Dissent and retribution
NIGEL JONES praises an account of how senior figures in Germany sought to oppose Nazism from within Nein! Standing Up to Hitler 1935–1944 by Paddy Ashdown William Collins, 416 pages, £25
What do politicians do when their careers run out of road? Michael Portillo took to the trains, Ed Balls took up dancing and Paddy Ashdown became a historian. This is the fourth book that the former Liberal Democrat leader has written set around the Second World War, and pays a fine, although sometimes confusing, tribute to the leaders of the anti-Nazi resistance, most of whom paid for their courage with their lives.
It is, in fact, two books melded into one, which accounts for the occasionally muddled chronology. Ashdown’s main narrative focuses on three men: General Ludwig Beck, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the conservative economist and politician Carl Goerdeler. All three were nationalists initially sympathetic to the Nazi ‘experiment’, but who quickly saw the criminal nature of the regime and devoted themselves to trying to remove it.
Beck resigned as head of the General Staff and tried to organise a military putsch. Canaris kept his post as chief of the Abwehr military intelligence service, but trod a devious, delicate and dangerous path of undermining the war effort while appearing to advance it. Goerdeler travelled around Europe trying to persuade the Allies to back their efforts to overthrow Hitler. Alas in vain.
Repeatedly, their plans ended in failure. Although this is often attributed to Hitler enjoying the devil’s own luck, I fear that some responsibility must be borne by the conspirators themselves. Ashdown argues that the Prussian sense of unthinking obedience hampered them, but they were also forever awaiting Allied approval, which never came. Churchill forbade all contact with the resistance, while Stalin and Roosevelt insisted on unconditional surrender.
At last, and far too late, a younger generation took over from the tired old trio. The dynamic Count von Stauffenberg became the heart, hand and head of the conspiracy, both planting the bomb that narrowly failed to kill the führer and flying back to Berlin to lead the failed Valkyrie putsch of July 1944. The brutal Nazi vengeance that followed wiped out almost all top-level resistance, depriving Germany, claims Ashdown, of an elite that would have built a new united Europe.
The resistance often paid for their courage with their lives
Ashdown swerves off course for several chapters to unravel the communist spy rings, based mainly in Switzerland, who used secrets smuggled out of Germany to help Stalin. Written in the style of an espionage thriller, this would have been better as a separate book.
Although concentrating too much on the anti-Nazi military aristocracy (there is little on humbler resistance groups), Ashdown’s book poses, but does not always answer, profound moral questions: do ethics trump patriotism, and when does treason and even murder in the service of overthrowing evil become not just a choice, but a duty?