When they write about human courage in the 20th century, the names of Peter and Christabel Bielenberg will be among the bravest, the most illustrious. The normal human response to the all-pervading evil of Nazism, a creed which throve on sadism and which knew no bounds of conduct, could so easily have been quiet submission. The Bielenbergs did not submit. They and a few other conspirators took arms against a system which had unleashed a reign of barbarity across Europe; and though their venture failed, across the broad sweep of the history of a deplorable century, it now shines like a beacon.
There were other great people who, unseen then and unsung now, conspired against Hitler, and their names are not known. The merest word muttered in the hearing of one of the armies of under-officials who supervised the Nazi reign of terror, who made its controls so ubiquitous, so inescapable, could lead to Dachau and the guillotine. Tens of thousands of Germans, democrats, socialists, communists, liberals, church men and women, took the path of resistance; and, paying the price, have vanished from the public perception.
Parable
That is why the Bielenbergs are so vital, not just as examples of German valour, but as a reassurance to us all that it is possible for humans to be superhuman; that within the most modest breast can beat a heart of immodest courage, and that intrepidity can fire the lowliest of us to great deeds. The Bielenbergs provide a parable to serve for all those whose names we no longer know, but who in their suffering and in their death redeemed the German people, and European civilisation itself.
Some 200 of the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler in July 1944 were murdered. Some were illustrious soldiers, men such as Colonel General Ludwig Beck, shot in Bendelrstrasse; Colonel General Erich Hoepner, hanged: Karl Stuelpnagel, former military governor of France, hanged; Admiral Canaris, executed at Flossenberg. These men, it might be argued, were atoning for their participation at the highest levels in the triumph of Nazism. But there were many others who owed no such debt, and who made the sacrifice because they knew it needed to be made.
The death of Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben might serve to stand for all those who vanished in the murderous frenzy that swept through Germany in the summer of 1944. He was pushed into a cell in Ploetzee prison in Berlin, placed under a metal meat hook, and stripped to the waist. A noose was placed over the hook, and wound round his neck. He was then hoisted upwards, and twisting this way and that, he was slowly strangled, while his murderers filmed his death for Hitler's edification.
Fellow conspirators
What terrors must have filled the souls of fellow conspirators as the Gestapo and SS arrested, tortured, murdered any who had the least association with the leaders of the July plot cannot be imagined. Among those arrested was Peter Belienberg - and who could have blamed his wife Christabel if she had chosen to hide after that arrest? Much as we love our loved ones, do we not love our own lives, our freedom from torture, bodily violation and sadistic death, all the more?
Christabel nonetheless chose to present herself to the Gestapo and demand the release of her husband. He, resilient, resistant, was unbroken by interrogation; and the brazenness, courage and resourcefulness the pair of them showed in the face of tyranny secured, against all odds, Peter's release from Gestapo custody to a punishment battalion on the Eastern front. It would have been as easy for the Gestapo to have murdered them both, for murder was as easy and as instinctual to that band of thugs as breathing is to the rest of us.
The most terrible man of that time was probably Roland Freisler, the hanging judge, who headed the Volksgericht, the feared tribunal of the Third Reich. He mocked and excoriated those he was about to sentence to death. He personally was responsible for the fates which befell most of the Bielenbergs' fellow conspirators. Of all the evil creatures who bedecked the upper reaches of the Third Reich, he was the foulest; and he was spared the justice of the conquered, for he was killed by a chance bomb which fell into his office during an air raid in 1945.
His widow was given a state pension by the new West German government after the war; but the widows of the murdered conspirators were not. The stench of Nazi culture and indoctrination took a long time to pass from the air of Germany. Yet great opportunities could have awaited the Bielenbergs had they stayed in Germany, for here could be the architects of the new Germany. Instead, they chose to come to Ireland, to make their home here, and to found a very Irish dynasty.
Extended family
Peter became an enthusiastic and vigorous farmer in Wicklow, and Christabel wrote one of the greatest explorations of cold courage in English literature, The Past is Myself. They became the centre of an adoring extended family, wise, clever, funny, humane, as decade after decade rolled by. The last time I saw them both was about two years ago, and the daffodils were blooming in their glorious gardens near Tullow. They sat in their sitting-room, talking easily, each with their own little heap of cigarette packets, smoking incessantly, one after the other, and exuding an unbelievable and enormously consoling sense of peace and contentment. And though Peter finally died last week, there is a lesson for us all in his and Christabel's life together: that sometimes the virtuous do triumph, and do truly live happily ever after.