Carl Friedrich Goerdeler was a Lord Mayor of Leipzig from 1930 to 1937 and the civilian leader of the German Resistance to Hitler.
Background
Goerdeler was born to a family of Prussian civil servants in Schneidemühl (Piła), Germany (now in Poland) in the Prussian Province of Posen. Goerdeler's parents were supporters of the Free Conservative Party, and Goerdeler's father served in the Prussian Landtag as a member of that party after 1899.
Education
Goerdeler studied economics and law at the University of Tübingen between 1902 and 1905.
Career
After studying law, he became a civil servant, and from 1920 to 1930 he served as second Mayor of Königsberg. A devout Protestant and a monarchist at heart, Goerdeler was appointed Lord Mayor of Leipzig in 1930 and price commissioner under the Brunmg cabinet.
He continued as an economic adviser to the government in the early years of the Nazi régime, accepting the post of Reich Commissioner of Prices in November 1934, responsible for overseeing prices in areas where supervision had formerly been earned out by various ministries.
In 1935 he resigned from this watchdog post in protest against government policies, which rejected his economic liberalism and proposals for local administrative reform. Goerdeler rejected the frenzied rearmament programme of the Nazis as well as their anti-semitism, resigning in 1937 as Mayor of Leipzig when a bust of the Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn was removed from its place in front of City Hail. In the same year Goerdeler emerged as‘ the leader of the conservative, nationalist Resistance to Hitler, using his position as principal contact man abroad of the Stuttgart firm of Bosch to warn influential people in Britain, France and America against the threat of Nazi Germany.
The headstrong, energetic Goerdeler became the driving-force of civilian Resistance circles by the outbreak of World War II, travelling widely abroad and exploiting his excellent domestic contacts with German officials, diplomats and business leaders. An admirer of the military he tried hard to arouse the generals against the régime, composing a memorandum in July 1940 intended for the German officer corps, in which he described the desolation of a conquered Europe under Nazi domination.
In spite of his great knowledge of home and international affairs, Goerdeler’s peace plan of 1943 was surprisingly lacking in realism, envisaging a Greater Germany without Hitler, that still included Austria, the Sudetenland, East and West Prussia, Poznan, Silesia and Alto Adige. Not prepared to give up the bulk of Hitler's territorial gains, Goerdeler thought in terms of a strong, post-war German national State which would serve as a bulwark against the communist East. He was convinced that the British and Americans could be induced into separate peace negotiations by the offer of German military help against Soviet Russia, and was bitterly disappointed by the Allied policy of unconditional surrender.
Goerdeler's mania for drawing up memoranda and lists for a post-Hitler Germany proved his undoing, after the failure of the 20 July 1944 plot. A variety of documents incriminating the man who would have been Chancellor of Germany had the conspiracy succeeded were found by the Gestapo, including the list of members of his future cabinet. Goerdeler’s various indiscretions contributed to incriminating other members of the Resistance who figured on his lists. Arrested and sentenced to death by the People's Court on 8 September 1944, Goerdeler was not executed for another five months while Himmler pursued secret peace feelers of his own.
He was finally hanged on 2 February 1945 in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse prison.
Politics
In November 1938, Goerdeler met with Young in Switzerland and asked if were possible for the British government to intercede on the behalf of 10,000 Polish Jews the Germans had expelled from Germany, and whom the Poles refused to accept. Goerdeler declared that the treatment of the Polish Jews, stranded on the German-Polish border, was "barbaric". In December 1938-January 1939, Goerdeler had a further series of meetings with Young in Switzerland, where he informed Young that the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938 had been ordered by Hitler personally, and was not a "spontaneous" demonstration as the Nazis had claimed. Goerdeler recommended that Young inform London that as soon as "the new persecution of the Jews is started, it is absolutely essential to break diplomatic relations". Goerdeler also informed Young of his belief that Hitler was seeking world conquest, and that the Führer had "decided to destroy the Jews-Christianity-Capitalism". Speaking to Young about the economic situation in Germany, Goerdeler stated:
Economic and financial situation gravely critical. Inner situation desperate. Economic conditions getting worse.
In another meeting with Young, Goerdeler claimed "the working classes are nervous, distrustful of the leader. Their allegiance is doubtful". Goerdeler maintained to Young that:
the feeling among the people against war is welling up at an alarming rate. His [Goerdeler's] recent talks with leading industrialists had satisfied X that the workers' feeling have been bitterly roused to the point where, if they were in possession of arms, they would physically revolt against the present regime.
Goerdeler's reports to Young were later published by the latter in 1974 as The "X" Documents.
Views
Goerdeler’s political and social attitudes on the domestic front were also somewhat anachronistic. He wished to preserve a strong executive power, stable authority and a healthy élite within a democratic framework of law, confident that he could win instant allegiance from the German people simply by confronting them with the evidence of Nazi crimes. With regard to the ‘Jewish Question', Goerdeler appeared to accept some of the premises of the Nuremberg Laws while seeking to abolish the strictly ‘racial’ measures. In a letter to Field Marshal von Kluge, whom he still hoped to win over to the Resistance in the summer of 1943, Goerdeler argued that ‘to continue the war with no chance of victory was an obvious crime’. He regarded both Goebbels and Himmler , the latter with somewhat more justification, as potential allies ‘since these two men have realized that they are lost with Hitler'.