The Allies hoped through bombing Berlin and other large German cities to generate widespread popular opposition to the Nazi regime. This did not materialize, though there was certainly resentment toward the authorities for bringing home the horrors of war. As Ruth Andreas-Friedrich observed following the raid that wiped out her block, survivors were markedly cool towards the SS salvage squad that came to help clear away the ruins: “‘If it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t be any ruins,’ the faces seem to say. ‘Why do you come now, when it’s too late? Why did you get us into all this in the first place?’”
While resentment towards the regime never translated into mass opposition, a number of resistance circles did emerge in Berlin over the course of the war. We have mentioned the Jewish-Communist Herbert Baum group, which came to grief in August 1942. Other small Communist cells cropped up, taking advantage of the Nazis’ distraction by the war and the sheer size and labyrinthine complexity of the capital. Some of the activists had served jail sentences during the early years of the Third Reich, from which they emerged with added hatred for their foe. Because of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, most veteran Communists held back from active resistance until the German invasion of the Soviet Union. During the first phase of the war, the most notable example of Communist resistance in Berlin involved a youth group that distributed fliers urging workers not to produce munitions. Their leader, Heinz Kapelle, was arrested and executed in July 1941—a harbinger of the fate of virtually all active Communist resisters in the city. The exiled KPD leaders in Moscow, anxious to maintain ties in Berlin that they could exploit upon returning to the city after the expected Red Army victory, smuggled a few emissaries into the capital from Sweden. One of them managed fleeting contact with a cell run by the Berliner Robert Uhrig, but Uhrig’s group was exposed in February 1942. Moscow did not have ties to a larger resistance group led by Anton Saefkow, which fell to the Gestapo in mid-1944. On the other hand, a leftist officer in the Air Ministry, Harro Schulze-Boysen, along with an official in the Economics Ministry, Arvid Harnack, radioed important military information from Berlin to Moscow. Their spy-operation, which the Nazis called the “Red Orchestra,” was broken up in August 1942. Schulze-Boysen was executed on December 22, 1942, leaving behind a verse in his cell that read: “The final judgment is not / Ended by rope or ax / And Judgment Day will give a chance / To get the verdict changed.”
The Red Orchestra was dangerous to the Nazis because it operated from inside the government. So did most of the figures involved in the famous conspiracy to assassinate Hitler that culminated in the abortive bombing at his East Prussian headquarters on July 20, 1944. This is not the place for a detailed history of the Twentieth of July movement and the bombing attempt; suffice it here to point up the salient points, highlighting the Berlin dimension.
Although few of the main figures in the plot were native Berliners, the conspiracy was based in the capital because many of the activists were members of military units or bureaucratic agencies headquartered there. Count Glaus von Stauffenberg, the man who planted the bomb, was chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the army reserve. Like many of his colleagues, he had originally been attracted to the Nazi movement in the belief that it offered the best hope for a national reawakening. When instead it began covering Germany in shame and leading it toward catastrophic defeat, the count turned passionately against the regime, which he decided could be brought down only if Hitler were eliminated. Yet for all his dedication to the cause of ridding Germany of Nazism, Stauffenberg was ill-equipped for the job of killing Hitler. Having lost his right hand and two fingers of his left hand, along with one eye, in the war, he could not use a pistol and had to resort to the messy and notoriously unreliable method of a time-bomb (a method, incidentally, that had failed to kill Hitler in Munich in 1939).
