Eight days later Tresckow and Schlabrendorff made another desperate attempt on Hitler’s life. As part of the ceremonies of the annual ‘Heroes Memorial Day’, 21 March 1943, Hitler was to tour an exhibition of captured arms mounted in the Berlin Arsenal on Unter den Linden. Field Marshal Model was to direct Hitler through the display and, to answer any queries, an officer from Army Group Centre was detailed to accompany them.
This officer, Colonel (later General) Freiherr Christophe von Gersdorff, was chief of Intelligence at Army Group Centre and a close colleague of Tresckow and Schlabrendorff. On 20 March Schlabrendorff had delivered to him another cache of British explosives, but he could only obtain tenminute fuses. Gersdorff was to pack his clothes with these explosives and blow up Hitler and himself.
The dignitaries were present at 1 pm when the official ceremonies began, all of which were broadcast live on German radio. Hitler made a short speech and then moved towards the entrance to the exhibition hall. Here the Führer was greeted by Gersdorff who saluted with his right hand, while setting off the chemical fuse with his left.
As the acid ate through the wire Gersdorff tried to keep as close to Hitler as possible. But Hitler apparently had some presentiment of Gersdorff’s plan: he refused to stop and view any of the exhibits. He almost ran straight through the hall and, despite the attempts of both Model and Gersdorff to interest him in the captured material, within two minutes emerged from the building. This threw the schedule into a confusion noted even by the BBC which was monitoring the radio broadcast.
With only minutes left, Gersdorff rushed to a nearby toilet to disarm himself. Back at his HQ, listening to the radio broadcast with a stop-watch in his hand, Tresckow knew that this attempt, too, had failed.
Gersdorff survived the war.21
2
Operation Valkyrie
After the ‘appeasement’ of Munich in 1938, opportunities to involve the army’s entire high command in Hitler’s overthrow began to recede. Following Germany’s military successes in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France, such opportunities receded even further. While younger commanders like Tresckow remained ready to act, they had few chances to do so, being too far removed from Berlin and other crucial centres of power. When a rare chance did come their way, it was invariably dogged by bad luck. Although they had a network of associates in Berlin and other strategic locations, these associates were too often vacillating, indecisive, imperfectly united, lacking in the requisite initiative and, perhaps most important, lacking in authority. By 1943, Germany’s armed forces were stretched from the Atlantic to the Russian heartland, from the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean—and, at almost every point of the compass, fully engaged. As long as this remained the case, the prospects were inauspicious for a coup originating on the periphery and radiating inwards. Any such undertaking would have to originate from the centre, from Berlin and from other internal concentrations of power; and the centre remained ‘soft’.
The men in Berlin, for example, were not, for the most part, senior military officers, but figures of lesser rank and influence. They were also seldom, if ever, wholly united, either about their objectives of the means of attaining those objectives. For many of the individuals involved, there were serious questions—of both expediency and morality—to be considered. In the moral sphere, prominent members of the ‘Kreisau Circle’ were steeped in law, and questioned whether political assassination, even of Adolf Hitler and his colleagues, could ever be legitimate. Opponents of murder and terror found it understandably difficult to have recourse to murder and terror themselves. Were they to do so, would they not be guilty of transgressions as grievous as those they sought to redress? ‘They were, to their credit, too conscious of their responsibilities, too torn by moral qualms to achieve the necessary degree of ruthlessness.’1 Helmuth James von Moltke, founder of the ‘Kreisau Circle’ and one of Stauffenberg’s cousins, is reported to have said to a member of the Stauffenberg family: ‘We’re not conspirators, we’re not capable of being, we’ve not learnt how to do it, we shouldn’t try to make a start now, it would go wrong, we should make an amateur job of it . . .’2
If violence were repudiated, what were the alternatives? In certain quarters, there was talk of ‘impeaching’ Hitler and putting him on trial, but such ideas, however theoretically valid, could, in the context of circumstances, hardly have been implemented. Yet even if violence were adopted, what then? It would not be sufficient simply to assassinate Hitler—or even Hitler and his immediate entourage of Party officials. Such action might produce a traumatic effect, as did the assassinations that have characterised our own era—those of John and Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, or Anwar Sadat, or Indira and Rajiv Gandhi—but the machinery of the state, manifested particularly through the SS, would have remained immovably in place. And there were other repercussions to be considered. Most German soldiers and lower-echelon officers had been thoroughly indoctrinated in National Socialism, receiving their formative intellectual ideological training through the Hitler Youth Movement. Apart from those at the front, they were fervent supporters of the régime. To topple the régime would thus be to risk full-scale civil war. It would disastrously divide the army, or plunge the army into open and armed conflict with the SS. And while the army’s upper echelons vehemently despised the SS, such conflict between the two institutions was too terrifying to contemplate.
In order to succeed, any prospective coup would somehow have to neutralise the SS. It would also have to neutralise, if not wholly dismantle, the entire machinery of the state. This was a rather more daunting prospect than just eliminating Hitler and his immediate cohorts. It was made more daunting still by the fact that Germany was fighting a major war at the time—a war that was no longer a struggle for conquest, but for survival, against adversaries little disposed to give quarter. So further complication confronted the conspirators, especially the military men. Although they felt it increasingly urgent to remove Hitler and his entourage from power, they also felt obliged—and this became an ever more pressing consideration as the war turned against Germany—to protect their country, their homes and families from being overrun.
Had the Western Allies been prepared to negotiate a peace, the conspirators—and, for that matter, most of the German military machine—would have been only too eager to comply. Serious proposals were made for collapsing the entire Western front, or for allowing an unopposed Allied landing near Hamburg. Such actions would at least have ensured that Germany, if the Fatherland had to be overrun at all, would be occupied by Western rather than Russian soldiers. Unfortunately, the Western Allies, believing victory within their grasp, refused to settle for anything less than unconditional surrender; and they had, moreover, negotiated their own accords with Stalin, on which they could not feasibly renege. In consequence, Germany lay vulnerable to the onslaughts of the Red Army and the ‘Communist menace’, a prospect as terrifying for the country’s population as it was later to become for Americans during the immediate post-war period and the McCarthy years. The need to remove Hitler and the National Socialist hierarchy was becoming ever more obvious, and not just to the conspirators, but if doing so would render Germany susceptible to total conquest and occupation by the Soviet Union, where did duty lie? If only to protect their homeland and their families, many Germans, who would otherwise have readily laid down their arms, felt they had no choice but to continue fighting.
Haunted by questions such as these, conspirators in Berlin and other focal points of power were paralysed. They talked, they debated, they quarrelled among themselves, they often worked at cross-purposes to each other, they agonised over prospects and implications, they explored ways and means, they devised feasibility studies, they complained, hoped and, not infrequently, prayed. They remained, however, incapable of action.
‘Freedom,’ Stauffenberg asserted, ‘can only be won by action.’3 It was with this passionate commitment that he joined the ranks of the conspirators, and he passed amon
g them like an electric current, jolting and galvanising them out of their inertia, infusing them with his own fiery fixity of purpose, and welding their often nebulous and ineffectual decency into a coherent and dynamic movement. Men twice his age and far superior in rank were suddenly kindled by the energy of the 36-year-old colonel and, at last, animated with a will to act. Previously irreconcilable differences between soldiers and civilians, radicals and conservatives, republicans and monarchists, plebeians and patricians, dissolved in the intensity of a focused resolution and fused in a new sense of direction. For the first time, the German resistance became a positive force, a force rooted not in caste or in calling, in sociology or in politics, but in ethics, morality and the lofty imperatives of ‘the spirit’. To designate this force, Stauffenberg again had recourse to the work of Stefan George, invoking one of his last and most apocalyptic poems: ‘Geheimes Deutschland’ (‘Secret Germany’).4
Under Stauffenberg’s auspices, activities against the régime proceeded on a number of fronts. In reprisal for bombs dropped on German cities, Hitler had decreed mass executions of captured Allied airmen, and lists of those killed were to be sent to him. In a ploy reminiscent of Gogol’s Dead Souls, Stauffenberg and his colleagues obtained from POW camps the names of men who had already died. These were then forwarded to his cousin, Helmuth James von Moltke, then serving with OKW (High Command of the Armed Forces) Intelligence. Each Allied prisoner slated for execution was, on paper, assigned the name of a dead or fictitious comrade, and reported to the Führer as recently shot. Many British and American airmen thus officially died twice, while a great many other pilots, gunners, navigators and bombardiers owed their lives to the deception.5;6
But the newly revitalised resistance could not confine itself simply to thwarting Hitler’s perverse and vindictive whims; and even if he and his entourage were eliminated by violence, there remained the question of what would happen next. Plans had to be evolved for wresting control of the entire nation, for dismantling its existing institutions, for bringing the war to an end and creating a new democratic Germany out of the ashes of the Third Reich. This was made all the more difficult because there was no single central point, no building or office or headquarters, that could be seized. Hitler had created a labyrinthine network of overlapping authorities for exercising command and control, each with its own hierarchy and its own, often secret, lines of communication. There was OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht), the High Command of the Armed Forces. There was OKH (Oberkommando des Heeres), the High Command of the Army. There was OKM (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine), the High Command of the Navy. There was RSH(A) (Reichssicherheits-Hauptamt), the Central Reich Security Office which, under Himmler, ran the SD (Security Service), the Gestapo and the Criminal Police. And, of course, there was the SS itself, also under Himmler.
As it happened, a blueprint already existed which could be adapted for wresting control of Germany—a blueprint endorsed, ironically, by Hitler himself. It was code-named ‘Valkyrie’. In the event of emergency within the Reich (an uprising of foreign workers, for instance), Operation Valkyrie was to be activated. This entailed the mobilisation and deployment of the Reserve Army, which, by 1944, numbered more than four million. Troops were to occupy the cities, martial law would be imposed and the army would wield supreme authority. Politicians, civil servants and Party officials would all be subordinate to military commanders. The plans for Valkyrie and its activation were entirely in the hands of the army: neither the Nazi Party nor the SS knew anything about them.
Stauffenberg and his colleagues resolved to avail themselves of the administrative machinery already in place. At the appropriate moment, Operation Valkyrie would be set in motion—on behalf of purposes very different from those for which it had originally been designed. To ensure the unwitting co-operation of pro-Nazi younger officers, troops loyal to the régime and any civilians who might be able to affect the situation, a ‘cover story’ would be released. It would be the same as that planned for the abortive 1938 conspiracy: an attempted or intended Putsch by the SS (which was, in 1944, a not implausible possibility). To counter this alleged Putsch, the Reserve Army would be mobilised and deployed throughout the Reich. SS and Party Officials would be arrested, and only then would the operation unmask itself as a full-scale coup d’état. Valkyrie would thus be double-edged, with a ‘legitimate’ façade to screen its real clandestine purpose. Many of the secret orders were typed by Tresckow’s secretary, Margarethe von Oven. He instructed her always to wear gloves, even when typing, so that any documents, if found, could not be identified. She said later in an interview that she vividly remembered typing the primary order for the first time. It began: ‘The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead . . .’
Much of the ground had still to be prepared. Timetables had to be synchronised, not only within the Reich itself, but in occupied territory as well. The allegiance of numerous local commanders and subordinate officers had to be enlisted—and was, in Berlin, in Königsberg, in Stettin, in Dresden Münster, Munich, Kassel, Hamburg, Wiesbaden and Nuremberg, as well as in Danzig, Vienna Salzburg, Paris, on the Eastern Front and elsewhere in the field. Programmes had to be prepared for the future, and policies had to be formulated, including an immediate peace settlement with the Western Allies. A provisional government would have to be established to negotiate a ceasefire, preserve order within Germany, and avert a national collapse or civil war.
Had he wished to do so, Stauffenberg might have presided over this provisional government and named himself undisputed ruler of the projected new Germany. Instead, shunning all positions of personal power, he assigned himself the relatively modest post of Under-Secretary of State for War. The new President or head of state was to be the beloved old soldier Field Marshal Ludwig Beck. The Chancellor was to be either Julius Leber, the Socialist spokesman, or Carl Goerdeler, Mayor of Leipzig. Stauffenberg’s superior as Minister of War was to be either his current commander, General Olbricht, or his former commander, General Hoepner. Field Marshal von Witzleben was to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Tresckow was to take charge of the police.
Before anything of this ambitious project could be implemented, however, some means had to be devised for neutralising Adolf Hitler. So far as Stauffenberg was concerned, there was no point whatever in trying to remove the Führer by nonviolent or legal means—impeaching him, for example, or forcing him voluntarily to abdicate. And if merely arrested, his survival would continue to command allegiance from fanatics in the Party, from the SS and from much of the population, thereby increasing the risk of civil war. Although numerous in theory, the options in practice were few—and only one was likely to be effective.
Although it contravened his principles, his code of honour, the oath of allegiance he had sworn as an officer and his personal code of moral and spiritual values, Stauffenberg saw that Hitler had to die. There was no alternative to political assassination. For a man of his chivalric background, who saw himself as a loyal German, a Catholic, an officer and a nobleman, there could scarcely have been a more onerous, more painful conclusion. Unflinchingly, Stauffenberg was prepared to reconcile this conclusion with his own conscience. He also undertook to incur, as he recognised he would, the most terrible of stigmas—that of high treason.
I know that he who acts will go down in German history as a traitor; but he who can and does not will be a traitor to his conscience. If I did not act to stop this senseless killing, I should never be able to face the war’s widows and orphans . . .7
Assassination entailed problems of its own. Stauffenberg quickly discovered that while Hitler’s whereabouts at any given moment were easy enough to establish, it was seldom possible to know his movements in advance. Prompted perhaps by his own acute and highly developed sense of self-preservation, Hitler avoided fixed schedules and insofar as he could, travelled only on the shortest possible notice. He wore a bullet-proof waistcoat and a metalplated bullet-proof cap. When he did travel, it was invariably with a large entourage
, which included his personal cook, driver, doctor and SD (Security Service) personnel, as well as a heavy SS escort armed with submachine-guns. His private aircraft, a Focke-Wulf Condor, was equipped with a thickly armoured cabin, and a parachute was attached to his seat. He always used his own cars, and during the war four separate motorcades were kept in perpetual readiness for him at different quarters of Germany. The cars themselves had bullet-proof tyres and windows, and extensive armour plating.8
Since the fall of Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, moreover, Hitler had taken to travelling less and less. He adamantly refused to visit hospitals or bombed cities, fearing such sights might make him give way to pity and, in his own eyes, weaken. He now shunned the crowds on which he had formerly sustained himself. He made almost no public appearances and became virtually invisible, save to his personal entourage and staff. Even Goebbels grew concerned:
It is tragic that the Führer has become such a recluse and leads such an unhealthy life. He never gets out into the fresh air. He does not relax. He sits in his bunker, worries and broods . . . The loneliness of General Headquarters and the whole method of working there naturally have a depressing effect upon the Führer.9
For some time, Hitler had not even visited Berlin. The Berghof too, with the ‘Eagle’s Nest’ in the Bavarian Alps, was now used far less, except for extra-marital dalliances by the oafish Martin Bormann. It was as if Hitler’s carefully cultivated pre-war persona—associated quite deliberately with light, with altitude, with loftiness, with vastness, with soaring and sweeping vistas—had now contracted along with Germany’s war effort and successes in the field. As the country’s military machine shrivelled, so did Hitler. A tremor developed in his hands. He stooped. His left foot dragged behind him as he walked. His face grew gaunt and haggard. If he had previously identified himself with the eagle, he now had more in common with the wolf.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 4