And again, his fierce tenacity and concentration of will displayed itself. He himself had originally wondered whether the illnesses which had debilitated him in childhood might impede his military career. Some of these ailments still occasionally recurred, and as late as 1931, he was compelled to spend time at a spa hospital. All the same, he refused to let this deter him, forcing himself to an athletic standard far surpassing that of more robust colleagues, one of whom reported:
I have often heard Stauffenberg putting forward his views in the officers’ mess, generally to the more junior officers. In most cases he would take the floor at once and lay down the law. This came easily to him, for he was intellectually clearly far ahead of his listeners. Being supremely self-confident and undoubtedly somewhat inclined to show off, he liked the sound of his own voice. Nevertheless his audience enjoyed listening to him.4
The official confidential report by his squadron leader, compiled in October 1933, is particularly illuminating:
A reliable independent character, capable of making up his own mind and taking his own decisions. Highly intelligent and of above average ability, both tactically and technically.
Exemplary in his handling of NCO’s and men and absorbed in training and raising the standard of his mortar platoon.
Unexceptional in his relationships with others. Shows great interest in social, historical and religious matters ...
As against these outstanding qualities, mention should be made of certain minor deficiencies and weaknesses. He is well aware of his military ability and intellectual superiority and is therefore apt at times to adopt a somewhat overbearing attitude towards his fellow officers, frequently evidenced by a sarcasm, which, however, never leaves hurt feelings.
He is somewhat sloppy in his dress and bearing, and as a young officer, should take more care of his appearance and give an impression of greater energy. He is rather susceptible to throat infections, which means that his powers of physical resistance are sometimes affected. He fights off illness with energy and determination.
If he goes on as he is, there is every prospect that he will do very well.5
Stauffenberg passed his officer’s exams with honours and also received a special ceremonial sabre ‘for outstanding achievements’. On returning to the 17th Cavalry at Bamberg, he was commissioned second lieutenant on New Year’s Day of 1930. The restricted size of the Reichswehr meant that advancement was inevitably slow. Training—especially after the National Socialists rose to power—became more arduous, and the insistence on professionalism more severe. Officers were schooled to discharge duties appropriate not only to their rank, but also to those one or even two above. When Germany’s armed forces began dramatically to expand, this principle would be turned to account. Officers would automatically move up one or even two grades, and be already groomed for their new responsibilities. The military machine thus had a built-in capacity to increase in size and to take in substantial quantities of fresh recruits while maintaining maximum efficiency in the chain of command.
In 1933, Stauffenberg returned to the cavalry school at Hannover for an advanced course in equitation. He would ride four horses every day, two from the school and two of his own. He concentrated especially on dressage; and in 1935, he took first place in his compulsory military equitation class, beating members of the team which would go on to win a gold medal in the 1936 Olympics.
By this time, he had married. Bamberg had not only initiated him into the military. It also brought him together with his future wife. In 1930, he had met and become engaged to Nina, Freiin von Lerchenfeld, a member of the old Bavarian aristocracy whose distant relations included the Battenbergs (subsequently the Mountbattens). Nina’s father, Gustav Freiherr von Lerchenfeld, was very much a man of the world, having served as consul-general in Shanghai, Warsaw and Kovno (now Kaunas in Lithuania). Before the First World War, he had also served as royal chamberlain of Bavaria.
On 26 September 1933, Stauffenberg and Nina von Lerchenfeld were married in the church of Saint Jakobs in Bamberg. She was seventeen at the time, he twenty-six. When she asked him why he had chosen her, he said ‘he had soon noticed that she would be just the right mother for his childern’.6 He and his father-in-law became close friends. He was not above teasing his mother-in-law, to whom he quoted Frederick the Great: ‘For an officer, a wife is a necessary evil. Warriors ought not to marry, but during times of peace the needs of the family and the offspring must be met.’7 In Stauffenberg’s case, these needs emphatically were. He proved a doting father, taking a simple boyish pleasure in his children. There were to be five of them: Berthold (born in 1934), Heimeran (1936), Franz Ludwig (1938), Valerie (1940) and Konstanze (born in 1945 after her father’s death).
After the abortive ‘Beer House Putsch’ of 1923, the National Socialist Party seemed to have vanished from the political arena, but by the end of the decade it was in full resurgence. In the 1928 elections, the Nazis obtained a marginal twelve seats in the Reichstag. Two years later, this number was increased to 107, and in July 1932, it rose to 230 out of nearly 650. The Nazis could no longer be ignored, and the aged President Hindenburg had no choice but to invite them to join the government. Hitler’s response to this invitation was predictably exorbitant. He asked that he himself be appointed chancellor, and requested a number of ministries for his party. Hindenburg refused, giving Hitler an angry lecture which was then made public. This fiasco damaged the National Socialists. So, too, did a groundswell of apathy and Hitler’s public defence of five storm troopers who had murdered a Communist. In the elections of November 1932, the National Socialists lost thirty-four seats and some two million votes.
By January 1933, however, it was clear that a coalition government could not be formed without involving political extremists, either the National Socialists on the right, or the Communists on the left. Hindenburg was asked to dissolve the Reichstag again and call a new election, this time banning both the National Socialist and Communist parties. To the increasingly senile old president this seemed too draconian a measure, and he refused. The army remained officially neutral, but behind its non-partisan façade it was badly split: few, if any, of its personnel were pro-Communist, but attitudes towards the Nazis ranged from zealous support to equally virulent antipathy and hatred.
Franz von Papen, the country’s political éminence grise and former chancellor, concluded that stability would be impossible to establish in Germany unless Hitler received the chancellorship he desired. But Papen also hoped to contain the Nazi upstart and force him to share power. On 30 January 1933, therefore, in accordance with Papen’s recommendations, Hitler became chancellor in a coalition cabinet. Papen himself became vice-chancellor; and he and his colleagues were now convinced the Nazis could be checked. ‘We have framed him in,’ one said, alluding to Hitler. As the historian Gordon Craig wryly observed: ‘The remark should be included in any anthology of famous last words.’8
On 3 February, Hitler met with the military high command and, in a lengthy speech, maintained that Germany’s armed forces would function most effectively under the ‘strictest kind of authoritarian state leadership’. As an incentive to them, he promised to remove all restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. In the meantime, the Nazis had, under Goering, wrested control of the police, which allowed their thugs and ‘goon squads’ to operate with a semblance of legality.
On the following day the new chancellor-cum-Führer persuaded the increasingly malleable President Hindenburg to issue a decree which banned all newspapers or public meetings presuming to criticise the government. On 17 February, Goering issued a decree forbidding the Prussian police to interfere with the activities of Nazi paramilitary formations such as the SA and SS. Three days later, Hitler met a group of prominent businessmen and industrialists, and told them the impending elections, scheduled for March, would be the last for ten, perhaps for a hundred, years.
A week later the Reichstag ‘mysteriously’ burned down. It is now generally accept
ed that this act of arson was perpetrated by Nazi agents-provocateurs, but at the time it was easily enough attributed to Communist agitators, against whom Hitler now had a plausible excuse to move. By the following morning, more than four thousand Communist functionaries had been arrested, along with numerous intellectuals and professional people hostile to the régime. Hindenburg was persuaded to sign yet another decree, suspending the rights of citizens and authorising the government to assume power in any of the republic’s federated states. German citizens could now be arrested simply on suspicion and imprisoned without trial. Concentration camps began to proliferate across the country for anyone who expressed dissent.
The elections of 5 March 1933 were, as historians have accurately said, ‘dominated by terror’. Not surprisingly, given the prevailing intimidation, the National Socialist Party won a majority. Yet it is worth noting that the Communists still took nearly five million votes and obtained eighty-one seats in the Reichstag. Although the Nazis had 288 seats, this was only 43.9 per cent of the vote, and the other parties held 359 seats. In other words, the majority of German citizens voted against the National Socialist Party.
But the Nazis were now not to be stopped. On 23 March, with its Communist deputies all either dead or in concentration camps, the Reichstag was dragooned into passing the notorious ‘Enabling Act’. By this act, it became ‘constitutional’ for the cabinet to frame laws without the approval of the Reichstag. Legislative and executive powers were now effectively merged, and Hitler was voted dictator. He had absolute and ostensibly ‘legal’ power to do as he wished with Germany. It had taken him less than two months to destroy the last vestiges of the country’s experiment in democracy. According to a cabaret joke at the time:
Members of which choral society earn individually more than Caruso: Reichstag deputies—they perform once a year, sing two songs (the national anthem and the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’) and receive twelve thousand marks each.9
In July 1933, the new régime signed a concordat with the Vatican. In the same month, another law was passed, making National Socialism the only legal party in Germany. To attempt to establish another would be punishable by a minimum three years’ imprisonment. Hitler’s authority was now beyond any possibility of challenge. Yet for his more grandiose designs, he needed the armed forces. It was to them that he began to turn his attention.
During the early years of his military career, Claus von Stauffenberg was, in many respects, less the single-minded professional soldier than the typical ‘Renaissance man’ he had been in the past. He read copiously, in a number of fields: military history, general history, politics, philosophy, psychology, economics, art and literature. He became fluent in Russian and English. Although no record exists of him having formally studied French, he appears to have known the language well. He continued to attend lectures and concerts, and maintained his ongoing apprenticeship to Stefan George. During 1930, while engaged in specialised military courses at Döberitz, he still contrived to attend readings and recitations at George’s Berlin apartment. ‘I had the greatest poet of the age as my master,’ he said to Nina.10 It was through George that the seeds of what would become Stauffenberg’s antipathy to National Socialism were planted in his mind.
As Nazism gained first support, then power, in Germany, certain of George’s poems came increasingly to be seen as prescient. Among the most important of these was a short lyric composed even before the First World War. Inspired by a famous painting of Signorelli’s, ‘Der Widercrist’ (‘The Antichrist’) was eventually to become a mantra for Stauffenberg’s circle of conspirators. Yet, as early as the 1920s, when Hitler first suddenly embarked on his quest for control of Germany, the poem could already be seen as prophetic; and George, as well as certain of his disciples, openly proclaimed it to be so.
‘He comes from the mountains, he stands mid the
pines!
We saw it ourselves! He transforms into wine
Clear water, and trafficks with dead men!’
Oh could you but hear how I laugh in the night!
My hour is now struck, my snares are all sprung
And fish fill my nets, thickly swarming.
Wise men and dullards, the mob, frenzied, reels,
Tramples the cornfields, tears up the trees.
Make way for the flock of the Risen!
No wonder of heaven but I can’t perform.
A hair’s-breadth impure, but you’ll not note the
fraud
With your stunted and stultified senses.
In place of the arduous and rare I invoke
The Facile; from compost I make things like gold,
And perfumes, and nectars, and spices.
And what the great prophet renounced I extol:
An art without ploughing or sowing or toil
Which yet drains the soil of its essence.
The high Prince of Vermin extends his domains;
No pleasure eludes him, no treasure or gain.
And down with the dregs of rebellion!
You cheer, mesmerised by demoniac sheen,
Exhaust what remains of the honey of dawn,
And only then sense the débâcle.
You then stretch your tongues to the now arid
trough,
Mill witless as kine through a pasture aflame,
While fearfully brazens the trumpet.11
George himself was hardly a conventional Christian. If anything, he was positively hostile towards conventional Christian theology, but he acknowledged a profound validity in the Christian emphasis on self-sacrifice; and he had no reservations about availing himself of Christian imagery and metaphor. The Antichrist in the poem derives in part from the figure in Revelation 19:20:
And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshipped its image.
He also derives from the similar figure, the archetypal ‘false prophet’ known as Simon Magus, who appears in Acts 8:9-24, as well as in the writings of Church Fathers and later Christian tradition. There is evidence to suggest that the original Simon, or the prototype on whom he is based, was in fact an early Gnostic; and one Church Father, Epiphanius, accuses him of being the founder of Gnosticism. In Christian scripture and tradition, he is described as the first heretic, and appears as a self-proclaimed Samaritan wonderworker and messiah. A charismatic individual with a following of his own, he is, like Peter but in his own more sinister way, a ‘fisher of men’, whose souls swarm into his net. He offers Peter money for the gift of healing by the laying on of hands. In other words, he attempts to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit for venal purposes, whence the sin known as ‘simony’ derives. He also casts doubts on Jesus and openly questions Peter’s authority as apostle. The encounter, in later sources, culminates with Simon challenging Peter to a kind of duel, each having to match the other, miracle for miracle. At first, Simon actually does outperform Peter, and the wonders he works are indeed impressive. Unlike Peter’s, however, they stem not from any divine power but, through mere sorcery, from a more questionable, if not altogether demonic, source. To that extent, they are sullied, tainted, ‘a hair’s-breadth impure’. They are ultimately manifestations of what George calls ‘das Leichte’ (‘the facile’): the spiritual equivalent of the ersatz or spurious. Dazzling though they may be, they are only the products of trickery, of legerdemain, of ‘hoax’ or ‘fraud’. They appeal to the eye, to the surface of consciousness, but have no more profound validity.
Thus does Simon Magus figure in scripture and Christian tradition. His attempt to challenge Christian authority and usurp it with his own establishes him as the archetype or prototype of the ‘black magician’ and ‘Antichrist’, a ‘rôle model’ for such later would-be necromancers and ‘black magicians’ as Aleister Crowley. The Antichrist in George’s poem, the embodiment of trickery and fraud, offers a form of ‘facile’, pre-packaged, boil-i
n-the-bag, television-dinner style salvation and redemption—surrogate, specious and, to that extent, intrinsically evil. He is a demagogue, seducing his followers down a path of meretricious spiritual power that will lead them, as well as himself, to destruction.
By 1933, it was already apparent how dangerously Hitler conformed to the pattern—apparent to George, at least, and to others with eyes to see. (Thomas Mann, for example, had already published his minatory story ‘Mario and the Magician’. Hermann Broch was already at work on the novel subsequently to be published in English as The Spell.) As the decade progressed and the Nazis consolidated their position, George’s poem became ever more apposite. By 1944, its ominous prophecy had already been effectively fulfilled, and the apocalyptic cataclysm of the closing stanzas was only too obviously imminent.
George had always decreed that politics were alien to art—and, by extension, inimical to the life of the spirit and to the very essence of humanity itself. His attitude towards the Nazis, however, sometimes appeared inconsistent, and this allowed a few members of his circle to support them, though the majority—including, of course, the number of Jews among them—did not. Ultimately, George was hostile to the new régime. Whatever it had in common with the ‘renewal’ he had advocated was superficial, spurious, ‘a hair’s-breadth impure’, the work of a false prophet; and the political reality of the Third Reich was as divorced from the spiritual Reich he had envisioned as Simon Magus’s ersatz miracles were, in Christian tradition, from Peter’s.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 14