The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [273]
The hopes of the Plotters that they could make peace with Britain suffered from the flaw that such decisions were no longer up to Britain alone. Once the war was being fought by an Anglo-Russo-American coalition, and especially after President Roosevelt’s January 1943 insistence on Germany’s unconditional surrender, it was unthinkable that Britain should enter into negotiations with any Germans behind her allies’ backs. As one of the senior officials in the German Department of the Foreign Office, Sir Frank Roberts, put it in his autobiography: ‘If Stalin got the impression we were in contact with the German generals, whose main aim was to protect Germany against Russia, he might well have been tempted to see whether he could not again come to terms with Hitler.’59
The British Government’s stance had been succinctly summed up by Sir D’Arcy Osborne, who when told by Pope Pius xii that the German Resistance groups ‘confirmed their intention, or their desire, to effect a change of government’ answered, ‘Why don’t they get on with it?’ It is anyway also questionable what genuine aid the Allies could actually have given to the Plotters. Logistical support was hardly needed and moral support was of little practical help. Any promises about their attitude towards a post-Hitler Germany would necessarily have been contingent on its nature, and British decision-makers had seen quite enough of the Prussian officer class between 1914 and 1918 not to place too much faith in its commitment to democracy. For them, Prussian militarism was almost as unattractive as full-blown Nazism, and national-conservative Germans were nearly indistinguishable from national-socialist ones. One can understand why Eden should have said that the July Bomb Plotters ‘had their own reasons for acting as they did and were certainly not moved primarily by a desire to help our cause’, however harsh that may seem in retrospect.
Seen in this light, the offhand attitude of Sir Alec Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office (‘As usual, the German Army trust us to save them from the Nazi regime’) becomes explicable. After Goerdeler had asked for Danzig, colonial concessions and a £500 million interest-free loan before deposing Hitler in December 1938, Cadogan had been equally scathing, writing in his diary: ‘We are to deliver the goods and Germany gives the IOUs.’60 The Foreign Secretary of the day agreed. On the subject of what Neville Chamberlain termed ‘Hitler’s Jacobites’, Lord Halifax complained, ‘The Germans always want us to make their revolutions for them.’
An assassinated Hitler might also have provided the ideal Dolchstosslegende (stab-in-the-back myth) once Germany was defeated in 1945, or later if the Wehrmacht had directed the war. Like the myth of 1918, which blamed the loss of the Great War not on the German Army in the field but on defeatists, capitalists, Jews, socialists, aristocrats and traitors at home, so a new myth would have developed that argued that just as Hitler was about to launch his war-winning secret weapons to destroy the Allied armies, which he had spent six months purposely luring towards Germany, he was murdered by a clique of aristocrats, liberals, Christians and cosmopolitans whose treachery was evident since they were working in tandem with British intelligence. It would have been a potent recipe for revanchism which might have resonated in Germany for years to come.
The war had to be won by the