Cultural Amnesia (112 page)

She should have trusted her instincts and shut out the smart voices, which—as often happens when they at last get a
hearing—turned out to be not smart enough. Her best instinct was to stick to a simple course of action once it had been chosen. That instinct became her enemy, and the enemy of the country,
on those occasions when a simple course of action was not appropriate. In domestic policy it hardly ever is. But her instinct paid off in foreign policy, with far-reaching results. When she chose
not to be faced down by the Argentinian junta, she followed through with the necessary consequence: war. There were yells of protest from the far left, which would have preferred to give a green
light to the Argentinian fascists rather than resort to gunboat diplomacy. The far left preferred love-boat diplomacy: an interesting reprise of the Labour party’s position in the late
thirties, when the menace of Hitler was admitted but the menace of rearmament seemed greater. Over the Falklands, the parliamentary Labour party had no choice but to go with her—nobody
pranced for war like the Labour
party’s leader, Michael Foot—but the first disaster would have put her on the block. There wasn’t one; the British carried
the day; and the junta fell as a direct result.

There was another long-term effect of her courage which is seldom considered. Later in the same year, 1982, she went to
Beijing to face the Chinese leaders in the matter of the upcoming Hong Kong handover. Typically, the bonzes of Beijing announced their conclusions before the talks: Hong Kong would become part of
China. But she had never thought any other result was possible. What was really in the balance was what would happen to Hong Kong
after
it became part of
China. The Chinese might have reduced it to the condition of Tibet. They didn’t do so, and have still not done so. It seems fair to conclude that Mrs. Thatcher obviated the possibility by
her prestige. She had won in the Falklands, and had done so partly because of the firmness of Britain’s alliance with the United States. (An important factor, in that regard, was
undoubtedly the diplomatic effort of the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson.) Thus she was able to suggest to the Chinese leaders that the consequences of extinguishing Hong
Kong’s freedoms might be drastic. She probably didn’t have to suggest it out loud: she had a way of glaring at the right moment that went through the language barrier like a bullet
through butter. With the Americans behind her, Mrs. Thatcher was presenting the Chinese leaders with the possibility of atomic war. The freedoms of the Hong Kong citizens were not up to much, but
they were better than nothing, and the colony’s last governor, Chris Patten, in the final few years before the handover, did a lot to reinforce them. Beijing vilified him for his pains,
even going so far as to call him a tango dancer: but such withering invective left him unshaken. He kept on reminding Beijing that the citizens of Hong Kong had rights and that the rights were
inviolate. He did what the Foreign Office had never done. So did Mrs. Thatcher. Beijing sent in the soldiers but they never fired a shot. Nobody was arrested. The Trojan War did not take place.
Since that blessedly uneventful day, a flourishing Hong Kong’s influence on mainland China has already been huge. If the eventual consequence is an irreversible erosion of China’s
monolithic state, the transformation will have to be traced back to the same extraordinary year, 1982, in which the Red Army’s tanks did not come to Poland. What didn’t happen
in Warsaw eventually influenced everything that did happen in Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It could well be that what didn’t happen in Hong Kong started the same
sort of process in the Far East. It was the year that Thatcher flew to China to be faced with a fait accompli, but in fact accomplished everything by dictating what would not be allowed to occur.
She couldn’t pronounce “Solzhenitsyn,” but in most other respects she knew how to say what she meant.

HENNING VON TRESCKOW

Henning von Tresckow (1901–1945) was the heart, the soul and the brain of the July 20, 1944,
plot against Hitler’s life. After the plot failed, Claus von Stauffenberg, who delivered the bomb to Hitler’s forward headquarters, was the name popularly associated with the
attempt; but really Henning, the mastermind in the background, was the man who mattered. Nor had he always been in the background. In March 1943 he personally got a bomb on Hitler’s
plane. The bomb should have gone off. Had it done so, Henning would have changed history. Superfically, he had all the characteristics of the ideal hero. On the revisionist left to this day,
efforts continue to denigrate the July plotters as aristocratic right-wing romantics who wanted the war against the Soviet Union to continue, with better leadership than the Nazis could
provide. With regard to how the Nazis are viewed in retrospect, the contest between the old aristocracy and the far left is a perennial stand-off, mainly because both sides were guilty, and
therefore each had a permanent interest in passing the buck to the other. Hitler would scarcely have risen to power if the Weimar Republic had not been sabotaged by the aristocracy. On the
other hand the Communists sabotaged it as well, and in the crucial period between the signing of
the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 and the launching of Operation
Barbarossa in 1941 they gave Hitler aid and comfort by denouncing any attempts to resist him as “imperialist.” The July plotters undoubtedly had questionable credentials as
democrats. But a full twenty among them, when interrogated by the Gestapo after the plot failed, insisted that they had been motivated by revulsion at what happened to the Jews. Henning, had
he lived, would have said the same. There can be no doubt that he despised the Nazis. There can, however, be a doubt about his views on the German army and its career of conquest. Like most
of the career officers he enjoyed the idea of the army becoming strong again. Because only Hitler could make it so, Henning was in a dilemma. He finally resolved it by turning against Hitler.
Henning’s key role in the conspiracy depended on his ability to persuade senior officers that they should do the same, so that there would be some hope of taking Germany back from the
grip of the SS after a successful attempt. He probably knew, before the critical day, that not enough of the senior officers had been persuaded. He then said the thing that mattered: the
attempt should go ahead, at whatever cost. In other words, he was proposing a religious sacrifice. If modern Germany, as a liberal democracy, now recognizes the word “July” in
that sacrificial spirit, it has a lot to do with Henning von Tresckow.

Now the whole world will fall upon us and mock us. But I remain,
as before, firmly convinced that we did the right thing. I regard Hitler not only as the arch-enemy of Germany, but as the arch-enemy of the world. If, a few hours from now, I stand before
the judgement seat of God, and am asked for a reckoning of what I did or failed to do, I believe with a good conscience that I can represent myself by what I have done in the battle against
Hitler.

—HENNING VON TRESCKOW, AS
QUOTED BY BODO SCHEURIG,
Henning von Tresckow: Ein Preusse gegen Hitler
, P. 217

H
ENNING VON
TRESCKOW
said this to his fellow conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff at 2nd Army staff headquarters in Ostrów, northeast of Warsaw, in the early morning of July 21, 1944, the day
after the plot failed against Hitler’s life. Or anyway, Schlabrendorff
said
that Henning said all this: all this and more. It really doesn’t
matter, because it was undoubtedly what Henning thought. Before the attempt, he had said that it should go ahead
coûte que coûte
—no matter
what the cost. After it failed, he made immediate plans to kill himself, because he knew too much and might, under torture, give everyone away. At one stage I was so struck with Henning’s
heroism that I thought of writing an opera libretto about him. The piece would have been written as a long flashback from the moment of his death, which Henning accomplished by walking into the
forest and blowing himself up with a grenade. He was trying to make it look like a battle incident, in the hope that the Gestapo would be fooled into thinking he had not been a conspirator, and
so lay off his family. It hardly needs saying that the stratagem didn’t work, but Henning should not be seen as a blunderer on that account. Many of the conspirators were blunderers, but he
wasn’t. He knew that the coup d’état scheduled to follow the July attempt was so sketchily organized that it would probably come apart even if Hitler was killed, but he thought
the attempt should go ahead because the sacrifice would mean something in itself.

He had a right to say so. Of all the long-term conspirators, he had come closest to killing Hitler on a
previous occasion. On March 13, 1943, only a month after the Stalingrad defeat, Henning got a bomb on the four-engined Focke-Wulf Condor carrying Hitler back from Smolensk to Rastenburg in East
Prussia. The only reason the bomb did not go off was that the Czech-made fuse was of a type sensitive to temperature. It froze at altitude. If the bomb had gone off, the modern history of Europe
might have been quite different. Henning had been only a millimetre away from eliminating the arch-enemy. It might have been better if Henning had been in direct charge of all the attempts.
Unfortunately he was also the ideal man for arranging the attendant coup: a necessary effort that involved a huge expenditure of time even when it got results. Most of the time it didn’t.
One of the lost dialogues of the war was the conversation he had with General Erich von Manstein—the embodiment of the old, pre-Nazi army—in
February 1943. Henning
paid what was ostensibly a staff visit to von Manstein’s headquarters at Saporoshje in Russia. From Alexander Stahlberg’s book
Die verdammte
Pflicht
we know that Henning and von Manstein were together for at least half an hour. What was said? Whatever it was, the canny von Manstein would not bet. Henning kept on plugging away
at the senior officers. He had been plugging away at them since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, and had been winning the allegiance of the junior officers since well before that. After July
20, 1944, it was frequently said that the young officers had found reason to rebel only after the reverse at Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943. But Henning was already organizing his network
of young rebel officers while Barbarossa was being planned in early 1941. Before the starting whistle blew in June of that year, he had recruited Schlabrendorff, Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff,
Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff, Hans Graf von Hardenberg and Berndt von Kleist. Most of the names were from the
Almanach de Gotha
, and some of them had a
romantic notion of making peace in the west so that the more dangerous enemy could be fought in the east: but on the eve of the invasion of Russia they were all capable of realizing that the most
dangerous enemy was a single German.