They had status, safety and power — and still chose to defy Hitler

Jonathan Freedland didn’t set out to write a guidebook to resistance. He was researching the story of Rudolf Vrba, the young Jewish escapee from Auschwitz who became the subject of his 2022 book, “The Escape Artist.” Freedland stumbled upon something odd: Heinrich Himmler, in an August 1944 speech, casually referred to a “reactionary cabal … prattling over tea,” now safely in Gestapo custody.

Tea?

In September 1943, a small group that included aristocrats, a diplomat, a pioneering educator and an intelligence officer gathered in a Berlin drawing room — not to gossip, but to quietly defy the Nazi regime. What they didn’t know: one among them was an informant. Their story, Freedland realized, was less a footnote than a thriller — a drawing-room mystery where the stakes were life and death. 

His new book, “The Traitors Circle,” tells that story. Subtitled “The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany — and the Spy Who Betrayed Them,” it celebrates an unlikely group of dissenters who, “when their country was in the grip of a terrible darkness … risked everything to break ranks and say no.” But because it arrives at a fraught political moment, it is also about the present, when many — certainly on the left — are asking how to push back when they see democratic norms being broken.

Freedland’s book joins a growing shelf of recent books urging resistance to autocracy. They include Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny,” M. Gessen’s “Surviving Autocracy,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s “Strongmen,” Timothy Ryback’s “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” and Anne Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy.” Most write that the United States is not Germany in 1933 and Trump is no Hitler, but warn about the ways democracies can surrender to or slowly devolve into autocracy. The small concessions. The rationalizing. The insistence that the institutions will hold, or the strongman can’t get away with it, or that his extremism can be co-opted and controlled. 

In a public conversation last week sponsored by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Freedland insisted that it would be facile to draw parallels between Nazi Germany and modern America. “It would be an insult to the victims of Adolph Hitler. These things are not the same. But two things do not have to be identical for one to shed useful light on the other,” he told me.

Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian and co-host, with Israeli journalist Yonit Levi, of the podcast “The Unholy,” cited three backsliding countries: Victor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. 

It’s “the same pattern: The democratically elected leader decides that they want all power to concentrate in their hands,” he said. “And so they methodically set about removing or hobbling those bodies which could act as a restraint on their power: the universities, the law courts, the press, the independent civil service or federal bureaucracy.”

The most familiar stories of German resistance usually involve a band of romantic students (the doomed conspiracy known as the White Rose) or the military idealists behind the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. The resisters at the tea party weren’t necessarily liberals, socialists or even, in some cases, particularly sympathetic to Jews. Some had flirted with nationalism. 

Admittedly, many of these figures were slow converts to opposition. When the Nazis rose to power in the early 1930s, they were skeptical and suspicious — but also hopeful.

“Maybe he’ll shake things up,” Freedland said, describing their thinking. “Maybe he can be managed.” Their horror wasn’t immediate, but cumulative. The regime violated their code: aristocratic, ethical, occasionally snobbish, but rooted in duty, honor and a sense of the common good.

Some were appalled not only by Hitler’s brutality but by his vulgarity — the ways he contaminated their idea of Germanness.

“Not because they were philo-Semites,” Freedland explained, “but because they believed the mistreatment of Jews debased what it meant to be German.” 

Freedland shares the story of Otto Kiep, a glamorous German aristocrat who served as Germany’s consul general in New York. When Hitler came to power, Kiep faced his first moral test: accept an invitation to a Jewish fundraiser honoring Albert Einstein — or decline out of loyalty to the new regime. Kiep chose Einstein, and earned a summons to meet with Hitler. (Hitler apparently forgave his envoy, who would later serve in the armed forces high command, where he would cooperate with various resistance networks.)

Resistance, Freedland said, “comes early — if your conscience is attuned.”  

At the heart of the book — both dramatically and emotionally — is Countess Maria von Maltzan. At 34, she was, said Freedland, part Vanderbilt, part action hero, and part spiritual descendant of Esther. By 1943 she was using her Berlin apartment to hide up to 20 Jews — one of whom was her lover.

Freedland recounts the moment the Gestapo invaded her home while Hans Hirschel, her lover, hid under her sofa in a secret compartment. When agents suspected someone was hiding in the sofa, she calmly suggested that they shoot it. But, she added, with aristocratic disdain, if they damaged the upholstery, she would require reimbursement — with a written receipt.

Bureaucracy defeated brutality. The Gestapo left. Both sofa and Hirschel remained intact. (Hirschel survived the war, and eventually worked as a lay judge at the office that handled reparations to those who suffered under the Nazis.)

It’s a scene out of a 1940s Warner Bros. thriller, but Freedland notes that his book draws on documented sources: interrogation transcripts, postwar interviews, and survivor testimonies.

We tend to imagine resistance in binaries: either you fight, or you comply. But the resisters at the tea party represented a range of responses. Some passed information to diplomats; others spoke for assassination. Some wanted reform, others sabotage. Some dreamed of restoring the Germany of Goethe and Beethoven; some hoped simply to preserve a shred of decency. And for some, like Countess Maria, it was enough to save a life, or 20. 

Freedland’s book invites readers to analyze the choices of the few who defied tyranny. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t wholly righteous. But they moved — some at great cost — from silence to speech, from thought to action. 

Freeland acknowledges that resisters like those in his book were a small minority under Hitler. Freedland’s mother, who survived the German rocket attack on London that killed his grandmother in 1945, “believed every last German was guilty and implicated.” And yet, 3 million Germans were arrested or imprisoned for crimes of dissent under the Nazis, in a country of 80 million. That’s more than his mother could have imagined, but too few to fully absolve the majority who went along. Freedland suspects that the story of the tea party is not widely told in Germany in part because the establishment does not want to be accused of exaggerating the extent of the defiance.

I asked Freeland if he saw a common character trait that would explain why the subjects of his book would join that minority.

“They believed in a higher authority,’ he said. That higher authority may be God, or the traditions of their class, or a sense of patriotism that transcends the political establishment of the moment. “They believed that they were answerable to some force above Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, so that when the Gestapo knocks on the door, they don’t think, ‘Well, that’s the supreme authority in the world who is about to detain me.’ They think, “Ultimately I’m going to be held accountable to somebody above the Gestapo man at my door.’”

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of (JR) or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.