An Honourable Defeat (18 page)

But that was not enough for Halder. He did approach the head of the Reserve Army, Friedrich Fromm, who would play such an ignoble role in the 20 July plot, but Fromm would not commit himself. The Reserve Army would be needed as it had internal military control of Germany. Nevertheless, there was still a chance of success, but it was risky — too risky for Halder.

Meanwhile Beck strained every nerve to convince him and Brauchitsch of the disastrous consequences of war. As was his manner, he presented them with memoranda in which he pointed out once again the suicidal nature of a world war, backing up his arguments with statistical data drawn from General Thomas. He also pointed out that on 27 October the USA had lifted the embargo on arms which had been the result of the earlier American declaration of neutrality. By 31 October, Halder sent a message to Oster via Groscurth, in which he asked Goerdeler and Beck — as potential heads of state in waiting — to hold themselves in readiness. It is likely that Goerdeler, in his optimistic way, would have set about drawing up one of the many lists of potential cabinet ministers he wrote, along with the vast amount of theoretical political writing his energetic but frustrated mind threw up. Halder also told Groscurth personally that fatal accidents could be arranged for the Nazi top table, including Hitler, but he was not specific and there was still an ominous note of ‘if only’ in his tone.

Nevertheless, the Resistance set itself once more on an alert footing. Schacht, who had been obliged to resign from his post as head of the State Bank in January, but was still a Minister Without Portfolio, was also told to prepare himself.

Hitler’s security arrangements were still relatively lax at this stage, but Oster was taking no chances. When Erich Kordt, the suburban-looking career diplomat who gave the impression that the most exciting part of his day was a beer and sausage lunch, boiled over with frustration and offered himself, following a meeting at Beck’s Goethestrasse house, as a potential assassin, Oster accepted. It would never hurt to have a second string to the bow, and Halder had proved too often in the past to have feet of clay. Oster also took counsel with Dohnanyi, Gisevius and Thomas. Perhaps a last memorandum to the Chief of the General Staff might stiffen his sinews. Clearly Groscurth was still sceptical about Halder.

But Halder had seen Hitler three times between 25 and 31 October and each time tried to dissuade him from his attack date. At the military councils of 25 and 31 October, Wilhelm von Leeb reported that all senior officers were against the attack, that Brauchitsch had supported them, but that Hitler would listen to no one. He dug in. Here one sees Hitler’s own deep-seated mistrust of the generals at work, coupled with the contempt and fear of the little man come to power with regard to those born to it. Hitler had seen how spineless the generals could be; he knew too that he was successful. He must have been drunk with success. But he had fought, we must assume, courageously in the First World War as a corporal, and from that experience he also thought he knew better than the generals about the psychology of soldiers, and how to command them.

Brauchitsch and Halder spent 2 and 3 November inspecting the West Wall. Everything confirmed what they already knew: Germany was not ready for war. Back in Berlin on 4 November, Thomas presented Halder with yet more pessimistic statistical data about supplies of munitions and food. There was also the obvious problem of a winter campaign: rain and snow created mud and frozen terrain, which affected men and machinery alike, as well as making it hard going for the horses on which the German Army still depended to a large extent for transport.

Halder returned apparently still determined to go ahead with a coup, but he did not have Brauchitsch’s wholehearted support, and even committed conspirators like Witzleben feared that too many junior officers were ‘drunk with Hitler’ to follow their leaders against him. After the war Brauchitsch said, ‘The whole thing [would have been] plain high treason...Why should I have taken such action? It would have been against the German people. Let us be honest...the German people were all for Hitler.’ No military logic could get the generals out of their cleft stick, and logic could not move the masses as Hitler could. A civil war would mean at worst the end of Germany and an opening up of the country to the dreaded forces of Bolshevism; at best it would mean the end of the Army, to which by tradition and training most of the generals owed their fiercest loyalty.

But Oster, who with Dohnanyi had the most modern outlook of all the conspirators, stuck to his plan of action. Halder’s intention was still to arrest Hitler, but Oster knew, as he had done a year ago, that the only way to finish the Nazis was to chop off their head. When Kordt had come to see him in his office at the Abwehr on Tirpitzufer on All Saints’ Day, the day after the meeting at Beck’s house, and had offered his services: ‘I’m prepared to throw the bomb, to rescue the generals from their scruples,’ Oster accepted immediately. Kordt, as a senior Foreign Office man in Ribbentrop’s entourage, was among the few who had easy access to Hitler (Beck, for example, met Hitler only once, in 1937, and Canaris only five or six times in the course of an eight-year career). ‘Give me eleven days,’ Oster told him. Eleven days to organise the explosives. He contacted Erwin Lahousen, the Austrian officer who was Groscurth’s successor as head of Abwehr Department II — the section which dealt with sabotage among other things. Lahousen, already involved in the Resistance — as were all of Oster’s immediate senior colleagues — could justify the drawing of explosives and fuses from stores, and also arrange for Erich Kordt to undergo a quick course at the secret Abwehr training camp on the shores of Lake Quenz near Brandenburg. Kordt would be presented to the staff there as a trainee V-man. There was no question but that explosives should be used, and Oster could not afford to think of the innocent lives which might be. lost along with Hitler and his crew. Kordt could never get to see Hitler alone, but only in the context of a planning meeting. So, even if Kordt had been a crack marksman, the likelihood of being able to draw a pistol, aim and fire one fatal shot in a crowded room was very remote.

Brauchitsch was summoned to the Reich Chancellery’s Congress Hall at noon on 5 November to make his report to Hitler on the West Front. Haider, despite his position as Chief of the General Staff, would be in attendance, but would have to sit out the actual meeting in an ante-room. Brauchitsch was very nervous beforehand. Once again the schedule was insanely tight. A decision on whether or not to go ahead with the 12 November attack date would have to be made by 1p.m. because the Army would need a week to gear up. Much now hung on which way Brauchitsch would swing. If he stood firm, Halder’s coup still had the ghost of a chance. If not...well, the few who knew about Kordt and Oster could at least cling to a last hope. But 11 November — the day scheduled for Kordt’s attempt — was barely twenty-four hours before the attack date for Operation Yellow.

The meeting lasted twenty minutes. Perhaps on account of his nervousness, Brauchitsch was sharper than he had intended to be from the outset, and both he and Hitler became furious. The Commander-in-Chief presented his statistics, and added, exaggerating slightly, that the morale of the men could not be compared with that of 1914. He also pointed out that during the recent Polish campaign discipline and
esprit
de
corps
had been about as low among the troops as it had been in late 1917 and 1918. He could not have said anything worse, for the collapse of the Army in 1918 and its betrayal (as Hitler perceived it) by its leaders had unleashed the revolution of winter 1918-19. This had been the most traumatic moment of Hitler’s life, and the experience which had turned him into a politician. He now became incandescent with rage and demanded proof of this allegation. Did Brauchitsch perhaps think that the Army was on the verge of breaking up, as it had in 1918? If there had been acts of indiscipline, how many of the culprits had been hanged?

Above all, before storming off to leave the normally reserved and dignified Brauchitsch white-faced and trembling with anger and humiliation, Hitler spat out that he was well aware of the ‘spirit of Zossen’ that existed among the generals of the Regular Army, and that any cowards would be crushed.

On the way back to Zossen, the shaken Brauchitsch gave an appalled Halder all the details of the interview. They had scarcely arrived back than they heard that Hitler had given the order for Operation Yellow to begin as scheduled, without further consultation. This was another slap in the face — Hitler was not even trying to hide his contempt — but the two men panicked. Halder immediately gave orders that all papers relating to his coup should be destroyed before the Gestapo arrived. Neither Halder nor Brauchitsch had forgotten what had happened on 30 June 1934, nor the fate of Generals Schleicher and Bredow on that day.

Personal fear of Hitler had robbed Halder of any sense of what he was standing for. His coup was designed precisely to bring to an end such effective bullying tactics as those Hitler had just employed. Halder’s only excuse is that it took a very strong personality indeed to stand up to the dictator. Those who knew him still speak of the overwhelming power of Hitler’s presence — something no photograph or film can convey. One should never forget that he was very far from the ridiculous figure he has become to us through overexposure and pastiche. He was the most formidable enemy humanity has ever known. The German Resistance could not have been up against anything worse.

Groscurth and Dohnanyi subsequently saved many of the papers scheduled for destruction, but Halder spent the rest of the day in a panic. Brauchitsch later calmed himself down, but effectively washed his hands of the business. He was still in favour of the coup, he said, and he still felt that the western offensive should be stopped — the original point of the coup anyway. Hitler had ordered it to proceed and thus provided the conspirators with their justification. They would have the backing of the western commanders. The Gestapo had not, after all, shown up in Zossen — in fact they were in total ignorance of Halder’s plans, as was Hitler. Halder began to swing again. Now he dispatched Groscurth to Canaris in Berlin with a report of what had happened and a request to remove Hitler by assassination as soon as possible.

Canaris took the news badly, and would not agree to the idea of an out-of-hand assassination. Oster had been wise not to involve him in the plan with Kordt. A coup which could be justified by the two moral leaders of the Resistance, Beck and Goerdeler, was what was needed to legitimise a replacement administration in Germany in the eyes of the world and to the German public. To Oster, already involved in other secret plans to avert the war, the news of Canaris’s rejection of Halder’s request came as no surprise. Never downcast by setbacks for long, he must have comforted himself with the thought of his other iron in the fire. But he knew how much more satisfactory and how much more assured of success a proper coup led by a man in Halder’s position would have been.

Meanwhile, Canaris had suffered another blow. On 6 November he was summoned to Hitler’s office and ordered to prepare Abwehr agents to be dressed in Dutch and Belgian uniforms to be dropped into those neutral countries and stand guard at the bridges, to prevent them from being blown up. The Polish campaign had been triggered by Gestapo agents in Polish uniforms staging an ‘attack’ on the radio station at Gleiwitz. These ‘gangster methods’ upset Canaris profoundly.
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One last hope was Witzleben, but he was far away at 1st Army Headquarters in Bad Kreuznach, beyond Frankfurt, and Oster would have to get official permission from Canaris to use a car to drive there: petrol was already rationed. Canaris was so out of sorts that he refused to give it, so Oster was forced to telephone Witzleben to get him to ring Canaris and request a meeting about military security with Oster. Finally, on the following day, Oster set out to see Witzleben with Gisevius.

Unfortunately Witzleben remained pessimistic about the chances of a coup’s success. He still firmly believed that Brauchitsch and Halder were men of straw and that the rank and file officers were firmly behind Hitler. Thus, despite one or two more efforts to save it, the second great chance to dismount the Nazis and stop the Second World War was missed, largely on account of one fit of temper from the Führer.

In the event, the attack date of 12 November was shortly afterwards put back on account of bad weather — this would not be the last postponement of Operation Yellow. On the other hand Hitler firmly turned his back on peace initiatives from the King of Belgium and the Queen of the Netherlands, which had been engineered secretly by Oster but also by two ‘Nazi’ generals, Reichenau and Warlimont, acting independently and out of purely military considerations.

There remained the possibility of Kordt’s attempt, but in the meantime Hitler had travelled down to Munich to celebrate — as he always did — the 8 November anniversary of his own failed 1923 coup. It was there that something happened which would rock the Party as much as it did the Resistance. One simple man working alone tried to kill him and came within a hair’s breadth of success.

Georg Elser was born in the Schwäbische Alb area south of Stuttgart in 1903. He came from a modest background and was apprenticed to a cabinet maker, to learn a craft at which he became exceptionally skilled. For five years, between 1925 and 1930, he worked as a joiner at a clock factory in Konstanz, and during that time he joined the Red Front Fighters’ League. From 1936 to 1939 he worked in an armature factory in Heidenheim, and from April 1939 he took a job in a quarry from which he was able to steal fuses and explosives. In July he designed his bomb, and the following month he left Heidenheim for Munich, where he took a room, living on his savings from now on. Between September and the beginning of November he worked patiently, concealed in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, for thirty-five nights, hollowing out and preparing the column in which he would conceal his bomb. He placed it on 1 November 1939, primed it on the 2nd, and on the 5th he set the time fuse he had designed to explode on 8 November at 9.20p.m., when Hitler would be making his annual address to the Old Guard who had taken part in the 1923 coup attempt.