Hitler (135 page)

The conspirators were no more successful in their efforts to gain foreign backing for their operation and to obtain certain assurances from the Western powers in case of a successful
coup d'etat.
Their repeated tries to make contact by all sorts of routes invariably went wrong. Granted, the reluctance of the Allied statesmen was far from incomprehensible. Why should they tie their own hands when victory was at last within sight? Moreover, they were justifiably concerned about affronting the Soviet Union, and with the elation that sprang from certainty of victory they were incapable of grasping the involved politico-moral conflicts of the German conspirators. Moreover, there was in Roosevelt, Churchill, and several of their advisers an unmistakable hostility toward the very type of person who now came forward to offer himself as the pillar of a new system, but who seemed only to represent the system of the day before yesterday: “militarists,” “Prussian Junkers,” “the General Staff.”

Nor was this feeling on the part of the Western powers mollified when in 1943 none other than Heinrich Himmler for a moment bobbed up on the periphery of the opposition. Disturbed by Hitler's seemingly morbid obstinacy and urged on by several of his own followers, he had obtained a medical affidavit that apparently described Hitler's general condition as pathological. Thereupon, though constantly vacillating, he had allowed Walter Schellenberg, chief of the foreign service of the SD, to utilize go-betweens in Spain, Sweden, and America to sound out the possibilities of a compromise peace without and against Hitler.
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Meanwhile several conservative plotters were attempting to play off the key figures of the regime against one another and simultaneously extend the opposition's connections into the realms of the SS, the police forces, and the Gestapo. On August 26, 1943, a meeting between Johannes Popitz, Prussian Secretary of the Treasury, and Heinrich Himmler provided the opposition with information on the acute qualms even among the regime's top leaders. But then the threads broke, almost simultaneously in all directions. Among the foreign countries, England in particular took a strong stand against all efforts at a premature peace settlement. Domestically, the leading members of the opposition themselves became involved in fierce controversy. Undoubtedly Popitz and the advocates of the resistance by intrigue who were playing along with Himmler and the SS intended to outwit their partners after the success of the planned coup, and re-establish legal conditions. This was nothing but a stupid revival of the conservatives' old illusions in the spring of 1933 that they would be able to “tame” Hitler. But in addition it was a failure to realize that even the most temporary alliance with one of the infamous members of the regime would utterly compromise the meaning and ethics of the opposition. In the course of one dispute in the headquarters of Army Group Center several of the younger officers indignantly told Admiral Canaris that in the future they would refuse to shake hands with him if a planned contact with Himmler were actually undertaken.

Such differences of opinion, and in general the peculiar babble of voices presumably speaking for the German opposition, should make it clear that it was not a bloc. To treat it as if it were a single concept is inaccurate; it was a loose assemblage of many groups objectively and personally antagonistic and united only in antipathy for the regime. Three of these groups emerge with somewhat sharper contours: (1) The Kreisau Circle, called after Count Helmuth James von Moltke's Silesian estate. This was chiefly a discussion group of high-minded friends imbued with ideas of both Christian and socialist reform. As a civilian group its opportunities were limited, and it practiced revolt only in the sense of intellectual encouragement. “We are being hanged because we thought together,” von Moltke wrote in one of his last letters from prison, with a note of almost happy pride at the power of the spirit thus attested by his death sentence.
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(2) Then there was the group of conservative and nationalist notables gathered around Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and General Ludwig Beck, the former army chief of staff. These men, not yet cognizant of the meaning of Hitler's policies, were still claiming a leading role for a Greater Germany within Europe. It has seriously been questioned whether they even offered any real alternative to Hitler's imperialistic expansionism. So strong was their leaning toward an authoritarian state that they have been called a continuation of the antidemocratic opposition in the Weimar Republic. Moltke spoke tersely of the “Goerdeler trash.”
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(3) Finally there was the group of younger military men such as von Stauffenberg, von Tresckow, and Olbricht, with no pronounced ideological affiliations, although for the most part they sought ties with the Left and in contrast to Beck and Goerdeler did not look to a rapprochement with the Western powers, but with the Soviet Union.

In terms of background, a strikingly large number of the conspirators belonged to the Old Prussian nobility. There were also members of the clergy, the academic professions, and high-ranking civil servants. On the whole, those oppositionists who were now beginning to urge action were people originally from the conservative or liberal camp, with a sprinkling of Social Democrats. The Left was still suffering from the effects of the persecution, but it, too, with characteristic ideological rigidity, feared any alliance with army officers as a “pact with the devil.” Among the many participants in the opposition there was, significantly, not a single representative of the Weimar Republic; that republic did not survive even in the Resistance. But members of the lower middle class were also conspicuously absent, and also businessmen. The former showed the “little man's” dull constancy to a course once taken and his inability to enter into any commitments beyond the personal realm. The latter remained fixated upon the traditional German alliance between industrial interests and power politics. Business always came to heel when the state whistled. That meant an economy capable of unusual performance; but it also led by many involved paths all the way to the defendants' benches in the Nuremberg trials of industrialists. Finally, there were scarcely any workers in the Resistance. Their opposition was greater than historians have so far noted, but it was still far less than their role of grand historic antagonists to Fascism called for. Fundamentally, they offered no real resistance on a realistic basis at all but, rather, a series of demonstrations, mute and planless, as if they were stunned from their defeat of 1933 and from the fading of all dreams about the power and importance of the proletariat.
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All these groups, moreover, were intimidated by the events of the war; they were exhausted and had experienced a failure of nerve. What can really be called opposition came “from above.”

It remained isolated. In February, moreover, von Moltke was arrested and the Kreisau Circle broken up. Shortly afterward, the Abwehr was subjected to a merciless investigation, so that discovery of the conspiracy had to be daily reckoned with. Goerdeler and Beck, repeatedly wavering, made a last attempt in April, 1944, to act before time ran out. They sent an offer to the United States to throw open the Western front after the
coup d'etat
and permit Allied parachute units to land in the territory of the Reich. But once again they received no reply. Their only course now was to place the elimination of the regime on the plane of moral argument, independent of all strategic and political considerations. Several of the conspirators seem to have taken the view that the top leadership should see the disaster through to the end and experience their just retribution.

It was chiefly Stauffenberg who now took over. He established new connections and recruited new conspirators. In spite of the Allied formula of unconditional surrender, in spite of the danger of a new stab-in-the-back legend, in spite of the possible charges of tardiness and opportunism, he pushed straight through all inhibitions and steered toward assassination and a coup. The scion of an old family of South German nobility, related to the Yorck and Gneisenau families, he had in his youth associated with the Stefan George circle. Legend has it that on January 30, 1933, he placed himself at the head of an enthusiastic crowd in Bamberg, to hail the beginning of the new regime. That happens not to be true, but he certainly watched with moderate approval the regime's revolutionary tendencies and Hitler's early successes.

He made a distinguished career as an officer attached to the General Staff. The 1938 pogroms against the Jews first aroused doubts in him; and in the course of the war, as he observed the occupation in the East and what was being done to the Jews there, he developed into a principled opponent of the Nazi government. He was thirty-seven years old and had lost his right hand, two fingers of his left hand, and an eye in the North African theater. Stauffenberg provided an organizational frame for an undertaking that had bogged down in mental maneuverings. He replaced obsolete notions, which trapped many military men in an inextricable tangle of clashing principles, with something akin to revolutionary resolve. “Let's get to the essence,” he once began a conversation with a new conspirator. “With all the means at my disposal I am practicing treason.”
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Time was pressing. In the spring the conspirators had succeeded in winning over none other than Rommel, the field marshal, who enjoyed great popularity. Around the same time Himmler remarked to Admiral Canaris that he had definite knowledge that a revolt was being planned by certain groups in the Wehrmacht; he, Himmler, would strike at the proper moment. Moreover, the Allied invasion was expected at any time, and it could be assumed that this would scotch all the conspirators' subsidiary political aims. It would also provide the tradition-bound older officers with a new alibi.

On July 4, 1944, the Gestapo arrested Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein as they were attempting to extend the network of Resistance cells by making contact with the Communist group that had formed around Anton Saefkow. In thus striking, the Gestapo itself propelled events toward a decision. Even Stauffenberg seems to have wavered for a moment at this time. A message from Tresckow, which incidentally revealed the innermost motivations of the conspirators, implored Stauffenberg to put aside all considerations of success or failure and wait no longer: “The assassination must be attempted,
coûte que coûte.
Even if it does not succeed, they must act in Berlin as if it did. The practical purpose no longer matters; what matters is that the German resistance movement should have taken the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, anything else is of no consequence.”
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On June 6, 1944, the invasion forces began moving out of the ports of southern England. An armada of 5,000 vessels headed for the coast of Normandy, while British and American parachute units dropped on the flanks of the intended landing zone. Toward three o'clock in the morning the first landing craft entered the water several miles off the coast, and, in rough seas, moved out of the shadow of the transport fleet.

As they approached shore toward dawn some three hours later, thousands of planes flew over the coastal strip and dropped a hail of bombs on the German positions. Simultaneously, the entire landing area was bombarded by heavy naval guns. At some points, especially at the foot of the Cotentin Peninsula and near the mouth of the Orne, the landing operation succeeded against unexpectedly meager German resistance. But in the central part of the landing area, near Vierville, the Americans ran into a German division that by chance had been alerted for an invasion exercise, and encountered withering fire (Omaha Beach). The defenders fired at a “carpet of people,” one report put it; the entire beach was covered with burning armored vehicles, ships, and dead and wounded men. By evening the Americans had taken two small bridgeheads, and the British and Canadians had seized an expanse of beach amounting to nearly 200 square miles. Above all, the Allies possessed numerical superiority in the landing area.

The quick success of the landing operation once again exposed German inferiority in matériel and military forces. Even the time and place of the invasion had taken the Germans by surprise. Because of German weakness in the air, the Allied troops and fleets had assembled undiscovered in the deployment area of southern England. German military counterintelligence had, it is true, precisely predicted the time of the landing, but the Abwehr was in bad odor and no attention had been paid to this information. Field Marsha] von Rundstedt, the commander in chief in the West, had informed Hitler as recently as May 30 that no signs of an impending landing could be observed. Field Marshal Rommel, inspector of the coastal defenses, had left his headquarters on June 5 and gone to Berchtesgaden for a talk with Hitler. Moreover, the German leadership was convinced that the enemy attack would come at the narrowest point of the Channel, in the Pas de Calais, and had therefore placed the main force there. Hitler, on the other hand, guided by his peculiar “intuition,” had expressed the view that Normandy was just as likely an invasion area; but he had finally bowed to the opinion of his military experts, all the more so since that opinion seemed to be confirmed by various movements on the enemy's part.

The invasion exposed a disastrous failure of leadership on the German side. The crisis had been foreshadowed when Hitler could not manage to forge the divergent views of his generals into a coherent plan for fending off a landing. The result was a series of muddled compromises, aggravated by the prevailing confusion of authority. On June 6 various command centers were scattered all over Berchtesgaden, not one of them able to function wholly independently, communicating with one another solely by telephone throughout the morning, and arguing chiefly over the release of the four reserve divisions in the West. Hitler himself, meanwhile, after one of his long, empty nights of palaver had gone to bed toward morning, with orders not to be awakened for the present. A first military conference took place at last early in the afternoon; but Hitler had asked the participants to meet in Castle Klessheim, about an hour's drive by car from Berchtesgaden, for he was expecting Hungarian Premier Sztójay there on that day. After his arrival he went up to the map table; from his look one could not tell whether he suspected the Allies of a feint or was himself trying to deceive his entourage. In Austrian dialect he said the equivalent of: “So this is it!” A few minutes later, after being briefed on the latest developments, he went to the upper rooms for the “show sit.” Shortly before five o'clock in the afternoon he finally issued the order “that the enemy is to be annihilated at the bridgehead by evening of June 6.”