As the war went on and defeat became more certain, political differences should have mattered less and political action become more urgent, but Gerhard Ritter seems right here too: “Without the determination of [Count Klaus von] Stauffberg, the resistance movement would have bogged down in more or less help-less inactivity.” What united these men was that they saw in Hitler a “swindler,” a “dilettante,” who “sacrificed whole armies against the counsel of his experts,” a “madman” and a “demon,” “the incarnation of all evil,” which in the German context meant something both more and less than when they called him a “criminal and a fool,” which they occasionally did. But to hold such opinions about Hitler at this late date “in no way precluded membership in the S.S. or the Party, or the holding of a government post” [Fritz Hesse], hence it did not exclude from the circle of the conspirators quite a number of men who themselves were deeply implicated in the crimes of the regime—as for instance Count Helldorf, then Police Commissioner of Berlin, who would have become Chief of the German Police if the coup d'état had been successful (according to one of Goerdeler's lists of prospective ministers); or Arthur Nebe of the R.S.H.A., former commander of one of the mobile killing units in the East! In the summer of 1943, when the Himmler-directed extermination program had reached its climax, Goerdeler was considering Himmler and Goebbels as potential allies, “since these two men have realized that they are lost with Hitler.” (Himmler indeed became a “potential ally”-though Goebbels did not—and was fully informed of their plans; he acted against the conspirators only after their failure.) I am quoting from the draft of a letter by Goerdeler to Field Marshal von Kluge; but these strange alliances cannot be explained away by “tactical considerations” necessary vis-á-vis the Army commanders, for it was, on the contrary, Kluge and Rommel who had given “special orders that those two monsters [Himmler and Göring] should be liquidated” [Ritter]—quite apart from the fact that Goerdeler's biographer, Ritter, insists that the above-quoted letter “represents the most passionate expression of his hatred against the Hitler regime.”
No doubt these men who opposed Hitler, however belatedly, paid with their lives and suffered a most terrible death; the courage of many of them was admirable, but it was not inspired by moral indignation or by what they knew other people had been made to suffer; they were motivated almost exclusively by their conviction of the coming defeat and ruin of Germany. This is not to deny that some of them, such as Count York von Wartenburg, may have been roused to political opposition initially by “the revolting agitation against the Jews in November, 1938” [Ritter]. But that was the month when the synagogues went up in flames and the whole population seemed in the grip of some fear: houses of God had been set on fire, and believers as well as the superstitious feared the vengeance of God. To be sure, the higher officer corps was disturbed when Hitler's so-called “commissar order” was issued in May, 1941, and they learned that in the coming campaign against Russia all Soviet functionaries and naturally all Jews were simply to be massacred. In these circles, there was of course some concern about the fact that, as Goerdeler said, “in the occupied areas and against the Jews techniques of liquidating human beings and of religious persecution are practiced… which will always rest as a heavy burden on our history.” But it seems never to have occurred to them that this signified something more, and more dreadful, than that “it will make our position [negotiating a peace treaty with the Allies] enormously difficult,” that it was a “blot on Germany's good name” and was undermining the morale of the Army. “What on earth have they made of the proud army of the Wars of Liberation [against Napoleon in 1814] and of Wilhelm I [in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870],” Goerdeler cried when he heard the report of an S.S. man who “nonchalantly related that it ‘wasn't exactly pretty to spray with machine-gun fire ditches crammed with thousands of Jews and then to throw earth on the bodies that were still twitching.’” Nor did it occur to them that these atrocities might be somehow connected with the Allies' demand for unconditional surrender, which they felt free to criticize as both “nationalistic” and “unreasonable,” inspired by blind hatred. In 1943, when the eventual defeat of Germany was almost a certainty, and indeed even later, they still believed that they had a right to negotiate with their enemies “as equals” for a “just peace,” although they knew only too well what an unjust and totally unprovoked war Hitler had started. Even more startling are their criteria for a “just peace.” Goerdeler stated them again and again in numerous memoranda: “the re-establishment of the national borders of 1914 [which meant the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine], with the addition of Austria and the Sudetenland”; furthermore, a “leading position for Germany on the Continent” and perhaps the regaining of South Tyrol!
We also know from statements they prepared how they intended to present their case to the people. There is for instance a draft proclamation to the Army by General Ludwig Beck, who was to become chief of state, in which he talks at length about the “obstinacy,” the “incompetence and lack of moderation” of the Hitler regime, its “arrogance and vanity.” But the crucial point, “the most unscrupulous act” of the regime, was that the Nazis wanted to hold “the leaders of the armed forces responsible” for the calamities of the coming defeat; to which Beck added that crimes had been committed “which are a blot on the honor of the German nation and a defilement of the good reputation it had gained in the eyes of the world.” And what would be the next step after Hitler had been liquidated? The German Army would go on fighting “until an honorable conclusion of the war has been assured”—which meant the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, Austria, and the Sudetenland. There is indeed every reason to agree with the bitter judgment on these men by the German novelist Friedrich P. Reck-Malleczewen, who was killed in a concentration camp on the eve of the collapse and did not participate in the anti-Hitler conspiracy. In his almost totally unknown “Diary of a Man in Despair,” [Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten, 1947], Reck-Mallec-zewen wrote, after he had heard of the failure of the attempt on Hitler's life, which of course he regretted: “A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of Germany and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who… without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal who is guilty of the murder of hundreds of thousands, burdened with the lamentations and the curse of the whole world; now you have betrayed him…. Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the house that went broke, in order to establish a political alibi for themselves—the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.”