When he woke up, the bad news which had in the meantime arrived finally stirred the Nazi warlord to action. He gave—too late, as it turned out—permission to engage the Panzer Lehr and 12th S.S. Panzer divisions in Normandy. He also issued a famous order which has been preserved for posterity in the log of the Seventh Army:
16:55 hours. June 6, 1944
Chief of Staff Western Command emphasizes the desire of the Supreme Command to have the enemy in the bridgehead annihilated by the evening of June 6 since there exists the danger of additional sea- and airborne landings for support … The beachhead must be cleaned up by not later than tonight.
In the eerie mountain air of the Obersalzberg, from which Hitler was now trying to direct the most crucial battle of the war up to this moment—he had been saying for months that Germany’s destiny would be decided in the West—this fantastic order seems to have been issued in all seriousness, concurred in by Jodl and Keitel. Even Rommel, who passed it on by telephone shortly before 5 o’clock that afternoon, an hour after his return from Germany, seems to have taken it seriously, for he ordered Seventh Army headquarters to launch an attack by the 21st Panzer Division, the only German armored unit in the area, “immediately regardless of whether reinforcements arrive or not.”
This the division had already done, without waiting for Rommel’s command. General Pemsel, who was on the other end of the line when Rommel called Seventh Army headquarters, gave a blunt reply to Hitler’s demand that the Allied beachhead—there were actually now three—“be cleaned up by not later than tonight.”
“That,” he replied, “would be impossible.”
Hitler’s much-propagandized Atlantic Wall had been breached within a few hours. The once vaunted Luftwaffe had been driven completely from the air and the German Navy from the sea, and the Army taken by surprise. The battle was far from over, but its outcome was not long in doubt. “From June 9 on,” says Speidel, “the initiative lay with the Allies.”
Rundstedt and Rommel decided that it was time to say so to Hitler, face to face, and to demand that he accept the consequences. They enticed him to a meeting on June 17 at Margival, north of Soissons, in the elaborate bombproof bunker which had been built to serve as the Fuehrer’s headquarters for the invasion of Britain in the summer of 1940, but never used. Now, four summers later, the Nazi warlord appeared there for the first time.
He looked pale and sleepless [Speidel later wrote], playing nervously with his glasses and an array of colored pencils which he held between his fingers. He sat hunched upon a stool, while the field marshals stood. His hypnotic powers seemed to have waned. There was a curt and frosty greeting from him. Then in a loud voice he spoke bitterly of his displeasure at the success of the Allied landings, for which he tried to hold the field commanders responsible.19
But the prospect of another stunning defeat was emboldening the generals, or at least Rommel, whom Rundstedt left to do most of the talking when Hitler’s diatribe against them had come to a momentary pause. “With merciless frankness,” says Speidel, who was present, “Rommel pointed out … that the struggle was hopeless against the [Allied] superiority in the air, at sea and on the land.”*20 Well, not quite hopeless, if Hitler abandoned his absurd determination to hold every foot of ground and then to drive the Allied forces into the sea. Rommel proposed, with Rundstedt’s assent, that the Germans withdraw out of range of the enemy’s murderous naval guns, take their panzer units out of the line and re-form them for a later thrust which might defeat the Allies in a battle fought “outside the range of the enemy’s naval artillery.”
But the Supreme warlord would not listen to any proposal for withdrawal. German soldiers must stand and fight. The subject obviously was unpleasant to him and he quickly changed to others. In a display which Speidel calls “a strange mixture of cynicism and false intuition,” Hitler assured the generals that the new V-l weapon, the buzz bomb, which had been launched for the first time the day before against London, “would be decisive against Great Britain … and make the British willing to make peace.” When the two field marshals drew Hitler’s attention to the utter failure of the Luftwaffe in the West, the Fuehrer retorted that “masses of jet fighters”—the Allies had no jets, but the Germans had just put them into production—would soon drive the British and American flyers from the skies. Then, he said, Britain would collapse. At this juncture the approach of Allied planes forced them to adjourn to the Fuehrer’s air-raid shelter.
Safe in the underground concrete bunker, they resumed the conversation,* and at this point Rommel insisted on steering it into politics.
He predicted [says Speidel] that the German front in Normandy would collapse and that a breakthrough into Germany by the Allies could not be checked … He doubted whether the Russian front could be held. He pointed to Germany’s complete political isolation … He concluded … with an urgent request that the war be brought to an end.
Hitler, who had interrupted Rommel several times, finally cut him short: “Don’t you worry about the future course of the war, but rather about your own invasion front.”
The two field marshals were getting nowhere, either with their military or political arguments. “Hitler paid no attention whatsoever to their warnings,” General Jodl later recalled at Nuremberg. Finally the generals urged the Supreme Commander at least to visit Rommel’s Army Group? headquarters to confer with some of the field commanders on what they were up against in Normandy. Hitler reluctantly agreed to the visit for June 19—two days hence.
He never showed up. Shortly after the field marshals had departed from Margival on the afternoon of June 17 an errant V-l on its way to London turned around and landed on the top of the Fuehrer’s bunker. No one was killed or even hurt, but Hitler was so upset that he set off immediately for safer parts, not stopping until he got to the mountains of Berchtesgaden.
There more bad news shortly arrived. On June 20 the long-awaited Russian offensive on the central front began, developing with such overwhelming power that within a few days the German Army Group Center, in which Hitler had concentrated his strongest forces, was completely smashed, the front torn wide open and the road to Poland opened. On July 4 the Russians crossed the 1939 Polish eastern border and converged on East Prussia. All available reserves of the High Command were quickly rounded up to be rushed—for the first time in World War II—to the defense of the Fatherland itself. This helped to doom the German armies in the West. From now on they could not count on receiving any sizable reinforcements.
Once more, on June 29, Rundstedt and Rommel appealed to Hitler to face realities both in the East and in the West and to try to end the war while considerable parts of the German Army were still in being. This meeting took place on the Obersalzberg, where the Supreme warlord treated the two field marshals frostily, dismissing their appeals curtly and then lapsing into a long monologue on how he would win the war with new “miracle weapons.” His discourse, says Speidel, “became lost in fantastic digressions.”
Two days later Rundstedt was replaced as Commander in Chief West by Field Marshal von Kluge.* On July 15 Rommel wrote a long letter to Hitler and dispatched it by Army teletype. “The troops,” he wrote, “are fighting heroically everywhere, but the unequal struggle is nearing its end.” He added a postscript in his own handwriting:
I must beg you to draw the proper conclusions without delay. I feel it my duty as Commander in Chief of the Army Group to state this clearly.21
“I have given him his last chance,” Rommel told Speidel. “If he does not take it, we will act.”22
Two days later, on the afternoon of July 17, while driving back to headquarters from the Normandy front, Rommel’s staff car was shot up by low-flying Allied fighter planes and he was so critically wounded that it was first thought he would not survive the day. This was a disaster to the conspirators, for Rommel had now—Speidel swears to it23—made up his mind irrevocably to do his part in ridding Germany of Hitler’s rule (though still opposing his assassination
) within the next few days. As it turned out, his dash and daring were sorely missing among the Army officers who, at long last, as the German armies crumbled in the East and West that July of 1944, made their final bid to bring Hitler and National Socialism down.
The conspirators, says Speidel, “felt themselves painfully deprived of their pillar of strength.”*24
THE CONSPIRACY AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR
The successful Allied landing in Normandy threw the conspirators in Berlin into great confusion. Stauffenberg, as we have seen, had not believed it would be attempted in 1944, and that, if it were, there was a fifty-fifty chance that it would fail. He seems to have wished that it would, since then the American and British governments, after such a bloody and costly setback, would be more willing to negotiate a peace in the West with his new anti-Nazi government, which in this case could get better terms.
When it became evident that the invasion had succeeded, that Germany had suffered another crucial defeat, and that a new one was threatening in the East, Stauffenberg, Beck and Goerdeler wondered whether there was any point in going ahead with their plans. If they succeeded they would only be blamed for bringing on the final catastrophe. Though they knew it was now inevitable, this was not generally realized by the mass of the German people. Beck finally concluded that though a successful anti-Nazi revolt could not now spare Germany from enemy occupation, it could bring the war to an end and save further loss of blood and destruction of the Fatherland. A peace now would also prevent the Russians from overrunning Germany and Bolshevizing it. It would show the world that there was “another Germany” besides the Nazi one. And—who knew?—perhaps at least the Western Allies, despite their terms of unconditional surrender, might not be too hard on a conquered Germany. Goerdeler agreed and pinned even greater hopes on the Western democracies. He knew, he said, how much Churchill feared the danger of “a total Russian victory.”
The younger men, led by Stauffenberg, were not entirely convinced. They sought advice from Tresckow, who was now chief of staff of the Second Army on the crumbling Russian front. His reply brought the stumbling plotters back on the track.
The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should it fail, the attempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance Movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Compared with this object, nothing else matters.25
This inspired answer settled the matter and revived the spirits and dissolved the doubts of Stauffenberg and his young friends. The threatened collapse of the fronts in Russia, France and Italy impelled the plotters to act at once. Another event helped to speed them on their way.
From the beginning the Beck–Goerdeler–Hassell circle had declined to have anything to do with the Communist underground, and vice versa. To the Communists the plotters were as reactionary as the Nazis and their very success might prevent a Communist Germany from succeeding a National Socialist one. Beck and his friends were well aware of this Communist line, and they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.* Furthermore, they knew that it had become infiltrated with Gestapo agents—“V men,” as Heinrich Mueller, the Gestapo chief and himself a student and admirer of the Soviet N.K.V.D., called them.
In June the plotters, against the advice of Goerdeler and the older members, decided to contact the Communists. This was at the suggestion of the Socialist wing and especially of Adolf Reichwein, the Socialist philosopher and celebrated Wandervogel, who was now director of the Folklore Museum in Berlin. Reichwein had maintained vague contacts with the Communists. Though Stauffenberg himself was suspicious of them, his Socialist friends Reichwein and Leber convinced him that some contact with them had become necessary in order to see what they were up to and what they would do in case the putsch succeeded, and, if possible, to use them at the last moment to widen the basis of the anti-Nazi resistance. Reluctantly he agreed to Leber and Reichwein meeting with the underground Communist leaders on June 22. But he warned them that the Communists should be told as little as possible.
The meeting took place in East Berlin between Leber and Reichwein, representing the Socialists, and two individuals named Franz Jacob and Anton Saefkow who claimed to be—and perhaps were—the leaders of the Communist underground. They were accompanied by a third comrade whom they introduced as “Rambow.” The Communists turned out to know quite a bit about the plot against Hitler and wanted to know more. They asked for a meeting with its military leaders on July 4. Stauffenberg refused, but Reichwein was authorized to represent him at a further meeting on that date. When he arrived at it, he, along with Jacob and Saefkow, were promptly arrested. “Rambow,” it turned out, was a Gestapo stool pigeon. The next day Leber, on whom Stauffenberg was counting to become the dominant political force in the new government, was also arrested.*
Stauffenberg was not only deeply upset by the arrest of Leber, with whom he had become a close personal friend and whom he regarded as indispensable to the proposed new government, but he saw at once that the whole conspiracy was in dire peril of being snuffed out now that Himmler’s men were so close on its trail. Leber and Reichwein were courageous men and could be counted on, he thought, not to reveal any secrets even under torture. Or could they be? Some of the plotters were not so sure. There might be limits beyond which even the bravest man could not keep silent when his body was being racked by insufferable pain.
The arrest of Leber and Reichwein was a further spur to immediate action.
THE COUP OF JULY 20, 1944
Toward the end of June the plotters received one good stroke of fortune. Stauffenberg was promoted to full colonel and appointed chief of staff to General Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home Army. This post not only enabled him to issue orders to the Home Army under Fromm’s name but gave him direct and frequent access to Hitler. Indeed, the Fuehrer began to summon the chief of the Replacement Army, or his deputy, to headquarters two or three times a week to demand fresh replacements for his decimated divisions in Russia. At one of these meetings Stauffenberg intended to plant his bomb.
Stauffenberg had now become the key man in the conspiracy. On his shoulders alone rested its only chance for success. As the one member of the plot who could penetrate the heavily guarded Fuehrer headquarters it was up to him to kill Hitler. As chief of staff of the Replacement Army it would have to be left to him—since Fromm had not been won over completely and could not be definitely counted on—to direct the troops that were to seize Berlin after Hitler was out of the way. And he had to carry out both objectives on the same day and at two spots separated by two or three hundred miles—the Fuehrer’s headquarters, whether on the Obersalzberg or at Rastenburg, and Berlin. Between the first and the second acts there must be an interval of two or three hours while his plane was droning back to the capital during which he could do nothing but hope that his plans were being energetically initiated by his confederates in Berlin. That was one trouble, as we shall shortly see.
There were others. One seems to have been an almost unnecessary complication that sprang up in the minds of the now desperate conspirators. They came to the conclusion that it would not suffice to kill Adolf Hitler. They must at the same time kill Goering and Himmler, thus ensuring that the military forces under the command of these two men could not be used against them. They thought too that the top generals at the front who had not yet been won over would join them more quickly if Hitler’s two chief lieutenants were also done away with. Since Goering and Himmler usually attended the daily military conferences at the Fuehrer headquarters, it was believed that it would not be too difficult to kill all three men with one bomb. This foolish resolve led Stauffenberg to miss two golden opportunities.
He was summoned to the Obersalzberg on July 11 to report to the Fuehrer on the supply of badly needed replacements. He carried with him on the plane down to Berchtesgade
n one of the Abwehr’s English-made bombs. It had been decided at a meeting of the plotters in Berlin the night before that this was the moment to kill Hitler—and Goering and Himmler as well. But Himmler was not present at the conference that day and when Stauffenberg, leaving the meeting for a moment, rang up General Olbricht in Berlin to tell him so, stressing that he could still get Hitler and Goering, the General urged him to wait for another day when he could get all three. That night, on his return to Berlin, Stauffenberg met with Beck and Olbricht and insisted that the next time he must attempt to kill Hitler, regardless of whether Goering and Himmler were present or not. The others agreed.
The next time was soon at hand. On July 14 Stauffenberg was ordered to report the next day to the Fuehrer on the replacement situation—every available recruit was needed to help fill the gaps in Russia, where Army Group Center, having lost twenty-seven divisions, had ceased to exist as a fighting force. That day—the fourteenth—Hitler had moved his headquarters back to Wolfsschanze at Rastenburg to take personal charge of trying to restore the central front, where Red Army troops had now reached a point but sixty miles from East Prussia.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 165