The Plots Against Hitler Read online

  The alliance with the army was sealed in June 1934, after Hitler crucially decided to dismiss his own militia, the SA. The leaders of this violent organization did not make a secret of their intention to remove the hated, aristocratic military leadership and to build instead a National Socialist people’s army. The generals could not live for long with such a threat. In the end, Hitler had to choose a side—and he did. In a burst of terrifying cruelty, later known as the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler ordered the entire SA leadership massacred. Several conservative opponents of the regime were also murdered, including two senior officers: former Reich chancellor Gen. Kurt von Schleicher, and intelligence officer Maj. Gen. Ferdinand von Bredow. But this did not keep the military leadership from celebrating, and the two main military leaders of the country, commander in chief Gen. Werner von Fritsch and chief of the General Staff Gen. Ludwig Beck, failed to even lodge a protest. The army’s victory was, of course, illusory. The SA was pushed to the sidelines in favor of the SS, the elite army of the National Socialist Party. It was more organized, and it posed a much greater threat to the army in the long run.

  To show gratitude for the elimination of their SA rivals, some senior generals, led by War Minister Field Marshal Blomberg, proposed that from then on, every soldier would swear loyalty not only to the nation and the Reich but personally to Hitler. (From 1934 onward, he held both chancellorship and presidency, and was simply called the Führer—leader.) And so it was: “I swear by God this holy oath, to unconditionally obey Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich and people and the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. As a brave soldier, I will be ready to risk my life at any time for this oath.”18

  A pro-Nazi shift also began in the working class, traditionally a mainstay of the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party. The government’s increased public spending, monumental public projects, and rearmament brought about a massive decrease in unemployment. Though strikes were banned and real wages stagnated, few went hungry as they had in the last years of the Weimar Republic.19 The National Socialist recreation service, Strength through Joy (Kraft durch Freude), organized vacations, excursions, and athletic and cultural events for workers and civil servants. A growing propaganda machine spread Nazi doctrine at schools, universities, and workplaces, and in journals and cinemas. Many went along with it. In his memoirs, Sebastian Haffner described these temptations:

  The effect [of the propaganda] was intensified by the way one was permanently occupied and distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies and national festivities . . . There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and vows . . . The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it. It was reason enough that people who distanced themselves too obviously, sshh!—were daily and nightly tortured to death with steel whips and electric drills.20

  The other side of the happily united Volk was “the Jew,” the eternal bête noire of the National Socialist Party. This relatively unpopular minority was pitched as the enemy against which the newly formed nation must unite. Yet things did not go smoothly from the start. For example, the cooperation of the public with the anti-Jewish boycott of April 1, 1933, was limited, in spite of venomous propaganda from the government and local organs of the Nazi Party.21

  However, the impact of anti-Jewish propaganda, which catalyzed existing anti-Semitic sentiments, was growing, especially in the younger generations. In fact, it was an essential part of the “togetherness” of the collective shaped by the regime. Sebastian Haffner, who was dating a Jewish girl in those days, recalled that on the day of the boycott, he went hiking with her in a forest near Berlin. En route, they met some groups of schoolboys accompanied by their teachers:

  Every one of these classes, as they passed, shouted “Juda verrecke!” to us in their bright young voices, as though it was a sort of hiker’s greeting. It may not have been aimed at us in particular. I do not look at all Jewish, and Charlie (who was Jewish) did not look very Jewish either. Perhaps it was just a friendly greeting . . . So there I sat “on the springtime hill” with a small, graceful, vivacious girl in my arms. We kissed and caressed each other, and every so often a group of boys went past and cheerfully told us to perish.22

  Under these circumstances, very few opposition activists dared to keep on protesting, and many of those who did were violently tossed aside. In the first year and a half after the takeover, SA thugs developed the habit of kidnapping “bad elements” and beating them to death in torture cellars. After the decapitation of the SA in June 1934, this sporadic, unorganized terror became much more efficient under the leadership of the SS. Throughout Germany, there were more than fifty concentration camps, where hundreds of thousands of Germans were interned. The prisoners were by no means exclusively resistance fighters. Most of them were citizens who had dared to criticize the government in public or even (in some cases) had cracked a joke at Hitler’s expense. Behind the barbed wire, prisoners faced starvation and backbreaking daily labor. Any violation of the rules could be punished by death, and many who passed through the electric fence into a camp never returned. A popular ditty went thus: “Please, dear God, make me mute, / lest in Dachau I’ll set foot” (Lieber Gott, Mach mich stumm, / dass ich nicht nach Dachau kumm).23

  Outside the concentration camps, opponents of the regime were also isolated and living in constant terror. Even if they weren’t arrested, they could be arbitrarily fired from their jobs. The long arm of the government could reach them, their family, and their friends at any moment. No one could be trusted. Anybody, close as he or she might be, could be an informer of the Secret State Police, known by its shortened name, Gestapo. Actually, there were relatively few professional Gestapo agents around, many fewer than most contemporaries imagined.24 Most informers were ordinary people who gave tips to the Gestapo of their own free will: children brainwashed at school or at Hitler Youth meetings, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. These informers were motivated not only by ideology—though it certainly mattered—but also by personal gain. Currying the favor of the authorities could take one a long way, perhaps securing a promotion in the workplace, thus oiling one’s way through the corridors of power.

  But that was not the full picture. Opponents of the regime were not merely passive victims. In fact, many of them were brave, resolute, and dedicated. Immediately after the disaster of 1933, Social Democratic and Communist groups started building on old party networks to form resistance cells in neighborhoods, clubs, and factories. Many of these groups distributed their own propaganda through leaflets, newspapers, and other kinds of underground media, coordinated by both insiders and exiled leaders. The Communists, especially, tried their hand at well-organized Bolshevik-style underground activity. Yet, according to Peter Hoffmann, by 1935, “the period of large-scale underground activity was over. The Gestapo had annihilated the various organizations.”25 In fact, by that year, most active members and leaders of the meticulously crafted Communist networks were in concentration camps, exiled, or dead.

  The reason was not stupidity or lack of experience but a structural problem. The Communists, true to their belief in mass action and popular resistance, worked to build a mass network. There was ample talk of “united fronts,” cooperation between different cells, and broad national distribution in factories and workplaces. But as a network expands, the ability of its experienced cadres and leaders to filter newcomers becomes more limited, and very quickly the whole organization grows out of control. Such decentralization may be a blessing under democratic conditions, but not under a totalitarian dictatorship. Every recruit is potentially dangerous; every newcomer could be an informer, or a Gestapo agent. The fact that most Germans were sympathetic to the regime made that danger even more acute. With every new member, the chance to be penetrated by the security ser
vice grew, as even loyal recruits could unintentionally speak to informers. An arrested member could always be tortured until he identified others, thus allowing the Gestapo to follow the links in the network all the way back to its leaders.

  Therefore, a network that was too large, like the Communist network, was bound to be destroyed. The Gestapo just had to wait for an opportune moment. The only model that could work for a coup d’état under totalitarian conditions would be an elitist underground with access to arms, and a very limited number of powerful members. Such groups were all but nonexistent in 1935. They would be formed only two years later, not from among Hitler’s rivals but from the ranks of his allies, under very unusual and surprising conditions.

  2

  “That Damned Mare!”:

  The Army Top-Brass Scandal

  ON A CHILLY day in September 1937, a political snowball started rolling from the green expanses of the Tiergarten in Berlin. As scandal followed scandal, the ensuing months witnessed a domino fall of several prominent figures in the German General Staff, foreign service, and government ministries.1 Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, and Hermann Göring, Hitler’s right-hand man, were the quickest to exploit and co-opt these events, using them to orchestrate far-reaching purges in the ruling elites of the Third Reich. Their metaphorical fingerprints were discovered in a series of sensational incidents, in which dubious, shadowy figures played fleeting roles and then disappeared again into the night. Rumors and half-truths, inventions and distortions were used in fierce political arm wrestling between the top brass of the SS and the Wehrmacht. The struggle, which ended in clear victory for the former party, also led to the development of an embryonic network of dissidents, which would eventually take part in the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler.2

  It began when Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, Hitler’s minister of war, was forced to resign because of an embarrassing affair. “It’s all because of that damned mare!” said a General Staff colonel when explaining its origin later. On that cold September day, Blomberg discovered to his dismay that his usual morning ride could not take place, as his mare was suffering from paralysis. Like many officers, Blomberg took great pleasure in the equestrian arts, and was used to riding every morning in the Tiergarten before the beginning of his busy daily schedule.

  Hitler, ostensibly, did not have much reason to complain about Blomberg and his work. The general, an appointee of the late president Hindenburg, was nothing but a staunch party sympathizer who worked enthusiastically to further the Nazification of the German army. Far from being the moderate, responsible general imagined by some contemporaries, Blomberg was taken in by Hitler and the new National Revolution.3 In the first years after the Nazi takeover, he even supported the arming of the SA. Thus, under a thin “apolitical” guise, he was one of the architects of Germany’s Nazification.

  However, from the party leadership’s point of view, Blomberg had one substantial shortcoming: he was cold to Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy. Just like Gen. Werner von Fritsch, the commander in chief of the army, Blomberg didn’t have principled objections to war. His main concern was timing. He and Fritsch expressed the fear that the German army was not yet ready for a large-scale conflict. Hitler, never too happy to work with independent subordinates, was eager to co-opt the dramatic events of late 1937 and early 1938 in order to get rid of both men. Their undoing would prove to be the birth of an organized conspiracy against Hitler.

  Blomberg decided to walk in the park without his horse and encountered a young woman named Eva Grün in a chance meeting that was to develop into a stormy love affair. The field marshal was fifty-nine years old, a widower glad to find a remedy for his loneliness. “He was crazy about me,” Grün proudly recalled.4 Blomberg asked, and received, the Führer’s blessing for the union, and Hitler even volunteered to serve as a witness at the couple’s wedding. After the ceremony, the happy couple traveled to Italy for their honeymoon.

  Then, mysterious events began taking place. Senior officers in the General Staff received phone calls from giggling young women, congratulating the army for accepting “one of their own” into its ranks. At the same time, rumors of Frau Blomberg’s complicity in pornographic modeling and prostitution had reached the Berlin Police Bureau. The chief of police, who did not know what to do with the hot potato, handed it over to Hermann Göring, the powerful “number two” in the Nazi hierarchy. Göring was quick to translate the incriminating evidence into political capital, and gave the file to Hitler.5 The rumors quickly spread through the General Staff.

  Army commander in chief General Fritsch and his chief of General Staff, Gen. Ludwig Beck, were furious. They petitioned Hitler to demote Blomberg without delay, as it was “inconceivable that the first officer in the army marry a whore.” One officer interpreted his duty in somewhat broader terms. He traveled to Capri, Italy, where the Blombergs were spending their honeymoon, placed a loaded pistol on the field marshal’s desk, and ordered him to end his own life. Blomberg did not comply with that order, but his career was over, and, on January 27, 1938, he was forced by Hitler to resign.6

  Little did Fritsch know that his righteous anger would pave the way for his own professional undoing. Widely assumed to be Blomberg’s natural successor, he was fiercely opposed both by Göring, who had set a greedy eye on the war minister portfolio, and by SS leaders Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, who dreamed of shaping their organization as an alternative National Socialist elite army. In the preceding years, Fritsch had shown some opposition to the enlargement of the SS, and tension had been growing even among the lower echelons of the two military organizations. “Wait, you pigs,” young SS soldiers threatened their Wehrmacht counterparts. “Soon, Himmler will become war minister, and then we’ll show you who’s the boss here.”7

  The idea to appoint Fritsch as the new minister was, hence, highly unattractive to Himmler and his SS colleagues. In order to stop the appointment—which was supported by Hitler—Himmler, Göring, and Heydrich hatched a plot to implicate Fritsch in homosexuality, a very serious charge in those days.

  At the center of the plot stood one Otto Schmidt, a convicted criminal who made his living by seducing and extorting homosexuals. When arrested in 1935 and brought to the Gestapo, Schmidt gave away all of his contacts, incriminating hundreds of homosexuals, including prominent people. A grateful Gestapo official portrayed him as the “biggest expert on the homosexual scene in Berlin.”8 One of the victims was an elderly, sick cavalry captain named Frisch.

  Someone, Schmidt or one of his interrogators, decided to add one letter to the name of this military homosexual, and thus Frisch was rechristened Fritsch. His rank was also upgraded from captain to general. The file reached Himmler and gave him the perfect opportunity to fabricate evidence on the “perversions” of the unsuspecting commander in chief. An investigation was promptly opened by the Gestapo, and its results, which implicated Fritsch in “unnatural sexual acts,” was duly submitted to Hitler.

  Thus, in summer 1935, Otto Schmidt’s sensational testimony was as juicy as any yellow-press article could have been. At the end of 1933, declared the witness, he was strolling in the Wannsee train station when he suddenly saw an “evidently homosexual” rich old man, dressed in a dark coat with a collar made of fur and a black hat, white scarf, and monocle. The last item was important, as it was General Fritsch’s trademark in the Third Reich’s military elite.

  The witness further testified to noticing the old man sneaking into the men’s room along with a homosexual known as Bayern Seppl (Bavarian Joe). After some time the old man emerged, only to find Schmidt waiting for him at the door. The extorter introduced himself as police officer Krüger and ordered him to identify himself. The old man gave the name “General von Fritsch” and paid the “officer” five hundred marks, the first installment in a long chain of hush-money payments.

  Hitler was initially unresponsive to the accusations. Himmler, who had long wished to get rid of Fritsch, submitted the investigation
portfolio in 1935 but was all but ignored by his Führer. At that time, his relations with the army commander in chief were smooth, and the swift rearmament of Germany required close cooperation with the General Staff. Hitler, always a pragmatist in sexual questions, ordered the file to be promptly burned.

  However, in 1938 things were different. The cautious Fritsch was not as esteemed in the Führer’s headquarters, and the Blomberg scandal had made Hitler very suspicious regarding the personal lives of the Wehrmacht top brass. The Schmidt file, never burned but only stored on a dark shelf, was quickly produced. Hitler did not think initially to get rid of Fritsch, but when presented with the opportunity by his SS lieutenants, he didn’t hesitate to use it to overhaul the leadership of the Wehrmacht.9

  Fritsch was astounded to find himself in Blomberg’s shoes. The only difference was that he enjoyed the strong support of many senior generals, foremost among them his friend and admirer Chief of the General Staff General Beck. The latter, though never a Nazi, was a loyal adherent of Hitler at this point, but the cruel demise of Fritsch created the first breach between him and the regime. In time, Beck would become the leader of the German resistance movement.