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- At least 170 German citizens were brought to trial

and convicted in 1944 as participants in the last plot

to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

It was not an isolated act

but only the last of over 20 attempts and plots

to overthrow the Nazi leadership,

acts of individual conscience at war

with an overpowering national consensus.

- [speaking German]

- [speaking German]

- [screaming in German]

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

[upbeat marching band music]

♪ ♪

[fireworks popping]

[upbeat music]

♪ ♪

[overlapping chatter]

[bombs whistling]

[upbeat orchestral music]

[explosion]

♪ ♪

- We lived in Berlin when the Nazis came to power,

and there were lots of people in Germany,

they were still inclined to like national socialism

in the beginning because they were first national,

and they were, secondly, thinking social,

that means industrial workers will be treated well,

and they must have their share

in the governing of the country,

and this is going to be social,

and it's going to be national,

and that's going to be just what we need.

- The Germans came from more than a thousand years

of monarchist traditions,

and they had not adjusted to democratic self-government.

And there came Hitler, that leader from nowhere,

and put on the old feelings a new head and walked

and worked the nation as if it was a monarchy

but no traditional strings attached in the moral,

traditional, ethical way, but that didn't appear at once.

- There were a few people in Germany

who recognized the emerging danger

and responded to it.

Who were they?

What made them choose to act against the new regime

with so very few prospects for success?

They knew they were endangering themselves,

as well as their friends and families.

Coming from such diverse backgrounds,

how did they find each other?

Why weren't they able to create

an organized resistance movement?

But above all, what could they do?

In the Nazi police state, what could anyone do?

This question was faced in different ways by people

who often didn't know each other

but were eventually drawn together,

people as diverse as Julius Leber,

a trade union leader and a former Reichstag deputy.

- He was an editor at the local paper

and member of the Reichstag, but he came to Luebeck

I think in '22, '23.

I was about ten years old then,

and I met him often until he went to prison

and I went to Norway in the spring of 1933.

I mean, he was an intellectual but very close

to ordinary people in the city,

very impressive,

militant kind of a political leader.

I remember sometimes there were not just oral quarrels

with the... with the Nazis, the growing Nazi movement,

but even clashes at meetings, gatherings, whatnot,

and he would never be in the background.

He would be in front of those

who did take the fight, even in the streets,

and he was in the concentration camp of Papenburg

near the Dutch border and then several years in Sachsenhausen.

It's just unbelievable,

the kind of torture that he went through.

- Helmuth James Count von Moltke,

an international lawyer and a descendant

of one of Germany's great 19th-century military heroes.

- On the 30th of January, a friend said,

"Well, it's a good thing the Nazis have come to power

"because it's going to be like any other government.

"It has its time, and then it gets tired,

and then it's replaced by another government,"

and Helmuth got furious... or not furious,

terribly excited, and said,

"How can you say such a thing when

"this is a terrible catastrophe that has happened?

How can you say such a thing? It's the beginning of the end."

He said that the very day it happened.

He became lawyer in Berlin, and he helped as much

as he could to get people out with as much as possible,

and he said to all of those who knew,

"Get out, get out, get out,

because he's going to do what he says in his book."

He was not a nationalist, of course.

He was antinationalist, but he was hardly national.

His values had never to do with nationalism.

His values were completely different, wider.

Within himself, he was a very free man.

That's why he could resist and be critical.

And so I think it was a terrific loss

for Germany to have killed him.

I really do think that.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

- Adam von Trott zu Solz,

a civil servant with an American great-grandmother.

As a Rhodes Scholar,

Adam von Trott had close personal ties to England.

- We were at Oxford together when it happened,

you see, when Hitler came to power,

and of all of the Germans there, Adam's reaction was,

in many ways, to me, the most interesting

because he knew what was... what it meant, all right,

and he didn't either think it would easily go away,

nor did he have any intention to leave it alone.

Some people then started thinking of emigrating,

and I would have had every sympathy, you know,

myself with that... that feeling

because it was so... it was so alarming,

what Hitler did when he came to power,

the way he clamped down on the place,

but Adam wasn't... he didn't ever view it in those terms,

as something that was beyond his reach.

He felt, "Well, I belong to this society.

"I'm not prepared to give it up to Hitler.

I'm not prepared to accept that he's got it."

- Dr. Carl Goerdeler, a conservative politician

and mayor of the city of Leipzig.

- [speaking German]

- He was active, I think,

since '35, '36, very active,

trying to find people who would cooperate

in order to stop it, not already to kill him,

but to stop him or bring him even to court.

- Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg,

a Nazi party member with growing doubts,

was deputy commissioner of police in Berlin.

- [speaking German]

- My brothers were fervent Nazis,

and my brother Fritzy turned...

well, in his heart, he turned against Hitler in 1934.

From 1936, 1937 on,

they were deciding to put away with Hitler.

I saw him after my father's death.

Father had had a state burial with Hitler present.

And it was then that he told me that he was,

well, organizing the plot.

He was in the plot to kill Hitler.

- Major General Henning von Tresckow,

operations officer in army group center

on the eastern front.

- [speaking German]

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer,

Lutheran pastor and theologian.

He came from a family that persisted

in defying the Nazis' ideology and anti-Jewish decrees.

- Dietrich, just by his personality

and the way he behaved, he was a dominant figure,

and that was his secret.

He was such an independent mind by education, by his past,

by his theological and church training.

Through him, the first shattering

of my nationalistic views started,

the first taking serious

the Jewish problem in Nazi Germany.

- By his example and his teaching,

Bonhoeffer brought a small number of seminarians

and pastors out of the established Lutheran church

and into a dissenting church, the Confessing Church.

He insisted that Christianity demanded resistance to Nazism.

- In the Confessing Church,

we were against Hitler's church policy,

but at the same time, we were anti-Semites,

not thinking of what later then really developed

and really blind, in a way,

for what already had happened in '33,

but Bonhoeffer saw the danger when it came up

and knew exactly what it meant in human terms.

The question was, how can a Christian in Germany like him,

being a member of the responsible

kind of elite in Germany,

how can he live without being drawn

into complicity with the murder of the Jews,

and how to draw yourself out of that core complicity?

That was the real problem out of which he understood

that he couldn't be near Christ,

couldn't claim to be a disciple of Christ

by just sitting away

and become an accomplice of the murder legislation

and the murder deeds.

And for that, he opened my eyes, at least,

and of several of us.

- Two days after Hitler came to power,

Dietrich Bonhoeffer broadcast a radio address

decrying the Nazi Fuehrerprinzip,

the idea of an all-powerful leader.

Jesus alone, he insisted, was the Christians' leader.

His broadcast was cut off halfway through.

[church bells tolling]

Among the institutions

which offered no opposition to Hitler

were the established churches.

A Nazi Lutheran bishop, Ludwig Miller,

was installed in the Berlin Cathedral.

[church bells tolling]

In July 1933, a concordat was concluded

between the Vatican and the German government,

Hitler's first major

international diplomatic success.

[militaristic music]

Other successes followed.

♪ ♪

This sort of international recognition

seemed to many to legitimize Hitler's absolute rule.

[triumphant fanfare]

With Hitler, a new Germany was born.

The Reichstag was dissolved.

Emergency ordinances gave the police the power

to ban public meetings and to control the press.

On March 23rd, the so-called Enabling Act was passed,

removing all constitutional restraints

on government power.

On March 29th, the social democratic deputy

Julius Leber was arrested at the entrance

to the Reichstag and sent to one

of the newly established concentration camps.

The first laws abrogating

the civil rights of Jews were passed.

By mid-July 1933,

all opposition parties were banned.

Communist party members were put into the camps.

- This complete destruction of all opposition

in the ordinary sense happened at once.

Hitler was a very efficient person.

He destroyed all the groups that were against him,

all of them, and he did it very well.

He took their leaders away,

put them into concentration camp, and created fear.

- Well, I don't think we understand police states.

But in Germany, there was both this... the absolute tyranny.

There also was the element of lawlessness,

which the Nazis used and exploited

because they didn't respect the law and the due process.

This is a tyranny.

Anything could happen to anybody.

This feeling was very frightening,

but it wasn't just a feeling.

It was the reality that the Nazis had a grip on the place

and they would do anything

and did and a large number of Germans

were put in concentration camps, I think.

It's always forgotten how many were put inside

in the very early days

when they just pushed in everybody who made trouble.

- I remember Peter coming back one night.

He had defended a socialist

who had been passing round legal leaflets,

and he'd got the man off,

and they'd walked outside the law courts.

He'd taken him by the hand and turned round to wave

as he got into his own car

and saw the man being bundled into a Black Maria

by police, and he'd spent the day looking for that man,

finding out what had happened to that man

and had been told everywhere

had he not ever heard of preventive custody?

I remember him coming into the house and saying,

"For me, there is no more law in this country,

and this is not a country where we can bring up our children."

- I'm wondering whether, in fact,

my political development

would have been different

if I hadn't happened to have quite a number

of close Jewish friends and contemporaries

who worked for the legal examiner

at the same time as me.

One passed the exam on the same day as me in May 1933,

and my career could go on and his couldn't.

And if I hadn't experienced

this number of friends

and acquaintances suddenly being underprivileged,

I'm not sure that I would have taken

an interest in politics at all,

and maybe... I don't know, maybe I would have

or could have become one of those fellow travelers

who didn't want to be bothered with any resistance

against the regime and bought a party badge

in order not to be molested by the Nazis

and... as had happened to most people.

[militaristic music]

- The Roehm putsch dispelled the last doubts

about the criminality of the Nazi regime.

Ernst Roehm headed a popular paramilitary force,

the Brownshirts,

which Hitler saw as a possible rival for power.

During the night of June 30, 1934,

thugs loyal to Hitler murdered Roehm

and other Brownshirt leaders.

They also murdered two army brigadier generals.

The army did not protest the crime.

- [speaking German]

[all speaking German]

- The integrity of the army was further eroded

by an unconstitutional oath of personal loyalty to Hitler,

which every German soldier was required to take.

- Adolf Hitler.

All: Adolf Hitler.

- [speaking German]

[all speaking German]

- And my father asked me, he said,

"Do you dislike it, though? You think it's a criminal?

How can you swear?"

And I said, "Well, it wouldn't have been good,

I would have been shot, and it would be useless."

And he said, "That's very dangerous,

"because if many people wouldn't have sworn,

"wouldn't have made that oath, nobody would have shot,

"but if everybody obeys order,

then, of course, Hitler gets away with it,"

and I said, "Yes, but at the same time,

"I made another oath to myself and... to break the official one

as soon as and as much as I can."

He said, "Yes, maybe, but this is

futilism and dangerous."

- In 1938, leading Nazis engineered the disgrace

and removal of two senior generals,

Fritsch and Blomberg,

due to their opposition to Hitler's plans for war.

When the army once again did not protest,

a few officers, already disillusioned

by the Roehm putsch and the Hitler oath,

were stirred into active resistance.

One officer who became more and more critical

of the regime was the young Prussian Henning von Tresckow.

- [speaking German]

- Dr. Carl Goerdeler, the mayor of Leipzig,

had briefly joined the Nazi government

as price commissioner,

believing that he could personally influence Hitler.

- [speaking German]

- In April 1937, Dr. Goerdeler

had resigned from the office of mayor in protest

against the removal of the Mendelssohn monument,

carried out in his absence

and against his explicit instructions

by the Nazi deputy mayor.

- [speaking German]

- And in all these things, Goerdeler was very much in it,

knew, was one of the men who traveled to England,

to different countries and traveled in Germany itself,

tireless, out of old conservative tradition,

but certainly to try

to... to bring about another... another Germany.

- [speaking German]

- The British Foreign Office simply told Goerdeler

that what he was proposing amounted to treason.

[bells tolling]

In March of 1938,

Austria was incorporated into the German Reich.

Although the international community protested,

there was no retaliation.

In addition, Hitler had already informed

his ministers and generals

that he intended to take over Czechoslovakia,

even if it meant war.

Hopes for stopping Hitler's evolving war plans

were focused on Colonel General Ludwig Beck,

army chief of staff, who was planning a military coup.

- There was the definite feeling that the generals

were going to do something.

They were going to arrest him.

It was not murder. It was not assassination.

- Hans von Dohnanyi had collected

a chronicle of scandals when he was still in the office

of the minis... of the Ministry of Law,

of the just... Ministry of Justice,

and had collected all the old scandal facts in certain files

in order to present that in a trial to the German public

in case Hitler would be stopped and brought to trial.

- I don't think my father was very happy with his alliance

with military people in general.

He was a convinced civilian,

and he hated any kind of uniform, et cetera,

and yet these were the necessary

and inevitable allies.

I mean, the only way to change the German government

in the period between 1933 and 1945 from the inside

was with the military, not against them.

- In order to act, Colonel Generals Beck, Halder,

and a vacillating Field Marshal von Brauchitsch

needed to know that the British would fight

rather than give in to Hitler's demands

and would not interfere in a German military coup.

As the Sudeten Crisis deepened,

General Beck arranged to send the elder Kleist

to London to warn the British

of the planned invasion of Czechoslovakia.

General Beck told Kleist,

"Bring me certain proof that Britain will fight

"if Czechoslovakia is attacked,

and I will make an end of this regime."

But the Chamberlain government dismissed

Kleist's reports and implied that he was a traitor.

Kleist's meeting with Winston Churchill

also achieved nothing.

The British would not respond, even when Theo Kordt

came from the German Foreign Ministry's permanent

undersecretary of state, Ernst von Weizsaecker,

with an appeal for stiff resistance to Hitler.

- Hell of a disaster, the Kordt mission.

It was inexplicable, they said,

that they couldn't understand it.

They couldn't believe that Weizsaecker

was sending somebody

to tell them how to frustrate his own government.

They couldn't believe it.

If Kordt comes and says,

"The military are ready to arrest Hitler

if you... if you don't give way out of Sudetenland,"

and if Halifax didn't believe him,

he should have sent somebody to Germany to find out.

This idea of intriguing with the army

was quite foreign to them,

and there was nobody... there was no department of state

that was ready to deal with that.

It wasn't diplomacy.

It wasn't military intelligence.

It didn't fit into anybody's duty.

- The British government, with the French,

were working hard to come

to a peaceful accommodation with Hitler.

[crowd cheering]

- I'm going to have another talk with Herr Hitler,

only this time, he has told me

that it is his intention

to come halfway to meet me.

[laughter]

- [speaking German]

- In September 1938, Britain, France,

and Italy met in Munich with Hitler

and signed an agreement

that the Sudetenland be annexed to Germany.

They accepted Hitler's promise that he had no further

territorial ambitions beyond the Sudetenland.

The warnings of Kleist, Goerdeler, Kordt,

and others were ignored.

The best opportunity for a coup had been lost.

[crowd cheering]

- Some of you perhaps have already heard what it contains,

but I would just like to read it to you.

"We regard the agreement signed last night

"and the Anglo-German naval agreement

"as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples

never to go to war with one another again."

[crowd cheering]

- The one really good opportunity was before Munich.

At that time, there was the ideal conditions

in that there was great doubt in Germany

that Hitler wouldn't get them into trouble

if he went on into the Sudetenland.

The army was poised to do something about it,

and all Britain had to do was to not agree,

and had that happened,

there was a good chance that it would have brought

about the downfall of the regime.

After that, there wasn't such an opportunity.

- Abandoned by the French and the British,

the Czechs put up no resistance to Hitler.

The Sudetenland was annexed to the Reich without war.

Hitler had won his gamble.

Failing to stop Hitler's progression towards war,

General Beck resigned from the army on August 19, 1938.

- At that time, there was a great fear in Germany

of going into a war.

I mean, I do know that 'cause I went there at that time,

and it was very evident that people thought,

"Is this man mad? Where is he taking us?"

But when he got away with that and there was no reaction

to him... to him not only taking the Sudetenland

but later on going into Prague and taking that,

well, then it became almost impossible

to say... for the army to move in and say,

"Oh, this man doesn't estimate rightly.

He's gonna land you in a world war,"

'cause he did estimate rightly

and he got away with these things.

[glass shattering]

- Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.

On November 9, 1938,

less than two months after the Munich conference,

Nazi troopers were sent on a nationwide window-smashing,

fire-setting rampage against the Jews.

- [speaking German]

- After Kristallnacht, Count von der Schulenburg's

resistance activities intensified.

Through his contacts with the Gestapo,

he managed to help Jewish people to leave Berlin.

In 1940, he joined the Ninth Infantry Regiment,

in which Axel von dem Bussche was a lieutenant.

- It's a strange regiment, Ninth Infantry in Potsdam.

After the war, it went... it was on record

and still is, of course, of having produced

more officers hung, killed,

shot by Hitler and his legal machine

than any other unit of the army.

So there was some sort of thing in that regiment.

There was some sort of proportion still left

what could be done and not.

To give you an example,

this regiment was part of the 23rd division

around Berlin.

The commanding general

was a man called Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt.

His nickname in the troop was Bonnie Charles.

And Bonnie Charles,

when he heard what was going on in Berlin

with regard to synagogues and more than Jew-baiting,

Jew-chasing and Jew...

chasing, that's an understatement.

So he put the whole division under alert...

Thinking and believing he would get orders to march to pacify

what he still thought was a genuine mob pogrom.

So we couldn't get out,

and the next day, the alert was stopped,

and gradually over the years, we heard

why he had put the division under alert.

He had thought he would get orders to march into Berlin

and stop this.

And the supreme commander

of the army stood by with silence,

as they had on June 30, 1934.

They could easily have squashed it,

but nobody gave the orders,

and an army will only march if it gets orders.

Next morning, my colleague, Heinrich Borgmann,

said, "Well, it was all staged,"

and I said, "What exactly do you mean by staged?"

"Well," he said, "The police were ordered to stand by,

"and the fire brigades were ordered to stand by,

"and these Storm Troopers were allowed to put fire

and... and smash the windows of Jewish shops."

And it's perhaps an interesting point

to note that '37 in November, a man with my background

wouldn't think that is conceivable, couldn't imagine.

It sort of started to fall into focus.

The pattern became gradually clear,

but every time something like that happened,

one had to adjust one's insight

into the possibility of human beings.

'37, I was 18 years of age,

and I suppose I came

from a more or less coddled background,

but the dimension of organized,

stimulated crime is something which sinks very slowly

into a brain of a 18- or 19-year-old boy.

It just... you can't... you can't believe it.

You've got to open some new dimensions of understanding.

[militaristic music]

- In March 1939, the German army marched into Prague,

and the Czech part of free Czechoslovakia

was incorporated into the Nazi empire.

A Second World War was now imminent, and in time of war,

those who chose loyalty to conscience

over loyalty to their government

would be branded as traitors.

- Now, Adam, at that time, was thinking.

He was looking at the situation from the outside.

He was wondering, is there any international combination

that could do anything to prevent a war?

- Trott became an emissary for the resistance

and traveled to England in 1939.

- Adam, he wanted me

to help him when he reached the British government,

and he met Halifax at my parents' house,

and Halifax encouraged Trott to talk.

And there was a roomful of people,

and so he had to be fairly circumspect,

but he did talk, and he said,

"There is a great unwillingness

"to go into a world war for Hitler

"amongst many people, army officers,

"people in the foreign office

"who... but they have no means of stopping it now,

and they... they need some sort of leader outside."

- People who didn't know him really well, intimately,

wouldn't know what he would really stand for

and would have doubts what he would be standing for,

and as a result of that, he hereafter

have been misinterpreted in Oxford,

particularly at his last meeting

with his friends in Oxford,

when he, in fact, couldn't tell them

what he thought his job was,

because Oxford is a talking shop,

and it would find its way back

to the knowledge of the wrong people in Germany.

- In 1940, Adam von Trott joined the Foreign Office,

a position which he used as a cover

for his continuing resistance activities.

In order to get the appointment,

he had to join the Nazi Party.

- Trott had an especially difficult task

because he had always outwardly to pretend

that he was positive about the regime

because he couldn't have traveled otherwise,

and so the people here thought he was a Nazi,

and he couldn't... and this all comes out of the difficulty

to understand what it is like to live in a dictatorship,

a dictatorship of that kind or how you cannot disagree,

how in a... in a totalitarian state like that,

disagreement, legal disagreement is not possible,

and that was not understood.

- Trott went to Washington and again met with mistrust.

The FBI followed him everywhere.

President Roosevelt would not meet with him

after he received a report from Britain

that Trott was not to be trusted.

- They did not recognize that there were other Germans,

and this was Adam's mission, which he took with him

wherever... at risk of his life, wherever he went,

to Sweden or to America, to Sweden, to Switzerland,

but his messages were continuously coming out

from all directions at danger to his life,

"There are other Germans. There is another Germany."

- Just as World War II was about to erupt,

the Dutch military attaché in Berlin,

Colonel GJ Sas, received a message

from a member of German military intelligence,

Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster.

- We got information from Oster,

who told us that there were...

attempts afoot to overthrow the Nazi regime.

Colonel Oster provided Sas

with almost daily day-to-day information

about Hitler's plans to attack,

to attack first Poland,

then Holland, Belgium, and France,

and subsequently Denmark, Norway, and England.

- [speaking German]

- Colonel Oster risked his life,

because if it had been known what he was doing

and what secrecy he was betraying,

it certainly would have been the end of him.

They said, "I cannot believe that a high German officer

gives away such valuable secrets to a potential enemy,"

and in the end,

the people who received the messages laughed about it,

but when the attack came, it was too late.

They were not sufficiently prepared.

[militaristic music]

[airplanes droning]

♪ ♪

[explosion]

[intense music]

♪ ♪

[triumphant military music]

♪ ♪

[fire roaring and crackling]

[bells tolling]

[solemn music]

♪ ♪

[crowd cheering]

[somber music]

[crowd cheering]

- [speaking German]

- With the fall of France,

many army officers who might once have opposed Hitler

were caught up in the pressure of wartime duties

and the elation of easy victory.

Only the few with deep convictions

remained committed to resistance,

which now seemed more difficult than ever.

- I recall the very desperate expressions and words

of my father on the very day on which Paris was conquered:

"To swim against public opinion in your own country

in times of victory is a difficult thing to do."

- [speaking German]

- Helmuth had a terrific depression

when France was taken and when Hitler was really at the top.

He had a depression that he felt ill,

and he... I mean, he didn't think of committing suicide,

but he was... he felt, what was... was it

all good to live for if this was it?

And then... and that point I always make,

because it played a big role in that group,

he sort of pulled himself out of this depression

by making a point of talking to other people

who were anti-Nazis about what would happen in the future

when the Nazis were gone,

and then they beca... he became quite systematic,

and the person who helped him there,

become systematic, was Peter Yorck.

Peter brought in the ones that were in the foreign office.

There were two that... Adam von Trott zu Solz

and Hans-Bernd von Haeften, and Hans-Bernd von Haeften

also... he brought in the element

of civil service and Christianity.

Then we had a man called Schulenburg,

Fritz Schulenburg.

He was a civil servant under the Nazis

and changed his mind, and he was very much

for getting the military to act against Hitler.

Helmuth made that great effort to get socialists in,

and, of course, that he only could do

because of his own leanings, and one of the socialists

who were very much anti-Hitler was Julius Leber,

who had been in concentration camp for years

and then came out, and he knew about the Kreisau.

But first of all, Helmuth got Reichwein,

and he brought other socialists to the group.

- [speaking German]

- There were differences of opinion.

There were people thinking more along

traditional, conservative lines,

others who would concentrate, including Moltke and Leber,

concentrating very much on the idea of a united Europe,

especially Western Europe,

but they also thought that there might be chances

for some larger European cooperation,

including large changes in Russia

and in Eastern Europe.

- [speaking German]

- This loose alliance of socialists,

conservatives, army officers, civil servants,

and clergymen met frequently to lay plans

for their vision of a post-war Germany,

a constitutional state within a federated European Union.

Because they sometimes met at Kreisau,

von Moltke's estate in Silesia,

the Gestapo would name them the Kreisau Circle.

[train whistle blowing]

In autumn of 1940, the Ninth Infantry Regiment,

which had participated in the invasion of France,

was moved back to Poland.

- We were moved with occupation troops

in the industrial rural city on the Vistula

between Warsaw and Danzig,

and all the civil servants of the civil government

were out in their brown uniforms

and chasing the Jews out of their dwellings

into a prepared part of the city which was a ghetto,

but, again, there was no mob.

This was an organized action.

[ominous music]

♪ ♪

You've seen things like Jew baiting

on November the 9th, '40,

or whether you're here at the same time

that there is a planned extermination

of an intellectual middle and upper class

of a formerly sovereign neighbor nation,

you couldn't believe it.

I mean, conceptually, you want to follow,

even if you are very young.

Conceptually, you want to follow,

and you can't... you can't get at the concept.

What... what philosophy is that?

And what good does it do?

[sighs]

No.

One went and did one's day-to-day duty

to get the food up

and... and the battalions fed and exercises planned,

and... and one just started

with keeping a curtain down.

One started to keep a curtain down towards these news.

[train engine chugging, whistle blowing]

- Throughout the war, a number of Jews

were enabled to leave Germany, aided by a group of resisters

working within the Nazi military intelligence service,

the Abwehr.

The Abwehr was headed by the chief

of military intelligence, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,

who continued to work for the Nazi regime

while providing cover and assistance

for the resisters within his organization.

Colonel Oster was Canaris' chief of staff.

- [speaking German]

[train engine chugging]

[train whistle blowing]

- One initiative of the Abwehr was Operation U7,

which sent some Jews out of the country

on the pretext that they were intelligence agents.

Dr. Fleiss and his family were included

in one of these rescue efforts.

- He had to wear the star.

That began in '41, in September,

and the first deportation started around September

and October '41, and then we got that letter

that we had to be prepared for deportation,

and then Dohnanyi said, "Look, Herr,

"I have decided we would do something

"to help you and your family.

It will be too dangerous. You won't survive."

He was quite clear about that.

It took us half a year, even more, to go out.

We only left on the 30th of September.

Took quite some time.

It was very complicated,

all these preparations, probably,

the money, everything, and to get the passports.

I never knew how Dohnanyi managed to do that.

It's incredible.

And Dohnanyi was terribly depressed

because of his country,

and then I remember that my father tried to cheer him up

and said, "Look, there are other people,

"not all of them are like that, and that will pass,

and then we'll all talk about it."

- The Canaris organization had recruited the young jurist

Hans von Dohnanyi

and the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

- Dietrich was given a passport by the Canaris organization

and went three, four times to Switzerland.

He went to Norway and to Sweden

to meet the Bishop of Chichester,

in those days, Bishop George Bell,

who, in the name of the... of the conspiracy,

even visited Anthony Eden, those days, foreign minister,

and reported him what he had... had heard

from Schoenfeld and especially from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

and how credible he was.

Of course, Anthony Eden remained suspicious.

- "My dear bishop, without casting any reflection

"on the bona fides of your informants,

"I am satisfied that it would

"not be in the national interest

"for any reply whatever to be sent to them.

"I realize that this decision

"may cause you some disappointment,

"but in view of the delicacy of the issues involved,

"I feel that I must ask you to accept it.

Yours sincerely, Anthony Eden."

- And to me, it always seemed extraordinarily strange

that the British recognized the Maquis,

the Yugoslavs, the Greeks.

They recognized opposition everywhere

but never recognized that there was a German opposition.

- Helmuth von Moltke also found cover

in the Abwehr under Canaris and traveled to seek support

and recognition for the resistance.

- Moltke particularly wanted very badly

for us to help him establish contacts with London.

- He did try quite systematically to get in touch

with the resistance in other countries

because he felt, again, that this was the same issue

and that one had to try and get to know them

because they would be the people who later on

would govern those countries,

and he had some success in... he had quite

a lot of success in Holland and in Scandinavia and Norway.

- He brought us documents about the...

about things particularly pertaining

to the resistance in Germany,

and as I believe I mentioned earlier,

the whole material

from the White Rose.

- In February 1943, a student resistance movement

surfaced briefly in Munich, calling itself the White Rose.

Inspired by the sermons of the Catholic Bishop von Galen,

Hans Scholl and his sister, Sophie,

and a small circle of Munich University students

printed and distributed leaflets

calling on the German people

to resist the Nazi government and the war.

The British constantly demanded concrete evidence

that a German resistance existed.

Helmuth von Moltke sent the proclamations

of the White Rose to London

through the Norwegian underground movement.

Hans and Sophie Scholl

and the others were quickly caught and arrested.

They were tried, sentenced to death,

and decapitated.

The evidence of their resistance was ignored

by the Allies, despite Moltke's efforts.

- Count Moltke, also he'd warn us

against the action against the Jews.

He had been in touch with an officer

who was stationed at a place

near a concentration camp,

and this officer had told him, and he said,

"I'm absolutely certain that this is true.

"At this concentration camp, people were killed

at the rate of 6,000 per day."

- When Dietrich Bonhoeffer in September of '41

saw Dr. Willem Visser 't Hooft, the general secretary

of the World Council of Churches, in Geneva,

Visser 't Hooft asked him what he was just praying now,

and he said, and answered clearly,

"I pray for the defeat of my country

"because that's the only way we can pay

for all the atrocities that we did in the world."

- [speaking German]

- And the actual act of getting rid of Hitler

was certainly, to my mind, amongst all those conspirators,

a matter of great doubt as to how it should happen.

Should... in fact, should it happen?

'Cause Moltke was not...

was very much against anything of that kind,

and Adam himself was very, very doubtful

to actually order somebody or collaborate

with somebody who would shoot the man.

- [speaking German]

- And it was actually this fear,

this impression of the imminent danger

for so many people that led my father

to try to... to do things which are not easy to do.

I mean, to make a decision to kill...

to kill somebody is a difficult decision,

by a political... by political assassination.

- [speaking German]

- Of course it's true you shall not kill,

but you had killed already.

You had killed since '33.

In your name, Jews were being killed,

and you had to stop the murderer.

You have to be prepared to accept the guilt

of... because you, much earlier, have failed.

The failure was not killing Hitler.

The failure was accepting '33

anti-Jewish legislation and Nazism.

That was the real guilt against which now stopping that man

who in your name killed thousands

and millions of co-citizens,

yeah, that was the guilt you had to take on you

and ask for forgiveness, but you have to do it.

- [speaking German]

[somber trumpet music]

- In June 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union,

violating their mutual nonaggression pact.

The Ninth Infantry Regiment moved with other army units

from Poland into the Ukraine.

At first, the Ukrainians

welcomed the German army as liberators.

But then Hitler gave administrative control

of all captured territories in the East

to the Nazi party-run Commissariat East

and to the black-uniformed SS,

and the stage was set for the bloodiest,

most vicious campaign of the war.

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

Captain Bussche was stationed in Dubno

training soldiers near an unused airport.

- The airport was about 200 yards away

through some shrubbery, so I walked out,

and there was this fantastic moment

where I collected my wits, to understand

there were these big holes which we couldn't... which

I never understood,

and there was these... this one enormously long queue

of naked human beings queuing up to that hole,

and at the end of the queue,

trucks came and loaded human beings.

They obviously undressed there, and the clothes were put

in the... in the trucks again and drove off.

And these... this queue of naked people sort of went

step after step nearer to these holes,

and then I saw that on the edges of the holes,

there were some types sitting in black uniforms

and shooting into the holes.

And it took me some time to get that together

to see... to understand that here was extermination going on,

extermination of Jews.

It takes some time.

You don't understand at first.

So I turned around and went to the colonel and said,

"Colonel, we've got to do something,"

and he said, "I have to see first."

So we went out again,

and he saw it and came to the conclusion

that if we marched in,

we would be shot down the next day as mutineers

by some very modern equipped battalion in Vinnytsia,

the headquarters of Adolf Hitler.

This went on for two days.

They shot approximately 1,800 human beings out there

in that circumstance,

and no... no interference from our side.

It's a moment where the bottom of everything falls out

and keeps away... you know, keeps away.

If we German soldiers,

looking at this mass extermination,

had concluded quickly that undressing

and queuing up voluntarily in this queue of naked people...

men, children, young women,

old women, young men, old men...

I believe we would have stopped it.

If the whole army had walked in like that,

it would not have happened.

Therefore, there is a element of self-blame

that it didn't occur to me.

It occurred to me after the war

that the only feasible solution in the moment

is putting yourself into the same situation

and seeing what happens.

Didn't occur to me.

And instinctively I knew,

and all of them who watched it knew,

some kind of traditional, accepted harmony

has been destroyed here, and we've been witness.

We've seen it, but we were not able to put it in words.

We were not able to put it in words nor in thoughts

nor in logical deduction.

This is what we have to do.

Something was shattered there.

We have to start from scratch.

You can repair political affairs...

repair,

but you cannot repair once that innocence has gone,

that self-understood innocence about interhuman manners.

That is gone.

And I can only repeat

what that bishop said a couple of days ago.

It is my responsibility and guilt

that I am still alive, period.

- By winter of 1942, the resisters within the military,

the Abwehr, and the civilian circles in Berlin

made plans to assassinate Hitler,

believing this to be the only means

of stopping the war and the atrocities.

Throughout '42 and '43, one of the focal points

for all active resistance within the military

was the Army Group Centre in Smolensk on the eastern front.

It was led by Colonel Henning von Tresckow,

who had filled the command staff with anti-Nazis.

All Tresckow's attempts to involve his superior officers

in the conspiracy had failed.

Generals Field Marshal von Bock,

Field Marshal von Kluge, and Field Marshal von Manstein

increasingly took refuge in strict military duty,

thereby ignoring the atrocities

which were being committed.

- [speaking German]

- By the end of 1942,

Tresckow and his group were the only ones

with the capacity or resolve to kill Hitler.

- [speaking German]

- The conspirators made their first

coordinated attempt on Hitler's life in March 1943.

Admiral Canaris flew from Berlin to Smolensk in advance,

carrying a box of explosives,

a commodity difficult to acquire in wartime Germany.

The admiral was accompanies by Colonel Oster

and Hans von Dohnanyi of the Abwehr group.

The conspirators agreed that Tresckow

would carry out the assassination in Smolensk

and then send the code word "flash" to Dohnanyi in Berlin

as a signal for the coup to begin.

- [speaking German]

- Just as Hitler's plane was departing Smolensk

after his meeting with Tresckow,

Schlabrendorff gave the bottles to a Hitler aide,

saying they were meant for a friend in Berlin.

The bombs were set to go off in half an hour.

- [speaking German]

[airplane droning]

[triumphant music]

♪ ♪

- A week later, Tresckow organized another attempt,

this time to take place in Berlin on Heroes Memorial Day.

[man speaking German]

♪ ♪

[man speaking German]

- As part of the ceremony, Hitler was to view

an exhibition of captured war material

in the Zeughaus accompanied by Colonel von Gersdorff.

As he waited for Hitler,

Gersdorff activated two bombs he had in his pockets,

setting them to explode in less than ten minutes.

Contrary to expectations,

Hitler raced through the exhibition

and did not stop for explanations.

He continued to walk briskly and left the exhibit

after a few minutes.

Another attempt had failed.

[militaristic music playing]

[man speaking German]

- Yet another assassination was attempted

by Lieutenant von dem Bussche,

who witnessed the massacre in Dubno

and now volunteered to kill himself

and carry Hitler with him.

- I knew what is commonly called conspirators

in that regiment,

and I went up as soon as I could

and reported this and said,

"Now we've got to shoot him, because unless that army

"and this government gets free from this bondage of this oath

"they think they are...

"linked to like in a lasso

"to that government, unless we kill number one,

"we can't start even reorganizing...

and stopping this."

And I went to Fritzy Schulenburg,

and Schulenburg said, "There is a man whom I consider

"the most gifted general staff officer I've ever seen,

and he wants to see a type like you."

And he brought me to Stauffenberg, to his office.

Then he says, "Well, you are infantry.

"You've got battle experience.

We need a man to blow the man up."

He was quite frank.

And I was picked up to introduce new uniforms

to Adolf Hitler, Goering, and Himmler,

who didn't come together very often, and blow them up.

And then one of these things happened which do happen

if a man is supposed to live

to his end like Hitler.

The uniforms ready to be shown in general headquarters

in East Prussia

were destroyed or partly destroyed

by British bombing in Berlin in the night,

and we couldn't go ahead

with presenting this half burnt-out material,

so it didn't take place

in November '43.

It was postponed to early '44,

and, meanwhile, they had shot my leg into pieces in Russia

and I couldn't partake, so there I am.

- Ever hopeful, Schulenburg and Stauffenberg

approached Lieutenant von Kleist

and asked him if he would volunteer

to blow himself up with Hitler.

- I found it a very difficult decision,

I must say, and that was... I said to Stauffenberg,

"I would like to think 24 hours about it."

From Berlin, I took again a train,

went home, and arrived the next morning,

and my father said, "Why are you here again?"

And I said, "Well, there are difficult decisions

I have to make."

And he said, "What is it?"

And I told him,

and he said at once, "Yes, of course you have to do it,"

And I said, "Yes, but I have to blow up with Hitler."

And he got up from his chair, went to the window,

looked out of the window for a moment,

and then he turned and said, "Yes, you have to do that.

"A man who doesn't take such a chance

will never be happy again in his life."

[man speaking German]

- Kleist's plan failed, as had other attempts,

due to Hitler's habit of changing his schedule

at the last minute.

There was not much time left in which to act.

Himmler's SS security police

were closing in on the conspiracy.

[dog barking]

Helmuth von Moltke had just been arrested after his name

had been divulged by a fellow resister

who was tortured by the Gestapo.

In April of 1943, the rescue operation of Jews

conducted by the resistance network within the Abwehr

had been uncovered, and Canaris,

Oster, Dohnanyi, and Bonhoeffer had been arrested.

In early summer of 1944,

Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein were picked up

after meeting with members of the Communist Party,

which was heavily infiltrated by informers.

With so many conspirators in the hands of the Gestapo,

the remainder were in imminent danger of exposure and death.

At this point, when so little time was left to them,

Stauffenberg was appointed chief of staff

to General Fromm,

commander in chief of the home army.

This gave the increasingly vulnerable conspirators

another chance to assassinate Hitler.

For the first time, the resistance

had a man with personal access to Hitler,

and the stage was set for the attempt

in the Fuehrer's headquarters, Wolfsschanze.

A few days before the 20th of July, Stauffenberg said,

"It is now time that something was done,

"but he who has the courage to do something

"must do it in the knowledge

"that he will go down in German history as a traitor.

"If he does not do it, however,

he will be a traitor to his own conscience."

- Stauffenberg was a fascinating personality.

Maybe he had a burning heart,

if you would permit me this expression.

On the other hand,

he was very cool in his plans

and personally charming, really friendly,

and it was nice to make jokes with him,

and I was extremely fond of him, I must say,

not only fond but also impressed,

and I had the feeling that he really was the best man

we could have had to...

make the thing go.

- He had a brilliant mind and a shattering laughter.

He could laugh,

and I've never heard anybody laugh like that.

- [speaking German]

- At that time, Stauffenberg

was working closely with Schulenburg

preparing the assassination attempt

at Hitler's headquarters.

Before the attempt,

Schulenburg went home once more.

- [speaking German]

- In the early morning of July 20th,

Stauffenberg and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften

flew to Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia

for a conference.

In his briefcase, Stauffenberg carried two bombs.

- [speaking German]

[dramatic music]

♪ ♪

[man speaking German]

- Before joining Hitler's conference,

Stauffenberg retired to the lavatory

to fuse the two bombs in his briefcase.

Hampered by severe wounds...

he had lost an eye and a hand

and two fingers of the other hand...

and being interrupted by a call to join the conference,

he managed to fuse only one bomb,

thereby reducing the force of the explosion by half.

Stauffenberg entered the briefing room,

inching his way as close as he could to Hitler.

He put his briefcase with the bomb

next to the map table's leg and, shortly after,

left under a pretext of making a phone call.

Stauffenberg and Haeften saw the explosion

as they were leaving for the airport.

Four people were killed. Others were wounded.

Hitler received only minor injuries.

- [speaking German]

- Walkuere was an emergency order

prepared for the Hitler government.

Kept locked in a vault in the Bendlerstrasse,

army headquarters in Berlin,

the order had been secretly tailored

by the conspirators to launch their coup.

It called on army units to march on Berlin,

ordered that Nazi government ministers

be relieved of their duties, SS and Gestapo officers

and concentration camp commandants to be arrested,

and the camps immediately opened.

At 1:15 p.m., Stauffenberg

and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften

boarded a plane for Berlin

convinced that Hitler was dead.

Within the first hour after the explosion,

the chief of the Central Department for Capital Crimes,

Dr. Bernd Wehner,

was summoned to go on a mission.

- [speaking German]

- When Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften

arrived at last at the Bendlerstrasse,

they found that the Walkuere orders had not been issued.

Precious hours had been lost.

General Beck was already there with Fritz von der Schulenburg

and Peter Yorck.

Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier

arrived shortly afterwards.

Hans Bernd von Haeften, Werner's brother,

was waiting for orders with Adam von Trott

at the Foreign Office.

The young officers of the Ninth Infantry Regiment

were waiting at the Esplanade Hotel

to be called into action,

among them Hammerstein, Kleist,

and Georg von Oppen.

Stauffenberg, meanwhile, was constantly on the phone

trying to move the coup forward.

- Normally, I think, there is a certain weight

on the skin through the air.

I don't know why, but it's physical, medical to me,

but, anyhow, its... its effect.

On such a day, you have the impression

that it's 100,000 times the weight

which you normally carry.

It's a fantastic atmosphere when the history of Berlin

on the edge of the knife, extremely difficult to describe

and interesting to watch the people

who act on such a day according to their characters

and to their abilities.

And here, again, I must mention Stauffenberg.

Nobody was cooler and concentrated,

more concentrated than him.

And everybody came and asked him

about every decision.

He was fantastic on that day.

[speaking German]

- [speaking German]

- But then pretty soon,

I was listening to the telephone conversation,

which... Fromm, General Colonel Fromm,

the commanding general of the Ersatzheer,

had with Keitel, and the end was that he said,

"So, Herr Feldmarschall, I can rely Hitler is alive?"

And Keitel must have said yes,

and I put the receiver back to the telephone,

and that, of course, made a very bad impression to me,

a very, very bad impression,

and I went back to look for Haeften,

and I said, "Now, listen, we will get on top of it because

"Fromm has talked with Keitel,

and he... Keitel said that Hitler's alive."

So then Stauffenberg came into all these stories

which are well known, and they arrested Fromm.

- [speaking German]

[militaristic music]

- Within hours of the explosion,

despite his injuries, Hitler was able to meet

Mussolini's special train as scheduled.

- [speaking German]

- Shortly before midnight, General Fromm

arrested the military leaders of the conspiracy

inside the Bendlerstrasse.

Stauffenberg assumed complete responsibility.

General Beck was allowed to shoot himself.

The others were led downstairs to the courtyard.

General Olbricht was shot first.

Stauffenberg was to be next, but Lieutenant von Haeften

threw himself in front of the count

and was shot instead.

Only then was Stauffenberg killed.

Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim was the last to die.

It was about half past midnight.

The collapse of the 20th of July coup d'etat

uncovered trails leading to the capture

and arrest of other conspirators,

who, after August 1944,

were put on a series of widely publicized show trials.

[man speaking German]

- The resisters condemned to death were hanged

with thin cords from meat hooks

in the Ploetzensee Prison.

- [speaking German]

- He died at the 21st of July,

and we had a funeral in Battenberg,

but at this time, even my mother believed

that he was fallen in battle.

It was a suicide.

[woman speaking German]

- Goerdeler went into hiding.

An award of 1 million marks was offered for his capture.

He was subsequently betrayed to the police

and tried in the People's Court.

- [speaking German]

- Aha!

- He had said to me, and I remember

one of his last words were,

"We've got to do it ourselves. It will happen.

"We've got to do it ourselves before the Allies

have to do it for us."

Before the 20th of July,

his health had suffered a great deal.

He was...

oh, he was gay enough, but though I think he knew

exactly what he was heading for if it didn't succeed.

- [speaking German]

[man speaking German]

- [speaking German]

- We went up to Berlin, Charlotta and I,

because she said, "I must be near him.

Maybe I can see him."

I went to the Gestapo hauptquartier

and asked if I could deliver a letter or anything,

and they just said, "Would you please go? Just go.

We don't want to see you here. Go."

Later on, I realized that he had been there

until 8:00 in the morning in this Gestapo quartier

and had then being led to the Werkstattofen

and then to his death.

Charlotta got a bill

about two months later.

I've forgotten if it was 150 marks for the execution.

That was all.

- [speaking German]

- Well, I have seen a great deal of him in the prison,

and he was very impressive, cool, friendly.

He behaved excellent as a prisoner.

- I saw him once more after the trial

on the 18th of January...

And I went to back Kreuzau for the weekend,

where I always fetched food,

and then I came back again and was again in Berlin

and just had written a letter saying that I had returned.

He got that letter in the morning.

That was the day he was killed,

the 23rd of January.

And I, of course, did not expect him to...

I didn't know what would happen in the circumstances

if the Allies had just come,

but the Allies were so slow in coming, so...

We hoped they would come in time.

Of course, that kind of thing, you know,

that goes without saying.

- And he was prepared to pay.

He was a human being who tried to escape,

as late as possible, execution or death.

He wanted to live, but when it was unavoidable, he knew.

That was the great thing in his letters and poems,

and he knows from the beginning up to the end.

The more spiritual you are,

the more politically you must be again,

and he once put that... that little sentence together:

"Only if you cry for the Jews,

you are permitted to sing Gregorian chants."

- The Abwehr resistance group had been moved from one prison

or concentration camp to another since 1943.

Hans von Dohnanyi

was eventually executed in Sachsenhausen.

On April 9, 1945, one month before V-E Day,

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris,

Colonel Hans Oster,

and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

were hanged in Flossenbuerg concentration camp.

"I am of the rock-firm conviction, now as before,

"that we have acted rightly.

"I consider Hitler not only as the archenemy of Germany

"but as the archenemy of the world.

"Not one of us can complain about his own death.

"Whoever entered our circle

"thereby put on the Shirt of Nessus.

"The moral worth of a human being begins only then,

"when he is ready to lay down his own life

for his convictions."