The Plots Against Hitler Read online

  More generals were indeed won over. One of Halder’s deputies in the General Staff, Qm. Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, became an active member of the conspiracy and was to remain loyal until the end. In addition, Oster was able to recruit his direct superior, Abwehr chief admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and Lt. Gen. Georg Thomas from the economic section of the General Staff. All three gave their full consent to cooperate, but none had troops directly under his command.18

  Hence, a field commander was urgently required to secure loyal troops in the capital. For that purpose, Oster and Gisevius had an eye on the commander of the Greater Berlin defense district, Gen. Erwin von Witzleben, who was known for his hostility to the regime. In conversations with other officers, he often refused to recognize Hitler as Führer, calling him instead “your headman” or “Adolf.”19 To test the waters, Oster arranged a meeting between the general and Gisevius. The rapport between the two men was instantaneous:

  Witzleben was a refreshingly uncomplicated man. He had no bent for the kind of political finesse so dear to a bureaucratic general such as Halder. The Berlin commander was a typical front-line general, who had his heart in the right place. Probably not too well read and certainly not inclined towards the fine arts, he was nevertheless a man firmly rooted in the chivalric traditions of the old Prussian officer corps. He liked country life and was a passionate hunter; there was nothing of the schoolmaster about him, as there was about our chief of staff. Oster had only to hint at the delicate matter at hand. Witzleben understood at once and placed himself unconditionally at our disposal.20

  Unconditionally? Not really. The uncharacteristic fondness shown by Gisevius, usually a basher of generals, to Witzleben should not hide the fact that even the most anti-Nazi of generals conditioned his participation, just as Halder did, on Britain’s and France’s having a firm attitude toward Hitler. The real difference between Halder and Witzleben lay more in their basic attitudes toward the question of coup d’état. For Halder, an impending war, which Germany could not win, was the reason for the coup. For Witzleben, war was a trigger that made a coup possible. Witzleben would stay loyal to the resistance until the bitter end. The conspirators knew that, unlike the cautious, sophisticated Halder, Witzleben could be believed and relied on.21

  In early September, a first meeting took place. Witzleben visited the country estate of Dr. Schacht, who would take it upon himself to lead the civilian government after the planned coup d’état.22 The Berlin commander came with one of his officers, the commander of the Potsdam Division, Lt. Gen. Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt. Just like his commander, he was an anti-Nazi and was fully committed to the conspirators. Following the meeting, Witzleben started to work on the military planning of the revolt and tried to win over new partners with even more troops under their command. Witzleben, in a way, filled a crucial gap in the network of the conspiracy. So far, the Berlin clique was mainly made up of intelligence and staff officers, whose circles of confidants overlapped. Witzleben connected them to a whole new world: that of the field commanders in Greater Berlin. Through him, the conspirators could tap military forces completely unavailable to them otherwise.

  Witzleben, who openly told Halder about his involvement, had two main supporters in Berlin: Lieutenant General Brockdorff, mentioned earlier, who was supposed to lead the uprising in Berlin itself, and Maj. Gen. Paul von Hase, a junior commander who had more troops at his disposal. Another ally was Lt. Gen. Erich Hoepner, commander of an armored division in Thuringia. Witzleben understood that for a military revolt, infantry units were not sufficient. Tanks were required in Berlin in order to safeguard the conspirators in the capital. According to one version, Hoepner’s task was to block SS reinforcements from Munich to Berlin. According to another, which seems more plausible, he was to move with his tanks to the north, to support the conspirators in Berlin itself.23

  Hitler, meanwhile, continued to conspire against Czechoslovakia. It seemed he did not suspect for a moment that a coup was being planned in the highest military circles. Determined to take the Sudetenland, and maybe even more Czech territory, with or without British and French consent, he had briefed Keitel and Brauchitsch on the planned invasion in early September. The operation was scheduled to begin one month later. The Czechoslovakian leaders were cowed. On September 7, President Edvard Beneš summoned the Sudeten leaders and promised to fully meet their requirements. “My God,” said one of them, “he’s given us everything!”24 But the Nazis, who were eager for a military confrontation, were becoming more and more bellicose by the day. The German incitement against Czechoslovakia had reached new heights, and Goebbels’s headlines were screaming about horrendous Czech atrocities visited on Sudeten Germans. On September 10, in a kind of macabre warm-up for Hitler’s fateful speech at the party rally at Nuremberg, Göring fulminated against Czechoslovakia: “A splinter of a nation, its origins unknown, is continuously repressing a cultured people . . . we know who is standing behind it: Moscow and the Jewish-Bolshevik devil.”25

  The American journalist William Shirer, who spent these frantic days in Prague, met the crestfallen Edvard Beneš, who well understood that he was being cornered. True, Czechoslovakia had a strong, resolute army, fortifications, and a modern air force, but it was doubtful whether it could stand up to an assault by the German Reich. Moreover, after the annexation of Austria, Hitler’s empire surrounded the Czechs on three sides. Shirer wrote that both train station and airport “were full of Jews scrambling desperately to find transportation to safer parts.”26

  Neville Chamberlain, clinging to his appeasement policy, was still hoping for a reasonable compromise. On September 14, an urgent letter from Downing Street arrived at Hitler’s office: “In view of the increasingly critical situation I propose to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution. I propose to come across by air and am ready to start tomorrow. Please indicate earliest time at which you can see me and suggest place of meeting. I should be grateful for a very early reply.”27

  Theo Kordt, a minister in the German embassy in London and the resident agent of the resistance, failed in his attempts to warn the British about Hitler’s “true intentions” and to convince them to play along with the conspiracy. In Berlin, his brother Erich reported to his coconspirators that Chamberlain proposed to meet Hitler immediately to solve the Sudeten question. He also updated them on the prime minister’s position. Oster and his friends, who started to despair as far as Britain was concerned, still trusted their own Führer. Some of them, at least, believed that he was so seized by megalomania that he would reject all British proposals, however moderate they might be.

  One can imagine their dread, therefore, when Hitler accepted Chamberlain’s proposal and offered to meet him in Berchtesgaden, at his palatial chalet in the Bavarian Alps. In the meeting itself, however, the Führer kept his belligerent mood. He would not tolerate any violence against his people in the Sudetenland. In any case, his intention was to solve the problem one way or the other.28 The disputed territory had to be annexed by Germany. No other solution was possible.

  The British prime minister, again, took a peaceful, soft approach. The war, which he dreaded both morally and practically, was knocking at the door. Chamberlain tried to buy time, telling Hitler that before accepting his demands, he must consult his cabinet. The Führer, certain that Britain would not raise a finger for Czechoslovakia, was reinforced in his belief. Now it was time to raise the stakes, as noted in a circular sent by the German Foreign Office:

  The Führer told Chamberlain yesterday . . . that his decision is to shortly put an end, in one way or the other, to the intolerable state of affairs in the Sudetenland. There are no more discussions to be had on autonomy for the Sudeten Germans, only on annexation to the Reich. Chamberlain has given his personal consent. Now he is consulting the British cabinet, and staying in touch with Paris. A second meeting between Chamberlain and the Führer is planned for the next few days.29

  The last development
was still unknown to the conspirators. Oblivious for a while of the discussions between Hitler and Chamberlain, they still hoped that Britain would not surrender to the new, more radical demands presented in Berchtesgaden.

  The next two weeks, between September 15 and 29, involved frantic planning, bordering on panic, at both political and military levels. Two main questions remained open. The first concerned the new regime after the overthrow of National Socialism. General Halder, always keen on pointing out difficulties, was deeply concerned by what he saw as the negligence of the conspirators on that crucial issue: “The putsch and the assassination that will remove Hitler is only the negative side. Every person interested in the fate of his nation has to be concerned also with the positive side. What will happen afterward? No one told me anything about it. The soldiers were only asked to ‘clean the place,’ like housemaids, but what will be in the room afterward? I heard nothing about it, neither from Beck nor Goerdeler. That was the decisive weakness of the resistance movement as a whole.”30

  Still, most conspirators agreed at least on some basics. After Hitler’s removal, the country would be run by a military dictatorship for a short transition period, followed by the restoration of the rule of law. The SS and Gestapo would be declared illegal, and a short while afterward elections would be held according to the old Weimar constitution. Schacht even mentioned a parliamentary government at some point, though most conspirators favored an authoritarian regime, perhaps even a restoration of the monarchy.

  A second, no less pressing issue was Hitler’s personal fate. Here, the conspirators were not of one mind. Halder strongly opposed an assassination (maybe because he feared a new “stab in the back” legend that would stigmatize him as a murderer) and proposed instead arresting the Führer and putting him on public trial. Goerdeler, who opposed assassination on religious grounds, probably supported the public-trial option as well. Dr. Hans von Dohnanyi, an anti-Nazi jurist and prominent Abwehr conspirator, had been collecting incriminating documents on the Nazis for years—and promised to publish them all after the coup. Dohnanyi had a slightly different plan: to stage a medical committee that would declare Hitler insane and order him to be locked up in a mental institution.31 Some of the conspirators, though, held a different view. They understood that Hitler’s charisma was the cement binding the Third Reich together and that as long as he was alive, Nazism would survive. Therefore, a new plan was hatched: a “conspiracy within the conspiracy,” to murder Hitler during the military operation without Halder’s knowledge.

  The initiator of the plan was Lt. Col. Hans Oster, the founding father of the military resistance and one of its most radical conspirators. As he was busy with the overall planning of the coup, he left the operational details to two of his younger agents, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz and Franz Maria Liedig. These young officers, ardent resistance fighters and former members of a right-wing Freikorps militia, were prepared to do anything to put an end to the regime. Heinz began his career as a notorious terrorist during the Weimar Republic and became a fanatical Nazi thug. During the 1930s, however, he was expelled from the National Socialist Party and turned his revolutionary zeal against the new regime. The methods he espoused remained the same: the regime could be changed only through violence, terror, and assassination. Unlike most members of the Oster clique—loyal civil servants who found their way to the resistance after much hesitation and misgiving—Heinz was a born revolutionary. For him, the underground was a way of life.

  Oster stayed in touch with Heinz and Liedig throughout September, and on approximately the tenth he ordered Heinz to form an elite shock troop. “Commando Heinz,” fifty to sixty men in all, was assembled at breathtaking speed, its soldiers armed by Oster from Abwehr supplies. Supervised by Abwehr officers, they encompassed all types: armed civilians, right-wing activists with revolutionary pasts, student leaders, and soldiers. Around September 15, the unit was finally formed, deployed in safe houses around Berlin, and waiting for a sign from Oster. Its job was to arrest Hitler and the Nazi leaders after Witzleben’s troops took over the capital. Heinz and Liedig, with Oster’s consent, planned to shoot Hitler to death during the operation under the pretext that he would try to avoid arrest. (Ironically, many people in the Third Reich perished for the same reason.)32

  Most historians believe that only three people were privy to the plot: Oster, Heinz, and Liedig.33 However, a rare document unearthed from the archive of the U.S. Army in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, indicates that Witzleben, too, knew about the plan and lent his support. Ursula von Witzleben, a relative of the general, recalled that on September 12, she and her husband were invited by Erwin and his wife to a private party:

  It was a disgusting day: cold, rainy and windy. After we drank tea, I wondered why my cousin [Erwin] decided to take a walk in the General Staff’s park at Kurfürstenstrasse . . . Around six, the square was full of people. Officers, soldiers and NCOs were passing by, at least in partial earshot of our conversation. Then my cousin turned on a narrow road in the park and stopped . . . “We cannot speak in the apartment, because I believe it is full of microphones.” Then he looked at me and kept on: “What I am going to tell you now, requires trust and great responsibility on your part . . . Hitler has to go, because the leadership of the army cannot agree by any means to implement his grandiose schemes . . . I will go to his office, speak with him man to man, as a responsible commander, and tell him that this is no leadership . . .” I was alarmed, because the plan was impossible. Consequently, I was able to tell my cousin only the following: “I am afraid you do not understand the situation. You are no longer a general bound to the Prussian king. You are going to see Adolf Hitler. You will enter the chancellor’s office, but will never return alive.” My cousin looked at me and said: “The others think the same, and therefore we have only one option: assassination.” “Is there no other way?” I asked. “No,” he answered. “Hitler wants war, he provokes it, and that will be the end of Germany.”

  Here Witlzeben added a prophetic remark:

  The people will have to carry a burden of collective guilt, but they will not understand it and will not be able to bear it.34

  So it seems that Witzleben was privy to Heinz’s plan and approved of it, though not without reservations. For him, as well as for Oster and Gisevius, it was clear that any possibility of success required meticulous military planning. Gisevius, for his part, was working to obtain police cooperation, for which he relied on the support of two old friends: Berlin police commandant Count Wolf von Helldorff and his counterpart from the Reich criminal police, SS Col. Arthur Nebe.

  These police officers both had a sullied past of Nazi crimes. Helldorff, a former SA leader and National Socialist “old fighter,” became notorious as a bon vivant and a corrupt and greedy police commander. During the 1930s, he was responsible for incessant violence against and blackmail of Jews. A close confidant of the Nazi leadership, he used to boast of his ties with Foreign Minister Ribbentrop.35 Nevertheless, in 1938 he began to look for alternatives. The reasons are not clear, but from that year on, he joined the conspirators, never to leave them. Now, he promised Oster that his policemen would at least keep neutral in case of a coup.36

  Just like Helldorff, Arthur Nebe, chief of the Reich criminal police department, was and remains an unsolved mystery. He was an SS commander, complicit in the most abominable crimes of the Nazi regime. Between June and November 1941, he was responsible for Einsatzgruppe B, one of the murder units that orchestrated the mass shooting of Jews on the eastern front. However, like Helldorff, he worked with the conspirators from 1938 onward. His cooperation was especially vital, as he supplied Gisevius, his contact person, with information on key government buildings, camps, and secret SS facilities.37

  Using the vital information given by Nebe, the conspirators began to plan the details of the military operation. In chapter 3, we saw how the complicated ties of family, kinship, and friendship shared by many conspirators of aristocratic background served as a basis for
the conspiratorial networks of the Berlin clique. Now, those ties were used for camouflage. Witzleben, taking a considerable risk, gave Gisevius an office in his military headquarters, under the pretext that he was a distant relative working on his “family papers.” It is hard to imagine an officer with a nonaristocratic background using such a ploy. Gisevius was indeed working on papers, just not dynastic ones. In fact, he was studying a detailed map of Greater Berlin, marking key points, central facilities, and routes for troop movement.

  On one of the days after September 12, Witzleben decided to send Gisevius and Lieutenant General Brockdorff into the field. They met near a suburban train station and were picked up by a car. The driver was a lively woman named Elisabeth Strünck, whose husband, a prominent insurance agent, was Goerdeler’s confidant and a member of the inner circle. The two passengers, civilian and officer, stepped into the car, and Elisabeth started the engine. The three “harmless sightseers” drove by all the strategic sites bound to be occupied on Day X, studying especially escape routes through gardens and back doors. Brockdorff “wrote steadily and calculated the minimum number of troops necessary.” It was decided that particularly large units would have to be employed for three critical tasks: the liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and the occupation of both the radio station at Königwusterhausen and the guard regiment headquarters at Lichterfelde.38