Killing Hitler (12 page)

That process was completed by the spring of 1940. In a sixty-page directive, Reinhard Heydrich aimed at a thorough review of all security procedures, to sharpen awareness and root out complacency. “The protection of the Führer,” he wrote, “must take priority over all other tasks.”
⁶⁸
To this end he argued for closer cooperation between the existing agencies, but he could not resist establishing yet another body under his own supervision. Heydrich’s new player was the “special protection service,” organized within his power base, the
Reichssicherheitshauptamt
(Reich Security Head Office). It was to serve as a central agency in the assessment of risks, the investigation of tip-offs, and the coordination of activities. Though it contained little that was new, and was still technically subordinated to the RSD, it gave a welcome boost to a network that had become jaded and inefficient. Security for all events was reviewed, with revised, more proactive procedures. Surveillance was revamped: spot checks and precautionary arrests were authorized, and the purchase of explosives and firearms was tightly controlled.
⁶⁹

Other innovations included another new body: the
Sicherheits-Kontrolldienst
, or Security Control Service, to oversee security in the New Reich Chancellery, and yet another, the
Führer-Begleitbattalion
, or Führer Escort Battalion, to accompany Hitler into military theaters and defend his military headquarters. Both domestic and travel arrangements were altered. All mail and gifts for Hitler were to be handled by trained SS personnel, while all luggage carried by the Führer’s party was to be kept under constant guard. The supreme irony was that the author of this raft of reforms, Reinhard Heydrich, would himself fall victim to an assassin.

•                •              •

It would appear that many postwar historians shared the perplexity of the Nazis in their interpretations of Georg Elser. Like Hitler, they found it difficult to square the sophistication of his attack with the simplicity of his motives. As a result, a number of myths developed, some of which have tenaciously clung to the story almost until the present day.

The first of these was the account that was given at the time—that Elser was in league with the British and that Payne Best and Stevens, who had been seized at Venlo, were his controllers. It was widely trumpeted that all three would be tried for espionage and exposed to the full penalty of German law. But in reality, given the complete lack of evidence, no trial could be convened, so all three men were quietly consigned to a concentration camp. Tellingly, even senior German intelligence personnel and those responsible for the interrogations denied the link.
⁷⁰
Nonetheless, the official story stuck and the unhappy trio were kept incarcerated pending the expected German victory, whereupon they would probably have featured as star witnesses in a show trial of prominent British politicians.

The second, more persuasive interpretation was that Elser was a Nazi stooge. Almost from the outset, opposition elements, such as Otto Strasser, viewed the Munich attack as a “provocation.” The earlier Reichstag fire, they claimed, had been engineered by the Nazis so as to give an excuse to clamp down on the political left. The Munich bomb plot, they suggested, was a “second Reichstag fire,” a ruse to generate enthusiasm for an unpopular war. Elser, therefore, was described as “Lubbe Number 2,” in reference to the ill-fated Dutch arsonist of 1933.
⁷¹
He was portrayed as a simple patsy, plucked from a concentration camp and sent to create a diversion, an “incident” that the authorities could then exploit for their own ends.

Given the Nazis’ proven fondness for such ruses, this idea also took root with a generation of postwar historians.
⁷²
Despite a complete lack of documentary proof, it appeared to be confirmed by circumstantial evidence and rumor: Hitler had left the Bürger-bräukeller
early that night, missing the explosion by a matter of minutes, and no security personnel were ever reprimanded over the incident. This theory was supported by the erroneous assumption, common at the time, that Hitler’s speech at the Bürgerbräukeller had been shorter than on previous occasions and that he had even spoken more hurriedly than was customary.
⁷³
Unreliable memoirs also lent it credibility. Payne Best, interned with Elser in Sachsenhausen, claimed to have been told that the latter had been hauled from Dachau to plant the bomb. In 1946, the theologian and anti-Nazi Martin Niemoller went further, relating that he had heard on the concentration camp grapevine that Elser had been a sergeant in the SS and that the attack had been personally ordered by Hitler.
⁷⁴

These myths were finally put to rest by two German historians in the 1970s.
⁷⁵
Elser, it appeared, had indeed worked alone. He was not the tool of others, neither the creature of British intelligence nor a Gestapo stooge. Unaided and undetected, he had built a bomb and planted it, coming within a whisker of killing Hitler. He could finally be cleared of all the accusations of complicity and was at last free to take his place among the ranks of the German resistance. In 1998, sixty years after his murderous deed, a memorial to Georg Elser was finally unveiled in his hometown of Königsbronn.
⁷⁶

By way of a coda, it is fitting to bring Elser’s story to its conclusion. After his confession, Elser was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp outside Berlin. However, given his importance to the regime as a fraudulent witness against the British, his life could not be put at risk, and he was kept as a
Sonderhäftling
, a “special prisoner.” He was afforded some creature comforts. He was given two rooms and was permitted to turn one into a small workshop. He was also granted a generous ration of cigarettes and was allowed to play a homemade zither. But he was kept in isolation for five years, with an SS guard permanently posted outside his door. Elser is usually described, perhaps unfairly, as a loner. But even he must have felt the chilling lack of human contact.

As the end of the war loomed and a German victory slipped from improbable to implausible, Elser became surplus to requirements. He would never take the stand in a show trial against Churchill and his “clique of warmongers and criminals.” He would never utter the damning lines that had been scripted for him. He had outlived his usefulness. In early February 1945, he was transferred to Dachau, on the outskirts of Munich.

A couple of months later, on 9 April—barely a few weeks before the German surrender—Elser was called once more for interrogation. A doleful glance shared with a fellow prisoner showed that he knew what was coming.
⁷⁷
On the direct orders of Himmler, all “special prisoners” were being put out of the way, where they could not embarrass the dying regime. The commandant of Dachau was curtly informed that Elser was to meet with a fatal accident during one of the next air raids on Munich.
⁷⁸
That very evening, Elser was taken out by a young SS man and shot in the back of the neck. His body was burned. A week later, his death was reported in the press as the result of an Allied bombing raid. In the frantic last days of the Third Reich, few would have noticed the report. Even fewer would have remembered Elser’s name.

CHAPTER 3
The Abwehr: The Enemy Within

There are those who will say that I am a traitor, but I truly am not. I consider myself a better German than all those who run after Hitler. My plan and my duty is to free Germany, and with it the world, of this pestilence.

—HANS OSTER
¹

IN OCTOBER
1919,
LESS THAN A YEAR AFTER THE END OF THE
First World War, a Committee of Enquiry was established in Berlin to investigate the circumstances surrounding the German military collapse of the previous summer. One of its star witnesses was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, former commander in chief and the new darling of the nationalist right. His appearance before the committee was remarkable. Outside, the crowds cheered his every move, while the newly republican army fell over itself to pander to its erstwhile commander. Inside, Hindenburg contemptuously ignored the questions put to him and embarked instead on a tirade against the new rulers of Germany. His statement ended with words that would threaten the very basis of the new German Republic: “No blame” for the defeat, he said, “was to be attached to the sound core of the army.”
²
Rather, he claimed that “civilian demoralization and disunion”
³
had so permeated
the military cadres that “our will to victory was undermined. I looked for energy and co-operation, but found pusillanimity and weakness.”
⁴
In his memoirs, he gave his spurious analysis a more lyrical, heroic bent: “Like Siegfried,” he wrote, “stricken down by the treacherous spear of savage Hagen, our weary front collapsed.”
⁵
Behind the rhetoric, the message was the same—the German army had been betrayed.

The myth of the
Dolchstosslegende
, the “stab in the back,” was born. It held that the German military had
not
been defeated in the field and that the ambitious and unscrupulous politicians of the left and center had shamefully asked for an armistice without the army’s knowledge. The politicians, it claimed, had seized defeat from the jaws of victory solely to be able to usher in their own revolution.

This interpretation of events was so far removed from the truth that it took some considerable feats of amnesia for it to be even vaguely credible. It was quietly forgotten, for instance, that it had been the German General Staff that had panicked in the summer of 1918 and had asked the politicians to sue for peace. It was forgotten that the German grand “victory” offensive of the previous spring had failed, to be followed by a long retreat into Belgium. It was forgotten that a brave few staff officers had predicted that Germany would be unable to defeat its enemies in the west, especially after the entry into the war of the United States in 1917. Such inconvenient facts were ignored, even at the highest level. After all, it naturally appealed to the German generals to shift the blame for the lost war. Revolution or no revolution, the prestige of the army was still paramount. Its position and privileges had to be defended, if necessary by distortions and untruths. So the myth of betrayal was deliberately propagated and allowed to develop.

This implausible theory found a ready audience in German society, which had been ill prepared for the prospect of defeat. For four years the people had been fed tales of heroism and adventure with the subtext that advances were being made on all fronts. The soldiers, too, found defeat hard to comprehend. Though they had not been fed the same propaganda and knew
the truth of their military predicament, they had difficulty accepting that their sacrifices and the wanton slaughter that they had witnessed had been for nothing.

The defeat, therefore, came as a profound shock and the automatic response of many was to assume that dark forces must have been at work. The reaction of one corporal was typical. He was recuperating following a gas attack when word reached him that the German government had sued for peace:

And so it had all been in vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and thirst…in vain the death of two millions…. Was it for this that…the volunteer regiments marched after their old comrades? Was it for this that these boys of seventeen sank into the earth of Flanders?…Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay hands on the fatherland?
⁶

One day, the author of these words would become a household name and a byword for political extremism. But Corporal Hitler’s reaction on that day was shared by the vast majority of his countrymen.

In these circumstances, the idea that the political left had betrayed Germany, undermined civilian morale, and hamstrung the army rapidly gained credence, and it soon became one of the totems of the German right. It would not only cripple the democratic left but also fatally weaken any sense of independent thought within the army itself. It would become the cancer at the heart of German politics.

It has been noted, with some justification, that the German army (Reichswehr) dominated the political life of the German Republic after 1918.
⁷
This might appear surprising. After all, Germany was, in theory at least, a model democracy. It had been largely successful in expunging the worst aspects of Prussian militarism. No longer did military personnel appear ubiquitous in public life. No longer could a university professor consider his rank of captain in
the reserves to be his most important title.
⁸
Moreover, the Reichswehr itself had been emasculated by the Versailles Treaty. Restricted to a mere hundred thousand men, stripped of its heavy weapons, tanks, and offensive capability, it had become little more than a glorified police force.

Yet the German Republic, though perfect on paper, was operating in very imperfect times. Besieged in its early years by enemies on the left and right, it was forced to rely for its very survival on the halfhearted and often grudging support of the military. The nascent republic, therefore, owed its life to the beneficence of its enemy, the army, and as a result, the influence and status of the latter were allowed to grow far beyond what the German politicians or the Western Allies would have wished. The army and the republic were bound together in a marriage of political convenience, which neither side had entered with any genuine conviction. The republic had never been enamored with its partner and had agreed to the union out of fear of the possible alternatives. The army, for its part, was merely going through the motions and waiting for a more appealing suitor to emerge.