An Honourable Defeat (19 page)

Elser was a small, quiet, shabby man who gave the impression of being shy. He had no interests beyond his carpentry and his love of music, which was a passion with him. He was not especially politically inclined — the fierce-sounding Red Front League was a socialist organisation which he had joined at the suggestion of a colleague at the clock factory simply because he had left-wing sympathies. He played in its band. However, he had hated the Nazi ideology of
Gleichschaltung
— making everyone conform — from the first, and had never been carried away by National Socialist enthusiasm. Above all, he was a loner who kept his thoughts to himself, not confiding much to his family, to his only close friend, Eugen Rau, or even to his girlfriend of many years’ standing, Elsa Heller.

He decided to kill Hitler some time in 1938, when it was clear that the dictator wanted war. Elser knew what another war would mean, and he instinctively saw that in the current political climate the only way to stop it would be to kill Hitler. Once having reached this decision, he set about accomplishing his end methodically and without hesitation. The Bürgerbräukeller, a large restaurant-cum-brasserie which had been one of the centres of the 1923 coup attempt, was where the Führer always held his annual get-together, and the ceremony was one of the few fixed points in Hitler’s calendar. Most of the bearers of the ‘Blood Order’ would be there, wearing their red and silver medal on the right breast, with its eagle and oak wreath, its view of the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, with swastika and sunbeams, and the words: ‘You were victorious.’

Elser attended the gathering in November 1938, with a view to getting the lie of the land. When he returned to Heidenheim he set about his preparations in earnest, his work in the armature factory providing tools and some of the materials for his bomb, and his experience in the clock factory also coming in handy. He even built a model bomb to test his mechanism.

Back in Munich almost a year later, he knew where he would plant the bomb — in a column which backed the podium where Hitler would stand to make his speech. On the nights that he worked in the Bürgerbräukeller he would go there for a meal and then hide until the place emptied and closed, mingling with the first customers the following morning. He was not a man to attract attention and, as he was working entirely alone, his security was complete. He would chisel away at the brick column for hours, slowly and deliberately, working on his knees, which became bruised and swollen.

Once his bomb was installed and the timer mechanism set, he paid a quick visit to his sister in Stuttgart to leave his few belongings with her. Then he went back to Munich to check that everything was still in order. He barely ever read anything, not even newspapers. If he had, he would have seen some disquieting news in the
Völkischer
Beobachter
of 6 November: for the first time in fifteen years, Hitler had it in mind not to attend the Old Guards’ reunion. The reason was that, after his row with Brauchitsch, the Führer had decided momentarily to visit the Front for himself. But, as was usual with him, he changed his mind again. However, fate was still with the dictator. Instead of speaking from 8.30p.m. until 10.00p.m. as scheduled, when he would have caught his private aeroplane back to Berlin, he was obliged by adverse weather conditions to use his train. In order to get back to Berlin in time to get on with his work schedule, Hitler had to leave Munich earlier. Thus it was that he addressed the meeting from 8.10p.m. until only 9.07p.m., giving a very childish speech in which he laid the blame for the coming war squarely on Britain’s shoulders. Then he left abruptly, not even waiting, as was his habit, to chat with his old comrades.

The bomb went off at 9.20p.m. exactly as planned. It brought the roof down, killing eight and wounding another sixty-three. It would certainly have killed Hitler. But by then Elser had already been arrested.

He was stopped by officials at the Konstanz frontier crossing to Switzerland at 8.45p.m. He was wearing an illegal Red Front badge on the reverse of his lapel, and he had incriminating material in his pockets, including springs and cogwheels from an alarm clock. Immediately Germany’s top detective, SS Brigade-leader Artur Nebe, head of the Criminal Investigation Department, but already involved in the Resistance, was called in. He interrogated Elser in detail, found the man taciturn and a shade ingenuous, but did not believe that he was lying when he said that he had worked on his own initiative. This neither Hitler nor Himmler would accept. Himmler especially was eager for Elser to be linked with the British Secret Service, or with the Black Front, the breakaway National Socialist group in exile, led by Gregor Strasser’s brother, Otto. Because of this, Elser was sent to the Gestapo Headquarters in Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, Berlin, where he was given what was known as ‘intensive interrogation’, but they got no more out of him than Nebe had. Finally he was sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, where he spent the next five years. At the end of 1944, he was transferred to the ‘VIP’ barrack at Dachau, where he joined other victims of the regime, among whom were the former Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg, and his wife and daughter, Hjalmar Schacht, Martin Niemöller, and Franz Halder, for it was here that the hesitant Chief of the General Staff finally ended up.

Elser was well treated throughout his imprisonment. It was Hitler’s intention to stage an anti-British show trial of him at the end of the war, at which he would be proved to be an agent of the enemy. In the meantime, Elser was allowed a workbench and tools in his cell, and he made chairs and bookcases for his guards in return for cigarettes. He became a heavy smoker during the years in prison, and smoking and playing the zither were his last remaining pleasures. He was never shaken in his belief that he had done the right thing, nor for a moment did he think that the Nazis would not kill him. And they did, when it was certain that the war was lost. The order came from Berlin on 5 April 1945 to stage the man’s death, making it look as if he’d been killed in one of the frequent Allied air raids. An opportunity presented itself to the camp administration to do so on 9 April.

After the explosion in the Bürgerbräukeller there was pandemonium. The Nazis suspected an elaborate international plot. The central Resistance wondered if some anti-Nazi group within their ranks had managed to get so close while they had shilly-shallied in Berlin. It was even considered that the whole event had been staged by Hitler himself in order to increase his prestige. Only after the war was Nebe’s original finding confirmed, that Elser had done it alone. His was the first of only two bomb attempts at which the bomb exploded — the second would be Stauffenberg’s on 20 July 1944. Stauffenberg’s was the result of years of Army attempts and planning; Elser’s anonymity was his best ally.

Elser is a neglected hero. Had he succeeded, he would probably never have taken credit publicly for the deed. His failure, ironically, aided the Nazis — there was a general wave of sympathy for Hitler, and the dictator’s security was immediately tightened — which meant in turn that Kordt’s plan was scuppered.

There was an additional way in which the Nazis turned the event to their advantage. At the end of September 1939, two British secret agents in Holland made contact with a German exile who told them of a planned anti-Nazi coup, to be carried out by members of the Army. They collected further details regarding the demands of this Resistance group, and these were confirmed by reports from London of meetings with Goerdeler and other members of the central Resistance. The two British agents were then authorised to make contact with the Germans, and did so over a series of meetings between late October and early November, all of which took place at Backhus, near Venlo.

But the Germans were in fact members of the Security Service, and the chief ‘Resistance’ officer was Walter Schellenberg, the twenty-nine-year-old head of Gestapo International Counter-Intelligence. On 9 November the British agents were taken to a point close to the German frontier and there arrested. This event, known as the ‘Venlo Incident’, could not have happened at a better time for the Nazis, who insisted publicly that the activity of the British spies was linked to a conspiracy which also involved Elser. At the same time the British, seeing themselves outmanoeuvred yet again — and by German agents posing as conspirators — turned an even colder and more suspicious eye on the genuine German Resistance. One man who would suffer particularly unfairly from the personal obloquy of his former Oxford ‘friends’ was Adam von Trott zu Solz — as will be seen. But it was a severer blow that his credibility suffered. Thus, unfortunately, more harm than good came to the Resistance out of Elser’s failure; but the result, had he been successful, cannot be estimated. There would certainly have been chaos in Germany; but it is unlikely that any of the surviving Nazi leaders would have committed the country to war. Hitler was the head and the heart of Nazism. However dangerous as a group, the others were just fellow-travellers.

As for the British, their Secret Service learnt a lesson. At the time — under the authority of officers who became very senior in MI5 and M16 after the war but who were then cutting their teeth in espionage and information gathering — the Secret Service (to use a blanket term for the various departments) was a group of imaginative amateurs. Academics and intellectuals were recruited on a semi-professional basis, and while some discharged their duties with great responsibility and got little thanks, others behaved like overgrown schoolboys. To an extent the two Englishmen involved in the Venlo Incident mirrored this. Sigismund Payne Best had lived in Holland since 1916 (when he had also served in Intelligence). He had married a Dutchwoman and ran a business there. His associate, R. H. Stevens, was an ex-Indian Army man sent out to join Best by the head of the service, Stuart Menzies, though Menzies’ predecessor, the outspoken Admiral Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, had described him as ‘an absolute fool’.

The German Secret Service departments were capable of disasters equal to the Venlo Incident — from a plan to put bombs into crates of oranges shipped from Spain to the British Navy, to Operation Pastorius, a plan to land ten young Nazis fluent in American English on the shores of the USA so that they could sabotage the American warplane industry. Canaris took the lead in this ‘show’ very reluctantly, and, as he privately predicted, it was a disaster. One of the ten dropped out before departure owing to an attack of VD; of the nine who went, all were arrested as they landed, and seven were executed shortly afterwards. The two survivors were imprisoned but pardoned after the war and may have betrayed the operation. But both sides now began to learn the efficiency and ruthlessness that fathered modern espionage and counter-espionage work, creating another minefield through which the Resistance had to tread.

Chapter Seven – In the Shadows

The invasion of France was postponed but not cancelled. What was more, initiative was passing from Brauchitsch and Halder to the generals who stood close to Hitler: Keitel and his deputy, Jodl. In other words, the Army High Command was losing ground to the Overall High Command — the office which had been Hitler’s creation. It was becoming clear that Hitler’s next move, based on past experience, would be simply to take over Brauchitsch’s job himself. It would be 1941 before he finally did so, but from now on Hitler was effectively in direct control.

Hans Oster had foreseen for a long time that the phoney war would come to an end. Even before the projected coup of 1939, he had made a lonely decision about how he might at least contain the Blitzkrieg in the West.

Not only in France, but also in Holland and Belgium, military leaders had been looking cautiously at Hitler’s mounting ambitions. There was no channel of sea to protect them, and though Holland’s neutrality had been respected in the First World War, Belgium and France had bitter memories of German occupation. It was from Holland that an unexpected and welcome ally came to Oster, when Major (later Colonel) Gijsbertus Sas was reappointed Military Attaché in Berlin by the Dutch Commander-in-Chief, General Reynders, in view of his political perspicacity and special understanding of German affairs.

Sas had been Military Attaché for the first time in 1936, when Oster was Sas’s host at the Olympic Games. Both shared a passion for riding, and the strong friendship which grew up between them and their families was based on their mutual enjoyment of the equestrian events. Oster’s daughter, however, remembers that at the beginning he cautiously warned his children not to breathe a word against the Nazis in Sas’s hearing. Indeed, in 1936, the Sas family were enthusiastic about the appearance of the New Germany. But as the friendship deepened and Sas came to see behind the veneer of Nazism, so Oster’s confidence in him grew. After his recall to Holland, Sas and Oster remained in close contact.

The Dutchman took up his reappointment in April 1939. Oster was delighted, and Sas was soon a regular visitor at the Osters’ spacious flat in Bayerische Strasse. It was in the course of a conversation they had there quite early on that the topic of Hitler’s war plans first came up. At first all Oster was prepared to do was not deny Sas’s presumption that Hitler indeed had intentions in the West. General Reynders read his Military Attaché’s reports on the situation throughout the summer and found them sober and responsible. But then, at the end of September, their tone became much more urgent.

On 28 September Sas reported that the West could expect an offensive in about six weeks’ time, and that Holland had better not count on the protection of its neutrality. He had reached this conclusion by himself, but when Reynders communicated back his scepticism, the Military Attaché went to see Oster again, who received him in the study of his flat. Once Sas had taken him into his confidence and told him about his 28 September report, and the thousand rumours and sources which had brought him to his conclusion, Oster did not hesitate for long before answering. ‘I think you are right. I am not, however, privy to the plans of the General Staff Operations Section; but I will try to find out what the exact current situation is.’

One of the problems of the story of the Resistance is that few of the conspirators left copious written material behind them. Much that was written was destroyed by the Gestapo in the purges following the failure of the 20 July 1944 Plot. Key men like Oster and Stauffenberg committed little to paper, certainly not of their private thoughts. So at first sight it is hard to say whether or not Oster came to the momentous decision to offer secret military information to a potentially enemy state spontaneously, or whether it was a measure he had already considered adopting if an opportunity to do so ever presented itself. He had certainly talked freely theoretically with Sas for several months about the situation in Germany, but specific information was quite another matter.

There is no doubt that he took the decision and operated the liaison with Sas alone, though he took Beck into his confidence and gained his agreement. The whole operation did not come to light until after the war, and until recently the debate about whether his action was justified still raged fiercely. Only in 1991 was a plaque to his memory affixed to his old Berlin home. The old question of the difference between treason against the government and treason against the country was raised, not without reason: had Oster crossed the border between the two, and entered forbidden territory? His daughter (not the only relative of a conspirator to do so) has made the point that even many decades after the war it was not always a good thing to bear the same surname as a prominent conspirator.

Oster knew that if he gave precise information to Sas about German invasion plans, he would be putting the lives of tens of thousands of German soldiers at risk. The fact is that he would have taken this into his calculations, accepting responsibility for a lesser evil in order to avoid a greater one. He was not an unreflective man, but he was able to make a decision and then stick to it. His daughter remembers:

My father had no anxiety. He just wasn’t frightened of things. He wasn’t incautious, he just saw his way and went ahead and did it. He was energetic and decisive. If you were a victim of anxiety during the Third Reich, you’d be good for absolutely nothing — look at Halder. My father’s views never changed, whatever Hitler’s fortunes were.

As a professional soldier, Oster would have weighed the pros and cons carefully. His thinking would have been coloured too by his deep regret at the failure of the 1938 coup attempt — the one which came closest to success, and by which any war at all would have been avoided. Now, a year later, he regarded the vacillations of the generals with increasing scepticism. He was as convinced as Beck and Canaris that a European war, let alone one that involved America, would mean the end of Germany and the deaths of millions of people. He had as little doubt as Beck (a view scoffed at by Hitler) that America, with its vast resources, would not stand by and let Britain be destroyed. For better or worse, Britain was the cradle of America, and language, history and much of the culture were things the two countries held in common.

Finally, and just as importantly, Oster was convinced of the essential criminality of the Nazi regime. Among the staff of the Abwehr, in their cramped little offices ranged along the narrow corridors of the Tirpitzufer building, few wore uniforms. Oster was barely to be seen in one since the Nazis had taken power — he felt that it had been sullied; nor did he accept his promotion to Major-General willingly at Hitler’s hands. He knew about the euthanasia programmes, he knew what Hitler planned against the Jews, and he was outraged that Germany should consider for a moment flouting the neutrality of Belgium and Holland.

Sas told Oster that any information he received would be transmitted to his Belgian opposite number, Colonel Goethals. Oster accepted this and said to the Dutchman, in his usual undemonstrative way: ‘It is my plan and my duty to rid Germany and the world of this plague.’

There followed a series of secret meetings with Sas. Getting into his car at the end of the first one, Oster said to his friend, Corvette-Captain Fritz Liedig, whom he had taken into his confidence, and who was waiting for him at the wheel, ‘There’s no going back for me now.’ He sat in the car in silence as they drove through the dark October streets of Berlin, then added: ‘It’s much easier to take a pistol and shoot someone down, it’s much easier to storm a machine-gun emplacement, than to do what I have decided to do. And if I should die, I beg you to remain my friend after my death — a friend who knew the circumstances under which I took this decision, and what drove me to do things which perhaps others will never understand, or at least would never have done themselves.’

That night, 8 October 1939, Oster had told Sas that while nothing was yet planned against Holland, the approach to France would certainly be made by force across Belgium. He had crossed his lonely Rubicon.

The reaction of the Dutch authorities to the news transmitted to them by Sas in confidence was at first sceptical, but fourteen days later, Oster communicated additional information that the invasion plan now included Holland, and that the attack date was likely to be mid-November, depending on weather conditions.

Now the Belgians put themselves on guard. They mobilised, but quietly, to Oster’s great relief. There was certainly no doubt that they took the warning seriously. In Holland the case was different. Sas was told by the head of the Dutch Secret Service that he had their full confidence; but in The Hague he learnt from a friend, the Adjutant to the Minister of War, that the opposite was true. His friend also showed him a report by the Secret Service which stated that Sas was not a credible source, and which, further, argued that his warnings were ‘ridiculous’. This was at the beginning of November. He returned to Berlin on the 7th, to find a message from Oster: ‘Come immediately. Every second counts.’

At their meeting, Oster was able to tell Sas every detail of what had happened between Hitler and Brauchitsch, and that the order had been given to attack on 12 November. But barely had this date been communicated to Holland, than it was deferred, first to the 15th and then almost immediately to the 19th. Then to the 22nd, then to 3 December. This was typical of Hitler’s unpredictable and impatient style, and as usual it served as protection for him. Oster never lost credibility in Sas’s eyes, but it was no wonder that the Dutch authorities looked at Sas askance.

The story of the next few months is so long and complicated that it becomes a mire of simultaneously occurring and contradictory events. The essentials are that the planned invasion of France was put off so frequently that Resistance warnings ceased to be taken at all seriously. On 10 January 1940, two German airmen had to force-land at Mechelen, Belgium. They were carrying invasion documents, but despite this breach of security, or perhaps because of it, Hitler decided to aim for an offensive on the 17th. Bad weather intervened again, however, and finally, on 16 January, the Führer decided to put the whole thing off until the spring.

Meanwhile, in Rome, the Bamberg lawyer, Dr Josef Müller, continued his efforts on behalf of the Resistance to persuade the Pope (Eugenio Pacelli had ascended the Papal throne in 1939 as Pius XII) to act as a peace broker between the Allies and a government of liberation in Germany. The negotiations were tortuous but the Pope was not unsympathetic to the role, which encouraged the conspirators greatly. However, the British Minister, Sir Francis D’Arcy Osborne, was doubtful of the Resistance: who were they, actually, and what political groupings did they represent? Furthermore, through Müller the Resistance had made this approach primarily to Britain, which in turn pointed out that it could do nothing without France. Secret meetings also took place with British representatives in Switzerland, but achieved nothing in the end. Nor did the efforts of a colourful but definitely dubious self-styled diplomat called James Lonsdale Bryans. Bryans was an old Etonian sponger who had a slender contact with Lord Halifax (then Foreign Secretary of Britain), and with Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli, whom Bryans met in Rome and who was engaged to the German Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell’s daughter, Fey. Bryans clearly saw an opportunity for self-aggrandisement in acting as go-between for Hassell and Halifax, and it is a measure of the Resistance’s anxiety to follow up any channel to the Allies that Hassell took the risk of meeting such a doubtful emissary. Bryans, to his credit, persevered until March 1940, but his representations on behalf of the Resistance fell on increasingly deaf British ears and finally Sir Alexander Cadogan, Vansittart’s glacial successor at the Foreign Office, showed him the door.

Oster’s friend, Corvette-Captain Liedig, came up with a plan late in 1939 based on the ever-present fear of Bolshevism. After the fall of Poland, in which that country had been split between Germany and the USSR more to the former’s benefit than had been suggested by the Treaty of 23 August, Stalin had made no difficulties but requested Germany’s connivance at his including Lithuania in his ‘sphere of influence’. The Soviets had attacked Finland in November, and there was, argued Liedig, every chance that they would sweep down on western Europe from the north. Hitler, the self-appointed bulwark against Bolshevism, now seemed to be opening the gates of Europe to Russia. If Germany toppled him now, and placed her forces at the disposal of Europe against the USSR, then the new German government could claim a generous peace settlement as a reward. Britain and Germany could even fight side by side against the common menace. Romantic as this sounded, in the end it proved at least partially true, though not until after the collapse of the Third Reich.

But again everything hinged on a decisive move from Brauchitsch and Halder, which did not materialise. Nor was there any help from the commanders in the West, though Wilhelm von Leeb remained willing to support Resistance plans. Beck, Goerdeler and their group, including the Abwehr conspirators, had revived their hope in a combined rising of the western Army at the very end of 1939, following vociferous protests from Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, the sixty-two-year-old Commander-in-Chief in the East.

Blaskowitz was complaining about the atrocities committed by the SS and the so-called
Einsatzgruppen
— task forces — behind the lines in Poland. In the days before the ‘Final Solution’ (formulated in January 1942), the massive deportations to those concentration camps which were developed specifically as death camps had not yet begun. But the slaughter had. There were four
Einsatzgruppen
, each numbering between 500 and 1000 men. Their official function was ‘the removal of all elements hostile to the Reich and to Germany behind the fighting line’. Among them, over their period of operation in Poland and later in Russia between autumn 1939 and about summer 1942, they were responsible for the deaths of two million people. On 29 August 1941, one such group killed 1469 Jewish children in Moletai and Utena in Lithuania. Their method of operation was very simple: