In defiance of the limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty, the army had established secret depots and supply bases, concealed from Allied inspectors. Caches of weapons were hidden on various estates. When the SA learned the location of some of these depots, a race ensued, with the SA hoping to appropriate arms and materiel, the army to safeguard them. On at least one occasion, Stauffenberg organised lorries to transfer arms from their depository before the SA could seize them.
In another context, the SA would have been laughable—or, at worst, a noxious nuisance. But the very numbers of SA recruits made them a force to be taken seriously. In 1933, there were 400,000 SA, four times the size of the regular army. A year later their ranks had swollen to two and a half million, and they were everywhere at large in Germany, parading what Stauffenberg and others called their ‘shit brown’ uniforms. Every city, every town, every village and hamlet had its official Party branch, presided over by an entourage of SA. The brown uniforms were donned by a spectrum ranging from the bourgeois paterfamilias bored with his wife and family to local bullies, thugs and petty criminals. They spent much of their time in pseudo-martial behaviour: farcical parades and marches, campfire rituals, torchlight processions, drills and ‘manoeuvres’ with shovels and pickaxes. They wallowed in bouts of drinking, raucous ‘patriotic’ singalongs and contrived sentimental camaraderie. They were also capable of more sinister things: they intimidated political opponents and, under that guise, anyone they simply did not like, anyone with whom they had personal scores to settle. They wrecked shops and other businesses, and ‘punished’ nightclub owners and cabaret performers who dared to satirise ‘the man with the moustache’. In the period immediately preceding and following the 1933 elections, it was not uncommon, at dawn, to find corpses in the gutters, victims of the SA’s mob persuasion and retribution.
Until his acquisition of power in 1933, Hitler needed the SA. Even he, however, recoiled from their anarchical activities, their boisterous and shamelessly ill-disciplined reign of terror. They presented a national disgrace, diminishing Germany in the eyes of the world. Yet they were essential in suppressing opposition, mustering (or dragooning) support for National Socialist policies, and eliminating potential obstacles from the Nazi path.
After January 1933, however, the SA became, for Hitler, superfluous and expendable. Indeed, they themselves were now an obstacle which had to be removed. Having obtained power in Germany, the Nazis now needed a more refined, more disciplined precision instrument to consolidate and exercise it. This function was to be performed by the then much smaller but much more efficient, much better educated and indoctrinated SS. And for the dreams of nationalistic expansion already festering in his mind, Hitler needed the army. Wooing the army involved transferring interest and allegiance to them from their greatest rivals, whom they regarded as swaggering bullies.
In February 1934, Ernst Röhm, commander of the SA and Hitler’s hitherto loyal colleague, seriously proposed that his organisation be turned into a new ‘people’s army’, of which the regular army and the SS would comprise parts—under his authority, of course. The army found any such suggestion not just repellant but unthinkable, and relations between the SA and the military high command deteriorated further. By summer, the situation had become critical. On 21 June, the high command persuaded Hindenburg, still the nominal head of state and an old soldier himself, to issue an ultimatum to Hitler: unless the prevailing tension was defused, martial law would be declared and authority in Germany would pass to the army. In the days that followed, action against the SA was advocated with intensifying urgency. On the 25th, the army was placed on alert, all leave was cancelled and all troops were confined to barracks. It was obvious that the SA would have to be tamed, reduced to a subordinate status and docility. The result was the Night of the Long Knives.
In the early hours of the morning of 30 June, Hitler and Goebbels flew from Bonn to Munich. A few miles to the south, on the shores of the lake known as the Tegernsee, Röhm and the SA hierarchy were asleep in an hotel, exhausted by the carousing of their summer festival. At dawn, Hitler and an entourage of SS burst into the premises, catching the ‘brown shirts’ in their beds. Some were taken outside and shot immediately. Röhm himself was brought back to Munich and a cell in Stadelheim prison, where a pistol was left for him on a table. When he refused to use the weapon—‘Let Adolf do it himself,’ he said—two SS officers entered and summarily dispatched him with their own firearms. Among the Nazi leadership, Röhm’s homosexuality had long been an open secret. It was now publicly announced as one of several justifications for his execution. A joke quickly became current:
It is only now that we realise the true significance of Röhm’s recent address to Nazi youth: ‘Out of every Hitler Youth, a Storm Trooper will emerge.’24
At the same time that Röhm and his colleagues were surprised on the Tegernsee, the SS, in a carefully orchestrated and concerted operation, moved against SA functionaries elsewhere in Germany. In Berlin alone, some 150 SA personnel were shot by SS execution squads. Hitler officially announced the total number of deaths as seventy-seven. Exiled sources in Paris put the number at 401. In one of the post-war trials, more than a thousand were said to have died.
Although the SA were the chief victims of the Night of the Long Knives, there were other casualties as well. In what appears to have been a case of ‘mistaken identity’—the kind of thing for which the IRA regularly ‘apologised’ in Northern Ireland—the music critic of Munich’s most prominent newspaper was also shot, because his name happened to be the same as that of an SA official. A number of hostile politicians perished and so, too, did two members of the army’s high command, General Kurt von Schleicher, former chancellor and war minister, and General Kurt von Bredow. In eliminating these prominent military figures, Hitler was taking a potentially dangerous gamble, but there was no backlash or mass protest from the army, which thus, to its tarnished honour, became his de facto accomplice.
Whatever individual officers may have felt about the deaths of Schleicher and Bredow, there was universal relief in Germany at the effective neutralisation of the SA. Stauffenberg’s opinion echoed the sentiment prevalent among military personnel and the middle classes. He described it as ‘the lancing of a boil’. For him, as for most other people, the black-clad executors of murder, the Praetorian Guard of the SS, still seemed too peripheral, and insufficiently numerous, to constitute a serious menace.
A month after the Night of the Long Knives, at nine o’clock on the morning of 2 August 1934, the aged and doddering President Hindenburg died. At noon, an announcement was issued that, ‘according to a law enacted ... the previous day’, the title of ‘President’ had been abolished. This role was now to be fused with that of the chancellor, and Hitler would perform both. He would henceforward be known officially as Reich Chancellor and Führer. He would also be commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
In the past, members of the army (on 21 May its name had been changed from the Reichswehr to the Wehrmacht) had taken an oath simply ‘to serve the people and the Fatherland honourably and faithfully’. On the day of Hindenburg’s death, German soldiers across the country were marched out on parade and formally ordered to take a new oath:
I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will yield unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and, as a brave soldier, will be ready at any time to lay down my life for this oath.25
The Oxford historian Gordon Craig has described their acceptance of the new oath as ‘moral capitulation on the part of the army leadership’.26 William Shirer elaborated on the consequences of this self-compromise:
the generals, who up to that time could have overthrown the Nazi régime . . . thus tied themselves to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognising him as the highest legitimate authority in the land and binding themselves to him by an oath of fealty which they felt honour-bound to obey in all circumstances, no matter how deg
rading to them and to the Fatherland.27
Stauffenberg’s co-conspirator Axel von dem Bussche stressed the immense significance of the new oath. It was Hitler’s recompense for the Night of the Long Knives, a calling in of markers. Having obliged the army by neutralising the SA, the Führer could demand something in return.
Too little has been published about how it came about that Adolf was able to get the oath of personal allegiance when Hindenburg died. Nobody to my satisfaction has yet connected it with the plot of June 30, 1934. Hitler must have known at that time that Hindenburg would die soon, and it was his problem to get the loyalty of the army as Hindenburg’s successor. He killed off the SA, thus getting rid of the only body able to compete with the army. June 30th was necessary for Hitler to get the unbreakable loyalty of the army ... The morning after Hindenburg died, the army was marched out and sworn in without being lectured about the difference between the old oath—to the Constitution—and the new oath—to Hitler.28
Bussche described how various individuals contrived to evade the oath. One man with legal training immediately discerned the difference between the old oath and the new, never lifted his hand and thereafter considered he had never sworn. Another escaped swearing the oath by simulating a faint. Ewald von Kleist did actually swear, then promptly swore a second oath vowing to break the first at the earliest opportunity.29 Such devices are not, of course, without a certain cynical humour, but they also bear testimony to how seriously an oath of the kind demanded from the Wehrmacht was taken. It was a point of honour, a sacred vow made before God as a soldier, an officer, a Christian and a German. To repudiate such an oath was to impugn one’s claim to be all of those things.
The oath of allegiance to Hitler was later to become a point of much contention among Stauffenberg’s conspirators. Some prospective recruits were actually deterred by it. For others, it made Hitler’s removal by assassination all the more urgent, since his death would free the Wehrmacht from all loyalty to the régime. Even Bussche himself felt compelled to rummage through the army’s penal code, seeking a legalistic loophole whereby he might circumvent the oath. Stauffenberg, according to Bussche, was rather more offhand and cavalier about the matter:
I discussed this with Claus. He said: ‘Well, I am a Catholic and we have a long-standing tradition that tyrants can be murdered. You have it too, but not as strong. Luther says you can kill a crazed leader.’30
What was Stauffenberg’s own attitude towards the oath? He appears to have deemed it of no relevance. It could not, in any case, supersede the even more sacred oath which he and his brothers had sworn to the principles of Stefan George. The Stauffenbergs ‘remained independent; they had had their “Führer” for a long time. They could not fall under Hitler’s spell as long as they felt bound to the poet and his Utopia of a Secret Germany.’31
If Stauffenberg accommodated himself to the early years of National Socialism in Germany, he seems to have done so less out of total blindness or naiveté than out of a wilful obliviousness and a determination to hope for the best. He recognised clearly enough (and said) that Hitler, without even a pretence to legality, had ruthlessly had old comrades shot when they were no longer of use. And he repeatedly expressed his revulsion for the crudeness and ‘ill-breeding’ of Nazi leaders, their orgies of hate-filled invective, their guttersnipe jargon, their vulgar demagogic methods.
On 16 September 1934, Stauffenberg and a colleague were sent as representatives of their regiment to attend an official Party Day lecture in Bamberg. The speaker was the notorious Gauleiter (provincial Party boss) of Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, perhaps the most obscenely vicious of Nazi racial theoreticians—a man whose charisma was matched, if not positively exceeded, by his nastiness. Stauffenberg already harboured a personal grudge against Streicher, who had published an attack on Stefan George. At the lecture, Streicher launched into one of his customary pornographic castigations of Jews. So offensive did Stauffenberg find this torrent of rancid rhetoric that he did what, in the context, amounted to the unthinkable. He was a tall man, and conscious of his height. Accompanied by his colleague, he suddenly stood up, left his seat, stalked down the central aisle of the hall and proceeded to the exit. Here he was intercepted and stopped by SS personnel, obviously annoyed at the conspicuousness of his action; but the SS, at this date, could not afford to alienate the army, still less a dynamic and promising young officer of Stauffenberg’s social status and aristocratic pedigree. After a brief verbal altercation, he and his colleague elbowed their way past the black-clad minions and out of the premises.32
Stauffenberg’s thoughts had already begun to move in potentially dangerous directions. Shortly after the Night of the Long Knives, he had had a private talk with his squadron leader. As junior officers they were hardly in a position to do anything themselves. But as Stauffenberg’s colleague later reported, they discussed, if only theoretically, the feasibility of deposing National Socialism by force, and the attitude the churches—particularly the Catholic Church—might adopt in such circumstances. The two men agreed that, given its power and influence, the régime could not be overthrown from below, by the populace at large, in a conventional revolution. Any action would have to be implemented from above, by a small high-level conspiracy. Around the same time, Stauffenberg summed up Hitler as
the typical modern demagogue with an astounding capacity for tub-thumping, a man who frequently merely takes the ideas that come to him and twists them to his own ends, but who is nevertheless capable of simplifying them and making them politically feasible; and is therefore capable of inspiring the mass of the people to devotion and self-sacrifice, even though to their own disadvantage.33
Despite his diffidence towards the régime, Stauffenberg had always refrained from criticising it openly. He seems to have felt no such compunction about the Party. But while criticism, even sarcasm and satire, were one thing, action—especially for a man of his youth and as yet junior rank—was another.
7
The Path of Aggression
Between 1933 and 1936, Stauffenberg returned to the cavalry school at Hannover. During this period, he prepared for the compulsory military district examination and for an exam in English. Both were mandatory for admission to the General Staff College. Only 15 per cent of those taking the exams ever reached the college, and only a third of these got as far as the General Staff. Stauffenberg was to do both.
In September 1936, just before entering the Staff College, he spent a fortnight in England. The journey—something to which he had eagerly looked forward for years—was subsidised by a grant conferred on him for his scores in his English exam. He visited the Tower of London, St Paul’s, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, Windsor and Eton, and on 7 September, he was invited to Sandhurst, where he met and spoke to a number of cadets studying German.
He was admitted to the General Staff College at Berlin-Moabit at the beginning of October, along with one hundred other young officers. Three months later, on New Year’s Day of 1937, he was promoted to captain. Among his colleagues at this time were two who were to play significant rôles in the conspiracy of 1944: Merz von Quirnheim, his associate from earlier military days, and Eberhard Finckh. Life in Berlin also brought him into regular contact with others, both family and friends, who would be involved in later events: Cäsar von Hofacker, for example, and the diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz.
It was at the General Staff College that Stauffenberg submitted two memorable papers, one of which, awarded first prize as a competition essay, was entitled ‘Thoughts on Home Defence against Enemy Parachute Troops’. Throughout the war, this was to remain a basic text for Colonel-General Kurt Student, commander of the Wehrmacht’s paratroops from 1938 on. It is the second paper, however, advocating the continued use of cavalry, that reveals most about Stauffenberg’s personality.
The question so often asked today, Should we have cavalry or tanks, is a bad question. The requirement is for cavalry and tanks . . . a tactical or strategic breakthroug
h now being hardly conceivable without the use of tanks in mass. But this does not affect the strategic rôle of cavalry. Looking at the problem quite dispassionately, the extent to which either the horse or the mechanical vehicle is capable of giving us cavalry-type mobility depends upon factors which have only been touched on here; among the most important are conditions on and beyond our frontiers and the fuel supply problem.1
In 1937, then, when French and British military thinkers were still questioning the viability of armoured warfare, Stauffenberg regarded it as a self-evident necessity but still argued for the retention of cavalry. Anticipating a war beyond Germany’s borders, he foresaw conditions of climate and terrain (in Russia, for example) in which cavalry would still prove its worth. In his mind the logistic problem of maintaining fuel supplies could lead to the immobilisation of armour and so vindicate the existence of cavalry formations.
But the real justification of cavalry for Stauffenberg lay ultimately in the kind of morale or ‘élan vital’ it inculcated, the kind of training it had provided for leadership since the Middle Ages. Cavalry had traditionally been the elite of all European armies, the direct descendant of medieval knighthood and chivalry; and although infantry had been the decisive factor on the battlefield for more than three centuries, it was nevertheless the cavalry that most stressed esprit de corps, discipline and audacity of command. It had therefore continued to function as it had traditionally—the arm of the service which provided a repository for the sons of the aristocracy, as well as for the boldest, most dynamic and resourceful commanders.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 16