Although the true number can never be known, one historian records at least forty-six significant attempts on Hitler’s life between 1921 and 1945.1 In 1933 alone, there were ten which the police regarded as both genuine and serious. Some of the projected assassination schemes were wildly flamboyant and romantically dramatic—a battalion of German and Cossack paratroops, for example, dropping into the airport near Berchtesgaden, storming the headquarters and capturing the Führer, who would no doubt have been shot while trying to escape. Others were more realistic and, in other circumstances, might well have succeeded. And quite apart from plans to remove Hitler by violent means, there were numerous other plots for deposing the National Socialist régime and seizing power.2 A few of these are worthy of note.
On 11 March 1938, the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria occurred. German troops marched into Vienna, and the original domains of the once-proud 600-year-old Habsburg empire were annexed to the Greater German Reich. Hitler then turned his designs to Czechoslovakia, a country which, unlike Austria, was not going to submit peaceably. Under its Chief of Staff, Ludwig Beck, the German high command was alarmed at the prospect of a major European war. Even apart from the moral issues, and the guilt Germany would incur for such aggression, the country was militarily unprepared for a large-scale conflict. If at first Beck’s opposition was based on simple expediency, it soon became a matter of duty and honour:
History will indict these commanders of blood guilt if, in the light of their professional and political knowledge, they do not obey the dictates of their conscience. The soldier’s duty to obey ends when his knowledge, his conscience and his sense of responsibility forbid him to carry out a certain order.3
Towards the end of July 1938, Beck prepared a statement to Hitler:
The Commander-in-Chief of the Army, together with his most senior commanding generals, regret that they cannot assume responsibility for the conduct of a war of this nature without carrying a share of the guilt for it in face of the people and of history. Should the Führer, therefore, insist on the prosecution of this war, they hereby resign from their posts.4
While most of the high command shared Beck’s objections to war, few of them possessed his integrity and preparedness to act on his principles. Lacking the requisite unanimity of support from his subordinates, Beck resigned alone on 18 August, to be succeeded by General Fritz Halder. Halder was no more cordial to Hitler, whom he described as a ‘criminal’, a ‘madman’ and a ‘bloodsucker’. 5 At the same time, he worried that any attempted coup might rend the whole of Germany and culminate in outright civil war. Despite the risk, he proceeded to plot a coup with other highly placed individuals, including Beck and Ernst von Weizsäcker, the father of Germany’s present-day president.
Any premature movement or re-deployment of the army would, it was recognised, attract attention and give the game away, but if Hitler actually ordered the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the army would have to move in any case. Hitler’s own orders, it was therefore decided, would set the army into motion—not towards an advance into Czechoslovakia, but towards an overthrow of the régime and a seizure of power. Among the units assigned to a key rôle in the projected enterprise was the 1st (Light) Division under Lieutenant-General Erich Hoepner, who had been initiated into the clandestine plans. One of Hoepner’s most trusted subordinates, and friends, was the 31-year-old Captain Claus von Stauffenberg. Among the others associated with the undertaking were Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, his uncle, Nikolaus von Üxküll, and two of his cousins, Cäsar von Hofacker and Peter Yorck von Wartenburg. When Stauffenberg emerged from hospital in 1943, he was no stranger to anti-Hitler conspiracy; he had been privy to the network of opposition within the military for five years.
The ‘cover story’ for the coup in 1938—the official reason or ‘excuse’ for the army’s seizure of power—was to be an alleged plot by the SS to usurp control of the country. This, it was felt, would ensure the allegiance of military personnel of all ranks. Such, already, was the animosity felt towards the SS by the army, and that animosity was only to intensify.
Many of the 1938 plotters wanted only to arrest Hitler and place him on trial. This would have precluded his being transformed into a martyr, and would also have pre-empted any accusations of a ‘stab in the back’. Since 1933, one of the conspirators had secretly been collecting and collating material for a legal indictment. But there was also talk of having the Führer officially declared insane by a panel of doctors. And despite a number of objections, there evolved a contingency plan for assassination, on the grounds that ‘tyrannicide had always been looked upon as a moral commandment’. According to Hans-Bernd Gisevius, then serving in the Ministry of the Interior:
Not every attempt at a coup d’état can be judged by the same ethical standards. I am speaking of a situation in domestic and foreign politics which already was rife with murder and injustice, which was moving towards the bloodbath of a war. At stake was much more than the peace and security of one single country. The interests of millions of innocent people were more imperative than the requirements of justice—requirements which the tyrant himself had unfailingly violated.6
A ‘raiding party’ of armed officers was accordingly formed, quietly assembled and ‘held ready in certain Berlin apartments’. When the coup was launched, this ‘raiding party’ was to descend on the Chancellery, ostensibly to arrest the Führer. In fact, ‘more drastic measures’ had been prepared: the ‘raiding party’ was ‘determined to provoke an incident and shoot Hitler in the process’.7 A new German government would then be formed and a democratic constitutional monarchy established, the crown being conferred on one of two grandsons of the former Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In the meantime, high-level diplomatic moves had been initiated through the Foreign Office. Secret emissaries were dispatched to France and to Britain, whose support was deemed to be of paramount importance. Throughout the autumn, consultations were conducted in secret with British officials.8
On 15 September, Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, arrived at Berchtesgaden to discuss the escalating Czech crisis with Hitler. So far as the projected coup was concerned, everything was in place: Chamberlain would remain adamant in the face of Hitler’s voracious demands, Hitler would in turn refuse to back down and, with the prospect of war looming, the conspirators would have grounds on which to act. Instead Chamberlain gave way to Hitler, accepting that the Sudetenland—the German-speaking enclave of Czechoslovakia—should be ceded to the Reich. The conspirators were thrown into ‘consternation’ and ‘confusion’. ‘In their view the British statesman had been doing homage to a gangster and thus had let them down.’9
For the moment there was still hope. In his statements, Chamberlain had said more than he was authorised to say and had to return to London for Parliamentary ratification. Under clandestine pressure from the conspirators themselves, Britain placed her fleet on alert—though it is hard to see how this can have been much consolation to a landlocked Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia herself mobilised. France recalled her reservists. International tension intensified, and it looked as if the renewed threat of war would at last give the conspirators the sanction they required.
On 27 September, Hitler mobilised certain divisions near the Czech border. On the 28th, the ‘raiding party’ bent on Hitler’s removal readied themselves for their assault on the Chancellery, the doors of which, in accordance with their plan, had been left open. But on the very next day, there occurred the infamous Munich Conference, in which Chamberlain and the French Premier Daladier capitulated to Hitler’s demands, thereby removing the last obstacle to his advance, unchallenged and unmolested, into Czechoslovakia. Without the threat of war to validate their undertaking, the conspirators were stripped of all justification for action. ‘So,’ the historian Peter Hoffmann observed, ‘the ground was cut from under the feet of the most promising attempt to overthrow Hitler’, and, ‘The Munich Conference and the abandonment of Czechoslovakia by the Western powers
administered to the anti-Hitler opposition a blow from which it could not recover.’10 At the Nuremberg trials after the war, General Halder was asked directly: ‘If Chamberlain had not come to Munich, would the plan have been executed and Hitler deposed?’ He replied that the plan would indeed have been carried out.11
It is, of course, easy to second-guess history, but it is difficult to imagine a moment of indecision and irresolution with more tragic consequences. Had Chamberlain remained firm at Munich, it is often asserted, Hitler would have backed down. In fact, Hitler would not have backed down, but, by virtue of not doing so, he would almost certainly have been deposed and very probably eliminated—and this would have been even more beneficial to humanity and to twentieth-century history. In their policy of ‘appeasement’, Chamberlain and Daladier have more to answer for than is generally believed.
Of all the plots against Hitler, that of 1938 stood probably the greatest chance of success and came closest to effective realisation. It was also the last occasion on which senior officers of the high command, including a presiding Chief of the General Staff, would have the willpower, the unanimity and the opportunity to work in such close concert. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, German successes in the field, and the stranglehold of the SS and Gestapo at home, ensured a support and a docility among the populace that made a full-scale coup increasingly difficult to contemplate. Yet even before Stauffenberg’s appearance on the scene, attempts on the Führer’s life continued.
In September 1939, immediately after the outbreak of war, Colonel-General Kurt von Hammerstein tried desperately to engineer one such assassination. Hammerstein was a former Commander-in-Chief of the army, who, on the inauguration of hostilities, was entrusted with one of the German armies on the French front. He was involved in no organised conspiracy, gave no thought to wider political repercussions; but his hatred for Hitler was more than a decade old, pre-dating even the Nazis’ rise to power. Acting virtually alone, he tried repeatedly—and unsuccessfully—to lure Hitler to his headquarters. ‘I would have rendered him harmless once and for all,’ Hammerstein subsequently said, ‘and even without judicial proceedings.’12 The military historian Sir John Wheeler-Bennett writes that, had Hitler only come within Hammerstein’s reach, the general ‘would have dealt faithfully and adequately with him’.13 Shortly before his death from cancer in 1943, Hammerstein stated: ‘A nation that has lost every feeling for right and wrong, good and evil, that commits such crimes, deserves to be destroyed . . .’14
The following month, after the successful conclusion of the Polish campaign, General Halder himself tried again, hoping to neutralise the Führer before shooting actually started with Britain and France. The speed and one-sidedness of the victory in Poland had made it more difficult to muster support than in 1938. Nevertheless, Halder was able to draw on most of the individuals involved in the previous year’s plot. Among his new co-conspirators were the Panzer, commander Heinz Guderian and the young Henning von Tresckow (later to become one of Stauffenberg’s closest associates and colleagues). Plans were laid to arrest and, in all likelihood, assassinate not just Hitler, but most of the Nazi Party hierarchy as well. The Kaiser’s grandson, Prince Louis-Ferdinand, secretly declared his readiness, if called upon, to serve.15 Clandestine links were established with the Vatican. The 9th Infantry Regiment of Potsdam—among whose young officers were Axel von dem Bussche and Ewald von Kleist, two of Stauffenberg’s subsequent collaborators—was placed on alert and assigned a key rôle in the undertaking.
Almost immediately, things began to go wrong. A bomb which had nothing to do with the conspiracy was planted in a Munich beer hall on 8 November. There followed a clampdown on the availability of explosives, making it impossible for the conspirators to obtain the supplies they needed. Worse still, they were unable to obtain the support of Field Marshal Walter von Brauchitsch, Commander-in-Chief of the army, who had just had a row with Hitler and been badly intimidated. Without Brauchitsch’s co-operation, action was unthinkable. Halder panicked, called off the projected coup and ordered the destruction of all records. For the next few weeks, he carried a loaded revolver in his pocket on every visit to the Chancellery, intending to shoot Hitler personally, but he could never muster the resolve to perform the act. At one point, he even talked about employing a contract killer, but it was too late for that.
One of Halder’s co-conspirators in the plots of 1938 and 1939 was Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben. As Commander-in-Chief in the West, Witzleben devised elaborate plans for assassinating Hitler in Paris in 1941. The Führer was to be invited to the French capital. A parade would be organised down the Champs Elysées, and Hitler would take the salute at the Place de la Concorde. Here he was to be shot by two officers on Witzleben’s staff; and, in case anything went wrong, another officer was entrusted with a bomb to throw.16 But after his unannounced visit at the end of the French campaign, on 23 June 1940, Hitler was never again to visit Paris. He repeatedly declined Witzleben’s invitations; and in March 1942, while in hospital for an operation, Witzleben was relieved of command and forced into retirement.
In January 1943, Major-General Henning von Tresckow was stationed with Army Group Centre on the Russian front. Tresckow had set about assembling more than fifteen prominent staff officers into a cadre that would turn the entire army group ‘into an instrument for a coup’. Among the troops on whom Tresckow counted was a highly mobile cavalry unit: two battalions of 1,100 men each, 650 of them Russian Cossacks. Once a coup was set into motion, this unit would have quickly been flown to Berlin. According to Tresckow’s original plan, Hitler was to be invited to the army group’s headquarters at Smolensk. During a meal in the mess, some two dozen officers would simultaneously draw their pistols and shoot him—thus making the responsibility collective and, at the same time, ensuring that at least one bullet elude the security entourage of SS to find its target. Unfortunately, the army group commander, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, had to be informed, if only to prevent his getting into the line of fire. Kluge scotched the plan not because he objected to assassinating Hitler, but because, by the tenets of the German Officer Corps, ‘it was not seemly to shoot a man at lunch’.17
On 13 March 1943, Hitler did visit Army Group Centre at Smolensk, and Tresckow tried again. As Hitler returned to his aircraft from the army group’s headquarters, troops lining the route were to open fire with their submachine-guns. But Hitler, seized by a sudden whim, decided to take another, apparently more scenic, route.18
Tresckow had a contingency plan which depended on the help of one of his friends from before the war, Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a former lawyer attached to Army Group Centre as an aide-de-camp. In 1939, Schlabrendorff had met secretly with Churchill, hoping to make the British government aware of the strength of the German opposition to Hitler. Now, Schlabrendorff had prepared a lethal package. He had used British explosives—dropped for Special Operations Executive agents and captured—because British fuses were silent, whereas German fuses made a slight hissing sound that might give them away. The principle governing Schlabrendorff’s devices was simple. A wire held the firing pin of the detonator in place against a spring. At the opposite end of this wire, there was positioned a small glass phial of acid. Once the phial was broken, the acid would eat its way through the wire. After a calculated interval, it would release the detonator’s firing pin.
Tresckow and Schlabrendorff had constructed their explosive devices carefully, packed so as to resemble two square bottles of Cointreau. During lunch at army group headquarters, Tresckow casually asked a member of Hitler’s entourage if he could take two bottles of liqueur to a friend at Hitler’s headquarters in Rastenburg, whence the Führer’s aircraft was bound. The request appeared innocent enough and was unthinkingly granted.
Schlabrendorff took the parcel to the airstrip and waited to see which aircraft Hitler would board. He then activated the bomb by breaking the phial of acid and handed the parcel to an aide. The aircraft took off, a
ccompanied by a fighter escort. Back at army group headquarters, Tresckow and Schlabrendorff telephoned a codeword to their co-conspirators in Berlin to indicate that the assassination attempt was under way. According to their calculations, the package would explode when Hitler’s aircraft was more or less over Minsk. ‘With mounting tension,’ Schlabrendorff subsequently wrote, ‘we waited for news of the “accident” . . .’
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 Hitler himself had safely reached Headquarters.19
The projected coup had to be cancelled immediately, and Tresckow and his collaborators were in despair. In the meantime, the explosive device had urgently to be retrieved before it was discovered. Tresckow telephoned the aide who had carried it and nonchalantly asked if it had yet been delivered to its intended recipient. On being told it had not, Tresckow feigned embarrassment and said he had mistakenly sent the wrong package. He would undertake to get it exchanged for the right one. The following day, Schlabrendorff flew to Rastenburg with two bottles of genuine Cointreau.
As I exchanged parcels ... I felt my blood running cold, for Hitler’s aide, serenely unaware of what he was holding, handed me the bomb with a grin, juggling it back and forth in a way which made me fear a belated explosion.20
Schlabrendorff took his deadly package to the nearby railway station, where he caught a night train for Berlin. Locking himself into a compartment, he proceeded to dismantle the device to see what had gone wrong. The glass phial had broken according to plan. The acid had spilled out and eaten its way through the wire. The firing pin had been released, but for some reason, the detonator had not triggered the desired explosion. At the time, Schlabrendorff guessed the detonator had perhaps been a dud, but it was blackened, which indicated that it had indeed gone off. It now seems most likely that, in the extreme cold over Russia in March, the explosive had simply failed to ignite.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 3
