The Valkyrie Option

by Markus Reichardt

  Himmler arrived alone and sat down without formality or even an attempt at joviality.

  ‘Well we all know what happened. An attempt was made on the life of our Führer. We as the SS, his bodyguards and the guardians of his state and creed need to assess the situation and see how we can protect Germany in this hour of need.’

  ‘Nice one Reichsführer’ Schellenberg smiled. Nothing committing yourself either way.

  Himmler looked around and Schellenberg followed his gaze. Funny; here they sat, the most feared men in the Third Reich, afraid and without leadership. The head of the secret police, the Head of the Camp guards, here they were, without purpose, awaiting direction like children looking for guidance from their parents. And suddenly it came home to him how much, how critically Himmler had depended upon the magic of Hitler’s existence. Their looks said it all, and at that moment he truly knew Hitler was dead. These men, the killers and henchmen of Hitler’s Reich, they who had slaughtered thousands, no millions, in his name, were afraid. Without Hitler they were nothing.

  “Walter, what do we know of what the Allies are saying, ’Himmler asked ’ I had heard something of their radio broadcasts but do we have anything better?” That was it his excuse to leave. “Reichsführer as we speak I am expecting a message from one of my agents in the Spanish capital that could give me real insights. Will you excuse me please” He rose.

  It was most unusual for a member of this circle to leave to play messenger boy but Schellenberg was counting on the special circumstances of the moment. None of them reacted, each locked in their own fear and doubts. A few small steps took him through the door. None of them noticed the thick black suitcase he had brought to the room early and had pushed underneath the table. Her had been the first there and none had seen that another, rather larger black suitcase was positioned behind the small credenza on which the telephone stood.

  A few quick strides took him to an office where one of his operatives, actually one of Canaris former Abwehr men, sat at a table with a small briefcase. “Thank you I will take it from here.” The clean-shaven, athletic man in the black leather jacket and the uniform of a SS-Brigadier underneath stood aside. One hand remained in the pockets of his black leather coat. In the heat of Berlin the coat was odd and certainly a legitimate excuse to sweat.

  Schellenberg snapped open the briefcase. One look assured him that the battery-powered transmitter was fully active. He had no idea how Stauffenberg had planted and set off the bomb, but he suspected that the Colonel with his need to be circumspect had not had access to this fancy toy. Strange what power comes from being decisive he thought. That had been Hitler’s secret. In a time of uncertainty and confusion, Adolf Hitler had led through certainty. With fanatical clarity of purpose he had marched to power in Germany and taken her to greatness, then moral and now military defeat. Schellenberg had never been an ideologue; without hesitation he pressed the button.

  Two dull, loud thuds shook the building, clouds of dust billowed as pieces of the wall and the ceiling fell to the floor and disintegrated. The sound of shattering glass echoed down the corridor. Three seconds later Schellenberg was running behind the man in the leather jacket towards the small conference room that he had left less than a minute before. Both of the Abwehr man’s hands held small Walther PPK pistols with silencers attached. His cold eyes scanning the corridor for any witnesses.

  Knowing he had seconds before guards or other witnesses would arrive on the scene, Schellenberg followed the man into the clouds of dust that hung in the shattered room. The table around which they had sat was completely gone as were most of the bodies of Ohlendorff and Mueller. Kaltenbrunner’s crumpled seven-foot frame lay face down smashed against a wall partially covered in fallen debris. A big part of his shoulder was missing. Even if he was still alive he would not survive. With two quick steps the Abwehr man reached the SD-chiefs body and in one fluid motion dropped his pistols, took Kaltenbrunner’s head in his hands and twisted it hard. Schellenberg did not hear the whispered ‘For you! Admiral Canaris’ nor would he have really cared. There was no audible crack – the spine had been shattered at too many places and offered no resistance. A few feet away lay what remained of the Reichsführer SS. Himmler was on his side, parts of his uniform burnt away a massive black scorch mark covering much of his chest and face. One of the legs was gone. Amid the terrifyingly blackened face his eyes were open. The pince-nez shattered and gone. Strange, the Schellenberg thought, he looks almost at peace. In a quick movement the Abwehr man knelt over the Himmler’s body and performed the same twisting motion. The operative straightened, hands again in the jacket’s deep pockets. “I guess you won’t be needing me anymore?” Behind him a shredded portrait of Hitler dangled loosely in its shattered frame over the door. Dust and smoke were still settling. ‘This is the end,’ Schellenberg thought philosophically’ this is where the Third Reich formally ends.’

  From that moment it took more than 5 seconds for the first person to appear. While the Abwehr man vanished in the ensuing confusion, Schellenberg pulled rank and supervised the recovery operations and the initiation of an investigation. Barking orders in the most assertive voice he could muster he went without challenge from assassin to acting head of the entire SS-apparatus. His last order before leaving the building two hours later was not to resist any Wehrmacht investigators who might be dropping by. Not once had he been challenged. Germans, and the SS-men in particular responded very well to confident authority, especially if it came in the uniform of an SS Obergruppenführer. The impulse that had sustained bloody Hitler’s regime now ensured its complete demise.

  9:am July 22nd

  Reichskanzlei, Berlin

  They were all there and they looked more nervous than at any time since the bomb had gone off. Hardly surprising Stauffenberg thought. Few of them had in their hearts truly believed in the success of the venture. The room in which they assembled had not seen much use since the last formal cabinet meetings in 1939, and so far the only visible change was a white sheet draped across the wreathed swastika in the claws of the giant eagle that dominated the far wall. In the last forty-eight hours it had come home to the young Colonel just how few of his fellow-conspirators had genuinely planned for a time beyond the success of the coup. For most of them, and that went especially for his fellow officers, participation in the conspiracy had been as much a private moral statement as it had been a path that fundamentally most them remained uncomfortable about. Field Marshall von Manstein had been right, German officers made bad conspirators and revolutionaries. The eagles embossed on the backrests of the seats that lined the dark oak table still had their hooked cross displayed in their talons.

  And yet there had been some real surprises over the past two days. Many Germans it seemed had taken a day to accept the new reality, accept that Adolf Hitler was no longer the Führer; that he was no longer alive. And then most had remembered there was a war on and snapped back into survival mode. The effect on the members of the SS had been most illuminating. With the hypnotic effect of the psychopathic God removed many had come around rather easily, almost relieved, like awakening out of a bad dream, completely disoriented. The biggest surprise had been Schellenberg. General Olbricht had nearly fainted when just before two in the afternoon on the 21st, Schellenberg dressed in a rather dust covered uniform, had pulled up in a black Mercedes, settled into a leather chair in his office and announced that Himmler and his second-in-command Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Ohlendorff and Gestapo Mueller – in other words the entire SS leadership bar himself - had perished in an explosion just hours earlier. And he left Olbricht in no doubt as to the origin of the explosion. As heads of nearly 350 000 SS, camp guards, secret police and special police, the Reichsfuehrer-SS and his quiet, scar-faced Austrian 2 IC had been marked by the plotters as a real threat in the consolidation of their power; powerful enough to be uncertain as to how to confront them. Schellenberg’s action left virtually no significant SS leader or party hack unaccounted for and Olbricht had
not even bothered to consult anyone but Stauffenberg before agreeing to Schellenberg’s request that the Nazi spy chief and some of his confidants be given a week to ‘disappear’. Germans might make poor revolutionaries but it seemed they also had little stomach for civil war. With Henning von Treskow’s cavalry 600-strong detachment expected to seize control of the Wolfschanze any time now, Göring, Bormann, Keitel and Dönitz would all be truly neutralized. Not that there had been much in the way of communications since General Beck’s radio broadcast.

  Inside his tunic Stauffenberg’s shoulder and arm stump itched. Berlin was as hot and humid as ever. But outwardly he remained calm, observing the men entering the room with great interest. Around him the members of the new cabinet of the post-Hitler Germany took their seats and looked around expectantly. Although the list had frequently changed the purpose of the cabinet had been to be inclusive of all the major participants of the conspiracy.

  Apart from the army officers, represented by Beck as Chief of State, von Witzleben for the Army, and himself, the conspirators represented a wide range of German public and political life. To Stauffenberg there had always been four groups: the civil servants, most of them conservative nationalists, represented the old guard - the group that hankered after the glory of Germany's imperial days and whose failure to accept the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic had been a major factor in smoothing Hitler's rise to power. Though many among them had opposed the upstart Hitler from the beginning, the majority had only moved into opposition very recently. Then there were the Social Democrats, who as the strongest mass party of the Weimar days had suffered terribly under Hitler's wrath over the past decade. But they, and they alone had through their union organisations, maintained a broad popular support base across Germany. The Churchmen and intellectuals represented a far more diverse group, most of them individuals or social cliques who had opposed Hitler quietly and on principle. Although their opposition had generally been ineffectual, their social networks had been, and would continue to be, critical for the broadening of a popular support base. Then there were Communists, a strong party but beholden to a foreign master. They were not represented at this meeting. Not merely did the churchmen, army officers and conservatives generally have a problem with them, but the Gestapo had been far too efficient for the clandestine Communists to remain as a functioning organisation. In fact it had been the betrayal by double agents inside the Communist leadership that had led to Goerdeler's arrest just days before. Although Stauffenberg himself had been willing to contemplate their presence, both Beck and von Witzleben had objected.

  The pragmatic addition to this list was Albert Speer, Hitler's Minister of Armaments. Speer had featured on a few Resistance lists as Armaments Minister for two reasons. Most who knew him, knew that he was the most non-ideological of the Nazi leadership, a technocrat who had risen to power for his architectural and administrative achievements rather than anything else. Without doubt his rise in Hitler’s regime had increased his enthusiasm for his Fuhrer. But it had been Speer in his organizational zeal and energy who had placed Germany's economy on a proper war footing. Even with Allied terror bombing German war production in 1944 was at its peak and still rising. No, whatever some of the intellectuals and clerics might say - and they had said a lot - they needed Speer – at least of the moment.

  Stauffenberg glanced over to the Minister who looked distinctly uncomfortable. The seats on both sides to him were empty. In a symbolic gesture that many would later identify as the beginning of his political career, Stauffenberg got up and explicitly sat down next to Speer. The grateful look in the former architects eyes told the Colonel a second later that he had made the right choice. For the moment Speer would be with them.

  As the room began to quieten down he surveyed the men around the table. Apart from his brother and other young aides who are standing to one side of the room to act as aides, he was by far the youngest. At the head of the table Karl Goerdeler, former Lord Mayor of Leipzig and Reich Price Control Commissioner when the Nazis came to power, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. A political conservative Goerdeler had spoken out against Hitler's regime from 1933. Though increasingly circumspect he had maintained his public opposition until 1938 when he resigned in protest of the excesses of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Short, with grey, thin hair he was not a dominating appearance but those who met him and looked into the intense eyes that overlooked a strong nose knew that Karl Goerdeler was and always had been a man of principle. Still immensely popular in his home state, Goerdeler's main connections lay with business sector. A fiscal conservative and an economic pragmatist the conspirators had always known that he could carry big business for them. Far more significant was that Goerdeler was the one individual that all of the major politicians, officers and trade unionists in the conspiracy had accepted as political leader; Karl Goerdeler sat at the head of the table as Chancellor-designate. And without any niceties he came to the point:

  'Gentlemen welcome. You all know who I am and why we are here. Thanks to the courage of our officers and Colonel von Stauffenberg in particular, Hitler is no more. His regime is gone. Germany has survived him for the moment but it remains in grave danger. We have announced the agreed basic points of our programme to our people and the world. It is our intention to withdraw peacefully and in good order to the borders of 1938. After that we will seek peace treaties that will avoid the mistakes of the Dictate of Versailles by laying the foundations for a lasting and just peace. With this as a basis for negotiation we have great hope that the Western allies will suspend operations against us. We are less sure about the Bolsheviks but will seek a negotiated end to hostilities if possible.

  We have been called by destiny to do our duty to save our nation and our people. You all have demonstrated your loyalty to Germany during these dark years. Now we need to make some decisions on how to safeguard our people and our beloved country in the immediate future. Those choices will require new thinking from us and they will require compromises. For the good of Germany we must make them.'

  He was standing now, fingertips resting on the table. No notes in front of him. Karl Goerdeler looked around. He had their attention. 'We all agreed over the past few months that we would need to find an end to this war into which Hitler dragged us. We must now find a way out of it with honour if we can, without it if we must.' Even the Generals were looking now. Goerdeler had always been an optimist when it came to post-war expectations. Until 1943 his communiqués to allied friends had demanded the restoration of German borders of 1938 as a minimum. That was clearly gone now, maybe Stauffenberg thought, the few days in prison had woken him up. ' I now call upon Feldmarschall Ludwig Beck to be confirmed by this meeting as head of state, with the title of President. Are there any objections?'

  There were no objections. Wearing his pre-war uniform Beck stood and placed his hand on the Bible held out for him by the Catholic Bishop of Münster Graf von Galen and the Protestant Pastor Dr Niemöller. The two Church leaders led Beck in a quick and functional oath in which the Almighty featured heavily. In less than two minutes it was over and Stauffenberg breathed a sigh of relief. In one quick move Goerdeler has masterly brought the military and the civilians together. The civilians had been given the moment of choice and the Army had had its man confirmed as head of state. They were next. One by one they placed their hand on the Bible; to Stauffenberg's surprise so did Speer, visibly moved by the ritual.

  The Colonel stood to take hold of the Bible on which his Commander in Chief had taken an oath to protect his nation and people. Stauffenberg felt clumsy touching the Bible with his two fingers but forced himself to concentrate as was sworn in as Minister of War. He laid it before him on the table. To his surprise Beck was visibly moved by the event. To avoid notice he gripped the Colonel's empty sleeve. He leaned forward and quietly said 'Colonel this should have been you.'

  Stauffenberg taken aback had no time to react. As everyone sat Goerdeler called on von Witzleben to report on the war situation.
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  The elderly officer stepped to a map, his skeletal hand pointing as it moved across Europe. With his thin white hair and balding skull, he looked much too small for the uniform he was wearing. His voice, though left no doubt of his will to command. He had felt the pain of Hitler’s anger on his body, but he had remained unbroken.

  'In the East the Bolsheviks have maintained the offensive in the north and almost reached the Finnish border all along the Leningrad sector. From there the front now runs from the Estonian frontier along Lake Peipus cutting across Latvia and Lithuania, touching the border with East Prussia, sloping back towards Bialystock before sweeping towards the outskirts of Warsaw. From there it follows the Vistula south and onto Lublin and roughly along the Dnjestr to the Black Sea. There is a major bridgehead across the river that where they have moved deeply into northern Romania. The Red Army concentrated its advance in this southern area ' His hand swept across the Ukraine, ' until May. Since then they have destroyed Army Group Center which has allowed them to recapture Byelorussia, and western Poland. We are in the process of rebuilding a semblance of a front in this area but that offensive was a heavier knock than Stalingrad. We are not sure where the next thrust will come but assume that for the moment the thrust into Poland has run out of steam.' He paused for questions.