Non-Aggression Pact, and despite being energetically pursued by Hitler’s secret state police, the Gestapo, the German communist underground network would turn to sabotaging the war effort and spying, not least through the great Russian wartime spy network which operated throughout occupied Europe, nicknamed by Himmler’s security structures die Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra).*
What was left of Hitler’s political opposition went underground. Among the German resistance’s early supporters were numerous activists in the social democrat cause and many in the trade union movement.
Opposition to Hitler was not confined to the workers. Although some German industrialists and financiers, such as Alfred Krupp, found good commercial reasons to support Hitler, a number of others, like the great engineering industrialist Robert Bosch in Stuttgart, courageously provided active succour to the opposition.
With the communists, liberals and social democrats forced underground, it was left to some elements of the German Church to nurture popular opposition to National Socialism. The Barmen synod of May 1934 in Wuppertal brought together Lutherans who openly condemned the materialism and ungodliness of National Socialism, attracting tens of thousands from all over Germany to an open-air demonstration at which they voiced their opposition to what was happening. In the St Annen-Kirche in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, the middle class thronged to hear ‘the fighting pastor’ Martin Niemöller preach his incendiary sermons against all the Nazis stood for. In southern German cities like Nuremberg, Stuttgart and Munich, Christians marched in the streets in support of Lutheran bishop Theophil Wurm and his colleague Hans Meiser, bishop of Munich, both of whom had been placed under house arrest for inciting public disturbance. An anti-Nazi tract written by Helmut Kern, a Lutheran pastor from Nuremberg, sold 750,000 copies in short order – the highest circulation for a religious tract since those of Luther himself.
Hitler, despite his by-now unchallenged dominion over the instruments of the German state, shrank from open warfare with the mass ranks of the German Churches, Protestant and Catholic. But he tried every other means to suppress the dissent. Niemöller was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, from which he did not emerge until the war was over. Troublesome pastors were conscripted en masse into the army, the Church’s work with the young was curtailed, teaching permits were withheld for those lecturing in theology at German universities, and permission was refused for the publication of all pamphlets except those acceptable to the Nazi regime. Hitler’s supporters even managed to infiltrate the Church elections of July 1933 to such an extent that he was able to enforce the anti-Semitic ‘Aryan Law’, removing all pastors who were ‘tainted’ by descent from Jewish or half-Jewish forebears.
On 14 March 1937, Pope Pius XI issued a powerful encyclical attacking the new wave of ‘heathenism’ in such strong terms that it became a call to arms against the Nazis. What followed was an open and violent counterattack on the monasteries, led by Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels. In a purge reminiscent of Henry VIII, some were commandeered for military bases, others were banned from accepting new entrants or holding religious processions. Between 1933 and 1945 thousands of brave pastors and friars were to be found among the inmates of the concentration camps, where many of them lost their lives as martyrs for their beliefs.
Although Hitler was finally able to stem ‘the mischief-making of the Church’, religion and religious activists, including the great pastor, theologian and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer, played a huge part in providing the inspiration, moral underpinning and manpower for the anti-Hitler resistance.
Scattered amongst these organised and semi-organised structures of the German resistance were a number of individuals who, as the excesses and horrors of Nazism became more and more evident, started to wage their own private and lonely struggles against the Nazi state. Among these were the Württemberg carpenter Georg Elser, who, acting entirely alone, missed assassinating Hitler with a bomb by a hair’s breadth because of fog at Munich airport; Otto and Elise Hampel, who distributed over two hundred anti-Hitler messages around Berlin and died under the guillotine as a result, and the students of the White Rose Circle who, led by their tutor, met the same fate for distributing pamphlets around Munich.
These remarkable individuals – Auden’s ‘ironic points of light’ – ignited brief beacons of moral courage in the darkness. But they did not – could not – alter the course of the war.
As they, and many we do not know of, changed their stance from supporting Hitler to actively opposing him, others in the most senior echelons of the Nazi state were tracing similar paths towards their own individual epiphanies.
Chief among these were three men: a civilian who could have been chancellor in Hitler’s place; a general who many believed was destined to lead his armies; and the head of his foreign intelligence service.
* Literally ‘the Red Chapel’. In this usage the word ‘Kapelle’ is meant to indicate that it is a secret organisation. The translation of ‘Kapelle’ as ‘orchestra’ is capricious and confusing. ‘Ring’ would have been better.
1
Late-evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian windows of the dining room of the National Liberal Club in London. It fell on a damask tablecloth laid with silver and porcelain in a secluded alcove set slightly apart from the other tables. The wooden panels all around glowed a deep mahogany, and the air resonated with the low murmur of diners enjoying themselves, despite the stern gaze of William Gladstone’s twice-life-size statue at the far end of the room.
The six men at the alcove table were not cheerful. They were sombre, quiet-voiced, and listening carefully to one of their number, an imposing figure with boyish good looks, startling light-grey eyes, heavy eyebrows and a forceful personality. The fifty-two-year-old Carl Goerdeler was a serious man who was used to being taken seriously. Ex-lord mayor of the great German city of Leipzig, until recently a key official in the government of Adolf Hitler and a sometime candidate for chancellor of Germany, Goerdeler was a dinner guest whom it was easier to listen to than to converse with.
Born on 31 July 1884 in the west Prussian town of Schneidemuehl, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the son of a district judge, had been a brilliant student at school, a brilliant law graduate at Tübingen University, and by all accounts a brilliant practising lawyer before finding his metier as an economist and senior official in German local government. He soon proved a talented and effective administrator, whose grasp of economics, incorruptible personality and ability to charm were quickly recognised. In 1912, at the age of just twenty-eight, Goerdeler was unanimously elected as principal assistant (effectively deputy) to the mayor of the Rhenish town of Solingen in western Germany. His military service on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First World War ended with a period as the administrator of a large swathe of territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus which had been occupied by Germany under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918. Here he added a reputation for humanity and compassion to his other recognised virtues.
The Armistice in November 1918 changed everything for Goerdeler, and for Germany. Like most Germans, he felt that his country’s emasculation in the Versailles settlement inflicted a deep shame and injustice on his Fatherland. It was in these post-war years that Goerdeler the nationalist and patriot began to take form. The brutal amputation of Danzig from the ‘motherland’, in order to give newly-enlarged Poland a corridor to the sea, especially offended his sensitivities, both as a German and as a Prussian. He maintained a vocal opposition to this Versailles humiliation long after most other civil and military leaders had accepted the necessity to move on. This was as admirably fearless as it was tactically stupid. It was also an early example of a stubborn refusal to compromise when Goerdeler considered his cause just, which would become a leitmotif of his life until the very end.
By now Goerdeler’s political views had solidified. He was by upbringing a devout Lutheran, and by political conviction a conservative