Stephan Malinowski - Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance

The nobility are masters of self-portrayal. They possess the unrivalled ability to present stylized impressions of themselves in images and legends and find storytellers who will transmit, and continually reinvent, their tales throughout the ages. In 2008, the American director Bryan Singera figure who had recently re-entered the limelight with his blockbuster Superman Returnserected a cinematic monument to one of the best-known representatives of twentieth-century German nobility. In the closing scene of the film Valkyrie, Singer and his leading man Tom Cruise resurrected a controversial version of the Resistance fighter Count Stauffenbergs execution by firing squad. According to the legend, the marksmen had to open fire twice during the night of 20 July 1944 to gun down the highly educated, charismatic driving force behind the failed rebellion against the National Socialist regime.

In Singers version of the tale, the scene that played out in the courtyard of the nerve centre of military power in Berlin becomes one of the most striking images connected with the conservative opposition to National Socialist rule. At the moment the first command was given to fireor so the story goesStauffenbergs adjutant Werner von Haeften made a dramatic gesture, throwing himself in front of his leader and intercepting the bullets with his body. Before Stauffenberg was cut down by the second salvo, he is said to have stood straight-backed and shouted, Long live the secret Germany! The victims corpses were summarily buried in a Berlin cemetery before being unearthed and incinerated shortly afterwards on Heinrich Himmlers orders, their ashes taken to the south of the city and scattered to the wind.

This scene appears to be a densely symbolic manifestation of the nobilitys irreconcilability with National Socialism. On one hand there is the Nazi killing machine embodied by Fritz Frommthe middle-class general who spinelessly betrayed the uprising and ordered the conspirators executionand by Heinrich Himmler, the prophet of a new nobility and the Fhrer of the SS who was consumed by anxious hatred as he hounded the rebels and their families and annihilated their remains. On the other hand are the victims of this murderous apparatus, the Resistance members who exhibited the nobilitys guiding principle of Haltung (bearing) in its purest form. These individuals laudable mission is encapsulated by Stauffenbergs climactic last words that pay tribute to the man he called Meister, the poet and self-declared aristocrat Stefan George. It was George who had conjured up the vision of the secret Germany, a hidden realm that would be accessible only to a privileged few. Ever since the 1920s, this evocative concept had been a watchword for the dream of forging a clandestine alliance between the wise, the noble, and the good.

Legends often contain a core of historical truth, and the fundamental disparity between the Nazis and the nobility is not just portrayed in the plotlines of evocative Hollywood films. Indeed, at least at first glance, it seems that National Socialism and the nobilitys centuries-old traditions were worlds apart and that shifting their loyalty from the Imperial Kaiser to the National Socialist Fhrer would be the last thing to attract the aristocracy. As a result of this impression, the research for this book began from a position of bewilderment. How could a group that placed such great store by tradition, perseverance, leadership experience, and a whole arsenal of positive values join forcesboth socially and ideologicallywith the twentieth-century radical Right? How could the nobilitya group with a subtle system of titles and an ancient conviction in their own superioritysuddenly bow down to a malevolent regime? And finally, how could the aristocratic belief in their inborn ability to rule allow itself to become subsumed by the lower-middle-class ideology of the racially defined