Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  Despite the conspirators’ efforts, the Valkyrie plan had a serious and possibly fatal flaw: neither Olbricht nor Stauffenberg was authorized to order its implementation. Hitler had expressly reserved this authority for himself, with the commander of the reserve army, General Friedrich Fromm, authorized to give the cue only in an emer­gency. Therefore Olbricht or Stauffenberg had either to win Fromm over or else to usurp his position and set Valkyrie in motion in his name. Olbricht was prepared to take Fromm into custody if necessary and sign the orders himself, but that risked questions about the chain of command and delays that might imperil the entire enterprise. It has also been pointed out rightly that this was a tactic that could work only once. If the conspirators failed to usurp Fromm’s position “the first time around, there would be no second chance.”27

  General Fromm was a large, shrewd man who liked to boast that he “always came down on the right side.” When Halder asked him earnestly in the fall of 1939 to support the generals’ coup that was being plotted, Fromm evaded the issue at first and then requested lime to consider the matter. He was torn by doubts about the chances of success and tormented by the fact that he had compromised him­self by responding to Halder at all. Finally he formally absolved him­self of involvement by recording the affair in his official diary.

  Fromm certainly did not number among “Hitler’s generals,” and to his friends he frequently expressed his distaste for the Nazis. He was also clever enough to deduce what Olbricht and Stauffenberg were up to from all the secretive activity in their offices and the visitors whom they received, he always acted, however, as if it was none of his business. He slipped up only once, in mid-July 1944, when, in a particularly buoyant mood, he told Olbricht to be sure, in the event of a putsch, not to forget Wilhelm Keitel, whom Fromm hated.28 Al­though Fromm did nothing to hinder the uprising, no one who knew him had any doubt that he would not assist it either and, most important, that he would definitely not sign the Valkyrie orders. The question of how he should be handled therefore remained open. By the end of October all other preparations were ready. Tresckow gave Witzleben the orders declaring martial law, and Witzleben, who was to assume command of the Wehrmacht once a coup was under way, affixed his signature.

  Scarcely had these preparations been completed, however, when Tresckow was ordered back to the front. Thus it was Stauffenberg who look on responsibility for igniting the “initial spark.” It was hoped that Tresckow would again assume a pivotal position in the military command from which he could provide support from the front as soon as the home army initiated the uprising, but this was not to be. The army personnel office had recommended him, along with other candidates, to serve as chief of staff for Army Group South under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, but Manstein rejected him. Instead, Tresckow assumed command of an infantry regiment in a division led by Manstein. Rumor had it that he was being put in “cold storage.”29

  The problem now as ever was to find an officer who had access to Hitler and was determined to kill him. Stieff had recently declared himself ready, but when Stauffenberg sought him out he stalled. He did, however, take possession of the explosives Stauffenberg brought him and finally demanded the assistance of an accomplice, apparently in order to help steel himself. Stauffenberg turned to Colonel Jo­achim Meichssner, the head of the organizational section of the OKW operations staff, who had tentatively promised in September to be the assassin. At the same time, Stieff was apparently considering making an attempt with two young officers on his staff, Major Joachim Kuhn and First Lieutenant Albrecht von Hagen; but after further consider­ation, he again backed out, explaining that it was impossible to carry explosives into a briefing without being noticed. In truth, it was prob­ably fear that deterred this lively and somewhat unstable man from action.

  These harrowing efforts to find someone who would set off the “initial spark” prompted Stauffenberg to make contact, through Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, with one of the “reliable young officers” he had heard about in the spring. Axel von dem Bussche was a highly decorated twenty-four-year-old captain. His initial naive enthusiasm for Hitler and National Socialism had already dimmed considerably when, in early October 1942, he happened to witness the mass execution of several thousand Jews at the Dubno airfield in the Ukraine, a shock he never recovered from. There were, he said, only three possi­ble ways for an honorable officer to react: “to die in battle, to desert, or to rebel.” When Stauffenberg now asked him if he would be will­ing to kill Hitler, Bussche accepted without hesitation.

  The plan was to use a previously scheduled presentation of new uniforms and equipment to lure Hitler from his bunker at headquarters, where he increasingly ensconced himself. Bussche was to explain the features and advantages of the new items and then, at a suitable moment, to set the fuse on the bomb, leap on Hitler, and hold him tight for the three or four seconds until the explosion. Toward the end of November the presentation seemed likely to take place at any moment. Bussche traveled to Führer headquarters in East Prussia and waited. “The sunny late-autumn days amid the forests and lakes are imbued with the heightened intensity a soldier feels before an attack,” he wrote.30 But the presentation was postponed again and again. Finally Stieff informed the other conspirators that the model uniforms had been in a railroad car that was destroyed in one of the bombing raids on Berlin. Replacements would probably not be ready before January. Bussche returned to the front, where he was severely wounded early in the new year, losing a leg, which disqualified him from further attempts.

  An unexpected complication now arose. Bussche was left with a bomb in his suitcase and no way of disposing of it. He found himself transferred from one hospital to another, all the while carrying his secret along with him. Not until the fall of 1944 did he finally find a sympathetic officer who threw it into a lake for him.31 Stieff, too, had been left with explosives on his hands when he backed out of killing Hitler. He assigned the disposal of “the stuff” to Kuhn and Hagen, who came up with the ill-advised idea of burying the explosives and detonators in the woods under a watchtower within the boundaries of Führer headquarters. As it happened, a military police patrol spotted them, but they managed to escape without being recognized. Had the incident been brought to light it might well have had serious consequences for the entire resistance. Fortunately, however, the investiga­tion was assigned to a close confidant of Hans Oster’s named Lieutenant Colonel Werner Schrader, and thus a conspirator ended up investigating the conspiracy.32

  In January, after Bussche had been wounded, Stauffenberg approached Lieutenant Ewald Heinrich von Kleist. Once again, the plan was to assassinate Hitler during the presentation of new uni­forms. Stauffenberg did not press Kleist, saying only that the earlier attempt had failed. Kleist said he wanted first to speak with his father, the same Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin who in the summer of 1938 had traveled to London at the behest of Oster and Beck to meet with Vansittart and Churchill. When the son appeared at the family estate the next day and asked his father’s opinion, the elder Kleist immedi­ately responded that this was a task he could not refuse. The son pointed out that he was being asked to do nothing less than blow himself up with Hitler. His father stood up, went to the window, and after a moment’s thought, replied, “You have to do it. Anyone who falters at such a moment will never again be one with himself in this life.”33

  But this brave resolution also failed, once again the date of the presentation was repeatedly postponed. Stauffenberg next turned to his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, who agreed in principle to carry out the task but was then dissuaded by his brother, Hans-Bernd, who raised vehement objections on religious grounds. These pangs of con­science, excuses, concerns about Hitler’s security precautions, and struggles to procure explosives and then dispose of them generated anguish and despair in the ranks of the conspirators-while mean­while the slaughter continued on all sides. All these pressures burst forth one day when Paul Yorck von Wartenburg screamed at Gersdorff, “That swine does, afte
r all, have a mouth that somebody could just shoot into!”34

  This very approach was adopted by Eberhard von Breitenbuch, a cavalry captain who now declared that he would do the deed. Tresckow had arranged for Breitenbuch to join Army Croup Center, where he became adjutant to the new commander in chief, Field Marshal Ernst Busch, following Kluge’s accident. On March 11 Busch was summoned to a briefing on the Obersalzberg and, as usual, look along his adjutant. Breitenbuch, not informed of the briefing until that very morning, agreed on the spot to make the attempt. While the participants in the briefing waited to see Hitler, Breitenbuch took the opportunity to write his wife a farewell letter and send her the few personal effects he had with him. Finally the door to the great hall of Hitler’s Berghof swung open and an SS man invited the waiting party to enter. Keitel, Jodl, and Goebbels led the way, while Breitenbuch, as the lowest-ranking officer, drew up the rear. Just as he was about to step into the hall, the SS man intercepted him, announcing that the briefing would be held without adjutants. Busch protested that he needed his aide, but Breitenbuch, with the cocked Browning revolver in his pocket, was turned aside. Although he later had similar opportunities he turned them down, saying, “You only do something like that once.”35

  The preceding is only a condensed account of the best-known of the assassination attempts. Although there were many other clandestine discussions and a number of attempts that also failed, little is known about them, because virtually all those involved were discovered and executed. It is said, for instance, that Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler on December 26, 1943, in the “Wolf’s Lair,” as Führer headquarters at Rastenburg was called. Stauffenberg’s original plan, apparently, was to blow himself up with Hitler, but Beck and Olbricht objected so vehemently that Stauffenberg agreed to spare himself. He was waiting in Hitler’s antechamber for their meeting to commence when he was informed that it had been canceled.

  Be that as it may, it was at about this time that Stauffenberg first began to consider taking the assassination into his own hands. Only in this way, he felt, could he break the curse that seemed to haunt the resistance.

  * * *

  In retrospect it may seem that the inner strength of the resistance had already begun to ebb by late 1943 and early 1944 and that Tresckow’s failed plot in March 1943 was the turning point in this drama. If so, Stauffenberg joined too late, forced as he was to struggle not only against the Nazi regime but also, to a greater extent than any of his predecessors, against mounting exhaustion and pessimism among the conspirators. Moreover, the state security apparatus began taking greater interest in the opposition after the raid on Military Intelli­gence, and bad news seemed to pour in from all directions.

  Tresckow, however, remained determined to escape the backwater in which he found himself as an infantry commander and to improve his chances of gaining access to Hitler. In December 1943 he con­tacted his old regimental comrade General Rudolf Schmundt with a proposal to establish a department of psychological and political war­fare at Führer headquarters, with himself as head. Tresckow’s “nega­tive attitude” had become so widely known in the meantime, however, that Schmundt, the chief of army personnel, who was still well-disposed to his old friend, quietly let the matter drop. Tresckow also applied to become General Heusinger’s delegate in the OKH operational section but failed at that, too, apparently for the same reason. Heusinger only glanced at the letter, which Schlabrendorff delivered to him, before saying, “It doesn’t require an answer.” Tresckow also wrote to Colonel Stieff, who was still hesitating, beg­ging him to take action at last. When he read the letter, Stieff “burst into approving laughter” and promptly destroyed it.36

  The conspirators suffered another blow in December when Carlo Mierendorff died in a building that collapsed during a bombing raid on Leipzig. According to witnesses, his final word, shouted from the burning cellar, was “Madness!”37 At about the same time the Gestapo honed in on members of an opposition group that had formed around Hanna Solf, the widow of the former German ambassador to Tokyo, and that provided support for people who were persecuted or living underground. Suspicion was probably aroused by the involvement of three officers from Military Intelligence: Nikolaus von Halem, the former legation secretary Mumm von Schwarzenstein, and Otto Kiep. The Security Service had begun systematically to put all Military In­telligence officers under surveillance in the hope that Canaris’s de­partment would continue to crack and could then be absorbed into the expanding empire of the SS. On January 12, 1944, the members of the Solf Circle were arrested while at afternoon tea. One week later Helmuth von Moltke, who had attempted to warn Otto Kiep of the danger, was also picked up. The flood of bad news continued on February 11, when Canaris was dismissed from his job and impris­oned in the Lauenstein fortress, while Himmler’s henchmen, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Walter Schellenberg, and Heinrich Müller, began to dismantle Military Intelligence piece by piece.

  The ascendancy of Heinrich Himmler and the SS state led to a bizarre episode that concluded just as the new year began. Spurred by the repeated failure to overthrow the regime by force, Johannes Popitz had hit on the idea of encouraging a “palace revolution” or at least of exacerbating the tensions that existed among the leading members of the Nazi Party in order to speed up the already percepti­ble disintegration process. At first Popitz considered approaching Göring, Hitler’s designated successor and the prime minister of Prussia, in whose cabinet he still officially sat as minister of finance. He soon concluded, however, that Göring had become too self-indulgent and corrupt, too preoccupied with his flamboyant social life to function even as the figurehead of a serious uprising. Popitz turned therefore to none other than Heinrich Himmler in his perilous venture to destroy the regime from within.

  Popitz had no reason at all to assume that Himmler would prove amenable. After a brilliant early career Popitz had become state secretary in the Ministry of Finance while still quite young, working for a time under the Social Democratic minister Rudolf Hilferding, whom he helped escape Germany after the Nazis seized power. His close bonds with Hilferding may explain why he leaned toward a policy of strong governmental control of the economy, which recommended him to some of the younger members of the Kreisau Circle despite his reputation as a “reactionary old Prussian.” Having made friends with Hans Oster in 1935, Popitz had become deeply involved in the resistance to Hitler even before the war; indeed as a sign of protest against the persecution of Jews, he submitted his resignation as minister to Goring in November 1938, explicitly requesting that Hitler be informed of the reasons. He never received a response, however, and in the end remained in office.

  Popitz was also acquainted with Carl Langbehn, who had joined the opposition in the late 1930s. It turned out that Langbehn knew Himmler personally both as a lawyer and as a neighbor in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. Through this connection Popitz now con­tacted the powerful chief of the SS, who had recently been appointed minister of the interior. They met on August 26. In a conversation conducted with Machiavellian cunning, in which he skirted the edge of the abyss more than once, Popitz suggested that no one but Himm­ler could resolve the desperate situation that had befallen the regime both at home and at the front. Such a suggestion was not totally devoid of promise, as the clear-headed, coolly calculating SS leaders had themselves already begun to entertain serious doubts about whether Germany could win the war and to wonder how their inter­ests might best be served. Popitz avoided referring directly to “over­throwing” Hitler, although that was his ultimate aim, instead making oblique references to “lightening the burden” the Führer had to bear. In general Popitz gained the impression that Himmler had long doubted that Germany could win the war. At the end of their conversation the two agreed to meet again soon.

  This second meeting never took place. The next month Langbehn was arrested after his contacts with the Allies through Swiss intermediaries were exposed. Popitz found himself increasingly marginalized within the civilian resistance despit
e the leading role he had played until this point. His daring initiative was, of course, an act of despera­tion, predicated on the belief that Himmler could be elbowed aside after he had served his purpose. That idea seemed an eerie echo of the illusions of the spring of 1933, when it was thought that Hitler could be controlled once in power. But Popitz’s greater error was his failure to realize that the SS leader did not act independently and exercised only delegated authority. Furthermore, he overlooked how damaging it would have been for the opposition to be maintaining contact, for whatever reason, with a man who was widely believed to epitomize Nazi terror. Gerhard Ritter was not far off track when he described Popitz as the type of intellectual who has “pure intentions but few sure political instincts.” It was this shortcoming that gave rise to the general feeling within resistance circles that Popitz had overstayed his welcome in the role o leader. At any rate, Goerdeler felt that Popitz had gone too far and, after hesitating at first, decided that he didn’t want to hear so much as a word about the conversation with Himmler At Stauffenberg’s urging Goerdeler, too, abandoned the finance minister. The circle had been “blown apart,” Hassell wrote in late February. “Everything is going to hell.”38