Princess Marie Vassilchikov, known to her family and friends as Missie, was a descendant of one of the oldest Russian aristocratic families. Her father was a Duma deputy and a close friend of reformer Pyotr Stolypin, her mother was a Vyazamskaya and both her grandfathers were Russian generals.
She was born in January of that fateful year 1917. Her family was evacuated from Russia in 1919 by the British, along with some surviving members of the Romanov family, and spent the interwar years in Lithuania. Then, in 1940, Stalin grabbed the Baltic States and the Vassilchikovs had to run for their lives once again. Missie arrived in Berlin just before the start of the German advance in France, with no money and no prospects.
However, thanks to her influential aristocratic friends and relatives, and the knowledge of languages, she soon got a job at the information agency of the Nazi Foreign Ministry. She became close to one of her colleagues, Adam von Trott, a leading member of the July 20 conspiracy to kill Hitler. She and another close friend, Princess Loremarie Schoenburg, an Austrian aristocrat, were friendly with a number of anti-Hitler plotters, including Gottfried von Bismarck, Otto’s grandson. Throughout that period Missie secretly kept a diary, in English, recording the events of the day and providing vivid portraits of their participants. Published after her death in the 1980s, it makes an instructive reading for our times.
The conspirators were almost exclusively German aristocrats from very old families—counts, dukes and princes. Some of them were high-level military commanders and police officers, many with direct access to Hitler. That was how one of them was able to plant a bomb, which exploded but failed to kill the Fuehrer.
Being what they were, they never had any illusions about Hitler, considering him a low class, ignorant buffoon. They were the ruling class of the German Empire before the collapse of the monarchy and in the Weimar Republic their class retained considerable power. Yet, they did nothing to prevent the Nazis from seizing power and went along with Hitler as he unleashed a major war in Europe, invaded neutral countries and dragged Germany into the ultimate imbecility of attacking the Soviet Union and declaring war on the United States.
They acted only in July 1944, 10 months before the end of the war, with the Red Army pushing into Europe and the German Reich, the Western Allies advancing in France and Italy, and Anglo-Americans pulverizing historic German cities on a nightly basis.
Each one of them had his own reasons not to resist Hitler but in general, these aristocrats shared at least some resentment of the victors of the First World War which Hitler made a major part of his political platform. They too felt that other Europeans were taking advantage of Germany and welcomed the Fuehrer’s promise to make Germany great again.
Besides, they were not at all supportive of the Weimar democracy and, most importantly, feared communism both in Moscow and on German streets.
An important comparison needs to be made. Those German aristocrats have been raised with a deep sense of duty, honor and obligation to serve, and they felt personal responsibility for the fate of their country. The leaders of Britain and America at the time also happened to be members of their countries’ old families. Churchill was a nobleman and the Roosevelts were a kind of American aristocrats. But in Germany, for all their misgivings, the aristos deferred for too long to an evil upstart. They finally moved against him only in the eleventh hour.
The plan to kill Hitler had been finalized some months before July, when an attempt on his life actually took place. The plotters had been delaying it in the hope of getting the support of the British and the Americans and a commitment to the preservation of the existing German State. Adam Trott was using his position in the Foreign Ministry to put out feelers to the West through neutral countries.
However, both Franklin D. Roosevelt and, especially, Winston Churchill were fully committed to unconditional surrender and the destruction of Germany. The view in Washington and London was that there were no “good Germans” and that the entire German nation was complicit in Hitler crimes. Adam Trott’s contention that the plotters were “better than that” — to use a modern American excuse — simply didn’t wash with the two leaders. Apparently, Churchill was only too glad to see one faction in Germany killing off another.
And indeed the July 20 plotters did not enjoy much support among ordinary German citizens. Soldiers at the front, who could not have been entertaining many illusions about the impending military defeat, were actually outraged by the treason of their senior officers. And civilians back home, despite suffering nightly bombing raids and getting a steady stream of death notices from the front, also rallied behind their Fuehrer. Personality cults are remarkably durable and are not easily shaken when confronted by reality. The masses, once hooked on a cult, don’t seem to want to abandon the belief that the father of the nation knows best and has a plan to get them out of a pickle.
Ultimately, the massive defeat may have been historically better for the German nation, sobering up all but the most ardent Nazis and making them face up to the crimes committed by the regime in their name.
Missie wrote in her diary that, as the Gestapo was closing in on him, Adam Trott was determined to deny everything — because he was intent on getting out of jail and trying again. Even after a decade of Hitler’s rule he still had no idea how bloodthirsty and vengeful a pathological narcissist could be, how full of grievances against the world — and especially against those elitist snobs who always looked down their noses at him. Everyone directly involved in the July 20 plot was tortured and brutally executed — many of them slowly garroted with a piano wire — on Hitler’s personal instructions. In fact, much of the German aristocracy were eliminated in the final months of the war.
