Henning Von Tresckow - Opposition To Hitler

Opposition To Hitler

Although he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of Nazism because it opposed the Treaty of Versailles, he was quickly disillusioned by 1934 when Schutzstaffel (SS) extrajudicially murdered many SA leaders and political opponents, including two generals, in the Night of the Long Knives (30 June 1934). The events of the 1930s, such as the 1938 Blomberg–Fritsch Affair, further strengthened his antipathy to the Nazis. He regarded the Kristallnacht (state-sanctioned, nationwide pogrom of Jews) as personal humiliation and degradation of civilization. He thus sought out civilians and officers who opposed Hitler, such as Erwin von Witzleben, who dissuaded Tresckow from resigning from the Army arguing that they would be needed when the day of reckoning came. By the summer of 1939, he told Fabian von Schlabrendorff, his cousin by marriage, that "both duty and honor demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism to save Germany and Europe from barbarism."

In the campaign against the Soviet Union, Tresckow resumed his resistance activities with renewed urgency. He was appalled by the Commissar Order, the treatment of Russian prisoners of war, and in particular the mass shootings of Jewish women and children by the Einsatzgruppen behind the lines. When he learned about the massacre of thousands of Jews at Borisov, Tresckow appealed passionately to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock: "Never may such a thing happen again! And so we must act now. We have the power in Russia!" (Although Bock personally detested Nazism, he remained loyal to Hitler.) As the chief operations officer of Army Group Center, he systematically placed officers who shared his views in key positions. They included Lieutenant Colonel Georg Schulze-Büttger, Colonel Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, Major Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg, Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Lieutenant Philipp von Boeselager and his brother Georg von Boeselager, Lieutenant Colonel Hans-Alexander von Voss and Lieutenant Colonel Berndt von Kleist among others, many of them from Tresckow's old Infantry Regiment 9. The headquarters of Army Group Center thus emerged as the new nerve center of Army resistance. At the end of September 1941, Tresckow sent his special operations officer Schlabrendorff to Berlin to contact opposition groups and declare that the staff of Army Group Center was "prepared to do anything." This approach, made at the height of German expansion and the nadir of anti-Hitler opposition, represented the first initiative to come from the front and from the Army, as Ulrich von Hassell noted in his diary. Schlabrendorff continued to serve as liaison between Army Group Center and opposition circle around General Ludwig Beck, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Colonel Hans Oster, the deputy head of Abwehr (German military intelligence) who was involved in 1938 coup attempt against Hitler (Oster Conspiracy). Oster's recruitment of General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office headquarters, in 1942 linked this asset to Tresckow's resistance group in Army Group Centre, creating a viable coup apparatus.