The Silent Opposition
The Memoirs of Ernst von Weizsäcker.
by John Andrews.
Regnery. 322 pp. $5.00.
In 1949 Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker was condemned at Nuremberg to seven years’ imprisonment on a charge of war crimes. His sentence was commuted and he was released in October of 1950; he died last August. For five vital years, from 1938 to 1945, he had been the head of Hitler’s foreign office, the man who made practical and consistent, or may even have modified, the criminal and aggressive foreign policy of Hitler and Ribbentrop. The verdict of the court was not indeed unanimous. Weizsäcker was known not to be a real Nazi; there was evidence that he had sought at some risk to prevent the war; and a dissenting judge recommended acquittal. His condemnation therefore raised doubts in many liberal minds. What was a German civil servant to do under Nazi masters? To resign, and thereby abandon all hope of preventing disaster? Or stay in office and risk condemnation by the victors?
The dilemma is genuine; and after the judgment against him (and in spite of a somewhat sinister account of his attitude in Ulrich von Hassell’s diary), Weizsäcker enjoyed a good reputation among Anglo-Saxons, who have never had to face this dilemma and are chary of too easy answers. As if to consolidate this reputation, he then, like so many Germans, published his memoirs. If this was his purpose, he once again, as so often in his politics, proved a bad calculator. Henceforth—in the English-speaking world at least—the portrait of the virtuous Weizsäcker is irreparably destroyed.
‘At first sight, observing the jaunty complacency of the author, his small-town snobbism, his utter lack of subtlety or introspection, his grotesque triviality, we might well be tempted to dismiss him sympathetically as a diligent but second-rate official of little intellectual capacity, short political vision, and no moral stamina, uncomfortably lodged in a key position and faced with problems beyond his powers. In fact this would be too favorable a view: it omits the evidence, obvious in spite of an ambiguous and evasive style, of real political intentions, which he never disclaimed.
Weizsäcker was a Swabian, with all the self-satisfaction and servility of the official aristocracy in a petty court. He had an abbreviated education and in his memoirs gives no evidence that he ever contemplated thinking. The only maxim which he mentions as guiding his life is in dubio abstine—“when in doubt, keep quiet”: a policy of evasion to which he has certainly remained faithful. After twenty years’ service as a naval officer he slid, through the office of naval attaché, into regular diplomacy, and there, by his diligent, compliant conduct, reached in eighteen years the top of his profession. Meanwhile, in 1933, Hitler had come to power, and thereafter Weizsäcker had to ask himself that formidable question: what, in such circumstances, does a respectable civil servant do? If we can believe him, he asked himself repeatedly. Unfortunately, never having thought deeply, he was not competent to answer so difficult a question. Therefore he adopted the easy solution: in dubio abstine.
In 1933 Weizsäcker decided that Hitler might be a statesman after all, so that it was his duty to stay in office. His reasons proved wrong, but he nevertheless stayed. In 1934 he found that Hitler, being a criminal murderer, could not last, so that Weizsäcker must stay to serve his successor. Hitler did last, but Weizsäcker nevertheless stayed, and, since others went, was promoted. After all, if Hitler was to last, was it not all the more necessary for Weizsäcker to stay, to control him? Hitler proved uncontrollable, but Weizsäcker still stayed. In 1938 Weizsäcker found it his duty to stay in order to prevent war. He did not prevent it, but he still stayed. In 1939 he found it his duty to stay in order to arrange a compromise peace. He did not do so, but he still stayed. He stayed in order “to shake off the dictatorship.” He did not shake it off, but he still stayed. He stayed until 1943 when he was transferred to be German ambassador to the Vatican.
So far, all this, though unedifying, is understandable. It is the reaction, of thousands of Germans who, being dependent on regular employment, and having families to maintain, doubted but complied, and now, by the plea of human cowardice, and by inventing retrospective but unplausible reasons, excuse themselves. If Weizsäcker had been at all contrite about his failure he might similarly—though less properly, for of the educated we demand higher standards—have claimed to be excused. In fact however he was not: indeed, his complacency is nauseating. By staying he achieved absolutely nothing except to further Hitler’s war. Nevertheless his determination to stay is represented by him throughout as a positive virtue.
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Why did he stay? Clearly not through any real scruples. A careful examination of this sorry collection of half-told facts and shifty arguments gives proof of that. In fact Weizsäcker had a policy. He was a German nationalist whose general sympathy with Hitler’s aims was obscured and modified not by moral scruples, or political principles, or common humanity, but by fear. He was afraid of defeat. If Hitler could gain his objects without war, no one was more willing to help him than Weizsäcker. He approved of the absorption of Czechoslovakia and Poland—provided it was done without risk of defeat in war. Munich he regarded as a triumph; for it was both a victory for Hitler, and bloodless; Chamberlain, whose surrender made it bloodless, was “a great man”; and no praise is high enough for the chief advocate of such surrender, Sir Nevile Henderson.
The great crime, in Weizsäcker’s eyes, was not to assist Hitler but to “exasperate” him. For all his insistence on the necessity (for others) of showing Hitler their strength, when others actually did so (in May 1938) Weizsäcker wrung his hands at this “unfortunate psychological error.” His own opposition, so often and so loudly asserted, consists only in retrospectively ascribing to himself phrases of meaningless ambiguity which he can now usefully reinterpret, and in assuring us that when General Beck—a real opponent of Hitler—ignored his timid advice and insisted on resigning, Weizsäcker, as an expression of sympathy, gave him a copy of Plutarch.
In truth, we have had enough of these “good Germans” who stayed in office for the good they could do. What good did they do? Here or there one or two of them may have softened an order, saved a friend: but what is that against the wholesale crimes which by their wholesale timidity they made possible? Hitler could never have ruined Europe without their compliance, and their only possible excuse is a frank confession of asininity—or silence. If standards of right and wrong, truth and false hood, are ever to return to European politics, this should be recognized. The Weizsäckers should appear before the public in white sheets, not blowing these discreet and furtive trumpets.
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