It was, of course, inevitable that a warrior caste like the Free Knights, enjoying their exemption from constraint and seeking anything from adventure to riches, would often enough turn to crime. By the eve of the Lutheran Reformation, a burgeoning new middle class had begun to swell the wealth of German cities. The Protestant ‘work ethic’ contributed dramatically to this development, and money once lavishly squandered by feudal nobles and potentates was finding its way into the coffers of such influential banking dynasties as the Fuggers of Augsburg, or those of the Thurn-und-Taxis family, who had established Europe’s first commercial postal and courier service. For the Free Knights, the newly prosperous class of merchants, entrepreneurs, bankers and financiers offered enticing opportunities for plunder. Caravans of bullion and commodities plying between such cities as Nuremberg, Augsburg and Frankfurt became fair game for bands of freebooting Free Knights, who would swoop on them like corsairs, or like the later outlaws of the American West. These depredations, which prompted the first use of the term ‘robber baron’, generated a state of ever intensifying friction between the Free Knights and the cities. Attempts to neutralise them by curbing or curtailing their hereditary rights and privileges were a primary cause of the curious aristocratic insurrection of 1522 known as the Knights’ Revolt.
The acknowledged leader and guiding hand of the revolt was the powerful and charismatic Franz von Sickingen. For posterity, however, Sickingen’s status has been eclipsed by that of his spokesman and lieutenant, the dynamic and resourceful young Ulrich von Hutten. Descended from a noble Franconian family, Hutten was not only a Free Knight of the Empire, but also a wandering scholar and soldier-poet. Learned and articulate, Hutten has sometimes been called the ‘first political German’, and established a prestigious (or notorious) reputation in the literary sphere as well. He is now held to stand in the great humanist tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but was much more vituperative and scathing than Erasmus, boldly attacking the Church, the venal bourgeoisie of the cities and, in particular, Italian financial and commercial interests in Germany. His poems, polemical tracts and rasping satirical dialogues are among the most important literature of the period.
Bold type shows members of the Bomb Plot executed in 1944
Genealogy of the Stauffenberg family
During the first decade and a half of the sixteenth century, antagonism had intensified between the Hutten family and the Duke of Württemberg. Matters came to a head when Ulrich von Hutten’s cousin, Hans, married a woman of the Stauffenberg family.3 Such was her beauty, according to contemporary accounts, that the duke found her irresistible and, in 1515, murdered her husband to obtain her. His hostilities with the Hutten family escalated into a blood feud, in which Ulrich von Hutten was to play a prominent part. It was with five blistering political pamphlets against the duke that he launched his literary career, publicly castigating his enemy in print for the whole of Germany. When the duke, stung by this humiliation, attempted to retaliate, Hutten invoked the aid of Franz von Sickingen and other Free Knights of the Empire. As a result of their concerted action, the duke was deposed and driven from his lands. This incident, stemming at least in part from a Stauffenberg woman, was to be another contributing factor to the Knights’ Revolt. It imbued the knights with an overestimated sense of their own power and spurred them on to more reckless undertakings. Their success in toppling a powerful secular authority generated fresh alarm and antagonism among the urban bourgeoisie.
As for the Stauffenbergs themselves, Jakob Schenk von Stauffenberg and his wife were early converts to Lutheranism, but other members of the family continued to adhere to their Catholic heritage.4 In the seventeenth century, one Stauffenberg was a Jesuit, while another served in the Catholic armies of the Empire during the Thirty Years War. The brother of this officer became Prince-Bishop of Bamberg. Another Stauffenberg became Prince-Bishop first of Konstanz, then of Augsburg. His brother rose in the Swabian contingent of the Knights of St John to the rank of ‘Generalfeldmarschalleutnant’. The family continued to have connections with some of the most resonant names not only in German, but in European, history. The great poet and playwright Friedrich von Schiller was descended from the fourteenth-century Konrad Schenk von Stauffenberg.5 Prince Metternich, that éminence grise of early nineteenth-century continental politics, was the nephew of a Stauffenberg.6
In 1874, the 73-year-old Lieutenant-General Franz Schenk, Freiherr von Stauffenberg was raised to the rank of Graf, or count, by Ludwig II of Bavaria.7 Trained as a lawyer, the lieutenant-general had also had a distinguished career in politics dating from 1837. Between 1877 and his death in 1881, he played a salient rôle in the parliamentary opposition to Bismarck. His grandson, Alfred, married Karoline von Üxküll in 1904. From this union, the three brothers, Alexander, Berthold and Claus von Stauffenberg, were born.
Karoline von Üxküll was of Prussian descent. Her lineage may not have been quite as old as that of the Stauffenbergs, but it included names no less resonant—at least two of which were to figure prominently in the minds of the three brothers. Claus von Stauffenberg was able to claim among his maternal ancestors two of the most distinguished commanders in German military history, two of the most important leaders of the Napoleonic Wars.
One of these was Field Marshal Peter Yorck, Graf von Wartenburg (1739-1830). Yorck began his career as a swashbuckling soldier of fortune. In 1779, at the age of twenty-one, he accused a superior officer of stealing an altar cloth from a church and thereby got himself court-martialled, imprisoned for a year and cashiered from the Prussian army. In 1781, he migrated to Holland, took service with the Dutch East India Company and spent a year at the Cape of Good Hope as well. In 1794, at the beginning of the revolutionary wars with France, he regained his Prussian commission and embarked on a prolonged campaign to update the Prussian army—to modernise the military machine which had rested on its laurels since Frederick the Great’s time half a century before and adapt it to the conditions of early nineteenth-century warfare. He was too late to do much at first, but at the Battle of Jena in 1806, where the supposedly invincible Prussians were resoundingly trounced by Napoleon, he managed to bring his regiment through the débâcle intact and with honour. He subsequently commanded a corps (half the force allowed Prussia by treaty) attached to the French army during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. He was to play a crucial rôle in bringing Prussia into the Grand Alliance that eventually toppled the French emperor. He also participated in the mammoth Battle of Leipzig, known as the ‘Battle of the Nations’, and in the joint Prussian—Russian—Austrian—Swedish—British invasion of France which culminated with Napoleon’s capitulation in 1814.
The second of Stauffenberg’s illustrious maternal ancestors was Field Marshal August Wilhelm Neithardt, Graf von Gneisenau (1760-1831). A Saxon by birth, Gneisenau served in the Austrian army, then in that of the small German principality of Bayreuth-Anspach. The army of Bayreuth-Anspach was among those recruited as mercenaries by Britain’s Hannoverian monarchy for service in the rebellious colonies of North America; and though he arrived too late to see much action, Gneisenau was present during the final phases of the American War for Independence.
Much later, in Prussia, Gneisenau was at the forefront of attempts to introduce social and constitutional reform, but it was as a military reformer that he achieved his most significant and durable success. After the defeat at Jena and the French occupation of Prussia, Gneisenau—together with Yorck von Wartenburg, Gerhard von Scharnhorst and their younger disciple, Karl Maria von Clausewitz—embarked on a dramatic and radical renovation of the entire Prussian military system. This renovation, executed secretly under the very noses of the occupying French, was to transmute the cumbersome old Prussian war machine into one of the most efficient, modern and sophisticated on the continent. Among other things, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst democratised the Prussian officer corps, made men of non-aristocratic status eligible for commissions and introduced universal conscription. They were also instru
mental in the creation of the Prussian (subsequently German) General Staff, the first such institution in the world, and in the creation of the General Staff College, prototype for Sandhurst, St Cyr, West Point and other such academies. Like Yorck von Wartenburg, Gneisenau played a prominent part in the Grand Alliance against Napoleon, functioning as the Prussian army’s Chief of Staff. In this capacity, he attended—and did the thinking for—the more famous and flamboyantly eccentric Marshal Gebhard von Blücher. When Blücher’s army was defeated by Napoleon at Ligny in June 1815, it was Gneisenau who assumed command. He prevented the retreat from disintegrating into a rout, regrouped the scattered Prussian formations and enabled them, in the nick of time, to come to Wellington’s aid at Waterloo.
With illustrious ancestors constantly in mind, Claus von Stauffenberg and his two brothers grew up and came to maturity. But the Germany they inhabited was a very different Germany from that of Gneisenau’s and Yorck von Wartenburg’s time. In a span of some fifty-five years, the country had undergone a revolution as dramatic, and traumatic, as that of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917, but the revolution was of a very different kind.
In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, Germany was divided into no less than 1,789 separate domains. There were 51 Free Cities of the Empire, including Hamburg, Bremen, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm and Frankfurt. There were 63 ecclesiastical principalities presided over by clerics. There were 200 other principalities, ranging from the demesnes of counts, through duchies, up to kingdoms like Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia, and there were 1,475 tracts of independent territory held by Free Knights of the Empire.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna reassembled this bewildering jigsaw into something more manageable: four Free Cities and thirty-five other principalities. Of these, Prussia was the most powerful militarily, but the ‘heart and soul’ of Germany were still deemed to lie elsewhere—in Saxony, in Bavaria and, especially, in such regions along the Rhine as the Palatinate, Hesse, Nassau, Baden and Westphalia, as well as the Stauffenbergs’ native Swabia. These regions were to constitute the arena for a new struggle between 1815 and 1866, a social, cultural and political struggle for Germany’s ‘heart and soul’. The two protagonists in the struggle were to be Prussia under the Hohenzollern dynasty and Austria (after 1848 the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) under the Habsburgs.
Although held only tenuously together, and grievously debilitated by the struggle with Napoleon, the Habsburg imperium still remained a major European power, ruled by the oldest reigning dynasty on the continent. It had on its side the weight of tradition, of legitimacy, of nearly a thousand years of high culture, sophistication, cosmopolitan urbanity, diplomatic experience—and the support of the Papacy, which carried much currency in such Catholic regions as Bavaria. Prussia could not compete in these respects, but she had the energy of a newly discovered nationalism, a vital industrial base, an increasingly efficient military machine and the support of the Lutheran Church, which has been described as pretty much an adjunct of the War Office. The rôle of the Lutheran Church should not be overlooked or underemphasised, for it was responsible for promoting the Protestant ‘work ethic’. Encouraging progress, commerce, industrialisation and material success, the dynamism of this ethic had, two centuries before, transformed England and Holland, catapulting both to the forefront of European affairs. Now, that dynamism was to find a new sphere of activity in Germany.
Thus the polarity of the mid-nineteenth century took shape. For many Germans at the time, Austria embodied culture and civilisation, but she also appeared decadent, inert and mired in the past. Prussia, though brash, vulgar and tactlessly self-assertive, embodied the qualities associated with youth—energy and idealism. Compared to Austria, she could appear alluringly dynamic. If Austria was old, Prussia appeared young and seemingly bursting with exuberance—even though her governing regime was among the most stodgy and reactionary in Europe.
Until 1866, the struggle between Austria and Prussia for the ‘heart and soul’ of Germany remained confined to social, cultural and diplomatic spheres. But Prussia was readying herself for more dramatic activity. Quietly, discreetly, virtually unnoticed by the rest of Europe, she had embarked on a process of radical modernisation. This took place under the auspices of the monarch, Wilhelm I, but its real instigator and guiding spirit was the king’s so-called ‘Iron Chancellor’, Prince Otto von Bismarck. And Bismarck, relying heavily on the institutions Gneisenau had helped to devise half a century before—the General Staff and the General Staff College—proceeded to forge, out of ‘blood and iron’, the most efficient military machine since Napoleon’s time. This machine was to be deployed with a single focused objective in mind: the neutralisation of Austria and the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. Operations were entrusted to the new Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.
In 1864, while Europe’s attention was distracted by the civil war raging in the United States, Bismarck and his Chief of Staff undertook to give their war machine a trial run. The target for this exercise, puny little Denmark, was hardly in a position to offer much serious resistance. The conflict lasted six months, although it took just ten weeks to defeat the Danish forces in the field. When Denmark sued for peace, Prussia annexed (with nominal Austrian collaboration) the prized duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
Having proved itself against a token adversary, the martial dynamo was ready for a more serious and consequential confrontation. At last, after half a century of subterranean diplomatic tussling, Bismarck was intent on settling, once and for all, the long-standing vendetta with Austria. Most outsiders at the time would not have wagered much on his chances, but the Habsburg imperium was militarily feeble, spending only enough on her army, as the novelist Robert Musil later wrote, ‘to ensure her position as the secondweakest great power in Europe’. According to jokes then current, the Prussian army made steel while the Austrian army made music; the Prussian army wore iron helmets with spikes, the Austrian cock hats adorned with feathers. Music and feathers were no match for Krupp steel. When war came in 1866, Austria’s showing was no more creditable than Denmark’s had been. Her troops offered stiffer resistance, but the war lasted only seven weeks, and when it was over, the struggle for the ‘heart and soul’ of Germany had at last been decided in Prussia’s favour. Among the spoils of war were Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Hannover and the Free City of Frankfurt.
Among continental powers, the only serious remaining rival was France and the Second Empire of Napoleon III. By 19 July 1870 (a day after the doctrine of Papal infallibility was proclaimed by the Vatican), Bismarck had skilfully manipulated the French emperor into declaring hostilities. Having thus exonerated himself from any charge of aggression, he responded with the kind of force and speed that would come to be known, seventy years later, as ‘lightning war’, or ‘Blitzkrieg’. The painfully humiliating Siege of Paris was to drag on until the end of January 1871, but effective fighting in the field between French and Prussian armies was over by 2 September 1870, a mere six weeks. When the conflict ended, Napoleon III had capitulated, the Second Empire lay in ruins and France, after careening vertiginously towards full-scale civil war, had pulled herself tenuously together into a chastened and none-toostable republic. In place of the Kingdom of Prussia and its associated satellite principalities, a new political entity had appeared on the world’s maps. On 18 January 1871, while his troops formed a ring of bayonets around Paris and his artillery shelled the helpless city at will, Wilhelm I was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles. The reborn German Empire, the Second Reich, was an imperium calculated to evoke echoes of the old Hohenstauffen dynasty, but it owed no allegiance whatever to Rome, and its capital was not on the Rhine, but in the Prussian capital of Berlin. Prussia and Germany were now, to all intents and purposes, synonymous, and a military model for the rest of the world even in matters of fashion. Many infantry regiments in the British Army adopted the spiked helmet, and some retain it even to
day. It also survives in the helmet of the British bobby: essentially a Prussian helmet with an amputated spike.
Nominally at least, the new German Empire was a confederation of kingdoms and principalities, each retaining its own semi-autonomous ruler. Thus, for example, Ludwig II of Bavaria continued to preside over his Wagnerian fairytale realm. But the Second Reich was not prepared to brook any insubordination from its constituent components. In 1886, after defying Bismarck, Ludwig was mysteriously and conveniently murdered—at the hands, it is now generally believed, of Prussian agents. It has even been suggested that Prussian policy had something to do with the death of Archduke Rudolf, the Austrian heir apparent, whose body was found, along with that of his mistress, at the hunting lodge of Mayerling in 1889.
The new imperium was a curious, at times hybrid, political entity. Many of the smaller principalities continued to exist as before: enclaves of archaic quaintness and picturesqueness out of the brothers Grimm, with gingerbread castles and a Ruritanian lifestyle unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is how ‘Germany’ appears in Thomas Mann’s early novel Royal Highness, published in 1909. But side by side with such kitsch anachronisms (of particular appeal to British tourists), there were burgeoning cosmopolitan cities like Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne—and, of course, the massive industrial centre of the Ruhr valley.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 10