An Honourable Defeat (31 page)

Stauffenberg immediately became involved in the work of the central Resistance, and soon met Henning von Tresckow, then in Berlin between his tours of duty on the East Front. The two men got on together well; though one was a Prussian Protestant and the other a Bavarian Roman Catholic, both were cultivated professional soldiers with intelligent political ideas about Germany’s future.

Earlier, in the summer, he had met and spoken with Julius Leber, the man who would become his political mentor. He also talked at length with his brother Berthold, who was working in the Legal Office of the Navy, and with whom he now lodged in Berlin, in his flat in Tristanstrasse in the south-western suburb of Wannsee. He was now a man with a mission, and already he had not only a great sense of its urgency, but had caught something of its fatalism too. He cancelled the operations Ferdinand Sauerbruch had proposed to fix a replacement hand.

Tresckow’s enforced departure for the Front was a personal blow, as the two men had become good friends and close confidants; but Stauffenberg was now quickly manoeuvring himself into a position of active leadership within the central Resistance. He had no rivals among the Kreisauers, who lacked his practical application and administrative ability, while backing his purpose. Beck was too old to be more than a worthy figurehead and profoundly sensible adviser, and Goerdeler, who would come to regard Stauffenberg as a rival and even a cuckoo in the nest, had no authority where it mattered for the practical purposes of a coup — within the ranks of the Army. It was, to borrow Tresckow’s words, the turn of the colonels, now that the generals had failed.
[83]
Stauffenberg had never had any doubts about the necessity of assassinating Hitler, preferably with Göring and Himmler, so as to frustrate the succession. The problem was gaining access to the reclusive dictator.

There were two possibilities. Helmuth Stieff, as head of the Organisation Department of the General Staff, had access to Hitler’s conferences, and Colonel Joachim Meichssner, head of the Organisation Department of Overall High Command under Keitel and Jodl, also had the opportunity. But Stieff lacked the fibre and Meichssner, whose nerves were shot, drank too much, so both men had to be abandoned as prospects. Three young officers, however, did present themselves as candidates for an assassination attempt between the end of 1943 and early 1944.

The first of these was Captain Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche, recruited by Fritz Schulenburg (who had also become a close friend and colleague of Stauffenberg) from Infantry Regiment 9. Bussche’s own commitment to the Resistance stemmed from when he had been an involuntary witness of the slaughter of 5000 Jews, including women and children, at Dubno aerodrome by Ukrainian SS in October 1942, though he had never been a friend of the regime. Bussche was a brave soldier — he had won the Iron Cross First and Second Class by 1944 — but a lung injury early in 1942 had invalided him out of active service. Now all he wished for was an opportunity to rid Germany of the cause of its descent into evil.

Schulenburg arranged a meeting between him and Stauffenberg in Berlin in October 1943. Bussche had already offered himself as a potential assassin. After some discussion, they decided on a line of action. New winter uniforms had been developed for the continuing Russian campaign, and Hitler was due to review them. A handful of soldiers would ‘model’ these uniforms for the Führer, and the conspirators hoped that Bussche could be selected to talk Hitler through the exhibition, in the same way as Gersdorff had earlier in the year. Like Gersdorff, Bussche would be equipped with a bomb, and he would embark on a similar suicide mission.

Bussche was an ideal candidate. He was a ‘Nordic’ type, he was much decorated and he had seen service right across the east front. With great difficulty Stieff procured the necessary explosives and fuses, and Bussche was indeed selected to conduct the proposed demonstration. He held himself in readiness from late November, and then there followed a month of agonising tension for him. Time and again a date for the showing of the new uniforms was fixed, and time and again Hitler cancelled it. Finally the prototype new uniforms were destroyed in an enemy air raid. Bussche was obliged to rejoin his regiment — by now he was back on active duty as a battalion commander. When a fresh opportunity occurred for Bussche to kill Hitler, Stauffenberg telephoned his commanding officer and asked that he be released to come to Berlin to conduct the demonstration, but the CO refused to give Bussche leave — he was too valuable where he was. Days later Bussche was so severely wounded that he lost a leg. His chance was gone.

There followed a similar plan involving Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, also an officer in Infantry Regiment 9, and the son of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin. When approached by Stauffenberg, Kleist first sought his father’s advice, who immediately and firmly told the young man that it was his duty to perform the suicide mission. Stauffenberg, he remembers

was an exceptional man. He took his time in sizing people up, and he himself didn’t exactly make an overwhelming first impression; but he had a great inner strength and a really glowing personality. He was absolutely devoted to the task he had set himself and nothing would deflect him from it. He was greatly sympathetic. He combined the qualities of high idealism with absolute realism: a rare combination of visionary and man of action. But he was also approachable, very nice, and had a lively sense of humour. I discussed the idea [of the assassination] with him and he didn’t push me, he said he knew that this was a very hard decision and that I should reflect on it for 24 hours...I had no problems or psychological inhibitions about killing Hitler. Equally I had no difficulties about the oath sworn to Hitler. For me it never had any meaning, it was fundamentally valueless, and I never had any intention of either keeping it or using it as an excuse for inaction. How could one take an oath sworn to a criminal under duress seriously? Our actions were firmly grounded on moral certainty.

Though he went on to play a part in the attempt on 20 July 1944, Kleist’s bid failed like Bussche’s and for the same reason. A third attempt, by Witzleben’s former ADC, Eberhard von Breitenbuch, who favoured using a pistol (he was a crack shot and Stauffenberg agreed to let the executor choose the means), was arranged for March 1944. Breitenbuch was now aide to the pro-Nazi Field Marshal Ernst Busch. He was due to accompany Busch to a meeting with Hitler at the Berghof, and there he would try to shoot the Führer down with a Browning 7.65 which he intended to conceal in his briefcase. At the very last minute, however, one of Hitler’s SS guards announced that aides would not be permitted into the meeting and forcibly held Breitenbuch back despite Busch’s objections. Breitenbuch then had to sit for an hour sweating it out under the eye of the SS bodyguards until the meeting ended and he could make his exit. He admitted freely that he could not summon up the courage for a second attempt.

A completely stillborn attempt was that of Stauffenberg’s own aide, Werner von Haeften, who was dissuaded from trying to kill Hitler on religious grounds by his older brother Hans-Bernd, a prominent member of the Kreisau Circle. Hans-Bernd himself was executed by the Nazis, who had no such qualms, on 15 August 1944. His brother died with his adored chief.

Although Werner von Haeften’s complete loyalty to Stauffenberg was never in doubt, the young man’s mercurial character and loose tongue were sometimes a security risk. As early as November 1943 he told a girlfriend, Philippa von Bredow, that he was going to kill Hitler. When she brought this up later, he snapped at her nervously to ‘keep her trap shut’. Stauffenberg would have been horrified. Apart from Berthold and his closest associates, he had not breathed even an opinion critical of the Führer. He played his hand very close to his chest, and entertained only a very small group of intimates, including Tresckow, Schulenburg and Trott, who became his adviser on foreign affairs.

In the meantime, however, Stauffenberg had put backs up in the civilian Resistance, by demanding from Goerdeler a list of those scheduled to take office in the post-Nazi government. Several people objected to this on grounds of security, but Stauffenberg was adamant: either he had the list or he would not co-operate. It was simple blackmail: he was the only hope of getting rid of Hitler now. He was given the list, learned its contents and destroyed it. Neither in Bamberg nor Berlin did the Gestapo find a shred of written evidence in their investigations after 20 July 1944. But a rift was beginning to form between Stauffenberg and Goerdeler; Stauffenberg did not want to see the former mayor of Leipzig as Chancellor after Hitler; he preferred Leber’s candidacy. There were fundamental differences of principle between the socialist Leber and the conservative Goerdeler. For himself, Stauffenberg had no personal political ambition, but his political instinct told him that Leber, not Goerdeler, was the man of the future. He also understood fairly quickly that there could be no separate deals struck with either Stalin or the Western Allies.

On 1 July 1944, Stauffenberg became Chief of Staff to General Fromm, head of the Reserve Army. This placed him not only in a position from which he would have direct access to Hitler himself — Fromm frequently had to attend conferences at the Wolf’s Lair — but he was close to the Reserve Army, in which the hopes of the Resistance lay. For a coup to work, this Army would have to be activated. A secret official plan — codenamed ‘Valkyrie’ — already existed, to be implemented in the event of a coup against the Nazi regime. If the plan could be used in conjunction with Army groups in Paris, Prague and Vienna to work
for
the coup, the country would be secured for the conspirators, who could seize power through their leaders in the national interest after Hitler had been assassinated: they could claim that Hitler had fallen victim to an attempted SS coup. Military and civil district commanders were selected and briefed for the takeover of power. Proclamations and drafts of radio broadcasts were composed and typed with the assistance of Frau von Tresckow, Countess Charlotte von der Schulenburg and Margarete von Oven, who had been secretary successively to Generals von Hammerstein and Fritsch. They typed in gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, using typewriters which were hidden when not in use. Frau von Oven remembered one occasion in late 1943, walking down Trabenerstrasse in Berlin with Stauffenberg and Tresckow, with drafts of the coup ‘Valkyrie’ orders under her arm, when a black car suddenly drew up and disgorged a number of SS men. Among the papers she had with her was the draft of an announcement to be broadcast by Beck, beginning with the words, ‘The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead...’ The three of them stood stock still, but the SS men ran past them into a nearby house. ‘Even Stauffenberg and Tresckow, two tough officers, were white as sheets,’ Frau Oven remembered. As the headquarters building where they worked was centrally heated, it was difficult to dispose of large quantities of papers. Nina von Stauffenberg once took a rucksack full of old conspiracy drafts back to Bamberg by train for burning — a journey of twelve hours.

With Tresckow away at the Front, it became clear to Stauffenberg that he would have not only to lead the coup in Berlin, but make the assassination attempt on Hitler at Rastenburg personally. It would be possible with the use of a fast aeroplane, but timing would be crucial.

Still a doubt remained. The Russians were pressing ever closer from the East. In the West, the Allies had established a bridgehead in France, and hundreds of thousands of fresh, well-fed and well-equipped American troops were bearing down on the exhausted and tattered German units trying to hold them off. The war was as good as over. Was it still worth staging a coup? Stauffenberg contacted Tresckow for advice, and received the reply:

The assassination must take place
coûte que coûte
. Even if it does not succeed, the Berlin action must go forward. The point now is not whether the coup has any practical purpose, but to prove to the world and before history that German Resistance is ready to stake its all. Compared to this, everything else is a side issue.

Chapter Thirteen – 20 July 1944

Colonel-General Friedrich Fromm was still an unknown quantity. He would not join the Resistance, but he did not oppose or betray it either. He does not emerge with great credit from this story; like so many of his colleagues, he was a man who wanted to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. His appointment of Stauffenberg as his Chief of Staff was a purely military matter. He had had his eye on the young officer for some time, and at his request Stauffenberg had written a report on the possible conduct of the Reserve Army in Total War which had so impressed Fromm that he had passed it on to Hitler, who remarked, ‘Finally, a General Staff Officer with imagination and integrity!’ In many ways, Stauffenberg was Hitler’s ideal. Though not obviously ‘Nordic’, he was handsome, young, and, above all, had been badly (and in Hitler’s eyes, romantically) wounded for the good of the cause. It is difficult to say whether the appointment to Fromm finalised Stauffenberg’s decision to attempt the assassination of the Führer, or whether he went after the posting as a means to that end. In any case, the effect was the same.

Stauffenberg’s first meeting with Hitler was at the Berghof on 7 June — the day after D-Day. He travelled there from Bamberg where he had been spending a week’s leave with his family prior to taking up his appointment with Fromm. At the meeting were Himmler, Göring and Speer: it is a pity the bomb could not have been planted then and there. He noted that, contrary to rumours, it was perfectly possible to get close to Hitler. It would not have been a problem to draw one’s pistol and shoot the Führer. The argument against such action was the strong rumour that Hitler wore body armour. Hitler, who habitually retired late and rose late, had not been told of the Normandy landings until he had woken, but the military situation was in any case quite hopeless. Supplies were all but used up, and factories were either bombed out or operating only partially. The German divisions were spread too thinly across all fronts and many were unfit for full combat. It is a testament to an insane courage that their forces held out against the enemy for so long. The paratroop regiments and the Waffen-SS divisions showed particular resilience.

Stauffenberg returned to Berlin after another brief stay at Bamberg, taking with him Forester’s Hornblower novel
The
Happy
Return
to read on the train. A few days later, he was persuading his cousin Yorck von Wartenburg of the Kreisau Circle to enter into active Resistance. By mid-June, Goerdeler was drawing up another of his potential Cabinet lists, and Wilhelm Leuschner was defining the hierarchy of a new trade union movement. Hopes, at least, were high. But on 16 June there was an unhappy meeting of the civilian Resistance at the Hotel Esplanade in Berlin. Leber, who had turned down Stauffenberg’s proposal that he be Chancellor in place of Goerdeler, and who was now in line for Interior Minister, attacked Goerdeler for his unrealistic foreign policy ideas — which still embraced a demand for Germany to retain her 1914 frontiers. Leber thought that East Prussia, the Sudetenland and Elsass-Lohringen (Alsace-Lorraine) would have to go. His homeland was Alsace, and there was no question of his patriotism, but he was still shouted down by the others.

Shortly afterwards, the Resistance was to suffer another cruel blow. Julius Leber and his close associate, Adolf Reichwein, had entered into negotiations with a view to Resistance and postwar co-operation with a Communist group led by three veteran freedom fighters, Bernhard Bästlein, Franz Jakob and Anton Saefkow. Leber knew the first two personally, having spent five years in the concentration camps with them before the outbreak of war. A series of exploratory meetings followed, but the Gestapo already had the group under observation, and Bastlein had been arrested on 30 May. Now the net closed, and early in July the Security Service raided a meeting at which the others were seized. Stauffenberg was appalled when he heard the news, and promised Leber’s wife Annedore that they would get her husband out of prison, whatever else happened.

One should remember that during these preparations, Berlin was being subjected to merciless air raids day and night. The battering had the effect of stiffening the resolve of the fanatical Nazis, who were in any case fighting to protect their own backs now. That such a man as Roland Freisler could continue to conduct trials in the name of a ‘law’ that had no value and had even lost the backing of power is evidence of this, and invites interesting psychological reflection. The members of the Resistance themselves knew that they had at the very most a 50 per cent chance of success, but the profound sense of Tresckow’s advice to fight for it whatever the cost went home to all of them. As late as the end of June, Adam von Trott zu Solz embarked on yet another journey to Sweden, in the faint hope of renewing contact with the British. In fact there was no hope at all.

Organisation was always a great problem for the Resistance. The arrangement of meetings was a matter of difficulty, since neither the telephone nor the post could be used. Fixed meetings often had to be aborted because of air raids and the resulting disruption of transport in Berlin. Often the conspirators used the Grünewald — the vast park in the west of the city — to meet, as houses were not always considered secure. Plans, too, had to be changed continually to keep up with the progress of the war. Schulenburg commented drily, ‘We’d have got further if Stauffenberg had made up his mind [to join us] sooner.’

At the end of June, Kurt Zeitzler, the Chief of Staff, had a nervous breakdown. He was replaced by Heinz Guderian. By now, Stauffenberg had taken up residence in his office near Fromm’s in the Bendlerblock on Bendlerstrasse, the massive building — the size of a small estate — which housed Armed Forces administration. Fromm was astonished at the number of unfamiliar officers he saw coming and going, but he did not ask what they were doing, contenting himself with passing the remark to Count Helldorf, still chief of the Berlin police, that ‘it’d be best if Hitler committed suicide’. Like many officers, he would doubtless have considered himself released from the Oath of Loyalty by Hitler’s death, which he hoped for, without wishing to work for it actively.

Early in July Trott returned empty-handed from Stockholm, but with news of the efforts of the National Committee for Free Germany. Stauffenberg was chary of this. ‘I don’t think much of proclamations made from behind barbed wire,’ he remarked.

Meanwhile, complicated arrangements were in train to obtain the correct English explosives and fuses for the attempt on Hitler. Once again, Stieff was in the forefront of this dangerous undertaking. At the same time, arrangements were being made for the takeover of power. For a time Rommel, a very popular general at home who had also earned the respect of the Allies, was considered for the position of head of state. Rommel, however, was never more than on the fringes of the conspiracy. Although he was sympathetic, he was put out of action when his heavy unmanoeuvrable open-topped Horch staff car was strafed by British fighters on 17 July and he was seriously wounded. After the 20 July attempt, however, the ever-suspicious Hitler obliged this best of his generals to commit suicide in order to spare his family the concentration camps and himself disgrace. The Führer then gave him a state funeral, but everyone knew what had really happened.

The position of post-Nazi President, therefore, reverted to Beck. Goerdeler would be Chancellor. Erwin von Witzleben would take over the Army and Erich Hoepner the Reserve Army. Wherever possible conspirators would be placed in the various Army districts around Germany and in the occupied territories, but otherwise commands from Berlin would have to have the authority of Fromm’s signature initially to implement ‘Valkyrie’. If Fromm would not agree at the eleventh hour, Hoepner would have to announce that he had taken over and issue the orders, hoping that the regional commanders would still obey. SS divisions and units would have to be neutralised and then subsumed within the Army. In co-ordination with ‘Valkyrie’, Helldorf, Nebe and Gisevius (who travelled to Berlin from Zurich for the coup) would use the regular police to take over the Security Service and seize its files. They would also arrest all Nazi leaders then in Berlin, such as Josef Goebbels and Robert Ley. There were plans to take over all radio stations, for a broadcast to the nation would have to be made immediately after the coup to establish the
bona
fides
of the conspirators. Also, telecommunications at the Wolf’s Lair would have to be neutralised for as long as possible. This daunting task was entrusted to the Army head of Signals, General Erich Fellgiebel.
[84]

The Resistance had not yet given up all hope of making peace with the West first in order at least to stall Stalin in the East, and they were especially well prepared in France. The weak Günther von Kluge had taken over general command in the West on 2 July, and he might still be swayed. The military commander was General Karl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, a veteran of the Resistance, and he was backed up by other convinced conspirators like Lieutenant-General Hans Speidel. A reminiscence of Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager is an indication of the almost surreal circumstances of the time. Shortly before the 20 July attempt, Tresckow sent Philipp’s brother Georg (of the old ‘Boeselager Brigade’) to Paris with a message for Kluge. But Georg needed an excuse for the journey. Fortunately a good one presented itself: the Boeselagers owned a racehorse, Lord Wagram, due to run at Longchamps. Accompanying it provided the perfect cover; but, as Philipp remarks, it is astonishing that such things were still possible in mid-1944!

The whole plan was rickety and riddled with risk, but it offered the only possibility, and time was running out fast for a coup of any sort to be effected.

Stauffenberg attended a further meeting at Berchtesgaden on 6 July, and another on the 11th. On this second occasion, when he travelled with his adjutant and confidant Captain Friedrich Karl Klausing, he was prepared to make the attempt, the explosives packed in a briefcase, and equipped with a pair of pliers to set the fuse whose handles had been specially adapted so that he could manipulate them with his remaining crippled hand. However, Himmler was not present at the meeting and so, after a telephone call to Olbricht, Stauffenberg decided to abort the attempt. As no plans seem to have been laid to set ‘Valkyrie’ in motion on this occasion one wonders if he did indeed intend to make the attempt. It may have been a full dress rehearsal. Stauffenberg must have been aware that he would have several opportunities in the next few days to attend meetings with Hitler. Nevertheless, to take such a risk without intending action seems hard to believe.

On 15 July, Stauffenberg accompanied Fromm to another meeting with the Führer, this time at the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg. They had received the summons at midday on the 14th, so there was just time to activate ‘Valkyrie’. This was to be it. Everyone was on edge. Berthold Stauffenberg commented, ‘Worst of all is to know that we’ll fail; and yet we must go ahead, for the sake of our country and our children.’ In the West, the SS division generals Sepp Dietrich and Hausser put themselves fully under Rommel’s orders. Very few people indeed seemed to have any faith in Hitler’s new wonder weapons, the V-bomb rockets.
[85]

The Wolf’s Lair was a complex of compounds and buildings, admission to which involved various degrees of security check. At that time it was in a state of rebuilding. At least Stauffenberg had the opportunity to take this in, for there was no chance to use the bomb. Once again a last-minute change of plan by Hitler saved him. Fortunately, although Talkyrie’s initial stages had been set in motion in anticipation of Stauffenberg’s action, the conspirators managed to pass these off as an exercise.

Stauffenberg was deeply depressed by this setback, and those who saw him at that time recall his state of nervous exhaustion. On the 16th, he telephoned his wife in Bamberg to ask her to postpone a family visit she intended to make with the children to Lautlingen. She objected that she had already bought the railway tickets, and he did not press her. It was their last conversation. The same day, Rommel transmitted a message to Hitler via Kluge that the maximum time the West Front could continue to hold out was twenty-one days. That evening there was a meeting of ‘the young counts’, as Goerdeler called them, at the Stauffenberg brothers’ flat in Wannsee. Mertz von Quirnheim, Claus’s successor as Chief of Staff to Olbricht, was there, together with Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, Cäsar von Hofacker, the contact man with the Army in France, Georg Hansen, who had taken over from Canaris at the Abwehr, and Schwerin von Schwanenfeld. They decided that the only way to save Germany now would be to kill Hitler at the very first opportunity and immediately thereafter enter peace negotiations with the USSR and the Western Allies simultaneously. They had no idea that Germany had already been divided up and parcelled out. Events had long since overtaken them and they did not know.

The following day, the day Rommel was shot up, the Security Service issued a warrant for Goerdeler’s arrest. Goerdeler was in Leipzig at the time, but immediately left for Berlin, where he went underground.

Soon after, orders came for Stauffenberg to attend a meeting at the Wolf’s Lair on 20 July to report on the recruitment of new People’s Grenadier Divisions — a kind of last-minute Home Guard. He was calm, at least outwardly, but possibly inwardly too, all day on the 19th. He smoked neither more nor fewer cigarettes than usual, and he fulfilled his desk duties at the Bendlerblock with his habitual punctiliousness. At 8p.m. he left the office for home, but stopped off on the way to attend Mass. Once back at Tristanstrasse, he packed the explosives in a case, concealing them under a clean shirt. His thoughts must have turned to Nina, now three months pregnant with their fifth child. He spent the evening quietly with Berthold.