Traitors or Patriots?

A Story of the German Anti-Nazi Resistance

Louis R. Eltscher

• Publisher: McNidder and Grace
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780857162045
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia tedesca

This is a classic morality tale – a story of the eternal struggle between good and evil. It speaks of those who resisted that evil and of those who succumbed to it. Little is known about those whose courage and conviction drove them to risk and lose everything to bring the Third Reich to an end.

The story of Georg Elser and his attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler encapsulates the wider story of the anti-Nazi German resistance almost perfectly. All the moral and ethical issues and the practical problems that the resisters faced are found in his story. In sum, it is a microcosm of the larger story. Elser personified the entire resistance movement!

Presented within the broader context of German history and contemporary world events, this comprehensive study relies on extensive historiography by noted scholars to produce a well-balanced, timely narrative of the German resistance to one of history's most violent regimes. Traitors or Patriots? tells a story of incredible courage and conviction that transcends time and place—a story for our own time and for all time.

CHAPTER 1

The Burden of History

On the night of November 8, 1939, Adolf Hitler traveled to Munich to deliver a speech to the Nazi Party faithful at a beer cellar in the heart of the city. Known as the Bürgerbräukeller, it was the site of an episode known to history as the Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred on November 8, 1923. Led by Hitler and his newly created Nazi Party, the speech delivered at this gathering was to be the first step in a planned coup d’état (putsch) against the Weimar Republic, which had replaced the imperial government at the end of World War I. Although it failed miserably, Hitler commemorated the event each year with a rally at the cellar. He customarily began speaking about eight thirty in the evening, concluding around ten o’clock. On this particular night, however, he altered his schedule.

Hitler had flown to Munich from Berlin, but because of frequently foggy conditions and the exigencies of war – Germany had just launched its military campaign against Poland that precipitated World War II the previous September – he decided to take his personal train back to Berlin; it was scheduled to leave at 9:31. Consequently, after beginning to speak at about 8:10, he concluded at 9:07. Normally he stayed around after the speech to chat with the “old fighters” who had been with him from the beginning of his political career. This time, however, he left the cellar immediately. Almost exactly thirteen minutes later, a massive explosion ripped through the beer cellar, killing eight people and injuring sixty-three. Had Hitler been on the speaker’s dais at that moment, he most probably would have died, irrevocably changing the course of twentieth-century history.¹

The immediate question on everyone’s mind when they learned of the incident was “Who did it? Who is the culprit?” Various scenarios were offered as explanations, such as a story that the British Secret Service had planned the assault, which was not an unreasonable assumption. Other theories had some disgruntled members of the Nazi Party plotting Hitler’s death. For example, SS chief Heinrich Himmler tried unsuccessfully to link the episode with a dissident, left-wing Nazi faction known as the Black Front, the leader of which was Otto Strasser, who had been expelled from the Nazi Party and now was living in exile.² Within the army was the suspicion that one or more inside their own ranks were responsible, whereas still others thought that Communists had set the bomb.³

The truth was both simpler and more startling, given that the perpetrator actually was a mere carpenter working entirely on his own. His name was Georg Elser. His journey from the quiet, conventional life of a skilled craftsman living in Königsbrünn, a small town in southwest Germany, to the position of a would-be assassin of his country’s head of state provides insight into the moral issues facing all of those who participated in the anti-Nazi resistance.

Born in 1903 in southwest Germany in what now is the German state (Land) of Baden-Württemberg to a family of modest means – his father reportedly was a farmer and lumber dealer – the young Georg attended the local school and subsequently became an apprentice carpenter. He also worked for a time in a watch factory in the nearby city of Konstanz. There he learned the skills that enabled him to construct the intricate clock mechanism that armed the Bürgerbräukeller bomb. He was remembered as a rather quiet but sociable man who had a limited circle of friends and who participated in various cultural organizations, especially those connected with music. He played both the zither and double bass. A Protestant, he was a regular churchgoer, whose religion has been described as “simple, non-intellectual and traditional.”⁴ One of his favorite activities was hiking with friends. Although he fathered a son out of wedlock, he never married.

To the extent that Elser had political views, they were decidedly leftist. He tended to vote Communist, not for ideological reasons but because out of all the many political parties in the Weimar Republic, he believed the Communist Party served the workers’ interests most completely. At the behest of a friend, he joined the militant Red Front Fighters’ League (Roter Frontkämpferbund) of the Communist Party, although he never was an active participant in its political activities and had little interest in theoretical issues such as Marxism. He “was no thug and no hard-nosed ideologue.”⁵

He did, however, hold a passionate hatred of Nazism and what it represented. His loathing of the Nazis was obvious from the onset of Nazi rule. He ostentatiously refused to participate in the obligatory Nazi rituals, such as the “Heil Hitler” greeting and the straight-arm Nazi salute. On more than one occasion, he refused to listen to Hitler’s speeches that were broadcast over the radio. He resented the encroaching power of the state over individual activity, most particularly, the suppression of civil liberties. He especially detested the policy of “coordination” (Gleichschaltung) and its demands for absolute conformity to the Nazi ethos.

His decision to make an attempt on Hitler’s life evidently was made in the fall of 1938, when he concluded that the Führer was plotting war and the only way to stop him was “the ‘elimination’ (Beseitigung) of the regime’s leadership,” which for him included not only Hitler but also Minister of Propaganda Joseph Paul Goebbels and Luftwaffe chief Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.⁶ At that point, he “methodically and without hesitation”⁷ began making his plans. During the following months, he visited the Bürgerbräukeller several times, taking measurements and making detailed sketches of the large hall, which could accommodate upward of three thousand people. Additionally, he began the construction of the devices to arm and activate the bomb, such as a clock mechanism with which he could set the precise detonation time. He also stole explosives and fuses from two places where he worked, an armaments factory and, later, a quarry.

By September 1939, he began work in the beer cellar itself. He labored for thirty-five nights hollowing out a main support column located near the speaker’s dais.⁸ Each evening, he entered the cellar. As it closed for the night, he hid until everyone had left, and then he went to work throughout the hours of darkness until morning light, carefully removing all traces of his presence before he left. Obviously unemployed at this point, he was living off his savings, which amounted to approximately 350 to 400 marks, a not inconsiderable sum for that day. By November 6, the bomb was in place and armed. He returned the next night to make sure that all was functioning correctly. It was. He left Munich the following morning, November 8, for Konstanz, and then traveled to Switzerland and safety, or so he hoped.⁹ In April 1939, before the outbreak of war, he had reconnoitered the Swiss border with Germany and decided that he could escape to Switzerland under cover of darkness.

With World War II now in progress, however, the borders were much more heavily guarded, and a German border patrol apprehended him before he could make it to safety.¹⁰ Suspecting that he was a smuggler, the guards searched him for contraband, such as cigarettes. Instead, they found suspicious-looking metal parts, pliers, a postcard of the Bürgerbräukeller, and most incriminating of all, notes on making explosives.¹¹ Later that evening, the border guards received news of the explosion, and Elser’s fate was sealed. He was taken to Munich and thence to Berlin, where he was subjected to severe beatings, including being repeatedly kicked by SS leader Himmler, in order to extract further information from him. Himmler and Hitler both believed that Elser somehow was linked to the British Secret Service or the aforementioned Black Front.¹² Ultimately, however, the Nazi leadership accepted his story that he had acted entirely alone.

He subsequently was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he languished for five years. Remarkably, he was well treated, probably because Hitler wanted to use him in a show trial after the war in order to “prove” that he was a British agent. Shortly before the end of hostilities, he was taken to Dachau concentration camp, where he was executed during an air raid, making his death appear to have been caused by a bomb.¹³

Leaders and Assassins

The story of Georg Elser and his attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler encapsulates the wider story of the anti-Nazi German resistance almost perfectly. All the moral and ethical issues and all of the practical problems that the resisters faced are found here. In sum, it is a microcosm of the larger story. Elser personified the entire resistance movement. Was this man a hero or villain, a traitor or a patriot? What motivated him to make an assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler? Answers to these and similar questions lie at the center of the resistance story.

Human history is replete with stories of assassination plots, and the motives run the gamut from derangement, personal animosity, and a desire for revenge to hate, anger, and ideology, or a combination thereof. Many assassins, such as those who murdered, or attempted to murder, presidents of the United States, were at the very least mentally unbalanced. Others, such as Gavrilo Princip, were motivated by ideology, in this case, extreme nationalism.

Princip was the assassin of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Habsburg throne of Austria-Hungary. The archduke’s death provided the spark that in the summer of 1914 plunged Europe into four ghastly years of war. Like many other assassins, Princip and his coconspirators thought they were serving a greater cause, in this case, Slavic nationalism and independence from Austria-Hungary. His southern Slav compatriots regarded him as a hero. To commemorate the event, they placed a paving stone at the spot in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where he’d stood when he fired the fatal shot. Many of the inhabitants of that region still regard him as a hero.¹⁴

The moral issues surrounding the question of assassination are very complex. Is it ever moral – the “right thing to do” – to kill a person in the pursuit of a moral cause? This question tormented the anti-Nazi resistance movement throughout the entire twelve-year life of the Third Reich. Four men who became active members of the organized army resistance personified the conflicts of conscience that many members of the resistance, military officers and civilians alike, experienced in their efforts to eliminate the Führer. Three were soldiers, and one was a clergyman, a civilian who was attached to the counterintelligence section (Abwehr) of the military establishment.

All three soldiers were career military officers who gave Adolf Hitler a degree of support before he assumed political power in 1933. The reasons are not difficult to discern. These men were steeped in the ethos of the Prussian military tradition and had absorbed the social and military values of Imperial Germany – that is, they were monarchists committed to authoritarian rule and to a society based upon a rigid class structure. They believed that Western liberal democracy and its values had no place in the Germany they loved. They also believed that obedience to orders issued by their superiors in the military hierarchy was a sacred duty. Their sense of honor dismissed as abhorrent any behavior that would give even a hint of mutiny. They were traditionalists but not extremists. They were conservatives in the best sense of that often-misused term. Their names were Hans Oster, Henning von Tresckow, and Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. As with Elser, each one of these men came within the proverbial hair’s breadth – within hours or even minutes – of eliminating their nemesis. They also were the leaders of four phases, or rounds, of the anti-Hitler conspiracy that existed within the military establishment.

The fourth man of this group was the clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Unlike the three soldiers, he opposed the Nazis openly and passionately well before they assumed power. He was among the very few public figures in Weimar Germany who fully recognized the nihilism that was at the core of Nazism and its beliefs. However, he had to overcome the constraints of a four-hundred-year tradition within the Lutheran Church that taught the importance of submission to civil authority. During the religious and political chaos of the sixteenth century, the Protestant German princes protected the Lutheran Church from its enemies, ensuring Lutheranism’s survival. The long-term result of this connection was the emergence of a close relationship between government and religion that has survived into the modern era.

Martin Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms provided the basis for this relationship. The civil authorities had the responsibility of upholding law and order in the “kingdom of this world,” and the mission of the church was “to proclaim the kingdom of God.” Neither authority was to interfere in the affairs of the other. Despite the strictures imposed by this doctrine, however, Bonhoeffer recognized early on that Hitler had to be removed from power by whatever means available if Germany were to be saved from war and disaster.¹⁵ He experienced no “prolonged inner struggle. For him the Hitler dictatorship had always been inherently and ineradicably evil; his opposition to it was based on deep-rooted spiritual conviction rather than compelling national interest.”¹⁶ Thus, when the opportunity arose, he joined the Abwehr – the counterintelligence section of the Armed Forces Supreme Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW) – ostensibly as a “confidential agent” (Verbindungsmann, or V-Mann).¹⁷ In fact, he was a courier for the resistance. He became the conscience of the conspiracy to kill Hitler.

All of these men – Oster, Tresckow, Stauffenberg, and Bonhoeffer – faced the same issue: Is assassination ever justified? They reached the same conclusion: in certain extraordinary circumstances, it is. And extraordinary circumstances definitely prevailed in Nazi Germany. These four men were absolutely convinced that Adolf Hitler was the personification of evil and had to be eliminated – killed. This was the only way to exterminate the Nazi pestilence that was ravaging their fatherland. This shared conviction separates thes...