The Valkyrie Option

by Markus Reichardt

  Antonov stepped back giving Zhukov the floor “The Germans and their allies have greatly increased the number of anti-tank guns in their frontlines. They also now no longer put up a static defence. Instead they let our units overrun forward positions before deploying their 88mm guns against which most of our tanks remain vulnerable. These guns simply outrange our tanks. This is the situation along the entire front. Also their mobile anti-aircraft capabilities have increased. We speculate that this is due to their ability to redeploy large numbers of anti-aircraft guns to our sector where they serve in a dual role. “

  Stalin raised an eyebrow. So the British bomber offensive actually had made a contribution after all.

  ‘What of the German offensive.’ Zhukov and Antonov glanced at each other, before the stocky front commander spoke: They had maintained their advance in the face of our counter-attacks but have failed to take what must have been their key objectives. The heroic defence of our ground forces supported by the Airfleets has denied them Wilno and we are about to retake Daugapils. This is the area where they have concentrated their heavy tanks. …’

  So it was undecided Stalin mused, they would have to await events. Either the Germans would find new strength for continued advance within the next two days or they would be hit by the massive counterattacks he had ordered the First, Second and Third Baltic Fronts to launch within that timeframe. One thing still bothered him. ‘You have not reported any success in hunting down the bandits who committed the various acts of sabotage against our naval bases. ‘

  Antonov stepped forward. “Comrade Stalin. Our investigation has ascertained that these acts were carried out by German submarines. Our naval forces caught one in the Black Sea heading away from Sevastopol where it had attacked. The other attacks also follow the Sevastopol pattern.”

  “I believe more vigilance is needed. Have the navy deploy more aggressively to guard our basis if you believe this the cause of the attacks, but it is my opinion that there were saboteurs involved. Just as they were in Minsk. “

  “The Minsk attacks were the result of some long-range weapon. Comrade Stalin”

  “This is doubtful unless they have mastered rocketry to an unprecedented level. The MVD tells me there was no sound of incoming projectiles, no sound of airplanes that could have dropped the bombs. I remain convinced of the need for greater vigilance in the rear of our forces. Comrade Beria will be instructed to liaise with you on how to improve security. “

  And with that Stalin signalled the end of the meeting. Grateful to have escaped any more pointed grilling over the recent setbacks, Antonov relaxed.

  Chapter 9

  The French people… are at present unduly pre-occupied … with questions of national prestige.

  State Department memorandum to

  President Truman April 1945

  October 26th

  Paris

  The day before the American ultimatum expired, the first weapons were handed in by the French. In many cases it was just symbolic, the actions of mayors and committee leaders who had no desire for bloodshed and who could see that America’s ability to withhold food supplies would quickly plunge their towns and regions into anarchy. In Paris De Gaulle and his advisors remained secluded in their headquarters while the delegates from other parties, seeking to establish an alternative administration in the capital stuck to bickering among themselves. De Gaulle was fuming; the French masses had acclaimed him as their leader and yet the allies continued to deny him formal recognition. Worse they were now disarming the French to disunite them. Even Churchill who should have known better was treating France as a war zone rather than an allied country. In his more generous moments, and in private, De Gaulle knew that Churchill was also hamstrung by his own growing dependency on US supplies.

  What he did not appreciate or know was that night the senior brass at SHAEF, who generally had no high opinion of the French to begin with, convinced their Commander to bring matters to a head. In the chill of the morning of the 26th, armed police swarmed around the Gaullist and Communist headquarters to conduct a search for weapons. They met little resistance and came away with a few insignificant rifles, officer sabres and some handguns. But the point had been made. America was in charge and for the moment France, if she wanted to survive the winter would have to accept American military administration. It was by now cold enough for even patriotic Parisians to see the value of US coal supplies.

  10pm, October 26th

  Harz Mountains

  They had met again to report back on their efforts and it soon became clear that there was no hope of gaining the support of even a meaningful number of Waffen-SS units. Once the approach to Dietrich had failed, neither Meyer nor Eicke or any of the other commanders had shown any willingness to declare. Even the fanatical Belgian Hitler admirer Leon Degrelle, could offer no more than a regiment of non-German Waffen SS veterans, and they were in the thick of the fighting in the Baltics. In addition, any chance of using some of the camp guard units had passed as virtually all of them were by now being processed through Wehrmacht training camps or already at the front. The old storm troopers, the SA, had to be written off as their leadership had not forgotten the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Hitler had used the SS to squash them. The few of them who had not yet been drafted were not likely candidates for an SS coup.

  The leader at the table, a Brigadeführer, came straight to the point; for the moment all they could do was wait and consolidate their resources. One by one the others made positive noises about going underground and continuing the struggle. No-one, however, talked about the practicalities of a guerrilla struggle or even a limited sabotage campaign; it was not something they knew much about. In fact out of uniform some of them had no idea of each other’s significance. When they left the meeting, it was the last time they ever came together. Within two weeks two of the men were on a boat to South America, another had been caught, while most of the rest simply decided to let matters be. Even the Brigadeführer recognized that for the moment it was better to lie low and slipped quietly into the role of invalided owner of his remote mountain hotel. The Führerprinzip had played its last trick; everything had been built on loyalty and authority. Once the authority was gone or had chosen to side with the opposition, the system came apart. Deprived of the certainty and iron hand of its former leadership the last remnant of the SS bureaucracy simply withered away. The Jesuit order of Hitler’s Reich proved unable to preserve the flame it was sworn to protect. Its motto had been “Meine Ehre heist Treue – My honour is loyalty’. Feebly slithering into the woodwork, the bureaucrats of Himmler’s order showed that without Hitler’s iron purpose they had neither the honour nor the loyalty; they were nothing.

  3pm, October 26th

  Treasury Building

  Washington

  Since midsummer 1944 there had been talk in London and Washington about military action against the death camps such as Auschwitz. Anthony Eden had come to Churchill on July 7th to tell him of a request by the Jewish Agency of Palestine to bomb the rail lines, the debate had bogged down in technicalities while both American and British air marshals argued that they could hardly bomb the places where they would kill the people they sought to liberate. So nothing had been done and that weighed heavily on men such as Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau. An advocate of the proposal who argued that the symbolic value would have possibly made the Nazis stop and think he had been brushed aside. Now with the Germans disclosing the extent of Hitler’s crimes, he sought to lash out at those who had delayed action.

  Sitting in his spartan office at Treasury fuming, he regarded Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary to the Treasury and unbeknown to him Soviet spy.[88] . Next to White sat another two Treasury officials but they were here as bodies not contributors and they knew it. As Morgenthau had admitted to his own diary, no-one had as much influence on his thinking as White. White was man he had sent to participate in the Bretton Woods Conference on July 22nd just after the German Gen
erals had, as he called it, ‘manufactured their alibi.’ In line with Roosevelt’s view that militarism was a German national trait, neither Morgenthau nor White believed that fundamental change had actually occurred in Berlin after the 20th of July. When the newspapers had finally reported on the German putting their own former leaders on trial for among other things crimes involving the wholesale murder of Jewish communities, Morgenthau had just snorted. Wholesale murder is not the half of it. We are talking about genocide, a crime on a scale never before seen and which call for new forms of punishment. The Germans did this, they should be made to pay as a nation. From such sentiments the Morgenthau plan to turn Germany into an agrarian state had been born. But that lay in ruins courtesy of Churchill’s outburst at Quebec.

  But in his anger Morgenthau tended to ignore that during the entire war the Roosevelt administration had had the opportunity to intervene to limit the war on Europe’s Jews, and had not done so. Instead, the President acutely sensitive to being seen as a Jew, had consistently played down the topic. Morgenthau also could not know that for some weeks , White’s communication to his Soviet handlers had been about ways in which to secure American acquiescence for the Soviet takeover not just of the Baltic states but also of Poland. [89]

  Today the Secretary of Treasury wanted to discuss a new idea but also hear what had transpired from a series of meeting his men had held with their British counterparts.

  “So in a nutshell what you are telling me Harry is that the British want to be let off the hook. “

  White smiled at his boss, there was a way to represent the exploratory talks in a positive or negative light. White chose to go the negative way. “Technically it’s a bit more subtle than that. They want a loan to refinance the debt they have with us at a lower rate and on better terms. But the terms should be very lenient.”

  “I haven’t yet heard you mention anything they might do in return for this. The President is less than happy about the way the British are going easy on Germany and hard on Russia’s security needs in Eastern Europe. The Vice President has also signalled his unhappiness about the way we – that is us and the Brits – appear less than wholehearted in the pursuit of Germany’s defeat.”

  “It might not come as a total surprise that the topic did not come up.“ White leaned back in his chair, knowing where this was going. Keynes and other in the British delegation had raised the topic but in such an oblique manner that it had been easy for him to drop reference to it from the minutes. For his part, Morgenthau had not forgotten the dressing down he had gotten from Churchill at the Quebec Conference and so was ready for the bait White tossed out next. “Actually the theme was more along what Britain needed to retain her world power status.”

  “And did you give them any sense of how we would be responding.”

  Harry D White just shook his head.

  “Good! because I have some ideas on how to reward them for cosying up to the Germans. … Churchill has decided that he wants to turn the clock back, go back to the last century where he can return to holding a large chunk of the world’s people in bondage through his Empire, trade with half the world on preferential terms to keep Britain artificially rich and powerful. Well I don’t see why we should pay for that.”

  He looked around, took off his glasses and briefly cleaned them. None of his assistants said a word. They knew he had called them here to discuss a new policy idea and were keen to hear it. “Churchill wants to use our money to bolster his power, I think not. Rather I think it should be the policy of the government to use its financial strength to support its foreign policy objectives at a national level. What I am proposing and what I would like your thoughts on is that we tell the British that we will indeed renegotiate and that the terms will depend on just how well they support our foreign policy objectives. “

  “What is your sense of how the President will respond? “

  Well I’ve a sense that he will quite like it, but that he will use different words to say the same thing. He’s less than happy with what he’s hearing from some of the Brits here in Washington. Just a few days ago we had someone from the Foreign Office here whinging about their debt. Damn it we gave them good rates, sold and supplied them with everything they wanted, everything needed to survive and now they want to not only change the objective of the conflict. They also want debt relief. “

  “But do you think he’ll stand up for such a policy in the middle of the conflict? What will he say when Churchill comes whining? “

  “Very little truth be told.“ Morgenthau muttered almost to himself, running his hands through his dark, thinning hair. Harry knew when to not push a point.

  Instead Morgenthau leaned forward: “There is a precedent you know.”

  “I don’t quite follow you boss.”

  “Well, the British ran up a massive debt during the Great War and one way or the other we made them pay back every last cent or we negotiated something else in return. Either way there was no debt relief. Back then we were united in our goals, so why should there be any debt relief now. “

  And with that thought Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau drafted a memorandum that would give the British cabinet nightmares when they discovered its content.

  11:20am October 27th

  German Embassy

  Warsaw

  Stauffenberg, Bor and Okulicki and Trott sat quietly at the table all savouring the hot real coffee that some crafty orderly – most probably with excellent black market connections – had managed to secure. The building had formerly been the German Kommandantur in Warsaw. Now it had been renamed the German Embassy, since the premises of the pre-1939 embassy had not survived the fighting. Through partly torn curtains the harsh sunlight shown into the room. Two guards, one Polish, one German stood near the door.

  Just half an hour ago former Governor Dr Hans Frank, Hitler’s representative in Poland during the dark days of Nazi occupation had been handed over to the new Polish authorities in Warsaw. Every journalist that Berlin and Warsaw could find had been invited and shipped to the occasion. Frank’s black hair had been combed back and his clean-shaven face was ashen as he stood in before the flicker of light bulbs and cameras. Dressed in a good civilian suit, he had looked like the undistinguished lawyer he had been before Hitler made placed him in charge of what had remained of Poland after Germany annexed most of its western lands in 1939. Frank’s deputy had committed suicide rather than be handed over so the limelight had been all on him. To his credit he had made a brief statement in which he acknowledged that terrible things had happened under his rule and that the Poles had a legal case. He then went on to list a variety of Nazi organisations that had actually implemented the Final Solution and the massacres of Polish leaders during his time and promised full co-operation.

  Frank’s statement had been all the more poignant as the Poles had assembled for the occasion nearly one hundred children who had been orphaned, mutilated or experimented on by the mad polices of racial purity which Frank’s henchmen had pursued on Hitler’s behalf. Most of them were barely into their teens, some cradled siblings who could barely walk due to youth or malnutrition. Their statements set a stark contrast to what Frank’s bland political and legal phrases sought to hide, mass murder and brutality on a grand scale. Hitler had meant to clear Poland of all people other than serf-like labourers in his quest for Lebensraum for his people whom he saw as a separate race. Many Germans had done his bloody work, but many had had memories of Polish atrocities dating back to 1919, 1921 and in 1938 that to them justified race-level hatred. And so the killing had just resumed. These orphaned children and the bland lawyer next to them stood in testament to man’s infinite ability to be cruel to his own species.

  Despite the media setup Bor set down his coffee and grinned at Stauffenberg, “you prepared your man well. He said the rights things.”

  Stauffenberg smiled, ‘he is a lawyer by training, most probably its professional instinct.’ Inwardly he was worried, he did not want the
Poles to know the deal that had been struck with Frank; his life in return for a new identity for his family in the west. “Anyway what is done is done. I hope you see that we continue to mean business in this difficult relationship.”

  ‘Difficult yes. Bor looked out the window briefly ‘ do you know how many incidents there have been just here in Warsaw alone just in the last week.’ Bor stopped himself. ‘But that is not why we are here to talk.’

  Now that we have Frank we need to talk about the others as well. The camp commanders, the Einsatzgruppen commanders the men who ordered the massacres.’

  Inwardly Stauffenberg sighed, even though they were sitting around a table, he knew that it was the personal links that held this tenuous arrangement together. Although handing over large chunks of Polish territory to Polish Home Army administration had absorbed much of the Polish tendency for factionalism. And while it kept the political issues redirected, the deal had actually brought Germany little relief in manpower. The few units that had been released from anti-partisan duty were second-rate and small in number. Worse the camp guards that were still being fed piecemeal into the frontline were of dubious military value. In the end the deal had replaced the strategic challenge of holding all of Poland against a strong internal resistance, with a tactical one of keeping open the lines of communications across Polish territory and here they still needed garrison troops because there was just too much misery, and hatred to trust the supply of their vital front to another power.