A World at Arms (146 page)

It was in the early stages of this obviously deteriorating situation that the attempt to kill Hitler and to overthrow his government took place. Some of those involved had been opponents of the regime for years, in some instances from long before the beginning of the war. Some had joined as they saw the horrors accompanying German victories, especially in the East, and others came to participate in view of the unwillingness of the regime to face up to what they saw as the imminence of defeat. The more active members of the opposition realized that in view of the mass support enjoyed by the regime only an insiders’ coup had any chance of success; once power had been seized, the mass of the population which had been deluded by propaganda and kept ignorant of critical developments could be informed of the true facts and rallied to a new system. During the war, it was by definition those who had access to weapons and explosives who would have to launch a coup, and there was an increasing recognition of the need to begin by killing the dictator whose orders and whose strand of loyalties held the system together. They had tried for the first time in March of 1943 to kill Hitler by placing a bomb on his airplane, but the fuse did not work properly and the conspirators were left with the ticklish task of recovering the explosive device. Several other attempts failed thereafter; a new element came into the picture with the appointment of Colonel von Stauffenberg to be Chief of Staff of the Replacement Army.

An energetic officer who had been seriously wounded in the Tunisian campaign, von Stauffenberg had become the motor of the conspiracy. The great problem was that there were so few who were both energetic and dedicated that he had to combine his access to Hitler’s circle in East Prussia as an opportunity to attempt the assassination with a quick trip to Berlin thereafter to direct the takeover itself, thereby guaranteeing an interval to any surviving supporters of the regime. The planned takeover was to be carried out under the cover of a regularly developed plan for dealing with such emergencies as massive disturbances among the millions of forced laborers in German-controlled Europe by the transfer of full powers to the military districts, a procedure familiar to Germans from having been in effect in World War I.

If the preparations were thus more sensible than some critics have maintained, there were nevertheless problems beyond the anticipated double role of von Stauffenberg himself. In the first place, many of those who might have played a major role had been caught and dismissed and in some cases arrested in the preceding years, and there is considerable evidence that Himmler and his secret police knew at least some details
of the planned coup. Secondly, the number of individuals in the governmental and military hierarchy actually or potentially sympathetic to any overthrow of the regime was very small. If one of Germany’s most prominent commanders, Field Marshal von Weichs, then Commander-in-Chief in Southeast Europe, noted in his diary on July 22, 1944, that even a successful assassination would not have kept the coup from failing because no one would have followed the orders of the conspirators,
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one can see how slight the chances of the opposition were. But they were determined to try in order, if nothing else, to demonstrate that there were those in Germany who were so appalled by the misdeeds of the regime that they would risk their lives in the attempt to overthrow it. When the explosion failed to kill Hitler, the overwhelming majority of Germany’s military leaders sided with him rather than his opponents. As both sides sent their orders over the teleprinters in Germany’s last “election” as a united country until 1990, most generals chose to support the Hitler regime and to reinforce rather than arrest its police.

The triumph of Hitler and his followers in this crisis had a number of critical consequences. It obviously meant in the first instance that his opponents, who had come into the open, were almost all now arrested and killed if they did not commit suicide lest they betray comrades under torture. A wave of arrests, fake trials and summary executions swept through all walks of life, ironically depriving the country of many of precisely those it would most need.
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Hitler himself now felt reinforced in the belief that destiny had called him to lead the German people, a belief which appears to have been reciprocated by vast masses of Germans who, according to the best evidence, were relieved rather than disappointed by the failure of the attempted coup.
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The consolidation of the regime, implicit in these developments, was made explicit by a major further shift of power in Germany to the SS, with Himmler placed in charge of the Replacement Army and other changes accelerating the process of what the historian of the Nazi Party, Dietrich Orlow, has called “partification”.
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If the first great triumph of the National Socialist regime had been the accession to power in January 1933, its last great victory was that over the remnants of domestic opposition in July 1944. Those who now controlled the nation’s destiny more completely than ever before were determined to mobilize its resources on the most extreme scale in order to turn the tide in Germany’s and their own favor, aware that the fate accorded their opponents quite likely awaited them. Unlike the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, who had a surprisingly clear view of the patriotic and humanitarian motives of the resistance,
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the Nazi leaders had neither understanding nor mercy. They would fight on all fronts for victory or total disaster.

The Western Allies had a reasonably accurate picture of the situation, partly from their own intelligence services, partly from their reading of the Japanese reports,
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but we do not know how the Soviet Union at the time saw the event. In any case, the Allies could all see that German resistance on all the fronts continued. For them, too, the war would grind on.

The German push for a more complete mobilization of resources for war had begun before the coup attempt of July 20. The production of war materials had been rationalized under Speer’s vigorous management, and the results were showing in large-scale production of the major standardized weapons in the face of Allied bombing–though without the bombing, it would have been higher still. Speer made a general effort to increase the utilization of available resources, in particu1ar of manpower for industry, in July.
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Simultaneously, Goebbels, who had earlier been excluded from the total war measures, argued strongly for extensive new mobilization steps in the same month and received new powers along with Himmler right after July 20.
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These steps not only drew additional resources into the German war effort but also met some criticism among the population that the burdens of war were not being equally shared by all.

On this last point the Germans soon had little to complain about. Several hundred thousand additional men were drawn into military service, primarily from industry, and formed into new
Volksgrenadier
(people’s grenadier) divisions which were expected to help stabilize the front and then turn to the offensive. A new military defense supplement, a sort of militia for home defense, was also organized under the title of
Volkssturm.
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This supplement to the army, whose numerous precursors were subsumed into the general system established by a decree of September 25, 1944, was to include all males from 16 to 60 who could possibly bear arms if any could be supplied. As the Allies approached and entered German territory from both east and west,
Volkssturm
units were expected to provide local support and reinforcement to the regular army and the armed units of the SS. The main concern of many obliged to serve in the
Volkssturm
was, however, not effective fighting but the risk of being shot as a partisan if captured; the German population knew all too well how Germans had treated those they considered partisans in the preceding five years of war.

The extension of military service was not, however, confined to the men who trained in their spare time for the
Volkssturm
while still working in factories and fields. In spite of Hitler’s original reluctance, more and more women were drawn not only into war industries but into the armed services as clerks, communications specialists, and in
numerous other functions.
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This was not all. Beginning in 1943, large numbers of teen–age boys had already been enrolled as
Flakhelfer,
or anti-aircraft auxiliaries.
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Often terrified and sometimes killed or wounded, these youngsters “manned” anti-aircraft guns and searchlights around German cities. Their service contributed substantially to the shooting down of Allied planes; occasionally they found their own homes demolished and their families killed at the end of a night’s service. By October 1944, the boys were being joined by girls. Several hundred thousand women were already serving as military auxiliaries in hospitals and communications centers; now some were being trained to fire the anti-aircraft guns.
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The Germans were not only mobilizing the last reserves of their own men and women, they were seriously thinking about the surviving Russian prisoners of war in their hands. Many of these had voluntarily or involuntarily been assimilated into the German army as auxiliaries or, as previously mentioned, been organized into battalions attached to German regiments. At Hitler’s insistence, and in accord with Nazi ideological preconceptions, no promises as to the future of the conquered portions of Russia were ever made to them–after all, since German settlers were to displace the Slavic inhabitants of Eastern Europe, any promises would come back to haunt the Germans. This attitude meant that those Russian prisoners like General Vlasov, who insisted on some commitments about the future of their country, could not be allowed to operate freely and, in addition, that there could be no effective political warfare against the Red Army.

Now that the last sliver of occupied Soviet territory had been cleared by the Red Army, and Hitler’s summer hopes of reconquering the Ukraine after driving the Allies back into the Channel had been dashed, there was some slight relaxation in German attitudes. Perhaps something could still be salvaged, and Heinrich Himmler, always on the lookout for new recruits, overcame his ideological fantasies sufficiently to meet Vlasov and support his movement in a minor way.
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Nothing much came of this, and Hitler clearly continued to have great reservations;
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but the willingness to turn for support to those hitherto always held to be
Untennenschen,
subhumans, shows the extent to which the Third Reich needed and wanted every possible recruit it could get.
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If the Germans were drawing their boys and girls into military service and reconsidering their attitude toward those they considered subhuman, it will be easy to understand their ruthless exploitation of what little non-German territory they still occupied. In these months whatever was left to steal was stolen in Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark and
the portions of the Netherlands and Yugoslavia still under German control. This policy was extended to the remaining nominal allies, Mussolini’s north Italian “Social Republic” and what remained of pre-war Hungary. Between expressing hope for victory if there were a break in the alliance of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union or as a result of the introduction of new weapons, Mussolini regaled Japanese diplomats with a litany of bitter complaints about the endless requisitions of goods and the slaughter of hostages by the Germans, which were wrecking any chance of support for his regime from the people of northern Italy.
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In German-occupied Hungary, the Germans, particularly the SS, tightened their hold on the economy. On the one hand they launched a program for the deportation and mass–murder of Hungary’s Jews, the last large remaining Jewish community in Central Europe. This process, in turn, provided the opportunity for them not only to seize Jewish property but to blackmail the owners of Hungary’s largest industrial complex, the Manfred Weiss firm, into turning over controlling shares to the SS in exchange for their lives. While a tiny number of Jews thus escaped, Germany acquired a stranglehold on the Hungarian economy, rejected all Hungarian protests against such an obvious infringement on their sovereignty, and exploited the economy and what was left of its fighting strength for their own war effort.
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Accompanying the effort to draw additional manpower and resources was a redirection of allocations within German war production. As the effort to turn the tide with new weapons went forward, there was also a significant shift in airplane production. In late June 1944 the decision was made to order fighters rather than bombers, a move to the defensive which was accentuated as the attacks on Germany’s oil industry made it appear all the more important to counter the Allied air offensive .
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Ironically this shift would not only fail in its primary purpose, but it also had a direct and negative impact on Germany’s defending army on the Eastern Front. There the Germans had relied on their bombing force as a form of artillery; with the number of available bombers steadily falling and few replacements, the situation for them became ever more precarious.

But this change would become obvious only when the Soviets launched their great winter offensive; in the meantime, the German front in the East was temporarily consolidated and holding on. In Hungary, in the
face of the offensive of the Red Army, supported by two Romanian armies, the Germans and some Hungarian units had built up a front after Romania switched sides, Bulgaria had been occupied by the Soviets, and the Germans had been forced to evacuate Greece, Albania and southern Yugoslavia. Local German and Hungarian successes blunted the thrusts of Second Ukrainian Front into the Hungarian plain. Simultaneously, the efforts of the Fourth Ukrainian Front to break into Slovakia and through the Carpathians had been slowed practically to a halt. The fact is that the offensive power of the advancing Red Army in the southern segment of the front had been exhausted; the different railway gage in much of the area over which it was advancing added to supply problems; and the Germans, at Hitler’s personal insistence, had allocated a disproportionately large part of their armor to this portion of the Eastern Front.