Once the bombs were activated, there would be a time delay of ten minutes before they exploded. This delay, however, was only approximate. The speed with which the acid consumed the wire would be, to some degree, affected by temperature, atmospheric pressure and other indeterminate factors. The hotter the day, the more quickly the explosion would occur; but there was no way of predicting precisely how quickly.
In the washroom, Stauffenberg changed his shirt and, assisted by his aide, began to arrange and activate the bombs in his briefcase. Using the specially modified pliers, he had already activated the first when he was interrupted by a sergeant-major, who—since the briefing with Hitler was about to begin—had been sent to hurry him up. The sergeant-major waited until Stauffenberg and Haeften had finished what they were doing. He was later to testify that he saw them busy with a wrapped parcel. It was undoubtedly the incommodious presence of this intruder that prevented Stauffenberg from arming both bombs. The device that remained inert was left with Haeften, who slipped it into his briefcase. With the activated bomb now in his own briefcase, Stauffenberg left the washroom. Within ten minutes, the blast would occur.
Emerging into a corridor, Stauffenberg again encountered Field Marshal Keitel. It was now twelve-thirty, and the field marshal, huffy and flustered as usual, begged him to hurry. Tardiness was not seemly for a German officer and might provoke the Führer’s wrath. Another officer, standing nearby, offered to help Stauffenberg with his briefcase. When Stauffenberg declined the courtesy, it aroused no suspicion. He was known and respected for his fierce self-sufficiency.
Presumably he had hoped to be conducted to the visitors’ bunker, where Hitler was staying at the time and where conferences usually occurred. The concrete walls of this structure would contain and maximise the effects of the blast. But since 15 July, conferences had been held in the adjacent map room, which had now become a separate briefing hut. It was a wooden structure of some sixteen by forty feet, with three large windows in the north wall. A blast here would be significantly less lethal.
As Stauffenberg approached the hut, another officer volunteered to help him with his briefcase. This time he accepted and added a request: ‘Could you please put me as near as possible to the Führer so that I can catch everything I need for my briefing afterwards.’1 It has been plausibly suggested that this was a reference to his hearing, which had been adversely affected by his injuries.
When he entered, the conference had already begun. General Heusinger, Assistant Chief of Staff, was reporting on the situation on the Eastern Front. Most of the two dozen men present, including Hitler, were clustered around a heavy oblong table, bent over maps which littered its surface. Stauffenberg joined them, edging his way to a position on the Führer’s right, some six feet distant. Keitel introduced him. He and Hitler shook hands. Placing his briefcase on the floor, Stauffenberg nudged it under the table with his boot. General Heusinger paused for breath. Taking advantage of this intermission, Keitel suggested that when Heusinger had finished speaking, Stauffenberg might report on the status of the Reserve Army. The Führer nodded approval, not deigning to say anything. General Heusinger then resumed his exegesis. There could now be no more than seven minutes before the bomb exploded.
Turning to the officer beside him, Stauffenberg excused himself. He had to telephone Berlin, he explained. It was urgent. He would return at once. Leaving his briefcase under the table, he threaded his way to the door. No one paid any attention to his departure except the fussy Keitel, who made a half-hearted attempt to go after him, then gave it up.
Once outside the briefing hut, Stauffenberg, in accordance with pre-arranged plans, hurried to a shelter across the compound. Here, General Erich Fellgiebel, Chief of Signals at Rastenburg, awaited him. Fellgiebel was a colleague, a fellow conspirator and integral component of the plot. When the explosion occurred, he was to telephone the other conspirators in Berlin, who would activate Operation Valkyrie, the mobilisation and deployment of the Reserve Army. Fellgiebel was then to cut all communications from Rastenburg, thus truncating the chain of command and thwarting all interference. The ‘Wolf’s Lair’ would be altogether isolated, severed from events unfolding elsewhere.
For three minutes, Stauffenberg and Fellgiebel waited in the shelter, concealing their tension, A subordinate signals officer happened to be present, and this compelled them to sustain an anodyne conversation about which car Stauffenberg should take to the landing strip. Then, at twelve-forty-two, a single shattering detonation ruptured the humid summer somnolence, followed by a stunned stillness. Stauffenberg contrived to give ‘a violent start’ and Fellgiebel feigned alarm. The signals officer dismissed the matter irritably. It must have been a mine, he said. Given the defences at Rastenburg, such things often occurred. Atmospheric pressure, defective mechanisms, stray wildlife were constantly triggering, explosions in the minefields. There was no cause for concern. From the briefing hut across the compound, a plume of sulphurous smoke boiled upwards, staining the sky.
Outside the signals shelter, Haeften appeared in a requisitioned car. Fellgiebel accompanied Stauffenberg to the vehicle, which lurched quickly into motion. It was necessary to escape from Rastenburg before the compound was sealed off. On the way from the signals shelter, the car passed within fifty yards of the briefing hut. Security personnel were rushing about in great disorder, like wasps from a disturbed nest. Figures were being carried out, though it could not be determined whether they were dead or only injured. The hut itself appeared gutted, and rubble littered the grass for some distance. Greasy smoke gushed from the windows, together with fitful flickers of flame. Stauffenberg was absolutely convinced that no one could possibly have survived the blast.
By now, klaxons were braying and Rastenburg’s former torpor had been supplanted by frenzy. A full security alert had galvanised the compound, internal telephones were ringing, guards being reinforced. At the first two checkpoints, Stauffenberg knew the sentries, who, after a moment’s chatter, waved him through the barriers. At the last and southernmost checkpoint, the car was halted by an officious sergeant-major. No one, he announced, was permitted to enter or leave the premises. Stauffenberg snapped at him impatiently, ‘in a parade-ground tone’. The sergeant-major was cowed but stolidly insisted on adhering to orders. Stauffenberg got out of the car, snatched up the telephone and personally rang the aide-de-camp of Rastenburg’s commandant.
‘Colonel Count Stauffenberg speaking, from outer checkpoint South. Captain, you’ll remember we had breakfast together this morning. Because of the explosion, the guard refuses to let me pass. I’m in a hurry. Colonel-General Fromm is waiting for me at the airfield.’2
Without waiting for a reply, he replaced the receiver, but the obstinate sergeant-major insisted on receiving the order personally and telephoned the commandant’s aide himself. On being told that Stauffenberg could pass, he raised the barrier. The car set off for the landing strip, Stauffenberg ordering the driver to hurry. Haeften tossed the second and unused bomb from the window.
By one-fifteen, Stauffenberg was airborne, and on his way back to Berlin. He could not yet confirm definitely the Führer’s death, of course. There was no means of doing that if he intended to get out of Rastenburg. Nevertheless, he was confident. With his own eyes, he had seen the devastation caused by the explosion. It seemed inconceivable that Hitler could have survived it.
In the briefing hut, an unwitting colonel, taking Stauffenberg’s vacated place at the table, had barked his shin against a briefcase. Cramped for space, he had pushed it further under the table, behind one of the heavy oak supports on which the tabletop rested. These supports were not just legs. They were solid slabs of wood extending the width of the table—tantamount, in effect, to sturdy waist-high partitions. The tabletop, too, was of solid oak, four inches thick. Hitler was thus shielded from the bomb by both the table’s top and its supports, which deflected the impact of the blast. The unwitting colonel, two generals and a stenographer were to die from their injuri
es. Nine other men had to be hospitalised, and everyone else present suffered at least minor wounds. Hitler’s hair was set aflame and his right arm was temporarily paralysed, his eardrums were pierced and he was badly dazed. The tremor he had begun to display, symptom of a nervous disorder, was to become exacerbated and remain acute for the duration of his life. It has been suggested that he may have suffered a form of breakdown. Certainly he was never again to appear in public. But he was very much alive; and the relieved lackeys attending him could see only minor burns and the indignity of shredded trousers.
In the signals shelter, General Fellgiebel had waited expectantly, ready to telephone Berlin and start Operation Valkyrie, then cut all communications to and from Rastenburg. To his horror, Fellgiebel saw the dazed and bewildered Führer being led shakily from the smouldering debris of the briefing hut. Despite this unexpected development, the general showed great presence of mind, anticipating what he knew would have been Stauffenberg’s own decision—the coup must proceed anyway. Shortly before one o’clock, he telephoned Berlin and activated Valkyrie. He then rang a contact at OKH (Army) Headquarters not far away.
‘Something fearful has happened,’ he announced. ‘The Führer is alive.’ When asked what had now to be done, Fellgiebel replied, ‘Block everything.’3
In other words, news of Hitler’s survival had to be kept from the outside world. As for cutting communications from Rastenburg proper, Fellgiebel had no need to do so: the compound’s security authorities had already ordered a total blackout. At the same time, it was impossible to isolate Rastenburg completely. Although the telephone and teleprinter exchanges could be cut, there were still radio transmitters; and both the Ministry of Propaganda and the German News Agency had their own private teleprinter lines which did not pass through the main exchange. No provision had been made, or could have been made, for dealing with these. In any case, despite whatever its planners had overlooked or been forced to omit, Operation Valkyrie was now in progress.
In Berlin, the conspirators had thronged the War Office in the Bendlerstrasse, anxiously awaiting Fellgiebel’s call. When it came, it implemented Valkyrie but made no mention of Hitler’s survival. By one-thirty at the latest, however, news of the Führer’s escape would have filtered through, if only via OKH Headquarters, but no one was able to consult with Stauffenberg. He, of course, was airborne at the time, and out of communication, still wholly convinced everything was going according to plan. In his absence, no one in any position of authority dared make a decision or determine what to do next. Some of the younger officers, Stauffenberg’s contemporaries, tried desperately to coax things into motion. An old friend of Stauffenberg, Colonel Albrecht Merz von Quirnheim, deserves special mention for his resolute insistence. But General Olbricht, from whom all orders had ultimately to issue, remained paralysed. Two hours passed. Tension intensified, nerves grew strained and the telephones remained silent. The conspirators hung suspended in a vacuum, the lack of information as painful and stifling as a lack of air. Immobilised by uncertainty, Olbricht continued to hesitate. And the minutes during which the coup might yet have succeeded slipped away.
In Rastenburg, there was no doubt by now who had been responsible for the bomb. Stauffenberg’s rapid and unauthorised departure—he had left behind his cap, his belt and other accoutrements—had made that clear enough. Even so, no one as yet suspected an organised conspiracy, and the maimed colonel was thought to have acted alone, a solitary depraved assassin. It was assumed he would attempt to flee the country, seeking refuge on neutral soil. An order was issued to the Luftwaffe, to intercept and shoot down a Heinkel bound for Switzerland or Sweden. The officer charged with transmitting this order, however, was one of Stauffenberg’s collaborators, and left it unimplemented on his desk.
Shortly after three-thirty, Merz von Quirnheim at last managed to goad Olbricht into action. Senior officers were summoned. Hitler, they were told, had been assassinated. The army was now under the supreme command of Field Marshal von Witzleben. The new head of state was General Beck. An officer was dispatched to Berlin Military Headquarters carrying orders for the further implementation of Operation Valkyrie. The same orders were issued by telephone and teleprinter to all military districts in the Reich.
Shortly before four o’clock, Olbricht and Merz von Quirnheim went to see General Fromm, Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army and Stauffenberg’s immediate superior. Throughout the previous months of planning, Fromm had vacillated abjectly. Although he had never been a committed member of the conspiracy, his co-operation had been deemed essential. The conspirators, albeit reluctantly, had therefore made him privy to their designs. Intent on nothing more than self-preservation, Fromm had tepidly aligned himself with them, as long as their enterprise promised some measure of success. Now, in the absence of any official information, he began to dither anew. As Olbricht and Merz von Quirnheim argued with him, a call came from the airport. Stauffenberg and Haeften had just arrived. They had no reason to assume that everything was not already well under way. In fact, scarcely had anything begun, and more than three valuable hours had elapsed since the explosion at Rastenburg.
The driver awaiting Stauffenberg and Haeften at the airport somehow contrived to miss them. The absence of any other car—and of petrol as well—meant further delay. In the meantime, Olbricht continued to dispute with Fromm. At four-ten, Fromm attempted to ring Keitel at Rastenburg. To everyone’s surprise, he got through. What, Fromm asked, was happening? A bomb had exploded, Keitel replied, but the Führer was alive. Keitel then enquired as to Stauffenberg’s whereabouts. Stauffenberg, Fromm reported, had not yet returned.
Olbricht had listened to this exchange. It was clear to him that Fromm’s co-operation could no longer be relied upon—if, indeed, it ever could have been. After resisting for so long, Olbricht was now thoroughly determined, as if steeled by Stauffenberg’s imminent return. Leaving Fromm, he hurried back to his own office and, at four-thirty, issued new orders. These were the first to offer the agreed ‘cover story’ for the coup.
The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead . . . An unscrupulous clique of non-combatant party leaders has tried to exploit the situation to stab the deeply committed front in the back, and to seize power for selfish purposes.4
A state of martial law was declared. All Waffen-SS (combat SS) units were immediately to be incorporated into the army and rendered subject to military authority. All Party officials were similarly subordinated to military control. The security service, the SD, was dissolved. The statement was signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben.
As these orders were going out, Stauffenberg and Haeften arrived back at the Bendlerstrasse. Stauffenberg went directly to his office, where four officers were waiting, and, without any greeting, said simply:
‘He’s dead. I saw how he was carried out.’5
In Olbricht’s office a few minutes later, Stauffenberg gave a more detailed report:
‘I saw the whole thing from the outside. I was standing outside the hut with General Fellgiebel. There was an explosion inside the hut and then I saw large numbers of medical personnel come running up and cars being brought along. The explosion was as if the hut had been hit by a six-inch shell. It is hardly possible that anyone could be alive.’6
By this time more reports had come in from Rastenburg. Although nothing as yet could be substantiated definitely, there was increasing evidence to suggest that Hitler was indeed still alive. Stauffenberg refused to believe it. Having personally witnessed the effects of the explosion, he could not accept that it had failed to kill everyone in the briefing hut, the Führer included.
With Stauffenberg attending him, Olbricht returned to Fromm’s office. Stauffenberg, he reported, had confirmed that the Führer was dead.
‘That is impossible,’ Fromm replied. ‘Keitel has assured me to the contrary.’7
It must have been at this moment that Stauffenberg first seriously began to suspect the truth. Keitel, after all, had also been in the briefing hut. I
f Fromm had just spoken to him, Keitel had obviously survived; and if Keitel had survived, the Führer might have done so as well. At the same time it is also possible that Stauffenberg’s conviction remained unshaken. In an interview with the authors of this book, Otto John, one of the few conspirators to survive, made an interesting and revealing statement. As late as 22 July, Otto John declared, two days after the event, he personally continued to believe that Stauffenberg had been telling the truth and that Hitler was indeed dead. ‘All we heard over the radio was Hitler’s voice, and we all knew that there was a double. ’8 The belief that Hitler had a double was widely held in the Third Reich, and this belief would clearly have contributed to the conspirators’ confusion. Stauffenberg may well have wondered whether the Party hierarchy, and the authorities at Rastenburg, were not attempting a sort of bluff. Whatever might be the case, he recognised the necessity, even more urgent now, of proceeding with Operation Valkyrie according to plan, even if that required a bluff of his own to prevent demoralisation from setting in among the conspirators. Accordingly, Stauffenberg retorted to Fromm, ‘Field Marshal Keitel is lying as usual. I myself saw Hitler’s body being carried away.’ And a little later he repeated what he had said to Olbricht, ‘General, I myself set off the bomb during the conference with Hitler. There was an explosion as though a six-inch shell had hit the room. No one who was in that room can still be alive.’9
Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the True Story of Operation Valkyrie Page 6
