Killing Hitler (36 page)

More significant, the German military was bound by its twin cultures of obedience and loyalty. These were no vague principles. They lay at the heart of the German soldier’s self-image, his sense of duty, and his sense of honor. Obedience, as well as being crucial to the discipline of any army, was central to German political culture. Prussia itself had developed as an
Obrigkeitsstaat
, an authoritarian state, where every citizen knew his place, knew his duty, and obeyed his superiors. Loyalty, too, was of much deeper significance. Not only had Hitler required the German army to take an oath to him personally, he had also appointed himself supreme commander. Thereafter, any act of disloyalty or disobedience could be construed as a direct challenge to the state.

Quite apart from such apparently abstract concerns, a number of more immediate factors served to reinforce the soldier’s natural sense of loyalty. First, it is generally considered fundamentally unpatriotic even to criticize one’s government during wartime, never mind to conspire to bring it down. Such reflexive loyalty was only strengthened in Nazi Germany by the continuing power of the “stab in the back” myth, in which the politicians were alleged to have betrayed the army at the end of World War I. Thus, during World War II, the prospects for the resistance were effectively undermined with each German victory. While he was seen to be winning, Hitler was untouchable. While the Wehrmacht was marching to success after success, the case put by the opposition was progressively weakened, and the chances of convincing the General Staff, or indeed the public, of the need for action diminished still further. As one conspirator noted grimly: “There is no point [in acting] while the people sing hosannas. It can only make sense when they scream for [Hitler’s] crucifixion.”
¹⁷

By the time of Germany’s first significant defeat, at Stalingrad in January 1943, voices were finally being raised in the military and beyond, criticizing Hitler’s tactics and calling his decision making into question. Yet, just as Germany’s Sixth Army was capitulating at Stalingrad, President Roosevelt was promulgating the policy of “unconditional surrender” at Casablanca. From then on, there was no alternative for every German soldier but to fight doggedly to save Germany from the specter of defeat, occupation,
and Bolshevization. Before the conspirators could profit from any discontent, therefore, fate cut the ground from beneath their feet and they were left with little of substance to promise any would-be convert.

In these circumstances, the surprise is perhaps not that the majority of German soldiers felt unable to take action against the regime, but rather that so many were willing to do so. As knowledge spread within the military of the atrocities being committed in Germany’s name, and as faith in Hitler as a military and political leader waned, so the conspiracy grew. For most, opposition to Hitler never went beyond a raised eyebrow or curses muttered under the breath. For others, opposition was openly expressed, but not acted upon for lack of opportunity, support, or personal valor. For a brave few, however, who combined motive, will, and opportunity, conspiracy against the Führer became
“eine Frage der Ehre,”
a question of honor.
¹⁸

Yet, deciding to act was only a part of the answer. Some still clung to the naive idea that Hitler could simply be arrested and arraigned for trial. The majority, however, had long arrived at the conclusion that Hitler’s hold on the German people was so strong that only his murder could bring the desired results. As one conspirator recalled:

The general conviction [was] that German troops would never be willing to accept a different command as long as Hitler lived, but that news of his death would instantly bring about the collapse of the myth surrounding his name. Hence there was no way of gaining the support of large numbers of German troops without eliminating Hitler.
¹⁹

Having decided on assassination, there was also the small matter of gaining access to the target. By 1941, Hitler had become a virtual recluse. By the time the war turned against him, after the debacle at Stalingrad, he eschewed almost all public appearances and was accessible only to his inner circle. When he did appear in public, his security apparatus was considerable. Wherever he
went, he was constantly surrounded by SS and bodyguards, who were fiercely loyal and, by the outbreak of war, well drilled in their procedures.

In private, Hitler was scarcely more vulnerable. With the notable exception of Berchtesgaden, where he felt safest, he was still surrounded by a strict security cordon. And though his daily routine was known to the conspirators, it allowed few opportunities for action. Rising at 10 a.m., he held a daily situation conference at 11, which was followed by lunch and an afternoon nap. Dinner then began at 8 p.m. and would last until the early hours.
²⁰
Realistically, therefore, any assassin would have to be either granted access to the morning conference or else invited to lunch or dine with the target. Once there, he would then have to consider his options. A pistol was unwise: both Hitler and his valets were routinely armed, and in the Führer’s presence, all visiting officers were required to remove their belts and weapons. Furthermore, it was widely believed that Hitler not only wore a bulletproof vest but sported a service cap reinforced with steel
²¹
and had X-ray detectors installed at his headquarters.
²²
In addition to all that, few members of the resistance felt that they had the nerve necessary to confront Hitler with a weapon.
²³
Poisoning, too, was out of the question, as all Hitler’s food was specially prepared by his own cooks and was tasted for him by his personal physician, Dr. Morrell.
²⁴
The weapon of choice, therefore, was usually the time bomb.

Moreover, as innate conservatives, the military resistance was more concerned than most about the type of regime that might follow a successful assassination. Some, bizarrely, thought that Himmler might prove amenable and establish a moderate Nazi government.
²⁵
The majority, however, preferred to target the entire leadership caste of the Nazi Party in one fell swoop. It made little sense, they would argue, to remove Hitler if in so doing power was handed to the unholy triumvirate of Goebbels, Himmler, and Bormann. Clearly, the domestic opposition faced complexities in their planning that simply did not apply to their counterparts in Moscow, London, or Warsaw.

•                •              •

The German military did not emerge as a genuine center of conspiracy until around 1941. With the exception of the Abwehr (see
Chapter 3
), few of its early plotters achieved anything of any consequence. In 1939, for example, the commander of Army Group A on the Lower Rhine, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, had attempted unsuccessfully to induce Hitler to visit his headquarters in Cologne, with the idea of arresting him.
²⁶
The following summer, a similar plot developed in occupied Paris with similar results. By the summer of 1941, however—paradoxically, when the German army appeared to be invincible—the first rumblings of a widespread military conspiracy began. Its nucleus would form in the unlikely location of the headquarters of one of Hitler’s Army Groups.

It is not immediately obvious why Army Group Center should have developed into a “nest of intrigue and treason” against Hitler.
²⁷
It contained, for example, Guderian’s 2nd Panzer Group, and counted the SS Panzer Division
Das Reich
and the élite
Grossdeutschland
Regiment among its number. Its soldiers had made rapid initial gains in Operation Barbarossa, and, after tasting victory in the great encirclement battles of Minsk and Smolensk, had been ordered to march on Moscow. They had experienced the same elation, terror, and privation that were common across the Eastern Front. Some of them may have witnessed the atrocities committed to their rear by the SS and others. Many more would have heard the rumors. Army Group Center’s commander, Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, certainly had. A career staff officer who had masterminded the annexation of Austria in 1938 and had led army groups in the Polish and French campaigns, Bock was already in his sixties. He was certainly no Nazi, but, although he had often expressed disquiet at SS activities, he contented himself with lodging a formal complaint with army headquarters in Berlin.
²⁸
Though he sympathized with the conspirators, he was not prepared to act.

Bock’s nephew, however, Colonel Henning von Tresckow,
was a man of a different stamp. A gifted soldier, Tresckow had fought in the First World War, where, as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant, he had been awarded the first of three Iron Crosses. A career as a staff officer beckoned, and in 1936 he left the Military Academy as the best cadet of his year. Despite initial enthusiasm for the Nazi regime, he quickly began to turn against Hitler. After the blatant illegality of the Röhm Purge in 1934, he was then shocked by the aggressive planning of the campaign against Czechoslovakia and disillusioned by the Blomberg and Fritsch crises (see pages 86–87) of 1938. Already by that time, he was beginning to think of high treason as the only answer to Germany’s plight. “Hitler,” he said to friends, “is a whirling dervish. He must be shot down.”
²⁹

The outbreak of war in 1939 affected Tresckow deeply. In stark contrast to the vast majority of his countrymen, he saw the conquest of Poland—in which he participated as a major in an infantry division—as a psychological and moral defeat for the German people and for the nascent resistance, of which he was already a member. Hitler’s methods, he feared, had been vindicated—those voicing opposition had been shouted down. His only hope at this point was that a military setback would create more favorable conditions for a coup.
³⁰
Finally, in 1941, with the planning for the attack on the Soviet Union, Tresckow believed that setback to be close at hand. War against the USSR would end in German defeat, he thought, “just as surely as the Amen in church.”
³¹
That defeat could then serve as the hour of Germany’s rebirth and her liberation from Nazism.

Tresckow’s plotting was given added impetus by the circulation of Hitler’s draft directives for the Barbarossa campaign. Hitler had already warned that the war against the Soviet Union would be “very different from that in the west.” He went on to outline the expanded role that the
Einsatzgruppen
were to play in the conflict. The brutal methods of racial warfare, which had already caused outrage among sectors of the German military during the Polish campaign, were now to be expanded. In the run-up to war, a series of directives was issued, giving responsibility to
Himmler’s SS to take “executive measures vis-à-vis the civilian population.” For those still in doubt as to what this all meant, a General Staff directive of May 1941 declared:

Bolshevism is the deadly enemy of the National Socialist German people…. [The] struggle requires ruthless and energetic action against Bolshevik agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, and Jews, and the total elimination of all active or passive resistance.
³²

On reading such orders, Tresckow was horrified. He saw the German army being dragged into the illegal, genocidal measures of the SS and Nazi Party. He saw Germany’s honor being sacrificed on the altar of Hitler’s megalomania. With uncanny prescience, he confided to a colleague:

This will still have an effect in hundreds of years, and it will not only be Hitler who is blamed, but rather you and me, your wife and my wife, your children and my children, that woman crossing the street, and that lad there kicking a ball.
³³

Tresckow hurried to complain to his superiors. Halfhearted protests were raised, but to no avail. The orders stood.

Once the war against the Soviet Union was launched, Tresckow was well placed to keep himself informed of the atrocities being committed in the army’s rear. As senior staff officer of Army Group Center, based in Byelorussia, he would have been aware of the brutal “pacification” campaigns then under way all around him. He would have seen the correspondence from the
Einsatzgruppen
, read the situation reports, and heard the rumors. Curiously, perhaps, he does not appear to have interceded to stop or limit the slaughter. He only acted, it appears, in one instance, and then only to secure the postponement of a planned massacre of “partisans and followers” until the agreement of the army high command had been given.
³⁴

It may be that he feared exposing himself as an opponent of
the regime or that he considered such actions to be futile. But Tresckow soon began to collect like-minded soldiers. He appointed trusted colleagues and friends to positions of influence in his headquarters. The first to arrive was his cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a young reserve lieutenant and lawyer, whom he appointed as his aide-de-camp. Others would follow, including the later would-be assassins Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, Eberhard von Breitenbuch, and Georg von Boeselager. Tresckow himself would become one of the most convinced and energetic advocates of opposition against Hitler, and his staff would serve as the nucleus of the conspiracy. He created a tightly knit and committed resistance cell, and located it on the general staff of one of Hitler’s most prestigious army groups.

Tresckow’s first tentative moves toward tyrannicide crystallized in the late summer of 1941. Based at the Army Group Center headquarters at Borisov in Byelorussia, he was soon made grimly aware of historical precedents. It had been there, in the winter of 1812, that Napoleon’s exhausted army had crossed the Berezina River and finally ceded victory to the Russians. As if to ram the point home, the Germans retrieved a number of Napoleonic standards from the riverbed and sent them to Berlin for restoration. When SS units then massacred the Jewish population of the town, Tresckow was also made aware of the horrors of his own time.