Since von Stauffenberg had no independent means of communicating with the plotters, Olbricht, Canaris, and the others were obliged to sit by their radios, waiting for reports from East Prussia. An hour after the bombs went off, initial word arrived of some kind of assassination attempt, but it was unclear whether Hitler had survived, with some sources reporting one thing and others the contrary. The failure of the plotters to place one of their number at the Wolfschanze, safe from the bombs but with access to communications to make a timely report, could have proven a fatal flaw in the plan as the senior officers in Berlin and throughout the Reich, even those amenable to ousting the Nazis, were understandably reluctant to move while Hitler might still be alive. It seems, on the other hand, that Goebbels and Himmler got first word that Hitler was, in fact, dead, and they took immediate steps to attempt to secure the succession. Their handicap was that, unlike the conspirators, they were starting virtually from scratch. Himmler correctly felt that he could count on the unwavering support of the SS, but these units were not on alert and, in some cases, had been intentionally positioned by the plotters to delay their intervention.
In the event, Canaris was able to convince Admiral Dönitz—who had begun to be discussed as a possible heir apparent to Hitler due to Goring’s gradual eclipse with the continued failures of the Luftwaffe and the fact that the Kriegsmarine had remained unconnected to the nature of the war in the East—that the Führer had been killed and that swift action was necessary to prevent a coup by Himmler. The relations between the SS and the Wehrmacht had never been good, with open warfare only being avoided by Hitler’s overshadowing presence. Actually, the very fact that Himmler had begun to move his troops first gave Canaris the “proof’ he needed for Dönitz that a coup was underway by the SS. The plotters now had the green light to make their own deployments.
While Himmler had only been able to reach SS units in and around Berlin itself, the extensive conspiratorial network had only to issue coded messages to commanders throughout the Reich, and thousands of SS officers and key Nazi officials were arrested and those SS units not actually at the combat front were disarmed and placed under guard. Only in Berlin itself did any fighting take place, as the Grossdeutschland Regiment battered its way into the city from its barracks in Potsdam supported by Luftwaffe ground troops against desperate resistance by scattered SS units. But since Hitler spent so little time in the capital anymore, most SS strength was concentrated at his favorite haunts or at the front, and the Wehrmacht eventually prevailed after twenty-four hours of street fighting. Goebbels was arrested, but Himmler was killed, either leading his men in one final charge, by suicide when resistance seemed futile, or by summary execution by a special squad of paratroopers assigned to the task, depending on the version one prefers.
The next few days were extremely tense for all Germans. Dönitz announced that “partisans” had probably been responsible for Hitler’s death and that Himmler had made an unsuccessful bid for power in the chaotic aftermath, leaving the implication that Himmler may have had a hand in the assassination as well. He vowed to continue the war to a “just peace” but deferred any further discussion of this subject for the time being. Hundreds of thousands of SS troops on both fronts remained under arms, but as displeased as they might have been with the murder of Himmler and the arrest of most of their senior officers, they were hardly in a position to go over to the enemy, certainly not the Russians, so they held their places in line amid assurances from Berlin that they would be reincorporated directly into the Wehrmacht with all ranks and privileges and with their valuable combat formations intact. Rommel, now recovered from his wounds, was named as the new chief of OKH, a move popular with the troops. Ulrich von Hassell, a former ambassador to Rome and a longtime member of the conspiracy, was named in Ribbentrop’s place as Foreign Minister.
One of the first acts of the new government was the dismantlement of the Nazi death camp system. This is not to say that the generals, who certainly had knowledge of the systematic genocide being practiced against Jews, gypsies, the handicapped, Slavs, and political opponents of the Nazis, were suddenly overcome with warm feelings for any of these groups. It was a calculated decision to make eventual peace talks, especially with the West, easier. The camps remained in existence. Slave labor continued to provide a major source of manpower for the German war machine, although now directly under the government instead of as Himmler’s private fiefdom, and the regime in the camps hardly improved in terms of diet, sanitation, or comfort, but the organized, mechanical killing stopped.
The war continued, of course, with the Russians pressing westward and now beginning a broad sweep through the Baltic states and entering what had been pre-1939 Poland at several points. The Allied bombing campaign went on unabated, and pressure was kept up all along the front. It only remained to see when and where the line would crack first.
1200 HOURS, 19 JULY 1943
BOCHOLT, GERMANY
Patton did not like the new attitude of his troops. Caution was a quality that he did not respect very much, particularly in fighting men. It was just as likely to result in higher casualties as in lower ones, and he could sense that his troops had become decidedly cautions.
He understood perfectly why they would be so. It looked to everyone, including himself, that the war would soon be over. In Italy, Montgomery had finally cracked the line of the Appennines, or more likely Patton figured, the Germans had abandoned it and pulled back to the line of the Adige River, vastly shortening their front and gleaning troops to send elsewhere. The British had been out of contact with the enemy for several days and were only now coming up to the Adige after a leisurely advance against no resistance. The Germans had also chosen to abandon Greece and southern Yugoslavia after the governments of Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had almost simultaneously declared their neutrality. The Germans had let the Bulgarians and Romanians go, but they had seized Admiral Horthy in Budapest and disarmed the Hungarian Army, or what remained of it after Stalingrad. Again the Germans had shortened their line to one running along the Carpathians along the western Romanian border, and west through Bosnia to the Adriatic, keeping hold of Hungary’s oil production facilities and agricultural production and the mines of Croatia for the present.
The Russians had balked at the Romanians’ condition for withdrawing from the war, that no Russian troops enter their territory. The Soviets had argued that Romanian troops had participated in the invasion of the USSR alongside the Germans and deserved to be punished, but Churchill and Roosevelt had convinced Stalin that the loss to the Germans of the Balkans, the Ploesti oilfields, and tens of thousands of Romanian and Bulgarian troops more than justified this exception, adding assurances that any Romanian government officials found guilty of war crimes would be brought to justice along with their German overlords. Stalin had finally relented, although radio intercepts indicated that suspiciously large concentrations of Soviet troops remained poised along Romania’s eastern border. While these events would normally have been very good news, Patton could not help but worry where the Germans would deploy the numerous divisions thus freed by the drastic shortening of their lines elsewhere.
Meanwhile, here in the West, the Rhine had at last been forced. Patton’s army had crashed through the Siegfried Line in a week of fighting that reminded Patton all too much of the carnage of the First World War. Hundreds of large guns and heavy bombers had pounded the German defenses around the clock and carpeted the German rear areas preventing the arrival of reinforcements or supplies. The Germans had built elaborate and ingenious networks of pillboxes, trenches, and tank traps, but technology had given a definite edge to the offensive, and his tanks, some equipped with flamethrowers or mine-clearing plows, had bulled their way through. But the effort had told on his men, now used to measuring a day’s progress in miles, who had been lucky to advance a few hundred meters, and this at tremendous cost. The crossing of the Rhine had been the same, with a curtain of fire and steel covering the defenders on
the far shore until pontoon bridges could be laid and a bridgehead secured.
Now that they were through the thick belt of fortifications, the pace of the advance had certainly picked up, as Patton rotated exhausted units out of the line and replaced them with fresh ones. But he felt he was hearing too many calls from armored spearheads claiming to be “pinned down” by enemy fire and waiting until artillery or airstrikes could clear the way before they would resume the advance. It was Patton’s view that this was symptomatic of men who did not want to run risks, particularly the risk of being one of the last casualties in a war that was ending. He feared, however, that, if the enemy were not kept on the run, the reserves released from other fronts would turn up facing the Americans and result in having to pay dearly in blood for terrain that could be scooped up almost for free with a little audacity now.
Consequently, he was leading from the front, driving his division commanders relentlessly, perhaps too much so. Patton had just received a reprimand from Marshall and had been forced to go through the humiliating experience of “apologizing” to his troops for having slapped several shirkers in a field hospital some days before. The men had complained of “combat fatigue,” a malady of whose existence Patton seriously doubted, and the men had been abetted in this by overly sensitive doctors who had no understanding of war or the military, even though they now wore army uniforms. Had it not been for the fact that Patton was commanding a consistently victorious army plunging deep into the enemy’s territory, he very likely would have been removed from his post. At least being up front, standing in his open jeep and shouting encouragement to his men as they rolled past kept him from thinking too much about it.
Perhaps the British landing on the German North Sea coast would crack the front open. They would come ashore at the mouth of the Weser River north of Bremerhaven. He would drive northeast toward them, through Munster and Osnabrock to link up east of Bremen, cutting off Holland and a large slice of northwest Germany. The French would be busy rolling up the Siegfried line from north to south from the breach he had made and investing the Ruhr. Bradley’s army would mop up along the coast and send reinforcements east to join him in a drive on Berlin itself Even if the Germans did bring in troops from Italy or the Balkans, they would be weary and combat-worn, if the Air Force let them through at all, and in the open plains of northern Germany, they would have to stand up and fight in the open, with the Russians breathing down their backs all the while. In two months, perhaps three, the war could be over, and Patton would have achieved his lifelong dream.
1800 HOURS, 22 JULY 1943
BERLIN, GERMANY
For some reason, even though evidence of inevitable defeat was piling up all around them, Admiral Canaris found the meetings of the new OKH much less depressing than he had the interminable sessions with Hitler, enduring pointless monologues late into the night only to have the best advice of the greatest military minds of the century discarded on the whim of a mere Austrian corporal. Now there was no collection of placemen in uniform, just fighting generals looking for solutions, not excuses. Dönitz presided, having been nominated to head the new junta along with Field Marshal Ludwig Beck, his chief of staff. Kesselring was there, and Rommel, von Rundstedt, and von Kluge, while Manstein was closely consulted in regard to pragmatically shortening the front in the East through withdrawals from the Kuban and other pointless salients. There was no longer Goebbels nor any of the other Nazi Party hacks. The only civilian in the bunker, which they still had to use because of the Allied bombing, was Foreign Minister Ulrich von Hassel, since there was nothing in the Reich these days that did not have to do with the country’s current and future relations with the enemy.
Kesselring was just completing a report on the state of Wehrmacht reserves. After the recent pullbacks in the south, there were now a full twenty infantry and four mechanized divisions, in addition to eight new Volksgrenadier divisions of militia, a home defense program Hitler had just begun before his death. All Luftwaffe production had been turned over to fighters, including some new jet-powered aircraft whose development Hitler had delayed, preferring panzers to planes, but there were no illusions that these could prove any more than a nuisance to the Allied air fleets. Even Russian bombers were beginning to appear in the skies over Budapest and Warsaw lately. The Navy had given up attempting to construct new warships, since the dockyards were too easy a target for enemy bombers. Those U-boats that still existed were now concentrated in the North Sea, now that the French and Belgian ports had been lost, and there was no chance of making a significant dent in the delivery of Allied troops and supplies across the Atlantic. Their primary role would now be coastal defense.
Dönitz thanked Kesselring for the overview and then announced, “I suggest that we give Rundstedt the volksgrenadiers and perhaps two infantry divisions, plus some replacements for his armor to defend in the West. The remainder of the troops should be moved into Poland and Hungary against the Russians.”
“But that won’t even make good my losses over the past two weeks,” von Rundstedt protested. His command now included everything from Norway to Switzerland on the Western Front.
“It’s not meant to,” Rommel responded. “We are at the point where victory is not an option, not even the defense of the Fatherland, only the question of which set of enemies we would prefer to deal with and whom we would prefer to have in occupation of our territory.”
“I agree,” Manstein joined in. “If the Russians set foot on German soil, they will raze every building to the ground and then salt the ground. The British and Americans will only occupy it, and they will eventually go home.”
“And the French?” Rundstedt insisted. “They may consider that they have a score to settle as well.”
“The French can do nothing without the support of London and Washington,” von Hassel replied. “They may wish to do more, but they won’t. And, besides, there is a qualitative difference between the two.”
“But we must make the West pay for every inch of ground,” Beck interjected. “You must instill this spirit in your commanders. In the East we must hang onto real estate, but in the West the British and Americans are very sensitive to casualties, and they love to calculate. We need to give them some figures to work with. Let them think, ‘It cost fifty thousand men to advance fifty miles into Germany, and it’s still 200 miles to Berlin, ergo …’”
It seemed as though the meeting were about to adjourn when a short, swarthy man who had been sitting quietly at the far comer of the conference table cleared his throat and leaned forward in order to be heard.
“Of course, that still leaves us with the question of the Jews.” The sliding of chairs and the rustling of papers stopped, and all eyes turned toward him.
General Ernst Kaltenbrunner had taken over command of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), sometimes still known as the Gestapo, upon the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by Czech partisans in Prague in May of 1942. Since the SD had come under the jurisdiction of Himmler’s SS, one might have expected Kaltenbrunner to have supported his former boss in the brief power struggle following Hitler’s death, but he had instead offered his services to the conspirators even before official word of the Führer’s demise had reached Berlin. With control over thousands of security troops and an extensive network of spies and counterspies, and having conducted a largely successful war against enemy intelligence agents and partisans over the past year, Kaltenbrunner possessed skills that the new government could not do without, and he had kept his position. Now he raised a question they had all been avoiding.
“I’m sure you are aware that we have closed down ‘operations’ at our principle ‘processing facilities’ in Poland, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec, over the past couple of weeks,” the man went on in a dull monotone. “I understood the logic of that decision, at the time, but I fear we now stand at a crossroads regarding future Jewish policy.”
“Hasn’t there been enough killing?” Kesselring snapped.
�
��Exactly my point,” Kaltenbrunner continued. “According to our files, nearly four million Jews and other individuals considered ‘undesirable’ have been eliminated from Europe to date, either at the facilities or in the field by our einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front. This was in compliance with orders from the Führer himself and Herr Himmler. There still remain some two to three million Jews either in those camps, in the labor camps like Auschwitz, and gathered from across Europe in the ghettos of the major Polish cities. The question we face is whether it would be wise to leave these two million witnesses alive to eventually fall into Allied hands.”
“But couldn’t we, with some justification, blame the entire Jewish question on Hitler and Himmler,” Kesselring asked, “especially since they’re both conveniently dead?”
Kaltenbrunner cocked his head and raised a bushy eyebrow. “That would be nice, but it’s not very likely. You all know as well as I that the SS did not in fact act alone in killing the Jews. Not that it would matter to the Allies. With the testimony of so many survivors, they will be looking for vengeance, particularly the United States with its large and influential Jewish population, and they will want live victims, not dead ones.”
“There is no way in which we could ever hide the fact of the elimination of the Jews,” Rommel joined in.
“We might not be able to hide the evidence of the killing and the disposal of the bodies,” Kaltenbrunner agreed. “The question is whether it would be well to have two million living, breathing people clamoring for German blood, which is what they will be doing, of course, or whether we would prefer to face condemnation for what would then just be a historical event. You must remember that someone will have to be pushing the prosecution. Will it be the Poles or the French, the Hungarians or Romanians? I doubt it. Their governments cooperated to an embarrassing degree with the rounding up of the Jews and claiming pressure from Berlin will not relieve them of all responsibility. Will it be the Soviets? Hardly. Stalin has just as many skeletons in his closet, literally, as we do in ours, and he has no more love for the Jews. Trotsky was a Jew, after all. And the Americans and the British? To some extent, but none of the victims were their citizens, while the countries to which the Jews did belong will be much less vociferous, and this will rob their offensive of impetus.”
Second Front: The Allied Invasion of France, 1942–43 (An Alternative History) Page 30
