In August 1942, the German 6th Army under Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, driving far to the south of Moscow, had pushed the Russians into Stalingrad, strategically sited on the Volga. Early in September, Paulus’s troops attacked the city’s western suburbs, fighting their way through a desperate house-to-house Russian defence. By mid-October, all but three sectors had fallen. Unknown to the Germans, however, the Russians had been secretly reinforced, and more than a million men were now mobilised in the countryside just beyond Stalingrad. On 21 September, while the Germans were still advancing, the first phase of a three-pronged Russian counter-offensive had begun, striking down from the north. The second prong struck from the south on 1 November. On 19 November, a massive artillery barrage inaugurated the third thrust, in the centre. By 23 November, twenty-two German and satellite Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian divisions—some 300,000 men—had been completely encircled.
A German relief force under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein attacked the Russians from the south on 12 December, fighting to within twenty-five miles of Paulus’s encircled army. By now Hitler was at his most hysterical. In September, when things had first begun to go wrong, he had petulantly sacked Halder as Chief of the General Staff and appointed a new commander, Colonel-General Kurt Zeitzler. Although certainly competent enough, Zeitzler was reduced to the status of a puppet and the Führer assumed control himself. Now, in one of his increasingly frequent tantrums, he furiously forbade Paulus to break out of the Russian encirclement and link up with Manstein’s approaching relief force. German soldiers could not be seen to retreat. They could only go forward. Without Paulus breaking out to reinforce and support it, Manstein’s relief force was defeated and compelled to withdraw, while Paulus remained trapped, the ring of Russian steel closing tightly on him and his surrounded army.
On 8 January 1943, the Russians invited Paulus to surrender. On Hitler’s frenzied orders, Paulus refused, and the Russians attacked again two days later. By 16 January, the German 6th Army had been squeezed into a pocket nine miles by fifteen. In a new crescendo of manic rage, Hitler forbade either retreat or surrender. Every German unit was to fight to the last man, and any soldier who did not die in his tracks was guilty of treason, to be punished accordingly. Against starvation, cold, disease and the ferocity of the Russian onslaughts, such menacing fulminations were puerile. On 31 January, Paulus and a pitiful 91,000 troops of the battered 6th Army surrendered. On 2 February, one Panzer corps which had continued to resist was annihilated. That afternoon, a German aircraft flying over the site of the carnage radioed back that all fighting had ceased. Since November, more than 200,000 German soldiers had perished. Of the 91,000 who surrendered, only 5,000 would ever find their way back to the Fatherland.
Stauffenberg had been a friend and admirer of Paulus. He had corresponded sympathetically with the hapless field marshal about the worsening situation at Stalingrad, and the stupidity on Hitler’s part which had produced it. On a visit to Germany in mid-January, he met his colleague Lieutenant-Colonel Werner Reerink, who reported Stauffenberg’s reaction to the imminent débâcle:
In the evening Stauffenberg took me for a walk through the Mauerwald, since, as he said, one could talk more freely in the open than in the office huts. He told me the detailed story of the vain efforts by OKH to persuade Hitler to order the breakout from Stalingrad and to save the lives of 300,000 men. OKH had been supported by Goebbels, who had shown himself most sensible—he had been the only Party man to take the attitude that the German people must be told the truth about Stalingrad and about the general situation. With Goebbels’ help they had almost got Hitler to issue the order for the breakout while there was still time. At the decisive briefing conference, however, Goering had taken the floor with the words: ‘My Führer, I guarantee that my Luftwaffe will keep the Stalingrad army supplied.’ Hitler had thereupon decided: ‘Sixth Army will remain in Stalingrad.’ Stauffenberg was totally and obviously shattered by such irresponsible and treacherous behaviour. He told me this in so many words.34
Like most other professional military men, Stauffenberg was severely shaken by events at Stalingrad. Defeat in itself would have been tolerable, but this was more than any conventional defeat, since it could have been averted. An entire German army, which in other circumstances could have retreated and lived to fight another day, had been utterly and pointlessly squandered, solely to appease the Führer’s vindictive wrath. In the early days of the war, many Germans, including a good many soldiers, had believed Hitler to be endowed with an uncanny intuitive military genius, an unerring aptitude for the decisive stroke that invited comparisons with Napoleon and Frederick the Great. The Russian campaign had called this belief into question. Stalingrad made it all too clear that the Führer was no more than a bloodthirsty amateur, and a fool whose infantile petulance had to be paid for in German lives. Burdened with the responsibility of making good the appalling wastage, Stauffenberg found it difficult to control his temper. On one occasion, when a number of younger staff officers expressed a desire to get away from headquarters and see action at the front, Stauffenberg retorted:
‘What is this sham heroism, going and getting yourselves shot like hundreds of thousands of others “in faithful performance of duty”. This is nothing but cowardly evasion, no better than the field marshals who make the excuse of their duty to obey and their “purely military outlook”. We have to have something quite different. When, by reason of his office or his upbringing, a man reaches high rank, a moment arrives when the man and the job are identical and no second thoughts can weigh with him; it is his duty to represent the general consensus of opinion. How few there are now who behave that way or even feel that they should do so. We have now got butchers and bakers and candlestick makers dressed up as generals. They draw their pay, do their “duty”, put their trust in the Führer and look forward to their next leave. What a way to run a country!’35
He then recited Stefan George’s ‘Verses for the Dead’, which invoked a time ‘when men of the future are purged of dishonour’ and ‘men of this nation no longer are cowards’.
Stauffenberg was loved, respected, even revered by the younger officers at OKH headquarters. His magnetism and charisma had often held them in thrall. One can imagine the effect produced by George’s harsh, stark and incantatory stanzas—especially in the prevailing sombre atmosphere, the pall rendered ever darker with every fresh communiqué from Stalingrad.
As the plight of Paulus’s doomed army became grimly apparent, Stauffenberg became more outspoken. After talking to senior officers about the need to confront Hitler with the reality of the situation, he returned, disappointed. To his colleagues, he reported, with exasperation, that their superiors ‘are scared shitless or have straw in their heads’.36 On another occasion, he attended a lecture for some forty staff officers, given by a civilian functionary, on German agricultural policy in the east. At the end of the lecture, Stauffenberg requested permission to speak, then proceeded to do so for half an hour. The lecturer subsequently reported:
Feeling responsible for the replacement of troops in the east ... he was watching the disastrous course of Germany’s Eastern policy with horror. We were sowing hatred which would one day be avenged on our children. Any examination of the replacement issue made it absolutely clear that victory in the East was possible only if Germany succeeded in winning over the local population ... the only thing our policy in the East was likely to achieve was to turn the masses there into Germany’s enemies. It was scandalous that at a time when millions of soldiers were staking their lives not one of the leaders had the courage to speak to the Führer openly about such matters, though it might be at the risk of his own life.37
The lecturer further commented that no one had dared to mention this in public before.
I was deeply impressed by Stauffenberg’s arguments, especially as they were put forward with such conviction that you felt certain he himself had the courage he demanded of the leaders. I was greatly surprised t
hat it was possible to speak so openly in a circle of General Staff officers, and even more so at the fact that the chairman of the meeting, far from refuting Stauffenberg’s criticism, declared that they all felt the same.38
By this time, it appears, Stauffenberg’s outspokenness was beginning to attract attention in unwelcome quarters. Although he himself had no great respect for Halder’s replacement, General Zeitzler, the general regarded him as ‘a good future corps and army commander’. Such promising material could not be spared, and on 1 January 1943, Stauffenberg was accordingly promoted to lieutenant-colonel. Almost immediately, and without being consulted on the matter, he was notified of his transfer to the post of Senior Staff Officer (Operations) for the 10th Panzer Division in North Africa. Zeitzler stated officially: ‘I wished to give him experience as a staff officer with troops and in command, in order to prepare him for later command of a corps and an army’, but the transfer was also clearly motivated by a desire to get the dangerously forthright and explicit 36-year-old officer away from the Eastern front, where he was ‘making waves’, and as far distant as possible from the clutches of the SS and SD.39 Stauffenberg himself recognised the necessity for this. Just before departing for North Africa, he remarked: ‘It is time I disappeared from here.’40 And on reporting to his new divisional commander, he stated that German soil ‘was slowly becoming too hot’ for him.41
After his frustrating and demoralising experience with OKH in Russia, North Africa must have seemed a welcome change for Stauffenberg. It offered the prospect of a ‘clean war’, waged in a traditional, even chivalrous, style, between professional soldiers and commanders who respected each other as adversaries. Compared to other theatres of operation, there were no serious atrocities. There was minimal interference, at least on the ground, from Party bosses, from politicians and even from the Führer. A few Gestapo personnel operated in cities like Casablanca and Tunis, but there were no SS or SD accompanying the troops and pursuing their murderous activities immediately behind the lines.
Despite these attractive considerations, Stauffenberg appears to have been not altogether free of misgivings, or perhaps just a nagging residual sense of guilt. He threw himself with zest into his responsibilities with 10th Panzer Division, but it was almost as if there were something slightly dishonourable in his transfer—an interruption of his ongoing activities elsewhere, an abandonment of his personal crusade, an attempt to evade his destiny. If, in the eyes of the gods, that was indeed the case, he was soon to be punished for it. Within two months, destiny, in the form of a strafing American P-40, was to catch up with him—and place him, maimed and desperately wounded, squarely at the centre of the situation from which North Africa had seemingly offered a refuge.
Part Four
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEART AND SOUL OF GERMANY
9
After the War of Liberation
As Robert Musil has stated, the collective impulses, urges, fears, aspirations, yearnings, dreams and tensions of a people or a culture would, if contained in the psyche of a single individual, produce a frothing lunatic. That, of course, applies to all peoples and cultures. Humanity has long known itself to be its own worst enemy. Nevertheless if the psyche of a ‘sane’ individual cannot accommodate the spectrum of human experience as a whole, it can still provide, in miniature or in microcosm, some indication of the broader logic governing peoples and cultures. Like individuals, people and cultures pass through periods of collective infancy and childhood, adolescence and youth, maturity and adulthood, senescence and decay. Like individuals, peoples and cultures pass through phases of well-being and maladjustment, health and disease, self-confidence and self-doubt, exuberant energy and apathetic torpor. And like individuals, peoples and cultures can undergo agonising identity crises.
In the half-century since the Second World War, the Third Reich has been explained in terms of many kinds of phenomena—sociological, economic, ideological, psychological. It was, of course, a combination of all of these. But it was a manifestation of something else as well, something much older, and more deeply rooted, than anything arising from the specific circumstances of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was a manifestation of—and an attempt to resolve—what might be described as a collective identity crisis, an anxious and long-standing quest for self-definition. The resolution posited by the Third Reich can now be seen as misguided, benighted, demonic and thoroughly inimical to humanity. But the problem that engendered it still exists, and remains unresolved. Germany is still in the throes of a collective identity crisis, still in quest of a viable self-definition. The problem has, if anything, become even more acute with the difficulties thrown up by reunification in 1990. If the Third Reich’s putative resolution of the problem proved more destructive and disastrous than anything else, Claus von Stauffenberg offers a more positive and constructive alternative, not just for Germany, but for Western society as a whole. In order to see how and why he does, however, the problem itself must be explored more fully.
In the early nineteenth century, Prussia began to exert a significant influence on the rest of Germany, and to challenge Austria for the opportunity, if not the right, to mould and shape German politics and the German collective psyche. The struggle between these two powers extended from the Oder in the east to the Rhine in the west, from the Baltic in the north to the Alps in the south. But it was also a psychological struggle enacted in the mentality of individual Germans, and Claus von Stauffenberg was no exception. He, too, provided an arena for the struggle. The struggle continued on both a personal and a cultural level long after it had been decided politically by the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Ultimately, Austria and Prussia can be seen as metaphors (what T. S. Eliot calls ‘objective correlatives’) for a polarity in the German collective psyche. Whatever happened on the battlefield or at the negotiating table, Austria and Prussia remained symbolic embodiments of a less tangible, more internalised conflict. In effect, Austria and Prussia were not just geographical or political entities, but also orientations, attitudes and states of mind.
The principle that made Prussia so dynamic a military power in Frederick the Great’s time was not nationalism as we know it today, nor even as it existed in other nations at the time. Frederick’s soldiers and administrators acted less out of devotion to the state than out of a kind of feudal loyalty to their monarch. Their loyalty was, in effect, not patriotism, but an unquestioning allegiance to a charismatic king. It was not until the Napoleonic era that allegiance was transferred from the sovereign to the state. Prussian (and German) nationalism was, in fact, born out of the conflict with Napoleonic France. That conflict was initially traumatic, then euphorically uplifting—for Germany in general and for Prussia in particular.
Until 1806, Prussia had reposed on the martial laurels won by Friedrich, the ‘Soldier King’, nearly half a century before. The army of Napoleonic France had proved invincible against Italians, Austrians and Russians, but no one at the time doubted that it would crumble against the Prussian military machine. In the years since Friedrich, however, the Prussian military machine had become slack and lazy, ill-disciplined, ill-led and complacent. It had done nothing to update its tactics or its organisation, nothing to adapt to the new premises and conditions of early nineteenth-century warfare.
On 14 October 1806, the Prussian army engaged the forces of Imperial France in two simultaneous battles. At Jena, the university town adjacent to Weimar and south-west of Leipzig, 53,000 Prussians confronted Napoleon himself and the main body of his army, 96,000 in number. A few miles away, at Auerstadt, some 63,500 Prussians and Saxons engaged a detached wing of the French army, 27,000 strong, under one of Napoleon’s marshals. In the two battles, the French suffered some 13,000 casualties. The Prussians suffered three and a half times that number, and another 18,000 were taken prisoner. But Jena and Auerstadt were more than comprehensive military defeats for Prussia. The initially orderly Prussian retreat deteriorated into a total rout; and the army that had so d
istinguished itself under Frederick the Great disintegrated in headlong flight, abandoning arms, equipment, cohesion and all semblance of martial discipline. By the end of the day, it had ceased to exist as an effective fighting force. Immediately thereafter, other Prussian units surrendered wholesale, and the number of Prussian prisoners soon exceeded 150,000. Towns and fortresses capitulated without resistance; and on 27 October, Napoleon rode in triumph into Berlin, which had been evacuated by the government and left undefended. By mid-November the whole of Prussia was under French control.
The Treaty of Tilsit, signed in July 1807, reduced Prussia to the status of a French satellite—a status similar to that of, say, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Poland under the post-Second World War Soviet imperium. Prussia was dragooned into a reluctant alliance with Napoleon, and her allegiance was humiliatingly guaranteed by the establishment of French garrisons and officials throughout the country—an arrangement anticipating, albeit with rôles reversed, that which took place in Nazi-dominated France under the Vichy government. The Prussian army was restricted in size to a token 42,000 men.
For all Prussians, the terms of the treaty constituted a mortifying national embarrassment, an ignominious capitulation that shattered national self-esteem. Yet the very intensity of the shame felt attested to a coalescing sense of national identity, something which many Prussians at the time were surprised to discover within themselves.
Stung by his country’s abasement, a cavalry major, one Ferdinand von Schill, embarked on his own freelance rebellion. Shortly after the Treaty of Tilsit, Schill formed a partisan cavalry unit, with which he resolved to pursue the war against France independently (just as numerous guerrilla units were shortly to do in Spain). Predictably, Schill’s quixotic plans for revolt came to nothing and he died in May 1809, fighting in the streets of the Baltic port of Stralsund, where he had hoped to link up with a British expeditionary force that never materialised. None the less, at a stroke, he became a national hero whose portrait was soon hanging in homes, offices and barracks across the whole of Prussia. He also posed a question which had never arisen in the Prussian military before—whether insubordination, under certain circumstances, might not be justifiable.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 21