Command of the Reserve Army was now entrusted to Himmler, which rendered it subordinate to, and eventually all but subsumed by, the SS. In hunting down conspirators, Hitler urged his deputy to be ruthless. ‘My Führer,’ Himmler replied with a smile, ‘you can rely on me.’ On 3 August, a fortnight after the attempted coup, he formally introduced the doctrine of Sippenhaft: ‘blood guilt’ or ‘blood liability’. According to this doctrine, allegedly rooted in ancient Germanic tradition, treachery was a manifestation of diseased blood, not only in the culprit himself, but in all members of his family. In consequence, Himmler concluded, ‘all were exterminated, to the last member of the clan’. The doctrine of Sippenhaft was now to be invoked anew. ‘The family of Graf Stauffenberg will be extinguished to the last member.’24
In the end, Himmler was balked by his own doting reverence for aristocracy and antique lineage. The blood of such families as the Stauffenbergs, he concluded, was too precious to be indiscriminately squandered. In this blood resided the puissance, the vertu, of Germany’s future leadership. As a result, most members of the Stauffenberg family escaped extermination. Many of them were consigned to internment camps. Relatives were wrenched apart, children separated from their parents and entrusted to the care of the State. Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg’s wives and children survived. So, too, did their brother, Alexander, who had not been implicated in the conspiracy.
There were other conspirators, at least eight of them, who, like Beck, eluded the Führer’s vengeance by committing suicide. One such was the gallant Henning von Tresckow on the Russian front. According to some accounts, Tresckow walked from his headquarters to the front line and there shot himself. According to others, he simply strode out, amid an artillery barrage, into the no-man’s-land between German and Russian lines.
Tresckow was very much in the minority. Most of the conspirators not only chose to stay alive, but even, with surprising docility, allowed themselves to be arrested. It has been suggested that they may not have expected as severe a punishment as they were subsequently to receive, but this seems unlikely. They cannot have had many illusions about what was in store for them. In fact, most of them welcomed the opportunity to speak out to their interrogators and, more publicly still, in court, where they hoped to be heard by the German people. They were eager to turn the indictments brought against themselves into indictments against the régime. In more than a few instances, they made a genuinely profound impression on their persecutors. Some were even seduced into sympathy.
Dr Georg Kiesel offers one such example. In the aftermath of 20 July, Hitler had demanded from Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the SD, a comprehensive enquiry into the conspiracy and a detailed report. Kaltenbrunner issued personal instructions that the Führer ‘must be given an uncompromising account of the motives for the assassination attempt. So many men of distinguished character and office were involved in the conspiracy that Hitler would, it was hoped, receive the shock he needed to make the necessary changes.’25
Kiesel, an SS interrogator and investigator, was assigned by Kaltenbrunner to compile much of the required documentation. To what must have been Hitler’s profound consternation, Kiesel described Stauffenberg as ‘a truly universal man’ and ‘a spirit of fire, fascinating and inspiring all who came in touch with him’.26 He actually went so far as to depict the Führer’s would-be assassin as ‘a revolutionary aristocrat, careless of himself, without a trace of vanity or ambition’, a eulogy that even Stauffenberg’s staunchest supporters might find slightly extravagant. Kiesel was equally impressed by his interrogation of Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold:
His short evidence was the clearest and most important document indicting Hitler that may ever have been written and shown to him. It manifested a type of German manhood with deep religious, political and artistic principles, utterly divorced from Hitler and National Socialism.27
Kiesel was not alone. Reports by other interrogators spoke with consistent respect of Stauffenberg, citing his ‘vision and struggles’ and his desire ‘to combine ethical socialism with his aristocratic traditions’.28 For many of the interrogators, their work was not without some considerable discomfort. They may have been vicious and sadistic bullies, but they were not fools, and had been inculcated since childhood with respect for those they regarded as their ‘betters’. Their victims were precisely such betters, men whom, for various reasons—caste or lineage, social standing and prestige, military or other accomplishments, intelligence and articulateness—they had revered. It must have been disconcerting to hear the well-reasoned and eloquently enunciated arguments of such men—arguments whose validity the interrogators themselves would have had difficulty ignoring. No one, after all, could be oblivious to the disaster which, by 1944, Hitler and the National Socialist hierarchy had brought down upon Germany. No one could be oblivious to the deteriorating military situation: the Western Allies driving eastwards from Normandy, the Red Army advancing westwards, British and American heavy bombers raining death down on German cities by day and night. And no one could be oblivious to the atrocities of the régime, the wholesale murder of Jews, Slavs and others, which the conspirators again and again cited as one of their primary reasons for action.
Under brutal torture—what the Gestapo, with typical bureaucratic euphemism, called ‘sharpened interrogation’—the conspirators displayed extraordinary bravery and tenacity. Fellgiebel suffered for three weeks before divulging any names. When he finally did speak, he involved only those he knew already to be dead. By virtue of such courage, a number of imprisoned individuals were released, and others were never arrested at all. Thus did men such as Axel von dem Bussche, Ludwig von Hammerstein and Ewald von Kleist escape and survive.29
All officers implicated in the conspiracy were expelled from the army by a spurious ‘court of honour’—a total of fifty-five men, including ten generals and a field marshal (Witzleben). This semblance of legality allowed them to be tried, along with their non-military colleagues, as civilians. There followed a series of grotesque ‘show trials’ in the notorious ‘People’s Court’, under the auspices of its so-called President, Roland Freisler, one of the most loathsome figures in the entire macabre history of National Socialism. No pretence was made to anything even approximating judicial procedure. Freisler interrupted the defendants, shouted them down, insulted them, swore at them, endeavoured to humiliate them by every means possible.
It is not known how many Germans altogether died in reprisal for the abortive coup, but the total number has been estimated as high as two or three thousand. In the ‘People’s Court’ alone, some two hundred were sentenced to death before Freisler, on 21 December 1944, was fatally injured in an Allied air raid. He was holding, at the time, the papers pertaining to the case of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Tresckow’s subordinate, who consequently escaped.
Those condemned by Freisler’s court were hanged in Berlin’s Ploetzensee prison. The method employed did not, as in conventional hangings, break the neck. It was a slow and painful death by strangulation, which sometimes lasted as long as twenty-five minutes. On Hitler’s express orders, the executions were filmed. Even Kaltenbrunner objected to this obscenity, but the Führer remained adamant. Nine camera-men were employed by turns, but filming, after the first day, was curtailed. According to their director: ‘I declared that I could not expect my camera-men to film any more of such cruelties. All the camera-men were with me on that.’30
In the company of close friends, Party officials and selected guests, Hitler would spend whole evenings watching such footage as had been filmed. He also had stills made, which Albert Speer reports seeing on his desk. Speer himself was invited to a showing, but declined in revulsion. The audience, he observed, consisted primarily of civilians and junior SS personnel. ‘Not a single officer of the Wehrmacht attended.’31
Despite the grisly fate awaiting them, the conspirators remained defiant, even parrying Freisler’s abuse in the ‘People’s Court’ and making themselves heard abov
e his hysterical tirades. When sentenced to hang, Fellgiebel replied, ‘Then hurry with the hanging, Mr President; otherwise you will hang earlier than we.’32
‘Soon you will be in hell,’ Freisler sneered at the lawyer Dr Josef Wirmer, one of the civilian conspirators.
‘It will be my pleasure when you follow shortly, Mr President,’ Wirmer retorted.33
Field Marshal von Witzleben issued a similar prophecy: ‘You can hand us over to the hangman. In three months, the enraged and tormented people will call you to account, and will drag you alive through the muck in the street.’34
Hans Bernt von Haeften, brother of Stauffenberg’s aide, was asked how he could possibly have broken faith with the Führer.
‘Because,’ Haeften answered, ‘I consider the Führer the executor of the evil in history.’35
On 21 July, the day after the abortive coup and just before his own suicide, Tresckow stated:
Now they will all fall upon us and cover us with abuse. But I am convinced, now more than ever, that we have done the right thing. I believe Hitler to be the arch enemy not only of Germany, but indeed of the entire world . . . No one among us can complain about his death, for whoever joined our ranks put on the poisoned shirt of Nessus. A man’s moral worth is established only at the point where he is prepared to give his life for his convictions.36
He went on to say:
In a few hours’ time, I shall stand before God and answer for both my actions and the things I neglected to do. I think I can with a clear conscience stand by all I have done in the battle against Hitler. Just as God once promised Abraham that he would spare Sodom if only ten just men could be found in the city, I also have reason to hope that, for our sake, he will not destroy Germany.37
Tresckow’s unwavering certainty was echoed in the last words of other conspirators. Immediately before his execution, Julius Leber sent a statement to his associates:
One’s own life is a proper stake for so good and just a cause. We have done what lay in our power. It is not our fault that we all turned out like this, and not otherwise.38
In a farewell letter to his mother, one of Stauffenberg’s cousins, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, wrote:
Perhaps there will yet come a time that will judge us not as scoundrels but as prophets and patriots.39
The night before his death, Yorck wrote to his wife:
I, too, am dying for my country, and even if it seems to all appearances a very inglorious and disgraceful death, I shall hold up my head and I only hope that you will not believe this to be from pride or delusion. We wished to light the torch of life and now we stand in a sea of flames.40
One of Stauffenberg’s closest friends and associates was Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg. Schulenburg’s was among the oldest and wealthiest of Prussian ‘Junker’ families. Like Stauffenberg and Tresckow, Schulenburg himself was a passionate devotee of Stefan George’s poetry. His wife’s birthday was on 20 July. On the evening of the 18th, he had returned home to visit her, saying he wished to celebrate in advance.
The children were to be got out of bed again ... When he drove away again in the early morning and sat on the driver’s seat he ... waved his cap like a civilian, bowed low and gravely and went off, to the laughter of the gesticulating children.41
No sooner had he reached Berlin than he learned that his brother had been killed in Normandy.
In his trial before the ‘People’s Court’, Schulenburg stated:
We have accepted the necessity to do our deed in order to save Germany from untold misery. I expect to be hanged for this, but I do not regret my action and I hope that someone else in luckier circumstances will succeed.42
Just before his execution, he wrote to his beloved wife: ‘What we did was inadequate, but in the end history will judge and acquit us.’43
Berlin’s Ploetzensee Prison is still in use today, but the room in which the conspirators died is not. It is a cold room. At the end of it opposite the entrance, five bleak meat hooks swing from a metal beam. In front of these hooks, there are usually banks of flowers. Despite its grimly stark appearance, the atmosphere of the place suggests something of a shrine. People approach it deferentially, in small groups or singly. Their talk ceases. They stand in contemplative silence for a few moments, then walk slowly on.
The nine months between 20 July 1944 and the end of the war in Europe were to witness an appalling loss of life. There was the prolonged Allied thrust from the Atlantic wall into Germany, with such major engagements as Arnhem and the so-called Battle of the Bulge; and the even more costly Russian advance from the east, into the shattered ruins of Berlin. There was also the Allied air offensive, with its sickening toll of both air crew and German civilians, which culminated in the devastation of Dresden. Lives continued to be lost at sea, as well as in occupied countries such as Greece and Yugoslavia. Thousands died in London from V-I ‘buzz-bombs’ and V-2 rockets. Most appalling of all, millions were exterminated in the death camps. Altogether, the last nine months of the war in Europe took more lives than the previous four years and eleven months of conflict. This statistic offers some gauge of the stakes involved in Stauffenberg’s conspiracy. Had Hitler died on 20 July 1944, the total casualties of the Second World War could have been halved.
Stauffenberg himself eluded Hitler’s vindictive sadism and the gruesome fate that befell so many of his co-conspirators. Shortly after midnight on the morning of 21 July, he, Olbricht, Haeften and Merz von Quirnheim were lined up before a pile of sand in an inner courtyard of the War Office. They were supposed to be shot in order of rank: Olbricht first, then Stauffenberg, then Merz, then Haeften. One of the latter two—Haeften according to some accounts, Merz according to others—is reported to have lunged in front of Stauffenberg and received the bullets intended for him. The firing squad was compelled to take aim again. An instant before the fatal shots cut him down, he shouted something defiant into the faces of his executioners. Amid the reverberating echoes from the surrounding walls, the words were indistinct. According to some accounts, he shouted: ‘Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!’ (‘Long live our sacred Germany!’) According to other accounts (and these would appear to be more accurate), Stauffenberg’s last words invoked his master, the poet Stefan George, and the title of George’s poem he had conferred on the German resistance: ‘Es lebe unser geheimes Deutschland!’ (‘Long live our secret Germany!’).44
Part Two
THE RISE OF PRUSSIA
4
Blood and Iron
By the dawn of the twentieth century, if not before, the name of Prussia had become synonymous in the English-speaking world with everything most quintessentially German. Among other things, it connoted militarism, aggression, obedience, rigorous discipline and assiduous service to the state. It often conjured up an unthinking robot-like efficiency, and it was associated with what outsiders believed to be the nucleus of the German aristocracy—the old, so-called ‘Junker’ class, the very name of which implied something pejorative. In 1900, the terms ‘Prussian’ and ‘German’ were habitually used by non-Germans more or less interchangeably. Even today, something of this association lingers. In 1947, according to Law Number 46 of the Allied Control Council, Prussia was formally and officially ‘abolished’: ‘The Prussian State which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany has de facto ceased to exist.’ Prussia exists today only as a nebulous geographical entity, a generalised and vaguely defined region. It no longer appears on any map, no longer has any precise delineation or frontiers, has no political or administrative status of any kind. Yet even today, in the English-speaking world, the word ‘Prussian’ evokes something more uniquely, more distinctively and more undilutedly German than, say, ‘Saxon’ or ‘Bavarian’.
Yet Prussia was a relatively late development, not just on the stage of world history, but on that of German history. It was one of the most recent powers to appear in the context of European politics. During the thirteenth century, when England
and France were already developing specific national identities, ‘Germany’ had nothing whatever to do with Prussia. To Western Europe, Prussia was pretty much what the American West was to denizens of Boston and New York at the beginning of the nineteenth century—before the California Gold Rush, before the Civil War, before the pioneers in their wagon trains had pushed the nation’s ‘manifest destiny’ even to the Mississippi, still less as far as the Pacific. Prussia was an unmapped wilderness, a forbidding hinterland peopled only by ‘heathenish’ tribes as divorced from Western ‘civilisation’ as were the American Indians.
Between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Prussia was part of the territory known as the Ordenstaat, or Ordensland. This was the unique domain of a military-chivalric institution, the Teutonic Order or Teutonic Knights, an offshoot of the medieval Knights Templar. It was they who colonised the region known as Prussia, as well as the Baltic coast as far as the Gulf of Finland, an area consisting of large parts of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and north-western Russia. The process had much in common with the colonisation of the American West. Indigenous tribes, including the Balts and native Prussians, were exterminated wholesale, and the land was parcelled out to agricultural settlers from Christian Europe.
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