Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (10 page)

It had been easy to approach Georg Schulze-Büttger, because his post as head of operations made him Tresckow’s closest collaborator on the staff. Schubü—his universally adopted nickname—was a devout Protestant and an indefatigable worker, endowed with an unfailing sense of humor. He was an invaluable member of Tresckow’s group; in fact, he had been aide-de-camp to General Ludwig Beck, the former head of the Army General Staff who had resigned in 1938. We envisaged Schubü playing a key role if the coup d’état ever succeeded.

The group was then enlarged by successive recruitments. Tresckow seized opportunities, but left nothing to chance. He never decided to approach an officer without first having observed him attentively. Rejecting any cooptation, he made up his own mind in each case.

At the end of 1942, our group included, in addition to Fabian von Schlabrendorff and me, Carl-Friedrich von Berg-Schönefeld, lieutenant colonels Gersdorff and Kleist (the latter known as Uncle Bernd)
¹
and Major Pretzell.
Major Alexander von Voss succeeded Schulze-Büttger. Pretzell was replaced by Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, who incarnated the cavalry officer par excellence: cheerful, optimistic, elegant, and refined.

By definition the group could not be stable, because any of its members could be transferred to other posts or lose their lives in combat. At that time there were at most thirty committed and resolute conspirators, the largest number of insurgent officers we would ever assemble. None of us wanted to expand the group too much, out of concern for secrecy, but also because we wished to spare lives by compromising as few people as possible. Our group could count on certain intermediaries. I had complete confidence in the aides-de-camp of the commanders in chief of the other two army groups, for they were classmates and horsemen to boot—united by the cavalry’s code of honor. With the marshal’s authorization, I used the pretext of regular mail delivery to visit the other armies. Completely against regulations, I exchanged maps of the front with my counterparts. Each of the conspirators activated his own network that had been constituted before the war and usually consisted of classmates. Schlabrendorff played a crucial role in the organization of the Berlin network, which was composed of the former chief of staff Beck, Hans Oster, and General Friedrich Olbricht. A trip by Tresckow to the capital would have looked suspicious, whereas the comings and goings of his orderly passed unnoticed.

My participation was valuable for the conspirators. Before the war, I had received, in Höxter’s infantry regiment, a kind of training normally reserved for military engineers: how to use explosives. I kept a stock of different kinds, of foreign origin. As a rule, explosives were rare and kept under tight control. All movements of stocks were precisely recorded. It was impossible, even for high-ranking officers in the Wehrmacht, and even within German territory, to divert significant quantities. I, however, was able to procure more or less anything I wanted. When our regiment was set up in April 1943, Colonel Helmuth Stieff had designated it an experimental unit
(Versuchstruppenteil);
this provided me an official justification for my tests, by which I determined that English explosives were the most effective, particularly their detonators. Therefore, I became the conspiracy’s chief explosives expert, as it were.

Nothing would be more misleading than to imagine us as a little group of conspirators entirely absorbed in our cause, spending whole nights consulting in a smoke-filled room, remaking the world and planning assassinations. For our meetings, we took advantage of the changing of the guard between day service and night duty. The latter was assigned to officers ranking below captain, and there were not enough of them to go around; I often volunteered. This gave me a pretext for going to Tresckow’s bunker. Night duty began at 11:00 p.m., but Tresckow went to bed late, after a ritual chess
game that provided an opportunity to discuss his projects with his circle of close associates. The meetings didn’t last long; we didn’t want to attract attention. We were accustomed to concise orders and exact communications, and we seldom chatted or engaged in collective reflection. At first, nonetheless, we discussed at great length the legitimacy of our mission and the justification for murder—for an assassination, even of a tyrant, remains a murder. Then we came to the practical aspects. Tresckow was full of ideas, and his observations, always correct, were naturally accepted by his comrades. He never spoke as a superior officer, always as a friend, with a paternal gentleness that led us to share his convictions. We would have liked to have him as a simple company captain. For Tresckow it was less a closed group of impassioned conspirators than a breeding ground for men ready to sacrifice their lives, to act at the least signal, to execute his plans without fail. Trust and total availability were our watchwords.

Tresckow was also looking for cover in the military hierarchy. To be sure, the putsch would not come from the generals, but Tresckow wanted at least to be sure that they would keep quiet and wish him well. At the end of 1942, he tried to approach Field Marshal Kluge through Carl-Friedrich von Berg-Schönefeld, the second in command of the intelligence services. While they were both out wolf-hunting, the lieutenant drew the marshal aside and surprised him by asking how he felt about Hitler and then asked what his reaction would be in the event that
Hitler were physically eliminated. Their conversation stopped at that point; the lieutenant reported to Tresckow, who went to see the marshal the next day to inform him of his plans. Kluge exclaimed, “Count on me!” He subsequently limited himself to an attitude of benevolent neutrality, but that was still enough to cost him his life.

The true motivations of the conspiring officers are still the subject of lively controversy in Germany. We are said to have wanted to preserve our conquests in the East at any price, by concluding a separate peace with the Americans and the British that would make it possible to impose harsher conditions on the Soviets once the war effort was directed entirely toward them. We are supposed to have wanted to reestablish Germany’s 1914 borders. I categorically deny that claim. Our information left no doubt about the Allies’ firm intentions; they would liquidate all the Reich’s possessions outside the 1938 borders. One didn’t need to be a great strategist to see that the entry of such a great economic power as the United States, spared fighting on its own soil, would tilt the scales sharply in favor of our adversaries. The war was obviously lost, and none of the belligerents had an interest in making a separate peace with Germany. The Casablanca Conference, in January 1943, had, moreover, required Germany to surrender unconditionally. Finally, Hans Oster, the number two man in the Abwehr and a focal point for the various conspiracies, informed us of
discussions regarding the fate of German territories that testified to the degree of solidarity among the Allies. For us, it was therefore a question of putting an end to the hostilities and saving as many lives as possible—nothing more.

I recall a conversation that I had with Tresckow and Schulze-Büttger in early 1943. When I asked in a loud voice whether it was still worthwhile, given the military situation, to pursue our assassination plans, Tresckow gravely remarked, “Gentlemen, every day we are assassinating nearly sixteen thousand additional victims. We have no choice.”

The German army had never ceased to use horses in support of the artillery, to substitute for failing machinery on the Russian front, and to aid bogged-down supply columns. Mobile and resilient, horses were often more reliable than motors, and despite exhaustion from the long marches made since summer, they continued to serve numerous purposes. The animals provided for the mounted cavalry could, at a trot, advance at sixteen kilometers an hour, and draft horses at thirteen kilometers an hour. The cold did not take them by surprise. Whereas the men tried to pad their thin uniforms with paper and rags, the horses’ hair thickened naturally, becoming almost like fur, to our great astonishment. When hay and
oats began to run short on the immense, snowy plains, the horses reacted by tearing off the tenderest branches of the pine trees. They even chewed on the edges of the cottages’ thatched roofs when they could reach them. Finally, they developed the habit of sucking icicles for water. Their adaptability was phenomenal.

For the cavalrymen, the horse was a home away from home. Our mounts carried our personal effects (clothing and other articles, toiletries) and the tents—each horseman carried a quarter of the latter. And what tender caresses the men and their animals exchanged after a battle! Obviously, we horsemen were linked by camaraderie, a pact of mutual aid, and the certainty that even if they remained silent, our fellows understood and supported us. But the animals—their hair, their moist muzzles, their shivers—paradoxically provided us with a physical intimacy, a warmth, that we could not allow ourselves even among our best comrades. In the extreme severity of war, the men confided in their horses, depended on them. The horse, for its part, was incapable of surviving without its master’s care. And in the end it is hard to say which was the more useful to the other, the horseman or the mount.

For a long time my brother Georg had been thinking about how to harness the tactical potential of the cavalry. On this immense front, it was not firepower and the abundance of matériel alone that would decide the outcome. Furthermore, in such respects, the German army
did not have the advantage. With an industrial base damaged by the Depression and now handicapped by air raids, it would never be able to produce as many artillery shells and munitions as it had in 1917. It would never succeed in challenging the superiority of an enemy that the United States had begun providing with armaments. Nor would human resources be able to turn the war around. By this fifth year of the war, those born between 1915 and 1925 had already been decimated. It would be necessary to call upon younger and younger recruits who were hastily trained. The rotation of troops was particularly tragic in the infantry. To sow disorder among the adversary, close the breaches, and cover our retreat, what we needed was mobility, quick reactions, and a more economical use of matériel. In apparently hopeless situations, such as Christmas 1941, Georg’s cavalrymen had acted decisively to avoid disaster by galloping toward the rear and setting up a line of defense, and by galloping forward to create chaos among the enemy.

My brother had two models, which, with his fair-minded intelligence and habit of judging solely on the merits, he had chosen among the enemy. Actually, Georg didn’t have any enemies, only adversaries: he never expressed either hatred or scorn when speaking of the Russians. His first model was Major General Lev Dovator, commandant of the Red Army’s Second Guards Cavalry Corps, which had succeeded in penetrating the German front line on December 13, 1941, cutting off
German communications and supply convoys. Such enthusiasm didn’t give Dovator much chance of survival: he was killed a few days later, at age thirty-seven. Georg’s second model was General Pavel Belov, who survived the war. In November 1941, while commanding the Soviet Second Cavalry Corps, supported by a tank division, Belov had already routed and repelled several Wehrmacht divisions. In early 1942, with incredible boldness, he had penetrated deep behind the German front line at Dorogobuzh, hooked up with the partisans, and held on until the end of March despite being completely surrounded.

For our cavalrymen scattered over different divisions, the constitution of a specialized regiment was a question of survival. Georg had long meditated on this while in Romania. On December 26, 1942, after a short leave in Heimerzheim, he traveled into the heart of Russia, stopping off to see his comrades in the old Sixth Battalion squadron. Of its officers, the only survivor was Wilhelm König, whom his colleagues had for years called only by his nickname, King. Georg received an enthusiastic welcome from his former subordinates.
¹
I had done everything I could to make his journey easier and, since the road to Rzhev passed not far from Smolensk, where Army Group Center was headquartered, I set up an interview for him with Field Marshal Kluge on January 8, 1943. With his particular capacity for conviction, Georg explained to the commander in chief the tactical advantages
of the cavalry: its mobility, its swiftness, its indifference to weather conditions, and its ability to harass the enemy out of proportion to its small numbers and modest firepower. Kluge had met my brother before the war, when he was in charge of the Westphalian military region. He had heard about Georg’s exploits in France and his spotless military career. He listened in silence. The next day—having slept on it—the marshal said that he had been convinced by my brother’s presentation, and was prepared to try out the idea. “Go and work out all the details with Tresckow,” he advised Georg.

I organized the meeting. Georg and Tresckow were leaders of men, true tacticians. They were able to judge and assess each other in a few moments; their discussion was brief. In a letter to Georg on July 27, Tresckow summed up their meeting and their intermittent contacts over the next six months: “We have seen each other only a few times, but I think these brief moments are enough for us to know what we are doing together. I will always be loyal to you, and I would be grateful for your loyalty in return. And now, keep it under your hat!”

The two men had resolved to set up an autonomous cavalry force that would serve not only military ends but might also, under Georg’s command, be used in the framework of a coup d’état. This force completed Tresckow’s arrangements for the overthrow of the regime: in addition to Kluge’s approval and a network of officers in whom he could have confidence, he could now count on
mobile operational units whose commanders were loyal to him. A great many practical details remained to be dealt with. A few weeks earlier, Colonel Helmut Stieff, another member of our network, had been appointed head of the Army General Staff’s Organization Department, and he shared Tresckow’s views regarding the dual role of the cavalrymen. Less than a week after his meeting with Georg, Tresckow received Stieff’s instructions. On January 14, he could order the immediate regrouping, under Georg’s command, of the vestiges of the main cavalry units.