The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  A small number of mostly aristocratic officers of the younger generation, however, like Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Henning von Tresckow, on the staff of Army Group Centre, were so outraged by the atrocities being committed in the east that they determined to take action. Tresckow in particular, though he had initially supported Hitler, had soon been appalled by the brutality and lawlessness of his regime. A Prussian officer in the classic mould, he considered that enemy soldiers should be treated according to the laws of war, and tried to circumvent the orders he was given to shoot Soviet political commissars on sight. His commanding officer, Field Marshal G̈nther von Kluge, expressed an interest in joining the military opposition but was too cautious to commit himself. Moral objections to Nazism were also at the root of the growing opposition expressed (in private) by the Kreisau Circle (a name given to it later by the Gestapo). This was a loose network of intellectuals, eventually numbering over a hundred, who met at the estate of Count Helmuth von Moltke at Kreisau, in Lower Silesia, for discussions about the situation. On three occasions in 1942- 3 the group held larger conferences that included theologians, lawyers, former Social Democratic politicians, and others from a wide variety of backgrounds.

  A number of members of the circle held minor government posts, among them Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg (a civil servant in the Price Commissioner’s office) and Count Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, who was Deputy Police President of Berlin. Moltke himself worked in the prisoner-of-war department of the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command. A number of the Kreisau Circle’s members had experience of other countries, which strengthened their critical perspective on Nazism. Their views were strongly idealistic. On 9 August 1943 they agreed a set of basic principles to be implemented after the collapse of Nazism. These emphasized Christianity as the basis for a moral regeneration of the German people. Basic freedoms had to be restored. Politically, Germany was to become a federal state with a weak central power. It was to be divided into provinces of between 3 and 5 million inhabitants each, which would be further divided into self-governing communities, organized into districts. The regions would have parliaments elected by the district assemblies, and a national Reichstag would be elected by the provincial parliaments. The minimum voting age was to be twenty-seven. The Kreisau Circle also wanted some kind of international community of states, to reduce the risk of war happening again. All of this expressed a kind of radical-conservative idealism, grounded in the suspicion of modern ‘mass society’ and aimed at re-creating a sense of rootedness and belonging based on Christian values and local identities. The members of the Kreisau Circle were suspicious of capitalism, and wanted both common ownership of vital industries and ‘co-responsibility’ in the individual plant. What they thought of as the excesses of urbanism would be overcome by the state guaranteeing to provide every family with a garden.259

  The Kreisau Circle and its members developed multiple and shifting contacts with members of the military and civilian resistance, and on 8 January 1943 a meeting took place between representatives of the two groups. It did not go well. Moltke considered Goerdeler a reactionary, while more politically experienced men like Hassell thought many of the ‘youngsters’ unrealistic.260 Various attempts by Moltke, Trott and others to forge contacts with the Western Allies and persuade them to work together with them to rebuild Germany after victory came to nothing.261 The Allies had their own plans. Distrust of Western parliamentary models of democracy, which the Kreisau Circle regarded as having failed under Weimar, was almost universal in the various arms of the German resistance, and this alone was hardly likely to recommend their constitutional plans to the British or the Americans. Goerdeler and the military conspirators were even less likely to win Allied approval. Leading figures in the group hammered out and repeatedly revised a set of aims that became steadily more modest as Germany’s military situation worsened, but even in May 1944 they included a negotiated peace on the basis of the German frontiers of 1914 plus Austria, the Sudetenland and the South Tyrol, autonomy for Alsace-Lorraine, and the retention of an effective defence force in the east.262

  The constitutional ideas of the conspirators ranged from an authoritarian, quasi-corporatist state, as suggested by Hassell, to a more parliamentary model advocated by Goerdeler in an attempt among other things to satisfy Social Democrats in the group like Julius Leber. Even here, however, Goerdeler wanted a strong corporative element, with candidates coming from economic interest groups and indirect elections to the Reichstag, which was to be restricted in influence by being granted only advisory powers and subordinated to a second chamber nominated by the head of state. Extra votes were to be given to fathers of families. Like the Kreisau Circle, Goerdeler and the military conspirators were determined to avoid the party-political animosities that had so undermined the Weimar Republic, so open electoral campaigning was not supposed to take place in the state they hoped to found. And like the Kreisau Circle, the military-conservative resistance regarded Christian values as the all-important foundation for the re-emergence of a morally upright Germany, though Leber and the Social Democrats were unhappy about this idea. The Social Democrats’ influence, which grew stronger over time, could be found in a degree of overlap with the Kreisau Circle’s emphasis on the need to control the capitalist economy. However, the vision of Goerdeler and his group, of a Germany in which class antagonisms would be overcome by the creation of a true national community dominated by the traditional aristocracy (the ‘stratum that carries the state’, as Schulenburg put it), was never likely to be accepted by the working-class followers of the Social Democrats. The hostility of the military-conservative resistance to a parliamentary constitution and a pluralist, open society demonstrated its backward-looking character and its lack of potential appeal to the masses. Indeed, given the participation of Prussian officers and conservative Prussian politicians in the group, it was hardly surprising that they looked back, as many in the Kreisau Circle also did, to the Prussian reforms of Baron Karl vom Stein at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a model for the future development of Germany. Here, too, their lack of realism was palpable.263

  One of the factors motivating the German resistance was undoubtedly outrage and shame at the regime’s treatment of the Jews. Already in late August 1941, Helmuth von Moltke was writing to his wife about the mass murder of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war in the east. This was, he said, burdening the German people ‘with a blood-guilt that can never be expunged in our lifetime and can never be forgotten’.264 In similar vein, Ulrich von Hassell confided to his diary on 4 October 1941 that General Georg Thomas, the chief procurement officer of the armed forces, had reported on his return from the Eastern Front on ‘the continuance of repulsive cruelties, particularly against the Jews, who were shamelessly shot down in batches’.265 ‘Hundreds of thousands of people have been systematically killed just because of their Jewish descent’, noted an outraged memorandum penned by Goerdeler and others on the postwar future of Germany in November 1942. After the fall of Nazism, the authors promised that the Nuremberg Laws and all laws specially affecting the Jews would be abolished. Yet the reason they gave was not that they were unjust, but that they were unnecessary because the very small number of Jewish survivors would no longer constitute a ‘danger for the German race’. Nor, significantly, did this prevent the resisters from drawing up plans to classify the surviving Jews on the basis of their race as much as their religion.266

  Moreover, a number of the military participants in the conspiracy had themselves ordered actions against the Jews, including for example Karl-Heinrich von Sẗlpnagel, army commander in Paris. As the senior official in Regional Leader Wagner’s Silesia, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg had implemented antisemitic and anti-Polish policies with enthusiasm, including the forced labour conscription or deportation of Poles and Jews. It was above all the German military defeat at Stalingrad, which he took as evidence of Hitler’s military incompetence, that drove Schulenburg into the opposition; and i
ndeed for many of the military figures among the resisters, the belief that Hitler was responsible for the worsening situation of Germany in the war was also crucial.267 Wolf Heinrich, Count Helldorf, Police President of Berlin, also involved in the conspiracy, had actually taken a leading part in persecuting the capital city’s Jews in the 1930s.268 The plot even included among its supporters and informants Arthur Nebe, commander of SS Task Force B in the Soviet Union, responsible for the murder of scores of thousands of Jews; his motives for joining the opposition were particularly obscure. Some of the conspirators, including Johannes Popitz, disapproved of the methods used by the Nazis to deal with ‘the Jewish question’ because they were too extreme, not because the idea of discriminating against the Jews was wrong in itself. As this suggests, it was not surprising that many of them had initially supported the Nazis for their racial policies as well as for other reasons. Well before 1944, however, such views had been all but obliterated by the view that, as Goerdeler put it, ‘the Jewish persecution . . . has taken the most inhuman, merciless and deeply shaming forms, for which no recompense can be adequate’.269

  There was one crucial difference between the military conspirators and the Kreisau Circle. Moltke and most of his friends were against an assassination attempt on Hitler on religious grounds, preferring to wait for the military collapse of the Third Reich before putting their plans into action. To a degree, this view was shared by other members of the civilian resistance. The military had no such scruples. In particular, Henning von Tresckow was convinced that Hitler had to be killed if the Nazi regime was to be overthrown. He began to organize a series of assassination attempts shortly after Stalingrad. On 13 March 1943 he tried to blow up Hitler’s plane on a flight between his field headquarters with explosives supplied by Admiral Canaris and military counter-intelligence and smuggled into the plane’s hold. But the attempt failed because the detonator would not work in the extremely low temperature of the hold at high altitude. The bomb, disguised as a package containing two bottles of cognac, was still in the hold when the plane landed. In the nick of time, Tresckow’s co-conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff managed to fly to the scene, get hold of the package and defuse it. On 21 March 1943 another young conspirator, Colonel Rudolf-Christoph, Baron von Gersdorff, took a bag of explosives along to an exhibition of captured Soviet equipment in Berlin, hoping to kill Hitler during his planned visit. But the Nazi Leader rushed through the building at such a pace that the opportunity did not present itself. As one attempt after another came to nothing, Goerdeler pressed the military to move quickly, otherwise millions more lives would be lost and Germany would be so thoroughly defeated that the new regime he envisaged would be in no position to make terms with the Allies. That he believed this would still be possible despite the decision of the Allied leaders at Casablanca early in 1943 to accept nothing other than unconditional surrender from Germany shows the conspirators’ lack of political realism; and even had Churchill and Roosevelt been prepared to negotiate, there was no chance that they would accept the terms that Goerdeler and his co-conspirators were offering.270

  Moreover, the conspiracy began to get into serious trouble as its members began for one reason or another to come to the attention of the Gestapo. Military Intelligence under Canaris and Oster, which the conspirators viewed as the key logistical centre of their operation, was increasingly threatened by the ambitions of Walter Schellenberg’s foreign intelligence department of the SS Security Service. This led to increased surveillance by the Gestapo. In the spring of 1943 Oster and some of his key officers, including Bonhoeffer, were arrested over allegations of currency offences. In January 1944 Hitler’s suspicions led to his ordering the takeover of foreign military intelligence, which Oster had been running until his arrest, by the Security Service of the SS. Canaris, an emigmatic figure who some suspected of betraying military secrets to the Allies, was interned. In a further blow, Moltke was arrested in January 1944. Meanwhile, Popitz, in an extraordinary act of political unrealism, approached Himmler with a view to winning him over to the idea of toppling Hitler on his own initiative. The initiative met with a vague expression of interest from the SS chief, but no more. Horrified, Goerdeler and the other civilian conspirators did their best to avoid contact with Popitz after this. Important figures dropped out - Kluge suffered serious injuries in a car accident, the Social Democrat Mierendorff and the retired army chief Hammerstein both died of natural causes. All of this set back the conspiracy by many months and reduced the coherence and potential effectiveness of the plot.271

  Deeper problems faced the conspirators as they tried to revive their assassination plans. In order for the plot to succeed, they had to persuade key units of the reserve army to move on Berlin and take over the major institutions of government, but, though they made some headway with the delicate negotiations, there were still many uncertainties. While General Friedrich Olbricht, who headed the armed forces reserve section in Berlin, was with them, actively planning the troop movements that would secure power once Hitler was dead, his boss, General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the reserve army, a man with an eye to the main chance, decided to play a waiting game when he was told about the conspiracy, though he did not betray the conspirators for the time being. Together with the former Chief of the Army General Staff Ludwig Beck, and Tresckow, Olbricht drew up plans for ‘Operation Valkyrie’, a military coup to be launched immediately Hitler was pronounced dead. But who would kill the Leader? This was the final problem to be solved. It required someone who combined access to Hitler’s person with commitment to the resistance - a difficult if not impossible combination to find. On more than one occasion, an attempt had to be abandoned because the man who had agreed to carry it out could not get near the target. But in the late summer of 1943, a new figure entered the conspiracy who fulfilled all these qualities. Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, was a lieutenant-colonel who had been badly injured in North Africa, losing his right hand and the third and fourth fingers of his left. He wore a black patch over one eye. He was due to take up his appointment as chief of staff of the Army General Office on 1 October 1943. An able and extremely energetic officer, Stauffenberg had, like a few others in the military hierarchy, initially supported Nazism, and been enthused by the early victories of German arms in Poland and France. But he had become disillusioned with Hitler’s recklessness on the Eastern Front and thought, above all after Stalingrad, that it was taking Germany into the abyss. Stauffenberg also had an unusual kind of moral and patriotic commitment, derived from his youthful membership of the circle around the poet Stefan George. What turned him decisively against Hitler were the atrocities committed by the SS on and behind the Eastern Front against Slavs and Jews, and his feeling that they had to be stopped became ever stronger. With Tresckow, Stauffenberg became the central energizing and organizing figure in the conspiracy. They set up one new assassination attempt after another, only to see them all fail, often by pure chance. In the end, Stauffenberg resolved to kill Hitler himself.272

  As the Gestapo began to close in on the plotters, finding a way of getting to Hitler became ever more urgent. On 1 July 1944 it presented itself out of the blue when Stauffenberg was promoted to a colonelcy and appointed chief of staff to Fromm, head of the army reserve. This gave him access to Hitler as Fromm’s emissary. At the same time, the purpose of the assassination was changing with the fast-moving military situation. After the Normandy landings, Stauffenberg doubted whether killing Hitler would serve any useful political purpose. Surely there was no hope any longer, if there had ever been any, of reaching a negotiated settlement with the Allies and rescuing something of Germany from the ruins. But, as Tresckow told him: ‘The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should that fail, the attempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German resistance movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Compared with this object, nothing else matters.2
73 On 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg visited Hitler’s field headquarters at Rastenburg, carrying a briefcase containing two bombs. With only a thumb and two fingers at his disposal, he was slow in priming the time-delayed detonator, and he only had time to prepare one of the bombs before being ushered in to the barracks where Hitler was conducting a review of the military situation with his staff; the other bomb he entrusted to his companion Werner von Haeften, who later threw it out of his car. Putting the case down next to the large wooden map-table over which Hitler was leaning, Stauffenberg left the room, saying he had to make a phone call. He watched from a distance as the bomb exploded, wrecking the barracks. Then he bluffed his way through the SS security cordons, got into a plane and flew back to Berlin.274