Book review: Nein! The Germans who stood up to Hitler
Nein! by Paddy Ashdown: Reviewed by Rodric Braithwaite
Riveting new detail is added to the story of the men and women who lost their lives trying to stop the Führer, in the final book by Ashdown, who died on Saturday
Riveting new detail is added to the story of the men and women who lost their lives trying to stop the Führer, in the final book by Ashdown, who died on Saturday
As Stauffenberg put it: “the man who has
the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in
German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a
traitor to his own conscience.”
In the old German
defence ministry in the Bendlerstrasse, Berlin, a whole floor has been restored
to the way it was at the time of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. It
was there that Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators managed their
doomed enterprise: he and three others were shot in the courtyard below at the
end of that dramatic day. Another floor is devoted to the trade unions,
political parties and churches who did what they could to stop the man who was
bringing shame and disaster to their country. It is a moving place.
The resisters were not
only military men, Prussian aristocrats and veteran civilian politicians such
as the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler. A younger group around Helmuth
von Moltke’s Kreisau Circle planned to fashion a Germany that was democratic,
antiracist, and internationalist: Paddy Ashdown, in his new book on the German
resistance, calls them “the flower of the Germany of their day”. There was much
bravery from “ordinary” people: Georg Elser, a carpenter, nearly succeeded in
blowing Hitler to pieces. Others protested peacefully, such as the devoutly
Christian students Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans from Munich; or Otto and
Elise Hempel, the couple at the heart of the bestselling novel by Hans Fallada
(and subsequent film with Emma Thompson) Alone in Berlin. They and many others were killed horribly by
Hitler’s butchers.
And yet the idea still
persists that those who opposed him were pathetically few in number, and that
most were rabid nationalists with whom we could never have done business. That
is inaccurate and unjust. Ashdown’s book is suffused with a moral sense, a
fellow-feeling for the courageous men and women who made gut-wrenching moral
choices in the most appalling circumstances.
The story has been written before,
but Ashdown contributes riveting new detail, especially about the Europe-wide
network of agents through which Admiral Canaris, the wily head of the German
foreign intelligence organisation, contrived to pass information to Hitler’s
enemies. The book is pacey, fluent, and fascinating. But Ashdown aims above all
to give these people the honour that is their due.
Some argue that the
resistance only started when Germans began to realise that their country was
losing the war. In fact civilian opposition to Hitler was active, though
ineffective, well before that. The first military plot was put together in 1938
under the leadership of the chief of staff, Ludwig Beck: it was aborted because
Britain and France were unwilling to show support while they still hoped to
reach an accommodation with the Führer. The first attempt to assassinate Hitler
was in 1934. More than 20 followed. They failed less because they were
incompetently executed than because Hitler had the devil’s own luck. In Berlin the 20 July
plot nearly succeeded. Parallel coups in Paris, Vienna and Prague got close.
All was frustrated when Hitler broadcast the news that he had, by a mere fluke,
survived the bomb planted by Stauffenberg in his military headquarters. In the
aftermath the Gestapo arrested 7,000 people: nearly 5,000 were executed. It is
remarkable that so many were able to escape detection by the Gestapo until
after the event.
Many of the plotters
were indeed old-fashioned German patriots. But they were no more “rabid” than
that imperial patriot Winston Churchill. Stauffenberg himself combined a deep
sense of military honour with an increasingly left-inclined political
radicalism... read more:
Stories of ordinary people who resisted
