The Women Who Flew for Hitler: The True Story of Hitler's Valkyries
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Not stopping to collect his hat, Claus headed straight to Haeften, waiting in the car. He was only halfway to the first gate when he heard the explosion, turned, and saw thick clouds of smoke, shot with yellow flames. ‘No one in that room’, he was certain, ‘can still be alive.’109 Bluffing his way through the checkpoints, he boarded the Heinkel 111 that had brought him in and was now waiting with its engines running, and headed for Berlin. It was still early afternoon when Claus landed, but to his anger there was no car ready to take him to the Bendlerblock, the main office of the Supreme High Command. When he finally arrived, Gisevius remembered that Claus ‘stood breathless and bathed in perspiration’, but ‘somehow the massiveness of the man had been reduced; he seemed more spiritual, lighter’.110 Claus had ‘a smile of victory on his face’, and radiated confidence and success.111 He had not heard that Hitler had survived.
The Valkyrie plan depended on an immediate response to news of the assassination. ‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead!’ the conspirators’ pre-planned radio announcement read, having been secretly typed up in the office by a secretary, Margarethe von Oven, her heart thumping as she worked. ‘The [new] Reich government has declared martial law in order to maintain law and order.’112 But Margarethe’s manuscript was still waiting in a desk drawer, martial law had not been declared, and the Reserve Army was not mobilized until four in the afternoon.* Without confirmation of the fatalities, Claus’s fellow conspirators had hesitated, failing to secure the all-important radio station or persuade enough key military commanders to back the coup. To their perpetual dishonour, most senior officers placed their oath to Hitler, their military duties and personal reputations, above the interests of their nation. The plot crumbled that evening, when news spread that Hitler was still alive.
Hitler had been only six feet away from the bomb, but the thick conference table had shielded him from much of the blast. Thrown from his chair, he was concussed, his head and back struck by falling timber, his hair burned, ears ringing and thighs riddled with over 200 oak splinters, but he had sustained no serious injuries. He was lucky. Three officers and a secretary would later die from their wounds. Hitler’s apparently miraculous survival fed his belief in his own inviolability. He greeted his secretaries ‘with an almost triumphant smile’, telling them, ‘I have been saved. Destiny has chosen me . . .’113 Later, after showing his shredded trousers to Mussolini, he sent them to Eva Braun, ‘with the instruction that they should be carefully preserved’ as evidence of providence.114 On discovering that Stauffenberg was the culprit, however, he ‘flew into a rage’ and ‘started cursing the cowards who wanted to get rid of him’.115 Over tea that afternoon, Hitler once again ‘leapt up in a fit of frenzy, with foam on his lips, and shouted that he would have revenge on all traitors’. Interrupted by a call from Berlin, he screamed orders ‘to shoot anyone and everyone’ before announcing, ‘I’m beginning to doubt whether the German people are worthy of my great ideals.’116
After a brief gun battle in the first-floor corridors of Berlin’s Bendlerblock, during which Claus was shot in the arm, he and his immediate clique were arrested. Their decorations and badges of rank were stripped from them, and tossed into an upturned helmet on the floor. Claus claimed personal responsibility for the attempted putsch, saying the others were under his command. Nevertheless, they were all summarily sentenced to immediate execution and led down the nearest staircase and out of the building. The front facade was floodlit by searchlights, and one side of the back courtyard was illuminated by the headlights of a truck. Set against a city in total blackout, ‘it seemed as theatrical as a movie backdrop . . . inside a dark studio’, Speer later recalled.117 Just outside the glare, a firing squad was waiting. It was half past midnight, twelve hours since Claus had planted the bomb at Hitler’s feet. Olbricht was the first to be led in front of the rifles, and was quickly cut down. Claus, his uniform sleeve now soaked with blood, was next, but some reports say that Haeften threw himself in front of the bullets intended for his friend. When his turn came, witnesses reportedly heard Claus shout out to the world, ‘Es lebe heiliges Deutschland!’ – ‘Long live sacred Germany!’
12
IN THE CAMPS
1944
‘Now, at last, things are going well! An assassination attempt has been made on Hitler . . .’ one fourteen-year-old Dutch girl wrote effusively in her diary. ‘And for once not by Jewish Communists or British capitalists, but by a German general who’s not only a count, but young as well.’1 Still hidden in her attic rooms in Amsterdam, Anne Frank believed that this was ‘the best proof we’ve had so far that many officers and generals are fed up with the war and would like to see Hitler sink into a bottomless pit’.2 Over 400 miles away, inside Nazi Germany, Melitta had also been confiding in her diary, but her entries were much more guarded. ‘News of assassination’, she pencilled neatly against 20 July, continuing without a pause: ‘Night flights, Ju 87 doesn’t work, due to loose contacts, repair and prepare installation Ju 88’.3 The next morning Melitta went to work as usual. It was only after her assistant reported further news that Melitta allowed herself to note, ‘apparently they have mentioned Col. Count St. [Stauffenberg] on the radio!’4 The exclamation mark, like the use of Claus’s formal name and title instead of the simple ‘C’ she usually wrote to denote him, put a discreet distance between herself and her brother-in-law. That evening she placed a call directly to Göring, whose adjutant eventually told her that no one had been critically injured in the attack. ‘Doubt that’, she risked adding to her account.5
For Otto Skorzeny, the first radio announcement on the afternoon of 20 July ‘came like a thunderbolt’.6 Quickly gathering some SS officers, he had arrived at the Bendlerblock around midnight. There he noted ‘an atmosphere of hostile suspense’, with several officers still armed with machine-pistols in the corridors.7 He was too late to prevent the immediate execution of Claus but half an hour later he met with Speer and the head of the Gestapo to discuss next steps. ‘When we greeted . . . no one clicked his heels,’ Speer later recalled. ‘Everything seemed muted; even the conversations were conducted in lowered voices, as at a funeral.’8 Within a few hours, the machinery of the Nazi state was back in operation.
Skorzeny’s take on the failed coup was that, ‘with the exception of Colonel von Stauffenberg’, the conspirators had been ‘hopelessly irresolute and resigned to the worst, so that a slight push from a handful of opponents brought the whole set of cards tumbling to the ground’.9 Even Churchill dismissed the attempt as simply part of ‘a murderous internecine power-struggle’.10 Skorzeny retained ‘the greatest respect’ for Claus, as a ‘man prepared to give his life for his convictions’, but he was incensed by the attempt to ‘stab the German nation in the back when it was fighting for its life’.11 Commissioned to hunt down the remaining conspirators, he applied a furious zeal to his work.
Hitler had addressed the nation just after midnight. At first he spoke slowly, hesitating, but his voice rose with passion as he attributed his survival to providence.* ‘My heart stopped in shock,’ the wife of one of the conspirators wrote, horrified to learn the attempt had failed, while another hurried ‘to light a fire and burn papers’.12 Outraged by the betrayal, the injured Führer was soon shouting into the microphone, swearing vengeance on the ‘tiny clique of ambitious, wicked, and stupidly criminal officers’ who had dared to oppose him. We will ‘settle accounts . . .’ he promised, ‘in the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settling them’.13
‘They will be murdered, wherever there’s a hint of suspicion,’ General von Thoma commented, listening to the broadcast as a POW in England. Stauffenberg’s ‘wife and children will probably have . . . long since been killed’.14 Nina, however, was still asleep in bed at Lautlingen. Having not heard from Claus for a few days, she had taken their children to the family schloss for the summer, where Berthold’s wife, Mika, was already ensconced with her young family. On 20 July, the two women had been sitting in the garden when
a maid ran out to tell them of a radio announcement about an assassination attempt. ‘We only looked at each other’, Nina later recalled, ‘and said, “This is it!”’15
Early the next morning, Claus’s elderly mother, Karoline, hurried into Nina’s bedroom. Following Hitler’s midnight broadcast, the Stauffenberg name was on everyone’s lips. Neither Nina nor Mika yet knew the exact role their husbands had played, nor that Berthold had already been arrested, and Claus shot and buried.* Later that morning the Gestapo arrived at Bamberg to arrest Nina. Not finding her there, they arrested her mother, eventually sending her to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp built specifically for women, sixty miles north of Berlin. It would be two more days before they called for Nina and the others at Lautlingen.
For Nina, ‘those two days were a gift from heaven’.16 Claus had given her ‘the order’ not to stand by him, ‘but to do everything to keep the children safe’.17 Their eldest son, Berthold, was now ten. He read a newspaper every day, and had heard about the attempt on the radio. He wanted to know what was going on, but the adults would not discuss it. Instead, his great-uncle Nüx took all the children on a long walk, distracting them with stories of his adventures as a big-game hunter in Africa. The next day Nina took her two eldest boys aside and gently told them that their father had carried out the attack, and had been executed by firing squad late that same day. For Berthold, his mother’s words were ‘shattering . . . the end of my world’.18 Like all the children, he had been brought up to venerate his Führer, but he also adored his father. ‘He believed he had to do it for Germany,’ Nina offered as she saw her son’s confusion.19 ‘He made a mistake . . .’ she added, reasoning that the boys might be interrogated. ‘Providence has protected our dear Führer.’20 ‘From that moment I was unable to think clearly,’ Berthold later confessed. He simply steeled himself to absorb ‘the blows that would fall on us’.21 They fell quick and hard.
The Gestapo visited Lautlingen while the children were asleep that evening. The next day, both their mother and great-uncle Nüx were gone. Mika took a train to Berlin, hoping to find out what had happened to her husband, and to bribe the Gestapo to get the family released. Instead, she too was arrested. Nina had decided to ‘play the stupid little housewife, with children and nappies and dirty laundry’.22 Now she learned this would do little good. Hitler was invoking the ancient law of Sippenhaft, or ‘kin detention’. ‘This scum must be eliminated, exterminated root and branch,’ he announced. ‘It is not sufficient just to seize the culprits and bring them ruthlessly to account – the whole brood must be wiped out.’23 Hitler’s injuries were worse than he wished to admit. His hearing and the nerves in his left arm were damaged, his legs ached, and ‘open sores’ were visible on his hands.24 He ‘looked horrible’, aides secretly admitted, ‘a fat, broken-down old man’.25 He was in no mood for mercy.
The night after Nina was arrested, Claus’s mother Karoline, her sister, and many aunts, uncles and cousins were seized and detained.* Nina and Mika’s children, the youngest of whom was just three, were left scared and bewildered in the care of their nanny and two Gestapo officials who quickly ‘behaved like masters of the whole house’.26 Margarethe von Oven,* the Reserve Army secretary who had typed out the Operation Valkyrie orders, was on a train back to Berlin on 21 July, carrying incriminating letters in her handbag. Suddenly she overheard people saying, ‘Stauffenberg . . . assassination . . . providence . . . a small clique . . . all of them liquidated.’27 Hurrying to the toilet, she tore up the letters and flushed them away. A week later, when she should have been keeping a low profile, she risked everything to visit the Stauffenberg children, still under house arrest. The name tags had been cut from their clothes, she noted, so that they could not be identified. In August the children were collected by the National Socialist Welfare Service. Before they left, their nanny took them to the local priest for his blessing. ‘With tears in his eyes’, he told them that whatever horrors lay ahead, they must never forget that their father ‘was a great man’.28 Only later did they realize how courageous these words were, at a time when the press and radio waves were filled with vitriolic reports about the conspirators. Then they were driven away in a black limousine. Such cars were now rare, and the children were torn between excitement and panic; their nanny was crying, and none of them knew where they were going.
Melitta had telephoned her family as soon as the first terrible reports began to come through, warning them to keep their distance from her, for their own safety. She hoped they would be overlooked because they were not blood-relatives of Claus.* ‘The extent of the catastrophe was all too clear,’ Klara said, immediately setting out for Gatow in spite of Melitta’s caution. When she arrived, the sisters took their old walk through the woods and down to the lake. The water no longer glinted with possibilities. Melitta would never take the ferry over to Tristanstrasse again, or sail on the lake with Claus and Berthold. But the shoreline still provided the seclusion where she and Klara could talk without being overheard. Klara thought Melitta seemed surprisingly calm. She was ‘under no illusion that she would avoid arrest’, but believed that the importance of her work gave her a chance to ‘come out unscathed’.29 Expecting to be detained at any moment, Melitta avoided her rooms until, ‘with a heavy heart’, Klara left, promising to telephone every day.30
Melitta had also called Alexander in Greece. Although they couldn’t discuss events, they tried to ‘give each other courage’.31 Melitta had already destroyed her husband’s letters. Her main fear now was that she might be drugged during interrogation, and this might ‘break her willpower’.32 Although hundreds of miles away during the attempted coup, as the chief assassin’s brother Alexander was still vulnerable. Nina thought the news had been ‘a great shock’ to him. Excluded from the plans, she felt ‘he had been underestimated by his brothers’ and ‘undoubtedly sensed that they had not let him into the secret because he . . . was much too careless’.33* Alexander braced himself for news of the arrest and execution of his family, and probably his own detention. When friends offered him the opportunity to flee to Egypt, he honourably refused. ‘If Schnepfchen must die for his brothers,’ Melitta confided to her diary, ‘then I am done with the whole thing here.’34 Alexander was arrested the next day.
That afternoon Paul phoned Melitta. ‘She was quite calm,’ he reported, but let him know that, ‘as a few gentlemen from the Gestapo were in her office, she probably would not be able to speak for some time’.35 First her office was ransacked, and then her Würzburg apartment. She met the ‘thugs’ with ‘such superior aplomb’, Jutta proudly reported, that they did not dare smash her clay sculptures.36 Melitta was then taken to the Gestapo offices on Prinz Albrecht Strasse.
Klara had kept her word, phoning every day. ‘When . . . no one answered I knew they had come for her,’ she wrote.37 To her amazement, a few days later she received a letter from Melitta, reassuring her that she had already petitioned Göring, and was hopeful of a swift release. She made it clear that Klara ‘should do nothing to intervene on her behalf’.38 Melitta did not want any unnecessary attention drawn to her ‘honorary Aryan’ family.
Although Melitta was not allowed to see the other prisoners, she was bearing up well. Her prison bed was ‘no worse than our Luftwaffe camp beds’, she felt, and her food – thick cabbage soup, bread, jam and coffee, ‘no worse than the mess’. She had been detained despite her ‘proven innocence’, she recorded neatly in the diary she had managed to bring with her, and was ‘completely calm and quite collected’. This was not entirely true. ‘Think a lot of the dead. Maybe I’ll see them soon,’ she wrote less carefully after her first interrogation. ‘And the poor children. Will I be able to care for them?’ As an afterthought she added, ‘B. [Berthold] is supposed to be involved! Proceedings conducted very well.’39
To pass the time, Melitta developed a routine of gymnastics, washing, and cleaning her cell. She mended her socks and bra with threads pulled from other clothes, plugged the worst hole
s in the wall with squashed bread, and fed the sparrows at her window as she had once tamed squirrels at Gatow. Sometimes she jotted down her memories of Franz, her own lost ‘sparrow’. After her ‘frenetic daily round and night flights’, however, she found her enforced inactivity hard to take.40 She also knew that drawing attention to the importance of her work was her best hope for securing her release. Arguing that her technical innovations were ‘indispensable’, and could have a ‘decisive influence’ on the war, she requested permission to work from her cell.41 Two days later Melitta’s assistant brought in her papers, and took back news of her to her sisters. Other prisoners were soon roped in to type for her. If Melitta occasionally sighed to see ‘two small Klemms’ flying above the prison yard, now, as so often before, she found refuge and courage in her work.
The Gestapo commissioner in charge of the Sippenhaft prisoners was SS-Stürmbannführer Paul Opitz. ‘A small, pale, tight-lipped man’, Opitz at least had ‘a kindly look in his eyes’, one detained woman noted, unlike his hostile ‘platinum-blonde’ secretary.42 A veteran of the Great War, like Melitta’s father and brother Opitz had joined the post-war volunteer corps in Posen, fighting to push back the Polish border.* Most of his later career had been with the SS immigration and border police: work that involved administration for the Einsatzgruppen tasked with mass murder in Poland in 1941. After 20 July 1944, Opitz was appointed to the special commission formed to investigate the plot. Perhaps sensing that the tide of the war had turned, he allowed the women connected with the conspiracy to have visitors, and ‘seemed to regard himself as a benevolent protector’, one later wrote. ‘I wish I could let them all go,’ he once whispered. ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with the business.’43
Admiring Melitta’s work ethic, Opitz made her an ‘honorary prisoner’.44 This meant she received more fresh water, and sweet rolls which she shared with other prisoners. ‘She was so fabulous, never a word of complaint,’ one recalled. ‘When she entered a room, even if it was a prison cell, it was as if a being from another world had come in . . . I always called her the angel of the prisoners.’45 Melitta also received a supply of menthol cigarettes and books. ‘Very nice,’ she wrote with typical brusqueness after reading Jeeves Saves the Day. ‘Washed polo blouse and socks.’46 In time she even gained some freedom of movement. Opitz told her she would soon be released. Instead, in early August she was transferred to Charlottenburg prison.* ‘Depressing, no sparrows, darker, no loo, milk soup,’ she wrote.47