IDEAS
At Last, Recognition and Praise for the Resistance in Nazi Germany
By SHAREEN BLAIR BRYSAC
When the British historian A. J. P. Taylor declared in the 1960's that German resistance to the Nazis was a myth, his was a widely held view. Even today many people in Germany and elsewhere believe there was little internal opposition to Hitler.
After decades of bitter debate, however, the German resistance's tangled history is coming into sharper focus. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war in 1989, newly released K.G.B. and C.I.A. files and long-ignored documents in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., reveal that the once-scorned Communist and socialist resistance deserves more credit.
As Germany celebrates the 10th anniversary of reunification this week, there are signs that the left's contributions are finally being recognized. Streets in western Germany are being named for members of the Red Orchestra, a leftist resistance group that had been maligned for decades, while the high-speed trains plying from Hanover through the former eastern zone to Berlin bear names of German resisters like Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who had been honored only in the former West Germany.
But this searching re-examination has not been painless. Old East-West antagonisms have shot through attempts to correct the record.
Delicate political sensibilities are part of the reason that a more complete picture of the German resistance has been so long in coming. During the Nazi era the breadth of internal opposition was hidden from the German people and, except for the failed Stauffenberg plot of July 20, 1944, to assassinate Hitler, from the rest of the world. Yet Gestapo records reveal that approximately 800,000 Germans in a population of more than 66 million were jailed for active resistance during the Reich's 12-year reign. Indeed, the first concentration camps, notably Dachau, built near Munich in 1933, were meant for left-wing dissidents. In 1936, a typical year, 11,687 Germans were arrested for illegal socialist activity, according to Peter Hoffmann's standard 1977 study, "The History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945."
Even after the war the record was obscured. To many Germans the resistance was an awkward reminder that choices were possible, even in wartime. In Germany's western sector, influential voices echoed the Nazi judiciary in defining all resistance against the fatherland as high treason.
This view persisted after the founding of the German Federal Republic, or West Germany, in 1949. Survivor benefits, for example, were denied to the widows and children of the conservative officers who tried to kill Hitler in 1944, even though the widows of SS officers were receiving benefits.
As West Germany became the anchor of Western Europe, its frontiers guaranteed by NATO, a less defensive populace began to honor some resistance leaders like the army officers led by Count Stauffenberg who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944, churchmen like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Catholic students in the so- called White Rose group. Even so, Communist opponents were still shunned. In 1956 the Bonn Parliament voted to compensate many German victims of Nazism, but when the Communist Party was declared illegal in West Germany, the Communists were excluded from any benefits.
Perhaps no group was more consistently misrepresented during the cold war or better illustrates the current re-examination of German resistance than the Red Orchestra. The Red Orchestra was a loosely organized group of about 120 Catholics, socialists, conservatives and former Communist Party members centered on Arvid Harnack, a former Rockefeller scholar and official in the German Economics Ministry; his American wife, Mildred; a Luftwaffe lieutenant, Harro Schulze-Boysen; and his wife, Libertas, who worked for the film section of the Propaganda Ministry.
Although often portrayed as a Soviet agent, Harnack in fact provided top-secret intelligence to an American diplomat in Berlin as well as to the Soviets. And despite Soviet requests to cease all resistance activities, the group printed and distributed anti- Nazi literature and helped Jews and dissidents escape until, because of a gross Soviet intelligence blunder, the Gestapo arrested 120 people in 1942 and 1943. One result was the torture, secret trial and execution of 31 men and 18 women, including Mildred Harnack.
In East Germany, the Soviet-installed government celebrated the Red Orchestra and other "anti-fascist heroes" to lend a measure of legitimacy to the regime. Streets and schools were named after Marxist resisters. History was rewritten with Orwellian zeal. Arvid Harnack's last words, uttered before he was executed, were changed from "I believe in the power of love" to "I die as a convinced Communist!"
In West Germany the truth was obscured in a different way. Writing in 1954, the historian Gerhard Ritter expressed a common West German judgment about the Red Orchestra: "This group had nothing to do with `German resistance.' They were frankly in the service of the enemy. They not only sought to induce German soldiers to desert, but they also betrayed important military secrets and so destroyed German troops." They were, Ritter declared, traitors.
Information that emerged after reunification has renewed the debate over who deserves to be honored. In 1992, for example, the Memorial Museum of the German Resistance in Berlin installed a corrective exhibition on the Red Orchestra intended as a "tardy atonement for the victims and their survivors, and an apology for long neglect in the history of the German resistance." But the group's inclusion at the memorial site provoked an outraged protest by families of the July 20 conspirators.
And when an exhibit from the museum was sent to Washington and New York in 1994, Maria Hermes, the daughter of the Catholic resister Josef Wirmer, insisted that a distinction be made between the men who planned the overthrow of Hitler to restore peace and re-establish Germany as a free constitutional state "and those of the anti-fascists who wanted to establish Communist rule." Schulze-Boysen's brother, Hartmut, fired back that unlike the officers who served Hitler loyally until 1944, his brother and friends had never served the National Socialist state. They "had given their lives not for Stalin but rather in fighting Hitler," he said.
Yet with the 10th anniversary of reunification, critical opinion is decisively turning in the revisionists' favor. A permanent exhibit honoring Schulze-Boysen and a comrade, Erwin Gehrts, opened last December in the Finance Ministry, a building which at onetime housed Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe.
Perhaps the most telling signal of the shift in German public opinion was the warm reception accorded "This Death Suits Me," the collected letters of Schulze-Boysen, when it was published last fall. Many people were moved by the final letter that the 33-year-old Schulze-Boysen sent to his parents: "I am completely calm and ask that you accept this with composure. Such important things are at stake today all over the world that one extinguished life does not matter very much. . . . Everything that I did was done in accordance with my head, my heart, my convictions, and in this light you, my parents, must assume the best. . . . It is usual in Europe for spiritual seeds to be sown with blood. Perhaps we were simply a few fools, but when the end is this near, one perhaps has the right to a bit of completely personal historical illusion."
Even the reviewer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the most conservative of dailies, described the Red Orchestra as one of the "most moving, most courageous and most farsighted groups of the German resistance."