But Tresckow and Schlabrendorff were determined to kill Hitler,
and Lahousen had brought them the means. For two days they
"practiced" on a disused Red Army firing range, and learned
to master the particular type of explosive they intended to use. It
was composed of compact slabs of nitrotetramethanium, which came in
sections, like a child's building bricks. The sections could be
"built up" to construct a bomb of whatever force was
required—they had been developed by the British for parachuting
to saboteurs of the Resistance—and were actuated by three types
of fuses: a ten-minute one (subsequently used by Stauffenberg in the
attentat
of 20th July), a half-hour, and a two-hour setting.
Tresckow first inclined to depositing a ten-minute bomb in the
conference itself, but both he and Schlabrendorff agreed that this
would be a needlessly extravagant way of achieving their purpose, and
one which carried the disadvantage that a number of Regular Army
officers who were intended to assume executive positions in the new
regime (including Kluger Hans) might be killed. No, the most
satisfactory solution, they agreed, would be an air accident; this
would leave, for a matter of hours at least, an element of doubt in
the situation, which the Berlin section would be able to exploit; the
uncertainty over the details of Hitler's end would be a comfort to
many who shrank from the crude reality of an assassination.
After the usual postponements Hitler and his entourage appeared at
Smolensk on 13th March. There were two aircraft, a personal bodyguard
of twenty-five SS men, Dr. Morell, Fräulein Manziali (the
vegetarian cook), and a mass of different categories of adjutants and
couriers. During the afternoon Schlabrendorff had an experience which
still more sharply emphasized the care with which Hitler protected
his own life and the magnitude of the task which faced the
conspirators. While the Führer and Kluge were standing at the
wall map, Schlabrendorff wandered over to the table where Hitler had
placed his cap on entering the hut; idly picking it up, the young
A.D.C. was staggered to find it "heavy as a cannon ball."
It had been lined with four pounds of hardened tungsten steel,
including the peak, as a protection against snipers in upper windows!
When the time came for the Führer's party to leave, Tresckow
approached one of Hitler's staff officers, Colonel Brandt, and asked
him a favour. Could the Colonel take back with him to East Prussia a
couple of bottles of brandy which Tresckow had promised to a friend
of his at Rastenburg, General Helmuth Stieff? Brandt raised no
objection, and said that he would. Kluge and Tresckow travelled in
the same car as Hitler to the airfield; behind came Schlabrendorff
with the "brandy bottles." There were two Kondor aircraft
waiting, but to their relief, the conspirators saw Brandt making for
the Führer's own, while most of the SS bodyguard travelled in
the other. At the last moment Schlabrendorff actuated the fuse (it
was at a half-hour setting) and handed the parcel up to Brandt. The
door closed and the aircraft trundled down the runway. The two
officers watched it become airborne and disappear into the grey cloud
banks toward East Prussia.
The minutes ticked past. Tresckow had telephoned Berlin, spoken to
Captain Gehre, who was in turn to repeat the password to Oster and
Olbricht. On a half-hour fuse they calculated that the explosion
would occur just as Hitler's aircraft approached Minsk, and would
certainly be announced over the radio by one of the fighter escort.
But Minsk receded, and Vilna, and Kaunas (Kovno), and after two hours
a routine teleprint announced that the Führer's plane had landed
safely.
A great hope fell.
You
heard no noise,
The ruin was within.
What a heart-stopping moment for Schlabrendorff! Truly the
imagination quails at the prospect which opened before him. Had the
bomb been discovered, perhaps accidentally, and neutralized? Or had
it simply failed, and if that was the case what would happen to the
parcel? Heaven knew, there were enough reasons why Brandt, an ardent
Nazi and quite outside the plot, might unwrap the "bottles"—either
the better to present them to Stieff or, perhaps, to sample one with
a few friends. With these thoughts racing in his mind,
Schlabrendorff's first concern was nonetheless for his colleagues in
Berlin, and he immediately telephoned Berlin to tell Gehre that the
operation had miscarried. Next, he had to decide how to cover his own
traces. Schlabrendorff could be forgiven if, sensing already the
Gestapo's torture instruments on his flesh, he had been concerned
solely with his own safety.
[After his arrest (in 1944) Schlabrendorff was taken to the
Gestapo prison in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse.
One night I was taken out of my cell ... in the room to which I
was taken there were four people, Commissioner Habecker, his woman
secretary, a sergeant of the SD in uniform and an assistant in plain
clothes . . .
The torture was applied in stages. First my hands were tied
behind my back; then a contrivance was applied to both hands, which
gripped all ten fingers separately. On the inner side of this
instrument were spikes, which pressed against my finger tips. The
turning of a screw caused the machinery to contract so that the
spikes penetrated into the fingers.
The second torture was applied in the following way: I was
strapped face down on a frame resembling a bedstead and my head
covered with a blanket. Then instruments like stove-pipes were shoved
up over my bare legs with nails fixed on the inner side. Once again a
screwing mechanism contracted these tubes, so that the nails bored
into my thighs and shins.
]
It might just be possible, with help from Canaris' Abwehr, to slip
out of the country either to Sweden or Switzerland before the hue and
cry went up. But no such thought seems to have crossed his mind.
Instead he put through a telephone call to Brandt at Rastenburg. As
he was put through, Schlabrendorff, not trusting his own voice,
handed the receiver to Tresckow. The parcel? No he hadn't delivered
it yet, said Brandt, it was lying about the office somewhere. Should
he ... ? No, replied Tresckow, it would be best if he kept the parcel
in his possession, there had been a mistake, Major von Schlabrendorff
would be travelling to headquarters tomorrow and would bring the
right one . . .
The next day Schlabrendorff took the regular courier plane to
Rastenburg with two real bottles of brandy, which, he could not but
notice, weighed more than, and looked different from, the parcel in
Brandt's possession. He immediately called on Brandt.
... I can still recall my concern when [he], unaware of what he
held, smilingly gave me the parcel and gave it a jerk that made me
fear a belated action. Feigning a composure that I did not at all
feel, I took the parcel and drove to the neighbouring railway
junction of Korschen.
From Korschen a sleeper train left for Berlin in the evening. I
got into a reserved compartment, locked the door and with a razor
blade opened the packet. Having stripped the cover, I could see that
both explosive charges were unaltered. ... I dismantled the bomb and
took out the detonator. When I examined it I found to my great
surprise what had happened. The fuse had worked; the glass globule
had broken; the corrosive fluid had consumed the retainer wire; the
striker had operated; but—the detonator cap had not reacted.
The Devil's hand had protected Hitler.
To persons not of the Roman Catholic faith, especially to those
such as scientists, technicians (and even military historians), who
are concerned with fact and reality, the purported existence of
cosmic forces can seem an irritating abstraction. Yet there are
occasions when the eternal struggle between good and evil seems more
than a convenient adjunct to a code of behaviour evolved by the
priesthood for disciplining the lower classes and assumes a
disquieting magnitude, which towers over the puny
"self-determination" of mortal man.
With the onset of the muddy season in the middle of March, OKW had
time to contemplate its projected strategy for 1943. For the first
time in twenty years Hitler was silent. He had no ideas. Looking back
on Hitler's conduct in this period, we can see 1943 as a plateau of
reason and orthodoxy standing between the extravagant ambitions of
the post-Munich period and the nihilist defensive with which the war
ended. Even in his private circle Hitler spoke little of grand
strategy, but discoursed at length on the new weapons which would
restore the military ascendancy of the Reich.
He had conceived no grandiose tasks for the Army, save to preserve
what it had already won, while the war machine of the Reich was
injected with the enormous human and mineral wealth of the conquered
East and "the new Europe."
This attitude suited the generals very well. It meant that they
could plan a battle without having to feel that its course and
direction lay at the whim of some vague political or strategic
concept of which they had been told nothing. Manstein's first plan,
which he had broached to Hitler as early as February, was to wait for
the Russians' summer offensive to develop and hit them "on the
backhand." He envisaged giving up the whole Donetz basin and
luring the Russians as far as the lower Dnieper. The whole weight of
the Panzer force would then strike southeast from Kharkov and pin the
attackers against the Sea of Azov. On that occasion Hitler was
already being compelled to swallow a lot of strong medicine, and this
plan (expounded before Kharkov had even been recaptured) was too much
for him to stomach. He rejected it on vague political grounds—the
effect on Turkey and Rumania—and although the plan cropped up
at intervals during the spring it gradually fell out of favour before
an alternative "forehand" (i.e., anticipating a Russian
offensive) stroke farther north.
Manstein's "backhand" plan was brilliant in conception,
and might well have resulted in one of the most classically perfect
battles of
riposte
ever fought. Its chief risk was not the
political one, but the danger that the Russians might strike too far
north—at Belgorod, for example, rather than at Izyum—and
force an armoured battle before the Germans were ready for it. With
this in mind, a majority of professional opinion began to build up
for a more limited (and obvious) action against the "Kirsk
salient," a huge and menacing-looking bulge in the German line,
more than a hundred miles square, which separated the fronts of
Manstein and Kluge.
The first essential, before these plans could be given any body,
was that the Panzer force be invigorated. For although the Tiger had
shown itself to be a magnificent tank and the Panther promised well,
every officer who had taken part in the Donetz battle recognised that
it had been a special case. New tanks, harder training, and improved
tactics were going to be needed to cut through the Russians'
numerical superiority, just as they had in 1941, for the production
of the Reich could never match that of Russian factories, now
settling down after the upheavals of the 1942 evacuation.
[In 1942, German tank production had been 4,280. In 1943, 6,000.
In 1944, when the reforms inaugurated by Speer and Guderian had taken
full effect (and in the teeth of heavy bombing by the West),
production rose to 9,161. The Russians figure for 1943 was 11,000;
and for 1944, 17,000. But the latter figure may have included
self-propelled guns, and if these are included in the German totals
the discrepancy between the two rates is not as marked as is often,
claimed. Production rate of Stürmgeschütze (assault guns)
and Jagdpanzer (self-propelled antitank guns) was 778 in 1942, 3,406
in 1943, and 8,682 in 1944. (Ogorkiewicz 217-18.)]
The man who carried the responsibility for the new policies in the
development of the Panzers was Colonel General Guderian. Hitler had
granted him exceptional powers, but it was not long before
professional jealousy, aroused, it cannot be doubted, as much by the
nature of the powers as by the manner of their conferment, started to
thwart Guderian's scheme. The opening paragraph of the Assignment of
Duties that Guderian had drawn up for Hitler's signature read:
The Inspector-General of Armoured Troops is responsible to
me for the future development of armoured troops along lines that
will make that arm of the Service into a decisive weapon for winning
the war.
A footnote then defined, "armoured troops" as
tank troops, rifle components of
panzer
divisions,
motorised infantry, armoured reconnaissance troops, antitank troops
and assault gun units.
Together with Guderian this definition had been agreed upon by
Jodl, Zeitzler, and Schmundt, all of whom were consulted for the
first draft, which was drawn up at Hitler's headquarters at Vinnitsa,
on 21st February. On the 22nd, Guderian had flown to Rastenburg,
where the majority of the OKW headquarters staff were still located,
and shown the draft to Keitel and Fromm. Their reaction has not been
recorded, but between 22nd February and the 28th, when the formal
copies went back from Rastenburg to Vinnitsa for Hitler's signature,
someone at Rastenburg had altered the footnote so that it now read:
. . . antitank troops and
heavy
assault guns.
Thus at one stroke the Inspector General was confined to the
self-propelled 88-mm. on the Panther chassis, and the mass of 75-mm.
on Mark IV and 38-T chassis—which made up 90 percent of assault
gun production—was kept outside his authority.
It was a foretaste of (in Guderian's words)
difficulties and lack of co-operation from certain quarters
[i.e., the General Staff] which occurred over and over again.
The protocol of the German Army dictated that the departments of
OKH be subordinated to the Chief of Staff, whose permission had to be
obtained for each and every visit to other units. Department heads
exercised no influence over the Training Army and the schools, nor
were they allowed to publish any written material. Guderian's task
was not made any easier by the fact that his own views as to the
conduct of operations were in opposition to those of practically
every other senior officer in the Army.