There has been an ongoing debate among the historians of the German anti-Hitler resistance about the correct interpretation of this history. Although scholars engaged in these debates rightly may resist labels such as “conservative” or “progressive” as too constrictive, it may help those less familiar with these debates to start with this classification. Conservative historians, like Hoffmann and Joachim Fest, tend to give a more positive interpretation of the conservative anti-Hitler resistance while at the same time being largely dismissive of the Communist resistance. As Hoffmann writes in his introduction, “While Communists, however, aimed at replacing one dictatorship with another, the non-Communist resistance was concerned above all to restore the rule of law, civil liberties, social justice, and the integrity of the national existence and territory” (21). In contrast, progressives such as Hans Mommsen and Christof Dipper—both of whose scholarship draws very harsh criticism from Hoffmann—are more critical of the conservative anti-Hitler resistance because of its failure to support modern democratic institutions and its demands for a return of German lands lost as a result of World War I.
And, as with any good scholarly debate, there are also sharp divisions over methodology and the interpretation of data. Hoffmann dislikes what he calls the “social-forces and social-structures school of historiography” (xviii), which he argues tends to build up charges against the national conservative resistance collectively, while failing to give enough attention to individual biography. In contrast, Christof Dipper argues that while Hoffmann can get the plot right, his use of facts is too isolated from the historical context. (For a 1994 feuilleton exchange between Hoffmann and Dipper, see David Bankier, ed., Probing the Depths of German Antisemitism [Berghahn Books, 2000]).
Beginning in the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, West German society was shaken by the first widespread public debates about the Holocaust. While the question of the motivations of the resistance and their attitudes toward the Nazi persecution and genocide against Europe's Jews was never completely absent from the historiographical debates about the German resistance, beginning in the 1980s scholars began to intensify their investigation into these matters. Historians began to ask new questions: To what extent were the different resistance figures motivated by the Nazi crimes against the Jews and others, and to what extent did they harbor anti-Semitic attitudes themselves?
It is within the context of these debates that one can situate Hoffmann's new book on Carl Goerdeler. “Many historians and other publicists regard Goerdeler as an antisemite and ‘dissimilationist’ because he regarded the Jewish people as an ethnic entity, and they assert that he intended to deprive the majority of German Jews of their citizenship rights. The memorandum ‘The Aim’ that Goerdeler wrote in 1941 and 1942 proposing a secure status for the Jews in the world has held a central place in accusations of antisemitism against Goerdeler” (xvi–xvii). Hoffmann's goal is to refute categorically these charges by looking at Goerdeler's words and actions prior to and after joining the anti-Hitler resistance. In his preresistance phase, Hoffmann gives numerous examples in which Goerdeler took steps to interfere with Nazi policies against Germany's Jews: in April 1933 he went as the mayor of Leipzig to the Jewish quarter to protect Jews against SA attacks (42); in April 1935 he acted against an attempted boycott of “non-Aryan” physicians (43); and in the fall of 1936 he resigned because his subordinate had removed a statue of Mendelssohn, despite his explicit insistence that the statue remain (53–56). Hoffmann also gives other examples where Goerdeler argued against the Nazis' anti-Jewish policies in official memoranda because of the harmful effect that this was having on Germany's international relations.
After his resignation as the mayor of Leipzig, Goerdeler joined with others in opposing the Nazi regime. He continued to condemn the Nazis' anti-Jewish actions in clear and unambiguous manner and was obviously dismayed and motivated by the mass killings in German occupied territory. Then, in late 1941 and early 1942, Goerdeler wrote a ninety-nine-page document for the resistance called “The Aim,” which attempted to lay out a plan for a post-Nazi Germany. A brief part of that document includes a discussion of the place of Jews in Germany and the world. Hoffmann dedicates chapters 5, 6, and 7 to a discussion of this part of the document, providing very detailed discussion of what Goerdeler wrote, what he intended, and the potential consequences of the policy for Jews in Germany, if the policy had been enacted.
Hoffmann's portrait of Goerdeler gives us a much clearer image of Goerdeler the lawyer than Goerdeler the man. Goerdeler is clearly someone whose views changed over his lifetime. Hoffmann notes, “Goerdeler confessed later that he had been brought up in a ‘narrow kind of nationalism’ … that he outgrew after 1930, as mayor of Leipzig, when he had much contact with foreigners and foreign countries” (26). But what did “Jewish difference” mean to Goerdeler outside his bureaucratic roles? After traveling to Canada in the late summer of 1937, Goerdeler wrote of his surprise that Canadians showed so much concern about the Jewish Question: “This astonished me all the more since I did see negroes in Canada but no Jews” (57). What did it mean for Goerdeler to “see” or “not see” Jews? In his conclusion, Hoffmann makes the following observation based on Goerdeler's prison writings: “For a moment now, he [Goerdeler] assigned to the Jews a ‘great guilt’ for having ‘pushed into our public life’ without restraint, reflecting gentile hostility toward the Jews' refusal to surrender their ethnic identity and separateness, while insisting on equality in all other respects” (172). How shared did Goerdeler imagine “our public life” to be?
While conducting some of my own research, I came across a set of interviews with non-Jewish Germans who had risked their lives saving Jews in Berlin during the war. There are many interesting aspects to these interviews, but one that is relevant here is that these Germans, who placed their lives at risk to save Jews, sometimes also held traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as racial-biological others (“It helped that he didn't look Jewish”) as well as behavioral traits (“She was especially clever and vain”). To apply the label “anti-Semite” to such individuals clearly fails to deal with the complexity of their views and behaviors.
I wish Hoffmann had included more discussion of Goerdeler the man. Hoffmann's concluding chapter provides more complexity to Goerdeler's character and shows him wrestling with concepts of Jewishness, nation, race, ethnicity, and cultural pluralism. It would be very useful to have a more extended analysis of some more personal writings by Goerdeler, where he was not constrained by issues of citizenship law or the political struggles among the members of the resistance. As with the ordinary Berliners who saved Jewish lives while still seeing Jews as somehow essentially different from themselves, Goerdeler deserves to be treated as a complex individual who took immense risks to resist the criminal Nazi regime, for which he paid with his life. As to his more personal views on Jewishness as well as ethnic and racial differences, there is more room for future research.
