Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (16 page)

Tresckow, Georg, and Oertzen. All three died in the summer of 1944
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(photo credit 20.2)

“But you’re not going to …”

“Yes, I am. I don’t want to let our enemies have the satisfaction of taking my life as well.”

He had prepared everything: the pretense of an enemy ambush, the submachine gun he would be holding, the grenade that he would press against his belly. Tresckow told the distraught Breitenbuch what he wanted to happen afterward. Then, still as tranquil, he shook his hand firmly and said, “Good-bye. We will see each other in a better world.” Tresckow got into the car, which then drove away, taking to his death the soul of this vast conspiracy in which Oster had been the brain, Beck the spinal marrow, and Stauffenberg the arm bearing the weapon. On July 21 Tresckow had sent his wife a farewell letter disguised as an ordinary note.
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A few days earlier, he had sent his cherished Erika a newspaper clipping of this poem:

At first Tresckow’s death was so well camouflaged that it was believed he had been killed in a skirmish with partisans. His body was taken back to Germany and
buried with military honors on the family estate of Wartenberg. But eventually all the lines of investigation into the assassination attempt pointed to him. Sometime around the middle of August, the SS came to dig up and dispose of his corpse; Tresckow’s widow and his daughters were already either in prison or in a foster home.

Helmut Stieff was one of the first arrested and put to death. On July 20, fearing that the attempt would fail, he had acted in a way that was not in accord with the second part of Operation Valkyrie: his indecisiveness had marked him as guilty. Betrayed by his contradictions, he was tortured and had confessed but pointed the finger only at people who were already dead. He was executed on August 8, hanged with one of the piano strings that had prolonged his suffering under torture.

Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, whose role was to take over an area of Berlin, was arrested two days after the attempt and interrogated by the military. He was only twenty-nine and had been married for four months. He managed to telephone his young wife one last time, and then, knowing that the Gestapo would arrive at any moment, he pretended that he had to relieve himself, locked himself in the toilet, put a grenade in his mouth, and pulled the pin. His guards heard the explosion and found his poor decapitated body amid the debris of the door they smashed in. Heinrich von Lehndorff—one of the men who had witnessed the massacre at Borissov—was arrested the same day. Sentenced to death on September
3, he was hanged the day after, leaving behind a wife and four children. On July 26 it was Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven’s turn to commit suicide. This forty-four-year-old colonel had provided explosives, which had been discovered. At the same time, Georg Schultze-Büttger was taken into custody. He was hanged on October 13, 1944, a few days after he had turned forty

On August 17, 1944, Fabian von Schlabrendorff was arrested. Tortured at length by the Gestapo, he did not give us away. “The Boeselager brothers? No, they’re excellent soldiers, completely loyal. They had nothing to do with it. You’re wasting your time,” he claimed. Under torture, his legal training came out. He raised procedural issues, and during a hearing he objected to the illegality of the treatment meted out to prisoners. Two of his ribs had been broken in interrogation; he created turmoil in the courtroom by displaying his injury. The prosecution was taken aback, and the trial had to be suspended. Then Schlabrendorff had a real stroke of luck: the courthouse was bombed, and his judicial dossier was lost in its ruins, along with the presiding judge, the infamous Roland Freisler, who had been carrying it. Asked afterward why he had been arrested and than interned, he replied that he was accused of “illegally slaughtering cattle.” He was put in a concentration camp and then transferred, along with General Franz Halder and former French prime minister Léon Blum, to South Tyrol. After being freed by American troops, he returned to civilian life and resumed
his work as a jurist; in 1967 he was appointed to the German constitutional court (Bundesverfassungsgericht). He died in 1980.

The day Schlabrendorff was arrested, Field Marshal Kluge was relieved of his command. Too much evidence showed that he had known what was going on and had covered for his subordinates: he was virtually condemned. On his way back to Germany, the old soldier committed suicide. He wrote a last letter to the Führer, begging him to stop the war, and declaring his fidelity for the last time. Despite these warnings, the war continued to chew up lives, families, and whole cities. On August 15 it was our dear Wilhelm König, our king of steel, who lost his life. Having survived incredible dangers, as if invulnerable, he was killed in an absurd way. One evening as he sat at his work table, he was hit by a stray mortar shell.

Every day, the mail brought us new reasons to mourn. Every day, official information reported the progress of summary trials. Hitler was undertaking a systematic purge. The repression spread, extending even to those who had only guessed what the conspirators were doing. Thousands were interned, sometimes for vague relationships with the members of the conspiracy. The military institution had to submit. Political commissars were named for the armies.

On July 24 the old military salute was abolished and replaced by the Nazi salute. Langen, the secretary of the
First Squadron of the Thirty-first Cavalry Regiment, received Göring’s order on the subject by telephone; it was effective immediately. He typed up the verbal directive and presented it to the commander of the brigade straightaway. It was important enough to warrant interrupting the officers’ work session. Georg was conducting a major briefing with the commanders of the two regiments, the battalions, and the squadrons. Langen, an NCO, knocked at the door: “Colonel, may I come in?”

“Yes, what is it?” Georg asked.

Langen entered and, following the new orders regarding military discipline, clicked his heels and gave the Nazi salute. The officers were appalled. In normal times, they might have smiled or thought it was a joke in poor taste. But in the context of the failed coup d’état, there was nothing to smile about.

“What is wrong with you? What does this mean?” Georg asked severely, showing a degree of irritation that was unusual for him.

Without a word, Langen handed him the paper. After rapidly perusing it, Georg asked, “Langen, from whom do you usually receive your orders?”

“From you, Colonel, and from the officers of our regiment, naturally,” the NCO replied sheepishly.

“Good, Langen, you’ve understood. You may go,” Georg concluded more kindly, with a slight smile.

The secretary backed out of the room after giving a very martial, and very classic, military salute. The directive
was not followed in the brigade. A political commissar was named, but he was a former Communist full of contradictions, and showed no particular zeal in exercising his office. Moreover, he quickly became the butt of jokes within the brigade.

On August 8 I was named head of the Forty-first Regiment of the Second Cavalry Brigade, whose commandant had just been seriously wounded. I said good-bye to my brother, my childhood companion, without suspecting that death was soon to separate us forever.

“How many times in the course of this war have I prayed to God to take my life and preserve that of others whom I consider more important than I am! He has not listened to me, because apparently I have not yet passed my qualifying examination in the great beyond,” Georg wrote in a letter to Annarès von Wendt in September 1942. Now Georg had passed his exam. He had shown that he could follow his convictions through to the end. In a certain sense, he was prepared to die. Georg was killed in combat on August 29, 1944, on the border of East Prussia—the Bug River near Lady-Mans. While he was driving along a ridge from which he was radioing directions to his troops, his vehicle was targeted by enemy mortar fire. He had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. His participation in the conspiracy remained a secret. Georg’s body was taken back to Heimerzheim—this was unusual in the context of the complete collapse of the military situation—and he was given a formal funeral. When Georg died, I lost half of myself. Tresckow, Hidding, König—all the members of the conspiracy whom I knew were dead. I was the only one still carrying the secret, without anyone to confide in.

August 2, 1944: Georg presents the Iron Cross First Class to his brother
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(photo credit 20.3)

But operational necessities left me no time to weep. Every day a new Russian attack nibbled off a few more kilometers. We were defending ourselves inch by inch, but we had to face facts: the Red Army would soon be at the gates of East Prussia. In the second half of August, the forces under my command, which were at that time retreating toward the west near Bialystok, began to move north, toward the border of East Prussia, and provided a clearly marked target for the Soviets.

In late August, I was summoned to army headquarters. A plane was supposed to take me there on September 1. This was clearly a trap to take me into custody; I was certain that my end was near. As I ran toward the waiting plane in a state of deep anxiety, my traveling Bible dropped out of my poorly closed bag and fell open. I bent down to pick it up, and saw these lines of the Benedictus:
Ut sine timore, de manu inimicorum nostrorum liberati, serviamus illi.
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I regained my confidence and boarded the plane, saying to myself, “By the grace of God!”

It was not a trap that awaited me at army headquarters, but an appointment as special officer for the cavalry. I thus became the staff’s correspondent for all matters connected with the mounted cavalry, and responsible for equipment and for the distribution and numbers of these troops, whether regarding the two brigades of mounted cavalry, the cavalry units attached to reconnaissance battalions for infantry divisions, the cyclist units, or the cavalry training school. I received requests from the operational units, and dealt with them in coordination with various administrative entities. I frequently visited the front lines in order to forge my own opinion concerning the most difficult points. The rest of the time I was located, like a large part of the infantry staff, in the offices of the former school of athletics in Wünsdorf.
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Even
though the town was rarely bombed, this period nonetheless induced anxiety. Not allowing myself to confide in anyone, to avoid aggravating my situation or endangering those with whom I might have spoken, I expressed myself freely only with my orderly. The atmosphere of feigned camaraderie among the staff was rather overdone; everyone watched what he said, while avoiding a reserve that would have been suspect. But I sometimes found it too hard to contain my feelings.

I had been invited by General Wilhelm Burgdorf (Hitler’s aide-de-camp and the head of his personal office, who, at that time, called the shots at headquarters) to an after-dinner wine tasting. There were many generals there, and I was by far the youngest guest. Toward the end of the evening, as I was getting ready to go, I heard Burgdorf say in the next room, “When the war is over, we will have to purge, after the Jews, the Catholic officers in the army.”

I went into the room, and after thanking him in the usual way, I said, “As a Catholic officer, I found what you just said very informative, General. I’d like you to know that despite my flaws, I have served the German people at the front, I have been wounded five times and been awarded the Iron Cross.” There was an embarrassed silence, and without staying any longer I politely took my leave.

As for my new assignment, while I was sorry to give up operational functions and leave my men to their fate, I
gained an overall view and an influence that I had never had before. I quickly became convinced that despite the distance, I could still be indirectly useful to my men. Over the following months, I had only one preoccupation: to save as many cavalrymen as I could. Until October my former companions in arms were used in inappropriate ways, broken up into minuscule units in extremely lethal trench warfare on the border of East Prussia. The number of horses at their disposal declined drastically. My visits in the field confirmed my worst fears: with the rapid advance of the Red Army, East Prussia was in danger of being surrounded, and the troops protecting it were threatened with complete annihilation. I wanted to get my comrades out of this wasps’ nest, and to do so I counted on the Führer’s craziest plans. For the end of 1944, Hitler envisaged a gigantic offensive far to the south, through Romania, in order to capture the oil fields in the Caucasus. The cavalry, which was very mobile, was ideally suited to this kind of operation: that was the argument I did not hesitate to use in order to move my cavalrymen to a less dangerous theater of operations.