Burn After Reading

by Ladislas Farago

  But, like some sort of reverse charity, sabotage in this case began at home. The Allies sabotaged those plans by withholding the promised arms and material support. Eisenhower sent only four specialists to establish radio contacts when a hundred times that many were needed. Instead of the agreed sixty tons of supplies to be smuggled into France by various clandestine means every day, the FFI received only twenty tons in a whole month.

  On D-Day, only half of the FFI had the arms and supplies it needed for the execution of the plans. Even so, it was ordered into action and fought with such devotion and skill that Eisenhower later said the FFI had the effectiveness of fifteen divisions.

  After the war, Eisenhower acknowledged the importance of this French contribution in glowing words: “Throughout France,” he wrote, “the Free French had been of inestimable value in the campaign. They were particularly valuable in Brittany, but on every portion of the front we secured help from them in a multitude of ways. Without their great assistance the liberation of France and the defeat of the enemy in western Europe would have consumed a much longer time and meant greater losses to ourselves.”

  Those French clandestine forces whose very existence Roosevelt refused to acknowledge proved in yet another manner that they were not a phantom force. During four years of underground fighting the French resistance lost one hundred and five thousand of its members. Some thirty thousand of them were executed by the Germans; seventy-five thousand died in concentration camps.

  “But perhaps the greatest achievement,” Ronald Seth wrote, “was not in the injury which it inflicted on the enemy, but rather in the honor it restored to France.”

  21

  The House On Herren Street

  A day or two after D-Day, Eisenhower’s headquarters issued a communiqué. It revealed the momentous military secret that the G.I.’s had been served ice cream in several delicious flavors all along the Normandy beachhead only some ten hours after the initial landing. This was meant to reassure the folks at home who still had a drugstore-counterview of the great war, but the invasion was more than the supreme efficiency test of a battalion of martial Good Humor men.

  When, on D-Day, the first GI waded ashore in Normandy, he was one man against what historian Percy Ernst Schramm, keeper of the German High Command’s official War Diary, described as “the maximum in available forces [the Germans] were capable of deploying in the West.” It took some time for the Allies, pouring in from the Channel, to match the defenders man for man. Even a week after D-Day, when we had three hundred and twenty-six thousand men ashore, the Germans still outnumbered us about two to one. In the end it needed millions of Allied soldiers, and nearly eleven months, to defeat this stubborn and ingenious enemy, although he was engaged, as he chose to be, on several fronts.

  Yet on June 6, 1944, when history’s greatest amphibian operation was prayerfully mounted, there was a man, a single American, whose activities, had he been given proper scope and adequate support, might have assured victory without this fantastic effort.

  The man was Allen Welsh Dulles, ex-diplomat and lawyer in civilian life, now operating out of Switzerland in the invisible bowels of the great war. Long before D-Day, Dulles had been in touch with influential men inside the Third Reich who professed to be willing and appeared to be able to assure victory to the Allies without the prodigious undertaking of the invasion.

  To say that Dulles might have won the war singlehanded may sound like a preposterous exaggeration, just as it may appear foolish and arrogant to pose the question : Was that historic trip across the English Channel really necessary?

  The bold question appears justified in the light of the total picture that presented itself to the Allied leaders on the very eve of D-Day. Even from a strictly military point of view, the invasion was but the second half of a one-two punch, for the Allies were already on the Continent—in Italy. It would have been possible to conduct the crusade for Europe from this vast Italian foothold (where the Germans had twenty-three divisions), then fan out to the south of France and South East Europe (taking on thirty-one more enemy divisions) and fight our way up France and Eastern Europe to the vitals of Germany, without a cross-Channel invasion.

  However, that is idle speculation. A far more important factor mitigating against the invasion from England was another situation, whose inherent opportunities, almost completely wasted, have received far too little attention in the histories of World War II.

  On June 6, the Wehrmacht was no longer the monolithic force it had been. While the combat efficiency of the Landser was still extremely high, and the German army was still a formidable war machine, dissidence and despair had appeared like termites in the officers’ corps and in various sectors of the home front. There was increasing determination among a growing number of Germans to terminate the war by a coup, even if it meant treachery, humiliation, and, indeed, defeat.

  It is not simple to fix a time at which the distintegration began, but most probably it started in June, 1943. Early that month, a young lieutenant colonel of the German Army decided that he had had enough. He was Claus Schenk Count von Staufenberg, thirty-six years old when he decided to join the cabal of anti-Nazi officers in the Wehrmacht. He was a scion of Swabian nobility, and his extraordinary talents had attracted attention, earning for him the nickname “young Schlieffen.” He was in North Africa with Rommel when he was severely wounded in an air attack, losing one eye, his right, and two fingers of his left hand. He was temporarily blinded even in his remaining eye. On his bed in the field hospital in historic Carthage, when he feared he had been utterly destroyed for any useful future, he made up his mind to continue the fight, not against his country’s foreign enemies, but against the Nazis whom he had come to regard as the greater foe. His wrath was concentrated on Hitler. It became as obsession with him to kill the man he held responsible, not merely for Germany’s physical anguish, but even more for her moral degradation.

  Von Stauffenberg was a newcomer to an old plot. Hitler had long been resented and detested by a group of high-ranking officers of the Army. They firmly believed that his liquidation would end the nightmare. They hoped at first to capture him and hand him over to a court of German justice to be punished for his deeds; then, when such a decorous approach seemed impossible, they wanted to assassinate him.

  Hitler’s arrest was first contemplated in 1938, on the eve of the Munich conference, by a group of generals led by Franz Halder, the Army’s new chief of staff (replacing General Ludwig Beck, the spiritual leader of the dissidents) and Erwin von Witzleben, commandant of the Berlin military district. Their conspiracy was inspired and fired by Oster, the diligent plotter inside the Abwehr, but Chamberlain’s surrender in Munich took the wind out of their sails. Then, on September 3, 1939, the day of the outbreak of the war in the West, Colonel-General von Hammerstein-Equord planned to use a visit of Hitler to his headquarters to arrest the Fuehrer and overthrow his regime, but Hitler did not show up.

  The first assassination attempt was scheduled for early November, 1939, stage-managed by Oster with Halder’s help, but the latter, who was expected to back the plot and provide the military forces needed for its execution, lacked the courage of Oster’s convictions. Aside from that, a nebulous attempt was then made on Hitler’s life in a beer cellar in Munich. It brought in its wake such stringent security measures that Oster’s assassin had no chance to get close to the Fuehrer.

  Another attempt was planned for August 4, 1941. It was thwarted by a sudden tightening of security measures around Hitler, presumably because a hint had leaked to the Gestapo.

  Von Witzleben returned to the picture in December. Everything was arranged for a showdown, when an emergency operation Witzleben had to undergo caused the plan to collapse.

  Some of these plots had touches of what later became staples, of television melodrama. One envisaged Hitler’s assassination during a presentation of some new Army uniforms. A volunteer, modeling the new uniform, was to conceal a bomb on him. He was supposed to
blow himself up and take Hitler into death with him by bumping into the Fuehrer with his fused infernal machine at the climax to this military fashion show.

  Enticed by Oster, a small group of determined combat officers now assumed responsibility for direct action. Leader of this group was forty-two year old General Henning von Tresckow, chief of staff of Field Marshal von Kluge on the Eastern front. Von Tresckow was a man of superb gallantry and moral strength, his innate decency and patriotism concealed behind a perpetual sardonic smile on his handsome face. His chief aide in the venture at the front was Lt. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the lawyer whose anti-Nazi hatred knew no bounds and whose courage blinded him to the perils of the undertaking. Back in Berlin, besides the omnipresent Oster, was. General Helmut Stieff, chief of the Organizations Department of the General Staff, whose happy disposition hid an iron will, superb courage, and a deeply felt dissatisfaction with the Nazis.

  In March, 1943, von Tresckow received word that Hitler would come to von Kluge’s headquarters at Smolensk on an inspection trip. Tresckow promptly decided to kill the Fuehrer by blowing up his aircraft as it was returning. As soon as word reached Smolensk of this fatal mishap, the commander of a cavalry regiment, Baron von Boeselager by name, would stage a coup de main at Kluge’s headquarters and take control of this army group. Insurrection was expected to snowball from there on. Stieff was to stage the sequelae in the Defense Ministry in Berlin. Oster and his aides were to handle the political phase of the rebellion.

  The bomb was concealed in a harmless-looking package addressed to Stieff in Berlin. It was given to Colonel Brandt, one of Hitler’s companions on the journey, who was told it contained two bottles of brandy. The plane with the lethal bottles and Hitler on board left on schedule—but the bomb was a dud! Far from having accomplished their mission, the plotters had to move fast to destroy the evidence in Brandt’s hands before it could destroy them. Schlabrendorff flew to Berlin and retrieved the package before its true contents became known.

  But the frustrated plotters would not give up. Von Stauffen-berg, recovered but crippled, was attached to the General Staff to enable him to play a leading part in the conspiracy. The group—made up of conservatives as well as Social Democrats, clerics as well as atheists—had some of Germany’s most prominent men slated to take key positions in a new government and ambitious plans to end the war and rehabilitate Germany. The caliber of these men and the quality of their plans held out the promise of success.

  This, then, was the situation when Eisenhower arrived in London in January, 1944, to plunge into preparations for Overlord. If the potentialities of the German unrest made any impression on him, or if the historic opportunities of the situation were even perfunctorily recognized by the planners around Ike, it is not evident from either the documents of the era or from the post-war memoirs of the generals. As far as I can ascertain, no serious effort was made by Eisenhower to procure specific information about the fantastic ferment in the very core of the German High Command. He paid no attention to those lean and hungry-looking men, whose conspiratorial ardor Caesar once so justly feared, but concentrated on the strictly military aspects of the war he was expected to win by strictly military means.

  Eisenhower resisted every attempt to draw him into this area. The possibility of a generals’ revolt in Germany as a shortcut to the abrupt termination of the war was raised in his presence several times, the possibility only, not the probability, and not on the basis of any specific data. On January 27, 1944, Ambassador John G. Winant hinted at such a possibility, but was rebuffed by Bedell Smith, Ike’s chief of staff. On April 14, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. mentioned in passing that “if a proper mood [could be] created in the German General Staff, there might even be a German Badoglio,” having in mind a German general who, like the Italian marshal, was willing to hand up his country on a silver platter. But Eisenhower expressed, not only doubt that such likelihood existed at all, but his disgust at dealing with German generals.

  On the very highest level, President Roosevelt maintained his disdain of political warfare. He hampered rather than promoted it with his philosophy about the conduct of the war and its termination solely by unconditional surrender. Roosevelt was motivated by the revolting picture of Germany as it was remade by Hitler. He was also influenced by General George C. Marshall, a single-minded soldier with a somewhat narrow military outlook. To him war was but the clash of armies, and in his strict adherence to the best American tradition, he detested the political general. It was simply inconceivable to Marshall to make a deal with conspirators, even if it meant winning the war without further bloodshed. And, finally, there was a resolve deep in the President’s soul never to make a deal with the “Junkers” of Germany, who, he thought, formed the core of Prussian militarism. He did not want even unconditional surrender as the result of a German conspiracy, but only one gained through the indisputable victory of Allied arms.

  The pragmatic fact is that the President’s unwillingness to use all means, including political means, to gain victory, substantially prolonged the war by withholding from the German rebels the essential outside aid and moral support for their own victory over Nazism.

  His Majesty’s Government under Churchill followed Roosevelt’s lead, for yet another reason entirely its own. The bitter memory of the Venlo incident left its scars in Whitehall. Never again was His Majesty’s government willing to listen to the siren songs of German patriots, for one could never know when they blossomed out as agents provocateurs or grinning double agents.

  The German opposition tried frantically to establish surreptitious links to the Allies. As early as October, 1939, only a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, an envoy of the opposition, a prominent Catholic named Dr. Josef Mueller, offered to set up a working relationship with the British Government via the Vatican. From Vatican City, Mueller contacted London, in a venture that required substantial courage and almost ended fatally for him. An Abwehr spy planted in the Vatican alerted Berlin to Mueller’s efforts, but fortunately for the clandestine envoy, the report wound up on Oster’s desk and was promptly pigeonholed.

  In February, 1942, the German diplomat Ulrich von Hassell (who was slated to become Foreign Minister in a post-Hitler cabinet) continued these efforts in Arosa in negotiations with a British envoy named J. Lonsdale Bryans. The Briton had to tell Hassell that he was unsuccessful in interesting the Foreign Office.

  In November, 1941, the German opposition enlisted the aid of Louis P. Lochner, the AP correspondent in Berlin, to establish a tenuous contact with London via the United States; in April, 1942, a similar effort was made with the help of a Swedish financier named Wallenberg; and then, in May, the German Evangelical Church tried working, through the Bishop of Chichester. Eden categorically told the Bishop the government was not interested.

  Then, towards the end of 1942, an avenue suddenly seemed to open up and the hopes of the anti-Nazis were rekindled. In November, Allen W. Dulles arrived in Switzerland and set up shop in a house on Herren Street in Berne.

  He was nominally a special assistant to the American Minister, Leland Harrison. In fact, Dulles was up to his neck in cloak and dagger; he headed the Swiss branch of the O.S.S., with cognizance, as it is called in the parlance of Washington, of Germany and South East Europe.

  A native of Watertown, New York, where he was born in 1893, Allen Dulles was the younger son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister who had married the daughter of General Watson Foster, soldier, lawyer, editor, diplomatist, minister to Russia in 1880–1882, Secretary of State in 1892–1893.

  From Princeton University (where he majored in history and philosophy and received a Phi Beta Kappa key), Dulles went to Allahabad in India to teach English in a missionary school. In 1916, he joined the Foreign Service, serving in Vienna and Berne. After World War I, Dulles headed the Near Eastern Division of the State Department by day and studied law by night. As soon as he had his law degree, he left the Foreign Service, kicking up
a brief storm by complaining publicly about the inadequate salaries of American diplomats.

  He practiced law in the firm headed by his elder brother, John Foster Dulles, and acquired a substantial German clientele. When an expert was needed to head the Berne branch of the O.S.S., with a pipeline to influential Germans, Donovan enlisted Dulles.

  Dulles decided to bide his time before plunging into his actual mission. With all the frontiers closed, he was largely dependent on cable to send his reports to Washington, and he used this avenue shrewdly for a brilliant ruse. The code in which some of his cables were sent had been broken by the For-schungsamt, and in due course his dispatches were read in Berlin. They attracted favorable impression for their objectivity, which was exactly what Dulles had planned. He hoped to attract Germans looking for an Allied agent willing to listen to them, and thus to organize a network of his own.

  So he created a shiny new Allied trap to which a number of German mice quickly beat a path. Since much of the German dissidence was inside the Intelligence organizations, especially the Abwehr; and since Intelligence had easiest access to Dulles’ intercepted bait, his earliest callers from that “other Germany” were some of his own opposite numbers. Among them was Hans Gisevius, a blond giant with impressive intellectual equipment, who was deeply enmeshed in various anti-Nazi conspiracies. Gisevius was a controversial figure inside the German opposition. He was a vice consul at the German Legation in Berne, under the Abwehr’s jurisdiction, assigned to perform unspecified intelligence functions. From him, Dulles learned of the ripening plot against Hitler.