Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (4 page)

On June 16 Georg and his men distinguished themselves once again. The scene took place at Marchainville, near the castle of Persay. The French were defending themselves well. An artillery battalion prevented the Germans from advancing. Georg and his squad managed to get around the obstacle, and they abruptly attacked from the rear. There were no casualties on either side; the French immediately surrendered. The booty was invaluable: three 75 mm guns, gun carriages, and … the prospect of a good dinner. To the amazement of the French, Georg collected all the provisions and canned goods, and decided “fifty-fifty” with an eloquent gesture. The French and the Germans thus ate their meals side by side. They almost managed to make friends during this improvised picnic. But then my brother suddenly noticed several French tanks approaching: the power relationship had been reversed. It was no longer time for joking. In a few seconds, Georg and his men packed up, left their dining companions and the food, and got out of the clearing as fast as they could. My brother’s military tactics and behavior inclined him to avoid unnecessary fighting and to save lives.

While Georg was leading his men through the Paris basin, I was serving as aide-de-camp to the commandant of the 186th Reconnaissance Battalion, within the 86th Infantry Division of Army Group A. We had started out from Hermeskeil, near Trier, traversed Luxembourg, and entered France by way of Sedan. After hard fighting near Rethel, we were getting ready to move on to the Langres Plateau, making a wide sweep toward the Swiss border.
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On June 17, my battalion was stationed in Allainville, near Grand. In the commandant’s absence, I was temporarily in charge. We were supposed to attack the town of Prez, a few kilometers to the south, when a certain incident prevented us from doing so. The head of a heavy artillery battery, a man named Auer who was very concerned about his own comfort, had brought along his personal
car, and this was equipped with a radio (something unusual at the time). It was late in the afternoon when he came to tell me what he’d just heard: a French news program had announced that Marshal Pétain was preparing to ask Germany for an armistice. I mentioned this to Rudolf von Gersdorff, head of the operations section of the division’s staff. The news was not official; there was neither a confirmed cease-fire nor any formal order in this regard. But we believed that the information was crucial and justified our change of conduct. It seemed clear that it would be useless and even criminal to shed any more blood at this stage. Therefore, on our own initiative—and this was certainly not usual for officers of a victorious army—we decided to establish contact with the enemy.

A French colonel who had been taken prisoner told us where the road had been mined. After attaching a white flag to a broomstick, we requisitioned a bugle and a car, and in this noble equipage Gersdorff and I approached the French lines. A sentry came to inquire what we wanted. The officer in charge of the French battalion was sought out. He was a mere lieutenant; like me, he was standing in for the leader of the battalion, who had left the day before to get instructions. The French lieutenant, after having us blindfolded, took us to the battalion’s command post. It was 5:00 p.m. The Frenchman knew nothing about the request for a cease-fire and stated that he had been instructed to hold his position until precisely 7:00 p.m. Afterward, he was supposed to
withdraw. As gentlemen, we thus agreed that the Germans would start moving after 7:00 p.m., and would occupy the village only after the last French troops had left it.

Satisfied with this arrangement, we returned to Allainville. Gersdorff asked me to see to the execution of the terms of the agreement, and went back to the divisional headquarters, which he had left several hours earlier and to which he said he absolutely must return.

A few moments later, Lieutenant Colonel Doege came up to me. The infantry regiment he commanded was moving south, and he coldly informed me of his intention to attack Prez.

“Impossible, Colonel,” I replied. “We have an agreement with the French. They’ve asked for a cease-fire.” I explained the situation. The lieutenant colonel didn’t want to hear about it, either because he wished to distinguish himself by some new feat, or because he didn’t have much confidence in what I said.

“Sorry to displease you,” he said, “but I’m going to give the order to attack.”

I could see that he was determined, and that his foolishness was probably going to cost dozens of lives in both camps. I decided to pull out all the stops. As calmly as possible, and fully aware of the disciplinary consequences that might result, I drew my pistol and pointed it at the colonel.

“It is I who am sorry, but if you give this order I will have to shoot you,” I said, very carefully.

The lieutenant colonel exploded with anger. But seeing the pistol pointed at him, and seeing that I looked as though I was actually prepared to shoot him, he yielded. The French battalion was saved. Everything went as planned, without drop of blood being shed. Few people knew what had happened, and we tried to keep it quiet. But we were unable to keep the news from circulating among the staffs. The story became almost a legend—in some versions, I actually fired. Fortunately, as the anecdote spread and became distorted, the names of the two people involved were forgotten. In any case, until the end of the war Doege and I took care to avoid each other.

The end of the campaign in France inaugurated a peaceful time of almost nine months. We took advantage of this relative calm to train men and horses, and especially to hunt. Fate had been good to me: I was based south of Orléans, in the middle of Sologne, a hunter’s paradise. There I lived in a house deserted by wealthy Parisians who had fled to the South. I still have very pleasant memories of those few months when the German occupation was, obviously, still not too painful for the French, or at least did not yet elicit hostile reactions.

My brother Georg was less fortunate. During the summer his squadron was located in Chauny, on the road from Poitiers to Angoulême. Chauny was almost in the South, in that part of Vienne close to the Charente. The sparsely wooded countryside, rather poorly maintained,
was hardly suitable for hunting, and poachers seemed already to have skimmed off the area’s limited supply of game: there remained neither big game, nor tracking, nor even battues; there were no wild ducks or partridges. Cats (which Georg abhorred), dogs, and sparrows were the only wild animals to be found. No matter! On July 23, a few days after they had established themselves in Chauny, Georg organized his first hunt and invited the head of the battalion.

Georg’s superior was cantoned some fifteen kilometers away, and the division was scattered over the whole department of Vienne. Lodged in a mansion that looked out on the main square, my brother reigned over his village and commanded his 250 men as he wished. They were, however, not entirely idle; during the summer, his squadron had to deal with the flow of tens of thousands of French who had headed south with the exodus, and were now slowly returning north along National Highway 10. The long line of automobiles loaded with mattresses, bicycles, cooking utensils, and packages of various kinds stretched as far as one could see, and the heat was merciless—as high as 50°C (122°F) in the sun. In addition, Georg and his men had to cope with the angry outbursts of an exasperated population. But it was not yet time for revolt. The French still didn’t feel that sensation of being crushed that would lead them to realize that they had been completely and lastingly defeated.
They did not yet bend under the weight of the foreign occupation. The infernal cycle of acts of resistance and repressions, and especially the cycle of persecutions and deportations, had not yet begun. A feeling of indifference was pervasive. One had to get along, and customs inspired by mutual tolerance were quickly established.
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Georg’s stay in Vienne was soon over. His division was called upon to participate in the top-secret preparations for the invasion of England. In September 1940, it started moving toward the English Channel. The soldiers took up their position within the Cotentin, the Calvados, and the Orne. Georg was very active in training his men.

But it was not toward England that the Sixth Infantry Division was finally to direct its forces. Despite intense bombardments and peace offers followed by threats, Britain, isolated and bled dry, did not falter. Above all, it did not give up hope of victory. So in March 1941, the Sixth Infantry Division was transferred to the far reaches of East Prussia and Poland, very near the USSR’s border. No information regarding the high command’s intentions filtered down. However, even the less lucid among us noticed the growing concentration of troops, the acceleration of training, and the energy expended by the battalion’s new commandant, Major Hirsch, on exploring the border area. All this was merely the prelude to an invasion of the Soviet Union. The attack began in the early hours of June 22, 1941. The Eighty-sixth Infantry
Division, in which I was an officer, was brought in from France only a few weeks later. We were thus less exposed to the first clashes with the enemy.

At the beginning of a battle, the role of a reconnaissance battalion was crucial. Reconnoitering the terrain, making raids to take prisoners or equipment (munitions and maps), harassing the enemy to demoralize him without investing great human resources, dislodging hidden snipers, making sure that columns advancing at very different speeds joined up where they were supposed to: such were, in their diversity, the scouts’ missions. On May 18, in preparation for the offensive, the command of the Ninth Army decided to split the elite unit constituted by the Sixth Reconnaissance Battalion into two parts. The first, called the advance battalion, still under Hirsch’s orders, was placed directly under the command of the Ninth Army. Georg, who was about to be promoted to the rank of captain, was given the leadership of a reconnaissance battalion that consisted only of a cavalry squadron and a cycle squadron, reinforced by an intelligence detachment, and especially by a mortar battery, a heavy machine gun, and an antiaircraft battery. The battalion played a very active role in the first hours of the offensive. By the evening of June 22, Georg’s forces had reached their objective. They were asked to establish a bridgehead on the Memel River. After crossing ten kilometers of marshes and forests, Georg encountered stiff resistance from the enemy. On June 25, the reconnaissance
forces were joined together again, but during this short interval the mounted cavalry, used for the first time in a relatively isolated manner, had shown its flexibility in all sorts of situations.

Around the middle of July, it was again the reconnaissance work carried out by Georg’s men that allowed the Sixth Division to take, almost without losses, the citadel of Polozk on the Dvina. On July 27, barely a month after the offensive had started, the Sixth Battalion had covered a thousand kilometers by forced march. The exhausted infantrymen’s feet were bleeding, despite the efforts of the physicians, who distributed large quantities of talcum powder and ointment. The vehicles were dented and covered with dust; logs were being used as bumpers. They advanced laboriously on rutted dirt roads and sank up to their axles on sandy tracks. Their oil pans scraped the ground, their engines coughed, sputtered, spat out oil, and left a trail of nuts and bolts. And when, by some miracle, the convoys were able to get up some speed on solid roads, each vehicle raised a long cloud of dust that spread over a hundred meters, enveloping those behind it. The horses moved forward almost imperturbably, caring little about the marshes or the dust so long as the cavalry detachments were separated from each other by at least a hundred meters. They went briskly around obstacles, plunged up to their chests in the sticky water of the marshes, galloped … and always arrived at the rendezvous on time. But the cavalry couldn’t advance alone.
It was mobile, but not invulnerable. The strikes it attempted resulted in casualties every time its troops were not properly covered by the artillery.

Until late July, the advance of the units to which Georg and I belonged was extremely rapid. We were on the road to Moscow, taking Napoléon’s route, more or less. The enemy’s resistance was weak, and his morale was failing. In view of the collapse of the Russian army, which was, moreover, practicing scorched-earth tactics, opinion in the Soviet Union was on the whole very favorable toward us.
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So we were optimistic about the outcome of the operations. We thought Russia’s fate would be decided within six weeks. But Russia wasn’t France. A blitzkrieg was impossible in a country of several tens of millions of square kilometers. At the end of July, our advance halted. On this terrain, the enemy had recovered. The threat to Moscow was too direct not to elicit a response, and the Sixth Infantry Division had to adopt a defensive position around Borki on the Mesha.

The month of August was difficult. There were daily skirmishes with the enemy. Placed under the authority of the Fifty-eighth Infantry Regiment, Georg’s unit was being used for reconnaissance missions on the left flank, which the Russians had penetrated by crossing the Dvina. On August 1, the cavalry repelled an enemy battalion, which outnumbered them four to one, back onto the far bank of the river. On August 2, the reconnaissance battalion found itself surrounded after a coordinated attack by
two Russian cavalry divisions. My brother’s squadron was quickly brought back to the battalion to which it was attached. There was no time to lose. Although it was seven p.m. and getting dark, Georg surprised the attacking forces by striking their southern flank, between Agejeva and Shichova. Supported by artillery, he inflicted severe losses on the adversary. The fighting went on all night and the following day. The day after that, the Russian attack was over, and the connection between the division and its reconnaissance battalion was restored.

However, these missions soon took a tragic turn. On the evening of August 4, Tonio, who had been put under Georg’s direct command in one of the skirmishes in which the squadron was regularly engaged, was hit by a bullet and fell from his mount. He remained on the battlefield while Georg and his cavalrymen, carried forward by their momentum, pursued the scattered Russians. The medics ran to help Tonio and discovered that he had a wound in his abdomen—a serious one, according to a preliminary diagnosis carried out in the twilight, but not mortal. His intestines and spleen had been damaged. He was taken to the field hospital, but died the next day from an embolism after an operation that seemed to have gone well. He was buried in a nearby cemetery, near an old church that the Soviets had converted into a wheat barn. Georg and I were shattered. Fortunately, we were able to see each other on August 26 and 27, because my division was in a neighboring sector. These moments spent
together provided us with a little consolation and a way to share our suffering as brothers. This was, alas, not the only sacrifice that year was to impose on us, because on November 30 we would lose our youngest brother as well.