A Narrative of Repentance and Martyrdom

Rothfels's personal circumstances and political intentions affected the way in which he constructed the history of the Resistance with an emphasis on its conservative members who belonged to the old elites.Footnote ⁵ Raised by Jewish parents, Rothfels (1891–1976) converted to Protestantism many years before he achieved professional success with his appointment in 1926 to an academic chair for modern history at the University of Königsberg in the border province of East Prussia. His neoconservative views and politically combative scholarship and teaching made him a magnet for students who were attracted to National Socialism.Footnote ⁶ He was active in right-wing nationalist circles, which assailed the parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, denounced the “injustices” of the Versailles Treaty, and called for the revision of Germany's boundaries following the defeat in World War I.Footnote ⁷ A wounded veteran, Rothfels was not immediately affected by the Nazi legislation of April 1933 that excluded persons of Jewish descent from positions in the civil service. He could no longer retain his faculty position when regional Nazi party officials in 1934 objected to a person of “alien blood” teaching German history at the university. The decision to emigrate was agonizing for him. His identification with the fatherland was so intense that it outweighed the humiliation of his loss of German citizenship. It was not until August 1939 that he left for England, and a year later he came to America.Footnote ⁸

Although Rothfels became a United States citizen and achieved professional security as a professor at the University of Chicago in 1946, he did not assimilate to American society. Life in his adopted country could never provide a substitute for the emotional ties that he felt toward his homeland.Footnote ⁹ In Chicago he and his wife socialized within a circle of German emigrants at the university, whose meetings frequently provided an occasion for them to excoriate the policies of the United States Military Government in occupied Germany. The tone of these discussions can be seen in Rothfels's article in 1946, which attacked the agreement at the Potsdam Conference to extend Poland's western frontier to the Oder-Neisse line. He drew an analogy between the methods of Hitlerism and the Allies' “surgical operations” that trampled upon Germany's boundaries.Footnote ¹⁰

In February 1947, Rothfels confided to an old friend in Göttingen that he wanted to correct a widespread perception of the failure of the German elites in a book on the Resistance. He claimed that the tendency to equate Nazis and Germans in the American media and public life and the publicity about the concentration camps were designed to legitimate the Potsdam treaty's cession of German territory on the other side of the Oder-Neisse line to Poland.Footnote ¹¹ The story of the Resistance became his means of refuting American and British critics of the German people and their history and demonstrating the existence of “another Germany” in the form of conservative groups in the anti-Nazi Resistance.Footnote ¹² From the start, Rothfels brought to his writing on the Resistance the defensiveness of an émigré whose political thinking had developed in the nationalist milieu of East Prussia in the 1920s.

Rothfels had another reason for hastening to publish The German Opposition to Hitler in 1948. Two years earlier, Franklin Ford published an article that proposed an interpretative framework for historical research on the July 20 plot that conflicted with Rothfels's conceptualization.Footnote ¹³ Ford worked as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services during the war and, after Germany's surrender, he examined materials related to the conspiracy and conducted interviews with survivors of the anti-Nazi opposition. The significance of the assassination attempt, in his view, lay in what it revealed about the evolution of the attitudes of the German conservative elites, from the 1930s when they saw the Nazi regime as “a useful ally” to the years after the military losses at Stalingrad and El Alamein, when they became disillusioned with Hitler, reckoned with the inevitability of defeat, and decided to rebel. To the conservative opponents of Hitler, the disintegration of the social and economic order and the fear of Bolshevization carried with it “the urgent need to control the domestic concomitants of defeat.”Footnote ¹⁴

Rothfels disagreed with Ford's assessment of the motivation of the loosely interlinked conservative circles in the July 20 movement. Advising future historians of the Resistance, Ford wrote, “True, some individual idealists had never ceased to express their moral indignation at Nazi excesses; but no danger involved in an analysis of German opposition to Hitler is more tempting nor at the same time more misleading than that of pressing too far the significance of a purely religious and humanitarian revolt.” The decisive impulse for the military plots against the Nazi regime must be sought elsewhere: first, in the framework of German foreign affairs and encroachments on the professional prestige and independence of the military elite and, in the later stage of the war, in the determination to cut Germany's losses.Footnote ¹⁵ Rothfels insisted upon the inadequacy of “the so-called ‘realistic’ interpretations” and “sociological approach.” In the appraisal of the Resistance, he wrote, “we have to come down to principles of moral affirmation beyond merely political exigencies [and] to appreciate those spiritual forces of resistance which . . . by exceptional pressure were brought out in an exceptional way.”Footnote ¹⁶

Rothfels's narrative was often defensive in tone and exculpatory in its assessments. He was oversensitive to claims that the German people closed their eyes to the regime's excesses and that army officers made the attempt to overthrow Hitler only when defeat was imminent. Responding to such criticism indignantly, he challenged anyone who threw “the stone in a self-righteous mood of moral superiority” to consult his or her own conscience. It was cheap and often “pharisaic to pass judgment without having been exposed to anything like the German experience after 1933.”Footnote ¹⁷ He advised historians to withhold judgments about the hesitation of army officers to launch a coup as long as the road to victory still seemed open. It required, he argued, “a realization of a threat to the highest human values to break through the code of duty and patriotism to the point where one was prepared to revolt in the midst of an all-engulfing struggle, or eventually not only to wish and pray but also to work for the defeat of one's own country.”Footnote ¹⁸

Rothfels's conceptualization of the Resistance placed the July 20 revolt beyond political expediencies into a metaphysical and religious sphere. The resisters took upon themselves responsibility for the crimes that were committed in Germany's name. They “lived and died for the idea of atonement” and saw “martyrdom as penance in behalf of the German people.”Footnote ¹⁹ Rothfels pointed out that his research did not bear out the perception of the resisters as a clique of reactionary Junkers. They were driven by feelings of Christian piety, a genuine conservative stand against political totalitarianism, and the goal of restoring the rule of law and justice.Footnote ²⁰ To sustain his claim that Claus von Stauffenberg, the colonel who led the assassination attempt, and his fellow conspirators had “a universal rather than a nationalist outlook,” Rothfels ignored the Resistance's persistent efforts to secure guarantees from London and Washington before launching a coup that the Western Powers would accept the restoration of Germany's 1914 frontiers with the addition of some of Hitler's territorial annexations. Moreover, he glossed over the antidemocratic elements in the constitutional plans for the future that Carl Goerdeler and other conservative resisters drafted.Footnote ²¹

German opposition to the Nazi totalitarian state was a compelling subject for Rothfels, who longed to return to his homeland after the war. He was eager to bridge the chasm created by the different circumstances in which an exile of Jewish ancestry and his former students and colleagues experienced Germany's most recent history. And he needed to regain the “community of experience” (Erlebnisgemeinschaft) that he believed he had lost with emigration. As he confessed in a letter to an old colleague in 1947, the idea of accepting a university appointment in Germany was a strong temptation, but he was uncertain whether someone who had not been part of “the positive and negative community of experience of the last eight years” could teach the young generation effectively.Footnote ²² He constructed a picture of Germany under National Socialism in which broad sections of the nation “continued to live a life of common decency,” and “while making the barest minimum of concessions, they remained morally untouched [and] never accepted the regime.”Footnote ²³ His historical account of the years of the Third Reich accentuated the anti-Nazi opposition; it marginalized the experience of European Jewry; it counterbalanced “accusations” with “redeeming facts” and did not pass judgment.

The Defensive Agenda in Historiography and Public Remembrance

Rothfels's book found an enthusiastic reception in West Germany when he sent copies to former colleagues in 1948. More than 200,000 copies of the German edition, published a year later, were sold.Footnote ²⁴ This response was affected by the author's identity as an emigrant of Jewish descent as much as by his historical representation of Germany under National Socialism. Friedrich Meinecke in Berlin informed other historians that Rothfels was one of the “Jewish émigré historians” in the United States who did not view Germany's tragic destiny vindictively.Footnote ²⁵ Siegfried Kaehler in Göttingen was moved to see how Rothfels, banished into exile, had remained loyal to his native land. He called the writing of the book a demonstration of independence from the prejudices of American public opinion.Footnote ²⁶ Gerhard Ritter in Freiburg was impressed by the vigor with which Rothfels refuted the “clichés about German submissiveness” and defended “the purity of the motives” of the July 20 resisters. His review of the book noted “the astonishing objectivity” with which Rothfels discussed “the persecution of the Jews, under which he himself suffered so much.” Rothfels did not hold the entire German nation responsible for the atrocities of the Nazis.Footnote ²⁷

After Rothfels accepted a faculty position at the University of Tübingen in 1951, he promoted the public commemoration of the Resistance in West Germany with the same defensiveness that characterized his writing after the war. On the tenth anniversary of the July 20 revolt in 1954, he spoke candidly about the political use of the memory of the Resistance. He declared, “Whoever looks at the reality of what happened in the Third Reich . . . shall have to recognize that in international relations there existed and exists a German task of rehabilitation.” The “men of July 20” preserved their country's honor and demonstrated through their act of atonement the existence of “another Germany” to enemy and neutral countries. In the aftermath of Hitler's dictatorship, the memory of their action could enhance West Germany's image abroad more than the Mercedes automobile or soccer championship victories could do.Footnote ²⁸

In assuming his role as an agent of remembrance, Rothfels defied the ambivalent and negative attitudes toward the Resistance in the population at large in the 1950s. While Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, and other politicians sought to use the legacy of the martyred resisters to establish an inspiring political and moral foundation for the Federal Republic of Germany, many Wehrmacht veterans who fought for the fatherland to the bitter end considered the officers in the assassination plot to be oath-breakers and traitors.Footnote ²⁹ As Theodore Hamerow noted, in Germany under the military occupation and afterward the “atmosphere of privation, bitterness, humiliation, and resentment left little time for reflection on the significance of the resistance.” Public-opinion surveys revealed sharp differences on the justification for resistance and considerable ambivalence toward those who had tried to topple Hitler. In a 1951 poll on the question of how the “men of July 20” should be judged, forty percent answered positively, thirty percent held an unfavorable view, and other respondents stated that they had no opinion or no recollection.Footnote ³⁰ Despite the glorification of the Resistance by political officials, popular attitudes continued to show a disposition to ignore or forget it.Footnote ³¹

“They laid a foundation stone for a new beginning in German history.”

In contrast to Rothfels's valorization of the “other Germany” in the form of conservative and aristocratic groups, Hajo Holborn (1902–69) placed the Social Democrats in the foreground of his representation of the Resistance. In Weimar Germany, Holborn belonged to that minority within the academic profession who had democratic-liberal convictions and supported the republican state wholeheartedly. Soon after the National Socialists came to power, he decided to resign his faculty position at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin rather than to make an ideological accommodation to the new administration.Footnote ³² Teaching at Yale University after he arrived in America in 1934, he integrated into the academic community with remarkable ease and became an admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. His relation to his adopted country grew deeper during World War II, when he served as an intelligence analyst in the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C.Footnote ³³

Holborn retained an abiding attachment to the German classical culture in which he had been educated. He was emphatic in disputing attempts that were made during and after the war to find the sources of Hitler's ideology in the great tradition of German philosophy. “It had to be admitted,” he wrote, “that there was another Germany representing a universalist and peaceful philosophy.”Footnote ³⁴ He strove for frankness and nuance in dealing with antisemitism in German society: “Greatly as the Germans were infected with anti-Semitism of various degrees, the mass extermination of the Jews would not have found support outside a very small minority. This does not free the Germans from their co-responsibility, since they tolerated and even backed earlier stringent anti-Semitic measures, which were then used by Hitler for perpetrating the final mass murder.”Footnote ³⁵

Holborn's historical approach to the Resistance was informed by his memories of Social Democratic opposition to the Nazi party, his sensibilities as a German-born and -educated scholar, and a broader perspective on contemporary German events that he had acquired in the United States. Tracing the Resistance's origins back to the years of the republican state, he stressed in 1960 that the earliest opposition to National Socialism came from the political parties that had fought Hitler's rise to power. The tremendous losses suffered by the Social Democratic and Communist movements through Nazi terrorism and waves of arrests drove them underground. The large number of Social Democrats thrown into concentration camps suggested to Holborn that covert circles must have been widespread.Footnote ³⁶ Unlike Rothfels, Holborn did not indict the statesmen and diplomats of the Western Powers for refusing to see the anti-Hitler conspirators as partners and for announcing a policy of unconditional surrender. “After all the German army, and equally the German diplomats, had done since 1933,” it was “not surprising” to Holborn that the British and American governments could not be persuaded that a German opposition of sufficient strength was determined to overthrow Hitler.Footnote ³⁷ The Allied leaders drew “understandably no sharp distinction between the Nazi party and the German armed forces,” he stated, since it was the army's victories that made it possible for the Nazis to carry out their crimes throughout the European continent.Footnote ³⁸

Holborn chose to conclude his grand History of Modern Germany: 1840–1945 with a discussion of the Resistance. He noted the difficulties that confronted German dissidents who conspired to overthrow a modern totalitarian government and the increasing number of opponents who were imprisoned and executed because of their activities. In the volume's earlier section on the German army's conduct in World War II, the secretive circles and plots to topple Hitler in 1943–44 assumed a minor role that was commensurate with the fact that this opposition had no consequences for the continuing German military operations.Footnote ³⁹ In his final reflections, Holborn presented the failed coup d'état of July 20, 1944, as a revolt against a heinous dictatorship that was launched by the conspiracy's inner circle to save their country from further devastation as well as to “demonstrate by the sacrifice of their lives before the world and history that the sense of obligation to humane values had not perished in Germany.” By their actions, he believed, the resisters “laid a foundation stone for a new beginning in German history.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The “What-If” Question during the Cold War

The son of Fritz Epstein, an erudite historian of Jewish descent, Klaus Epstein (1927–67) was still a schoolboy when his parents left Germany for England in 1934 and sent him to a Quaker boarding school for German-Jewish children in Holland. He came to the United States several months after his parents had emigrated there in 1937. His father found employment at the Widener Library at Harvard University. Klaus's development as a historian was guided by his teachers at Harvard and his father. In the 1950s, while Fritz Epstein divided his time between his work as a curator at the Library of Congress and the administrator of a project for the filming of captured German war documents, he was active in restoring contacts between the academic communities in America and West Germany and hosted German historians who visited Washington.Footnote ⁴¹ He imparted to his son a perspective on German history that was clearly evident when Klaus Epstein wrote a critical appraisal of George Mosse's book on the institutionalization of the völkisch ideological movement from the 1870s to the triumph of National Socialism in 1933. He contended that Mosse constructed an “unbalanced” narrative that was “not the whole truth” concerning the cultural life of Germany. “Mosse consistently refuses to distinguish adequately between Nazis and other Germans,” he declared.Footnote ⁴²

Very striking in Klaus Epstein's personal and professional life was the speed with which he reconnected with the land of his birth during four extended visits after the war. He was a sympathetic—though not uncritical—observer of the Federal Republic under Adenauer's government and wrote about its success in becoming a functioning democracy. The “uncompromising anti-Nazism” of the Social Democratic Party before 1933 and during the Third Reich, he thought, was “a great asset in its appeal to Germany's young voters.” He was especially sensitive in understanding the grievance of the West Germans over the partition of their country, which left the East Germans living under a Soviet-protected communist regime.Footnote ⁴³ He was living in Bonn and doing research for the second volume of his historical study of German conservatism at the time of his death in an automobile accident.Footnote ⁴⁴

Klaus Epstein became involved in the historical discourse on the Resistance in the early 1960s, amid concerns about an apparent revival of Germanophobia. The sensational success of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which sold millions of copies in America in the early 1960s, was seen by Epstein and other critics of the book as a disturbing sign of a revival of anti-Germanism from the world-war years.Footnote ⁴⁵ Shirer's epic narrative began with a synthesis of the German past based on the controversial postulate that Hitler's mind-set and fanatical antisemitism had roots that were deeply embedded in German experience and thought, and that “Nazism and the Third Reich were but the logical continuation of German history.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The huge sale of Shirer's hefty volume led the critics to fear that his “from Luther to Hitler” historiographical paradigm would mistakenly inform American views of Germany for many years to come. Epstein rejected Shirer's thesis as the product of ignorance and prejudice and reproached him for making “dogmatic assertions concerning the collective guilt of the German people for the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi government.” He censured Shirer for failing to do justice to the greatness of those Germans who abandoned conventional conceptions of patriotism and risked their lives in an attempt to overthrow Hitler in the midst of war. In his account of the German opposition, Shirer was “far more ready to castigate hesitations and blunders than to explain the enormous difficulties which the conspirators faced” in a totalitarian police state.Footnote ⁴⁷

A year later, Epstein used the appearance of the second edition of Rothfels's book to present his own historical appraisal of the Resistance. Epstein's position was more complex than his critique of Shirer's book would suggest. Epstein stated that Rothfels was “a bit too apologetic” in his explanation for the rise of National Socialism, which ignored Germany's authoritarian political traditions and blamed the de-Christianization of Europe and the emergence of mass society in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ Rothfels's attachment to the neoconservative movement of the 1920s led him to interpret apologetically the resisters' plans for Germany's future government. Epstein argued that the Kreisau Circle's political program was notable for its negative evaluation of parliamentary democracy and its aim of establishing counterweights against political pluralism and a mass electorate. Helmut James von Moltke and other members of the Kreisau Circle had “little to teach to postwar Germans.”Footnote ⁴⁹ At the same time, Epstein appreciated the constructive power of legends in every nation and the political value of commemorating the July 20 revolt in West Germany's public life. The historical evidence that many of the conspirators were not democrats was, in his opinion, “irrelevant in this context.” He thought that only German resistance to Nazi tyranny could “create the heroic background needed to build viable democratic institutions” on the ashes of the Third Reich. That thousands of Germans followed ethical principles at the risk of their lives was “a fact not to be weighed against, but placed beside the equally indelible fact of Auschwitz.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Under the impression of the division of Germany and the Cold War, Epstein fired off a passionate attack against President Roosevelt for giving no support to the resisters in the German diplomatic service and army. He deplored Roosevelt's “incorrigible prejudice” in deliberating on German affairs and failure to discern the danger that Russian communism posed for the postwar era. The president and his advisers were so riveted to the proposition that Germany and Nazism were identical that they could not consider the possibility that Germans might overthrow Hitler and present themselves for negotiations with “the request for a reasonable peace settlement which would keep some kind of German state intact.” Epstein introduced two “what-if” questions in Resistance historiography. If Roosevelt had pursued a more flexible policy than unconditional surrender, and if the July 20 coup had succeeded, the power vacuum in which Stalin established communist satellite regimes in eastern Europe after 1945 could have been averted.Footnote ⁵¹

Remembering German Opponents of Nazism and Rethinking the German Question

The son of secular Jewish parents, Peter Gay was born in 1923 and spent six years of his youth in Nazi Berlin until his family emigrated in 1939. They found refuge in Cuba first before receiving visas to come to the United States in January 1941. For many years he felt anger and hatred toward the Germans and did not visit his native country until 1961, and even then he spent “four days there, saturated with barely suppressed rage.” He broke out of his fixed pattern of hostility toward Germany in the 1960s. Especially important in this process were his friendship with Karl Dietrich Bracher, a professor of contemporary history at the University of Bonn, and “the family story” of his wife Dorothee, whose father Rüdiger Schleicher and uncles Dietrich and Klaus Bonhoeffer were arrested and murdered by the Nazis because of their resistance activity. Gay spoke publicly for the first time about his inward journey in a New York Times op-ed essay in 1976. He stated that the memory of those exceptional Germans who sacrificed their lives for their principles and who courageously provided hiding places for some 5,000 Jews in Berlin “is justly cherished.” The purpose of disclosing his personal experience was to press historians to rethink the German question. He stated, “I think of these Germans, and the young, when I reject a single-minded historical determinism or a one-dimensional national character.” Of particular concern to him were the recent debates over continuities in German history, which had been stimulated by the publication of Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 in 1973 and other works that viewed the Second Empire as the breeding ground for the Third.Footnote ⁵²

Peter Gay was not denying all antecedents of National Socialism in pre-1933 German history or discounting the historian's responsibility to search for answers to the question of how the barbarous and uniquely inhumane crimes of Nazi Germany could have happened. His criticism was directed at a distorting vision of nineteenth-century ideas and institutions. In a bolder articulation of his argument in 1978, he referred to “an occupational hazard” for the historian of modern Germany: seeing the entire past as a “prologue to Hitler,” ignoring the mass of possibilities inherent in any situation, and slighting the element of contingency.Footnote ⁵³

“Friends Who Stayed Behind”

In his more than three decades of historical scholarship on the Resistance, Klemens von Klemperer (1916–2012) preserved a strong personal identification with the younger generation in the Kreisau Circle and especially with Adam von Trott, the scion of an old aristocratic family and a conspirator in the Foreign Office who was executed in 1944. Von Klemperer was the son of a wealthy industrialist of Jewish origins and was baptized as a Protestant in his childhood. He attended a prestigious Gymnasium in Berlin from 1924 to 1934, and his schoolmates included boys from families of the old Prussian nobility. When the racist policies of the Nazi government closed his opportunities for a profession in Germany, he pursued his university education in Vienna and did not emigrate to the United States until October 1938. Thus he witnessed the Nazi takeover of power in Germany and Austria. Throughout his life, he remembered how he shared the generational experience of the Youth Movement of the interwar years and the idealism and sensibilities of his German and Austrian “friends who stayed behind,” some of whom went into the Resistance and others who never returned from the battlefield.Footnote ⁵⁴

Von Klemperer did not sever his ties to his native country or abandon his Christian faith and conservative Lebensgefühl after he resumed his studies at Harvard in 1939. When he served in the United States Army in 1943–46, he maintained a sharp distinction between the enemy he was fighting and the Germans and Austrians, such as his “friends,” who wanted to cleanse their countries of the Nazi plague.Footnote ⁵⁵ He recalled in his memoir, “Never, even during wartime, had I made a secret of my rather complex position on the ‘German problem,’ combining unqualified condemnation of the policy of oppression and narrow nationalism with a deep affection for ‘the other Germany’ of decency and urbanity.” More firmly, he confessed, “The more the German nation had become an accomplice of atrocious crimes, the more I held onto the conviction that among the many wicked citizens of Sodom, there must have been righteous ones. Some of them, after all, were my friends. I clung to this proposition all the more firmly at a time when the thesis of collective guilt was rampant in American public discourse.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Jousting with the “Debunkers”

Von Klemperer entered the historiographical debates on the Resistance in the 1960s in the defense of the July 20 movement against the “debunkers.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Among these critics was Henry Pachter, a German refugee of Jewish descent, who had been active in the antifascist underground in Germany and in the left-wing German exile community in Paris before his arrival in America.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pachter's irreverent remarks about the army officers of July 20, 1944, were just the opening salvo for his attack on the glorification of the failed military coup in the commemoration of the Resistance in West Germany's public life. He argued that “any attempt to erect a monument to the [conspirators] as the German resistance is historically erroneous, if not politically dangerous.”Footnote ⁵⁹ In a subsequent polemical exchange with Rothfels, he criticized the way in which some mythmaking historians and political officials in the Federal Republic of Germany were marginalizing the role of Social Democrats and Communists in the Resistance and attempting to monopolize the opposition in the name of one elitist group, whose ideological orientation was antiliberal and socially reactionary rather than democratic and Western. He stated that Germans today had to find the ideological foundations for a new republic in the traditions of their democratic history rather than in the martyrdom of people who were not exemplary.Footnote ⁶⁰

Von Klemperer realized that Rothfels's appraisal was losing its power to convince. Accordingly, he began his own defense of the Resistance by disowning two historiographical tendencies: “uncritical celebration” and “the smart, easy fault-finding work of debunking.” He observed the “predominantly aristocratic and conservative” shape of the Resistance after the organized workers' movement was crushed. In the face of an evil tyranny, he stated, resisters such as Moltke and Stauffenberg found strength in a feudal ethos of noblesse oblige, fearlessness, and fortitude and in religious faith. German men and women were transformed in the course of their opposition to National Socialism insofar as they transcended conventional notions of class interests, patriotism, and obedience to the state authorities and followed the dictates of God and their consciences. Thus, in his first work on the Resistance, von Klemperer stated a postulate that would inform his interpretation of the opposition that led to the revolt of July 20. In extreme situations, resistance tends to transcend practical political considerations and realistic calculations about success and failure. It has to be sustained by values of a higher order and a “mighty impulse.”Footnote ⁶¹ In choosing to focus his research on the peace feelers and diplomatic ventures of Adam von Trott and other emissaries of the Resistance abroad, von Klemperer tended to study the anti-Hitler opposition in isolation from the military campaigns of the German army and the problematic conduct of those officers who decided later to launch the 1944 coup.Footnote ⁶²

In the early 1980s, von Klemperer became a distinctive presence in the historiographical debates on the Resistance in the Federal Republic of Germany. In a leading journal there, he published an article on the role of religious piety in the decisions of Germans who joined conspiratorial circles that aimed to overthrow Nazi tyranny. “Even agnostic or Marxist historians shall have to consider these facts,” he declared.Footnote ⁶³ For some time, he had observed uneasily the appearance of what he called “a revisionist school” within the young generation of German historians, who were challenging the idealized representations of the Resistance in the pioneering studies by Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter.Footnote ⁶⁴

A Pendulum-Swinging Change in Resistance Historiography

From the early 1980s on, historians in the Federal Republic of Germany began to contest the tendencies of politicians to invoke the heroism and martyrdom of the Menschen des 20. Juli and to use the Resistance to create a historical and political legitimacy for the postwar democratic state. Hans Mommsen and Klaus-Jürgen Müller, the most prominent historians in this group, did not deny the courage and decency of Moltke and his friends in the Kreisau Circle, but they were fully aware of the gap between historical evidence and the rhetoric of public remembrance. Müller observed that many interpretations of the Resistance by academics and journalists were “strongly determined by the politics of the present day.” The official cultivation of the remembrance of the July 20 revolt was conducive to “enthusiastic apologizing and unreflective heroizing.” Mommsen stated, “Making heroes of the men and women of the opposition is thus no more appropriate than is an outward identification with the forces of the ‘other Germany,’ which too easily ends in our ignoring the fact that Nazi rule had its roots in German society as a whole.”Footnote ⁶⁵ With the passage of time since World War II and with the waning of the Cold War, West German historians no longer felt obliged to repudiate the thesis of collective guilt or to use the Resistance as a political asset.Footnote ⁶⁶

Mommsen's penetrating analysis in 1966 of the constitutional plans for a future Germany drafted by conspirators in the diplomatic corps and civilian administration was a milestone in the evolution of Resistance historiography. These “conservative-nationalist resisters,” as he labeled them, did not counter Hitler's dictatorship with an alternative that would adhere to the principles of parliamentary democracy and modern social pluralism. Their concept of an “organic” body politics reflected their distrust of a popular electorate and democratic institutions. The thinking of the older resisters around Goerdeler and Ulrich von Hassell betrayed a preference for a non-fascist, authoritarian system of government in the postwar period and “a distinct tendency to seek the restoration of a socially and politically dispossessed leading class.” The younger resisters in the Kreisau Circle were seeking a new social order permeated by a Christian spirit, but their utopian ideas were very far from applying Western liberal principles to Germany. Neither one of the two generations wanted to return to the values and institutions of the Weimar Republic. Mommsen observed how their political vision was shaped by the neoconservative critique of civilization in the 1920s, with its disdain for the leveled-down mass society, flight from the conflict of political interests in a pluralistic society, and longing for an elite leadership that transcended politics.Footnote ⁶⁷

Without recourse to moral categories, Klaus-Jürgen Müller offered an interpretative model for understanding the uneven path of General Ludwig Beck and other officers to the decision to revolt. He stated that officers who later participated in the conservative-nationalist opposition cooperated with Hitler in the consolidating phase of the Nazi dictatorship. The basis of this “entente” were the objectives that they shared with the regime: the speedy buildup of the German army, the revision of the territorial arrangements of the Versailles peace treaty, and aspirations for hegemonic power in central Europe.Footnote ⁶⁸ Müller contended convincingly that the government's antisemitic actions and violent repression of the left-wing opposition in the 1930s did not arouse protest in circles of the military elite. The disagreement with Hitler came over the army leadership's traditional claim to a position of authority in the making of the state's foreign policy and in decisions on military strategy and operational planning. The evolution from dissent and disillusionment to resistance was “no straight path.” The conspirators arrived at the crucial step of a coup relatively late, when they saw a catastrophic defeat looming in the campaign against Russia. “Ethical and moral considerations were never changeless absolutes” in their motivation and “never a universal factor common to all of them,” he wrote. More weighty were the objections raised by military experts to Hitler's “irresponsible” conduct of the war.Footnote ⁶⁹

An international conference in 1984 on the fortieth anniversary of the July 20 conspiracy provided a forum for the scholarship of the “revisionist school” and proved to be a turning point in the historiography of the Resistance. More than seventy-five scholars participated in the conference, which was organized by the Historische Kommission and the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial Center) in Berlin. Through the reports in the press and the publication of the conference papers a year later, the new perspectives, analytical approaches, and critical interpretations of Mommsen, Müller, and other scholars gained wider acceptance.Footnote ⁷⁰ A more complex and ambiguous picture of the July 20 movement emerged, as these historians called attention to “the affinity” of the conservative-nationalist resisters to some core values of National Socialism, the fluid boundaries between collaboration and resistance, and the long and uneven path to resistance.Footnote ⁷¹ Lothar Kettenacker and Bernd Martin criticized the hegemonic aspirations and unrealistic expectations of the German opposition in its efforts to negotiate peace terms with the Western Allies. Both scholars attributed the Resistance's failure to secure British and American support to its unacceptable proposals regarding Germany's frontiers rather than to the stubbornness of Winston Churchill and the Allied policy of unconditional surrender.Footnote ⁷²

At the conference, von Klemperer contested the methodology, interpretations, and “harsh” judgments of the “revisionist school.”Footnote ⁷³ Explanations of the Resistance in terms of the interests of a caste, class, and institution, he stated, did “not do justice to the uniqueness of resistance” in extreme situations and the resisters' readiness to risk their lives.Footnote ⁷⁴ Historians would not understand properly the daring overtures of the opposition's emissaries to the outside world if they did not consider the ethical and religious impulses. Moltke and Trott wanted to give a testimony of “another Germany” and wanted the revolt being planned to be understood abroad as “an act of repentance.”Footnote ⁷⁵ He insisted that historians should consider the Resistance's missions abroad and peace feelers in the realm of the possible: “The if-question, the question of what would have happened if an agreement between the Resistance and the Allies had come about is not more and not less justified than all questions that examine realistic alternatives in politics and warfare.”Footnote ⁷⁶

“Overwhelmed by the Ambiguity of Almost All Resistance against Nazism”

The “revisionist school” in Resistance historical research in the Federal Republic of Germany posed a greater challenge to von Klemperer's thinking and sensibilities than his remarks at the Berlin conference would suggest. He confessed to his discomforting feeling in his memoir: “When I started my studies of resistance several decades ago, I was moved primarily by an eagerness to bear witness to courageous men and women, to their heroism. My vision of that heroism has remained unaltered. At the same time, I have been overwhelmed by the complexity and ambiguity of almost all resistance against Nazism.”Footnote ⁷⁷ His immediate instinct after the conference was to vindicate the conservatism of the groups in the July 20 movement. He insisted that a clear line of separation between the conservative resisters and the antidemocratic and nationalist ideology of the neoconservatives of the Weimar era and the National Socialists must be drawn, and he dismissed the similarities in their “vocabulary of faith” as superficial.Footnote ⁷⁸

It was not long before von Klemperer came around to an acceptance of the multiple ambiguities of the Resistance. Speaking at an international conference on the Resistance at the University of Leeds in Britain in May 1986, he placed himself among “the sober and unsentimental historians” who were now scrutinizing the two modes of political behavior, collaboration and resistance, among the conservative elites in Nazi Germany. He now admitted that there were “good reasons for revisionism.” In the years immediately after the war, Rothfels and Ritter tended to marginalize the opposition from the political Left and to enshrine the July 20 conspiracy. The result of this approach was “the heroization and monumentalization, if not mystification, of the Widerstand to the exclusion of the Communist Resistance.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Although Christof Dipper's study of antisemitic views within the conservative circles of the Resistance had elicited strong disapproval at the 1984 conference, von Klemperer now admitted that “the German Resistance did not mount the barricades for the Jews.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Von Klemperer, however, never retracted his opinion that historians in the “revisionist school” were rendering “hard and extreme judgments” and had “come close to debunking” the Resistance.Footnote ⁸¹ At international conferences in 1988 and 1990, he voiced a caveat against their methodology and contended that the sociological and historicizing approaches should not stop short of the “existential dimension of resistance” and the lonely conscience of the individual. He challenged his fellow historians to go beyond the historical and sociological determinants of group behavior and “penetrate to the singularity of the act of resistance” in the Nazi state.Footnote ⁸² The situation of German resisters, he pointed out, was more complex than resistance in the occupied countries. They were outcasts from the community of national solidarity and were hovering on the threshold of treason in their communication with the enemy in wartime. Historians were obliged to probe the hardships of a split existence and the anguish and despair that these German patriots felt.Footnote ⁸³

An emphasis on the existentialist dimension in oppositional behavior in Nazi Germany became a distinctive mark of von Klemperer's historical interpretation. He described the move into true resistance as “an extraordinary leap into an existential situation that defies historical and social stereotypes.” Calling the “solitary witness” the prototype of the German resister, he noted the self-sufficiency of the conspirators who made the daring decision to risk treason and defeat.Footnote ⁸⁴ Von Klemperer delved into Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theological thought to illuminate the ultimate meaning of the July coup to the conspirators: an acceptance of their share of responsibility and guilt, an act of repentance, and a complete abandonment to God's grace.Footnote ⁸⁵

By the time that von Klemperer completed his comprehensive work on the foreign relations of the German opposition in the early 1990s, he had clearly defined his position as one of guarding against “two dangers” in Resistance historiography: apologetic explanations that try to sweep away what cannot be ignored, on the one hand, and the lack of understanding for the dilemmas and predicaments of the German resisters and “the temptation of being excessively judgmental,” on the other hand.Footnote ⁸⁶ His analysis was a balancing act between the discipline of recognizing the evidence from the records of the British Foreign Office and other archives and his understanding of the predicament of Trott, who had to obtain from the Western Allies guarantees related to Germany's expanded frontiers in order to win over the army generals to a coup against Hitler. Von Klemperer recorded the conspirators' territorial aspirations and vision of German hegemony in central Europe, and he acknowledged the solid grounds for distrust in the reactions of British diplomats.Footnote ⁸⁷

And yet von Klemperer had not lost his empathetic historical relationship to Moltke, Trott, and other members of the Resistance. He told a German audience in 2001, “If I speak of the ‘other Germany,’ of the resistance, exile, and emigration, so you shall notice that they are for me no cold, abstract concepts but direct or indirect experience. . . . I am old enough to have experienced things that are relevant to my subject today. Thus I have gained much sympathy for the suffering and dilemmas and for the heroic acts of the people in those difficult times.”Footnote ⁸⁸ This autobiographical statement sheds considerable light on his wishful and apologetic stance in the conclusion of his book. He posed the question of what the governments in London and Washington should have done to help the German opposition. He diminished the significance of differences between the Western Allies and the German conspirators on territorial issues by declaring that the peace terms proposed by the Beck-Goerdeler group were negotiable. He stated that “imaginative statesmanship” could have found a way to give moral encouragement to them and that a stable connection or informal liaison should have been established between the British and American diplomatic corps and intelligence agencies and the German opposition.Footnote ⁸⁹

“That event could never strike roots in the hearts of Germans.”

Both von Klemperer and Fritz Stern gave steadfast support to the commemoration of the Resistance in the Federal Republic of Germany, even as the memory of the resisters became increasingly conflicted and the efforts to create a vibrant commemorative culture for July 20 had to contend with the indifference of a large part of the population. In a survey that was conducted a few months before the fortieth anniversary in 1984, fifty-six percent of the respondents of all age groups were able to give a correct answer to the question of what happened on July 20, 1944. Striking was the lack of interest within the younger generation: sixty-three percent of the respondents between the ages of sixteen and twenty-nine did not know, and four percent gave a wrong answer. By the 1990s, July 20, 1944, still had not become a special day in the consciousness of many Germans.Footnote ⁹⁰

In 1994, clouding the commemoration of the attempt to overthrow Hitler were controversies over the political use of the Resistance legacy, contentions about the resisters' antisemitic views, and revelations emerging from the intensive research into the German armed forces during World War II.Footnote ⁹¹ Christian Gerlach, Christian Streit, and other historians disclosed that a few officers who jumped on board the conspiracy in 1944 had a combined hostility to bolshevism and Jews and had earlier taken part in planning the war of racial extermination on the eastern front.Footnote ⁹² The more light that military historians shed on the Wehrmacht officers on the eastern front, the more difficult it was to separate some of the heroes of the July 20 revolt from the notorious aspects of the military operations there.

Under the title “men of the Resistance and mass murder,” Gerlach published in Freitag in 1994 an exposé of the “complicity” of Major-General Henning von Tresckow and Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, two heroic figures in the public remembrance of July 20, 1944, in the shooting operations against Jews by the Einsatzgruppen and SS brigades under the guise of fighting “partisans” in 1941. Since the raids of these irregular units were carried out in an area of occupied Soviet territory where Tresckow was in command of army troops, he received and initialed the reports that crossed his desk.Footnote ⁹³ By fall 1941, the officers in Tresckow's circle were somberly aware of the criminal nature of the SS activities and thereafter expressed their disgust to the High Command and sought its intervention in vain. Their humanitarian concerns still took second place to their view that the moral integrity of the army had to be preserved and that military defeat had to be averted.Footnote ⁹⁴ Ten years later, Gerlach reported in Die Welt that the involvement of army officers associated with July 20, 1944, in war crimes on the eastern front was wider than historians had previously thought. He stated that General Eduard Wagner was responsible for the brutal occupation policies that led to the death of Soviet prisoners of war by starvation and to the killing of Soviet patients in hospitals.Footnote ⁹⁵

Relatives and friends of the resisters associated with the July 20 movement reacted with anger to these revelations that did not correspond with their own image of moral heroism. On the fiftieth anniversary of July 20, Goerdeler's daughter, Marianne Meyer-Krahmer, expressed her frustration with publications on the Resistance in recent years and lamented that some historians were predisposed to focus on the defects.Footnote ⁹⁶ Countess Marion Dönhoff, the editor of Die Zeit, took issue with Mommsen's method of analyzing and interpreting the intentions of the conservative elite in the Resistance. He was judging them, she argued, by the present-day criterion of parliamentary democracy rather than by their willingness to sacrifice their lives in an uprising against an evil tyranny.Footnote ⁹⁷ In an article in Die Zeit that bore the headline “against the self-righteousness of those born after,” Dönhoff scolded Gerlach for daring to render judgments when he had not lived under a threatening dictatorship.Footnote ⁹⁸ With sadness, she observed that the historical memory of July 20, 1944, “could never strike roots in the hearts of Germans.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Karl Otmar von Aretin, the son-in-law of Tresckow, and Rüdiger von Voss, the chairperson of the governing board of the Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, questioned Gerlach's method of interpretation and accused him and other historians of smearing the officers around Tresckow and striving to “delegitimize” the ethical foundation of the Resistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

“We should not withhold our admiration.”

Fritz Stern and von Klemperer supported the efforts of Germans who wanted to shape the public memory of the Resistance as an uprising of the conscience. Stern cooperated with the Goethe House in New York City in April 1988 in hosting a conference on the Resistance at Columbia University. In his welcoming address, he defended the honor being given to the German opponents of Nazi tyranny. He stated, “The memory of the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust is not violated—indeed it is strengthened—if one recalls as well those men and women who sought to help or put a spike in the demonic wheel.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ He agreed to help Klaus Naumann, the chief of staff of the Bundeswehr, “open doors” in Washington, D.C., for the location of an exhibition in 1994 on the fiftieth anniversary of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Stern persuaded the head of the Library of Congress to offer gallery space for an exhibition that was assembled by the Memorial Center for the German Resistance in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁰²

Through years of research, von Klemperer came to know personally survivors of the military conspiracy, such as Axel von dem Bussche and Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and the wives of three executed plotters, Barbara von Haeften, Freya von Moltke, and Clarita von Trott.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Memorial Center for the German Resistance invited him to give public addresses at the commemorative events that it organized in Berlin in 1989, 2001, and 2005. He supported an inclusive representation of the anti-Nazi opposition extending to the Communists at a colloquium in Berlin in 1994, when a public dispute arose over the decision of the Memorial Center to include in its photographic exhibition the National Committee for a Free Germany, a group that was formed by German Communist exiles in Moscow.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ He was also a frequent speaker at the conferences sponsored by the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli 1944.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

As the historical representation of the July 20 conspiracy became increasingly contested, the two German-born refugee historians of Jewish ancestry lent professional and moral legitimacy to the public remembrance of the July coup as an uprising for freedom and human dignity. Stern's public address for the commemoration in 2010, which was widely reported in the German press, offers some insight into how and why he assumed this unanticipated role. He stood in the courtyard of the old Bendlerstrasse military headquarters in Berlin, the site where Stauffenberg and his co-plotters were shot, “in humility since we remained spared from the agony of the test and we know not how we would have behaved.” Granting the dangers of dissent under Hitler's dictatorship, it remained, nevertheless, “painful that so many people accepted so much injustice silently.” Stern discussed the error and tragedy in the conspirators' lives, their illusions about National Socialism and collaboration with its authoritarian state, and then their revulsion at the war crimes in the east and lonely path into resistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The Resistance had a compelling fascination for him because he viewed Germany's modern history as a “process of stoppable self-destruction.” Opposition to National Socialism pointed to the openness of its history. He thought that the commonplace view of German history as “an irreversible process of failure and falseness missed the true tragedy; uniform wickedness does not describe the German experience, but a succession of ‘might have beens,’ of great promises never realized.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Long before Stern became acquainted with members of the political elite in the Federal Republic of Germany and his public role there grew in the 1980s, he showed a deep appreciation for the heritage of the Resistance and thought that the Germans should cherish its memory.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ His admiration for the martyred patriots and his conviction that July 20, 1944, could be “a great saving and unifying symbol” for the German people were the shared sentiments in his friendship with Marion Dönhoff. As he recalled in later years, his experience at the memorial service in 1954 accompanied his life and “made possible for [him] the way to new relationships to the German present, deepened by later friends, which included shared memories of July 20.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Speaking to students at the University of Tübingen in 1984, Stern made a signal contribution to the discourse on the Resistance that attracted considerable attention in West Germany. This event was probably the springboard for his role as “a foreign historian-observer with a native touch” in the German public sphere.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The significance of his lecture was derived from its contents and, perhaps more, from his professional and moral authority as an émigré historian who had fled Nazi Germany in 1938 as a victim of racist persecution. Stern criticized the German civilian and military elites, including some people who later joined the Resistance, for succumbing to the “temptation of National Socialism,” to the belief in the coming of the Third Reich as a national rebirth. Especially striking were the humility and emotional restraint with which he discussed the problematic conduct of the resisters and alluded to the criticism in recent historical scholarship. He confessed, “I was spared this temptation, not through any special virtue on my part but because I am a full-blooded non-Aryan for whom temptation was forbidden.”Footnote ¹¹¹ In a plea to the young generation, he declared, “Despite all the distance we may now feel between us and the non-democratic and, for us, obsolete thought of the resistance, and despite all our regrets that so many of them witnessed so many murders and atrocities without protesting . . ., we cannot and should not withhold our admiration from these men and women. Theirs was a unique rebellion, a noble exit from the stage of history.”Footnote ¹¹²

Von Klemperer validated the representation of the July 20 movement as the “other Germany” by invoking his authority as a contemporary witness and professional historian. He brought to its remembrance a religious and existentialist philosophical perspective, a “stoic acceptance of an imperfect reality,” and respect for the tragic element in history.Footnote ¹¹³ He told a German audience, “The first command in the judgment of so extraordinary a chapter of history, as the resistance in a totalitarian state presents it, is to ask ourselves the question: how would we have behaved under similar conditions?” Chiding young German historians, he said that there was too much negative criticism of the conspirators “in the false assumption that at that time the options had been entirely clear.” He pleaded for an understanding of the predicaments and dilemmas of the men and women of the conservative resistance.Footnote ¹¹⁴

When the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli 1944 selected for its 2008 conference the emotionally loaded and controversial issue of the Wehrmacht officers in the Resistance and war crimes on the eastern front, von Klemperer was invited to give the opening address. He was convinced that moral revulsion against the war of racial annihilation in the east led officers such as Tresckow and Stauffenberg to revolt. He reminded his audience that the landscape of the Resistance in Nazi Germany involved situations of perplexing moral unease. “We should not underestimate the obstacles that a Prussian officer had to overcome in order to rebel and to place in jeopardy the fate of fighting troops under his command,” he declared. There was, however, haziness in his use of the existentialist concept of the absurd to convey the anguish of dissident officers who could not easily extricate themselves from the war against the Soviet Union, which Hitler was waging as a racial-ideological struggle. They found themselves in a world that was alien to them and defied rational understanding; they continued to go on even though it was difficult to steer a course that corresponded to their principles.Footnote ¹¹⁵

As this analysis demonstrates, émigré historians of modern Germany brought a substantial personal engagement to their study of the Resistance. Biographical circumstances affected both their choice of groups within the anti-Nazi opposition to place in the foreground and their construction of the narrative. This account also points to the value of observing the experiences and sensibilities of generations in the writing of history. Von Klemperer considered Rothfels's book to be an act of courage in defending the “other Germany” so soon after World War II. He struggled emotionally and intellectually with the accumulating evidence of the ambiguous character of the Resistance, when scholars of a younger generation in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1980s and 1990s drew a highly critical picture of the military and civilian resisters in the July 20 movement.

In contrast to the émigré historians in this study, George Mosse (1918–99) had a completely dismissive attitude toward the resistance to National Socialism inside Germany, and he took no account of it in his perspective or writings on German history.Footnote ¹¹⁶ George Mosse was the son of secular Jewish parents and heirs of Rudolf Mosse's newspaper publishing enterprise. He was at a boarding school when the Mosse publishing house was expropriated in March 1933. In exile thereafter, his older sister and brother were critical of their father, who had not grasped the threat of National Socialism in 1930-32. He recalled in later years, “Exile meant recriminations, a soul-searching of what could have been, had one fought harder.” Stating that the experiences of exile raised his political consciousness, he added, “All I have published has had a political agenda.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ After 1960 he became intensely engaged in exploring his Jewish identity, and for many years he divided his teaching commitments between universities in Madison, Wisconsin, and Jerusalem. Explaining his choice of research subjects, he wrote, “The Holocaust was never very far from my mind; I could easily have perished with my fellow Jews.” In his writings on the history of the völkisch ideology and antisemitism, “and also those dealing with outsiderdom and stereotypes,” he searched for the answers to how the Holocaust could have happened.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Mosse saw the Widerstand as pathetically insignificant because it had no real consequences for preventing the Holocaust or bringing to a halt its deadly course.

The writings and discourse of the émigrés in this study offer some insights into the meaning that the phenomenon of anti-Nazi opposition had for many émigré historians of modern Germany. Rothfels was exceptional in yearning to return to his homeland permanently after the war. Other refugee historians of modern Germany remained in the United States and had professional lives that involved shuttling back and forth between the two countries. Knowing that inside Germany some men and women conscientiously worked against the Nazi dictatorship at the price of their lives carried some weight in their complex attitudes toward their native country after 1945 and made it possible for them to have new relationships with “the German present.” Very troubling for refugee historians of modern Germany, regardless of whether they were liberal or conservative, were the unbalanced, deterministic, and unintentionally distorted accounts of the long-run historical origins of the Third Reich. They spoke out firmly on the need to see the element of contingency and to distinguish between Nazis and other Germans. Anti-Nazi oppositional groups before and after 1933 gave a face to their insistence upon the method of differentiation in the study of Germany's history and pointed to the openness in its turbulent history and the possibility of a new beginning.