Christian Charity, the Nazis’ Final Foe

What the Tom Cruise film does not explain – A 1,000-page footnote to “Valkyrie”/By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the Feb. 09 issue of The Atlantic Times, with my original headline)

Bryan Singer’s film “Valkyrie” starring Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German colonel who tried to kill Hitler, requires footnotes: What motivated Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, and what was the Nazis’ ultimate goal? A new, definitive biography of SS leader Heinrich Himmler provides an answer.

“There’s no doubt about Himmler’s anticommunism and anti-Semitism; he wiped out both groups mercilessly,” writes historian Peter Longerich, “but basically he was much more engrossed with Christianity. The conflict with the Christian world, in which he grew up, was of truly existential significance to him.”

According to Longerich, Himmler considered it his life’s calling to coalesce the fight against Christians with his idea of resurrecting the lost world of (pagan) Germania. While anti-Semitism and anticommunism were core elements of Hitler’s entire National Socialist movement, de-Christianization linked to re-Germanization “was the quintessential task of the SS in Himmler’s mind,” Longerich writes in his 1,000-word tome (Longerich, Peter. Heinrich Himmler, Biographie. Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2008; 275).

Longerich teaches modern German history at London University’s Royal Holloway College, where he also directs the Holocaust Research Center. His spine-chilling and magnificently documented account of the SS leader’s life and worldview – a full quarter of this book consists of endnotes – has so far only been published in German, but will hopefully appear in English before long. This article is not meant to be a review of Longerich’s scholarly masterpiece. It is quoted here merely in support of the assertion that National Socialism’ thrust was aimed against the entire Judeo-Christian culture, a fact much questioned by some contemporary American scholars such as Richard Steigmann-Gall who portrayed Nazism as an outgrowth of Christianity. Himmler saw Christianity as an “alien, Asiatic” imposition on the Germanic world.

By stressing Himmler’s anti-Christian fixation, Longerich, a German citizen, substantiates a key statement by Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig and civilian mastermind of the German resistance. As far back as in 1937, Goerdeler deposited his “political testament” with Friedrich Krause, a Leipzig editor who had fled to New York. In this document, Goerdeler warned that Hitler was determined to destroy first the Jews and then the Christians, as this writer has shown (q.v., Siemon-Netto, Uwe. The Fabricated Luther, Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths, second edition. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2007; 116).

This forewarning was Goerdeler’s essential message as he traveled tirelessly to Western capitals before World War II urging governments not to give in to Hitler’s demands. “Hitler is the incarnation of evil,” he told  British envoy Arthur Primrose Young. “The man who has enunciated the doctrine of the totality of the party … cannot tolerate another God beside him … Judaism has inflamed his hatred with its doctrine of the one God who affects man’s entire life with his laws and commandments. Next, (Hitler’s) hatred will turn on the Christian religion. Humility and charity render him rabid ... To (Hitler) the notion that man as a child of God is directly connected to (God) is a frightening heresy ... To the extent that in his appalling lack of education he knows Christianity at all, Hitler puts himself in the place of Christ.”

Himmler too loathed the Christian virtue of neighborly love, Longerich reports: “The principle of Christian compassion stands in the way of his (Himmler’s) insistence on an uncompromising treatment of ‘sub-humans.’” Himmler strove to “replace Christian principles with Germanic virtues, such as toughness, as a precondition to persevere in the struggle against sub-humans and win the future.” He added, “We live in the era of the ultimate showdown with Christianity” (280).

Carl Goerdeler (1884-1945) would have become chancellor of post-Nazi Germany had the attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 succeeded. Instead he was hanged on Feb. 2, 1944. Goerdeler’s opposition against the Nazis began well before Hitler took over Germany in 1933. In the film, “Valkyrie,” Goerdeler’s was the least truthfully developed character, as scriptwriter Christopher McQuarrie admitted in an interview with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading national daily.

The reason for Goerdeler’s portrayal as Stauffenberg’s antagonist within the resistance was chiefly dramaturgic, McQuarrie explained: “Without conflict you have no drama.” For theological, philosophical, and practical reasons Goerdeler was initially opposed to this and all previous schemes to kill Hitler. He wanted the military to arrest the dictator instead and have him tried for treason before a German court; this way, he thought, the Nazis’ crimes would be laid bare before a horrified German public.

Interviewed by The Atlantic Times, Goerdeler’s daughter Marianne Meyer-Krahmer related, “My father counseled the generals not to be duped by Germany’s early victories in the war. He told them: ‘What good is your victory if the vanquished nations are being treated so shamelessly?’”

A film is arguably not the right medium for a theological and moral discourse concerning the legitimacy of tyrannicide, which is really what the disagreement between Goerdeler and the anti-Nazi military men was all about. But like Goerdeler, senior officers felt shame over their nation’s war crimes, as Bryan Singer’s film shows. And it was this sense of shame that led them to plot against Hitler’s life not just towards the end of the war but also on several previous occasions.

“It was in reaction to reports about the mass murder of Jews… that Stauffenberg first mentioned the need for Hitler’s overthrow, that was in April of 1942,” historian Peter Hoffmann of McGill University in Montreal told Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; at about the same time, Gen. Henning von Tresckow argued that unless the military killed Hitler, “we ourselves will become accomplices” (in the murder of the Jews). Hoffmann, the premier specialist on the German Resistance, counseled “Valkyrie” scriptwriters McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander free of charge.

Given these historical facts it seems scandalous that in their reviews of “Valkyrie” some prominent U.S. film critics labeled Stauffenberg and his co-plotters “Nazi” officers, and mocked these men who ended their lives before a firing squad or on meat hooks for having done too little too late –and too incompetently. “Stauffenberg was never a Nazi!” Hoffmann insisted, pointing out that as a career officer, he was formally prohibited to engage in any kind of political activity under the Weimar Republic’s 1921 national defense act (which is not to say that members of the Wehrmacht had not also participated in war crimes).

“Most of the men involved in the 1944 plot were committed Christians,” Smith College historian Klemens von Klemperer, another leading expert on the German resistance, told this writer more than two decades ago. Some were ardent Roman Catholics like Stauffenberg, others Protestants like Carl Goerdeler, whose self-proclaimed motto was “omnia restaurare in Christo” (restoring everything in Christ).

Over half a century ago, historian Gerhard Ritter wrote a stirring account of Goerdeler’s inner turmoil over how to depose Hitler in a manner commensurate with his Christian beliefs and his political philosophy rooted in the thought of Baron Karl vom und zum Stein, the celebrated 18^th and 19^th-century Prussian statesman, whom Goerdeler and many of his co-conspirators endeavored to emulate. Like vom Stein, Goerdeler was motivated by a “high degree of faith in the … power of reason, chiefly moral reason,” Ritter wrote (Ritter, Gerhard. The German Resistance: Carl Goerdeler’s Struggle against Tyranny. New York: Praeger, 1958; 357 pp.).

In “Vakyrie” and in some historical accounts, Goerdeler was ridiculed for his “mania for drawing up … lists for a post-Hitler Germany, (which) proved his undoing” (q.v., Wistrich, Robert. Who’s Who in Nazi Germany. New York: MacMillan, 1982; 101). But this was very much in line with Lutheran thought. Martin Luther’s said, “When the coachman has lost his mind he must be removed from the driver’s seat.” But before that, he cautioned, a qualified replacement must be found lest chaos ensue.

With this mind, Goerdeler began already early in the Nazi era to compile elaborate lists of men and women qualified to assume power immediately after Hitler’s removal; they included the names of potential candidates for chief of state all the way down to the level of county executive and local police chief.

A sophisticated stage play rather than a feature film would probably be the most appropriate artistic forum to explain the complex historical figure of Carl Goerdeler. Still, Bryan Singer managed drive home one significant point made by one of the plotters early in his film. In the book of Genesis, God promised to spare Sodom if ten righteous men were to be found in that depraved place (Genesis 1:32). Sodom could not come up with those ten righteous men; Germany did. This, to Singer’s credit, “Operation Valkyrie” has made abundantly clear.