Dissension from within
Dr. Gerhard Weinberg, one of the world's most recognized scholars on World War II, discusses dissension over the leadership of Germany and Japan during Saturday's session of the 2014 International Conference on WWII in New Orleans. (Photo by Jeff Stoffer)

Dissension from within

By the middle of 1944, Germany and Japan were both staggering. The D-Day invasion, Allied control of Italy, the Soviet Union's breakthrough on the eastern front and U.S. control of Saipan, inside the Japanese line, had placed the Axis on a course destined for defeat.

Still, the most powerful enemy leaders in both theaters – Germany's Adolf Hitler and Japan's Hideki Tojo – had support from the masses and, especially in Hitler's case, were unwilling to concede. The general populations of their war-torn empires stood by them, often under the threat of execution and certainly spellbound by propaganda. It would take a different kind of revolt to topple either leader, Dr. Gerhard Weinberg explained Saturday at the 2014 International Conference on WWII, produced by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

"In Germany, there was not the slightest chance for a revolution from below," said Weinberg, one of the world's leading scholars on Nazi Germany and World War II. "The only possibility for a change in regime was what might be described as revolution from above, or inside. As a practical matter, this meant killing Hitler."

The situation was similar in Japan where Emperor Hirohito and other top leaders saw the 1944 U.S. seizure of the Mariana Islands and an exhaustion of forces in the Ichi Go strike against China as good reasons to reconsider the leadership of Tojo, who at the time was both the emperor's top general and prime minister. "It was clearly not going well by June of 1944," Weinberg told nearly 1,000 attendees of the conference. "Here was a serious crisis that pointed to a need for change at the top."

All seven Japanese former prime ministers agreed, and Tojo was forced to resign. His departure, however, did not change Japan's war policy. His replacements did little to turn the tide of the war back in favor of Japan or work toward a negotiated peace with the Allies, who were closing in. Thirteen months later, the atomic bomb would end all discussion.

The first known attempt to assassinate Hitler, meanwhile, came in March 1943 when a bomb planted in his plane by one of his own officers did not detonate. His staff were preparing for his death, however it may come, with a procedure code-named "Valkyrie." The plan called for a military takeover of Germany in the event of Hitler's assassination. The new leadership, explained Weinberg, would have to convince the general population – still largely mesmerized by Hitler and his distorted vision – that the fuhrer's death would not doom Germany. "The new regime could explain itself to the population and try to make peace with the Allies."

Claus von Stauffenberg, a Nazi officer who had tried to recruit others to join him in an effort to kill Hitler, nearly succeeded on July 20, 1944. He had left a briefcase with a bomb in it under a table at a meeting attended by Hitler. The briefcase was moved, killing and wounding other Nazi leaders, but only slightly injuring Hitler. When the bomb went off, Valkyrie orders were issued throughout the Nazi empire. Hitler, however, was not dead, and almost-simultaneous orders appeared, attesting to his survival. "The locals had to decide," Weinberg said.

"Hitler was surprised" about the attempt, Weinberg said. "And he was furious."

All except one general in his army, who was stationed in Paris, rejected the Valkyrie orders. "Most of them were confirmed adherents to Hitler and his policies," Weinberg said. "At least they were until they wrote their memoirs after the war." Many, including Stauffenberg, were executed for their actions or inactions in the conspiracy.

Japan and Germany alike were thus poised to endure their fates as the Allies moved on Berlin and three months later, the United States delivered the atomic bombs on Japan.

Neither regime tolerated dissension from its people. Those who were considered resisters – aside from the small "white rose" student movement in Germany – were typically executed. It was simply over contacts with those who supported assassinating Hitler that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler's most beloved military generals, was forced to commit suicide in the summer of 1944.

That there was, in fact, some resistance to the dictatorship "did leave postwar Germany with a positive legacy," Weinberg said. "Postwar Germany needed those who had followed a moral compass."

The terminations of World War II's most infamous leaders – Hitler by suicide as the Allies were entering Berlin and Tojo by resignation, followed by his 1948 execution as a war criminal – definitively ended any chance of Axis recovery or reinvention. If their leadership had ended sooner, by assassination or popular revolt, millions of lives might have been saved, Weinberg said.

"If there had been a successful assassination, the mass killings would have come to a halt. The Allies would have insisted on an unconditional surrender. This was a war in which people were dying by the thousands every day. The sooner you end it, the more people would survive."

One woman who lost two brothers and a sister-in-law late in the war came to the conference to describe what it was like to serve in the French resistance as a teen-aged girl. Colette Marin-Catherine of Caen, France, told the crowd through a translator of the horrors of German occupation in Normandy, which led her family to support the Allies before the D-Day invasion.

When asked about other French citizens who submitted to the four-year German occupation and worked in support of the Nazis, she said through a translator, "If I could, I would kill them."

She told of hauling the dead and wounded across the Normandy countryside to a converted field hospital in Bayeux where she was quickly put to work as a volunteer nurse. Her brothers and sister-in-law, meanwhile, were sent to Nazi work camps where they perished.

She said she remembers helping treat one German soldier in Bayeux, a prisoner who was astonished that he had received any kind of care from the Americans or French.

Even today, however, she resents the turmoil, destruction and death Germany brought to Normandy during World War II. "I personally wouldn't shake hands with a German person over 70 years old," she told the crowd.