Newton’s First Law of Motion states, “Every object persists in its state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed on it.” Edit that thought—cut out some words, replace a few others, and you arrive at where we are today: The Trump administration will barrel ahead unless it is stopped by an insurmountable force. What force? James Madison unknowingly identified it in Federalist 55: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
To find those qualities that justify esteem and confidence, we can look to an unexpected source: Nazi Germany. In the documentary The Restless Conscience (available on Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes), director Hava Beller details the little-known German resistance, men and women of all classes, political thought, and religious persuasions who attempted to stop Hitler through individual, resolute acts of conscience. They were unable to constitute an insurmountable force against Hitler, but they embodied the qualities we may need to confront Trump in extremis. [Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before Trump tested positive for Covid, but his condition might make him even more desperate and dangerous.]
JGM: When did you first hear about the German resistance?
HB: I met a woman named Dorothea von Haeften-Steinhardt in the spring of 1981. She was telling me about her childhood in Germany when she mentioned her father, Hans Bernd von Haeften, who had been hanged by the Nazis for his role in the German Resistance. She said her father had been a civil-service diplomat before Hitler came to power and that he stayed in the Foreign Office to be more useful to the resistance.
He was part of a group of civilians—the Kreisau Circle—who resisted Hitler from the beginning. They formed in 1937 and met at Kreisau, at the home of Helmuth and Freya von Moltke. It was initially a group of anti-Nazi friends—socialists, intellectuals, pastors, educators, trade unionists, civil servants, Social Democrats—who aspired to create external conditions for a coup d’etat. They drew a plan for a future government after the Nazis would be gone, prepared constitutional drafts, and had repeated contacts with the Allies. There were many interior disagreements. Some felt they didn’t want to use the same methods as the Nazis: killing Hitler would still be killing. Others thought this was the only way to finally get rid of him.
When Dorothea told me about her father, my immediate response was the same I continue to have: If I had been in their place, caught up at that time, at that place, how would I have reacted? Would I have had the courage to do what they did?
JGM: Who were the resisters? Many of them seemed to come from the aristocracy.
HB: The resisters came from all walks of life. There were communists and socialists and educators and politicians and army officers and religious people. Trade union members, military intelligence, and officers from the Foreign Office. Sometimes it looks like it was primarily military or aristocracy because they had the cover of an official position, so they ended up being the ones who had the opportunity to act on the goal of eliminating Hitler.
JGM: Your film depicts the difficulty of building a resistance movement in Germany; the resisters generally worked in isolation.
HB: That’s one of the other particulars of this resistance. Because the Gestapo was very effective in uncovering resistance and separate subversive activities, Germans could not organize like resistance groups in other countries. They were very much isolated. They worked as individuals, who eventually got into loose groups of friends. Some of them didn’t know each other. And it was very dangerous to know each other, because if any of them would be caught and tortured, they might divulge names of fellow resisters.
JGM: As you interviewed the resisters’ families, did similar themes keep coming up in terms of their motivations and tactics?
HB: Of course—it was individual moral choice versus an evil regime. They were motivated by moral choices.
JGM: From early on there were numerous attempts by different anti-Nazi groups, some military, some civilians, to alert the allies about Hitler’s intentions. Tell us about them.
HB: Earlier I mentioned Hans Bernd von Haeften and the Kreisau Circle. Adam von Trott zu Solz had contact with Oxford because he was a Rhodes scholar there. He spoke at Oxford and also tried to contact Halifax at that time, but he was limited in what he could say outright because it was very dangerous. In order to be allowed to travel abroad for his resistance activities, he had to keep his position in the Foreign Office as a cover. Ironically, he was not trusted because he was in the Foreign Office and because he could not declare his intentions outright, lest that information travel back to Germany and compromise and endanger the underground resisters.
JGM: The resistance seemed to proceed in stages, from efforts to prevent Hitler’s coming to power, to attempts to prosecute Hitler for violation of civil rights, then assassination attempts when there appeared to be no other option. Did you get a sense of evolution within the German resistance movement?
HB: Yes and no. Yes to a point, in a larger curve. It did proceeded in stages, prompted by changing circumstances, but there was no change in the determination of the resisters.
There were only differences of opinion.
There were at least twenty attempts made on Hitler’s life. As time moved on and the urgency escalated, the methods escalated as well. At one point there was mounting exasperation as one attempt after another failed, and some of the resisters were arrested and tortured, increasing the danger of being discovered, while the Gestapo was getting closer. At the same time there was the forbidden information slipping in about the atrocities and the camps, all of which accelerated the resisters’ resolve.
JGM: I’d like to get back to the question of personal motivation. Tell me about Axel von dem Bussche.
HB: He was an 18-year-old soldier in the Nazi army when they went into Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia, and France. As a young man, he didn’t question what he was doing. When I interviewed him many years later, he said it was as if a curtain had been pulled over his mind…until he witnessed the massacre of Jews in Dubno, Russia. That propelled him into action. During our interview, Bussche recounted witnessing the long lines of naked men, women, and children as they were led into a pit to be murdered by black-uniformed SS. He said, “It took me some time to understand that extermination was going on, extermination of Jews, and instinctively I knew that some kind of traditional, accepted harmony had been destroyed here.”
He is the everyman—every one of us who does not respond to things we witness. But for him, it evolved. There came a point where he had to react. He decided to take the ultimate step: he volunteered for a suicide mission to assassinate Hitler.
For me, one of the things that was really special about the German resistance is that they didn’t have to do what they did. They didn’t have to endanger themselves, and they didn’t have to endanger their families. It was a choice. What I found so incredible, and what propelled me to drop everything to spend ten years making this film, was trying to know what happened and to understand it.
JGM: What did you come to understand after making the film that you didn’t understand before?
HB: It’s a personal question, but I’ll try to answer the best I can. I grew up in a kibbutz, a socialist utopia where everybody is equal in all respects. We grew up to care for others and to stand up for what is right, to take a very high moral ground. But very early in my life, I perceived a dichotomy between our high aspirations and the way we really are.
When I heard that there were German resisters, I was very surprised, then I found out many people didn’t know about it. I had to find out: I cannot explain beyond that. I did not accept the fact that they were the disappeared, that they did something that I found extraordinary and nobody, except for a very few people, cared.
I wanted to learn who they were, why they did what they did, what obstacles they had to face and overcome. I needed to understand what was at stake, and how the resisters found the will and the courage to stand up to that evil.
The difficulties I encountered trying to get support for the film was a saga in itself.
The first response was “You have a one-minute film” (meaning: there was no resistance”!) or “We don’t want to create a new myth about Germany” or “We don’t want to whitewash the Germans.” And finally: “We don’t want to know about it!”
JGM: Let’s move from Germany to the present. I don’t know your politics, so let me phrase my question judiciously. Based on your personal history, based on what you learned in making this film, do you believe that people have a moral obligation to resist a head of state who is clearly dangerous to democracy and the rule of law?
HB: So much so that it’s not even a question. Yes. The question is, How? How to do it so it succeeds with a minimum of lives lost. What’s going on now screams to heaven.
JGM: Do you have a sense of how we can resist Trump?
HB: No. I don’t know. It takes the wind out of me because I don’t know. You need a common denominator to give to people or organizations, something to begin with so we can decide how to proceed, to keep—I’ll take it to an extreme—to keep alive.
I don’t want to politicize this interview or this film, because the film itself is really about the challenge and the essence of being human, but I must say that I watched the speeches at the first night of the Republican convention and I got sick.
I don’t even know how to describe this state of being. Evil is just play, evil is nothing. It’s unacceptable, and I don’t have answers except it’s unacceptable. It seems to me that at the moment what is being done is the only way, and I don’t have an answer. I know what I want, but I don’t know how to achieve it.
JGM: My husband insists on watching the Republican convention because he truly believes one should know thine enemy.
HB: He’s right. That’s why I tried to watch, but I couldn’t.
JGM: The situation is giving me a perpetual migraine, but I know I have to focus. I know I have to figure out a path of resistance that’s appropriate for me. To a certain extent, I know what I’m going to do. I know where I’m going to put my energies and what actions I want to take. But I wonder if that’s the answer—that everyone has to figure out their own path for action.
HB: That’s right. That’s bringing it back to the German resistance. They were at the same place, just a little more advanced.
JGM: You made the film in the ’90s, when the political situation in this country was very different from what it is today. But what message do you want audiences to take away from the film now, under Trump?
HB: To put it very clumsily, follow your conscience. That’s really all that’s left to us. Do what you believe is right.