Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (17 page)

Colonel von Bonin was at that time head of the operations division of the Army General Staff; he supported my plan. In addition, through the intermediary of his orderly, I had General Heinz Guderian’s ear. On November 28, 1944, the Third Cavalry Brigade received its evacuation order and left a front where it had lost, in less than two years, 46 officers and 850 NCOs and enlisted men, and suffered
more than 3,600 wounded. It took the last trains to get out of East Prussia: no less than fifty-six convoys to transport men, equipment, and horses. During the second half of December, the troops arrived in Hungary, near Lake Balaton, amid vineyards, ancient churches and abbeys, and manor houses from the Austro-Hungarian period. This rolling landscape was particularly cheering after the rigors of the devastated Russian plain. But the Soviets were already there. The Führer’s offensive was no more than a madman’s dream, and we could hope to do no more than delay the enemy’s advance.

When I was finally able to rejoin my beloved cavalrymen, the Red Army was already at the gates of Austria. In the meantime, I had been promoted to the rank of major, and I was put in command of the Thirty-first Cavalry Regiment. I was welcomed with a joy that did my heart good, despite the difficulites that still faced us.

The news of Hitler’s death reached the troops on May 1, 1945. It was met with general indifference, even among his former supporters; for months, everyone had been thinking only about getting home alive. My sole concern was to ensure that the boys who had been entrusted to me would return to Germany. Until the last day, I had all the infirmaries in the region searched for the division’s wounded and amputees, in order to spare them from being massacred should the sector be taken over by Tito’s partisans or by the Red Army. I did the impossible, right under the noses of the Russians, whose drunkeness
helped me get three wounded officers out of the Judenburg Hospital.

I heard about the surrender on the night of May 8, 1945, when the cavalry division had just finished its last hunting party of the war—and of its history. We had to make the right decisions, because the surrender did not mean the end of hostilities. The Russians were taking advantage of this unstable period to seize as much territory as possible. Our regiment was supposed to cover the retreat of the whole cavalry corps, whose first units had crossed the Mura, south of Graz, on May 7. On May 9, shortly after midnight, at the rear of the cavalry corps, I myself crossed the bridge at Wildon. In the moonlight, I stopped my horse for a moment and went over to the parapet. Plunging two fingers into the lining of the left pocket of my uniform jacket, I pulled out the little cyanide capsule that had been with me for almost three years. Kluge, whose son-in-law was a physician, had given it to me one day when our airplane was almost shot down by partisans. Now I threw it into the river. Thus, this symbol of the painful end of my youth, of those years of bitterness and dread, of unspoken fears, sank silently into the water. This poison capsule was death itself, caught in a fold of my garment. I felt lighter. The war was over. I was alive!

But this was no time for dreaming. The roads were crowded with cars, trucks, and armored vehicles of all kinds. I had the bridge blown up at 4:30 a.m., in order to slow the Russians’ advance a little. In Wildon I demanded that the mayor immediately burn the red flags adorned with the hammer and sickle that the inhabitants, who had two months earlier been supporters of Germany, had been cowardly enough to hang from the windows of their houses. When evening came, we set up our headquarters in the village of Weitenhof, where we rested. The Mura, more than eight kilometers away, marked the boundary between the Russian and the Allied zones. We thought we were safe there, but we were mistaken. We had hardly settled in before my driver shouted, “The Russians are here with tanks!” We immediately evacuated the village, the staff cars roaring off right in front of the stunned Russians, and we took the road to Köflach.

Philipp in May 1945
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(photo credit 21.1)

When we were some distance from the town, the head of the column called me on the radio: “Major, the English are in front of us. What should we do?”

“Well, say hello to them!”

I went up to the head of the column in order to meet my British counterpart. The introductions were cordial. We exchanged cigarettes. I told the Englishman that the Russians were occupying Graz. “Don’t you want to help us drive them out?” he asked in jest.

“No thanks, frankly. Since the surrender, my job is to take my regiment back to Paderborn in Germany.”

To escape the crowded roads and at the risk of running into the Russians, we branched off to the west, and led by a guide, took a mountain road. It was there that we
had arranged to stay when the English accepted our capitulation on May 11. We were supervised by cavalrymen, or rather former cavalrymen who had been transformed into tank men.

The countryside was splendid, and nature seemed to have prepared herself carefully to welcome our exhausted soldiers and provide them rest. The solemn setting of the Alps, the pine forests, the flourishing vegetation in full bloom—everything contributed to give the surrounding mountains an unreal appearance. The fighting, the gunshots, the machine-gun fire, the attackers’ wild cries, and the death rattles of the dying quickly became memories. After having lived in the depths of hell, we were now near heaven. Game was abundant—roedeer and woodcocks delighted hunters. We had to find activities to occupy men who suddenly found themselves with nothing to do: I took volunteers on long rambles on horseback high into the mountains, we organized equestrian tournaments, Roman chariot races, and even acted out the rape of the Sabines in period costume. We were not taken prisoner or even completely disarmed. By July I was home again, my pistol in my belt and flanked by my two horses.

One day in October 2003, I received a letter from the office of the French minister for European Affairs, inviting me to a meeting with members of the French Resistance that was to be held early in the following year, in the presence of a few hundred secondary school students. On the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Normandy, France also wanted to highlight the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination attempt made on July 20. The presence of the last witness of the resistance to Hitler among the German military was supposed to serve the cause of Franco-German friendship.

I accepted on the condition that I not be given a starring role. I was only the last representative of those whom fate had treated less generously. I therefore insisted on being accompanied by Henning von Tresckow’s daughter, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equordt’s daughter, and Hans Oster’s daughter-in-law—who herself had been arrested in April 1943 for collaborating with the lawyer Müller, who was conscientiously passing information to the Allies through a religious pipeline. The meeting took place on January 27, 2004, in a setting filled with sinister memories: the Foreign Ministry’s Kleber International Conference Center in the former Hotel Majestic, whose cellars had been used to torture members of the Resistance. On the platform with me were Jacques Baumel, Marie-Jo Chombart de Lowe, Jean Gavard, Lucie Aubrac, and also Uta von Aretin, and Anna Oster. It was a very moving moment for me.

July 9, 2004
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(photo credit epl.1)

Moreover, France had reserved for me an unexpected honor: I was made an officer of the Légion d’honneur, as a posthumous homage to all my companions, and to Tresckow in particular. This gesture, carried out by France’s minister of European affairs, was full of great symbolic value. The next day, I went to the Arc de Triomphe to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. This was a kind of vengeance taken on cruelty and incomprehension for a man like me who had always tried to follow three rules: to keep my political conscience awake, to respond to the call, and also to know how to say no.

July 20, 2004: Philipp with his wife, Rosy, at the Ploetzensee Memorial in Berlin
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(photo credit epl.2)

Shortly before the beginning of the offensive against the Soviet Union in 1941, Antonius and Georg von Boeselager, along with my grandfather Karl von Wendt,
¹
made a friendly pact: if one of them died during the war, the others would somehow find a way to bring his body back to Germany. This strange agreement soon had to be put into effect, alas, when Antonius died during the first weeks of the conflict. In November 1941, when Georg sent Karl von Wendt to look for warm clothing in Germany, he asked him to make a detour to Welish: under cover of night, he was supposed to disinter Tonio and take his body back to Heimerzheim. Karl did not demur; he did what was asked of him. When he arrived in Heimerzheim in the middle of the night, he dug a grave in the castle’s private cemetery and buried the body.

In August 1942 Karl in turn died during the violent fighting around Rzhev. Georg, who was then in Romania, could do nothing. Then, starting in January, he was too occupied with the reorganization of the cavalry. He therefore entrusted the operation to Philipp, who was
still Field Marshal Kluge’s aide-de-camp. Philipp had the staff’s carpenter construct an oblong box lined with zinc, which was supposed to protect his maps from the damp. The explanation seemed plausible enough; the box didn’t really look like a coffin. Accompanied by his orderly, Philipp went to the cemetery where Karl had been buried. It was toward the end of the winter. Time was limited, because the Russian pressure on Rzhev was increasing again, and the region would no doubt have to be abandoned, along with its cemeteries containing many of their comrades. The two men went as far as Grubewo, five kilometers from Rzhev. The incessant combat over the winter had transformed the countryside into a lunar landscape. Of the city, which had formerly contained fifty-seven thousand inhabitants, there remained only ruins. That night, they went into the cemetery. The cross atop the tomb, with its inscription still perfectly legible, rose over a thick layer of snow. They brushed the snow off the tomb, but the ground was completely frozen. They had to sprinkle gasoline on the ground and set it on fire. It was a strange sight—these flames flaring in the quiet of a snowed-in cemetery, amid the silent population of ghosts! Philipp and his orderly didn’t linger. They transferred the body to the map box, locked it, refilled the hole, and left. A few days later, Rzhev fell into Russian hands.

However, neither Philipp nor Georg had time to return to Germany. The military situation was poor.
Philipp’s new responsibilities did not allow him to go on leave; therefore, he kept the body with him. The box was equipped with handles that made it easier to load on trucks. During sedentary periods, the mysterious container was unloaded and put in Philipp’s lodging or his tent. He traveled for no less than eighteen months with Karl’s body, which was finally buried only in mid-August 1944, by his brother-in-law Kaspar von Fürstenberg, a few days after Philipp took command of the Forty-first Cavalry Regiment. Philipp’s efforts made it possible for us to rediscover my grandfather’s remains and take them home to Germany in August 1997.