Hitler (134 page)

 

Later that evening, while he was redistributing the troops in the Italian theater and arranging for reinforcements, Hitler felt an impulse to occupy the Vatican also: “Especially the whole Diplomatic Corps in there,” he commented. He thrust aside all objections: “I don't give a hang. That rabble is there; we'll get all those swine out. Later we can apologize.” He finally dropped the idea. Nevertheless, he managed to send in enough additional troops so that when Badoglio shortly afterward arranged an armistice with the Allies the Germans were able to overwhelm the numerically superior Italian forces and occupy all the key positions in the country.

The arrested dictator was moved about for a few days, until a German commando squad liberated him from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso. Spiritlessly he let himself be reinstalled in power; he saw that it only meant a different form of imprisonment. In October he had to cede Trieste, Istria, South Tyrol, Trient, and Laibach to Germany; he put up with it without emotion. All he really wanted was to return to the Romagna, his native soil. His thoughts revolved around death. For a woman admirer who asked him for his autograph during this period, he wrote on a picture:
“Mussolini defunto.”

 

These events did not weaken Hitler's determination; on the contrary. The personal weaknesses, halfway measures, and treacheries he encountered only fed his sense of distance from humankind and produced that grand tragic aura he associated with historical importance. During the years of his rise he had derived his greatest certainties from the periods of crisis. Now, too, his faith in himself increased with every setback; it was part of his fundamentally pessimistic sense of life that he drew strength and vindication from the disasters. “Hitherto every worsening of the situation has ultimately meant an improvement for us,” he told his generals. Part of the effect he went on having upon his entourage, upon the skeptical military men and the wavering functionaries, undoubtedly sprang from this conviction that flew in the face of all reality. Eyewitnesses have described how from the autumn of 1943 on he moved through the dark backdrop of the bunker at the Führer's headquarters surrounded by a wall of silence and misanthropy, and more than one person who saw him had the impression “of a man whose life was slowly ebbing away.”
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But all have emphasized his undiminished magnetism, which he still possessed in strangest contrast to his outward appearance. We may have to discount this account to some extent: those who report it, after all, have to justify their own passivity at a time when there was less and less excuse for it. But no matter how much we subtract, there remains the remarkable phenomenon of energy multiplied by disaster.

The arguments he could still muster were comparatively weak. He preferred to point back to the period of struggle, which he now stylized into the great parable of the triumph of will and tenacity. Then he would speak of the miraculous “secret weapons” with which he was going to retaliate for the Allied terror raids on Germany. He also made much of the rift that was bound to occur in the enemy's “unnatural coalition.” But, characteristically, he was not prepared even to consider the possibilities of a separate peace with one side or the other. In December, 1942, and once again in the summer of 1943, the Soviet Union had indicated through its representatives in Stockholm that it was willing to negotiate with Hitler over a separate peace. By fall of that year, in growing fear that the Western powers were playing for a war of exhaustion between Germany and Soviet Russia, the U.S.S.R. cautiously mentioned terms. She offered restoration of the Russo-German borders of 1914, a free hand in the Straits question, and extensive economic ties. The Russians kept their deputy Foreign Minister and former ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Dekanozov, in Stockholm for an exchange of views from September 12 to 16. But Hitler rejected all negotiations. He regarded the Soviet contact as a mere tactical maneuver; and in fact to this day it has remained unclear how serious Moscow's intentions were. But Hitler's intentions remained obsessively and rigidly determined by the decision once taken. With a shrug Hitler told his Foreign Minister, who was for responding to the peace feelers: “You know, Ribbentrop, if I came to an agreement with Russia today, I'd attack her again tomorrow—I just can't help myself.” To Goebbels he remarked in the middle of September that the time for such contacts was “totally unsuitable”; he could negotiate with some prospect of success only after a decisive military victory.
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Up to this point decisive military victories had only whetted his appetite for ever more decisive military victories. But a turning point was no longer conceivable. By this time the god of war, as Jodi remarked, had long ago turned away from the German side and moved into the enemy camp. In 1938, at the time the great architectural projects were being conceived, Albert Speer had set up an account to finance the vast buildings for the world capital of Germania. Now, at the end of 1943, he quietly liquidated the account, without mentioning it to Hitler.

 

 

 

 

Kill him!

Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg at the
end of 1942, in answer to the question
of what should be done with Hitler

 

At the beginning of 1944 the assault upon Fortress Europe began in earnest, forging Hitler to the defensive on all fronts. In the south the Western powers pressed forward as far as Central Italy. Their technological advantage, based for the most part on superior radar, enabled them to wage almost total air warfare, while the German side was forced temporarily to cease submarine attacks. In the East, meanwhile, the Russians were racing toward the battlefields on which the German armies had won their first great victories in the summer of 1941. Though his defensive lines were wavering and breaking everywhere, Hitler merely continued to repeat his formula of resistance to the last man, thus once again revealing that his talents as a generalissimo covered only offensive situations. The speed of the retreat kept him from carrying out his aim of leaving the enemy nothing but “a totally scorched and destroyed land.”
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But the landscape itself was the scene of a ghostly drama. Oil-soaked iron grids had been set up above gigantic fires, and members of “Squad 1005” worked feverishly and silently around these. Their assignment was to locate the innumerable mass graves of nearly three years of rule, to exhume the corpses, and to eliminate all traces of the massacres. Gigantic clouds of black smoke rose up from these cremation sites. The regime was abjuring its visions and reducing them to an
idée fixe.

Ever since it had become apparent that strength was departing from Hitler's colossus, resistance had been stirring everywhere in Europe. In many cases it was centered in the Communist parties, but it also sprang from leagues of military officers, from the Catholic Church, or from groups of intellectuals. In some countries, such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and even France, it became organized in paramilitary formations, calling themselves the Home Army or the Fighting Forces of the Interior, to wage an embittered and bloody war against the occupation troops. The Germans answered the growing number of assassinations and acts of sabotage with summary executions of hostages, in which the death of a single guard might often be paid for by twenty, thirty, or even more victims. The revenge of SS Division Das Reich upon the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane and its 600 innocent inhabitants marked the climax of this merciless guerrilla war. Tito's famous breakthrough operation on the Neretva, or the Warsaw uprising of the summer of 1944, were battlelike actions that became legends of the European Resistance.

Simultaneously, oppositional forces reappeared also inside Germany. In the past years they had been undone first by Hitler's diplomatic, then his military successes, and after the victory over France had reached the nadir of discouragement. But now the changing fortunes of the war brought out all the repressed doubts that had been present since the beginning of the Hitler regime, alongside of the cheering and jubilation. After Stalingrad, and once more after the defeats of the winter of 1943–44, the prevalent mood in Germany for considerable spells of time was compounded of fear, war weariness, and apathy. It was a mood that spurred the efforts of the opposition, since there was at last some hope of a response. After the many disappointments of earlier years the oppositionists were afraid that the rapidly approaching military defeat would once more, and forever, rob them of their chance to act. This concern enormously strengthened their resolution. But it also provides grounds for the charge, which has been repeatedly voiced, that the German opposition opportunistically resolved to topple the regime only when it was already falling. All that happened, it has been argued, is that a few nationalists roused themselves to act because they were more eager to save the country's power than its morality.

We cannot judge this matter without taking into account the difficulties the opposition faced in 1944. Some time before, the Gestapo had blown the cover of the “Central Bureau,” Oster's office, and arrested its chief members. Admiral Canaris had been largely frozen out, and General Beck temporarily incapacitated by a severe illness. Moreover, Mussolini's fall had given Hitler a good scare and prompted him to still greater wariness. He tried more than ever before to keep his movements secret. His staff had instructions to conceal scheduled appointments even from the highest persons in the leadership, such as Göring and Himmler. On the rare occasions that he did appear in public he usually changed the program at short notice, sometimes only minutes before he was due to appear. Even in his own headquarters he used to wear the heavy, armored cap that came down over his ears. In his radio address of September 10, 1943, dealing with the events in Italy, there was a distinctly threatening note in the way he called upon his “field marshals, admirals, and generals” to show their loyalty to him and dash the enemy's hopes of finding in the German officers corps “traitors like those in Italy today.”

The dilemma faced by the active opponents of the regime in Germany was computed of a complicated complex of inhibitions of a traditional order. While throughout the European Resistance, national and moral duty coincided almost completely, in Germany these norms clashed sharply, and for a good many of those who opposed the regime the contradiction was insoluble. Throughout all their years of plotting and planning, many leading members of the opposition, particularly the military men, were unable to overcome entirely that last emotional barrier. What they were projecting still seemed to them treason, a renewed “stab in the back.” Unlike the European Resistance, what they could initially expect from their liberating act was not liberty but defeat and surrender to an implacable enemy. And it would take an arrogant moralist to belittle the conflict of those who, despite their hatred of Hitler and their horror of the crimes he instigated, nevertheless could not forget the crimes of Stalin, the atrocities of the “Red Terror,” or the great purges, as well as the victims of the Katyn Forest massacre.

Such scruples also marked the unending discussions whose gravity can be appreciated today only by an act of historical empathy. How binding was an oath taken to one who had committed perjury? How far did the duty of obedience extend? Above all, there was the question of assassination, which some saw as essential and as the only consistent, grand act of resistance, whereas others, whose moral integrity cannot be called into question,
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rejected the idea to the very end. But both groups were isolated within their own country, surrounded by a gigantic intelligence apparatus and always vulnerable to denunciation. In addition, the dependence of all their plans upon the course of events was a perpetual brake upon action. Every victory of Hitler's diminished the chances for an internal coup; every defeat weakened the opposition's stance with regard to the Allies, whose support was indispensable.

Given these circumstances, the history of the German opposition is a saga of scruples, contradictions, and mix-up. The sources sometimes lead one to think that a good many of the doubts that plagued the opposition were inspired by a mania for creating problems, thus dodging the obligation to act. Other scruples served one group among the higher officers as an excuse for their own moral rigidity. But even considering all this, there remains in all the statements and activities of the German opposition an unmistakable note of deep despair. This evidently sprang not so much from the feeling of powerlessness in the face of the brutal regime as from the inner impotence of people who had recognized the anachronistic, crippling nature of their values, but were nevertheless unable to give those values up. Significantly, such men as Generals Beck, Halder, and von Witzleben, or Admiral Canaris, much as they despised Hitler, had to conquer a thousand resistances within themselves before they could resolve to act, and after the first failure in the autumn of 1938 they never again summoned up the momentum. It took the entry of a number of young officers, less hampered by preconvictions, to supply new energy to an enterprise that had run down from the weight of its arguments and counterarguments. One of them, Colonel von Gersdorff, recognized this contrast. He has described how carefully Field Marshal von Manstein, in the course of a talk, excluded himself from the circle of the conspirators. At last, after a pause for reflection, he broke the silence by asking: “Then you want to kill him?!” And received the terse reply:
“Jawohl, Herr Feldmarschall,
like a mad dog!”

From the spring of 1943 on, there was a series of attempts at assassination. Not one came off, either because of technical failure, or Hitler's knack for scenting danger, or because some seemingly incredible chance intervened. Two explosives that Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff had placed in the Führer's plane in the middle of March, 1943, after Hitler had visited the headquarters of Army Group Center, failed to explode. A week later von Gersdorff planned to blow himself up, together with Hitler and all the leaders of the regime, during a tour of the Berlin Arsenal. This project came to nothing because Hitler suddenly cut the visit to ten minutes, so that the time fuse could not be set off. Colonel Stieff planned to set off a bomb during a military conference in the Führer's headquarters; this failed because the bomb exploded prematurely. A young infantry captain named Axel von dem Bussche volunteered in November to sacrifice himself: while showing new army uniforms, he would leap upon Hitler, seize him, and at the same time set off the explosion. But on the day before this plan was to be carried out, an Allied bomb destroyed the uniforms. When in December von dem Bussche appeared with a new set of samples, Hitler suddenly decided to go to Berchtesgaden. By so doing he frustrated both this attempt and another planned for December 26 by a colonel who wanted to carry a time bomb into the Führer's headquarters in his briefcase. This was the first appearance on the scene of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Shortly afterward von dem Bussche was severely wounded, whereupon another officer put himself at the disposal of the conspirators: Ewald Heinrich von Kleist. For reasons never explained Hitler did not appear at the presentation planned for February 11. An attempt by Cavalry Captain von Breitenbuch to shoot Hitler down during a conference at the Berghof failed because the SS guard, allegedly on orders from Hitler himself, refused the captain admittance to the great hall. A number of other projected assassinations ended similarly.