By HANS MOMMSEN

 

Carl von Ossietzky (1889–1938) was the pacifist editor of a small weekly paper, Die Weltbühne, (‘The World Stage’), in which he exposed the secret rearmament of Weimar Germany under General von Seeckt. The Reichswehr (the regular army of the Weimar Republic) called for Ossietzky’s prosecution and he was jailed briefly in 1932. When the Reichstag was burnt down in 1933 he was suspected by the Nazis of involvement and sent to Oranienburg concentration camp. During his imprisonment he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He died of tuberculosis in Oranienburg in 1938. [Tr.]

 

On the morning before the Reichstag Fire, on 27 February 1933, Carl von Ossietzky was urged by friends to go abroad and escape imminent arrest by the political police. He felt that such a move was premature, but probably also hesitated because of his wife Maud’s poor health. However, the crucial consideration was that by leaving Germany he would be abandoning his life’s work as a political activist and pamphleteer. It was the very thing for which, years before, he had reproached Erich Maria Remarque. 1 Ossietzky had already been faced with the question of whether to go into exile after his conviction in the Weltbühne trial. Before beginning his prison sentence he published an editorial about the trial in the Weltbühne of 10 May 1932. In it he wrote:

When someone who opposes the government leaves his country, his words soon sound hollow to those who remain. To be more precise, in the long run the pamphleteer cannot survive if dissociated from everything he is fighting against, or fighting for; he will simply lapse into hysteria and distortion. To be really effective in combating the contamination of a country’s spirit, one must share its entire destiny.

Ossietzky sacrificed his life for this conviction.

The ‘contamination’ to which Ossietzky was referring arose from the rampant authoritarianism which he, as a dedicated pacifist, pointed to in the historically inappropriate glorification of the military. Indeed, the enforced demilitarization of the German Reich under the Treaty of Versailles brought about an all-embracing militarization of civil society, which, from the start, Ossietzky consistently fought against, especially in the pages of the Weltbühne. Ossietzky possessed an astonishing knowledge of the internal political imbroglios which led to the build-up of the ‘Black Reichswehr’ and later the preparations for the creation of an army of 21 divisions. Thus Ossietzky’s clash with the authorities was in a way pre-ordained. In November 1931 proceedings were opened in the Fourth Criminal Chamber of the Reich High Court against Ossietzky as publisher of the Weltbühne, on a charge of treason. The so-called ‘Weltbühne Trial’ was one of the most spectacular political court cases under the Weimar Republic, and it attracted great international attention. The fact that more than a year and a half had elapsed between the publication of the incriminating article and the laying of charges strongly suggests that the Reich Defence Ministry under Wilhelm Groener, operating in the background, intended to make an example of Ossietzky to the pacifist movement, and to the parties of the left, whose criticism of the illegal rearmament was increasing in vehemence.

In Ossietzky they were targeting one of the most consistent opponents of the creeping militarization of the Weimar political system – a system which with good reason he mercilessly attacked as ‘the military state in intellectual form’. He repeatedly and sarcastically pointed out that the ‘enthusiasm for arms’ promoted chiefly by Groener and his successor, Kurt von Schleicher, had replaced the civilian virtues of the Republic. The essential falseness of the Republic lay not least in the fact that in 1919 it had not conclusively called the representatives of the imperial army to account. It was these men who posed a threat to the stability of the democratic system well beyond the early days of the Republic. True, Gustav Stresemann 2 had, despite holding on to the notion of a powerful Germany, put up some modest opposition to the ambitions of the military under von Seeckt. But on 2 June 1932 Chancellor Papen’s cabinet decided to dissolve the Reichstag; in the new phase of rule by presidential decree, as Ossietzky stressed, there was a fundamental change. Government thinking and rearmament were now indissolubly linked.

It was symptomatic that not only the noisy nationalist right but also the ‘bourgeois’ centre parties were unwilling to take pacifist positions seriously, let alone tolerate them. The sentence to 18 months’ imprisonment, for the publication of facts that had long been known to the initiated, was blatantly unjust. Yet it was happily accepted by his opponents, as were subsequent similar verdicts. Resistance to the power of the state in this area was considered intolerable. Very few voices were raised in protest; but one was the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, which wrote ironically:

It is true that we live in a democracy, but anyone who applies its principles, particularly against military authorities, or those which would like to be seen as such, is punished with imprisonment and – what is worse – with the odium of being branded a traitor.

The paper was alluding to the fact that, unlike normal press trials, Ossietzky was accused of acting not out of conviction, but from dubious motives. It was a charge which, despite being inured to ignominious accusations, he had difficulty in disproving.

It was precisely this evidence which the Nazi arrest warrant on 28 February 1933 made specific reference to. It described Ossietzky as a ‘malicious agitator’ who had not hesitated ‘to betray the vital interests of the Reich’. This continuity from the latter days of the Weimar Republic reveals the murkiness of the allegedly constitutional nature of the presidential regime, even though it adhered nominally to due processes of the law. In many respects Ossietzky’s battle against the militarization of Weimar anticipated the later resistance to the Nazi regime. Ossietzky challenged the way in which the nationalist loyalty of the ordinary citizen was being perverted for the purpose of establishing absolute military power.

In the ‘final report’ written by Ossietzky before he went to prison in Berlin, he committed himself to maintaining the Weltbühne as a voice of opposition:

Even in this country trembling under the elephantine tread of fascism, it will keep the courage of its convictions. Whenever a nation sinks to the murkiest moral depths, anyone who dares to take an opposing line is always accused of having violated national sentiment.

Very similar words were spoken by Henning von Tresckow 3 in the weeks before the attempted coup of 20 July 1944, when he referred to the ‘Robe of Nessus’ that the conspirators had donned, in the full knowledge that the patriotism which had prompted them to act would never be apparent to the mass of the people.

Ultimately Ossietzky was fighting against Germany’s persistent belief in the supremacy of the state, against an idealized concept of the state which lay at the heart of German governmental tradition, and which made it impossible set the interests of the individual citizen against a state seen as standing above party politics. As Ossietzky repeatedly observed, the authoritarian attitudes of broad sections of the population had by no means been removed with the collapse of the Kaiser’s empire. The problem was not simply that the overt or covert opponents of the parliamentary system were in the majority and were forcing the democratic parties into ever greater concessions. It was rather that the leftwing liberals, among whom Ossietzky counted himself, had since the beginnings of the Weimar Republic found themselves in a dwindling minority.4 Ossietzky wanted a different, genuinely liberal republic, based on broad civic participation, and it is clear that he assumed too much political insight on the part of the majority of citizens, in whose name he expressed unconditional opposition to the encroachment of the state apparatus.

It is a fact that, precisely because his views were ethically based, Ossietzky belonged to the minority of political activists under Weimar, who shared a western understanding of politics that viewed the state as essentially an instrument for the service of the citizen. In his book The German Idea of Freedom, 5 Leonard Krieger, the most important American historian writing on Germany in the early post-war years, was one of the first to point out the fact that German liberalism, unlike its counterpart in western Europe, ultimately claimed that state and society were identical. This can largely be traced back to the impact of Kantian philosophy, which conceived of the state primarily as a moral structure and assumed the virtual identity of the citizens’ interests with those of the state, whether this took the form of a monarchical regime or a constitutional system.

This can be demonstrated by the role of the right to resist, which Adolf Arndt, the social-democrat constitutionalist, once called an inalienable human right. It is significant that this right does not get a mention in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and is only developed in a rudimentary form in Hegel’s philosophy of government. Similarly, Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann6 and Karl Rotteck, 7 the two principal advocates of liberal constitutional theory in Germany, rejected this legal concept. They saw the state as a moral entity and invested it with a purpose that was independent of the individual citizen. Hence they did not relegate the state to being a guarantor of civil liberty, with the added task of providing the greatest possible happiness to its members, as conceived by western pragmatism.

This loading of ethical content into the concept of state was most pronounced in Protestant church circles and found theoretical expression in the philosophy of identity developed by Kant. The notion that there could be justified civil protest against arbitrary acts by the state, as in the case of the Göttingen Seven in 1833,8 and later with the revision of the constitution of the Saxon monarchy in 1851, may still have been alive in the first half of the nineteenth century. But in the wake of the newly acquired national confidence of the German Empire it became completely obsolete. This is perfectly demonstrated by the views of the historian Heinrich von Treitschke, which were representative of German public opinion in general. Treitschke saw ‘the right to resist’ as a contradiction in terms.

In contrast to the western constitutional tradition, which – as in the Declaration of Human Rights of 1793 – granted a central place to the right to resist, the German constitutional tradition remained wedded to the fundamental assumptions of the philosophy of identity, and negated any claims of natural law. This position was reinforced under the dominance of legal positivism in the late nineteenth century, which used the principle of a state founded on the rule of law to exclude any legally based protest by the citizen. Even Max Weber, the sociologist of law, takes no account of the older doctrine of tyranny and despotism and ignores the problem of the abuse of any political dominance that has a formal legitimacy.

The notion that a modern constitutional state cannot, by its nature, be an unlawful state, explains why even the Weimar constitution, which adopted the basic rights of the Paulskirche Constitution, 9 stopped short of including a right of resistance. During the 1920s, when largely unfounded criticism of the ‘party-political state’ became widespread, the illusion grew that conflicting social and political interests could be overarched by adhering to the formal principle of legality. That is why the senior officers of the Reichswehr, who shared many of Adolf Hitler’s anti-constitutional aims, nonetheless sought to bind him to the ‘pillar of legality’ and restrain him from revolutionary action. In doing so they, like the rightwing political parties, prepared the way for Hitler’s pseudo-legal acquisition of power. Similarly, the centrist democratic parties bowed to blackmail and the threat of civil war by the NSDAP and the SA and, on 23 March 1933, approved the Enabling Law in order to avert a breach of ostensible legality.

Even the political left, by adhering to the principle of legality, missed their last chance of opposing the steps that led relentlessly to their dissolution. As late as 30 January 1933 the Social Democratic Party and the Free Labour Unions adopted a stance ‘with both feet on the ground of legality’. They failed to see that this ‘legality’ had long ago become a tool in Hitler’s hand, even though Benito Mussolini had already demonstrated how, without a formal breach of the prevailing constitution, it was possible to take the road to dictatorship.

As the Weltbühne trial showed, the cult of formal legality had already been exploited to criminalize minority positions and eliminate them by quasi-judicial means. What had begun under Weimar, continued on a greater scale after the Nazi Gleichschaltung, or ‘co-ordination’, of the judicial system. Until the collapse of the Third Reich, the judiciary functioned as a loyal instrument of the regime. The Special Courts, established in 1944 under the Gauleiters and Reich Defence Commissioners and staffed by the regular judiciary, proved themselves willing enforcers of the brutal orders issued by the foundering regime, right up until April 1945.

The fixation with the principle of formal legality went so far that, when the leading figures of the SA were murdered on and after 30 June 1934, the German public did not regard this as a breach of legal order but as a move to restore it. The securing of the formal rule of law, which at the time was promoted by Carl Schmitt, 10 was undertaken in the legislation to justify the national state of emergency of 1 July 1933. However, the formal rule of law collapsed with the dismantling of the state. In a similar process the administrative civil service of the Reich placed itself at the disposal of the Nazi leadership, in order to preserve the principle of legality and to avoid losing the initiative to the Party. The price paid for this was a massive infringement of rights, which finally led to the complete abolition of the stricken Rechtsstaat. In order to retain ‘control in the Jewish question’ – as the Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, put it – the senior ranks of the civil service were prepared to give way in this matter and to accept the progressive marginalizing and impoverishment of the Jewish citizens of Germany.

The complete usurping of the administration of justice by the Nazi system was only possible against the background of an overvaluation of formal legality, which caused many to close their eyes to the fact that the regime did not hesitate to break the law consistently and gave itself ever greater scope for action that was immune to the normal processes of law. This reached from the Party’s own internal courts, through the increasing judicial prerogatives of the Gestapo, down to the denial of access to proper justice for Poles, Jews and other ‘alien races’.

The adherence to the legality-principle imposed a lasting handicap on middle-class conservative resistance, which was only sluggishly taking shape. This resistance did not emerge until the resistance-groups formed in connection with the Weimar associations and parties had been largely wiped out by the Gestapo, or, like the communists, had to limit their activities to reestablishing the cadres that were constantly being broken up. The oath of allegiance to the Führer, which the conspirators elevated to a near-religious problem, and the aversion to tyrannicide, were significant inhibiting factors.

The obsession with legality doubly handicapped the German political elite in making a decisive move against Hitler, quite apart from the fact that there were considerable affinities between the attitudes of the middle-class elite and those of the National Socialists, specifically in foreign and military policy. On one hand the idolizing of Hitler as head of state led to his being dissociated from the crimes of the regime. With the oft-repeated formula ‘If the Führer only knew about this’, he was presented as the victim of deceiving advisers. On the other hand the elite was prevented from acting by an exaggerated fear of a ‘revolution from below’, which represented an indirect reaction to Germany’s traditional lack of a right of resistance.

This applied, first and foremost, to the Protestant camp, which showed a high degree of affinity with the Nazi regime, both ideologically and through the German Christian movement and Reich Bishop Müller’s ambitions for a nationalist Church. Leading Protestant theologians made it emphatically clear that a Christian had no right to oppose the established authority. As Paul Althaus put it:

Every power that maintains order is there by God’s grace, has authority and a claim to our obedience, even if it is a foreign power; as long as it maintains order, it is better than chaos or an impotent national government. 11

Even the anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer hastened to concede to the state the right to take action, including the use of force, against the Jewish section of the population, and that this had to be accepted by the Church.

Greater flexibility was shown by the Catholic Church, which could draw on a long tradition of resistance going back to Thomas Aquinas, in which tyrannicide was not automatically rejected but was subject to certain conditions. Among these were that all means to a peaceful resolution of the conflict must have been exhausted, that there were good grounds for believing an improvement to the existing situation would result and that the violence used would be limited and would not be allowed to descend into a bloody civil war. These provisos, which were adopted by Protestant theologians after 1945, admittedly proved to have little practicality under the conditions of Nazi dictatorship. Nonetheless, Helmuth James von Moltke12 was anxious to obtain from Hans von Dohnanyi 13 theological credentials for the right of resistance, in order to push the hesitant generals into action.

The younger members of the 20th July movement, especially Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, Henning von Tresckow and the Kreisau group, tended to put aside legalistic concerns of this kind. By contrast, Carl Goerdeler 14 and his supporters, who belonged predominantly to the older generation, wanted at all costs to avoid an assassination and advocated having Hitler arrested. They were convinced that, in all circumstances, violent resistance should be considered only after all available legal remedies had been exhausted. Early in the summer of 1944 the Prussian Minister of Finance, Johannes Popitz, 15 declared: ‘Every effort has been made to get rid of the regime legally. Now only a dead Hitler can save us.’ For only Hitler’s death would free soldiers and civil servants from their oath. Nonetheless, even the planning of ‘Operation Valkyrie’ gave a nod to the fiction of legality. 16 In the circular, which von Witzleben sent to his army subordinates on 20 July, there was mention of ‘an unscrupulous clique of battle-shy Party leaders’ having staged a coup, which had been met by the imposition of a military state of emergency. 17

After the German surrender on 8 May 1945, interest in the German resistance movement was slight and only revived when the appeal to ‘the other Germany’ offered a chance to counter the notions of collective guilt that had occasionally arisen on the Allied side. However, it cannot be said that the German opposition to Nazism was rated highly either by the occupying authorities or by the German public. Rather, the relationship with the resistance remained largely severed, and this situation became more acute following the rearmament of Germany from 1954 onward, even though the Department of ‘Moral Leadership’ (Innere Führung, dealing with the political re-education of officers) was anxious to encompass the memory of the military resistance in the Bundeswehr’s cultivation of tradition.

The debate about the justification of resistance was renewed from the mid-1950s onward, and it is no surprise that attention was focused on the question of the right to resist. In 1960 the second edition of a semi-official publication, Die Vollmacht des Gewissens (‘The Prerogative of Conscience’), was published. This carefully restricted the right to resist to those people who distinguished themselves through social status and moral insight, who carried ‘positive responsibility in the state structure’ and who ‘risked the decision to resist’ on the basis of knowledge of ‘a positively better way for the state to fulfil its function of maintaining order’. The ‘interim status’, since it lacked any legal safeguards, must be reduced to a minimum and not be allowed to become ‘turbulent and anarchic’, in the jargon of traditional German thinking on law and order.

Views of this kind found their way into the highest echelons of the judiciary of the Federal Republic. They limited the right of resistance to the ruling elite, to resistance ‘from the command level’, as otherwise the criterion of ‘expert insight’ could not be fulfilled. In 1962 the General State Prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, protested in vain against this restriction of the right of resistance to an elite minority and the exclusion of the ordinary citizen, as well as of resistance by socialists and communists.

A further criterion stressed by the leading writers on the subject was the serious examination of one’s conscience, which had to precede the decision to engage in active resistance. This doctrine, essentially influenced by Protestant theology, arose from the longstanding tendency among historians to declare the decision to resist to be exclusively a matter of conscience and to regard the political motives of the conspirators as secondary. At the same time, this denial that the anti-Nazi resistance had any political substance was motivated by the desire to conceal the close affinity between the aims of some of the conspirators with those of the Nazi regime.

The debate over the right to resist was first seriously launched in 1963 with Eberhard Zeller’s influential book Geist der Freiheit (‘Spirit of Freedom’), in which the coup of 20 July 1944 was described as ‘a responsibly managed revolution using the existing command structure of the reserve army, which avoided chaos and civil war’ and as ‘a controlled transition to a new, albeit provisional, order’. It was only in the 1960s that the historians’ restricted view of resistance was challenged and its characterization as ‘apolitical’ was increasingly questioned. Even so, the most recent study of the 20th July Plot, by Joachim Fest, slips back into the old tendency to make moral heroes of the conservative-nationalist resisters. In public discussion any mention of the political objectives and motives of the resistance-fighters is still seen as an attempt to disparage them.

Judicial rulings in the early days of the Federal Republic adopted the narrow view, a fact which prompted Adolf Arndt to issue his now famous 1962 polemic, Agraphoi Nomoi (‘Unwritten Laws’). Behind the judgements of the Federal Supreme Court, he wrote, there lurked ‘the notion of an order whose supremacy is self-justifying’. Arndt warned against endowing the Nazi regime with the character of statehood in a legal sense. ‘No state exists that can survive at the cost of justice.’

It was precisely on this point that, in the early Federal Republic, there was a relapse into political habits of thought, which maintained a more or less clear-cut separation from western constitutional tradition. True, after 1945 a certain recognition of the right to resist gradually took root, and the Evangelical camp, under the pressure of Nazi crimes, retreated from older notions of unquestioning acceptance of the state, no matter how unjust it might be. Nevertheless, when Hans Nawiaski formulated his view of the right to resist – ‘If basic rights are encroached upon by official violence which is itself unconstitutional, then resistance is everyone’s right and duty’ – he received no support from the Parliamentary Council. 18

The majority, even including Carlo Schmid, 19 considered it inappropriate to give positive constitutional validation to the right of resistance. For this reason, a version modelled on the United Nations Charter, as proposed by Ludwig Bergsträsser,20 was rejected. It is clear that two contrary currents came together here. Those who affirmed the right to resist on principle, but refused on juridical grounds to include it in the list of basic rights, met those who clung to the notion that the power of the state stands above party interests and is an end in itself.

In fact, nearly two decades later, the German Bundestag did eventually incorporate the right to resist in Article 20 Section 4 of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law, Germany’s federal constitution). This arose from a compromise with the labour unions, which wanted to be assured that in the event of a coup d’état the right to stage a political strike would be preserved. The wording takes account of the preservation of constitutional order and restricts legitimate resistance, assuming all political and judicial remedies have been exhausted, to ensuring the ‘survival of the fundamental order of a free democracy’ – to quote Ernst Böckenförde. As Jürgen Habermas21 has pointed out, this provision is principally directed against groups considered ‘disloyal’ and which are accused of being outside the framework of a constitution capable of defending itself. In this way, as the nonconformist exponent of public law, Ulrich K. Preuss, argues, the constitution can be used as ‘a tool of political and moral disenfranchisement’.

In fact, the drafting of Article 20 Section 4 of the Basic Law achieves just the opposite of the desired relativizing of state action and disregards the fundamental lesson of totalitarian regimes. This is that those in power do not attack the prevailing legal order frontally, but deliberately evade it and thus throw the odium of the breach of legality onto their opponents. In such circumstances the traditional criteria for the right to resist are no longer effective. Individuals and entire institutions are thrown back on ‘petty resistance’ and civil disobedience, which renounces the use of violence to confront violence.

The difficulty the Federal Republic had in ridding itself of the authoritarian mindset was shown by the ‘Spiegel Affair’ in 1962– 3,22 which showed clear parallels with Ossietzky’s clash with the Reichswehr, even including the fictive formula of ‘betrayal of secrets’. Today the military question in the Federal Republic has been settled in all essentials, and the idea of the ‘citizen in uniform’ has largely become a reality. Incidents involving rightwing extremists in sections of the Bundeswehr have done nothing to alter this. At the same time the marriage of militant nationalism with militaristic pomp has given way to a widespread absence of nationalist fervour and a relatively indifferent and sceptical attitude towards the military apparat.

In this way Germany has removed the overheated combination of elements which, even before the First World War, prompted Carl von Ossietzky to raise his voice in protest. However, residual features of traditional state omnipotence still remain, for example in the area of citizenship law and the rights of foreign residents. Even though Germany has become accustomed to a functioning democracy, underpinned by the law, it is not immune to a relapse into authoritarian attitudes, which take the form of intolerance toward marginal groups, foreigners and radical critics.

Adolf Arndt had hoped that the right to resist, which he conceived as a human right, though not one that can be given positive expression, could be bound into the complex of fundamental rights and their impact on third parties. However, there is the contrary tendency which holds that fundamental rights are not so much established to counteract encroachment by the state, but rather are used, under the label of the ‘liberal and democratic order’, to stigmatize dissenting political opinions as aiming to achieve a different republic and to avoid engaging in any dialogue with them.

It is widely thought acceptable to express intolerance towards outsiders and to criminalize attitudes that are critical of the system. Similarly, racial prejudices have by no means lost their virulence and voices are heard on all sides calling on the state to remove allegedly troublesome foreigners. Nonetheless, the internal democratization of German society is on the right path, though it needs constant attention to prevent a creeping recidivism. In the spirit of Carl von Ossietzky it is necessary to stand up for frankness and tolerance in the political forum, not to restrict the right of minorities of whatever kind to exist, but to insist tirelessly on the realisation of this right – just as the Weltbühne did by opposing every attempt of state authority to harass or manipulate the ordinary citizen.

1. Author of the controversial pacifist novel, All Quiet on the Western Front
(1929), Remarque (1898–1970) emigrated to Italy in 1929 and then to
the USA in 1939.
2. Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) was briefly Chancellor of Germany in
1923, then Foreign Minister until his death, during which time he
negotiated the Dawes Loan (1924), the Treaty of Locarno (1925) and
Germany’s admission to the League of Nations (1926).
3. Colonel Henning von Tresckow (1901–1944) was a staff officer in Army
Group Centre during the invasion of Russia. Closely linked with the
Stauffenberg Plot of July 1944; when the coup failed he committed suicide.
(See Chapters 11 and 12). In classical mythology Hercules donned a tunic
impregnated with poison from the centaur, Nessus. When he tried to tear
it off, his flesh came off with it.
4. Cf. Larry E. Jones, German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar
Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1988) pp.17ff.
5. Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political
Tradition (Chicago, 1957, 1972) pp.4ff.
6. Dahlmann was Germany’s leading constitutional thinker of the early
nineteenth century. In 1815 he published Ein Wort über Verfassung (‘A
Word on Constitutions’); his major work was Politik (‘Politics’). In 1833,
as one of the ‘Göttingen Seven’ (q.v.), he challenged the right of the King
of Hanover to revoke the country’s parliamentary constitution. In 1848,
as a deputy in the Frankfurt National Assembly, he tried unsuccessfully
to assert the assembly’s authority over Prussia in the matter of Schleswig
and Holstein; surprisingly, Dahlmann did not want Prussia to compromise
with Denmark.
7. Rotteck, a contemporary of Dahlmann, was also an academic and politician
with proto-democratic leanings. Elected mayor of Freiburg, Rotteck’s
appointment was vetoed by the government of Baden, on the grounds
that he was ‘subversive’.
8. When Victoria came to the throne in Britain, the century-old personal
union between the thrones of England and Hanover was broken and under
the Salic Law the Hanoverian crown passed to Victoria’s uncle, Ernst
Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. The new monarch immediately revoked
the constitution of 1833. In protest, seven faculty members from the
University of Göttingen refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new
king. As well as Dahlmann, they included Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, of
‘fairy-tales’ fame. All were dismissed from their posts and three were forced
into exile.
9. Germany’s first democratic constitution, drawn up by the first national
parliament, which met in St Paul’s church, Frankfurt, in 1848.
10. Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), jurist and political theorist. Member of the
Nazi Party and the Nazi Academy of German Law, his political philosophy
has been described as anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal and anti-democratic,
but also penetrating and clear-sighted. His books include Political
Romanticism (1919), Dictatorships (1921) and Guardians of the Constitution
(1931).
11. Paul Althaus, Professor of Theology at Erlangen University. This quotation
is from his Obrigkeit und Führertum (‘Authority and the Nature of
Leaders’), 1936.
12. Count Helmuth James von Moltke (1907–1945). Appointed in 1939 as
legal counsel to the foreign section of the armed forces high command
(OKW). Worked for better German treatment of prisoners-of-war and
adherence to international law. In 1940 founded the Kreisau Circle with
Yorck von Wartenburg and others. See Chapter 3 onward.
13. Hans von Dohnanyi (1902–1945). Lawyer, civil servant and dedicated
anti-Nazi, he was the brother-in-law of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
14. Carl Goerdeler (1884–1945). Mayor of Leipzig (1930–37) and leading
figure in the civilian resistance to Hitler. Appointed in 1934 as Reich
Commissioner for Prices and Foreign Exchange, he soon became
disillusioned with Nazism. As overseas representative of the Bosch
company he made contacts in Britain, France and the USA. (See especially
Chapter 3).
15. Johannes Popitz (1884–1945). Despite his ministerial position in the Nazi
regime, in 1938 he began plotting with senior military officers to remove
Hitler. However, his political views remained on the extreme right. Due
to his connection with the July 1944 plot he was arrested and executed in
October of that year.
16. Codename for preparations for the July 1944 coup (see especially Chapter
11).
17. Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben (1881–1944), who had been poised
to arrest Hitler in 1938. He was close to the 20 July conspirators and was
their choice as commander-in-chief. When the plot failed, he was arrested
and executed in August 1944.
18. In 1948 Nawiaski was a member of a drafting sub-committee for the
constitution of the 1949 German Federal Republic, which was then
submitted to the Parliamentary Council.
19. Carlo Schmid, leading Social-Democrat politician of the post-war years.
20. Ludwig Bergsträsser, a member of the German Democratic Party (DDP)
before 1933, returned to politics after 1945 as a Social Democrat. As a
resister during the war he worked closely with Wilhelm Leuschner (see
Chapter 8).
21. Jürgen Habermas, distinguished contemporary German political theorist.
22. In October 1962 the offices of Der Spiegel, the news magazine, were raided
and the editor, Rudolf Augstein, arrested for betraying defence secrets.
The Defence Minister, Franz-Josef Strauss, was subsequently dismissed.