Foreign Policy Objectives

The most important goal of the resistance fighters was to end the war immediately. The ensuing peace was to reconcile the peoples of Europe with one another and lay the foundations for peaceful relations between Germany and its neighbors. A progressive European consciousness developed out of the desire to form a system of peace which would be respected by all nations.

Many of the conservative opponents of the National Socialists had been influenced by the traditions of power politics. For this reason, they initially desired to advance Germany's interests in an assertive manner against the other European states. Some supported the views of the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, who desired an arrangement with the western powers to put Germany in a position of strength with regard to the Soviet Union. Others adhered to the plan of Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, for many years German ambassador in Moscow, who endorsed a settlement with the Soviet Union. Younger diplomats such as Adam von Trott zu Solz, Hans-Bernd von Haeften and other members of the Kreisau Circle, however, wished to go beyond the nation state. They developed the idea of a European confederation. On the basis of the right to self-determination, they sought to create an international system based on mutual trust which would render arms races and wars of aggression impossible.

The resistance fighters agreed that after the war restitution would have to ensue for the injustice perpetrated by the Germans against the nations and peoples of Europe and above all against the Jews. In light of the crimes committed in the occupied territories, the exploitation of "foreign races," and the immense war damages as a result of the war Germany had started, the members of the resistance acknowledged by 1943 at the latest that Germany had utterly forfeited any moral claim to a leading role in Europe.

From 1943 on, Germany's Allied enemies demanded the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht as a prerequisite for an armistice. They resolved to act collectively at the end of the war, and to divide Germany into occupation zones under Allied control. The Allies disregarded the ideas of the German resistance groups because by the time the assassination attempt was made, they had long since past the point of trusting Hitler's opponents and recognizing them as negotiating partners.