1 Claus von Stauffenberg, a captain in the 6th Panzer Division in 1940.
2 Colonel-General Ludwig Beck: Chief of Staff, German Army 1935-8, one of the leaders of the German resistance to Hitler.
3 Colonel-General Franz Halder. An early prominent member of the opposition to Hitler, he succeeded Beck as army Chief of Staff.
4 Hitler and his generals: left to right: Hitler, Field Marshal Keitel, Colonel-General Halder, Field Marshal Brauchitsch.
5 Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, who accompanied Stauffenberg on the attempt to assassinate Hitler.
6 Major-General Henning von Tresckow (centre), Chief of Staff of Army Group Centre (eastern front) which he built into an active opposition group. All the officers pictured here were involved in attempts to remove Hitler.
7 General Friedrich Olbrict, a member of the opposition to Hitler.
8 Colonel-General Fromm who arrested and ordered the death of Beck, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Merz von Quirnheim and Haeften. 9 Dietrch Eckart, occult éminence grise behind Hitler.
9 Dietrch Eckart, occult éminence grise behind Hitler.
10 Goering, Bormann and others outside the briefing hut at the ‘Wolfsschanze’ headquarters in East Prussia where Stauffenberg attempted the assassination of Hitler.
11 Goering, Bormann and others viewing the damage in the briefing hut caused by Stauffenberg’s bomb, 20 July 1944.
12 Following the blast an official photograph was issued of Hitler’s trousers.
13 Hitler visiting Major-General Scherff who was wounded by the bomb.
14 The ghost of a house: remains of Hitler’s headquarters, the ‘Berghof’ above Berchtesgaden, Bavaria.
15 The ‘Knight of Bamberg’, a thirteenth-century sculpture in the cathedral of Bamberg to which Stauffenberg has often been compared.
16 Field Marshal August von Gneisenau with his staff. Hero of the War of Liberation, 1813-15, he was an ancestor of Stauffenberg’s.
17 Alfred, Graf von Stauffenberg and his three sons, Berthold, Claus and Alexander, in 1924.
18 Stauffenberg with his wife, Nina, at their wedding, Bamberg, 26 September 1933.
19 Stauffenberg on his horse ‘Schwabenherzog’ during the regimental farewell parade, Bamberg, 1934.
20 On the left, Stauffenberg riding in a competition, May 1935.
21 Stauffenberg (right) talking to Lieutenant-Colonel Coelestin von Zitzewitz and, with his back to the camera, Eastern Intelligence Chief Colonel Reinhard Gehlen.
22 Stauffenberg with his friend and co-conspirator Albrecht Merz von Quirnheim in army headquarters, Vinnitsa (Ukraine), 1942.
23 Stauffenberg recuperating from his wounds at the family home in Lautlingen.
24 Stauffenberg (left) walking with Hitler to a military conference, with the chief ADCs of the army and navy. Vinnitsa, 1942.
25 Stauffenberg meeting Hitler at the East Prussian headquarters, the ‘Wolfsschanze’, 15 July 1944. He was carrying a bomb with him but chose not to explode it.
26 Berthold von Stauffenberg during his trial before the Nazi ‘People’s Court’, 10 August 1944. He was executed the same day.
27 Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben appearing before the ‘People’s Court’, 8 August 1944. He too was executed the same day.
28 Torfelsen, a rocky outcrop high above Lautlingen, which was a favourite retreat for Stauffenberg.
29 The village of Lautlingen, in the Swabian Alps south of Stuttgart. Schloss Stauffenberg lies in the centre.
30 Schloss Stauffenberg, the family home for over three hundred years, now a museum dedicated to music.
31 The Altes Schloss in Stuttgart where Stauffenberg lived as a child. His father, Senior Marshal to the last king of Württemberg, held an apartment there until 1918.
32 The poet Stefan George in 1899.
33 Stefan George and the ‘Cosmics’, July 1900. From left: Alfred Verwey, George, Ludwig Klages, Alfred Schuler and Karl Wolfskehl.
34 Stefan George with members of his circle in the gardens of Heidelberg Castle, 1919.
35 Stefan George in 1928.
36 Stefan George with Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg, Berlin, 1924.
37 Stefan George, Berthold von Stauffenberg and Cajo Partsch in 1933.
38 The courtyard of the former army headquarters, Stauffenbergstrasse, Berlin, today a museum of the German resistance to Hitler. To the left is the entrance to Stauffenberg’s office; to the centre, the site where he and his companions were shot on the evening of 20 July 1944.
39 The execution room at Ploetzensee prison, Berlin, where conspirators were hanged from rope attached to the meat-hooks.
8
Operation Barbarossa
The organisation to which Stauffenberg was posted was OKH, Oberkommando des Heeres, the General Staff or high command of the army, officially designated as the Wehrmacht. There was also a distinct, separate, overlapping and often conflicting organisation, OKW, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the high command of all the armed forces, which did not deal specifically with the Wehrmacht as such. OKH was under the supreme command of the Chief of the General Staff—who, when Stauffenberg joined it, was his old friend, Colonel-General Franz Halder, one of the guiding spirits behind the thwarted coup of 1938. OKW, on the other hand, was under the supreme and direct command of Adolf Hitler. In addition to OKH and OKW, there were a number of other chains of command: the SS and the SD; Goering and the Ministry of the Interior; the Foreign Office under Ribbentrop.
The whole set-up was a chaos of competing authorities, each in its own watertight compartment ... Hitler was obsessed by a suspicion mania. Instead of a sound, sensible organisation for war, he preferred this total confusion, since it prevented any potential concentration of power in the hands of any one authority.1
If the situation seems hopelessly baffling now, it was almost as much so to German officers at the time. One of his colleagues described a lecture Stauffenberg gave to a group of young officers training for General Staff positions. He drew diagrams on the blackboard beside him, detailing the various command organisations and the tangled links of authority and supply between them.
Before long, his diagram looked like a confused work of abstract art. Stauffenberg paused. Finally, in despair, he asked his audience if any organisation so constructed could possibly win a war.2
On another occasion, at the General Staff College, he opened a lecture as follows:
If our most highly qualified General Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organisation for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid than that which we have at present.3
The muddled command structure of the Third Reich’s armed forces is generally regarded as a major contributing factor to Germany’s eventual defeat. It was also to be the bane of Stauffenberg’s existence during the two and a half years he spent with the General Staff. Its headquarters, to which he was officially attached, were, for much of the war, frenetically peripatetic. At first OKH headquarters were shunted about between various sites in southern Germany. After the French campaign, they were established at Fontainebleau, near Paris, which enabled Stauffenberg to make frequent trips into the French capital and visit the opera. By October 1940, headquarters were back in Germany, at Zossen, near Berlin, and after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, they were moved to the Eastern Front. Eventually, during the latter phases of the war, they were installed in East Prussia, not far from Hitler’s own (OKW) headquarters at Rastenburg.
Stauffenberg was placed in charge of Group II of the General Staffs Organisation Section. The head of the section and his immediate superior was Colonel Walther Buhle, a man he did not particularly like. Subsequently, as a major-general, Buhle was to be transferred from the General Staff to Hitler’s own (OKW) headquarters—and to be injured in the blast of 20 July 1944. Among Stauffenberg’s colleagues on the General Staff was another friend, Albrecht Merz von Quirnheim. Stauffenberg’s responsibilities involved much
travel, both to the front and to support areas in the rear. He had virtually complete freedom of movement, and transport—including aircraft—was made available to him whenever he wished. At the front, he was obliged to maintain ongoing observation of various units and to monitor their battleworthiness, the state of their equipment, supply and morale. In the rear, he had to monitor training programmes in the Reserve Army, to allocate replacements, to find positions for new officers, to shunt recovered casualties back to front-line formations—and to confront the problem, increasingly insoluble as the war progressed, of keeping front-line units properly supplied, reinforced and up to strength. These and numerous other duties kept him incessantly busy. Of all the officers in his section, he is the most frequently cited in the OKH war diary for 1942.
On 1 January 1941, six months after his appointment to the General Staff, Stauffenberg was promoted to major. By this time, he was deeply involved in planning the invasion of Russia, preliminary studies for which had begun as early as July 1940. From the very beginning, he had had serious misgivings about the operation, and worried about Germany’s capacity to sustain the requisite military effort on an entirely new front. From a strategic point of view it was more important to him that Britain should be defeated or forced to peace talks before any trial of strength with the Soviet Union began. He considered the plans for the invasion of England to be viable, and believed them to have been abandoned prematurely.4
In February 1941, Rommel and the tanks of the Afrika Korps made their first appearance in North Africa, shoring up the crumbling units of Mussolini’s beleaguered army. In April, German forces invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, capturing Athens by the end of the month. In May, Stauffenberg visited the Greek capital, as well as Salonika and Crete, which had been taken by German paratroops in accordance with the principles he himself had outlined in his prize-winning paper for the General Staff College. According to Rudolph Fahrner, the possibility of deposing Hitler was again discussed at this time, but Stauffenberg was sceptical about success. The Führer, he observed cynically, ‘is still winning too many victories’.5
On 22 June 1941, the anniversary of the French surrender, Operation Barbarossa began. In flagrant violation of the non-aggression pact signed with Stalin, 175 German divisions—more than a million and a half men—smashed their way across the frontier and into the Soviet Union. It was a massive, three-pronged offensive along a front of unprecedented length. Army Group North drove towards Leningrad, eventually to besiege that city. Army Group Centre advanced on Moscow, and would come within striking range of the Russian capital. Army Group South swept through the Ukraine towards the Caucasus.
The Red Army was believed to number between 150 and 200 divisions, but during the late 1930s Stalin had purged his officer corps. In consequence, there were few senior commanders left in positions of authority, morale was poor among the troops, training inadequate and discipline slack. The Russians reeled before the speed, mobility and impact of the German offensive. They had 24,000 tanks to the Germans’ 3,550, but most were obsolete and 75 per cent of their armour was unserviceable. Despite a numerical superiority of almost three to one over the Luftwaffe, most of the Red Air Force’s 8,000 warplanes were hopelessly antiquated and unfit for combat.
By the end of the summer, the Wehrmacht had suffered some 560,000 casualties. The Russians, however, had lost four million killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and were everywhere in retreat. Even so, Hitler and his generals underestimated the Soviet Union’s resources, reserves of manpower and resilience. Industrial production, quickly relocated to beyond the Urals, was dramatically increased. New Russian units, previously unknown to the Germans, began to appear, as if from nowhere. After estimating the Soviet strength at between 150 and 200 divisions, the German high command had soon counted more than 360, and fresh ones were constantly entering the conflict. Hans von Herwarth, one of Stauffenberg’s subordinates and a cousin by marriage, described how a fellow officer arrived one day with a bottle of cognac and proposed a celebration. ‘Astonished, I asked him what in heaven’s name there was to celebrate. He replied that he had just heard on the radio that we had just destroyed our minus-100th Soviet division. We drank to our success.’6
In August, shortly after Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk, the German advance came to a halt while Hitler and the high command argued about how to proceed. Yet as early as July, and despite the enormous losses inflicted on the Russians, Stauffenberg had received a foretaste of what was to come, finding himself beset by requests for replacements, reinforcements and reserves. These were soon to become unanswerable. By the following year, there would be only a thousand new recruits to replace every ten thousand troops lost. No army could possibly sustain attrition on this scale for long.
Stauffenberg toured the front of Army Group Centre in July, familiarising himself with the situation at first hand. At Smolensk, he paid a call on Guderian, who complained that, had the advance not been interrupted, Moscow could easily have been taken before the Russians regained their balance. He also met Tresckow and Schlabrendorff in Borissov. In August, he made a similar visit to Army Group North.
At the beginning of October 1941, the German advance resumed. Army Group Centre embarked on the thrust which, after ferocious fighting, would carry it to within fifteen miles of Moscow before, on 5 December, the Russian winter brought it to a halt, achieving what the Red Army could not. In the meantime, Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, was approached on behalf of the civilian ‘Kreisau Circle’ and asked to sound him out about the prospects of conspiracy. Berthold reported back:
I have had a talk with Claus. He says that we must win the war first. While it is still going on, we cannot do anything like this, especially not in a war against the Bolsheviks. When we get home, however, we can then deal with the brown pest.7
In fact, Stauffenberg was already discussing conspiracy with army colleagues and superiors. Berthold’s reply would seem to have been dictated not by reluctance or even diffidence, but by the mistrust and scepticism with which the military plotters regarded the civilians of the ‘Kreisau Circle’, who had previously confessed themselves to be amateurs, lacking the requisite ruthlessness and expertise. Stauffenberg’s colleague on the General Staff, Major Freiherr Dietz von Thüngen, has given a vivid description of Stauffenberg at work:
What was he like? I had some inkling from the reputation which preceded him: ‘One of our very best, far above average, his character is his strong point.’ This was amply confirmed if one had an opportunity of seeing him at work. I never opened Claus’s door without finding him on the telephone, mountains of paper in front of him, the receiver in his left hand, turning over the files with his right, a pencil between his fingers. He always looked happy; depending upon who he was talking to, he would be laughing (that invariably came somewhere in the conversation) or cursing (that generally happened too), or giving an order, or laying down the law; but at the same time, he would be writing, either his great sprawling signature or short remarkably detailed notes on the files. His clerk was usually with him, and whenever there was a pause would take down, post haste, notes for the file, letters or circulars, Claus never forgetting to dictate with almost pedantic accuracy such tiresome accessories to General Staff work as letter heading, reference number and subject. Claus was one of those men who could do several things at once, all with the same concentration. He had an astounding capacity for working through files, in other words, reading them and sifting the important from the unimportant at a glance—an enormous advantage in his type of work. Equally astounding and equally striking were his capacity to concentrate, his clarity of expression and his sudden asides, which invariably hit the nail on the head and frequently took his listeners aback. When I used to visit him he was generally at the end of a twelve-, fourteen-, or even sixteen-hour day filled with telephoning, conferences, visits, dictation, working on files, notes for conferences, etc. He worked at an incredible pace, with unyielding concentration, and yet he appeared j
ust as fresh late at night as he did in the morning.8
Again and again in the reports of Stauffenberg’s colleagues, one finds testimonies to a charismatic natural authority, which prompted others, even men far senior in rank, to defer to him. According to Hans von Herwarth: ‘What surprised me was the manner in which those who surpassed him in rank recognised his natural superiority and yielded to it.’9
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 19