Killing Hitler (37 page)

He resolved to act, and, hatching a plan with Schlabrendorff, planned to kidnap Hitler during a forthcoming visit to Army Group Center. Once arrived at staff headquarters, he thought, Hitler’s car could be commandeered and its occupants arrested. The Führer could then be put on trial and dealt with accordingly, perhaps by execution. The visit to Borisov was planned for 4 August. At dawn that morning, Hitler arrived at the local airstrip, was collected by a convoy of SS cars newly arrived the previous evening, and was driven the 4 kilometers to army group headquarters. Once there, he hurried into a meeting with Field Marshal von Bock and General Guderian. It is even suggested that he had time for a word with Tresckow himself, confiding to him his plans to turn postwar Moscow into an enormous lake.
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That
afternoon, he was driven back to the airfield and flown to Rastenburg. According to one eyewitness, security for the visit had been “incredible.”
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For Tresckow, it was a grim realization. Unable to win Bock over to the conspiracy, and unable to tackle the Führer’s security personnel head-on, he was effectively powerless. He also recognized the cruel dilemma of his position: by waiting for Hitler’s defeat, he was wasting the chance to save something from the ruins of Nazism, but by acting precipitately, he risked abject failure and certain death. He needed contacts to the civilian resistance within Germany. Any arrest or assassination of Hitler, he realized, had to be accompanied by a thoroughgoing coup to seize political power and remove the Nazi Party.

That winter, while Schlabrendorff was sounding out possible collaborators among the domestic opposition, Hitler’s aura of invincibility was finally and irreparably dented. In early December, German forces faltered before Moscow, paralyzed by the freezing weather and reeling from the determined counterattacks of fresh Soviet troops. At one point, they had stood a mere 19 kilometers outside the city’s suburbs, but they were driven back, and the forward German salients were eliminated. Though they would succeed in stabilizing the front and even regaining the initiative, they would never threaten Moscow again. It was their first defeat in over two years of fighting.

That same month, as the Germans were freezing before the Soviet capital, the Japanese were launching their surprise attack on the U.S. base at Pearl Harbor. On 11 December, Hitler delivered a lengthy speech to the Reichstag attacking Roosevelt, praising the Japanese, and culminating in a declaration of war on the United States. His closing words, announcing the commencement of hostilities, were drowned out in a frenzy of cheering.
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Beyond the Reichstag, however, few viewed the prospect of war with America with enthusiasm. Despite the best efforts of Goebbels, public morale sank to a new low as the German people prepared for indefinite warfare. The General Staff was alarmed at the addition of a new enemy with almost limitless reserves. For Tresckow, it marked the beginning of the end. He commented
sadly: “I wish I could show the German people a film, entitled ‘Germany at the End of the War.’ Perhaps then they would realize with horror, what we’re heading for.”
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One man who was slowly coming round to share this view was a brilliant young staff officer named Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg’s Born into the Swabian nobility in 1907, Stauffenberg was an intellectual and a man of delicate health who had developed a profound, if mystical, sense of German nationalism. An early enthusiast for National Socialism, he had joined the cavalry in 1927 and progressed swiftly through the ranks, being elevated to the General Staff in 1939 and serving with distinction in the Polish and French campaigns. Stauffenberg was a comparatively late convert to the cause of the resistance. Indeed, when told of seditious plans by his colleagues in 1939, he told his wife that he knew such activities to be “tantamount to treason,” but he had decided not to report them.
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Clearly, he did not yet hold the view that Hitler had to be removed.

As with many of his colleagues, the decisive factor in Stau-ffenberg’s conversion appears to have been the atrocities perpetrated by the SS against enemy civilians, and especially Jews. In the summer of 1941, for example, he seems to have had his first suspicions, and asked a colleague to “collect everything that implicated the SS.”
⁴⁰
At around that time, he also made the acquaintance of Henning von Tresckow, to whom he professed himself to be “no Nazi.”
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Though he would tentatively advocate a reckoning with what he called the “brown plague” of Nazism, he preferred to wait until the war was over. And crucially, right until the spring of 1942, he still believed that the war could be won, and preferred to temper outright criticism of Hitler as a military leader by suggesting that he might benefit from more capable advisors.

By that summer, however, Stauffenberg was openly advocating Hitler’s removal. There were a number of factors that brought this shift about. The murderous treatment of Soviet prisoners and civilians, at a time when Stauffenberg was attempting to raise volunteer units among them, struck him as spectacularly wrongheaded.
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Also, the thrust toward Stalingrad and the
Caucasus, begun that summer, was considered wildly optimistic. However, the decisive factor in Stauffenberg’s conversion was the murderous policy of the SS on the Eastern Front. In May 1942, he received a graphic eyewitness account of the mass execution of Jews in a small Ukrainian town. His immediate reaction was that Hitler had to be overthrown.
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From that point on, with all the enthusiasm of a new convert, Stauffenberg repeatedly, and often incautiously, expressed his opinion on Hitler and the Nazi regime. The Führer, he said, was “foolish and criminal”; his war was “monstrous” and had been based on lies. He liked to quote the work of the mystical poet Stefan George, in whose circle Stauffenberg had participated as a young man. One of his favorites, entitled
The Antichrist
, appeared to him to be particularly apposite:

The high Prince of Vermin extends his domains;
No pleasure eludes him, no treasure or gain.
And down with the dregs of rebellion!

You cheer, mesmerised by the demoniac sheen
,
Exhaust what remains of the honey of dawn
,
And only then sense the debacle.

You then stretch your tongues to the now arid trough
,
Mill witless as kine through a pasture aflame
,
While fearfully brazens the trumpet.
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For Stauffenberg,
The Antichrist
almost became a mantra. He would recite it with mystical fervor, “his great frame striding up and down the room and his…left hand gesticulating fiercely.”
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He also used it as an effective recruiting device. On one occasion, he merely quoted the poem and made no further comment, leaving the stark vision to do his persuading for him.
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In time, he came to advocate tyrannicide and even volunteered to carry out the attack himself.
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Perhaps it is indicative of the currency of such opinions among the staff officers on the Eastern Front that Stauffenberg was never reported or cautioned
for his outspoken attacks on the regime. Rather, he was maneuvered into a field posting in North Africa, far away from the Soviet Union and far from the bloody brutality of the SS. In early February 1943, he took up his post as senior staff officer in the 10th Panzer Division in Tunisia, but he would curb neither his forthright opinions nor his conspiratorial activities.

It is, in fact, testament to the breadth of anti-Nazi feeling within the Wehrmacht that the first conspiracy worthy of the name originated from beyond the narrow circle of plotters around Tresckow and Stauffenberg. In February 1943, General Hubert Lanz, commander of an army group in eastern Ukraine, had been directly ordered by Hitler to hold the city of Kharkhov. On assessing his available forces, however—three SS-Panzer Divisions against fully three advancing Soviet armies
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—he realized that his orders amounted not only to a suicide mission but also to the wanton sacrifice of élite fighting units. After conferring with his chief of staff, Major-General Hans Speidel, and one of his corps commanders, Colonel Hyazinth von Strachwitz, he concluded that Hitler had to be removed.

Lanz hatched a plan to kidnap Hitler during a forthcoming visit to Army Group B headquarters at Poltava. Though an assassination was not initially planned, it was considered in the event that the kidnap attempt met with resistance. Strachwitz assured Lanz that his troops, men of the élite
Grossdeutschland
Division, could be relied upon to provide the necessary muscle to overcome Hitler’s security personnel. Hitler, it was naively assumed, could then be handed over to the military authorities for trial as a war criminal. When Lanz withdrew his forces from Kharkhov on 15 February—in direct contravention of Hitler’s orders—it appeared that the time for action had come. Enraged, Hitler flew to Army Group B two days later to manage the ensuing crisis. But instead of visiting Poltava, he traveled instead to Zaporozhye to confer with Lanz’s superior, Field Marshal von Manstein. Lanz was relieved of his command for disobeying orders and transferred to the reserve, and his plot unraveled as swiftly and silently as it had developed. Unwittingly, Hitler had once again evaded those who would do him harm.

Eight hundred kilometers to the north, meanwhile, a second plot was in an advanced stage of planning. This one was no halfhearted kidnapping; rather, it was very definitely and unashamedly an assassination. In the previous months, Tresckow’s circle had been augmented by a number of new additions, who brought fresh energy and dynamism to the conspiracy. One of them was a young cavalry officer named Georg von Boeselager. Born in Kassel during World War I, Boeselager came from a traditional military family, and certainly would not have disappointed his forebears. Awarded the prestigious Knight’s Cross during the French campaign, he then became only the fifty-third recipient of the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross during the advance on Moscow. In the following summer, his unit was absorbed into the cavalry regiment of Army Group Center. There, Boeselager the dashing young war hero met Tresckow the traitor.

In fact, Boeselager’s flirtation with the resistance had begun some months before. Already in the summer of 1941, he had complained bitterly of Hitler’s leadership and of the criminal nature of the Nazi regime. “When the war is over,” he confided to colleagues, “it will be up to people like us to do something about it.” He would soon learn that action was required with rather more urgency. In the summer of 1942, his brother Philipp, an officer on the staff of Field Marshal von Kluge, made a shocking discovery. In a meeting with SS General von dem Bach-Zelewski, he had queried the general’s use of the phrase “special treatment” with regard to prisoners, Gypsies, and Jews. He was told bluntly that it meant death by shooting.
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Few German soldiers on the Eastern Front would have been unaware of the brutal treatment meted out by the SS to the perceived enemies of the Reich, but here was confirmation from a very senior officer that mass murder was not only tolerated but was even official policy. It is inconceivable that Georg von Boeselager would have been long ignorant of his brother’s stark realization.

Boeselager’s arrival at Army Group Center headquarters, which had been engineered by his brother, began the process of transforming his principled but as yet unfocused criticism of the excesses of Nazism into something more immediately deadly.
Under Tresckow’s tutelage, he underwent a “thoroughgoing reorientation of his thinking” and emerged as a man in fundamental moral and religious opposition to Hitler, and who was moreover prepared to act.
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For Tresckow, meanwhile, Boeselager represented the reliable military force that he had so patently lacked at Borisov eighteen months previously. At this point, it appears that Tresckow was leaning toward the idea of shooting Hitler during one of the Führer’s visits to the Eastern Front. When he learned of Hitler’s visit to Army Group South in February 1943, for example, he hurried to Zaporozhye to demand why his fellow conspirators there had not seized their chance: “We have been waiting for an opportunity for months!” he raged:

Waiting for it, longing for the day when we can kill this scoundrel who is destroying our Germany! The day never comes! Each time, it’s no use! Each time, something goes wrong! And you here in Zaporozhye, who see things the way we do, you let the chance slip!”
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His new plan, therefore, envisaged Boeselager’s cavalry troops providing the firepower to assassinate the Führer and take on the SS bodyguard. All he needed now was to provide the target. And in early March, he received news that the increasingly reclusive Hitler had agreed to visit Army Group Center headquarters at Smolensk.

From his previous experience, Tresckow was well aware of the complications and difficulties in executing such an operation. Given the chaos that could ensue, he felt he had to secure the cooperation, or at least acquiescence, of his superior officer, Field Marshal von Kluge. Kluge, however, though broadly sympathetic to the cause, could not align himself with it. He temporized and prevaricated, raising objection after objection. Despite Tresckow’s persistent badgering, he simply could not bring himself to be party to the assassination of his commander in chief. Suspecting something was afoot, he turned on Tresckow on the morning of Hitler’s visit, saying: “For heaven’s sake, don’t do
anything today!”
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Tresckow’s reply is not recorded, but he clearly refused to listen.