The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Around late 1941, some of the conspirators again planned to kill Hitler. Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht at the western front, reluctantly allowed some of his staff officers to plan another assassination attempt. It is possible that the detailed information on the atrocities of the SS in Poland given to him by Canaris in spring 1940 influenced his decision.21 Again, a coup was not, and could not really be, planned. The resistance network was still too small and lacked operational strength.22

  The two would-be assassins, Capt. Alexander von Voss and Capt. Count Ulrich Wilhelm Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, were both close associates of Field Marshal Witzleben. Schwerin belonged to the tiny minority of young, deeply religious officers horrified by the atrocities in Poland.23 The route of Voss into the resistance, however, was more complicated, a clear example of revolutionary mutation. Voss was a nonpolitical Prussian conservative, with a nationalistic and military mind-set. His letters are a mixed bag of optimism and eagerness for German victory, and a growing critique of the National Socialist system’s corruption, abuse of the French, and failure to end the war with a fair peace agreement. His wife testified that, like Schwerin, he was horrified by the atrocities in Poland. This criticism, however, did not lead him into the resistance until he joined Witzleben’s staff, in October 1940. There, as he rubbed shoulders with die-hard resistance fighters, his doubts and criticism crystallized more and more into active resistance. Witzleben, he wrote, was like his father, and the two had lengthy daily conversations. The field marshal told him “what he otherwise does not tell anyone else.” It was the father-son relationship with Witzleben that mutated Voss into an active resistance fighter.24

  When Voss and Schwerin heard, in late 1941, that Hitler had planned a military parade in Paris, they recruited a handful of conspirators to form a sharpshooter squad. According to another version of the plot, Count Schwerin was supposed to throw a hand grenade at the Führer. Voss and Schwerin probably knew they would be shot shortly afterward (the former even wrote farewell letters to his family), but both still decided to go ahead with the plan. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the rumors of a planned parade were baseless. Hitler didn’t even intend to visit Paris. He was usually reluctant to visit the fronts, and when he did so, he took care to change his schedule frequently and without notice.25

  Beck was even more pessimistic than usual, owing both to the conspirators’ latest failure and to the deteriorating military situation in North Africa. “Who will save us?” he wondered in despair to his confidant, the teacher and reserve captain Hermann Kaiser.26 The echoes of despair even reached the Finnish ambassador in Berlin, who wrote to the foreign ministry in Helsinki that the opposition was merely a medley of disgruntled citizens, who posed no threat to the regime and should not be taken seriously.27 Still, Beck and Oster kept waiting for their chance. In January 1942, they agreed, with Witzleben’s consent, to make Hitler’s death, through an assassination, the precondition for any future coup attempt.28

  All the while, the conspirators, Kreisauers, Social Democrats, and conservatives alike continued to weave their networks of imagination: papers, memoranda, draft constitutions, and prospective cabinet lists. One such list proposed Witzleben as president, Beck as war minister, and Goerdeler as minister of the interior, but it was quickly forgotten.29 Oster continued to recruit new members, and he especially looked for a charismatic, capable field commander to plan the assassination attempt. Halder failed him, Brauchitsch failed him, Britain and France failed as well, and Hitler was stronger than ever. Still Oster persisted, even in his darkest, most despairing days.

  After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941, Oster finally decided that Henning von Tresckow, a senior operations officer in Army Group Center, was the right man for the job. The focus of the conspiracy moved to the eastern front, entailing a dramatic transition in both network structure and strategy.

  11

  Brokers on the Front Line:

  The New Strategy

  ON THE MORNING of June 22, 1941, the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg, walked into the office of the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, in the Kremlin. He found his host stunned and confused by the news of a German incursion deep into the USSR, in gross violation of the Nazi-Soviet pact that the two countries had signed less than two years before, in August 1939. The Germans had assembled huge forces on the border, consisting of three large army groups supplemented by thousands of tanks and fighter planes, in preparation for one of the largest military campaigns in history. Schulenburg read to the bewildered Molotov a communiqué that had been dictated to him by Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in Berlin:

  In 1939 the Reich government sought, ignoring vigorous opposition deriving from the fundamental contradictions between National Socialism and Bolshevism, to achieve understandings with Soviet Russia . . . The Reich government pursued a friendly policy toward the Soviet Union . . . As a result of this policy, the Soviet Union enjoyed major advantages in its foreign policy . . . The Reich government assumed that the two peoples would achieve abiding neighborly relations, and that each nation would respect the regime of the other and would not intervene in its internal affairs. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the Reich government erred fundamentally in making this assumption . . . The Soviet government has violated the agreement it signed with Germany and is about to attack Germany from the rear in a life-or-death struggle. The Führer has ordered the German Wehrmacht to resist this threat with all the means at its disposal.1

  Schulenburg, who had devoted most of his diplomatic career to improving relations between the two countries, was himself in shock. “I believe,” he told Molotov, “that we are talking about war, and there is nothing more that I can add.” The Soviet foreign minister then asked, “Why did Germany sign a non-aggression pact only to violate it so casually?” The ambassador kept his silence.2

  Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union, in Operation Barbarossa, triggered a major shift in the German resistance movement. As we have seen, the setbacks that the conspirators suffered between 1938 and 1941 had proved to all that the Berlin clique of Beck, Goerdeler, Hassell, and Gisevius was ineffective. These setbacks gradually bolstered the view held by Colonel Oster and others that attempts to convince the high command to stage a revolution from above were all but futile. Instead, Oster argued, the conspirators had first to kill Hitler to trigger the coup, and only then could they convince the senior generals to get on board.

  However, this new strategy required an altogether different mode of operation. During the war, it was hardly possible to assassinate Hitler in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich, where his security arrangements were almost impregnable. And a fortuitous security breach, like the one used by Georg Elser in 1939, was unlikely to recur. The only possible course of action was to kill Hitler when he was on the move during a visit to one of the fronts. To do that, one needed intelligence, coordination, and a network of couriers and collaborators outside of Berlin.

  As we saw in the preceding chapter, some conspirators had planned to assassinate Hitler in Paris in late 1941. This isolated scheme lacked the military force it needed to back it up. Even if it had been successful, the conspirators had no means to follow up with a coup d’état. Only the dramatic military expansion of the Nazi empire into Soviet territory, from 1941 onward, gave the conspirators the opportunity to properly plan assassination attempts. Once resistance cells were formed there, the eastern front proved to be a much better stage for saboteurs and conspirators. Unlike the crowded and closely monitored urban center of Paris, it had vast expanses on which to experiment with bombs, and few watchful eyes. The matter was still complicated, though: resistance cells had to be created and, just as crucially, Hitler had to be lured to visit a place where the assassins were ready.

  Meanwhile, the old Berlin clique had morphed into a network of small, connected cliques. The network built by Goerdeler, Oster
, and Gisevius in 1938 had been a dense social circle, in which most members were concentrated in one place (Berlin) and knew each other very well. By the end of 1941, the resistance was gradually taking the shape of an alliance between two main cliques, one in Berlin and one at the eastern front, with some offshoots elsewhere as well. The conspiracy became much more complicated and entangled, and its day-to-day operations required more effort, talent, and, most of all, leadership and social-networking capabilities. As a result, notwithstanding Beck’s nominal leadership, the resistance was overseen not by one military figure but rather by a coalition of coconspirators constantly negotiating with each other.

  In order to link one clique to the other, a new function became essential. A “broker” is a kind of superconnector who enjoys good contacts in other groups as well as in his or her own social circle. The broker’s job is to bridge remote groups whose members don’t know each other, and to coordinate their activity so as to facilitate joint operations.3 That function, from late 1941 on, was fulfilled by Hermann Kaiser, a history teacher and captain in the reserves. As the officer responsible for the war diary of the commander in chief of the Home Army, Kaiser had formed a dense web of contacts with senior officers. Under the pretext of frequent work trips, he was able to coordinate between the different cliques, groupings, and cells of the resistance.4 Gradually, even Beck became dependent on him. For the elderly, lonely, and ailing leader of the resistance, Kaiser was not only a liaison but also a friend who accompanied him to concerts and engaged him in political, military, and aesthetic discussions.5

  Kaiser’s diary documents not only his frequent trips and meetings with senior officers but also the reason he was so well liked by them. Through highly placed contacts, he had access to a generous supply of good wine and was always happy to share bottles with thirsty friends.6 During the austerity of the wartime regime, that was unusual. Amid the intoxicating bottles, the former teacher brokered the dangerous idea of resistance to the Nazi regime.

  Kaiser, one of the most active conspirators, has not garnered much attention in conventional resistance literature. His diary, an invaluable source for the history of the conspiracy, was published only in 2010. This relative neglect is unsurprising, given the tendency of resistance literature to focus its attention on the plots and their leaders without paying due attention to the connections and interaction between them. Yet Kaiser’s role coordinating between the Berlin clique and the anti-Nazi resistance at the eastern front was crucial.

  Just like many other conspirators, Kaiser began his career as a nationalist right-winger. An initial supporter of the Nazi revolution, he even joined the party. But when a friend of his was murdered on the Night of the Long Knives, he began to distance himself from Hitler and his henchmen. His two brothers, both of them critics of the regime, also influenced him to tread the path of opposition. Furthermore, along with other conspirators, he was unhappy about the German atrocities in Poland and was especially incensed when churches were destroyed. “As an enthusiastic idealist and devout Christian,” wrote his acquaintance, historian Friedrich Meinecke, “he saw Hitlerism as a sin against God.”7 Later, he was disgusted by atrocities against Russian POWs and civilians at the eastern front. The murder of the Jews also troubled him, but it seems that, in comparison to other leaders of the resistance, the Holocaust was not as important to the final balance of Kaiser’s motives.8

  In any case, his opposition didn’t immediately manifest itself as active resistance. In accordance with the rule of revolutionary mutation, it was a professional, not a clandestine, contact that drew him to the circle of the conspirators. Kaiser, an amateur historian, was studying the life of a general from the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. As part of his research, he frequently met both scholars and officers. On January 16, 1941, he came into contact with Gen. Ludwig Beck, the leader of the German resistance movement. The content of the meeting is mostly unknown to us, but it is clear from Kaiser’s diary that Beck initiated him into the resistance, telling him that their mission was to “cut the Gordian knot,” namely, to overturn the regime. “We agreed on everything,” wrote Kaiser in his diary. “[Beck] is a very wise man with character, a sense of responsibility and broad education. [He said] that the boundaries must be delineated only by responsibility to nation, conscience and God.” After two more meetings, both in September 1941, Beck and Goerdeler had successfully won him over to the conspiracy. “Y [Goerdeler] is a man with character, nerves for action, integrity and sincerity,” he noted. No stone was left unturned: the gloomy situation at the eastern front, the possibility of obtaining a fair peace for Germany after the war, and the atrocities against civilians and prisoners in Russia were all discussed. Kaiser’s conclusion was that “not one day is to be lost. We must act now.” The die was cast. From then on, he became a full-time conspirator.9

  Through Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Hermann Kaiser came into contact with Lt. Col. Henning von Tresckow, a senior operations officer in Army Group Center at the eastern front. Tresckow, a former adherent of the regime, was horrified at the Nazi crimes of the 1930s. A consistent supporter of the German Jews, he deplored both legal discrimination and violent persecutions. Kristallnacht, especially, was, to him, an unforgivable act of barbarism. The aggregate impact of these events, along with the plot against General Fritsch and the atrocities in the Polish campaign, turned him into an implacable enemy of Hitler.10

  Around 1941, Tresckow was won over to the conspiracy by Schlabrendorff, an aristocratic lawyer and veteran of the German resistance. In the months following the onset of Operation Barbarossa, Tresckow became a focal point for local critics of the regime. Though he was disliked by some as an overambitious, arrogant officer, his influence on others was extremely strong. “A leader one would wish to have,” wrote a superior, oblivious to Tresckow’s anti-Nazi activities.11 “He had a personality that simply bowled you over,” recalled his friend, admirer, and coconspirator Margarethe von Oven. “He had an incredible gift for connecting with you and winning you over. He had something—how shall I put it? Have you seen pictures of him? He exercised a very strong immediate influence on his surroundings; he had a great personal charm—charm and the ability to convince. You trusted him.”12 Quickly, Tresckow became the rising star of the conspiracy. He promised Schlabrendorff that he would build an organized resistance cell at the eastern front using the first major military setback as a pretext to act against Hitler.13

  According to Schlabrendorff, Tresckow was “one of National Socialism’s natural enemies. His unflagging zeal in his fight against Hitler made him one of the outstanding figures of the resistance.”14 Tresckow indeed viewed himself as an exemplar of the Prussian military tradition, which was separated from Nazi totalitarianism by an abyss. In the confirmation ceremony of his sons, he said that their Prussian heritage was “a synthesis of duty and freedom . . . of strictness and compassion.” This tradition, so often misunderstood, “demands a commitment to truth, inward and outward discipline in carrying out one’s duty to the last moment.” But most importantly, “it is impossible to separate freedom from the true Prussian spirit . . . and without it there is a danger of degenerating into a soulless soldiery and narrow-minded self-righteousness.”15

  Tresckow kept his word. In the following months, he formed an anti-Nazi cell that, in addition to Schlabrendorff, included Rudolf von Gersdorff, the army group’s intelligence officer, who had turned against the regime because of the massacres in Poland and Russia; Alexander Stahlberg, a cousin of Tresckow’s; Eberhard von Breitenbuch, who would later try to assassinate Hitler; and Col. Bernd von Kleist, one of the staff officers. Kleist, a sharp-witted and cynical man, forecast the outcome of Operation Barbarossa. “The German army attacking Russia,” he told his fellow conspirators, “is like an elephant treading on an anthill. The elephant will kill thousands, tens of thousands, perhaps millions of ants, but in the end the [ants’] numerical superiority will win out, and they will climb up him and consume him to the bone.”16r />
  Tresckow’s cell did not begin as a group of plotters. Rather, according to the rule of revolutionary mutation, it began as a legal, tight social network that granted these young and idealistic officers, all of them critics of the regime, a sense of belonging within a hostile political environment. “We, the younger people, respected and revered [Tresckow] . . . ,” recalled Breitenbuch. “His heart was open even to the domestic worries of each one of us—and how rare that was! I have never met another person who could win you over to his views with such clarity and common sense.”17 The group liked to shut themselves up in a room with a roaring fireplace, where they feasted on steaks and wine and discussed social, military, and political matters over long chess games. Such an atmosphere helped the charismatic Tresckow to gradually consolidate a group of loyal comrades and “mutate” it into a revolutionary cell.18

  12

  War of Extermination:

  The Conspirators and the Holocaust

  HITLER NEVER CEASED to stun Tresckow and his friends with his brutality. On March 30, 1941, the dictator announced his infamous Commissar Order, in which he declared that the officers who served as political attachés in each Red Army unit must be shot when captured rather than taken prisoner. The war in Russia would not be conducted chivalrously: “This war is a war between worldviews—Bolshevism has been doomed to die. We must therefore free ourselves of the idea of the brotherhood of soldiers. The Communist is not our comrade and never was. This is a war of extermination . . . and we do not conduct a war in order to keep the enemy alive.”1