Gestapo agents arrived at the Berlin apartment of Countess Maria von Maltzan in 1943 after being tipped off by one of her neighbors. They were searching for a Jewish man they believed to be hiding in her home. In fact, her Jewish lover was lying in the base of a heavy mahogany sofa bed that was locked from the inside; he had codeine to suppress his persistent cough. When the agents failed to pry the sofa bed open, Maltzan told them it was stuck, but they could “shoot through the couch” if they thought she was hiding anything. Her one condition, delivered in the haughty tone of an offended aristocrat, was that they sign a note guaranteeing repayment for the damage. Her bluff worked—and both she and her lover would survive against all odds until the Third Reich’s defeat.
As Jonathan Freedland notes in “The Traitors Circle,” of the more than 160,000 Jews who lived in Berlin before Hitler took power in 1933, only about 1,500 were left when World War II ended. Known within their own ranks as “U-boats,” they survived under seemingly impossible conditions thanks to the ingenuity and courage of Maltzan and others like her. Mr. Freedland, a columnist for the Guardian and the author of “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World” (2022), argues that the domestic opponents of Hitler who saved Jews and engaged in other “treasonous” acts have not received anything like the recognition they deserve. “The Traitors Circle” is aimed at rectifying that situation.
There are good reasons why German resisters, repeatedly stymied in their attempts to assassinate Hitler or at least stir up wider opposition to his regime, have not achieved the fame of the exponentially larger, far more effective resistance movements that were mounted in Poland, France and other occupied countries. But Mr. Freedland fashions an engrossing narrative out of their daring if at times bungling exploits, hard-won successes (especially when it came to saving individual Jews) and tragic failures.
Mr. Freedland focuses on a group of dissidents who were not “the usual suspects.” They were not communists or, with one exception, Jewish. Instead, they represented German high society, possessing “titles and jewels and impeccable contacts,” he writes. Most significantly, they shared a growing hatred of Hitler’s regime. A sense of duty, rooted for many in a profound Christian faith, impelled each to take extraordinary risks. As Mr. Freedland points out, given the circumstances, “almost all of us would have stayed silent.”
In some cases, the heroes of his book spoke up right away. Shortly after Hitler took power in January 1933, Otto Kiep, Germany’s consul general in New York, was invited to a dinner honoring Albert Einstein—a fundraiser for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He accepted and made a short speech at the event, praising the guest of honor. At a time when Einstein was already receiving death threats, Kiep had chosen to do what would have been perfectly normal a few years before. It was seen by the Nazi authorities as provocative defiance.
Kiep soon resigned as consul general, but he still was sent on trade missions. In at least one case, he signed a mandatory oath of loyalty to Hitler. He was not alone in trying to navigate between his conscience and the mounting pressures to conform. Elisabeth von Thadden, like Maltzan, had been born into the landed aristocracy. She was the headmistress of a Christian boarding school for girls that promoted traditional values while ostensibly accepting the changes required by the new order. But the balancing act ended when she read from the Old Testament—Jewish Scripture—on a day of national celebration, and the 13-year-old daughter of a baroness loyal to the Nazis informed on her. Thadden was forced out of her position at the school in 1941, only fueling her determination to oppose the regime more forcefully.
The centerpiece of Mr. Freedland’s spellbinding account is a gathering of a circle of friends on Sept. 10, 1943. Ostensibly, this was simply a tea party; in reality, it brought together like-minded souls who had known one another since the prewar era. They were comfortable confiding in one another the point of calling the war “already a lost cause for Germany,” as Kiep put it. Johanna Solf, the widow of a former German ambassador who had hosted earlier political salons, volunteered that once a new government took over Hitler would be put “against a wall.”
Their openness proved to be a huge mistake. Thadden, the former schoolmistress, had vouched for a newcomer named Paul Reckzeh who attended the party. Reckzeh had been set up as a spy and agent provocateur by the Gestapo: Thadden had been fooled by his elaborately constructed cover story. Reckzeh was a doctor at Berlin’s Charité hospital who posed as an anti-Nazi but was all too eager to play his part in the unmasking of the participants. He provided the testimony that led to a series of arrests—then interrogations and torture, followed in most cases by a final march to the gallows, firing squad or guillotine.
Informers were everywhere in Hitler’s Germany, outnumbering active resisters by far. When Thadden was mercilessly tortured before her execution, she admitted her role but refused to implicate anyone else. She already felt guilty enough for her fatal misjudgment of Reckzeh, who would survive the war and repeatedly elude attempts to bring him to justice afterward. He died in Hamburg at the age of 82 in 1996.
In the final days of the Third Reich, the Nazis were more frantic than ever in their pursuit of their opponents, real or imagined, and were relentless in their efforts to squeeze out more denunciations. “The war against the Allies was nearly over, but the Reich’s war on the German citizens it had branded as traitors would be fought to the very end,” Mr. Freedland writes. This made the courage of the true resisters all that more remarkable.
Mr. Nagorski is the author of “Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.”
