THE PLOTS AGAINST HITLER
DANNY ORBACH
Head of Zeus, 2017, 406 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Nazi Germany is a test case in
historical counterfactuals. If the
assassination-plotters and coup-conspirators in the German military had succeeded
in their many attempts from 1938 to 1944 to remove Hitler and overthrow the
Nazi regime, then entirely different options to years of mass military deaths, civilian
slaughter and horrendous concentration camps would have come into play.
The German military Resistance
almost pulled it off but were dogged by continual bad luck, including faulty bomb
technology, last-minute changes to Hitler’s schedule, and a mounting
frustration which frayed the discipline necessary to the resistance network’s clandestinity. Nevertheless, they came agonisingly close to
saving the lives of millions.
Yet, as Danny Orbach
(University of Jerusalem historian) discusses in The Plots Against Hitler, the military resisters’ entitlement to moral
approbation has been challenged by revisionist historians. These critics rightly point out that the German
military rebels were, with few exceptions, conservative authoritarians. Some had cooperated for many years with the Nazi
regime. Some had been mass murderers and
war criminals responsible for directing the slaughter of Russians, Poles and Jews. Some were anti-Semites who supported ‘legal
and non-violent’ discrimination against Jews in Germany or their expulsion to a
Jewish ‘homeland’.
It is a lengthy charge sheet,
from which the critics conclude that, had the military Resistance toppled
Hitler, although Europe may have been spared the vicious worst of Nazism, little
would have fundamentally changed in fascist vision and practice in Europe.
Orbach is dissatisfied with
both the romanticisation of the military Resistance as moral heroes of the
anti-Nazi struggle and with the heated indictment against them as
insufficiently anti-Nazi.
One of the loyalties of the
German military officer caste was to their political leaders. This included the Nazi regime but, for some
officers, these early bonds began to weaken because of their professional disagreements
with Hitler’s security bodies (the SS and the Gestapo), personal grievances and
career marginalisation, or strategic policy differences over the scope and timing,
but not the aims, of a war drive for territorial expansion which they supported
in principle.
There was usually a major
trigger which turned growing dissent into a dramatic break with the regime. This could be one violent Nazi outrage too many
such as anti-Jewish pogroms or the persecution of non-conformist clergy (all
the conspirators held deeply religious beliefs) in Germany, or SS atrocities
against Jews, civilians and Russian POWs on the eastern front (which the
resisters-in-waiting saw as bringing dishonour on the Wehrmacht).
For example, the best known of
the military rebels, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the aristocratic officer
and Nazi loyalist who organised Operation Valkyrie, the resisters’ final, and
fateful, assassination and coup attempt, had his Damascene anti-Nazi conversion
in response to the SS mobile death squads (Einsatzgruppen) which slaughtered
eastern front civilian Jews wholesale.
The resisters might have at one
stage agreed with many Nazi principles but their opposition to their violent
implementation eventually revealed the inseparability of the conception and
execution of Nazi philosophy, and a network of military dissidents cohered
around their opposition to Hitler’s war crimes and military follies.
The resisters came from the
top levels of the army (including Generals), military intelligence, even the
Gestapo itself. These closet anti-Nazis
led a nerve-wracking double life inside Hitler’s war machine, plotting to
arrest or kill Hitler and his top political lieutenants. Some were able to save prominent individual
Jews from the Holocaust.
Their civilian wing came from
the domestic civil service bureaucracy and the foreign ministry, whilst they
also reached out to a broader popular support base for post-coup legitimacy. They planned a Nazi-free Germany in concert
with the centre-left politicians and trade union leaders of the SDP, who they slated
for top posts in a post-coup government installed by the military. Despite the resisters, in nearly all cases, being
strongly anti-communist, they even made overtures to the political and paramilitary
underground of what was left of the German Communist Party.
The failure of Stauffenberg’s
Operation Valkyrie resulted in the crushing of the military resistance. Almost
every member was arrested, tortured and executed (unless they beat the Gestapo
to it through suicide). The most prominent
leaders were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks to maximise their humiliation
and degradation.
The resisters paid with their
lives in an attempt to save millions of others.
This, says Orbach, qualifies them as heroes. Their anti-Nazi moral integrity, however, is
heavy with enough caveats to not rule out that, had they succeeded, they may have
had recidivist relapses into quasi-authoritarian rule-by-elites with overtones
of a Nazism they had been supportive of in their early careers. Their self-sacrificing,
and profoundly tragic, fate, however, indicates that an anti-Nazi moral redemption
is at least as likely a legacy for those German military rebels who took up
arms against Hitler.
