ON THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 1939, the people of Berlin awoke to the sound of military units arriving for the grand birthday parade of the chancellor and Führer of the Greater German Reich, Adolf Hitler. The sounds and sights gladdened the hearts of many. Even the sun shone brightly, providing glorious “Führerwetter,” as Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had dubbed it. A public holiday had been declared and the entire city urged to line the route leading to the review stand in Wilhelmstrasse and give a collective Sieg Heil salute as the Führer passed in his seven-liter black Mercedes.
Fifty thousand troops—one thousand for each birthday year—would march past the review stand, followed by columns of tanks, armored cars, and motorcycle sidecar units. The parade would take four hours to pass.
Swastikas were draped from balconies and windows, and shops and office buildings displayed photographs and busts of Hitler. Combined with a flood of propaganda and praise for the individual at the heart of the state, the message seemed clear. Germany was Hitler, and Hitler, Germany.
The strongman of Europe had annexed Austria, with the Anschluss bringing the country of his birth inside the new German Reich, and had executed his will to tear the Treaty of Versailles to shreds. Germany had rearmed and faced down Britain and France, two of the powers that had defeated it a generation before. At home, he had promised and shown a way out of the economic depression.
In the United States, shocked by Hitler’s dominance, Time magazine made him its “Man of the Year” for 1938. “To those who watched the closing events of the year,” it noted, “it seemed more than probable that the Man of 1938 may make 1939 a year to be remembered.”
A defeated nation, a nation that had been made to feel ashamed for its part in the Great War, a nation trampled down by poverty and unemployment, was now for many a great nation again.
Some people, yes, were being put in concentration camps: Marxists and socialists who talked Germany down; Jews, who had been blamed for the war and for the economic collapse. But these were “defeatists,” “the enemy within,” the Nazi propaganda proclaimed. All “good” Germans, real Germans, must show their pride in the Fatherland, and that must mean supporting Hitler.
Didn’t it?
HITLER’S BIRTHDAY APPEARED to be a day of double celebration for the tall, handsome Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen. As he watched the Heinkel bombers and Messerschmitt fighter aircraft cross the city skyline in tight formation, colleagues congratulated him on his promotion to lieutenant.1 He had been told that he would soon be taking on a new role in the air force intelligence division, scanning foreign press reports and writing briefings for one of the most powerful figures in the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, who had come to see himself as something of a mentor to the young aristocrat.
But Schulze-Boysen was in fact a daring, sometimes reckless anti-Nazi. Aided by his wife, Libertas, he planned not only to reveal some of the regime’s most heinous crimes, but also to turn over its military secrets to the enemy. As war consumed the world, he would become one of the most significant spies at the heart of the Reich.
ARVID HARNACK WATCHED the spectacle of the birthday parade from outside the Economics Ministry, where he worked. He had met Schulze-Boysen and, terrified by his bravado, had distanced himself from him. But soon their paths would cross again.
Serious and fiercely intelligent, Harnack was a highflier, one of the nation’s greatest academic minds, who had studied in England and the United States. At the ministry, he was the perfect Nazi, working to ensure that Germany had the economic power Hitler would need to carry out his will—at home and abroad.
But in reality, Harnack was at the center of a growing opposition movement to Hitler, and was already sharing some of the Reich’s most confidential secrets with both Washington and Moscow.
As he watched an SS man carrying a staff on which stood a gilded eagle clutching a swastika in its talons, he wondered what his wife, Mildred, would make of all this. She was American but loved Germany. She had recently visited England and Denmark, and seen what the foreign press was reporting about the Nazis. She despaired when young students she had taught at the University of Berlin told her that Hitler was saving Germany from the Jews.
That Thursday, busy passing Harnack’s secrets to America’s only spy in Germany, Mildred had not wanted to be anywhere near the parade.
Later, Harnack would tell her that the sheer length of time it took the troops to goose-step pass was a reminder of how Hitler appeared to be taking Germany and its people nearer to war.
AS A DISPLAY of military might, the parade was like nothing the foreign dignitaries and members of the international press had ever seen. But it obscured one thing: that there were people in the uniforms of the Third Reich who not only had plotted to overthrow Hitler but also hoped to assassinate him.
Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Oster, a talkative, open, and honest man who had served bravely in the Great War, despised Hitler and his “politicization” of all aspects of German society; among friends, he would insist on only referring to the Führer dismissively as “Emil.” His senior role in German military counterintelligence, the Abwehr, allowed him to discover the real truth behind the torture of political dissidents, Jews, and religious figures, and of the concentration camps. Oster, a pastor’s son, believed Hitler intended to drive Germany’s Jews to destruction and felt a growing responsibility before God for their rescue.2
His friend Hans von Dohnanyi—a studious-looking man with dark hair swept to one side and thin metal-rimmed glasses—was collecting a Chronicle of Shame, a legal file of Hitler’s crimes to be used in a prosecution of the Führer following a coup.
Oster was intent not only on resisting the Nazi regime, but also on removing Hitler. By that spring morning in 1939, he had already planned one coup and was now planning another. For Oster there would be no trial of Adolf Hitler. He planned to kill him.
DOHNANYI WAS A close friend of the Harnacks and brother-in-law to theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Through such links the academic, military, civil service, and religious dissenters found themselves connected.
Pastor Bonhoeffer had spoken out against Hitler from the start and was now banned from speaking in Berlin. He had returned to Germany two days before Hitler’s birthday, having been on a visit to England, and like many agonized over how to avoid compulsory military service in the war that he was certain was coming.
Back in Berlin, Dohnanyi told him more about the camps, detailed information that many outside of dedicated antifascist circles would struggle to obtain: Ex-prisoners were forbidden to speak of their experiences in the camps. Only some dared describe the ill-treatment they had seen: the rapes and murders, the starvation of prisoners. Dohnanyi, Oster, and Bonhoeffer had learned the truth, and it horrified them.
In London, Bonhoeffer had been with two churchmen—a Dutchman and an Englishman—who had both said they would help him in any way they could. Both hated the Nazis and had spoken out against the persecution of Jews.
Bonhoeffer knew that when war came he would need these friends abroad if he was to help find a way toward peace.
LIKE BONHOEFFER, KURT Gerstein had been repulsed by Hitler’s creation of a German Reich Church: Christians loyal to the National Socialists, who encouraged youngsters away from church groups and into the Hitler Youth.
That Thursday he was shown an article by the “German Christians” that celebrated “with jubilation” the Führer’s birthday. “In him God has given the German people a real miracle worker,” the Nazi Christian publication declared.3
Gerstein’s determination to expose the crimes of the Nazis would take him into the dark uniform of the Waffen-SS and the even darker heart of Hitler’s Holocaust. It was a journey of such moral complexity that a human spirit would struggle to survive.
Many in their opposition to Hitler wished to bear witness in some fashion—Dohnanyi through his Chronicle of Shame, Libertas Schulze-Boysen in her record of atrocities in the East—but Gerstein’s mission would lead him on a twisted path of complicity and collusion, which still shocks and confuses today.
DIPLOMAT FRITZ KOLBE read reports about the parade on cables from the Foreign Ministry. Sitting in his office at the German consulate in Cape Town, Kolbe noted that many of his colleagues wished they were in Berlin to see it, and their Hitler salutes were delivered with a little more energy that day. Kolbe never returned the greeting, but his countrymen did not really challenge him. They saw him as a strange little man, obsessed with walking and chess, and knew he was going through a messy separation from his second wife.
Short, bald, and approaching forty, Kolbe wondered what part he might have in a coming war. If conflict came, he was certain South Africa would go with other members of the Commonwealth and side with Britain. Where would that leave him? In Berlin, with the Nazis he loathed?
As he worried about his future, he never imagined that within a few years he would become the United States’ most successful spy in Germany.
A FEW MONTHS earlier, in order to mark his birthday, Hitler had opened the new Reich Chancellery, a huge building running from Wilhelmstrasse and along the length of Voss Strasse.
Behind its yellow stucco and gray stone front, its vast rooms included Hitler’s study, with its thirty-foot-high ceiling, and a marble gallery that was twice the size of the famed Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Visitors, boasted Hitler, would get a “taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!”4
Some four thousand workmen labored day and night for one year to complete the enormous project, and many wanted to find a place in the street nearby for the parade. Many of the factories in the city lay silent that day so workers and their families could enjoy the celebration. Those operated by Jewish workers stayed running.
Over the last few years Germany’s Jews had been removed from various professions, forcing Jewish teachers, musicians, lawyers, and doctors to work in hard manual-labor jobs for the Reich: on road-making projects, as rubbish-disposal men, and in sewage plants. They were kept separate from Gentiles and had to survive on fewer rations.
But in areas like working-class Neukölln, Jews and Gentiles found common ground in their hatred of the Nazis. Many congregated around electrician Herbert Baum and his wife, Marianne, who were developing a flair for the dramatic, creating their own antifascist propaganda to counter that of Goebbels. They had already humiliated the “poison dwarf” once and planned to do so again.
The Baums and their Jewish friends intended to fight back.
IT WAS NOT only Berlin that rang with the choreographed bluster of Hitler’s birthday celebrations. Flags flew throughout the country, and the Nazi-controlled press recorded the day of deification in special editions.
As elsewhere, official buildings and many homes in the southern city of Ulm were bedecked with swastikas, garlands, and busts of the Führer. The city on the Danube was proud of its special place in German history, having been a final resting place for medieval German kings and emperors.
In a large second-floor apartment in Olgastrasse, across the rooftops from the steeple of Ulm Minster, lived the family of Robert and Magdalena Scholl. There were no flags flying from their windows that April day. Herr Scholl, who had turned forty-eight a week before Hitler’s fiftieth, was a man of deep conviction and strongly held liberal beliefs. Fiercely independent-minded, he “translated” the Nazi propaganda on the radio for his family and told them war was coming. He had maintained his friendships with Jewish friends and associates in Ulm when others shunned them.
Scholl had brought up his five surviving children in his image. Hans, the elder boy, was the dominant character among them, but Sophie matched him in spirit. As they learned about the treatment of Jews across Germany, the words of one friend struck them deeply: “They are crucifying Christ a second time, as a people!”
For the Scholls, opposition to Hitler was a moral imperative, a simple question of right versus wrong. No matter what the consequences. In the horrors that Hitler would create in the coming years, the family would pay a terrible price for its desire for a better Germany.
AS THE DARK Mercedes passed through the crowds, the Führer stood with his right arm outstretched in salute. His face was as impassive to the people’s adulation as it would later be to their suffering. His eyes remained fixed, the faces passing in a blur, featureless; he looked at them only as a single force by which he would achieve his ambitions.
Names did not matter in the compliant mass. The state need not concern itself with those who followed, or with that large proportion who granted it their passive consent. There were many who had not greeted Hitler’s coming to power with jubilation but who had shrugged and said it would all just “blow over.” When it did not, they found their nation had changed, but they went on with their lives and their work.
It was the individuals who did not conform who needed to be identified. Those who resisted, opposed, refused, and stood up to be counted in the darkest of times, even though they were painfully vulnerable in a state overrun by paranoia, fear, and terror. The ones who, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words, felt, “Silence in the face of evil is evil itself: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” They could not be granted the anonymity of the crowd.
These were the men and women whom the state sought to identify, then to wipe from its memory.
Through the telling of the story of their lives, this book seeks to overturn a popular myth: that the German people followed Hitler as if as one mass, mesmerized like the children of Hamelin by the Pied Piper.
These are the ones who through a love of Germany committed treason against it, rejecting the shackles of a warped, corrupt, and evil state.
They stood up in the knowledge that almost all dissent would be punished by death.
They gave their lives with one thing foremost in their minds: that through their actions they might redeem the honor of their nation.