Gestapo Interrogation Transcripts: Professor Kurt Huber and Falk Harnack. NJ1704. (English Edition) [Kindle-editie] beoordelingen het boek quotes

When one views the interrogations of Professor Kurt Huber and Falk Harnack side by side, it's easier to comprehend the reasons for the work-ending acrimony that caused the demise of White Rose resistance in February 1943.Too often, White Rose resistance is depicted as a homogeneous effort to overthrow Hitler's evil regime. Writers portray the group of friends as all-Christian, all-democratic, all steadfastly anti-Nazi. The reality of who they were, how they thought, and what they did could not have been further from that standard portrait.On the one hand, we see Professor Kurt Huber, an intellectual of incomparable standing. He moved in heady circles, counting as close friends Karl Alexander von Müller (President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, mentor of Adolf Hitler), Generaldirektor Max Gottfried Dingler, and Georg Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck.With these Nazi intellectuals, Huber had been free to express otherwise-dissident opinions about the corporal who had taken the (they believed) good ideas of National Socialism and made them too communistic. They supported the military, regretting only that Hitler was causing them to lose the war. Huber and these friends were all for the freedom of the individual, as long as the individuals in question were Aryans.Above all, Huber resented Hitler for having alienated England. He believed that Germany should have allied with England in a larger campaign to rid the world of Communism and Soviet domination.On the other side of the equation we see Falk Harnack. He had been born into a prestigious family that included the esteemed theologian Adolf von Harnack in its lineage, and the Bonhoeffer brothers as cousins. Falk's brother Arvid and sister-in-law Mildred (nee Fish) had headed up the so-called Red Orchestra, with Arvid executed in December 1942 and Mildred on February 16, 1943 for their part in that conspiracy.Very left-leaning, Falk argued against the Soviet form of Communism while supporting basic concepts of socialized government. The Harnacks believed that world peace could only come about when West and East met on common ground.Huber and Harnack had sparred at a meeting in Munich in mid-February 1943, leaving the White Rose friends shaken. Huber's continued 'participation' in their intrigue hinged upon their willingness to dissociate from Harnack, a step few of the friends were eager to take.The Huber-Harnack animosity did not stop with that meeting. The two men continued their verbal battle during their respective Gestapo interrogations. On the pages of this book, we have the clearest portrayal of the fundamental challenge faced not only by the friends in the White Rose, but by all who tried to overthrow Hitler's corrupt, criminal regime: How could people band together in common cause against National Socialism, when their political convictions could not otherwise be reconciled?