The day after provoking Brauchitsch to the edge of a nervous breakdown Hitler busied himself with composing the texts of proclamations to the Dutch and Belgian people justifying his attack on them. Halder noted the pretext: “French march into Belgium.”
But on the next day, November 7, to the relief of the generals, Hitler postponed the date of the attack.
TOP SECRET
Berlin, November 7, 1939
… The Fuehrer and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, after hearing reports on the meteorological and the railway transport situation, has ordered:
A-day is postponed by three days. The next decision will be made at 6 P.M. on November 9, 1939.
KEITEL
This was the first of fourteen postponements ordered by Hitler throughout the fall and winter, copies of which were found in the OKW archives at the end of the war.26 They show that at no time did the Fuehrer abandon for one moment his decision to attack in the West; he merely put off the date from week to week. On November 9, the attack was postponed to November 19; on November 13, to November 22; and so on, with five or six days’ notice being given each time, and usually the weather stated as the reason. Probably the Fuehrer was, to some extent, deferring to the generals. Probably he got it through his head that the Army was not ready. Certainly the strategic and tactical plans had not been fully worked out, for he was always tinkering with them.
There may have been other reasons for Hitler’s first postponement of the offensive. On November 7, the day the decision was made, the Germans had been considerably embarrassed by a joint declaration of the King of the Belgians and the Queen of the Netherlands, offering, “before the war in Western Europe begins in full violence,” to mediate a peace. In such circumstances it would have been difficult to convince anyone, as Hitler was attempting to do in the proclamations he was drafting, that the German Army was moving into the two Low Countries because it had learned the French Army was about to march into Belgium.
Also Hitler may have got wind that his attack on the neutral little country of Belgium would not have the benefit of surprise, on which he had counted. At the end of October, Goerdeler had journeyed to Brussels with a secret message from Weizsaecker urging the German ambassador, Buelow-Schwante, to privately warn the King of the “extreme gravity of the situation.” This the ambassador did and shortly thereafter King Leopold rushed to The Hague to consult with the Queen and draw up their declaration. But the Belgians had more specific information. Some of it came from Oster, as we have seen. On November 8, Buelow-Schwante wired Berlin a warning that King Leopold had told the Dutch Queen that he had “exact information” of a German military build-up on the Belgian frontier which pointed toward a German offensive through Belgium “in two or three days.”27
Then on the evening of November 8 and the afternoon of the following day there occurred two strange events—a bomb explosion that just missed killing Hitler and the kidnaping by the S.S. of two British agents in Holland near the German border—which at first distracted the Nazi warlord from his plans for attacking the West and yet in the end bolstered his prestige in Germany while frightening the Zossen conspirators, who actually had nothing to do with either happening.
A NAZI KIDNAPING AND A BEERHOUSE BOMB
Twelve minutes after Hitler had finished making his annual speech, on the evening of November 8, to the “Old Guard” party cronies at the Buergerbräukeller in Munich in commemoration of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, a shorter speech than usual, a bomb which had been planted in a pillar directly behind the speaker’s platform exploded, killing seven persons and wounding sixty-three others. By that time all the important Nazi leaders, with Hitler at their head, had hurriedly left the premises, though it had been their custom in former years to linger over their beers and reminisce with old party comrades about the early putsch.
The next morning Hitler’s own paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter, alone carried the story of the attempt on the Fuehrer’s life. It blamed the “British Secret Service” and even Chamberlain for the foul deed. “The attempted ‘assassination,’” I wrote that evening in my diary, “undoubtedly will buck up public opinion behind Hitler and stir up hatred of England … Most of us think it smells of another Reichstag fire.”
What connection could the British secret service have with it, outside of Goebbels feverish mind? An attempt was made at once to connect them. An hour or two after the bomb went off in Munich, Heinrich Himmler, chief of the S.S. and the Gestapo, telephoned to one of his rising young S.S. subordinates, Walter Schellenberg, at Duesseldorf and ordered him by command of the Fuehrer, to cross the border into Holland the next day and kidnap two British secret-service agents with whom Schellenberg had been in contact.
Himmler’s order led to one of the most bizarre incidents of the war. For more than a month Schellenberg, who, like Alfred Naujocks, was a university-educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland two British intelligence officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens. To them he posed as “Major Schaemmel,” an anti-Nazi officer in OKW (Schellenberg took the name from a living major) and gave a convincing story of how the German generals were determined to overthrow Hitler. What they wanted from the British, he said, were assurances that the London government would deal fairly with the new anti-Nazi regime. Since the British had heard from other sources (as we have seen) of a German military conspiracy, whose members wanted the same kind of assurances, London was interested in developing further contacts with “Major Schaemmel.” Best and Stevens provided him with a small radio transmitter and receiving set; there were numerous ensuing communications over the wireless and further meetings in various Dutch towns. By November 7, when the two parties met at Venlo, a Dutch town on the German frontier, the British agents were able to give “Schaemmel” a rather vague message from London to the leaders of the German resistance stating in general terms the basis for a just peace with an anti-Nazi regime. It was agreed that “Schaemmel” should bring one of these leaders, a German general, to Venlo the next day, to begin definitive negotiations. This meeting was put off to the ninth.
Up to this moment the objectives of the two sides were clear. The British were trying to establish direct contact with the German military putschists in order to encourage and aid them. Himmler was attempting to find out through the British who the German plotters were and what their connection was with the enemy secret service. That Himmler and Hitler were already suspicious of some of the generals as well as of men like Oster and Canaris of the Abwehr is clear. But now on the night of November 8, Hitler and Himmler found need of a new objective: Kidnap Best and Stevens and blame these two British secret-service agents for the Buergerbräu bombing!
A familiar character now entered the scene. Alfred Naujocks, who had staged the “Polish attack” on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, showed up in command of a dozen Security Service (S.D.) toughs to help Schellenberg carry out the kidnaping. The deed came off nicely. At 4 P.M. on November 9, while Schellenberg sipped an apéritif on the terrace of a café at Venlo, waiting for a rendezvous with Best and Stevens, the two British agents drove up in their Buick, parked it behind the café, and then ran into a hail of bullets from an S.S. car filled with Naujock’s ruffians. Lieutenant Klop, a Dutch intelligence officer, who had always accompanied the British pair in their talks with Schellenberg, fell mortally wounded. Best and Stevens were tossed into the S.S. car “like bundles of hay,” as Schellenberg later remembered, along with the wounded Klop, and driven speedily across the border into Germany.*28
And so on November 21 Himmler announced to the public that the assassination plot against Hitler at the Buergerbräukeller had been solved. It was done at the instigation of the British Intelligence Service, two of whose leaders, Stevens and Best, had been arrested “on the Dutch–German frontier” on the day following the bombing. The actual perpetrator was given as Georg Elser, a German Communist carpenter residing in Munich.
Himmler’s detailed account of the crime sou
nded “fishy” to me, as I wrote in my diary the same day. But his accomplishment was very real. “What Himmler and his gang are up to, obviously,” I jotted down, “is to convince the gullible German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides.”
The mystery of who arranged the bombing has never been completely cleared up. Elser, though not the half-wit that was Marinus van der Lubbe of the Reichstag fire, was a man of limited intelligence though quite sincere. He not only pleaded guilty to making and setting off the bomb, he boasted of it. Though of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the attempt, he did make the former’s acquaintance during long years at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There he told the Englishman a long and involved—and not always logical—story.
One day in October at the Dachau concentration camp, where he had been incarcerated since midsummer as a Communist sympathizer, he related, he had been summoned to the office of the camp commandant, where he was introduced to two strangers. They explained the necessity of doing away with some of the Fuehrer’s “traitorous” followers by exploding a bomb in the Buergerbräukeller immediately after Hitler had made his customary address on the evening of November 8 and had left the hall. The bomb was to be planted in a pillar behind the speakers’ platform. Since Elser was a skilled cabinetmaker and electrician and a tinkerer, they suggested that he was the man to do the job. If he did, they would arrange for his escape to Switzerland and for a large sum of money to keep him in comfort there. As a token of their seriousness they promised him better treatment in the camp in the meanwhile: better food, civilian clothes, plenty of cigarettes—for he was a chain smoker—and a carpenter’s bench and tools. There Elser constructed a crude but efficient bomb with an eight-day alarm-clock mechanism and a contraption by which the weapon could also be detonated by an electric switch. Elser asserted that he was taken one night early in November to the beer cellar, where he installed his gadget in the well-placed pillar.
On the evening of November 8, at about the time the bomb was set to go off, he was taken by his accomplices, he said, to the Swiss frontier, given a sum of money and—interestingly—a picture postcard of the interior of the beer hall, with the pillar in which he had placed his bomb marked with a cross. But instead of being helped across the frontier—and this seems to have surprised the dim-witted fellow—he was nabbed by the Gestapo, postcard and all. Later he was coached by the Gestapo to implicate Best and Stevens at the coming state trial, in which he would be made the center of attention.*
The trial never came off. We know now that Himmler, for reasons best known to himself, didn’t dare to have a trial. We also know—now—that Elser lived on at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps, being accorded, apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had personally gained so much from the bombing, quite humane treatment under the circumstances. But Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would not do to let the carpenter survive the war and live to tell his tale. Shortly before the war ended, on April 16, 1945, the Gestapo announced that Georg Elser had been killed in an Allied bombing attack the previous day. We know now that the Gestapo murdered him.30
HITLER TALKS TO HIS GENERALS
Having escaped assassination, or so it was made to seem, and quelled defiance among his generals, Hitler went ahead with his plans for the big attack in the West. On November 20, he issued Directive No. 8 for the Conduct of the War, ordering the maintenance of the “state of alert” so as to “exploit favorable weather conditions immediately,” and laying down plans for the destruction of Holland and Belgium. And then to put courage in the fainthearted and arouse them to the proper pitch he thought necessary on the eve of great battles, he summoned the commanding generals and General Staff officers to the Chancellery at noon on November 23.
It was one of the most revealing of the secret pep talks to his principal military chiefs, and thanks to the Allied discovery of some of the OKW files at Flensburg it has been preserved in the form of notes taken by an unidentified participant.31
The purpose of this conference [Hitler began] is to give you an idea of the world of my thoughts, which govern me in the face of future events, and to tell you my decisions.
His mind was full of the past, the present and the future, and to this limited group he spoke with brutal frankness and great eloquence, giving a magnificent résumé of all that had gone on in his warped but fertile brain and predicting with deadly accuracy the shape of things to come. But it seems difficult to imagine that anyone who heard it could have had any further doubts that the man who now held the fate of Germany—and the world—in his hands had become beyond question a dangerous megalomaniac.
I had a clear recognition of the probable course of historical events [he said in discussing his early struggles] and the firm will to make brutal decisions … As the last factor I must name my own person in all modesty: irreplaceable. Neither a military man nor a civilian could replace me. Assassination attempts may be repeated. I am convinced of the powers of my intellect and of decision … No one has ever achieved what I have achieved … I have led the German people to a great height, even if the world does hate us now … The fate of the Reich depends only on me. I shall act accordingly.
He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his “hard decisions” to leave the League of Nations, decree conscription, occupy the Rhineland, fortify it and seize Austria. “The number of people who put trust in me,” he said, “was very small.”
“The next step,” he declared in describing his conquests with a cynicism which it is unfortunate that Chamberlain never heard, “was Bohemia, Moravia and Poland.”
It was clear to me from the first moment that I could not be satisfied with the Sudeten-German territory. That was only a partial solution. The decision to march into Bohemia was made. Then followed the establishment of the Protectorate and with that the basis for the conquest of Poland was laid, but I was not quite clear at that time whether I should start first against the East and then against the West, or vice versa. By the pressure of events it came first to the fight against Poland. One might accuse me of wanting to fight and fight again. In struggle I see the fate of all beings. Nobody can avoid fighting if he does not want to go under.
The increasing number of [German] people required a larger Lebensraum. My goal was to create a rational relation between the number of people and the space for them to live in. The fight must start here. No nation can evade the solution of this problem. Otherwise it must yield and gradually go down … No calculated cleverness is of any help here: solution only with the sword. A people unable to produce the strength to fight must withdraw …
The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, including Bismarck and Moltke, was “insufficient hardness. The solution was possible only by attacking a country at a favorable moment.” Failure to realize this brought on the 1914 war “on several fronts. It did not bring a solution of the problem.”
Today [Hitler went on] the second act of this drama is being written. For the first time in sixty-seven years we do not have a two-front war to wage … But no one can know how long that will remain so … Basically I did not organize the armed forces in order not to strike. The decision to strike was always in me.
Thoughts of the present blessings of a one-front war brought the Fuehrer to the question of Russia.
Russia is at present not dangerous. It is weakened by many internal conditions. Moreover, we have the treaty with Russia. Treaties, however, are kept only as long as they serve a purpose. Russia will keep it only as long as Russia herself considers it to be to her benefit … Russia still has far-reaching goals, above all the strengthening of her position in the Baltic. We can oppose Russia only when we are free in the West.
As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, “whose death can alter everything … Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring danger to us. How easily the death of a statesman can come I myself have experienced
recently.” Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous—“because of her neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much. Still, time was working for the enemy. “The moment is favorable now; in six months it might not be so any more.” Therefore:
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 104