An Honourable Defeat (21 page)

Hitler announced the date for so-called Exercise Weser on 27 March 1940. On 1 April Liedig was briefing Oster on the state of play. Oster, hugely frustrated, said to him: ‘I simply don’t understand the British. How can they be so blind? Surely they can see that a show of force would send Hitler packing...’ The following day he went to Sas and told him that the invasion of Denmark and Norway would take place immediately after the first week of April — between the 8th and 10th. Sas told not only The Hague, but also informed Goethals, and went to see the Norwegian legation counsellor and the Danish Naval Attaché. The Dane informed Copenhagen, but Stang, the Norwegian, dismissed Sas’s information as nonsense. In fact, Stang was a supporter of Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi leader. But in the end it was Britain and France which distracted the attention of the Scandinavian states. On 5 April the Allies accused Norway and Sweden of materially aiding Germany, and warned them against taking a pro-German stance. On 8 April, British minelayers were at work along the Norwegian coast. The German Fleet and troop transports were already at sea. Oster, with a touch of Goerdeler’s optimism, bent over the map and said, tapping it, ‘The British Navy will engage us about here. They’ll defeat us, that’ll be the end of Emil [Hitler], and we’ll be able to negotiate a peace.’

But the minelayers had finished their work, and the British Fleet arrived too late. Cruiser Squadron 1 was still loading on 7 April at the Firth of Forth as a German squadron passed out of the northern end of the Kattegat. On 9 April the Germans made their landings according to plan. Denmark fell in a day. Norway collapsed in a month.

With this totally successful act of aggression the Resistance saw their chances of negotiating with the Allies slip even further away. At the same time, Hitler’s triumph suppressed all the more forcefully any hope of a successful coup. It was impossible to predict the reaction of the masses, and his string of easy victories with minimal loss of life was head-turning. Hitler had gained more territory for Germany with less difficulty than Bismarck himself. Obstacles seemed to melt away at his touch. Only one slender possibility of a favourable outcome remained — that war with France could be averted. But this expectation was beginning to look more like wishful thinking.

Plans for the invasion of France had been on the table for some time. The Blitzkrieg technique had proved successful, and there was no sign that the French had adapted their defences to it. Reconnaissance flights had also shown that the French were not as strong as had been supposed. Now it was well into spring, and Hitler’s patience was at an end. After a row with Göring about waiting for the right weather conditions for fighters and bombers, the Führer set the time and date for invasion, in deep secrecy, for 5.35a.m. on 10 May.

Contrary to forecasts, 9 May was a beautiful day all over Europe. Oster sat it out grimly. All the Resistance could hope for now was a last-minute cancellation, the code word for which was ‘Augsburg’ which could be given only by Hitler from his special train. The dictator had set out from Berlin in the late afternoon, ostensibly to visit units in Denmark and Norway. But at Hamburg the train had changed direction and headed south to Hanover, due east of which lay Holland. The change of direction could mean only one thing.

If the ‘Augsburg’ signal had not been given by 9p.m., Operation Yellow could not be called off. Oster and Sas met at the former’s flat at 7p.m. Both men’s nerves were taut. At 8.30p.m. they could stand the waiting no longer and took a taxi to Tirpitzufer. Sas waited downstairs while Oster ran upstairs to the Abwehr offices. Twenty minutes later, he returned, his face set.

‘My dear friend, it’s all up with us at last. There’s been no counter order. The bastard’s gone off to the West Front; it’s all over. Let’s hope we meet again after the war.’ He added bitterly: ‘Blow up the bridges over the Maas for me.’
[61]

Chapter Eight – Holding On

As soon as he had the news, Sas communicated it to his own authorities and to Colonel Goethals. At midnight he received a lightly coded message from The Hague to enquire if there really were to be no change in the arrangements for ‘the operation on your wife’. Sas told them it would take place in under six hours. But the Dutch did not take the warning seriously, and even the Belgians did not mobilise until 3a.m. The German forces swept over them, driving the British Expeditionary Force, severely depleted, back across the Channel, and decimating the French units which had fought alongside it. General Hoth raced along the north coast of France, while Generals Guderian and Kleist (the latter a cousin of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin) headed south and east, smashing through the Ardennes. Paris fell on 14 June, the French capitulated on 22, and hostilities ceased on 25. Hitler ordered that church bells be rung throughout the Reich for a week in celebration. He also created twelve new field marshals — ironically, among them were Leeb and Witzleben — nineteen colonel-generals, and seven generals. Göring now became the first and only ‘Reichsmarschall’ of the Greater German Empire.

The Resistance now entered a long period of abeyance. The phoney war was over, and the new conditions that ensued made it much more difficult to meet, to plan and to carry out any attempt at a coup. Quite apart from anything else, many conspirators were simply kept too busy with their regular duties to contribute; others were posted far away, or to the Front; others decided that now they had to make Germany their priority, and fight for their country rather than against its leaders. Gisevius expresses the dilemma well:

The opposition had to consider its stand in the new situation. A man might have fought bitterly against Hitler’s insane war policy, but now the war was there. How was he to react towards it? As an oppositionist? As a patriot? As a European? Or as none of these, but quite simply as a soldier whose business it was to obey orders?

Let us not forget that totalitarianism and opposition are mutually exclusive political ideas. In a democracy it is possible to practise opposition, but dictatorship permits no antagonists...Opposition is a struggle against an existing regime; it is an attempt to bring about a shift in course or a change in personnel, without directly overthrowing a system...The people of a nation [subjected to evil dictatorship] must take upon their conscience the tremendous burden of devoting all their imagination and zeal to the purely destructive activities of underground work...

As far as peace negotiations were concerned, it soon became clear that any hope of temporising with Britain was gone too (that is, for the Nazis, though the Resistance continued — vainly — to try to talk terms at least). Early in May 1940 the belligerent and ambitious Winston Churchill, leader of a rebel faction within the Conservative Party, staged a coup of his own and forced the waning Chamberlain out of office. Chamberlain died, worn out, soon afterwards.

As he had shown in his treatment of striking workers early in his career, Churchill was an aggressive man whose chief approach to problems was to fight them head on. Hitler was a problem. Now that Churchill was Prime Minister, he would fight him. That was the way to get rid of him. Though crude and intemperate, Churchill was the perfect match for Hitler, and perhaps the only man who could have united the will of the British at this isolated moment in their history. Hitler certainly feared him.

Despite the loss of momentum, the spirit of the Resistance was kept alive through a number of groups and individuals. Several people made, or at least thought very seriously about, an assassination attempt on Hitler.
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In 1938, the Swiss theology student Maurice Bavaud had tried three times to get a shot off at Hitler, making him the one man other than Stauffenberg to make more than one attempt. He was caught, and executed in 1941. In 1939 the British Military Attaché, Colonel F. Noël Mason-Macfarlane (‘Mason-Mac’, as he is affectionately remembered by his friends) quite seriously suggested to the British government that he should take a shot at Hitler from the window of his flat at 1 Sophienstrasse, because it conveniently overlooked the Führer’s platform opposite the Technical High School, from which Hitler frequently made speeches.

There were two other remarkable lone attempts to undermine Hitler by less direct means. Albrecht Haushofer was the academic son of a famous professor at Berlin University. Professor Karl Haushofer enjoyed a close friendship with Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s ill-fated deputy, and the family thus had a certain degree of protection, which was important because Frau Professor Haushofer was part Jewish. Albrecht was on the staff of the Foreign Office. His father was the founder in Germany of the science of geopolitics, and Albrecht, a great traveller himself, had a very close knowledge of Britain. He was therefore in a better position than most to see that a world war threatened. He tried to use his own influence with Hess to block the promotion of the warmongering Ribbentrop and, though he failed in this, Hess approached him in September 1940 with a view to making peace overtures to Britain. Hess suggested that a meeting on neutral ground — possibly in Lisbon — might be set up between himself and Haushofer’s acquaintance, the Duke of Hamilton. The proposal entailed much discussion, but finally a letter was dispatched to the Duke, who did not, however, reply. In the course of time Operation Sealion — the planned invasion of Britain — was dropped and German attention once more turned towards an eastern campaign, but in the spring of 1941 another possibility arose for Haushofer to communicate with the British, this time via a Swiss contact. Hess was not against the idea, but it came to nothing. The crux of this episode was that Hess, a man of very limited intelligence, developed an
idée
fixe
about the Duke of Hamilton. On 10 May 1941 he set off on his famous flight to Britain, with the idea of contacting the Duke, and through him seeking an audience with King George VI.

Haushofer had nothing to do with this mad scheme, but his association with Hess was known and now, with Hess’s protection gone, the Gestapo arrested him and went through his papers. He was released, but his reputation was severely damaged both at home and abroad, where he had painstakingly sought to send out peace feelers. The regime never trusted him again, and like so many others he was re-arrested following 20 July 1944. In prison he wrote a sequence of sonnets which are well-known in Germany, one of which celebrates the fortuitous death during an air raid of the infamous Nazi hanging judge, Roland Freisler:

But yesterday he sent four to their deaths,

And today he lies dead in the ruins himself.

He’ll send no more to meet the rope or axe;

A pile of rubble’s all his office now...

Justice by chance? A thousand bombs descend

On this great city, killing high and low —

Was one bomb used by Destiny as its judge?

Haushofer was killed on the same April night, and in the same group, as his friend Guttenberg.

A lonelier course was taken by the young mining engineer Kurt Gerstein. His story is a unique one in the history of the Resistance, and does not fit in easily, but it is a tragic illustration of moral paradox.
[63]

Kurt Gerstein was found hanging in his cell at the Cherche-Midi prison in Paris on 25 July 1945, a fortnight before his fortieth birthday. His whole life had been an inversion. His profound Christianity had driven him to join the SS to expose it from within; but his technical expertise had condemned him to a job at the very centre of its rotten heart.

He came from a conservative, traditional family in Münster, where the values of obedience and stoicism had been bred into him from childhood. Obedience was not something to which he was inclined naturally, but he grew up conventionally, though his attachment to the Evangelical Church was noticeably passionate. At the end of 1933, despite having already joined the SA, Gerstein sent two telegrams protesting against the disruption by the Nazis of German evangelical youth work, in which he was deeply involved. The recipients of these, Nazi Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach and State Bishop Ludwig Müller, did not react, but the early protest was a courageous one. Further moves against the Church compounded Gerstein’s outrage, and as Nazi skulduggery all round him became unbearably evident, so there grew within him a need to bear witness to the crimes of the regime which would not be denied.

In Hagen in 1935, the local Roman Catholics demonstrated at a performance of the anti-Christian play
Wittekind
by Edmund Kiss. The riot was quashed by the police. The following day, Gerstein booked a front-row ticket and from it conducted his own solo demonstration. In the fight which followed he lost several teeth. Although the introduction of the Nuremberg laws against Jews does not appear to have affected him (he came from a conventionally, but not violently, anti-Semitic background), he did help one Jewish convert friend to continue his theological studies. His reaction to further depredations by the Nazis on the Church was always extreme. His stance for what he saw as purity, and against Nazi obscenity, was fanatical, and yet friends remember a man who had a good sense of humour and a great capacity for irony.

He was first arrested in 1936 for organising the First Congress of the Miners’ Association of the Saar, and though the Confessing Church, with which he was closely associated, interceded for him and prevented his imprisonment, he was dismissed from the Party. His dominant father forced him to apologise and recant. All his older brothers and his father were by now Party members. Not belonging was a severe hindrance to a career. He obeyed, but nevertheless continued his fight, through pamphlets and publications which he financed from the private income he derived from the family firm in Düsseldorf. Significantly, one series of pamphlets was called ‘Of Honour and Purity’, in which he was clearly trying to square his conscience and beliefs with Nazi ideology, but he was re-arrested in summer 1938 and accused of monarchist plotting. By now he was married and had started a family.

He was sent to a concentration camp for six months, but was then released owing to lack of evidence. Although his father continued to support him, Gerstein became depressed and pessimistic. He had used up his private supply of money on his pamphleteering, and had not been in work for a year. An attempt to take up medical studies foundered, as did another to read theology. Finally, with the help of a powerful industrialist, Hugo Stinnes Jnr, he got a job in a potassium mine in Thuringia in the summer of 1939.

His spirits lifted slightly, but the comfort was not to last. His sister-in-law, Bertha Ebeling, of whom he was very fond, became one of the early victims of the Nazi euthanasia programme at one of the centres in Hadamar and Grafeneck. These centres, supervised by the former CID chief of Stuttgart, Christian Wirth, who was to go on to run one of the death camps in Poland, were to be the first to use gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Bishop Galen’s sermons against the programme followed soon after.

This event triggered Gerstein’s plan to join the SS and become a ‘spy for God’, though the idea seems to have been with him since the end of 1939. He joined in March 1941 and because of his engineering background and his smattering of medicine they allocated him to the Medico-Technical Service of the Waffen-SS Group D (Hygiene), which was working on water disinfection systems for front-line troops and prisoners of war. Stationed at Arnhem, he contacted an old Dutch friend and immediately confided his plans to him. By now he was committing a number of crimes against the State — he listened to the BBC, for example, and read banned books. He was also convinced of the need for Germany to lose the war. Nevertheless he received a glowing report at the end of his SS training period, and when it was discovered by the Party that he was an expelled member, the SS refused to let him go because of his invaluable technical knowledge.

That was at the end of 1941. Early the following year his friend Helmut Franz described Gerstein as ‘a bundle of nerves made up of hate, fear and despair’. It will be remembered that in January 1942 the plan for the Final Solution was drawn up. In June Gerstein, by now head of Technical Disinfection Services of the Waffen-SS, became involved in the work of the extermination camps. His role was to improve their efficiency.

He was considered an expert in cyanide disinfectants. One of his first experiences of the camps was at the side of Christian Wirth, at Belzec. There he was able to witness the procedure of gassing people with carbon monoxide. The Jews were stripped and crammed into a shed, into which exhaust fumes were fed by pipes. It then took the technical team at the camp two hours and forty-nine minutes (it was timed exactly) to get the big diesel started; a further thirty-two minutes were needed for all the people in the shed to die. Wirth, a champion of carbon monoxide over the far more efficient Zyklon-B, the new crystallised cyanide gas originally developed for disinfection purposes, was embarrassed and upset.

As a cyanide expert, Gerstein could pronounce shipments of Zyklon-B (which quickly replaced carbon monoxide as the killing method) useless because it degenerated in transit, and no one questioned his word; but he could not do this with every shipment and he could only delay and disrupt, not prevent, the slaughter. There were four camps in Poland specifically dedicated to slaughtering Jews, not including the massive death factory of Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps with smaller gas chamber complexes. He was caught in a terrible trap, but he did not commit suicide, or apply to be sent to the East Front, or seek refuge in alcohol, as some SS men did. He stuck to his mission.