The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Hitler sat in an armor-plated compartment inside the airplane. On the strength of their experiments, the conspirators knew that the explosion would be strong enough to tear this cubicle apart, along with the rest of the plane. Tresckow and Schlabrendorff sat by the radio and waited for the news of a plane crash somewhere above Minsk.

  As they waited tensely, they were troubled by moral qualms. Tresckow and Schlabrendorff knew that they had to kill a single criminal in order to save potentially millions of people, but what about the innocent officers who would die with Hitler in the crash? The two had come to the conclusion that, given the horrifying crimes that had been committed in the east, no German officer was innocent. All those who had kept silent as Jews, Russians, and Poles were being slaughtered, and even those who had protested but continued to serve, bore responsibility and thus deserved death. And even if these men were not guilty, their deaths were necessary. As Tresckow put it, “In order to free Germany and the world from the greatest criminal in history, it is permissible to kill a few innocent people.”36 But nothing happened, Schlabrendorff recounted:

  After waiting more than two hours, we received the shattering news that Hitler’s plane had landed without incident at the airstrip at Rastenburg, in East Prussia, and that Hitler himself had safely reached Headquarters. We could not imagine what had gone wrong. I called Gehre in Berlin immediately, and gave him the code word for the failure of the assassination. Afterward, Tresckow and I, stunned and shaken by the blow, conferred about what our next move should be. We were in a state of indescribable agitation; the failure of our attempt was bad enough, but the thought of what discovery of the bomb would mean to us and our fellow conspirators, friends, and families, was infinitely worse.37

  Despite this setback, Tresckow did not sink into depression. He quickly took action. He called Lieutenant Colonel Brandt, who had already arrived at the headquarters, and told him that a mistake had been made and that the wrong bottles of liqueur had been sent. He asked the lieutenant colonel to keep the package until they could deliver the real Cointreau. Tresckow had to prevent the bomb from being delivered to Stieff, who knew nothing about the assassination plot. Schlabrendorff set off for the high command headquarters, gave Brandt two real bottles of Cointreau, and reclaimed the original package. Brandt, who was oblivious to the deadly content of the package, juggled it back and forth. Schlabrendorff, who did everything possible to conceal his dread and nervousness, seriously feared a belated explosion. He took the package to the railway station, where a Berlin-bound military night express stood waiting.38 There, Schlabrendorff entered the sleeping car, locked the door, and opened the package with a razor blade. He removed the wrapping and made an amazing discovery: “I could see that the condition of the explosive was unchanged. Carefully dismantling the bomb, I took out the fuse and examined it. The reason for the failure immediately became clear: Everything but one small part had worked as expected. The bottle with the corrosive fluid had been broken, the chemical had eaten through the wire, the firing pin had been released and had struck forward—but the detonator had not ignited.”39

  The malfunction seems to have been due to a defect in the manufacture of the explosive and to the low temperature inside the plane. Gersdorff, Tresckow, and Schlabrendorff had done the best they could, but, as in earlier resistance efforts, fortune intervened to save the Führer. Soon they decided to try again.

  On March 21, Hitler was scheduled to make a speech at the official commemoration of Heroes’ Memorial Day in Berlin. Following the speech, he was to visit the armory (Zeughaus), where he would view an exhibition of captured Russian war materiel. Gersdorff’s intelligence department had organized the exhibition, and he was supposed to guide Hitler through the display and explain it to him. Tresckow asked Gersdorff whether he was willing to take the opportunity to strike Hitler along with Himmler, Göring, and Goebbels. Apparently, he would need to blow himself up along with Hitler.40

  Gersdorff agreed to do it, even though he understood that it probably meant sacrificing his own life. With a huge effort, Tresckow managed to convince Field Marshal Kluge not to attend, as he was supposed to be a critical figure in the anti-Nazi coup that would follow the assassination.

  Gersdorff traveled to Berlin with Field Marshal Walter Model, one of Hitler’s most ardent loyalists. A day before the event, the two of them met with Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant. Model asked about the precise hour set for the visit to the museum, because he wanted to visit his wife before returning to the front. At first, Schmundt refused to say, on the grounds that security procedures forbade letting anyone know. He, Schmundt, would be subject to the death penalty if he leaked the secret, he said. Model persisted, and Schmundt finally gave in. Gersdorff listened alertly. Afterward, Schmundt said that he had checked the list of invitees and that Gersdorff did not appear there. Luck was once again with the conspirators; Model protested vehemently and said that he was not versed in Russian armaments. What if Hitler were to ask him a question he could not answer? He demanded that Gersdorff accompany him and respond to all of the Führer’s technical questions. Schmundt gave in and added Gersdorff to the guest list. Gersdorff later wrote, “I spent March 20 at the Armory to examine the possibilities for an assassination attempt. Laborers were at work everywhere, in the yard of the museum, where the ceremony was to take place, and in the exhibition halls themselves. A speakers’ stand had been set up, and a stage for the philharmonic orchestra. The entire area had been festooned with wreaths of flowers. SS and SD troops roamed ceaselessly among the workers . . . guarding the place day and night.”41

  Gersdorff realized that he could not conceal the bomb in the exhibition hall. The security procedures were too thorough, the room was too large, and there was no way of knowing exactly where Hitler would stand. Alternatively, he could plant the bomb in the speaker’s podium outside, but that, he saw, was guarded day and night by the SS. Gersdorff concluded that he would have to carry the bomb on his person and detonate it when he stood next to Hitler, killing himself along with the dictator. At 10:00 p.m., as he sat in his room in the Eden Hotel, deep in thought, Schlabrendorff knocked on the door and delivered a bomb with a ten-minute delay. Gersdorff recalled,

  I arrived at the Armory on the late morning of March 21 . . . At 11 a.m., officers and party officials began to gather, but they had no idea that the ceremony would begin only at 1 p.m. A few acquaintances tried to speak to me, and I must have given them the impression of being a distracted, dreamy man . . . After Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, Hitler began to speak. I heard him only intermittently . . . I remember that, despite all the optimistic forecasts about the military situation, he spoke in mystical terms about “the twilight of the gods.” I did not know how long he would speak for, so I could not activate the fuse during the speech.42

  After concluding his address, Hitler entered the armory with Gersdorff, Göring, Himmler, Keitel, Field Marshal Bock, and several other officers. Gersdorff tried to start explaining the exhibits to the Führer, but Hitler did not listen and began instead to walk frantically toward the door. Fifty seconds later, the radio announced, to a drumroll, that Hitler had left the armory and had begun inspecting the honor guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.43 Gersdorff later told a historian,

  So the window of opportunity for the assassination closed, because the fuse needed at least ten minutes, even if the temperature were normal [and longer if it was cold]. Hitler’s life was saved by a last-minute change, a typical stratagem of his sophisticated security system. Tresckow listened to the broadcast of the ceremony in Smolensk with a stopwatch in his hand. When he heard . . . the announcer declaring that he [Hitler] had left the Armory, he understood that the plan could not have been completed.44

  Gersdorff remained active in the resistance movement to the end, but he did not again dare to try to assassinate Hitler himself. Tresckow also vowed to carry on, but the conspirators continued to be plagued by bad luck. At the beginning of March, shortly before the failure of the assassi
nation attempt in Smolensk, Beck was hospitalized and diagnosed with cancer of the stomach. He became a shadow of himself, pale and depressed. Members of the inner circle were distressed by his condition. “Only now his importance becomes clear,” Kaiser told another conspirator, agreeing with him that “people are ready to take only [Beck] in consideration. No one can replace him. Witzleben must step forward, but he is not a statesman . . . May God watch over Beck.”45

  A month later, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, one of the most active conspirators in the army, was arrested and interrogated on suspicion of treason. He was released only at the intervention of high-ranking officers. Beck, Goerdeler, and Hassell felt that they, too, were under Gestapo surveillance. The room for maneuvering was diminishing quickly.46

  Tresckow, who observed strict rules of caution, was not yet a suspect, but he knew that he wouldn’t be safe forever. Everyone sensed that a terrible catastrophe was at hand. On April 5, 1943, it happened. Tresckow heard, at his headquarters in Smolensk, that the Gestapo had raided the Abwehr offices in Berlin, where they arrested Hans von Dohnanyi and seized many incriminating documents. Worst of all, Maj. Gen. Hans Oster, the heart and soul of the anti-Nazi military conspiracy, was relieved of his command and placed under house arrest. The resistance’s nerve center in Berlin was collapsing.

  14

  Code Name U-7:

  Rescue and Abyss

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF the German military intelligence service (Abwehr), in Tirpitz-Ufer, Berlin, was a dull, gray office building. In this spartan, unassuming environment, the directorate of the anti-Nazi military resistance also operated, enjoying the direct support of the chief, Adm. Wilhelm Canaris. Both busy with their official military duties and underground tasks, Hans Oster and his right-hand man, Dr. Hans von Dohnanyi, found the time and energy to stage sophisticated operations to rescue Jews, converted Jews, and their relatives.

  None of these operations could be arranged without the consent and active support of Admiral Canaris. The “little admiral,” as he was known, was a controversial figure. A short, soft-spoken, white-haired spymaster, he kept excellent working relationships with most National Socialist leaders. His extraordinary ability to play double and triple games led even fanatical Nazis to believe that it was impossible that he would cooperate with traitors and conspirators.1 Inside the Abwehr, he was known as a strict and highly distrustful chief, neither gregarious nor friendly. Even his relationship with his own family was cold. Generally, he was a misanthrope who preferred the company of Seppl and Sabine, his beloved dachshunds. Every day, he brought them to his office, and he would sometimes lock the door and play with them for hours. His biographer Heinz Höhne relates that anyone who was not fond of dogs could never expect to win his grace. Another sensitive spot was officers who were too tall. Such people tended to be shooed away, marginalized, and discriminated against.2

  Very few people doubted Canaris’s loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi regime. During the Weimar period, he was known as a monarchist and staunch antidemocrat. As a member of several subversive cells of the radical right, he was involved in the activities of the terror organization Consul. It is unknown whether Canaris was directly involved in assassinations of Weimar politicians committed by this group, but he helped the terrorists to obtain funds and maybe even ammunition. He was also notorious for helping another good friend, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to overthrow the young Second Spanish Republic in a bloody civil war. His contribution to the Fascist cause in Spain was crucial, and he was later remembered as “one of the people to whom Franco owed his power.”3 In 1937, he still refused to listen to his friend and deputy commander Hans Oster, who tried to open his eyes to the real nature of the Nazi regime. Back then, he was still a convinced National Socialist. “I require you to stand foursquare by the National Socialist state,” he told his officers. “Adolf Hitler’s ideas are imbedded with the following soldierly spirit: honor and a sense of duty, courage, military preparedness, a readiness for commitment and self-sacrifice, leadership, comradeship and a sense of responsibility.”4 For him, Hitler was a conservative, nationalist leader set to restore Germany’s glorious past.

  But apart from his nationalist worldview, Canaris could never share some of the more brutal aspects of Nazi ideology. Surprisingly for a man with a past such as his, he was sensitive to the travails of innocent people and found it hard to stand idle while they suffered. He had helped German Jews before the war and was never a Jew hater, even when loyally serving the Nazi regime. The notorious anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer denounced him and his wife, Erica, for consistently shopping in Jewish-owned shops.5

  Slowly, as with many other future conspirators, the accumulating force of events moved Canaris to change his mind about Hitler. The Fritsch affair, especially, along with the outbreak of war, opened him up to the influence of Oster and Dohnanyi, who were working with him on a daily basis. Another turning point was the Polish campaign, marred as it was by German atrocities. Canaris was busy then in a frenzy of intelligence and sabotage operations, and he took special pains to dispatch spies to foreign countries, including British colonies. He often left Berlin for the field and witnessed the conditions in occupied Warsaw, which horrified him. According to Heinz Höhne,

  The scenes of devastation in Poland left an indelible mark on Canaris. Land warfare was something new to him. His knowledge of war was based on memories of cruisers dueling at long range and colored by the rites traditional among gentlemen of the sea. This was another kind of war, an orgy of mass slaughter and total destruction, a battle between fanatical beliefs and ideologies waged amid burning cities and the ruins of a national culture. What he saw evoked a sense of personal and national guilt which soon became condensed into the realization that was to plague him more and more as time went by: “God will pass judgment on us.”6

  “Canaris was a pure intellect,” testified his close associate Erwin Lahousen, “an interesting, highly individual and complicated personality, who hated violence as such and therefore hated and abominated war, Hitler, his system and particularly his methods. In whatever way one may look at him, Canaris was a human being.”7 Knowing full well that he was serving the side responsible for the atrocities, he found a way to live with his conscience. In addition to his formal military duties and the support he gave to the resistance, he made increasing efforts to save individual victims. He did so at the request of an old acquaintance, the wife of the former Polish military attaché in Berlin:

  While visiting Poznan, Canaris was accosted and asked for help by a pale, bewildered-looking Polish woman. The admiral stared at her in dismay as recognition slowly dawned. It was Madame Czimanska, wife of the Polish military attaché and a popular hostess in prewar Berlin . . . She had no idea of her husband’s whereabouts . . . Sobbing, Madame Czimanska told Canaris the story of her escape and expressed shame at the Polish forces’ apparent lack of determination. Canaris consoled her. “Don’t distress yourself . . . The Polish armies have fought well and bravely.” When she asked permission to join her mother in Warsaw, however, he shook his head. “I wouldn’t go to Warsaw,” he said. He walked over to a big map and ran his finger across it. “Switzerland,” he told her, “that’s the best place.” Canaris produced papers which enabled Madame Czimanska and her children to settle in the neighborhood of Bern, where she found an apartment which he sometimes visited in his subsequent trips to Switzerland. He also acted as a staging-post for correspondence between her and her mother in Warsaw. Having discovered that the latter was living in Ulonska Street, he enlisted Horaczek [the Abwehr commander in Warsaw] to drive him there. “We’ll go to the old lady and pass on the news that all’s well with her daughter and the children.”8

  Canaris also strove to rescue Jews. One of them was Rabbi Joseph Yitzchak Schneersohn, the spiritual leader of Chabad, more commonly known as the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Very few people, then and now, have known that Canaris himself stood behind this operation.9

  Like many other Jewish c
ommunities, Chabad congregations in Europe were surprised by and unprepared for the Nazi onslaught. When it became clear that Poland was soon to be overrun by the Nazis, Rabbi Schneersohn ordered emergency measures to be taken. He instructed all yeshiva students with American citizenship who studied in Warsaw to return at once, and traveled to the Polish capital himself to save his precious library. Unfortunately, a few days after his arrival, the Wehrmacht occupied Warsaw. Rumors circulated among his Hasidim that the old rabbi, a Latvian citizen, was trapped in occupied Warsaw and even seriously injured. The Chabad lobby in the United States sprang into action. Some of the Hasidic Jews, who had contacts in the administration, urged the State Department to pressure the Germans to save the rabbi. The efforts took a long time but finally paid off, and at a certain stage even the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, became personally involved.

  The Americans made contact with a man named Helmuth Wohlthat, a senior German diplomat who was opposed to the war. Wohlthat immediately concluded that the rescue of such a prominent personality might motivate the Americans to mediate between Germany and Britain. Like many Germans, he seriously overestimated the power of the Jewish lobby in the United States. Wohlthat, of course, could not do such a thing by himself, and therefore he made contact with Canaris to ask for help.