Volume 20, Number 4 · March 22, 1973
Noble Man
By George F. Kennan
Helmuth von Moltke: A Leader Against Hitler
by Michael Balfour, by Julian Frisby
St. Martin's Press, 388 pp., $16.50
In the Western-liberal historical assessment of the German resistance to Nazism there has been one tendency which holds in barely concealed contempt, or makes light of, what might be called the upper-class oppositionists, usually pictured as people whose activities centered around the July 20 plot. So strong is the unwillingness to concede to these people any serious merit, or even sympathy, that one gains the impression of a certain real irritation, as though the persons in question had had the ill grace, before dying in their various forms of agony, to confuse the issue by disturbing an otherwise tidy pattern of unadulterated German iniquity (unadulterated anywhere to the right of the communists) with a red herring, designed to mislead simple folk into supposing that there might have been some real enlightenment, some nobility of spirit there after all.
Review, 2878 words
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