Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  Beck’s doubts about the generals’ strike were, in fact, well-founded, supported as they were by his realistic assessment of the situation. Any plan would have had to come to grips with the fact that this was a popular regime, headed by a man who had proved success­ful, was widely admired, and had just seen his support driven to new heights by the triumphant annexation of Austria. The regime, in its populism, was not unlike many people: egotistical, ruthless, and unconstrained by traditional values. Against it stood an Old World, elitist and confined by outmoded conventions that even it was struggling to shake off. A case in point: when Fritsch learned more about the background of the charges levied against him, he complained bitterly about his treatment and finally even conceded that Hitler had been as involved as Himmler; nevertheless, he refused to protest because that would have been rude and inappropriate for a person of his social standing. Fritsch’s inability to come to terms with the coarse new world in which he suddenly found himself is evidenced in his almost comic yet poignant plan, devised with Beck’s approval, to challenge Himmler-whom Fritsch believed had engineered the scandal-to a duel.

  Until that day in January when Fritsch was suddenly confronted with a bribed witness before a host of onlookers, he and his army had thought that their position in the Reich was unassailable, that they had emerged victorious from the power struggle or at least were coasting toward inevitable victory. Now all such illusions were shat­tered. Despite his assurances that the Wehrmacht was and would remain the sole bearer of arms in the land, Hitler moved in August to elevate the SS to a kind of fourth service alongside the army, air force, and navy, thus laying the foundation for the emergence of the Waffen-SS. Venerable institutions are much more commonly laid low by their victories than by their defeats, especially when the true na­ture of those triumphs is disguised-as it so often is-or when it transpires that they are not in fact victories at all.

  3. THE SEPTEMBER PLOT

  Scarcely had Hitler finished basking in the jubilation, the flowers, and pealing bells that greeted him on his triumphant journey through Austria to the Heldenplatz in Vienna, when he became impa­tient for new adventures. At that very moment, however, forces were beginning to stir that would work with great determination to change the course that Germany was taking. The Fritsch affair had demon­strated to Hans Oster just how difficult it would be to persuade the generals to mount the kind of resistance that he deemed necessary. Regardless of how alluring they may have found Hitler’s increasingly open plans for military expansion, they feared his gambler’s instincts and the recklessness with which he risked war, even with Great Brit­ain. Most remained paralyzed, however, inhibited from taking serious action, partly by the personal oaths of allegiance they had sworn to the Führer and partly by their ingrained belief in such ideals as loy­alty and obedience.

  Oster and his friends realized that even though Hitler had already demolished any basis for such loyalty, it persisted and could only be uprooted through the threat of a major foe. Only if the British adopted a determined, unyielding stance that drove home the danger of another great war would the generals realize the seriousness of the threat Hitler posed to his own country. Finally they would be seized with their responsibility for the greater whole, regardless of their oaths of allegiance and traditional duty to obey.

  This was the thought that prompted the curious pilgrimage to London and Paris beginning in the summer of 1938. Envoys of the opposition hoped to inform the Western powers of Hitler’s intentions toward Czechoslovakia and to elicit strongly worded declarations of Western determination to oppose such aggression. Driven by his own restiveness, Goerdeler had traveled to Paris in early March and then again in April, meeting with the most senior official in the Foreign Ministry, Alexis Léger, but failing to obtain much more than fine words. In fact, many comments made at the time suggest that the French did not know what to make of a German who would warn a foreign power about the designs of his own government. No one seemed quite certain that Goerdeler was not actually acting on behalf of the Nazi regime. He aroused the same irritation in London. The extent to which the nations of Europe were caught up in their own preoccupations in those years can be seen in the fact that Sir Robert Albert Vansittart, the chief diplomatic adviser to the British Foreign Office, felt called upon to point out during their first conversation that what his visitor was doing amounted to nothing less than high treason.1

  Oster’s chosen emissary was Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a worldly, courageous, and selfless conservative from Pomerania. In mid-January 1933 he had sought an interview with Hindenburg in a vain attempt to prevent Hitler’s nomination as chancellor and had subsequently withdrawn in disdainful rage to his country estate. On several occasions he had already approached English friends with warnings about Hitler’s expansionist designs. Now he traveled to Lon­don with an assignment from Ludwig Beck: “Bring me back certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked, and I will put an end to this regime.”2 Kleist began his meeting with Vansittart by informing the chief diplomatic adviser that he came “with a rope around his neck.” Everything else he had to say, however, made as little impression as did his later interviews with Lord Lloyd and Win­ston Churchill. Fully misunderstanding Kleist’s mission, Prime Minis­ter Chamberlain described Kleist and his reactionary friends as nothing more than modern Jacobites hoping to spark a revolution and restore the past with British help, much as the original Jacobites had sought to undo the revolution of 1688 and restore the deposed mon­archy with French assistance. Little did Chamberlain realize that the analogy, far from being grounds for objection, pointed to the last chance to save the peace.

  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Oster’s next emissary, the industrialist Hans Böhm-Tettelbach, also returned empty-handed. Far from allowing himself to become downhearted, Oster hoped to make his messengers seem more reliable by seeking assistance from co-conspirators in the Foreign Office. He asked Erich Kordt, the chief of the Ministers’ Bureau, to draft a message to the British gov­ernment requesting a “firm declaration” of opposition to Hitler’s war­mongering, a statement whose meaning would be “apparent even to ordinary people.” If such a document could be obtained, Oster added, there would “be no more Hitler.”3 It was too risky to carry a copy of the message, so one of Kordt’s cousins was asked to memorize it and repeat it for his brother Theo Kordt, who worked in the German embassy in London.

  Although Theo Kordt aroused greater interest than his predeces­sors had and was even admitted to 10 Downing Street through a back entrance for an interview with Lord Halifax, the foreign minister, his mission, too, proved futile. Halifax listened attentively, to be sure, and seemed impressed when Kordt reminded him that Great Britain might have averted war in 1914 by issuing a similar declaration. He assured his guest as they parted that he would inform the prime minister and certain cabinet members about the gist of their conver­sation, so that Kordt departed with his hopes high. Once again, how­ever, Great Britain could not be persuaded to issue a public declaration. The only noticeable effect of the conversation came in a letter Chamberlain sent to Hitler just before the outbreak of war in late August 1939, in which he mentioned the parallel to 1914 and expressed his hope that this time “no such tragic misunderstanding” would arise. A few weeks later, when the die had already been cast, Halifax commented to Theo Kordt, with a note of regret, “We could not be as candid with you as you were with us,” for at the time of their conversation Whitehall had already decided to yield to Hitler’s demands.4

  So it went, over and over again. By the time Erich Kordt was drafting his message, the secretary of state in the Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, had already begged the high commissioner for Danzig, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, “with the frankness of a desperate man betting everything on one last card,” as Burckhardt later de­scribed it, to use his connections to persuade the British government to make some definitive gesture, perhaps by “sending out a general with a riding crop,” whose language Hit
ler would presumably under­stand.5 But all efforts were in vain. In the summer of 1939, just before the invasion of Poland, when war again seemed imminent, Hjalmar Schacht met several times with Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Helmuth von Moltke, Erich Kordt, Adam von Trott, and Ulrich Schwerin von Schwanenfeld all joined the procession. But the British remained impassive, stoic, and distrustful, offering little more than empty words.

  British policy at this time has often been criticized as inadequate. The pitiful failure of the German opposition figures’ forays was due in large measure to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, upon which all attempts ultimately floundered. Britain had emerged exhausted from the First World War, and the prime minister wished to spare his nation another passage at arms, which would overtax its remaining strength and, it seemed, inevitably bring about an end to the empire. Chamberlain was no sentimental pacifist; there was more cool realism and even hard-hearted calculation in him than was later generally realized. He believed that a policy of prudent step-by-step appease­ment would have a literally disarming effect, even on a man such as Hitler, and he pursued this course with conviction and tenacity. It was the only way, Chamberlain felt, to secure the peace-a goal for which he was prepared to pay virtually any price that did not compro­mise British honor and patience.

  This is the background against which all the forays made by Hitler’s opponents must be seen. The tactics the opposition had adopted were the very opposite of the British cabinet’s, for they sought confrontation where Chamberlain hoped to avoid it. All they wanted from the British were words and gestures which they errone­ously believed that Whitehall could easily deliver, because they were convinced that the Western powers would never abandon Czechoslo­vakia. In fact, Chamberlain was secretly prepared to do just that. To satisfy the requests of the German conspirators, the British would therefore have had to reverse their entire policy of conciliation. Fur­thermore, the British feared that the statements requested of them might goad the irascible Hitler to make decisions that would inevita­bly lead to war. Eventually, in view of Berlin’s constant exacerbation of the tensions, Lord Halifax did send a message to the German government on September 9, 1938, reflecting at least somewhat the posture urged on Whitehall by the conspirators. The British ambassa­dor to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, flatly refused, however, to de­liver a message so clearly out of step with the official conciliatory approach. Similarly, when Vansittart had written a memorandum a few months earlier advising a firmer posture toward Hitler, it was suppressed from within the bureaucracy. Vansittart’s arguments were based on information channeled to him from German opposition cir­cles detailing the Reich’s economic, psychological, and military un-preparedness for war.6

  As carefully calculated as Chamberlain’s policies were, there was one element in the equation that he failed utterly to comprehend because it lay so far outside the orbit of his experience. For the sake of peace he was prepared to see Germany annex the Sudetenland, then Bohemia, and then even the Polish Corridor and parts of Upper Silesia; the new government in Berlin, he firmly believed, would eventually become as “sated, indolent and quiescent” as even the most rapacious of beasts.7

  But Chamberlain did not understand Hitler at all, and his incomprehension would prove the undoing of his shrewdly devised policy. As a European statesman of the old school, the prime minister thought in terms of national interest. He had some grasp of such imponderables as injured pride and honor and the redress that Hitler constantly demanded. What he failed to realize, however, was that Hitler was not really serious about such things, indeed that amid his extravagant racist fantasies of saving the world there was little room for such categories as “nation,” “interests,” or even “pride.” Like the Germans themselves-and probably like everyone else-the prime minister failed to fathom the radical otherness that Hitler introduced into European politics. In the words of a deeply shocked German conservative during the early years of Hitler’s chancellorship, the Führer did not really seem to belong in this world. He “had some­thing alien about him, as if he sprang from an otherwise extinct pri­meval tribe.”8

  One cannot judge the efforts of the German conspirators at this time without considering several other factors as well, especially the confusion they spread when abroad, despite their agreement about the ultimate purpose of their trips. It was, of course, very difficult under the circumstances to meet and adequately discuss strategy among themselves. Böhm-Tettelbach, for instance, did not even know when he traveled to London that Ewald von Kleist had been there just two weeks earlier on the same mission. Even more disturbing were the contradictions in what the various emissaries had to say. For instance, Goerdeler demanded-like Hitler himself-not only the cession of the Sudetenland but also, as if anticipating the Führer, the elimination of the Polish Corridor and the return of Germany’s former colonies. Meanwhile Kleist spent his time advocating the restoration of the monarchy. When Adam von Trott declared that a new German government would preserve Hitler’s territorial gains, he was unceremoniously evicted from the home of an English friend.

  The German emissaries, many of whom considered themselves particularly knowledgeable about Great Britain, believed that making material demands such as these would heighten their credibility with the British. It is certainly true that the conspirators would never have gained the necessary public support to overthrow Hitler if their new regime had begun by renouncing all that the Führer had achieved-for instance, by revoking the Anschluss with Austria-whether voluntarily or under foreign pressure. Still, it is hard to believe their fool­ishness in playing down the basically moral nature of the opposition to Hitler and emphasizing German territorial claims instead, all in the belief that they would be better understood by the materialistic Brit­ish, who are moved not by theory but by practical considerations.

  Further confusing the issue for the British was the fact that nearly all these self-declared opponents of the regime held posts within it, some of them quite senior. At the end of a trip abroad in 1938, Adam von Trott wrote to his friend David Astor that, after giving the question much thought, he had decided to return to Germany solely in order to combat the Nazi regime. Suspicion lingered and grew, nev­ertheless, often leading to the breakup of long-standing friendships. The British, so blessed by nature and history, could hardly begin to understand the pretenses and subterfuges to which opponents of a totalitarian system had to resort. In the end, many in Britain could hardly distinguish between Hitler and these self-described opponents of his who seemed to endorse so many of his demands. “There is really very little difference between them. The same sort of ambitions are sponsored by a different body of men, and that is about all,” wrote Vansittart, even though he was quite sympathetic toward the main purpose of the emissaries, namely a firm stance toward Hitler. Hugh Dalton, future chancellor of the exchequer, remarked sarcastically that these German conservatives were nothing more than “a race of carnivorous sheep.”9 Finally, there was the conviction in Britain, by no means confined to readers of the gutter press, that Germans were innately evil, or at any rate inclined to be so, as a result of their historical and cultural heritage. Cast in this light, Hitler’s conservative opponents did not seem much different from the Führer himself, and considering the sins of Germany’s elites extending back to the days of the kaisers, they were certainly no better.

  One additional consideration actually weighed in favor of Hitler against his opponents. It was well known that the Junkers had always been more strongly oriented toward the East than toward the West and had long had many interests in common with Russia, in addition to their neighborly, cultural, and even emotional ties; no one could rule out the possibility that this group would not one day come to an understanding with the Soviet Union-as they had before with Rus­sia-ideological impediments notwithstanding. Hitler, on the other hand, clearly lay above all reproach in this regard. Whatever else might be said about him, he was genuinely opposed to Communism, w
hich was spreading into Western Europe through the Front Populaire in France, the Spanish civil war, and countless activities, mostly underground. Hitler himself described Germany under his leadership as a bulwark against the tide of Communism. He told Arnold Toynbee that he had been placed “on earth to lead humanity in its inevitable struggle against Bolshevism.”10 To people who saw the world in such sweeping, categorical terms, Hitler’s illegal acts and despotic style must have shrunk to relative insignificance, or at least seemed minor problems that the Germans themselves could handle. Hitler’s alien, sinister aura only heightened his credibility as the commander of a last bastion of Western civilization against the Communist hordes.

  The efforts of the German conspirators were stymied by these as well as many other misunderstandings and misconceptions, which replicated on an international level the same delusions about Hitler shared by his would-be partners in domestic politics. In the end, therefore, there were insurmountable obstacles to any meeting of minds with the British, and if anything, the distance between the conspirators and the British only grew. When von Trott tried to prod Chamberlain in the direction of the German opposition, his words were received “icily.” The ultimate reason for the countless misun­derstandings in which the talks finally bogged down was clearly the two sides’ mutual lack of understanding. The Germans, especially those who had British ancestors, had studied in Britain, or took a particular interest in the country, greatly admired the vast British Empire. They invoked it frequently and, to the discomfort of their hosts, often expressed their hope that Germany might one day achieve for itself some modicum of the hegemony that Britain had over the world. The British tended to interpret this as a manifestation of the old Teutonic ambitions and the insatiable German desire for a “place in the sun” that had challenged Britain’s own status in the world for generations. Neither side perceived that the era of the great empires was actually drawing to a close, that imperialism had already become a relic of the past.