An Honourable Defeat (28 page)

Hans and Sophie were buried in Perlach Cemetery in south Munich on 24 February. In the town, graffiti appeared on walls: ‘Their spirit lives.’

*

Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had more youth movements, clubs and organisations than any other country. They were attached to the various sects of the church, to political parties, to health and fitness societies, sporting groups and trade unions. Their basic philosophy centred around a healthy open-air existence, self-sufficiency bolstered by a sense of community spirit, and the singing of folksongs. All of them were made illegal by Hitler, who replaced them with the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls (there were similar organisations for children below the age of fourteen), to which every boy under eighteen and every girl under twenty-one was supposed to belong. The Hitler Youth was founded in 1923, but by 1932 it still had by far the lowest membership of all its rival organisations — 40,000, compared with 2 million members of the other young sports clubs. Many Hitler Youth members were members in name only anyway, and the old youth organisations flourished underground. But new groups sprang up as well, as a direct protest to Nazism. They went by various umbrella names, such as ‘Swing Youth’ and ‘Jazz Youth’. Sometimes their protest went no further than listening to ‘decadent’ western music and especially jazz, frowned on by the Nazis because it was the product of Negro culture. Nazi accusations against the non-conformist youth groups ranged from homosexuality to ‘cosmopolitanism’! Himmler was quick to suggest sending all ‘unregenerate’ members to the concentration camps and there, boys and girls alike, should be ‘beaten, given the severest exercise, and then put to hard labour’.

A broadly based youth organisation which grew out of the working class and flourished in the industrial west went by the name of ‘Edelweiss Pirates’.

They evolved partly as a reaction to the underground Communist Party. In exile in the USSR, under such men as Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, the Party flourished; but at home, after some success in Resistance work before the war, it fell into a no-man’s-land because of the pact with Stalin. That Stalin could come to terms with a man like Hitler, who had made the Communist Party illegal, was a testimony to the cynical contempt both men showed for their own so-called ideals and for the people who were forcibly governed by them. Officially, German Communists were bidden to regard the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact as a stroke of genius by Stalin in protecting the Motherland from the Nazi threat. Communist Resistance virtually ceased until 1941. By then, the war was well under way, and the deprivations it brought in its wake encouraged moods of passivity, apathy and resignation in all but the strongest; the typical Communist of the Resistance in the last years before the war was about thirty, a skilled worker used to many years’ unemployment. Now such men were an important four or five years older, and most had been called up. Youth groups had formed already in rivalry to the Hitler Youth, but now, especially in the Rhineland, the Edelweiss Pirates emerged as an expression of spontaneous protest.

The groups grew as the Allies destroyed more and more sports facilities and youth clubs as part of their policy of bombing civilian targets, and as the leaders of the Hitler Youth grew up and were conscripted. Their centres were the towns of Cologne, Duisberg, Dusseldorf, Essen and Wuppertal. The groups were not coherent and had no ideology. They were united in enmity to the regime and to the regimentation of the Hitler Youth in particular. They did not want to be cannon fodder and they could see which way the war was going. They avoided uniforms, but they had a mode of dress by which they could recognise each other — usually (for boys) shorts, white socks, check shirts and a neckscarf. They would also wear an Edelweiss or an Edelweiss badge if possible, usually attached under the lapel. Girls wore white pullovers, white socks and windcheaters. The police drew up detailed sartorial lists by which Pirates could be recognised. Their songs were the old prewar international folksongs, and the guitarist of any group was protected like a standard bearer. Most of them were male, and aged between fourteen and seventeen. Many members of the Hitler Youth were closet Edelweiss Pirates, though the Pirates concentrated on damaging Nazi property — especially public bulletin and notice boards — and pitched battles with Hitler Youth groups were not unusual. To begin with the authorities contented themselves with keeping the groups under observation, and took no action beyond the occasional raid when the activities of the Pirates became too bold for comfort. But towards the end of the war, when the bands of boys were joined by young German deserters and fugitive foreign forced-labourers, the Gestapo laid a heavier hand on them.

Where a group took what could be construed as specific action against the regime, they would be merciless. The youngest member of the Resistance to be beheaded at Plötzensee — the familiar red Notice of Execution appeared on the Berlin streets on 27 October 1942 — was only seventeen years old. His name was Helmuth Hübener. He was a member of the Mormon sect, and his crime was to organise a small group which wrote down .the details of BBC broadcasts, then duplicated and distributed them. The court found that he was of above average intelligence and maturity for his age. Because of his alleged precocity and his political essay, ‘The War of the Plutocrats’ (written for his final school examination before he went on to become an administration trainee) it was considered correct to try and punish him as if he were an adult.

The loose structure of Edelweiss Pirate groups meant that it was easy to classify them officially as criminals, and only recently have they come to be regarded as part of the Resistance. A further muddying of the water was caused by confusion of them at the very end of the war with the so-called Werewolves. These were groups of fanatical Nazi adolescents, who at the very end of the war, and even after it had ended, fought on, sabotaging Allied equipment and executing ‘traitors’.

Some joined the Edelweiss Pirates after becoming disaffected with the Hitler Youth. Fritz Theilen’s first protest was to shit in his Hitler Youth leader’s briefcase — an imposing-looking bag which he found to contain nothing but a newspaper and a sandwich. He got away with that, but he was expelled from the Hitler Youth for refusing to do punishment exercises when his group’s flag was found to be less than perfectly presented.
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Theilen then joined a group of older boys who were waiting to be called up, but who met at the local sports ground on Saturday mornings. Through them he joined the Navajos — an offshoot of Edelweiss Pirates — which used to meet in Blücher Park, Cologne. They were occasionally harassed by Nazi groups, because they sang forbidden songs quite openly, but if there were no police to back the Nazis up, it was usually possible to fight them off. But heavy restrictions were placed on young people in Nazi Germany. By a police decree of 9 March 1940, those under eighteen years old were forbidden to be on the streets during the hours of darkness, and banned from bars, cinemas, cabarets or clubs after 9 o’clock at night. They were also prohibited from smoking or drinking in any public place, and they were not allowed to go to dances or use sports facilities or shooting galleries. Members of the Party, Party organisations, or the Armed Forces were exempted from these rules. Punishments for infraction of them ranged from up to either 50 Reichsmark or three weeks in prison for young offenders, to 150 Reichsmark or six weeks in gaol for adults encouraging or permitting them to indulge in such activities.
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As the war progressed, so did the popularity of the Hitler Youth wane. The police and the Hitler Youth’s own ‘police’ units — originally developed to seek out and punish misdemeanours within the ranks of the Hitler Youth — found it increasingly difficult to control the growing ranks of unofficial youth groups, which began to hold meetings numbering several hundred. There was safety in numbers, and the guitar player would always be especially protected. Two rings would be formed around him or her — the first of girls, the outer one of boys. Hitler Youth attackers would aim to carry the guitar player off or at least smash the guitar. They rarely succeeded.

The Edelweiss Pirates were not without a sense of duty, however. In the massive Allied air raids on Cologne at the end of May and beginning of June 1942, which wrecked the old town completely, Pirates formed themselves into auxiliaries of the police and the fire brigade in order to help in firefighting and rescue work. These young people, born around 1925, had experienced nothing but the repression and dreariness of National Socialism all their lives, and they were simply fed up with it. The horror of the war was brought home to them in the regular bombing raids on the industrial west from 1942 on. The spontaneous reaction was the healthy and natural one of young creatures to throw off the bungling, destructive management of the old. Girls, not always able to express Resistance as aggressively as boys, were courageous in acts of disobedience. The girls of one branch of the Düsseldorf League of German Girls so hated having to belong to it that they simply turned left when told to turn right at square bashing exercises and their leaders could do nothing but rant in the face of such unassailable solidarity.

The Pirates used the air raids — when everyone else was sheltering in bunkers — as cover for their meetings as they became better organised. Older, more politically orientated leaders appeared among them — renegade schoolteachers and former youth workers. The police made a show of stepping up their activities against them, but in fact the Gestapo chased them only when they were sure they would not be outnumbered. When Pirates were arrested, however, they could count on a beating and interrogation. By 1944, they began to be in danger of their lives.

By 1944 too it became imperative to go underground in order to avoid being drafted into the Army — or even the SS, for by now you had no choice where you were sent. About this time Fritz Theilen came into contact with Bartholomäus ‘Bartel’ Schink. Bartel was sixteen and ran a group in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne. They engaged in political activity: fly-posting anti-Nazi leaflets (when the flour for flour-and-water glue ran out they used powdered plaster from bombed-out houses, though fish glue was best for permanence), graffiti mocking Nazi slogans (‘One People, One State, One Heap of Rubble’ instead of ‘One People, One State, One Leader’) and the spreading of news from the BBC. Their headquarters was a shed on an allotment owned by the parents of one of the gang, and by May their main activity was pillaging the supply trains in the Cologne goods yards in order to pass on the food to Russian prisoners-of-war. They also carried out these activities under the dangerous cover of air raids. By now Allied bombers had reduced Ehrenfeld to a wasteland, inhabited by the homeless, deserters, escaped POWs, draft-dodgers and Resistance fighters. In this atmosphere the Pirates found themselves blamed for the crimes of looters and black-marketeers, and for the looting of private property that never took place (citizens invented stories in order to claim extra supplies for themselves). The police also took part in this kind of thing: Fritz Theilen was once sent into a burning tobacconist’s to rescue cigarettes and cigars for the benefit of the police.

During a raid on the goods yards in August, they were surprised by a Gestapo patrol. Bartel fired at the Nazis — all the boys had pistols — but most of the group were arrested soon afterwards. The majority were sent to hard labour camps for dissident youth behind the crumbling West Front, but thirteen Pirates were publicly hanged in Hüttenstrasse in Ehrenfeld on 10 November, on charges of helping deserters and forced labourers. Bartel Schink was one of them.

Chapter Ten – Resistance in the East

As Germany became ever more embroiled in the conflict she had started but could never win, and as Germans grimly accustomed themselves to the new idea of ‘total war’, so an increasing number of senior officers took refuge from moral responsibility in their military duty. This tendency was heightened by the joint declaration from Churchill and Roosevelt following a conference at Casablanca in. January 1943 that Germany would now be coerced into unconditional surrender. The Allies would also begin a systematic bombing campaign on Germany.

At the same time, Stalingrad was falling. In the Resistance, Beck’s group knew Paulus to be a weak character, but hoped nevertheless that he would have defied Hitler by now, given the inhumanity of the Supreme Commander’s order to hold on. Beck even wrote to Manstein, under whose overall command the 6th Army was, but neither he nor Paulus rose to the occasion.

This and the Casablanca decision were further serious blows to the Resistance. Now that it became clear that it would be a fight to the finish, many officers sincerely felt that their duty lay in protecting Germany as far as possible. Only those clearsighted enough to see that the best way of averting ruin was to stop Hitler in his tracks, and who had the courage to believe that the removal of the Führer was still an imperative moral action, continued to work with absolute determination towards killing him.

The job of doing so was getting more difficult. Hitler, faced with setbacks for the first time, and suspicious even of constructive criticism, was following the textbook progress of a megalomaniac tyrant. Here already were the signs of that complete madness which would lead him to order the destruction of Germany itself — its factories, towns and ports — when it finally became clear to him at the very end that he had lost. The German people had failed him; the only glorious Germans were dead; the rest he would take down with him in an unholy Viking funeral.

He became increasingly reclusive, rarely leaving the Berghof in Berchtesgaden, or his bunker-like headquarters in the depths of East Prussia, the so-called Wolf’s Lair (
Wolfsschanze
) near Rastenburg (now Ketrzyn). His security measures, however, increased with his paranoia, and he had eyes everywhere. Hitler had never been under any illusions that his people loved him; it is unlikely that he wanted love. He had always prided himself on his sixth sense for danger — Goebbels had created a myth around it — but it did not always work and he backed it up with complex and rigorous security arrangements.
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By 1923, the Führer already had a bodyguard of 100 men — the ‘Shock Troop Hitler’. As Chancellor, he was provided with protection at the expense of the State. Inherited from the Weimar Republic, it was not very substantial — just a few policemen drummed up as bodyguards on important public occasions. Hitler added to this force from the ranks of the SS and the Security Service. He never used a foreign car, and the German make he preferred was Mercedes. He had a Mercedes 770 G4 W31, a 770 KW 150 II and a 7.7 litre W150. Each had a reinforced bodywork and bulletproof glass. Holsters were built into the doors. When travelling by car, he always did so in a large convoy to confuse possible assassins.

He had two personal aeroplanes. The first was built in 1937, a Focke-Wulf FW 200 Condor V3 — the ‘Führermaschine Immelmann III’; the second, built in 1942, was an FW 200 Condor C-4/U-I. Both had a reinforced bulkhead between the part where Hitler sat and the other passengers. His armchair in the second aeroplane at least could be ejected, and had its own built-in parachute.

Hitler preferred to travel by car or plane, but when he needed to use it, the ‘Führer-train’ was at his disposal. It was made up of eleven coaches, including a saloon, a dining car, a conference car, a baggage waggon, a coach for his bodyguards and another for the press.

His greatest security measure, however, remained his own temperament. He instinctively liked to keep people guessing about what he would do, and to catch them wrong-footed. He was the supreme exponent of divide and rule, to the extent of living in an atmosphere of senior management confusion. He always made his mind up about when and how to travel at the last moment, and he would frequently decide not to go at all. When he appeared at meetings, he was always surrounded by SS men, though curiously it was not until very late in the war that attenders at meetings had to leave their pistols outside, and briefcases were not searched. General security at Berchtesgaden and the
Wolfsschanze
, however, was very tight.

The Führer did not often visit the East Front. The activities of the SS and the
Einsatzgruppen
caused outrage and disgust among many Regular Army officers, but they could salve their consciences if they so wished with the consideration that they, at least, had nothing to do with the atrocities. However, in early June 1941, before the order was ever given to attack Russia, Hitler, with his usual contempt for Brauchitsch and Halder (who in any case gave in), issued instructions regarding the treatment of captured Soviet political commissars. The written order included this: ‘You are requested to limit distribution to the Commanders of Armies or Air Fleets...and to arrange for further communication [of this order] to lower commands by word of mouth...’ and, as if that were not indication enough of the criminal intent to follow, it continued: ‘in the struggle against Bolshevism, we must not assume that the enemy’s conduct will be based on principles of humanity or international law.’ In view of the Germans’ behaviour in Poland already, such sentiments are sickening, but now came the meat of the order:

Political commissars have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently they will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle they will be shot at once, whether captured during operations or otherwise showing resistance. The following regulations will apply:...on capture they will be immediately segregated from other prisoners on the field of battle...After they have been segregated they will be liquidated
.
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This so-called Commissar Order was countersigned by Keitel, the chief of the Overall High Command of the Armed Forces. All Brauchitsch and Halder could do — and to be fair to them they did this — was pass the order on with the rider that, as the duty of soldiers was fighting, there would be little time for such ‘mopping up’ operations. The implication of the order was clear though: Hitler wanted to force the Army’s direct involvement in his crimes. It was another way of trying to demonstrate his power over it. In fact he failed. The order was barely carried out at all by members of the Regular Army, and his action in trying to impose it had, if anything, a stiffening effect on the Resistance in Army Group Centre — the Army on the East Front.

The senior operations officer on the Staff of Army Group Centre was Lieutenant-Colonel Henning von Tresckow.

Tresckow was born in 1901, the son of an old Prussian-Brandenburg military family. He followed in the family tradition, and in 1918 he became the youngest lieutenant of 1st Infantry Guard Regiment. He was a brave, intelligent soldier, but after the war he found the Army too restricting and left it to join a bank. In 1924 he travelled with the military historian Kurt Hesse through England, France and South America. Returning in 1926, he married Erika von Falkenhayn, the daughter of the former Prussian Minister for War, and rejoined the Army as a lieutenant in the prestigious Infantry Regiment 9. His thinking and ideas remained broader than the Army could contain, however. He conceived Germany’s future, ideally, along the lines of a British constitutional monarchy. His sympathies were broadly liberal and he supported the dismantling of class barriers. Like many of his brother officers, he was disappointed at the Weimar Republic’s inability to establish order and stability in Germany, and initially welcomed the arrival of Hitler, but the murders of 30 June 1934 disenchanted him. From 1936 onwards he remained consistently opposed to the regime. He realised that the Russian campaign was as good as lost from the moment it started. Nevertheless, the great successes scored at Bialystok, Minsk, Smolensk and Vjasma were largely his work. His aim was to keep the Army intact, not to help Hitler; and though the latter effect was the inevitable by-product of the former, he hoped it would be possible to preserve the Army for the period after Hitler had been toppled, as a means of defending German integrity, if need be. He constantly badgered his commanding officers — first Bock, later Kluge — with complaints about SS atrocities committed behind the lines, and was tireless in his attempts to ‘turn’ any generals he could contact in the eastern theatre of war.

When he realised that the generals were not going to take any action, he decided on a plan of assassination himself. At first he recoiled at the idea of using a bomb — his traditional Army upbringing caused him to consider such a method ungentlemanly. To begin with he thought about using several officers to shoot Hitler down simultaneously. Such a means would also avoid the risk of causing the death of innocent people. But the plan proved to be impracticable, and once Tresckow had decided to use explosives, he set about looking for the most effective ones.

He had been building up a Resistance group within Army Group Centre since the beginning of the Russian campaign. Its members included the Intelligence officer, Rudolf von Gersdorff, and Tresckow’s own aide, Fabian von Schlabrendorff. Hammerstein’s contact with British diplomats in Berlin just after war broke out and a lawyer by profession, Schlabrendorff was already a veteran of the Resistance. Oster had sent him to London in 1939 before the outbreak of war to try to intercede with the British. As a great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s adviser, Baron Stockmar, he was able to make the visit to Britain a private one, ostensibly to consult family papers kept in an archive at Windsor. Another important member of the group was Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg, who was ADC to the Army Group’s commander from the end of 1941, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. Also associated with the conspiracy were the brothers Freiherrn Philipp, and the highly decorated Georg von Boeselager. This purposeful group of younger men, who had Kluge’s tacit backing if not his wholehearted support, formed the strongest and most closely knit action unit the Resistance had yet known. Tresckow was an intelligent tactician and a determined man. The only missing prerequisite was access to Hitler, though their resolve was strengthened by Hardenberg’s witnessing of an action against Jews at Borisov, where he saw several thousand slaughtered by Latvian SS. Tresckow forwarded a complaint, but there was no reaction to it.

Although the group had no formal link with the centre of Resistance in Berlin, Schlabrendorff frequently travelled between Army Group Headquarters at Smolensk and the capital, and had maintained contact with Oster, who in turn, through fellow conspirators like Hassell and Trott, sounded out likely Allied responses to a coup in the east. Schlabrendorff also made contact with Beck, Goerdeler, Otto John, Dohnanyi and Guttenberg, and in the course of time Tresckow’s group was welded to the main Resistance.

Tresckow himself counts among the most notable of all the conspirators. His attempt on Hitler’s life was to be the most important since Elser’s in 1939 — and it came as close to success. Through Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Field Marshal Erwin Witzleben, still at this stage commanding in the west, was also kept
au
fait
with Tresckow’s plans. But this was still early days. Witzleben retired owing to ill health on 15 March 1942.

Günther von Kluge took over command of Army Group Centre in December 1941. He was a gifted commander but a weak man, one who would have doubtless gone along with a successful coup but who could not bring himself to join one in advance. When Hitler sent him a gift of 250,000 Reichsmark for his sixtieth birthday, for improvements to his estate, Kluge accepted it. Tresckow tried to persuade him that the only way he could justify so doing — for it was clearly a bribe — was to make a firm commitment to the Resistance. But once again ‘Clever Jack’, as he was privately nicknamed, prevaricated.
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Meanwhile, after the fall of Stalingrad and Goebbels’ speech invoking ‘total war’ at the Berlin Sports Palace on 18 February 1943, ordinary soldiers at the Front had lost faith and openly wrote disillusioned letters home: ‘The only thing I’d like to know’, wrote Heinrich Roth to his wife in May, ‘is how these idiots think they’re going to win now...None of us soldiers think there’ll be good times after the war. On the contrary, none of us think we’ll even be able to bring the war to a good end...’

One key general was, however, brought into the conspiracy in the winter of 1942-43. He was Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office (Allgemeines Heeresamt — AHA), though he, too, needed constant prodding to keep him up to the mark. Schlabrendorff made the contact with him through Captain Hermann Kaiser, who in turn was on the staff of the head of the Reserve Army, General Friedrich Fromm. Fromm was also targeted by the conspirators. As has been mentioned, the Reserve Army would be a vital tool in securing Germany’s domestic infrastructure in the event of a coup. Fromm turned out to be a good deal less tractable than Olbricht, but he betrayed nobody to the Gestapo. Whatever else the vacillating generals did, they did not betray their brother officers to the Nazis.

In summer 1942 Tresckow asked Gersdorff to organise the necessary explosives and fuses for an assassination attempt. The explosives had to be compact and the fuses silent. This was not an easy commission, but as an Intelligence officer, Gersdorff had access to the Abwehr, and in Section II, the one which dealt, among other things, with sabotage, he found what he was looking for. His excuse for requisitioning it was that he wished to equip White Russians serving in an anti-partisan unit, the ‘Boeselager Brigade’ (in fact created as a back-up force in the event of a coup) to be formed under Georg Boeselager. Section II gave him a plastic explosive from stock captured from the British. A small amount was very effective. He was also given British fuses. These were silent and much more sophisticated than German types, which could be set for much shorter times, but which betrayed their presence by a loud hissing sound. The model chosen by Gersdorff operated by the action of acid released from a capsule when the fuse was activated, which ate through a wire in a given amount of time, which in turn released the spring driving the firing pin on to the detonator. Fuses were set with delays at ten-minute intervals, the precise time determined by a fixed temperature. The colder it was, for example, the longer the fuse took to detonate.