A SUMMING UP
OSKAR KUSCH JOINED approximately 33,000 other German soldiers and sailors who were executed by their own side out of about 50,000 men condemned to die by formal and informal German military courts—a stark and frightful measure of the totalitarian character and ideological infiltration of Germany’s military justice system in World War II. While many were sent to their death for “subverting the military spirit,” others had been found guilty of desertion, treason, cowardice, and an assortment of other infractions. Only the Soviet regime in its Great Patriotic War trumped this German brutality, with about 158,000 executions of its own men for desertion alone.1 By contrast, the United States executed 146 of its soldiers in World War II, France 102, and Great Britain 40. The corresponding numbers for World War I are especially startling: Germany executed 48 of its military personnel between 1914 and 1918, the United States 35, Britain 346, and France about 650. As the compiler of these statistics notes, “rather than representing an enclave of resistance, the German military justice system … functioned as a willing and cooperative partner of the regime, demonstrating its loyalty by adopting Nazi views and imposing the death penalty with a relentless vigor fully in line with Hitler’s draconian strictures.”2
Kusch became a tragic victim of this system. His family background, his schooling, his intellectual quests and artistic inclinations, his formative experiences in the bündisch youth movement, as well as his character, temperament and sense of humanity, his integrity and conscience, placed him on a predictable collision course with the Nazi regime. He would maintain this dedication to the ideals of his adolescent years unwaveringly into the last hours of his life. Well into World War II, the inherited ethos of the Kriegsmarine’s officer corps, and especially the camaraderie among U-boat men regardless of rank, offered a safe refuge and haven for political dissidents like Kusch and shielded them against the ever-expanding grasp of the regime in its drive for absolute totalitarian domination. It would have been inconceivable for a Werner Winter, a Gerhard Bielig, an Erich Topp, a Gustav-Adolf Janssen, a Wilhelm Franken, or even the two young midshipmen on U-154’s first patrol under Kusch, let alone any of his enlisted men, to turn a worthy human being and exemplary U-boat officer over to the authorities for embracing persuasions that ran counter to official ideology.
Sadly, Kusch failed to realize that this protective cocoon of service traditions, plain human decency, and forgiveness for minor signs of ideological differences as long as they did not affect the basic bonds of camaraderie or the military effort, kept thinning out by the fourth and fifth years of the war. The caliber, educational breadth, and value-forming opportunities of junior naval officers decreased due to Germany’s political and cultural isolation while their politicization and ideological indoctrination grew. They missed the moderating palliative of travel abroad, contact with and appreciation for other cultures, and guidance by pre-Hitlerian role models the way Kusch and naval officers of older Crews had enjoyed them. Kurt Druschel, as a former Hitler Youth leader, is just as typical an example in this regard as Ulrich Abel and Arno Funke are as longtime Nazi party members. Indeed, the case of Oskar Kusch suggests that the greater use and therefore heightened presence and influence of reserve officers in the later phases of the conflict deserve more scholarly attention than has been the case in the past when the focus had been almost exclusively on regular active-duty officers.
Several analysts have characterized Kusch primarily as an artist, an aesthete, a reality-defying dreamer stuck in youthful fantasies and ideals, a naïve romantic equally blind to the demands of a career as a professional naval officer as to the dangers of political dissent in a wartime and totalitarian context. Therefore, such critics would claim, his experiences added up to a special and solitary case and cannot lend themselves, pars pro toto, to any broad generalizations about Germany’s naval officer corps under Hitler. From the perspective of these critics, Kusch should never have become an officer in the first place. The present study has proved otherwise, or at the very least has shown that Kusch personified a vision of a better, richly cosmopolitan, free, and tolerant German society and culture, while simultaneously performing his duties as a naval officer and U-boat commander with exemplary competence, circumspection, and enviable leadership abilities. It was exactly this extraordinary mental and professional skill set, which Kusch already demonstrated as a watch officer under Winter and Janssen and was highly valued by them, and which was later praised by men like Janker, Isensee, and Lüdmann on U-154, that placed Kusch above and beyond the automatons in uniform who populated so many ranks of the Kriegsmarine at the time. The latter served Germany bravely enough as typical soldiers, but lacked Kusch’s imagination, erudition, honesty, and civil courage.
Robert F. Kennedy likely never heard of Oskar Kusch, but he must have had nonconformists like him in mind when he declared in 1966: “Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”3 Kusch, too, wished to enlighten his bleak and darkening world one convert at a time, even if Abel, Druschel, and Funke proved predictably immune and vengefully hostile to his advances. For them, any criticism of the Nazi regime, attacks on Hitler’s person and decisions, and doubt about a miraculous final victory of German arms and German ways, amounted to defeatism rather than a triumph of common sense. In their eyes, only would-be traitors and cowards would dwell on Allied superiority in numbers, equipment, and leadership—daily and scary reminders to the contrary out at sea and in the skies above them notwithstanding. For these soldiers, honor, duty, patriotic fervor, and strict military discipline remained central demands and included prominently the equation of defense of country with loyalty to the regime.
Kusch performed his military duties conscientiously even though he had lost all faith in a German victory and had never embraced Hitler’s war aims. When he returned to Lorient from Zürs in January 1944, he was fully prepared to take U-154 out to sea again in the face of forbidding odds. As many other Germans did, Kusch imagined, hoped for, and would have joyfully joined a coup d’état carried out by the Wehrmacht’s top military leaders to topple and remove Hitler and his brown columns, to terminate Europe’s latest orgy of self-destruction, to rescue German honor by ending atrocities committed against Jews and others based on racial hubris, and to help create a postwar European and world order predicated on the values of his youthful convictions and experiences. In all this he could not count on the least assistance and inspiration from Germany’s top naval leaders. Traumatized by the memory of the World War I naval mutinies, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his closest subordinates and associates had sold their souls to the Nazis unconditionally, saw their own fate and future linked to the survival of the regime, and while generally not implicated in outright crimes against non-Germans, became willing accomplices in keeping the Nazi authorities in control by eliminating dissenters such as Kusch. Following the inner logic and questionable rewards of this variety of Nibelungen loyalty, Hitler chose Dönitz as his successor as Germany’s head of state and government so that the latter could finally surrender what little remained of Germany’s forces—a step the dictator had cowardly postponed beyond all military reason to add a few more days to his wretched life.
Many contributed to Oskar Kusch’s tragic death through deliberate actions or by failing to act when they could have, and they did so for a range of reasons, considerations, and excuses. No one can deny that Ulrich Abel triggered his commanding officer’s plunge into the abyss. Without Abel’s cleverly launched and carefully timed report—whether it grew from personal enmity, envy, humiliation, revenge, ideological ardor, or any number of other motives or a combination of them, is ultimately immaterial—Kusch would at the very least have taken U-154 out on another patrol. His survival chances would have been grim, as Abel’s own fate and that of Kurt Druschel would demonstrate. In fact, of some 42,000 sailors who served at one time or another on German submarines between 1939 and 1945, at least 28,748 perished, more than half in and after 1943, and another 5,000 were captured, amounting to a casualty rate unequalled in any other service branch.4 Abel has been rightly singled out for knowingly turning Kusch over to a politically corrupt and ideologically obsequious naval justice apparatus. In doing so he violated cherished traditions of the German naval officer corps and betrayed comradely trust. Still, it must be remembered in fairness to Abel that his report called only for Kusch’s removal as commanding officer, not for his incarceration or death, and it was not certain the report would indeed bring on an elaborate trial rather than quiet and inconspicuous reassignment for Kusch. On the other hand, once Kusch had been assigned the death penalty, Abel chose not to approach the court or anyone else in the naval or judicial hierarchy to plead for clemency for his former skipper on the grounds that Kusch’s execution had never been his goal or intention. Thus, the suspicion lingers that personal and political considerations, as well as Abel’s grave and pessimistic apprehensions about Germany’s military misfortunes, were foremost on his mind when he composed and submitted his report.
Kurt Druschel’s culpability is somewhat more challenging to assess. As the junior-most member of the officer group opposed to Kusch, the engineer took his cue from the considerably older, less excitable, and more experienced Abel. Druschel’s was a wilder and more easily piqued temperament, as shown in his willingness to employ physical force against his commanding officer if necessary and in his preparedness to drive the hotel room episode in Zürs to an irresponsible climax. As a prominent product of the Hitler Youth, Druschel held a worldview and had experiences as a child and adolescent that could not have been further apart from Kusch’s. The engineer had matured professionally by the time of the second mission, but his ideological convictions and his faith in final victory remained as set as they had been when he first came on board. His initial deposition and subsequent court testimony revealed not one gram of sympathy for his commanding officer and instead showed outright contempt for a man so openly and often abrasively critical of Druschel’s idol. Indeed, Kusch’s removal of the Hitler picture and his accompanying comments must have filled Druschel with fierce rage. To his credit, Druschel did honor the promises he had given Dr. Nothdurft out in the Atlantic and again at Zürs not to report his captain, and he seemed genuinely surprised, but far from bitter or concerned, when he learned of Abel’s action. The fact that Druschel was a regular officer with at least some immersion into corps traditions at the naval academy and subsequently, and not a reservist such as Abel or Funke, appears to have acted as a further brake on extreme measures on his part.
Reserve Lieutenant Arno Funke’s culpability in the Kusch tragedy appears lighter than Abel’s and Druschel’s. He only came on board for the second patrol and did not initiate any direct action against his commanding officer. His disagreement with Kusch as to when and how to attack the TJ convoy appears to have reflected genuine nautical alternatives rather than an ideologically or personality-driven confrontation. Funke, in his pretrial deposition to Dr. Breinig, did verify many of Abel’s allegations, but was careful to distinguish between what he had witnessed himself and what had reached him as hearsay. Not personally present at the court-martial at Kiel or at the postwar Hagemann trials, but clearly a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, Funke has remained a shadowy figure in the background, driven more by notions of self-preservation than by a desire or temptation to thrust another knife into Kusch’s back.
A highly controversial and elusive figure in the Kusch drama was Dr. Hans Nothdurft, primarily because he acted inconsistently and changed his numerous accounts as a nonexpert witness on U-154 several times over the span of fifty years. Moreover, most of his obviously exaggerated and at least in part self-serving contentions lost any chance of being verified, corroborated, corrected, or dismissed by other witnesses on board once Abel and Druschel and so many other men who had served on U-154 under Kusch had died. In the end, Nothdurft’s oscillation between “good cop” and “bad cop” fell far short of shielding Kusch from his fate and contributed vastly to Hagemann’s acquittal after the war in allowing the naval justice official’s lawyers to invent a whole range of military shortfalls on Kusch’s part that had played not the slightest role in the justification for the initial verdict. Hagemann could not have found a more fortuitous and elaborate witness accusing Kusch of all sorts of mental afflictions and plans for desertion, sabotage, and worse military crimes and thus vindicating the original sentence. Further, Nothdurft’s contentions also cast belated doubt on the entirely political nature of the proceedings in Kiel, thereby assuring Hagemann’s acquittal for “lack of evidence” for having acted inhumanely and delaying Kusch’s rehabilitation for fifty years after the war. Why the medical doctor did so, and who besides himself could have benefitted from his shifting testimony, remain mysterious and troubling questions to this day.
Judge Karl-Heinrich Hagemann foremost, but also the two military jurors Wolfgang Dittmers and Otto Westphalen at his trial, bear the most immediate responsibility for Kusch’s death. Exceeding by far the prosecution’s recommendation of ten years in jail, interpreting without factual basis Kusch’s opposition to the regime as a severe military transgression on the dubious basis of an inhumane totalitarian decree, allowing major logical gaps in the formal justification for the verdict to persist unexamined, unexplained, and uncorrected, and, above all, by making a mockery of the supposedly ideological independence of the naval justice system, these three men headed a procession of fellow conspirators and colluders, spineless naval brass, assorted opportunistic underlings, and a coterie of cowardly hangers-on down the path to a judicial murder. While Hagemann’s motive for Kusch’s removal appears to have been primarily ideological and secondarily grounded in an antipathy to the social and intellectual circles in which Kusch and his friends moved and to the fashionable lifestyles attributed to them, Dittmers and Westphalen deliberately harmed and betrayed a fellow officer and comrade. They did so, not based on his having committed a specific military misdeed, but on the vague and unproven suspicion that his political outspokenness simply must have created chaos on his boat when, in actuality, no such conditions materialized. The behavior and utterances of both officers also betrayed at least a latent subscription to National Socialist ideas and ideals. Once Hagemann had been acquitted, legal proceedings against Dittmers and Westphalen lost any prospect of success.
Kusch’s immediate superiors, Ernst Kals and Hans-Rudolf Rösing, had two opportunities to prevent the worst but chose not to grasp them. Together, they could have delayed, deflected, or even cancelled Dr. Breinig’s investigation in France by pointing to the irregular nature and submission of Abel’s report. As Gerichtsherr, Rösing clearly had the power to call off court-martial proceedings against one of his better U-boat captains, but to do so was not within the range of his courage or imagination. Then, when the file containing Kusch’s death sentence recommendation reached Rösing’s desk for review two weeks later, he threw away his chance to speak up for leniency and instead endorsed the court’s decision after a most cursory review, in the process chiding Breinig implicitly for the latter’s recommendation of a “mere” jail sentence. Had Kals and Rösing expressed reservations about the appropriateness of the verdict and how it had materialized, and characterized Kusch as the popular and successful skipper that he was, Grand Admiral Dönitz and his legal advisers might have likewise viewed Kusch less as a supposedly war-weary defeatist with anti-Nazi persuasions and more as the victim of a conspiracy among his officers grown from personal and political animosities.
Even though Ernst Meinert only oversaw Kusch’s incarceration and eventual execution, through his countless chicaneries against Kusch, his relatives, and friends he tipped and tilted the scales further against the U-boat captain by forwarding to Dönitz and his staff in Berlin copies of Kusch’s private correspondence. For Meinert, the simple act of communicating with someone sentenced to death for subversion suggested complicity in the same crime, revealed the same opposition to the regime, and deserved to be exposed and punished. By the same logic, receiving a letter, any kind of letter, from Kusch out of his jail cell in Kiel placed the recipient in jeopardy of being identified as someone in sympathy with Kusch’s views and actions. Clearly Meinert wished to convey to Berlin that Kusch had not changed his attitudes, that he was indeed politically guilty as charged, and that any thought of leniency or clemency was woefully misplaced. Guilt by association, after all, had always been a popular instrument in the Nazi arsenal of terror.
That leaves Karl Dönitz and his legal staff in Berlin as the ultimate arbiter and decider of Kusch’s fate, since everyone knew Reich Marshal Göring’s confirmation of the sentence, whether left unchanged or modified, would amount to a mere formality. Despite Dr. Rudolphi’s later denial or equivocation, all available evidence indicates that he, Dönitz, and Admiral Warzecha did indeed weigh the matter for some time and with deliberation. Kusch’s friends Werner Winter and Gustav-Adolf Janssen had sensed from the moment they learned of Hagemann’s verdict that ultimately only Dönitz was in a position to reverse it. Bypassing the timid Kals and hostile Rösing, they knew instinctively that the grand admiral was their only hope. They became immediately active, in Janssen’s case spectacularly so, and were well placed for success: Winter had been one of Dönitz’s original converts for service in the revived U-boat arm and Janssen had been the grand admiral’s aide-de-camp before taking command of U-103. In short, the proven, battle-tested active officers who knew Kusch best and appreciated him for who he was tried everything to save their comrade’s life. At the same time, Rudolphi felt he had to defend Hagemann’s verdict to save face and demonstrate the “integrity” and “independence” of the naval justice system, besides demonstrating loyalty to the political regime. It is not unimaginable that Dönitz did indeed ponder these conflicting influences and perspectives during the ten days or so that Kusch’s file was in his hands. But why did he, in the end, side with the bureaucrats and not with “his” U-boat men despite his promise to Janssen to hear from Kusch personally in the matter?
Dönitz’s postwar argument that he had to set down an example in Kusch’s case to maintain discipline and uphold the will to fight in the U-boat arm carries all the persuasive power of an ex post facto made-up excuse for an irreversible personal mistake or misdeed. The grand admiral visited his U-boats and their crews with regularity and knew first-hand that discipline, in the French bases as elsewhere, remained extremely solid, if not exemplary, to the very end—just as had been the case in World War I. There was no fear that the events of 1918 in the Kaiser’s surface fleet could somehow play themselves out again in 1944 or 1945 in the submarine service. Lack of discipline had not been a problem aboard U-154 and constituted the rarest of grievances throughout the U-boat force. How Kusch’s execution could have resolved a nonexistent breakdown in discipline remains a question and mystery Dönitz would take to his grave. Moreover, to have any deterrent effect at all, it seems logical that reports of Kusch’s execution should have been distributed widely throughout the navy. But nothing of the kind was done. Most surviving former Kriegsmarine and U-boat personnel learned of Kusch’s fate only in the 1990s.
Essentially the same argument applies to Dönitz’s claim that Kusch had to die because he was a defeatist and might infect those around him. It was true enough that Kusch no longer believed in a German victory by 1943, or in a stalemate, but in this conviction he was neither alone nor different from those who sat in judgment over him. Given Dönitz’s grim “will-to-victory” messages under the code word “Rose,” for example, and the frank admission of men like Hagemann, Breinig, and Meinert that they had lost faith in a German military triumph after the catastrophe at Stalingrad, it remains one of the more perfidious dimensions of the Kusch tragedy that he was condemned to die by men who themselves considered a victorious outcome of the war illusory by 1944, Dönitz included. Indeed, Kusch had never displayed and always consciously rejected any of the typical and traditional symptoms of defeatism such as sabotage, disengagement from the enemy, desertion, collaboration with the enemy, and treason. For Kusch, fulfilling his military obligations to the end had grown from a far stronger commitment to his men, his country, and his profession than that “certain sense of duty” Dr. Nothdurft had detected in U-154’s commanding officer in their animated conversations out in the Atlantic. Instead of publicizing Kusch’s fate throughout the Kriegsmarine as the just punishment for someone who had lost faith in the cause, Dönitz and his staff must rather have “feared” that news of Kusch’s execution would not occasion applause and approval within Germany’s naval officer corps, but would instead evoke incredulity, resentment, and the very erosion of the fighting spirit with which they had charged him. So much for Dönitz’s pious fable that getting rid of Oskar Kusch had amounted to a “difficult but necessary duty.” Kusch died as a consequence of his political convictions, not because of any military shortfalls or misdeeds.
The case of Oskar Kusch remains unique in the annals of German naval history, not least because of Abel’s role in the affair. Having three ardent and vengeful Nazis as subordinate officers amounted to an unlikely constellation even on a German submarine, just as the selection of Hagemann instead of Breinig as presiding judge and of Dittmers and Westphalen as jurors at the trial constituted imponderables impossible to foresee. Few officers anywhere in the German armed forces equaled Kusch’s moral courage of frankly speaking up and standing up for truth, integrity, and higher ideals in the face of ideological idiocy, obstinacy, and blind obedience to an evil regime.
And yet, Kusch was not atypical when it came to his societal background, education, sense of patriotism, and overall career experience. German naval officer Crews at least through 1937, including those of Gerhard Bielig or Gustav-Adolf Janssen for instance, drew their members from a highly educated segment of society that saw service in the navy at least in part as an escape from and an alternative to academic pursuits in an ideologically corrupted system of higher education in Germany. Later Crews, such as those of Kurt Druschel and Otto Westphalen, demonstrated a much higher affinity to Nazi concepts and behavioral norms in part because of their extended exposure to the Hitler Youth and a corresponding lack of experiences in more liberal and cosmopolitan organizations. The dire officer crunch by 1942 washed many reservists such as Abel and Funke into positions previously occupied exclusively by regular active-duty officers with their more independent and traditional sets of ethical norms. These newcomers often had roots in the Nazi-leaning merchant marine, held party membership, and resented the superior reputation and prestige of men like Kusch who had made the navy their career from the start. They often viewed themselves as guardians of ideological conformity and in that sense anticipated the use of NSFOs (National Socialist Guidance Officers) in the last phase of the war.
As a proud and highly competent U-boat officer and captain even after the “Happy Times” had ended in mid-1942, Kusch exemplified both the esprit de corps and some of the elitist exclusivity of that service branch. On pictures taken at the time he wore his cap with its distinctive white cover proudly at a rakish angle, sported the ubiquitous beard popular among submariners returning from their missions, and could very well have convinced himself that frank political talk and criticism of the regime would necessarily be protected by time-honored shipboard camraderie and confidentiality or, if somehow reported to superiors, weighed little in comparison to his professional accomplishments and the personnel needs of the U-boat arm.
Kusch’s trust in such traditions was fully justified when it came to the enlisted men serving under him. They understood their captain instinctively, chuckled about his eccentricities, applauded his leadership and concern for them, and rewarded him with excellent performance, loyalty, and support to the end and beyond. It was other officers—heavily politicized ones like Abel, Druschel, Funke, and Westphalen, but also more seasoned and presumably more sympathetic men such as Dittmers, Kals, Rösing, von Friedeburg, and Dönitz—who dropped their support, colluded with the ideologically tainted naval justice bureaucracy, and sacrificed a worthy man even though Winter and Janssen told them in no uncertain terms they were making a terrible mistake. Some of them must have found Abel’s case persuasive, even if the death penalty seemed inappropriate. Some, perhaps unduly bothered and embarrassed, withdrew behind a screen of indifference and opportunism. Others feared a similar fate as Kusch and elevated self-preservation over comradely responsibility. Dr. Nothdurft, even though only on loan to the Kriegsmarine, would be fairly representative of this category.
Collectively, the behavior and decisions of these men stand in stark contrast to the still widespread myth that the U-boat service constituted a Nelsonian band of brothers, forever loyal to each other, to their leader, and to their mission. If not yet in the beginning, by 1943 and 1944 this mythical community, if it ever really existed, showed serious cracks, limitations, and growing incoherence. The ever-deepening totalitarian character and pressure of the regime, along with the quickly deteriorating military situation, were dissolving old bonds of trust, honor, and dignity and replacing them with the false notion that responsible patriotic service required loyalty to the Nazi regime even if it had its brutal and indecent sides. Dönitz fell for this false equation easily and willingly enough, as did Abel, Druschel, and their friends. For Kusch it always constituted a pact with the devil that no decent, thinking, feeling human being could possibly honor.
In remarkable detail, Kusch’s case and tragic fate have also laid to rest the widely circulating notion that the naval justice system under Hitler was somehow independent in its decisions and immune to political guidance from above, that blue and brown could never mix. No such integrity ever existed or could possibly prevail in a system lacking an independent process of appeal and review, or in its adherence to laws and decrees whose inhumane and totalitarian nature should have been plain to any practitioner of the legal profession at the time. The very possibility and sometimes outright demand for party membership among justice officials in a one-party state rips apart the veneer and illusion of an independently operating judicial branch. In reality, collusion among officials, ideological instructions from Berlin, and draconian sentencing guidelines—to isolate just three major problems—transformed the naval judicial service into a convenient tool to silence or remove political opponents, quite apart from its massive and unsavory postwar coverup. Karl-Heinrich Hagemann’s proceedings at the Villa Forsteck in Kiel may have employed subtler means of injustice and observed more traditional decorum than Roland Freisler’s notorious People’s Tribunal where the accused suffered outright insults along with other psychological and physical indignities; still, in the end Oskar Kusch was just as dead as the victims of Freisler’s special court in Berlin.
A particularly troubling dimension of the case is how long it took to rehabilitate Kusch after 1945. In this regard, the collective obstructionism of former naval justice officials, the eagerness of the Allies to return to German courts as soon as possible the responsibility for handling transgressions of Germans against Germans, the early end to denazification after a rather perfunctory effort, and the reluctance of large segments of German society to engage in meaningful Vergangenheitsbewältigung before the 1960s and 1970s, account for much of the delay. Even the remilitarization of the two German states in the context of the Cold War, with its vetting of candidates applying for reenlistment, did little to revisit and confront problematic decisions and traditions of the past. The novel concept of the “citizen in uniform,” so applicable to Kusch’s life and legacy, seemed difficult to teach and even more challenging to live out in a society with shallow democratic experiences and reluctantly embraced liberal values. Only a generational change and a set of uncommonly courageous and conscientious historians at last brought relief.
Some analysts, Heinrich Walle in particular, have raised the issue of whether, how, and to what extent Oskar Kusch could and should be classified as part of the broader resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazis. Certainly, his persuasions, utterances, and to some degree even his actions, such as removing the Hitler portrait, constituted a deliberate, tangible, and courageous turning against the Nazi state, its ideology, and its symbols, even if Kusch never formally joined an identifiable group of individuals planning a violent overthrow of the Third Reich. Kusch’s opposition stopped short of outright resistance, sabotage, and counteractions and thus must be located somewhere between passive rejection of the regime and a proactive willingness to start an open rebellion to bring about its demise, just as his circle of friends around Rudi Pallas, Dieter Berger, Kurt Wiemer, as well as Inge von Foris and her family, seemed ready to support a coup by the top military leadership but hesitated to initiate an uprising for a variety of plausible concerns and considerations. As far as is known, no contacts or communications linked Kusch’s cluster of friends to the men behind the July 20, 1944, conspiracy to kill Hitler.
A perhaps more meaningful way of weighing and assessing Kusch’s legacy would be to ask: What can the postwar world in general and today’s German officer corps in particular take away from Kusch’s example and the details and knowledge of his fate? How does one balance patriotic duty as a soldier in a democratic state with the demand that carrying out orders and engaging in military actions should be accompanied and tempered by an ever-active and well-trained conscience? Does Oskar Kusch’s legacy not invite every soldier for all times to come to ask: Are my actions ethical and right? Am I a good comrade? Is my behavior in line with the highest principles of a free and tolerant society? Are the orders I am carrying out just and compatible with the lessons learned from that terrible struggle against totalitarian regimes in the 1930s, 1940s, and others since?
Germany would sorely miss men of Oskar Kusch’s character and caliber, along with other victims of German-on-German violence and brutality, as the country rebuilt its state and society after the war and sought to step away from its bouts of national hubris and entanglements with inhumane, criminal totalitarianism. Had Kusch survived, one pictures him with Inge von Foris and their friends cleaning up and reconstituting Berlin’s cultural scene. Perhaps Oskar Kusch would have become an artist, a writer, an academic, a social critic, or even a politician. He had it all in him. Or he might have ended up more like Rudi Pallas, never really recovering his bearings after the horrors of the war experience and long incarceration, full of frustration that so little could be changed, that so many former followers of the brown regime remained in office and good standing, and that fundamentally the ideals of their youth remained as elusive as ever. These and other thoughts tease our imagination a full century after Kusch’s birth.