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This below is Chapter 4 Section 7:
Emigration and Resistance
In a broader sense, emigration and resistance already existed in classical antiquity and in the early modern period, while the terms probably cannot be applied to the Middle Ages; however, in a narrower sense, emigration and resistance should only be discussed after the state of the Liberal System has been formed in the most important parts of the world and has become a paradigm almost everywhere. In it, dissent and deviant action are institutionally protected, indeed they are encouraged, and criticism of the government is therefore not resistance but opposition. Since there is no resistance, there is also no politically justified emigration: between 1870 and 1914 there were no groups of English, French or Germans living abroad who would have left the respective country in protest and fought its government. Such an emigration and a corresponding, i.e. forbidden, resistance existed only among Russians or in Russia. But these realities and concepts could only be spoken of because the measuring stick of the progressive West was also applied to Russia. In the strictest and truest sense, emigration and resistance should be spoken of only when a state in which opposition was possible is brought back in this or that way to a state in which free decision-making without danger to those involved is no longer permitted in the state because one party, which regards all other parties as “enemies” and seeks to destroy them, has seized power.
Tsarist Russia was in its idea a patriarchal state in which the will of the “autocrat” was identical with the will of the whole, and the unquestionable devotion of the mass of peasants was proof that the idea was firmly rooted in reality. But from the two capitals—under the influence of Western European concepts—the unity of the patriarchal state was more and more questioned, first by parts of the nobility and then by many protagonists of the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. The beginnings of an industrial revolution and the advance of social differentiation made Russia, under the cover of tsarist censorship, more and more like the rest of Europe, and with the February Revolution it seemed to have become the freest country in the world, having finally outgrown autocracy and the state church. The grumbling and the reluctance of the representatives of the ancien régime should not be called resistance; all the forces that mattered politically—from the “Octobrists” and the “Cadets” to the Social Democrats—were united in affirming the revolution. Presumably they would have remained united on fundamentals if the situation of the almost-lost war had not played such a large part in the upheaval and if this very situation had not made such profound and extremely controversial decisions necessary.
When the Bolsheviks seized power under the banner of the demand for immediate peace and expropriation of land from the landowners, the “Committee for the Defense of the Homeland and the Revolution” was formed in Petrograd on the evening of November 8, which can be regarded as the first organization of resistance against the Bolshevik “counter-revolution.” To a large extent, it involved the members of the other socialist parties, against whom the coup had been directed in the main. The government of the People’s Commissars, however, asserted itself against this committee with an armed hand just as quickly as against Kerensky’s attempt to retake the capital with the help of loyal troops. The criticism of leading Bolsheviks of the formation of a one-party government is more likely to be subsumed under the concept of opposition than that of resistance. But one act of government which, as an outspoken measure of persecution, was bound to create a situation of resistance for a large party was the decree in 1917, declaring the Constitutional Democrats “outlaws.” The first act of resistance that resulted in fatalities was the protest demonstration after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and with this the regime not only definitely crossed the line of legality, but also shed the blood of workers for the first time, whom of course it called “petty bourgeois” in an early act of the semantic war. How could centers of military resistance not have formed after the regime itself had initiated the civil war in May 1918 by attempting to disarm the Czechoslovaks? The government in Samara or Ufa, behind which stood the “Komuch” made up of members of the Constituent Assembly, had some justification for considering itself the legal government of the country, and when Fanny Kaplan was arrested after the assassination attempt of Lenin, she said that Lenin was a traitor to socialism because he had dispersed the Constituent Assembly, and that all of Russia must unite around the government in Samara. But after this very government had been overthrown by a coup by its Minister of War, Admiral Kolchak, there could no longer be any question of legality on either side, and apparently only the weapons of civil war spoke.
Nevertheless, there were still signs of opposition and some forms of resistance on both sides. The ousted Social Revolutionaries played a significant part in Kolchak’s defeat, and behind Denikin a party system seemed to be developing from which only the Bolsheviks would be excluded. On the Bolshevik side, the Mensheviks had not been banned for some time, and they collaborated with the soviets. However, they were under so much pressure and had so little chance in the open elections to the soviets that when leading Mensheviks published extremely harsh criticisms of the Bolshevik dictatorship in magazines or pamphlets, they were acts of resistance rather than opposition, and in a private letter, Martov even spoke of the “monstrous and belligerent system of Asiatic government” which was taking Russia back even further than Tsarist autocracy to a barbaric past. Nevertheless, Martov and Dan, Liber and Nikolayevsky shied away from the decisive step, namely, the transition to the White side, and this was not least due to the fact that the White armies not entirely infrequently unleashed pogroms against the Jews. Thus, despite all opposition and despite some resistance, the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries remained rather a weight on the scales of the Bolsheviks, and only after the end of the civil war were they finally thrown into prison or driven into exile.
They were the last group to join the emigrants abroad as a form of resistance that could no longer articulate itself in their own country, but which remained in contact with the resistance movements in the fatherland in a variety of ways, for example through those of Martov and then “Socialisticeskij Vestnik” magazine, published by Boris Nikolayevsky in Berlin, of which numerous copies made it to Russia for many years to come and found eager readers there.
As an overall phenomenon, Russian emigration was the largest the world had ever seen. In the early 1920s it comprised about one and a half million people, and all of them had left the country for political reasons at immediate risk to life and limb, where hundreds of thousands of their respective party friends or class members had been killed or died of hunger and cold.
This emigration included, above all, the leaders and large sections of the supporters of all non-Bolshevik parties.
The monarchists had formed the backbone of the White armies in Russia; they went into emigration almost without exception, the last being the officers and the men of General Wrangel’s army, which evacuated the Crimea in November 1920 and was initially maintained as an armed force with the reluctant help of the French in Gallipoli and elsewhere. The further fate of these men was terrible: they were turned into free refugees and distributed among various countries. But the living conditions of the other emigrants were also generally deplorable: in Berlin alone in 1923, some 300,000 Russians were dependent on carrying out simple tasks or on support; not a few died of hunger.
During their emigration, the liberals quickly split into a right-wing and a left-wing faction, the second of which, under the leadership of Paul Milyukov, moved more and more closer to the right-wing Socialist-Revolutionaries.
Quite a few of the Socialist-Revolutionaries openly boasted that, through their work behind the fronts of the monarchist armies, they had saved Russia from the reactionary “general on the white horse,” and most monarchists therefore hated the “treacherous SRs” hardly less than the Bolsheviks.
A great many Mensheviks had gone over to the Bolsheviks in the course of 1917 and 1918, but Julius Martov and the inner leadership had always opposed the ruling party. But in a certain sense they had legitimized the Bolshevik regime through their criticism, and when they finally emigrated, a characteristic ambivalence remained: as early as 1926 the party demanded de jure recognition of Soviet Russia, and it was therefore usually considered “half-Bolshevik” by the monarchists.
The monarchists, however, did not form a cohesive unit either; rather, they divided into the main Entente-friendly section under Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich in Paris and a more German-friendly minority under Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich. This minority included the Russian emigrants in Bavaria who had close ties with Max von Scheubner-Richter and later sided with the Third Reich under the leadership of General Biskupski.
But to a considerable extent Russian emigration was not primarily politically motivated, but rather literary and scientific. Entire subjects disappeared very quickly from the universities, such as “bourgeois national economics” and “idealist philosophy,” and in the field of history some particularly distinguished alumni only managed to survive with great difficulty until the beginning of the 1930s. Numerous scholars, such as the philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Semyon Frank in 1922, were expelled simply because of their worldview. Many of the important poets and writers also emigrated, including Dmitry Mereshkovsky and the later Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin. The internal emigration included Anna Akhmatova and Ossip Mandelstam, and also Boris Pasternak; the great poet Gumilyov was administratively shot by the Cheka in 1921 based on an implausible accusation. But the exiled writers were unable to assert their claim to represent Russian literature despite founding numerous publishing houses and important journals. On the one hand, the Western public did not take a very active interest in them because of the language barrier, and on the other hand, some of the most important poets stayed behind in Russia and some even took the side of the revolution. Moreover, new poets appeared in Russia who quickly became known abroad, such as Isaak Babel and Boris Pilnyak, and quite a few of the emigrants eventually returned home, including Alexei Tolstoy, who became a highly esteemed “Soviet poet.”
The most peculiar phenomenon in Russian emigration was the so-called “change of signs” (“smena wech”). In 1921, six authors published an anthology under this title in which they sharply criticized themselves. The emigrants had so far been guided by the false view that the Bolsheviks were an international gang of robbers alien to the Russian people. But it had now become clear that this party had saved Russia from ruin and that it had deep roots in Russia’s past. It was no coincidence that the most famous general in the tsarist army, Brusilov, had agreed to serve in the Red Army. An international doctrine has become a national reality, and the conclusion must now be drawn from this, namely to change the road signs and return to Russia.
It is true that this return migration did not take place on a large scale, since the ruling party was much less accommodating to the White officers than to the writers. But nevertheless a powerful tendency found its first expression in it, and it formed an ominous omen for the resistance, which was potentially very strong within the country, but which had no nucleus of crystallization after the dissolution of the old army, the nationalization of industry and the expropriation and disenfranchisement the Orthodox Church, and was fought very effectively by the GPU.
Thus, Bolshevism’s most stubborn opponent, Boris Savinkov—formerly a famous terrorist as a social revolutionary and then deputy minister of war under Kerensky—was lured to the Soviet Union in 1924, where he hoped to find resistance organizations. After his arrest, he made a spectacular confession at trial regarding his many activities, which during the Soviet-Polish war had even included the plan to set up a liberation army made up of Russian prisoners of war. A little later he committed suicide in prison under unclear circumstances.
Its end was probably linked to the existence of one of the most peculiar resistance organizations in the Soviet Union, the so-called TRUST, which arose from contacts between an émigré officer and a Soviet official named Yakushev. The organization consisted of numerous tsarist officers and representatives of the former parties, most of whom were in influential positions and worked towards the overthrow of the regime. Contacts were quickly established with leading émigrés, and the organization provided considerable evidence of its knowledge and influence, but always sought to restrain the émigrés from rash actions on the grounds that seizure of power was a certain prospect. It was not until 1927 that it emerged that Yakushev had been arrested after that first contact and “turned” by Dzerzhinsky personally. Thus the GPU had succeeded in unmasking numerous internal enemies and at the same time deterring the emigrants from taking action. It was not long before it found itself in a position to have the most active of the émigré officers, General Kutiepov, kidnapped and eliminated.
However, a contrary trend arose because the communist party opposition took on the character of resistance since its official elimination in 1927-28, for example Leon Trotsky, who had previously hardly been able to stand “fascist troublemakers”—as he called them— in his meetings, or Christian Rakovsky who still carried out a lively correspondence activity in their places of exile and tried to form an illegal network of followers. But they were soon silenced, and thousands of their followers went to the camps, where they formed nuclei of a fairly active and vocal resistance, as long as remnants of the privilege of political prisoners still existed. However, after a shorter or longer period of time, very many went over to the victorious Stalinists, just as numerous Mensheviks and, above all, the entire “Bund” had joined the Bolsheviks a few years earlier.
The resistance of some national minorities against Moscow’s centralizing tendencies, which soon gave no more signs of life under the heavy hand of Stalin, and above all the resistance of the peasants against expropriation and collectivization, which at times almost resembled a civil war, albeit one highly one-sided civil war, until it died out in the deportations and starvation of many millions, had a different character.
Stalin himself then gave the entire world the impression that there was strong and determined resistance to the regime in the Soviet Union by decimating the party and army through the Great Purge. But the behavior of the high-ranking officers and also of the party leaders does not allow the conclusion that they had hatched conspiracies and made preparations for a coup. On the contrary, they allowed themselves to be led “like sheep to the slaughter.” In fifteen years, Stalin had managed to eliminate any kind of institutional independence and to place every single member of society so completely under the pressure of expectations within the framework of the great tasks or to keep them under surveillance so that organizational or even journalistic starting points for efficient resistance were simply impossible. But the emigrants may well have been right when they claimed that, despite all the concentrated propaganda about reconstruction and unity, after the terrible experiences of collectivization and the Great Purge, a deep discontent and at least a diffuse unease permeated the entire society, from which a tremendous amount of bitterness and hatred would arise if the iron clasp of the regime was ever loosened. During the Finnish War, surveys among Soviet prisoners of war yielded revealing results. The conclusion was obvious that although there was neither opposition nor resistance in Stalin’s Soviet Union, there were all the prerequisites for a restart of the civil war with a completely changed front line.
There had been no civil war in the strict sense in Germany, and in 1940 no one seriously believed that a civil war could occur if the Reich found itself in a difficult military situation. In 1933, the communists’ call for a general strike might have resulted in a civil war if the Social Democrats had joined, but the power of the National Socialist movement apparently already seemed overwhelming to the Social Democratic Party of Germany; and the communists were too focused on the imminent “winding down” of Hitler’s government to believe that their call would be successful. The last opposition movements of the other parties should certainly not be described as resistance, and it can therefore be stated that in Germany, unlike in Russia, emigration preceded resistance. This emigration seemed to differ from the Russian one from the outset in that it was not only for political but also for racial reasons. But in early emigration the racial factor played only a minor role, because with the enemy image of “Jewish Marxism” the tone was much more focused on “Marxism,” and the persecution fell on Jewish and non-Jewish Marxists indiscriminately. The specifically Jewish emigration was, at least to some extent, an emigration that corresponded to the old postulate of Zionism. Therefore, the early emigration from Germany was no different than the emigration from Russia, primarily political and literary-scientific.
The depth of the opposition of individual parties to National Socialism can be seen almost quantitatively in the percentages by which the leading groups emigrated or fell victim to persecution.
Almost all of the communist leadership emigrated, as far as they were not arrested, like Ernst Thälmann, or died while attempting illegal work, like John Schehr. At first, the events initially did not result in any spiritual crisis or conversion; people continued to talk about the “revolutionary situation” and the guilt of the social fascists; it was not uncommon for communist publications to give the impression that nothing had changed in Germany compared to the Brüning fascism and the Papen fascism.
In the late spring of 1933, the Social Democrats seemed to be on the verge of a party split between the emigrated party executive and the deputies who had stayed at home, until the party ban interrupted developments and many of the German party members chose the path of resignation or an effort to “survive.” The party executive emigrated to Prague believed that the intellectual crisis, which could not be overlooked or overplayed, could be solved by resorting to revolutionary Marxism, but the fundamental difficulty came into clear light by the fact that the confident manifesto of June 18, 1933, at the same time said that communism had been a crime against the German working class. Renewal tendencies of an unconventional kind were most evident among a young left that tried to build a bridge between the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany and wanted to change both parties equally. The strongest group was the “Neubeginnen Group,” led by the former communists Walter Löwenheim and Richard Löwenthal. Both published remarkable writings under the pseudonyms “Miles” and “Paul Sering” that were intended to serve as a reorientation by raising the question of the nature of fascism in a different way. But the former reformists also spoke out in the most important organ of self-examination, the “Journal for Socialism,” and the former foreign policy editor of Vorwärts, Viktor Schiff, declared precisely not the reformist but rather the revolutionary spirit to be the cause of Fascism.
Hardly any of the leaders of the Center Party emigrated. The prelate Kaas went to Rome, but could hardly be regarded as an emigrant; in June 1934, Heinrich Brüning fled an immediate death threat and kept a very low profile even after that.
Of the liberal parties and the German Nationalists, only a number of artists and scientists who were close to these parties emigrated.
But there was a National Socialist emigration, just as there was later resistance from dissidents or former National Socialists. The central figure was Otto Straßer, who first went to Czechoslovakia, where his close collaborator, the radio specialist Rolf Formis, who in February 1933 had sabotaged an election speech by Hitler in Stuttgart as the technical manager of the station in SA uniform, was killed by the Gestapo agents in early 1935. In 1936, the former National Socialist Senate President of Danzig, Hermann Rauschning, went abroad to the West, where he became world-famous for his book “Conversations with Hitler.” Immediately before the outbreak of war Fritz Thyssen, who for a long time had been Hitler’s only important supporter and financier among the active industrialists, also went into exile.
In comparison to the Russian political emigration, the quantitative proportion among the parties was different, but on the whole, here as there, all the important representatives of the political class tended to be expelled, including leading representatives of the ruling party itself.
Consequently, not only the left was represented in the emigration, just as not only the right was to be found in the exile of the Russians. Likewise, the literary and scientific emigration consistent by no means exclusively of Jews, even though the Jewish leftist intellectuals certainly made up a particularly large contingent.
It is superfluous to enumerate the great names of this emigration. The most remarkable thing is that it succeeded to a far greater extent than the corresponding and quantitatively larger part of the Russian emigration in asserting its claim to be regarded as the German literature. With a grain of salt, one could say that leftist, bourgeois-pacifist, and decidedly avant-garde Germany emigrated—from Arnold Zweig and Willi Munzenberg to Thomas Mann and Walter Gropius. What remained behind was the national, provincial and metaphysical Germany from Ernst Jünger through Hans Zöberlein to Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer. Quite a few of them soon withdrew into internal emigration. The names of former socialists and workers’ poets such as Paul Ernst, Heinrich Lersch and Karl Bröger show that things were not easy here either. Of a very special kind was the case of Stefan George, who was considered one of the heralds of the new Reich and who nevertheless avoided in Switzerland all honors, before he died in December 1933.
An almost equally sharp and yet equally vague distinction went through science. Particularly moving was the fate of the numerous “national Jews” among the scholars, most of whom would have gladly and sincerely joined the “national uprising,” as their statements indicated. A letter from the mediaeval scholar Ernst Kantorowicz to the Prussian Minister for Science, Art and National Education dated April 20, 1933 was symptomatic: as a wartime volunteer, front-line soldier and post-war fighter against Poland and Spartacus, he was not affected by the new regulations, but he would nevertheless cease teaching, since recently having Jewish blood in one’s veins lately involved a moral defect. Among those affected by the first leave of absence in April 1933 included Moritz Julius Bonn, Karl Mannheim and Max Horkheimer, but also non-Jews such as Paul Tillich, Günther Dehn and Wilhelm Röpke. By 1939, no fewer than 800 full professors and 1,300 adjunct professors had emigrated, almost a third of the total workforce, including 24 natural scientists who had either already received or would receive the Nobel Prize.
Here, too, very important scholars and several Nobel Prize winners certainly remained: Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers of the philosophers, Friedrich Meinecke and Otto Hintze among many other historians; Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark among the natural scientists. But some of them became outspoken opponents of the regime, and in any case it was an enormous bloodletting for German culture and for German science, which deeply degraded Germany’s reputation in the world and was a very important contribution to the scientific lead and thus for the later victory of the Anglo-Americans. There was hardly any analogue to the “change of signs” movement in the German emigration, although the Germans saw their fate far more as expulsion, while for the Russians emigration was very often the longed-for rescue from imminent danger of death or from unbearable living conditions.
It is not easy to say what the hour of birth of the inner-German resistance was. In any case, the attempts of the German communists to maintain their organization within the framework of illegality and to prepare for the hour of their own seizure of power should not be counted as resistance. After all, one would hardly speak of Bolshevik resistance if they had lost the civil war in Russia, as in Hungary. They were the initiators and aggressors, and thus differed from anyone willing to coexist with other directions in one system. A trace of initial approval and thus a later change in attitude should be considered a conceptual characteristic of resistance, and one need only to read Julius Leber’s contemporary notes to recognize that there were undeniably certain affinities between Social Democrats and National Socialists in their criticism of dogmatic Marxism. The polemic against formal democracy is hardly a comparable point of agreement between communists and National Socialists, and one must rather assume a harsh and unalterable enmity as the basic fact within which National Socialism could also be described as militant resistance against communism. The possibility of including the communists to the German resistance arises at all only from the transition to the policy of the popular front, and it is subject to the question whether this transition arose from a change of attitude or was a mere tactical device to achieve complete victory. It is easier to answer the other question, whether the brutality of the suppression of communists and Social Democrats aroused so much indignation on the the bourgeoisie that a number of people or entire institutions decided to resist. On the whole the answer must be no, and it must even be extended to the first measures taken against the Jews, because obviously the memory of the events of 1917-1920 in Russia and Germany was still so strong that the proverb about the shavings that fall in planing [translator: i.e. levelling wood, as in, “you must crack a few eggs to make an omelette”] appeared as a satisfactory explanation, especially since a clear distinction was initially made between national and anti-national Jews. It is true that the National Socialist movement also had sharp and bitter opponents on the right from the start, such as Erich Ludendorff and Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, but this opposition could be called sectarian or reactionary, and in any case some of the best-known men of the later resistance, such as Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow were on the side of the nationalist movement with their sympathies, while Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg and Arthur Nebe even served the party in high positions. The first moral indignation, similar to that of Martov, who in 1918 had said that he felt shame at the bloody deeds of the Bolsheviks towards his former opponents, the cultured bourgeois, resulted from the June 30 murders, and Hans Oster later spoke of the “methods a gang of robbers,” which should have been stopped at the right time. Equally characteristic was the transformation in which Martin Niemöller became an opponent of National Socialism—a man and Freikorps fighter who could hardly have been more nationalistic, who was now forced to come to terms with the abysmal contrast between his Christian faith and National Socialist racial doctrine . The third major motive that brought about a change of heart among the friends of National Socialism, or at least of national uprising, was the realization that Hitler was about to involve Germany in a world war and thus the violate the most elementary of all imperatives of national restitution: that the world war situation of multi-front combat must never be repeated. Now a resistance group determined to act formed around the chief of staff, Ludwig Beck, and even Claus von Stauffenberg now said: “The fool is making war.” Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin and Carl Friedrich Goerdeler no longer shied away from contacts with the English government, which one could call “treasonous”. Former Freikorps fighter Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz put together a shock troop squad to arrest Hitler. The communist groups were all but crushed, but the more cautious Social Democrats, who secretly received the SOPADE reports on Germany from the exiled party executive, could be seen as a network of potential helpers within the masses. But Chamberlain’s flight to Berchtesgaden and then the Munich conference marked the end of the most promising action by Hitler’s German opponents.
The actual outbreak of war in the following year did not meet with any significant resistance, perhaps because even Göring himself was frantically trying to keep the peace, and certainly not least because the opinion was widespread that the Führer was bluffing this time too and would once again win the game. Not unimportant was also the fact that the Polish “corridor” was the oldest and most obvious demand of German nationalism, although it was far less justifiable by the idea of the right to self-determination than the annexation of Austria and the Sudeten territories. The signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact came as too much of a surprise to immediately provoke serious resistance.
The victory in Poland did not in itself create a new situation for the men of the military resistance, but its consequences changed the situation. The moral motive was greatly reinforced by the action of the SS and the Security Police, and from the Commander-in-Chief East to the rank and file, many members of the Wehrmacht now realized for the first time that they were involved in a war very different from the First World War. At that time the Polish Jews had welcomed the Germans as liberators; this time they showed great hostility from the outset, or at least after a short time, and no one could be surprised by this. When during the First World War would a high-ranking German officer ever written that he was ashamed of being a German?
Likewise, the ideological motive, i.e. the insight that Hitler’s worldview and actions were strange and becoming more and more alien, was also strengthened. The communists were largely thrown into paralyzing confusion by the signing of the treaty between Hitler and Stalin, but even the French communists did not become friends of fascism, no matter how much they helped to paralyze the will to resist. For the anti-communists in the high bureaucracy, in the Wehrmacht, among the people and even in the party, the pact was an absolutely incomprehensible and immoral act, which Stalin handed over to the whole of East-Central Europe and largely reversed the results of German colonization of the East. The negotiations which were conducted with England during the winter, through the mediation of the Vatican, were mainly motivated by the feeling that Hitler must be prevented from playing the Soviet card entirely and separating Germany once and for all from the context of Europe or the West.
Most of all, however, the motive of avoiding war, i.e. avoiding the world war, gained strength. Never before and never later did the Wehrmacht’s top echelon stand so close to disobedience as in the final months of 1939, when Hitler repeatedly issued orders for the attack to begin in the West and repeatedly revoked them for pragmatic reasons. There is no doubt that the memory of the First World War and the conviction of the outstanding quality of the French army were decisive for the reluctance of the generals, but just as strong was the thought that Germany could not cope with a world war in which sooner or later the United States of America would intervene. That Hitler had assessed the military and psychological situation more correctly than the army command was evident to everyone after the six weeks of the French campaign, but concerns about the incalculable duration of the overall war had not diminished. Highly symptomatic was Rudolf Hess’ flight to England, in whose preparation the advice of Albrecht Haushofer, a man who belonged to the resistance, had played a role.
However, it would be a shortcut to focus only on those officers and diplomats who were critical of Hitler’s policies and worldview. This criticism had, after all, originated in the “church struggle,” and in every totalitarian country the mere self-preservation of individual institutions and deviating ways of thinking must be regarded as a special form of resistance. Thus the self-assertion of the churches was an act of resistance, and it was incomparably more successful than it had been in the Soviet Union, not least because Hitler had been met with some sympathy at first. What could come of this was shown must clearly in 1940 and 1941, by the reactions of clergymen and laypeople to the killing of the mentally ill. The party felt compelled to stop its actions, and the conviction spread among the church people that this Germany must not win the war. Party officials could therefore claim that political Catholicism was apparently seeking German defeat. Hitler’s deep dissatisfaction with the judiciary was a well-known fact. But there were even doubts as to whether the Gestapo, with its considerable number of detectives from the Weimar period, worked and could work efficiently enough in Hitler’s sense. For example, Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen, grandson of Grand Admiral Tirpitz, worked in the Reich Aviation Ministry, at whose wedding Göring himself had been best man. Schulze-Boysen had been a nationalist revolutionary until 1933 and had published the journal Gegner, in which he and his friends polemicized against the “ossified West” and “American alienation” in a much the same way as the young Georg Lukács had done before his conversion to Marxism. After the seizure of power, he had been terribly beaten up by SA men, and a little later he made contact with the Soviet trade mission. The Gestapo knew nothing about all this or could not put it together properly. Nor did they know anything about Dr. Richard Sorge, who had already become a convinced communist during the First World War and then published articles in communist magazines. He was able to join the NSDAP and become the confidant of the German ambassador in Tokyo. Not to be forgotten is the private sector, where numerous opponents of Hitler found a relatively safe haven.
Hitler had come to power in a country of the European type of society by making public appearances and gaining the approval of large parts of the population and the hesitant support of the ruling class. Thus he was able to carry out a political revolution which until then had only had an analogue in Italy. After that he could arrest the leading groups of his enemies and bend his friends to his will, he could discriminate against a small and supposedly foreign part of the people and bring the culture into line. But in its social structure German society remained essentially unchanged. Although Hitler was an autocrat, he was nevertheless incapable of carrying out large-scale measures of physical extermination in peacetime, which would have been directed against strong and important strata or classes of the people, if only because the German Reich until 1939, despite all the will to change and despite the annexation of 10 million people was undoubtedly regarded as a part of Europe which was not met with any marked hostility from other governments. Therefore in countless places and especially in some of the most important institutions of German society there were potential points of resistance, and if towards the end of 1940 the hopes of an early peace agreement had faded and deep resignation in view of a long war had spread, this Germany was far from wax in Hitler’s hands.
The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, had seized power at the moment of defeat and collapse, and their ideology had convinced them that they were destined to cleanse the earth of all the dirt and the filth which they regarded as the inevitable concomitants of the capitalist system. They had waged and wanted to wage a civil war, although they had other and far more numerous enemies than there should have been according to the doctrine, and during the civil war and afterwards they annihilated large classes, strata and groups of their multi-ethnic state, indeed, at the end, even hundreds of thousands of their own party members. Around 1930 they encountered a resistance that was far more comprehensive, but also far more helpless and unorganized than the diverse resistance movements in Germany in 1935. In 1940, by all human judgment, even the most modest organizational starting points for resistance against Stalin did not exist. Much more widespread, however, was a dull resignation from almost the entire population, which was strangely contrasted with the confidence in some party and army circles that the Red Army was superior to all armies in the world and would soon achieve final victory over the mutually weakening enemies.
As long as only domestic politics could be pursued, the Bolshevik system had claimed incomparably more victims, and obviously the protagonists had not known any compunction whatsoever and had actually built a system of planned economy that represented a genuine alternative to the market economy system that had previously been regarded as the only modern system, while National Socialism embarked on a “Third Way,” which some of its opponents considered too capitalistic or haphazard and others just too socialistic or coercive. There have been no known protests about excessive harshness in the fight against the enemy from the ranks of the Communist Party or the secret police (apart from objections on the grounds of obvious arbitrary measures), and one unverified report is quite unusual, according to which Dzerzhinsky, drunk at a banquet in the Kremlin, begged those present to shoot him for shedding such rivers of blood. In contrast, a tone of uncertainty, strained brutality, and apologia is unmistakable in almost all of Himmler’s statements up to the first year of the war. The Bolsheviks conducted the struggle against their domestic enemies in peacetime with far more rigor and on the basis of an older and more genuine faith than the National Socialists. But both were probably only able to act as they did because the historical and social situation was completely different in each case. The resistance they encountered and which must be counted among the structural features of the regime was itself closely related to the structure of the respective societies. But if the two regimes had a different relationship to war and to the conflicts of the states, then the realities of annihilation might change fundamentally as soon as they entered a war, and especially a great war. Before making this war the subject of discussion, however, it is necessary to a look at another structural feature, the mobilization, which both regimes wanted to realize above all and in all, and which nevertheless proceeded from quite different premises and showed a different character.