CHAPTER 24
PLOTTING AGAINST HITLER
The German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years.
—HENNING VON TRESCKOW
Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death.
—DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
I am sure that there are very many in Germany, silenced now by the Gestapo and the machine-gun, who long for deliverance from a godless Nazi rule, and for the coming of a Christian order in which they and we can take our part.
—BISHOP GEORGE BELL
Since the fall of France a year earlier, the coup had stalled. Hitler’s victories had been so stunning and rapid that most generals had lost all confidence in their ability to oppose him. His popularity soared. In recent months Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania were conquered, and General Rommel had triumphed in North Africa. Hitler seemed unstoppable, so most generals floated along with the rising German tide and could not be persuaded to lift a finger against him.
Dohnanyi and Oster knew that persuading the top generals was the only hope of toppling Hitler. It had been earlier hoped that a grassroots movement could have brought the Nazis down from below. But once Martin Niemöller was imprisoned, this possibility evaporated. His bold defiance of the Nazis and his leadership qualities made him the perfect candidate. This was doubtless why Hitler sent the fiery Christian to a concentration camp. Now it had to come from above, and that meant the generals.
Some generals were the noble leaders of the conspiracy, ready to act at any time. But many others were less noble and wise, and their desire to be unmired from the swamp and ignominy of Versailles was so strong that it overrode their extreme revulsion toward Hitler. Many reasoned that once he had served his purposes, he would falter and be replaced by someone less brutal; if necessary, they would see to that. But not while they were winning so spectacularly, not while they were rolling back Versailles. Many also felt that killing Hitler would make a martyr of him. Another stab-in-the-back legend would arise, and they would be cast forever in the roles of Brutus and Cassius to Hitler’s Caesar. Why risk anything? The gelatinous Brauchitsch epitomized those who had firmly resolved to blow with the wind. “I myself won’t do anything,” he said, “but I won’t stop anyone else from acting.”
Beck, Dohnanyi, Oster, Canaris, Goerdeler, and the other conspirators did what they could during this year of Hitler’s successes, but essentially they were stuck.
The Commissar Order
Then came June 6, 1941, and the notorious Commissar Order. Hitler was about to launch his campaign against Russia, code named Operation Barbarossa, and his bitter contempt for the “eastern races” such as the Poles and the Slavs would again be on full display. The Commissar Order instructed the army to shoot and kill all captured Soviet military leaders. Hitler had allowed the army to avoid the most gruesome horrors in Poland. He knew they didn’t have the stomach for it, and the soulless SS Einsatzgruppen had done the foulest and most inhuman deeds. But now he ordered the army itself to carry out the butchery and sadism in contravention of all military codes going back for centuries. The generals took notice. Even the weakest-willed among them saw that they had been gaily riding along on the back of a tiger.
Murdering all captured Red Army leaders was unthinkable, but Hitler was not interested in old-fashioned ideas about morality and honor. He would show them the brutal road to victory and now belched diabolical aphorisms of perfectly circular logic. “In the East,” he said, “harshness is kindness toward the future.” The leaders of the German military “must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples.” In explaining the need for the Commissar Order, he absurdly stated that the Red Army leaders must, “as a rule, immediately be shot for instituting barbaric Asian methods of warfare.”
Henning von Tresckow was a typical Prussian with a strong sense of honor and tradition who had come to despise Hitler early on. He was the first officer at the front to contact the conspirators. When he heard about the Commissar Order, he told General Gersdorf that if they weren’t able to convince Bock to have it canceled, “the German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years.” He said the guilt would fall not only on Hitler and his inner circle, “but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and mine.” For many generals this was the turning point. The indefatigably weak-willed Brauchitsch was so shocked by the Commissar Order that he brought it up with Hitler, who promptly hurled an inkwell at the venerable general’s head.
Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941. Germany was at war with the Soviet Union. The sense of invincibility around Hitler was still strong, but now there arose for the first time the question of whether Hitler ought to quit while he was ahead. Wouldn’t his winning streak sometime come to an end? There was something that gave sane men pause, something about the endless white terrain of Russia. Hitler, however, was unburdened by such sanity, and despite the long odds of success, the march of the German armies toward Moscow now began.
The conspiracy leaders bided their time. Hitler’s Commissar Order helped them recruit many generals, and as its brutal implications were witnessed firsthand, their ability to win converts would increase. Meanwhile, Oster and Dohnanyi continued their work under the protection of Admiral Canaris. If ever anyone led a double life, Canaris did. He took morning horseback rides in Berlin’s Tiergarten with Heydrich, the piscine ghoul, and yet was at this very time using his power to undermine Heydrich and the Nazis at every turn. The gangsterism of Hitler sickened him. On a trip to Spain, while riding through the countryside in his open car, he stood and gave the Hitler salute to every herd of sheep he passed. “You never know,” he said, “whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd.”
Bonhoeffer’s next trip for the Abwehr would not be until September, when he would again travel to Switzerland. In the meantime he continued writing Ethics and doing pastoral work. With the help of Oster and Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer got exemptions and deferments for a number of pastors in the Confessing Church. He hoped to keep them from danger, but also to keep them functioning as pastors since the needs of their flocks were greater than ever. It was mostly a losing battle, as were so many, but Bonhoeffer nonetheless waged it with vigor and was grateful for small successes.
Much of Bonhoeffer’s pastoral work was now via correspondence. In August he wrote another circular letter to the hundred or so former ordinands. In it one finds words that shed light on his own death:
Today I must inform you that our brothers Konrad Bojack, F. A. Preuß, Ulrich Nithack, and Gerhard Schulze have been killed on the eastern front. . . . They have gone before us on the path that we shall all have to take at some point. In a particularly gracious way, God reminds those of you who are out on the front to remain prepared. . . . To be sure, God shall call you, and us, only at the hour that God has chosen. Until that hour, which lies in God’s hand alone, we shall all be protected even in greatest danger; and from our gratitude for such protection ever new readiness surely arises for the final call.
Who can comprehend how those whom God takes so early are chosen? Does not the early death of young Christians always appear to us as if God were plundering his own best instruments in a time in which they are most needed? Yet the Lord makes no mistakes. Might God need our brothers for some hidden service on our behalf in the heavenly world? We should put an end to our human thoughts, which always wish to know more than they can, and cling to that which is certain. Whomever God calls home is someone God has loved. “For their souls were pleasing to the Lord, therefore he took them quickly from the midst of wickedness” (Wisdom of Solomon 4).
We know, of course, that God and the devil are engaged in battle in the world and that the devil also has a say in death. In the face of death we cannot simply speak in some fatalistic way, “God wills it”; but we must juxtapose it with the other reality, “God does not will it.” Death reveals that the world is not as it should be but that it stands in need of redemption. Christ alone is the conquering of death. Here the sharp antithesis between “God wills it” and “God does not will it” comes to a head and also finds its resolution. God accedes to that which God does not will, and from now on death itself must therefore serve God. From now on, the “God wills it” encompasses even the “God does not will it.” God wills the conquering of death through the death of Jesus Christ. Only in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ has death been drawn into God’s power, and it must now serve God’s own aims. It is not some fatalistic surrender but rather a living faith in Jesus Christ, who died and rose for us, that is able to cope profoundly with death.
In life with Jesus Christ, death as a general fate approaching us from without is confronted by death from within, one’s own death, the free death of daily dying with Jesus Christ. Those who live with Christ die daily to their own will. Christ in us gives us over to death so that he can live within us. Thus our inner dying grows to meet that death from without. Christians receive their own death in this way, and in this way our physical death very truly becomes not the end but rather the fulfillment of our life with Jesus Christ. Here we enter into community with the One who at his own death was able to say, “It is finished.”
Bonhoeffer corresponded with the brethren individually too. He received a letter from one Finkenwaldian who had resisted meditating on the biblical texts. But in the midst of war, he told Bonhoeffer that he kept up the practice on his own. When it was too difficult to meditate on the verses, he had simply memorized them, which had a similar effect. He said that just as Bonhoeffer had always told them, the verses “opened out at an unexpected depth. One has to live with the texts, and then they unfold. I am very grateful now for your having kept us to it.”
His correspondence with so many is a testament to his faithfulness as a pastor. Although not himself on the front lines, he heard from many of the brethren who were, encouraging them by return mail and praying for them. One of them, Erich Klapproth, wrote that the temperature was forty below zero: “For days at a stretch we cannot even wash our hands, but go from the dead bodies to a meal and from there back to the rifle. All one’s energy has to be summoned up to fight against the danger of freezing, to be on the move even when one is dead tired.” Klapproth wondered whether they would ever be allowed to return home again, to resume their calm and quiet lives. Shortly thereafter, Bonhoeffer learned that he had been killed.
Hearing that his dear friend Gerhard Vibrans had been killed hit him particularly hard: “I think the pain and feeling of emptiness that his death leaves in me could scarcely be different if he had been my own brother.”
Bonhoeffer’s larger efforts for the Confessing Church did not stop. The war gave the Nazis ample opportunities to harm the churches. Toward the end of 1941, Bonhoeffer helped Perels draft a Petition to the Armed Forces:
The hope of Protestant Christians that the antichurch measures would cease, at least for the length of the war, has been bitterly disappointed. . . . [A]t the same time, antichurch measures at home are taking on ever harsher forms. In congregations the impression is gradually emerging that the calamity of the war and the absence of the clergy are here being intentionally exploited by the party and the Gestapo to destroy the Protestant church even during the war itself.
The document cited many forms of abuse. Himmler was trying to destroy the Confessing Church most vigorously, and all Confessing Church pastors who had not been drafted were forced to abandon their pastorates and given jobs of “some useful activity.” The Gestapo’s treatment of pastors at interrogations was “now in general the same as that of criminals.” Another example showed the Nazi leadership’s bitter hatred of Christians and Christianity:
A prominent layman of the Protestant church, whose son had been killed in the East, was forced to endure great abuse through an anonymous communication. He had announced the death of his son with the following words: “Fallen in faith in his Lord and Savior. . . .” The communication speaks of “shame on the sanctimonious clan and their degenerate blood” that has denounced the son as a believer in an “obscure itinerant preacher.”
Finally Christians across Germany were battling against the euthanasia measures:
The killing of so-called unworthy lives, which has now become better known in the congregations and has claimed its victims from them, is viewed by Christians of all confessions with the deepest alarm and with revulsion, especially in connection with the general abrogation of the Ten Commandments and any security of law and thus as a sign of the anti-Christian stance of leading authorities in the Reich.
Second Trip to Switzerland
In September Bonhoeffer was back in Switzerland for the Abwehr. Again he met with Visser ’t Hooft. Things were looking bad for the Resistance since Hitler’s armies had been thus far successful in the Russian campaign. But Bonhoeffer had a different impression. “So this is the beginning of the end,” he said when they greeted each other. Visser ’t Hooft was puzzled. Did Bonhoeffer mean it was the beginning of the end for Stalin and the Soviets? “No, no,” Bonhoeffer replied, “Hitler is nearing an end, through a surfeit of victories.” Bonhoeffer was convinced that Hitler was nearing the end of his charmed run. “The old man will never get out of this,” he said.
By the fall of 1941, however, all hopes that the conspiracy could get Britain’s assurances of a negotiated peace were gone. The war had dragged on too long. With Germany fighting Russia, Churchill saw it as all or nothing. He was not interested in the conspiracy—if one even existed. He took a defiant stance that branded every German a Nazi and turned a deaf ear to the voices of the conspirators. Bishop Bell spoke on their behalf nonetheless. He tried to raise British awareness that there were men and women in Germany eager for Hitler’s demise. Earlier that year he had given a speech at a large demonstration criticizing the British government for talking of victory, but not of any mercy toward those suffering outside Britain. In no small part from conversations with Bonhoeffer and the Leibholzes, Bell knew whereof he spoke: “I am sure that there are very many in Germany, silenced now by the Gestapo and the machine-gun, who long for deliverance from a godless Nazi rule, and for the coming of Christian order in which they and we can take our part. Is no trumpet call to come from England, to awaken them from despair?”
Churchill and his Foreign Secretary Eden were unmoved. Still, Bonhoeffer would persevere. He wrote a long memorandum in which he explained, among other things, that the Allied indifference to those who might stage a coup against Hitler was discouraging them from staging it. If the good Germans in the conspiracy thought that after risking their lives they would be treated by the British and their allies as indistinguishable from the Nazis, there was precious little incentive to do so: “The question must be faced whether a German government which makes a complete break with Hitler and all he stands for, can hope to get such terms of peace that it has some chance to survive. . . . It is clear that the answering of this question is a matter of urgency, since the attitude of opposition groups in Germany depends upon the answer given.”
Bonhoeffer naively thought he might receive some word from the British government after this memorandum was circulated in the proper circles. None came. In one conversation that September in Geneva, Visser ’t Hooft asked Bonhoeffer what he prayed for. “If you want to know the truth,” Bonhoeffer replied, “I pray for the defeat of my nation. For I believe that is the only way to pay for all the suffering which my country has caused in the world.” Fresh reports were coming back from the front lines, and what Bonhoeffer heard through Dohnanyi was monstrous. Hitler must be stopped at any price.
As Germany’s armies moved toward Moscow, the barbarism of the SS had again been given the freedom to express itself. It was as if the devil and his hordes had crawled out of hell and walked the earth. In Lithuania, SS squads gathered defenseless Jews together and beat them to death with truncheons, afterward dancing to music on the dead bodies. The victims were cleared away, a second group was brought in, and the macabre exercise was repeated.
As a result of such things, many more in the army leadership were driven to the conspiracy. At one point officers came to Field Marshal Bock and begged him with tears in their eyes to stop “the orgy of executions” in Borisov. But even Bock was powerless. When he demanded that the SS commander in charge of the massacres be brought to him, the civilian commissioner, Wilhelm Kube, laughed defiantly. Hitler had given the SS free rein, and even a field marshal could do nothing about it.
It was during this time that Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg and his cousin von Stauffenberg overcame their fundamental feelings against conspiracy. Both were devoutly Christian and had been raised in the caste of German military aristocracy. What they witnessed was a reversal and mockery of every value they held dear. Stauffenberg would take the lead in the famous July 20, 1944, attempt to kill Hitler, as we shall soon see.
Operation 7
When Bonhoeffer returned from Switzerland in late September, he learned of more horrors. But these were being perpetrated inside Germany. A new decree required all Jews in Germany to wear a yellow star in public. Things had now moved into a new realm, and Bonhoeffer knew it was but a foretaste of things to come. At the Dohnanyis’ house that September, Bonhoeffer famously said that, if necessary, he would be willing to kill Hitler. It would not come to that, but Bonhoeffer had to be clear that he was not assisting in the fulfillment of a deed he was unwilling to do. He stipulated, however, that he would first have to resign from the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer knew that most of its members would not share his position on this matter, but more important, he did not want to implicate them in something that he was undertaking alone. His role in the conspiracy was between him and God alone; that much he knew. And he knew that being chosen by God, as the Jews were chosen, and as the prophets were chosen, was something unfathomable. It was the highest honor, but a terrible one, one that none would ever seek.
It was around this time that Bonhoeffer became involved in a complex plan to save seven Jews from death. It would be his first serious assignment for the Abwehr. It was code named U7 for Unternehmen 7 (Operation 7) for the number of Jews first involved; the number eventually doubled. Admiral Canaris wanted to help two Jewish friends and their dependents, and Dohnanyi, two of his lawyer friends. They would smuggle the seven Jews into Switzerland for the ostensible purpose of having them tell the Swiss how well the Germans were treating Jews.
As far as those in Himmler’s circles were concerned, the Jews were expected to lie on behalf of the Nazis, and by speaking well of the Nazis to the Swiss authorities, they would be granted their freedom. At first, some of the Jews believed this was actually expected of them and refused to participate. Dohnanyi had to convince them, at great risk to himself, that it was a counteroperation, and that he wanted them to tell the truth to the Swiss authorities, and to go free. He made it clear that he, Colonel Oster, Admiral Canaris, Count Moltke, and others were involved in a conspiracy against Hitler.
But the operation proved complex and time-consuming. First Dohnanyi had to get the Jews off the deportation lists, and then he had to officially make them Abwehr agents, as he had done for Bonhoeffer. Then he had to convince Switzerland to take them in, which was the greatest difficulty. The Swiss were officially neutral in the war, so they refused to help German Jews. At this impasse, Bonhoeffer, Justus Perels, and Wilhelm Rott (Bonhoeffer’s assistant at Zingst) used their ecumenical contacts. They appealed to Swiss churchmen in what was clearly a life-and-death situation. If these Jews did not escape Germany soon, they would be transported to a terrible fate. Rott pleaded with the president of the Federation of Swiss Churches, knowing what they were asking was officially impossible: “What we now ask you is whether, by urgent representations and official action by the Swiss churches, the door might possibly be opened for just a few, or at least for one solitary case for which we specially plead.” Despite Rott’s begging, the Swiss were unmoved. Bonhoeffer then wrote Barth, asking for help.
The Swiss had their price. Dohnanyi had to secure a large amount of foreign currency to be sent to Switzerland, since these men and women wouldn’t be able to work in the country. This last detail of foreign currency, like a hanging thread, was eventually noticed and then pulled by the Abwehr’s archnemeses Himmler and Heydrich* until things began to unravel, eventually leading to Bonhoeffer’s arrest. But it was what the Nazis were doing to the Jews that pushed Bonhoeffer and many in the conspiracy to action in the first place. When their death sentences were finally handed down in 1945, and they could speak without endangering others, both Bonhoeffer’s brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher shocked their captors by telling them boldly that they had entered the conspiracy primarily for the sake of the Jews.
Hitler Stumbles
In October, Dohnanyi and Oster met with Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Major General Henning von Tresckow, who believed that things were again ripe for toppling Hitler. The generals on the Russian front were becoming increasingly annoyed with Hitler’s interference. Between this and the continuing sadism of the SS, many were finally ready to turn against him. And as Bonhoeffer prophesied, Hitler had come to the end of his unbroken string of successes.
In November 1941 German troops under the command of Field Marshal von Rundstedt were roaring toward Stalingrad when on November 26 in Rostov, they suffered a serious defeat and began to retreat. That was the first time any of Hitler’s forces were decisively routed. It was not something the Führer’s hubris could accommodate. He was personally affronted and now, from a thousand miles away at Wolfsschanze, his bunker in the woods of East Prussia, Hitler demanded that Rundstedt hold the line at all costs. His troops must pay any price and bear any burden. Rundstedt wired back that it was “madness” to attempt to do so. “I repeat,” Rundstedt continued, “that this order be rescinded or that you find someone else.” Hitler relieved Rundstedt of his command and did so.
The tide was turning for Adolf Hitler. The rest of his eastern armies were now charging into the white jaws of the notorious Russian winter, whose fury increased with each day. Thousands of soldiers were dying from severe frostbite. Fuel was freezing. Fires had to be started under tanks in order to start them. Because of the cold, machine guns ceased firing. Telescopic sights were useless.
Still, despite the entreaties of other generals, Hitler mercilessly drove his armies forward, and on December 2, a single German battalion pushed close enough to glimpse the fabled golden spires of the Kremlin, fourteen miles away. That was as close as the Germans would get. On December 4 the temperature fell to thirty-one below zero. On the fifth it fell to thirty-six below zero. Generals Bock and Guderian knew they had come to the end of their abilities and resources. They must retreat. Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the army, determined to resign his post. On the sixth the Russians attacked the German lines with such shattering force that the once invincible armies of Adolf Hitler turned tail and went into full retreat. They were chased back across the endlessly bleak landscape, and it was to their great credit that they survived the retreat at all. Napoleon’s armies had not fared as well.
The reversal pierced Hitler like a dagger, but the news on December 7 of the sneaky Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor revived his spirits. He especially rejoiced at the underhandedness of the attack, saying that it corresponded to his “own system,” and in that eternally sunny way of his he interpreted the mass murder of Americans as an encouraging sign from Providence, just when he needed one. The U.S. declaration of war against Japan and Germany spelled the beginning of the end for Hitler, who would be fighting a war on two fronts until the day of his suicide. But Hitler could not see the grim future. At the moment, he still had his mind on Russia where he was busily snow-shoveling a fresh path to world domination.
First, he would cashier the generals whom he blamed for the shameful disaster. He should have done so long ago. Bock was replaced. Guderian was dismissed. Hoepner was stripped of his rank and forbidden to wear his uniform. Sponeck was imprisoned and sentenced to death. General Keitel, as a reward for years of faithful fawning, got away with a blistering dressing-down, during which the Führer denounced the highly decorated invertebrate as a dummkopf. Brauchitsch responded to the fiasco with coronary failure and turned in his resignation.
This was catastrophic for the conspirators, who had been courting Brauchitsch for some time and had lately gotten his assent to their plans. Now their wobbly linchpin pulled himself out. The conspiracy leaders must turn their attention to his replacement. But Brauchitsch’s replacement would be disinclined to participate. This was because Hitler, always inclined to cut out the middleman, appointed himself as Brauchitsch’s replacement. As commander in chief of the army, he would oversee all military operations going forward. Before it was all over, Hitler would be doing everything himself. If there had been tennis courts at Wolfsschanze, surely the Führer would have overseen the schedule for those using them too.
The Conspirators Regroup
With Brauchitsch gone, the conspiracy had to find another way forward. There were other reasons to be disheartened, not least the dashed chances for a negotiated peace with Britain and her allies. But there was no time to be lost in hand-wringing. The escalating deportations of Jews to the east saw to that. But for their escape four years earlier, Bonhoeffer’s beloved Sabine and her husband and girls might well be in a boxcar on their way to certain death. Bonhoeffer thought of Franz Hildebrandt. He thought of Jewish friends at the University of Berlin and of childhood friends from Grunewald. The extermination of “world Jewry” under the Orwellian aegis of the Final Solution had begun. At a conference at Wannsee early in 1942, the fate of all Jews within reach of the Third Reich had been sealed. The importance of killing Hitler and derailing the progress of his hellish vision for the world was more urgent than ever. But how?
The conspirators’ plans were roughly the same as before: Hitler would be assassinated; General Beck, who had resigned in protest four years earlier, would lead the coup and likely become the head of a new government. According to Gisevius, Beck “stood above all parties . . . [as] the only general with an unimpaired reputation, the only general who had voluntarily resigned.” Having Beck as the leader of a new German government gave many generals the courage to move forward.
Meanwhile the larger conspiracy went ahead on several fronts, with the Abwehr planning to send Bonhoeffer on a mission to Norway in early April. For the first time, though, in February 1942, Dohnanyi learned that the Gestapo was watching him and Bonhoeffer. Dohnanyi’s telephone had been tapped, and his correspondence was being intercepted. Martin Bormann and the cadaverous Heydrich were likely behind it. Aware of the increasing danger, Bonhoeffer drew up a will, which he gave to Bethge; he did not want to alarm his family.
Bonhoeffer was meeting regularly with his brother Klaus, who as the top lawyer for Lufthansa had many high-level business contacts. Klaus was able to bring his colleague Otto John into the conspiracy, and John drew in the Prussian Prince Louis Ferdinand. The number of people involved became quite large. There were roughly two main groups conspiring against Hitler. The first was centered on Canaris and Oster and the Abwehr. But another group, led by Count Helmuth von Moltke, was now beginning to form. It was called the Kreisau Circle.
The Kreisau Circle
The Kreisau Circle took its name from the place of its first meeting, the Kreisau estate of Moltke.* Von Moltke was a member of the Prussian House of Lords and a scion of an illustrious military family. His father commanded Germany’s forces at the outset of the First World War and served as aide-de-camp to Kaiser Wilhelm II. His great-uncle, Field Marshal Helmuth Graf von Moltke, was the legendary military genius whose celebrated victories in the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars prepared the way for the creation of the German Empire in 1870.*
Like many in the Kreisau Circle, Moltke was a committed Christian. Canaris drafted him into the conspiracy at the outset of the Polish campaign when he documented many human rights abuses. In October 1941 he wrote, “Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day, and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. . . . What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time?” In another letter he wrote, “Since Saturday the Berlin Jews are being rounded up. Then they are sent off with what they can carry. . . . How can anyone know these things and walk around free?”
Before his execution in 1945, Moltke wrote his wife that he stood before the court “as a Christian and nothing else” and said that “what the Third Reich is so terrified of” was that he had discussed with Protestant and Catholic clergymen “questions of the practical, ethical demands of Christianity. Nothing else: for that alone are we condemned . . . I just wept a little, not because I was sad or melancholy . . . but because I am thankful and moved by this proof of God’s presence.” To his sons, he wrote that he had tried to help the victims of the Nazis and to try to prepare the way for a change to new leadership: “In that my conscience drove me . . . and in the end that is a man’s duty.” He believed that only by believing in God could one be a total opponent to the Nazis. Early on he tried to convince the Nazis to abide by the Geneva Convention, but Keitel dismissed it as a “notion of chivalry of a bygone era.” Moltke later helped deport Jews from Germany.
The other main figure of the Kreisau Circle was Count Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, whose cousin Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg would lead the failed Valkyrie plot on July 20, 1944. But the Kreisau Circle was staunchly opposed to assassination. Its conspiracy was mostly limited to discussing how Germany should be run after Hitler’s removal, so there was not extensive contact with the Abwehr conspirators. After the first meeting at Moltke’s estate, they gathered at Yorck’s villa in Berlin’s Lichterfelder neighborhood. Yorck eventually changed his mind about the assassination and became a principal figure in the Stauffenberg plot.
* . Gisevius tells us that these two miscreants were often called the Black Twins.
* . Kreis means “circle”; the repetition of Kreisauer Kreis is lost in translation.
* . He was also a celebrated linguist, but famously taciturn, and therefore said “to be silent in seven languages.”