July 20, 1944: what if?

The Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie came out on DVD on May 19th and I couldn't resist renting it. I watched, appreciated the accuracy of the various sets, wondered how the filmmakers morphed the Air Ministry in Berlin into a computer-generated street scene of the Wilhemstrasse in 1944, but mainly thought about what might have happened if Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had succeeded.

The July 20th conspirators were the last group in Germany to overtly oppose Hitler, even though they were better placed than other groups to actually topple his regime. They came from within the Gorman establishment: landed, titled, army, and very conservative. The conspirators, to give them credit, knew almost instinctively that their actions came too late in the day, and were almost certainly bound to fail. But they hoped that perhaps the best they could achieve was to leave a message that some Germans did in fact resist Hitler.

But it is a salutary lesson to go slowly through the biographies of the other resistors, the virtually unknown, arrested, tortured and beheaded long before the likes of Stauffenberg and Goerdeler made their takeover attempts. The (almost) unknowns were often bright kids from poor backgrounds, active in socialist and communist groups, Christians, housewives acting as couriers, brave teenagers posting newsletters, social workers helping Jews, kids who simply rejected the idea of the Hitler Youth and wanted to listen to jazz and swing. They were betrayed, arrested early in the war, tried in the People's Court and then executed within a few hours or days.

What were the aims of the July 20th conspirators, how did they see a post Hitler Germany, what would have happened if the bomb under the map table had killed Hitler? The movie doesn't bother itself with such details, and neither does much popular history for the possible answers arc problematical. The view that the plotters would have ushered in a free, democratic Germany, happily surrendering to the Allies and finishing the war is false. The truth is they wanted to be rid of Hitler before he led them to even greater disasters. There was rising concern about the destruction of the Jews and other murderous Nazi practices, but it's clear from their writings that it was not the crimes themselves, but the damage they did to Germany which motivated them. These were courageous men, but their beliefs, prejudices and goals arc utterly foreign to us today.

These were men who had done wall by Hitler, taking part in his successful campaigns and fully supporting the invasions of both Poland and Russia as legitimate expressions of German rights. Claus wm Stauffeberg wrote that, " it is essential that we begin a systematic colonization in Poland," a not unexpected sentiment from a Prussian landholder angry over the loss of estates to Poland. His brother Berthold, also executed as a conspirator, said under interrogation that he and his brother "had basically approved of the racial principle of National Socialism, but considered it to be exaggerated and excessive ... The racial idea has been grossly betrayed in this war in that the best German blood is being irrevocably sacrificed, while simultaneously Germany is populated by millions of foreign workers, who certainly cannot be &scribed as of high racial quality." Berthold's younger twin brother, Alexander, also under interrogation, "took the view that the Jewish question should have been dealt with in a less extreme manner because then it would have produced less disturbance among the population." These were men who disliked the way the crime was perpetrated rather than the crime itself Even Carl Goerdeler who was to become the new head of state if the plot had been successful, did not include the restoration of the civil rights of Jews in his program.

An echo of this comes down through the years from Claus von Stauffenberg's son who entered the debate on German memorialization of all the resistors to Hitler. How docs the state commemorate these people of such divergent philosophies. Can you include communists who, while opposing Hitler, were dedicated to establishing another totalitarian regime in his place? It's not a purely theoretical question for there are plenty of examples of German communists who managed to survive Hitler and the camps going on to become major figures in the DDR. Claus von Stauffenberg's son is against memorializing these resistors, thereby rejecting the majority in favour of the latecomers and the compromised.

It is also useful to look at some of the discussions about Allied plans to assassinate Hitler. It was of course considered, and several plans were put forward, the most promising being an assassination attempt late in the war carried out by a two-man sniper team, parachuted close to the Berghof. Post war analysis of the plan has concluded that it had a reasonable chance of success. Hitler's security at certain times on the Berghof was lax enough to allow an assassination attempt, but there was no agreement on what might happen after. In fact, the likely scenarios developed by British analysts at the time, suggested that the removal of Hitler would result in a more effective waging of the war by Germany. Hitler was a strategic liability to his country and an asset to the Allies by this time.

But if Stauffenberg's bomb had killed Hitler in Rastenburg, what then? Let's assume the conspirators managed to arrest some of the higher SS and party officials, controlled the radio and communications out of Berlin, and secured the allegiance of considerable sections of the Wehrmacht within Germany and France. They would then be faced with much of the SS, Waffen SS, Gestapo and a highly confused populace suddenly deprived of their Fuhrer. What of major figures like Himmler, in control of a fanatical private army present in force through the Reich and its conquered territories? Himmler would have jumped at the opportunity presented by Hitler's death, regardless of what the July 20'h conspirators achieved during the first hours of confusion in Berlin. What of Bormann, Goering, Goebbels and Speer? Like Himmler they controlled their own powerful empires within the party and the country and, if nothing else, would have been jockeying for power and advantage in the vacuum left by Hitler's death.

What choices might they have made, what alliances between themselves, either for or against the conspirators? It would all have happened very quickly, for they were all aware that weakness and indecision would only hasten the arrival of the Russians on their eastern borders. On avoiding that disaster they were all agreed. Neither side could afford to neglect the primary task of fighting the Russians, so fighting between factions loyal to the resistors or to the party would probably end quickly as a result of deals or temporary truces. We should remember that the aim of the conspirators was not immediate surrender. They wanted to negotiate a peace which would leave Germany intact and the central power in a reconstituted Europa and which would, above all else, avoid a Russian invasion of the heimat.

That was their primary goal and their preferred plan was to negotiate with the West. Some even deluded themselves, as did Himmler and others later, into thinking that they might ally themselves with the West and continue the campaign in the east together. But, being realists, and having the Nazi-Soviet pact as a model, they would have opened negotiations with both the eastern and the western allies. After all they had everything to lose, and failing success with one, they might reach accommodation with the other. Given the natures of the two systems the Germans were fighting against, it is likely that the Soviets would have responded to Hitler's death first. On July 20, 1944, the western allies were ashore in France after stupendous efforts with their populations fully in support and primed for the unconditional surrender of Germany. They were unlikely to be dissuaded from this goal. Stalin had to consider public opinion, but to a lesser extent, and the Germans would have been able to offer him very attractive terms in return for an armistice on the eastern front. Simply withdrawing to Germany's eastern borders would have delivered Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic States to the Red Army without a fight.

Not enough? Stalin would have wanted a presence in whatever new government was to be formed by Germans in Germany. He could have required, and would have got, the presence of many of those Moscow-trained Germans who later formed the leadership of the DDR, in a post-Hitler government. Both conditions would have been deeply unpalatable to the July 20th conspirators, and there would have been defections from their ranks, but this outcome would have been the best deal on offer and would have left almost all the old Reich intact.

The response to the assassination by the West, would in contrast, have been complex and slow. The result might have been the opposite of that expected: continued fighting in the west, capitulation in the east with Stalin tacitly supporting the situation, all the while maintaining his position in Allied councils. Unthinkable? Not really, the anti-Hitler conspirators would have succeeded in maintaining an intact Germany, Stalin would have been spared the costly battles of the summer and spring of 44-45 and would occupy the buffer states between the Soviet Union and Germany, plus he would have a political foot-in-the-door in Germany itself. And Hitler would be dead.

The alternative we prefer is that a post-Hitler government would enter negotiations with the Allies--East and West--and conclude.... what? The West wanted unconditional surrender. The July 20th conspirators rejected that and wanted a "just" peace, one which would leave Germany as a sovereign state at the centre of a European revival. Had they acceded to unconditional surrender, which was unthinkable, the result would have been an even more emotional repeat of the stab-in-the-back legend of the First World War. There would have remained in Germany a ferocious majority utterly convinced that they and their Fuhrer had been betrayed by a gang of traitors. What then? Would it have been possible to arrange something less than unconditional surrender, with the new government in Germany undertaking to deliver up or prosecute war criminals? This too would have been unsatisfactory. The Allied experience after the First War was that German prosecution of war criminals was ineffective, the conspirators themselves were often highly compromised and Germany had no legal structures in place to do the job. In any case the outcry from the populations of the Allied countries would have put an end to that idea.

So a likely, but unpalatable outcome would have been what the West always feared: an armistice between the Soviets and Germany. The West could not contemplate a compromise peace with Germany. Stalin could, and a post Hitler government in an undefeated Germany wanted survival of an intact country at almost any price. Stalin and later Soviet leaders were always interested in a neutral Germany. This too could have become an armistice requirement, and would have been an acceptable price to the conspirators, a chance to wipe out the past, rebuild, and become the central European economic power.

How could the west respond to this, a neutral Germany, disarming, and clearly "associated" with the Soviet Union? By the terms of any armistice, the Russians would surely have scooped up all the German scientific breakthroughs especially in rocketry and jets, including scientists and working production lines. None would have gone to the West as in fact happened, to the West's lasting benefit. Could the western allies have continued to attack Germany under these circumstances? Only at the risk of engaging the Soviets directly, or perhaps initiating an earlier version of the Cold War with a neutral Germany whose status was guaranteed by the Soviets. It would have been a horrible deadlock, a completely unacceptable suspension of the war, and, lurking in the wings, the atomic bomb which was always designed to be used in Europe, and not as happened against Japan.

Perhaps we should be glad that Stauffenberg failed, that Germany was utterly defeated. The alternatives could have been much worse.

----------

Please note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Article Details

Printer friendly Cite/link Email Feedback
Author:	Sager, Murray
Publication:	Esprit de Corps
Date:	Aug 1, 2009
Words:	2030
Previous Article:	Casualty count rises.
Next Article:	The golden age of sail the great windships: the craftsmanship of the Maritime shipbuilders sealed their reputation for building swift-sailing...