An Honourable Defeat (29 page)

This was important, and over the next few months Gersdorff obtained a supply of the explosive and the fuses, which Tresckow and Schlabrendorff secretly tested in fields at the Front. In the course of these experiments during the second half of 1942, the conspirators were introduced to a little British bomb not much bigger than a prayer-book and known as a ‘clam’, because it was designed to adhere to a target by magnets. Filled with plastic tetryl and TNT, it packed enough punch to drive through a 2cm steel plate. The conspirators knew, however, that for such a bomb to have a fatal effect on a man, it would have to be discharged in a confined space to maximise the blanketing effect of the enclosed shock wave. Tresckow decided that his best bet would be to smuggle such a bomb, with a time fuse of appropriate length, into either Hitler’s car or his aeroplane.

While Tresckow was planning his attempt, the Resistance in Berlin was busy organising ways of securing the country after Hitler’s fall. Olbricht, aided by Gisevius, who worked over the old 1938 plans once more, was engaged in working out means of taking major cities for the Resistance. Of these, Berlin was the most important. Providentially, the Brandenburg Division of the Army, which was under the Abwehr’s control, was undergoing reorganisation and needed a new commanding officer. Canaris and Oster were able to place Colonel Alexander von Pfuhlstein in this position in spring 1943. Pfuhlstein was on good terms with Olbricht and Oster. The Brandenburg Division would be able to cut off the large SS division stationed at Jüterbog to the south of Berlin, and isolate the city from Rastenburg to the east.

In the meantime, the ‘Boeselager Brigade’ was provided with the best possible equipment, thanks to the efforts of another conspirator, Helmuth Stieff, head of Organisation in the Army General Staff. There remained the problem of cutting off telecommunications to and from Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair HQ; but although the head of Signals, General Erich Fellgiebel, was in the conspiracy and prepared to do this as best he could, complete segregation would depend upon the occupation of signal stations and key telephone exchanges as soon as Hitler was dead.

Every detail of the plot was arranged, though it would be difficult to co-ordinate each element to the day. The other maverick factor was Hitler’s own unpredictability — he was growing ever more suspicious, and had yet to accept an invitation to visit Smolensk. However, the failing fortunes of war had made the Führer anxious, and he did agree to come on 13 March 1943 for a briefing meeting. He arrived in a flight of three Condors, accompanied by Jodl and Colonel-General Kurt Zeitzler, Halder’s youngish replacement as Chief of the General Staff, whom Canaris referred to rather unfairly as ‘that fat Nazi’. The party landed at Smolensk airport but was driven from there to Army Group Centre HQ in Hitler’s own convoy of cars which had been driven over from Vinnitsa specially. He was, as always these days, surrounded by machine-gun toting SS men.

‘Operation Flash’, as this attempt to kill Hitler was coded, was ready to be launched. The action itself was almost casual in its simplicity, given the complexity of the arrangement surrounding it.

The headquarters of the Overall High Command of the Armed Forces, Mauerwald, was not far from Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair, and several OKW members had travelled with the Führer from there for this briefing meeting. One of them, travelling on the same aeroplane, was an Operations Staff officer called Heinz Brandt, a former Olympic rider. Tresckow asked him if he would take back a couple of bottles of Cointreau as a present for Helmuth Stieff. The package, whose squarish shape suggested two small bottles of the liqueur, was in fact two pairs of ‘clam’ bombs, held together by their magnets and tightly wrapped. They were accompanied by a thirty-minute fuse.

That same afternoon after lunch, Hitler embarked on his Condor once more, and Schlabrendorff gave the package to the unsuspecting Brandt. Just before doing so, he activated the fuse. Soon afterwards the Condor took off. Tresckow, Schlabrendorff and Kluge (who was a party to the conspiracy) watched it disappear with bated breath. Four ‘clams’ should be more than enough to do the trick, and Hitler’s death would look like the result of an air crash, especially if Artur Nebe ran the investigation and could cover up any incriminating evidence. The Army could legitimately take control of the country in the interests of national security, and Goerdeler and Beck could set about the business of negotiating a peace with the Allies.

Schlabrendorff telephoned Ludwig Gehre, a contact in Dohnanyi’s office, to give him the signal that Operation Flash was on. They calculated that the Condor would explode just before it reached Minsk, some 130 miles to the west.

They passed the rest of the afternoon in a state of unbearable tension, waiting for confirmation of the Führer’s death. Then came the news that he had landed safely at Rastenburg aerodrome.

It barely seemed possible, but there was no time to be lost in reflection. Schlabrendorff rang Gehre again to give him the codeword for the failure of Flash, while Tresckow rang Brandt to ask him to hang on to the ‘Cointreau’. There had been a mix-up, he said, but Schlabrendorff would be arriving the following day to collect the package and give Brandt the parcel really destined for Stieff. Then there was nothing they could do but wait. Stieff had not been told of the ploy, as a security measure; all they could hope for was that Brandt would not become curious, and that the bomb would now not explode after all.

The following morning Schlabrendorff took the normal courier flight to Rastenburg, taking with him a package which really contained two bottles of Cointreau. He immediately sought out Brandt and swapped the parcels with him, his heart in his mouth at the casual way the innocent Brandt manhandled the explosive packet. He took this with him to the sleeping car in a railway siding which served as overnight accommodation for visitors to Mauerwald, and there in his compartment he carefully slit open the package and examined the bomb. The detonator had worked, but the ‘clams’ had not ignited. He could only conclude that despite the high tolerance of the explosive, it had simply been too cold for it to go off.

Fighting the stress which was affecting them all, he took the bombs with him to Berlin the following day, and told Oster the whole story. Their disappointment was great, but they still had the bombs, and they immediately cast about for another opportunity to use them.

It so happened that the annual Heroes’ Memorial Day had been postponed by Hitler by a week that year. Normally, it would have fallen on 15 March, the day Schlabrendorff arrived in Berlin, but the Führer had put it off until 21 March in the hope that the German Army might score some counter-victory against the Russians in the meantime which he could exploit for propaganda purposes. In fact an SS division retook Kharkov just in time. The delay also gave the Resistance time to organise another attempt, and once again Fate seemed to be helping them, for part of the ceremony was to involve a visit by Hitler to an exhibition of Russian war material captured by Army Group Centre and set up by Rudolf Gersdorff’s Intelligence section. The exhibition would be in a hall of the Old Arsenal Museum in central Berlin, where the Heroes’ Memorial Day ceremony normally took place, with the playing of classical music and a speech by Hitler.

At first the Resistance considered the possibility of concealing the bomb somewhere in the exhibition, but there was no opportunity to do so undetected before Hitler’s visit, and in any case no guarantee that he could be induced to stand near enough any given spot for long enough for the bombs to go off. Gersdorff, who had no dependents since the death of his wife the previous year, volunteered to carry the bombs with him in the pockets of his greatcoat. If he could stay close enough to Hitler — as his guide to the exhibition — he should be able to blow the dictator up at the cost of his own life. Tresckow accepted this brave proposal, but then Hitler’s Army ADC, Rudolf Schmundt, though an old friend of Tresckow’s (they had been in Infantry Regiment 9 together), became vaguely suspicious and would not allow Gersdorff s name on the list of those to be admitted to the exhibition with Hitler. Finally he was persuaded that Gersdorff was the only man able to explain the exhibits properly to the Führer.

There were other difficulties. Normally, this rare annual public appearance by Hitler followed a set timetable. This year, matters were not fixed according to the usual schedule, nor was the schedule published in advance. What did seem certain was that Hitler would spend at least ten minutes viewing Gersdorff’s exhibition. That, however, entailed another problem. The shortest duration of time-fuses available of the silent British type was ten minutes. German grenade fuses might have been used as they only took four or five seconds, but they hissed noisily and in any case could not be adapted to fit the ‘clams’. Gersdorff would have to judge the moment when he activated the fuses to the second. Another problem was that Hitler was acutely sensitive to mood. If Gersdorff showed tension or fear, Hitler would know it.

The day dawned and the hour approached for Hitler to visit the exhibition. As a senior officer with special responsibilities, Gersdorff was able to avoid the SS body searches, but he was aware of much tighter security than there had ever been hitherto. Had Hitler somehow got an inkling of Operation Flash? It was too late now for reflection. Hitler was approaching the spot where Gersdorff was waiting with other dignitaries at the entrance to the museum. Gersdorff had two of the little bombs in each greatcoat pocket. He gave the Hitler salute and then quickly set the fuse in his left pocket. He dared not put his hand in his right pocket immediately afterwards for fear of arousing suspicion. Everywhere around them were alert young SS men.

There was another shock in store for Gersdorff. Unexpectedly at the last minute Hitler asked that Field Marshal von Bock, Kluge’s predecessor in command of Army Group Centre, should accompany the visit with his ADC, Graf von Hardenberg. Hardenberg was innocent of this assassination attempt, but he was in the conspiracy and he was also a close friend of Gersdorff. But the die was cast.

Hitler entered the exhibition hall with his entourage, and Gersdorff at his elbow. Then, taking everyone aback, he flew through it. He paused nowhere, took no interest in anything, and firmly avoided any attempt by anyone in his entourage, including Göring, to delay or detain him. He was outside again in two minutes, throwing the organisers of the day into momentary confusion. Gersdorff, breathing hard and too shocked to analyse what could have gone wrong, quickly and unobtrusively made his way to a lavatory where he defused the armed bomb in his left pocket.

There could be little doubt that Hitler’s sixth sense had saved him this time. Goerdeler wrote an extremely long secret memorandum to the generals on 26 March, in which he discussed sixteen points which argued the absolute necessity of an immediate coup. He tried to rally them by recalling to their minds Hitler’s outrages against their own colleagues — referring to the dictator ripping the epaulettes from senior officers’ shoulders after the first defeats in Russia, and describing the collapse of the German internal infrastructure as the war effort made ever increasing demands on the nation and the Allies’ air raids smashed ever more German factories. Goerdeler finally proposed his old solution of making a deal with the western Allies against Russia, which was an indication of how out of touch he had become with enemy thinking.

Tresckow was not defeated, but he had shot his main bolt. Stauffenberg had made his entrance, but his role was yet to develop. The Kreisau Circle continued their moral and ethical reflections. It was a time when the Resistance needed all the strength and the courage of their convictions; and precisely now, within a month of the failure of Operation Flash, they were to suffer another, all but mortal, setback.

Chapter Eleven – Breaking Point

On 5 April 1943 Hans Oster was removed from office and Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested. His wife was also arrested, as were Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Josef Müller, the lawyer and diplomat whom the Resistance used as their contact with the Vatican. Neglect of a tiny crack had brought down a whole wall.

This was one of a series of disasters. Beck’s cancer had grown so bad that in March 1943 he had to undergo major surgery and, although he recovered, he was out of action for a time. In March, the Resistance approached Kurt von Hammerstein in the hope that he would go to see General Fromm and persuade him to change sides; but Hammerstein also had cancer, and was by now seriously ill. He could not help and said so, but added, showing his old fighting spirit, ‘If I only had a division, I’d go and fetch that devil [Hitler] out of hell.’ Captain Hermann Kaiser wrote sorrowfully in his diary in February: ‘[Olbricht] wants to act when he gets the order, and [Fromm] wants to give the order when someone else has acted.’ In March, Moltke wrote bitterly to an English friend:

The main mistake was to leave such an attempt to the generals. It was a vain hope from the start, but it was hard to convince most people of that in time. The French generals couldn’t get rid of Napoleon. It’s exactly the same with the Germans today.

Witzleben, too, was ill: in July he entered a hospital with a gastric ulcer. The fall of Mussolini in the same month, and the failure of the Kursk summer offensive, leading to counter-attacks from the Russians, were of some comfort to the Resistance, but it was remote.

In April 1943, Kurt von Hammerstein died. The family had to go to enormous lengths to have the funeral service held at the Dahlem Church where he had worshipped — the incumbent pastor would not agree to officiate at first — and to avoid having the coffin wrapped in the swastika flag: it was deliberately abandoned in a brown paper parcel at Thielplatz underground station. They had to accept a wreath from the Führer, however, which was laid by General Joachim von Kortzfleisch, now commander of the Army division covering Berlin and the surrounding district. The city commander of Berlin, Paul von Hase, who was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s uncle, and Wilhelm-Friedrich, Graf zu Lynar, Witzleben’s ADC, lent their support to the family. Both were members of the conspiracy.

Tresckow was tireless in his efforts to keep the momentum of the Resistance going and, pleading sick leave on account of Front fatigue, managed to spend several months in Berlin in the course of 1943, during which he tried with every means at his disposal to get a posting to a position where he could be of some service to the central Resistance, but to no avail. He was finally ordered back to a command on the east Front, far from the action he so desperately wanted to be a part of. The Resistance considered making an approach to Guderian, but Schlabrendorff considered him ‘the incarnation of characterlessness’, and Tresckow had no faith in him either. In late October 1943 the vacillating but generally sympathetic Kluge had a serious car accident and was replaced as commander of Army Group Centre by Ernst Busch, a rigorously pro-Hitler officer.

The arrest of the Scholls in Munich had put the Gestapo on its toes and even Schulenburg was arrested briefly and interrogated about his attempts to recruit young officers from Infantry Regiment 9 to the cause, but he was able to exonerate himself. That was on 2 April. The night before he had collapsed on the Berlin S-train, almost certainly from nervous exhaustion. Most principal members of the central Resistance were under observation. Himmler stayed his hand in case they could be useful to him in a coup of his own against Hitler — and Schulenburg was changing lodgings frequently to minimise Security Service observation.

Three days after his arrest the great blow fell. The Nazi Security Service had long been looking for an opportunity to take over the Abwehr, and now it thought it had seen an opening. The Abwehr office in Munich had become involved in a private currency exchange racket going on in Prague, and the culprit, a Portuguese honorary consul called Wilhelm Schmidhuber who also worked as an agent of the Abwehr, was arrested in October 1942 by the local Gestapo.
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Schmidhuber was not a pleasant or terribly trustworthy character, but he was useful. He was very much Dohnanyi’s man. After the arrest, the steps the Abwehr took to protect him were not sufficient, and it allowed itself to be outmanoeuvred by the Gestapo. When the Abwehr then found itself unable to bail Schmidhuber out without becoming compromised, the consul saw this as betrayal, and decided to tell the Security Service everything he knew. Fortunately it was not much; but it was enough.

Through Schmidhuber’s interrogation it was discovered that Dohnanyi had been using large amounts of foreign currency, of which the Abwehr had the disposal, to help Jews by illegally compensating them for their confiscated property or businesses in Germany. The matter was not helped by the fact that Dohnanyi was of distant Jewish extraction himself, and had been allowed to continue his Abwehr work only by special dispensation of the Führer. A third weapon the Security Service was able to use against the Abwehr was that they had been using Jews as agents for a long time. Moltke had a tip-off that the Gestapo was about to strike but his warning came too late.

On the morning of 5 April Manfred Roeder, the Nazi prosecutor, presented himself at Abwehr headquarters on Tirpitzufer. Roeder was forty-three years old, and had made his mark as an ‘ice cold’ investigator by breaking the Red Orchestra ring. He informed Canaris that an investigation was being held, and then asked Oster to accompany him to Dohnanyi’s office, as he had a warrant for his arrest. Oster immediately insisted that, as Dohnanyi’s senior officer, he would take full responsibility and should be arrested instead. Roeder retorted that the offence was a private criminal one of unauthorised currency exchange and that therefore only Dohnanyi could answer the charges. They went down the narrow corridor to Dohnanyi’s office. There had been no time to warn him, and he was anxious to conceal certain papers and files on his desk, dealing with a new mission to Rome for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and containing a draft report to Josef Muller about the failure of ‘Flash’. The file with the key papers was marked with an ‘O’ — the significance of which is in doubt. The papers were apparently destined for Beck, but Oster took the symbol to mean himself.

While Roeder was searching the safe, Dohnanyi tried to indicate the incriminating papers to Oster. He wanted Oster to pass them off as fiction — misinformation to be fed to the enemy as part of the Abwehr’s routine work. Oster, however, misunderstood, panicked and tried to conceal them. His action was noticed by Roeder’s assistant, a glacial Nazi police captain called Franz Xaver Sonderegger. Oster thus drew suspicion on himself, though he was not immediately arrested. However it took months of coded messages smuggled out of Dohnanyi’s prison cell to persuade him to change his attitude to the ‘O’ papers and treat them as official misinformation. By then Oster himself had been suspended. Later in the year he was placed on the Reserve list. By the end of 1943 he was forbidden by Keitel to have anything to do, with the Abwehr, and the following spring he was retired. He left Berlin and went to live on the estate of his sister and her husband at Schnaditz. From then until his arrest immediately after 20 July 1944 he was permanently under Gestapo surveillance. Dohnanyi, who never left prison again and who was later transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, also moved heaven and earth to get the ‘Zossen documents’ — his huge archive of Nazi war crimes — destroyed; but this the Resistance was still unwilling to do, to their ultimate cost.

The immediate reaction of the Resistance was to put every plan on ice for the summer months of 1943 at least. Gisevius was sent to convey a warning to the Pope, who was still interested in the principle of peace brokerage. Canaris was in more immediate danger than Beck, but he not only managed to hold on to his position but to hit out actively at the unpleasant and unwelcome Roeder. Roeder had said scornfully that the Brandenburg Division was a gang of layabouts and that he would soon be throwing some light on them. This boast reached the ears of Canaris, who made sure that the division’s commander, Alexander von Pfuhlstein, heard about it. Pfuhlstein leapt to the defence of his men, went to Roeder and slapped his face. This was in January 1944, by which time Roeder had become very dangerous indeed. Keitel gave Pfuhlstein a mild punishment, however: seven days confined to quarters. By April, though, Pfuhlstein’s ‘defeatist’ attitude led to his being relieved of the command — another blow to the Resistance, though Schwerin von Schwanenfeld managed to transfer from his staff job with the division to an administrative position with Army High Command only a few minutes’ walk away from the offices of Olbricht and Stauffenberg in Bendlerstrasse. His new post had the advantage of giving him the authority to issue passes and IDs. In Pfuhlstein, however, Oster lost a close supporter and friend, and Pfuhlstein’s ingenuous answers to Gestapo questions damaged Oster’s case seriously.

Meanwhile, the arrogant Roeder had become involved in litigation with a colleague, Ernst Kanter, following a complaint by the latter about the former’s failure to observe confidentiality. After a row, Roeder requested a transfer. The damage by then, however, had been done. Canaris managed to hold on until February 1944, but then the defection of an Abwehr agent, Erich Vermehren, in Istanbul to the British gave the Security Service the final handle it needed to pull the ‘little Admiral’ from office. The British regarded the defection as a minor triumph, though unbeknownst to them it had robbed them of one of their best allies.

Vermehren had defected in panic when he heard the news of the arrest of his friend Otto Kiep, along with other members of the Solf Circle. Vermehren had also met Trott in Istanbul on one of the latter’s peace-feeler missions. He had never been pro-Nazi, and his own freedom of movement had been limited by his marriage to Countess Elisabeth von Plettenberg, a devout Roman Catholic several years his senior, who was related to Bishop Galen and former Chancellor von Papen. Trott had been instrumental in getting Elisabeth to Istanbul to join her husband, on von Papen’s guarantee (Papen was German ambassador to Turkey by now) — upon which Vermehren contacted the British agent in place there, Nicholas Elliott, who got the couple out. The immediate result was imprisonment for their families at home, and interrogations for Trott and Vermehren’s boss in Istanbul, Paul Leverkühn. To be fair to the Vermehrens, they defected only after much heart-searching; they were aware of the possible effect their action would have on their families and friends. Hitler, beside himself with rage because he believed the Vermehrens to have left with more important information than they actually had, made travel for German nationals much more difficult after this incident, and even Papen told the neutral Turks that failure to hand the couple over was a
casus
belli
. The increased Nazi security which resulted from their defection was another unwelcome blow to the Resistance. The Vermehrens are still alive; they have changed their name and live in Switzerland.

Over the years, the strain of leading a double existence had told increasingly on Canaris. He grew ever more mistrustful and bitter. His consolation was the company of his dachshund, Seppl; when the dog died, there was uproar in the household until he was replaced. But Canaris fought to the last, and was even able to have Colonel Georg Hansen, a fellow conspirator and head of Abwehr I, placed as his successor. However, the days of the Abwehr were numbered; the young and ambitious head of Security Service Department VI (Foreign Affairs), Walter Schellenberg, had it subordinated to his department after 20 July 1944. This was the same Schellenberg who had distinguished himself by arresting the British spies at Venlo in 1939, and who now ran peace-feeler errands for Himmler in Sweden. Canaris himself was given a meaningless job as head of the Department for Economic Warfare at Eiche, near Potsdam — he was thus effectively marginalised. In the days following 20 July 1944 he was arrested by Schellenberg personally.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer can have had no idea that his arrest was so imminent. 1943 had started well for him with his engagement to Maria von Wedemeyer in Pomerania on 17 January. It is unlikely that he knew how closely his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi was involved with Operation Flash — members of the Resistance confided in nobody: everyone knew how effective Gestapo methods were at extracting information from suspects. Towards midday on 5 April he telephoned his sister Christine Dohnanyi from his parents’ house in Marienburger Allee in Berlin and was surprised to hear the phone answered by a man. Instantly he realised what had happened. He did not disturb his elderly parents, who were enjoying their after-lunch nap, but went straight upstairs to his own room to check that there were no incriminating documents in his desk. Then he went next door, where another sister, Ursula Schleicher, lived, to await events. At about 4p.m. his father came over to tell him that two men wanted to speak to him in his room. The two men were Roeder and Sonderegger. Soon afterwards they drove off with him.

His parents received a reassuring letter from him on 14 April — how quickly, he remarked, one could adapt to going without creature comforts: he barely even missed his cigarettes. The truth was that he had been placed in solitary confinement, given stinking blankets, and was denied access to soap and water or clean linen. The warders were forbidden to talk to him. He was fed on dry bread thrown on to the cell floor through a slit in the door. Nevertheless in May he managed to smuggle out a speech to be read at the baptism of his godson — the child of Bonhoeffer’s niece and her husband Eberhard Bethge. In it he quoted Proverbs 4, 18: ‘But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.’