Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  If the records are not misleading, Oster finally agreed, although he knew that both Witzleben and Halder were opposed on principle to murdering Hitler. And thus a third conspiracy arose within the al­ready existing “conspiracy within a conspiracy.” It comprised the most determined core of conspirators-those who would stop at nothing. In hindsight, they were perhaps the only ones who might have been a match for the Nazis. All the others, including Halder, Beck, and even Witzleben, were impeded by their notions of tradi­tion, morality, and good upper-class manners, though there were con­siderable individual differences among them. The resistance was therefore never really able to match the ruthlessness of the regime. Indeed, a few days after this evening conference, Beck warned Oster that the conspirators should not defile their good names by commit­ting murder. The debate surrounding this issue would continue un­abated until July 20, 1944.

  Nevertheless, all now stood ready for the coup. What remained was the signal from Halder, to be given as soon as Hitler issued the orders to invade. But on the evening of September 13 stunning news arrived. The British prime minister had declared his willingness to hold personal discussions with the Führer, immediately, at any location and without concern for protocol. Hitler is said to have com­mented later that he was “thunderstruck” by Chamberlain’s action. For the conspirators, it was as if the world had come crashing down around them. As one of their number later wrote, they each struggled to maintain their composure; those who had advocated a more cautious approach heaped scorn on the irresponsibility of the activists who once again had underestimated the genius of the Führer. Witzleben expressed doubts about the judgment of the conspirators who claimed to be political experts. Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt voiced his con­cern that the conspirators would now no longer be able to count on the army troops that were crucial to a successful coup. In a mood of glum uncertainty, most of the conspirators began to fear that the ground had been torn out from under them once and for all.

  Ultimately, the overture to Hitler only proved something that Chamberlain had never been willing to acknowledge but that cer­tainly must have begun to dawn on him within a few bitter days: Hitler wanted not to resolve the crisis in Europe but to heighten it. The Führer felt confirmed in his belief that the Western democracies would yield in the end when Chamberlain accepted the transfer of the Sudetenland to Germany, a decision endorsed by the British and French governments after nervous negotiations, and even accepted by Prague, though it consented only under great pressure.

  Hitler was nevertheless surprised when, one week later, on September 22, 1938, the prime minister flew to Bad Godesberg, near Bonn, to deliver a copy of the agreement personally and to discuss the modalities of the transfer. Paradoxically, such eagerness to appease actually complicated Hitler’s plans for further annexations by ruining the triumphant march into Prague that he was already savoring. After an embarrassed pause, Hitler quietly informed Chamberlain that the agreement they had reached in Berchtesgaden just a week before was null and void. He now insisted not only on marching immediately into the Sudetenland but also on satisfaction of longstanding Polish and Hungarian claims on various border regions of Czechoslovakia. After an exchange of letters from the respective staffs failed to resolve these issues, the negotiations were broken off that evening. An enraged Chamberlain demanded a memorandum setting forth the new Germany requirements. According to Ernst von Weizsäcker of the Foreign Office, Hitler “clapped his hands together as if in great amusement” when he described the course of the conversations. Three days later he issued an ultimatum: he would only hold his divisions back if his new Godesberg demands were accepted by 2:00 p.m. on September 28. “If England and France want to attack,” he told the British emis­sary Sir Horace Wilson, who had come to Berlin on September 26 in a final attempt to reach an agreement, “then let them do so. I don’t care. I am prepared for all eventualities. Today is Tuesday. Next Mon­day we’ll be at war.”30

  Just as news of Chamberlain’s trip to Berchtesgaden had virtually paralyzed the conspirators, Hitler’s additional demands in Godesberg infused them with new life. When Oster heard the details from Erich Kordt, he said, “Finally [we have] clear proof that Hitler wants war, no matter what. Now there can be no going back.”31

  Everywhere in Europe war preparations began, accompanied by the darkest forebodings. By the time the first news arrived from Bad Godesberg, Czechoslovakia had already ordered its forces to mobi­lize, not without some sense of relief. Britain followed suit, ordering the navy to make ready for war. In London, slit trenches were dug, gas masks distributed, and hospitals evacuated. France called up the reserves. In Germany, Goebbels’s propaganda campaign about the suffering of the Sudeten Germans, which had been launched just weeks before, grew shriller and shriller. Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht attack units to advance from their assembly areas in the inte­rior to the launch points on the Czech border. In an attempt to stir up war fever in Germany, Hitler ordered the Second Motorized Division to pass through Berlin on its way to the border. It rumbled down the Ost-West-Achse boulevard, before turning into Wilhelmstrasse, where he reviewed it from the Chancellery balcony. Contrary to all expectations, however, no cheering throngs lined the streets. Hitler noted with annoyance the solemnity of the passersby and the glacial silence with which they observed the troops before turning away. Visibly upset, he withdrew into the middle of the room. The Ameri­can correspondent William Shirer observed that this was the most striking antiwar demonstration that he had ever seen.32

  What disappointed Hitler only encouraged the conspirators, who now moved to their starting positions. They carried out the final military and police preparations and checked over their proclamations to the German people. Equipped with firearms, ammunition, hand gre­nades, and explosives, Heinz’s task force waited at the ready in a number of private dwellings in Berlin, such as 118 Eisenacherstrasse. Helmuth Groscurth, who was spending the evening with his brother, suddenly broke off their conversation and asked him if he could keep a secret. After repeated assurances, Groscurth finally told him the news: “Tonight Hitler is going to be arrested!”33

  In fact, the ultimatum did not expire until 2:00 p.m. the next day. That morning Oster forwarded to Witzleben a copy of the note that Hitler had sent to Chamberlain in Bad Godesberg abruptly rejecting the British offers. Witzleben immediately took it to Halder. As Halder read it, “tears of indignation” welled up in his eyes, and together the two decided not to wait any longer. Halder offered to inform Brauchitsch and rally him to the cause, if possible, especially since he himself did not have direct command over any troops in his position as chief of general staff.

  Commander in Chief Brauchitsch was also outraged by Hitler’s note. He, too, began to see through the Führer’s duplicity. “So he lied to me again!” he roared. But Brauchitsch was not yet prepared to commit himself to a coup at this point. He would “probably” partici­pate, Halder reported to the waiting Witzleben upon his return. Wit­zleben thereupon telephoned the commander in chief right from Halder’s office and appealed to him—“virtually begging him,” ac­cording to Gisevius, “to issue the order to go ahead.” The indecisive Brauchitsch said, however, that he wanted first to stop in at the Chan­cellery to assess the situation personally. Upon returning to military district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm, Witzleben called out to Gisevius, “Any time now, Doctor!”34

  At eleven o’clock, Erich Kordt was informed by his brother in London that Great Britain would declare war if Czechoslovakia was invaded. Paris, too, seemed resolute. But German war preparations continued nevertheless. The previous evening Hitler had ordered the divisions on Germany’s western borders to mobilize as well. Kordt met Schulenburg, and they agreed to clear the way for Heinz’s task force by opening from the inside the guarded double doors at the entrance to the Chancellery. Everyone waited: Witzleben, Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, Oster, Kordt, Gisevius, Heinz, and the others. Most important of all, Halder waited for Brauchitsch to return from the Chancellery. And then t
he clock stopped ticking.

  * * *

  At literally the last minute, Hitler decided to yield to pressure from Mussolini and agree to a conference in Munich to settle the Sudeten issue. The conspirators were aghast. After all their planning, this was clearly the end of their plots. The issue had been clear-either a coup or war-and now the Munich conference threw everything into question. Only Gisevius, arguing desperately, tried to persuade Witzleben to stage the coup anyway. But the general asked him sharply, as Gisevius later recalled, “What can the troops possibly do against a leader this victorious?”35

  In an instant the situation was turned upside down. The dread of war that had haunted the morning hours gave way to jubilation and relief that afternoon. When the news was announced in the British House of Commons, there was a moment of stunned silence and then un outburst of joy. Everywhere the reaction was the same, and the few unhappy or chagrined voices were soon drowned out by cheers. When Winston Churchill denounced the Munich agreement as the “first foretaste of a bitter cup,” he was shouted down by indignant members of Parliament.36

  Among the few who took little joy from the news of this day was Hitler himself. He had seemed pale and agitated during the Munich conference, often standing with his arms crossed, staring darkly ahead. “This fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague,” Schacht heard him say. Although historians now have little doubt that Germany would only have been able to hold out for a few days against an invasion by the Western powers in the fall of 1938, Hitler still felt that he had been cheated of his grand timetable. The depth of the rancor and disappointment he felt over the Munich conference is reflected in the thoughts he expressed while holed up in his bunker in February 1945: “We should have gone to war in 1938,” he said. “That was our last chance to keep it localized. But they gave in everywhere. Like cowards they yielded to all our demands. So it was very difficult to initiate hostilities.”37 The general public, unaware of Hitler’s deter­mination to go to war-and even of Britain’s successful efforts to get Mussolini to intervene-concluded that the Führer could master any situation. He seemed magically in league with chance, luck, with the very fates themselves.

  Among the losers at Munich were Hitler’s domestic opponents. In a single day, as one of them noted, they had been reduced from powerful foes of the regime to a “bunch of malcontents” whose ideas had been disproved by events time after time and who had now become nothing more than a police problem.38 But worse yet, the Munich accord was a devastating indictment of their political judgment and could not help but tarnish their reputations. The conspira­tors fell into a mood of bitter helplessness, and the ties among them-already weak in many cases-slackened further or were sev­ered completely. Feelings of mutual distrust began to arise, and many resistance leaders, such as the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, began to doubt if it was still possible to save the situation “before it reached the abyss.” Munich had “decimated” the opposition, Halder aptly commented.39

  Perhaps even more important than the failure of the coup to get off the ground was the fact that the events of the last days of Septem­ber destroyed the very premise on which the German opposition had based its strategy, and it is one of the curious aspects of the move­ment that this truth remained largely unnoticed. Despite all the un­certainties, no other attempt to strike Hitler down in these years would come close to having as good a chance of success. Thereafter the conspirators never ceased complaining about the “betrayal” of the Western powers, their feebleness and blindness. These oft-repeated reproaches surfaced just a few days after the Munich conference in a letter Goerdeler wrote to an American friend describing the accord as “outright capitulation” and predicting that war was now inevitable.40 Yet these statements actually illustrated the conspirators’ crucial stra­tegic mistake, an error that was brought into stark relief by the deba­cle of September 28, 1938: they had made their actions dependent on events they could neither accurately foresee nor control-first, Hitler’s actually ordering an invasion; second, the Western powers’ then declaring war.

  The conspirators would not overcome this basic flaw until shortly before July 20, 1944. Whereas in the fall of 1938 they made their coup contingent on Hitler’s going to war and on a firm response from Britain and France, they later made their activities dependent on Hitler’s victories and defeats: victories, they felt, made him popular with the people and therefore unassailable, while defeats laid them, his internal enemies, open to accusations of aiding and abetting the downfall of their own country. Most of the conspirators never escaped this dilemma, and the infirmity of purpose that is often imputed to the German resistance stemmed to a large extent from this self-im­posed dependence on external circumstances. The alternative to this approach was embodied by Gisevius, the “eternal plotter,” as the other conspirators derisively called him. His radicalism, which so an­noyed Halder, stemmed largely from his firm focus on the criminal nature of the Nazi regime. This enabled him to liberate action from all considerations of tactics, ultimate aims, and outside influences. Similar approaches were taken by Oster, Henning von Tresckow, Friedrich Olbricht, Cäsar von Hofacker, and Carl Goerdeler, who had warned repeatedly against waiting for the “right psychological moment” and now considered emigrating to the United States.41

  One evening soon after the debacle of September 28, Oster and Gisevius somberly burned the plans and notes for the coup-all that remained of their daring dream-in Witzleben’s fireplace. Many months would pass before the resistance began to recover from the blow it had suffered. Only a small, highly committed core of conspira­tors remained, and even they felt completely spent; their nerves were too frayed and their energy too depleted for them to organize another coup attempt, especially since to do so went against the grain of all they had been taught, their way of thinking and their traditions, which, though honorable, had been overtaken by the times. The in­dustrialist Nikolaus von Halem, who maintained ties with a variety of opposition groups, had already dismissed the officers’ ideas as “ro­mantic” in the summer of 1938 and observed that Hitler, the “mes­senger of chaos,” could only be removed from this world by a professional hit man, or at least some figure from the renegade old soldiers’ organizations. For a long time he considered attempting to persuade the former leader of the Oberland Freikorps, Beppo Romer, to undertake such an attempt.42

  But Halem’s approach was ultimately just another brand of romanticism. Much closer to reality was Franz Halder, who steadfastly held to his highly negative view of the regime, refusing to allow himself to be seduced by any of Hitler’s triumphs and finding in the mounting horrors new confirmation of his belief that Hitler was evil incarnate. His willingness to take action flared up once again, but weakly and only for a passing moment For the rest of the time, he doggedly performed his duty, served his country, kept himself isolated, nursed his hatreds, and, despite the darkness and horror on all sides, would not be persuaded to act. At noon on September 28, when news of the Munich conference broke, he lost his composure after so many days of feverish preparation. According to one observer, he “utterly col­lapsed” on his desk, “weeping and saying that all was lost.”43

  It had been a trying time for Hitler, too, who also thought that all was lost, his life’s work in ruins. But he set about searching relent­lessly for ways to recoup the situation. That was the crucial differ­ence.

  4. FROM MUNICH TO ZOSSEN

  While the opponents of the regime were in the throes of depression, wondering whether it was possible to take moral stands in such a fallen world or whether those who did so inevitably ended up looking like fools, Hitler forged resolutely ahead. Although still disappointed with the Munich agreement, he realized that an opportunity had arisen to resolve the smoldering conflict with the army once and for all.

  Only two weeks after the Wehrmacht had marched into the Sudetenland through the cheering throngs in the second of its “flower wars,” Hitler presented the OKW with the outline of an executive order that was d
ressed up in the form of an “Appeal to Officers.” It denied military leaders the right to form political judgments, de­manding instead “obedience,” “rock-solid confidence,” and “faithful, aggressive determination.” The principle that the general staff should share in political decision making was eliminated, as was the traditional practice, extending back to the era of the kaisers, of registering dissenting views in writing. To the extent they could agree on anything, the generals had joined together from the very beginning in warning against virtually every political decision Hitler had made- and they had been proved wrong time and again. Now the Führer informed the commanders in chief, “I don’t want any more caution­ary memoranda.”1

  Under the pressure of this dispute, a split developed within the officer corps for the first time, or at least more visibly than before. On the whole, the officer corps had preserved a surprising degree of internal solidarity over the previous few years and possibly for this reason had managed to maintain a certain self-confidence despite all the setbacks. Hitler had long hoped to break this cohesion; he tested it with the sudden expansion of the Wehrmacht after 1935, which also enabled him to push a greater number of ideologically reliable of­ficers into leadership positions in the military. For much the same reason, the exact responsibilities of the army, navy, and air force were never clearly defined. In addition, Hitler purposely sowed conflict between the high command of the armed forces (OKW), which re­ported directly to him, and the high command of the army (Oberkommando des Heeres, or OKH), led by the obstinate old of­ficers’ caste. Despite all this, internal cohesion remained solid. The only exception had occurred early in the year when Admiral Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the navy, rejected an appeal to help with the rehabilitation of Fritsch: “That’s a mess that the boys in red pants got themselves into,” he said, “and they can get themselves out of it.”2