The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  Until that fateful day, Stauffenberg and his coconspirators had been preparing, down to its last detail, the coup d’état’s operational plan. They treated it—as they were trained to—as staff work, and applied careful concealment procedures. When Beck, for example, visited Olbricht for consultations, he took pains to shake off Gestapo agents on his trail. First, he went to the train station and waited on the platform as if he were going to take the express train. When the train came, he sneaked into the tunnel between the platforms and took an exit to a side street, where Olbricht’s son-in-law, Friedrich Georgi, was waiting in a military vehicle. Likewise, Olbricht followed strict procedures when meeting Gisevius. No conspirator, under any circumstances, was allowed to visit Olbricht without notice, lest he draw unwanted attention.25

  From the summer of 1943 onward, Olbricht had collaborated with Stauffenberg on the reworking of his old plans from 1942. Once a week, Stauffenberg visited Beck in his house at Goethestrasse in order to take advice on the drafts. The operational code name was Valkyrie. In the ancient legends of northern Europe, the Valkyries were war fairies, hovering above battlefields to decide the fate of the combatants and to carry the fallen mighty to the seat of the gods, Valhalla. It was the fate of Adolf Hitler that the modern Valkyries of the resistance were about to decide.

  Originally, the Valkyrie orders were designed to reinforce the eastern front in case of a sudden military collapse. Valkyrie II, a revision drafted by Olbricht’s office in spring 1942, authorized the Home Army to promptly deploy its units locally in case of a paratrooper attack, an uprising of foreign workers, or another emergency inside the Reich.26 On July 31, 1943, Olbricht dramatically revised the orders for the purpose of the coup d’état. According to the revision, which was duly authorized by General Fromm, the commander of the home front had the authority to deploy not only his own troops but all detachments and soldiers within reach, including military schools, personnel on leave, and units in training and reorganization. They were to be organized within six hours into combat detachments and to be moved as quickly as possible, using all available means, wherever they were needed. All other existing security measures and plans were to be carried out exclusively in accordance with Valkyrie.

  By carefully redrawing the plan along these lines, the conspirators, whose bastion was the Home Army, secured for themselves almost unlimited control over the Wehrmacht in Germany, most importantly in the Greater Berlin area. They also took care to practice, drill, and rehearse the plan multiple times in different military districts to improve performance and, above all, the reaction time of the troops. Wisely, it was decided that “the preparations must be carried through as secretly as possible. By no means should authorities or individuals outside the Wehrmacht be informed about the intentions or the preparations.”27 The idea was, of course, to keep the prying eyes of the SS, Gestapo, and SD away from the plans.28

  The leaders of the resistance decided that immediately upon the Führer’s death, the Valkyrie orders would be sent to all Wehrmacht district commanders.29 The first communiqué would disclose that Hitler was dead and that an irresponsible clique of Nazi leaders had plotted to take over the country. In addition, the order would note that, as a preventive measure, the army had taken the government into its own hands. Military forces would arrest the SS leaders, Reich ministers, governors, and other top-echelon officials, and take hold of electricity, water, and gas, as well as communication and radio facilities. Incriminating documents, carefully prepared by Hans von Dohnanyi and others, would be utilized as evidence in special military tribunals orchestrated by Stauffenberg to condemn the Nazi leaders to death in the first days after the coup. According to the plan, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had long urged the conspirators to do away with Hitler, would take over the Wehrmacht, and Major General Tresckow would lead the police. In Greater Berlin, four key individuals had declared unconditional loyalty to Beck and Stauffenberg: Maj. Gen. Paul von Hase, the commander of the Berlin garrison and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s uncle; Maj. Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen from the Wehrkreis (regional) headquarters; Col. Wolfgang Müller, a left-leaning officer responsible for infantry training in the Home Army; and Berlin police chief Count Wolf von Helldorff. The conspirators expected that the officers of the armored school at Krampnitz and the commander of the guard battalion in Berlin, Maj. Otto Remer, would follow orders from Olbricht and Stauffenberg even though they were not privy to the conspiracy.30

  In the west, the conspirators could rely on an important force led by the military governor of France, Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, and on Lt. Gen. Hans Speidel, the chief of staff of Army Group B. There were also other seasoned, loyal veterans of the conspiracy occupying key posts in France. The broker connecting Stauffenberg to the western front was his cousin Caesar von Hofacker, who was deployed in the Wehrmacht headquarters in Paris.

  Another important component of the plan was the takeover of the Führer’s headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia. By autumn 1943, Stauffenberg and Tresckow had worked on detailed operational plans to take control of the compound, under the heading “Calendar: Measures.” This plan, the details of which were only recently discovered in the archive of the Russian secret service, included complex joint actions of the Berlin conspirators and units in Lithuania and at the eastern front. Immediately after the assassination, the conspirators were supposed to submit the code names Swallow and Seagull to loyal commanders. These commanders, in turn, would issue orders to take over the headquarters of Hitler, Himmler, Göring, Ribbentrop, and all SS garrisons in the region under the pretext that “traitorous elements in the party and the SS plan to abuse the grim situation at the Eastern Front and stab the army in the back.” Documents, prepared in advance, denounced both terror in Germany and Hitler’s lust for foreign conquest, and promised soldiers that from then on, only sacrifices required for the protection of their homes and families would be demanded. Tresckow and his confidants were supposed to orchestrate this operation.31

  Once the conspirators had seized control of Berlin, the provisional government of Ludwig Beck would take over. After lengthy, stormy debates, it was decided that Beck would become head of state, Goerdeler would be his prime minister, and the Social Democrat Wilhelm Leuschner would be deputy prime minister. Ulrich von Hassell would serve as foreign minister, and the powerful Ministry of the Interior (including control of the police) would be granted to another Social Democrat, Dr. Julius Leber. Olbricht would serve as minister of war, with Stauffenberg as his deputy. Once the radio stations were under anti-Nazi control, Goerdeler would broadcast to the German people in the name of the new administration. We can learn something of the plans and intentions of the conspirators from “An Appeal to the German People,” a document that was supposed to be signed by Beck, the prospective head of state. According to available evidence, it was probably written by Stauffenberg, with the assistance of other conspirators:32

  Germans!

  The tyranny of Hitler is broken!

  In the last years frightful things have taken place in front of our very eyes. Hitler, never entrusted with power by the German people, usurped the chancellorship using the worst kind of manipulations . . . To keep power in his own hands, Hitler established a reign of terror. In the past, our compatriots were able to take pride in their honesty and integrity, but Hitler despised the word of God, undermined the law, destroyed integrity and devastated the happiness of millions. He ignored honor and magnanimity, the liberty and lives of others. Countless Germans, as well as people from foreign nations, have been languishing for years in concentration camps, where they suffer agony and are subjected to horrifying tortures. Many of them have died. Our good name has been stained by cruel massacres. With bloodstained hands, Hitler continues to walk the path of madness, leaving behind him a trail of tears, grief and agony . . . while his phony military ingenuity has brought disaster upon our brave soldiers . . . The brave sacrifices of the nation have all been squandered in vain. Ignoring expert advice, Hitl
er has sacrificed entire armies to satisfy his craving for glory and his megalomania.

  The authors of the document knew that only Hitler’s death would liberate the multitude of officers of all echelons from their oath of allegiance, and therefore they attributed great importance to the assassination itself. Beck and Stauffenberg also believed that they had to explain the radical path they had chosen—the utter violation of their own oaths. They wrote,

  Hitler has broken countless times his oath of allegiance to the nation . . . violating divine and human laws. Therefore soldiers, public servants and even ordinary citizens are not bound to him by oath any longer. In this time of emergency I rose up and took action, along with others from all classes and regions of the motherland. Temporarily, I accepted the responsibility of leading the German Reich, and formed a government under the leadership of the Reich chancellor. The government began its duties. [Field Marshal Witzleben] is the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, and on all of the fronts, the commanders in chief have submitted to his command.

  Here follows a general, nonbinding declaration of the government:

  The principles and plans of the government will be published. They will be binding, until the German people have the opportunity to decide . . . We would like to replace power and terror with law and liberty . . . we would like to restore our standing and honor in the community of nations . . . With our best efforts we would like to stretch out our hand and heal the wounds caused by this war to all nations, and rehabilitate the mutual trust between them. The guilty men, who have brought disgrace on our good name, and caused so great a suffering to our people and other nations, will be punished.33

  These proclamations reflect the conspirators’ attempts to explain their acts, prove their patriotism, and give some hope to the German masses, who were languishing under air raids and economic deprivation. The same tendency can be found in Field Marshal Witzleben’s proclamation to the Wehrmacht (coauthored by Beck, Tresckow, Kaiser, and Stauffenberg). It emphasized Hitler’s military folly and responsibility for the loss of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad, in order to contrast it with Beck’s farsightedness in his opposition to the war. Furthermore, it made clear to the soldiers that “above all we have to act because of the crimes committed behind your backs.”34

  The leaders of the Social Democratic resistance group promised their coconspirators in the army that in case of a civil war, they would be able to agitate the workers, organize strikes, and disrupt the movement of National Socialist forces. According to the memoirs of Emil Henk, the charismatic leader Carlo Mierendorff had renewed contact with his old Social Democratic comrades at the end of 1942. Under his auspices, related Henk, they had carefully built a network of activists throughout urban and rural Germany. The network was well compartmentalized, and Mierendorff was supposed to trigger it by command as soon as the generals took over Berlin.35 Mierendorff’s death, in an air raid in December 1943, was a significant blow, but the network continued to work under the supervision of Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber. It is not known how large the network was, and in any case Henk’s self-celebratory account must be read with extreme caution. Even if such a network did exist, one has to doubt the extent of its influence on the large masses of German workers, taking into account the frequent reports on their weakness and apathy recounted by SOPADE, the central committee of the Social Democratic Party in exile.36

  After taking over the government, the conspirators hoped to reach a truce with the Western Allies as quickly as possible. Most of them hoped, almost until the very end, to keep fighting at the eastern front in order to prevent the Bolsheviks from occupying Germany. Between 1942 and 1944, both Moltke and Goerdeler held talks with American diplomats and neutral intermediaries in Istanbul and Stockholm. At the same time, Gisevius had formed a strong contact with Allen Welsh Dulles, the commander of the U.S. intelligence service’s Office of Strategic Services in Bern, and frequently updated him on the development of the conspiracy.37 But the Western counterparts in these talks, both diplomats and intelligence operatives, were not qualified to give any concessions to the conspirators, and the talks failed to impress the decision makers in London and Washington. By and large, Great Britain and the United States insisted on an unconditional surrender of the German Reich, in accordance with what had been decided at the Casablanca Conference, in January 1943. This, as one may guess, did not give the conspirators much room for maneuvering. Even the attempts of Allen Dulles to convince Washington to grant something to Gisevius and Goerdeler did not bear significant fruit.38

  In the opening months of 1944, the conspirators realized that they could expect very little from the Western Allies. A ray of hope, however, came from the western front. Through Caesar von Hofacker, Stauffenberg had been able to get in touch with his old commanding officer Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the celebrated “Desert Fox” and now the man in charge of Army Group B in occupied France. After the ignoble failure of the African campaign, Rommel’s relations with Hitler had steadily deteriorated, and by summer 1944, he began to seriously tilt toward the conspirators.39 He staunchly opposed an assassination, for fear of civil war and internal unrest, yet, according to Hofacker’s testimony, he promised to cooperate nevertheless. The prospect of an alliance with one of the most popular generals in Germany was a great boon for Stauffenberg and his associates. They knew that his cooperation could give them access to immense military forces on the western front.

  The good news, though, came with a wide array of operational difficulties. Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Tresckow were able to revise the Valkyrie plans as a covert operation for a coup d’état, but they did not have the authority to set them in motion. According to the operational procedure, only Gen. Friedrich Fromm, the commander in chief of the Home Army, was authorized to sign these orders.40 As we have seen in chapter 13, Fromm played a sophisticated double game for many years, neither giving the conspirators away nor joining their cause. The general continued to play that game almost to the last moment. When Olbricht lectured him on the urgency of a coup d’état, for example, he merely thanked him and led him to the door.41 On another occasion, he told Olbricht and Stauffenberg “not to forget that fellow Keitel when you do your putsch.”42 The conspirators, as usual, could not understand his message. Was he promising to cooperate with the coup, or merely expressing his well-known animosity to Field Marshal Keitel? No one could tell or predict what his response would be when the time came.

  If Fromm refused to cooperate, the conspirators had planned to arrest him and bring in Gen. Erich Hoepner, an esteemed panzer leader, as his replacement. Hoepner, denounced by Gisevius as an “opportunist,” had indeed been privy to the plans of the conspirators in both 1938 and 1939. At the same time, though, he was a highly enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s war of extermination in the east. During the first months of the operation, he published virulently anti-Semitic orders of the day and enjoyed a “cordial relationship” with Einsatzgruppen murder squads.43 After the collapse of the Moscow offensive, when he was sacked because of his failure to obey the Führer’s “no withdrawal” orders, he resumed cooperation with the conspirators. In winter 1941–1942, he was even mentioned as part of the unrealistic plan to storm Hitler’s headquarters with an armored unit.44 From the conspirators’ point of view, the main problem was that Hoepner had been forbidden, through a personal order from Hitler, to wear a uniform. Many officers were likely to disobey the orders of a sacked general. In short, Hoepner was a far from reassuring alternative to Fromm.45

  Anyway, the coup was still a way off. The demonstration of the new winter uniforms to the Führer had been delayed and rescheduled for the beginning of 1944. Then, a few days before the planned assassination, Bussche was notified by telephone that the design for the uniforms had been destroyed in an air raid. Subsequently, he had to return to the front, where he was seriously wounded.46 Nevertheless, the conspirators were quick to find a new volunteer: Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist. A scion of a noble family, this young lieuten
ant was the son of Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, one of the founders of the German resistance movement. Many decades later, the younger Kleist recalled how he had been drafted:

  It was January 1944. I was on leave at the time when I received an urgent telegram from Schulenburg telling me to report back for duty with my regiment—the 9th Infantry. I met him in his apartment. He got straight to the point by telling me: “Look, we’re ready. Everything is in place. But we need a volunteer to assassinate Hitler. Are you willing to do it?” He explained to me that it would have to be a suicide attempt in which I would blow myself up with Hitler. Schulenburg took me to see Stauffenberg in Berlin who proceeded to brief me further. Stauffenberg greeted me in his usual warm-hearted manner and offered me a cognac. We discussed the plan until I said, “Okay, give me 24 hours to think it over.” I went home to brief my father about it.47

  The young officer traveled from Berlin to Pomerania to seek his father’s advice. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a veteran of the conspiracy, had once put his life on the line by traveling to London as the resistance’s emissary, but would he agree to sacrifice his son for the cause? According to the young man’s testimony, his father paced to the window, paused for a moment, and then advised him to go ahead. “Anyone who fails to respond in such a moment would never be happy again.” Kleist accordingly returned to Potsdam and informed Stauffenberg that he was ready.48

  Stauffenberg gave Kleist British plastic explosives and installed him as Bussche’s replacement in the winter uniform demonstration. Once again, fate intervened: Hitler canceled the demonstration at the last minute, and Kleist had to return to his unit. Before he did, he told Stauffenberg that he was ready to take part in a coup d’état. Counting the failures of Gersdorff and Bussche, Kleist’s had been the third failure of an officer who had volunteered as a suicide bomber. Nothing seemed to work.