He tells the story of the courageous groups of Germans who risked their lives to defy Hitler with all the flair of the seasoned thriller writer that he is
September 9, 2025 10:43
There are some groups of German resisters to Nazism during Hitler’s rule whose courageous activities have been well chronicled. Perhaps the best known are the bomb plotters Adam von Trott and his fellow army officers who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944 and nearly succeeded but paid for it with their own lives, and the pacifist White Rose circle of young people in Munich who distributed anti-Nazi propaganda and suffered the same fate.
But there were many more who opposed Nazism in one way or another, quietly or actively. As Jonathan Freedland notes in the preface to his new book, between 1933 and 1945 some three million Germans were detained in concentration camps for “crimes of dissent”.
While researching his bestselling book The Escape Artist, about a young Jew who escaped from Auschwitz to tell the world what was happening there, Freedland came across the story of one such group and he tells their story in meticulous detail in a book that deserves to achieve a similar readership.
Like Von Trott, the group’s members came from Germany’s elite: aristocrats, diplomats, civil servants, a distinguished headmistress. Some actively helped Jews to escape from Germany, others helped to work out a possible alternative government should Hitler be assassinated or overthrown.
As Freedland notes, between 1933 and 1945 some three million Germans were detained in concentration camps for ‘crimes of dissent’
Freedland reminds us that the 1944 bomb was not the only such attempt on Hitler’s life. In March 1943 another group of army officers arranged for a bomb to be placed in the hold of the Fuhrer’s plane in Smolensk, primed to explode as he flew back to Berlin.
It failed to detonate.
One who knew about the plot was Otto Kiep, who as Germany’s consul general in New York had not only attended a fundraising dinner in 1933 in aid of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, at which Albert Einstein was the guest of honour, but made a speech praising the great Jewish scientist. It was an extraordinarily brave public gesture, given that Hitler had just become Chancellor, and he was summoned back to Berlin, fearing the worst. He was even ordered to appear before Hitler himself, who, typically, went off on a ten-minute rant about the future of the Third Reich. Kiep kept his job, returned to New York but soon resigned. Back in Germany, when war broke out he wound up in army counter-intelligence but maintained his private opposition to Nazism, awaiting better times.
Other members of what was essentially a very loose collection of resisters led similarly prominent lives until the Nazis started to circumscribe them. Elizabeth van Thadden set up and ran a remarkable girls’ boarding school encouraging free-thinking young women until the Nazis closed it down. Countess Maria von Maltzan sheltered Jews in her Berlin apartment, one of whom, Hans Hirschel, became her lover. In one dramatic scene, told by Freedland with all the flair of the seasoned thriller writer that he is, Gestapo agents ransack the flat in search of Jews while Hirschel lies hidden in a sofa bed specially adapted for the purpose.
Society figures Hanna Solf and her daughter Iagi also hid Jews and managed to smuggle some out of Berlin and across the border into neutral Switzerland. These people and others came together in September 1943 at a fateful tea party in Van Thadden’s Berlin apartment. This gathering marks the centrepoint of Freedland’s beautifully constructed book. Unknown to them, they were being hunted by a senior Gestapo officer, Leo Lange, who had spent the early years of the war heading death squads on the eastern front and then pioneering the use of mobile gas chambers.
Information leaking from the tea party would spell disaster for most of those present. I will not spoil Freedland’s narrative by spelling out the details of what happened in the following months.
The story does not conclude with fall of Nazism. There is a fascinating post-war section exploring the ramifications of a gross act of betrayal and the legacy of these brave people. As Freedland concludes, “They set an example that lives on, down the generations… When the moment came, they dared to be traitors – not to their country, but to tyranny.”
The Traitors Circle
by Jonathan Freedland
John Murray
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