In October 1944, Heidi Brendler spent her energy going from day to day and trying to deal with the helotry of her life. It had been three months since she had been involved in an underground mission. Although willing, deep down she was grateful Landis Koller seemed to be ignoring her. And in reality, he was ignoring her. Since the execution of Max, he had felt the need to shield her from the obscenity of war and the possibility of capture, torture and execution.
Germany was being bombed daily. Leipzig somehow avoided the bombardment, though the ball bearing plant took a minor hit causing some damage. The people moved and worked like a ghost community. They went through the motions of life, almost in a robotic way. One exception to this was Sarah Engel. She seemed to have a limitless supply of optimism and energy. In all of the degradation, she remained indefatigable.
When she moved to Leipzig, Heidi brought two books on ancient history and the Hebrew Torah. Many nights, she read her books by candle light, seeking answers to the cataclysm engulfing the Jewish people. Information from one of the books by Flavius Josephus illuminated a time in A.D. 70, not unlike her own, when one million Jews were killed or taken as slaves by the Romans. It was a dark time for the Hebrew people. They were cut off from the Temple just as she had been cut off from the Synagogue. The Jewish people of that day had lost nationhood. The extreme darkness Heidi was experiencing seemed to parallel the nadir of that time. She now believed the circumstances in Germany represented the judgment of God on her people. She felt abandoned. She determined that when God abandons a society, holiness disappears, wisdom evaporates, and love ceases to exist. This is what Germany looked like to Heidi in 1944.
The more she read, the more Heidi came to believe that the Creator of the Universe, the One the Hebrews called Yahweh, was sovereign in the world. She also believed Him to be just. But where was this justice in light of the expanse of human suffering she was witnessing? In Hebrew, the word ‘Satan’ literally meant adversary. She understood Satan to be God’s adversary. And yet it seemed the Lord was allowing his adversary to attack her people through a man who had once been only a down-and-out vagabond in Vienna. This man rose only to the rank of corporal in WWI. He was a derelict in post war Munich. This man, an Austrian, was now the German Fuehrer. And he personified a maniacal hatred of Jews.
Since the time of her ancient forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the pattern had repeated itself. God had guided and protected her people as long as they were faithful to worship Him and Him alone. When they abandoned their worship of Him, He abandoned them. The ancient text was clear. The Lord had made unconditional promises to the patriarchs. Abraham had traveled to the land of Canaan, and there, God had promised to make him and his descendants a ‘great nation’ and to give them the land. But Palestine, the land of the promise, was now in Arab hands, and the Hebrews were being slaughtered by the millions.
Heidi believed the promises and concluded that the abandonment was temporary. She continued to worship the Lord her God as a sovereign and just God, true to all that He had promised. Except for Sarah she was alone in Germany. She was anonymous. Her survival depended on it.
* * *
After the shameful forced suicide of Field Marshal Rommel, all semblance of nobility in the German military was lost. The officers who were not involved in the assassination plot were forced to stand by while their comrades were hauled before the farcical trials in the People’s Court. This was possible because Hitler created a so-called ‘Court of Honor’ where all Army officers thought to be involved in the plot were expelled from the military so they could not receive a court martial. The Court of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer in his own defense. The only evidence presented came from the Gestapo. The presiding generals of this court included Field Marshal von Rundstedt, who had been relieved of several commands, and General Guderian, the renowned Panzer tank commander. Together they turned over several hundred of their comrades to certain execution after drumming them out of the Army.
The general staff, as a meaningful entity, had come to an end. The men who had stood by while Hitler murdered his colleague Ernst Rohm in 1934, who stood by while Nazi policy murdered thousands of disadvantaged children and millions of Jews, who stood by while Germans ignored the rules of the Geneva Convention and committed countless war crimes, were now just as guilty of the crimes as if they had ordered them. With the execution of their colleagues, there was no more opposition to Hitler. Many of these generals knew the evil of the man before whom they groveled. In the final stages of the war, General Guderian made this observation of the Fuehrer:
“In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him: it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.”
The last meaningful effort to rid the world of the Austrian Corporal turned Supreme Commander failed by a simple act which was of ominous significance. Colonel Stauffenberg had placed the powerful bomb three feet from Hitler and exited the room with four minutes to detonation. In the next two minutes Colonel Brandt, who was sitting next to Stauffenberg, stood to get a better view of the maps on the heavy oak table. As he did, the briefcase containing the bomb was in his way, making it difficult for him to stand. It was then that he reached down and moved the briefcase to the outside of the oak table support. It was this support that took the brunt of the massive explosion and shielded Hitler from its force, saving his life.
Sadly, even at this time, the majority of the German people still believed that Adolph Hitler might lead them to victory, so complete was his hold over the German mind and soul.