An Honourable Defeat (5 page)

From the beginning, the Resistance (and at this stage it could barely be called that yet) had to be one stemming from the Establishment. The present plan was a desperate one.

Events seemed to be moving too fast even for Hitler, who, as he often did when overtaxed by the occasion, dithered. He did not feel confident enough to throw in his lot with the Army against the SA, much as he wanted to; on the other hand, the longer he delayed, the greater became the perceived threat from Röhm. Once again, Germany was in political turmoil. This time, a blood-letting was inevitable.

It was triggered on 17 June 1934. At the University of Marburg Franz von Papen, a vain Prussian aristocrat and a favourite of Hindenburg, who had been Chancellor briefly and disastrously in the dying days of the Weimar Republic and was now Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, gave a speech to the students. The speech was an attack on the National Socialists in general and Goebbels in particular, but it took the form of an appeal to Hitler’s conscience. By now everyone knew that Hindenburg’s days were numbered (he was in his eighty-seventh year), and that when he died Germany would be bereft of the father figure which was all that was holding it together. By now the National Conservatives were aware that they were well in sight of their last chance of controlling Hitler, and that the SA had to be neutralised at all costs.

The speech was written by Papen’s assistant, the young lawyer Edgar Jung, who was shortly to pay with his life for putting too much faith in the power of his chief. At the time Papen was making the speech, Hitler was at a Nazi conference in Gera, a small town to the south of Leipzig. When news of the Marburg speech reached him, he rushed to Berlin in a panic, to find that Röhm had retreated to Munich, his stronghold since the old days of the Party, and that Blomberg had gone to Neudeck, Hindenburg’s estate in East Prussia. Goebbels meanwhile had made every effort to suppress the text of Papen’s speech, and was pouring out a torrent of invective against the Establishment Right, and Papen especially. Papen, together with his political kindred spirits the Foreign Minister and the Finance Minister, offered their resignations to Hitler, but he refused to accept them. He was not yet so powerful as to be able to defy the outside world, and he still needed the cloak of respectability provided by the Army and the Government. The SA was three million strong. It was a Party organisation, not national; but Hitler was not confident of his control over it. His own leadership was not yet absolutely secure, and the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, might have turned out to be a powerful rival.

Only by the sacrifice of the SA could Hitler survive, and once he had decided on his course of action, he moved with characteristic speed and ruthlessness.

But not immediately. The SA was very powerful, and would have to be taken by surprise. In the ten days of planning with Göring and Himmler which followed, the plot to remove all the SA leaders from the board at a stroke was extended to include other enemies of the NS State, from religious troublemakers to dissident Nazis and National Conservatives.

On 30 June the SS, secretly drilled and organised, struck. There were three days of intense slaughter. Röhm and his principal henchmen were gunned down immediately, in circumstances which showed that they, at least, were not on the verge of launching a coup against the government — Röhm himself was pulled squealing from the bed of his latest SA boyfriend. In the slaughter that followed — the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — many members of the early opposition learned what it meant to cross Hitler. Gregor Strasser was arrested, taken to Gestapo cells, shot in the lungs and left to bleed to death. General Schleicher, answering his doorbell, was shot dead together with his wife. His housekeeper, unable to live with the memory, later committed suicide. General von Bredow, Schleicher’s loyal assistant, met the same fate as his master on the evening of the same day.

Now for the first time no clear-sighted person could pretend that the new regime in Germany was not a criminal one. This was still an internal affair, and foreign reactions could be managed as the government wished. Foreign correspondents were concentrated in Berlin, a city where Nazism deliberately kept a low profile in its early years: Hitler had no wish to start alarm bells ringing abroad until he was good and ready. Intelligence gathering was rudimentary and espionage was still an unsophisticated science. But at home, the Army had mortgaged its good name for the sake of losing an unworthy rival.

The Army saw itself as the guardian of German security at home and abroad, and of German honour. Hypocritical as it may have been in the past, nevertheless it had remained true to this function. It had suffered emasculation and humiliation, but it had kept its integrity until now. It had seen a dangerous and criminal rival removed in the shape of the SA, but it had done so not only by connivance, but by actively aiding the SS — an organisation more akin to the Army than the SA in its structure and physical appearance, but none the less a Party organisation. The SS was still relatively small, and lacked its own full complement of
matériel
. It had carried out the butchery; but the Army had provided the transport. This was the first, but very far from the last time that the Army would stand by and/or provide the arena for the SS to do its dirty work. Admittedly, it did not always do this without protest; but the protests were few and went unheard.

The cynical postscript to Hitler’s illegal purging of his enemies with the Army’s help — Stalinist techniques which Prussian officers ought to have been appalled at, but who really perceives himself? — was the obtaining of Hindenburg’s imprimatur. Hindenburg was by now a sick man, whose mind had almost completely decayed. He did not have a completely unblemished record himself, but he was at core an honourable man who, if he had been in full possession of his faculties, would have condemned such actions. But his son and his secretary were in the Nazis’ pocket. It is to his credit that the one appeal which reached him did not fail completely.

The landowner Elard Kammerherr von Oldenburg-Januschau was as old as Hindenburg. He was a neighbour, and a political and personal friend. It was to him that Hindenburg had confided that he would never make Hitler Chancellor, a decision which Januschau approved. Since the Nazis had come to power nevertheless, Januschau had tried to maintain his influence with his old friend. During the June 1934 purge, Hitler intended to eliminate Franz von Papen along with his assistants. To this end the SS surrounded the Vice-Chancellery on 30 June; but one of Papen’s men, Wilhelm von Ketteler, managed to escape, and drove hell for leather from Berlin to East Prussia, where he intended to appeal to Hindenburg, who was in semi-retirement on his Neudeck estate there. Ketteler managed to avoid all SS road-blocks, but found Hindenburg’s grounds cordoned off. In desperation he drove on to Januschau, and told him what was going on. Papen was a great favourite and protégé of the President.

The eighty-year-old former cavalry officer listened carefully to what Ketteler had to say, and made his decision fast. Calling for his horse to be saddled, he was soon mounted and riding across country to Neudeck, able to avoid SS patrols because he had been born and brought up in the country and knew it like the back of his hand. He arrived at Hindenburg’s front door unchallenged, but there stood a guard. Before he could challenge Januschau, however, the old man dismounted, throwing the reins to him and shouting authoritatively: ‘Just hold her, would you?’ before springing up the steps into the house. Moments later he stood at Hindenburg’s bedside. The President was too far gone to be wholly effective against Hitler any more, but Januschau’s intervention did succeed in getting the President to order the release of several of those held in custody.
[19]
The pliant von Papen himself, extricating himself from his show of bravery at Marburg, survived, and later became German Ambassador to Turkey. Edgar Jung, the writer of the Marburg speech, was murdered during the purge. The Gestapo killed von Ketteler in 1938.

By 2 July the seal of approval sought from Hindenburg had been obtained. He sent a telegram to Hitler saying: ‘From the reports placed before me, I learn that you, by your determined action and gallant personal intervention, have nipped treason in the bud. You have saved the German nation from serious danger. For this I express to you my most profound thanks and sincere appreciation.’ Thus the action of 30 June was publicly and internationally justified and exonerated. As for the deaths of two of its own generals, Schleicher and von Bredow, the Army maintained a diplomatic silence about them. If the Nazis declared them to have been traitors, then that was justification enough.

Hitler was later to describe the Army contemptuously as a mastiff which he found he had to egg on to attack, but he could never bring himself to trust it. He knew he could rely on the Navy, though he feared the superiority of the British at sea, and the Air Force, which was a new and unfamiliar engine of war — at the outset the Germans saw it principally as a supporting arm of the Army. True, Göring had been a fighter ace in the First World War, but he failed to turn the Luftwaffe into an adequate means either of defence or attack.

The Army was the cornerstone. Hitler’s mistrust of it persisted despite the fact that even by this early date he must have been feeling confident that he could control it by appointing weak, bribable or complaisant men to its top posts, and despite having seen that there was no unified Resistance to him within its ranks. It was clear from the outset that the war Hitler had in mind would be principally a land war, but the Army was never given the
matériel
allocated to the other two services. It is one of the great but obvious paradoxes of the Resistance that those who opposed Hitler were also among those who fought most bravely for Germany and sought to redress the deficiencies of the Nazi military administration.

The only thing that stood between Hitler and absolute power now was Hindenburg. Events had long since overtaken the old man and, fading fast, he died on 2 August. Once again, Hitler went into action quickly — this time so quickly that the entire affair must have been prepared well in advance, and with Blomberg’s active assistance. On the very day of Hindenburg’s death Hitler ordered the entire Armed Forces to be sworn in afresh, according to the words of a new Oath of Loyalty. ‘I swear by Almighty God this sacred oath: I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and, as a brave soldier, I will be ready to stake my life for this oath at any time.’ By the wording of the oath, Hitler had taken to himself the office of Supreme Commander which had been held until earlier that day by Hindenburg, as an office attached to the presidency. Hitler also took over the presidency, officially adopting the title of Führer — ‘Leader’ — which covered all three high offices. The last Weimar Chancellor had become Germany’s first dictator, and not an official voice was raised in protest.

This oath was to become notorious. Viewed objectively, it was unconstitutional; but under what constitution? That of Weimar? But that had been superseded because Hitler had declared that the law was now embodied in his person. The oath was one more clever psychological ploy by the Führer. It was de facto invalid: if such solemn undertakings are to be given they presuppose a degree of moral and political obligation on the part of the individual to whom they are given. Luther had defined and stated this, and so had Hitler himself, in
Mein
Kampf
. But to men used to a set form, breaking the oath was not so simple, especially when Hitler blurred the line between loyalty to him and loyalty to Germany. There were cases of soldiers who either killed themselves or deliberately sought death in battle because they could not resolve the problem.
[20]
For many of the generals, however, the oath provided a convenient excuse not to join the Resistance.

Who were the men responsible for the Army’s connivance? Blomberg and Fritsch, of course; but also Fritsch’s Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General (
as
he then was) Ludwig Beck. Blomberg and Fritsch had only a short time to go before they too fell under the wheels of Hitler’s chariot; but Beck was to become one of the seven most important leaders of the Resistance. Why did he, at least, support Hitler at this stage?

The Army was prepared to negotiate with Hitler, a foreign upstart it could easily have crushed if it had shown a united front, even to the extent of letting pass the murder of two of its most senior officers, for a variety of cogent reasons. German military expansion, cautiously permitted by the Allies at a Disarmament Conference in 1932 in the interest of security for all, was welcomed by the Army. When he came to power Hitler accelerated the process, leaving the League of Nations in order to avoid too many inhibiting negotiations and international undertakings. This, too, the Army approved. The revitalisation of the armaments industry created badly needed employment, and so did the national motorway construction programme. The Nazis, true to the socialist part of their programme, introduced a popular radio, to be available to all. A popular car was designed by Hitler’s friend Dr Ferdinand Porsche, initially called the Strength-Through-Joy Car after the programme of which it formed part, but later simply known as the Volkswagen (People’s Car). It did not go into production during the Nazi era, but all this activity helped restore German self-esteem, and not everything the Nazis did was either bad or mismanaged.

The patrician Army approved; and although conscription could not be reintroduced yet, it was very much on the cards. Despite the fact that it was still forbidden, 280,000 men had joined the Army by the spring of 1935, many of them from the ranks of the SA. The more Hitler defied the Treaty of Versailles, and the more the Allies let him get away with it, the greater the glow that surrounded him. His early successes were a severe hindrance to the Resistance. No one yet knew that Hitler planned to make war, though many may have made an intelligent guess at his intentions; but a strong Germany might have negotiated its way out of the rest of the Treaty of Versailles, and even got some of its former territory back. There were those who thought Hitler was undesirable, but a means to an end who could be got rid of once that end had been attained. There were those who thought Nazism so unspeakable that it would burn itself out; Germany simply would not support such a regime for more than a year or two.