The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (203 page)

This was a staggering blow to the conspiracy. Oster—“a man such as God meant men to be, lucid and serene in mind, imperturbable in danger,” as Schlabrendorff said of him—had been one of the key figures since 1938 in the attempt to get Hitler, and Dohnanyi, a jurist by profession, had been a resourceful assistant. Bonhoeffer, the Protestant, and Mueller, the Catholic, had not only brought a great spiritual force to the resistance but had given an example of individual courage in their various missions abroad—as they were to do in their refusal, even after the torture which followed their arrests, to betray their comrades.

But most serious of all, with the breakup of the Abwehr the plotters lost their “cover” and the principal means of communication with each other, with the hesitant generals and with their friends in the West.

Some further discoveries by Himmler’s sleuths put the Abwehr and its chief, Canaris, out of business altogether within a few months.

One sprang out of what came to be known in Nazi circles as “the Frau Solf Tea Party,” which took place on September 10, 1943. Frau Anna Solf, the widow of a former Colonial Minister under Wilhelm II who had also served as ambassador to
Japan
under the Weimar Republic, had long presided over an anti-Nazi
salon
in Berlin. To it came often a number of distinguished guests, who included
Countess Hanna von Bredow
, the granddaughter of
Bismarck
,
Count Albrecht von Bernstorff
, the nephew of the German ambassador to the United States during the First World War, Father Erxleben, a well-known Jesuit priest,
Otto Kiep
, a high official in the Foreign Office, who once had been dismissed as German consul general in New York for attending a public luncheon in honor of Professor Einstein but who eventually had got himself reinstated in the diplomatic service, and Elisabeth von Thadden, a sparkling and deeply religious woman who ran a famous girls’ school at Weiblingen, near Heidelberg.

To the tea party at Frau Solf’s on September 10 Fräulein von Thadden brought an attractive young Swiss doctor named Reckse, who practiced at the Charité Hospital in Berlin under Professor Sauerbruch. Like most Swiss Dr. Reckse expressed bitter anti-Nazi sentiments, in which he was joined by the others present, especially by Kiep. Before the tea party was over the good doctor had volunteered to carry any letters which Frau Solf or her guests wished to send to their friends in
Switzerland
—German anti-Nazi émigrés and British and American diplomatic officials—an offer which was quickly taken up by more than one present.

Unfortunately for them Dr. Reckse was an agent of the Gestapo, to whom he turned over several incriminating letters as well as a report on the tea party.

Count von Moltke learned of this through a friend in the Air Ministry who had tapped a number of telephone conversations between the Swiss doctor and the Gestapo, and he quickly warned his friend Kiep, who tipped off the rest of the Solf circle. But Himmler had his evidence. He waited four months to act on it, perhaps hoping to widen his net. On January 12, everyone who had been at the tea party was arrested, tried and executed, except Frau Solf and her daughter, the
Countess Ballestrem
.
^*
The Solfs were confined at the
Ravensbrueck
concentration camp and miraculously escaped death.
^†
Count von Moltke, implicated with his friend Kiep, was
also arrested at this time. But that was not the only consequence of
Kiep
’s arrest. The repercussions spread as far as
Turkey
and paved the way for the final liquidation of the Abwehr and the turning over of its functions to Himmler.

Among Kiep’s close anti-Nazi friends were Erich Vermehren and his stunningly beautiful wife, the former Countess Elisabeth von Plettenberg, who like other opponents of the regime had joined the Abwehr and who had been posted as its agents in
Istanbul
. Both were summoned to Berlin by the Gestapo to be interrogated in the Kiep case. Knowing what fate was in store for them, they refused, got in touch with the British secret service at the beginning of February 1944 and were flown to Cairo and thence to England.

It was believed in Berlin—though it turned out not to be true—that the Vermehrens had absconded with all the Abwehr’s secret codes and handed them over to the British. This was the last straw for Hitler, coming after the arrests of Dohnanyi and others in the Abwehr and coupled with his growing suspicion of
Canaris
. On February 18, 1944, he ordered that the Abwehr be dissolved and its functions taken over by R.S.H.A. This was a new feather in the cap of Himmler, whose war against the Army officer corps went back to his faking charges against General von Fritsch in 1938. It deprived the armed forces of any intelligence service of their own. It enhanced Himmler’s power over the generals. It was also a further blow to the conspirators, who were now left without any secret service whatsoever through which to work.
^*

They had not ceased trying to kill Hitler. Between September 1943 and January 1944 another half-dozen attempts were organized. In August Jakob Wallenberg had come to Berlin to see Goerdeler, who assured him that all preparations were now ready for a coup in September and that Schlabrendorff would then arrive in
Stockholm
to meet a representative of Mr.
Churchill
to discuss peace.

“I was awaiting the month of September with great suspense,” the Swedish banker later told Allen Dulles. “It passed without anything happening.”
⁹

A month later General Stieff, the sharp-tongued hunchback to whom Tresckow had sent the two bottles of “brandy” and whom Himmler later referred to as “a little poisoned dwarf,” arranged to plant a time bomb at Hitler’s noon military conference at Rastenburg, but at the last moment got cold feet. A few days later his store of English bombs which he had received from the Abwehr and hidden under a watch tower in the headquarters enclosure exploded, and it was only because an Abwehr colonel,
Werner Schrader, who was in on the conspiracy, was entrusted by Hitler with the investigation that the plotters were not discovered.

In November another “overcoat” attempt was organized. A twenty-four-year-old infantry captain, Axel von dem
Bussche
, was selected by the conspirators to “model” a new Army overcoat and assault pack which Hitler had ordered designed and now wanted to personally inspect before approving for manufacture. Bussche, in order to avoid Gersdorff’s failure, decided to carry in the pockets of his model overcoat two German bombs which would go off a few seconds after the fuse was set. His plan was to grab Hitler as he was inspecting the new overcoat and blow the two of them to pieces.

The day before the demonstration an Allied bomb destroyed the models, and Bussche returned to his company on the Russian front. He was back at Hitler’s headquarters in December for a fresh attempt with new models, when the Fuehrer suddenly decided to leave for Berchtesgaden for the Christmas holidays. Shortly afterward Bussche was badly wounded at the front, so another young front-line infantry officer was pressed into service to substitute for him. This was Heinrich von
Kleist
, son of Ewald von Kleist—the latter one of the oldest conspirators. The demonstration of the new overcoat was set for February 11, 1944, but the Fuehrer for some reason—Dulles says it was because of an air raid—failed to appear.
^*

By this time the plotters had come to the conclusion that Hitler’s technique of constantly changing his schedules called for a drastic overhauling of their own plans.
^†
It was realized that the only occasions on which he could definitely be counted to appear were his twice-daily military conferences with the generals of OKW and OKH. He would have to be killed at one of them. On December 26, 1943, a young officer by the name of Stauffenberg, deputizing for General Olbricht, appeared at the Rastenburg headquarters for the noon conference, at which he was to make a report on
Army replacements. In his briefcase was a time bomb. The meeting was canceled. Hitler had left to have his Christmas on the Obersalzberg.

This was the first such attempt by the handsome young lieutenant colonel, but not the last. For in Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, the anti-Nazi conspirators had at last found their man. Henceforth he would not only take over the job of killing Hitler by his own hand in the only way that now seemed possible but would breathe new life and light and hope and zeal into the conspiracy and become its real, though never nominal, leader.

This was a man of astonishing gifts for a professional Army officer. Born in 1907, he came from an old and distinguished South German family. Through his mother, Countess von Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, he was a great-grandson of Gneisenau, one of the military heroes of the war of liberation against
Napoleon
and the cofounder, with Scharnhorst, of the Prussian General Staff, and through her also a descendant of Yorck von Wartenburg, another celebrated general of the Bonaparte era. Klaus’s father had been Privy Chamberlain to the last King of
Wuerttemberg
. The family was congenial, devoutly Roman Catholic and highly cultivated.

With this background and in this atmosphere Klaus von Stauffenberg grew up. Possessed of a fine physique and, according to all who knew him, of a striking handsomeness, he developed a brilliant, inquisitive, splendidly balanced mind. He had a passion for horses and sports but also for the arts and literature, in which he read widely, and as a youth came under the influence of Stefan George and that poetic genius’s romantic mysticism. For a time the young man thought of taking up music as a profession, and later architecture, but in 1926, at the age of nineteen, he entered the Army as an officer cadet in the 17th Bamberg Cavalry Regiment—the famed
Bamberger Reiter
.

In 1936 he was posted to the War Academy in Berlin, where his all-round brilliance attracted the attention of both his teachers and the High Command. He emerged two years later as a young officer of the General Staff. Though, like most of his class, a monarchist at heart, he was not up to this time an opponent of National Socialism. Apparently it was the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 which first cast doubts in his mind about Hitler, and these increased when in the summer of 1939 he saw that the Fuehrer was leading Germany into a war which might be long, frightfully costly in human lives, and, in the end, lost.

Nevertheless, when the war came he threw himself into it with characteristic energy, making a name for himself as a staff officer of General
Hoepner
’s
6th Panzer
Division in the campaigns in Poland and France. It was in Russia that Stauffenberg seems to have become completely disillusioned with the Third Reich. He had been transferred to the Army High Command (OKH) early in June 1940, just before the assault on
Dunkirk, and for the first eighteen months of the Russian campaign spent most of his time in Soviet territory, where, among other things, he helped organize the Russian “volunteer” units from among the
prisoners of war
. By this time, according to his friends, Stauffenberg believed that while the Germans were getting rid of Hitler’s tyranny these Russian troops could be used to overthrow Stalin’s. Perhaps this was an instance of the influence of Stefan George’s wooly ideas.

The brutality of the S.S. in Russia, not to mention Hitler’s order to shoot the Bolshevik commissars, opened Stauffenberg’s eyes as to the master he was serving. As chance had it, he met in Russia two of the chief conspirators who had decided to make an end to that master: General von Tresckow and Schlabrendorff. The latter says it took only a few subsequent meetings to convince them that Stauffenberg was their man. He became an active conspirator.

But he was still only a junior officer and he soon saw that the field marshals were too confused—if not too cowardly—to do anything to remove Hitler or to stop the grisly slaughter of Jews, Russians and POWs behind the lines. Also the needless disaster at
Stalingrad
sickened him. As soon as it was over, in February 1943, he asked to be sent to the front and was posted as operations officer of the
10th Panzer
Division in
Tunisia
, joining it in the last days of the battle of the
Kasserine Pass
in which his unit had thrown the Americans out of the gap.

On April 7 his car drove into a mine field—some say it was also attacked by low-flying Allied aircraft—and Stauffenberg was gravely wounded. He lost his left eye, his right hand and two fingers of the other hand and suffered injuries to his left ear and knee. For several weeks it seemed probable that he would be left totally blind, if he survived. But under the expert supervision at a Munich hospital of Professor Sauerbruch, he was restored to life. Almost any other man, one would think, would have retired from the Army and thus from the conspiracy. But by midsummer he was writing General Olbricht—after much practice in wielding a pen with the three fingers of his bandaged left hand—that he expected to return to active duty within three months. During the long convalescence he had had time to reflect and he had come to the conclusion that, physically handicaped though he was, he had a sacred mission to perform.

“I feel I must do something now to save Germany,” he told his wife, the Countess Nina, mother of his four young children, when she visited his bedside one day. “We General Staff officers must all accept our share of the responsibility.”
¹⁰

By the end of September 1943, he was back in Berlin as a lieutenant colonel and chief of staff to General Olbricht at the General Army Office. Soon he was practicing with a pair of tongs how to set off one of the English-made Abwehr bombs with the three fingers of his good hand.

He was doing much more. His dynamic personality, the clarity of his mind, the catholicity of his ideas and his marked talents as an organizer infused new life and determination into the conspirators. And also some differences, for Stauffenberg was not satisfied with the kind of stodgy,
conservative, colorless regime which the old rusty leaders of the conspiracy, Beck, Goerdeler and Hassell, envisaged as soon as National Socialism was overthrown. More practical than his friends in the
Kreisau Circle
, he wanted a new dynamic Social Democracy and he insisted that the proposed anti-Nazi cabinet include his new friend Julius Leber, a brilliant Socialist, and Wilhelm Leuschner, a former trade-union official, both deep and active in the conspiracy. There was much argument, but Stauffenberg rapidly achieved dominance over the political leaders of the plot.