ABWEHR LAWYER HANS von Dohnanyi watched the roundups of Berlin’s Jews with growing revulsion.
On walks with Hans Oster in the Tiergarten he discussed the latest reports from the camps, many of which he was copying for his secret record of Nazi crimes. Dohnanyi knew that several times in the past Oster had helped Jews by employing them as Abwehr agents or informers in the belief that no one would suspect military intelligence of employing a Jew. He now confessed that for some time he had been trying to work out how he could protect a lawyer friend of his named Friedrich Arnold, a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Arnold had appealed to Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for help for himself and others who were in fear of deportation.
And an idea had formed in the two men’s minds, which they wanted to share with Oster. It was based not just on Oster’s recruitment of Jewish people into the organization but on Bonhoeffer’s own extensive trips abroad over the past few months.
OSTER HAD NEVER given up on his efforts to send messages to Britain, and Bonhoeffer had become his new chosen emissary. Through Dohnanyi he had organized a series of trips for Bonhoeffer, who, as a nonmilitary man and a respected Christian, Oster believed would be given a fair, respectful hearing by the British.
While the approaches to the British before the war broke out had been far from successful—although the difficulties had been many—Oster realized that London had little idea that a core group of conspirators remained alive, in positions of some power, and still committed despite the war.
Bonhoeffer’s friend Willem Visser ’t Hooft, the Dutch theologian he had last seen in London shortly before war broke out, was based in Geneva and had told him to contact him if he needed to. Dohnanyi helped Bonhoeffer get the necessary German travel papers, and Bonhoeffer himself secured the sponsorship in Switzerland of Protestant theologian Professor Karl Barth, who had lost his job at the University of Bonn after refusing to swear an oath to Hitler.1 He named Barth as his sponsor to distance himself from Visser ’t Hooft, as he had other hopes for his meeting with the Dutchman. Barth was shocked to find Bonhoeffer was working for German military intelligence, and Bonhoeffer chose not to explain the true nature of his work, saying only that it was “top secret” and asking him to trust him. “At a time in which so much must be based simply on personal trust, everything is finished when mistrust emerges,” he told him.2
Visser ’t Hooft was delighted to see Bonhoeffer again. The German pastor looked no different than when he had seen him in London: the same smart gray three-piece suit with silver pocket watch tucked into the waist, the same swish of fine gray hair combed tightly across the high dome of his head. But his personality had hardened. Bonhoeffer briefed him on life in Germany, the continuing persecution of the Jews, the arrests of Christian churchmen, and the T4 euthanasia program of which Dohnanyi was collecting evidence.
Visser ’t Hooft said he would contact Bishop George Bell immediately, and Bonhoeffer shook his hand gratefully. He knew that Bell, with his seat in the House of Lords, would have access to the most powerful people in Britain, perhaps even the prime minister, Winston Churchill.
A FEW MONTHS later Bonhoeffer returned to Zurich, this time with a memorandum for the British to be passed on by Visser ’t Hooft. He told the Dutchman that British indifference to the German resistance might discourage them from removing Hitler and that the conspirators had to know that the Allies recognized they were distinct from the Nazis.
Bonhoeffer read a section aloud to his friend: “The question must be faced whether a German government which makes a complete break with Hitler and all he stands for, can hope to get such terms of peace that it has some chance to survive. It is clear that the answering of this question is a matter of urgency, since the attitude of opposition groups in Germany depends upon the answer given.”
Visser ’t Hooft asked Bonhoeffer what he prayed for, and the German pastor looked grave. “If you want to know the truth,” he said, “I pray for the defeat of my nation. For I believe that is the only way to pay for all the suffering which my country has caused in the world.”
By now, the reports of the atrocities in the Soviet Union were crossing Dohnanyi’s desk and they were uppermost in Bonhoeffer’s mind. But the invasion had hardened Allied hearts, too. When Bonhoeffer appealed to Britain, he must have realized that it could no longer make decisions alone. As one senior official in the German department of the Foreign Office later put it, if Stalin was to hear that Britain was negotiating in secret with German generals, “[he] might well have been tempted to see whether he could not again come to terms with Hitler.”3 And at this stage of the war, what could London do? It could not second-guess the political makeup of a postwar Germany and make promises it might not keep. There was no question of logistical support for the “resistance”—whatever it felt that constituted—and also the German army had access to its own supplies and could arm its own coup. Churchill was fighting a war of desperation and felt he could give no quarter to the Germans: In his public statements the Germans were Nazis, pure and simple.
However, in Chichester, when Bishop Bell received Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s messages from Switzerland, he resolved to bring them to the attention of not only the British government but also—in a cautious way, so as to protect his source—the British public. “I am sure that there are very many in Germany, silenced now by the Gestapo and the machine gun, who long for deliverance from a godless Nazi rule, and for the coming of Christian order in which they and we can take our part,” he told one meeting. “Is no trumpet call to come from England, to awaken them from despair?”4
At the height of the war, with Germany rampant, Bell’s attempts to raise interest in “good” Germans earned him ridicule and sometimes abuse. “Get back to Germany where you belong!” a woman shouted at him one day at a parish meeting.5
AMONG THE INTELLECTUAL circles of the Prussian nobility a left-leaning group with a hatred of Nazism had developed around Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, who lived on the Kreisau country estate, where tenant farmers worked the land in a valley of undulating farmland in central Silesia in the eastern reaches of interwar Germany.6 A great-grandnephew of a field marshal who was remembered as bringing the German army into the “modern age,” Moltke had studied law but had declined an invitation to become a judge, as it would have meant joining the Nazi Party. Instead, he had set up a practice in international law in Berlin that helped people emigrate.
When back home on the estate, he invited like-minded intellectuals there to discuss Hitler’s fascism, and their group became known as the Kreisau Circle. His closest confidants were his cousin Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, who had also studied law and suffered a career setback when he refused to join the Nazi Party; London-born Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg, whose father had been the Kaiser’s military attaché to Britain, and who had turned against the Nazis after the violence of the Röhm purge; and lawyer and diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz, whose extensive travels before the war had included a spell at Oxford University. Trott had visited Britain and the United States before the war, to appeal for support for the German opposition to Hitler. He had met Lord Halifax and William Donovan, who would go on to create the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Although largely Protestant, the group also reached out to other Christians, including Jesuit priest Father Alfred Delp.
As liberal bourgeois intellectuals, they had struggled to see why Hitler had been so popular with the public during the early and mid-1930s and had assumed that it would not take long for the people to realize he would bring disaster upon Germany. Moltke did not believe that Germany could win the war and feared the survival of Europe was dependent on Germany’s defeat. It was a terrible and painful conclusion for someone from such a proud German military family.
The group discussed at length what kind of Germany they could build after Hitler’s downfall. Their government would be based on both Christian and socialist values, with all adults over twenty-one given the vote in local and provincial elections. Industry would be nationalized, and workers would have a say in the running of businesses. Even after the war began, they continued to believe they could rescue Germany from being an international pariah, so that it would become a leading member of a peaceful community of European nations, which would include Britain and the Soviet Union. Two guests of the meetings at the Kreisau estate also met with members of the Arvid Harnack group: Hans Peters, a former chair of the University of Berlin’s ruling board, knew Schulze-Boysen, while economist Horst von Einsiedel knew Harnack himself.
Knowing that only the military could physically overthrow the Nazis, the Kreisau Circle felt it was their responsibility to have in place a plan that would see a Germany in crisis avoid repeating the ideological and political disaster of 1933. They knew that taking action called for deep ethical considerations, that the resistance could be accused of treason, but it must have one objective: the removal of the head of state. The resistance must cause the complete collapse of the Nazi political system; it was the only way to rebuild a society on secure and just principles. Despite their differences with Goerdeler, who they saw as a reactionary, he was still their favored candidate to be the new German chancellor.
Oster might have been plotting a coup for some time, but it was within the Goerdeler group and the Kreisau Circle that the seeds of the movement to carry out the most audacious coup attempt of the war were developing. That, though, was ahead.
First, Moltke had Abwehr business to attend to. Canaris had brought Moltke into his intelligence service early in the war as an adviser on international law, although the aristocrat—who was thirty-two when war broke out—refused to wear a military uniform and was always kept separate from the Oster group by the wily old admiral. Moltke traveled extensively in Poland and saw the results of the atrocities there. While aware of the dangers of a Hitler-led Germany from the beginning—he had warned friends in 1933 that “whoever votes for Hitler votes for war”—he was still shocked by the savagery of the regime. Moltke told his friend the American journalist Wallace Deuel, of the Chicago Daily News, late in 1940 that the hopes for those who opposed Hitler were slim and that Hitler “will compromise all Germans and make them responsible for the atrocities in the occupied territories and in Germany.”7
Moltke was close friends with Dohnanyi, who shared with him some of the contents of his Chronicle of Shame, and he condemned the actions of the army, as well as the SS, stating: “[We have] no proper generals but military technicians, and the whole is a gigantic crime.” On hearing of the mass roundups of Berlin Jews, he wrote to a friend: “What shall I say when I am asked: ‘And what did you do during that time?’” In another letter, he said: “How can anyone know these things and walk around free?”8
Moltke asked Dohnanyi to use his legal skills to draft a report examining the oath of loyalty in a dictatorship and the legal and moral “right of resistance.”9
In return, Dohnanyi had a request for him. In April 1942 he sent him a message telling him to prepare for a special trip abroad.
AFTER HIS MISSIONS to Switzerland, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was determined to continue to reach out to the Allies. Dohnanyi suggested linking up with the Kreisau Circle, which had developed strong links with a senior clergyman, Bishop Eivind Berggrav, who was an outspoken opponent of Norway’s pro-Nazi government led by Vidkun Quisling. The opposition saw Berggrav as a powerful ally and, when they learned that Quisling planned to arrest him, decided to send Bonhoeffer and Moltke to Norway to assess the situation.
Both were provided with a complete cover story by the Abwehr for the trip. Bonhoeffer’s official task was to attempt to smooth over the anger that Quisling had stirred up with the country’s Protestant church and that was threatening to cause widespread protest in the occupied nation. The Norwegian church had been united in its opposition to the Nazis, with every bishop severing connections to the Norwegian government.
On April 10, 1942, Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi took a train to Sassnitz, a picturesque town on Rügen Island on Germany’s northern coast, where Dohnanyi introduced Bonhoeffer to Moltke before returning to Berlin.
The next day Bonhoeffer and Moltke were sitting at a table in a café when they saw the ferry appear out of the fog. They crossed the Baltic Sea to Malmö, took the long journey up the Swedish coast by train, and crossed into Norway. In Oslo, Bonhoeffer—on his “official” mission from the Abwehr—was allowed to talk with representatives of Bishop Berggrav, who had been placed under house arrest by Quisling. Instead of trying to smooth things over, he encouraged the Norwegian church to keep fighting, “even as far as martyrdom.”10 The two Abwehr emissaries then went to the Norwegian government and persuaded them to release Berggrav to help maintain order. Quisling agreed.
Through Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus, who as a lawyer for Lufthansa had an extensive range of contacts in the Norwegian business community, it was arranged for Moltke and Bonhoeffer to meet Norwegian industrialists to encourage contact with Crown Prince Olav, who was in exile in London, and to ask him to be a conduit for messages from the German resistance.
Back in Berlin, Bonhoeffer learned that Bishop Bell would be making an extended visit to neutral Sweden. There could be no better opportunity to provide an up-to-date, face-to-face report on the conspiracy to the British government.
Dohnanyi and Oster managed to arrange a special courier pass through the Foreign Ministry, and Bonhoeffer was able to catch a plane to Stockholm, arriving on May 31 and immediately heading to the Nordic Ecumenical Institute in Sigtuna to meet Bell. The pair had not met for three years, but despite all that had happened across Europe and the fact that Bell had had no advanced warning of Bonhoeffer’s visit, they were quickly talking as old friends. Bonhoeffer persuaded Bell of the depth and scale of the conspiracy throughout the army and military intelligence, and took the risk of giving as many names as he could, including Goerdeler and Oster, and trade union leaders such as Wilhelm Leuschner and Max Habermann. He said he wanted London to be assured that these Germans recognized their nation’s sins and did not wish to escape its need for repentance. He suggested a future German monarchy under Louis Ferdinand, a Prussian prince his brother had introduced to the conspiracy. The British should mention his name to the Americans, Bonhoeffer said, as the prince had met President Roosevelt before the war.
The British bishop thanked the German pastor warmly for his “spirit of fellowship and of Christian brotherliness” and hoped God would be with him in his work. But, having witnessed the understandable anti-German feeling across Britain, he warned that Churchill would be skeptical of the messages from Germany and that there were many in London who, after the failed attempts at appeasement before the war, would not trust any German.
Back in London, Bell met with British foreign minister Anthony Eden and said he was convinced of Bonhoeffer’s integrity and that there had to be a clear distinction drawn between the Nazis and the “anti-Hitlerites” who stood up to defy them. The other Nazi-occupied countries of Europe had been promised liberation, but the anti-Nazi Germans had been refused the same promises by the Allies. He also spoke to Sir Stafford Cripps, a powerful member of Churchill’s war cabinet, who had been impressed by Visser ’t Hooft and reports he had brought from Bonhoeffer and Moltke’s friend Adam von Trott.
Unfortunately, though, the British government decided that it was not “in the national interest for any reply whatever” to be sent to the conspirators. At this stage they would never negotiate with the German opposition for fear of antagonizing Stalin and certainly not without the consent of the United States government.
When Bell delivered a copy of his report to the American ambassador in London—with a promise that it would be passed to the State Department—he did not receive a message back.
WHILE PLANNING THE Oslo trip, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer had sought Moltke’s advice on their plan to smuggle Jews out of Germany. Moltke’s legal expertise on obtaining Swiss visas had been essential.
Back in Berlin, Dohnanyi developed the plan and a list of people to help, including Friedrich Arnold himself, a retired Jewish lawyer named Julius Fliess who had won a number of bravery medals during the First World War, and Fliess’s wife and family. Fliess was an invalid and had already been threatened with deportation. Bonhoeffer also wanted to help Charlotte Friedenthal, a convert who had worked as secretary to the central offices of the Confessing Church.11 There were seven names on the initial list, so Dohnanyi code-named the plan Unternehmen 7, or U7 (Operation 7).12
To hide the male refugees in the Abwehr, Dohnanyi used the same routine as when employing his brother-in-law Dietrich Bonhoeffer: By declaring the men “uk”—unabkömmlich, meaning that they were indispensable to the Abwehr—he ensured that they could not be conscripted for work or active service by any other branch of the military, and that for confidential operational reasons they were essential to the Abwehr’s work. The additional bridge he had to cross was the removal of the Jews from deportation lists, which he achieved through police contacts.
Then, with Canaris’s blessing—the admiral knew some of the people to be helped by U7—Dohnanyi developed a complete cover story for the operation. It was typically convoluted: The Jews had been “briefed” to explain to the Swiss that the stories of Nazi persecution were malicious rumor and Allied misinformation, and they would later seek to get to the United States and spread the same information there. This cover story Canaris shared with the Gestapo to make the operation appear legitimate. The cover was so convincing that some of the Jews at first refused to go. Dietrich Bonhoeffer took Friedenthal aside and persuaded her that this story was just a charade: When they got to Switzerland, they could behave and say what they wished, as if they had reneged on their “deal” with the Abwehr.
The next problem was getting permission from Switzerland to allow the people to enter. The Swiss were reluctant to take the refugees. Bonhoeffer said he could speak to Alphons Köchlin, the president of the Schweizer Kirchenbund, the Swiss Protestant Church organization, and ask him to sponsor the granting of Swiss entry visas. Dohnanyi decided another trip by Bonhoeffer would look suspicious, so he sent Wilhelm Schmidhuber, a dark-haired smooth talker with a reputation for giving lavish gifts, who had been working in a part-time capacity for the Abwehr in Munich for several years and had been the one who had suggested the use of Joseph Müller for the Vatican peace conversations. Well-known at border checkpoints and with a reputation for being involved in many different roles—including one as honorary Portuguese consul—Schmidhuber crossed easily into Switzerland and delivered a note from Bonhoeffer to Köchlin, who was pleased to help.
But by this time the seven escapees had almost doubled to thirteen.13 Dohnanyi realized they would need money to survive in Switzerland and worked out a scheme to allow them to exchange their German currency and some personal items of value for Swiss francs from Abwehr accounts. The illegal payments to the refugees would be disguised as compensation for the confiscation of property and would be deposited in a Swiss bank by Schmidhuber. The refugees would then be able to access it and start a new life.
Dohnanyi’s new conspiracy would take many months to organize and put into operation. If it failed, it would bring down himself, his friends, perhaps the whole organization.