some were commandeered for military bases, others were banned from accepting new entrants or holding religious processions. Between 1933 and 1945 thousands of brave pastors and friars were to be found among the inmates of the concentration camps, where many of them lost their lives as martyrs for their beliefs.
Although Hitler was finally able to stem ‘the mischief-making of the Church’, religion and religious activists, including the great pastor, theologian and spy Dietrich Bonhoeffer, played a huge part in providing the inspiration, moral underpinning and manpower for the anti-Hitler resistance.
Scattered amongst these organised and semi-organised structures of the German resistance were a number of individuals who, as the excesses and horrors of Nazism became more and more evident, started to wage their own private and lonely struggles against the Nazi state. Among these were the Württemberg carpenter Georg Elser, who, acting entirely alone, missed assassinating Hitler with a bomb by a hair’s breadth because of fog at Munich airport; Otto and Elise Hampel, who distributed over two hundred anti-Hitler messages around Berlin and died under the guillotine as a result, and the students of the White Rose Circle who, led by their tutor, met the same fate for distributing pamphlets around Munich.
These remarkable individuals – Auden’s ‘ironic points of light’ – ignited brief beacons of moral courage in the darkness. But they did not – could not – alter the course of the war.
As they, and many we do not know of, changed their stance from supporting Hitler to actively opposing him, others in the most senior echelons of the Nazi state were tracing similar paths towards their own individual epiphanies.
Chief among these were three men: a civilian who could have been chancellor in Hitler’s place; a general who many believed was destined to lead his armies; and the head of his foreign intelligence service.
* Literally ‘the Red Chapel’. In this usage the word ‘Kapelle’ is meant to indicate that it is a secret organisation. The translation of ‘Kapelle’ as ‘orchestra’ is capricious and confusing. ‘Ring’ would have been better.
1
Late-evening sunlight streamed through the Palladian windows of the dining room of the National Liberal Club in London. It fell on a damask tablecloth laid with silver and porcelain in a secluded alcove set slightly apart from the other tables. The wooden panels all around glowed a deep mahogany, and the air resonated with the low murmur of diners enjoying themselves, despite the stern gaze of William Gladstone’s twice-life-size statue at the far end of the room.
The six men at the alcove table were not cheerful. They were sombre, quiet-voiced, and listening carefully to one of their number, an imposing figure with boyish good looks, startling light-grey eyes, heavy eyebrows and a forceful personality. The fifty-two-year-old Carl Goerdeler was a serious man who was used to being taken seriously. Ex-lord mayor of the great German city of Leipzig, until recently a key official in the government of Adolf Hitler and a sometime candidate for chancellor of Germany, Goerdeler was a dinner guest whom it was easier to listen to than to converse with.
Born on 31 July 1884 in the west Prussian town of Schneidemuehl, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the son of a district judge, had been a brilliant student at school, a brilliant law graduate at Tübingen University, and by all accounts a brilliant practising lawyer before finding his metier as an economist and senior official in German local government. He soon proved a talented and effective administrator, whose grasp of economics, incorruptible personality and ability to charm were quickly recognised. In 1912, at the age of just twenty-eight, Goerdeler was unanimously elected as principal assistant (effectively deputy) to the mayor of the Rhenish town of Solingen in western Germany. His military service on Germany’s Eastern Front in the First World War ended with a period as the administrator of a large swathe of territory in present-day Lithuania and Belarus which had been occupied by Germany under the terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918. Here he added a reputation for humanity and compassion to his other recognised virtues.
The Armistice in November 1918 changed everything for Goerdeler, and for Germany. Like most Germans, he felt that his country’s emasculation in the Versailles settlement inflicted a deep shame and injustice on his Fatherland. It was in these post-war years that Goerdeler the nationalist and patriot began to take form. The brutal amputation of Danzig from the ‘motherland’, in order to give newly-enlarged Poland a corridor to the sea, especially offended his sensitivities, both as a German and as a Prussian. He maintained a vocal opposition to this Versailles humiliation long after most other civil and military leaders had accepted the necessity to move on. This was as admirably fearless as it was tactically stupid. It was also an early example of a stubborn refusal to compromise when Goerdeler considered his cause just, which would become a leitmotif of his life until the very end.
By now Goerdeler’s political views had solidified. He was by upbringing a devout Lutheran, and by political conviction a conservative with an attraction to constitutional monarchism. He was authoritarian, patriotic, consumed by a belief in the power of political ideals and democracy (but only to the point where these did not interfere with efficient government). Economically, he believed in financial rectitude; in his dealings with others he was punctilious, in his personal habits he was frugal, and in his personal life he was guided by an unyielding moral code which even extended to refusing entry into his family home to those who had been divorced. One of his friends, and a future fellow plotter against Hitler, wrote: ‘Goerdeler was a clear-headed, decent, straightforward kind of man who had very little or nothing about him which was sombre, unresolved or enigmatic. He therefore assumed his fellow human beings needed only enlightenment and well-meaning moral instruction to overcome the error of their ways.’
These qualities would have made Carl Goerdeler a great man in any stable age, but they rendered him a hopelessly naïve utopian in the cruel age of turbulence and revolution in which he had to live his life.
After a period as the deputy mayor of Königsberg on the Baltic coast during the 1920s, Goerdeler was elected Oberbürgermeister (lord mayor) of Leipzig in 1930, just two months before his forty-sixth birthday. Now he was a big figure on the national stage. At the time he took over the Leipzig administration, Germany was midway through its second great economic convulsion, following the hyper-inflation of the early 1920s. In December 1931, with unemployment rocketing, Goerdeler accepted an invitation from President Hindenburg to join his government as Reichskommissar (State Commissioner) for price control. His deft handling of this delicate role earned him widespread acclaim. When Hindenburg’s chancellor, Heinrich Brüning, resigned in May 1932, Goerdeler was widely thought of as his successor. But the political turmoil which ensued did not produce a man of rectitude and order – it produced instead Adolf Hitler, who became chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933.
Carl Goerdeler
Goerdeler did not at first oppose Hitler. He saw the new chancellor as potentially an enlightened dictator, who with the right advice could be a force for good and for order after the upheavals and failures of the Weimar years.
It did not take long for the scales to fall from the lord mayor of Leipzig’s eyes.
On 1 April 1933, when the city’s Jewish businesses were threatened by Nazi stormtroopers of the Sturmabteilung (SA) during Hitler’s ‘day of national boycott’, it required an appearance by the mayor in full ceremonial dress, backed by the police, to save the situation from descending into violence and calamity. There followed several instances when
