Carl Goerdeler and the Jewish Question, 1933-1942 by Peter Hoffmann (review)

Peter Hoffmann is without question the leading authority on the history of the German resistance. His History of the German Resistance, 1933-1945 (1977) remains the best comprehensive history of the struggle to remove Hitler and the Nazis from power, and it is unlikely that it will be surpassed in scope, detail, and mastery of sources. Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 (1995, 1999, 2008) is similarly excellent. Hoffmann has consistently argued that leaders of the German resistance were motivated above all by moral and ethical convictions rooted in the best of the Christian and humanist traditions, not the least of which was their anguish over the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

The extent to which the leaders of the German resistance were indeed motivated by their concern over the fate of the Jews, and the precise moment when this concern became manifest in their determination to overthrow Hitler and the Nazi regime, will remain topics of considerable disagreement and discussion. But for Hoffmann there is no room for ambiguity in the case of Carl Goerdeler, the most prominent figure in the civilian resistance to Nazism and the person designated to succeed Hitler as chancellor in the event of a successful coup. As Hoffmann writes: "There was in Germany no sustained, concerted, or widespread opposition to the regime's anti-Jewish policies. There was, however, the consistent, pertinacious, and courageous opposition of Carl Goerdeler" (p. 169). But the evidence upon which this assertion rests is thin and requires a careful and discriminating eye to tease out and interpret what little can be found in the existing record to validate such a claim. That is both the strength and the weakness of Hoffmann's most recent book.

Hoffmann's argument essentially rests upon his analysis of three documents in addition to the so-called "X-Documents" that Arthur Primrose Young published in 1974 on his own contacts with Goerdeler in the late 1930s. The first of these is a lengthy memorandum that Goerdeler sent to Hitler in 1936 in which, among other things, he pleaded for a change in state policy with respect to the Jews, the Masonic lodges, and the churches on the grounds that this would clear the way for an Anglo-German understanding on a host of pressing economic issues. The second is an equally long statement entitled "Das Ziel" that Goerdeler composed in late 1941 and early 1942 as a programmatic manifesto for the national-conservative elements of the anti-Nazi resistance. By this time the mass murder of Soviet Jewry was well under way, and the Nazis were completing plans for the systematic extinction of all Jews in Europe. Here Goerdeler outlined an international solution to the Jewish problem that envisaged the creation of an independent Jewish state in Africa or South America to which all Jews throughout the world would belong; as its citizens Jews would therefore be entitled to its diplomatic protection. German Jews would also be recognized as subjects of the German state, as Staatsangehörige as opposed to Reichsangehörige, a status that would afford them the protection of the law in their persons and property while excluding them from participation in the organic political life of the German Volk as full-fledged German citizens. The third document is Goerdeler's famous "Gedanken eines zum Tode Verurteilten über die deutsche Zukunft," which he wrote in September 1944 from his cell in the basement of the Hotel Prinz Albrecht. Once again Goerdeler reprised the idea of an independent Jewish state—this time he mentioned Palestine as a possible location—but wrote nothing about the millions of Jews who already had been murdered by the Germans.

To be sure, there is more to Hoffmann's story than this. Interspersed throughout his insightful analysis of these documents are accounts of Goerdeler's opposition to the April boycott of 1933, to the Nazi purge of the German...