An Honourable Defeat (34 page)

Both he and Johannes Popitz, the former Prussian Cabinet minister, were kept alive for a long time as the Security Service milked their expertise on and even asked their advice about the problems of reconstruction after the war. Himmler was by now anxiously exploring peace possibilities through contacts in Sweden, and it is possible that Goerdeler may have exploited this in his turn. Nevertheless, his mind declined during the lonely months of his imprisonment. He was executed at last on 2 February 1945. He never lost the habit of copious writing, and his ‘Thoughts of a Man Condemned to Death’, a political and personal testament written in prison, runs to 200 pages.

Hans Oster was arrested on 21 July and interrogated by the SS lawyer, Walter Huppenkothen, a cold-blooded sidekick of Franz Xaver Sonderegger’s. Although he was able to keep one step ahead of his gaolers, he suffered terribly from isolation in prison, and when on 22 September Sonderegger discovered the great archive of Nazi crimes compiled by Dohnanyi in a safe at Zossen, he had to draw on his last reserves of strength to fight a rearguard action, but the battle was over. After the huge American air raid on Berlin on 3 February 1945, which left 22,000 dead, plans were laid to remove important prisoners from the capital and its environs. Soon after, Oster, Canaris and others were transferred to Flossenburg concentration camp near the Czech border, where for the first time they encountered physical violence. At the beginning of April they were joined there by another ‘transport’ which included Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

On 5 April 1945 at his regular lunchtime meeting, Hitler decided to liquidate Canaris, Oster, Karl Sack, Ludwig Gehre, Bonhoeffer and Theodor Strünck — the last an associate of Gisevius and Goerdeler. All were prisoners at Flossenburg by then. Huppenkothen was sent to the camp to supervise the executions, though he made a detour to Sachsenhausen briefly on 6 April to ‘try’ and see executed Hans von Dohnanyi. On 8 April a similar trial was held at Flossenburg by SS Judge Otto Thorack, with Huppenkothen in attendance. Each defendant’s hearing lasted half an hour. The sentence was death by hanging, and it was carried out at dawn in the freezing cold the next day.
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Of Bonhoeffer, the SS doctor who witnessed the killings wrote later (in 1955): ‘In nearly fifty years as a doctor I never saw another man go to his death so possessed of the spirit of God.’ Canaris was not shown any physical violence and was allowed clean linen, but he was not spared lengthy interrogations. He was put in a cell next door to Colonel Hans M. Lunding of Danish Intelligence, with whom he communicated using a tapping code on the partition wall. His last message, at 2a.m. was:

I die for my country and with a clear conscience. You, as an officer, will realise that I was only doing my duty to my country when I endeavoured to oppose Hitler and to hinder the senseless crimes by which he has dragged Germany down to ruin. I know that all I did was in vain, for Germany will be completely defeated.

Otto John managed to escape to Spain, but his brother Hans, and Klaus Bonhoeffer, Justus Perels and Rüdiger Schleicher, had all been arrested by early October 1944 and taken to Lehrterstrasse Prison. They were taken from there to a piece of waste ground by an SS squad in the night of 22-23 April 1945 and murdered by shots through the neck, together with Karl Ludwig Guttenberg and Albrecht Haushofer.

Of those who died in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock on the night of 20 July, Werner von Haeften had been engaged to be married to Bonte von Hardenberg, one of Graf Hardenberg’s daughters. The circumstances of Hardenberg’s own arrest at his home in Neu-Hardenberg carry elements of black comedy. The four Gestapo officers arrived as the family were finishing dinner. Hardenberg said goodbye to his wife, and went into the library, followed by one of the policemen, who was not in time, however, to prevent the count from shooting himself twice in the chest. In fact the policeman thought for a moment that Hardenberg was shooting at him and fired back, after each shot jumping for cover behind the oak door of the small inner library, missing each time; but he did hit one of his fellow policemen in the leg.

Hardenberg survived his suicide attempt, and the next morning the Gestapo men, who had stayed the night, were offered breakfast by the countess. After some hesitation they accepted. It was now the morning of Tuesday, 25 July 1944. Hardenberg was still bent on dying, and persuaded his doctor, who had been summoned, to give him an overdose of morphine. However, he survived that too. Then he tried to open up his bullet wounds, saying, ‘I must die!’ Meanwhile his Security Service guard slept, snoring, in the same room. Another doctor arrived and from him Hardenberg procured a large pair of scissors, which he drove into his wrists, but they were too blunt to be effective. Meanwhile, more Gestapo arrived, bound the count’s wounds, and drove him off to Berlin in an SS ambulance. The journey took two and a half hours.

Hardenberg was subsequently delivered to Sachsenhausen con-centration camp on a stretcher. There, one of the prison orderlies whispered to him, ‘Don’t talk — there are stool-pigeons everywhere.’ Then he kissed Hardenberg on the forehead, saying, ‘I don’t know what’s up but we all thank you for what you’ve done.’ Hardenberg later recalled, ‘I was very gratified — until I learnt a few days later that the man had been interned for years under Article 175!’ — Article 175 was the law against male homosexuality.
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In the camp, Hardenberg was cured by a fellow prisoner, the eminent French surgeon, Condère. He survived the war.

The whole of the Stauffenberg family was arrested within days of 20 July. Countess Nina was held in solitary confinement, but the others were kept together and, like so many other relations of conspirators, trailed from concentration camp to concentration camp, where they were kept in special barracks. They were not mistreated, though they shared the common fate of prisoners in the camps: semi-starvation and being a prey to every louse, bedbug and illness in God’s creation. Goerdeler’s younger brother Fritz was with them for some of the time. He had trained as a doctor and was able to give some help, but there was no medication available. Nina’s mother, Freiin von Lerchenfeld, died at Stutthof camp, near Danzig, in the winter of 1944-45. Temperatures stood at -20° Celsius.

With the Russian advance, the special prisoners were transported to camps in Germany. In Buchenwald, the guards were much more brutal. Here, Kurt von Hammerstein’s wife and daughter were imprisoned. By the end of April 1945 the VIPs were taken briefly to Dachau, and thence to the Tyrol. As there wasn’t enough room on the trains, the younger and fitter prisoners travelled on foot. In one such group was a nephew of Stauffenberg’s. He knew the area round Dachau well. When his group was well clear of the camp their two SS guards said that they would do a deal. The American forces were breathing down their necks anyway. They would let the prisoners go in return for two outfits of civilian clothes. They were harmless little privates who might well have been forced to join the SS. A deal was struck. This Stauffenberg was the first of the family to get home.

Meanwhile the main body of special prisoners were taken to Innsbruck, and thence across the Brenner Pass to a village in the South Tyrol by bus. Among them were General Halder, the former Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg, the French statesman Leon Blum, and another nephew of Stauffenberg, Graf Otto-Philipp, then a teenager, who is today the master of the family Castle Greifenstein, near Bamberg.

I think the Nazis were keeping us as hostages to buy their liberty or at least clemency. There were over 100 of us as we arrived at the village on about 1 May. There a rumour started that orders had been given to kill us rather than let us fall into enemy hands. Our ordinary guards were scared, but their officers were fanatics, and the SS men would have carried out their orders. Against orders, we disembarked from the buses and followed the officers who had gone into the village to sort out billets. We wanted to find out what our fate would be. Our guards didn’t dare fire at us, and so they escorted us. Among us was the General Staff Colonel Bogislaw von Bonin, who had been arrested for retreating on the east front in defiance of a Führer order, but he still had his full uniform with decorations and the General Staff red stripe on his trousers. He found a German Army radio station in the village, and went there without the knowledge of the SS. The regular soldiers didn’t know he was a prisoner and obeyed him when he ordered them to put him in contact with the commander-in-chief, Italy, General Vietinghoff, whom he knew well. He spoke to Vietinghoff and explained the situation candidly, requesting help. He then rejoined the rest of us in the schoolhouse where we had been billeted. That night there was a great clamour, though no shots were fired. An Army major appeared in the school and told us that his unit had arrived, disarmed the SS and sent them off in one of the buses — they were killed later by Italian partisans. The unit had been sent by Vietinghoff and we were now under the Army’s protection. They took us to a hotel nearby where we were liberated by the Americans a day or two later.

By then Hitler was dead — he had committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin on 30 April, taking with him his bride, Eva Braun, and his favourite Alsatian dog, Blondi. The Russian tanks were only a few hundred yards away. On 7 May the war ended in Europe, as Jodl signed the unconditional surrender in Reims. Thirty million people had died in the carnage — far more than would have done had the war ended in the summer of 1944. A further eleven million died in the concentration camps, half of them Jews, including millions during the slaughterhouse summer of 1944.

The attempt to bring Hitler down was not understood properly by the Allies at the time. On 1 August 1944 the New York
Herald
Tribune
reported: ‘If Hitlerism has begun its last stand by destroying the militarist tradition it has been doing a large part of the Allies’ work for them.’ On 9 August it followed this up with an article which argued that the attempt on Hitler was more reminiscent of ‘the atmosphere of a gangster’s lurid underworld’ than of what ‘one would normally expect within an officers’ corps and a civilised state’. The attempt had been carried out with ‘a bomb, the typical weapon of the underworld’.
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Less forgivable was the attitude of the academic and diplomat John Wheeler-Bennett, one of the first Anglo-Saxons to write a history of the German Army following the war, who wrote soon after 20 July,

It may now be said with some definiteness that we are better off with things as they are today than if the plot of 20th July had succeeded and Hitler been assassinated...The Gestapo and the SS have done us an appreciable service in removing a selection of those who would undoubtedly have posed as ‘good’ Germans after the war...It is to our advantage therefore that the purge should continue, since the killing of Germans by Germans will save us from future embarrassments of many kinds
.
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Today there is greater understanding of what the men and women of the German Resistance tried to do — even taking the exigencies of the time into account, Wheeler-Bennett’s attitude is inexcusable. But the heroes — if heroes they were — remain unsung. Streets in Germany are named after them, but there are no monuments. Otto-Philipp von Stauffenberg has a room dedicated to his uncle’s work at Schloss Greifenstein, but he is not aware of any great knowledge of or interest in the Resistance among young Germans.

What happened to those who survived? Not all can be accounted for here. In the postwar years, Schulenburg’s widow, destitute, had to prove to the authorities that her late husband, a Nazi Party member with an ‘early’ number, had been in the Resistance, before she could qualify for a pension. Other widows, Marion Yorck von Wartenburg and Clarita von Trott zu Solz, resumed their interrupted careers. Countess Yorck is a lawyer and Dr von Trott a psychiatrist. Both live in Berlin, the latter a stone’s throw from St Ann’s Church in Dahlem. Two minutes’ walk from the church in another direction lives Ludwig von Hammerstein, now retired, who became a journalist after the war and was for many years head of RIAS — Berlin’s Radio In the American Sector. His house is a few doors down from where the Bielenbergs lived. Christabel and Peter Bielenberg have lived in Ireland since the end of the war.

Ewald von Kleist — whose father was among those executed after 20 July — is a publisher in Munich; Georg von Oppen is a rancher in the Argentine. Axel von dem Bussche, until his death in 1993, lived in retirement in Bonn. Oster’s surviving daughter, whose fiery personality derives in part, one likes to think, from her father, lives comfortably in a Hamburg suburb. Hans von Dohnanyi’s son Klaus is a prominent liberal politician and a former mayor of Hamburg. Ludwig Beck’s daughter Gertrud is a widow and lives near Munich. In a beautiful house in a village buried deep in the Allgäu lives Inge Scholl, now retired, but one of Germany’s foremost postwar educational reformers. Otl Aicher died in 1991, but his contribution to graphic art was immense. He designed logos for Braun, Lufthansa and ERCO, and he was the originator of the ‘geometric man’ used on road signs throughout the world. Nina von Stauffenberg lives in Bamberg — still in the same apartment she and Claus moved into as newlyweds in 1933. Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg was born in London in 1902 where his father was military attaché. Two of his six children live there today.

Major Ernst Remer enjoyed a rapid series of promotions following 20 July, and after the end of the war he founded one of Germany’s first neo-Nazi parties: the Socialist Reich Party. He is still a hero in neo-Nazi circles there.

That this is the story of a defeat none will doubt. Some will dispute that it was an honourable one. It is certainly not the story of a failure. Against terrible odds and in appalling circumstances a small group of people kept the spirit of German integrity alive, and with it the elusive spirit of humanity. We should all be grateful to them for that.