The Plots Against Hitler Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on Ranks

  Introduction

  Opposition in Flames

  “That Damned Mare!”: The Army Top-Brass Scandal

  The Officer, the Mayor, and the Spy

  “In the Darkest Colors”: The Decision of General Beck

  The Bird and Its Cage: First Attempt at Coup d’État, September 1938

  Without a Network: The Lone Assassin

  The Point of No Return: Pogrom and War

  The Spirit of Zossen: When Networks Fail

  Signs in the Darkness: Rebuilding the Conspiracy

  On the Wings of Thought: Networks of Imagination

  Brokers on the Front Line: The New Strategy

  War of Extermination: The Conspirators and the Holocaust

  “Flash” and Liqueur Bottles: Assassination Attempts in the East

  Code Name U-7: Rescue and Abyss

  Count Stauffenberg: The Charismatic Turn

  Thou Shalt Kill: The Problem of Tyrannicide

  A Wheel Conspiracy: The Stauffenberg Era

  The Final Showdown: July 20, 1944

  Photos

  The Shirt of Nessus

  Motives in the Twilight

  Networks of Resistance

  Knights in Dirty Armor: Heroes of the Resistance and Us

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2016 by Danny Orbach

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Orbach, Danny, author.

  Title: The plots against Hitler / Danny Orbach

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015043037 (print) | LCCN 2015046580 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544714434 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544715226 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Assassination attempts. | Heads of state—Germany—Biography. | Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945. | Anti-Nazi movement—Germany—History—20th century. | Opposition (Political science)—Germany—History—20th century. | Assassins—Germany—History—20th century.

  Classification: LCC DD247.H5 072 2016 (print) | LCC DD247.H5 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/43—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043037

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photograph © Getty Images

  v1.0916

  “Guilt,” from Moabit Sonnets by Albrecht Haushofer, translated by M. D. Herter Norton. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  This book is dedicated to my dear teacher Itzik Meron (Mitrani),

  who accompanied this project from the outset

  but did not have an opportunity to witness its publication.

  Note on Ranks

  Many of the protagonists in this book were officers in Third Reich military organizations: Wehrmacht, Navy, and SS. A number of them advanced in rank between 1938 and 1944—the years covered here—and often more than once. Many books on the German resistance, especially in English, mention consistently the last and highest rank each individual obtained. Claus von Stauffenberg, for example, usually appears as a colonel, though he received this rank only in July 1944. In this book I mention the relevant rank for each time period. So, Henning von Tresckow is referred to as a colonel in chapters dealing with his assassination attempts in March 1943, but as a major general in later chapters. Two of the ranks of general officers in the Wehrmacht, “general of infantry/artillery ext.” and “colonel-general,” do not have a clear equivalent in English-speaking armies. Therefore, for simplicity’s sake, I translate both to “general.” The SS had its own special ranks, which I convert to American military equivalents; for instance, Brigadier General Nebe instead of Oberführer Nebe.

  Introduction

  And when the cries of misery have reached my ear

  I warned, indeed, not hard enough and clear!

  Today I know why I stand guilty here.

  —ALBRECHT HAUSHOFER, 1945

  GUILT. NO OTHER word carries so much significance when considering German history. Even the drama of the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, staged by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg and his confederates in the anti-Nazi resistance movement, is fraught with guilt and a maelstrom of other emotions, which we view through the thick fog of myth and memory.

  The story of the anti-Nazi underground in the German army and its various attempts to assassinate Hitler has been cast and recast in books, movies, screenplays, and TV shows. That is hardly surprising, as the story contains elements of a thriller: nocturnal meetings in frozen fields; the elaborate drama of military conspiracies; bombs hidden in briefcases and liqueur bottles; and the dramatic day of July 20, 1944, with its abortive assassination and final, desperate attempt at a coup d’état.

  Drama apart, the story of the German resistance has a crucial moral component. After all, the Nazi era is still viewed around the world, and most of all in Germany itself, through the lens of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and the burden of National Socialist crimes. Traditionalist German historians, from the 1950s to today, have tended to view the story of the German resistance as a “spot of light” in the darkness of the Nazi era, therefore easing the burden of historical guilt. The resistance fighters were portrayed as upright, deeply moral people set to “confront the dark forces of the age,” in the words of Hans Rothfels, the founding father of resistance historiography in Germany.1 The narrative presented by traditionalist German historians, most subtly by Peter Hoffmann, is rich in detail and highly sympathetic to the German resistance fighters. The coup attempt of July 20, 1944, according to Countess Marion von Dönhoff, was a “revolt of conscience.” The motives of the conspirators, she wrote, were moral.2 Their purpose, states Peter Hoffmann, was first and foremost to stop Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust. It was a humane goal, in the sense that its purpose was to uphold the principle of “life and the preservation of life.”3 They were patriotic Germans, for sure, who hoped to save their fatherland from destruction, but nationalism was always secondary to morality.

  Come the boisterous sixties, and the political climate in Germany changed dramatically. Young historians, like other educated Germans of their age, began to mercilessly examine the “myths” of the past. The German resistance did not survive the new critical climate unscathed. From the late sixties on, critical, left-leaning historians such as Hans Mommsen, Christoph Dipper, and Christian Gerlach cast doubts on the integrity of the German resistance. To them, the conspirators, most of whom were conservative bureaucrats and military officers, were dubious figures to begin with. True, Count Stauffenberg tried to assassinate Hitler and paid for it with his life. But had he not cooperated with the Nazi regime for many years beforehand? What about the other conspirators? Were they really moral men and women, anti-Nazis to the core, who tried to stage “a revolt of conscience,” or rather were they opportunistic figures who cooperated with the Nazis until the war was no longer winnable?

  Gradually, laurel after laurel was removed from the heads of previously revered conspirators. They may have slowly learned to hate the Nazi regime and opposed most of its crim
es, argued Hans Mommsen, but they were also antidemocratic reactionaries.4 They harbored strong anti-Semitic sentiments, wrote Christoph Dipper in a highly influential study published in 1984. They may have been against the Holocaust, but most of them wanted the Jews out of Germany and supported “legal” and “nonviolent” discrimination.5 They weren’t merely anti-Semites but also murderers and war criminals, argued Christian Gerlach in 1995. Many prominent conspirators, first and foremost Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow, willingly took part in the mass murders of Russians, Jews, and Poles. Traditionalist historians, Gerlach contended, had whitewashed the conspirators’ crimes and written “nonsense” about their supposedly unimpeachable record. The sad truth was that they resisted Hitler not because of his crimes but because they disagreed with him about the “best way to win the war.”6

  The debate goes on. The German resistance to Hitler, it seems, is a field in which historical arguments are not purely academic but shot through with passion. People are elevated to Olympus by one scholar, only to be condemned to the darkest hell by another. Professional and even personal accusations are hurled back and forth. I myself, as the following pages will demonstrate, am far from a neutral spectator. In the first days of my interest in the resistance, as a young student in Israel, I was impressed by what I saw as the selfless bravery of the German conspirators. As a third-generation child of Holocaust survivors, I was deeply moved to read about the conspirators’ sympathy for the persecuted Jews. I was equally disappointed to discover their supposed anti-Semitism and complicity in war crimes in Dipper’s and Gerlach’s accounts. I decided to delve into the sources and form my own opinion.

  In ten years of research prior to the publication of Valkyrie, my Hebrew-language monograph on the resistance, I examined every primary and secondary source I could find.7 My research took me to some thirteen archives in Germany, England, Russia, and the United States. At times, I was shocked by my own findings. Gradually, I became more and more disillusioned with the left-leaning, “critical” school of resistance studies. Seemingly critical scholars, I found, blamed German resistance fighters for opportunism, anti-Semitism, and war crimes based on skewed evidence, distortions, and misreadings of primary sources. The representation of the resistance by such scholars is often a caricature, a “crooked mirror” that teaches us more about the political bias of the scholars than about the German resistance itself.8

  However, I could not return to the cozy, heroic picture presented by many traditionalist historians. True, some of the critical historians were sloppy, but the questions they asked were worthwhile. Gradually, I came to believe that one must transcend the current moralistic debate, redraw its terms, and reframe it altogether.

  This book is an attempt to do that. It retells the story of the resistance, shedding new light on its psychological, social, and military dynamics, as well as on the reasons behind its decision to assassinate Hitler. I use the German resistance as a test case to draw specific insights with general implications: Why are certain people, and not others, drawn to active resistance despite the mortal risks involved? Who is most likely to become a resistance fighter? What can we learn about the complex and fluid motives that may lead people to resist? When one steps out of the moralistic debate, even without disavowing it entirely, a whole new world of meaning may be discovered. In it, motivations and intentions are more properly seen as slippery and difficult to pin down. As the medievalist Aviad Kleinberg wrote in his study of Catholic saints,

  The question of what really motivates the ascetic is meaningless, as is the question of whether a “true” saint really exists. If “true” means perfectly pure, the response will always be negative. Nothing in the world is pure. Does this mean that everything in the world is completely impure? There again the response will be negative. In this world we are always dealing with relative values . . . Furthermore, what makes a person act at one moment is not necessarily what makes him act at another. People sometimes do things without intending to do them; sometimes honor, power, habit, or fatigue can alter the purest intentions. People rarely conform to clear and precise models, just as they rarely have feet that perfectly fit size 11 shoes. They fit, more or less. They fluctuate and shift from one model to another. At any given moment their actions reflect the balance of drives and contingencies that result from a unique situation which cannot be reproduced.9

  Indeed, what sense does it make to ask whether the resistance fighters had “moral” or “patriotic” motives without deciphering what morality and patriotism meant to them? Is it possible to draw a line between morality and patriotism, and if so, did the conspirators consciously do so? Can one build a more convincing model of their motives? These questions will be explored throughout the book, and concluded upon in chapter 20.

  The story of the German resistance conspirators, however, was essentially a military one. The following chapters will chronicle the dramatic history of the schemes, assassination attempts, and bomb plots they were involved in. We will follow the conspirators from 1938 to 1944, uncovering assassination plots, some famous and some little known, in an attempt to treat the rarely discussed issue of conspiratorial networks. Previous studies have tended to focus on groups or individuals in the resistance, but almost none of them, as far as I have been able to establish, have adequately analyzed the interactions between the members of these groups.10 How were new fighters recruited to the resistance? How did the conspiratorial networks operate in reality, and how did different leadership styles affect the outcome of the plots and their chances of success? Most importantly, we shall see how certain individuals, whom we shall call brokers and connectors, kept the networks alive by ensuring that information flowed within them.

  In addition, we shall deal with the complexities involved in the decision of the German resistance fighters to assassinate Hitler. On one hand, such an action offered the enormous temptation to change the course of history with one stroke. On the other, murdering one’s sovereign leader was, for most conspirators, ideologically, legally, and morally problematic. How did the leaders of the resistance, devout Christians as they were, justify the killing of their hierarchical superior, to whom they swore an oath of allegiance? Such questioning teaches us a lot not only about the resistance but also about problems of obedience and disobedience in Nazi Germany and beyond.

  I base my narrative on primary sources—diaries, letters, memoirs, and testimonies—as well as on German, American, British, Finnish, and Soviet documents. I also make use of the records of Gestapo interrogations and of Nazi court proceedings, as well as interviews with the conspirators and members of their families. A particularly important source is the almost inexhaustibly rich trove of documents collected by the late professor Harold C. Deutsch and preserved among his papers at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I have also made extensive use of the private archives of two other prominent historians, Eberhard Zeller and Bodo Scheurig, both kept at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

  Many of the documents I have used have been examined little (if at all) by the existing literature. For example, the fascinating diaries of Hermann Kaiser, the broker who connected the different resistance groups in Berlin and the east, offer a rare glance into the inner circle of the conspiracy. I have also made extensive use of interviews that Harold C. Deutsch and his team conducted with participants in the September 1938 coup attempt, an episode that remains relatively obscure to this day. These interviews cast new light on the frame of mind of senior members of the resistance movement on the eve of and during World War II. Likewise, French sources that until now have not received the attention they deserve enabled me to uncover the story of the negotiations conducted in the summer of 1944 between agents of the German resistance movement and Free French espionage officers. Another important source, also cited here for the first time, is the transcript of the interrogation, by Soviet intelligence, of Col. Hans Crome, a member of the resistance movement who was taken prisoner by the Red
Army in 1944. This document, written in Russian, is preserved in the Russian Federation’s state archive, in Moscow. Its significance lies in the information it includes about the resistance movement’s recruitment methods, its undercover communications procedures, and its internal structure.

  In addition, I have made critical use of the substantial body of research on the German resistance movement published between 1945 and 2015 in English, Hebrew, and German. My findings point out the severe failings of some of the most influential and accepted works on the subject. The breadth of these sources, primary and secondary, has enabled me to present a full account of these events, including moments of crisis and decisive junctures, while reaching new insights valid beyond the bounds of this specific story. In our world of revolutionary “springs,” civil wars, occupation regimes, and brutal tyrannies, questions of resistance are more important than ever.

  1

  Opposition in Flames

  BY JANUARY 30, 1933, the eve of the Nazi takeover, it was still unclear whether Hitler and the National Socialists would rule Germany without a fight. The two anti-Nazi opposition parties, the Communists and the Social Democrats, still held far-reaching networks of activists, many of them armed. They boasted millions of loyal supporters, clubs, and labor unions, and more than enough young men willing to fight. Within a year, all of these seemingly formidable networks of opposition would disappear, consumed by fire.

  On the evening of February 27, 1933, two pedestrians and a policeman were walking by the Reichstag, the impressive home of the German parliament in Berlin, when something unusual suddenly caught their eyes. A light, some strange flicker, was dancing behind the windows, followed by a swiftly moving shadow. The policeman knew immediately he was looking at arson, and called for reinforcements. Police entered the Reichstag together, moving through a screen of thick, black smoke. Quickly, they noticed the mysterious trespasser sneaking from the chamber, half-naked, covered in sweat, with a beet-red face and unkempt hair. A passport found on him indicated that his name was Marinus van der Lubbe, a Dutch citizen. He had used his shirt and a can of gasoline to start a fire. When asked for his reasons, he answered, “Protest! Protest!”1