Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie

by Michael Baigent

  Stauffenberg’s influence among both colleagues and superiors has been effectively summed up by the biographer Joachim Kramarz:

  Young though he was, Stauffenberg soon came to be trusted by everybody. Anyone who got to know him, went to him whenever he wanted to pour his heart out, and this applied not merely to men of his own age and rank; even generals visiting headquarters from the front or from the replacement army would often seize the opportunity of having a talk with him. Whenever Stauffenberg was late for lunch, the word went round: ‘He’s got some general weeping tears in his office again.’ Matters came piling in on him which were really not his responsibility. The fact that he was thereby contravening an order from Hitler did not bother him in the least. He busied himself with anything that interested him, even if outside his official competence.10

  His position brought Stauffenberg into regular contact with his friend Franz Halder. The two men confided in each other as they could in few others.

  Stauffenberg’s personal relationship with Halder was considered as something exceptional by his fellow officers. Major (as he then was) de Maiziere, for instance, says, ‘Although two or three rungs down the ladder, Stauffenberg was the only one of the organisation section apart from the section head who from time to time did business direct with Halder and with whom Halder would discuss things personally.11

  To Halder, Stauffenberg was ‘magnetically attractive ... a born leader, one whose sole 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’.12 After the war, Halder described Stauffenberg’s hardening antipathy towards the régime:

  For hours at a time we would mull over and over possible methods of removing this monster without in the process seriously damaging the army now in contact with the enemy in fulfilment of its duty to defend the Fatherland, and without destroying the entire structure of the state ... Later, when Hitler’s decision to take the offensive against Russia was becoming ever clearer, and finally in the period when the war was being carried into Russia, our discussions revolved around the question of the way in which military means might be used to remove Hitler from the saddle without turning him into a martyr, and how the party’s grip might be broken.13

  Stauffenberg’s hostility towards the régime was now based neither on expediency nor on theoretical political grounds. According to Halder: ‘His criticism was based simply and solely upon the revolt of his whole soul against the spirit of Hitlerism.’14 This point was echoed by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who stated that ‘Stauffenberg’s objection to Hitler was fundamentally a spiritual one and in no way based on a fear of impending German military defeat or any other materialistic considerations ...’15

  A key factor in the development of Stauffenberg’s attitude was first-hand experience of the work of the SS. He had seen the notorious Einsatzkommando units performing their grisly tasks in Poland. In France, he had been privy to atrocities committed by other, regular SS and Waffen-SS units, including the murder of unarmed British soldiers who had already surrendered. In a lecture at the General Staff College after the French campaign, he had posed a sarcastic question, then answered it himself: ‘What is the difference between an SS division and an army division? Simply that SS divisions have better equipment but no divisional chaplains.’16

  Whatever the enormities committed by the SS in Poland and in France, they paled beside the carnage wrought by the Einsatzkommandos on the Russian front. Enjoying unchallenged authority even a few yards behind the front lines, they went about their murderous business with a zeal that revolted Wehrmacht personnel. Indeed, the scale and intensity of SS savagery began to produce an adverse effect on Wehrmacht morale. In December 1941, a report from Army Group Centre stated that ‘the officer corps, almost to a man, is against the shooting of Jews, prisoners and commissars’.17 SS activities were considered ‘a stain on the honour of the German army’. In a statement typical of many others, a commander declared it to be a flagrant violation of ‘our concepts of custom and decency that a mass slaughter of human beings should be carried out quite publicly’.18

  By the winter of 1941-2, OKH had established its headquarters at Vinnitsa, in the Ukraine. A fellow officer, who visited Stauffenberg at his office here, was surprised to see a portrait of the Führer above his desk. Stauffenberg quietly explained: ‘I chose this picture. And I put it up so that whoever comes here shall see the man’s expression of madness and the lack of any sense of proportion.’19 Just before leaving, Stauffenberg’s visitor asked what could possibly be done about Hitler, what might constitute a solution. ‘Kill him,’ Stauffenberg replied bluntly.

  In July 1942, Hitler paid a personal visit to OKH headquarters at Vinnitsa; and, as plate 24 in this book shows, Stauffenberg was in contact with the Führer. There is no record of what precisely passed between them, or of what Hitler might have said or done to provoke Stauffenberg to an even more intense hatred, but after the visit his statements became markedly more vehement. ‘Is there no officer over there in the Führer’s headquarters,’ he exploded one August morning, ‘capable of taking his pistol to the beast?’20 In the autumn, he replied to an officer worried about presenting a report to the Führer: ‘The point is not to tell him the truth, but to put an end to him, and I am prepared to do that.’21 On a morning ride with a colleague, he suddenly burst out in condemnation of the mass shootings of Jews and declared emphatically that such crimes could not be allowed to continue. After that, ‘during almost every ride, Stauffenberg spoke of tyrannicide. He cited Thomas Aquinas, who had maintained that in certain conditions tyrannicide was both permissible and commendable.’22

  It is very likely that Stauffenberg could have been driven to conspiratorial action as early as the summer or autumn of 1942. If he was prevented from being so, it was primarily because he found a constructive, even creative, enterprise into which he could channel both his energy and his antipathy towards the régime. This served to offset his frustrations with Hitler’s policies, and to offer an alternative to despair. Had things fallen out differently, it might also have changed the course of the war and of post-war history.

  The speed and sledgehammer force of the German advance into the Soviet Union, coupled with Soviet unpreparedness and initial military incompetence, had yielded huge numbers of prisoners-of-war. The first week of the campaign alone brought in more than 287,000. During the following months, Russian soldiers surrendered not just by thousands or even tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands at a time. Soviet armies would capitulate en masse, and the tally of prisoners was soon running into millions.

  Much of this success could be ascribed to German military prowess, but certainly not all. When the Nazi invasion began, the population of the Soviet Union had suffered cruelly at Stalin’s hands and harboured no great love for the Communist régime. In many regions, such as White Russia and the Ukraine, the advancing Germans were hailed by the populace as liberators. And if Soviet citizens were eager to welcome the invaders, so too were many units and elements of the Red Army. During the previous decade, the army, and especially the officer corps, had endured particularly severe victimisation. They had little incentive to fight and die for the dictator who had persecuted them and for the system they despised. Whatever the Nazi tyranny, many felt it could not possibly be worse than what they had already experienced; and the prospect of change seemed to offer a chance of changing things for the better. In consequence, vast numbers of soldiers and officers defected voluntarily.

  A more astute German policy could easily have turned these defectors into loyal allies, and also eroded the morale of those who continued to resist. It would not have taken much to turn both the Soviet people and the Red Army decisively against Stalin. At very least, a renewed civil war between ‘Whites’ and ‘Reds’ could have been fomented, from which the Soviet system would not have emerged unscathed and Germany could only have benefited. But according to Nazi racial
theory, Slavs, like Jews, were ‘Untermenschen’, sub-human inferior beings, who could not possibly be regarded as comrades. In his insane prejudice, Hitler insisted:

  St. Petersburg must... disappear utterly from the earth’s surface. Moscow too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia ... As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pigstyes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp.23

  The savagery with which such pronouncements were acted on transformed potential allies into the fiercest of enemies; and the Nazis irrevocably alienated precisely the people—the Soviet soldiers and citizens—who could have guaranteed their triumph. To the men of the Wehrmacht, the stupidity of the Party hierarchy was blindingly self-evident. Stauffenberg ‘was especially outraged at the treatment given to Soviet soldiers who had surrendered or been captured; he spoke about this openly and with passion’.24

  By the spring of 1942, even Goebbels was beginning to see the errors of German policy. In April of that year, he wrote in his diary:

  The inhabitants of the Ukraine were at first more than inclined to regard the Führer as the saviour of Europe and to welcome the German Wehrmacht most cordially. This attitude has changed completely in the course of months. We have hit the Russians, and especially the Ukrainians, too hard on the head with our manner of dealing with them. A clout on the head is not always a convincing argument ...25

  Just over a month later, he added: ‘Personally, I believe we must change our policies essentially as regards the people of the east.’26 No such change occurred: Hitler, Himmler and the other members of the hierarchy remained blinded by their own benighted theories. A year later, Goebbels wrote again, almost wistfully: ‘We would certainly be able to stir up many of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. against Stalin if we knew how to wage war solely against Bolshevism rather than against the Russian people.’27

  Despite the strictures imposed by Nazi ideology, the Wehrmacht did contrive to accommodate Russian prisoners, to employ them for its own purposes and thus spare them from extermination by the SS. At first they were taken on only in small numbers, and only for non-combat tasks—labour battalions, cooks, drivers and sundry auxiliary services—but gradually the numbers increased, and began to be assigned to combat rôles as well. Battalion-sized units were formed, and these were later expanded into ‘legions’. While such units were originally confined to non-Russian Soviet soldiers—Georgians, for example, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians—Russian soldiers were also eventually incorporated. There were attempts, too, to find high-ranking Soviet officers who could be employed as propaganda figures, to induce rank-and-file soldiery to desert and take up German arms. For this purpose, two organisations were established, the Russian Liberation Movement, or R.O.D., and the Russian Liberation Army, or R.O.A.28 The ‘army’, of course, did not actually exist in practice, but its mere name gave Russians serving with German forces a sense of unity and identity; and they were further encouraged by being given R.O.A. patches and insignia to sew on their uniforms. By the beginning of 1943, between 130,000 and 150,000 Soviet soldiers (some 176 battalions and thirty-eight independent companies) were enrolled in the Wehrmacht. A key figure in recruiting them was Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, one of Halder’s senior aides, then chief of intelligence on the Eastern front and eventually, after the war, head of the West German secret service. Working closely with Gehlen were a number of figures—Tresckow, for example—who subsequently would be involved in the conspiracy of 1944. Among Gehlen’s most trusted personal friends was Claus von Stauffenberg.

  Stauffenberg’s position with the General Staff made him more privy than most to the appalling drain and wastage of German manpower. The statistics were becoming daily more alarming. Infantry companies were being reduced from 180 men to a mere eighty. In January 1942 alone, Army Group Centre suffered losses of 95,000 and received only 10,300 replacements. By the autumn, total losses would exceed total reinforcements by 800,000, and this deficit would soon soar to more than a million. On the basis of such figures, one could calculate and project a precise date at which the entire Wehrmacht would quite simply cease to exist.

  The Red Army offered an attractive possible solution for Stauffenberg, who was personally saddled with the responsibility of plugging the gaping holes in Germany’s troop strength. Not, of course, that he believed a clearcut German victory against the Soviet Union was any longer possible. He had no illusions about that now. But he thought it feasible that Russian troops could at least be used as a buffer, and perhaps as a German-sponsored instrument in a civil war that might topple Stalin’s régime. If nothing else, the stain on the Wehrmacht might be lessened, a respite might be obtained and an opportunity vouchsafed for Germany to restore her ebbing supplies of manpower. There might also arise some prospect of much more grandiose and ambitious designs.

  For Stauffenberg, 150,000 Soviet soldiers in German uniform was only the beginning. He was after something more, and knew well enough that it was there for the taking, if only bureaucracy could be neutralised and Nazi prejudice overcome or circumvented. His first step involved wresting Russian prisoners from certain death at the hands of the SS and obtaining direct authority over them. In the past, such captives, when they were enrolled in the Wehrmacht at all, were enrolled on an ad hoc basis by individual units; but as their numbers grew and their need for clothing, arms and equipment increased proportionately, Stauffenberg’s section of OKH had a legitimate justification for becoming involved. It was soon in sole charge of ‘organising into units all former Soviet soldiers who had volunteered to serve in the Wehrmacht’. By virtue of the ‘efforts of Stauffenberg and his staff ... the volunteers were made the responsibility of army headquarters and not the SS’.29 When Hitler decreed the recruitment of Russian troops to cease, Stauffenberg managed to get the order modified and, in practice, ignored, to such a degree that the Führer had to issue additional orders in the following months. When yet another order definitively forbade all further recruitment, Stauffenberg had it released to the army command three weeks before it took effect, thus enabling recruitment to be accelerated during the intervening time.

  Stauffenberg contrived to circumvent not only Hitler, but also lesser minions of the Reich, such as Alfred Rosenberg, the noxious racial theoretician formerly in charge of Nazi ideological training and now Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Like his master, Rosenberg hated Russians, but he persuaded the Führer to sanction recruitment of non-Russian Soviet soldiers. According to Hans von Herwarth:

  Making use of the ‘discovery’ of the SS that the Cossacks were an independent people, Stauffenberg gave orders that they were exempt from Hitler’s ban. We in our turn saw to it that the exception was widely publicised. As a result, thousands of POW’s—many of them Russians—took the hint, identified themselves as Cossacks and left the camps.30

  At the same time Stauffenberg was engaged in an ongoing struggle to ensure that Soviet volunteers received the same treatment as all other Wehrmacht personnel. A civilian observer speaks of a conference in June 1942, at which Stauffenberg ‘gave a masterly exposé, ending with an extempore draft of an instruction laying down equality of treatment for the volunteers’. When Hitler proposed a different coloured uniform for the volunteers, Stauffenberg managed to thwart the idea. Hans von Herwarth reports entering Stauffenberg’s office one day and seeing an order on his desk to the effect that all Russian prisoners were to be tattooed with an identification mark on the buttocks. Stauffenberg

  quickly telephoned the general who was in a position to reverse the order ... I listened in amazement as he pressed his case by assuring the general that, when next they met on Unter den Linden ... he, Stauffenberg, would challenge the general’s identity and require him to drop his trousers to prove he was not a Russian captive.31

  The order was summarily withdrawn.

  By the
autumn of 1942, Stauffenberg and one of his colleagues had set up an umbrella organisation called the ‘Russian Propaganda Section’. Under the auspices of this section, a training programme was instituted: the ‘Russian Leadership Centre’. Its personnel were recruited so as to constitute ‘a skeleton officer corps’. Stauffenberg ‘set great store by getting the right leaders for these units under his care. He did not want them turned into hired and misused auxiliaries, but to form them into freedom-loving battle groups retaining their own customs and traditions.’32

  Primarily as a result of Stauffenberg’s efforts, more than 800,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war were on active service with the Wehrmacht by 1943. It is interesting to speculate on how he himself may have conceived of deploying them. It has been suggested that he may have regarded them as the nucleus of a potential ‘third force’, which could be utilised against the tyranny of both Stalin and Hitler.33 If they could have stemmed the tide, or at least stabilised the situation, on the Eastern front, they might then have been turned westwards, against the machinery of the Reich itself. Such a hypothesis is intriguing. It is difficult to believe that something of the sort did not, at one time or another, cross Stauffenberg’s mind; and some evidence has been adduced to indicate that he was actually trying to implement, if only in embryo, some such design. But he, along with everyone else, was soon to be overtaken by events. By the end of 1942, the situation on the Eastern front was to have become irretrievable, almost entirely as a result of Hitler’s own perversity.