The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (130 page)

Himmler’s order led to one of the most bizarre incidents of the war. For more than a month Schellenberg, who, like Alfred Naujocks, was a university-educated intellectual gangster, had been seeing in Holland two
British intelligence
officers, Captain S. Payne Best and Major R. H. Stevens. To them he posed as “Major Schaemmel,” an anti-Nazi officer in OKW (Schellenberg took the name from a living major) and gave a convincing story of how the German generals were determined to overthrow Hitler. What they wanted from the British, he said, were assurances that the London government would deal fairly with the new anti-Nazi regime. Since the British had heard from other sources (as we have seen) of a German military conspiracy, whose members wanted the same kind of assurances, London was interested in developing further contacts with “Major Schaemmel.” Best and Stevens provided him with a small radio transmitter and receiving set; there were numerous ensuing communications over the wireless and further meetings in various Dutch towns. By November 7, when the two parties met at
Venlo
, a Dutch town on the German frontier, the British agents were able to give “Schaemmel” a rather vague message from London to the leaders of the German resistance stating in general terms the basis for a just peace with an anti-Nazi regime. It was agreed that “Schaemmel” should bring one of these leaders, a German general, to Venlo the next day, to begin definitive negotiations. This meeting was put off to the ninth.

Up to this moment the objectives of the two sides were clear. The British were trying to establish direct contact with the German military putschists in order to encourage and aid them. Himmler was attempting
to find out through the British who the German plotters were and what their connection was with the enemy secret service. That Himmler and Hitler were already suspicious of some of the generals as well as of men like Oster and
Canaris
of the Abwehr is clear. But now on the night of November 8, Hitler and Himmler found need of a new objective: Kidnap Best and Stevens and blame these two British secret-service agents for the Buergerbräu bombing!

A familiar character now entered the scene. Alfred Naujocks, who had staged the “Polish attack” on the German radio station at Gleiwitz, showed up in command of a dozen Security Service (S.D.) toughs to help Schellenberg carry out the kidnaping. The deed came off nicely. At 4
P.M
. on November 9, while Schellenberg sipped an
apéritif
on the terrace of a café at Venlo, waiting for a rendezvous with Best and Stevens, the two British agents drove up in their Buick, parked it behind the café, and then ran into a hail of bullets from an S.S. car filled with Naujock’s ruffians.
Lieutenant Klop
, a Dutch intelligence officer, who had always accompanied the British pair in their talks with Schellenberg, fell mortally wounded. Best and Stevens were tossed into the S.S. car “like bundles of hay,” as Schellenberg later remembered, along with the wounded Klop, and driven speedily across the border into Germany.
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And so on November 21 Himmler announced to the public that the assassination plot against Hitler at the Buergerbräukeller had been solved. It was done at the instigation of the British Intelligence Service, two of whose leaders, Stevens and Best, had been arrested “on the Dutch–German frontier” on the day following the bombing. The actual perpetrator was given as Georg Elser, a German Communist carpenter residing in Munich.

Himmler’s detailed account of the crime sounded “fishy” to me, as I wrote in my diary the same day. But his accomplishment was very real. “What Himmler and his gang are up to, obviously,” I jotted down, “is to convince the gullible German people that the British government tried to win the war by murdering Hitler and his chief aides.”

The mystery of who arranged the bombing has never been completely cleared up. Elser, though not the half-wit that was Marinus van der Lubbe of the
Reichstag fire
, was a man of limited intelligence though quite sincere. He not only pleaded guilty to making and setting off the bomb, he boasted of it. Though of course he had never met Best and Stevens prior to the
attempt, he did make the former’s acquaintance during long years at the
Sachsenhausen
concentration camp. There he told the Englishman a long and involved—and not always logical—story.

One day in October at the Dachau concentration camp, where he had been incarcerated since midsummer as a Communist sympathizer, he related, he had been summoned to the office of the camp commandant, where he was introduced to two strangers. They explained the necessity of doing away with some of the Fuehrer’s “traitorous” followers by exploding a bomb in the Buergerbräukeller
immediately after
Hitler had made his customary address on the evening of November 8 and had left the hall. The bomb was to be planted in a pillar behind the speakers’ platform. Since Elser was a skilled cabinetmaker and electrician and a tinkerer, they suggested that he was the man to do the job. If he did, they would arrange for his escape to Switzerland and for a large sum of money to keep him in comfort there. As a token of their seriousness they promised him better treatment in the camp in the meanwhile: better food, civilian clothes, plenty of cigarettes—for he was a chain smoker—and a carpenter’s bench and tools. There Elser constructed a crude but efficient bomb with an eight-day alarm-clock mechanism and a contraption by which the weapon could also be detonated by an electric switch. Elser asserted that he was taken one night early in November to the beer cellar, where he installed his gadget in the well-placed pillar.

On the evening of November 8, at about the time the bomb was set to go off, he was taken by his accomplices, he said, to the Swiss frontier, given a sum of money and—interestingly—a picture postcard of the interior of the beer hall, with the pillar in which he had placed his bomb marked with a cross. But instead of being helped across the frontier—and this seems to have surprised the dim-witted fellow—he was nabbed by the Gestapo, postcard and all. Later he was coached by the Gestapo to implicate Best and Stevens at the coming state trial, in which he would be made the center of attention.
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The trial never came off. We know now that Himmler, for reasons best known to himself, didn’t dare to have a trial. We also know—now—that Elser lived on at Sachsenhausen and then Dachau concentration camps, being accorded, apparently on the express orders of Hitler, who had personally gained so much from the bombing, quite humane treatment under the circumstances. But Himmler kept his eye on him to the last. It would
not do to let the carpenter survive the war and live to tell his tale. Shortly before the war ended, on April 16, 1945, the Gestapo announced that Georg Elser had been killed in an Allied bombing attack the previous day. We know now that the Gestapo murdered him.
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Having escaped assassination, or so it was made to seem, and quelled defiance among his generals, Hitler went ahead with his plans for the big attack in the West. On November 20, he issued Directive No. 8 for the Conduct of the War, ordering the maintenance of the “state of alert” so as to “exploit favorable weather conditions immediately,” and laying down plans for the destruction of Holland and Belgium. And then to put courage in the fainthearted and arouse them to the proper pitch he thought necessary on the eve of great battles, he summoned the commanding generals and General Staff officers to the Chancellery at noon on November 23.

It was one of the most revealing of the secret pep talks to his principal military chiefs, and thanks to the Allied discovery of some of the OKW files at Flensburg it has been preserved in the form of notes taken by an unidentified participant.
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   The purpose of this conference [Hitler began] is to give you an idea of the world of my thoughts, which govern me in the face of future events, and to tell you my decisions.

   His mind was full of the past, the present and the future, and to this limited group he spoke with brutal frankness and great eloquence, giving a magnificent résumé of all that had gone on in his warped but fertile brain and predicting with deadly accuracy the shape of things to come. But it seems difficult to imagine that anyone who heard it could have had any further doubts that the man who now held the fate of Germany—and the world—in his hands had become beyond question a dangerous megalomaniac.

He chided the generals for their doubts when he made his “hard decisions” to leave the
League of Nations
, decree conscription, occupy the
Rhineland, fortify it and seize Austria. “The number of people who put trust in me,” he said, “was very small.”

“The next step,” he declared in describing his conquests with a cynicism which it is unfortunate that
Chamberlain
never heard, “was
Bohemia
,
Moravia
and
Poland
.”

The trouble with the German leaders of the past, Hitler said, including
Bismarck
and Moltke, was “insufficient hardness. The solution was possible only by attacking a country at a favorable moment.” Failure to realize this brought on the 1914 war “on several fronts. It did not bring a solution of the problem.”

Thoughts of the present blessings of a one-front war brought the Fuehrer to the question of Russia.

As for Italy, all depended on Mussolini, “whose death can alter everything … Just as the death of Stalin, so the death of the Duce can bring
danger to us. How easily the death of a statesman can come I myself have experienced recently.” Hitler did not think that the United States was yet dangerous—“because of her neutrality laws”—nor that her aid to the Allies yet amounted to much. Still, time was working for the enemy. “The moment is favorable now; in six months it might not be so any more.” Therefore:

The attack in the West, Hitler told his generals, meant “the end of the World War, not just a single action. It concerns not just a single question but the existence or nonexistence of the nation.” Then he swung into his peroration.

It was a telling speech and so far as is known not a single general raised his voice either to express the doubts which almost all the Army commanders shared about the success of an offensive at this time or to question the immorality of attacking Belgium and Holland, whose neutrality and borders the German government had solemnly guaranteed. According to some of the generals present Hitler’s remarks about the poor spirit in the top echelons of the Army and the General Staff were much stronger than in the above account.

Later that day, at 6
P.M
., the Nazi warlord sent again for Brauchitsch and Halder and to the former—the General Staff Chief was kept waiting outside the Fuehrer’s office like a bad boy—delivered a stern lecture on the “spirit of
Zossen
.” The Army High Command (OKH) was shot through with “defeatism,” Hitler charged, and Halder’s General Staff had a “stiff-necked attitude which kept it from falling in with the Fuehrer.” The beaten Brauchitsch, according to his own account given much later on the stand at Nuremberg, offered his resignation, but Hitler rejected it, reminding him sharply, as the Commander in Chief remembered, “that I had to fulfill my duty and obligation just like every other soldier.” That evening Halder scribbled a shorthand note in his diary: “A day of crisis!”
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