An Honourable Defeat (15 page)

It is perfectly fair to accuse the British of blinkered and even pusillanimous thinking at this stage of the run-up to war. Chamberlain spent crucial periods in August 1938 and 1939 in Scotland grouse-shooting, and his Foreign Secretary (between the two periods in which the office was held by Eden), Lord Halifax, was niggardly in the discharge of his duty. Worse, on a personal level, Halifax had been at Eton with Vansittart, and was envious of the latter, who had been a member of Pop and Captain of the Oppidans. Eden was anti-Semitic and sympathetic to Hitler. He suppressed reports from Germany to the prime minister, and regarded the representations of the Resistance with an undue degree of suspicion. Chamberlain, a former mayor of Birmingham, was sadly out of his depth as prime minister at such a time. His own remarks ‘if only we could get on terms with the Germans’ or ‘I confess some feeling of uneasiness and I don’t feel sure we ought not to do something’ may be compared with Hitler’s ‘I have given the command and I will shoot anyone who utters a word of criticism’ as a measure of how ill-matched the pair were.

Kleist was entrusted by Beck to give the British the specific message that failure to stand up to Hitler over Czechoslovakia would result in war. This was not even followed up properly. That there is no excuse is borne out by the fact that British agents in place in Germany from the mid-thirties (including one who held the highest rank in British Intelligence after the war) were consistently sending information home confirming Hitler’s warlike intentions. Some still privately express their anger at Chamberlain today.

On the other hand one must remember that Britain was still at the tail-end of its world superiority, and to a certain extent its leaders were living in the past. Even Churchill expressed admiration for Hitler as late as 1937, and no one would take the representations of the Resistance regarding Hitler’s ambitions seriously. At the same time Chamberlain was nervous of taking a belligerent stance because his traditional Allies showed no sign of supporting him if push came to shove. In May 1937 the USA passed the Neutrality Act, divesting itself of the traditional rights of a neutral to trade with a belligerent (Sweden made a killing out of its iron-ore trade with Germany during the war). This was a heavy blow to Britain and France, because it made the purchase of American military equipment in peacetime of questionable value, since supplies could not then be assured in war. At the same time, Commonwealth prime ministers stated that they could not support a European war. Mackenzie King refused to have Canada made the long-stop arsenal for British rearmament, Robert Menzies indicated that tensions in the Far East would make it impossible for Australia to participate in a European war (though doubtless Gallipoli was still fresh in his memory), and in South Africa, General Hertzog said that a central European land war could not be the concern of his country. Above all, there was the spectre of the First World War. Barely twenty years had passed since that monumental, pointless slaughter, and the political and emotional scars it had left were still fresh. Ultimately no one can wholly blame Chamberlain for the worse carnage to come .
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Having said all that, one must also remember in fairness that Eden did pay close attention to an early report by his friend Nigel Law on Nazi oppression in 1936, that later on he seems genuinely to have been waiting for the German Resistance to ‘put its money where its mouth was’ before proffering help, and that even Sir Nevile Henderson, described by Colvin as having ‘the most calamitous personality of all time’, relented from his admiration of Hitler and the Nuremberg rallies for long enough in August 1938 to mention in a dispatch (Number 647) that ‘I believe that if we saw any utility in war, now would be the time to make it, rather than later’.

But, whatever signals Chamberlain received, and despite the efforts of a series of Resistance emissaries and the Resistance man at the German Embassy in London, Theo Kordt, his decision was peace at all costs. The late summer and autumn of 1938 present a depressing picture of the British prime minister travelling across to Germany almost, as it were, at Hitler’s beck and call, and, even less sympathetically, prepared to sell Czechoslovakia down the river and be an accessory to Hitler’s illegal rape of that country if only he could buy the dictator off by such means. Despite the mobilisation of the British Fleet at the end of September at the behest of Sir Alfred Duff Cooper (who subsequently resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty in disgust at Chamberlain’s appeasement policy), and despite an ultimatum issued to Germany (though couched in the most circumspect of terms) on 10 September, Chamberlain continued to spike his own guns by placating Hitler. With what contempt must the dictator have entertained the overtures of this man. His own nickname for the British prime minister was ‘The Arsehole’. But Chamberlain continued to see himself as the man who might pull Europe back from the very brink. He knew that Hitler was mad; he knew what a disaster a fresh world war would mean. He knew that the mobilisation of the Fleet had made Hitler hesitate. He was blind only to his own limitations.

Chamberlain concocted his own secret plan, known as Plan Z, in which he featured as ‘Mr X’. By its terms he would sort out the Sudeten crisis with Hitler personally. In pursuit of it, and flying in the face of urgent appeals from the German anti-Hitler faction in their Foreign Office, from no less an authority than Ernst von Weizsäcker via the eminent Swiss High Commissioner for Danzig, Carl Burckhardt, Neville Chamberlain went to Berchtesgaden to see Hitler on 15 September. This was a blow in the face for the Resistance, poised as they were to bring the dictator down. At the meeting, Chamberlain, who had brought no interpreter of his own, was not even allowed a record of his conversation with the Führer because Ribbentrop, who had been excluded from it and was in a fury as a result, refused permission for him to be given one. Chamberlain swallowed this humiliation and trusted his memory when he gave his report to the Cabinet in London on the following day. He advocated letting Hitler have his way over the Sudetenland, adding that he believed this would satisfy the Führer’s territorial ambitions. Less than a week later, having finished consultations with the British parliament and with the French, the prime minister was back in Germany ready to grant the peaceful cession of the Sudetenland, only to find that the dictator had raised the stakes. Hitler now insisted on a military occupation and the evacuation of Czech dwellers in the Sudetenland. This should begin immediately and be completed by 28 September. Otherwise, he said, he would declare war on Czechoslovakia on 1 October.

This demand was unacceptable to the French who said so immediately and mobilised fourteen divisions. Hitler continued to brazen it out. The unit primed to storm the Chancellery and arrest him stood on red alert. On 27 September Hitler ordered a march past of armoured divisions in Berlin. To his fury it met with an apathetic reaction from the populace. ‘With people like this, I cannot go to war,’ he said, sullenly. But he stood by his bluff. He knew that Chamberlain was a broken reed; at that moment the British prime minister was his best ally. The mobilisation of the British Fleet made him hesitate, but the action was undercut by yet another conciliatory note from Chamberlain suggesting that Hitler could ‘get all essentials without war and without delay’.

Matters were at breaking point. So sure were the conspirators that Hitler would brazen it out and go to war that even Brauchitsch had been persuaded to join them and give the necessary counter-orders the moment Hitler authorised the go-ahead for Operation Green. But meanwhile, and at the eleventh hour, Chamberlain had instructed the Ambassador in Rome, Lord Perth, to suggest to Mussolini that he might intercede with Hitler to avoid a final confrontation. Mussolini was ill-equipped and uneager to join his ally in a war of the dimensions likely to unfold, and picked up the cue with alacrity. Hitler was no less happy to seek an honourable settlement without bloodshed: the fourteen French divisions and the British Fleet had shaken him. The French were as keen as the British to avoid a fight, and a conference was hastily convened in Munich. At it, Hitler was not only able to retain the prestige he had very nearly lost, but he also scored another singular diplomatic triumph: the Sudetenland was his. Not a shot had been fired, the Czechs had been betrayed, and now the rest of their country, to which the German dictator referred contemptuously as ‘the rump’, was at his mercy, together with its renowned arms industry.

But apparently peace had been preserved. The Resistance looked on helplessly. Its chances of a coup had been shattered just hours before fulfilment, for even if Hitler had backed down, the resultant loss of standing might have been enough to destroy him. Now he was more triumphant than ever, and he would celebrate his victory, and demonstrate his contempt for everyone else, by a bloody stroke against the Jews which would wipe out any last illusions anyone might have entertained about his intentions or his morality.

Part Two – 1938-1944

Late one night in the war, a Berliner was making his way home during the blackout. Suddenly he heard a sharp voice behind him hiss: ‘Hands up or I shoot.’ He could see the barrel of a pistol glinting. Then the voice said: ‘OK — hand over your wallet and make it snappy.’ The Berliner breathed a huge sigh of relief. ‘Man, you gave me a shock,’ he said. ‘For a moment there I thought you were the police.’

Chapter Six – The End of Germany

On 10 October 1938, the Sudetenland became part of Greater Germany, and Czechoslovakia lost its mountain defences. Most of the Jews living in the area fled to the unoccupied provinces of Moravia and Bohemia. In Germany, Hitler turned his attention to those Jews who had been born in what had been Polish provinces of the former Russian Empire. These people, he decreed, would have to be expelled. Eighteen thousand of them were thrust towards the Polish frontier on the night of 27 October in a massive SS ‘action’. Before the reluctant Poles would accept them, they had to remain in misery in the no-man’s-land between the two countries, and many died.

The son of one of these Jewish families was a student in Paris at the time. When, on 6 November, he heard the news of what had happened, he went to the German Embassy in a rage, and shot and mortally wounded the German official who received him, the young Third Secretary, Ernst vom Rath.

Vom Rath was very far from being a Nazi, but that did not stop Hitler’s making a martyr out of him. There followed, on the night of 9 November, a nationwide attack on Jews, their property and their synagogues. George Ogilvie-Forbes, a British diplomat in Berlin who was also part of the anti-appeasement camp, reported to London that the German people seemed to have mortgaged their right to be part of the international community. The British consul at Frankfurt wrote:

It seems to me that mass sexual perversity may offer an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable attack. I am persuaded that, if the government of Germany depended on the suffrage of the people, those in power and responsible for these outrages would be swept away by a storm of indignation, if not put up against a wall and shot
.
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But how vigorous the mass of the population was by now, was another question. Two years earlier Nigel Law had reported to Anthony Eden from Berlin:

To return to the individual and the uncertainty which surrounded him. Night and day he feels himself spied upon. [He] anxiously looks behind the door before answering your question and then decides, after all, that it is wiser not to reply...People no longer read the papers: they are bored with the repetition of speeches and the accounts of parades. They contain no other news and, as someone said to me: ‘We have no information on which to base ideas of the future and it is wise and more pleasant not to think. The problems of each day are enough...’ To sum up, I found a depressed people without hope for the future and obsessed by fears
...
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Kristallnacht
as the Nazis called it — ‘the night of broken glass’ — stripped those Jews who had remained in Germany of any illusions about what would happen to them if the Nazis continued in power. Over 190 synagogues were smashed or burnt down, graveyards were desecrated. The action derived its name from the number of shop windows smashed. When it was all over, the Jews were accused of having provoked the attack and presented with a bill for the damage. While the German people cannot be excused from guilt for this atrocity, from the point of view of the story of the Resistance it has to be said that many hundreds of Jews found shelter and protection at the hands of German neighbours — Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses were especially courageous — and that
Kristallnacht
marked a turning point away from Nazism for many Germans who had wavered hitherto. The action was fomented and principally carried out by SS and SA groups, and one Brigade-leader wrote complainingly to Himmler that local anti-Semitic forces were ‘induced during the first few hours to start pogroms against the Jews, though it proved very difficult to persuade them’. In terms of the central Resistance group, Hjalmar Schacht made a public protest, saying that there was no place in the Reichsbank for anyone connected with such thuggery; and von Helldorf, who had been absent from Berlin at the time of the riots there, berated his police for their passivity. ‘To the dismay of all the Nazis,’ reports Gisevius, ‘he announced that if he had been present he would have ordered the police to shoot the rioters and looters. It was a remarkably courageous statement for a chief of police and high officer of the SA to make. Precisely because of Helldorf s position it was particularly dangerous for him to condemn the...Party line.’
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It is interesting that even this late it was still possible for prominent men to voice their opinions without disappearing into the concentration camps. Gisevius argues that if more such people had been less craven public opinion could still have been turned against the Nazis. He adds that ‘to the credit of the people it must be said that the overwhelming majority had no part in this hideous affair’. Naturally it will never be possible to establish the truth or otherwise of that statement, but it is reasonable to assume that most Germans did nothing for or against
Kristallnacht
. In the kind of society Germany had become, it was better to keep your head down if you wanted to survive. The German people were beginning to see the kind of man they had elected, and greeted with such enthusiasm, only six years earlier. But they were being swept along too fast to think of a revolution, and all opposition politicians were either dead, in prison or in exile. There were no popular rallying-points, and insidiously, like a cancer, the Gestapo was spreading its tentacles into every walk of life. The most horrifying truth about Nazi Germany is that a country can, at such a time, throw up more than enough people to support a vicious and oppressive regime quite voluntarily. ‘Say no,’ wrote Wolfgang Borchert, the greatest German anti-war poet of the Second World War. ‘Don’t play ball with them.’ But it was far easier to say yes, or to say nothing. Borchert was called up in 1940 and served two prison sentences as a result of a series of brushes with authority. While in prison he was badly mistreated. His health was broken, and he died in Basle in 1947, aged twenty-six.

For those in the Resistance — by which I mean men (and, due to the structure of society at the time, to a far lesser extent women) in official positions of authority and power — there remained the problem of basic loyalty. A man like Hans Oster was a rarity: he saw his duty as a Christian and as a citizen of the world, and once he had perceived it and was sure of its moral rectitude, he had no difficulty in pursuing the aims it set him. Though a more political creature, and more of a German nationalist, Carl Goerdeler had much in common with him. Beck, once on the road, would stick to it doggedly, having arrived at his course by a mixture of rationalism and
force
majeure
. Canaris, Gisevius, Helldorf and Schulenburg all found a way to square their Resistance to the regime with their consciences, their background and their upbringing — and these factors made it harder for some than for others. Some members of the Resistance could not help, by virtue of the posts they held, but work for the Reich while they simultaneously opposed it. Some were never clear cut about where they stood. Great generals like Guderian and Manstein never supported the Resistance but equally never betrayed it.

In addition to the loneliness and isolation membership of the Resistance brought in its train — quite apart from the sheer dan-ger — the traditional background of the conspirators made them acutely aware of the question of loyalty. The Resistance in France or Yugoslavia had clear goals and no doubt about the heroism and patriotism of its actions. In Germany, though there was a legal distinction between treason against the country (
Landesverrat
) and against the government (
Hochverrat
), Hitler had so identified himself with the country that despite his crimes those in authority under him who disagreed with him strongly enough to want him removed still found themselves in a moral and political quandary which we may find difficult to understand. They were also without a single central government in exile, or, as was the case in Italy, a monarchy, to which they could transfer loyalty. They had nothing to fall back on, and these were mostly men who supported the idea of an authoritarian government; men who saw in Hitler’s rule much to approve of.

The men of the Opposition were unanimous in attributing Germany’s decline to lack of leader-material and absence of desire for leadership. Beck’s study of Ludendorff was basically concerned with this problem, and Goerdeler’s favourite historical theme was the failure of political leadership in the Reich since the departure of Bismarck. Schulenburg joined the NSDAP [Nazi Party] because he believed ‘party politics’ to be the opposite of true political leadership, which he saw personified in Otto Strasser...[Goerdeler] decried democracy as ‘rule by the masses’, and went on to say that England [sic] was not a true democracy since her electoral system enabled a minority to appoint a government
.
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At the same time as considering the human inconsistency which pervaded attitudes to the Resistance, one must remember the historical context. The political outlook of the conspirators was outmoded: they had been disillusioned by the failure of democracy in the Weimar Republic, and their central concept was an authoritarian oligarchy for Germany, or at best a pyramid-style meritocracy. Had the Resistance succeeded in toppling Hitler, it is very unlikely that any of their theoretical schemes for government would have come to fruition. Traditional admiration of Britain’s constitutional monarchy still existed, but was tempered by memories of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Weimar. The American system seems to have been an unknown quantity, despite the association with the USA of such men as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and, more significantly, the part-American diplomat and aristocrat Adam von Trott zu Solz. The men of the Resistance were great theorisers, and they were children not only of their own time but of their parents’ time. Among the aristocrats in their ranks, and there were not a few, even the left-wing Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Claus von Stauffenberg desired a continuation of the old aristocracy as political leaders. Von der Schulenburg even looked the part, with his monocle and duelling scars. It is significant that the German politicians after 1945 came from the middle and working classes (on both sides of the East-West divide). Nazis and the old-fashioned German leadership that opposed them went down together.

In one sense it was very ironical that the main burden of Resistance fell on the Army, and not insignificant that most of the conspirators were drawn from the ranks of the intellectual General Staff. The Army’s tradition was always one of aloofness, and this continued during the early Nazi years in harmony with Prussian military history and aristocratic concepts of caste. We have seen that neither the Navy nor the Air Force were in the running, and in passing it may be added that the bulk of their officers were middle-class. The crack (and brand new as a military concept) paratroopers were attached to the Air Force and were supportive of the regime. As Hans Rothfels, one of the earliest and best commentators on the Resistance, comments: ‘Before 1914 [the Army’s aloofness] meant avoidance of interfering in public affairs, which in those days appeared “improper”.’ After 1919, it meant that the German Army formed a kind of state within a state and reserved its own policy. Under conditions created by the Nazi regime, however, the ‘hands off attitude ‘meant in practice the toleration of crime and murder by those who possessed the necessary force to prevent them...remaining aloof contradicted another highly honourable and aristocratic tradition, that of noblesse oblige and of a duty to protect the weak.’

In view of all this, it seems that officers who attended divine service in full uniform (and in large numbers) were making no more than a token and rather idle gesture against the regime, which they regarded as something beneath them. But one should not forget what a young and unstable country Germany was — and is. As a true unified democracy, it has only existed twice, from 1919 to 1932, and since 1990. The Germans have always been saddled with two national vices — love of uniforms and love of order, but they have a far worse — though related — one: insecurity.

To understand the notions of the generals it is necessary to look ahead a little into the Second World War. Even a glance indicates that no profound sense of honour motivated them. Several defected from the Resistance (with which they had dallied) in the wake of Hitler’s early successes — Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France. It may be that some of them believed Goebbels’ propaganda, that in Hitler Germany had found the ‘greatest military commander of all time’, and it may be that some responded to the new sense of pride that Hitler had instilled in the nation. But on what foundation was that pride built? Surely not on a political police network that came to mean prison or a hideous concentration camp barrack for anyone who raised the mildest objection to the regime? Surely not on a determined policy of genocide regarding the Jews, and of land theft in the occupied territories, and the slaughter of the intelligentsia and clergy in Russia and Poland? And yet, it seems, that so it was, and few excuses can be found. Three matters must be taken into account: a deep-rooted fear of ‘Bolshevism’ — Germany almost became a Soviet State in 1919 — traditional anti-Semitism, and traditional contempt for Poland. It should be stressed again that Hitler did not have one original thought, and his ambitions and prejudices mirrored, in an uninhibited way, those of his time. That Army commanders could turn a blind eye to the activities of the SS behind the lines in Russia and Poland can be explained, though not excused, by these attitudes.

‘Chamberlain has saved Hitler,’ Gisevius complained bitterly as hopes of bringing down the regime shattered. There were more cautious regroupings of senior officers by the OKW, but the Resistance continued its appeals to Britain — with continuing lack of success. Brauchitsch withdrew hastily from any association with the Resistance. Halder, the Chief of Staff, dithered.