Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie

by Michael Baigent

  Schill’s personal martyrdom accomplished nothing, but it paved the way for two subsequent acts of insubordination which were to have much more weighty consequences. These acts were to involve two of Claus von Stauffenberg’s ancestors, and came to figure prominently in his mind as august precedents.

  At the beginning of 1812, Napoleon began to prepare for his disastrous invasion of Russia. In order to protect his rear, he forced Prussia into an agreement that involved fresh humiliations. The country was obliged to consent to a full-scale military occupation, and was further coerced into making available one corps (nearly half the size of the permitted army) for the French emperor’s grand designs. Some 20,000 Prussians were forcibly attached to the French army and ordered to participate, as a covering force, in the invasion of Russia.

  In angry reaction to these terms, there took place the mass protest known as the ‘Resignation of the Three Hundred’. Led by Gneisenau, Clausewitz and a number of others, three hundred prominent and high-ranking officers resigned from the Prussian Officer Corps—almost a quarter of the corps’ total strength. Some of them, like Clausewitz, even fled to Russia and enlisted in the Tsar’s service. Although the resignations were not officially branded an act of mutiny, that is what they were.

  Prussian defiance did not stop there. Gerhard von Scharnhorst, Gneisenau’s colleague, had also attempted to resign. His resignation was refused, but he was allowed to relinquish his position as Chief of the General Staff. As Napoleon’s invasion force marched eastwards, Scharnhorst, working within the Prussian military administration, and Gneisenau, acting outside it, undertook to build an entirely new Prussian army: a ‘citizens’ army’ this time, no longer dominated by the old Junker aristocracy, with noble pedigrees no longer being required for commissions and promotion being based, as in France, on merit. Under the very noses of the occupying French, a new, secret and shadowy Prussian army was clandestinely created and mobilised—not a mere guerrilla force, but a full-fledged military machine intended to take the field and meet its adversaries in pitched battle. This process of martial reconstruction was implemented in flagrant breach of all signed treaties with France, and in clear defiance of the government and King Friedrich Wilhelm III.

  While Prussia’s ‘citizens’ army’ was quietly mustering in his rear, Napoleon continued his advance into Russia. On 7 September 1812, the French Grande Armée engaged the Russians at the bloody Battle of Borodino, depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Borodino was technically a French victory but losses on both sides were enormous, and while the Russians could afford such casualties, the invaders—as Hitler was to learn 130 years later—could not. With his maimed and depleted troops, Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, only to find the city—where he had hoped to rest, regroup and replenish his forces—evacuated and set aflame. Deprived of food, shelter and the anticipated respite, he embarked, on 19 October, on his retreat back to France. This retreat lasted through all the depredations of the Russian winter, and was harried constantly by regular Russian units, as well as by partisan guerrillas.

  The withdrawing Grande Armée reached Prussian territory in December. Invoking his agreement with the Prussian government, Napoleon requested a Prussian corps to cover his retreat and delay the advance of the pursuing Russians. The corps placed at his disposal was commanded by another of Stauffenberg’s ancestors, Hans Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg.

  On 30 December 1812, Yorck negotiated and concluded a secret agreement of his own with the Russians at Tauroggen. Having signed it, he said to the officers of his staff:

  ‘Gentlemen, I do not know what I shall say to the king about my action. Perhaps he will call it treason. If so, I shall carry the consequences.’1

  Then, acting entirely on his own initiative, without having received any orders or informed his superiors, he officially declared his soldiers to be neutral and withdrew them from all operations. According to one commentator:

  This was the most signal act of insubordination in Prussian history and, in the context of the moment, next door to a coup d’état, inasmuch as it virtually compelled the government in Berlin to take the logical next step and declare war on France.2

  Confronted with Yorck’s fait accompli, Berlin declared war on 16 March. No longer neutral by then, Yorck’s corps was already in combat, aligned with the Russians against the retreating French. At the same time, the ‘citizens’ army’ raised in secret by Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and their colleagues broke cover, took the field and joined Yorck’s regulars, bringing the Prussian deployment up to maximum strength. The combined Russian and Prussian forces, soon to be reinforced by Austrians and Swedes, proceeded to harry the Grande Armée’s beleaguered veterans across Germany and back into France. Here, they linked up with Wellington’s British army advancing from Spain across the Pyrenees, and forced Napoleon to abdicate.

  Prompted by Yorck’s audacious action, Prussia had, in effect, undergone a kind of revolution, perhaps unprecedented in European history: it had not been implemented from below, by the masses, nor had it been a palace coup. It had been forged by a unique alliance between the Prussian populace, particularly the peasantry and aristocracy, against their government and their king, compelling the reluctant régime to enter the war against its own wishes. No one was unduly concerned about the legitimacy of the enterprise. According to Prussian nobles at the time, ‘we were here before the Hohenzollern’; and this, of course, applied to the peasantry as well. One is reminded of the revolts of Luther’s time, when both peasants and Free Knights of the Empire defied the authority of their imperial master, Charles V.

  Yorck’s independent action and Prussia’s subsequent declaration of war inaugurated what became known as the War of Liberation, and it liberated not just Prussia, but the whole of Germany, from the occupying French. It left the country with a new, well-trained and immensely powerful army, reconstructed along the lines defined by Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and their colleagues. When Napoleon, after his first abdication, escaped from Elba and took the field again, it was this army that mobilised first among the continental powers. Commanded officially by the aged Marshal Blücher, but with Gneisenau as Chief of Staff and making the major strategic decisions, it was this army that came to Wellington’s aid at Waterloo.

  The War of Liberation triggered a wave of euphoria, verging on hysteria, throughout the whole of Germany. This was something the country had never hitherto experienced. For the first time, the focus of loyalty was not the monarch—indeed, the monarch had been defied, circumvented and rendered impotent—but Prussia, and, beyond Prussia, Germany. Prussia and Germany were embraced and extolled with as much fanatical fervour as if they were new discoveries; and service in their cause was espoused with a rapture verging on the messianic. Men of all ages, of all classes, from all quarters of Germany, rallied exuberantly to the colours. The martial traditions of Frederick the Great were revived and whipped up into a Zeitgeist. So numerous was the influx of recruits that not even the new and expanded Prussian army could accommodate them. Paramilitary organisations sprang up, composed of over-zealous youths parading extravagant uniforms and protuberant military ineptitude. War fever raged, and not even the rigorous discipline instituted by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau could altogether contain it.

  The campaigns of 1813, 1814 and 1815 midwifed the birth of a German nationalism which bore a distinctly Prussian and militaristic stamp. Although Austria had also re-entered the conflict against France, her army had performed lamely all through the Napoleonic Wars, and continued to do so now. As far as the German principalities were concerned, Austria had been relegated to a peripheral rôle. It was Prussia that first rose in revolt, Prussia that fielded the effective soldiery, Prussia that served as the beacon, the tutelary genius, the guiding spirit and principle. It was from Prussia that the greatest energy and enthusiasm emanated, and Prussia that therefore provided the primary inspiration.

  Amid the martial hysteria sweeping Germany, one voice was raised in opposition. It was nevertheless a voice
which, for more than a generation, had exerted an influence across the whole of Europe and even Britain, a voice which spoke with a godlike authority and had appointed itself the voice of the German people. The voice was that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

  It is difficult for us today, in the world of mass media and celebrities of a very different order, to appreciate the magnitude of Goethe’s influence and the Olympian status he enjoyed. Cultural commentators and critics invariably compare him to Shakespeare or to Pushkin. Except perhaps for Tolstoy, no literary figure since Goethe has exercised such authority or received such widespread acclaim. His work and thought dominated the whole of European literature for nearly half a century and his influence is discernible in writers as diverse as Byron, Shelley, Poe, Melville, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo. While Pushkin was a folk hero to the Russian people (after his death, 32,000 people a day filed past his home in Petersburg), Goethe was venerated with an almost religious zeal. To the German people, he was their universally acknowledged ‘Great Man’, their claim to fame, their spokesman to the world, their collective voice.

  Goethe’s influence extended far beyond literature. He was considered a leading statesman, philosopher, critic and scientist. His work and thought encompassed virtually the whole of human endeavour; and he commanded as much respect from such men as Alexander von Humboldt, the distinguished explorer and scientist, as he did from the artistic world. He has often been described as ‘the last Renaissance man’.

  Tsar Alexander I had met him and honoured him with the Order of Saint Anne. Napoleon, too, had met him and conferred on him the Cross of the Legion of Honour. He and the French emperor formed their own mutual admiration society. Each saw in the other an image of himself. Goethe was the Napoleon of arts, letters, culture, the life of the spirit, while Napoleon was the Goethe of politics, diplomacy and war. Both were flattered by the comparison.

  And Goethe—this imperious Olympian figure in the sphere of the mind—was implacably hostile to German nationalism. His antipathy rested not on conventional social or political grounds, but on grounds of self-definition and national identity.

  What does it ‘mean’ to be ‘English’? It is doubtful that many Englishmen have asked themselves that question. For those who have, the answer would probably consist of a helpless shrug of the shoulders, seeming so self-evident as to defy verbal formulation. Or it would consist of clichéd and stereotyped traits or characteristics—the ‘stiff upper lip’, for instance. But these are descriptions of attributes. They do not answer the question of what being English actually ‘means’.

  For centuries, there has been no need to question the ‘meaning’ of being English, and the question itself has become meaningless. Being English is something taken for granted. So, too, is being French. Thus, for example, the major English novelists of the nineteenth century—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Trollope—will examine English society, English manners and mores, and the English character, but they will not probe the nature of the English ‘soul’. Similarly, whatever the concerns of Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola and Victor Hugo, the French ‘soul’ is not among them.

  Such complacency is not as universal as most Englishmen and Frenchmen automatically and unwittingly assume. There are other cultures and peoples for whom the problem of self-definition has been an incessant source of uncertainty, of anxiety—a matter not unlike that of a youth passing through the familiar ‘identity crisis’, and tormenting himself with baffling, seemingly unfathomable enigmas. ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is this “thing”, this elusive and mysterious “entity”, that I call my “self”?’ ‘What is my true nature?’ ‘Why am I here?’ ‘What is the purpose of my existence?’ ‘How can I determine—if such a thing exists at all—what constitutes my “destiny”?’ ‘What is the character of my soul, assuming such a thing exists, and how does it differ from other people’s?’ Such questions may not seem in the least applicable to the fact of being English or French. For centuries, however, they have been of obsessive relevance to the fact of being Russian or German. Unlike Englishmen or Frenchmen, Russians and Germans have consistently been tortured by the ‘meaning’ of being what they are. The nature of the ‘German soul’ has preoccupied German writers from Goethe, through Thomas Mann, to Günter Grass and Siegfried Lenz, and the ‘Russian soul’ has preoccupied Russian writers from Pushkin, through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Andrey Bely, to Andrey Bitov today.

  At a number of points in their respective histories, Germany and Russia have seen themselves as a kind of frontier. Each has considered itself a demarcation line between conflicting principles—between west and east, between culture and barbarism, between rationality and irrationality. Each has deemed itself an arbiter between these principles, burdened with the responsibility, even the mission, of reconciling and synthesising them. More often than not, this has meant the subordination of one principle to another, which led to grotesque imbalances and disastrous consequences. For the matter cannot be reduced to a simplistic form based—as it usually is—on facile value judgements.

  Rationality, for example, can indeed be a positive force, associated with culture, civilisation, sanity, order, moderation, tolerance and humanity. But it also has its negative aspects: aridity, sterility, desiccated legalism, ‘soulless bureaucracy’, uniformity and a mechanical adherence to logic. ‘Sweet reason’ can only too easily find its apotheosis in the computer, or in such vacuous Utopias as those of Brave New World and 1984.

  Conversely, irrationality can be a negative force associated with barbarism, madness, chaos, anarchy, intolerance, a frenzied orgiastic abandonment and ‘bestiality’. Yet it has positive aspects, too: tenderness, affection, passion, intuition, imagination, inspiration, vitality, spontaneity, creative energy. None of these things originates in rationality. Only too often it stifles them.

  Since Peter the Great’s time at the dawn of the eighteenth century, Russia has sought to impose the structures of Western rationality on a people for whom such structures were often alien, even inimical. The revolution of 1917 ushered in a régime that was yet more rational, derivative from alien sources, and out of touch with the reality of the domain it sought to rule. In consequence, Russia’s rationality—imported first from French philosophers of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, then from Marx—has consistently proved a fragile and brittle thing. Andrey Bely, the greatest Russian novelist of the twentieth century, builds his most important work, St. Petersburg around a single central symbol—Peter the Great’s rigorously geometric, rectilinear, logical and systematic city artificially constructed on the amorphous, undifferentiated foundation of a swamp. This metaphor, for Bely, sums up the relationship between rationality and irrationality in Russia, between consciousness and the unconscious, between the régime and its subjects. The façade of ordered and rational Western civilisation rests precariously on a quagmire of something much more instinctive, inchoate, emotional and temperamental—something which can perhaps be dominated by the superstructure of reason, but never ultimately shaped or transformed by it.

  Bely was writing on the eve of the Russian Revolution. By that time, Germany had been wrestling with essentially the same problem, the relationship between rationality and irrationality, for considerably longer—since Luther’s era at least, if not since the Middle Ages. Germany, after all, was the frontier between the high civilisation of ancient Rome and Eastern ‘barbarism’. It was the ‘end of the world’, or, at least, the end of the European world. What lay beyond seemed as forbidding, as mysterious, as vast, as intimidating, as inimical as the Atlantic, seen from, say, the west coast of Ireland. In his most famous work, The Demons, the Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer describes the reactions of the Teutonic mind when first confronted with the seemingly endless vacancy to the east—the vacancy of the Hungarian plain, the Russian steppe. The Teutonic mind, Doderer says, is numbed and overwhelmed by disquiet, by an intimation of the numinous, whether sub-rational or supra-ration
al.

  Even more than Russians, Germans saw their country as a focal point, the European nerve centre where the currents of East and West, as well as the characteristics symbolically associated with each, converged. Among other things, this dictated a different orientation in gender. Despite the rational structures imposed first by Peter, then by Lenin and Stalin, Russia remained for her people a feminine and maternal entity—‘Mother Russia’. Germany veered towards a masculine, patriarchal and paternalistic collective identity—the ‘Fatherland’. Despite this, for Germany as for Russia, the irrational continued to lurk precariously close to the surface, liable at any moment to erupt and usurp dominion. The more urgently the German psyche endeavoured to distance itself from the irrational, the closer it approached. Why this should be is a complex matter, requiring some explanation.

  The human creative activity which appeals most obviously to rationality is philosophy. From classical Greece onwards, philosophy has been seen as a unique adjunct of ‘higher’ civilisations based on reason. (Until very recently, philosophy encompassed science and mathematics, both of which are no longer classified among the ‘Humanities’.)

  The human creative activity which appeals most obviously to the irrational is music. Music is not a unique attribute of ‘higher’ civilisations. It plays a prominent rôle in the most ‘primitive’ and ‘barbaric’.