Burn After Reading (37 page)

The bomb was concealed in a harmless-looking package addressed to Stieff in Berlin. It was given to Colonel Brandt, one of Hitler's companions on the journey, who was told it contained two bottles of brandy. The plane with the lethal bottles and Hitler on board left on schedule—but the bomb was a dud! Far from having accomplished their mission, the plotters had to move fast to destroy the evidence in Brandt's hands before it could destroy them. Schlabrendorff flew to Berlin and retrieved the package before its true contents became known.

But the frustrated plotters would not give up. Von Stauffen-berg, recovered but crippled, was attached to the General Staff to enable him to play a leading part in the conspiracy. The group—made up of conservatives as well as Social Democrats, clerics as well as atheists—had some of Germany's most prominent men slated to take key positions in a new government and ambitious plans to end the war and rehabilitate Germany. The caliber of these men and the quality of their plans held out the promise of success.

This, then, was the situation when Eisenhower arrived in London in January, 1944, to plunge into preparations for
Overlord
. If the potentialities of the German unrest made any impression on him, or if the historic opportunities of the situation were even perfunctorily recognized by the planners around Ike, it is not evident from either the documents of the era or from the post-war memoirs of the generals. As far as I can
ascertain, no serious effort was made by Eisenhower to procure specific information about the fantastic ferment in the very core of the German High Command. He paid no attention to those lean and hungry-looking men, whose conspiratorial ardor Caesar once so justly feared, but concentrated on the strictly military aspects of the war he was expected to win by strictly military means.

Eisenhower resisted every attempt to draw him into this area. The possibility of a generals' revolt in Germany as a shortcut to the abrupt termination of the war was raised in his presence several times, the possibility only, not the probability, and not on the basis of any specific data. On January 27, 1944, Ambassador John G. Winant hinted at such a possibility, but was rebuffed by Bedell Smith, Ike's chief of staff. On April 14, Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. mentioned in passing that “if a proper mood [could be] created in the German General Staff, there might even be a German Badoglio,” having in mind a German general who, like the Italian marshal, was willing to hand up his country on a silver platter. But Eisenhower expressed, not only doubt that such likelihood existed at all, but his disgust at dealing with German generals.

On the very highest level, President Roosevelt maintained his disdain of political warfare. He hampered rather than promoted it with his philosophy about the conduct of the war and its termination solely by unconditional surrender. Roosevelt was motivated by the revolting picture of Germany as it was remade by Hitler. He was also influenced by General George C. Marshall, a single-minded soldier with a somewhat narrow military outlook. To him war was but the clash of armies, and in his strict adherence to the best American tradition, he detested the political general. It was simply inconceivable to Marshall to make a deal with conspirators, even if it meant winning the war without further bloodshed. And, finally, there was a resolve deep in the President's soul never to make a deal with the “Junkers” of Germany, who, he thought, formed the core of Prussian
militarism. He did not want even unconditional surrender as the result of a German conspiracy, but only one gained through the indisputable victory of Allied arms.

The pragmatic fact is that the President's unwillingness to use all means, including political means, to gain victory, substantially prolonged the war by withholding from the German rebels the essential outside aid and moral support for their own victory over Nazism.

His Majesty's Government under Churchill followed Roosevelt's lead, for yet another reason entirely its own. The bitter memory of the Venlo incident left its scars in Whitehall. Never again was His Majesty's government willing to listen to the siren songs of German patriots, for one could never know when they blossomed out as
agents provocateurs
or grinning double agents.

The German opposition tried frantically to establish surreptitious links to the Allies. As early as October, 1939, only a few weeks after the outbreak of hostilities, an envoy of the opposition, a prominent Catholic named Dr. Josef Mueller, offered to set up a working relationship with the British Government via the Vatican. From Vatican City, Mueller contacted London, in a venture that required substantial courage and almost ended fatally for him. An
Abwehr
spy planted in the Vatican alerted Berlin to Mueller's efforts, but fortunately for the clandestine envoy, the report wound up on Oster's desk and was promptly pigeonholed.

In February, 1942, the German diplomat Ulrich von Hassell (who was slated to become Foreign Minister in a post-Hitler cabinet) continued these efforts in Arosa in negotiations with a British envoy named J. Lonsdale Bryans. The Briton had to tell Hassell that he was unsuccessful in interesting the Foreign Office.

In November, 1941, the German opposition enlisted the aid of Louis P. Lochner, the AP correspondent in Berlin, to establish a tenuous contact with London via the United States; in April, 1942, a similar effort was made with the help of a Swedish financier named Wallenberg; and then, in May, the German Evangelical Church tried working, through the Bishop of
Chichester. Eden categorically told the Bishop the government was not interested.

Then, towards the end of 1942, an avenue suddenly seemed to open up and the hopes of the anti-Nazis were rekindled. In November, Allen W. Dulles arrived in Switzerland and set up shop in a house on Herren Street in Berne.

He was nominally a special assistant to the American Minister, Leland Harrison. In fact, Dulles was up to his neck in cloak and dagger; he headed the Swiss branch of the O.S.S., with
cognizance,
as it is called in the parlance of Washington, of Germany and South East Europe.

A native of Watertown, New York, where he was born in 1893, Allen Dulles was the younger son of a distinguished Presbyterian minister who had married the daughter of General Watson Foster, soldier, lawyer, editor, diplomatist, minister to Russia in 1880–1882, Secretary of State in 1892–1893.

From Princeton University (where he majored in history and philosophy and received a Phi Beta Kappa key), Dulles went to Allahabad in India to teach English in a missionary school. In 1916, he joined the Foreign Service, serving in Vienna and Berne. After World War I, Dulles headed the Near Eastern Division of the State Department by day and studied law by night. As soon as he had his law degree, he left the Foreign Service, kicking up a brief storm by complaining publicly about the inadequate salaries of American diplomats.

He practiced law in the firm headed by his elder brother, John Foster Dulles, and acquired a substantial German clientele. When an expert was needed to head the Berne branch of the O.S.S., with a pipeline to influential Germans, Donovan enlisted Dulles.

Dulles decided to bide his time before plunging into his actual mission. With all the frontiers closed, he was largely dependent on cable to send his reports to Washington, and he used this avenue shrewdly for a brilliant ruse. The code in which some of his cables were sent had been broken by the
For-schungsamt,
and in due course his dispatches were read in
Berlin. They attracted favorable impression for their objectivity, which was exactly what Dulles had planned. He hoped to attract Germans looking for an Allied agent willing to listen to them, and thus to organize a network of his own.

So he created a shiny new Allied trap to which a number of German mice quickly beat a path. Since much of the German dissidence was inside the Intelligence organizations, especially the
Abwehr;
and since Intelligence had easiest access to Dulles' intercepted bait, his earliest callers from that “other Germany” were some of his own opposite numbers. Among them was Hans Gisevius, a blond giant with impressive intellectual equipment, who was deeply enmeshed in various anti-Nazi conspiracies. Gisevius was a controversial figure inside the German opposition. He was a vice consul at the German Legation in Berne, under the
Abwehr's
jurisdiction, assigned to perform unspecified intelligence functions. From him, Dulles learned of the ripening plot against Hitler.

Early in February 1944, the plotters resolved to move at the earliest possible moment, before the Allies had a chance to land, in order to confront them with the reality of a new Germany that had rid herself of Hitler and was ready for peace. Elaborate arrangements were made : General Beck was to become chief of state and Dr. Goerdeler, the former Lord Mayor of Leipzig, was to be appointed Chancellor. Von Hassell was to receive the Foreign Ministry; von Witzleben was to become commander in chief of the
Wehrmacht,
the Defense portfolio going to Hoepner, an officer who had incurred Hitler's wrath and had been cashiered some time before. The indefatigable von Tresckow was to take charge of the police, while von Stauffen-berg was to remain in the background as the gray eminence of the rebellion.

An assassination was scheduled for February 11, but was cancelled when one of the intended victims, Heinrich Himmler, did not show up at the meeting with Hitler, at which a bomb was to explode. On March 9, arrangements were made to kill Hitler with a revolver shot during one of his situation
conferences, but it proved impossible to smuggle the assassin into the meeting. On May 15, the opposition received a tremendous boost through the appearance in its very center of two of Germany's outstanding soldiers, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General von Stuelpnagel, commandant of occupied Paris.

Dulles was kept posted of every move. It is presumed that he advised Eisenhower and Donovan. Whether Roosevelt was told of the conspiracy in the specific terms known to Dulles cannot be ascertained. It did not make any difference one way or another. The President had refused to sanction active American participation in the plot.

Dulles was torn between elation and frustration, between a burning desire to intervene in the
coup
and his orders to stay aloof. There he was, with his fingers on the feverish pulse of the German opposition, fully in a position to supply all the outside aid the plotters needed so desperately, and
thereby contribute decisively to the early termination of the war, making the invasion superfluous
. Yet his hands were tied. He lacked the authority to provide any support, not even a single fuse for a bomb, nor even any moral support. He had to sit back like a man dying of thirst, separated by an abyss he could not bridge, several feet from a spring of crystal clear water.

When the invasion came, the plotters were stunned and suspended action for the rest of June, except for Rommel, who started a campaign of his own, trying to persuade Hitler to throw in the sponge. Then, on the night of July 1, the decision was reached to set the plan into motion without any further delay. As the written record of that decision itself put it, “After the landing of the Allies, irreparable catastrophe can be avoided only by cutting short the war and stopping further bloodshed through the immediate formation of a new government—chosen from the leading members of the resistance movement—so constituted as to be acceptable to the Allies as a bargaining partner.
This presupposes the death of Hitler.”

Von Stauffenberg was appointed Hitler's executioner. To assure access for him to Hitler's inner sanctum, he was made
chief of staff to General Erich Fromm, commander in chief of the so-called
Ersatzheer,
the new last-ditch army scraped up from the bottom of Germany's manpower barrel. It was decided to carry out the act with a bomb consisting of two pounds of explosives to be detonated with a chemical-mechanical fuse of English make, set for thirty minutes delayed action. Stauffenberg was to carry that pancake bomb into Hitler's conference room in his leather briefcase. The bomb did not need to be of great power, since the contained concussion in Hitler's concrete map room would enormously increase its lethal effect.

On July 20, at 10:15 a.m., Stauffenberg flew into Rasen-burg, accompanied by First Lieutenant von Haeften, his aide, and Stieff. He proceeded calmly to the officers' mess inside the
Wolfsschanze
where he had breakfast, waiting to be called to Gen. Buhle, with whom he had a business appointment. Then he accompanied Buhle to Field Marshal Keitel, at all times carrying his attaché case. At 12:20 p.m., he was ready for his fateful date with Hitler, but was shocked when he was told that the situation conference was to be held in the Tea House, a flimsy frame building, instead of the concrete bunker where it was usually held. The shift filled him with grave misgivings, but he decided to go through with the plan. Upon entering the Tea House, he appeared to lose his way, going into a sideroom instead of the conference room where Hitler was already waiting. He needed this moment of seclusion to activate the time-fuse.

When Stauffenberg entered the conference room—about thirty-seven and a half feet long by fifteen feet wide, with a huge table occupying its center—he found Hitler seated at the center near the entrance with his back turned to him. Keitel, seated at the Fuehrer's left, introduced von Stauffenberg to Hitler as an envoy of Fromm's. There was no seat reserved for Stauffenberg at the table, so he went to the far right corner where Brandt was seated, put the briefcase under the table and left, on the pretense of making a phone call to Berlin.

He was on his way out of Security Section A, riding with von Haeften to the airfield when he heard the explosion. He
looked at his watch. It was exactly 12:50 p.m. He assumed that the Fuehrer had been killed. He arrived in Berlin, in the Defense Ministry on Bendler Street, in this firm belief, only to find the Ministry in an uproar. He was told that his bomb had failed to kill Hitler.