This edited volume is a strong collection of articles dealing with a wide range of German diplomats active during the Third Reich. The book's title is something of a misnomer, however, and the fact that the editors are aware of this—they acknowledge that they include even persons whose “resistance” or alleged distance to the regime was either “controversial and dubious” or only existed in their “own self-understanding” (9)—does not make that choice more understandable. It is therefore fortunate that the title is neither program nor message and thus does not take away from the inherent value of this volume, which consists in the main of balanced and probing accounts of thirteen diplomats. Their actions ranged from nonconformist behavior for personal and sometimes obscure reasons, to forms of outright resistance fueled by moral outrage about political developments under the Nazis. Between these two poles is a smorgasbord of human behavioral patterns, all examined through a biographical lens that, despite obvious and manifold limits—such as the availability and reliability of more “objective” sources, especially during the time period under consideration here— proves eminently suitable for getting at the actors’ motivations and intentions.
The volume begins with an overview by Hans Mommsen of the Foreign Office's role during the July 20 conspiracy. This is followed by two chapters by Michael Wala and Reinhard R. Doerries on the diplomats Friedrich von Prittwitz und Gaffron and Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, both of whom were anglophiles, democrats, and early critics of the Nazis. But whereas von Prittwitz und Gaffron immediately stepped down as the German ambassador to the United States, von Bernstorff remained at his post as embassy counselor (Botschaftsrat) in London. The latter was quickly neutralized and forced into early retirement, but he kept on working courageously against the Nazis until they murdered him in April 1945.
Besides von Prittwitz und Gaffron and von Bernstorff, only two other diplomats—Adam von Trott zu Solz and Fritz Kolbe, who worked as a spy for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—were similarly oriented toward the West in their outlook and views, and, as the chapters by Benigna von Krusenstjern and Lucas Delattre reveal, both of them risked their lives in the fight against Adolf Hitler. But whereas Kolbe acted as a lone perpetrator, von Trott zu Solz played an instrumental part in Claus von Stauffenberg's July 20 plot—something for which he paid with his life. The chapters by Jan Erik Schulte and Günter Brakelmann about his coconspirators, Eduard Brücklmeier and Hans Bernd von Haeften, demonstrate just how different the individuals involved in this conspiracy were. Unlike von Trott zu Solz, the conservative von Haeften's resistance was driven by his Christian beliefs. And unlike von Haeften, Brücklmeier, a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS), was not opposed to Adolf Hitler's foreign policy goals in principle: he was moved to resist by his pragmatic conviction that Germany could not win the war. By contrast, von Prittwitz und Gaffron, whose worldview was much more in accordance with that of von Trott zu Solz, did not participate in the conspiracy, very likely because the goals of the conspirators were not—Wala suggests—in accordance with his own deeply held democratic convictions.
In fact, the primary reason there was no concerted opposition within the Foreign Office to the Nazi dictatorship becomes obvious when one considers the motives of the individuals discussed in this volume. Besides being few in number, the resisters shared very little common ground in terms of motivation. For example, the diplomat Otto von Strahl was an early supporter of the NSDAP, but, as Martin Kröger hints in his chapter, personal resentments might have been an underlying motivation for his resisting the Nazis: in 1938 he was forced, under unclear circumstances, to resign from his position as consul in Durban, South Africa. And, as Michael Jonas writes, Wipert von Blücher shared the convictions of many of his conservative colleagues, but refused to join their conspiratorial efforts because of his rejection of tyrannicide for religious reasons. For their part, the diplomats Gerhart Feine, Heinrich Wolff, and Wilhelm Melchers were all instrumental in saving the lives of a number of Jews, but only Wolff was motivated by a genuine sympathy for Jewish victims, whereas—as Karsten Linne, Francis R. Nicosia, and Christopher Browning show—Feine's and Melchers's actions were based on political calculations.
The latter was also the main motivation of Ernst von Weizsäcker. Given his central importance during the so-called Ministries Trial of 1947–1949, it is fitting that the book's two penultimate chapters by Lars Lüdicke and Dirk Pöppmann provide a thorough examination of this leading diplomat's role during and after the Nazi regime. Von Weizsäcker came to symbolize a certain type of official, namely, the type that cooperated until the bitter end while, at the same time, insisting that one could not but stay to prevent anything worse from happening—an attitude shared by the majority of German diplomats during the Third Reich. Despite this, and despite the fact that von Weizsäcker was found guilty at his trial, Eckart Conze shows in the concluding chapter of the volume, which focuses on the Foreign Office after 1945, that von Weizsäcker still enjoyed a heroic reputation that was not seriously challenged until Hans-Jürgen Döscher's pathbreaking study Das Auswärtige Amt im Dritten Reich (1987). For all these reasons, the focus of the collection on his persona and career makes much sense.
At the same time, however, it once again raises the issue of the volume's title. As Robert Kempner, the U.S. chief prosecutor during the trial, aptly commented about von Weizsäcker, his form of resistance was an “unresisting ‘Resistance’” (278). And as Johannes Tuchel fittingly quips in his article about the aftermath of the 20 July conspiracy, even the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) was not able to portray convincingly the Foreign Office as a bastion of resistance. Nevertheless, as Conze demonstrates, the myth of a resisting Weizsäcker remained alive and well in the Federal Republic, making Döscher's revisionist efforts especially difficult. In fact, both the Foreign Office archive and the influential weekly Die Zeit tried to hinder and discredit the historian.
In short, then, there was no collective abhorrence of Nazi crimes on the part of German diplomats that might have served as a motive for collective—or even wider—resistance against the regime. Rudolf von Scheliha, whose conscience compelled him to resist from early on and who, as Anne Nelson argues, only received the recognition he deserved in 1995, was the exception. The fact that it took the Foreign Office that long to honor him speaks volumes. Schulte's and Wala's book is written in the spirit of the weighty tome Das Amt und die Vergangenheit (2010), which then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer initiated in 2005 in an attempt to examine without ideological blinkers the history of the office he himself had led from 1998-2005. Some of the contributors to this volume, including the coeditor Schulte, were involved in that massive research project, which makes it difficult to understand why the individual contributions hardly refer to each other and why the editors fail to summarize the major findings of this collection or place them in a larger historical and historiographical context. That said, that is a task easier demanded than done given the very diversity of the diplomats under consideration in this volume, not least with respect to the motivations for their behavior.
