-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
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First published by Jonathan Cape 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
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2
Operation Valkyrie
After the 'appeasement' of Munich in 1938, opportunities to involve the
army's entire high command in Hitler's overthrow began to recede. Following
Germany's military successes in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium and
France, such opportunities receded even further. While younger commanders
like Tresckow remained ready to act, they had few chances to do so, being too
far removed from Berlin and other crucial centres of power. When a rare
chance did come their way, it was invariably dogged by bad luck. Although
they had a network of associates in Berlin and other strategic locations,
these associates were too often vacillating, indecisive, imperfectly united,
lacking in the requisite initiative and, perhaps most important, lacking in
authority. By 1943, Germany's armed forces were stretched from the Atlantic
to the Russian heartland, from the Barents Sea to the Mediterranean-and, at
almost every point of the compass, fully engaged. As long as this remained
the case, the prospects were inauspicious for a coup originating on the
periphery and radiating inwards. Any such
undertaking would have to originate from the centre, from Berlin and from
other internal concentrations of power; and the centre remained 'soft'.
The men in Berlin, for example, were not, for the most part, senior military
officers, but figures of lesser rank and influence. They were also seldom, if
ever, wholly united, either about their objectives or the means of attaining
those objectives. For many of the individuals involved, there were serious
questions - of both expediency and morality - to be considered. In the moral
sphere, prominent members of the 'Kreisau Circle' were steeped in law and
questioned whether political assassination, even of Adolf Hitler and his
colleagues, could ever be legitimate. Opponents of murder and terror found it
understandably difficult to have recourse to murder and terror themselves.
Were they to do so, would they not be guilty of transgressions as grievous as
those they sought to redress? 'They were, to their credit, too conscious of
their responsibilities, too tom by moral qualms to achieve the necessary
degree of ruthlessness.,[1] Helmuth James von Moltke, founder of the 'Kreisau
Circle' and one of Stauffenberg's cousins, is reported to have said to a
member of the Stauffenberg family: 'We're not conspirators, we're not capable
of being, we've not learnt how to do it, we shouldn't try to make a start
now, it would go wrong, we should make an amateur job of it . . .[2]
If violence were repudiated, what were the alternatives? In certain quarters,
there was talk of 'impeaching' Hitler and putting him on trial, but such
ideas, however theoretically valid, could, in the context of circumstances,
hardly have been implemented. Yet even if violence were adopted, what then?
It would not be sufficient simply to assassinate Hitler - or even Hitler and
his immediate entourage of Party officials. Such action might produce a
traumatic effect, as did the assassinations that have characterised our own
era those of John and Robert Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, or Anwar Sadat,
or Indira and Rajiv Gandhi - but the machinery of the state, manifested
particularly through the SS, would have remained immovably in place. And
there were other repercussions to be considered. Most German soldiers and
lower-echelon officers had been thoroughly indoctrinated in National
Socialism, receiving their formative intellectual ideological training
through the Hitler Youth Movement. Apart from those at the front, they were
fervent supporters of the regime. To topple the regime would thus be to risk
full-scale civil war. It would disastrously divide the army, or plunge the
army into open and armed conflict with the SS. And while the army's upper
echelons vehemently despised the SS, such conflict between the two
institutions was too terrifying to contemplate.
In order to succeed, any prospective coup would somehow have to neutralise
the SS. It would also have to neutralise, if not wholly dismantle, the entire
machinery of the state. This was a rather more daunting prospect than just
eliminating Hitler and his immediate cohorts. It was made more daunting still
by the fact that Germany was fighting a major war at the time- a war that was
no longer a struggle for conquest, but for survival, against adversaries
little disposed to give quarter. So further complication confronted the
conspirators, especially the military men. Although they felt it increasingly
urgent to remove Hitler and his entourage from power, they also felt obliged
- and this became an ever more pressing consideration as the war turned
against Germany - to protect their country, their homes and families from
being overrun.
Had the Western Allies been prepared to negotiate a peace, the conspirators -
and, for that matter, most of the German military machine- would have been
only too eager to comply. Serious proposals were made for collapsing the
entire Western front, or for allowing an unopposed Allied landing near
Hamburg. Such actions would at least have ensured that Germany, if the
Fatherland had to be overrun at all, would be occupied by Western rather than
Russian soldiers. Unfortunately, the Western Allies, believing victory within
their grasp, refused to settle for anything less than unconditional
surrender; and they had, moreover, negotiated their own accords with Stalin,
on which they could not feasibly renege. In consequence, Germany lay
vulnerable to the onslaughts of the Red Army and the 'Communist menace', a
prospect as terrifying for the country's population as it was later to become
for Americans during the immediate post-war period and the McCarthy years.
The need to remove Hitler and the National Socialist hierarchy was becoming
ever more obvious, and not just to the conspirators, but if doing so would
render Germany susceptible to total conquest and occupation by the Soviet
Union, where did duty lie? If only to protect their homeland and their
families, many Germans, who would otherwise have readily laid down their
arms, felt they had no choice but to continue fighting.
Haunted by questions such as these, conspirators in Berlin and other focal
points of power were paralysed. They talked, they debated, they quarrelled
among themselves, they often worked at cross-purposes to each other, they
agonised over prospects and implications, they explored ways and means, they
devised feasibility studies, they complained, hoped and, not infrequently,
prayed. They remained, however, incapable of action.
'Freedom', Stauffenberg asserted, 'can only be won by action.'[3] It was with
this passionate commitment that he joined the ranks of the conspirators, and
he passed among them like an electric current, jolting and galvanising them
out of their inertia, infusing them with his own fiery fixity of purpose, and
welding their often nebulous and ineffectual decency into a coherent and
dynamic movement. Men twice his age and far superior in rank were suddenly
kindled by the energy of the 36-year-old colonel and, at last, animated with
a will to act. Previously irreconcilable differences between soldiers and
civilians, radicals and conservatives, republicans and monarchists, plebeians
and patricians, dissolved in the intensity of a focused resolution and fused
in a new sense of direction. For the first time, the German resistance became
a positive force, a force rooted not in caste or in calling, in sociology or
in politics, but in ethics, morality and the lofty imperatives of 'the
spirit'. To designate this force, Stauffenberg again had recourse to the work
of Stefan George, invoking one of his last and most apocalyptic poems:
'Geheimes Deutschland' ('Secret Germany').[4]
Under Stauffenberg's auspices, activities against the regime proceeded on a
number of fronts. In reprisal for bombs dropped on German cities, Hitler had
decreed mass executions of captured Allied airmen, and lists of those killed
were to be sent to him. In a ploy reminiscent of Gogol's Dead Souls,
Stauffenberg and his colleagues obtained from POW camps the names of men who
had already died. These were then forwarded to his cousin, Helmuth James von
Moltke, then serving with OKW (High Command of the Armed Forces)
Intelligence. Each Allied prisoner slated for execution was, on paper,
assigned the name of a dead or fictitious comrade, and reported to the Fuhrer
as recently shot. Many British and American airmen thus officially died
twice, while a great many
other pilots, gunners, navigators and bombardiers owed their lives to the
deception.[5]
But the newly revitalised resistance could not confine itself simply to
thwarting Hitler's perverse and vindictive whims; and even if he and his
entourage were eliminated by violence, there remained the question of what
would happen next. Plans had to be evolved for wresting control of the entire
nation, for dismantling its existing institutions, for bringing the war to an
end and creating a new democratic Germany out of the ashes of the Third
Reich. This was made all the more difficuIt because there was no single
central point, no building or office or headquarters, that could be seized.
Hitler had created a labyrinthine network of overlapping authorities for
exercising command and control, each with its own hierarchy and its own,
often secret, lines of communication. There was OKW (Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht), the High Command of the Armed Forces. There was OKH (Oberkommando
des Heeres), the High Command of the Army. There was OKM (Oberkommando der
Kriegsmarine), the High Command of the Navy. There was RSH(A)
(Reichssicherheits-Hauptamt), the Central Reich Security Office which, under
Himmler, ran the SD (Security Service), the Gestapo and the Criminal Police.
And, of course, there was the SS itself, also under Himmler.
As it happened, a blueprint already existed which could be adapted for
wresting control of Germany - a blueprint endorsed, ironically, by Hitler
himself. It was coda-named 'Valkyrie'. In the event of emergency within the
Reich (an uprising of foreign workers, for instance), Operation Valkyrie was
to be activated. This entailed the mobilisation and deployment of the Reserve
Army, which, by 1944, numbered more than four million. Troops were to occupy
the cities, martial law would be imposed and the army would wield supreme
authority. Politicians, civil servants and Party officials would all be
subordinate to military commanders. The plans for Valkyrie and its activation
were entirely in the hands of the army: neither the Nazi Party nor the SS
knew anything about them.
Stauffenberg and his colleagues resolved to avail themselves of the
administrative machinery already in place. At the appropriate moment,
Operation Valkyrie would be set in motion - on behalf of purposes very
different from those for which it had originally been designed To ensure the
unwitting co-operation of pro-Nazi younger officers, troops loyal to the
regime and any civilians who might be able to affect the situation, a 'cover
story' would be released It would be the same as that planned for the
abortive 1938 conspiracy: an attempted or intended Putsch by the SS (which
was, in 1944, a not implausible possibility). To counter this alleged Putsch,
the Reserve Army would be mobilised and deployed throughout the Reich. SS and
Party Officials would be arrested, and only then would the operation unmask
itself as a full-scale coup d'etat. Valkyrie would thus be double-edged, with
a 'legitimate' facade to screen its real clandestine purpose. Many of the
secret orders were typed by Tresckow's secretary, Margarethe von Oven.[6] He
instructed her always to wear gloves, even when typing, so that any
documents, if found, could not be identified. She said later in an interview
that she vividly remembered typing the primary order for the first time. It
began: 'The Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, is dead . . .'
Much of the ground had still to be prepared. Timetables had to be
synchronised, not only within the Reich itself, but in occupied territory as
well. The allegiance of numerous local commanders and subordinate officers
had to be enlisted - and was, in Berlin, in Konigsberg, in Stettin, in
Dresden, Munster, Munich, Kassel, Hamburg, Wiesbaden and Nuremberg, as well
as in Danzig Vienna, Salzburg, Paris, on the Eastern Front and elsewhere in
the field. Programmes had to be prepared for the future, and policies had to
be formulated, including an immediate peace settlement with the Western
Allies. A provisional government would have to be established to negotiate a
ceasefire, preserve order within Germany, and avert a national collapse or
civil war.
Had he wished to do so, Stauffenberg might have presided over this
provisional government and named himself undisputed ruler of the projected
new Germany. Instead, shunning all positions of personal power, he assigned
himself the relatively modest post of Under-Secretary of State for War. The
new President or head of state was to be the beloved old soldier Field
Marshal Ludwig Beck. The Chancellor was to be either Julius Leber, the
Socialist spokesman, or Carl Goerdeler, Mayor of Leipzig. Stauffenberg's
superior as Minister of War was to be either his current commander General
Olbricht, or his former commander, General Hoepner. Field Marshal von
Witzleben was to be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. Tresckow was to
take charge of the police.
Before anything of this ambitious project could be implemented, however, some
means had to be devised for neutralising Adolf Hitler. So far as Stauffenberg
was concerned, there was no point whatever in trying to remove the Fuhrer by
non-violent or legal means - impeaching him, for example, or forcing him
voluntarily to abdicate. And if merely arrested, his survival would continue
to command allegiance from fanatics in the Party, from the SS and from much
of the population, thereby increasing the risk of civil war. Although
numerous in theory, the options in practice were few - and only one was
likely to be effective.
Although it contravened his principles, his code of honour, the oath of
allegiance he had sworn as an officer and his personal code of moral and
spiritual values, Stauffenberg saw that Hitler had to die. There was no
alternative to political assassination. For a man of his chivalric
background, who saw himself as a loyal German, a Catholic, an officer and a
nobleman, there could scarcely have been a more onerous, more painful
conclusion. Unflinchingly, Stauffenberg was prepared to reconcile this
conclusion with his own conscience. He also undertook to incur, as he
recognised he would, the most terrible of stigmas - that of high treason.
I know that he who acts will go down in German history as a traitor, but he
who can and does not will be a traitor to his conscience. If I did not act to
stop this senseless killing, I should never be able to face the war's widows
and orphans . . .[7]
Assassination entailed problems of its own. Stauffenberg quickly discovered
that while Hitler's whereabouts at any given moment were easy enough to
establish, it was seldom possible to know his movements in advance. Prompted
perhaps by his own acute and highly developed sense of self-preservation,
Hitler avoided fixed schedules and, insofar as he could, travelled only on
the shortest possible notice. He wore a bullet-proof waistcoat and a
metal-plated bullet-proof cap. When he did travel, it was invariably with a
large entourage, which included his personal cook, driver, doctor and SD
(Security Service) personnel, as well as a heavy SS escort armed with
submachine-guns. His private aircraft, a Focke-Wulf Condor, was equipped with
a thickly armoured cabin, and a parachute was attached to his seat. He always
used his own cars, and during the war four separate motorcades were kept in
perpetual readiness for him at different quarters of Germany. The cars
themselves had bulletproof tyres and windows, and extensive armour plating.[8]
Since the fall of Stalingrad at the beginning of 1943, moreover, Hitler had
taken to travelling less and less. He adamantly refused to visit hospitals or
bombed cities, fearing such sights might make him give way to pity and, in
his own eyes, weaken. He now shunned the crowds on which he had formerly
sustained himself. He made almost no public appearances and became virtually
invisible, save to his personal entourage and staff. Even Goebbels grew
concerned:
It is tragic that the Fuhrer has become such a recluse and leads such an
unhealthy life. He never gets out into the fresh air. He does not relax. He
sits in his bunker, worries and broods ... The loneliness of General
Headquarters and the whole method of working there naturally have a
depressing effect upon the Fuhrer. [9]
For some time, Hitler had not even visited Berlin. The Berghof too, with the
'Eagle's Nest' in the Bavarian Alps, was now used far less, except for
extra-marital dalliances by the oafish Martin Bormann. It was as if Hitler's
carefully cultivated pre-war persona - associated quite deliberately with
light, with altitude, with loftiness, with vastness, with soaring and
sweeping vistas - had now contracted along with Germany's war effort and
successes in the field. As the country's military machine shrivelled, so did
Hitler. A tremor developed in his hands. He stooped. His left foot dragged
behind him as he walked. His face grew gaunt and haggard. If he had
previously identified himself with the eagle, he now had more in common with
the wolf.
The 'Wolfsschanze' or 'Wolf's Lair', Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg, was
admirably in harmony with Hitler's state of mind from 1943 on. Now in Poland
and called Ketrzyn, it lies amid the Masurian Lakes, the low-lying marshes,
swamps and forests of what was then East Prussia, some fifty miles east of
the old Teutonic Knights' capital at Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad). The soil
around Rastenburg was compounded of centuries of corpses. Here, in 1410 the
Battle of Tannenburg had been fought, and the Teutonic Knights, then at the
apex of their power, had suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of a
combined Polish and Lithuanian host. At the outbreak of the First World War
in 1914, two complete Russian armies had been outfought, outmanoeuvred,
encircled and forced to surrender by the ingenuity of Hindenburg and
Ludendorff. They had christened the engagement 'Tannenburg' to ensure that
their triumph, rather than the 1410 debacle, would be permanently associated
with the name. But whatever echoes or residues of former victory remained,
Rastenburg was a dark, bleak and forbidding place. The austere headquarters
compound consisted of 'a gloomy camp of huts' and underground concrete
bunkers scattered about the depths of the sombre forest. Visitors spoke
repeatedly of an atmosphere of brooding and oppressive isolation, of a dank
clamminess rank with perversity, decay and death. This was hardly surprising.
Beyond the wooded low hills surrounding the place, smoke rose from the
chimneys of the ovens at Stutthof and Treblinka and, not too much further to
the south, at Chelmno, Sobibor and Maidanek.
Unless he could be caught on one of his increasingly rare forays into the
outside world, the conspirators, in order to strike Hitler, would have to
reach into Rastenburg itself. In either case, the undertaking would not be
easy. Someone had to be found who enjoyed at least some access to the Fuhrer
and could circumvent his elaborate security precautions or penetrate to him
in the isolation of his headquarters. Although the conspirators' network did
have individuals placed within the 'Wolf's Lair', none of them was suitable
or prepared to assume the task of committing the assassination personally.
Although his access to the Fuhrer was at first not much greater than most
other officers', Stauffenberg announced his readiness to do the job himself.
There were obvious disadvantages to his performing that role, and urgent
objections from his colleagues. In the first place, he was severely
handicapped. However impressively he had managed to surmount his injuries, he
would, inevitably, be lacking in dexterity. More important still,
Stauffenberg was the acknowledged leader of the conspiracy, the figure to
whom everyone else turned for guiding force and strength of resolve. His
qualities had imparted cohesion and momentum to the enterprise; and except
perhaps for Tresckow, then a thousand miles away on the Eastern Front, there
was no one of sufficiently authoritative rank to fill his shoes. He might
indeed succeed in assassinating the Fuhrer, but if he himself died in the
process, the conspiracy would be left headless, bereft of impetus, morale and
presiding spirit. In his absence, the conspiracy itself might fragment, and
the consequences would then be disastrous - a backlash, anarchy or civil war.
Volunteers had therefore to be found for what would undoubtedly be a suicide
mission. Stauffenberg accordingly fumed to the 8th Infantry Regiment of
Potsdam, which had been assigned a crucial role in the aborted coup of 1939.
The man chosen to exterminate the Fuhrer was a young captain, Axel, Freiherr
(Baron) von dem Bussche.[10] Among his many decorations was the Ritterkreuz
(Knight's Cross), the highest German military honour. Having been wounded in
action, Bussche was unfit for further front-line duty and had been attached
as adjutant to his regiment's reserve at Potsdam. Himself a passionate
opponent of the regime, he had been asked by the conspirators to ensure that
his unit, insofar as possible, contained no Nazis and no supporters of the
Party.
During the summer and early autumn of 1943, new uniforms - particularly
winter clothing for the Eastern Front - had been designed and produced for
the army. Stauffenberg undertook to' arrange a demonstration at which the new
kit would be modelled for Hitler personally. Bussche would serve as model-
with explosives strapped around his waist and, should a coup de grace be
required, a long thin knife in his boot. At the appropriate moment, he would
clasp the Fuhrer in an embrace and both would be blown up.
Hitler assented in principle to attending a display of the new uniforms, but
refused to be pinned down to a specific date. Until the end of November,
Bussche held himself in readiness for self-immolation and martyrdom. Before
he could be called upon, an Allied air raid destroyed the specimen kit he was
to model. Before replacements could be produced, Bussche himself was returned
to active duty and was again badly wounded, losing a leg. Unable conveniently
to dispose of them, he was forced to carry his explosives around with him
from hospital to hospital. Only towards the end of 1944 did he find an
opportunity to discard them into a lake.
With Bussche no longer available, the suicide mission he had undertaken to
perform devolved on another young officer from the 8th Infantry, Lieutenant
Ewald Heinrich von Kleist.[11] Descended from the great Prussian playwright
and story-writer, as well as from a long line of military commanders, Kleist
was fervently anti-Nazi. His father had been a long-standing opponent of the
regime, marked down to be murdered on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934
and escaping only by virtue of advance warning.
Towards the end of January 1944, the stock of new uniforms had been
replenished and Stauffenberg made the requisite preparations with Kleist. The
lethal fashion show was re-scheduled for the second week of February, and the
conspirators, from the Eastern Front to the Atlantic Wall, again put
themselves on alert, awaiting the codeword signifying the Fuhrer's death. At
the last minute, for reasons that remain unknown to this day, Hitler ordered
the demonstration postponed.
Another attempt, this time to shoot Hitler, was undertaken on 11 March. It,
too, was thwarted by chance. And by now Germany's situation was becoming
increasingly desperate. An Allied invasion of France was imminent, the only
uncertainty about it being when and where it would take place. Allied columns
were racing each other, almost unimpeded now, towards Rome, and the
juggernaut of the Red Army was advancing from the east. If Hitler had been
inaccessible before, he became even more so now. Given his failure to come
within range of the conspirators, they, it was clear, would have to go to
him. Assassination would have to be attempted at his headquarters in
Berchtesgaden, or in Rastenburg, but no outsider could hope for access to
either sanctuary.
On 5 July, Julius Leber - one of the conspirators' two candidates for future
Chancellor- was arrested by the Gestapo. The authorities had got wind of
something and were beginning to close in. Stauffenberg had visited Rastenburg
a month before, on the day following the Allied invasion of Normandy. He had
now been promoted and, as Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army, could expect to
be summoned at frequent intervals to the Fuhrer's headquarters. It was
becoming daily more apparent that he would have to carry out the
assassination himself, and that he would have to do so quickly. Stauffenberg
said, 'Now it is not the Fuhrer or the country or my wife and four children
which are at stake; it is the entire German people.'[12] He would also have
to preserve himself intact, escape from the scene of his deed and contrive
somehow to return safely to Berlin, there to preside over the details
attending activation of Operation Valkyrie.
Again his colleagues protested, insisting that 'the Chief of the General
Staff could not at the same time lead the assault party'. [13] Even more than
before, Stauffenberg was now recognised as the incendiary soul of the entire
German resistance.
These objections were not without validity. If human error doomed the
conspiracy to failure, the error was a simple and understandable one.
Everything depended too entirely, too exclusively, too absolutely on the
power of a single man. The will to act, the capacity to improvise and deal
with contingencies, impetus, tenacity and resourcefulness - all rested with
Stauffenberg. He was the catalyst, the binding and solidifying agent that
held disparate components together, making them cohere. In his absence,
concerted decision would disintegrate into uncertainty, panic, hysteria,
inertia; and the machinery he had set in motion would falter, then stall.
By July 1944, it had become clear that the assassination- the key to
everything else - would not be carried out at all unless Stauffenberg himself
acted as assassin. But the odds against Stauffenberg were staggering . . .
>From a military standpoint, Stauffenberg's plan to act in both roles was
absurd. A commander was to carry out his own orders at the front; then, three
hours would elapse between the assassination and the return of the assassin
to Berlin - if he did return. He had to try to survive the assassination
attempt and return to the coup d'etat centre, because no one could lead the
coup in his absence. [14]
Stauffenberg had no illusions about the difficulties of the task he had taken
upon himself. He and his colleagues were dubious about any prospect of
success:
Stauffenberg and his friends knew that their chance of success was as good as
naught. They acted in the face of overwhelming odds, without substantial hope
of succeeding in killing Hitler or in seizing control of Germany. They had
even less hope of surviving politically more than a few days or weeks, no
hope therefore of putting into effect their reconstruction ideas, for they
saw no way of avoiding the occupation, amputation and division of Germany by
enemy forces. But General Beck, Brigadier von Tresckow,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg all agreed: The
assassination had to be attempted at all cost.[15]
Statements by the conspirators themselves would seem to support this
contention, reflecting a resigned scepticism. Lieutenant Colonel Casar von
Hofacker, Stauffenberg's cousin and one of the leaders of the conspiracy in
Paris, when asked the odds in his favour, replied coolly: 'Ten per cent '[16]
When asked by his wife if he thought the coup could succeed, Julius Leber
answered: 'I don't know. I have only one head, and I can't use it for
anything better than this cause.'[17] According to Tresckow:
The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not
succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be undertaken. What matters
now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world
and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared
to take this decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of
consequence.[18]
Stauffenberg's uncle, Graf von Uxkull, felt that 'even though I believe that
it has in fact no chance of success, it at least has the advantage that we
shall have shown the world that some attempt has been made by Germans to rid
themselves of these criminals.'[19] And Stauffenberg's brother, Berthold,
stated: 'The most terrible thing is knowing that it cannot succeed and that
we must still do it for our country and our children.'[20]
Yet it is clear that for Stauffenberg and his colleagues, the enterprise was
much more than just a poetic symbolic gesture. If their intention was simply
to demonstrate to the world that there were 'good Germans', it would have
been easy enough, after all, to martyr themselves. A head-on suicidal attack
on the Fuhrer, on one of his headquarters, on the SS or on some crucial
installation would have served that purpose, and spared the conspirators the
complexities of organising a coup extending from the Eastern Front to the
Atlantic wall. Even a kamikaze-style attack on Hitler alone would have stood
a greater chance of success. The point is that, whatever their misgivings
about its outcome, the conspirators went about their undertaking quite as if
they expected it to succeed, and they were to continue doing so even after
the last hope of success had been extinguished. This requires greater courage
and tenacity than simple martyrdom; and it means more than any poetic
symbolic gesture, such as those one finds, for example, in the history of
Irish republicanism.
In the days following the Normandy invasion, Stauffenberg would again rally
his co-conspirators with the poetry of Stefan George. He would recite 'The
Antichrist' and the prophetic 'verses for the Dead':[21]
When men of the future are purged of dishonour,
Their shoulders released from the shackles of bondage,
Their vitals alive with the hunger for virtue,
Then flashes of blood will illumine the millions
Of graves of the fallen, then thundering armies
Will ride over clouds, and the terror of terrors,
The third of the tempests will sweep through the country:
The dead are returning.
When men of this nation no longer are cowards,
Or weaklings, but feel their vocation and mission,
Their hearts will decipher in untold disaster
A message from heaven, their hands will be lifted,
Their lips will be tuned to the homage of honour,
The flag of the king, the legitimate symbol,
Will fly through the dawn and be lowered in praise to
The highest of heroes.[22]
And at the prospect of enjoying access to the Fuhrer's headquarters, even
though it meant performing the act of assassination personally, Stauffenberg
said: 'This is more than we dared hope for; fate has offered us this
opportunity, and I would not refuse it for anything in the world. I have
searched my conscience, before God and before myself. This man is evil
incarnate.'[23]
Although precise details are vague and confused, Stauffenberg is reported to
have taken a bomb with him to a briefing at Berchtesgaden on 6 July. It is
unclear whether he actually intended to use it, or was simply testing his own
courage in a sort of 'dress rehearsal'.
There has been one plausible suggestion that it was indeed a test of some
kind, of security, if not of his own courage, and that he did not expect to
encounter Hitler personally. It is also possible that somebody else was
actually supposed to take charge within Berchtesgaden proper and activate the
bomb. In any case, nothing happened and Stauffenberg returned to Berlin in a
state of intense exasperation: 'he talked with noticeable emotion and fiery
impatience about the situation at Berchtesgaden and declared that now he
would have to take charge of that as well'.[24] He is even reported to have
snapped irritably: 'I'll do it myself with my three fingers!'[25]
He tried again, on 11 July, once more smuggling a bomb into Berchtesgaden.
Everything was in place, and cars and aircraft were ready to get him back to
Berlin as quickly as possible. But the conspirators had agreed that it was
essential to eliminate not just the Fuhrer, but Himmler as well. Himmler, it
transpired, was not present, and Stauffenberg returned to Berlin with the
bomb intact. By the 14th, Hitler had left Berchtesgaden and installed himself
at Rastenburg.
On 15 July, Stauffenberg flew to the 'wolf's Lair' at Rastenburg and smuggled
his bomb into the Fuhrer's East Prussian headquarters. On this occasion, the
initial order to activate Operation Valkyrie was given. Again, however,
Himmler was not present, and the assassination was postponed. Such delays
could clearly not be allowed to continue: it was agreed among the
conspirators that on 20 July, Stauffenberg would strike, regardless of
whether Himmler was there or not. That week a friend told Stauffenberg of
rumours which had surfaced in Berlin, claiming that the Fuhrer's Headquarters
were soon to be blown up. Stauffenberg commented. 'So there is no longer a
choice. We have crossed the Rubicon.'[26]
In the early evening of 19 July, he stopped at a small church in a Berlin
suburb where a service was in progress. For some time, he stood alone at the
back, then had himself driven home and spent the rest of the evening with his
brother Berthold.
pp 27-41
Notes and References
When not cited here, the full bibliographical details are to be found in the
Bibliography
2 Operation Valkyrie
I Balfour, Withstanding Hitler, p.109. Professor Balfour adds: 'People whose
motivating influences are patriotism and Christianity are not nowadays likely
to wade through rivers of blood in the hope of reforming society.'
2 Ibid., p.109.
3 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p.132.
4 Ibid., p.25; Hoffmann, 'Claus von Stauffenberg und Stefan George: Der Weg
zur Tat', Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, Bd. 12, 1968, p.540.
5 Kramarz, op. cit., p. 126.
6 Now Margarethe, Grafin von Hardenberg. See Meding, Mit dem Mut des
Herzens, p.103.
7 Hoffmann, in Large, Contending with Hitler, p.127.
8 Hoffmann, Hitler's Personal Security, pp.63, 74-5.
9 Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, p.661.
10 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, pp.323-8.
Ibid., pp.328-9.
IZ Ibid., p.374.
13 Zeller, The Flume of Freedom, p.292.
14 Hoffmann, in Large, op.cit., p.126.
15 Ibid., p.127
16 Zimmermann and Jacobsen, Germans against Hitler, p. 156.
17 Zeller, op.cit., p.232.
18 Schlabrendorff, The Secret War against Hitler, p. 277.
19 Kramarz, op.cit., p.110
20 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933-1945, p. 374.
21 Zeller, op.cit., p.191
22 George, The Works of Stefan George, trans. by Marx and Morwitz, p. 398.
23 Galante, Hitler Lives - And the Generals Die, p.6.
24 Zeller, op.cit., p.292.
25 Ibid., p.432, n.31.
26 Spieglbild einer Verschworung, p.117
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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