-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Jonathan Cape 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
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--[6]--
6
The New Reich
Whatever personal chord it may have touched in him, 'der Bamberger Reiter'
did, in fact, portend something of Claus von Stauffenberg's destiny. On I
April 1926, at the age of nineteen, he entered the regiment in which his
uncle had served: the 17th Bavarian Cavalry, also known as the Bamberg
Cavalry and with its depot in that town.
Having been so drastically reduced in size by the Treaty of Versailles, the
Reichswehr was all the more stringent in its training programmes. Candidates
for officers' commissions had first to serve in the ranks as ordinary
soldiers, and the young aristocrat did not always find this congenial. 'For
our kind,' he wrote in a letter to his father a few weeks after his
induction, 'it is not easy to play among the common people for long
periods.'[1] He also stated that he had never expected the early phases of
his military service to be enjoyable; and there was never any question of his
failing to 'stick it out'. He was to be promoted to lance-corporal on 18
August 1927; to NCO on 15 October 1927; to sergeant on 1 August 1928; to
staff-sergeant on 1 August 1929; to second lieutenant on 1 January , and to
full lieutenant on 1 May 1933.
Among other things, his association with the Bamberg Cavalry allowed
Stauffenberg to indulge his love of horses.
He had a real passion and an inborn skill for riding and handling horses.
When he was billeted on a farmer, he one day came across a young mare among
the draught-horses, 'an enchanting personality', as he put it. He bought the
mare, trained her to perform the passage and levade and won a prize with her
in the difficult dressage test.[2]
In later years, he was to buy shares, along with his father-in-law, in a foal
named Jagd, which he chose from a stud farm and trained personally. He was to
become one of Germany's most prominent horsemen, standing as a candidate for
the country's Olympic dressage team. And a decade later, as war drew nearer,
he was to prepare for the Staff College in Berlin two markedly different
papers that reflected the contradictory aspects of his character, one
oriented presciently towards the future, the other rooted firmly in tradition
and the past. The first of these papers was a striking and revolutionary
advocacy of the deployment of paratroops in a combat role - something unheard
of at the time, yet soon to be a' cornerstone of the most advanced military
thinking and implemented by the Wehrmacht in such theatres as Holland and
Crete The second paper, with an archaic chivalry verging on quaintness,
passionately advocated and tried to rationalise the continued use of mounted
cavalry in contemporary warfare.
In October 1927, as a candidate for a commission, Stauffenberg was posted to
the infantry training school in Dresden, where he first met his later
co-conspirator, Merz von Quirnheim, and began to learn Russian. In 1928, he
received a new posting, to the cavalry school at Hannover, where only the
most highly rated sergeants were sent. During the winter of 1927-8, he
travelled frequently to Berlin, where he would meet Berthold and Alexander
and attend poetry readings at Stefan George's apartment.
At the cavalry school in Hannover, he first met one of his future divisional
commanders, Major (later Lieutenant-General) Friedrich-Wilhelm, Freiherr von
Loeper, who, on the basis of his glowing reports, nominated Stauffenberg
course leader. In this capacity, he quickly earned the confidence of both
colleagues and superiors.
He was an expert at settling differences, acting as a go-between and
smoothing out quarrels; he looked for and found the good side to everybody
and had an extraordinary knack of making the best of everything.[3]
And again, his fierce tenacity and concentration of will displayed itself. He
himself had originally wondered whether the illnesses which had debilitated
him in childhood might impede his military career. Some of these ailments
still occasionally recurred, and as late as 1931, he was compelled to spend
time at a spa hospital. All the same, he refused to let this deter him,
forcing himself to an athletic standard far surpassing that of more robust
colleagues, one of whom reported:
I have often heard Stauffenberg putting forward his views in the officers'
mess, generally to the more junior officers. In most cases he would take the
floor at once and lay down the law. This came easily to him, for he was
intellectually clearly far ahead of his listeners. Being supremely
self-confident and undoubtedly somewhat inclined to show off, he liked the
sound of his own voice. Nevertheless his audience enjoyed listening to him.[4]
The official confidential report by his squadron leader, compiled in October
1933, is particularly illuminating:
A reliable independent character, capable of making up his own mind and
taking his own decisions. Highly intelligent and of above average ability,
both tactically and technically.
Exemplary in his handling of NCO's and men and absorbed in training and
raising the standard of his mortar platoon.
Unexceptional in his relationships with others. Shows great interest in
social, historical and religious matters . . .
As against these outstanding qualities, mention should be made of certain
minor deficiencies and weaknesses. He is well aware of his military ability
and intellectual superiority and is therefore apt at times to adopt a
somewhat overbearing attitude towards his - fellow officers, frequently
evidenced by a sarcasm, which, however, never leaves hurt feelings.
He is somewhat sloppy in his dress and bearing, and as a young officer,
should take more care of his appearance and give an impression of greater
energy. He is rather susceptible to throat infections, which means that his
powers of physical resistance are sometimes affected. He fights off illness
with energy and determination
If he goes on as he is, there is every prospect that he will do very well.[5]
Stauffenberg passed his officer's exams with honours and also received a
special ceremonial sabre 'for outstanding achievements'. On returning to the
17th Cavalry at Bamberg, he was commissioned second lieutenant on New Year's
Day of 1930. The restricted size of the Reichswehr meant that advancement was
inevitably slow. Training - especially after the National Socialists rose to
power - became more arduous, and the insistence on professionalism more
severe. Officers were schooled to discharge duties appropriate not only to
their rank, but also to those one or even two above. When Germany's armed
forces began dramatically to expand, this principle would be turned to
account. Officers would automatically move up one or even two grades, and be
already groomed for their new responsibilities. The military machine thus had
a built-in capacity to increase in size and to take in substantial quantities
of fresh recruits while maintaining maximum efficiency in the chain of
command.
In 1933, Stauffenberg returned to the cavalry school at Hannover for an
advanced course in equitation. He would ride four horses every day, two from
the school and two of his own. He concentrated especially on dressage; and in
1935, he took first place in his compulsory military equitation class,
beating members of the team which would go on to win a gold medal in the 1936
Olympics.
By this time, he had married. Bamberg had not only initiated him into the
military. It also brought him together with his future wife. In 1930, he had
met and become engaged to Nina, Freiin von Lerchenfeld, a member of the old
Bavarian aristocracy whose distant relations included the Battenbergs
(subsequently the Mountbattens). Nina's father, Gustav Freiherr von
Lerchenfeld, was very much a man of the world, having served as
consul-general in Shanghai, Warsaw and Kovno (now Kaunas in Lithuania).
Before the First World War, he had also served as royal chamberlain of
Bavaria.
On 26 September 1933, Stauffenberg and Nina von Lerchenfeld were married in
the church of Saint Jakobs in Bamberg. She was seventeen at the time. he
twenty-six. When she asked him why he had chosen her, he said 'he had soon
noticed that she would be just the right mother for his children'.[6] He and
his father-in-law became close friends. He was not above teasing his
mother-in-law, to whom he quoted Frederick the Great: 'For an officer, a wife
is a necessary evil. Warriors ought not to marry, but during times of peace
the needs of the family and the offspring must be met.'[7] In Stauffenberg's
case, these needs emphatically were. He proved a doting father, taking a
simple boyish pleasure in his children. There were to be five of them:
Berthold (born in 1934), Heimeran (1936), Franz Ludwig (1938), Valerie (1940)
and Konstanze (born in 1945, after her father's death).
After the abortive 'Beer House Putsch' of 1923, the National Socialist Party
seemed to have vanished from the political arena, but by the end of the
decade it was in full resurgence. In the 1928 elections, the Nazis obtained a
marginal twelve seats in the Reichstag. Two years later, this number was
increased to 107, and in July 1932, it rose to 230 out of nearly 650. The
Nazis could no longer be ignored, and the aged President Hindenburg had no
choice but to invite them to join the government. Hitler's response to this
invitation was predictably exorbitant. He asked that he himself be appointed
chancellor, and requested a number of ministries for his party. Hindenburg
refused, giving Hitler an angry lecture which was then made public. This
fiasco damaged the National Socialists. So, too, did a groundswell of apathy
and Hitler's public defence of five storm troopers who had murdered a
Communist. In the elections of November 1932, the National Socialists lost
thirty-four seats and some two million votes.
By January 1933, however, it was clear that a coalition government could not
be formed without involving political extremists, either the National
Socialists on the right, or the Communists on the left. Hindenburg was asked
to dissolve the Reichstag again and call a new election, this time banning
both the National Socialist and Communist parties. To the increasingly senile
old president this seemed too draconian a measure, and he refused. The army
remained officially neutral, but behind its non-partisan facade it was badly
split: few, if any, of its personnel were pro-Communist, but attitudes
towards the Nazis ranged from zealous support to equally virulent antipathy
and hatred.
Franz von Papen, the country's political eminence grise and former
chancellor, concluded that stability would be impossible to establish in
Germany unless Hitler received the chancellorship he desired. But Papen also
hoped to contain the Nazi upstart and force him to share power. On 30 January
1933, therefore, in accordance with Papen's recommendations, Hitler became
chancellor in a coalition cabinet. Papen himself became vice-chancellor; and
he and his colleagues were now convinced the Nazis could be checked. 'We have
framed him in,' one said, alluding to Hitler. As the historian Gordon Craig
wryly observed: 'The remark should be included in any anthology of famous
last words .[8]
On 3 February, Hitler met with the military high command and, in a lengthy
speech, maintained that Germany's armed forces would function most
effectively under the 'strictest kind of authoritarian state leadership'. As
an incentive to them, he promised to remove all restrictions imposed by the
Treaty of Versailles. In the meantime, the Nazis had, under Goering, wrested
control of the police, which allowed their thugs and 'goon squads' to operate
with a semblance of legality.
On the following day the new chancellor-cum-Fuhrer persuaded the increasingly
malleable President Hindenburg to issue a decree which banned all newspapers
or public meetings presuming to criticise the government. On 17 February,
Goering issued a decree forbidding the Prussian police to interfere with the
activities of Nazi paramilitary formations such as the SA and SS. Three days
later Hitler met a group of prominent businessmen and industrialists and told
them the impending elections, scheduled for March, would be the last for ten,
perhaps for a hundred, years.
A week later the Reichstag 'mysteriously' burned down. It is now generally
accepted that this act of arson was perpetrated by Nazi agents-provocateurs,
but at the time it was easily enough attributed to Communist agitators,
against whom Hitler now had a plausible excuse to move. By the following
morning, more than four thousand Communist functionaries had been arrested,
along with numerous intellectuals and professional people hostile to the
regime. Hindenburg was persuaded to sign yet another decree, suspending the
rights of citizens and authorising the government to assume power in any of
the republic's federated states. German citizens could now be arrested simply
on suspicion and imprisoned without trial. Concentration camps began to
proliferate across the country for anyone who expressed dissent.
The elections of 5 March 1933 were, as historians have accurately said,
'dominated by terror'. Not surprisingly, given the prevailing intimidation,
the National Socialist Party won a majority. Yet it-is worth noting that the
Communists still took nearly five million votes and obtained eighty-one seats
in the Reichstag. Although the Nazis had 288 seats, this was only 43.9 per
cent of the vote, and the other parties held 359 seats. In other words the
majority of German citizens voted against the National Socialist Party.
But the Nazis were now not to be stopped. On 23 March, with its Communist
deputies all either dead or in concentration camps, the Reichstag was
dragooned into passing the notorious 'Enabling Act'. By this act, it became
'constitutional' for the cabinet to frame laws without the approval of the
Reichstag. Legislative and executive powers were now effectively merged, and
Hitler was voted dictator. He had absolute and ostensibly 'legal' power to do
as he wished with Germany. It had taken him less than two months to destroy
the last vestiges of the country's experiment in democracy. According to a
cabaret joke at the time:
Members of which choral society earn individually more than Caruso: Reichstag
deputies - they perform once a year, sing two songs (the national anthem and
the 'Horst Wessel Lied') and receive twelve thousand marks each.[9]
In July 1933, the new regime signed a concordat with the Vatican. In the same
month, another law was passed, making National Socialism the only legal party
in Germany. To attempt to establish another would be punishable by a minimum
three years' imprisonment. Hitler's authority was now beyond any possibility
of challenge. Yet for his more grandiose designs, he needed the armed forces.
It was to them that he began to turn his attention.
During the early years of his military career, Claus von Stauffenberg was, in
many respects, less the single-minded professional soldier than the typical
'Renaissance men' he had been in the past. He read copiously, in a number of
fields: military history, general history, politics, philosophy, psychology,
economics, art and literature. He became fluent in Russian and English.
Although no record exists of him having formally studied French, he appears
to have known the language well. He continued to attend lectures and
concerts, and maintained his ongoing apprenticeship to Stefan George. During
1930 while engaged in specialised military courses at Doberitz, he still
contrived to attend readings and recitations at George's Berlin apartment. 'I
had the greatest poet of the age as my master,' he said to Nina.[10] It was
through George that the seeds of what would become Stauffenberg's antipathy
to National Socialism were planted in his mind.
As Nazism gained first support, then power, in Germany, certain of George's
poems came increasingly to be seen as prescient. Among the most important of
these was a short lyric composed even before the First World War. Inspired by
a famous painting of Signorelli's, 'Der Widercrist' ('The Antichrist') was
eventually to become a mantra for Stauffenberg's circle of conspirators. Yet,
as early as the 1920s, when Hitler first suddenly embarked on his quest for
control of Germany, the poem could already be seen as prophetic; and George,
as well as certain of his disciples, openly proclaimed it to be so.
'He comes from the mountains, he stands mid the pines!
We saw it ourselves! He transforms into wine
Clear water, and trafficks with dead men!'
Oh could you but hear how I laugh in the night!
My hour is now struck, my snares are all sprung
And fish fill my nets, thickly swarming.
Wise men and dullards, the mob, frenzied, reels,
Tramples the cornfields, tears up the trees.
Make way for the flock of the Risen!
No wonder of heaven but I can't perform.
A hair's-breadth impure, but you'll not note the fraud
With your stunted and stultified senses.
In place of the arduous and rare I invoke
The Facile; from compost I make things like gold,
And perfumes, and nectars, and spices.
And what the great prophet renounced I extol:
An art without ploughing or sowing or toil
Which yet drains the soil of its essence.
The high Prince of Vermin extends his domains;
No pleasure eludes him, no treasure or gain.
And down with the dregs of rebellion!
You cheer, mesmerised by demoniac sheen,
Exhaust what remains of the honey of dawn,
And only then sense the debacle.
You then stretch your tongues to the now arid trough,
Mill witless as kine through a pasture aflame,
While fearfully brazers the trumpet. [11]
George himself was hardly a conventional Christian. If anything, he was
positively hostile towards conventional Christian theology, but he
acknowledged a profound validity in the Christian emphasis on self-sacrifice;
and he had no reservations about availing himself of Christian imagery and
metaphor. The Antichrist in the poem derives in part from the figure in
Revelation 19:20:
And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence
had worked the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of
the beast and those who worshipped its image.
He also derives from the similar figure, the archetypal 'false prophet' known
as Simon Magus, who appears in Acts 8: 9-24, as well as in the writings of
Church Fathers and later Christian tradition. There is evidence to suggest
that the original Simon, or the prototype on whom he is based, was in fact an
early Gnostic; and one Church Father, Epiphanius, accuses him of being the
founder of Gnosticism. In Christian scripture and tradition, he is described
as the first heretic, and appears as a self-proclaimed Samaritan
wonder-worker and messiah. A charismatic individual with a following of his
own, he is, like Peter but in his own more sinister way, a 'fisher of men',
whose souls swarm into his net. He offers Peter money for the gift of healing
by the laying on of hands. In other words, he attempts to purchase the power
of the Holy Spirit for venal purposes, whence the sin known as 'simony'
derives. He also casts doubts on Jesus and openly questions Peter's authority
as apostle. The encounter, in later sources, culminates with Simon
challenging Peter to a kind of duel, each having to match the other, miracle
for miracle. At first, Simon actually does outperform Peter, and the wonders
he works are indeed impressive. Unlike Peter's, however, they stem not from
any divine power but, through mere sorcery, from a more questionable, if not
altogether demonic, source. To that extent, they are sullied, tainted, 'a
hair's-breadth impure'. They are ultimately manifestations of what George
calls 'das Leichte' ('the facile'): the spiritual equivalent of the ersatz or
spurious. Dazzling though they may be, they are only the products of
trickery, of legerdemain, of 'hoax' or 'fraud'. They appeal to the eye, to
the surface of consciousness, but have no more profound validity.
Thus does Simon Magus figure in scripture and Christian tradition. His
attempt to challenge Christian authority and usurp it with his own
establishes him as the archetype or prototype of the 'black magician' and
'Antichrist', a 'role model' for such later would-be necromancers end 'black
magicians' as Aleister Crowley. The Antichrist in George's poem, the
embodiment of trickery and fraud, offers a form of 'facile', pre-packaged,
boil-in-the-bag, television-dinner style salvation and redemption -
surrogate, specious and, to that extent, intrinsically evil. He is a
demagogue, seducing his followers down a path of meretricious spiritual power
that will lead them, as well as himself, to destruction.
By 1933, it was already apparent how dangerously Hitler conformed to the
pattern - apparent to George, at least, and to others with eyes to see.
(Thomas Mann, for example, had already published his minatory story 'Mario
and the Magician'. Hermann Broch was already at work on the novel
subsequently to be published in English as The Spell.) As the decade
progressed and the Nazis consolidated their position, George's poem became
ever more apposite. By 1944, its ominous prophecy had already been
effectively fulfilled, and the apocalyptic cataclysm of the closing stanzas
was only too obviously imminent.
George had always decreed that politics were alien to art - and, by
extension, inimical to the life of the spirit and to the very essence of
humanity itself. His attitude towards the Nazis, however, sometimes appeared
inconsistent, and this allowed a few members of his circle to support them,
though the majority - including, of course, the number of Jews among them -
did not. Ultimately, George was hostile to the new regime. Whatever it had in
common with the 'renewal' he had advocated was superficial, spurious, 'a
hair's-breadth impure', the work of a false prophet; and the political
reality of the Third Reich was as divorced from the spiritual Reich he
hadenvisioned as Simon Magus's ersatz miracles were, in Christian tradition,
from Peter's.
George found nothing great in Hitler as he did in Caesar or Napoleon. He was
repeatedly disparaging about the National Socialists. In 1931 or 1932, he
said that if National Socialism came to power, everyone in Germany would have
to go about with a noose around his neck, so that whenever a person was not
wanted he could immediately be hanged. To the comment that the Nazis were a
dreadful lot, he replied: 'Henchmen are never very pleasant people.'[12]
George's sometimes equivocal disapproval, however, did not deter the Nazis
from hailing him as a spiritual precursor and trying to co-opt him, much as
they did Nietzsche. He was repeatedly mortified and outraged to find his
name, certain of his poems, aspects of his thought, and a number of his
personal symbols - the swastika, for example - being appropriated by the
Nazis and utilised for their own propaganda purposes. He was no less
indignant when he received overtures from Goebbels, inviting him to become
the Party's 'official poet'.
In October 1928, George published what he declared to be his most important
and prophetic book of poems, Das Neue Reich ( The New Reich), which undertook
to evoke a realm of culture and the spirit very different from the one the
Nazis had in mind. A month later, he convened a meeting of his circle and
regaled his disciples with a personal recitation intended to sum up his
life's work. The occasion had a distinctly valedictory atmosphere to it, a
sense of leavetaking and farewell. It was also suffused with admonitions,
omens and portents for the future. At this assembly, George himself read his
last two great hymns, 'Burg Falkenstein' ('Falkenstein Castle') and 'Geheimes
Deutschland' ('Secret Germany'). The second of these is an inordinately
dense, opaque and impenetrable work. There have been suggestions that it
contained a sort of clandestine legacy, coded instructions or covert
programme for members of the circle. This seems unlikely but, given George's
tendency to incorporate levels of significance accessible only to his own
initiates, it would be rash to draw too definitive a conclusion. In any case,
and whatever the work's 'sub-text' might or might not be, it clearly meant
something very special to Stauffenberg. Fifteen years later, amid the throes
of war, it was the title of this poem that he conferred on the conspiracy. In
all probability, too, the title of this poem was the last phrase on his lips,
flung defiantly into the faces of the firing squad.
In 1931, as the Nazis advanced towards absolute power, George effectively
expatriated himself, obtaining premises in Minusio, in Switzerland, near
Locarno on the Italian border. Minusio was originally intended to be no more
than a winter refuge, but George began to speed more end more time there. By
1933, he had become, to all intents and purposes, an exile, returning to
Germany only for brief visits.
In May of that year, a Nazi press statement spoke grandiloquently of the
'great tasks' poets would be called upon to perform. George was specifically
mentioned as exemplifying the solidarity poets could display with the State
by giving expression to the spirit of the new Germany. At the same time,
George was approached discreetly through an intermediary and asked if he
would preside over, or at least participate in, a poetic academy. If he were
amenable, an official invitation would be issued publicly, acknowledging his
role as a spiritual and cultural precursor of National Socialism. George
replied with a characteristically lofty ambiguity:
I in no way deny the ancestry of the new national government and do not
dispute my spiritual contribution . . . The laws of the spiritual and the
political are certainly very different - where they meet and where the spirit
rises to the general good is an exceptionally tangled phenomenon. I cannot
put words into the mouths of those in government about what they think of my
work and how they value its significance. [13]
As for becoming associated with a poetic academy, he refused with cool
aloofness, adding that 'I have for almost half a century presided over German
poetry and the German spirit without an academy. Had there been one, I would
probably have been opposed to it.[14] He had intended to celebrate his
sixty-fifth birthday that year with his sister, in his home town of Bingen,
on the Rhine. Fearing some sort of 'official recognition' from the regime,
however, he abandoned his plans and slipped quietly away from his sister's
premises four days early, on 8 July. He celebrated his birthday on the 12th
in the seclusion of his Berlin apartment. Still intent on avoiding Nazi
acclamations, he then departed, earlier than usual, for Minusio.
In the autumn of 1933, George's health began to decline rapidly, and by the
beginning of winter he was on his deathbed. Calling his closest disciples to
him, he voiced his fear that, on his death members of the SS or some other
Party representatives might appear, might try to claim his body, bring it
back to Germany and turn his funeral into some sort of state occasion. The
Stauffenbergs were requested to prevent this from happening.
George died on 4 December and his burial was scheduled for two days later.
Claus von Stauffenberg arranged a roster for the funeral vigil. He ensured
that he, his brothers and a dozen or so friends including some military
colleagues, maintained a permanent round-the-clock watch over their mentor's
bier, to keep all official German representatives away.
In the middle of the cleared chapel the oak coffin stood on a stand. At the
head there was a laurel wreath whose leaves were arranged in Roman style. On
the left and right there were three laurel trees, that grew over the coffin.
In the corners of the bare chapel the friends kept a vigil for the dead,
which is customary in Tessin; following the instructions of Claus von
Stauffenberg, they took turns. In front of the chapel, to the left and right
of the entrance, two laurel trees were planted. On the evening of 5 December,
the friends came to the chapel, to see the dead man once again. By his
forehead there were two laurel tree branches; by the left hand was some gold
jewellery. As people stepped in, they laid flowers down in front of the
coffin. The deceased was separated from the living by the laurel trees.[15]
George's anxieties about official Nazi attempts to take over the occasion
appear to have been justified. Certainly there were some enquiries by
'strangers' who, it now seems clear, were Party representatives; and the
German consul in Lugano, some seventeen miles away, contacted the mayor of
Minusio to discover the time of the burial. On what seem to have been the
Stauffenbergs' instructions, the mayor was told the burial would be at three
in the afternoon. It took place, in &et, at eight-fifteen in the morning.
When the regime's representative arrived, he was too late to give an oration,
too late to do anything save lay a wreath with a large swastika on the grave.
A woman member of the George circle covered the swastika with an armful of
roses. Someone else cleared the roses away. Shortly afterwards, the swastika
was removed by an unknown hand. [16]
Theodor Pfizer, the Stauffenbergs' boyhood friend and confidant, left a
succinct account of the proceedings.
[. . .]all three (brothers) belonged to Stefan George's close circle and were
gathered at his death-bed on the 4th of December, 1933. They were duty-bound
beyond the demands of their own wishes and questions, beyond those of their
careers and of the family, to the 'Secret Germany'.[17]
By 1933 - the year of the Nazis' seizure of power and of George's death-
Stauffenberg had begun increasingly to distinguish himself in the army.
Reports spoke of his extraordinary affability and friendliness, his capacity
to inspire trust in everybody, his expertise at settling differences, acting
as intermediary and resolving quarrels. He was often described as saving a
situation with his uninhibited and infectious laugh. He could also be
overbearing and witheringly sarcastic.
As might be expected, in many things he was conservative, but he attached no
intrinsic value to something simply because it happened to be old and
hallowed. When circumstances seemed appropriate, he could also display
passionate support for the new and untested. In 1935, an aerodrome was built
near the cavalry school at Hannover, depriving the troopers of their
accustomed training area. A proposal to move the school to a site near Berlin
elicited angry objections and protests: it would be contrary to tradition and
would diminish the school's reputation. Yet Stauffenberg vigorously endorsed
the move. Attached though he was to the cavalry and its place in military
history, he recognised the future importance of air power and arranged his
priorities accordingly.
Like most professional armies, the Reichswehr - the army of the Weimar
Republic - had forbidden any political stance or activity, any membership of
a political party, even the right to vote. It is questionable whether
Stauffenberg would ever have belonged to a party anyway. 'He builds his own
party,' a colleague observed of him. He saw the Reichswehr as more than just
a military instrument or a school for future leadership. It was also, he felt
strongly, an essential component in the structure of the republic, a
guarantee of the country's security and honourable reputation. To that
extent, he believed German soldiers had to be, if not politically active, at
least politically aware. Like most members of his caste, he found it
difficult to muster any great enthusiasm for the increasingly enfeebled
republican government. Yet he regarded his obligation to serve the community
as binding, without any explicit display of irony or scepticism, and this
placed him at odds with adherents of the old imperial order, pining for the
deposed Hohenzollerns and sneering at the Weimar flag as 'black and red
mustard'. When visiting relatives in Franconia, Stauffenberg would make a
point of wearing his uniform. He knew it would be thought outrageous for a
member of his caste to serve as an officer in a republican army. Many of them
believed with his own father that the government was one of usurpers - that
the King of Bavaria had not abdicated voluntarily, but been forcibly deposed
by revolutionary elements. Stauffenberg had no compunction about playing the
iconoclast with such entrenched attitudes.
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, there were predictable public
manifestations of both antipathy and support. Stauffenberg's biographers have
been consistently embarrassed by a contemporary report citing his involvement
in a pro-Nazi street celebration in Bamberg. He was in uniform at the time,
apparently on the way to a dinner. According to some accounts, he got caught
up in the excited and enthusiastic mob and was jostled - or let himself be
jostled - to the front of the procession. According to others he assumed a
position at the head of the procession deliberately. Such behaviour, of
course, was not just unseemly for an officer in uniform. It was also a
flagrant breach of the Reichswehr's official proscription of political
activities.[18]
In the context of the time, such behaviour on the part of a 26-year-old
officer is understandable enough. In 1933, the most vociferous opposition to
National Socialism came from militant leftists, who opposed it not because
they truly understood it, but because it was an ideology hostile to their
own. Of those not blinkered or constrained by any ideology, only a very few
prescient individuals - Thomas Mann, for example, and Hermann Broch - could
have any real inkling of what was to come. So far as most Germans were
concerned, National Socialism offered a welcome promise of a return to law, a
salutary antidote to the dithering weakness of the Weimar government, a
prospect of economic recovery and a bulwark against the insidious
encroachments of Communism. The horror of the Russian Revolution and civil
war were no more than a decade and a half in the past; and the Soviet Union
under Stalin was no very inspiring example to Germany's battered and
precariously established middle class. What was more, National Socialism
could still, at that date, make a potent appeal not just to the country's
young, but to the most intelligent and best educated among them. Freud and
particularly C. G. Jung had elicited great interest and sympathy among the
generation of Stauffenberg's contemporaries; and the new sphere of depth
psychology constituted an exciting and hitherto undiscovered world, many of
whose governing principles - the insistence on cultural and spiritual rebirth
and renewal, and the importance of the language of symbolism - on the face of
it appeared to mesh with those of National Socialism. Similar themes were
also being stressed by literary figures such as Hesse, Broch and Mann, who
drew liberally on Freudian and Jungian thought. While the political Left
propagated sterile cerebral concepts addressed to the rational intellect
alone, Nazism trafficked in a skil[l]ful manipulation of symbols, which
struck deeper, more resonant chords than any theoretical abstractions. The
language of symbols was sonorous, evocative, puissant, eliciting a response
from beyond the threshold of rationality. It spoke to the heart and the
nervous system, as well as to the head. It seemed to offer a lofty and
exalting poetic truth; and poetic truths can only too easily be confused with
political truths - as demonstrated, for example, by rhetoric about a 'united
Ireland' in Ulster today.
Thus, a generation of young men and women could be duped with a readiness
that now appears both inexplicable and culpable. Yet had not Nazism evolved
as it did, and culminated in the horrors that have seared themselves into our
collective consciousness, its appeal would have been considerable today, not
just to louts and skinheads, but to the literate, the thoughtful, the
well-educated, the artistically inclined. It is not too extravagant to
suggest that the very people who, since the 60s, have espoused Jung,
esotericism, eastern thought, comparative religions, folklore and the 'fork
soul', would have been seduced by at least certain aspects of Nazism during
the late 20s and early 30s. As Mann attempted to demonstrate in The Magic
Mountain (1924), the mystically oriented sensibility is inherently
susceptible, and vulnerable, to exploitation by right-wing totalitarianism.
As a result a number of the future conspirators, including Tresckow, Merz von
Quirnheim and Casar von Hofacker, found elements in National Socialism they
felt they could endorse. So, too, could certain members of Stefan George's
circle. In the early 30s, Stauffenberg could say that 'The German people are
rebelling against Versailles, and National Socialism endeavours to do away
with the misery of unemployment by creating work and instituting other
services for the man in the street.'[19]
He hoped the Nazis' acquisition of power 'would mean the end of party
political wrangling', and that there might now be 'a firm, straightforward
policy' - an impatience and a yearning only too familiar in the Western
democracies of today. And he approved, in theory at least, the principle of a
dynamic centralised leadership which - in contrast to the dithering and
impotence of Weimar - did not shrink from making energetic decisions. There
was also a loftier dimension to Stauffenberg's attitude:
Hitler is capable of putting into words certain basic and genuine ideas which
could lead to a spiritual revival. As a result, both the idealistic and the
high-minded might indirectly be attracted to him.[20]
According to one of his friends, Stauffenberg 'was stirred by the magnetism
this man was able to generate, by his vehemence which made what seemed
impossible in a stagnant world suddenly appear feasible.[21] In spring 1942,
the same friend admitted to another confidant, Hans von Herwarth:
[. . .]he had initially been quite impressed by Hitler's accomplishments -
the re-arming of Germany, the reoccupation of the Rhineland and so forth.
He had been particularly attracted by the fact that all this had been
accomplished without armed conflict. By the time I met Stauffenberg, however,
he had already become thoroughly alarmed over what was taking place.[22]
Whatever his initial and qualified sympathies for the new regime,
Stauffenberg was not blind to the mechanisms whereby it had attained its
success. He explained these lucidly and cogently as consisting of three
primary factors. First, Hitler had destroyed democracy, but he had done so by
ostensibly democratic means, thus rendering powerless the machinery of the
State and of party politics. Second, the Western Allies had, at Versailles,
provided Hitler with his most persuasive arguments, enabling him to appear as
the champion of 'legitimate popular despair'. Third, the National Socialist
programme offered an irresistibly attractive alternative to the perceived
menace of Communism.
As for Stauffenberg's alleged involvement in the Bamberg street
demonstration, the circumstances remain unclear and unconfirmed. Some
commentators have denied that the incident took place at all, as have fellow
officers in his regiment. Some days after the Nazi triumph in the elections,
the subject of street demonstrations was discussed in the officers' mess. It
is uncertain whether this discussion referred to an actual and specific
occurrence or to a hypothetical situation. In any case, Stauffenberg is
reported to have asserted that the citizenry, in such circumstances, would
not have understood if an officer simply stood aloof. In the same context, he
is said to have invoked the great military leaders of the wars against
Napoleon: Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Yorck von Wartenburg. They, too, had
become politically engage. Not only had they acted as instruments of the
popular will. They had also tempered, contained, curbed and channelled the
potentially anarchic energy that will had unleashed. As always with
Stauffenberg, the sense of aristocratic responsibility functioned as a
governing principle, a moral imperative. It went hand in hand with a respect
for the people, but a mistrust of the mob. As he stated on another occasion:
'Popular guidance is an inescapable and important part of politics, and is
not something that can be left to any Tom, Dick or Harry without disastrous
consequences.'[23]
Stauffenberg accordingly agreed to direct night exercises by the SA, the
Sturmabteilung ('storm troopers', or 'brown shirts'). By forcing the SA to
expend energy on night exercises, he hoped, if only on the local level, to
keep them off the streets and divert them from their customary nocturnal
routine of rioting, drinking, bullying, rowdy carousing, destroying property,
beating up and even murdering Jews and political opponents. Reducing fat,
swaggering and ill-disciplined louts to haggard and panting wrecks by forced
marches and rigorous drills was just the sort of thing to appeal to
Stauffenberg's sense of humour.
Like almost all professional soldiers at the time, in Germany and elsewhere,
Stauffenberg despised the SA. These oafs, he felt, embodied all that was
worst, all that was most loathsome and offensive in the German national
character. They were also a constant source of embarrassment and even a
potential threat to the army. Not, of course, that they could replace the
army. They lacked the discipline, the organisation and the military expertise
for that. But they fancied themselves to possess those qualities or, at any
rate, something else, which might render those qualities superfluous. In
consequence, there was a constant antipathy and rivalry between the army and
the SA, and a mounting tension. By , each suspected the other of imminent
revolt.
In defiance of the limits imposed by the Versailles Treaty, the army had
established secret depots and supply bases, concealed from Allied inspectors.
Caches of weapons were hidden on various estates. When the SA learned the
location of some of these depots, a race ensued, with the SA hoping to
appropriate arms and materiel, the army to safeguard them. On at least one
occasion, Stauffenberg organised lorries to transfer arms from their
depository before the SA could seize them.
In another context, the SA would have been laughable - or, at worst, a
noxious nuisance. But the very numbers of SA recruits made them a force to be
taken seriously. In 1933, there were 400,000 SA, four times the size of the
regular army. A year later their ranks had swollen to two and a half million,
and they were everywhere at large in Germany, parading what Stauffenberg and
others called their 'shit browns uniforms. Every city, every town, every
village and hamlet had its official Party branch, presided over by an
entourage of SA. The brown uniforms were donned by a spectrum ranging from
the bourgeois paterfamilias bored with his wife and family to local bullies,
thugs and petty criminals. They spent much of their time in pseudo-martial
behaviour: farcical parades and marches, campfire rituals, torchlight
processions, drills and 'manoeuvres' with shovels and pickaxes. They wallowed
in bouts of drinking, raucous 'patriotic' singalongs and contrived
sentimental camaraderie. They were also capable of more sinister things: they
intimidated political opponents and, under that guise, anyone they simply did
not like, anyone with whom they had personal scores to settle. They wrecked
shops and other businesses, and 'punished' nightclub owners and cabaret
performers who dared to satirise 'the man with the moustache'. In the period
immediately preceding and following the 1933 elections, it was not uncommon,
at dawn, to find corpses in the gutters, victims of the SA's mob persuasion
and retribution.
Until his acquisition of power in 1933, Hitler needed the SA. Even he,
however, recoiled from their anarchical activities, their boisterous and
shamelessly ill-disciplined reign of terror. They presented a national
disgrace, diminishing Germany in the eyes of the world. Yet they were
essential in suppressing opposition, mustering (or dragooning) support for
National Socialist policies, and eliminating potential obstacles from the
Nazi path.
After January 1933, however, the SA became, for Hitler, superfluous and
expendable. Indeed, they themselves were now an obstacle which had to be
removed. Having obtained power in Germany, the Nazis now needed a more
refined, more disciplined precision instrument to consolidate and exercise
it. This function was to be performed by the then much smaller but much more
efficient, much better educated and indoctrinated SS. And for the dreams of
nationalistic expansion already festering in his mind, Hitler needed the
army. Wooing the army involved transferring interest and allegiance to them
from their greatest rivals, whom they regarded as swaggering bullies.
In February 1934, Ernst Rohm, commander of the SA and Hitler's hitherto loyal
colleague, seriously proposed that his organisation be fumed into a new
'people's army', of which the regular army and the SS would comprise parts -
under his authority, of course. The army found any such suggestion not just
repellent but unthinkable, and relations between the SA and the military high
command deteriorated further. By summer, the situation had become critical.
On 21 June, the high command persuaded Hindenburg, still the nominal head of
state and an old soldier himself, to issue an ultimatum to Hitler: unless the
prevailing tension was defused, martial law would be declared and authority
in Germany would pass to the army. In the days that followed, action against
the SA was advocated with intensifying urgency. On the 25th, the army was
placed on alert, all leave was cancelled and all troops were confined to
barracks. It was obvious that the SA would have to be tamed, reduced to a
subordinate status and docility. The result was the Night of the Long Knives.
In the early hours of the morning of 30 June, Hitler and Goebbels flew from
Bonn to Munich. A few miles to the south, on the shores of the lake known as
the Tegernsee, Rohm and the SA hierarchy were asleep in an hotel, exhausted
by the carousing of their summer festival. At dawn, Hitler and an entourage
of SS burst into the premises, catching the 'brown shirts' in their beds.
Some were taken outside and shot immediately. Rohm himself was brought back to
Munich and a cell in Stadelheim prison, where a pistol was left for him on a
table. When he refused to use the weapon - 'Let Adolf do it himself,' he said
- two SS officers entered and summarily dispatched him with their own
firearms. Among the Nazi leadership, Rohm's homosexuality had long been an
open secret. It was now publicly announced as one of several justifications
for his execution. A joke quickly became current:
It is only now that we realise the true significance of Rohm's recent address
to Nazi youth: 'Out of every Hitler Youth, a Storm Trooper will emerge.'[24]
At the same time that Rohm and his colleagues were surprised on the
Tegernsee, the SS, in a carefully orchestrated and concerted operation, moved
against SA functionaries elsewhere in Germany. In Berlin alone, some 150 SA
personnel were shot by SS execution squads. Hitler officially announced the
total number of deaths as seventy-seven. Exiled sources in Paris put the
number at 401. In one of the post-war trials, more than a thousand were said
to have died.
Although the SA were the chief victims of the Night of the Long Knives, there
were other casualties as well. In what appears to have been a case of
'mistaken identity' - the kind of thing for which the IRA regularly
'apologises' in Northern Ireland today - the music critic of Munich's most
prominent newspaper was also shot,
because his name happened to be the same as that of an SA of . A number of
hostile politicians perished and so, too, did two members of the army's high
command, General Kurt von Schleicher, former chancellor and war minister, and
General Kurt von Bredow. In eliminating these prominent military figures,
Hitler was taking a
potentially dangerous gamble, but there was no backlash or mass protest from
the army, which thus, to its tarnished honour, became his de facto accomplice.
Whatever individual officers may have felt about the deaths of Schleicher and
Bredow, there was universal relief in Germany at the effective neutralisation
of the SA. Stauffenberg's opinion echoed the sentiment prevalent among
military personnel and the middle classes. He described it as 'the lancing of
a boil'. For him, as for most other people, the black-clad executors of
murder, the Praetorian
Guard of the SS, still seemed too peripheral, and insufficiently numerous, to
constitute a serious menace.
A month after the Night of the Long Knives, at nine o'clock on the morning of
2 August 1934, the aged and doddering President Hindenburg died. At noon, an
announcement was issued that 'according to a law enacted . . . the previous
day', the title of 'president' had been abolished. This role was now to be
fused with that of the chancellor, and Hitler would perform both. He would
henceforward be known officially as Reich Chancellor and Fuhrer. He would
also be commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
In the past, members of the army (on 21 May its name had been changed from
the Reichswehr to the Wehrmacht) had taken an oath simply 'to serve the
people and the Fatherland honourably and faithfully'. On the day of
Hindenburg's death, German soldiers across the country were marched out on
parade and formally ordered to take a new oath:
I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will yield unconditional obedience to
the Fuhrer of the German Reich and People, Adolf Hitler, the Supreme
Commander of the Wehrmacht, and, as a brave soldier, will be ready at any
time to lay down my life for this oath.[25]
The Oxford historian Gordon Craig has described their acceptance of the new
oath as 'moral capitulation on the part of the army leadership'. [26] William
Shirer elaborated on the consequences of this self-compromise:
[. . .]the generals, who up to that time could have overthrown the Nazi
regime . . . thus tied themselves to the person of Adolf Hitler, recognising
him as the highest legitimate authority in the land and binding themselves to
him by an oath of fealty which they felt honour-bound to obey in all
circumstances, no matter how degrading to them and to the Fatherland.[27]
Stauffenberg's co-conspirator Axel von dem Bussche stressed the immense
significance of the new oath. It was Hitler's recompense for the Night of the
Long Knives, a calling in of markers. Having obliged the army by neutralising
the SA, the Fuhrer could demand something in return.
Too little has been published about how it came about that Adolf was able to
get the oath of personal allegiance when Hindenburg died. Nobody to my
satisfaction has yet connected it with the plot of June 30, 1934. Hitler must
have known at that time that Hindenburg would die soon, and it was his
problem to get the loyalty of the army as Hindenburg's successor. He killed
off the SA, thus getting rid of the only body able to compete with the army.
June 30th was necessary for Hitler to get the unbreakable loyalty of the army
. . . The morning after Hindenburg died, the army was marched out and sworn
in without being lectured about the difference between the old oath - to the
Constitution - and the new oath - to Hitler.[28]
Bussche described how various individuals contrived to evade the oath. One
man with legal training immediately discerned the difference between the old
oath and the new, never lifted his hand and thereafter considered he had
never sworn. Another escaped swearing the oath by simulating a faint. Ewald
von Kleist did actually swear, then promptly swore a second oath vowing to
break the first at the earliest opportunity. [29] Such devices are not, of
course, without a certain cynical humour, but they also bear testimony to how
seriously an oath of the kind demanded from the Wehrmacht was taken. It was a
point of honour, a sacred vow made before God as a soldier, an officer, a
Christian and a German. To repudiate such an oath was to impugn one's claim
to be all of those things.
The oath of allegiance to Hitler was later to become a point of much
contention among Stauffenberg's conspirators. Some prospective recruits were
actually deterred by it. For others, it made Hitler's removal by
assassination all the more urgent, since his death would free the Wehrmacht
from all loyalty to the regime. Even Bussche himself felt compelled to
rummage through the army's penal code, seeking a legalistic loophole whereby
he might circumvent the oath. Stauffenberg, according to Bussche, was rather
more offhand and cavalier about the matter:
I discussed this with Claus. He said: 'Well, I am a Catholic and we have a
long-standing tradition that tyrants can be murdered. You have it too, but
not as strong. Luther says you can kill a crazed leader. '[30]
What was Stauffenberg's own attitude towards the oath? He appears to have
deemed it of no relevance. It could not, in any case, supersede the even more
sacred oath which he and his brothers had sworn to the principles of Stefan
George. The Stauffenbergs 'remained independent; they had had their "Fuhrer"
for a long time. They could not fall under Hitler's spell as long as they
felt bound to the poet and his Utopia of a Secret Germany.[31]
If Stauffenberg accommodated himself to the early years of National Socialism
in Germany, he seems to have done so less out of total blindness or naivete
than out of a wilful obliviousness and a determination to hope for the best.
He recognised clearly enough (and said) that Hitler, without even a presence
to legality, had ruthlessly had old comrades shot when they were no longer of
use. And he repeatedly expressed his revulsion for the crudeness and
'ill-breeding' of Nazi leaders, their orgies of hate-filled invective, their
guttersnipe jargon, their vulgar demagogic methods.
On 16 September 1934, Stauffenberg and a colleague were sent as
representatives of their regiment to attend an official Party Day lecture in
Bamberg. The speaker was the notorious Gauleiter (provincial Party boss) of
Nuremberg, Julius Streicher, perhaps the most obscenely vicious of Nazi
racial theoreticians - a man whose charisma was matched, if not positively
exceeded, by his nastiness. Stauffenberg already harboured a personal grudge
against Streicher, who had published an attack on Stefan George. At the
lecture, Streicher launched into one of his customary pornographic
castigations of Jews. So offensive did Stauffenberg find this torrent of
rancid rhetoric that he did what, in the context, amounted to the
unthinkable. He was a tall man, and conscious of his height. Accompanied by
his colleague, he suddenly stood up, left his seat, stalked down the central
aisle of the hall and proceeded to the exit. Here he was intercepted and
stopped by SS personnel, obviously annoyed at the conspicuousness of his
action; but the SS, at this date, could not afford to alienate the army,
still less a dynamic and promising young officer of Stauffenberg's social
status and aristocratic pedigree. After a brief verbal altercation, he and
his colleague elbowed their way past the black-clad minions and out of the
premises.[32]
Stauffenberg's thoughts had already begun to move in potentially dangerous
directions. Shortly after the Night of the Long Knives, he had had a private
talk with his squadron leader. As junior officers they were hardly in a
position to do anything themselves. But as Stauffenberg's colleague later
reported, they discussed, if only
theoretically, the feasibility of deposing National Socialism by force, and
the attitude the churches - particularly the Catholic Church - might adopt in
such circumstances. The two men agreed that, given its power and influence,
the regime could not be overthrown from below, by the populace at large, in a
conventional revolution. Any action would have to be implemented from above,
by a small high-level conspiracy. Around the same time, Stauffenberg summed
up Hitler as
[. . .]the typical modem demagogue with an astounding capacity for
tub-thumping, a man who frequently merely takes the ideas that come to him
and twists them to his own ends, but who is nevertheless capable of
simplifying them and making them politically feasible; and is therefore
capable of inspiring the mass of the people to devotion and self-sacrifice,
even though to their own disadvantage.[33]
Despite his diffidence towards the regime, Stauffenberg had always refrained
from criticising it openly. He seems to have felt no such compunction about
the Party. But while criticism, even sarcasm and satire, were one thing,
action - especially for a man of his youth and as yet junior rank - was
another.
pp.120-145
--[notes]--
6
The New Reich
1 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Bruder, p. 84.
2 Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, p. 174.
3 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p.35.
4 Ibid., p.33.
5 Ibid., p.35.
6 Hoffmann, op. cit., p 97.
7 Ibid.
8 Craig, Germany 1866-l945, p.568.
9 Grunberger, A Social History of the Third Reich, p. 427.
10 Kramarz, op.cit., p.25..
11 George, Werke, p.158.
12 Hoffmann, op. cit., p.118.
13 Ibid., p.117.
14 Ibid.
15 Boehringer, Mein bild von Stefan George, p.202.
16 Hoffmann, op. cit. p.128.
17 Pfizer, Die Bruder Stauffenberg, p.490
18 This information was first published in H. Foertsch, Schuld und
Verhangnis, Stuttgart, 1951, p.22. It is discussed critically by Kramarz, op.
cit., pp.37-40 and p.191, n.2-6; Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
und seine Bruder, p.123 and at considerable length on pp.507-9, n.115..
19 Kramarz, op.cit., p.41.
20 Ibid.
21 Zeller, op.cit., p.184.
22 Herwarth, Against Two Evils, p.216.
23 Kramarz, op.cit., p.42.
24 Grunberger, op.cit., p.424.
25 Craig, op.cit., p.589.
26 Ibid., p.590.
27 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p.283.
28 Interview with Axel von dem Bussche, Bonn, 6-7 December 1992.
29 Interview with Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, Munich, 15 October 1992.
30 Interview with Axel von dem Bussche, Bonn, 6-7 December 1992.
31 Hoffmann, op. cit. p.121.
32 Ibid., p. 132; Kramarz, op.cit., p.41.
33 Kramarz, op.cit., p.44.
-----
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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