Authors: Roger Moorhouse
But the portions are small
What good does it do us
When Hitler’s flags stand tall!
If under those flags
There is no freedom at all.31
Only a few contained serious political comment. One distributed in
Charlottenburg, for example, predicted that the war would lead to the
emancipation of mankind, an end to exploitation and the demise of
‘the class rule of the bourgeoisie’. ‘The air’, it concluded, ‘would be
cleared once and for all.’32
There were also a number of instances of communist agents
leafleting in the capital in broad daylight. In one example, a group in
Wilmersdorf enlisted the aid of a traditional schoolboy jape. After
engaging passers-by in conversation, they would give their unwitting
victims a valedictory pat on the back. Only later did the passers-by
discover that they had leaflets stuck to them and that they had – in
effect – been used as a communist sandwich board.33
Other Berliners sought to provide ideological sustenance only to
their fellow communists. Alfred Hoernle, from the northern suburb of
Hermsdorf, was known by the pseudonym ‘Black Carl’ and distributed
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communist propaganda to the like-minded citizens of the area. As one
of his ‘customers’ explained:
I worked in those days in my father’s firm as a barber. ‘Black Carl’
always came at the same time, there was a very specific rhythm. He
would enter the shop, remove his rucksack from his shoulders and
hang it on a hook. He behaved just like a regular customer, as I cut
his hair, except that he always ‘forgot’ to take his rucksack with him
when he left. Inside it there was printed material for us to distribute.
It wasn’t much . . . but it was the only ‘spiritual nourishment’ that we
received.34
Another Berliner who made small gestures of dissent was Josepha
von Koskull. A housewife in her mid-forties, she recalled how in the
spring of 1943 she had seen the date ‘1918’ daubed on a nearby house.
The significance of that date would have been immediately obvious
to any German of the wartime era: 1918 was the year Germany was
defeated in the First World War, the year the country was plunged
into civic unrest, economic collapse and revolution. Impressed by the
simplicity and effectiveness of this warning from the past, Koskull
began writing the date on notices and posters, ‘usually early in the
morning, around half past seven, going down the Nürnberger Strasse’.
Each time she returned to the site of her ‘protest’ some days later,
she noticed that the number had been covered with thick black paint.
Though she was well aware of the dangers of her actions, Koskull
wanted to send those of a like mind ‘a sign of life’.35
Some were less immediately political. Manfred Omankowsky
belonged to the ‘Swing Kids’ movement, which disdained the Spartan,
militaristic nature of Nazi ideology and defined itself primarily through
its adherents’ passion for swing music. Omankowsky was a typical
‘Swing Boy’. Coming from a Social Democratic household in
Reinickendorf, he grew his hair long and was an avid fan of jazz,
collecting records sold illegally on the black market and attending
underground dance clubs. Though he had not initially been motivated
by political concerns – instead expressing what he described as a
‘natural protest against the authority of the state’ – he soon found
himself in open conflict with the Nazis. One of his favourite haunts
was the notorious Pharus Hall in the northern suburb of Wedding.
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berlin at war
Once a hotbed of communist agitation and the scene of a brutal
‘battle’ with the SA in 1927, it was still a site of protest:
That’s where it was all going on. Within a radius of 200 metres there
were sometimes whole crowds of youths hanging around. There were
hundreds of us. There were lots of Swing Kids in the neighbourhood.
We danced – or as we put it ‘scrubbed’ – to our banned music especially
in the side rooms and in the toilets of the Pharus Hall. When the Hitler
Youth turned up, we fought with them.36
It is perhaps inevitable that the attention of history should trad-
itionally have been focused on the headline acts; on those who actively
sought to bring down Hitler, such as Stauffenberg and the Red
Orchestra. They, after all, were playing for the highest stakes and
running the greatest risks. But it is also high time that recognition
was given to those whose ambitions were much more modest; to
those who sought to preserve a modicum of normality, of freedom
of thought and expression; to those who – like Josepha von Koskull
– merely sought to give their fellow Berliners ‘a sign of life’.
One hot afternoon in the summer of 1944, fifteen-year-old Dieter
Borkowski was enjoying a few days’ leave from a Berlin flak battery. He
had spent the day strolling along the banks of the Havel River in the
south-west of the city with a young Ukrainian forced labourer, Marussja,
on whom he had developed something of a crush. The two had caught
the tram from the city centre out to the suburbs and had whiled away
the afternoon picnicking and chatting in the sunshine. ‘One could almost
believe’, he wrote in his diary, ‘that we were at peace.’37
Later that afternoon, that sense of tranquillity was rudely inter-
rupted. Walking back towards the city along the river, the pair were
suddenly confronted by a barbed-wire cordon erected on the Glienicke
Bridge and patrolled by soldiers. For a split second Borkowski wondered
if it might have been put there to catch him – he had, after all, broken
the law by spending the day with a Soviet forced labourer – but he
quickly dismissed the idea as ridiculous. However, when he and
Marussja passed through the checkpoint unhindered, his confusion
deepened. He had no idea that he was witnessing part of Operation
Valkyrie.38
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Operation Valkyrie was the brainchild of a Wehrmacht colonel,
Claus Schenck von Stauffenberg. Born into an aristocratic south
German family, Stauffenberg was a career soldier who had partici-
pated in the Polish, French and North African campaigns before being
seriously wounded in April 1943 in Tunisia. Returning to Germany, his
convalescence coincided with a growing disgust at the Nazi regime,
particularly its racial policies and its foolhardy prosecution of the war.
Rather than passively plan for some putative post-Nazi government,
Stauffenberg intended nothing less than to bring about the demise of
the Nazis. Allying himself with others of like mind – politicians and
military men – he used his position within the army reserve to help
develop a plan for a military coup against Hitler. The result, Operation
Valkyrie, was the single most important episode in the story of the
German resistance to Nazism, combining both the most serious
attempt to assassinate Hitler and the only attempted coup in the
history of the Third Reich.
Operation Valkyrie was set in motion on 20 July 1944, when
Stauffenberg planted a time bomb in a situation conference at Hitler’s
East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg. The bomb duly exploded,
killing three of those present outright and mortally wounding one
other, and Stauffenberg – believing that Hitler was among the dead –
hurried to Berlin to take charge of the wider coup against Nazi rule.
In the capital, Stauffenberg’s co-conspirators were busy attempting
to seize power. They hoped to achieve this by a ruse. By activating an
official contingency plan, designed to suppress unrest on the home
front, they hoped to bring sufficient troops out onto the streets that
they could seize temporary control of key strategic points in the capital
and thereby dislodge the Nazis from power. Crucially, however, those
troops would not be let into the secret of the coup attempt; they
would be acting in unwitting support of the conspiracy.
While secrecy was an essential component of the plot, it is obvious
that the military and political elites that made up the backbone of the
20 July conspiracy were profoundly dubious about permitting any sort
of ‘popular’ involvement in the action. To some degree, they rightly
doubted the level of popular support that any such coup might enjoy.39
But it is also clear that many of the conspirators – and especially the
military men among them – were simply not thinking of ‘the people’
as players in the drama at all. As conspirator Hans Gisevius complained,
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they were aiming at little more than a straightforward military takeover:
‘Stauffenberg’, he wrote, ‘wanted to drop no more ballast than was
absolutely necessary, then he would paint the ship of state a military
grey and set it afloat again.’40 ‘Valkyrie’, it seems, was to be an old-
fashioned military coup, not a full-blown revolution, and it was
designed to take place well above the heads of ordinary Berliners.
Thus, when the coup was launched in Berlin that afternoon in the
summer of 1944, the people of the capital – regardless of their polit-
ical affiliations and loyalties – were kept well and truly out of the loop.
A few diarists knew what was going on, but this was primarily because
they had contacts with the circle of conspirators. Ruth Andreas-
Friedrich, for instance, rashly claimed to have been ‘right in the midst
of it’,41 while Missie Vassiltchikov was genuinely well informed, having
first learned of the conspiracy nearly a year before.42
The reaction of most ordinary Berliners, however, was one of utter
bewilderment. ‘The general confusion is indescribable’, wrote one
diarist. ‘Everyone seems to have lost their head.’43 Countless rumours
swirled around the capital that day – that Hitler was dead, that the
SS had carried out the coup, or that Goebbels was now in charge –
and, to add to the chaos, the city echoed with the sounds of marching
troops, shouted orders and rattling tanks. As Ursula von Kardorff
noted, pickets were erected on many streets in the government district,
but few of those watching events from their apartments or workplaces
had any idea why the soldiers were there, or indeed which ‘side’ they
served.44
The only clarity, it seems, was provided by the radio. Ruth Andreas-
Friedrich recalled hearing that afternoon that Hitler was dead: ‘As if
at a signal we reach for the switch of the radio. Music – the lively
Badenweiler March
, Hitler’s favourite tune . . . That doesn’t sound like
death’, she thought, ‘it sounds damnably like he’s alive.’45 Shortly after
6.00 that evening, a radio announcement was finally made confirming
that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life, but that he was unhurt
and had received Mussolini for talks. A later bulletin announced that
Hitler himself would speak to the nation that night.
It was shortly after midnight when Hitler was ushered into the simple,
pine-panelled tea house at his eastern headquarters, the
Wolfsschanze
.
Dressed in a black tunic, standing before a modest white podium with
three microphones, he showed little outward evidence of the drama
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of that day. But for those countless Germans listening at home, his
voice seemed to lack the fortitude of earlier years; his delivery was
slow, halting even. ‘My fellow Germans’, he began:
Yet another of the countless attempts on my life has been planned and
carried out. I am speaking to you for two reasons: 1. So that you can
hear my voice and know that I myself am not injured and well. 2. So
that you can hear the details of a crime without parallel in German
history.
He went on to castigate what he described as the ‘very small clique
of ambitious, unscrupulous, criminal and stupid officers’ that had
spawned the conspiracy. ‘The claim by these usurpers that I am no
longer alive, is at this very moment proven false, for here I am talking
to you, my dear fellow countrymen.’46
For many of Hitler’s listeners, the burning question was whether it
was really him. But the voice was unmistakeable. ‘From the first word’,
Theo Findahl wrote, ‘we realise that it is Hitler and not one of his imita-
tors. His voice is extremely agitated . . . It is easy to hear that it is not
an act.’47 With that broadcast, all lingering doubts about Hitler’s survival
were banished. For the masses of ordinary Germans huddled that night
around their crackling radio sets, clarity was finally restored. Whether
they had secretly welcomed the assassination attempt or not, they now
at least knew where they stood; the war would go on, the Nazi regime
was to be obeyed as before.
In the days that followed, Berlin presented the impression of
normality. Theo Findahl wrote: ‘the attempted coup of yesterday has
not left the slightest trace on Berlin’s outward life. Everything is taking
its usual course – trams, underground trains are again running to their
timetables, shops and offices are open as before, on the streets and in