George found nothing great in Hitler as he did in Caesar or Napoleon. He was repeatedly disparaging about the National Socialists. In 1931 or 1932, he said that if National Socialism came to power, everyone in Germany would have to go about with a noose around his neck, so that whenever a person was not wanted he could immediately be hanged. To the comment that the Nazis were a dreadful lot, he replied: ‘Henchmen are never very pleasant people.’12
George’s sometimes equivocal disapproval, however, did not deter the Nazis from hailing him as a spiritual precursor and trying to co-opt him, much as they did Nietzsche. He was repeatedly mortified and outraged to find his name, certain of his poems, aspects of his thought, and a number of his personal symbols—the swastika, for example—being appropriated by the Nazis and utilised for their own propaganda purposes. He was no less indignant when he received overtures from Goebbels, inviting him to become the Party’s ‘official poet’.
In October 1928, George published what he declared to be his most important and prophetic book of poems, Das Neue Reich (The New Reich), which undertook to evoke a realm of culture and the spirit very different from the one the Nazis had in mind. A month later, he convened a meeting of his circle and regaled his disciples with a personal recitation intended to sum up his life’s work. The occasion had a distinctly valedictory atmosphere to it, a sense of leavetaking and farewell. It was also suffused with admonitions, omens and portents for the future. At this assembly, George himself read his last two great hymns, ‘Burg Falkenstein’ (‘Falkenstein Castle’) and ‘Geheimes Deutschland’ (‘Secret Germany’). The second of these is an inordinately dense, opaque and impenetrable work. There have been suggestions that it contained a sort of clandestine legacy, coded instructions or covert programme for members of the circle. This seems unlikely but, given George’s tendency to incorporate levels of significance accessible only to his own initiates, it would be rash to draw too definitive a conclusion. In any case, and whatever the work’s ‘sub-text’ might or might not be, it clearly meant something very special to Stauffenberg. Fifteen years later, amid the throes of war, it was the title of this poem that he conferred on the conspiracy. In all probability, too, the title of this poem was the last phrase on his lips, flung defiantly into the faces of the firing squad.
In 1931, as the Nazis advanced towards absolute power, George effectively expatriated himself, obtaining premises in Minusio, in Switzerland, near Locarno on the Italian border. Minusio was originally intended to be no more than a winter refuge, but George began to spend more and more time there. By 1933, he had become, to all intents and purposes, an exile, returning to Germany only for brief visits.
In May of that year, a Nazi press statement spoke grandiloquently of the ‘great tasks’ poets would be called upon to perform. George was specifically mentioned as exemplifying the solidarity poets could display with the State by giving expression to the spirit of the new Germany. At the same time, George was approached discreetly through an intermediary and asked if he would preside over, or at least participate in, a poetic academy. If he were amenable, an official invitation would be issued publicly, acknowledging his rôle as a spiritual and cultural precursor of National Socialism. George replied with a characteristically lofty ambiguity:
I in no way deny the ancestry of the new national government and do not dispute my spiritual contribution... The laws of the spiritual and the political are certainly very different—where they meet and where the spirit rises to the general good is an exceptionally tangled phenomenon. I cannot put words into the mouths of those in government about what they think of my work and how they value its significance.13
As for becoming associated with a poetic academy, he refused with cool aloofness, adding that ‘I have for almost half a century presided over German poetry and the German spirit without an academy. Had there been one, I would probably have been opposed to it.’14
He had intended to celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday that year with his sister, in his home town of Bingen, on the Rhine. Fearing some sort of ‘official recognition’ from the régime, however, he abandoned his plans and slipped quietly away from his sister’s premises four days early, on 8 July. He celebrated his birthday on the 12th in the seclusion of his Berlin apartment. Still intent on avoiding Nazi acclamations, he then departed, earlier than usual, for Minusio.
In the autumn of 1933, George’s health began to decline rapidly, and by the beginning of winter he was on his deathbed. Calling his closest disciples to him, he voiced his fear that, on his death, members of the SS or some other Party representatives might appear, might try to claim his body, bring it back to Germany and turn his funeral into some sort of state occasion. The Stauffenbergs were requested to prevent this from happening.
George died on 4 December and his burial was scheduled for two days later. Claus von Stauffenberg arranged a roster for the funeral vigil. He ensured that he, his brothers and a dozen or so friends, including some military colleagues, maintained a permanent round-the-clock watch over their mentor’s bier, to keep all official German representatives away.
In the middle of the cleared chapel the oak coffin stood on a stand. At the head there was a laurel wreath whose leaves were arranged in Roman style. On the left and right there were three laurel trees, that grew over the coffin. In the corners of the bare chapel the friends kept a vigil for the dead, which is customary in Tessin; following the instructions of Claus von Stauffenberg, they took turns. In front of the chapel, to the left and right of the entrance, two laurel trees were planted. On the evening of 5 December, the friends came to the chapel, to see the dead man once again. By his forehead there were two laurel tree branches; by the left hand was some gold jewellery. As people stepped in, they laid flowers down in front of the coffin. The deceased was separated from the living by the laurel trees.15
George’s anxieties about official Nazi attempts to take over the occasion appear to have been justified. Certainly there were some enquiries by ‘strangers’ who, it now seems clear, were Party representatives; and the German consul in Lugano, some seventeen miles away, contacted the mayor of Minusio to discover the time of the burial. On what seem to have been the Stauffenbergs’ instructions, the mayor was told the burial would be at three in the afternoon. It took place, in fact, at eight-fifteen in the morning. When the régime’s representative arrived, he was too late to give an oration, too late to do anything save lay a wreath with a large swastika on the grave. A woman member of the George circle covered the swastika with an armful of roses. Someone else cleared the roses away. Shortly afterwards, the swastika was removed by an unknown hand.16
Theodor Pfizer, the Stauffenbergs’ boyhood friend and confidant, left a succinct account of the proceedings.
All three (brothers) belonged to Stefan George’s close circle and were gathered at his death-bed on the 4th of December, 1933. They were duty-bound beyond the demands of their own wishes and questions, beyond those of their careers and of the family, to the ‘Secret Germany’.17
By 1933—the year of the Nazis’ seizure of power and of George’s death—Stauffenberg had begun increasingly to distinguish himself in the army. Reports spoke of his extraordinary affability and friendliness, his capacity to inspire trust in everybody, his expertise at settling differences, acting as intermediary and resolving quarrels. He was often described as saving a situation with his uninhibited and infectious laugh. He could also be overbearing and witheringly sarcastic.
As might be expected, in many things he was conservative, but he attached no intrinsic value to something simply because it happened to be old and hallowed. When circumstances seemed appropriate, he could also display passionate support for the new and untested. In 1935, an aerodrome was built near the cavalry school at Hannover, depriving the troopers of their accustomed training area. A proposal to move the school to a site near Berlin elicited angry objections and protests: it would be contrary to tradition and would diminish the school’s reputation. Yet Stauffenberg vigor
ously endorsed the move. Attached though he was to the cavalry and its place in military history, he recognised the future importance of air power and arranged his priorities accordingly.
Like most professional armies, the Reichswehr—the army of the Weimar Republic—had forbidden any political stance or activity, any membership of a political party, even the right to vote. It is questionable whether Stauffenberg would ever have belonged to a party anyway. ‘He builds his own party,’ a colleague observed of him. He saw the Reichswehr as more than just a military instrument or a school for future leadership. It was also, he felt strongly, an essential component in the structure of the republic, a guarantee of the country’s security and honourable reputation. To that extent, he believed German soldiers had to be, if not politically active, at least politically aware. Like most members of his caste, he found it difficult to muster any great enthusiasm for the increasingly enfeebled republican government. Yet he regarded his obligation to serve the community as binding, without any explicit display of irony or scepticism, and this placed him at odds with adherents of the old imperial order, pining for the deposed Hohenzollerns and sneering at the Weimar flag as ‘black and red mustard’. When visiting relatives in Franconia, Stauffenberg would make a point of wearing his uniform. He knew it would be thought outrageous for a member of his caste to serve as an officer in a republican army. Many of them believed with his own father that the government was one of usurpers—that the King of Bavaria had not abdicated voluntarily, but been forcibly deposed by revolutionary elements. Stauffenberg had no compunction about playing the iconoclast with such entrenched attitudes.
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, there were predictable public manifestations of both antipathy and support. Stauffenberg’s biographers have been consistently embarrassed by a contemporary report citing his involvement in a pro-Nazi street celebration in Bamberg. He was in uniform at the time, apparently on the way to a dinner. According to some accounts, he got caught up in the excited and enthusiastic mob and was jostled—or let himself be jostled—to the front of the procession. According to others he assumed a position at the head of the procession deliberately. Such behaviour, of course, was not just unseemly for an officer in uniform. It was also a flagrant breach of the Reichswehr’s official proscription of political activities.18
In the context of the time, such behaviour on the part of a 26-year-old officer is, understandable enough. In 1933, the most vociferous opposition to National Socialism came from militant leftists, who opposed it not because they truly understood it, but because it was an ideology hostile to their own. Of those not blinkered or constrained by any ideology, only a very few prescient individuals—Thomas Mann, for example, and Hermann Broch—could have any real inkling of what was to come. So far as most Germans were concerned, National Socialism offered a welcome promise of a return to law, a salutary antidote to the dithering weakness of the Weimar government, a prospect of economic recovery and a bulwark against the insidious encroachments of Communism. The horror of the Russian Revolution and civil war were no more than a decade and a half in the past; and the Soviet Union under Stalin was no very inspiring example to Germany’s battered and precariously established middle class. What was more, National Socialism could still, at that date, make a potent appeal not just to the country’s young, but to the most intelligent and best educated among them. Freud and particularly C. G. Jung had elicited great interest and sympathy among the generation of Stauffenberg’s contemporaries; and the new sphere of depth psychology constituted an exciting and hitherto undiscovered world, many of whose governing principles—the insistence on cultural and spiritual rebirth and renewal, and the importance of the language of symbolism—on the face of it appeared to mesh with those of National Socialism. Similar themes were also being stressed by literary figures such as Hesse, Broch and Mann, who drew liberally on Freudian and Jungian thought. While the political Left propagated sterile cerebral concepts addressed to the rational intellect alone, Nazism trafficked in a skilful manipulation of symbols, which struck deeper, more resonant chords than any theoretical abstractions. The language of symbols was sonorous, evocative, puissant, eliciting a response from beyond the threshold of rationality. It spoke to the heart and the nervous system, as well as to the head. It seemed to offer a lofty and exalting poetic truth; and poetic truths can only too easily be confused with political truths—as demonstrated, for example, by rhetoric about a ‘united Ireland’ in Ulster today.
Thus, a generation of young men and women could be duped with a readiness that now appears both inexplicable and culpable. Yet had Nazism not evolved as it did, and culminated in the horrors that have seared themselves into our collective consciousness, its appeal would have been considerable today, not just to louts and skinheads, but to the literate, the thoughtful, the well-educated, the artistically inclined. It is not too extravagant to suggest that the very people who, since the 60s, have espoused Jung, esotericism, eastern thought, comparative religions, folklore and the ‘folk soul’, would have been seduced by at least certain aspects of Nazism during the late 20s and early 30s. As Mann attempted to demonstrate in The Magic Mountain (1924), the mystically oriented sensibility is inherently susceptible, and vulnerable, to exploitation by right-wing totalitarianism.
As a result a number of the future conspirators, including Tresckow, Merz von Quirnheim and Casar von Hofacker, found elements in National Socialism they felt they could endorse. So, too, could certain members of Stefan George’s circle. In the early 30s, Stauffenberg could say that ‘The German people are rebelling against Versailles, and National Socialism endeavours to do away with the misery of unemployment by creating work and instituting other services for the man in the street.’19
He hoped the Nazis’ acquisition of power ‘would mean the end of party political wrangling’, and that there might now be ‘a firm, straightforward policy’—an impatience and a yearning only too familiar in the Western democracies of today. And he approved, in theory at least, the principle of a dynamic centralised leadership which—in contrast to the dithering and impotence of Weimar—did not shrink from making energetic decisions. There was also a loftier dimension to Stauffenberg’s attitude:
Hitler is capable of putting into words certain basic and genuine ideas which could lead to a spiritual revival. As a result, both the idealistic and the high-minded might indirectly be attracted to him.20
According to one of his friends, Stauffenberg ‘was stirred by the magnetism this man was able to generate, by his vehemence which made what seemed impossible in a stagnant world suddenly appear feasible’.21 In spring 1942, the same friend admitted to another confidant, Hans von Herwarth:
he had initially been quite impressed by Hitler’s accomplishments—the re-arming of Germany, the reoccupation of the Rhineland and so forth.
He had been particularly attracted by the fact that all this had been accomplished without armed conflict. By the time I met Stauffenberg, however, he had already become thoroughly alarmed over what was taking place.22
Whatever his initial and qualified sympathies for the new régime, Stauffenberg was not blind to the mechanisms whereby it had attained its success. He explained these lucidly and cogently as consisting of three primary factors. First, Hitler had destroyed democracy, but he had done so by ostensibly democratic means, thus rendering powerless the machinery of the State and of party politics. Second, the Western Allies had, at Versailles, provided Hitler with his most persuasive arguments, enabling him to appear as the champion of ‘legitimate popular despair’. Third, the National Socialist programme offered an irresistibly attractive alternative to the perceived menace of Communism.
As for Stauffenberg’s alleged involvement in the Bamberg street demonstration, the circumstances remain unclear and unconfirmed. Some commentators have denied that the incident took place at all, as have fellow officers in his regiment. Some days after the Nazi triumph in the elections, the subject of street demonstrations was discussed in th
e officers’ mess. It is uncertain whether this discussion referred to an actual and specific occurrence or to a hypothetical situation. In any case, Stauffenberg is reported to have asserted that the citizenry, in such circumstances, would not have understood if an officer simply stood aloof. In the same context, he is said to have invoked the great military leaders of the wars against Napoleon: Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Yorck von Wartenburg. They, too, had become politically engagé. Not only had they acted as instruments of the popular will. They had also tempered, contained, curbed and channelled the potentially anarchic energy that will had unleashed. As always with Stauffenberg, the sense of aristocratic responsibility functioned as a governing principle, a moral imperative. It went hand in hand with a respect for the people, but a mistrust of the mob. As he stated on another occasion: ‘Popular guidance is an inescapable and important part of politics, and is not something that can be left to any Tom, Dick or Harry without disastrous consequences.’23
Stauffenberg accordingly agreed to direct night exercises by the SA, the Sturmabteilung (‘storm troopers’, or ‘brown shirts’). By forcing the SA to expend energy on night exercises, he hoped, if only on the local level, to keep them off the streets and divert them from their customary nocturnal routine of rioting, drinking, bullying, rowdy carousing, destroying property, beating up and even murdering Jews and political opponents. Reducing fat, swaggering and ill-disciplined louts to haggard and panting wrecks by forced marches and rigorous drills was just the sort of thing to appeal to Stauffenberg’s sense of humour.
Like almost all professional soldiers at the time, in Germany and elsewhere, Stauffenberg despised the SA. These oafs, he felt, embodied all that was worst, all that was most loathsome and offensive in the German national character. They were also a constant source of embarrassment and even a potential threat to the army. Not, of course, that they could replace the army. They lacked the discipline, the organisation and the military expertise for that. But they fancied themselves to possess those qualities or, at any rate, something else, which might render those qualities superfluous. In consequence, there was a constant antipathy and rivalry between the army and the SA, and a mounting tension. By 1934, each suspected the other of imminent revolt.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 15