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World War II - Germans Resisting Hitler - Tom Dunkel
110 Plays1 year ago
Ep 004 - Nonfiction. I interview author Tom Dunkel on his new book, “White Knights in the Black Orchestra: The Extraordinary Story of the Germans Who Resisted Hitler.”
Tom is a really great speaker & I loved our discussion about his book. His answers to my questions were profoundly insightful, and I probably could have talked to him for much longer. Topics ranged from assassination attempts against Hitler to the history of German resistance in government to the moral calls to action felt by these courageous German resistors.
Tom also made a special note that he wanted to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, who provided support for this project.
You can buy Tom’s book here: https://bit.ly/407Mgpz
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Transcript
Introduction and Book Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Hey everyone, this is AJ Woodhams, host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today I'm so excited to have on author Tom Dunkel. Tom's talking about his new book, White Nights in the Black Orchestra, the extraordinary story of the Germans who resisted Hitler. I love this book so much. This is gonna be such a great conversation. Tom, how are you today?
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm doing well, AJ. And again, I apologize for not wearing my tuxedo today, but we'll have to make it work.
00:00:41
Speaker
No, no, no, no. You look great. You look great. For those of you who don't know, Tom is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and author, a former staff features writer at The Baltimore Sun, and a longtime freelancer for publications like The Washington Post Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. His new book was about the resistance to Hitler within the German government.
00:01:05
Speaker
during World War II. And Tom, I thought it was really, really fascinating. I learned so much. Maybe just to get started here.
Historical Context of Hitler's Rise
00:01:16
Speaker
So your book starts in the early 1930s. Can you give the audience some context? What was going on inside Germany? What was going on in the world? What was the political landscape that the characters in your book were navigating?
00:01:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. Originally, at the proposal stage, I was going to begin the book in 1939, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who's one of the central characters in the book, spends time in the United States. In the fall of 1930, he goes to Union Theological Seminary in New York City to study.
00:02:00
Speaker
and then leaves and comes back in spring of 1930, summer 1939. He manages to get a teaching fellowship at Union Theological Seminary, right as things are really heating up and it looks like war is about to break out in Europe. And so I was going to begin it there, but I found I was flashing back so much to the early years that I decided just have to basically move the book back to 1930.
00:02:30
Speaker
In the early years, people are thinking, well, Hitler will modify once he gets the power. And this is kind of a show. But when you're really faced with the responsibility of leading a country, a lot of his rhetoric is going to tone down and we'll be fine. As you know, that turned out not to be the case in a terrible misjudgment of character and the political backdrop.
00:03:00
Speaker
This unwinds from when he's chancellor in the early 30s to as we get deeper into the Nazi period and eventually into the war time.
Moral Dilemmas of Resistance
00:03:11
Speaker
I gained an appreciation as I was researching this for the context of their moral decisions and the moral dilemmas that conspirators within the government were faced with. And the image that they kept
00:03:30
Speaker
popping into my mind was that these people were sort of trapped in a box canyon where they were looking for, they wanted to do the right thing. They had a moral compulsion to do the right thing and could not really allow themselves not to do the right thing, but the question becomes, well, what exactly can you do and what impact, what ripple effect impact will it have? Number one on the country, there was a thought, okay, if we, if we depose of,
00:04:00
Speaker
Hitler one way or another? Are we going to start a civil war in Germany? And then there's also the more personal question that
00:04:09
Speaker
in the in the nazi years they had that concept of collective guilt so if i commit a crime i'm not only held responsible for that but my extended family is as well so if you become part of a plot to overthrow the government you're not only risking your own life you're risking a life of your own your whole family and what is your moral responsibility at that point to
00:04:37
Speaker
OK, I can risk my life to have a right to risk my wife's life and my children's life and my parents' life. It's these terrible choices that the people were trying to make and how they were in a way kind of fumbling in the dark to find both a way to satisfy their conscience and also a way to try to get their country out of this horrific dilemma they were in.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah. Now, the book is about the Germans who resisted Hitler, but it focuses mostly on two people, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and am I saying this right? Hans von Donagni. That's close to Donagni, yeah.
00:05:28
Speaker
Okay, Bandhananyi. Started with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What kind of person was he? What was he like? Why was he especially suited for this particular role inside government resisting Hitler?
Bonhoeffer's Intellectual Journey
00:05:44
Speaker
Bonhoeffer was one of those, almost, I guess you could describe him as an intellectual prodigy in a way.
00:05:55
Speaker
As I recall, by the time he was nine or ten years old, he had decided he wanted to become, you know, a pastor, which his siblings, some of his siblings found rather amusing, and not a proper occupation for an upper-class German family. But he was speaking, I think, three or four languages by the time he was 14 or 15, and then by the time he was
00:06:24
Speaker
As I recall, by the time he was 20, he had his bachelor's degree and master's degree, and I think he had finished most of his doctoral work, but not all of it by then. And actually what brings him, part of what brings him to the United States in 1931 is that he had done all of this, and even had done an assistant pastorship in Barcelona, but he was still too young to be ordained in Germany. He had to be either, he was 24 or 25 years old.
00:06:53
Speaker
So he essentially had some time on his hands. So he decides to come to Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which has a tradition of kind of a progressive activist approach to the ministry. And he gets a fellowship there for the fall of 30 into the summer of 31. But he was
00:07:19
Speaker
somewhat intimidating to people because he was so smart and extremely well read and a voracious reader as well and Clearly a man of faith and Bonhoeffer when he was in America He was I thought this is really interesting You write that he was he was really involved in the african-american community. Is that right? Yeah even to the point of He would
00:07:48
Speaker
Abyssinian Baptist Church was the big black church in Harlem, and Adam Clayton Powell Sr. was the pastor at that time. And so you have this young, you know, flaxen-haired German exchange, student rather, coming over to the States, and he
00:08:14
Speaker
Abyssinian Baptist Church was not the nearest church that he could have gone to. But he was drawn, partly there was a black student at Union Theological Seminary that said, hey, go check this church out. And he checked it out and enjoyed it to the extent that he was actually invited by Pastor Powell to join in the ministry where he was doing home visits with families. And
00:08:44
Speaker
Even culturally in Harlem, Bonhoeffer was a piano player. And again, quite good. At eight or 10 years old, he's playing Mozart.
00:08:56
Speaker
you know, sonatas on the piano. But he started hanging out, interestingly enough, in a jazz club in uptown Manhattan. But he was immersing himself. He made a deliberate effort to immerse himself into American culture, much to his credit. And he was even taking road trips on Christmas breaks and spring breaks and such. And he
00:09:25
Speaker
was keenly aware of the racial divide in the United States at that time. And not attuned to it as a foreigner coming to the States, not yet knowing that what was going to happen over in Germany where you have an acute ethnic divide, particularly with Jews and Germans in his own country. But it was sort of a precursor of what he was going to deal with and see over there.
00:09:55
Speaker
talking about he could not understand the level of discrimination in the States and how people could relate to a Duke Ellington as a musician, but the notion of Duke Ellington eating the same restaurant with you would just be more than white people in the States could handle. So he was aware of that sort of
00:10:25
Speaker
that ethnic tension and stew that he has sort of walked into. But he was, he's an interesting guy. And Bonhoeffer, of course, has come to be quite widely read. And he's, but he was conservative in a lot of ways. And, you know, when he would talk about, for example, he thought, well, a husband and wife should have the same opinion about things he couldn't quite handle. Because as he
00:10:53
Speaker
As his life evolves, he gets engaged during the war in his contemplating marriage. And he said also that a lot of times he was aware that he wouldn't intimidate people with his intellect. And he would, he told his good friend Eberhart Betke that
00:11:13
Speaker
In a way, he was a little bit jealous of Bethke. He said, you know, you're very easy going and people relate to you where people seem to, I seem to come off as very, somewhat stern with other people. But he was a charismatic guy. There's no question about it. And deeply, deeply committed to his faith. And of course, his faith would bring him into conflict with the political establishment. And he was, and his, Danyani was his brother-in-law.
00:11:43
Speaker
and others were faced with that dilemma. And Danyani being a Christian as well, how active should you be as a Christian? And when they get to the point where they're thinking of assassinating Hitler, then there's a lot of, there's a religious and ethical dimension to that as well.
Risks and Secrecy in Resistance
00:12:02
Speaker
You know, it's interesting. His brother Klaus also got active in the resistance, a little bit more on the civilian end. He was an attorney at Lufthansa Airlines. But his wife, Emmy, after the war, she was talking about how she wrestled
00:12:29
Speaker
with the notion of what the whole family went through. Because, you know, Bonhoeffer, without doing spoiler alerts here, I mean, there was a number of friends and family who wound up getting killed. And any Bonhoeffer admits it after the war, where she's thinking, you know, this was such a blood-soaked period of time, you know, was it worth resisting?
00:12:58
Speaker
But then she went on to say that, and there was a quote from her in a letter where she goes, people think that the resistance, and I'm closely paraphrasing here, people think that the resistance was a matter of choice or free will, but there really was no choice. I mean, they knew the risks, but they could not let themselves be passive.
00:13:26
Speaker
So there was that feeling that we just, you have no choice. So the question becomes, well then,
00:13:32
Speaker
the next step of that is, well, what exactly do we do? And that's what a lot of the conspirators were wrestling with throughout the war. And particularly as it got to the point where it looked like what we have to do is frankly kill him, meaning Hitler. Yeah, the moral call to action was really fascinating. Let's talk about Hans van den Ani. What kind of person was he? Why was he especially suited for this role?
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, Hans Danyani is, Bonhoeffer is, I think, fair to say well-known, you know, here in the States, certainly in Germany, and he's one of the more well-known resistors and activists during World War II. His brother-in-law Hans Danyani gets very short shrift, and he's not as well-known as I think he should be. He was a
00:14:31
Speaker
an attorney, and an early, and again, very Bonhoeffer being precocious as a theologian and intellect. Donianni was quite, people were quite impressed by his intellect and by his capabilities as an attorney. And he rose, he started off in
00:14:52
Speaker
Oh, I can't, it was one of the ministries of commerce or economics, but quickly got a job with what was brought into the ministry of justice. I think he was 25 at the time, which is the age when he marries Dietrich's sister, Christine. And again, a person of, he was, people who interacted
00:15:19
Speaker
with him during the war, felt that he could be kind of, I don't want to say prudish, but kind of
00:15:29
Speaker
He was, Bonhoeffer, I think, had a little bit more of a personal, instant personal charisma with people. Danyani was, I think, fair to say, very business-like. And he was determined from as soon, he met Hitler early on, which is
00:15:49
Speaker
33 or 34 he's in a meeting with Hitler and he comes back from that meeting and tells his wife, you know, this guy's crazy. He's mad and he begins In 34 starting to keep what is like one could think is a running diary, but it was really kind of a dossier on the on the Nazi Movement and regimes specifically Not just
00:16:18
Speaker
atrocities, but even any kind of thing within the government that smelled wrong to him. And in the back of his mind, it was at some point, there's going to be an accounting one way or another. And that this would be, he's thinking as an attorney here, valuable evidence to document what was going on here. And
00:16:41
Speaker
even doing that, and even when he started doing it early on, was at some risk to his life. In fact, he took great precautions where he was typing his notes. I think it's our clothes, a dozen different typewriters that he was using because he didn't want to be traced in any way, and a couple of people knew what he was doing, including Hans Gertner, who was the Minister of Justice, who let him
00:17:09
Speaker
proceed on his way with that, but he became sort of a, he actually called it a chronicle, but he was, he felt this compelling need to chronicle the Nazi regime. And then he becomes increasingly activist and he reaches, and he's known for that within some circles of the government.
00:17:35
Speaker
And another character that enters the narrative is Wilhelm Canaris, who was the head of the AVER, which was the Overseas Military Intelligence, where we could sort of think of that as analogous perhaps to the CIA for people not familiar with AVER. But Canaris was a career military man. And an interesting, again, when you speak about divided loyalties and complexities of
00:18:05
Speaker
of enduring the Nazi regime. Canaris was the highest up of the number of these conspirators and he was using the avars as a way to shelter people
00:18:18
Speaker
particularly at Abwehr headquarters. And ever, as you get deeper into the war, I think there's 10,000 people working for the Abwehr. But within headquarters, he has a, essentially a cell of about 40 or 50 anti-Hitler conspirators that he is giving free reign and shelter to.
00:18:41
Speaker
And he brings Danyani into the Abwehr right after the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Because by then, Danyani had had a reputation, again, within these circles, within the government, of both being a man of high character and integrity, but also being someone who was drawn to being an activist. And we have to do something about Hitler.
00:19:10
Speaker
So within government, how many people would you say were actually in the Black Orchestra, which is this group of resistors within government that you write about? You're not going to get a firm number on something like that because, number one, it was too dangerous and not like you could have a meeting of all the Black Orchestra people. Let's get together and talk about killing Hitler. It would depend on what
00:19:39
Speaker
level you're speaking of. In other words, within, say, within the Abwehr, that core group, and again, people are active on different levels, but within the Abwehr, there's estimated to be about 40 people who know what's going on and who are involved in conspiring. They, of course, are in touch with people within the military, particularly generals out in the field, because one of the concerns they had was
00:20:09
Speaker
Okay, if we if we kill Hitler, it's not going to do much good if we don't have a sort of a core group of in the military that's going to support us because you know, if you kill them and they decide to just continue with with business as usual with the Nazi government, what have we really accomplished so they they felt that they had to get that that that
00:20:33
Speaker
indefinable, but sort of gut feeling of enough high-level people in the military to support this. And it was quite interesting. Within the German military, they were required. And I think this is, and I can't remember exactly, it's either in 33 or 34. When you were in the military, you take an oath to your country.
00:21:00
Speaker
Well, that changed when Hitler became chancellor. And in 33 or 34, you start taking the oath to Hitler, to the Fuhrer. And among the officer corps, you take a loyalty oath and they take it seriously. But there was also an enormous sense of professionalism and loyalty to your fellow
00:21:29
Speaker
officers and to the point where they would be able to discuss quite openly among themselves, and again with people on the fence or some people that weren't even in favor of the conspiracy,
00:21:43
Speaker
quite openly talk about assassinating Hitler. And there was a number of those officers and generals and majors and colonels that could have betrayed the conspirators but did not do that. I mean, there was almost an overriding sense of loyalty to your fellow officers. So to put a number out, it certainly was in the several hundreds as this conspiracy expands and then there's,
00:22:13
Speaker
There's two coup attempts in 38 and 39 in which, you know, you have a number of, they, you know, they're, okay, we shoot Hitler, but then we got to take control of the government after that. And they have to be, there were officers who were part of, yeah, we're going to take our men out in the field, we'll take control of the streets of Berlin, we'll do that. So people were cooperating. So certainly within the several of several hundreds
00:22:40
Speaker
had a notion and were active in it. And then beyond that, there's all sorts, you know, there's, you know, people, you know, part-time players in it. But I would say that in terms of the Black Walker, so think of it as 40 or 50 in that court group, a group of several hundred that extended to officers who were complicit in cooperating.
00:23:06
Speaker
And then beyond that, you had more people who were sympathetic and might've joined the conspiracy when you get to the situation in July with the Valkyrie bombing. I've noticed a lot of the resistors that you write about were in kind of, they were more of an elite class. There were aristocrats, upper-class people, people with privileged backgrounds,
00:23:35
Speaker
I mean, that's essentially certainly in the officer corps and in the diplomatic corps. Why do you think that was? Well, that's largely the way a lot of society's work is that your elites tend to run things. And particularly in the older European countries, you have your established
00:24:05
Speaker
Same thing was going on in Britain. I mean, you have your established, you know, your upper class both in business and politics and in the military, that's not unusual. And particularly in those situations, it was interesting because partly because of how old the countries are, you have those
00:24:31
Speaker
interlocking family trees. I mean, it was quite interesting how many members of the upper class in Germany were related to each other. Everybody seems to be a cousin or a second cousin. And that was just the way the culture and the society functioned then. But it was particularly if you're speaking within
00:24:54
Speaker
that upper level, upper echelon of the government is going to be mostly of the upper class. And in fact, Danyani makes a comment as we're getting into the later, darker final days of the war. He is befriended by
00:25:18
Speaker
medical doctor, the police doctors. And they start talking politics and he mentions what
00:25:28
Speaker
By that, and again, spoiler alert territory here, but he is in prison at one point. He's talking about the resisters he meets on a lower level, meaning not people necessarily from the upper class in prison and how impressed he was with those people. And he expresses his dissatisfaction with the
00:25:55
Speaker
upper class in Germany and the officer class in Germany that they could have and should have done more. And if they had, and particularly if they'd done it early on, then the Nazis would not have spun out of control. In other words, the time to stop Hitler was early and not enough people stood up at the right time to do it. People who were in a position of authority and responsibility that could have done something.
Resistance Groups Explained
00:26:24
Speaker
Let's talk about the title of your book, White Nights in the Black Orchestra. So I've heard of the Red Orchestra before. I think maybe a lot of other people have, which is the nickname that the Nazis gave to a famous group of resistors in Germany. But I had never heard of the Black Orchestra until I read your book. Talk a little bit about that. Why is it called the Black Orchestra?
00:26:54
Speaker
Yeah, there's a there's a two track explanation of the title and as you one gets deeper in the book it the meaning becomes clear. The Black Orchestra was in essence a slang term it's believed to have
00:27:09
Speaker
started with the Gestapo. And again, it preceded the black orchestra. There was a group, the red orchestra, and kind of the linguistic background of this is that if you had a resistance group, they would often have a radio, you know, to communicate. And in those days, you're communicating by radio with a by Morse code, tapping out Morse code messages, which
00:27:36
Speaker
uh is analogous to somebody playing a piano that's that's kind of the the etymology behind the word and okay the radio operator was the piano player then and other people are going to be part of the orchestra so hence you know that description of a resistance group and the red orchestra was a was a group of of civilian resistors and there was a couple of
00:28:01
Speaker
involved with a couple of different clusters, a smaller group of people. And they had, a number of them had sympathies with Russia and not all of them, but in terms of the slang terminology that became adopted within the Gestapo, that group became known as the Red Orchestra. And they were
00:28:24
Speaker
As soon as I recall on top of my head, they were arrested, I think, in the fall of 1942. They finally got discovered and arrested and go on trial. The Black Orchestra, a group within the government, Gestapo and people in the military become aware of them after that. And it was just an evolution of the term of it. And the Black Orchestra, I guess, being more sinful to be within the government and resisting. But they adopted that.
00:28:53
Speaker
slang expression for the Black Orchestra. So the Red Orchestra never actually, they never called themselves that. It's a name that the Gestapo gave them. That's where they believe the evolution of the term came from within the Gestapo. Just their shorthand way of referring to these people. Yeah. And the Black Orchestra was the same thing. They never actually called themselves the Black Orchestra.
00:29:15
Speaker
No, that was a Gestapo term as well, and it's sort of a slang term that was thrown around as they're doing their investigations. But no, they didn't refer to themselves as anything. They didn't have a name for themselves. So what were some of the activities that the Black Orchestra was doing? What were some of the different ways that they were organizing and resisting Hitler? Yeah, well, for example,
00:29:44
Speaker
In 1938, Hitler, he tells his, as I recall, it was in November in 1937, he'd actually tell us he has a meeting with his top tier generals, and that's where he uses that expression that
00:30:05
Speaker
Every generation needs a war, and I'm going to see that our generation has this war. Where he is in his own head is making plans to expand beyond the borders of Germany. And the first excursion is into Austria. And then the Anschlutze is in March of 1938, I think.
00:30:28
Speaker
That was his, that was the first domino to kind of fall and it felt pretty peacefully. Next up he had his eye on Czechoslovakia and the sedate land area of Czechoslovakia, which was had a German population and Hitler's using that as kind of a wedge issue that other Germans are being mistreated in the sedate land. We have to go in there and save them and blah, blah, blah.
00:30:57
Speaker
At that point, they actually begin to talk about an outright coup attempt of some, and one of the, again, there's a couple of tracks they're pursuing here, one of which is, which perhaps sounds naive or overly optimistic, was that they were going to
00:31:22
Speaker
put Hitler under arrest and put him on trial and try to dispose of him without violence. And parenthetically, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's father was a psychologist and psychiatrist. They were going to have Bonhoeffer's father again
00:31:47
Speaker
through contact with his conspirators and with Danyani, who's his son-in-law. But Huffer's father was going to be the person who was to do the medical evaluation on Hitler and declare him insane when they put him on trial. So that conspiracy is rolling to the point where they have
00:32:07
Speaker
it organized and they have managed to collect munitions. They have a plan for little safe houses in Berlin. Hitler makes a, there was a couple of the top tier generals who were on the
00:32:32
Speaker
on the fence about cooperating with a conspiracy with the generals who would have the authority to actually call troops to arms against the government. They get cold feet. Hitler makes a comment and they get the sense that maybe Hitler has gotten the sense that there's a coup in motion and they call it off and they talk about burning all the files. So that's in fall of 38.
00:32:56
Speaker
So at first the plan was just to arrest Hitler and put him in jail, not actually kill him. That was the hope. Although, as a conspiracy within the conspiracy, Hans Oster was, I was trying to say at that point, kind of the hub of the wheel in terms of actually
00:33:21
Speaker
Planning and in being a conduit between military people and people within the avar. He was he was sort of the coordinator of this He has a major Heinz who is in charge. He was going to be in charge of the assault unit that was going to storm the Chancellery and take Hitler into custody privately after a meeting Oster and Major Heinz Friedrich Heinz, I believe was his first name and
00:33:50
Speaker
they get together between themselves and they say, listen, no matter what Hitler does, whether he cooperates or not, shoot him. So that was not authorized by the entire conspiracy at that point. There was, again, people of conscience here. General Ludwig Beck was another
00:34:14
Speaker
high up general who is involved with the resistance and with the coup and an old time classic honorable Prussian military man. He was uncomfortable just with the notion of assassination, just morally uncomfortable with assassinating the head of the government and had certainly had his articulated his reasons for that. So there was that wrestling match that was kind of going on at what point and later on
00:34:44
Speaker
Beck consents that this is really the only way out of this. But at that point in 38, the hope was theoretically to take Hitler into custody or arrest him, put him on trial, get him declared mentally incompetent or whatever. And if the military, enough people in the military went along with it, they could ease him out of the chancellorship that way.
00:35:08
Speaker
As the war progresses, though, the goal is always assassination. Just kill Hitler, because arresting him is out of the question by this point. That becomes more, yeah, by the time they get to 1939, after the invasion of Poland, the conspiracy heats up again. And there's, again, that thought of a coup at that point.
00:35:33
Speaker
But the notion is that it's probably going to have to be an assassination attempt. And then that fails with the actual invasion of Poland. Because at that point, Britain declares war, and Germany is now at war.
00:35:57
Speaker
It's difficult if not impossible to get the officer corps to revolt when the country's at war, you know, all out war. I mean, you know, it's sort of self preservation of the, of the fatherland at that point. Tell us about the assassination attempts because I thought those are really interesting. What were some of the ways that, um, the people in this group, what were some of the ways that they tried to kill Hitler?
00:36:22
Speaker
For example, in March 39, they came very close to killing Hitler with a bomb that was put on his airplane.
Assassination Attempts on Hitler
00:36:31
Speaker
And they did that with, again, organized out of the ad there, Canaris signing off on this, and in consultation with some officers on the Russian front. And the way it evolved is they had a plan where
00:36:51
Speaker
Germany goes into Russia in June of 41 and Hitler originally thought Foolishly that that was gonna go a lot a lot quicker than it did and then eventually he winds up getting bogged down in winter time there anyhow by 43, there's the things are they're still fighting on the Russian front and Hitler has a Has a headquarters
00:37:19
Speaker
close to the Russian front. And they sort of maneuver him into visiting what was called Army Group Center, which is one of the headquarters on the front, which is in Smolensk.
00:37:36
Speaker
And they kind of conspire through military officers who know somebody on Hitler's staff to get Hitler to stop at Army Group Center and kind of do kind of a
00:37:55
Speaker
PR visit to the troops and to the generals in the field there. And at that point, he's traveling by plane and unbeknownst to one of the officers accompanying on a plane did not know what this package contained, but one of the conspirators tells him that, oh, I lost a bet.
00:38:18
Speaker
with someone, one of the generals back in Berlin, I owe him a couple of bottles of Quantro. Can you put this on the plane and take it? And of course it was not Quantro in that package, it was plastic explosive. And they get it on board and it's in the storage compartment.
00:38:35
Speaker
and where the attempt failed was that the plastic explosive, however, wherever it was, I guess it was in the hold on the plane, it was just too cold that basically the plastic explosive, the mechanism triggered, basically the plastic explosive froze up, which created the,
00:38:55
Speaker
awful dilemma and some hearts were pounding in Smolenskin in Berlin because they had to go retrieve this package before it ever got to that general who was going to get it, who were there to open it up and find a bomb inside and not two bottles of Quattro.
00:39:10
Speaker
And so I can imagine setting all this up and then getting the phone call that not only did the plan not work, not only did you not kill Hitler, but then realizing you've actually got to go back and retrieve the bomb. Lieutenant Fabrian Schlabendorf was the person who got on a, uh, on a mail plane the next day from Smolens from the front.
00:39:39
Speaker
goes to Berlin and then, as I recall, at that point, the package might have been in Wolfflare, which is Hitler's military headquarters outside. He calls ahead and said, oh, listen, I made a mistake. I gave the guy the wrong package and manages to get there in time and retrieve the bomb. And they actually take the explosive and they tried to,
00:40:09
Speaker
to, in essence, recycle it a week later. They got another general, Gerstorf, who volunteered to do a suicide bombing. And this, again, is a week or 10 days later, Hitler was due to do a review of armaments captured that were on display at the Armory in Berlin. And Gerstorf,
00:40:38
Speaker
Avvar was involved in kind of a planning of this display and so they they could contrive a situation with where Gerstoff had a reason to be there and was going to greet Hitler and walk him through the exhibit and this and that. So he takes the plastic explosives with him and the one the one glitch they had was
00:41:03
Speaker
Gerstoff wanted a fuse that he could trigger instantaneously, and they could not get a fuse like that quickly enough. And I believe that fuse that he wound up using had a 10-minute timer on it. And so he greets Hitler as he walks into the armory, and he triggers his... Hitler's with a cluster of people, and Gerstoff is trying to get close to him and walk with him, and he triggers this bomb. And then Hitler, whether
00:41:33
Speaker
I doubt he was tipped off or whether he was running behind schedule or whether he had kind of a sixth sense at times of whether he was in any danger. But he was due to, as I recall, spend a half hour in this exhibit and winds up speeding through in about two or three minutes. And so Gerstorf is kind of hustling after him, trying to get close enough
00:41:53
Speaker
And Hitler's gone, and he had a wreath-laying ceremony at the armory out in the quadrangle area there. So he's outside, and Gerstoff is no longer close to him. So Gerstoff has to run off and go to a men's room and dismantle the bomb. So that was another attempt.
00:42:17
Speaker
was another one where another suicide bomb attempt where a captain had, Hitler was very hands-on in terms of he wanted to see new armaments or new equipment. He liked to personally see this before he would sign off on a lot of it and they had designed some
00:42:40
Speaker
as I recall, it was winter warfare, backpacks and overcoats, a new generation of this. And there was actually, if you want to call it a fashion show, but a couple of the officers were going to parade around in this new gear for him. And there was a captain again who volunteered to do a suicide bombing. And he was picked to be
00:43:08
Speaker
you know, the model as it were to display this new winter warfare equipment. And the first attempt got, Hitler's schedule was notoriously fluid for security reasons. So they had one set up for this that got canceled the last minute. They came back and they were gonna do it again. And I think this is in December of 43 at this point. But what happened is that there was the Allies at this point
00:43:39
Speaker
There's a lot of bombing going on and allies are doing a lot of bombing of Germany and particularly Berlin and they wound up bombing the.
00:43:47
Speaker
not that it was targeted, but they bombed the supply train that contained this shipment of new military clothing and equipment that Hitler was going to take a look at. So they canceled that unveiling for him. So that attempt missed. And then, of course, later on, July 44, there's the Valkyrie bombing attempt with Klaus von Stauffenberg that's
00:44:18
Speaker
memorialized by Tom Cruise in the movie that a lot of people are familiar with and that's the one that came that came the closest to to actually killing Hitler. And there was nothing now I'm thinking, you know, again, there was another the bombing attempt, which was not part of the conspiracy, per se, which was the was, if you want,
00:44:43
Speaker
For want of a better word, a rogue conspirator, which is a gentleman by the name of George Elser, did a bombing attempt on Hitler in November of, November 38 is our call, in Munich, in the beer hall in Munich. And that bomb went off as well. I mean, he killed, my recollection, killed about a dozen people that day, but Hitler,
00:45:11
Speaker
He left early and went back to Berlin and he had had, again, this was a meticulously planned, this guy planned this attempt for about a year where he actually had moved to Munich and would go have dinner in this beer hall almost every night. And it's, you know, it sounds incredible, but he was actually hiding in the beer hall at night.
00:45:36
Speaker
after it closed, and he was meticulously carving out, it was a column with a wooden facade panels around it. So he broke into this column. He was carving out, chipping away, creating a space big enough for a bomb to be in there. But he was planning this for a year and actually planned it pretty meticulously. And it actually, the bomb went off, but it was just,
00:46:05
Speaker
you know, maybe a half hour of timing difference, 20 minutes and history would have been different. So the famous assassination attempt, the movie Valkyrie with Tom Cruise was made about the July 20th plot.
Financial Strategies of Conspirators
00:46:22
Speaker
What were Bonhoeffer and Van Dannagni, what was their involvement in the July 20th plot?
00:46:31
Speaker
At that point, they don't have any involvement there. When people, Valkyrie being the most well-known plot, I think, in part because, at least in the States here, in part because of the Tom Cruise movie. But you have to look at that plot as a continuum of events that we began, again, from
00:46:57
Speaker
From Danyani's perspective, he was an active conspirator starting in about 1934. He and Bonhoeffer and a few others get arrested in April of 43. Oster gets arrested a little bit. Oster at that point is thrown out of the military. He's not arrested, he's essentially
00:47:28
Speaker
goes into a quasi house arrest situation and moves out of Berlin. And Oster was, again, considered kind of the glue at the center, sort of the hub at the center of the wheel at that point. So there's a period of not floundering, but they're wondering, OK, what is the next phase of this? And in the summer of 43,
00:47:56
Speaker
a couple of the conspirators who were left, and there's a civilian, a couple of the civilians in Beck, they are actually introduced by a doctor friend of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's father, who makes an introduction between this young Lieutenant Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg and some members of the conspiracy, and if any,
00:48:26
Speaker
eventually meets Beck and Carl Gordler, who's one of the civilian leaders of the military. And they both get a sense that
00:48:36
Speaker
Van Stauffenberg was a very charismatic guy. And they get a sense that, OK, this is our man who can replace Oster as sort of a hub of this wheel, if you were. And the conspiracy at that point essentially moves out of Abwehr, where Oster was based, and over to army group headquarters where
00:49:01
Speaker
Stauffenberg is based and Stauffenberg becomes the key person in the sense not only in planning because he is in a position of getting close to Hitler. He gets promoted to the position on the army command staff that would put him in not regular but occasional contact with Hitler. And
00:49:27
Speaker
He's also motivated to, personally motivated to the extent where he's willing to do a suicide bomb. And he tries a couple of, there was a couple of attempts before Val Curie where they called it off. One was because Stauffenberg had a bomb and again, they're back at these plastic explosive bombs. He has a bomb in his briefcase at one particular meeting, but he didn't want to
00:49:54
Speaker
explode that bomb because he wanted some more members of the German High Command to be in that meeting. And as I recall, Göring was not there, and I think maybe he was hoping Himmler would be there, but not enough, Hitler was there, but not enough of his key people that he didn't want to do that bomb attempt. Then he has one in
00:50:17
Speaker
early July of 44, where Hitler leaves, and it's at the Wolfsler headquarters, his military headquarters, Hitler happens to lead, again, with his schedule being somewhat unpredictable, von Stauffenberg is there, he has a bomb in the briefcase, Hitler leaves the meeting earlier than he was expecting.
00:50:37
Speaker
Then a week or so later is the July 20th attempt, where that's the one where it actually comes to fruition. And they had, there was other conspirators on site, as I recall, General Phil Gebel was in charge of communications. He was going to get the word out when the bomb goes off on site. He's going to
00:51:07
Speaker
he's gonna phone back to Berlin and say, okay, they had plans for certain generals to call up some troops, take over the streets of Berlin and essentially go into a lockdown situation at Army High Command and some things. And they were aware, even though they were in prison at this time, they were still, in fact,
00:51:33
Speaker
One of their methods of communication was, via books, they would have coded messages. You were allowed to get, I think about once a week, you could get a food package and reading materials. So they were communicating through code little underlines. They would really faint underlines. They would put like on every 10th page in a book, they would underline one consonant or vowel. You'd have to
00:52:01
Speaker
go through a whole book to figure out what the message was. But they were communicating in large part through Hans van de Ani's wife, who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer's sister, Christine, who was still in touch with some of the members of the conspirators who had not yet been arrested at that point. Oster had not yet been arrested. Canaris had sort of stepped back a little bit, but they were aware that the July
00:52:30
Speaker
conspiracy bombing was in motion. They were aware that Stauffenberg had joined the conspiracy. So they knew what was going on. In fact, it was about two weeks before the bombing. I don't know how he described their relationship. It was Bonhoeffer's mother's cousin.
00:52:54
Speaker
was General Paul Hayes, who was essentially the commandant of Berlin and also had authority for the prisons. About two or three weeks before the July 20 bombing, he actually comes to see Bonhoeffer in prison. Bonhoeffer is being held at that point in Tegel prison in Berlin.
00:53:18
Speaker
and spends about five hours there and actually brings, I think it was either four or five bottles of sparkling wine he brought with him. And at this point,
00:53:29
Speaker
He was an active member, you know, he was a key member of the conspiracy at that point, because again, he was going to call up some of his men to take control of some of the streets of Berlin. And Hayes knows, Bonhoeffer doesn't know the exact day that the bombing is coming, but he knows this is in motion and something's happening imminently when his uncle, if you will, he called him Uncle Paul.
00:53:56
Speaker
When Uncle Paul comes to see him in prison and spends five hours with him, he knows something is happening very quickly. So Bonhoeffer and Van Den Anje, what lands them in prison isn't actually, they didn't get caught plotting to try and kill Hitler. What actually lands them in prison is financial crimes, right? Yes, essentially they were caught
00:54:26
Speaker
funneling money within Abwehr. And when you speak to Hans Daljani as a person and his sense of conscience, this is a perfect example and it wind up, you call you in essence, unraveling the conspiracy for them. They had developed a, when the deportations start,
00:54:51
Speaker
And forgive me for some of my trying to remember off the top of my head, I believe the first deportation of Jews out of Berlin. I'm trying to remember if it's October 41 or 42, but I believe it's 41 at that point when they first start.
00:55:09
Speaker
Bonhoeffer becomes, there's a woman who works, Bonhoeffer was active in what became a splinter movement within the Lutheran church called the Confessing Church. And these were, if you want, for want of a better word, progressive Lutherans who wanted no part of the Nazi regime and in their own way were doing
00:55:35
Speaker
to call it conspiratorial activities but there was a secretary there, who was of as a lot of people in German become unsafe to be a practicing Jew, but you were still of Jewish heritage, and you were still still considered a Jew in the eyes of government and therefore.
00:55:54
Speaker
target for deportation. So Bonhoeffer gets concerned that this woman, Charlotte Friedenthal, may be sent to one of the camps and he wants to do, you know, what can we do to try to help her. So he talks to Danyani. Danyani was in touch with a couple of other
00:56:13
Speaker
Jews in Berlin who had approached him back in 36 because they were losing their law licenses and he couldn't do much for them other than delay that a little bit. They came to see him around that same time and it turns out their families are on a deportation list. So they have developed a plan which
00:56:33
Speaker
originally was seven people and it was called operation seven and eventually grew to 14 people, 14 Jews that they're going to get out of the country and the way they do it with Canaris's approval and it sounds almost too good to be true but Canaris winds up
00:56:51
Speaker
convincing Heinrich Himmler and the SS to sign off on this plan where they're going to send some Jews abroad to be spies for the German government. Because who's going to ever expect these people who've been expelled from Germany that would actually be spying for us? So they get them out to Basel. Again, there's 14 of them. And what they did
00:57:14
Speaker
is they diverted money from avar operation funds. Hans Danyani felt that for these people to leave the country, they would have to leave everything behind, all their property, all their possessions. And he said, we can't just dump these people in another country without giving them a money stake. So the
00:57:34
Speaker
worked out to be about what would be the equivalent of about 100,000 US dollars. They diverted that into a secret pot of money to essentially be a grub stake, if you will, for these families that they were relocating to Switzerland. And there were some people in the accounting department of the Abwehr who were not part of this conspiracy.
00:58:01
Speaker
who started to get suspicious about that. And then, coincidentally, there was a guy in the Abwehr, based in Munich, who was not a part of this conspiracy, but he was doing some illegal activity on the black market. And he got discovered and gets arrested, and he gets
00:58:26
Speaker
Put under questioning and tortured and he knew he was not a real active member of the conspiracy. He was helping. He may have had some help in terms of this.
00:58:37
Speaker
signing off on some of this money, they were diverting. But he wound up, when he was getting tortured, he breaks. So that sets into motion the arrests of Bonhoeffer Doniani and another conspirator by the name of Joseph Mueller are all arrested on the same day in April of 1943. But that
00:59:03
Speaker
is when the heat starts to be turned up on the Abwehr where it becomes, the German government gets more suspicious that there are people within the Abwehr that are actually active in conspiracies. And even Canaris, as clever as he was in covering his tracks, he becomes an object of suspicion within the government at that point. And it's not until
00:59:33
Speaker
a bit later that he's actually discovered though, but that was sort of the beginning of the unwinding in April of 43 when those guys get arrested. So why is this story important?
Modern Relevance of Resistance
00:59:48
Speaker
I think it's important on a couple levels. I think on the one level, again, it's just on the issue of a number of these people are
01:00:03
Speaker
At least here in the, and I was writing for a general interest audience, and particularly general interest American audience that I don't think is fair to say is aware of what was going on is that as much was going on inside the government is that time.
01:00:22
Speaker
specific people who were really active. And again, Hans Deilani is a person who is not well known before. And there were some other people. Helmut Moltke, we didn't get a chance to mention. He's another attorney in Aver who was involved in the conspiracy and a very interesting guy. So that there was more of an appreciation of what was being done inside the German government. And also, again, the notion of
01:00:52
Speaker
putting a lens on this, where you get more of an appreciation of just what a difficult position those people were in. And also, this is not ancient history. If we look at what's going on in Europe right now, and frankly, some of what's going on in our country right now, and we all know about the resurgence of fascism around the world.
01:01:16
Speaker
People of conscience did not end it. It's not a concept for history. Acts of conscience take place in real time and all the time, but there are certain pivot points of history where people are called upon to make decisions and acts
01:01:44
Speaker
morally more than others and we are both to some extent in our country but it's going on in a number of countries around the world right now where you know moral conscience is this is a time to where your conscience is tested and that's where I think looking
01:02:04
Speaker
At people who went through the same thing before and know again, you're not going to have exact parallels in political or social situations, but there are sure.
01:02:16
Speaker
There's a lot of commonality in what went on in Germany in the 30s and 40s and what's going on in places around the world today. And how do people respond? What is the right thing to do? And then you, ideally with a book like this, you want readers to ask the question, you know, what would I have done or where is my line and what would I do? There's a, just very quickly, I mentioned Helmut Moltke.
01:02:42
Speaker
very interesting guy, but he was again from a well-known upper class German family. His great grand uncle had been a hero of the Franco-Prussian war and he had a thousand acre land grant and this was a well-established family and he becomes part of the conspiracy and there is a point
01:03:06
Speaker
I'm trying to think of, this must have been in 42, because it's after the Germany goes into Russia. His specialty is international law, and particularly he was aghast at some of the violations of the Hague Convention and rules of war and civilians being killed. He's looking at the statistics from the Russian front.
01:03:31
Speaker
And he breaks it down. I think this is correct. These numbers are coming across his desk. And there's 15,000 Russians being killed a day and 10,000 Germans. And he breaks it down into how many are being killed an hour, how many are being killed by the minute.
01:03:48
Speaker
And he's writing letters to his wife who is taking care of the family farm in Silesia. Well, Helmut is spending most of his time in Berlin. He's got a little apartment there. And he writes to her one night, right? And it's after he's looking at these numbers. And he says, you know, how can I sit here sipping my tea? And the phrasing is something on the order of, it says,
01:04:19
Speaker
And what will I say when people ask, and what did you do at that time? I mean, the moral weight that these guys were carrying, and it was on their minds every day, but he was acutely aware of you're in a moment of time where action is required and called for, and are you going to step up to the moment and take action and do something?
01:04:47
Speaker
Or there was a lot of people who were content to just keep sipping their tea. He was not one of those people.
Podcast Conclusion and Book Promotion
01:04:54
Speaker
Thomas has been a really terrific conversation. I've learned so much. I loved your book. I love these stories. Particularly, I really enjoyed the stories of courage that you highlighted in your book. I think this is a really timely piece here.
01:05:14
Speaker
Now, if someone wants to find you, where can they find you? Do you have social media? Are you online? Oh, they can start at my website, which is tomdunkle.com.
01:05:25
Speaker
I'm on Twitter, I think it's Tom Dunkle underscore number one. May also just very quickly make one commercial, not commercial now, but I want to just express my thanks as a number of writers do to the National Endowment of the Humanities. NEH gave me a grant for this project, which was hugely helpful.
01:05:49
Speaker
particularly for those of us writers who were writing during the pandemic, which kind of threw all of our research and everything off kilters.
01:05:59
Speaker
It's very interesting. The NEH is one of the few things in the government that post Republicans and Democrats agree about these days. But I just would like to allow the work that they do for writers and for projects like this. But yeah, but certainly the website is the easiest way to reach me and I respond to any questions and complaints and criticisms 24 seven. So that's great. It's great.
01:06:27
Speaker
Well, everyone, White Nights and the Black Orchestra, the extraordinary story of the Germans who resisted Hitler. Go buy it. Go check it out from the library. It's really a terrific book. Tom, I really appreciate you coming on today. I really loved our chat and hope you'll join us again. Thanks so much. Oh, thank you, AJ. My pleasure.