'These attempts demonstrate that despite the great danger, there were people ready and willing to resist Hitler.' Photo: Detail from book cover of The Plots Against Hitler, by Danny Orbach
The Plots Against Hitler, by Danny Orbach
Author: Danny Orbach. Review by Reg Naulty
When people learn that Quakers are pacifist, they commonly ask what we would have done about Adolf Hitler, by which they mean, how would we have resisted him? It is instructive therefore, to find out how people living in Hitler’s regime did it. Such a question is given additional interest by our awareness of the fragility of democracy, which has been heightened by the presidency of Donald Trump, who showed how democracies can slide towards autocracy.
Danny Orbach’s book reads like a thriller. The most spectacular of the forms of resistance against Hitler (but by no means the only ones) were attempts to kill him. The first of these was the work of one man, a carpenter, George Elser, who foresaw that Hitler’s policies would lead to war. He was gifted technically, and worked in a munitions factory and a quarry in order to familiarise himself with explosives. Hitler came to Munich every year to give a speech, and Elser put a bomb in a pillar just behind the podium. It went off as planned but Hitler left early and escaped.
The second attempt was in 1943 when a bomb masterminded by Henning von Tresckow, a senior army officer radicalised by events he had witnessed in war-torn Poland, was put in a plane flying Hitler back from the Eastern Front. The bomb failed to go off, because its detonator malfunctioned. The third attempt was in July 1944 when Claus von Stauffenberg, another senior army officer, carried a bomb into Hitler’s briefing room. The bomb went off, but someone moved it with his foot beforehand, which diminished its effect on Hitler.
Friends would not have participated in such plots, since we do not approve of assassination, but we would want to act, and it says something about religion that the chief instigators of these plots were all religious, some Protestant and some Catholic. A clue to a more acceptable form of resistance was given by the Abwehr (military intelligence), which, under the leadership of Wilhelm Canaris, sent four trainloads of Jews from Amsterdam to Spain in mid 1942. They had to cease this practice because it had become illegal and was expensive, which attracted the attention of the Gestapo.
These attempts demonstrate that despite the great danger, there were people ready and willing to resist Hitler. So to the original question we can reply that we would have joined with others who were resisting him. These others had profound misgivings about the methods they found themselves driven to adopt. Alternatives which Friends might have had to offer would have interested them. Those who perished as a result of these adventures were brave idealists, deeply tormented in their last years on earth. One hopes that they now rest in peace. Danny Orbach tells their tragic story well.
