by Danny Orbach
Stauffenberg’s next move was to widen the insurgency to Paris, where the conspirators had a dense network of like-minded officers. As was dictated by the structure of the network, he first called his cousin Caesar von Hofacker, the broker connecting Berlin to the western front. Stauffenberg told him that the action in the capital had begun and that success in the west was the key to the whole operation.26 Only there, and not in Berlin, did Stauffenberg have a chance to lay his hands on a considerable army led by loyal officers.
A little more than two hours beforehand, at 2:00 p.m., the phone rang in the office of Col. Eberhard Finckh, the quartermaster of Army Group West and a loyal ally of the conspirators. The colonel, Stauffenberg’s former classmate in the military academy, was an old enemy of the Nazi regime. He picked up the phone. “Hier ischt Finckh” (Here is Finckh), he said in his thick Swabian accent. The other side was silent. One second, two, three passed, and then Finckh heard the code words “Übung abgelaufen” (Exercise finished). The conversation was over.
Finckh did not lose a moment. He quickly left his office, stepped into the car, and ordered the driver to take him to Field Marshal Kluge’s headquarters in Boulevard Saint Germain. Kluge was not there, and Finckh was greeted by his close colleague General Blumentritt, a pragmatic officer not associated with the conspirators. Like most German military leaders, he knew that the final defeat at the western front was soon to follow, but it was hard to foresee his reaction to the new situation. Finckh tried his luck and told him the usual cover story. “General,” he said in a formal tone, “the Gestapo is trying to stage a coup in Berlin. The Führer was assassinated and is no longer alive. Witzleben, Beck, and Goerdeler have formed an emergency cabinet.”27 After a moment of silence, Blumentritt reacted favorably. “It should be welcomed,” he said, “that the people you have mentioned are at the helm. They will probably quickly begin preliminary peace talks.”28 Blumentritt called Lt. Gen. Hans Speidel, Rommel’s chief of staff and a member of the resistance, and the three men decided to work for the new government.
At around 4:30 p.m., Hofacker picked up Stauffenberg’s call from Berlin and promptly updated the young conspirators who were waiting in the Majestic Hotel, the headquarters of the German army in Paris. They were still in high spirits. One of them, Walter Bargatzky, later related,
I sat in my office in Majestic. At 4 p.m., a German radio concert was on air. Every moment the radio station might be occupied by the insurgents. Every sound brought the explosion ever nearer, bursting in the prison-like silence of eleven long years. My friend G. entered the room, tormented with expectation and looking almost crestfallen. I grabbed his arm. “Always think on this moment,” I told him. “It is the most important in the whole war.” G. himself did not know what was happening, but I guessed it dawned on him and I was grateful for his silence . . . Now Stauffenberg, back in Berlin . . . spoke with Hofacker on the military radio. “Hitler is dead,” he told him.29
Soon afterward, Hofacker rushed to see General Stülpnagel, the military governor of occupied France, and updated him on the coup in Berlin. Stülpnagel was exultant when he heard that Hitler was dead and the operation in the capital was in full swing. At that very moment, Hofacker told him, armed troops were surrounding the government quarter in Wilhelmstrasse. Stülpnagel immediately summoned his chief of staff, Colonel Linstow, along with Paris commandant Boineburg-Lengsfeld and his chief of staff. The three officers found the governor standing behind his table. His commands were unequivocal: “The SS and SD are staging a coup against Hitler. You must arrest right away the members of the SS, SD, Colonel Knochen, the police commandant of France, and all the rest of the people whose names you know very well. In case of resistance, open fire. Is everything clear?”30 The officers saluted, clicked their heels, and left the room.
The conspiracy headquarters in Berlin were bristling with activity. After Stauffenberg updated Hofacker in Paris, he tried, one last time, to win over his superior Gen. Friedrich Fromm. Olbricht and Stauffenberg entered the office together, and the former reported on the issue of Valkyrie. The commander of the Home Army was furious. “Who issued the Valkyrie orders?” he snapped. “You both know that only I am authorized to do so!”
“My chief of staff, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim,” replied Olbricht.
Fromm summoned Mertz at once and told him he was under arrest. “No one is leaving this room,” he said.
Now Stauffenberg could contain himself no longer. “Sir, General,” he said, “you are wrong. Hitler is dead. I placed the bomb myself. A moment ago I returned from supreme headquarters, and with my own eyes have seen that no one in the briefing hut remained alive.”
“This is a revolution!” yelled Fromm. “This is treason . . . punishable by death. You will all face a firing squad.” Then he snapped at Stauffenberg, “The assassination has failed. You must shoot yourself at once.”
“You cannot arrest us,” said Olbricht in reply. “You do not understand the real power relations. We are arresting you.”
Fromm, his face red, waved his fists at Stauffenberg. At that moment, the door opened, and Haeften and Kleist entered with pistols drawn. The two men aimed their guns at Fromm. “Armed officers are guarding your door,” Stauffenberg told him briskly. “If you force us, we will resort to arms. Lieutenant von Haeften, cut his telephone lines.”
Five minutes later, General Hoepner entered the room, clad in his uniform. After apologizing to Fromm, an old friend, for the inconvenience, he asked him whether he would nevertheless be ready to cooperate. The commander of the Home Army shook his head sadly. “I think that the Führer is alive, and that you are all making a mistake. I am sorry,” he said, “but I cannot do otherwise. I cannot sign the Valkyrie orders for you.”31 Fromm preferred to be arrested than to cooperate with the conspirators.
Where were the Valkyrie orders, anyway? Two hours earlier, Mertz had sent them to Major Oertzen in the Berlin military district headquarters. Now, he handed them over to Captain Klausing, Stauffenberg’s other confidant, and ordered him to personally go to the switchboard and distribute the commands among all headquarters throughout the Reich. Upon reaching the control room, Klausing ordered the technicians to urgently submit the orders through the teleprinter. The head technician asked whether to classify them as top secret, and Klausing instinctively answered in the affirmative.32 Later, the conspirators would suffer as a result of this mistake. The procedure to hand over top-secret commands was cumbersome, and Klausing’s decision delayed their transmission to some of the units by two to three hours, causing significant disturbances to the operation.
The first message opened with the ominous words “The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead.” It declared that a “conscienceless clique of party leaders has tried to take over the government for their own selfish ends. Therefore, the army is taking over the government of the Reich.” The order was to occupy all institutions of the National Socialist Party, to disarm the SD, SS, and Waffen-SS, and to take control of all communication facilities. It was signed by Witzleben, as commander in chief of the Wehrmacht. This was followed at 6:00 p.m. by another, more radical message. Officers from all over the Reich read it with astonishment as it slid out of their teleprinters:
The following will be relieved of their offices forthwith and placed in secure solitary confinement:
All Gauleiter, Reichsstatthalter, Ministers, Governors [Oberpresidenten], Police Presidents, Senior SS and Police Commanders [HSSPF], heads of Gestapo and SD offices, heads of propaganda offices, Kreisleiter. Exceptions only by my special order.
CONCENTRATION CAMPS:
Concentration camps will be occupied at once, camp commandants arrested, guard personnel disarmed and confined to barracks. Political prisoners are to be instructed that, pending their liberation, they should refrain from demonstrations or independent action.
WAFFEN-SS:
If compliance by commanders of Waffen-SS formations or by the senior Waffen-SS officers appears doubtful or if they seem unsuitable
, they will be taken into protective custody and replaced by Army officers. Waffen-SS formations whose unquestioned compliance appears doubtful will be ruthlessly disarmed. Firm action with superior forces will be taken to avoid further bloodshed.
POLICE:
Gestapo and SD headquarters will be occupied. Otherwise the regular police will be used as far as possible to relieve the Wehrmacht. Orders will be issued by the Chief of German Police through police channels . . .
To deal with all political questions, I attach to each Wehrkreis Commander a political representative. Until further orders he will be responsible for administration. He will advise the Wehrkreis Commander on all political matters.
The headquarters of the Commander in Chief of the Home Army is the executive agency for all matters concerning the exercise of executive power. It will dispatch a liaison officer to Wehrkreis Commanders for the exchange of information and views.
In the exercise of executive power no arbitrary acts or acts of revenge will be tolerated. The people must be made aware of the difference from the arbitrary methods of their former rulers.
Commander in Chief of the Home Army 33
“The arbitrary methods of their former rulers”? Stauffenberg, who signed this order in Fromm’s name, was surely aware of the recklessness of that last sentence: it gave away the revolutionary logic of the order, thus depriving the conspirators of their legal cover. Soon after, additional orders were sent, calling to confiscate the documents of the Nazi Party and to establish courts-martial. Here, legal cover was completely abandoned, but these orders reached the commanders of the military districts relatively late, only at 8:00 or 9:00 p.m.
At 4:30 p.m., after arresting Fromm, the conspirators still ruled over only their own building. Colonel Mertz and General Hoepner briefed the section heads. Mertz informed them that the Führer had been murdered and that the army was quelling a traitorous revolt by party elements. Hoepner maintained that Beck and Witzleben had therefore taken over leadership of the Reich and army, respectively. Hoepner himself was appointed commander in chief of the Home Army. They should understand the importance of the moment and perform their respective duties.34 Stauffenberg sent one of his men to arrange a guard for the Bendlerstrasse. Shortly afterward, a unit from the guard battalion Grossdeutschland reached the compound and guarded all entries. No one was allowed to enter or exit without a permit signed by Stauffenberg or the personal consent of one of the commanders.35 In that manner, just after 5:00 p.m., Stauffenberg took control of the building. Along with Beck, Olbricht, and Hoepner, he began a marathon of telephone calls to the district commanders to ensure their full cooperation.
At around 4:15 p.m., a short while after Beck’s arrival at the Bendlerstrasse, the conspirators had other prominent visitors. Following Olbricht’s request, Count Helldorff and Gisevius came to report. Their limousine stopped at the gates of the Bendlerstrasse, and soon they were meeting Beck, Stauffenberg, and Olbricht. Olbricht briefed Helldorff on his duty: to arrest the Nazi leaders after the occupation of the government quarter by the guard battalion. Beck, ever careful, told Helldorff that Hitler might have survived the blast. Helldorff was unmoved and once again declared his unconditional loyalty. Soon after, he left the building to join his forces. Now, it was certain: the corrupt member of the SA, an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party from its early days, had finally bound his fate to the conspirators.36
A few minutes after 5:00 p.m., the conspirators had to cope with a half-baked attempt at a countercoup. An SS officer named Pfiffrather (“a butcher-type,” in Gisevius’s view) arrived with a few soldiers. In the name of the Reich main security office, he asked to question Stauffenberg about his unusual behavior in Wolf’s Lair that day. The colonel, of course, had him arrested forthwith. The rest of Pfiffrather’s entourage was seized at the gate by the guards. The Nazi general Kortzfleisch, who also ventured into the conspirators’ den, was arrested in the same manner. To Beck’s fury, he recited over and over again his oath of loyalty to the Führer.37
The main problem was now in Berlin. The conspirators had to have troops, and preferably tanks, to occupy the radio stations, to take over the government quarter, and, as importantly, to arrest and neutralize Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, the key Nazi leader in the capital. Orders to this effect were dispatched by Lieutenant General Hase to the guard battalion Grossdeutschland, the armored school at Krampnitz, and the infantry school at Döberitz. Similar commands were sent also to the eastern front, where Philipp von Boeselager, Kluge’s former adjutant, was waiting with a company of soldiers. Taking measures to reinforce the conspirators in Berlin, he ordered his troops to march west to the airport.38
In Döberitz, the officers of the infantry school were dumbfounded by the unusual orders. They formed a “war council” of sorts but could not reach a decision, especially given that the unsuspecting commandant, Lt. Gen. Otto Hitzfeld, was away at a funeral. A senior conspirator, Col. Wolfgang Müller from the Home Army, was stationed at the base, but he returned from a tour of duty relatively late, at around 8:30 p.m., and even then could not convince all officers to act.39 Still, some of the junior commanders did decide to move, and several small units were successfully dispatched to take control of a radio station and several communication facilities in Greater Berlin. Major Jacob, who led the unit, was ready to follow orders from the Bendlerstrasse, even though he had never been a conspirator. He and his men entered the station with drawn pistols, declared that the SS guards were subject to their command, and ordered the technicians to stop all broadcasts.
The problem was that Jacob, a highly decorated tactics instructor, was ignorant of the correct communication procedures. He did not know that the broadcasts were not running from the studio but, rather, from an adjacent bunker camouflaged as an air-raid shelter. He was easily fooled, and the broadcasts did not stop.40 The other radio stations, occupied only briefly, were also not being used. The occupying officers were not conspirators. Most of them were confused, and they stopped all cooperation when they heard that Hitler was alive. Had a resolute anti-Nazi conspirator been sent to each station, things might have developed differently.
Colonel Müller, the only conspirator at Döberitz, was ineffective even when he came back to his office, at 8:30 p.m. He tried to do his best to urge the officers to act, and they finally decided to contact the commander of the school, General Hitzfeld. The latter at first demanded a written order, but then was convinced and ordered “a relentless attack on the SS.”41 Müller’s response was awkward. Instead of capitalizing on Hitzfeld’s order and sending the units at once, he drove to the Bendlerstrasse to receive written orders from Olbricht. From a strictly military point of view, that made sense, because Müller belonged to the Home Army, not the command staff of the school, and written authority over the school was formally required. Yet, in continuing to act as an officer rather than a revolutionary, he rendered Döberitz useless for the entire evening. Also here, the physical presence of a senior, authoritative conspirator, preferably a general, could have brought about a very different result.
It is one of the many unsolved riddles of the coup that even at this critical hour, Stauffenberg and Beck failed to dispatch trusted conspirators to the key points in Greater Berlin, such as the infantry school and the radio stations. There was no lack of available manpower. Fritz von der Schulenburg and other conspirators were unemployed. The leaders were mainly busy with telephone calls, almost oblivious to how events were unfolding around them. Stauffenberg, for example, was certain that his orders were being followed in Berlin and that the real drama was actually taking place in the provinces—a grave mistake.
Gisevius, though, was uneasy. He pressured Stauffenberg to radicalize the putsch by executing senior Nazis, starting with the SS officer Pfiffrather. Stauffenberg snapped that “his turn will come,” but he refused to let Gisevius lead an arrest squad of officers. However, Stauffenberg promised to form such a unit under the leadership of Col. Fritz Jaeger, veteran of t
he 1943 conspiracy. Jaeger saluted, commandeered some troops from the guard battalion Grossdeutschland, and tried to get even more from Hase. But the latter had sent most of his available troops for other tasks, forcing Jaeger to wait for reinforcements.42 The clock showed 5:30 p.m., and time was running out.
Ironically, Jaeger did not need that much manpower, as strategic sites were nearly unprotected. In Berlin, for example, there was an almost unguarded conference where many Reich ministers were in attendance. The SS and Gestapo headquarters were likewise in disarray and could easily have been taken over.
The situation was difficult for the conspirators in other military districts, too. Most local commanders refused to accept the authority of the conspirators and chose instead to believe Goebbels, who broadcast at 6:00 p.m. that Hitler had escaped an assassination attempt. Many obeyed the counterorders sent by Keitel through the teleprinter.43 Some conspirators in East Prussia did try to convince their superiors to act, and maybe even to occupy the Führer headquarters, but their efforts were mainly improvised and uncoordinated. The conspirators did not have time to update the old plans drafted by Tresckow and Stauffenberg to occupy Wolf’s Lair, and the plans were still hidden deep belowground. No one even bothered to unearth them, and they remained in the dark until the Soviets discovered them after the war.
Only in three cities, Prague, Vienna, and Paris, did the conspirators enjoy temporary success. In the Czechoslovakian capital, the local district commander arrested the Nazi deputy governor, and in Vienna, officers sympathetic to the conspirators confined the local SS leader. One of the deputies of General Esebeck, the acting commander, spoke with Stauffenberg on the phone and obtained his chief’s consent to follow the Bendlerstrasse.44 In Paris, the leading figure was the military governor of France, Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the sole conspirator who fulfilled his duty as planned. Far from repeating the mistakes made in Berlin, Stülpnagel personally ordered his officers to arrest all SS men in Paris. Every arrest squad was accompanied by an anti-Nazi officer who reported directly to the governor.