wait for the novel