An Honourable Defeat (30 page)

There was no reason to give up hope. Many of the conspirators thought that the end of the war could be only weeks away, and they went on believing it, clinging to the thought, as 1943 gave way to 1944 and the months passed. Karl Sack, the General Staff judge who had always been on the fringes of the conspiracy, did all in his power to get the investigations dragged out and the trials delayed. As late as June 1944, Dohnanyi deliberately infected himself with diphtheria so as to be too unwell for investigations against him to proceed. While he was still in office, Canaris did what he could to frustrate the Gestapo, as did Guttenberg and Justus Delbrück, who were still working at the Abwehr. The determination of the surviving Resistance was not dented even by the conference at Tehran at the end of the year, at which Churchill and Roosevelt agreed the division of Germany with Stalin, and drew up plans to move Poland’s frontiers some 150 miles westwards, thereby robbing Germany of all her rich agricultural eastern provinces, including East Prussia. Perhaps the Resistance had little or no intelligence of the decisions the most powerful Allies were making about the future of their country. Certainly Goerdeler and even Stauffenberg continued to entertain hopes of retaining the 1914 frontiers as well as the German-speaking lands occupied by Hitler until the very end — a quite unrealistic ambition by any standards. Hope of quarter from the Allies by now must have been illusion. In July 1943 the Allies launched ‘Operation Gomorrah’, a bombing raid which destroyed 277,000 homes in Hamburg and left 3000 civilian dead. This brought the population of Berlin to the verge of hysteria, as one of the conspirators wrote to his wife. It was a foretaste of what was yet to come to Leipzig, Dresden and the capital itself.

Meanwhile in the East, as the Russians slowly but surely pushed the German armies back, a new Resistance movement was growing in the POW camps of the Soviet Union. In 1943 the National Committee for Free Germany was established as an anti-Fascist movement to overthrow Hitler.

It was not exclusively Communist, though it had the absolute backing and encouragement of the Soviet authorities, who no doubt saw it as a potential force through which to establish a post-war regime in Germany that would be loyal, and possibly subservient, to Moscow. In terms of the administration of what was until 1990 the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) this policy was a complete success.

Leading German Communists in exile in Russia suffered the agony of split loyalties after the German invasion in 1941, because they were natives of the country invading the one which was offering them asylum. In that year, the Bulgarian Communist leader Georgi Dimitroff (also an exile at the time) convened a meeting in Moscow to remind them of their supra-national political loyalties, to call to mind the crimes of the Nazi state, and to map out the future duties of German Communists at home. Meanwhile, the USSR should be given every possible aid and support in its hour of need. The Russians kept a low profile at the meeting, which was dominated by former leading politicians like Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht, and intellectuals and artists like Johannes R. Becher and Erich Weinert. Most of these men had been out of Germany for eight years, and at their first contact with young German working-class POWs, they were horrified at the enthusiasm for Hitler they encountered. By the winter of 1941, however, the German Communists had already experienced some success in converting these men, as Hitler’s campaign foundered and they began to realise the sacrifices Germany was making in pursuit of merely the realisation of one man’s ambition.

Among the new converts was Captain Ernst Hadermann, a former socialist teacher who had won the Iron Cross First Class in the First World War. He was articulate and intelligent, and his patriotism could not be in doubt. He was an ideal proselytiser. In May 1942 he gave a memorable speech to his fellow prisoners in Camp 95 at Yelabuga near the River Kama. In it he described the ‘nefarious effects of National Socialist rule upon Germany’s peasantry, youth, education and culture’. Warning of the inevitable defeat of National Socialism, Hadermann called for the overthrow of Adolf Hitler, the restoration of freedom to the German people, and the signing of an honourable and timely peace treaty.
[80]

The speech had a profound effect, and it was published in an edition of 500,000 with an introduction by Erich Weinert under the title ‘An Honest Word by a German Captain’. Copies were dropped over the German lines, and even found their way into Germany itself. Propaganda leaflets were increasingly dropped over the lines from aircraft (as the war progressed the Russians had little or nothing to fear from the Luftwaffe), or even fired from guns.

Hadermann’s work resulted in the formation of the First Anti-Fascist Officers’ Group. There were twenty-one of them, not all of them by any means Communists or even Socialists. They cast themselves in the role of the German officers who had defied their king in order to help Russia defeat Napoleon and thereby free Prussia from the French yoke — Boyen, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, Clausewitz and Wartenburg.

A newspaper soon followed,
The
Free
Word
, which appeared from August 1942. A Central Anti-Fascist School for German POWs was founded in Oranki, and German Communists canvassed the camps. Their reception was not unsympathetic, not least because the Russians treated their prisoners relatively well — certainly not in the brutal manner depicted by Goebbels (and actually practised on Russian prisoners by the Germans in defiance of the Geneva Convention); but it was at the defeat at Stalingrad that the process of conversion found real success. Ulbricht, Weinert and the novelist Willi Bredel travelled to Stalingrad in January 1943 to assist propaganda efforts and interview new German POWs there. Most felt then that Hitler would rescue them yet. So, to disabuse them, a concentrated campaign of leaflets and loudspeaker broadcasts encouraging surrender was aimed at the German Front. Essentially they gave the lie to the Nazi statement that the Soviets ‘took no prisoners’.

The campaign worked. The soldiers were disillusioned by Hitler’s broken promises of a rescue, and came to see that the Führer still expected them to give their lives to the last man even after continued defence had become meaningless. The final insult to the 90,000 survivors came when they realised that they had indeed been written off at home. In order to make heroic capital out of the defeat, Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry was giving it out that the 6th Army had defended Stalingrad to the death, drawing a shameless analogy with Thermopylae.

The Soviets were careful not to push Communist ideology too hard and were rewarded with thousands of converts. They had less success with senior officers captured at Stalingrad and during the defeats which followed it, but it was out of the Officers’ Group that the National Committee for Free Germany was founded on 27 July 1943 at Krasnogorsk. Erich Weinert became its president. He argued convincingly that as the Germans had helped Hitler to power, they could only clear themselves of guilt by being the ones to remove him. Otherwise they would deserve to share in the débâcle which would follow unconditional surrender to the Allies.

From the National Committee came the League of German Officers. The League was designed to appeal to senior officer prisoners, and this time the Russians and the German Communists had better success in recruiting them. The German campaign in the Soviet Union was over, the Nazis had brought Germany to its knees, and it was time to think of the future. General Melnikov, head of Soviet POW administration, told three key captive generals, Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Otto Korfes and Martin Lattmann, that the USSR had no designs on Germany and would agree to a unified state within the boundaries of 1937, together with the continued existence of a strong German Army. Seydlitz, who had commanded 51st Army Corps at Stalingrad, and had tried to persuade Field Marshal Paulus to surrender as early as November 1942, was a descendant of the General Seydlitz who had been one of the signatories of the Treaty of Tauroggen with Russia against Napoleon in 1812. He agreed to join the League on his fifty-fifth birthday in 1943 and was followed by his two colleagues. Unfortunately, in his crusading zeal, he then tried too aggressively to convert more of his colleagues at a prison camp for German generals at the Voikov Estate in Vladimir. They closed ranks against him.

The Russians did all they could to boost the kudos of the League. After its founding convention, a number of leading Soviet artistes were invited to perform, but they were outraged when they discovered that their audience was to be German. The soprano of the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre had lost her only brother at the Front the day before. After the performance, Seydlitz invited her to sit at his table. She said: ‘Kindly wait with your invitations until the war is over.’

The League continued to grow, notwithstanding the attitude of the generals at Vladimir, and close ties were effected with the National Committee, to avoid any suspicion of elitism. The greatest coup was the conversion of Field Marshal Paulus. He joined the Free Germany Movement on 14 July 1944. The Allied attack in the west on 6 June (D-Day) had convinced him that the future of Germany no longer lay with Hitler. He brought many hitherto reluctant generals with him.

They set themselves three main goals: to persuade the German Army to leave the occupied territories, to convince the German civilian population that Hitler should be removed, and to convert POWs to the anti-Fascist cause. Time was of the essence. The Russians set up a radio station for them, and executives were introduced into every prison camp. So-called front workers conducted propaganda campaigns at the Russian front line, and the Soviets released newly captured POWs deliberately to give the lie to Nazi propaganda about Russian mercilessness. Leaflets were dropped instructing German soldiers how to surrender in Russian, a tactic which was highly successful at Cherkassy in January 1944, where the men were abandoned by their commanding officers.

The National Committee was not without its setbacks, however. A group of fanatical Nazis among the POWs joined and rose as a Fifth Column within its ranks. One of them, Hans Huber, a former SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant-Colonel), sent coded messages about National Committee activities to the Nazis through his Free Germany articles and radio broadcasts. He planned to have the whole of the Committee leadership captured by a special Nazi airborne assault. In this he overreached himself, but not without creating a crisis of confidence between the Committee and the Russians at a crucial time, when the Western Allies were beginning to express doubts to Stalin about the whole Free Germany movement. The split widened when the Germans discovered that the USSR and Poland planned to take a large slice of German territory east of the rivers Oder and Neisse after the end of the war. This news especially affected the non-Communist members of the National Committee, which by now however could count its total membership in tens of thousands.

After Cherkassy, Hitler acknowledged the existence of the movement, Seydlitz was sentenced to death in absentia and his wife was forced to divorce him. Some wives did not support their husbands’ anti-Fascist stance at all. The wife of Major Bernhard Bechler reported eight anonymous letters she had received in September 1943 telling her of her husband’s broadcasts
[81]
for Radio Free Germany. She also reported a fifty-seven-year-old coalminer who came to see her to give her the same news because he thought she would be relieved to know her husband was still alive. The coalminer was arrested and executed as a result. When Bechler returned to Germany after the war and learned the truth, he divorced her.

As the war progressed, specially trained units of converted German POWs were equipped with forged German Army IDs, German and Soviet currency, ration cards and uniforms, portable printing presses, radios and megaphones. Later they were also armed. They combined propaganda with Intelligence work and finally, on German soil, engaged in combat on the Russian side. Radio Free Germany was assisted by the BBC, which publicised its broadcasts. The Free Germany Movement continued its efforts until the very end of the war, even when it was clear that Russia had no intention of honouring any of the undertakings originally promised by General Melnikov. Out of it grew the new Communist State of East Germany, which in turn has now been swallowed up by history.

Part Three - 1944-1945

Göring was a keen huntsman. He also boasted that if ever foreign warplanes should fly over Germany, you could call him Meyer. When the Allies began to bomb the country, the Germans nicknamed the air raid siren ‘Meyer’s hunting horn’.

Chapter Twelve – A Hero Enters Late

It was in 1943 that Stauffenberg joined the Resistance. The impetus he gave it was such that many wished he had made his conversion years before. He was not universally admired by the conspirators, but he had precisely the qualities of leadership that the Resistance so badly needed. He was young and charismatic, and he combined a strong intellect with realistic political instincts and the qualities of a man of action.

Claus Philipp Maria Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg
[82]
was born at Jettingen, to the west of Tübingen, in 1907, of a Swabian Roman Catholic noble family whose written records went back to 1382, but the earliest mention of which occurs over a century earlier. Though conservative in outlook — Stauffenberg’s father was senior marshal of the court of the King of Württemberg — there was an unconventional streak in the family. His great-grandfather, Franz-Ludwig, was raised from Freiherr to Graf by Ludwig II of Bavaria as a punishment (Franz-Ludwig had supported Bismarck’s unification policy against the king’s wishes) because Franz-Ludwig had formerly stated that he was against any such form of aristocratic promotion. Claus’s father, Alfred, was a great handyman and gardener from whom Claus inherited his practical streak. His mother, Caroline, was unworldly and artistic. From her Claus inherited his gift for music — he was a talented cellist — and for drawing. He had twin brothers, Alexander and Berthold, who were two years his senior. Alexander became a historian, and Berthold a lawyer. Berthold, in the Navy during the war, was also involved in the Resistance. Alexander, the least worldly of the three, was never taken into their close confidence. He was the only one to survive the war. Claus was the leader, and was often mistaken for the oldest brother — by Moltke, for example.

During his childhood, Stauffenberg experienced the collapse of the old order and the rise of the Weimar Republic, which held little attraction for him. He had a liberal education at the 250-year-old Eberhard Ludwig Grammar School in Stuttgart, one of Germany’s best. Tall and very handsome, he was nevertheless prone to illness and not physically strong. His natural disposition was for cultural pursuits. He preferred Beethoven to Wagner, whom he found bombastic, enjoyed
Lady
Chatterley’s
Lover
which his mother gave him in English, and he appreciated wine and good food — like Moltke, he even cooked with pleasure, an unusual trait in a German male at that time.

He had great natural charm, and one of his more endearing pastimes in later life was to lie on the drawing-room floor with his wife Nina, she with a cushion under her because she was so slim, while they read an English novel together, the quicker reader waiting for the slower. He was characteristically untidy in his dress, and was careless of his uniforms. He could cat-nap to order, and he was maniacally punctual. Times for daily domestic events like luncheon had to be fixed precisely. Like Oster, he rode a bicycle to and from work. Despite being casual about clothes, he was strict about orderliness. If, for example, his boots were not lined up exactly side by side, he could become furious. He had a highly volatile temperament which he learnt to control by assuming a stony countenance. He was a heavy smoker all his life, but could stop at will if it was necessary to do so — to combat an illness, for example. Someone who did not know him once saw a bust of the twenty-one-year-old Stauffenberg by his friend Frank Mehnert, and said that the physiognomy suggested a murderer. His hero was his ancestor August Wilhelm Anton Graf Neidhardt von Gneisenau, who took part in the American War of Independence on the side of the British, but who was later a leading figure in the reform of the Prussian Army.

The sculptor Mehnert had met Stauffenberg through the George Circle — an elite group of talented young men who were disciples of the poet Stefan George. Clause was introduced to the Circle — and to George — by his older brothers when they were students at Heidelberg University in 1923. George had a profound effect on the young man’s thinking. The poet published a sequence of poems in 1928 under the title, ‘The New Reich’, in which he evokes the vision of a new Germany which will fulfil the ideal of ancient Greece. This led to an unfortunate association with the Nazis, who exploited the work for their own ends. George himself would have nothing to do with them, and when Hitler came to power he went into voluntary exile in Switzerland, where he died later in 1933, aged sixty-five. The poem which made the greatest impression on Stauffenberg was ‘The Anti-Christ’, which he invoked to justify his Resistance activity. His own name for the Resistance — ‘Secret Germany’ — was taken from the title of another of George’s poems, in the ‘New Reich’ sequence. It is interesting to note in passing that one of George’s older disciples, the Jewish academic Friedrich Gundolf, had years earlier turned down a would-be student burning with ambition called Josef Goebbels.

Stauffenberg himself did not go to university. He scraped through his school matriculation examination — he’d lost time through ill health — and decided on a career in the Army. This surprised his family, not only because of his poor health, but because his first choice of career had always been architecture. However, there had been four other main influences during his formative years: George, the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and the ideal of Gneisenau, Commander-in-Chief of the Prussian Army during the Napoleonic Wars. Stauffenberg’s ancestor had seen service in Poland in 1793 and 1795, and later fought at Saalberg and Jena. In 1807 he successfully defended Kolberg, and was always an advocate of resistance to Napoleon. Later Gneisenau shone alongside Scharnhorst as the greatest exponent of the democratisation of the Prussian Army. Though not temperamentally a conventional officer, Stauffenberg distinguished himself at Cadet School, becoming popular among his fellows and demonstrating effortless qualities of leadership. Among his friends were the racing-driver nephew of von Brauchitsch, Manfred, and Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, who would become a close associate in the Resistance. In 1926 he joined the 17th Cavalry, based in Bamberg. A legend has grown up that he led an enthusiastic pro-Nazi demonstration in the town on 30 January 1933. In fact all that happened was that a fellow officer and his troop mistakenly saluted the swastika flag that day (it did not become the state flag until 15 September 1935). Stauffenberg began as a loyal servant of the regime, but he was never either a Nazi or an active supporter of Nazi policy. He pointedly walked out of a Bamberg hall in which the Gauleiter of Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, was giving one of his obscenely anti-Semitic speeches to a gathering of the League of German Girls.

He became a lieutenant in 1930 and the same year met his future wife, Nina von Lerchenfeld, then seventeen, at a ball given by her parents. Three years later he married her in St James’s Church, Bamberg. He wore full uniform with his steel helmet to the ceremony. ‘Marriage is a duty,’ he said. ‘Therefore I will wear uniform.’ The young couple took an apartment in the Lerchenfelds’ Bamberg house, which was to become their permanent home, though Claus was very often absent. They had five children, the last of whom, Konstanze, was born after her father’s death.

In 1936 he visited England, where he hunted as a guest of the German Embassy, and also spent time in London and at Sandhurst. He was critical of Britain, referring to the Empire as the ‘embers of a dying fire’. At the same time his eclectic reading habits led him to discover not only Keynes but C. S. Forester. He devoured the ‘Hornblower’ books eagerly. Later that year, he went to Berlin, having passed the tough selection process for General Staff training. In 1937 the American general, Wedemeyer, met him in Berlin and later remembered him as ‘a very handsome man — a fine military bearing, courteous, considerate and sensitive’.

In the summer of 1937 he distinguished himself with a prize-winning essay on defence against paratroopers. Paratroops were a new idea in warfare, and Stauffenberg’s work became adopted as part of standard training. He also distinguished himself in analysis of another relatively new military science — tank warfare. A year later he was posted as Number 2 Staff Officer to General Erich Hoepner’s 1st Light Division at Wuppertal — innocent of its intended use in the abortive 1938 coup attempt. That October he entered the Sudetenland with it, to be greeted with enthusiasm.

Any sympathy he might have felt towards the regime withered, however, with the experience of
Kristallnacht
. Stauffenberg’s character seems to have been completely free of any racism whatsoever. He was, however, a professional soldier and he had not yet become politicised. Thoughts harboured against the National Socialist government now had to be shelved as Germany sped towards war. The 1st Light Division was in Poland at the beginning of September 1939. A six-week war had been anticipated. Stauffenberg now estimated that the war just started would take Germany ten years to win, if it could hold out that long. We have no record of how he reacted to atrocities committed behind the lines: but one occasion is indicative of his attitude. When a brother officer and a close personal friend caused two Polish women to be executed through negligence, Stauffenberg had the man court-martialled and demoted. His own career reflected others’ reactions to his strong personality and individualism. Time after time, promotion within the General Staff eluded him. This was frustrating to him, though he put a bold face on it. He was proud of Germany’s victories, and doubts were slow to grow in his mind. He was, after all, still only a captain at this stage.

Experience on the Russian front in the course of 1941 was to focus these doubts further, though Stauffenberg did all he could to counteract the disadvantages under which the German Army was fighting. Like Tresckow, he was caught in the cleft stick of wishing to defend his country while at the same time growing daily more disaffected with its leaders. By the end of 1941 he was beginning to appreciate the joke: ‘The difference between Bismarck and Hitler is that Bismarck said what he believed, but Hitler believes what he says.’ Certainly by the middle of 1942 he was convinced of the need to get rid of Hitler. Throughout the year he saw how Hitler shortchanged the Army in terms of supplies and reinforcements, to the benefit of the other services, while all the time the odds against the Russians lengthened. At the time Stauffenberg was removed from the central Resistance. He was a soldier on active service, and he was almost thirty years younger than the leaders of the Resistance. Still he continued to try to help the war effort, to keep his natural enthusiasm going; the doubts in his mind were dangerous ones. He built up units of anti-Stalinist ‘turned’ Russian POWs — despite Hitler’s proscription of the use of what he saw as ‘subhumans’ alongside Aryan Germans — and even insisted on their having equal rights with German troops. In working to counteract Hitler’s racist stupidity, he aided the dictator.

Halder’s replacement by Zeitzler as Chief of Staff in September 1942 did not bring the hoped-for breath of fresh air. Zeitzler was, if anything, even more craven than his predecessor. The scales finally fell from Stauffenberg’s eyes: the General Staff, that great institution, was irrevocably compromised by the Nazis. At a conference at Vinnitsa in October, Stauffenberg made an extempore speech in which he did not mince words. Germany was in the process of sowing such hatred in the east, he said, that ‘our children will reap the reward of it one day’. This was a scandal and an insult to the sacrifice of millions of lives. Why did no senior commander have the courage to go and tell Hitler so, ‘even at the risk of his life’?

He still sought escape in duty. By the spring of 1943 he had been promoted Lieutenant-Colonel. He got himself transferred to the North African theatre of war, as 1st Staff Officer to a panzer division in Tunisia. His predecessor, badly wounded, warned him to beware of strafing attacks from low-flying enemy aircraft and, once there himself, he could see how Allied air supremacy kept even the best German armoured divisions pinned down. He made a great personal impression on the men, and once, during a night manoeuvre, saved his unit from an unexpected enemy land attack. When the British started shooting, he simply bellowed the order ‘Cease fire’ in his impeccable English, which they did, until Stauffenberg’s men were safely out of the way. Then Stauffenberg ordered the British to start shooting again, which they did, this time at each other, because they had had the Germans caught in a crossfire.

His career in North Africa did not last long. On 7 April he was badly shot up when his jeep was strafed by a British fighter. He lost his right hand, the third and fourth fingers of his left, and his left eye. He was rushed to hospital in Carthage, and thence, when he was well enough, to Munich. They saved the right eye, and conducted operations on the middle ear and one knee. With his usual determination, he learned to bathe and dress himself, and as early as August he was pressing to be returned to active service — almost as if he were eager to escape the responsibility which Fate was pressing on his conscience: to do something about Hitler. In Munich, however, he was visited by his uncle, Count Nikolaus von Uxküll, who was already involved in the Resistance and who encouraged his nephew’s leanings in that direction. It was an enormous decision for Stauffenberg to make, especially in view of his background and his chosen career; but he did make it, motivated finally by his sense of honour and of what was right. The decision once made, he did not swerve from it one iota.

In October 1943, Stauffenberg was well enough to take up active duty again, but this time it was of a different kind. He went to Berlin to become Chief of Staff in the General Army Office under Friedrich Olbricht. He had arrived in the capital on 10 September, two days after the capitulation of Italy. Hitler’s attitude to this had been to throw his last reserves into the fight, rather than retreat or concede a yard of conquered land. This policy ran counter to the conventional diplomatic ideas trotted out in
Mein
Kampf
, where, aping Luther, he had also written that to save a state from destruction, members of that state had every right to rid it of destructive leaders. The personal Oath of Loyalty had become a complete fiction.