She had known that something was planned: Major-General Tresckow had told her on 10 July that ‘it had to be done’. She had frequent contact with many of the conspirators and noticed on 18 and 19 July that everyone had become very nervous. In fact, she thought them too nervous to carry it through.
On 20 July, General Heusinger’s aide had come to visit Steinort and take coffee with Gottliebe von Lehndorff. At 2 p.m. the telephone rang; it was OKH headquarters; he was to report immediately to the Wolfsschanze. He returned to Steinort at 4 p.m. saying, ‘I saw Hitler and nothing happened to him. Everyone is completely crazy there.’ Shortly before this, Ribbentrop’s adjutant had come and informed her of the bomb and Hitler’s survival.
Heinrich von Lehndorff was brought before the people’s court: he stood his ground, saying, ‘I have done this because I consider Hitler to be a murderer.’
Gottliebe von Lehndorff and her children were all arrested. The children, the eldest of whom was seven, were told to say goodbye to their mother: ‘You will have to change your names and Hitler will educate you and you will never see your mother again.’ The children were taken to a concentration camp where they were separated from each other. The eldest managed to find only her youngest sister, aged one.
Heavily pregnant, Gottliebe von Lehndorff was imprisoned in Torgau until the birth of her daughter. Four days later she was taken by two Gestapo women to another camp. After a train journey she was made to walk, carrying her child, from the station to the camp. She was very weak and was bleeding. The Gestapo women beat her each time she fell. When she arrived at the camp, she collapsed, unconscious.
Later she received her husband’s last letter: he wrote that ‘It was more important to do this, more important than our family.’ He begged that she would understand this.
25 Zeller, op.cit., p. 370.
26 Kramarz, op.cit., p. 9.
27 Zeller, op.cit., p. 370.
28 Leber, Conscience in Revolt, p. 262.
29 On 15 October 1992, 2nd Lt Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, of the 9th Infantry Regiment of Potsdam, spoke to us of 20 July 1944 as a day in which ‘history was balancing on the edge of a knife’. He explained that such an atmosphere forms people, guides people: even the air, in some way, feels heavier.
Kleist was an aide in the Army Headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse. Late in the afternoon of 20 July he met, on the stairs, his friend Captain Friedrich Klausing, also of the 9th Infantry Regiment, who was acting as an aide to Stauffenberg. Kleist inquired where he was going. Klausing replied, ‘To get a pistol.’ ‘Why?’ asked Kleist. Klausing stopped and said, ‘Now, you know we have been together in Russia. We have been in tight situations and I always said that we would get out of it. But this time it is over.’ Nevertheless Klausing played his part and was executed for it.
As there were no troops at the Army headquarters Kleist was sent to the local Berlin Headquarters to see the commander, Lt-General Paul von Hase—a member of the conspiracy—and obtain some troops. All was in great confusion there and he was unable to achieve anything.
He returned to the Bendlerstrasse, walking cautiously through the Tiergarten, pondering the events of the day. In the distance he heard shooting which he thought did not bode well. He sat down to think about what to do. He had an escape route prepared: in wartime, to use any type of transportation one needed documents, the best being a ‘white’ paper which would cover every type of transport. Kleist had a number of these, all correctly stamped for use. He had discovered a German battalion in Norway, very near to the Swedish border, and he intended going there and then escaping into Sweden. While he was considering all this, he could hear the trains going by very close to him. He could easily have escaped at that moment. But he did not wish to leave until he knew the situation at Headquarters. So he carried on to the Bendlerstrasse, where he was later arrested and taken to a Gestapo prison.
On one occasion, between interrogations, he was pushed face first against a wall with his hands spread above his head. Another prisoner was brought in and also pushed against the wall. He glanced cautiously to the side and saw his father. They could not speak but his father’s eyes said, ‘I hope you behave’—that is, I hope you have refused to talk. Kleist never saw his father again.
His trial was set for December 1944, but unexpectedly he was set free. He, went home, had a good bath, a meal and a sleep, then, as he was curious about why he had been released, he returned to the Gestapo HQ the next day to find out.
He was interrogated in a curious fashion, the Gestapo officer asking leading questions, hinting at how he should answer. For example: ‘I said that on release you would go to the front line right away.’ To this, Kleist quickly agreed, and although he realised that he was supposed to go to the east, he went instead to see a friend in the High Command of the army fighting in Italy and obtained papers to travel there. He was captured there by the Allies.
Long after the war he met up with an SS general who told him the reason that he had been released was in order to try to find his friend Ludwig von Hammerstein, who was still at large. They thought that Hammerstein might break cover and try to contact Kleist.
30 Zimmermann and Jacobsen, op.cit., p. 212.
31 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 395.
32 Zimmermann and Jacobsen, op.cit., p. 201.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid.
36 Klemperer, German Resistance against Hitler, p. 385.
37 Schlabrendorff, op.cit., pp. 294-5.
38 Leber, op.cit., p. 259.
39 Zimmermann and Jacobsen, op.cit., p. 254.
40 Leber, op.cit., p. 186.
41 Zeller, op.cit., p. 132.
42 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, p. 526.
43 Leber, op.cit., p. 250.
44 For a discussion of the various recollections of Stauffenberg’s last words see Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, p. 710, n. 12; Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 598, n. 318; ‘Claus Graf Stauffenberg und Stefan George: Der Weg zur Tat’ in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, Bd. 12, p. 549.
4 Blood and Iron
1 Wunder, Die Schenken von Stauffenberg, p. 71.
2 Ibid., p. 101.
3 Ibid., p. 100.
4 Ibid., p. 105.
5 Ibid., p. 80.
6 Ibid., p. 462.
7 Ibid., p. 321.
5 The Cult of Stefan George
1 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p. 19.
2 Pfizer, ‘Die Brüder Stauffenberg’, in Robert Boehringer. Eine Freundesgabe, p. 489.
3 Ibid., p. 499.
4 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 85.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., p. 93.
7 Interview with Major-General Berthold von Stauffenberg, Stuttgart, 14 September 1992.
8 Interviewed in the television documentary ‘The Restless Conscience’ by Hava Kohav Beller, 1991.
We talked to Major Axel von dem Bussche on 6 and 7 December 1992. He told us of what he considered to be the profoundest moment of his life, when his eyes opened and he realised the full horror of the true situation in Germany. He used an odd word to describe this awakening which, he said, took place while he was serving in the Ukraine in October 1942.
‘I was privileged to see hundreds of naked Jews shot at the airport of Dubno. I knew I had to do something. I said that we have to kill the Führer to destroy the power of the oath, for by this, he had captured the flower of the German Youth.’
Subsequently, through his friend and fellow officer in the 9th Infantry Regiment of Potsdam, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, Bussche was drawn into the anti-Hitler conspiracy.
Bussche was much wounded and much decorated: he lost his thumb in France, where he was awarded the Knight’s Cross, and was wounded in the lung near Moscow in the winter of 1941. During 1942 he served in the Ukraine and the Crimea as an officer in a Romanian regiment. He later took part in
the siege of Leningrad.
During the siege, Bussche and his fellow officers, including Captain Friedrich Klausing and Lt Richard von Weizsäcker (later President of Germany) were sitting in the commander’s dacha one evening drinking schnapps. Their commander was absent. On the wall in front of them was a photograph of Hitler. Suddenly one officer drew out his pistol and shot at Hitler’s portrait, putting a hole through Hitler’s forehead and the wall behind.
There was a dreadful moment of silence. Then Weizsäcker said, ‘Before we discuss what to do we had better all shoot at it.’ So the others drew their pistols and fired at the portrait: it then had six holes through it. Another silence followed. They decided to take the portrait down and replace it with another. This would also cover the bullet holes. Unfortunately they discovered that there was no other portrait: the one they had destroyed was the sole regimental allocation.
Again they stopped to consider what they had done. They all wondered how they might justify their actions to their commander, a former policeman. Then one recalled a German army regulation: that if a superior officer got into a fight with any of his subordinate officers then that superior would be transferred without further investigation.
Accordingly, later that evening, when they heard their commander returning over the snow, they all rushed outside and, acting drunk, gave him a resounding beating. Then they retired to their quarters. The next day, feeling rather nervous, they apologised to him. He said that he had been dealing on the black-market and thought that they had beaten him up for bringing the regiment into disrespect. He never talked about the incident again, neither did he ever report the reason for the bullet holes in his wall.
Later, in December 1943, Bussche was again badly wounded. He lost one leg and retained only partial use of the other. He was to spend almost a year in an SS hospital—for they had the best facilities, which he merited as a highly decorated officer.
While there, he became friendly with a nurse who told him, in horror, of the things she was witnessing: the chief surgeon was a fervent Nazi involved in medical experiments. She told him how, on one occasion, when a new shoulder blade was transplanted on to an SS officer, the replacement blade had come from a concentration camp inmate especially executed for the purpose.
Bussche was still in his hospital bed on 20 July 1944. He heard on the radio about Stauffenberg’s bomb and that it had failed. A leading Nazi, Robert Ley, came on the radio to rant about ‘blue-blooded swine and traitors’.
The next day one of Bussche’s nurses returned from Berlin extremely angry. On the previous afternoon she had been in the office of her husband, an SS officer, when the telephone rang. Her husband listened, then turned to her and said, ‘Now it has started,’ He took out a steel helmet and grenades and took up a post by the window. He was expecting the building to be stormed by anti-Hitler troops that afternoon.
Bussche spent the night of 20 July eating his address book, page by page. Yet in his kit he still had the explosives from his own abortive attempt to assassinate Hitler during the showing of new uniforms. It was some time before a friend was able to get rid of them.
Three days before the coup attempt the extrovert Captain Klausing had visited Bussche in hospital and had made himself very popular among the SS there. He appeared on the first published list of those arrested. Some time later Bussche was invited to drink some wine with the wounded SS officers. They said, ‘Well, your friend Klausing made such a good impression that we have sent a cable to the Führer asking that he not be hanged.’ The Führer replied that all must hang. The day after Klausing was executed, his father, a convinced Nazi and rector of the University of Prague, shot himself.
After his discharge from hospital Bussche was granted a small car, modified so that he could drive it despite his injuries. Late in March 1945 he travelled to Berlin to collect it. As he was leaving he was flagged down by a colonel in full battledress who said he was in command of that sector of Berlin and yet had no fuel for his own transport. Bussche gave him a lift.
During the journey they drove past a number of trams being filled with rubble. Bussche, in some astonishment, asked what this was for. The Colonel replied that it was to stop the Russian tanks. In disbelief Bussche inquired as to how long he thought such obstacles would stop them. ‘About sixty seconds,’ replied the Colonel dryly. ‘Fifty-nine seconds for them to stop and laugh and one second to drive through.’
‘But don’t worry,’ he added, ‘we have a secret weapon.’ Bussche looked at him. ‘You have heard of the V-1 and the V-2 weapons? Well, we have the V-8 to end the war.’ And what was that, Bussche inquired sceptically. ‘Adolf with a club,’ retorted the Colonel. Bussche then knew that it was all finished.
After the war Bussche met the pharmacist who had prepared the suicide pills for the Nazi leadership once they realised that they were probably going to lose the war. It was with one of these pills that Himmler and Goering took their own lives. Bussche asked at what date did the leadership request these. Early 1944, was the reply.
9 Interview with Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, Munich, 15 October 1992.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Kramarz, op. cit., pp. 69-70.
14 Mann, ‘Freud and the Future’, Essays, p. 319.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., pp. 319-20.
18 Ibid., p. 320.
19 Musil, The Man Without Qualities, Vol. I, p. 45.
20 Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, p. 55 (ll. 1274-8).
21 For a review of the Wandervögel groups, see Rudolph Raasch, Deutsche Jugenbewegung 1900-1933, German edition: Frankfurt, 1991; George L. Mosse, ‘The Youth Movement’, The Crisis of German Ideology, pp. I71ff.
22 Kramarz, op. cit., p. 23 and p. 186, n.16.
23 J. Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, German edition: Frankfurt, 1965, p. 20.
24 Thormaehlen, ‘Die Grafen Stauffenberg Freunde von Stefan George’, in Robert Boehringer. Eine Freundesgabe, p. 693.
25 Ibid., p. 694 and p. 695.
26 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 83.
27 Thormaehlen, op. cit., p. 695.
28 Goldsmith, Stefan George: A Study of his Early Work, p. 1.
29 Bennett, Stefan George, p. 18.
30 Scott, Bone of Contention, p. 111.
31 George, Werke, p. 295.
32 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, pp. 26-7.
33 Pfizer, op. cit., p. 492.
34 Hoffmann, ‘Claus Graf Stauffenberg und Stefan George: Der Weg zur Tat’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, Bd. 12, p. 528.
35 Thormaehlen, op. cit., p. 695.
36 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 76.
37 Ibid., p. 78.
38 Thormaehlen, op. cit., p. 693.
39 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p. 25.
40 All the letters from Claus von Stauffenberg to Stefan George quoted are held in the Stefan George-Archiv in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart. This letter has been published in Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 80.
41 George, The Works of Stefan George, trans. Marx and Morwitz, p. 343.
42 Pfizer, op. cit., p. 501.
43 George, op. cit., trans. Marx and Morwitz, p. 307.
6 The New Reich
1 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Brüder, p. 84.
2 Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, p. 174.
3 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p. 35.
4 Ibid., p. 33.
5 Ibid., p. 35.
6 Hoffmann, op. cit., p. 97.
7 Ibid.
8 Craig, Germany 1866-1945, p. 568.
9 Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, p. 427.
10 Kramarz, op. cit., p. 25.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 35