Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)

by Ian Kershaw

  It was inevitable that seasoned military strategists and battle-hardened generals, schooled in more subtle forms of tactical command, would clash with him – often stridently – when their reading of the options available was so diametrically at variance with those of their supreme commander, and where the orders he emitted seemed to them so plainly militarily suicidal. They were also, however, schooled in obedience to orders of a superior; and Hitler was head of state, head of the armed forces, and since 1941 – disastrously – commander-in-chief (responsible for tactical decisions) of the army. Refusal to obey was not only an act of military insubordination; it was a treasonable act of political resistance.

  Few were prepared to go down that route. But loyalty even to the extent of belief in the Führer’s mission was no safeguard against dismissal if near-impossible demands were not met. In accordance with his warped logic, where ‘will’ had not triumphed, however fraught the circumstances, Hitler blamed the weakness or inadequacy of the commander. Another commander with a superior attitude, he presumed, would bring a different result – however objectively unfavourable the actual position. The commander of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Busch, a Hitler loyalist, correspondingly paid the price for the ‘failure’ of Army Group Centre during the onset of the Soviet offensive. He was dismissed by Hitler on 28 June, and replaced by one of his favourite commanders, the tough and energetic newly-promoted Field-Marshal Walter Model (who at the same time retained his command of Army Group North Ukraine) – dubbed by some, given the frequency with which he was charged with tackling a crisis, ‘Hitler’s fireman’.188

  Within days, there was a change of command, too, in the west. Reports to the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht submitted by the Commander-in-Chief, Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, and the Commander of Panzer Group West, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, had drawn a pessimistic picture of the prospects of holding the lines against enemy inroads in France. Jodl played to Hitler’s sentiments by noting that this meant the first step towards the evacuation of France. The report had followed similarly realistic assessments of the situation on the western front delivered by Rundstedt and Rommel at the Berghof two days earlier, on 29 June.189 On 3 July, Rundstedt received a handwritten notice of his dismissal from Hitler. Officially, he had been replaced on grounds of health.190 The sacking of Geyr and Field-Marshal Hugo Sperrle, who had been responsible for air-defences in the West, also followed. Rundstedt’s replacement, Kluge, at that time high in Hitler’s esteem, arrived in France, as Guderian later put it, ‘still filled with the optimism that prevailed at Supreme Headquarters’.191 He soon learnt differently.

  Another military leader who fell irredeemably from grace at this time was Chief of the General Staff Kurt Zeitzler. When appointed as replacement to Halder in September 1942, Zeitzler had impressed Hitler with his drive, energy, and fighting spirit – the type of military leader he wanted. The relationship had palled visibly since the spring of 1944, when Hitler had pinned a major part of the blame for the loss of the Crimea on Zeitzler. By May, Zeitzler was indicating his wish to resign. The Chief of Staff’s strong backing at the end of June for withdrawing the threatened Army Group North in the Baltic to a more defensible line, and his pessimism about the situation on the western front amounted to the last straw. Zeitzler could no longer see the rationale of Hitler’s tactics; Hitler was contemptuous of what he saw as the defeatism of Zeitzler and the General Staff. At the end of his tether following furious rows with Hitler, Zeitzler simply disappeared from the Berghof on 1 July. He had suffered a nervous breakdown. Hitler never spoke to him again. He would have Zeitzler dismissed from the Wehrmacht in January 1945, refusing him the right to wear uniform. Until his replacement, Guderian, was appointed on 21 July, the army was effectively without a Chief of the General Staff.192

  The Soviet advance had left the Red Army, in the northern sector of the front, poised not far from Vilna in Lithuania. Already, the borders of East Prussia were in their sights. On 9 July, Hitler flew with Keitel, Dönitz, Himmler, and Luftwaffe Chief of Staff General Günther Korten back to his old headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. Field-Marshal Model and General Johannes Frießner, recently appointed as commander of Army Group North in place of General Georg Lindemann, joined them from the eastern front. The discussions ranged mainly over plans for the urgent creation of a number of new divisions to shore up the eastern front and protect any inroads into East Prussia. Model and Frießner sounded optimistic. Hitler, too, thought his Luftwaffe adjutant, Below, also remained positive about developments on the eastern front. Hitler flew back to the Berghof that afternoon.193 He had already hinted that, in the light of the situation in the east, he would have to move his headquarters back to East Prussia, even though the fortifications of his accommodation there were still incomplete. Reading between the lines of one or two comments, Below gained the impression, he later wrote, that during what were to prove Hitler’s last days at the Berghof, before he left on 14 July for the Wolf’s Lair, never to return, he was no longer under any illusions about the outcome of the war. Even so, any hints of pessimism were more than countered by repeated stress on continuing the war, the impact of the new weapons, and ultimate victory. Once more, it was plain to Below that Hitler would never capitulate.194 There would be no repeat of 1918. Hitler’s political ‘mission’ had been based from the outset on that premise. The entire Reich would go down in flames first.

  Hitler had lived amid the relative tranquillity of the Obersalzberg for almost four months. The regular entourage at the Berghof had dwindled somewhat in that time. And in the days before departure there had been few guests to enliven proceedings. Hitler himself had seemingly become more reserved. On the last evening, perhaps sensing he would not see the Berghof again, he had paused in front of the pictures hanging in the great hall. Then he had kissed the hand of Below’s wife and Frau Brandt, the wife of one of his doctors, bidding them farewell.195 Next morning, 14 July, he flew back to East Prussia, returning to a Wolf’s Lair now heavily reinforced and scarcely recognizable from its appearance when first set up in 1941. He arrived in the late morning. At one o’clock he was running the military conference there as if he had never been away. He was more stooping in his gait than earlier. But his continued strength of will, despite the massive setbacks, continued to impress the admiring Below.196 For others, this strength of will – or obstinate refusal to face reality – was precisely what was preventing an end to the war and dragging Germany to inevitable catastrophe. They were determined to act before it was too late – to save what was left of the Reich, lay the foundations of a future without Hitler, and show the outside world that there was ‘another Germany’ beyond the forces of Nazism.

  Among the conferences held during the last days at the Berghof were two, on 6 and 11 July, related to the mobilization of the ‘home army’ (Heimatheer). They were attended by a young officer with a patch over one eye, a shortened right arm, and two fingers missing from his left hand – all the consequence of serious injuries suffered during the African campaign.197 The officer, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, chief of staff since 1 July of Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the reserve army, was present, a day after Hitler’s arrival at the Wolf’s Lair, at a further conference about strengthening the home army.198

  The question of creating new divisions from the home army was once more on the agenda for the military conference on 20 July. Again, Stauffenberg was ordered to be present.

  This time, he planted a time-bom b, carried in his briefcase, under the oaken table in the centre of the wooden barracks where Hitler was holding the conference. Hitler began the briefing, half an hour earlier than usual, at 12.30p.m. Fifteen minutes later the bomb exploded.199

  14

  LUCK OF THE DEVIL

  ‘It’s not a matter any more of the practical aim, but of showing the world and history that the German resistance movement at risk of life has dared the decisive stroke. Everything else is a matter of indifference alo
ngside that.’

  Major-General Henning von Tresckow, June 1944

  ‘It is now time that something was done. But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.’

  Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, July 1944

  ‘A tiny clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and at the same time criminal, stupid officers has forged a plot to eliminate me and at the same time to eradicate with me the staff practically of the German armed forces’ leadership.’

  Hitler, 21 July 1944

  Stauffenberg’s attempt to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944 had a lengthy prehistory.1 The complex strands of this prehistory contained in no small measure profound manifestations and admixtures of high ethical values and a transcendental sense of moral duty, codes of honour, political idealism, religious convictions, personal courage, remarkable selflessness, deep humanity, and a love of country that was light-years removed from Nazi chauvinism. The pre-history was also replete – how could it have been otherwise in the circumstances? – with disagreements, doubts, mistakes, miscalculations, moral dilemmas, short-sightedness, hesitancy, ideological splits, personal clashes, bungling organization, distrust – and sheer bad luck.

  The origins of a coup d’état to eliminate Hitler dated back, as we saw in earlier chapters, to the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Hitler’s determination to risk war with the western powers and court disaster for Germany had at that time prompted a number of highly-placed figures in the Army High Command, diplomatic service, and the Abwehr, together with a circle of their close contacts, to plot to remove him should he attack Czechoslovakia. Though fraught with difficulties, the conspiracy had, in fact, taken shape by the time that Chamberlain’s readiness to come to terms with Hitler at Bad Godesberg, then at Munich, removed the opportunity and took the wind out of the sails of the plotters. Their planned action might, in any case, have failed to materialize. The following summer, as the threat of war loomed ever larger, the same band of individuals had attempted to revive the conspiracy that had faltered with the Munich Agreement. But the fainter flickerings of opposition a year after Munich had come to nothing – floundering on internal divisions, Hitler’s continued popularity among the masses, and, not least, the loyalty (if at times appearing to waver – reluctant, but ultimately and decisively intact) of the army chiefs whose support for any coup was vital. The same ingredients would hamper the conspiracy against Hitler in immensely more difficult conditions during the war itself.

  The Swabian joiner Georg Elser had, working alone, shared none of the hesitancy of those operating from within the power-echelons of the regime. He had acted incisively, as we saw earlier, in the Bürgerbräukeller on the night of 8 November 1939, and come within a whisker of sending Hitler into oblivion. Good fortune alone had saved Hitler on that occasion. But outside the actions of a lone assassin, with the left-wing underground resistance groups, though never eliminated, weak, isolated, and devoid of access to the corridors of power, the only hope of toppling Hitler thereafter lay with those who themselves occupied positions of some power or influence in the regime itself.

  On the fringes of the conspiracy, the participation in Nazi rule in itself naturally created ambivalence. Breaking oaths of loyalty was no light matter, even for some whose dislike of Hitler was evident. Prussian values were here a double-edged sword: a deep sense of obedience to authority and service to the state clashed with equally profound feelings of duty to God and to country.2 Whichever triumphed within an individual: whether heavy-hearted acceptance of service to a head of state regarded as legitimately constituted, however detested; or rejection of such allegiance in the interest of what was taken to be the greater good, should the head of state be leading the country to ruin; this was a matter for conscience and judgement.3 It could, and did, go either way.

  Though there were numerous exceptions to a broad generalization, generational differences played some part. The tendency was greater in a younger generation of officers, for example, than in those who had already attained the highest ranks of general or field-marshal, to entertain thoughts of active participation in an attempt to overthrow the head of state. This was implied in a remark by Stauffenberg himself, several months before his attempt on Hitler’s life: ‘Since the generals have up to now managed nothing, the colonels have now to step in.’4 On the other hand, views on the morality of assassinating the head of state – in the midst of an external struggle of titanic proportions against an enemy whose victory threatened the very existence of a German state – differed fundamentally on moral, not simply generational, grounds. Any attack on the head of state contituted, of course, high treason. But in a war, distinguishing this from treachery against one’s own country, from betrayal to the enemy, was chiefly a matter of individual persuasion and the relative weighting of moral values. And only a very few were in a position to accumulate detailed and first-hand experiences of gross inhumanity at the same time as possessing the means to bring about Hitler’s removal. Even fewer were prepared to act.

  Beyond ethical considerations, there was the existential fear of the awesome consequences – for the families as well as for the individuals themselves – of discovery of any complicity in a plot to remove the head of state and instigate a coup d’état. This was certainly enough to deter many who were sympathetic to the aims of the plotters but unwilling to become involved. Nor was it just the constant dangers of discovery and physical risks that acted as a deterrent. There was also the isolation of resistance. To enter into, even to flirt with, the conspiracy against Hitler meant acknowledging an inner distance from friends, colleagues, comrades, entry into a twilight world of immense peril, and of social, ideological, even moral isolation.

  Quite apart from the evident necessity, in a terroristic police state, of minimizing risks through maximum secrecy, the conspirators were themselves well aware of their lack of popular support.5 Even at this juncture, as the military disasters mounted and ultimate catastrophe beckoned, the fanatical backing for Hitler had by no means evaporated and continued, if as a minority taste, to show remarkable resilience and strength. Those still bound up with the dying regime, those who had invested in it, had committed themselves to it, had burnt their boats with it, were still true believers in the Führer, were likely to stop at nothing, as adversity mounted, in their unbridled retribution for any sign of opposition. But beyond the fanatics, there were many others who – naïvely, or after deep reflection – thought it not merely wrong, but despicable and treacherous, to undermine one’s own country in war. Stauffenberg summed up the conspirators’ dilemma a few days before he laid the bomb in the Wolf’s Lair: ‘It is now time that something was done. But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.’6

  As this implies, the need to avoid a stab-in-the-back legend such as that which had followed the end of the First World War and left such a baleful legacy for the ill-fated Weimar Republic was a constant burden and anxiety for those who had decided – sometimes with a heavy heart – that Germany’s future rested on their capacity to remove Hitler, violently or not, from the scene, constitute a new government, and seek peace terms. This was one important reason why, from 1938 onwards, the leading figures in the resistance fatefully awaited the ‘right moment’ – which never came. Fearful of cutting down a national hero who had just won scarcely imaginable triumphs (which, in some cases, they themselves had cheered, and were captivated by) they felt incapacitated as long as Hitler was chalking up one apparent success after another before the war, then in the wave of Blitzkrieg victories. But, also worried about the consequences of removing Hitler and seeming to stab the war effort in the back after a major disaster, the hesitancy continued when final victory had become no more than a chimera. Rather than controlling the mome
nt for a strike, the conspirators let it rest on external contingencies that, in the nature of things, they could not orchestrate.

  When the strike eventually came, with the invasion consolidated in the west and the Red Army pressing towards the borders of the Reich in the east, the conspirators themselves recognized that they had missed the chance to influence the possible outcome of the war through their action. As one of their key driving-forces, Major-General Henning von Tresckow, from late 1943 chief of staff of the 2nd Army in the southern section of the eastern front, put it: ‘It’s not a matter any more of the practical aim, but of showing the world and history that the German resistance movement at risk of life has dared the decisive stroke (Wurf). Everything else is a matter of indifference alongside that.’7