by Ed Strosser
The plotters had two problems, however. Like a rich man without any pocket change, it was oddly difficult for German army leaders to obtain explosives during the biggest war in history. But they quickly overcame this by fashioning the bomb from captured British explosives. The second issue was a lack of cheerful volunteers, other than Stauffenberg. No one else had the courage and the access to plant the actual bomb. That meant Stauffenberg would be absent from the plot’s center in Berlin during the crucial coup-making hours. Leadership would fall to his colleagues, who lacked the passion and determination to complete the mission that Stauffenberg held. But with no other viable options, the plot was set in motion.
Twice that July, Stauffenberg showed up at a weekly group meeting with Hitler in his Russian front headquarters, packing a plastic explosive in his briefcase, right next to his charts of the phantom divisions that fed Hitler’s fantasy of turning back the Russians. But both times Stauffenberg changed his mind at the last second. For a while the plotmates had agreed they would only detonate the bomb if it would kill both Hitler and SS leader Himmler. But their bad luck held, and Himmler stopped attending these meetings, so they agreed to settle for just Adolf. On July 13, Stauffenberg set out for his third meeting with Hitler at his Prussian HQ with the bomb jammed into his briefcase. This time he was determined to light the fuse.
Back in Berlin, confident that finally Hitler would be blown up, Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, deputy commander of the replacement army and a key plotmate of Beck and Stauffenberg, ordered the start of Operation Valkyrie, which was the army’s standing plan to seize control of the country in cases an internal uprisings. The plotters would use the cover of Valkyrie to seize the government, take out the SS, and neutralize the vast Nazi apparatus. Then they would be in position to open peace talks with the Allies. Orders were sent out to army units throughout the country to be on the alert for further instructions. Soldiers maneuvered into position around Berlin to seize Gestapo and SS positions. But the overly cautious Stauffenberg got cold feet when Himmler failed to attend the meeting, even though the plotmates had agreed to go ahead with the plan anyway. He nervously called his colleagues Beck and Olbricht in Berlin, and they agreed to cancel the plans. Olbricht hastily withdrew the Valkyrie orders, but when Fromm found out that the orders had already been issued, he laid into Olbricht.
The following week, Stauffenberg was called to attend another meeting with Hitler. For the fourth time he packed his bomb.
The morning of July 20, Stauffenberg took a flight to Hitler’s HQ retreat at Rastenburg, in the forest of East Prussia, the ancestral home of the German army. He traveled with his aide, Lt. Werner von Haeften. In a shocking turn of events, the plotters prepared a backup plan: Both men carried bombs in their briefcases; in case one briefcase was lost, the show could go on.
The plan was simple. Perhaps too simple. Stauffenberg would kill Hitler with the bomb. A coup member in charge of communication at Rastenburg would cut all communications with the outside world. Troops and police loyal to the coup would seize key government centers in Berlin and other German cities, and the army in France would round up SS and Gestapo members, execute them, and open talks with the Allies. What could go wrong? It wasn’t quite the scale of a Russian invasion but the plotters — all colonels and generals — thought they could handle it.
To prepare for the meeting with Hitler, Stauffenberg and Haeften ducked into an empty office to light the fuse. A getaway car and speedy airplane waited to whisk them back to Berlin. But Stauffenberg, with only three fingers, had trouble setting the time-delay fuse. Outside the office, an impatient General Keitel, Hitler’s pet general, sent in a soldier to rush the two along. While Stauffenberg did manage to set his bomb, he was unable to insert Haeften’s backup bomb into his briefcase.
Stauffenberg entered the meeting and took his place next to Hitler at a large wooden table covered with maps. He placed his explosive luggage as close to Hitler as possible. But unlike prior meetings that took place in a concrete bunker, this one was in a lightly built wooden hut with open windows, which would reduce the impact of any blast. After a minute or two, just before 1:00 p.m., Stauffenberg excused himself from the meeting and dashed to his waiting car with Haeften, trying to not look like a guy about to kill Hitler and become outlaw number one in Europe.
But back in the hut, the same stoogy Colonel Brandt, who had unwittingly carried the liquor bombs onto Hitler’s plane, became annoyed by Stauffenberg’s briefcase blocking his way. He moved it to the other side of the solid wood table support, away from Hitler. For his trouble, Brandt was blown up when the bomb exploded moments later. In their getaway car, the three-fingered assassin and Haeften saw the explosion and concluded the overdue deed was finally done. Despite being stopped by SS guards manning the gate, they talked their way out and sped toward the airport. Along the way, Haeften ditched his briefcase with his bomb.
Back in Berlin, Beck and Olbricht, not known for their dashing drive, did nothing except sweat and wait. Because of the uproar caused by the premature launching of Operation Valkyrie the previous week, Olbricht hesitated in activating the plan until he confirmed that Hitler was dead. Better wait, he figured, than risk a dressing-down from Fromm and a negative job review. So he did nothing. He and Beck, who was decked out in his uniform for the first time since his 1938 resignation, were awaiting the call from Gen. Erich Fellgiebel, the coup member who headed the communications at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg. The plan was that Fellgiebel would phone Beck and Olbricht when the bomb went off so they knew that Hitler was dead. Everyone would skate through the coup without actually putting their lives on the line. Everything depended on Hitler dying from the bomb. But the bomb didn’t kill Hitler. The heavy oak table shielded Hitler enough so that he suffered only minor wounds. When he staggered out of the bombed-out building, Fellgiebel spotted him and froze. Rather than call his plot-mates telling them Hitler was alive, he did nothing. He did try to shut down all communications in and out of Rastenburg but succeeded only in tipping himself off to the SS.
Fellgiebel’s reaction proved to be a typical plotmate response. Now that the time to fish or cut bait had arrived, everyone involved either froze or waffled in their decisions, unwilling to sacrifice themselves and desperate to escape the inevitable backlash by Hitler. The SS quickly took control over Rastenburg’s communications, and Fellgiebel never sent any signal to Berlin that Hitler was alive. In fact, they never heard from him again.
Beck and Olbricht nervously shuffled papers as the afternoon wound down; Stauffenberg winged to Berlin. The plot was frozen in place. Plotmate Wolf Heinrich, Count von Helldorf, head of the Berlin police, anxiously waited for orders to move out. So far it was the armchair coup.
Finally, just before 4:00 p.m., Stauffenberg landed outside Berlin and phoned Olbricht to announce that Hitler was certainly dead. At last, the plotters snapped out of their sweaty lethargy and issued orders. But they had already lost three precious hours while the Nazis didn’t even know there was a coup afoot. The initiative slipped away.
At 4:00 p.m. sharp the coup lumbered to life: Olbricht sent out the Valkyrie orders; the troops in Berlin, commanded by plotmate von Haase, were dispatched to seize key government buildings; the Berlin police jumped at strategic locations; and Nazi and military leaders throughout the country were ordered to secure themselves and their locations against a revolt by the SS.
At first, things were going well, but troubles soon began to pile up. First, Olbricht went to Fromm in the Bendlerblock army HQ, to enlist him into the plot. Fromm, shocked, absolutely shocked that the coup he was nominally part of had actually started but, not wanting to be caught on the losing side, promised to join only if he received assurance that Hitler was dead. At Olbricht’s suggestion, he called Rastenburg. Olbricht was under the illusion that all communication was cut. But Fromm got through immediately and was told by Keitel that Hitler had survived the bombing. Fromm was furious when he found that Valkyrie
had been started in his name. The plotters demanded he join them, and he simply drew his pistol and placed them all under arrest. The dim-witted plotters had forgotten to bring their guns. They didn’t even post guards to protect the headquarters or surround themselves with loyal troops. They had armed themselves only with attitude, their dubious honor, and wishful thinking.
Facing the collapse of the coup and in many ways determining the future course of World War II, cancer-ridden Beck, Olbricht, and the three-fingered assassin Stauffenberg wrestled Fromm to the ground and took away his pistol. They locked him in his office without a snack. Fromm received the first time-out of the revolution.
Had the plotters drawn up a pre-coup checklist, it probably would have looked something like this:
Stiff Prussian attitude — check
Note pad for dictating orders — check
Indignant look for questioning underlings — check
Loyal soldiers or weapons — Not needed!
THE OATH
I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.
Few things hindered the army’s resistance more than the oath. Once taken, most officers couldn’t see how they could violate it and remain in the army. To these men the oath was like some pixie dust sprinkled in their eyes. In a way it served as their security blanket. If they ever doubted what to do, they could always fall back on following the oath and sleep well, knowing they did their duty.
At about 6:00 p.m., rebel army troops led by Maj. Adolf Remer, not a party to the plot, surrounded the Propaganda Ministry, with its Radio Berlin transmitter. Inside, the parboiled Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, saw them coming and sprang to action. The plotters, trapped in their Prussian traditions of duty and honor, expected Remer to capture the transmitter, as ordered. Goebbels, wise to Hitler being alive, took advantage of the same instinct to follow orders and invited Remer into his office for a little chat. The slick Goebbels convinced Remer that he was unknowingly taking part in a coup. To back up his claim, Goebbels got Hitler on the phone — the plotmates never thought to cut his phone lines — and he told Remer to obey him and not the army. Remer, his common sense overwhelmed once again by the potent mix of German order-taking abilities and Nazi craftiness, now clicked his heels and ordered his troops to protect Goebbels. Fortified by clear orders, Remer turned on the plotmates.
With one slick move Goebbels, a shriveled PR hack in a poorly fitting suit, had flipped the troops actually carrying the guns over to Hitler’s side. A single phone call had outwitted the career army men, some of the cream of the crop of the General Staff. As usual, the plotmates had no idea the ground had shifted under their feet. Their belief was that all orders would be followed; even if the order meant sending an unknown army major to inexplicably arrest a key member of the Nazi high command. This, however, was not their father’s Germany — it was a whole new world, and the fast-talking, initiative-taking Goebbels ran circles around them. The plotters had stupidly trusted that the officer would explicitly follow their orders. They lost the one great chance to overwhelm the Nazis.
By 7:00 that evening, the troops under Remer marched back to the Bendlerblock and surrounded the plotmates. Inside they were still obliviously issuing orders to their phantom revolutionary army. Somehow they never noticed that no one was replying. Had they bothered to investigate, they would have found their communications had been cut an hour earlier. Now, they were isolated.
But they were not alone. True to form, the plotmates had failed to clear the Bendlerblock of pro-Hitler soldiers, and many still roamed the halls. Later that night some of these officers burst into the offices of the plotters and opened fire. It was a one-sided affair, as the plotmates were still unarmed. They were quickly overpowered, and Fromm, now freed from his time-out, confronted them. Remer’s troops flooded into the building.
Fromm now found himself in a tough spot. He was marginally part of this whole affair. If Hitler had been blown up, Fromm would have taken on a key role. But fate had turned him against his former allies. He latched on to the opportunity to save himself and issued an immediate death sentence on all four conspirators: Beck, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, and another ally, colonel of the General Staff Mertz von Quirnheim. All but Beck were taken away. Fromm gave Beck a chance for the honorable way out by using a pistol on himself. Beck fired a shot that merely grazed the top of his head. An annoyed Fromm grabbed the gun away, but Beck pleaded for another chance to take his own life. Fromm gave the pistol back to the cancerous general. Still the old soldier, who had spent his entire adult life in the army, failed again to accurately shoot a bullet a few inches. A disgusted Fromm brutally ordered a solider to finish off his old, former boss.
Fromm then turned to his old plotmates and ordered them shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. And there, in the dark of night, highlighted by the headlights of a truck, a squad of German soldiers ended the last gasp of German resistance to Hitler. They had been bred in the generations-old traditions of the Prussian officer corps, had conquered most of Europe, and were now holding their ground against enemies whose size and strength dwarfed their own. Yet they still could not conquer a few square miles of their own city, and the enemy didn’t even know a fight was on.
Outside of Berlin, the coup stumbled blindly forward, not knowing their leaders had fallen. Upon being told that Hitler was dead, Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France and an avid member of the coup, leapt into action and ordered the arrest of senior officers of the SS in the Paris area. Then he headed over to see Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, the commander of the German army on the western front.
PRUSSIA
It has been said that Prussia is not a country with an army, but an army with a country. Settled by Teutonic knights way back in the thirteenth century, the country occupied most of today’s eastern part of Germany, Poland, and sections of the Baltic countries. Following the unification of Germany in 1871, Prussia had a big country of its own: Germany. The Prussian king became the German king, the Prussian army became the heart of the German army. But after World War II, the Germans who weren’t dead fled Prussia; it was officially dissolved, and the Soviets took a blowtorch to the homeland of the German nobility. The core of Prussia, the estate-rich east, was split up with a section absorbed into Poland and another chunk still an isolated outpost of Russia.
Kluge was yet another one of those halfhearted fence-sitting generals; earlier that afternoon he had received two interesting phone calls. First, Beck had found some down– time to phone Kluge and urge him to join the coup. A short time later, Keitel at Rastenburg rang to let him know that Hitler was alive and Kluge should obey orders from him and not the plotters. Kluge was stunned. Before hearing from Rastenburg, he had been planning to join the coup. But now, that meant violating his oath to Hitler and worse yet, facing his wrath if the coup failed. He was torn — the fate of the war and the lives of millions waited for his decision. Finally he made his choice: he would wait and see what happened to Hitler. Then he would throw his support behind the winning side. When he sat down for dinner with Stülpnagel, Kluge made up his mind and betrayed his caste. He denied any knowledge of the assassination plots, even though he had held discussions about them for years. A stunned Stülpnagel did nothing other than stutter a few syllables. He knew he was a dead man if the coup failed because he had a jail full of angry SS officers being prepped for the firing squad. But once again, the plotmates did nothing when confronted with disaster. Stülpnagel took the bad news in stride, finished dinner, and returned to Paris to release his SS prisoners.
Like the other plotmates, Stülpnagel lived in the old world of honor and oaths. Unknown to the plotters, however, that world had long passed them by. It was a nineteenth-century world, and they were fighting
Adolf Hitler, the archetype of the twentieth-century dictator. In their country’s and the world’s darkest hour, these men of outmoded ideals could not muster the courage and will to abandon them. It was a loss the whole world suffered.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER
Hitler scoured the continent to wipe out any distant relative of Stauffenberg. Thousands were killed, even those connected by the slimmest of threads. The resistance to Hitler from inside the German high command died.
The street outside the Bendlerblock where he was executed in Berlin now bears Stauffenberg’s name.
The noble-born generals of the Prussian cabal, who had elevated their survival above all other concerns, while accommodating Hitler’s evil, were now paying the ultimate price. For years after the failed putsch of 1923, they could have had their way with Hitler. But they realized only he could give them what they wanted: control of Europe. They put the awesome might of their resuscitated armies under his control and on a cataclysmic collision with the rest of the world. It was too late when many realized they could not control him. Even with the terrible end in sight, and with the knowledge of the horrible crimes committed in their name, the generals couldn’t summon the courage to sacrifice themselves to kill Hitler. Ultimately both were destroyed by their enemies who learned Hitler’s lessons better than the generals, that they were in a fight until death or bitter victory.
TWELVE.
THE BAY OF PIGS INVASION: 1961
Invading a country is a big deal. It usually makes the news. John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected, seemed to be very mature for his age. Perhaps it was his World War II experience combined with his movie-star aura and privileged upbringing that led him to imagine he could cloak an invasion in total secrecy. But when the invaded country is well known as the rabid enemy of a world superpower like the United States, it’s hard to hide the looming colossus shooting from behind the sand dunes. Even a platoon of CIA flacks disguised as press aides proclaiming full deniability can’t spin away an invasion. But Kennedy tried.