SOURCES OF SUPPORT FOR “CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARY”

WRITERS

The June Club, founded in Berlin to revive the “Spirit of 1914” and reconstituted by its most conservative members in 1924/25 as the Herrenklub

The “Stahlhelm: League of Combat Veterans”

The German Nationalist Union of Commercial Employees (DHV) and its “Hanseatic Press”

The Benedictine Monastery of Maria Laach, which organized retreats for Catholic monarchists

The magazine Die Tat, which hired the “conservative revolutionary” Hans Zehrer as chief editor in 1929

Lieutenant Ernst Jünger(1895-1998):

Photographed soon after the war’s end with

thePour le mérite

(the “Blue Max”):Storm of Steel (1920) made him famous….

“And You?”(Stahlhelm poster,

1932):This “League of

Combat Veterans” grew to about

300,000 members in the mid-1920s.

A provincial Stahlehlm rally proclaimed in September 1928 that “We hate with all our souls the current state form, because it hinders the liberation of our enslaved

Fatherland.”

Here 50,000 attend a Berlin Stahlhelm rally in 1929

The “First President” of the Stahlhelm, Franz Seldte,

supported the DVP, but his “Co-President” Theodor Duesterberg,

pushed for a rightist “National Front”

The DNVP supported Duesterberg for

President in March 1932

“Whoever desires a true NATIONAL COMMUNITY votes for Duesterberg, the German man” (March

1932):Duesterberg was shocked to learn during the

campaign that his own grandfather was Jewish….

Emblem of the German

Nationalist Union of Commercial

Employees (DHV),Hamburg, 1899:

“United and Strong, German to

the core!”(With monument to the victory of

the ancient Germans over the Roman legions in

the Battle of Teutoberg Forest)

In this poster from 1906 and postcard from 1901, the DHV seeks to rally white-

collar workers behind demands for old-age pensions,

guaranteed Sunday holidays, and other typical demands of

the labor movement.

The DHV chair Hans Bechly (left) joined the DVP and sought to strengthen the political middle, but

his director of political education, Max Habermann, insisted that the DHV publicize Young Conservative and even Nazi writers

By 1932 a large majority of DHV members voted Nazi, even though DHV leaders backed Brüning

Hitler as the heir to Frederick the Great and Bismarck

(postcard from 1933)

Hitler and the Crown Prince, March 21, 1933

A DNVP youth group marches through Potsdam, March 1933

Edgar Jung (1894-1934)

Free Corps veteran 1924: Organized the

assassination of pro-French separatists in Speyer, then opened law practice in Munich

1927: Published The Regime of the Inferior

1932: Advisor and speechwriter for Chancellor Papen

June 1934: Shot on Hitler’s orders for writing Papen’s Marburg Speech

The monastery church at Maria Laach, the Benedictine Abbey restored in the 1890s. By 1932

the monks expected a Red Revolution and called for a new “Holy Roman Empire.”

The monks celebrated the advent of the 3rd Reich in 1933, but when Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick visited them, he reproached them for not following German

artistic models

THE DISILLUSIONMENT OF ABBOT ILDEFONS HERWEGEN

April 1933: Writes all bishops to advocate “an unambiguous YES to the New State.”May 28, 1933: Addresses mass rally in Cologne to urge all Catholics to participate in Third Reich.June 1933: Grants sanctuary to his boyhood friend Konrad Adenauer.January 1934: Tells another monk that “Hitler had a good idea, but his ‘helpers’ have gotten out of control. He has grave objections to the sterilizations, persecution of religious youth groups, and suppression of all criticism.”March 1934: Tells another monk that “We are governed by criminals.”

Hitler shows Mussolini the conference room in East Prussia where he was almost killed on July 20, 1944

Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg

Field Marshall Erwin von Witzleben before the“People’s Tribunal” in Berlin (executed on August

8)

Carl Goerdeler before the People’s Tribunal, August 1944

The execution chamber where the death agony of the ringleaders was filmed for Hitler’s

entertainment

OVERVIEW OF “RESISTANCE” PROTAGONISTS

MILITARY OFFICERS

CIVIL SERVANTS

CATHOLIC CLERGY

PROTESTANT CLERGY

LABORITES

Ludwig BeckCarl Goerdeler

Cardinal Faulhaber

Martin Niemöller

Wilhelm Leuschner

Hans OsterAdam von Trott zu Solz

Bishop Galen (Münster)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Julius Leber

Henning von Tresckow

Johannes Popitz

[Konrad von Preysing]

Theophil Wurm

Klaus von Stauffenberg

Ulrich von Hassell

[Alfred Delp, SJ]

Otto DibeliusJakob Kaiser

Admiral Canaris

[Bernhard Lichtenberg]

Max Habermann