The tendency of science to judge the thoughts and actions of those involved in the resistance against Hitler from an anachronistic "post-Auschwitz point of view" instead of taking into account the conditions at the time was an eternal complaint of the historian Peter Hoffmann.

In his attempt to refute the accusation of "dissimilatory anti-Semitism" against Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, the politician chosen by the conspirators of July 20, 1944 as Reich Chancellor, Hoffmann referred to Thomas Nipperdey's appeal to the historian and his readers to reflect on the past , "what it once had, what every time and also our present has, namely an open future".

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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This approach was the prerequisite for Hoffmann's fundamental contributions to resistance research.

By his own admission, he was always concerned "to explain, as far as the surviving sources allow, how things are, not to determine how they might be".

Among his critics, who accuse the conservative elite of having decided in favor of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 primarily because of the poor course of the war, Hoffmann offended with his view that the horror at the murder of the Jews was a main reason for the readiness to take part in a violent coup attempt.

In a certain respect, Hoffmann's life's work can also be interpreted as a kind of resistance on the part of the historian against moralizing know-it-alls and ideological contamination.

Resistance, coup, assassination

Beginning with the mammoth volume "Resistance, Coup d'état, Attentat", published in 1969 and still considered a standard work to this day, Hoffmann's efforts to present the wide-ranging opposition to Hitler in all its fragmentation and complexity are characterized by meticulous research into sources and factual evaluation of the wealth of material.

His work is based on the conviction that the nature of Hitler's tyranny could not be understood without an understanding of the few who distanced themselves from the enthusiasm of the masses for the regime and were willing to defend their sense of justice and morality with their lives.

Of course, that did not mean absolving the Germans of their joint responsibility for the crimes of the regime.

The fact that Hoffmann, who was born in Dresden in 1930 and grew up in Stuttgart, moved into the twentieth century after completing his doctorate on diplomatic relations between Bavaria and Württemberg during the Crimean War can be explained not least by his own biography.

His Württemberg family associated with the Stauffenbergs, the Weizsäckers and the Bonhoeffers.

His father, the library councilor and later head of the Württemberg State Library Wilhelm Hoffmann, ran courier services for the resistance under the guise of his professional activity in Switzerland and was initiated by Eugen Gerstenmaier into the assassination plans against Hitler.

In July 1944, Adam von Trott even instructed Wilhelm Hoffmann to ensure that a pistol he gave him was passed on to his wife in Berlin.

Like many historians of his generation, the son was also concerned with the question of how Hitler's dictatorship could have come about.

Hoffmann recalled how he and his fellow student Hans Mommsen agreed in 1954 at a “night standing convention” in Tübingen, where he studied under the contemporary historian Hans Rothfels, who had returned from emigration, that “we must try to cover the terrible twelve years to understand".

Both had tried in their own way, with Hoffmann admitting that the friendship had been marred by scientific differences.

Hoffmann was commissioned by the Aid Organization Foundation on July 20, 1944 to write the history of the resistance and the associated access to sources that had not been tapped until then United States and finally as a professor of German history at McGill University in Montreal.

He kept the vows made at the 1954 Standing Convention to the last hour. Two days before his death on January 6 at the age of 92, Peter Hoffmann wrote from Montreal, hoping that the illness would give him some time to recover from his illness to complete the biography of Henning von Tresckow, one of the main actors in the assassination attempt on Hitler, enriched by chance finds in the former KGB archives.