![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI read, via Joel at Far Outliers, a description of how Japan turned down three opportunities to surrender to the Allies in the first two-thirds of 1945. This reminded me of the real possibility that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been the least bad way of ending the war--certainly it would have been better than (say) a Soviet-American partition of Japan on the German and Korean models, following a bloody invasion that would kill hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers and millions of Japanese. By extension, this reminded me of how utterly blinkered--politically, morally--the planners of the July 20 Plot in 1944 against Hitler were.
As Hannah Arendt noted scathingly in my 1974 paperback edition of her masterful 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, the leaders who were involved cared not about what Germany had done to others, but rather about what others might do to Germany.
John Dombrowski's December 1997 Culture Wars article "The Greatest War Crime" examines in detail the many efforts that these people made to establish some sort of compromise peace with the Allies, almost from the moment that the Second World War started. All of these efforts--not incidentally demanding a German right to keep the central European territories, at least, that it had conquered, and uncompromised independence on the basis of an alliance against the Soviet Union--met with failure.
That Dombrowski sees the failure of the United States and Britain to respond to these entreaties as a moral indictment upon them says rather a lot about Dombrowski, and Culture Wars, and for that matter, about the plotters. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt needs only refer (103) the reader to a short passage from Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair, published in its German original (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten) two years after Reck-Malleczewen's own execution in Dachau in 1945.
I do sympathize with the sufferings of the coup plotters after their coup failed, and I certainly think that the world would have been served wonderfully if only Hitler had died before he did (six years before, twelve, twenty-two, fifty-six). If, by some chance, they had taken power in 1944 I very much doubt whether the world would have turned out better than it did. If they had acted before then, the plotters would have had to be different, better men. If they had, then I doubt we'd have had a Second World War at all. That's the problem, of course--Hitler was only a leader.
As Hannah Arendt noted scathingly in my 1974 paperback edition of her masterful 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, the leaders who were involved cared not about what Germany had done to others, but rather about what others might do to Germany.
In these circles, there was of course some concern about the fact that, as Goerdeler said, "in the occupied areas and against the Jews techniques of liquidating human beings and of religious persecution are practiced . . . which will always rest as a heavy burden on our history." But it seems never to have occurred to them that this signified something more, and more dreadful, than that "it will make our position [negotiating a peace treaty with the Allies] enormously difficult, that it was a "blot on Germany's good name" and was undermining the morale of the Army. "What on earth have they made of the proud army of the Wars of Liberation [against Napoleon I in 1814] and of Wilhelm I [in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870]," Goerdeler cried when he heard the report of an S.S. man who "nonchalantly related that it 'wasn't exactly pretty to spray with machine-gun fire ditches crammed with thousands of Jews and then to throw earth on the bodies that were still twitching.'" Nor did it occur to them that these atrocities might be somehow connected with the Allies demand for unconditional surrender, which they felt free to criticize as both "nationalistic" and "unreasonable," inspired by blind hatred. In 1943, when the eventual defeat of Germany was almost a certainty, and even later, they still believed that they had a right to negotiate with their enemies "as equals" for a "just peace," although they knew only too well what an unjust and totally unprovoked war Hitler had started (101).
John Dombrowski's December 1997 Culture Wars article "The Greatest War Crime" examines in detail the many efforts that these people made to establish some sort of compromise peace with the Allies, almost from the moment that the Second World War started. All of these efforts--not incidentally demanding a German right to keep the central European territories, at least, that it had conquered, and uncompromised independence on the basis of an alliance against the Soviet Union--met with failure.
The memorandum pleaded for solidarity between the German resistance movement and the "civilized world" on the basis of opposition to "destruction so vast...even the victors would suffer from extreme poverty....totalitarian control...increasing even in liberal countries...tendency to anarchism and the abandonment of all established civilized standards...the threat of bolshevization.... The memorandum asked that the Western Allies not decry in public "statements and appeals of the German opposition" (Ibid, p. 216). It attempted to portray the horrors of world revolution which the German resistance saw as the sole alternative to a negotiated peace between Germany and the Western Allies.
Among peace feelers, this document was probably unique in that it spelled out in detail why the resistance movement needed to count on at least the passive cooperation of Britain and the United States if it were to successfully supplant Hitler's regime with one enjoying the broad backing of all significant sectors of the German populace. It indicated that the elimination of Hitler would still leave in place the power of the Gestapo which would likely foment "Nazi revolts after the coup," and the hatred toward Germans in the occupied territories which would make an orderly withdrawal difficult.
That Dombrowski sees the failure of the United States and Britain to respond to these entreaties as a moral indictment upon them says rather a lot about Dombrowski, and Culture Wars, and for that matter, about the plotters. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt needs only refer (103) the reader to a short passage from Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen's Diary of a Man in Despair, published in its German original (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten) two years after Reck-Malleczewen's own execution in Dachau in 1945.
A little late, gentlemen, you who made this archdestroyer of Germany and ran after him, as long as everything seemed to be going well; you who . . . without hesitation swore every oath demanded of you and reduced yourselves to the despicable flunkies of this criminal who is guilty of the murder of hundreds of thousands, burdened with the lamentations and the curse of the whole world; now you have betrayed him. . . . Now, when the bankruptcy can no longer be concealed, they betray the honor that went broke, in order to establish a political ablibi for themselves--the same men who have betrayed everything that was in the way of their claim to power.
I do sympathize with the sufferings of the coup plotters after their coup failed, and I certainly think that the world would have been served wonderfully if only Hitler had died before he did (six years before, twelve, twenty-two, fifty-six). If, by some chance, they had taken power in 1944 I very much doubt whether the world would have turned out better than it did. If they had acted before then, the plotters would have had to be different, better men. If they had, then I doubt we'd have had a Second World War at all. That's the problem, of course--Hitler was only a leader.
