By Hans Mommsen

The military resistance to Hitler has long been a favourite subject for modern historians. Among others, Klaus-Jürgen Müller, Peter Hoffmann, Gerd R. Ueberschär, Count Detlev von Schwerin and Bodo Scheurig have all described in detail the part played by senior military officers in the movement of 20 July 1944. In addition there have been numerous monographs dealing chiefly with the careers of individual officers. They make it possible to distinguish the different motives and objectives that led them into the resistance. At the same time the relevance of the rapidly changing overall military situation emerges more clearly than before. Intensive research into the history of the Second World War has made a crucial contribution to this.

Nevertheless, we have lacked until now a comprehensive account of the military opposition to Hitler. This seems to have become more urgent in the light of recent research into the German occupation of the Soviet Union, principally Christian Gerlach’s account of the German occupation of Byelorussia (Belarus), in which he is critical of leading representatives of 20th July including Henning von Tresckow, Baron Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg.

Quite apart from the revised research picture it is desirable to look at the military opposition to the Nazi regime as an independent movement and not primarily as an appendage to the group of conspirators centred around Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler and Ulrich von Hassell. To be more precise, the early literature on the resistance nurtured the impression that the military officers acted essentially as the executive arm of the civil opposition, and that they came forward with a largely predetermined government list, believing that, once the Nazi regime was overthrown, they would be able to have a decisive influence on policy.

Contrary to this view it must be observed that the military opposition initially came from the Army Group Centre1 and sprang from independent roots. This is where the problem of drawing a dividing-line between ‘civil’ and military opposition arises. We should not here take the term ‘military opposition’ to mean the entirety of all resistance within the armed forces. It is certainly legitimate to define it quantitatively, as Wolfgang Schieder has attempted to do. He assumes a total of 185 military conspirators, but at the same time concedes that the boundary between active conspiracy and passive approval of the coup is a fluid one.

It is nonetheless helpful to differentiate between the older and younger age groups in the military who, as Schieder shows, were each shaped by a different political upbringing. Some were already active as officers in the First World War, while others began their military careers between the wars, a fact reflected in their respective ranks. Those in the former category were predominantly generals, while the latter were mostly staff officers. Accordingly he talks in terms of a senior and a junior line.

This kind of systematic approach does, however, have the disadvantage that it conceals the discontinuity of military opposition between 1938 and 1942. The move to remove the Nazis in 1938, planned in close cooperation with Carl Goerdeler and Ludwig Beck, and Franz Halder’s initiative, following the Polish campaign, to prevent an attack on France, are recognized as having been isolated episodes. The surviving core in the military thus lost the support of the fighting troops, especially since a number of senior officers, who had previously been identified with the intention to topple Hitler, now parted company with the opposition.

This was certainly true of Generaloberst Franz Halder and the commander-in-chief of the army, Generalfeldmarschall Walter von Brauchitsch, who regarded any action against the regime as impossible in view of its military successes, fearing a split in the ranks of the Wehrmacht. Their principal motivation had been to avoid the expansion of the war and this now appeared to be a lost cause. The units commanded by remaining sympathizers of the conspirators were transferred to new locations and with them receded any prospect of an anti-Nazi coup. With the exception of the resistance circle formed within the Abwehr around Oberst Hans Oster, the group led by Ludwig Beck had no very close links with officers on active service. Halder and Brauchitsch had withdrawn from the group; Generalfeldmarschall Witzleben had been posted to Paris, and Generalleutnant Alexander von Falkenhausen to Brussels, and were thus on the periphery. The others had retired from the armed forces. It is therefore more appropriate to count Beck among the civilian opposition, who were chiefly represented in the initial phase by Carl Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell and Johannes Popitz. The struggle to persuade the army commanders to make themselves available for an overthrow of the regime was what characterized resistance activity until well into 1943. As Goerdeler and his followers saw it, the Wehrmacht should act as the crucial lever of political power in the insurrection, but once power had been won, it should immediately be ceded to the civil government. However, this arrangement was blurred by the intention to appoint Ludwig Beck both as head of state and commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, rather as things were done in the late Weimar period.2

Early research into the resistance generally accepted this viewpoint and scarcely inquired into the independent political objectives of the military. Furthermore, the close links between Beck and Goerdeler gave rise to the impression that the two men largely agreed on their constitutional policy (in fact Beck had no direct input into Goerdeler’s programme-defining memorandum, Das Ziel [‘The Goal’], even though it was based on a lengthy exchange of views between the two men).

As regards Beck’s successor as Chief of the General Staff, Generaloberst Franz Halder, the few available sources of evidence indicate that, while he mistrusted the extremist tendencies within the Nazi Party and the SA (and proposed to use the army to hold them in check), he supported the authoritarian form of government and, like many of his contemporaries, excluded Hitler from his strictures of Nazism. With few exceptions, the officers who had been involved in the 1938–1939 plans for an insurrection, withdrew, just as Halder did, from the civilian opposition group around Goerdeler and, apart from Hans Oster, there were only isolated cross-connections with the Wehrmacht.

From the autumn of 1941 a new opposition took shape among a group of younger staff-officers, who at first only maintained informal contact with Beck and Oster. The driving-force behind this movement was Henning von Tresckow who, in October 1941, dispatched Fabian von Schlabrendorff to Berlin to make contact with the civilian opposition. We know this from Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries. At the beginning of 1940 Tresckow was still in sympathy with the offensive against France that was being planned by von Manstein. However, if we accept Bodo Scheurig’s judgement, after the French campaign Tresckow’s former scepticism returned. He realised that the Reich was a long way from concluding a general peace; instead, Hitler was making preparations to continue the war with an assault on the Soviet Union.

From 10 December 1940 Tresckow held the post of senior operations officer in Army Group B, which in April 1941 was renamed Army Group Centre. At first it seems that he was poised between confidence in the campaign-plan assigned to his army group and doubts as to whether it could be carried through. Even before receiving the order to attack he certainly feared that their Russian opponents had been underestimated, and declared that everything depended ‘on the swift and unrelenting triumph of Army Group Centre’ before the onset of winter.

Tresckow’s scepticism and inner mood of protest were provoked by the methods called for by Hitler in the ‘war of racial extermination’, as well as his absurdly over-ambitious strategic objectives. He noted with growing bitterness that his warnings and reservations found no support in the OKH (army high command), which in turn was unable to get its opinions heard by the Hitler-dominated OKW (combined forces high command). His first steps were limited to preserving his own military identity and the respect of his troops. However, he failed in his attempt to persuade the commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre, Generalfeldmarschall von Bock, to withdraw the military jurisdiction decree, even though it was in clear contravention of international law. On the contrary, the Kommissarbefehl3 was accepted from the very beginning and no restraint was placed on it.

After Tresckow had failed in his attempt to mobilize first von Bock and then von Kluge4 against Hitler’s methods, he decided to act on his own initiative and win the support of people who felt as he did. These men, whom he had placed in commands within the Army Group, included Baron Rudof-Christoph von Gersdorff, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Count Hans von Hardenberg and Berndt von Kleist. His recruitment policy laid the foundations for a widely ramified resistance group, which revived the plans for an attempted military takeover.

The rise of this second opposition movement, which unlike its civilian counterpart did not shrink from employing clandestine methods, inherited its political philosophy from the military command-structure that Hitler had wantonly destroyed. After Hitler had assumed supreme command of the Wehrmacht (combined armed forces) in February 1938, the army continued for a while to maintain its autonomy, but this had now almost completely been forfeited. In many respects the very existence of the army was threatened by the increasing insignificance of the General Staff, the rapid changes in high-ranking personnel and the fact that, in December 1941, the Führer himself took over supreme command of the armies fighting on the Russian front.

Tresckow, as a trained staff-officer, could see that the constant overstretching of military resources through Hitler’s all-or-nothing strategy was bound to have dangerous consequences in the medium term. At the same time, the progressive undermining of the professional foundations of operational leadership led to increasing bitterness among those officers who were not hypnotized by Nazi propaganda slogans and were able to maintain a critical view of the overall situation. At first there was a hope that by influencing the OKW, OKH and individual army commanders, the necessary adjustments could be made to the plan of campaign. However, this proved illusory since the army commanders lacked the will and the moral courage to confront Keitel and Jodl (respectively chief-of-staff and chief of operations of the OKW), let alone Hitler himself.

Early in 1942 Tresckow decided to take matters into his own hands. His decision to find a way of removing Hitler was made under the shadow of a serious military crisis caused by the army being brought to a standstill outside Moscow late in 1941. Admittedly the intention to get rid of Hitler alternated with efforts to bring about a reform of the command structure which would in effect remove Hitler from supreme command of the army. The exact dates are uncertain since the statements of contemporaries, on which we rely in this matter, tend to project backward events that took place later.

In July 1943 Tresckow tried to arrange the arrest of Hitler in Vinnitsa, the eastern military headquarters in Russia. He subsequently attempted to stage a coup and had the brilliant idea of developing a scenario, codenamed ‘Valkyrie’, ostensibly to prevent a possible uprising by foreign slave-workers in the Berlin area, but in fact designed to seize all key buildings following Hitler’s arrest or assassination. All this was done largely independently of the civilian opposition, though there were some sporadic contacts through the mediation of Hans Oster. Tresckow’s plan was to set up a military dictatorship with the help of General Olbricht, chiefof- staff to the commander of the reserve army. When Tresckow was posted to Russia, he entrusted the execution of the coup d’état to Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Tresckow’s coolness, determination and brilliance in exploiting existing military institutions in furtherance of insurrection pointed the way. It was through him that the military opposition became the real driving force of the conspiracy. The plans for the coup were based on the 1856 law on the declaration of a state of emergency, to which Johannes Popitz had added guidelines, which were referred to in later appeals by the 20th July movement.

On the other hand, what political objectives were being pursued by the circle that was forming around Stauffenberg is an open question. His statement directed at Goerdeler, to the effect that ‘the conditions of Weimar should not be revived by any group’, indicates a considerable distance between the concepts of the civilian opposition under Goerdeler and Beck and those of the labour unionists Wilhelm Leuschner and Jakob Kaiser, who had by now joined the movement. The rather vague ideas Stauffenberg expressed, socially romantic and with a berufsständisch slant, show that he was keen to take an independent line.

Goerdeler’s demand that the generals must be prevented ‘from doing anything political’ illustrates the growing tension between the older and younger groups of conspirators. It is almost impossible to determine whether anything more than a superficial exchange of ideas took place between Tresckow and Goerdeler on questions of constitutional and social policy. It is, to say the least, doubtful whether the ‘close affinity’ was sealed by ‘a great meeting of minds’, to quote Bodo Scheurig.

The links with Goerdeler and Beck had existed since the late summer of 1942 and were established by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, on whose evidence we are heavily reliant. Late in 1942 Goerdeler visited Army Group Centre in Smolensk and tried to get Kluge to support joint action by the generals around Hitler. Later, too, he backed Tresckow’s efforts to persuade Kluge to act. However, his letter to Kluge dated 25 July 1943 was never sent.

Without giving precise dates, Schlabrendorff reports a meeting in Berlin between Goerdeler, Tresckow and Olbricht, at which Olbricht agreed to carry out the coup d’état with the help of the reserve army. In the late summer of 1943 these contacts intensified, but it must be assumed that closer links with the civilian group only took place when it was necessary to push ahead with the staffing of Operation Valkyrie. This applied mainly to drawing up lists of proposed political commissioners within the military organization, which began in the late autumn of 1943. These were to be subordinate to the relevant military authorities and obliged to take instructions from them, unlike the arrangements established by Otto Braun in the Weimar period.5

To begin with, Tresckow acted largely independently of Stauffenberg who, after returning from military hospital, took up the post of Chief-of-Staff of the Reserve Army. However, they shared the intention of removing Hitler and reached this decision through motives which distinguished them from the civilian opposition groups. It is true that there was a wide measure of agreement between the civilian and military conspirators, both in their fundamentally conservative-nationalist stance and in their disgust at the crimes of the regime. Yet only a minority saw these crimes as a direct consequence of the Nazi system. For Tresckow and Stauffenberg, not surprisingly, military considerations were what weighed most heavily.

This difference in emphasis is still just visible in the appeals to the people and the army for a coup d’état, drafted jointly with Beck and Goerdeler. In the texts written by Goerdeler the moral criticism of Hitler predominates, stressing his ‘lust for glory’ and ‘power-mad arrogance’, to which he had sacrificed ‘entire armies without a pang of conscience’. By contrast, the words of an undated note by Stauffenberg, which he had with him on the day of the putsch, were far more sober: ‘If the present course is pursued, the inevitable result will be defeat and the destruction of [Germany’s] hereditary human reserves (blutsmäßiger Substanz). The fate that hangs over us can only be averted by removal of the present leadership.’ Stauffenberg went on to condemn the pervasive corruption and jobbery, but stressed above all that the regime had no right to ‘drag the whole German people down with it.’ In this context he presented the task of the revolutionary government:

After a change of government let the most important objective be that Germany should still be a power-factor that can be deployed in the interplay of forces, and that the Wehrmacht in particular should remain a viable instrument in the hands of its commanders.

For men like Tresckow and Stauffenberg, maintaining the army intact and avoiding a devastating military defeat were the prime considerations. If the same method of conducting the war continued to be used on the Russian front, a catastrophe was inevitable. Without hesitation they rejected Hitler’s aim of crushing not only the Soviet system but the Russian state and of robbing Russia of its vital strength. The war, they declared, should not be directed against the Russian people but only against the Soviet system. As Stauffenberg put it, he had ‘the instinctive feeling that the Soviet Union could only be beaten with the help of the Russians and the many other ethnic peoples living there’. Similarly Tresckow, as Gersdorff remembered, had ‘from the outset’ held the view that Russian nationalism had to be mobilized against communism.

Hence Tresckow and Stauffenberg made consistent efforts to establish Russian volunteer units, and later the Vlasov army, and in doing so deliberately tried to bypass instructions to the contrary coming from the Führer’s headquarters. Originally, both officers hoped to achieve military stability on the Russian front, even after the regime had been overthrown. The motive of saving the army, which gained ever greater importance for them, is understandable when seen against the background of enormous losses, which could be laid at the door of Hitler’s string of wrong decisions and his overestimation of German strength. The sombre mood and the sense of crisis triggered by the battle outside Moscow were expressed openly in letters from Helmuth Stieff. They were combined with a growing revulsion at the brutal treatment of prisoners-of-war, Jews and other civilians, which led to a strengthening of the will to resist in the Russian opposition.

This aspect was expressly addressed in Stauffenberg’s note:

The treatment of occupied lands represents a significant factor in the grave overall situation. The Russian campaign began with the order to kill all commissars, and went on by allowing prisoners-of-war to starve to death and carrying out manhunts with the aim of rounding up forced labour. This represents the beginning of the end of the whole war.

This note seems to reflect the fact that the annihilation of the Jews and the war against partisans were less in the forefront of Stauffenberg’s mind. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the fact that it was not mere tactical considerations that deterred him from putting the Kommissarbefehl into effect and taking measures against the civilian population; he also found Hitler’s policy of violence morally repugnant.

This view is supported by an account from a fellow-officer, Alexander Stahlberg, of a conversation with Tresckow on 17 November 1942, in which the latter stated openly that the activities of the SS in the rear of the front line were not a matter of ‘isolated excesses’ but ‘systematic extermination of human beings’. Army Group Centre possessed reliable information about the exterminations, the extent of which defied ‘all imagination’. He saw them as ‘dishonouring the self-sacrifice of the soldiers at the front’. When Tresckow tried to put Generalfeldmarschall von Manstein6 in the picture, the field marshal refused, in the face of good evidence, to give any credence to reports of the systematic liquidation of Jews.

The motives governing the actions of the military resistance were certainly varied. But we can be sure that an important one was their concern for the units under their command, indeed their responsibility for keeping the army intact, and not driving it into a hopeless and murderous war that was bound to end on German soil and would, as in 1918, trigger a revolutionary uprising. To this was added their criticism of the irresponsible way Hitler interfered with operational decisions right down to battalion and company level, something which showed his contempt for professional officers and which needlessly cost lives.

For the members of this younger generation of officers, on whom the German revolution of 1918–1920 had left a strong impression, an ingrained anti-communism went without saying. Tresckow and Stauffenberg were no exception. Indeed, Stauffenberg had originally stated that the Nazi regime could only be dealt with when Bolshevism was out of the way. The anti-Soviet stereotype operating here nourished the illusion that it would be possible simply to put the ruling Soviet apparat out of action and thus obtain the support of the ethnic Russian population. This attitude suggested that, like Hitler and the Nazi propagandists, they equated Bolshevism with the Jews.

Opinions of this kind were to be found among many leading members of the military resistance. In their operational orders army commanders like Generaloberst Erich Hoepner or Carl- Heinrich von Stülpnagel even surpassed the OKW in the use of

anti-Semitic language. Thus, in the battle-orders for Operation Barbarossa, issued by Hoepner to his Panzer Group IV on 2 May 1941, we read that the impending battle ‘to ward off Jewish Bolshevism’ must be fought with ‘unprecedented harshness’ and ‘directed with an iron will towards the complete and merciless destruction of the enemy’. In particular there must be ‘no sparing of those who uphold the present Russian-Bolshevist system’. This from a man who, since the mid-1930s, had been a convinced opponent of Nazism and in whom Stauffenberg placed great hopes.

The strongly anti-Bolshevist attitude among men critical of Hitler helps to explain why, even within Army Group Centre, there was no resistance worth mentioning to the methods used in combating the partisans, even though these quickly changed into a systematic extermination of the Jewish population in the occupied territories. It is difficult, to say the least, to understand why the senior officers of the Army Group were ready to assume the presence of a widespread partisan movement and to give uncritical credence to reports to this effect from the Einsatzgruppen.7 These reports went through the hands of Gersdorff and Tresckow, and it is a fact that, in the summer of 1941, Soviet partisan activity was only just beginning to get under way and did not play a serious part until 1942. Christian Gerlach has pointed out that Gersdorff, as security officer for the Army Group, had direct involvement in the anti-partisan actions, while Tresckow was also personally concerned with these on numerous occasions; it was not only the line officers who had responsibility for what went on in the rearward areas. Between June 1941 and May 1942, the rear of Army Group Centre reported the shooting of 80,000 partisans and suspected partisans.

There is abundant evidence not only that, in the anti-partisan activities of Army Group Centre, were large numbers of innocent civilians liquidated, but also that these were for the most part local Jewish communities. There needs to be an examination of the degree of direct involvement in this by members of the resistance, especially Henning von Tresckow, Baron Rudolf- Christoph von Gersdorff, Baron Georg von Boeselager and others. It is true that Gersdorff, in an appendix to the war-diary of Army Group Centre, recorded the opposition expressed by officers to ‘the shooting of Jews, prisoners and commissars’. This was considered ‘a violation of the honour of the German army’. Similarly, in his ‘assessment of the enemy’ dated 10 March 1942, he pointed out that it was particularly ‘the rapid spread of information about the plight of Russian prisoners-of-war’ that was giving a lasting boost to Russian resistance, and that a ‘sharp change of attitude to the treatment of prisoners and to propaganda’ was necessary. This view was circulated among the most senior Reich officials by the Reich Minister for Occupied Territories, but it was an illusion to expect any intervention from the top.

As far as Henning von Tresckow and his fellow conspirators are concerned, we cannot escape the impression that from the winter of 1941 a growing disillusionment took over and that they were becoming aware of the criminal operations of the Einsatzgruppen and SS brigades. We may perhaps allow that Tresckow was not sufficiently aware that the pretext of antipartisan operations, which in many cases were carried out by units of the regular army, often concealed the systematic liquidation of the Jewish population. However, his personal contacts with Arthur Nebe8 and closeness to Gersdorff, who was responsible for these measures, make this difficult to accept. There is, however, little purpose in narrowing down this question to the involvement of specific individuals.

Following the extremely pessimistic assessment of the military situation in the wake of Stalingrad, the objections of senior army officers to the policy of genocide which was in fact being carried through, came to the fore more strongly, yet humanitarian considerations were still apparently taking second place to the that of preserving the moral integrity of the army. At the same time we must not overlook the fact that prominent members of the military resistance, including General von Stülpnagel and the Quartermaster-General, Eduard Wagner, actively supported the extermination of the Jews or took part in drawing up the ‘criminal orders’ for this programme. Equally, Tresckow’s collaboration with Arthur Nebe, who commanded Einsatzgruppe B, cannot be dressed up as an attempt to stem the brutal measures, since Nebe must be regarded as one of the most blatant exponents of the policy of annihilation.

Hence, we have no alternative but to admit that a considerable number of those who played an active part in the July Plot, and in many cases lost their lives as a result, had previously participated in the war of racial extermination, or had at least approved of it for quite a time and in some cases had actively promoted it. As a rule this happened under the cloak of fighting the partisans, yet those who were directly or indirectly involved could scarcely fail to see that the SS brigades and Einsatzgruppen were carrying out a comprehensive ‘ethnic cleansing’, to which the Wehrmacht, if only by condemning large numbers of Russians to starvation, were giving active support.

In reaching a verdict on individuals, we should not place too much importance on the question of how they reconciled guilty involvement with their concern to extricate themselves from this and ultimately to accept the consequences of active resistance. What is more significant is that one of the roots of the conspirators’ action was their intimate knowledge of the criminal policies of the Nazi regime and not least of the Wehrmacht itself. And even though political and military interests predominated, these were increasingly matched by moral motives.

Among the military opposition, and in the 20th July movement generally, we can discern an ambivalence in their attitude to the Jewish question. This had a lot to do with the persistence of the conservative anti-Semitism of imperial times among the German upper classes. The number of people who, from the outset and from personal conviction, rejected the Nazi persecution of the Jews, was very limited, and even opponents of the regime, such as Hoepner or Werner von Fritsch, welcomed Hitler’s anti-Jewish measures. However, the majority of civilian conspirators, who did not become aware of the systematic liquidation of European Jewry until the latter half of 1942, went through a rapid learning process in this respect. The military opposition, meanwhile, apparently went through the same process, even though the criminal actions of the regime had been taking place in front of their eyes.

In the preparations for the attempt on Hitler’s life, the independent action of the military opposition played a prominent part. It is no coincidence that a meeting prior to 20 July 1944 of the people destined for office in the new government failed to take place, nor was Goerdeler informed of the impending assassination, though in this case fears about security may have been the decisive factor. There was no question but that Beck was to hold the position of Generalstatthalter, or head of state, while Stauffenberg was apparently thinking of replacing Goerdeler with Julius Leber as Chancellor, either immediately or after a transitional period.

Stauffenberg famously said, ‘the Wehrmacht is the most conservative institution in our state that is at the same time rooted in the people’. He also said that the officer corps ‘must not fail again and let the initiative be taken out of their hands’ as they had done in 1918. These words indicate that Stauffenberg would in no way have been satisfied with acting as a lever of power in the hands of the civilian opposition. It is impossible to be more precise about this, since the relevant papers have nearly all been destroyed. Nonetheless, it seems doubtful that, had ‘Valkyrie’ been successful, any use would have been made of the political appeals that Goerdeler had prepared, as a government statement and for a speech to be broadcast to the nation.

The history of the military resistance represents a unique example of the conflict between politics and warfare. Tresckow and Stauffenberg took the action they did, because they recognized the pointlessness of continuing the war on Hitler’s terms, and they feared involvement of the Wehrmacht in the escalation of Nazi crimes. Without the willingness of the Wehrmacht to submit to a great extent to Hitler’s demand for a war of racial extermination, those crimes would have been impossible, notwithstanding isolated attempts to free the army from the odium of this criminal policy. After the defeat on the outskirts of Moscow in the winter of 1941, this gradually began to change, but the decision to take a genuinely opposing stand was made by only a few, a fact which rules out military opposition as an alibi for the Wehrmacht as a whole.9

It is significant that the decision to act to save Germany came from senior army officers who made no secret of the fact that, unless the dictator was put out of action, Germany was heading for catastrophe. This knowledge was combined with a growing feeling of remoteness from the military and political style of the regime, which was trampling on the Prussian tradition, while at the same time trying to exploit it. The position of the predominantly conservative group of officers who had originally – and with very few exceptions – welcomed the ‘National-Socialist rising’, was summed up most cogently by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, when he said that ‘the Prussian challenge to the Reich’ stood as firmly as ever.

1. In the German invasion of Russia in 1941, Army Group Centre was the force that advanced through Byelorussia with the objective of capturing Moscow.

2. Kurt von Schleicher was both an army general and Chancellor (December 1932–January 1933).

3. The ‘Commissar Decree’ stated that all communist political commissars, who were present in every unit of the Red Army, should be liquidated.

4. Feldmarschall Günther von Kluge (1882–1944). Replaced von Bock as commander-in-chief of Army Group Centre in December 1941. In July 1944 he replaced Rommel as commander in France, but was quickly relieved of his post by Hitler, for failing to uncover the July Bomb Plot. Though he had refused to join the plotters, he had promised help after Hitler’s removal. When ordered back to Germany, he committed suicide.

5. Otto Braun (1872–1955). Prime Minister of Prussia in the Weimar republic, who pursued a notably independent line until forcibly removed from office by Chancellor Papen in 1932.

6. Erich von Manstein (1887–1973). One of Hitler’s most brilliant army commanders. In 1940 he masterminded the invasion of France. In the Russian campaign he commanded the 11^th Army on the southern flank and then the Army Group Don. He was promoted to field marshal in July 1942. However, he had frequent strategic disagreements with Hitler and was relieved of his command in March 1944. Having some Jewish blood (his real name was Lewinski), Manstein may have felt insecure and therefore anxious not to show any sympathy towards the Jews.

7. The Einsatzgruppen (‘action squads’) were irregular units commanded by SS officers, which assiduously performed the task of murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews, Soviet officials and other Russians behind the lines and sometimes with the active assistance of the regular Wehrmacht.

8. Arthur Nebe (1894–1945). An enigmatic figure, he secretly joined the Nazi Party before 1933. However, as head of the Criminal Police he refused to have Hitler’s rival, Gregor Strasser, liquidated, and later leaked information about the Gestapo to the resistance, through Gisevius (q.v.). On the other hand, as a senior SS officer he commanded an Einsatzgruppe in Russia in 1941, was seen as a possible successor to Heydrich in 1942 and, in 1944, was sufficiently trusted by Himmler to be put in charge of investigating the July Bomb Plot. In the end his links to the resistance were uncovered and he was himself executed.

9. This was the message of a series of events in January–February 1998 put on by the press office of the City of Frankfurt for the opening of the Resistance Exhibition mounted by the Office of Research into Military History.