page_title: German resistance to Nazism
section_title: Towards July 20
hierarchical_section_title: German resistance to Nazism / Towards July 20
context_page_description: German resistance to Nazism was the opposition by individuals and groups in Germany to the Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. Some of these engaged in active resistance, including attempts to remove Adolf Hitler from power by assassination and overthrow his regime.
  German resistance didn't take the form of a united resistance movement at any time during the Nazi period, unlike the much more coordinated Italian Resistance, Soviet partisans, Polish Underground State, Greek Resistance, Yugoslav Partisans, French Resistance, Dutch resistance, and Norwegian resistance movement. The German resistance consisted of small and usually isolated groups. They were unable to mobilize large-scale political opposition. With the exception of individual attacks on Nazis, acts of sabotage or the successful disclosure of information about Nazi armaments factories to the Allies, as by the Austrian resistance group led by Heinrich Maier. One strategy was to persuade leaders of the Wehrmacht to stage a coup against the regime; the 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler was intended to trigger such a coup.
context_section_description: By mid-1943 the tide of war was turning decisively against Germany. The last major German offensive on the Eastern Front, Operation Citadel, ended in the defeat for the Germans at Kursk, and in July 1943 Mussolini was overthrown. The Army and civilian plotters became more convinced than ever that Hitler must be assassinated so that a government acceptable to the western Allies could be formed and a separate peace negotiated in time to prevent a Soviet invasion of Germany. This scenario, while more credible than some of the resistance's earlier plans, was based on a false premise: that the western Allies would be willing to break with Stalin and negotiate a separate peace with a non-Nazi German government. In fact both Churchill and Roosevelt were committed to the “unconditional surrender” formula.
  Since the Foreign Office was a stronghold of resistance activists, it was not difficult for the conspirators to reach the Allies via diplomats in neutral countries. Theo Kordt, based in the German Embassy in Bern, and advised by the Foreign Officers resisters Ulrich von Hassell and Adam von Trott zu Solz, communicated with the British via intermediaries such as Willem Visser 't Hooft, secretary-general of the World Council of Churches, based in Geneva. The Kreisau Circle sent Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Helmut von Moltke to meet George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, at a church conference in Stockholm. Bell passed their messages and plans on to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. An American journalist, Louis P. Lochner, carried coded messages out of Germany and took them to Roosevelt. Other envoys worked through Vatican channels, or via diplomats in Lisbon—a recognised site for indirect communication between Germany and the Allied countries.
  All of these overtures were rejected, and indeed they were usually simply ignored. The western Allies would give the German resistance no assistance or even recognition. There were several reasons for this. First, they did not know or trust the resisters, who seemed to them to be a clique of Prussian reactionaries concerned mainly to save their own skins now that Germany was losing the war. This attitude was encouraged by visceral anti-Germans such as Lord Vansittart, Churchill's diplomatic adviser, who regarded all Germans as evil. Second, Roosevelt and Churchill were both acutely aware that the Soviet Union was bearing the brunt of the war against Hitler, and were aware of Stalin's constant suspicions that they were doing deals behind his back. They thus refused any discussions that might be seen as suggesting a willingness to reach a separate peace with Germany. Third, the Allies were determined that in World War II, unlike in World War I, Germany must be comprehensively defeated in the field so that another "stab in the back" myth would not to arise in Germany.
  Olbricht now put forward a new strategy for staging a coup against Hitler. The Reserve Army had an operational plan called Operation Valkyrie, which was to be used if the disruption caused by the Allied bombing of German cities caused a breakdown in law and order, or a rising by the millions of slave labourers from occupied countries now being used in German factories. Olbricht suggested that this plan could be used to mobilise the Reserve Army to stage a coup. In the autumn of 1943, Tresckow revised Valkyrie plan and drafted supplemental orders to take control of German cities, disarm the SS and arrest the Nazi leadership after Hitler's assassination. Operation Valkyrie could only be put into effect by General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Reserve Army, so he must either be won over to the conspiracy or in some way neutralised if the plan was to succeed. Fromm, like many senior officers, knew about the military conspiracies against Hitler but neither supported them nor reported them to the Gestapo.
  In August 1943 Tresckow met a young staff officer, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, for the first time. Badly wounded in North Africa, Stauffenberg was a devout Catholic, a political conservative and a zealous German nationalist 
caption: Werner Karl von Haeften
exif: {}