The ‘Wolfsschanze’ or ‘Wolf’s Lair’ , Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg, was admirably in harmony with Hitler’s state of mind from 1943 on. Now in Poland and called Ketrzyn, it lies amid the Masurian Lakes, the low-lying marshes, swamps and forests of what was then East Prussia, some fifty miles east of the old Teutonic Knights’ capital at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). The soil around Rastenburg was compounded of centuries of corpses. Here, in 1410, the Battle of Tannenberg had been fought, and the Teutonic Knights, then at the apex of their power, had suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of a combined Polish and Lithuanian host. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, two complete Russian armies had been outfought, outmanoeuvred, encircled and forced to surrender by the ingenuity of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. They had christened the engagement ‘Tannenberg’ to ensure that their triumph, rather than the 1410 débâcle, would be permanently associated with the name. But whatever echoes or residues of former victory remained, Rastenburg was a dark, bleak and forbidding place. The austere headquarters compound consisted of ‘a gloomy camp of huts’ and underground concrete bunkers scattered about the depths of the sombre forest. Visitors spoke repeatedly of an atmosphere of brooding and oppressive isolation, of a dank clamminess rank with perversity, decay and death. This was hardly surprising. Beyond the wooded low hills surrounding the place, smoke rose from the chimneys of the ovens at Stutthof and Treblinka and, not too much further to the south, at Chelmno, Sobibor and Maidanek.
Unless he could be caught on one of his increasingly rare forays into the outside world, the conspirators, in order to strike Hitler, would have to reach into Rastenburg itself. In either case, the undertaking would not be easy. Someone had to be found who enjoyed at least some access to the Führer and could circumvent his elaborate security precautions or penetrate to him in the isolation of his headquarters. Although the conspirators’ network did have individuals placed within the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, none of them was suitable or prepared to assume the task of committing the assassination personally.
Although his access to the Führer was at first not much greater than most other officers’, Stauffenberg announced his readiness to do the job himself. There were obvious disadvantages to his performing that rôle, and urgent objections from his colleagues. In the first place, he was severely handicapped. However impressively he had managed to surmount his injuries, he would, inevitably, be lacking in dexterity. More important still, Stauffenberg was the acknowledged leader of the conspiracy, the figure to whom everyone else turned for guiding force and strength of resolve. His qualities had imparted cohesion and momentum to the enterprise; and except perhaps for Tresckow, then a thousand miles away on the Eastern Front, there was no one of sufficiently authoritative rank to fill his shoes. He might indeed succeed in assassinating the Führer, but if he himself died in the process, the conspiracy would be left headless, bereft of impetus, morale and presiding spirit. In his absence, the conspiracy itself might fragment, and the consequences would then be disastrous—a backlash, anarchy or civil war.
Volunteers had therefore to be found for what would undoubtedly be a suicide mission. Stauffenberg accordingly turned to the 9th Infantry Regiment of Potsdam, which had been assigned a crucial rôle in the aborted coup of 1939. The man chosen to exterminate the Führer was a young captain, Axel, Freiherr (Baron) von dem Bussche.10 Among his many decorations was the Ritterkreuz (Knight’s Cross), the highest German military honour. Having been wounded in action, Bussche was unfit for further front-line duty and had been attached as adjutant to his regiment’s reserve at Potsdam. Himself a passionate opponent of the régime, he had been asked by the conspirators to ensure that his unit, insofar as possible, contained no Nazis and no supporters of the Party.
During the summer and early autumn of 1943, new uniforms—particularly winter clothing for the Eastern Front—had been designed and produced for the army. Stauffenberg undertook to arrange a demonstration at which the new kit would be modelled for Hitler personally. Bussche would serve as model—with explosives strapped around his waist and, should a coup de grâce be required, a long thin knife in his boot. At the appropriate moment, he would clasp the Führer in an embrace and both would be blown up.
Hitler assented in principle to attending a display of the new uniforms, but refused to be pinned down to a specific date. Until the end of November, Bussche held himself in readiness for self-immolation and martyrdom. Before he could be called upon, an Allied air raid destroyed the specimen kit he was to model. Before replacements could be produced, Bussche himself was returned to active duty and was again badly wounded, losing a leg. Unable conveniently to dispose of them, he was forced to carry his explosives around with him from hospital to hospital. Only towards the end of 1944 did he find an opportunity to discard them into a lake.
With Bussche no longer available, the suicide mission he had undertaken to perform devolved on another young officer from the 9th Infantry, Lieutenant Ewald Heinrich von Kleist.11 Descended from the great Prussian playwright and story-writer, as well as from a long line of military commanders, Kleist was fervently anti-Nazi. His father had been a long-standing opponent of the régime, marked down to be murdered on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 and escaping only by virtue of advance warning.
Towards the end of January 1944, the stock of new uniforms had been replenished and Stauffenberg made the requisite preparations with Kleist. The lethal fashion show was re-scheduled for the second week of February, and the conspirators, from the Eastern Front to the Atlantic Wall, again put themselves on alert, awaiting the codeword signifying the Führer’s death. At the last minute, for reasons that remain unknown to this day, Hitler ordered the demonstration postponed.
Another attempt, this time to shoot Hitler, was undertaken on 11 March. It, too, was thwarted by chance. And by now Germany’s situation was becoming increasingly desperate. An Allied invasion of France was imminent, the only uncertainty about it being when and where it would take place. Allied columns were racing each other, almost unimpeded now, towards Rome, and the juggernaut of the Red Army was advancing from the east. If Hitler had been inaccessible before, he became even more so now. Given his failure to come within range of the conspirators, they, it was clear, would have to go to him. Assassination would have to be attempted at his headquarters in Berchtesgaden, or in Rastenburg, but no outsider could hope for access to either sanctuary.
On 5 July, Julius Leber—one of the conspirators’ two candidates for future Chancellor—was arrested by the Gestapo. The authorities had got wind of something and were beginning to close in. Stauffenberg had visited Rastenburg a month before, on the day following the Allied invasion of Normandy. He had now been promoted and, as Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army, could expect to be summoned at frequent intervals to the Führer’s headquarters. It was becoming daily more apparent that he would have to carry out the assassination himself, and that he would have to do so quickly. Stauffenberg said, ‘Now it is not the Führer or the country or my wife and four children which are at stake; it is the entire German people.’12 He would also have to preserve himself intact, escape from the scene of his deed and contrive somehow to return safely to Berlin, there to preside over the details attending activation of Operation Valkyrie.
Again his colleagues protested, insisting that ‘the Chief of the General Staff could not at the same time lead the assault party’.13 Even more than before, Stauffenberg was now recognised as the incendiary soul of the entire German resistance.
These objections were not without validity. If human error doomed the conspiracy to failure, the error was a simple and understandable one. Everything depended too entirely, too exclusively, too absolutely on the power of a single man. The will to act, the capacity to improvise and deal with contingencies, impetus, tenacity and resourcefulness—all rested with Stauffenberg. He was the catalyst, the binding and solidifying agent that held disparate components together, making them cohere. In his absence, concerted decision would
disintegrate into uncertainty, panic, hysteria, inertia; and the machinery he had set in motion would falter, then stall.
By July 1944, it had become clear that the assassination—the key to everything else—would not be carried out at all unless Stauffenberg himself acted as assassin. But the odds against Stauffenberg were staggering ... From a military standpoint, Stauffenberg’s plan to act in both rôles was absurd. A commander was to carry out his own orders at the front; then, three hours would elapse between the assassination and the return of the assassin to Berlin—if he did return. He had to try to survive the assassination attempt and return to the coup d’état centre, because no one could lead the coup in his absence.14
Stauffenberg had no illusions about the difficulties of the task he had taken upon himself. He and his colleagues were dubious about any prospect of success:
Stauffenberg and his friends knew that their chance of success was as good as naught. They acted in the face of overwhelming odds, without substantial hope of succeeding in killing Hitler or in seizing control of Germany. They had even less hope of surviving politically more than a few days or weeks, no hope therefore of putting into effect their reconstruction ideas, for they saw no way of avoiding the occupation, amputation and division of Germany by enemy forces. But General Beck, Brigadier von Tresckow, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Claus and Berthold von Stauffenberg all agreed: The assassination had to be attempted at all cost.15
Statements by the conspirators themselves would seem to support this contention, reflecting a resigned scepticism. Lieutenant-Colonel Cäsar von Hofacker, Stauffenberg’s cousin and one of the leaders of the conspiracy in Paris, when asked the odds in his favour, replied coolly: ‘Ten per cent.’16 When asked by his wife if he thought the coup could succeed, Julius Leber answered: ‘I don’t know. I have only one head, and I can’t use it for anything better than this cause.’17 According to Tresckow:
The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be undertaken. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take this decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.18
Stauffenberg’s uncle, Graf von Üxküll, felt that ‘even though I believe that it has in fact no chance of success, it at least has the advantage that we shall have shown the world that some attempt has been made by Germans to rid themselves of these criminals’.19 And Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, stated: ‘The most terrible thing is knowing that it cannot succeed and that we must still do it for our country and our children.’20
Yet it is clear that for Stauffenberg and his colleagues, the enterprise was much more than just a poetic symbolic gesture. If their intention was simply to demonstrate to the world that there were ‘good Germans’, it would have been easy enough, after all, to martyr themselves. A head-on suicidal attack on the Führer, on one of his headquarters, on the SS or on some crucial installation would have served that purpose, and spared the conspirators the complexities of organising a coup extending from the Eastern Front to the Atlantic wall. Even a kamikaze-style attack on Hitler alone would have stood a greater chance of success. The point is that, whatever their misgivings about its outcome, the conspirators went about their undertaking quite as if they expected it to succeed, and they were to continue doing so even after the last hope of success had been extinguished. This requires greater courage and tenacity than simple martyrdom; and it means more than any poetic symbolic gesture, such as those one finds, for example, in the history of Irish republicanism.
In the days following the Normandy invasion, Stauffenberg would again rally his co-conspirators with the poetry of Stefan George. He would recite ‘The Antichrist’ and the prophetic ‘Verses for the Dead’:21
When men of the future are purged of dishonour,
Their shoulders released from the shackles of bondage,
Their vitals alive with the hunger for virtue,
Then flashes of blood will illumine the millions
Of graves of the fallen, then thundering armies
Will ride over clouds, and the terror of terrors,
The third of the tempests will sweep through the
country:
The dead are returning.
When men of this nation no longer are cowards,
Or weaklings, but feel their vocation and mission,
Their hearts will decipher in untold disaster
A message from heaven, their hands will be lifted,
Their lips will be tuned to the homage of honour,
The flag of the king, the legitimate symbol,
Will fly through the dawn and be lowered in praise to
The highest of heroes.22
And at the prospect of enjoying access to the Führer’s headquarters, even though it meant performing the act of assassination personally, Stauffenberg said: ‘This is more than we dared hope for; fate has offered us this opportunity, and I would not refuse it for anything in the world. I have searched my conscience, before God and before myself. This man is evil incarnate.’23
Although precise details are vague and confused, Stauffenberg is reported to have taken a bomb with him to a briefing at Berchtesgaden on 6 July. It is unclear whether he actually intended to use it, or was simply testing his own courage in a sort of ‘dress rehearsal’. There has been one plausible suggestion that it was indeed a test of some kind, of security, if not of his own courage, and that he did not expect to encounter Hitler personally. It is also possible that somebody else was actually supposed to take charge within Berchtesgaden proper and activate the bomb. In any case, nothing happened and Stauffenberg returned to Berlin in a state of intense exasperation: ‘he talked with noticeable emotion and fiery impatience about the situation at Berchtesgaden and declared that now he would have to take charge of that as well’.24 He is even reported to have snapped irritably: ‘I’ll do it myself with my three fingers!’25
He tried again, on 11 July, once more smuggling a bomb into Berchtesgaden. Everything was in place, and cars and aircraft were ready to get him back to Berlin as quickly as possible. But the conspirators had agreed that it was essential to eliminate not just the Führer, but Himmler as well. Himmler, it transpired, was not present, and Stauffenberg returned to Berlin with the bomb intact. By the 14th, Hitler had left Berchtesgaden and installed himself at Rastenburg.
On 15 July, Stauffenberg flew to the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ at Rastenburg and smuggled his bomb into the Führer’s East Prussian headquarters. On this occasion, the initial order to activate Operation Valkyrie was given. Again, however, Himmler was not present, and the assassination was postponed. Such delays could clearly not be allowed to continue: it was agreed among the conspirators that on 20 July, Stauffenberg would strike, regardless of whether Himmler was there or not. That week a friend told Stauffenberg of rumours which had surfaced in Berlin, claiming that the Führer’s Headquarters were soon to be blown up. Stauffenberg commented. ‘So there is no longer a choice. We have crossed the Rubicon.’26
In the early evening of 19 July, he stopped at a small church in a Berlin suburb where a service was in progress. For some time, he stood alone at the back, then had himself driven home and spent the rest of the evening with his brother Berthold.
3
In the Wolf’s Lair
At seven in the morning, on Thursday 20 July 1944, Stauffenberg boarded a courier aircraft at a military aerodrome south of Berlin. He was accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, and by another officer, also privy to the conspiracy. Even at this early hour, the day was hot and sultry, promising to become more oppressive as it wore on.
The flight to Rastenburg was ordinarily of some two hours’ duration. Today, however, it was delayed, and did not land until ten-fifteen. At the airstrip, a car awaited Stauffenberg and his fellow officers, to convey them to the Führer’s compound. For f
our miles, the road ran tunnellike through the sombre gloom of pagan fir forests dank with the stench of mould. The trees then gave way to a camouflaged perimeter of minefields, networks of festooned barbed wire, checkpoints manned by hand-picked SS who demanded precise passwords. The temperature was now in the upper eighties, the air was stifling with humidity and Stauffenberg, like everyone else, was sweating profusely. This very discomfort, however, would work in his favour.
At a table laid under an oak tree outside the mess, he breakfasted. At eleven o’clock, he met with two general officers. At eleven-thirty, there followed a forty-five minute conference with Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the General Staff and one of Hitler’s most contemptibly abject subordinates. To Stauffenberg and the other conspirators, Keitel was known as ‘Lakeitel’, a play on the German word ‘Lakei’, meaning ‘lackey’ or ‘toady’, and with effeminate connotations as well.
The conference with the Führer, scheduled originally for one o’clock, had been moved forward by half an hour. With fifteen minutes to spare, Stauffenberg, blaming the heat and humidity of the day, requested premises in which he might wash, and change his sodden shirt. A deferential officer directed him to a washroom. On the way he was joined by Haeften, carrying a suitcase with two bombs. The bombs were not unlike the one employed by Tresckow’s subordinate, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, in the abortive assassination attempt of 1942. Detonation depended on acid eating its way through a length of wire. In order to rupture the container of acid, Stauffenberg had equipped himself with a specially modified pair of pliers which enabled him to perform the operation with the three fingers of his left hand. The remains of these pliers are today on display in Berlin, in the building that once housed the Reserve Army’s headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse, now the Stauffenbergstrasse.
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 5
