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"The Traitors' Circle: The Rebels Against Hitler and the Spy Who Betrayed Them" by Jonathan Freedland

Most of us like to think that we would have been one of the rebels or refusers, that we would have been brave. But the statistics suggest that most of us would not. Almost all of us would have stayed silent.

Jonathan Freedland is a remarkably versatile writer. He is the author of compelling novels both under his own name and the pseudonym Sam Bourne; an always incisive columnist for The Guardian; a BBC broadcaster and podcaster; and also the creator of meticulously researched and captivating works of history. When I served as chair of judges for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize, his enthralling book, “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World” was a shoe-in on our shortlist; we all admired it so much.

So I began reading his new work of non-fiction with a frisson of excitement and my, it does not disappoint. Both meticulously researched and thrillingly written, it concerns a group of secret rebels against Hitler. Belying the prevailing idea that all Germans were in at least tacit support of the Nazi regime, Freedland tells the astonishing stories of some of the men and women who were not, and who actively defied and resisted it. Drawn from the German elite and aristocracy, they seem unlikely rebels. But they were united by a shared loathing of the Nazis and a refusal to bow to Hitler, and they somehow marshalled the courage to resist his regime,

“The Traitors Circle” sheds fascinating new light on a period that is still being documented by dozens of new books every year. But the truly compelling thing about this book is the questions it asks of us now about the stand we ourselves might… or might not take when faced with oppression and persecution. As Freedland writes, such questions pressed with a particular intensity in the Germany of the 1930s and 1940s. But they also ‘echo down the decades’ and some of them reverberate ‘especially loudly at the moment’.