BOOK REVIEW / The line of least resistance: An honourable defeat: A History of the German Resistance to Hitler

CLAUS von Stauffenberg, the man who put the bomb in the briefcase, was a patrician hero with Prussian discipline. He had a black eye-patch and heels that clicked to command; he even wore a steel helmet at his wedding. Hitler, so wary of the monocled toffs in his army, was impressed. In many ways, Stauffenberg was the Fuhrer's Aryan ideal; young and handsome, honourably wounded in the North Africa campaign (right hand missing), he was one of the few German officers who could look Hitler in the eye.

Almost exactly 50 years ago, on 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg carried the lethal briefcase into Hitler's GHQ at Rastenburg, East Prussia. As Chief of Staff in Berlin, Stauffenberg was able to get close to the Fuhrer; he had been sitting opposite him earlier on the day the bomb went off. Five people died from their injuries; Hitler sustained no more than damaged ear drums and a pair of scorched trousers. It was the 43rd serious attempt on his life.

Retribution was ruthless. Several of the chief conspirators were hanged by piano wire from meat hooks. Stauffenberg himself is said to have cried 'Long live holy Germany]' before the firing squad. As a final cruelty, the plotters' widows received bills of 158.18 marks for 'execution costs'.

In Germany this year, the 20 July anniversary was designated to honour all those who resisted Nazism, from 1933 to its demise. There were not many: just 2 per cent of the adult population were involved in the resistance at any level. Among them were a few brave church leaders, a scattering of civilian idealists like the Munich student Sophie Scholl (of the White Rose pacifist movement), some Communists and Social Democrats.

The textbook version of the German resistance, however, leans heavily on the legacy of Stauffenberg. Many young Germans protest that he should have had the moral courage to eliminate Hitler much earlier in the war, not in the summer of 1944 when defeat for Germany was almost certain. The most prominent members of the German resistance had in fact welcomed many of Hitler's policies - especially when it came to rebuilding the army. Once the madness of Hitler had become manifest, the dilemma for these patriots was painful: to love the Fatherland yet desire the downfall of Nazism.

An Honourable Defeat explores these grey areas of moral predicament. The dog-like devotion to military codes of honour may appear ridiculous now (one assassination attempt was postponed because a field marshal judged that 'it was not seemly to shoot a man at lunch'). Stauffenberg came from a noble Swabian Roman Catholic family; 'Long live holy Germany]' would hardly have been an ideal slogan for a modern democratic nation, and this book fails to address the question of what form his Germany would have taken. Although a Berlin street was named after Stauffenberg in 1955, it was not until 1967 that the Berlin Senate decided to erect a memorial to him. By then, any resistance against the German state could be justified by the Nazi past, and the Baader-Meinhof group was able to count on sympathy among the young because it dared to do what almost all Germans had failed to do when it really mattered, some 30 years before. But this is not within the scope of Anton Gill's enquiry.

Gill does, however, give a very readable account of the other loners brave or insane enough to contemplate killing Hitler. One of these was the British military attache in Berlin, Colonel Mason-Macfarlane; in 1939 he offered to take a pot-shot at the Fuhrer from the window of his flat in Sophienstrasse. (We are in the realm of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, a thriller in which Hitler is stalked by a lone English adventurer.) A cabinet-maker from Stuttgart and a Swiss theology student were among the other would- be assassins. Both were executed.

Even the smallest act against the Nazi regime required enormous bravery. But the fact remains that the German people did not attempt to resist the Hitlerian terror. All had witnessed anti-Semitic barbarity; yet there was a willed ignorance about the extermination of European Jewry. As Primo Levi wrote: 'Those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers.'

Among his other books, Anton Gill has written a memorable study of Nazi concentration camp survivors: The Journey Back from Hell. This account of the July Plot is a solid, somewhat workaday affair, but it's a valuable introduction, none the less, to the few brave members of the German Resistance.