August 30, 1992 | Just before she began work on The Restless Conscience, her impressively researched and quietly astonishing documentary about the anti-Hitler resistance in Nazi Germany, German-born filmmaker Hava Kohav Beller described the project to a few close friends. She was shocked, but not entirely surprised, by their response.
”There was a very strong resistance to this film about resistance,” Beller recalled a few days ago while phoning from a friend’s home in France. ”I had people say, ‘Oh, you want to make a three-minute film?’ Or they said, ‘Oh, you’re writing a fairy tale?’
”Some people thought I was writing about something that never was. And there were other people who thought it might whitewash the Germans, or create a new myth about Germany.”
Worse, when Beller approached corporate and private foundations for grant money, ”I was told by these foundations that they didn’t want to associate their names with this subject. For the first seven years, nobody wanted to hear about it.
”So it was very difficult to find support and funding. And that was true in the United States as well as in Germany, for different reasons. It was rather strange to find all these different groups as bedfellows.”
Even stranger — to some observers, at least — is that Beller wanted to make a movie on the subject of anti-Hitler Germans in the first place. Beller, who is Jewish and was born in Frankfurt, fled Germany with her parents during the Nazi era to escape the Holocaust. She and her parents were lucky. Her grandmother, who perished in Auschwitz, was not.
Beller could be forgiven for hating her homeland. Instead of hating, however, she has researched, interviewed and investigated, in an attempt to understand. And in understanding, she has come to celebrate those who retained their humanity at a time of monstrous inhumanity.
”This era has been preoccupying me, and I cannot comprehend it,” she said. ”And there’s a certain point after which I cannot go, I don’t understand how it can be. I had to find a light in this dark void of time.
”I also believed that there always must be, in times like this, at least one person who does not go along. And it was important for me to find this person.
”I wound up finding many more than one.”
The Restless Conscience, which earned a richly deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary, uses archival footage and dozens of newly filmed interviews to reconstruct the history of the Germany resistance. Chief among the witnesses who tell their stories is Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, a German army officer who volunteered for a suicide mission to assassinate Hitler, with the whole-hearted approval of his father. ”A man who doesn’t take such a chance,” he recalls his father saying, ”will never be happy again in his life.”
Axel von dem Bussche, once a young officer in the Ninth Infantry Regiment, remembers his horror at seeing mass executions of civilians, describing it as ”a moment when the bottom of everything falls out, and keeps away.”
It was just that sort of moment — an accumulation of such moments, really — that turned even members of the German old school, people like Count Helmuth Jesse von Moltke, against Hitler. Von Moltke paid the ultimate price for refusing to support his fuehrer. ”Within himself,” the nobleman’s widow proudly recalls, ”he was a free man.”
Aristocrats, clergymen, trade unionists, idealistic students, highly placed Wehrmacht officers. So many different people, so many different backgrounds, united only by their sense of decency, their regard for justice — and their mounting dread that their fatherland had been taken over by a monster.
”Some of these people actually joined the Nazi Party out of idealism,” Beller said. ”They believed that Hitler really was good for Germany, and he would bring it up on its feet. And when they realized the criminality and the corruption — and the criminality most particularly — they turned around completely, for the same idealism, against Hitler. With the same fervor.
”These people acted on their beliefs. And when they realized that they were in the wrong direction, they turned away.”
Beller was raised in Israel and later studied film in New York, where she lives and works. She learned of the anti-Hitler resistance ”quite by chance” in 1981, when a friend married a German woman, and Beller met the wife for the first time.
”I asked her about her childhood,” Beller said, ”and she talked about her mother. So I asked her about her father, and she said, ‘He was hanged.’ So. That’s rather unusual.
”But it turned out that her father was one of the resisters in Germany. And I was so struck by the fact that there was a resistance that, a few weeks later, I flew to Germany, and I started to look for the few who survived.
”But most of them had been executed. So I had to find people who knew them — wives, children, friends and colleagues who were with them either in the beginning, or during the war. It was difficult, because most of them don’t think they’ve done anything extraordinary. For them, it was just a matter of course . . . And some were also reluctant because, as we all know, things can be misrepresented or misperceived.”
In dealing with the children of men who had been executed for their resistance activities, ”It was more complicated. Because, in fact, the father was the one who made the choice, but they had to grow up without a father. And with a certain stigma at the beginning. Because in the beginning, it was thought — and still, today, some people in Germany still say — that Germans who were part of the resistance were traitors.”
In the view of Hava Kohav Beller, however, they really were martyred patriots. And The Restless Conscience is a testament to their courage.
”This film is a human document,” Beller said. ”As a human being, I felt a great need to find other human beings who continued their humanity . . . For my own sake, for the generation of my child — for the future — I had a need to know that there were people who resisted, who did not go along.”
