In Sep­tem­ber 1943, a group of Ger­man elites gath­ered for a birth­day par­ty. Over Kaf­fee und Kuchen, they dis­cussed the future of their coun­try, one they hoped would not involve Hitler. They were betrayed by one of their own and, four months lat­er, arrest­ed by the Gestapo. 

This is where Jonathan Freedland’s lat­est work of non­fic­tion begins. Freed­land then recon­structs the paths the par­ty­go­ers took to arrive at that crit­i­cal moment as well as their fates after­ward. The result is a well-researched and occa­sion­al­ly thrilling explo­ration of what caus­es some peo­ple to resist tyran­ny — and oth­ers to indulge in it. 

The par­ty­go­ers opposed Nazism in var­i­ous ways. Some cor­re­spond­ed with dis­sents abroad and imag­ined a post-Nazi Ger­many; oth­ers helped Jews. The fan­tas­tic, high-wire res­cue exploits of one mem­ber of their cir­cle — a free-spir­it­ed Sile­sian noble­woman with seem­ing­ly lim­it­less phys­i­cal prowess — defy belief until it is revealed that she under­took many of her res­cue mis­sions while on stim­u­lants. Just as inter­est­ing as the countess’s adven­tures are the ways in which the par­ty­go­ers attempt­ed to strike some accom­mo­da­tion with the regime before they moved into qui­et resis­tance. One diplo­mat ratio­nal­ized his con­tin­ued ser­vice to the Reich by styling him­self as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Ger­man peo­ple, not Hitler, until los­ing his post and being giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to more ful­ly adhere to his con­science. Anoth­er was a con­ser­v­a­tive Ger­man nation­al­ist, ini­tial­ly not unop­posed to Nation­al Social­ism, who was removed as head­mistress from the school she had found­ed for read­ing a psalm — an Old Tes­ta­ment, Jew­ish text — dur­ing a school cer­e­mo­ny. Both spent the rest of the war adher­ing to their prin­ci­ples, and both paid for it with their lives.

The pro­tag­o­nists arrived at resis­tance from a vari­ety of ide­o­log­i­cal paths. Some were nation­al­ists who believed Hitler had poi­soned their beloved coun­try, and oth­ers were moti­vat­ed by a strong sense of Chris­t­ian moral­i­ty. All hailed from aris­to­crat­ic or oth­er­wise priv­i­leged back­grounds; as Freed­land points out, these were peo­ple accus­tomed to being in charge, and their patri­cian her­itage gave them the con­fi­dence to break laws with which they did not agree. Their last name and titles had saved a few of them from more minor brush­es with the law of the Reich, but by that Sep­tem­ber their luck ran out. They were sent to sev­er­al camps and pris­ons, includ­ing Ravens­brück, and con­vict­ed in a show tri­al; those who sur­vived did so because they out­lived the Reich. 

Less inter­est­ing are the moti­va­tions of the man who betrayed them to the Gestapo. At first, he appears dri­ven by a sense of infe­ri­or­i­ty mixed with ruth­less ambi­tion. Lat­er, as his post­war sto­ry unspools, his amoral­i­ty appears even more stun­ning­ly patho­log­i­cal. Per­haps the less said about the turn­coat, the bet­ter; after all, cru­el, pow­er-hun­gry men with deeply flawed per­son­al­i­ties are hard­ly unique or unfa­mil­iar, now or then. Those who are more intrigu­ing and instruc­tive are the peo­ple who active­ly oppose men like him and the world they attempt to cre­ate. The Trai­tors Cir­cle does not break new ground in the his­to­ry of resis­tance to Nazism, nor does it attempt to. Instead, it stiff­ens the spine and reminds us that even in the dark­est days imag­in­able, decen­cy, moral­i­ty, and courage still matter.