The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Then, a new window of opportunity suddenly opened. Gen. Kurt von Hammerstein, commander in chief of the army prior to 1934 and a staunch anti-Nazi, was called from retirement to command an army at the western front. Through the years, he became isolated and bitter, forced to helplessly watch Nazi barbarism and irresponsible foreign policy. Hammerstein, known as the “Red General” because of his good contacts in the German left, was not bound by dogmatic values of obedience and honor like most of his military colleagues. He recognized the part he had played in allowing the Nazi takeover and was resolute about doing everything possible to remedy his mistake. Now, he believed, Providence had given him a second chance.

  On September 9, Hammerstein took charge and moved to his new headquarters, in Cologne. Soon afterward, he invited Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an emissary of the resistance, for a meeting, and concluded a plan for rapid action. Hammerstein would call Hitler to visit Cologne to “demonstrate the military might of the Third Reich in the west at the same time as the Polish Campaign was being fought in the east.”2 Upon his arrival, the Führer would be arrested and neutralized. Hammerstein was ready to suffer the consequences and hoped that his example would serve as a trigger for a general insurgency. Schlabrendorff promised to do his best. For a few hopeful days at the beginning of September 1939, the networks of resistance awoke again into life. Schlabrendorff recounted in his memoirs that “it became my job to inform the British on Hammerstein’s plan. The British embassy had already been vacated, but I succeeded in reaching Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, the counselor of the British embassy, around lunchtime in the Hotel Adlon.”3

  The Adlon, tall and luxurious, towered above the linden trees of Unter den Linden, the main thoroughfare of Berlin, a few steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Schlabrendorff entered the lobby and found the British diplomat waiting for him. While they were chatting in the lounge, two SS officers approached them. Schlabrendorff, as he testified later, had “most uncomfortable moments,” as he believed the officers came to arrest him for dining with a British diplomat hours after the outbreak of the war. Luckily, however, they were oblivious to his presence and came merely to arrange with Sir George some details related to the imminent departure of British embassy staff.4

  For a moment, hopes were high. For the first time since Witzleben’s departure from Berlin, the conspirators found a senior commander ready to cooperate with them. Even better, unlike anyone else with whom the conspirators had worked before, Hammerstein demanded assurances neither from Halder nor from Britain. He was ready to act against Hitler unconditionally, and alone.

  Now the plan was ready for the next stage. Hammerstein dispatched the invitation to Hitler’s headquarters. But the Führer refused to come. He probably didn’t trust Hammerstein, whose anti-Nazi sympathies were well known, to the extent of putting his personal safety in Hammerstein’s hands. Worse, a few days later, the Red General was removed from his post and retired. Hammerstein, sad and embittered, had failed to take his second chance. In 1933, he had not stopped the National Socialists from taking power, and now he could not stop them from waging war. In the next few years, before he succumbed to cancer in 1943, Hammerstein spoke bitterly of the leaders of the Wehrmacht, of their narrow-mindedness and cowardice. “These people turn me, an old soldier, into an anti-militarist,” he told a friend upon hearing that Halder and Brauchitsch would not support a coup, not even after the National Socialist atrocities in Poland.5

  The months of October and November, after Hammerstein’s sudden departure, were a prolonged nightmare for the conspirators. Still, even in the midst of their despair, the networks of resistance slowly expanded: some joined, and even more became ripe for recruitment. The atrocities of the SS in Poland convinced several young officers who had not yet been politically involved to turn against the regime. Thus, for example, Maj. Helmuth Stieff, from the organization section at the army high command, became anti-Nazi following the massacres in the first months of the war: “Uprooting whole generations, including women and children, could be done only by sub-humans who do not deserve to be called ‘Germans.’ I am ashamed to be a German. Such a minority, with its murder, pillage and arson . . . will bring disaster on us all unless rapidly stopped.”6

  Hermann Kaiser, a captain in the reserves, who was later to fill a crucial role in the resistance networks, was also moved by the atrocities in Poland. He wrote in his diary in May 1941, “The army is hungry for pillage. Situation in Warsaw: The population is starving, so that women and children collapse and die in the street. Provincial Labor Leader [Gauarbeitsführer] Faatz: The Polish must perish, be exterminated . . . Destruction of churches: altars are being destroyed with firearms, and crucifixes are being slashed with axes . . . Property is being redistributed.”7 Even more radical was Fritz von der Schulenburg, deputy commander of the Berlin police, drafted into the army after the beginning of the war: “These acts will be stopped only through shooting. A change can be made only through an armed revolt. Only the forced removal of the omnipotent man can bring about a healing change.”8

  Irrespective of their will to act, Stieff and Schulenburg could do nothing against the regime. Everything was dependent, yet again, on Halder and Brauchitsch. Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth, on a visit to Poland right after the invasion, was also horrified by the massacres of Jews, noblemen, and intellectuals. Accordingly, he gave detailed reports to Oster, Beck, and his direct superior, Halder. The chief of staff, however, was not interested in horror stories and refused to consider them as a good enough reason for a coup d’état. He even forbade Groscurth from dispatching these reports to the military commanders on the western front, in order “not to burden them with details.”9

  Canaris’s desperate attempts to end the atrocities did not fare any better. In the first months of the war, he issued protest after protest, only to be ignored by all. Just like Hammerstein, he began to hate the senior generals for their criminal indifference. “There is just no point in trying to convince them,” he told Hassell.10

  Dramatic developments stirred the high command yet again on October 9. Hitler convened the senior commanders of the Wehrmacht and gave them what many of them feared most: the order for a German offensive in the west: “If, in the near future, it turns out that England and its French satellite do not intend to end the war, I have reached a decision to act aggressively and without delay . . . An offensive is to be prepared . . . through the territories of Luxemburg, Belgium and Holland. This offensive should be executed with full force, as quickly as possible.”11

  Most generals in the high command were strongly averse to the western campaign, scheduled by Hitler for November 26. Brauchitsch was certain that Germany would be soundly defeated. Gen. Ritter von Leeb, commander of the Third Army Group, sent an impassioned memorandum against the offensive and called for peace, and even a radical Nazi general such as Reichenau denounced the plan as “criminal.” He did not mean the breach of sovereignty of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, but rather a crime against the army, which might be destroyed as a result of such a dangerous adventure.12

  Groscurth, eager to take advantage of this new opportunity, turned again to Halder. This time, the chief of staff was more attentive. His quartermaster general, Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, promised Halder to “lock Brauchitsch up” if he refused to cooperate. In addition, he promised the chief of staff to tour the fronts to find new allies among the senior commanders in the field. On October 29, General Halder gave his final okay, and a few days later he instructed Oster to re-create the 1938 plans. For one week, the Wehrmacht high command in Zossen, near Berlin, turned into a hub of clandestine subversive activity.13

  Again, Oster and his friends were busy planning. Contact was made with Heinz, the commando leader from 1938, and he was told to stand on high alert. In Rome, Dr. Josef Müller approached the British for assurances that they would not take advantage of the situation in case of a coup. Loyal commanders, such as Witzleben, agreed to put their troops at the disposal of the conspi
rators. Erich Kordt was even ready to assassinate Hitler simultaneously with the coup. He asked Oster for explosives in order to blow Hitler up during one of the daily briefings.14

  But this coup attempt was no more than a phantom of the conspiracy of 1938. To paraphrase the French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, it seems that Halder was “staging a play on the revolt of 1938” instead of repeating it. He never stopped raising obstacles and flatly refused to move on without Brauchitsch’s consent. In addition, he complained to an emissary of the resistance, Lt. Gen. Georg Thomas, that Britain was waging war “not only against Hitler, but also against the German people.” There was no other great man to replace the Führer, most young officers supported the regime, and the nation needed a guiding idea such as National Socialism. But still, Halder never said no, and left the conspirators in suspense. Would he act at the decisive moment? No one could tell. The agents of the resistance fared even worse with General Brauchitsch. When Thomas tried to brief him on the secret negotiations with Britain, he was silenced and threatened with arrest.15

  On November 5, the army was ordered to stand on high alert, ready to march westward against Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. The conspirators believed they had reasons to be optimistic. The most important commanders were against the offensive, and the chance of winning their support for the coup was therefore substantial. Halder ordered Beck and Goerdeler to be ready for immediate action. Again, their hopes were high. Meanwhile, Brauchitsch drove to the Reich chancellery to convince Hitler to give up the offensive.16 If the meeting failed, the conspirators believed, Brauchitsch would surely back them with his support. Beck, Oster, and the other leaders were putting their trust in Zossen, the center of resistance to the offensive in the west. Goerdeler, optimistic by nature, had begun to prepare cabinet lists for a new government. Beck and Schacht were more skeptical. Everyone was anxious to hear news from the crucial meeting between Hitler and Brauchitsch.

  And news did come. The bizarre meeting between the Führer and the commander of his land army put an end to the conspiratorial farce of Zossen. After Brauchitsch mumbled something about the bad weather and possible insurgency among the troops, Hitler thundered at him, “In which units? What measures have you taken? How many death sentences did you give in response?” In his fury, Hitler said that he was quite familiar with the “spirit of Zossen”—a spirit of subversion, mutiny, and treason. One day, he would squash that spirit once and for all.17

  Brauchitsch came back to Zossen trembling with fear. Hitler’s remark about the “spirit of Zossen” convinced Halder and the conspirators that their plot might have been exposed. In a momentary panic, the chief of staff ordered all documents to be burned and the plan canceled. “It is not possible to avert the western offensive,” he told Groscurth with tears in his eyes. “I simply cannot do it.”18

  Beck, meanwhile, received a detailed report from Groscurth on the atrocities of the SS in Poland: fifteen hundred Jews, including women and children, had been intentionally frozen to death while being transported in open trucks. The former chief of staff was horrified. These atrocities, he wrote to General Brauchitsch, would disgrace the German army for eternity. Brauchitsch did not even bother to respond. “The baleful character of the regime, especially ethically speaking, is ever clearer to Beck,” wrote Hassell in his diary.19 But what could the former chief of the General Staff do to help the Jews and the Poles, and to stop his country from being both morally corrupted and militarily defeated? The only solution was to cajole Halder again. Beck was reluctant, but when Stülpnagel, who held both men in high esteem, organized a meeting, the leader of the resistance could not refuse.20

  The two met again on January 26, 1940. To avoid the Gestapo, they walked together in the empty streets of Dahlem, a quiet suburb of Berlin. Beck lectured Halder on the urgency of a revolt: Hitler was bringing doom on Germany. Halder, as usual, pointed out difficulties: the nation stood behind Hitler, and the conspirators had failed to make adequate political preparations. In these circumstances, it was not possible to stage a coup. Beck, in response, accused Halder of cowardice. “As an experienced rider,” he said, “Halder must know that one had first to throw one’s heart over the obstacle.” This remark, noted Nicholas Reynolds, turned the rest of the meeting into an “exercise in name calling.”21 Beck must have remembered that, in the past, it was Halder who had tried to convince him to move against Hitler. Now, the roles were reversed. It seems that it was less the personality of either Beck or Halder that mattered, and more the role of the chief of staff, which invested its bearer with a sense of responsibility and caution. Beck and Halder parted on the “worst of terms.”22 They never saw each other again.

  One ray of hope remained. Erich Kordt, the young diplomat in the foreign ministry, was ready to go ahead with the assassination plan. Maybe, he thought, Halder would change his mind if the Führer were dead. But, on November 8, it became clear that the plan couldn’t be carried out. As a result of Georg Elser’s assassination attempt, all security organizations were on high alert, and it was virtually impossible to get explosives except for strictly authorized, well-defined reasons. The last chance appeared to have gone.23

  As if that were not enough, the conspirators suffered another blow from the outside. On November 9, the SS kidnapped two British agents, S. Payne Best and Richard Stevens. The pair were in touch with two colonels from the resistance, who promised to connect them with a general. After a few meetings, an interview was scheduled in Venlo, on the Dutch-German border. Unfortunately, the two “colonels” were Gestapo agents, and their commander was none other than Walter Schellenberg of SD (SS security service) counterintelligence. When the agents arrived at the meeting point, in a café a few meters from the German border, they were attacked by machine-gun fire. Their companion, a Dutch intelligence operative, died, and they themselves were bundled into Germany.24 As is mentioned in chapter 6, Hitler and Himmler both suspected that Best and Stevens were the wire-pullers behind Elser’s assassination attempt. That was not true. Nevertheless, the event was detrimental for the conspirators. Now, the British were ever more careful when in touch with German anti-Nazis, and the negotiations, never flowing anyway, turned into a trickle.25

  In 1940, the German resistance had reached an impasse. The conspiracy, though somewhat larger, was completely impotent, with most of its senior allies lost. The powerful generals, Halder and Brauchitsch included, were unreachable; grim predictions of German defeat looked hollow; and negotiations with the British were going nowhere. The strategy of Beck, Goerdeler, and Hassell, presuming the cooperation of outside forces, cajoling and imploring Halder and Brauchitsch to act, had gone nowhere, along with the belief that a legal, “bloodless” revolution was a realistic option. September 1938 was long in the past, and it seemed futile to try to repeat the same strategy over and over again. More and more conspirators accepted Oster’s opinion that Hitler must first be removed by assassination, and only then should the generals be approached. Oster had had enough of attempts to convert Halder and Brauchitsch. Along with many others, he liberated himself from the incompetent “spirit of Zossen.”26

  But that was not enough. Oster understood that the reliability of the conspirators, himself included, had been irreversibly compromised in the eyes of the British. To remedy that, he made a decision considered by many Germans, even after 1945, to be unforgivable. In late September 1939, he called his old friend Colonel Sas, the Dutch military attaché, and leaked to him the exact timing of the German offensive in the west. He knew that German soldiers might die because of it, but then maybe the war would be brought to a quick end. Under these circumstances, who knew? Perhaps coup d’état would become a distinct possibility again. From conspiracy, Oster moved to collaboration with the enemy.

  “One may say I am a traitor to my country,” he told the Dutch officer when giving him the information, “but actually I am not that. I regard myself as a better German than all those who follow Hitler. It is my plan and my duty to free Germany
and thereby the world of this plague.” Oster knew well that he had crossed the Rubicon. “There is no going back for me anymore,” he told his friend and confidant Franz Liedig, one of the co-organizers of the 1938 shock troops. Later on, he continued to sabotage the German war effort by tipping off officers from Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and Yugoslavia about impending German attacks on their countries.27

  It was to no avail. Both the Dutch and the Belgians refused to believe Oster’s information, and they were certain that the German informer was nothing but a provocateur.28 Very few believed, indeed, that Germany would attack the western countries at all. On May 10, 1940, when Hitler finally gave the orders to march, the western armies were mortally surprised. The Wehrmacht turned to France through the Low Countries, occupying Belgium and the Netherlands. To the astonishment of Beck and the other ringleaders of the resistance, the French army and the British Expeditionary Force were soundly beaten. France was exposed to German attack, and its army, already weakened by the Belgian debacle, was hardly able to slow the Wehrmacht at all. In spring 1940, it was only a matter of time before France fell.

  The conspirators were agape once more. Beck refused to believe that England and France were so weak. He was still certain that Hitler was bound to lose the war. Hitler could not win; he should not win. In early 1940, Beck met with one of his friends, a pastor, who was optimistic about the war. He told Beck that Germany would win. The general gave his military counterarguments and explained to his friend why the Reich would finally lose. Once the conversation had ended, Beck escorted him out of the garden. When he opened the gate, the former chief of staff provided an afterthought. “I have seen the man,” he avowed, “and I can assure you that he is one of the most evil men ever to walk the face of the earth.”29