Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Germans Who Rebelled Against the Nazis About this episode Today, we journey back to Berlin in the summer of 1943, where a clandestine gathering of Germany’s elite quietly plots to resist Hitler’s regime. But there is a traitor in their midst...
We're joined by acclaimed journalist and author Jonathan Freedland, author of 'The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them'. He unravels the true story behind the Solf Circle - a group of courageous men and women who risked everything to oppose the Nazis from within.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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1:56 Dan Snow? Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It's the 10th of September 1943. There's a soiree going on in Berlin. A loose group of very well-connected people, colleagues, friends, acquaintances, have gathered in an apartment in the Scholotenberg area of the Nazi capital, Berlin. The Second World War is going extremely badly. The writing is on the wall. There are Allied boots on the ground in mainland Italy. Hitler's last desperate, hopeless offensive action on the Eastern Front, well, the last
2:38 Dan Snow? one of any serious magnitude and ambition, at Kursk, has been a catastrophic and bloody failure. The Soviets are counter-attacking. The front line is moving back towards Central Europe, quite fast. That is the backdrop for this particular soiree. The host is Elizabeth von Tadden, and the reason for the get-together is apparently her younger sister's 50th birthday. But actually, that's a cover. In fact, there are nine influential people, meeting to discuss what they should do, how they can get Germany out of the war, more or less intact, without catastrophic further defeats and occupation.
3:20 Dan Snow? Otto Kiep, he was a former diplomat, he was there and he talked about how Mussolini's recent toppling meant that Italy was ready to make peace to the Allies. And we must remind ourselves that Mussolini was eventually, after everything else was tried, removed by his cabinet, by the King of Italy, by the political elite. Perhaps the same could be true in Germany. Political hostess Hannah Solf gleefully anticipated that particular day. She said about Hitler, "We'll put him against a wall." Sounds like she was happy to pull the trigger on that particular fiery squad as well. Meanwhile, von Tadden herself, well, she was a devout Protestant, she was a former head teacher of a girls' school, she was worried about the humanitarian crisis that would follow the end of hostilities.
4:04 Dan Snow? These were the kind of subjects they were talking about, as they gathered on a late summer's day, drank tea, ate sandwiches, and a slightly unappetizing bit of ersatz war food, called war cake.
4:18 Dan Snow? They believed, I think, in the late summer of 43, that Germany might be reborn as a democratic nation-state. They felt they might be nearing the end of Nazi rule. Unfortunately, what they didn't know is that there was a traitor in their midst. This podcast is the story of that soiree, of that tea party, and of what came next. It wasn't pretty. I'm very happy to say I've got Jonathan Freedland back on the podcast. He's a Guardian columnist, he's the host of the Guardian's Politics Weekly America podcast, he presents BBC Four's The Long View. He's one of the great broadcaster, journalist, opinion writers, working in the English English today. He's just written a book, The Traitor's Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed
5:03 Dan Snow? Them. This is a story about resistance, and treachery, and pessimism, and hope. Enjoy.
5:13 Speaker 03 Jonathan, great to have you back on the podcast.
5:36 Speaker 05 Good to be with you, Dan.
5:37 Dan Snow? Well, tell me, who are those people? Who are those people at that infamous tea party? Give me their backstories.
5:43 Speaker 05 Well, they're a remarkable group. They're drawn from high society, they're very elite Germans. Some of them are aristocratic. There is not one, but two countesses in this group. There's an ambassador's widow, there's a former high-ranking diplomat, a former consul general in New York, there's someone who's a senior official at this point in the German Foreign Ministry, former Treasury mandarins, there's a doctor, there's a former model, there's a pioneering innovative headmistress. But it's the top draw of German society. These are the people who would have been at embassy balls, and nights at the opera, white tie dinners, it's that crowd.
6:27 Dan Snow? Was there always a political undercurrent to this group? Were they sort of passive resistors from the early days of the Nazi regime?
6:34 Speaker 05 So they were all engaged in resistance in different forms. I think this gathering, there's probably more and less to it than meets the eye. I think it was genuinely a birthday party. The hostess was marking the 50th birthday of her younger sister. I think that was real. But also, whenever these groups of people, and this particular combination of people, I don't think had met before. It was a rolling set of combinations of people who would gather. Yes, there was always a political undercurrent because they were all like-minded, or so they believed. They believed they were among their own, among kindred spirits. What they had in common, they thought, was opposition to Adolf Hitler and to the Nazi regime. And there was something just therapeutic, almost, about being in the same room with people who felt the same way.
7:18 Speaker 05 Sometimes it would be practical. They'd be trading information, nuggets of of advice, of know-how. Sometimes they would be talking plans, as they did on this fateful afternoon. They were talking about plans for once Hitler was gone. But also, they were just a group of people who found solace in being with each other.
7:37 Dan Snow? They sound quite establishment. Were they the sort of conservative opposition, the kind of conservative aristocratic opposition to Hitler, would you describe it? Or are they the kind of socialists, intellectuals, homosexuals that Hitler had tried to smash and imprison and break in his early, well, throughout his years in office?
7:56 Speaker 05 Much more the former, and that's one thing that's interesting, picking up actually a question you just asked earlier about the nature of their political opposition. They weren't completely consistent. They weren't people who, from day one in 1933, had uniformly seen the danger and opposed it. Some of them were. So the ambassador's widow, her late husband, the ambassador, was one of the people who eyeballed the march of the brown shirts as they seized power in January 1933, and said in Latin, as a former diplomat should, finis germaniae. This is the end of the German people. He turns to his friends and says that. He could see from the beginning. But there were others.
8:38 Speaker 05 Including the woman who was the hostess that day, who initially thought, well, you know, Germany has been in decline. She was a conservative nationalist, I think she would have described herself, and thought this Hitler chap may have something to commend him. And there were two or three like that who thought at first go, you never know, this might be all right. But their awareness of the realisation of the threat Nazis imposed, it came at different stages. In some cases, it was within weeks, some within months, and some it took longer for them to get to that point. And in a strange way, I find that kind of appealing about this group, because they were very human, in the sense they were inconsistent, they thought like people rather than political activists. They
9:21 Speaker 05 weren't all ideologues. They just saw what was going on around them. And by the time they all gather for that tea party, they are implacably opposed. They are convinced that Adolf Hitler is immoral, for many of them, un-Christian, and I think uniformly they think a huge betrayal of what Germany should represent.
9:41 Dan Snow? Well, and critically, he just lost the Battle of Kursk and Italy, hasn't he? I mean, his summer of 1943 is, he arguably could never have won the war, and certainly couldn't have won it from December 41 onwards. But by the late summer of 43, we are now in the appalling, tragic, elongated, inevitable endgame of the Second World War. Were they influenced by just his manifest failure as well? I mean, had they just discovered things about the Holocaust? Or were they like, okay, we can see the bloody way the wind's blowing here. This is very bad.
10:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, I want to give them more credit than that latter view would suggest, because I don't think it was just sort of opportunistic in the sense of, well, it's now the losing side. Each one of them, although they, as I say, they might not have realised it in January 33, long before the war starts, they are anti-Nazi. So this isn't just a pragmatic decision about, you know, fleeing a sinking ship. They are opposed on moral grounds, and one of those moral grounds being the persecution of the Jews. Several of them are directly involved in that. They are either helping spirit Jews out of the country by getting them papers. Very forged papers, at least I think you could say three have hidden Jews under their own roofs.
10:55 Speaker 05 They are at mortal risk and one is really involved. One of those two countesses I mentioned is absolutely hands on involved. She's a kind of action hero. She hide turns her own apartment into a kind of unofficial refuge sanctuary for the Jews who at that time were known as submarines, as U-boats, because they were, they had to be beneath the surface and silent. And so her home at some point, you know, on a single night, there could be upwards of 20 people hidden in silence in her apartment. This is Countess Maria von Malsen, an extraordinary character, who would issue strict instructions to these people hiding in her home.
11:39 Speaker 05 They had to say not a word when she was out because she worried that her neighbours would betray them to the authorities. They mustn't use the stove because smoke or steam coming out of the chimney would give them away. They weren't allowed to flush the toilet because the sound would give them away. So they were grown adults tiptoeing around her apartment by day while she was out trying to earn a living and to get enough food to provide for these 20 odd people. She was involved in, you know, getting people out through sewers, through escape routes. In one extraordinary episode, she even hid one of these people, who will turn out to be her own secret lover, in a piece of mahogany furniture. And the man was hiding in there when the Gestapo came to call.
12:24 Speaker 05 So they are really involved at the sharp end, a lot of these people. But what underpins it is a moral realisation that this new man Adolf Hitler and his regime represents something heinous. And the persecution of the Jews is central to that persecution of Christians and of Christianity also features. They think this man is an affront. To their own Christian belief as well.
12:49 Dan Snow? Okay, what do they decide to do? I mean, this is dangerous stuff. What do they decide to do? What do they say to each other at this salon?
12:57 Speaker 05 So the salon is, you know, there is a series of sort of intersecting circles here. One of the people at the party, the ambassador's widow, has been convening this salon, which bears the name of her late husband, the same man who spoke in Latin at the moment of Nazi ascendancy, the Solf Circle. They turned their apartment, as late as the late twenties, into this rolling salon, but where there's conversation, dissenting, talk, clerics, officials, journalists, scientists, they're all gathering there. That continues, and most of it is just talk, but within that talk, there are people who meet each other. And for example, foreign diplomats were invited and information would be smuggled out.
13:39 Speaker 05 So one of the things this group attached great weight to was making sure that representatives of foreign governments knew that what they heard as rumor was more than just rumor. So then, in other words, there may be a diplomat from Australia who has heard that there are nasty things happening, but thinks they might be just propaganda stories. And these people would say, no, it's true. There are concentration camps, there are murders, there are people taken away in the dead of night. So that's one of the things they're doing. This is rolling on. They are giving each other advice about how they can get information out, how they can help people in danger, about how they can make their ration books stretch, how they can get food to hidden Jews. They're doing all of that.
14:21 Speaker 05 But on that particular day, when they meet in September 1943, as you said, the war is turning against Hitler and their mind turns to, what about the eventual fall of this regime? It's assumed that others, including people they know, by the way, will be involved in the actual business of toppling Adolf Hitler, but they think their contribution will be preparing the ground for that, including who comes next. And they know, because these are people from the governing classes of Germany, whose families have been ruling Germany. For as long as anyone can remember, one of the people at the tea party, her father
15:01 Speaker 05 served in Bismarck's cabinet. There's another who had served in the final war cabinet of the First World War. These are people who are absolutely considered that if anyone's going to take over, it's going to be people like us and people who we know. And they begin to talk names of who can take over once the war has turned. And there is talk too of how foreign help can be enlisted, particularly actually for the day after, as we would now put it. The assumption is that as it was in 1918, Germany will be left destitute by defeat and there will be chaos, hunger, and they will need the help
15:44 Speaker 05 of people outside. And they talk about how the Quakers helped back in 1918. You know, do we have contact with them now so that Christian groups from outside can send in aid to war ravaged Germany after the war? That's the kind of conversation. And they tiptoe around the business of the kinetic business of getting rid of Adolf Hitler. But they do it, they're only tiptoeing. I mean, they're in that zone. And that is given that somebody who is at this tea party is there not as a kindred spirit, but in order to betray them or fully bent on betraying them to the Gestapo, that talk will prove fatal for them.
16:26 Dan Snow? Okay, so there's no talk of where we're putting the bomb and then what plane we're going to fly to take over that airfield. It is rather intellectual stuff. And indeed, you could argue slightly naive if they think that they're going to have any agency over what's coming after Hitler. I suppose if they think he's going to be executed, then perhaps the German people do have agency. This is before the Soviets and the Western Allies are marching all over German soil perhaps. But it's a sort of rather high level intellectual discussion rather than nuts and bolts planning.
16:51 Speaker 05 Yes, in terms of, it's not about, as you say, putting bombs on railway tracks, although that does feature in this story. I don't want to give too much away, but there are people in this group who are themselves on the edges of other circles that are involved in that kind of work.
17:06 Dan Snow? Because they sound quite Stauffenberg aligned.
17:09 Speaker 05 Yes, that's right. And the Stavonberg plot of July 20th, 44 will feature in this story. It has real consequences for them. In terms of the Third Reich and the regime, they are linked enough to those plotters, to those people who are at the planning and sort of military end. But no, on that day and in that conversation, they are speaking about other forms of activity, including what can be done. But they are also talking about the diplomatic front, including, again, this will prove very costly for them, the diplomatic routes which were central to resistance at that time, which was, is there a way of
17:50 Speaker 05 negotiating some kind of peace with the British and the Americans that will bring this terrible war to an end? And in the process, we'll see the removal of the current regime. Are there others who could make a separate peace, a secret peace? And, you know, one of the people there at the meeting brings word of an initiative whereby a former German ambassador to Moscow will be smuggled behind enemy lines and will talk to the Russians about concluding some kind of peace deal. So there are all kinds of initiatives. These are people who are desperate to find an end to this nightmare, whatever way they can. And one of those routes is to talk to people outside the country about possibly brokering some kind of peace
18:35 Speaker 05 that will exclude Hitler, but will save Germany and the rest of the world. Another, well, they want to know how much longer the war would go on. So that's it. But the larger point in a way I want to make as well in speaking up for these people is that I have come away from this with a broader definition of resistance than I think I had before. In other words, I think before I too thought unless there's a ticking bomb and a briefcase under Hitler's desk, it kind of doesn't really count. And what I've come to realise, looking at this group, is the person who is getting food to a Jew in hiding, the person who gets the forged papers to the family who are desperate to get across the border to Switzerland.
19:19 Speaker 05 They made a real contribution. Those people, there are people alive now who wouldn't be alive if their grandparents or great-grandparents weren't saved by those acts. They were, I'm not going to say just as risky, but they were mortally risky. They required enormous bravery. And there's one, just to make this point in its most kind of microcosmic way, the other of the two countesses, I came across her story very early on. And I read that she would make it her habit to walk around the streets of Berlin when she was out and about with two bags of heavy shopping, one in each hand. Now, why did she do that? She did that so that if
19:58 Speaker 05 she was greeted by someone who would then in turn greet her with the Heil Hitler and the salute, she would be unable to reciprocate because both her hands were full, a bag of shopping in each. It's a tiny, tiny gesture, but it's in small gestures like that that they made their opposition to this regime known. And you just sense if everyone had done that, then to what extent would the mentality, the collective mindset, the group thing, the masked obedience that Hitler relied on, would it have begun to fracture, fragment and fall apart? Individual gestures, they have value and they have worth. I've come to see that, having looked at these people's stories.
20:47 Dan Snow? It is the Dan Snows History. More on these traitors coming up after this.
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24:20 Dan Snow? So there was somebody, we will not reveal. People have to buy the book so they can find out who in the room was the traitor, was the informant, but there was someone in there. And within a year, you write, every single person in that conversation would be either murdered or in prison.
24:36 Speaker 05 Yes, that's right. They had no idea, as they spoke very freely, that one of their own, someone they believed was a kindred spirit, was in fact making mental notes of the whole conversation and would hand those over immediately to the Gestapo. And yeah, it set in train what was then a kind of cat and mouse hunt. They were pursued by the Gestapo. And he was an element of the story that I had no idea about going in, which is, I knew there would be a detective, a Gestapo detective, who would hunt them down. What I did not know is that that man, that Gestapo detective, had himself the most extraordinary backstory,
25:19 Speaker 05 which is that he really has a claim to be one of the top, I would say, half dozen or top 10 Nazis guilty of the Holocaust itself. And that I did not know, that he was not just some regular sort of shoe leather detective in on the streets of Berlin, but rather was somebody implicated at the highest level with the mechanics of the Final Solution.
25:47 Dan Snow? Well, but he's now also hunting down every member of this group. Just out of interest, what are the sorts of reasons that people would shop their peers into Gestapo? Is it personal advancement? Is it deep insecurity and wanting to feel powerful? Is it money? Why did the Nazi state prove so adept attracting these sorts of informants?
26:08 Speaker 05 Oh, that's such a good question, and it was one that really vexed people at the time. But it's fascinating because there is material on this that I came across where the Gestapo themselves sort of muse out loud about who they can rely on. So I think there's two different categories. There's people who were informants to the point of becoming agents, and those people were drawn by all of the above to your list. There were definitely financial inducements, people living on rations that could be very valuable. There was, for people of military age, particularly men of military age, the great incentive was that if you were on the home front acting as an informant or an agent, it meant you
26:49 Speaker 05 weren't on the front line and in uniform and risking your life. And that was hugely, as you can imagine, that was a massive incentive that you could skip military service, which at that point was becoming to look more and more like a potential death sentence. But I do think the psychological draw of, and certainly I think this was a factor in the, one of the two villains in this story, was the idea of playing a role in history, being important, and informing on the group in the traitor circle that I talk about, who were at the very top of German society, was that some of them would have been very
27:28 Speaker 05 well known in Berlin at that time as society figures. If you were the person who played a role in putting them away, or worse, and you knew that their case was going to go all the way to the top of the Nazi state, and this case did, this was Himmler, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, kept very close eyes on this case. The outcome of it was brief too, and led to a crucial military decision made by Adolf Hitler himself, then you yourself felt important. You felt you had a walk-on part in history. And I think that was a major incentive. So I think that's a big thing for the people who were agents. In terms of the people who were acting as informants, I had underestimated the extent
28:10 Speaker 05 to which Germany had become in that period a paranoid state, a paranoia state. I think in my own mind, I really had a sense of that about modern or relatively modern East Germany and the Stasi. But the sense in which that was true of Nazi Germany, where neighbours were informing on neighbours, where family members were giving up family members, that you could never be sure who was hearing you at any moment, colleague on colleague, son on father. I think I'd not really absorbed that. And this story has taught me how deeply true that was. So that, for example, the countess who I mentioned, who's harboring her own Jewish lover
28:54 Speaker 05 in her apartment, he's hiding when the Gestapo come to call in a kind of box underneath a sofa bed. It's an extraordinary episode where the Gestapo are there searching and she insists there's no one there. She's sitting on the sofa while her own lover is hidden inches below. That came about, that search, because somebody else in her building had accused her of harboring Jews to the Gestapo. Now, the countess who'd been accused knew immediately who her accuser was. She guessed because she knew that her accuser had herself been accused of harboring Jews.
29:36 Speaker 05 That one of the most frequent motives to inform was to get the finger of suspicion pointed away from you. So if you were a suspect in any kind of investigation and you knew yourself there was something to it, you would immediately think, who can I give up in order to ingratiate myself with the authorities? So this is why everyone was spying on everyone else. And there is a moment there where, in the book, based on written documentary evidence, there a wife complains that she cannot even speak to her own husband about her true feelings about the regime because nobody can trust anybody in Hitler's Germany.
30:18 Dan Snow? Crikey. Imagine that. Now, I let that pass over that architect of the Holocaust earlier. Could you give us any more details on why, in a long and lamentable list of deeply evil people, why this gentleman was so particularly involved in setting up the industrial slaughter of Jews and other people in Europe?
30:36 Speaker 05 Yes, no, absolutely. Because it is, to my mind, one of the standout. Elements of this saga and shocking. So his name was Leo Langer, Hubert Leo Langer. He was a sort of jobbing Gestapo guy until the Nazis invade Poland and he's deployed then in Poland and he's involved in eliminating potential resistance, which means Poles often who are suspected of opposition to the new German regime, they might be sentenced and have to be executed. He's involved in that at first, but then he's tasked with experimenting with the new method of killing, which is gas, that the higher-ups back in Berlin are beginning
31:19 Speaker 05 to experiment with poison gas, with carbon monoxide as a more efficient method of killing. And somebody has to trial this out. A new detachment, a specialist squad, is formed under him and in his name, the Langer detachment, which trials this out and does it at first with its chosen set of victims, all those branded in Nazi language mentally defective, those people with mental illness or learning difficulties. He goes around psychiatric hospitals, rounding up patients and herding them into what is in effect a mobile gas chamber. It is a van on wheels and it's done up to look like a coffee truck. It says, it has the logo,
32:04 Speaker 05 the livery on the outside of the Kaiser's Coffee Company. And he arrives at these hospitals and the doctors in charge happily hand over, in some cases, several hundred of their patients, who go into the back of the van in batches of sometimes 40 or 50. They are driven around in a compartment at the back. They are subject to initially bottled gas, which is leaked out and kills them. And that experiment is deemed a great success, that it works efficiently. And he then is asked to take it up a level and does the same method with groups of Jews in Poland. Until eventually, they think, well, let's take this mobile operation into a sort
32:47 Speaker 05 of static form. And he is asked then to be the commandant of what will be the first death camp. So people know about Auschwitz, and maybe they've heard of Treblinka and Sobibol. But the very first one, a place dedicated to killing, not a concentration camp in the sense of a labor camp, but a death camp, was a place in Poland called Chelmno. And its method of killing, there was a van that was still, so it was a mobile gas chamber, but now stationary. And that is the first death camp. And its first commandant is Leo Lange. So everything that flows after that, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and of Birkenau
33:28 Speaker 05 that we know of and are famous, were trialed, innovated, developed by the Lange detachment. And it's Leo Lange who is then tasked as the detective in hunting down the group of people in, in my book, The Traitor's Circle. So he's not an incidental figure in The Final Solution, in the murder of 6 million. He is a central figure. And yet he resurfaces in this story of mine, which, as I say, I didn't know, and I was shocked to discover. This is Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the Nazi traitors who tried to end the war. More coming up.
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35:41 Dan Snow? Your book makes us all question how we would handle these situations and find ourselves living in these societies. What is your thought on why some people make that extraordinary choice? Why that Countess von Moltzen? Why did she dedicate her life to undertaking astonishingly risky acts of resistance, for example, whereas I'm sure I'd have just sat there and tried to avoid it all and kept my head down?
36:05 Speaker 05 Well, full marks to you for criticizing yourself in that way, because most people don't make that move. Most people, when they think about the story, go, well, I would obviously have been one of the resistance, because we want to believe that about ourselves. But the data, the stats, suggest that your first instinct was right there, and it would be true of me and true of most people listening. So, one Allied investigator, after the war, estimated that some 3 million Germans were detained or arrested in prison for crimes of dissent of one kind or other, sometimes for no more than a critical remark, which is a big number, much bigger than I was expecting. In my estimation, I thought that, as you said right at the start of our conversation,
36:50 Speaker 05 yes, there were socialists and communists who rounded up in 1933, but after that, my sort of unreflective thought was that most people fell in line. So it turns out that it's about 95% did fall in line and obey, and about 5% didn't. So 5% is not nothing, and those 5%, those 3 million people deserve great credit, but most do not. And that, I think, begins to tell you something not just about 1930s, 1940s Germany, but probably about human nature, that actually, if you have got something to lose, a family, a job, a home... Your instinct mainly is to stay in line and to keep your head down and hope it passes. And what these people did was so exceptional.
37:35 Speaker 05 And so I think that's the starting point is most of us would not. And it's a hard thing to realise about yourself. And then the second thing is, okay, so what kind of person would? One of the things I wanted to do in the book as much as I could is to see, are there common threads? Is there a type? It's not quite as neat as that. Well, let's say there are two things I discovered that I thought were really interesting. For one thing, there is a large number disproportionate number of women in this group. Several young women, two, those two countesses, one is in her late twenties, one is in her early thirties. There are disproportionate number of women. What the women themselves have in common, I think I probably would have said they've probably got a very strong mother and a role model. Actually, no. What they had in common was strong fathers and strong relationships with their fathers.
38:19 Speaker 05 They were raised by men who inculcated in them the belief that they were as good as any boy and as strong as any man. And that's what all of these people raised separately, it seemed to me they had that in common. And what that did was gave them a kind of confidence, which, under the pressure of the Nazi regime, turned into courage. That they believed that they had agency, they could do something because their father, when they were three or four or seven years old, told them there was nothing they couldn't do. That was one thing. But the second thing, which a lot of these people have in common, again, is not completely neat and across the board.
39:02 Speaker 05 But they have a belief in an authority higher than the government or regime that is at that point persecuting them or ruling them, rather. That they don't believe that the summit of all authority in the world is Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Several of them are religious and they believe there's an authority above the Third Reich, and that is Jesus Christ. And they are answerable, accountable, ultimately to God, rather than to this secular authority. That gives them a kind of confidence to sort of face down the Gestapo men who come to call. And related to that, and it's not always hugely attractive, there's a kind of arrogance
39:46 Speaker 05 that comes from their class, which is, they think, I'm from a nobility that has been here hundreds of years. In some cases, they think they've been there a thousand years. My family, they think, my castle, my estate, my bloodline, will be here long after you, Mr. Hitler, have come and gone. And therefore, I can stand up to you. And in certain cases, in this group, some people have both of those things. In fact, some people have all three. There are women who have had strong fathers, they're conviction Christians, and they believe in their class and in their nobility. Again, you know, if you're a sort of progressive minded Guardian-ish chap
40:29 Speaker 05 like me, it's quite a jolt to realise that actually, that kind of aristocratic swagger can be equipment for resistance. It's not what I would have had in my sort of script, on my bingo card before writing this book, but I now do think it's there. One important caveat, though, it was true of some of these people, but it would be wrong to say it was true of the aristocracy in general. On the contrary, the overwhelming number of German nobles and aristocrats and titled folk absolutely lined up behind Adolf Hitler, the people in this story, absolutely the exception. So while it may have been necessary, it was certainly, you know, to have that aristocratic self-confidence, it wasn't sufficient. These people were exceptional.
41:14 Speaker 05 And why they were is a great question about human nature, one that this story, I think, provides some clues to, but it will remain a sort of perennial eternal question of why do some people do this, and most people rather don't.
41:29 Dan Snow? Lastly, people will be reading it, wondering what the lessons are here as the world backslides away from liberal democracy. And the lesson for me seems to be: Fight like hell before you get to the position where the state is entirely taken over by murderous, genocidal psychopaths. It's go hard. If you're worried about your ability to resist when your life is on the line, go harder earlier.
41:52 Speaker 05 That's completely right. The lesson I take away from it is move fast. I mean, this happened so quickly that there wasn't time to think it through, there wasn't time to see how it plays out, there wasn't time to sort of, let's wait, there's another election cycle coming, let's see what the international community do. None of those things panned out. It moved with lightning speed. And therefore, there is a kind of conclusion about pessimism, which is err on the side of pessimism, assume the worst and act on that basis rather than hoping for the best, because then, you know, you won't be caught short. But yes, you can't
42:31 Speaker 05 afford to wait. These people, several of them did wait. And by the time they were ready to act, their options were so limited and their odds were so stacked against them. Whereas if they had not given time for things to play out and not given things the benefit of the doubt, it would have been wiser. So I do look at a world now in which, as you put it very well, I think, you know, the democratic backsliding is just undeniable. And there is such a loud voice in all of us telling us not to be hysterical. Don't be hyperbothic. Don't overreact. You know, it seems hot-headed to be making these alarmist,
43:16 Speaker 05 drawing alarmist conclusions. And yet now, having written this book and worked on it for most of the last three years, when I hear people sort of think like that, I think the people who argued that last time were wrong. And actually, there isn't much time. You have to move as quickly as you can. You have to get the support and alliances that you can. You are in a hurry.
43:40 Dan Snow? Well, important words. Thank you very much, Jonathan, for coming on the podcast. The book is called?
43:44 Speaker 05 The book is called The Traitor's Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them.
43:51 Dan Snow? I mean, that gets most of the important words into that title and subtitle. There is a master of his art. Well done, you. Spies, rebels, Nazis. That's brilliant. Okay, thank you very much. Good luck with it all, Jonathan.
44:04 Speaker 05 Thank you, Dan. It's been a pleasure.
44:09 Dan Snow? Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube, and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below, and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.
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