Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie

by Michael Baigent

In the years immediately preceding the creation of the empire, Prussia had closely monitored the American Civil War. Prussian ‘observers’ were often to be found hobnobbing with the staffs of both Union and Confederate forces, and much was learned from the North American conflict about the urgent need for industrialisation, about modern weaponry and the advantages of up-to-date artillery, about the possibilities created by railed transport. Bismarck was quick to translate the lessons learned into practice. While he was developing and then flexing his military machine against Denmark and Austria, he was also building railroads. In the scale of this enterprise, Germany rivalled the United States and outstripped Britain, Russia and France; and while the railroads in other countries were designed to link major urban centres, those in Germany were geared specifically to strategic military needs.

  During the conflict in the United States, the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest had been asked what constituted the key to martial success. Forrest had replied with a memorably succinct and oft-quoted formulation of the self-evident: ‘To git thar fustest with the mostest.’ Germany’s railway system was structured in precise conformity to this principle—organised to facilitate mobilisation and deploy the maximum number of troops, in the shortest possible time, at the frontiers. On the eve of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, France mobilised in a traditional leisurely fashion, not significantly changed since the Napoleonic era. In the astonishing span of two days, meanwhile, the German railway network had mustered a quarter of a million soldiers at the border, poised for a concerted thrust into enemy territory. Everyone had imagined that war, when it came, would be fought on German soil. In fact, it was fought entirely on French soil, and culminated with the siege and bombardment of the French capital.

  Britain had taken about a century and a half to industrialise. The United States, prompted by the needs of the Civil War, did so in roughly half that time. France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy and other nations proceeded at a much slower pace. Within a quarter of a century, however, Germany’s accelerated industrialisation had made her one of the age’s ‘superpowers’, equalling the United States and surpassed only by the British Empire. By 1900, Germany was overtaking even Britain and had the largest iron and steel industry in Europe. By then, too, she was presuming to challenge Britain, France and the United States in the quest for overseas colonies. Attempts were made to establish spheres of influence as widespread as Mexico, what is now Namibia in South-west Africa, Morocco (where a conflict with the States was narrowly averted) and China (where German troops contributed to the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion). By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany had embarked on what had hitherto seemed the unthinkable. Under her new Secretary of the Navy, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, she was engaged in constructing a ‘blue water’ battle fleet calculated to challenge Britain’s sovereignty of the waves. The so-called ‘Dreadnought Race’ between 1906 and 1914 established a pattern for twentieth-century politics, and presaged the nuclear arms race of the Cold War. Yet German industrialisation, and the power accruing from it, had outstripped the country’s social and political maturity. The result was analogous to a precocious and long-bullied adolescent wielding a Magnum or a submachine-gun.

  Part Three

  CLAUS VON STAUFFENBERG

  5

  The Cult of Stefan George

  It was in the heady, volatile and incipiently belligerent atmosphere pervading a newly fledged ‘superpower’ that Claus von Stauffenberg was born on 15 November 1907, two years after his twin brothers, Berthold and Alexander. His father was Alfred Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg and his mother—Gneisenau’s great-granddaughter—Karoline, Gräfin von Üxküll. The Stauffenbergs were traditionally, albeit nominally, Roman Catholics, but Gräfin Karoline was Protestant.

  Since Hohenstauffen times, the Stauffenbergs had been Free Knights of the Empire, a status cherished more proudly than any conventional title of nobility. In 1874, however, Claus’s great-grandfather, Franz Ludwig Schenk, Freiherr von Stauffenberg—lieutenant-general and hereditary counsellor to the king of Bavaria—was asked by Ludwig II what form of recognition he desired to commemorate both his seventieth birthday and his twenty-five years of service as president of the Bavarian parliament. ‘Anything you like,’ the old man replied to the monarch, ‘except an additional title.’ As a result, he was given one, being created Graf or ‘count’, the equivalent of a British earl.1

  Claus’s father, Graf Alfred, was a Commander of the Bavarian Order of St George and a major in the cavalry of Württemberg, the kingdom into which, after the Napoleonic Wars, Swabia had been incorporated. Between 1910 and the end of the Great War in 1918, Graf Alfred was also ‘General Plenipotentiary’ and Senior Marshal to the court of the King of Württemberg, who had retained his throne and nominal independence within the newly created Second Reich. In 1918, however, following the collapse of the Reich and the Kaiser’s abdication, the Wittelsbach monarchy of Württemberg—the oldest monarchy in Europe—was abolished, and with it Graf Alfred’s official status. Although he had no great affection for the post-war Weimar Republic, he continued to serve his former kingdom as ‘General Plenipotentiary’ and President of the Chamber of Revenues until his retirement in 1928. He has been described as ‘a devout but not political Catholic’, a conservative aristocrat and an expert on protocol and court ceremonial, which did not prevent him from being an adept handyman and a keen gardener on his estate. Like many of his class, he winced at sentimentality, invariably responding to it with goodhumoured sarcasm.

  Claus’s mother, Gräfin Karoline, was lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Württemberg. She has been described as romantic, idealistic, dreamy, impractical and highly literate. She was passionately devoted to Shakespeare, as well as to Goethe and other great German poets of the early to mid-nineteenth century: Schiller, Novalis, Hölderlin and Heine. In their work, she sought a refuge from what she deemed the tedium and constricting rituals of court life. In so-called ‘practical affairs’, she is said to have displayed a naiveté that often yielded comic results.

  Until the fall of the Württemberg monarchy in 1918, the Stauffenbergs resided in the ‘old castle’ of the royal residence in Stuttgart, occupying apartments on the second floor of the massive towered Renaissance building. Subsequently, the family moved to their hereditary manor and estate at Lautlingen, some sixty miles south of Stuttgart and an equal distance north of Lake Constance. The village lies in a valley which forms a pass through the foothills of the Swabian Alps, with a river and a railway following the valley floor. Even today, and despite the noise of traffic, the setting is idyllically pastoral. Cows graze in clover fields between apple orchards. To every side rise hills thickly forested with dark green pines, broken by the occasional birch, beech, larch and mountain ash. On the horizon, the walls and turrets of distant castles can be seen. The road from Lautlingen to Stuttgart is dominated by the silhouette of Burg Hohenzollern, a fairy-tale edifice atop a conical hill. Built in the nineteenth century, this structure housed, until recently, the body of Frederick the Great.

  In Lautlingen and the adjacent villages, the houses are of traditional Alpine style, with balconies, wooden shutters and steeply sloped roofs. The Stauffenberg manor—Schloss Stauffenberg—was built in the nineteenth century within the old manor’s plastered walls, the fortified towers of which are still visible. The structure, a large plain white-painted mansion, lies in the very centre of the village, its grounds adjoining the churchyard. Today, it is a museum for the history of music, where concerts are regularly held. During Stauffenberg’s boyhood and youth, it was surrounded by the cottages of local peasants and artisans. Family and villagers formed a close-knit community, and Gräfin Karoline would customarily visit the neighbourhood’s sick and aged—not out of condescending noblesse oblige, but out of a much more deeply rooted sense of service and out of a genuine sympathy and rapport.

  It was in this environment that Claus von Stauffenberg, from his eleventh year onwards, spe
nt much of his time. He was officially enrolled at the Eberhard-Ludwigs School in Stuttgart, a famous 250-year-old institution known for its propagation of Swabia’s humanist tradition. Homer, Plato, Shakespeare and Goethe were accorded special priority in the curriculum. The headmaster also stressed Schiller’s pronouncements on freedom, Hölderlin’s Swabian identity and the poetry of Stefan George. Stauffenberg was a sickly and delicate boy, subject to recurring headaches and throat infections, and was often absent from class. During his frequent bouts of illness (and, indeed, during the last two years of his enrollment at the Eberhard-Ludwigs School), he remained at Lautlingen and was privately tutored there. He was thus steeped all the more deeply in the landscape and its history.

  Theodor Pfizer first met the Stauffenbergs in the autumn of 1918, when Claus was eleven, and sat in the same class as Berthold and Alexander. He was one of their closest childhood friends and, like them, became a disciple of Stefan George. In 1957, Pfizer published his recollections of the years he shared with the three aristocratic youths. He described how profoundly attached they all were to their native region. ‘The Stauffenberg brothers were rooted in this soil, they blossomed in this air ...’2 They would speak of Swabia as the true heir to the humanist tradition of the Renaissance, and pride themselves on the fact that Schiller, Hölderlin and the nineteenth-century poet and nouvelle-writer Eduard Mörike ‘all had their roots here’. Pfizer also described his many long walks with the brothers in the surrounding hills. Claus, he recalled, was particularly attached to a site known as Torfelsen, the crest of a steep ridge to the south of the family estate, where jagged rocks projected high out over the beech forest below. Here, Pfizer recalled, Claus would retire to meditate, drinking in the panoramic vista of hills and valleys. ‘Here we spoke of the future, of the painful development of a new Germany, of the tasks of the state, the possibilities of having an effect on it, of career hopes and desires.’3

  Along with an indelible attachment to the landscape, Stauffenberg acquired at Lautlingen a pervasive self-awareness of his own patrician caste. He was an aristocrat, and always conscious, even if only subliminally, of being one. For him aristocracy was not merely an exalted social status, something assumed, something put on and worn like an outer garment. It was a basic premise of his existence, something akin to a vocation, a mission and an ongoing obligation to service. It required an ever-present deference to duty, as if a debt had constantly to be repaid to the community in exchange for the privileges that community conferred. In other words, it was an integral part of a reciprocal arrangement. One could not simply benefit from those whom chance or fate had assigned a different social position: one was responsible for them and accountable to them, not just paternally, but fraternally as well; and one had to return to them something of what one had received from them.

  For Stauffenberg’s caste, possession of land—and especially the old inherited family estate—was not its own self-justification, nor was it sufficient to validate one’s own existence: it was a means to an end. It served the utilitarian purpose of ensuring a sufficient standard of living, not just for the individual, but for the family, the line, and its continuity. Land guaranteed that descendants would receive the education and training required to assume responsibility in their turn—the responsibility of a class born and bred to the often onerous obligations of leadership. As a consequence, there were, ultimately, more important duties than merely looking after an estate. The most worthy and estimable of these was service to the community.

  In 1934, at the age of twenty-seven, Stauffenberg wrote to one of his wife’s cousins: ‘The true aristocratic attitude—which is the primary thing for us—demands service to the state, regardless of the specific profession.’4 A crucial characteristic of this attitude, he stated on another occasion, was ‘firmness’. ‘Firmness lies in a measured progress in spite of one’s own doubts, in the unconditional obedience to the self . . .’5 At the same time, he deplored men ‘of the same level of education’ as his own, but without the sense of responsibility and service—men ‘whose pride is stupid arrogance and whose camaraderie is wretched egotism’.6

  In conversation with a co-author of this book, one of Claus’s sons, Major-General Berthold von Stauffenberg, gave his view of the obligation of service: ‘This was in the family tradition. We are not really a military family. Public service, really. I absolutely feel the sense of public service.’ In his opinion, his father ‘was very patriotic for Germany. Not necessarily for Prussia. For Germany’, and the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler ‘was not that much out of line for our family’. Certain families felt ‘a pressure to live up to’ the example set by the conspirators, but they did not really understand what was involved. The Stauffenbergs were free of such pressure because the conspiracy followed naturally from the logic which had always governed the family’s thinking. ‘As I understand it,’ he concluded, ‘this feeling is part of nobility.’7

  Similar attitudes were expressed by survivors among Claus von Stauffenberg’s aristocratic co-conspirators. Before his death in 1992, Axel von dem Bussche described how he saw long lines of Jews being shot by the SS behind the lines on the Eastern Front.

  Some traditional harmony had been destroyed here. We had seen it, but we were not able to put it in words. Something was shattered there. It is my responsibility and guilt that I am still alive.8

  In an interview Ewald von Kleist was equally forthright about the horror he felt when he first discovered that ‘the state had become a murderer’. ‘The basis of politics must be morality,’ he said. ‘We felt terribly ashamed of what happened to Germany. One cannot blame a rank-and-file soldier who knew little of what was going on, but one can blame a person at the top who knew what was going on and yet did nothing.’9 In speaking of the German aristocracy, Kleist again laid stress upon service:

  The German aristocracy were very different from the English. They were generally not as rich and were educated, furthermore, in serving ... They liked to serve. The intention was not to become rich by serving, unlike the English, who would use the colonial service as an opportunity to make their family rich for generations. A German was not expected to come home a rich man.10

  For Kleist, the ideal of aristocratic service was embodied by the monarchical system and incarnate in the king, the people’s supreme servant. He emphasised, however, that he was speaking of the king, not the emperor or Kaiser. ‘The fact that the Kaiser was a king was more important than him being a Kaiser.’11 The First World War was a disaster for Germany not because of the dissolution of the German Empire or the abdication of the Kaiser, but because of the collapse of the monarchical system within the various German states.

  Morality is important. The concept of dishonesty violated an unwritten code which was part of a hierarchy with the king at the summit. It wasn’t always so intelligent, this code. It was often narrow-minded, but it made life easier because everything existed within a framework. The difficulties began when the monarchy had gone. This code became a part of the Widerstand, but just one part.12

  For almost everyone who knew him, Stauffenberg embodied the ideal of aristocratic service and the code of which it was part; this underpinned his capacity for leadership. General Franz Halder, architect of the abortive coup of 1938 and Chief of the General Staff until 1942, explained:

  I recognised in Claus von Stauffenberg a born leader, one whose whole outlook on life was rooted in his sense of responsibility towards God, who was not prepared to be satisfied with theoretical explanations and discussions, but who was burning to act ... My concept of a born leader is a man who, unlike most people, does not allow his thoughts and actions to be dictated by external influences; by ‘born leader’ I mean a man who has both the courage and the will power to deal with the problems of life on his own responsibility. There is no incompatibility between ‘leadership’ and ‘service’ when a natural leader of his own free will decides to serve ... his country or an ideal.13

  In addition to the imperatives of ser
vice and responsibility, Stauffenberg’s sense of his own aristocracy involved a distinctive awareness of his relationship to the past. This can best be understood through an essay, published in 1936, by Thomas Mann, who described what he called ‘mythic consciousness’, a particular kind of mentality whereby certain individuals defined themselves.

  The ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself were different from our own, less exclusive, less sharply defined. It was, as it were, open behind; it received much from the past and by repeating it gave it presentness again.14

  When confronted by a crisis, the leader of antiquity ‘searched the past for a pattern into which he might slip’. Once mantled with such a precedent, tested and validated by history, tradition and his own ancestry, he might confront the present situation, not nakedly, so to speak, or alone, but from within a time-hallowed context. ‘Thus his life was in a sense a reanimation, an archaizing attitude. But it is just this life as reanimation that is the life as myth.’15 Alexander, Mann explains, saw himself as walking, quite consciously, ‘in the footsteps of Miltiades’, the Greek commander against the Persians at the Battle of Marathon. Caesar identified himself similarly with Alexander. ‘But such “imitation” meant far more than we mean by that word today. It was a mythical identification ...’ And while it was characteristic of antiquity, ‘... it is operative far into modern times, and at all times psychically possible.’16 Mann cites Napoleon, whose charismatic leadership again stemmed in large part from his conscious identification with the great commanders of the past.

  How often have we not been told that the figure of Napoleon was cast in the antique mould! He regretted that the mentality of the time forbade him to give himself out as the son of Jupiter Amnion, in imitation of Alexander. But we need not doubt that—at least at the period of his Eastern exploits—he mythically confounded himself with Alexander; while after he turned his face westwards he is said to have declared: ‘I am Charlemagne.’ Note that: not ‘I am like Charlemagne’ or ‘My situation is like Charlemagne’s,’ but quite simply: ‘I am he.’17