The Plots Against Hitler

by Danny Orbach

  His wife tried to convince him to argue for his innocence in a public trial. “No,” said Rommel. “I would not be afraid to be tried in public, for I can defend everything I have done. But I know that I should never reach Berlin alive.”51

  Rommel donned the old coat of the Africa Corps, took the field marshal staff, and climbed into the car. It stopped in a clearing, and the two generals gave Rommel a vial of poison. The driver later said, “I saw Rommel in the back seat. He was obviously dying, sunk in himself, without consciousness, and sobbing; not groaning or rattling, but sobbing. His cap had fallen. I straightened him up, and put the cap on him again.”52

  Even before Rommel’s suicide, Field Marshal Kluge understood that his time was also running out. On July 21, he tried, in panic, to loudly denounce the conspirators, and wrote Hitler that “a vicious hand, my Führer, was sent to assassinate you, but it failed by the blessing of Providence . . . I promise you, my Führer, absolute loyalty, whatever will happen.” In an appeal to his soldiers, he heaped abuse upon the conspirators and called them “criminals” and “a small clique of expelled officers.” But Fromm’s fate showed that turncoats were not to be spared, and Kluge was incriminated by too much evidence.53

  If that were not distressing enough for Kluge, a few days after July 20, a ghost from the past came to haunt him. Colonel Gersdorff, of all people, turned up at the headquarters and tried to convince Kluge to do something by himself. All was not yet lost. Kluge could surrender now to the Western Allies and overthrow Hitler. In a second conversation, Gersdorff tried his luck again with a similar proposal. “But if it fails,” protested the field marshal, “Field Marshal von Kluge will go down in history as the biggest swine.” Gersdorff countered that “all great men in history had to face the decision, whether to be denounced by history or be remembered as saviors in times of emergency.” Kluge, sad and resigned, put his hand on Gersdorff’s shoulder. “Gersdorff,” he said, “Field Marshal von Kluge is no great man.”54

  All his fears came true. A short while afterward, Kluge received a brief telegram from headquarters: he was relieved from duty, to be replaced by Field Marshal Model, an ardent National Socialist. Kluge drove to a quiet country road in France and took poison. For Hitler he left a last letter, expressing and explaining the ambiguity of his behavior throughout the war, from the bribe he received in 1942, through his limited cooperation with the resistance in 1943, up to his final betrayal on July 20, 1944:

  Both of us, Rommel and I, predicted the current development. Our advice went unheeded . . . Field Marshal Model has varied experience, but I do not know if he is able to cope with the situation. I hope with all my heart that he can. But if things develop differently, and your new weapons do not work, please consider, my leader, ending the war. The German people have suffered so terribly, and the time has come to put an end to this horror . . . I have always admired your greatness . . . If fate is stronger than your genius and power of will, Providence is stronger too . . . Be great enough now, to end a hopeless struggle when necessary.55

  At the Nuremberg Trials, General Jodl recalled that Hitler read Kluge’s letter in silence. A few days afterward, on August 31, he remarked that but for his suicide, there would have been no choice but to arrest him.56

  On July 27, the National Socialists “took care” of the scattered remnants of Tresckow’s group. Joachim Kuhn, the right-hand man of both Tresckow and Stauffenberg, was advised by his division commander that a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Unlike Tresckow, he did not commit suicide, nor did he wait for his hangman as Witzleben had. Instead, he crossed the front lines and gave himself up to the Red Army. Margarethe von Oven, Tresckow’s loyal friend, was arrested by Gestapo agents in Berlin. Fabian von Schlabrendorff was picked up from his bed on August 17. As Tresckow had committed suicide, Kuhn had deserted, and Gersdorff’s involvement had not been discovered, Schlabrendorff—the eastern broker—was the only link through which the Nazis could get to the others. He was led to a Gestapo cell in Berlin and there met many of his coconspirators, including Canaris, Oster, Dohnanyi, Goerdeler, Bonhoeffer, and Popitz. Subsequently, he was handcuffed and led to be interrogated, where he was told that his activities were already known and he had better confess. Schlabrendorff denied any involvement in the conspiracy and said emphatically that he knew nothing about Tresckow and his plans. A few days later, he was led to the crematorium of Sachsenhausen to witness the cremation of Tresckow’s remains. But the psychological trick failed. He still refused to confess, and his interrogators turned to violence. Schlabrendorff’s hands were chained behind his back and he was told he had one last chance to confess. When he refused, he was tortured by a device that forced pointed pins into his fingers. Then his legs were pierced with nails.57

  Schlabrendorff kept his silence, even when his interrogators resorted to medieval tortures such as the rack. In the end, he was severely beaten and then splashed with cold water to wake him up. One day later, he had a heart attack but was tortured again after a short while. Finally, he confessed but took pains to incriminate only himself and others who were already dead. The interrogators then decided to hand him over to the People’s Court.

  The trial opened on February 3, 1945, chaired again by Dr. Roland Freisler. Schlabrendorff stood at the dock along with his old friend Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin. Kleist, the fearless aristocrat who had fought against Nazism since before 1933, stood calmly in the dock. When Freisler accused him of treason, he answered, “I have committed treason since January 30, 1933, always and by all means. I never denied my struggle against Hitler and Nazism. I see this struggle as the will of God. Only He will be my judge.”58 When Schlabrendorff’s turn came, air-raid sirens began to wail. Thousands of American bombers were pulverizing Berlin in the heaviest bombardment since the outbreak of the war. The court moved to a shelter. Freisler, undaunted, began to read the indictment against Schlabrendorff. Then a bomber scored a direct hit on the court building. A heavy beam fell on Freisler’s head; he died on the spot. One of the lawyers turned to his bloody carcass on the floor and saw the indictment still held tightly in his fist.59

  Another session of the court, chaired by Freisler’s vice president, Dr. Wilhelm Crohne, continued Schlabrendorff and Kleist’s trial. Kleist was sentenced to death, but Schlabrendorff was spared. The judge was afraid that the description of the tortures, given by the defendant in chilling detail, would leak out. “After I finished speaking,” recalled Schlabrendorff, “silence reigned in the courtroom. My true statement made such an impression, that I noticed it even on the judge’s face.” Crohne said, “I forbid all present, without exception, to speak about what they heard here.” He was probably worried for the public image of the Nazi justice system. “That includes written descriptions and formal addresses to the authorities.” Crohne decided to acquit Schlabrendorff and ordered him released.60

  Still, after Schlabrendorff was led back to the Gestapo prison, officials explained to him that the “People’s Court was wrong,” but out of “respect for the court” they would only shoot him, not hang him. In a cynical bureaucratic gesture, he was even forced to “acknowledge this information with his signature.”61 Subsequently, he was transferred to Flossenbürg, a notorious concentration camp, along with Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer, Thomas, Schacht, and others. When they passed inside the electric fence, it seemed to many that all hope was lost. “No one gets out of here alive,” Schacht whispered to Thomas.62

  Gisevius, as usual, had been luckier than others. While he was hiding in a Berlin safe house, his friends from the American OSS worked to save his life: “Good news came from Switzerland for me personally. Help was on the way. I had friends there—and friends helped. A ‘book’ given to intermediaries was to serve as a confirmation to me that I could trust the messenger. A week passed—two, three, four. Then at last it came.”63

  In addition, Gisevius was informed that help would arrive “shortly.” After months of nerve-racking anticipation, a mysterious woman came into t
he hideout and asked him if “everything was all right.” A few moments later, the doorbell rang again. Gisevius rushed out, only to see a blacked-out car racing away. A package was waiting for him in the mailbox. There, he found a Gestapo ID and a forged passport under the name Dr. Hoffmann, complete with a top-secret document from the Gestapo in Berlin. Gisevius must have been astonished: Dr. Hoffmann, it was written there, was an agent going to perform a confidential and important duty in Switzerland. All officials of the government and the party were required to help him as much as they could. Gisevius left for the train station immediately. Resourceful and ruthless as ever, he showed the ID, declared himself a Gestapo agent, and secured a comfortable seat. A few hours elapsed, and he arrived at the Swiss border.

  The atmosphere at the border was calm. According to Gisevius, “The two officials, the Gestapo man and the customs officers, rubbed their eyes sleepily” as he came for inspection. When presented with Gisevius’s faked credentials, they might have wondered about his shabby appearance. In fact, Gisevius was worried that his cover story might blow up, as his dirty clothes and overgrown hair did not fit the strict standards of the SS. He had worn the same crumpled suit since July 20, and his hat, “borrowed” from another passenger on the train, was also ill fitting. Yet the officials did not ask too many questions. Maybe, he surmised, they believed his strange appearance was tailored for a particular spying mission. When they opened the gate, Gisevius later recalled, he raised his arm “limply in response to their greeting, for the two of them stood stiffly to see me out of the Gestapo’s Germany. And then I was free.”64

  But Gisevius’s friends and superiors, the members of that old resistance cell in the Abwehr, were not so lucky. In spring 1945, Canaris was still fighting a pitched battle with his interrogators to refute their evidence and prove to them that everything he had done was part and parcel of his military duties. He never knew of Müller’s talks with enemy agents about the information leaked by Oster, or about the conspiracy and treason lurking all around him.65 But in April, the Gestapo commissioners searched the Wehrmacht high command at Zossen and came back with a big fish in their net. They had found Canaris’s diary, full of incriminating evidence about his involvement starting from 1938 and 1939, the protection he had granted to the conspirators in his service, and, even worse, attempts by his closest confidants to give secret information to the Allies and sabotage the German war effort.66 The fate of Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, the man who combined the “purity of a dove with the guile of a snake,” was sealed. During the war, he had saved hundreds, both Jews and Christians, but he could do nothing for himself. Once, as the commander of the Abwehr, he had had at his disposal thousands of agents, troops, and an enormous budget. Now, the SS faced an old, depressed man, beaten and abused by guards. “I was not a traitor,” he told a Danish officer held next to him. “I only fulfilled my duty as a German. If you survive, let my wife know.”67

  Hans von Dohnanyi was no longer the energetic jurist of bygone days, the heart and soul behind the rescue and resistance operations at the Abwehr. In a futile attempt to delay his trial, he swallowed poisoned food sent by his wife and contracted diphtheria, which paralyzed half of his body.68 The Nazis had no mercy. A special SS court convened at Sachsenhausen and sentenced him to death. Canaris, Oster, and others were condemned to death as well by a similar court.

  Canaris’s Danish neighbor later testified that on April 9, 1945, the admiral was dragged naked from his cell to the gallows. He was killed with Oster and Bonhoeffer, and his body was found two days later by U.S. forces. Hans Oster, the first conspirator in the German army, was one of the last to be hanged—the first to rise up, the last to fall. Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin was executed in Berlin that same day.69

  Schlabrendorff was supposed to die with them, but again a coincidence saved his life. He was transferred to Dachau and then to the south Tyrol. There, he was interned with other prominent survivors from the resistance movement and beyond: Gens. Franz Halder, Georg Thomas, and Alexander von Falkenhausen; former minister Hjalmar Schacht; Dr. Josef Müller of the Abwehr; and the families of Goerdeler and Hassell. Along with them were prisoners from abroad: Best and Stevens, the two British officers kidnapped at Venlo in 1939; the French former premier Léon Blum; and Kurt von Schuschnigg, the last chancellor of Austria. Finally, the whole group, conspirators and foreign prisoners alike, was released by Wehrmacht soldiers and delivered unharmed to the U.S. army.70

  Under the orders of the local commander of the Allied forces, the former conspirators were transferred to Naples and from there to a hotel on Capri, the picture-postcard island in the Bay of Naples. U.S. intelligence agent Gero von Gaevernitz, a German American who had been in contact with the conspirators before, went at once to see them. As he entered the hotel, he was immediately surrounded by an agitated group of former political prisoners, some of them barely saved from SS execution squads. “My family does not know that I’m alive,” said one of the prisoners. “The Gestapo has announced my execution.” “Never mind my clothes,” said a woman next to him. “I was dragged through twelve concentration camps.” One man, however, stood out among the others. He was calm, cool-headed, and less eager to speak about his experience. And then it dawned on Gaevernitz: in front of him was Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the man who planted a bomb in Hitler’s plane in 1943.”71 Subsequently, Schlabrendorff was allowed to repatriate to Germany. His memoir The Secret War Against Hitler became one of the major firsthand accounts of the German resistance.

  Because of the fortitude and silence of Schlabrendorff and other conspirators, some of the men of July 20 lived to witness the end of the war. Col. Rudolf von Gersdorff, Capt. Axel von dem Bussche, Capt. Eberhard von Breitenbuch, and Lt. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, all suicide-bomb volunteers, were saved from the noose. Margarethe von Oven managed to hide the extent of her involvement from the Gestapo and was released from arrest after two weeks of questioning. Other survivors included Capt. Philipp von Boeselager, Lt. Gen. Hans Speidel, Gen. Georg Thomas, and a handful of members from the Kreisau Circle and from the Social Democratic and conservative resistance.

  Maj. Joachim Kuhn was released from Soviet captivity in 1955 in body, but not in soul. He had suffered severe torture and came back a deeply disturbed shadow of his former self. He spent the rest of his life in delirium. A lost German prince in his own mind, he sent countless letters to West German authorities claiming imaginary inheritance rights. Stauffenberg, his former friend, became an object of hatred to him, as did all the other conspirators. When Axel von dem Bussche came to see him, the visitor was kicked out of the house. In Kuhn’s clouded inner world, perhaps, the resistance had come to be associated only with personal misfortune.72

  Countess Nina von Stauffenberg gave birth in prison to her fifth child, Constanze. Nina was released a few days before the Third Reich surrendered, and she located her children relatively quickly, but only after going through some dangerous adventures (including an encounter with an angry, drunk American soldier who threatened to kill her as revenge for his fallen brother, before softening up and showing her pictures of his family). Her excellent English helped her to communicate with U.S. occupation troops and mediate between them and the local German population.73

  So ended the story of the German resistance movement; honorably, perhaps, but in utter failure. Its members were able neither to prevent the outbreak of the war nor to bring it to an early end. Notwithstanding all of their efforts and sacrifice, most Germans still followed Hitler to the bitter end.

  20

  Motives in the Twilight

  What good are our tactical and other capabilities when the critical questions remain open?

  —HENNING VON TRESCKOW

  THE LONG DEBATE in the resistance literature about whether the conspirators had “moral” or “patriotic” motives has usually been oblivious to the ambiguity of the basic definitions. What is a motive? What does morality actually mean? Are morality and nationalism mutually exclusive? What happens
when there is a clash between two moral considerations, or between moral purism and the practical interests of a conspiracy? These questions were painfully relevant for the conspirators, especially the military ones. We have to confront them, too, if we want to understand the motives of these men and women; just as we must try to overcome the temptation to project our categories, in the twenty-first century, onto the bygone world of the Second World War.

  However, before we start our discussion, it is important to counter three obstinate myths prevalent in German resistance historiography. Many observers and scholars have argued, first, that the conspirators were fighting Hitler only to save themselves or to “restore their past careers.”1 Yet conspiring against the Nazi regime was not the best way to preserve one’s life, and the danger certainly outweighed the slight chance of getting a lucrative job after the planned coup. If personal security or professional frustration had been the conspirators’ primary concern, they would not have jeopardized their own lives and those of their families. Most likely, they would have bowed to the regime and later kowtowed to the occupiers, aiming to safely restore their past careers in East or West Germany. The lethality of any anti-Nazi activity in the Third Reich, let alone attempting to assassinate Hitler, surely precludes such selfish motives.