In August, when Hassell judged it safe to resume his diary, he was still smarting from the way his friend had behaved. ‘The memory of my conversation with Weizsäcker torments me, because – even after taking into account the validity of all possible tactical considerations – there still remains his way of going about it, which, to put it mildly, is incomprehensible to me.’6 Struggling to excuse his friend’s behaviour, he blamed the conditions under which the Nazi regime forced its critics to operate: ‘the Cheka methods used by them … The fact that all opposition and all criticism, even those arising out of the most patriotic motives, are looked upon as punishable crimes … Their instinctive aversion to every person with real character … The consequent trembling fear on the part of everybody.’
His summary ended with a characteristic remark of defiance: ‘According to confirmed rumour Hitler has a particular dislike for Ilse and me.7 In view of the character of the man I consider this a compliment …’
The pages Hassell deposited in the foxhole that cold March morning point to his frustration: ‘I get fed up with Berlin (that is these futile attempts to overthrow the system) and long to settle for good at Ebenhausen and do only literary work.8 But that would certainly be wrong and cowardly.’
As Hassell and his circle recognized, orchestrating a coup d’état was not simply about replacing Hitler; it was about wresting control from the formidable Nazi apparatus, which was supported by hundreds of thousands of SS troops. The implementation and success of a coup therefore depended on the military: only the army had the weapons and power necessary to effect regime change.
Even before the war began, Beck, Goerdeler and Hassell had devoted their energies to bringing senior military commanders on board. But while a number were convinced of the necessity of a coup, they had failed to offer active support.
The obstacles were legion. Every soldier in the German Army had sworn a sacred oath of loyalty to Hitler.9 In strict legal terms, he was the Supreme Commander. Unless, therefore, he was removed, the army could not be counted on; yet without it, a coup could not be carried out. Additionally, irrespective of this oath of allegiance, the attitude of most officers was determined by the success of Hitler’s war leadership.10 As long as the dictator continued to win battles, the conspirators saw little chance of persuading the military to cooperate. In the early years of the war, they recognized that the rapid military victories up to and including the first phase of the Russian campaign had strengthened Hitler’s position. ‘Nothing is to be hoped for now,’ Hassell wrote in the summer of 1941.11 ‘In wide circles, specifically in the army, Hitler’s prestige is still great and has even increased as a result of the Russian campaign, especially among officers.’
Among the small group of generals sympathetic to the underground opposition’s arguments, there was a further obstacle. None was prepared to make a move against Hitler and conclude peace with the Allies until they knew the terms of any settlement. The shameful defeat of 1918 and the subsequent peace treaty signed at Versailles had contributed to Hitler’s rise, and no general would commit Germany to a second humiliation.
Hassell’s principal role in the conspiracy, which was to explore the possibility of negotiating favourable peace terms with the Allies, was therefore of crucial importance. To convince the generals to precipitate a coup, his most pressing concern was to establish the conditions under which Germany’s enemies would agree to an armistice or a separate peace with the ‘other’ Germany.12 In return for a change of regime, and the ending of the war, Hassell wanted to secure British agreement on the future borders of the German Reich and, in particular, a promise not to exploit the void created by Hitler’s removal for military purposes.
To this end, from 1939, he worked tirelessly and at great personal risk to further his connections abroad. On his return from Rome, he had joined an organization called the Central European Economic Conference, which had been set up to study European economic conditions. His job enabled him to travel freely and he used his trips as a cloak for his conspiratorial activities. While the passport stamps he was required to obtain meant the German authorities knew about his various movements, he managed to keep his meetings with representatives of the British government secret.
In February and May 1940, Hassell travelled to Arosa in Switzerland, where he made contact with James Lonsdale-Bryans, an intermediary to the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. Believing that Hitler’s personal removal was a principal war aim, Halifax seemed willing to offer inducements to the conspirators for a reasonable peace.13 However, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, took a different view. After meeting Lonsdale-Bryans, he noted: ‘Ridiculous stale story of a German opposition ready to overthrow Hitler … this was the 100th time I had heard this story.’14
Anthony Eden replaced Halifax in May 1940, and Cadogan’s view prevailed. Senior officials at the Foreign Office did not believe a coup against Hitler was likely nor was Hassell regarded as credible. In their eyes, as the son-in-law of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, Kaiser Wilhelm’s naval chief, he was a typical representative of the influential Prussian caste that had been responsible for the First World War, the greatest military catastrophe of the twentieth century.15 Further, this caste had supported Hitler’s policies in past years, as indeed – or at least on the face of it – had Hassell when he served as Ambassador to Rome, an important Axis posting.
The Foreign Office maintained this political line consistently. At the beginning of 1941, telegrams were sent to the British missions in Berne, Stockholm and Madrid with the express purpose of forbidding any response to further peace feelers from putative German coup leaders.16 Only when regime change had occurred was Britain willing to negotiate. ‘I am sure,’ Churchill wrote to Eden in September 1941, ‘we should not depart from our position of absolute silence.17 Nothing would be more distressing to our friends in the United States or more dangerous with our new ally, Russia, than the suggestion that we are entertaining such ideas. I am absolutely opposed to the slightest contact.’
Hassell refused to give up. In January 1942, he met Carl Burckhardt, the vice president of the Red Cross, in Geneva.18 Burckhardt told him that leading circles in Britain were convinced that ‘an arrangement with a decent Germany must be made’. This information was at odds with official British attitudes and policy. Yet in Hassell it fuelled the hope that an understanding was still within the bounds of possibility.
These hopes were dashed when, after meeting Roosevelt and Stalin at Casablanca in January 1943, Churchill announced that the Western powers were demanding Germany’s ‘unconditional surrender’.
Churchill would come to regret his failure to respond to the peace feelers put out by Germany’s underground opposition. After the war, he admitted that he had underestimated the strength and size of the anti-Hitler resistance. ‘In Germany there lived an opposition,’ he wrote, ‘which belongs to the noblest and greatest that the political history of any nation has ever produced.19 These men fought without help from within or from abroad driven forward only by the restlessness of their conscience.’
‘If the generals had it in mind to withhold their intervention until it was absolutely clear that the corporal is leading us into disaster, they have had their dream fulfilled,’ Hassell wrote in response to the Allies’ insistence on unconditional surrender.20 ‘The worst about it is that our own prophecy has been fulfilled; i.e. that it would then be too late and any new regime could be nothing more than a liquidation commission.’
Hassell and his circle now recognized that if the army would not overthrow Hitler then ‘some sort of partial action’ – his murder, in other words – was needed in the hope that ‘the whole building would collapse like a house of cards’.21, 22
Assassination, however, presented problems of its own. While Hitler’s whereabouts at any given moment was easy enough to establish, it was seldom possible to know his movements in advance.23 Prompted perhaps by his own acute sense of self-preservation
, Hitler avoided fixed schedules and, insofar as he could, travelled only at the shortest possible notice. He wore a bulletproof waistcoat and a metal-plated bulletproof cap which, as his adjutant Schmundt testified, was of extraordinary weight.24 When Hitler did travel, the arrangements for his protection were all but impenetrable; he had his own security-service bodyguards, as well as a heavily armed SS escort; his doctor was constantly in attendance and he travelled with a cook, who prepared his food.25 His private aircraft, a Focke-Wulf Condor, was equipped with an armoured cabin, and a parachute was attached to his seat. He always used his own cars and four separate motorcades were kept in constant readiness at his various headquarters. The cars themselves had bulletproof tyres and windows, and extensive armour plating.
Crucially, therefore, Hitler’s killer would have to be someone who had access to him. Given that an assassin was unlikely to come from within the security forces – to a man, fanatically loyal to the Führer – in the search for a potential candidate, Hassell and his circle were back at square one. The killer had to be a member of the armed forces – someone who could get close to Hitler on his visits to Wehrmacht headquarters or who saw him regularly at military briefings.
Hassell was pessimistic. ‘In spite of all efforts,’ he confided to his diary, ‘what is still missing is a spark plug.’26 He was troubled too by the consequences of a failed attempt: ‘Hitler’s prestige is still great enough – if he can keep on his feet – to enable him to take counteraction which would mean at least chaos or civil war.’27
Briefly, within days of the Casablanca Conference, his hopes were raised by the events on the Eastern Front. On 31 January, after one of the bitterest battles in military history, 91,000 German soldiers surrendered at Stalingrad – a dramatic and humiliating addition to the 200,000 casualties the Wehrmacht had already suffered.
While Germany had previously undergone reverses – in the Battle of Britain, for example, and at sea – Stalingrad was the first major setback on land.28 ‘The last few weeks have brought the most serious crisis we have experienced thus far in the war,’ Hassell noted in his diary on 14 February 1943.29 ‘For the first time Hitler cannot deny his responsibility; for the first time the critical rumours are aimed directly at him.30 Exposed for all our eyes is the lack of military ability of the “most brilliant strategist of all time” – i.e. our megalomaniacal corporal … It is clear to all that precious blood has been shed foolishly or even criminally for purposes of prestige alone. Since strictly military affairs are involved this time, the eyes of the generals have been opened too so that they realise to which point the Wehrmacht has been brought and where Germany will soon be. In view of an event unique in German military history, even the most blind should now surely let the blinkers drop from their eyes.’
By mid March, after the coup he hoped for had not materialized, Hassell was fulminating: ‘Sad to say the serious crisis mentioned at the beginning of my last notes did not precipitate the cleansing storm, the bitterly necessary, intensely longed-for change of regime … Vain are all efforts to pour iron into the bloodstream of the people, who are already supporting with all their might a half-insane, half-criminal policy.31 The military events alone, the irresponsible leadership of this megalomaniac and irresponsible corporal, should have induced them to act if the inner rot were not enough.’
Notwithstanding the defeat at Stalingrad, Hassell could not understand how the generals lived with their consciences. If they were not convinced of the need for revolt by political or military arguments, how could they have failed to respond to the brutality of Hitler’s Commissar Order, which required the Wehrmacht to kill Communists captured on the Eastern Front, and, most especially, to the genocide of the Jews there?
Incredulous at the generals’ insouciance, his verdict was damning: ‘They have undoubted technical ability and physical courage, but little moral courage, absolutely no broad world vision, no inner spiritual independence or that strength of resistance which rests on a genuine cultural basis.32 For this reason, Hitler has been able to make them subservient and bind them hand and foot. The majority, moreover, are out to make careers in the basest sense. Gifts and Field Marshals’ batons are more important to them than the great historical issues and moral values at stake. All those on whom we set our hopes are failing, the more miserably so since they agree with all they have been told and permit themselves to indulge in the most anti-Nazi talk, but are unable to summon up the courage to act although all of them would go along with it.’
Hassell was correct in his assessment of the generals collectively, but he was wrong to believe that not a single one was willing to risk an attempt on the Führer’s life. At the time he was writing, Major General Henning von Tresckow, backed by General Ludwig Beck and senior officers in the Abwehr, was engaged in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler on the Russian Front. The fact that Hassell was being watched by the Gestapo – and had been since March 1942 – meant that Beck, his great confidant and the acknowledged leader of his resistance group, had no choice but to keep him out of the loop.
Aged forty-three, Tresckow was chief of operations at Army Group Centre, the Wehrmacht’s headquarters on the Eastern Front. His family, Prussian aristocrats, had a long military history.33 Over the course of 300 years they had supplied the Prussian Army with twenty-one generals. Tresckow himself had won the Iron Cross at the age of sixteen, fighting in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. ‘You, Tresckow,’ his commanding officer told him at the time, ‘will either become Chief of Staff or will die on the scaffold as a rebel.’34
Before the Second World War began, Tresckow was a committed anti-Nazi. Like Hassell, Kristallnacht drove him into opposition. Regarding it as a personal humiliation, he believed that ‘both duty and honour’ bound him to do his best ‘to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism to save Germany and Europe from barbarism’.35
After cultivating a group of like-minded fellow officers, in October 1941, Tresckow sent his cousin and adjutant, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, to Berlin with a message for Beck to say that the staff at Army Group Centre were ‘ready to act’.36 First, however, Tresckow wanted a guarantee that Britain would make peace soon after a change of regime – a guarantee that Beck and Hassell were unable to give him.
In the winter of 1942, as the war situation became more pressing, Tresckow sent a second message to Beck, telling him that his group were now willing to assassinate Hitler and thereby provide ‘the spark’ for the coup.37 They would take action at the first opportunity.
It did not come until a few months later when, in January 1943, Hitler was scheduled to visit Army Group Centre’s HQ at Smolensk.
Tresckow’s plan was to kill Hitler during lunch in the officers’ mess. All two dozen officers seated around the table would shoot him – thus making the responsibility collective and ensuring that at least one bullet would get through the security entourage of SS and hit its target.38 It was necessary, however, to inform Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, if only to prevent him from getting in the line of fire. While Kluge professed to be opposed to Hitler, he scotched the plan. Claiming that it insulted the tenets of the Officer Corps, he told Tresckow that ‘it was not seemly to shoot a man at lunch’.39
As it transpired, Hitler’s visit was cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for 13 March.
This time, Tresckow’s plan was to assassinate him as he left the headquarters. Hand-picked troops lining the route were to open fire with their sub-machine guns. Again, Kluge had to be told and initially he gave his consent. But at the last minute he did not have the strength of character to follow through. As Schlabrendorff recalled, the field marshal ‘brought up various arguments, claiming that neither the world, nor the German people, nor the German soldier would understand such an act at this time.40 He insisted that it would be much better to wait until the military situation had developed to a point that would force Hitler’s elimination.’
It was a specious argu
ment; as both Tresckow and Schlabrendorff recognized, the field marshal’s opposition to the assassination attempt probably stemmed from the fact that Hitler had just given him 250,000 Reichsmarks as a birthday present.
Knowing that Kluge could not be relied on, they had a contingency plan to which the field marshal was not privy. ‘Dropping the idea of shooting Hitler,’ Schlabrendorff wrote, ‘we planned instead to eliminate him by smuggling a time bomb aboard his plane. In this way, the stigma of an assassination would be avoided, and Hitler’s death could be attributed – officially at least – to an accidental plane crash.’41
Schlabrendorff had managed to obtain British explosives, seized from captured SOE agents – an important factor as British fuses were silent, whereas German fuses made a slight hissing noise. After placing the explosives in two bottles of cognac, Tresckow asked Colonel Brandt, who was travelling in Hitler’s entourage, if he would deliver the bottles to a friend, based at the Führer’s headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. This apparently innocent request was granted.
Hitler left for Rastenburg later that day. Taking the parcel to the airfield, Schlabrendorff waited for a signal from Tresckow. He then activated the bomb and handed the package to Brandt. The aircraft took off, accompanied by a fighter escort. According to Tresckow’s calculations, the bomb would explode thirty minutes after take-off. ‘With mounting tension,’ Schlabrendorff subsequently wrote, ‘we waited at headquarters for news of the “accident”, which we expected shortly before the plane was to pass over Minsk.42 We assumed that one of the escort fighters would report the crash by radio. But nothing happened.’
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