REDEMPTION FOR THE German nation was a powerful motivation for many who stood up to Hitler. “We shall need very many of us just people if there is to be anything left of us that can still bear a name before God and the world,” Theodor Haecker, who inspired the young people of the White Rose, wrote in his diary.1
In refusing to be dehumanized and crushed as individuals, they sought to prove to themselves and to others that not all of the nation had submitted. They were keeping alive the part of the country they loved in their own actions. And to the civilized world today, their actions still matter, as they shine a message to us: Decency and honor can be maintained, and the instinct for human solidarity will survive even in the most fascistic of regimes. When power and violence attempt to crush all into conformity, there will always be those who cannot be suppressed.
One must remember that the resisters operated in a society where the machinery of propaganda ensured that there was only condemnation of their actions and no reporting at all of the concentration camps or atrocities. There was no public, vocal opposition behind which a campaign could be built. Anyone whose conscience dictated that they must oppose Hitler had to overcome the fact that their neighbors saw only one picture of the Nazi state. The regime ran a perfect campaign of fake news, of which to question and oppose was a betrayal of the nation and the fighting soldier.
As Falk Harnack wrote in 1963, there is “a fundamental, worldwide difference between high treason and espionage committed in a democratic state and in a bestial dictatorship . . . where all opposition to the government is brutally suppressed . . . Hitler’s dictatorship had at its disposal limitless power; it had extraordinary means of support. Only the most extreme measures had any real chance of success. The resistance acted from moral duty. Above all, the people had to be torn from the criminal path that Hitler’s leadership had trodden, and a national catastrophe had to be avoided. That was the opinion both of the right as well as the left resistance.”2
There is no greater measure of the challenges that the German opposition to the Third Reich faced than the immense personal cost that they paid for their courage.
THE HARNACKS, THE Bonhoeffers, and many other resisters such as Justus Delbrück need not have stayed in Germany during the Nazi era. They all had opportunities to leave before the war clouds came. The chemist Max Delbrück did leave and settled in the United States. He later won a Nobel Prize but always felt a sense of uneasiness about his decision to go. Those who stayed and resisted deserved the greater credit, he decided.3 That credit was not always forthcoming.
The world had been tipped on its head by the war. In Germany the widows and children of Gestapo and SS men were considered patriots. Old army groups still met and sang Nazi songs, while meanwhile the widows and children of the conspirators were shunned, denied pensions, and denounced as traitors.
In December 1946, a war crimes unit of the United States Army of Occupation in Germany reported on its investigation into the death of Mildred Fish-Harnack. It found: “[She] was in fact deeply involved in underground activities aimed to overthrow the government of Germany; that the trial (although secret) was conducted before five judges of the highest state military court and that this court, in view of the activities in which had been engaged, was justified in imposing the sentence which was imposed.”4 The fact that the court had sat twice in order to get the right result for Hitler was not taken into account. Nazi law had been upheld by the American lawyers.
There was no doubt that the reputation of the Harnacks had been tarnished by the Red Orchestra’s links to Russia. American investigators relied on captured Gestapo records to make their judgments—but the Gestapo had had no inkling of the Harnacks’ connection to the United States and had investigated and prosecuted the group as a Soviet spy ring, embellishing its connections to Moscow.
Inside Germany they were spies of a foreign power, therefore traitors, not idealist patriots. To the Americans, they were first and foremost Soviet agents. During the Cold War, judgments were particularly harsh, but as the journalist Margret Boveri, who knew the Harnacks and many of their friends, has noted: “Judgements change with the passage of time and reflect the varying constellations of political and ideological power.” For her, the group around the Harnacks and Schulze-Boysens should be remembered as “the intellectual heirs of the French Revolution, the bearers of its ideals of progress, democratic egalitarianism and, of course, the concomitant equality of the sexes.”5 For Freya von Moltke, widow of Helmuth von Moltke and herself a member of the Kreisau Circle: “They were people who wanted to do something, who couldn’t put up with nothing being done. To write off all the Red Orchestra people as Communists misses the truth.”6
As Mildred suggested on the way to the scaffold, it was for her love of Germany and the freedom of human beings that she had acted. She loved America, admired President Roosevelt, and hated the effect the worldwide Depression had had on working people. In recent years Mildred’s name is finally being remembered, with the author Shareen Blair Brysac having done much to rehabilitate her image. September 16—her birthday—is now Mildred Harnack Day in Wisconsin. Children in public schools spend the day discussing her courage and her legacy.
THE SAME COLD War tensions that had seen the image of the Harnacks and the others dragged through the mud played a part in protecting some of the officials of Nazi justice.
In the fourth leaflet printed by the White Rose, Hans Scholl had urged that none of the “scoundrels in this regime” should go free at the end of the war, with their “abominable crimes” forgotten as they “rally to another flag and then act as if nothing had happened.”7
He might have been writing about Manfred Roeder, who early in May 1945 was taken into American custody and was quickly passed to the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). With focus turning to what the Bolsheviks would do now that Hitler was dead, Roeder explained that he was an expert in rooting out Soviet spies. A British intelligence investigation into the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group had concluded that they were anti-Nazi rather than Moscow agents, but Roeder embellished the links between the group and Trepper’s Rote Kapelle, and he intrigued the CIC. The Harnacks’ work for the Americans was not considered. When Nuremberg prosecutors submitted files for his prosecution, the CIC took Roeder into custody and out of the grasp of the war trials.
Roeder shared the protection of the CIC with Walter Huppenkothen, whose hands were bloodied from service with the Einsatzgruppen and from his pursuit to the death of Bonhoeffer, Canaris, and Oster. A Nuremberg lawyer wrote to the CIC saying it was “hard to believe” it could protect “two such notorious, unscrupulous opportunistic Nazis.”8 However, Roeder and Huppenkothen promised the CIC they could identify dozens of German Communists, and they played on American intelligence fears that many members of the Rote Kapelle may have survived and would continue to operate a postwar spy network in Western Europe.
By 1948 the CIC realized it had “exploited [Roeder] to the fullest extent” and that the Rote Kapelle had ceased to exist. However, by then, CIC involvement appeared to have wrecked the Nuremberg lawyers’ chances of prosecuting either Roeder or Huppenkothen. Both were released.
Roeder became a political figure on the postwar German far right and used his public voice to further besmirch the image of the German resistance, attacking not only those who had died but also Greta Lorke, by then living in East Germany with a job as a senior civil servant, and Helmut Roloff, who had become a well-known concert pianist.
He died in 1971, still unrepentant and still boasting about his CIA friends. He had never stood trial.
Huppenkothen did come before a court in West Germany but was controversially acquitted of murder. In 1955 he was convicted of violating procedures in the executions of Canaris and the others and sentenced to seven years in prison.
THE GESTAPO DEAL with the People’s Court over Falk Harnack—to overlook his involvement with the White Rose in the hope he would inadvertently lead them to other anti-Nazi conspirators—yielded nothing.
After his release the army transferred Harnack from Chemnitz to Greece, where the army was fighting a guerrilla war with partisans. Through local villagers Harnack made contact with members of the Greek resistance and indicated that he was working in opposition to his own forces.
On December 20, 1943, Harnack’s commanding officer received an order from Himmler requiring that the army deliver him to the SS. Himmler was getting nothing from the court deal.
Falk Harnack was told that he was being returned to Chemnitz and was accompanied to the airstrip by a lieutenant with whom he was friendly. With his luggage already on the aircraft, Falk realized something was wrong.
“Is it bad or good?” he asked the lieutenant.
“Not good,” came the reply.9
Both Harnack and the lieutenant knew that if he got on the plane he would be flying to his death. The officer agreed to let Harnack escape, and he headed into Athens, still in German uniform. He eventually reached a partisan group that agreed to let him fight with them.
After the war he wrote and directed films, including Der 20. Juli about the July 20 bomb plot.
When Harnack discovered Roeder’s telephone number in Frankfurt am Main, he regularly rang him in the middle of the night to berate him.
Some of the Berlin Rote Kapelle survived. Günther Weisenborn served a prison sentence but returned to his career as a writer. In 1955 he collaborated with Falk Harnack on Der 20. Juli.
On being released from a prison in Waldheim, near Dresden, Greta Lorke walked for days through a Germany of broken bridges, bombed buildings, and field-strewn corpses to get back to Berlin. Once there she found her parents and her son, Ule, and then searched for Hans, the son of Hans and Hilde Coppi, who had both been executed. He had survived, and Lorke became his godmother. Lorke also took in Erika von Brockdorff’s young daughter, Saskia.
Lorke was feted at first in East Germany, as the Communists tried to claim the German Rote Kapelle as their own, but she found herself trapped between the unrealistic Soviet depiction of her friends and the debate about its “treasonous” activities in the West, which had been inflamed by a book by Roeder.
With sadness, she confided in Hans Coppi—the orphaned baby who went on to be an engineer and historian of the Rote Kapelle—that her time in Wisconsin had been the “happiest time in her life.”10
AFTER THE WAR, Anatoli Gourevitch, the Soviet agent whose mission to contact Harro Schulze-Boysen in Berlin had been tracked by the Gestapo, was flown to Moscow, where he admitted having cooperated with the Germans after his arrest. Sentenced to twenty years in a gulag, he was released in 1955 under an amnesty to Soviet citizens who “assisted the foreign invaders in the Great Patriotic War in 1941–1945.”
Alexander Korotkov, who recruited Arvid Harnack in Berlin, later became head of the KGB in the Russian zone of the devastated and Allied-occupied city. He died in 1961 of a heart attack while playing tennis.
THE COURAGEOUS STUDENTS in Hamburg were inspired rather than discouraged by the executions in Munich, and quickly began reprinting the White Rose leaflets.
Student Hans Leipelt had been thrown out of Hamburg University because he was half-Jewish and had moved to Munich, where a chemistry professor named Heinrich Otto Wieland was refusing to turn away Jewish students.11 With the support of Jürgen Wittenstein, he collected money to help Kurt Huber’s family. Clara Huber received the money anonymously through a priest and never knew where it came from.
Leipelt teamed up with his new girlfriend, Marie-Luise Jahn, and began reprinting the sixth White Rose leaflet, which had been written by Huber. At the top of the page they put a new heading: “And their spirit lives on, despite all!”12 Both were arrested in October 1943, and the Gestapo also brought in Leipelt’s Jewish mother, Katharina, a doctor of science who had supported the Hamburg group’s activities. A year passed before Leipelt and Jahn were tried. He was sentenced to death; she was given twelve years in jail.
Leipelt, who had never met the Scholls, was executed in the same death chamber at Stadelheim on January 29, 1945. Katharina Leipelt died a few weeks before her son. She took her own life while in prison, as did her friend Elisabeth Lange.13
The Hamburg group also included Dr. Curt Ledien, who was hanged on April 23, 1945, and Gretl Mrosek, philosophy student Reinhold Meyer, and medical students Frederick Geussenhainer and Greta Rothe, who all died in custody in a swathe of Nazi retribution in the final days of the war.
Inge Scholl described the Nazis’ determination to keep killing resistance fighters in the last few weeks of the war: “Their revenge against people who as individuals had dared to attack the essential idea of the regime was to pull their opponents down to death along with themselves.”
Heinz Kucharski, who had led the Hamburg group after Leipelt went to Munich, had been condemned to die, too. He was being transported to the execution site when he made a daring and successful escape from a train and ran free into the night.
TRAUTE LAFRENZ, WHO had been a key member of the White Rose in Munich and had helped support the group in Hamburg, was rearrested after the clampdown in the north. She spent more than a year in various prisons before being freed in April 1945 when American soldiers liberated Bayreuth. After the war she moved to the United States.
Robert Scholl was also released from jail when Germany was liberated. He went on to become mayor of Ulm before his death in 1973. His wife, Magdalena, died in 1945, her heart broken: She lost not only Hans and Sophie in the war, but also Werner, who was killed on the Eastern Front in 1944.
Elisabeth Scholl became close to Sophie’s boyfriend, Fritz Hartnagel, after the executions. They later married and settled in Stuttgart.
Inge Scholl married Otl Aicher in 1952, and she worked tirelessly to keep alive the spirit and memory of the White Rose. She was supported by the families of Willi Graf, Kurt Huber, Alex Schmorell, Christoph Probst, and many others.
Sophie Scholl has almost two hundred schools named in her honor across Germany. She and Hans were voted among the top five greatest Germans in a poll by a television network in 2003. The square outside the main building at Ludwig Maximilian University is named in their honor.
FOR ORGANIZING THE rescue of thirteen Jewish people in Operation 7, Hans von Dohnanyi was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at a special ceremony in Berlin in 2003, which was attended by his three children.14
WHAT DOES KURT Gerstein’s dual role in the resistance and the Holocaust reveal to us today? The enormity of the killing dwarfs his actions. Around 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz alone—and one million of those died for no other reason than that they were Jewish. They came from all over Europe and died with Polish political prisoners, Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others deemed enemies of the state.15 An estimated 1.4 million were killed in the three Operation Reinhard camps, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, where Gerstein had first witnessed the horror behind the “final solution to the Jewish question.”16
We are all characters of contradiction, but the contradictions in Gerstein’s life were immense. He was both rigidly Christian and a joker, a product of convention and a rebel. Somewhere in that personality was a man who saw the rigidity of Nazi evil and had to subvert it. As a child he had written criticisms of his homework on the class blackboard for his schoolteacher to see; as a young adult he stood up in the front row of a Hitler Youth theater production to criticize its anti-Christian message; as an SS officer he wore a clothes brush in his gun holster; and when confronted by the Holocaust, he pretended the murderous gas canisters were damaged. His story comes from the heart of a horror story, so real we can barely believe it. Because of that, it must be instructive.
In a letter to his father in March 1944, Gerstein said, “[A man] must never exonerate himself to himself before his conscience and before the higher order of things to which he is subject by saying, ‘that is not my business, I can do nothing to change things.’”
His father always misunderstood Gerstein’s coded way of talking and told him only that, as a soldier, he must follow orders: The “responsibility is with the man who gives the orders, not the one who carries them out.”17
In his reply, his last letter to his father, Kurt Gerstein said, “Whenever I have received orders of such a nature, I have either never carried them out or I have used a diversion to prevent them from being executed.”
But is that enough? There was no doubt he was a witness, but also surely a participator. In August 1950, Gerstein’s name was put before the denazification court in Tübingen—the court having been convened as Gerstein would need to be rehabilitated in order for his wife to receive a war widow’s pension. Pastor Martin Niemöller, head of the Confessing Church, spoke up for him and described Gerstein as “certainly rather a peculiar saint, but a man of absolute purity and straight as a die.”18 He added: “He was prepared to sacrifice, and indeed did sacrifice, his honour, his family and his life.”19
The court noted that Gerstein “represented the type of man who, by virtue of his deepest convictions, disavowed the Nazi regime, even hated it inwardly, but collaborated with it in order to combat it from within and to prevent worse things happening.”
It acknowledged his efforts to divert Zyklon B from its use in the Holocaust by marking containers as “disinfectant only,” but noted that “the possibility cannot be excluded that in this he did not entirely succeed.” It also accepted that he “rendered useless two shipments of prussic acid” and that these were “acts of resistance which . . . placed him in very great jeopardy.”
But despite his great effort and best intentions, he was “not sufficiently important or influential to stop this machine . . . The machine was stronger than he was. In the end, he realized this and manifestly suffered greatly from his consciousness of the fact.”20
It concluded: “The court is of the opinion that the accused did not exhaust all the possibilities open to him and that he could have found other ways and means of holding aloof from the operation . . . After all his previous experience, it must have been absolutely clear to him that he, as an individual, was in no position to prevent these extermination measures or, by rendering useless trifling quantities of the prussic acid supplied, to save the lives of even some of the persons concerned.
“Accordingly . . . the court has not included the accused among the main criminals but has placed him among the ‘tainted.’”21
Saul Friedländer, who spent the war hidden in a Catholic boarding school in France and later discovered that his parents had been murdered in Auschwitz, has written: “The Tübingen Court did not deny that Gerstein had carried out acts of resistance; it condemned him, in effect, for the uselessness of his efforts. He is punished, in a way, for not having behaved like the great majority of ‘good’ Germans and waited quietly until all the Jews were dead; paradoxically, the ‘innocence’ of such Germans is contrasted with the ‘guilt’ of a man who was obliged in some degree to accommodate to the crime in order to resist it . . . Is such a resistance therefore less or more ‘guilty’ of the crime than the passive spectator who tolerates it without moving against it?”
What more could Gerstein have done to restrain the criminals of the Third Reich? In practice, probably nothing. The killing did not depend on him. Should he have escaped, or even committed suicide? Or was he right to stay and bear witness? After all, what is not in doubt was that Gerstein’s was no cell-block conversion: He had been clear all along to friends and religious mentors that he was joining the Waffen-SS to expose its crimes. One can question his wisdom—his sanity even—but not his initial intent.
Yes, there is something in the Biblical saying that “He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled therewith,” and Gerstein was defiled, but he was also the one who saw the horror and knew that it was wrong. Had there been many more Gersteins—each trying to get the message out, each destroying gas canisters—they would have been acknowledged as heroes. But there was only him. His actions were carried out in loneliness; the reaction to his warnings increased his isolation; he died alone.
Fifteen years after the Tübingen judgment, the premier of the province of Baden-Württemberg, Kurt Kiesinger, overturned the guilty verdict. Gerstein was declared not guilty. “Gerstein resisted National Socialist despotism with all his strength and suffered consequent disadvantage,” Mr. Kiesinger stated. Baron von Otter had been among those who had given evidence for Gerstein.
But perhaps the binary option of a guilty or innocent verdict presents parameters too simplistic by which to judge a case as complex as Gerstein’s. Writing about Gerstein adds another layer of complication to an abomination that words struggle to describe. In any case, how can we make sense of the Holocaust?
THE FRIENDS OF Herbert Baum represented one of the most significant civilian German resistance groups, and they paid a high price for standing up to tyranny.
Even those in the group who escaped the executioner did not survive the war. Alice Hirsch, Lotte Rotholz, and Edith Fraenkel, who had received prison sentences, were later sent to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
But those who had stayed out of Gestapo hands survived—largely due to the courage of others.
Ellen Compart was protected by a Christian named Willi May and his Jewish wife, Gerda, who showed remarkable courage in obtaining a duplicate set of her own identity papers for Compart to use. It was an astonishing act that saw Gerda talk herself out of Gestapo suspicion—one of those heroes that history rarely has the opportunity to record.
Ursula Ehrlich also survived in hiding in Berlin, as did Harry Cühn. Rita Meyer survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.22
CHARLOTTE PAECH ALSO survived. When the court that had sentenced fellow members of the Baum group to death failed to process her warrant for execution, she disappeared into a detention center and sat out her sentence. The authorities then realized she was a nurse and sent her to the deportation center that they had set up in the pathology department of the Jewish hospital in Wedding, where she had worked for fourteen years. It was good to be working in a familiar building and helping patients again—even though the circumstances were dire. Many of the inmates at the makeshift prison were only there as they had contracted typhus and were deemed too weak to be transported.
One day Paech was called to the warden’s office, where the secretary informed her that the Gestapo suspected there was a “loose end” in her file and they were reopening her case. Paech did not know why she was still alive, but feared now that the Gestapo would come for her.
The three-story building, which dated from the start of the First World War, was surrounded by a wall that had been partially destroyed in an air raid. Guards had put up a fence, and Paech learned they were due to erect another. She reckoned she could climb or squeeze through one but would never have the time to get over the second fence, which was due to be erected on a Monday morning.
Sunday afternoon patrols were carried out not by the Germans but by a Jewish Gestapo informant who was deeply unpopular with inmates. Paech decided that she would try to escape while he was on duty: Getting him into trouble might be a bonus.
During an exercise period Paech approached the man and told him she had permission to walk outside the fence from one of the Gestapo men. They argued, but the man gave in because he knew that Paech was considered a good nurse and model prisoner by the Gestapo.
Once beyond the wall she walked up and down a few times and realized the prisoners were trying to distract the guard. She slipped through a gap in the broken wall and into the street.23
After all she had been through, she was free again. The streets of Wedding looked bombed out, frightening, hostile, but also wonderful.
Never recaptured, she later married Richard Holzer, the man who had warned against the consequences of the Baum arson attack and who had spent the remainder of the war in Hungary.24 She died in September 1980.25
THE YOUTHFUL COMMITMENT and courage of the Baum group is inspiring. Most were aged between ten and thirteen when Hitler came to power and were in their very early twenties at the time of the Soviet Paradise arson attack. Charlotte Paech earned the nickname “Grandma” from the group as she was thirty-two at the time.26
These young people maintained their resistance to the regime while living with intense persecution and with the trials of life in Nazi Germany: not only the deportations of friends and relatives but also personal tragedies such as that suffered by Harry Cühn and Edith Fraenkel, whose baby died, aged just six months, at the height of their resistance activity.27 Others in the group had children at home whose lives were put in danger by their courage. Suzanne Wesse’s daughter, Katherina, was just five when her mother was executed.
Hella Hirsch, who had worked as a forced laborer for IG Farben in Berlin, was executed two days before her twenty-second birthday. She had been admired by friends as being wise and serious beyond her years. They remembered her saying, “Progress in history seems to come about only through human suffering. Terrible events have to happen and great destruction has to take place for the Phoenix to rise from the ashes. In our situation only a complete German defeat could lead to a new beginning, but we might be vanquished and wiped out in the process.”28
Today, there are two monuments to the Baum group in Berlin: at the western entrance to the Weissensee Jewish cemetery and at the Lustgarten.29
FRITZ KOLBE ESCAPED Berlin in the middle of March 1945 in an official Foreign Office Mercedes that kept breaking down. It took him more than two weeks to reach Bern. After five days in the city, his visa ran out and his bosses were expecting him back, even though the Soviets were closing in on the German capital. But Kolbe had no intention of returning. The man who had done so much to bring down the criminals who ran his country was finally seeing the endgame he desired play out. But it left him without a nation, without a home.
Fritz Kolbe became a “stowaway,” living under the protection of his spymaster, Allen Dulles.
But there was little reward for him after the war, even though Eisenhower called him “one of the most valuable agents we had” and he had passed 2,600 documents to the Americans.
He tried to get a job in the Foreign Ministry of the new Germany, but there were remnants of the Nazi regime still in place. Kolbe was seen as a traitor. Eventually he found work as a subscriptions manager for a prestigious monthly magazine that, among things, gave voice to the people who had resisted Hitler. It was in this magazine that surviving conspirators of the July 20 plot first told their stories.
Kolbe and Dulles remained friends. When Dulles received the Medal of Merit from President Truman in 1946, much of the work cited in the honor had come from intelligence brought to him by Kolbe. Dulles went on to become director of the CIA, the intelligence organization that grew out of the wartime OSS.
When Fritz Kolbe died in 1971, there were twelve people at his funeral in Bonn. Two were unknown to the family and the rest of the congregation. They laid a wreath and left quietly.
The wreath had been laid on behalf of the CIA.
DONALD HEATH, THE diplomat and spy who had worked with Arvid Harnack in Berlin, never forgot Arvid or Mildred.
In 1947 he traveled to Berlin and tracked down Falk Harnack to ask about their deaths. Falk told him what he understood had happened, and the American listened in absolute silence. When Falk finished, Heath got up and went into the garden alone. Falk realized he was crying.
Heath went on to enjoy a forty-year career in the US Foreign Service. In the early 1950s he was the first US ambassador to the newly independent countries in Indochina—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. He died in 1981, aged eighty-seven.30
OF THE PEOPLE on the Gestapo vans that took the Canaris and Oster groups to Flossenbürg and Buchenwald, Schacht, Schuschnigg, Liedig, and Generals Halder, Falkenhausen, and Thomas would survive the war, although Thomas died in Allied captivity soon after. The Abwehr officer Captain Theodor Strünck was executed the same day as Canaris and the others.
On April 15, 1945, two weeks before the Americans liberated the camp, Georg Elser was shot in the back of the neck by an SS man and his body burned. Elser’s hometown of Königsbronn now features a memorial and permanent exhibition to him.
Tried at the People’s Court, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the former lawyer and Tresckow’s right-hand man, revealed details of his torture, which he successfully argued made his testimony inadmissible. Escaping a death sentence, Schlabrendorff survived incarceration in Flossenbürg and Dachau.
Despite having been tortured to the extent that he had suffered a heart attack, Schlabrendorff refused to name names and saved the lives of many others, including three of Hitler’s would-be assassins. Because of his courage Axel von dem Bussche, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, and Eberhard von Breitenbuch survived the war. Gersdorff, who had planned to blow himself and Hitler up in the Zeughaus attack, in fact won the Knight’s Cross in France a little over a year later.
Bussche, Gersdorff, and Breitenbuch had all entered into assassination attempts in which they, too, would have died. As they showed such selfless courage, it is a failure of history that their names are not more widely remembered.
Philipp von Boeselager, who when he died in 2008 was the longest surviving of the July 20 conspirators, also owed his life to Schlabrendorff. When asked by the Gestapo about Boeselager and his brother Georg, Schlabrendorff had looked shocked. “The Boeselager brothers? No, they’re excellent soldiers, completely loyal. They had nothing to do with it. You’re wasting your time.”31 Georg, who had been prepared to shoot Hitler when he landed in his plane on the Eastern Front, was killed in combat in East Prussia late in August 1944.
Ulrich von Hassell had been arrested prior to the July 20 coup. In the wake of the bomb plot, he was among the many from the wider conspiracy who were executed. He died on September 8, 1944, at Plötzensee prison. Carl Goerdeler was executed at the same location on February 2, 1945.
ACCORDING TO THE German Resistance Memorial Center, 104 official death sentences were handed down in relation to the July 20 plot.32 Countless others committed suicide or died in prison. Most of the condemned were executed in the brick execution shed at Plötzensee, where almost 2,900 death sentences passed by the People’s Court, the Special Courts, and the Reich Court-Martial were carried out during the Nazi reign of terror. More than half were German-born.33
The July 20 plot failed in its immediate aim, of course, which was to kill Hitler and topple his government, but as historian Hans Mommsen has noted: “The importance of this plot did not lie in its immediate success, but in the attempt to save Germany’s reputation in the world as a starting point to overcoming Nazism.”34
In the end, though, might we still ask, was it worth it? Most resisters stood no chance of overthrowing the Hitler regime. Only the army could change the course of history, and in the end even it failed. The pages of this book are filled with people who died before their time—the executed, the persecuted, those driven to suicide by torture and the fear of betraying a friend. Those who resisted the Nazis paid a terrible physical price. Moments of mercy were rare.
But these resisters show that even in the most terrible of times there are those among us who cannot help but maintain personal integrity, a sense of the individual, and political and moral principles. The individuals who played an active part in the Holocaust were able to continue because of the tolerance and passivity of others. Doing something meant that you stood against it and maintained your humanity. Fighting back, as Baum group member Herbert Budzislawski told his Gestapo interrogators, was the only way “to live in Germany as a human being.”35
Sophie Scholl once confided to her diary about the horror all around her and the guilt she felt for being part of a nation that had created it. “Doesn’t every human being, no matter which era he lives in, always have to reckon with being accountable to God at any moment?”
To be able to stand with honor before God, she knew, one had to resist evil.
AN ACCUSATION OF treason has always hung over those who tried to bring down the Nazis from within. When a nation sinks to a moral low, it seeks to accuse those who speak out of disloyalty to its flag.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer described the dilemma that he and the others faced as having “either to hope for the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization might survive, or to hope for victory entailing the destruction of civilization.”36
But the charge of treason is bogus. As bogus as Nazi justice and Roland Freisler’s claim to be an honorable judge.
Nazi Germany forfeited its rights to be considered a legal state: Therefore the actions of the people in the pages of this book were resistance, not treason. They acted with tremendous courage, knowing the odds were stacked against them. They showed no personal ambition, only hopes for their nation and for humanity. Many represented the very antithesis of blinkered nationalism, knowing they were committing high treason as they sought a better outcome for all.
As Hans Oster told the Dutch officer to whom he had revealed the plans of Hitler’s invasion of Western Europe: “People may well say that I am a traitor but in reality I am not. I regard myself as a better German than all those who are trotting along behind Hitler. It is both my purpose and my duty to liberate Germany, and with her the world, from this plague.”37
Hitler had begun a vast war of conquest that Oster and others felt would ultimately result in Germany’s destruction: Oster’s purpose was not to destroy his country but to save it.
And in the end, while they could not save their nation, they did ensure that, as Germany sought to find itself again, it could cling to a spirit of goodness and purity: a resistance, an opposition, a White Rose.
As Henning von Tresckow, a leading spirit in the movement to remove Hitler and the man who inspired Stauffenberg, said, “We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Compared with this, nothing else matters.”