Plotting Hitler's Death
Page 11
In the light of Hitler’s foreign policy successes, however, the ranks now began to waver. For the first time, senior officers endorsed his rebuke of the army high command. They lamented the lack of faith and loss of confidence the OKH showed in the Führer. The full extent of the split is evidenced in a letter written by OKW general Alfred Jodl in which he describes the OKH as the “enemy side.” The consequence was that no resistance was offered when Hitler took advantage of the situation to reshuffle personnel for a second time, dismissing a number of generals whose skeptical attitudes boded ill for the sort of unconditional obedience he now expected, including Wilhelm Adam, Hermann Geyer, and Wilhelm Ulex. Nevertheless, despite all the traps Hitler attempted to set within the officer corps and despite the tensions that did arise, the traditional esprit de corps remained quite strong. Those who opposed Hitler or even conspired against him over the ensuing years were generally safe from denunciation by their fellow officers. Among the rare exceptions to this rule were Erich von Manstein, who informed on Tresckow early in 1944; Wilhelm Keitel, who threatened to denounce any officer who criticized the Führer, “including on church or Jewish questions”; and Heinz Guderian, who only refrained from denouncing a fellow officer when he was similarly threatened in return.3
The success of Hitler’s initial attempt to repress army interference in political affairs soon became apparent. On the night of November 9-10, 1938, which has come to be known as Kristallnacht, “spontaneous demonstrations,” as Joseph Goebbels phrased it in his directive, were organized all over Germany. Synagogues were burned, Jewish-owned stores demolished, and large numbers of Jews arrested; some were killed. It was plain to see that the government was as responsible as the hordes of SA men were for the arson, plunder, and murder of that night. People were horrified and shamed but remained quiet. Their feelings, however, were soon given voice at a conference of army commanders, where a number of generals did not hesitate to express their outrage. General Fedor von Bock even asked his fellow officers excitedly whether someone couldn’t just “string up that swine Coebbels.”4
Walther von Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, remained immovable. After all the disputes and unpleasantness of the previous weeks, he simply shrugged his shoulders at demands that he lodge a protest. Raeder, on the other hand, backed the formal protests of a number of senior naval officers, among them Admiral Conrad Patzig and Captains Günther Lütjens and Karl Dönitz, and sought an audience with the Führer. The only response Raeder received, however, was that the SA district leaders had gotten out of control, a fabrication that satisfied him.5 Meanwhile, at a general meeting in the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht sharply condemned the events. In addition, the senior SA commander and prefect of the Berlin police, Count Wolf-Heinrich Helldorf, who had been absent from the city that night, summoned high-ranking police officials to a meeting immediately upon his return and bitterly reproached them for having obeyed the order to stand by and do nothing. If he had been in Berlin, he told them, he would have issued orders to fire on the SA mobs. In the gloomy silence of those November days, the sound of another voice rose for the first time, that of a young captain named Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, who criticized the officer corps as seeming dumbstruck, adding that not much more could be expected from people who had already had their backbones broken several times.6
Hitler rarely missed an opportunity to demonstrate to those he had defeated the full extent of their loss. On the morning of March 15, 1939, he finally fulfilled his dream of taking Prague, sending motorized units into the city through swirling spring snow. He kept the officer corps in the dark about his exact plans until the last possible minute, however, at times going so far as to mislead it with placating words. Even the devoted Keitel, chief of the OKW, later complained that he knew nothing of Hitler’s intentions and was left to guess.
The opposition to Hitler failed to realize the significance of the occupation of the western provinces of Czechoslovakia. Most thought of it as another Munich, confirmation of all they had learned about the weakness and perfidy of the Western powers. In reality, though, Prague was the turning point. Hitherto, Hitler had always justified ripping up treaties and breaking solemn promises by invoking the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. He had defended German incursions by citing the right to self-determination of those territories under foreign occupation-a right that had been proclaimed by the Western powers themselves. Now, for the first time, he emerged clearly as an aggressor, going beyond anything he had done in the past. The occupation of Prague, therefore, provided an excellent opportunity for a coup. The opposition groups remained scattered, however, and instead of a revolt there was widespread rejoicing over the Führer’s latest stroke of genius. Diaries and memoirs of the period record that even some opposition figures felt patriotic pride as well as depression at Hitler’s latest success. Like Mussolini during the turbulent days of Munich, some even began to believe, though without his feeling of contempt, that the democracies were by their nature weak-willed and easily intimidated.
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Scarcely had Hitler annexed western Czechoslovakia when he let it be known that he now intended to settle scores with Poland. This time-as if he had somehow sensed the previous fall’s conspiracy to overthrow him if he went to war-he seemed very much at pains not to provide the generals with opportunities for collusion. He concealed his decision to go to war, which had long been firm, and assured those around him that he would resort to force only if all attempts failed to reach an amicable settlement. “We have to be good now,” he told a visitor.8
And so the conspirators remained passive, clinging to the idea that a coup would only be justifiable if Hitler expressed a clear determination to go to war and issued the corresponding orders. Under pressure from Oster, Goerdeler, Gisevius, Hassell, and others, Beck now attempted to involve Halder, his successor as chief of the army general staff, in new plans. At a meeting in Beck’s home in Lichterfelde, the two conspirators readily agreed on the basic nature of the regime, Hitler’s thinly veiled determination to provoke war, and the need to overthrow him. They disagreed sharply, however, on when to strike. Halder remained convinced, as he had been before Munich, that they could not act unless the Führer was clearly headed for war. As to Hitler’s present designs on the port city of Danzig, it was a German city, as even the British allowed, and it was still quite possible that the negotiations with the Poles would be concluded peacefully.
By now Beck had come to see things quite differently. He was no longer willing to stand by while Hitler scored piecemeal successes, for he saw that they hastened the inevitable catastrophe. War would come at some point, making a coup even more difficult to carry out. Once hostilities began, “other irrational, ‘patriotic’ laws” would be implemented. Time was therefore short. Halder and Beck were engaged in the same dispute that had divided Halder and Gisevius a year earlier, but this time it was inflamed by the tensions and strained personal relationship between the current chief of general staff and his proud but isolated predecessor, their mutual professional admiration notwithstanding. When the two parted, both felt deeply irritated, with Halder having detected accusations of indecisiveness in virtually everything Beck had said.
Although the core conspirators gradually came back together, they soon got bogged down in their passionate debates on a welter of issues that were better resolved by decisiveness than by argument. Meanwhile Erwin von Witzleben, the former commander of the Berlin military district, took matters into his own hands. A practical man with little patience for tortuous discussion, he had been posted to Frankfurt am Main, as commander in chief of an army group there. Far from the center of things, he felt condemned to inactivity, a trying condition for someone of his energetic nature. Although he, too, realized that a coup had little chance of success at the present time, he had no doubt that a man as manic and restive as Hitler would soon provide fresh opportunity and the conspirators had to be ready.
Togethe
r with Georg von Sodenstern, his chief of general staff, Witzleben developed a long-term plan to identify like-minded officers and systematically build up as solid a network as possible of commanders who were prepared to support a military coup when the time was ripe. All previous plans had indeed relied far too heavily on two conditions: the elimination of Hitler in a quick strike and the smooth operation of the regular chain of command. Witzleben believed that it was no longer possible to assume that orders for a coup would be followed automatically without objection or complaint, a conclusion based on the fact that Hitler had succeeded so thoroughly in widening the rift within the armed forces. It has been suggested that Witzleben’s idea of forming a secret officers’ cadre was an alien concept incompatible with German military tradition, but it was no more revolutionary than Hitler’s own policies and constituted an apposite response to them. There is considerable truth to the argument that the coup of July 20, 1944, failed at least in part because the conspirators depended too greatly on the chain of command and, for whatever reason, were blind to the conclusions that Witzleben now drew.
At this time, many of the resistance connections that had been severed in the wake of the Munich agreement were reestablished, though only hesitantly and as the opportunity arose. Schulenburg paid a visit to Witzleben in Frankfurt, as did Gisevius. Most important, Oster arranged for Carl Goerdeler to meet Witzleben. Goerdeler immediately began pressuring Witzleben to carry through his plan and promised lo establish contacts with Christian and socialist trade unionists, thereby broadening support for the conspiracy beyond what had existed at the time of the September plot, especially in the political realm. Thus, through Witzleben’s efforts, new links between military and civilian opposition groups were forged and old ties were restored.
Witzleben’s initiative never amounted to much, however, because he did not plan to have his network of conspirators completed until the following year. The next day, when Gisevius returned to Berlin to see if Beck, Canaris, and Oster were interested in a meeting with Witzleben, all military commanders, including Witzleben, were summoned to a meeting to be held the following day, August 22, 1939, at Obersalzberg. In an unusually harsh address lasting several hours, Hitler informed them that he had decided to strike immediately because all considerations argued in favor of rapid action. As if attempting to screw up his courage, he hinted to the hushed audience of generals sitting “icily” before him that a pact would soon be signed with Stalin-a pact that Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was in fact negotiating in Moscow at that very moment. “Poland is now right where I wanted to have it,” he said, predicting that Britain and France would once again shrink from war. “Our opponents,” he told the generals, “are little worms. I saw them in Munich.” His only concern was that “at the last minute, some bastard will produce a mediation plan.”9 Hitler even named the prospective time of attack: the morning of Saturday, August 26.
But once again, his schedule was disrupted. Britain reacted to the German war preparations with stoical equanimity and, after months of negotiations, transformed its provisional support for Poland into a formal pact. Amid the blizzard of entreaties, bulletins, and miscommunications, Halder told the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, “You have to strike the man’s hand with an ax.” Great Britain now moved to dispel any lingering doubts about its determination to fight. On the afternoon of August 25 a message arrived from Mussolini reminding Hitler that their agreements stated that a war would not be launched until later and informing him that Italy was regrettably not prepared to open hostilities at this time. Again Hitler hesitated; after brooding nervously for a short spell, he came to a decision that left everyone agape: the order to attack was rescinded. “Führer rather shaken,” Halder noted in his diary.10
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As the order to attack was being canceled, Schacht, Gisevius, and General Georg Thomas were on their way to the Military Intelligence building on Tirpitzufer to pick up Canaris, with whom they intended to drive to general staff headquarters in Zossen, east of Berlin. There, in a final, desperate act, they planned to force Brauchitsch and Halder to choose between arresting the three of them or arresting Hitler and the government. Determined to stop at nothing, they had agreed to exert extraordinary pressure on the commanders: if Brauchitsch and Halder chose to arrest them, they would deem themselves released at that moment from their pledge of loyalty to their fellow officers and would reveal the army chiefs’ involvement in the resistance.
When the three arrived at Tirpitzufer, they encountered Oster. “Shaking his head” and “laughing heartily,” he told them that the order to attack had been rescinded. Gisevius, the eternal man of action, argued yet again that this provided a unique opportunity to eliminate Hitler. The others, however, could scarcely believe that he wanted to carry on. The normally implacable Oster maintained that a “war lord who can rescind within a few hours as far-reaching an order as that for war or peace is done for.” In any case, Oster felt, the generals would no longer back Hitler. Only days earlier he had instructed the members of Friedrich Heinz’s special task force to prepare themselves once again for the storming of the Chancellery. Now any such action would be superfluous, he thought, in view of the dramatically changed circumstances. Canaris, too, was in an exuberant mood and declared that peace was assured “for twenty years.” Everything would unfold as desired if just allowed to develop, and there was no need in the meantime to raise the generals’ hackles by making rash demands.11
Despite all that can be and has been said about Oster’s surprise about-face, there is no minimizing the enormous sense of relief that must have been felt by all after so many months of continuous pressure. Not only Oster but Canaris, Hassell, and many others were so jubilant that peace had been preserved that their judgment was dulled. Even in the Chancellery it was “clear to everyone,” as an officer on duty there noted, “that Hitler had suffered a major diplomatic defeat.”12
But anyone who understood the Führer’s obsession with prestige over the years should have realized that he would quickly go to whatever lengths necessary to repair the damage. “Führer still hopes to sock it to Poland,” wrote Colonel Eduard Wagner, a general staff departmental head, in his diary.13 The belief that war had been avoided was totally misguided, and Gisevius was clearly right. Indeed, the ensuing days brought the very situation the conspirators had always dreamed of. In their exhaustive debates, they had always come to the depressing conclusion that Hitler’s victories were psychologically as disarming as his defeats. What they had therefore always hoped for (in various scenarios) but what never seemed to occur was a serious setback that could be blamed on Hitler alone and that exposed to all the world his unwavering determination to go to war.
During their debates, they also concluded that the time that elapsed between Hitler’s order for an invasion and the actual onset of hostilities was of decisive importance. They worried that the interval might not be long enough for them to decide on a coup and carry it out. In the days before the Munich agreement, Halder had already sought to allay such fears, assuring his fellow conspirators that Hitler could never deceive him on this score: the order would have to be given at least three days before an attack. Now the conspirators had the luxury of an even longer time span. But nothing had been prepared, and nothing was done. Of course, the abortive September plot of the previous year had had a devastating effect on the conspirators’ resolve. The written plans for a coup had gone up Witzleben’s chimney in smoke, and another draft was at best in the early planning stages. Nevertheless the impression remains that for most of the conspirators waiting had itself become a kind of strategy. Commingled with their immense relief that the peace had been saved was a sense of deliverance from actually having to do anything.
After such misguided elation, the descent to reality was all the more devastating when, on August 31, Hitler reissued the invasion order for the following morning. That afternoon Gisevius ran into Canaris on a back staircase at
army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. “So what do you think now?” asked the admiral. When Gisevius failed to find the appropriate words, Canaris added in a flat voice: “This means the end of Germany.”14
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The outbreak of hostilities in the early hours of September 1, 1939, was an enormous setback for the military and civilian opposition, whose desperate efforts had all been directed at preventing war. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, confirming the predictions of the countless analyses, memoranda, and warnings that had been drafted by the regime’s opponents. But all their activity had been in vain. Hitler had scarcely noticed the reports, and to the extent that the documents were intended for the opposition, little had been achieved, because the coup they were supposed to justify never got off the ground. Nothing so damaged the credibility and reputation of the regime’s opponents in the eyes of their foreign contacts as their failure to take action on September 1.
All will to resist seemed to disappear for an extended period after the war began, in part because of the deep, irrational feelings of loyalty that the outbreak of war always arouses, regardless of right and wrong or whether the conflict is willfully unleashed in contravention of existing treaties. Considerations such as these may leave some lingering doubts, but once war breaks out, all efforts and activities focus on responding to the challenge and bringing the conflict to a successful conclusion. Customs and traditions play a role, of course, as do the powerful emotions surrounding such notions as patriotism, loyalty, duty, obedience, and their counterpart, treason. Although the world that generated such sentiments had become distant under the Nazis, people still felt them strongly even in the face of reason. Typical was the behavior of General Georg von Sodenstern, who ten days before the outbreak of war had conferred with Witzleben over far-reaching plans to topple Hitler. But in September, when war had been declared, he turned “to the military duties incumbent upon him and away from any thought of a violent uprising.”15 Because such responses were by no means unusual, the resistance lost much of its strength after war broke out.