Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (3 page)

In the meantime, I had done my compulsory national service in Merseburg. My group was made up of fifteen Rhinelanders and the same number of Bavarians, and the two contingents were unable to speak with each other because each knew only its own dialect. We were supposed to help construct a dike. I was an engine driver, and my job was to bring construction materials to the site. The atmosphere wasn’t bad; we had agreed not to compete with each other, and the Bavarians conscientiously soaped the rails before dawn so that the materials would arrive more slowly. Everybody benefited. But it was a spartan life. We slept on pallets on the concrete floor of a shed. The people in charge were not intelligent. The indoctrination sessions were so mediocre that they frequently
ended a quarter of an hour early in a gale of laughter. I was careful not to judge this experience negatively; this obligation was additional proof of the absurdity of certain of the regime’s measures, but after all, I had taken advantage of it to harden myself a little, and I got along well with my fellow Rhinelanders.

It would be an exaggeration to say that our vigilance toward the regime had already been awakened at that point. The officers were trained in a completely apolitical way, as if the Wehrmacht, the heir of the Reichswehr and an eternal institution, were situated sufficiently above the vicissitudes of the time to be indifferent to them. We were entirely devoted to our military training and, since we lived in barracks far from the cities and were cut off from the press, we were not well informed. I have to admit that the famous encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety)
, which denounced Nazism, had hardly any effect on me. I was barely twenty years old; at that age, one easily forgets encyclicals read from the pulpit, and one certainly does not read them for amusement!

However, one important point attracted my attention. For a time after Hitler’s accession to power, my father had a Nazi Party card. This was not because of personal conviction, or even opportunism. He had allowed himself to be persuaded by people from the village who had come in 1934 to ask him to join the party. Our father was a principal figure in the Rhineland’s nobility. I think he saw the question in the following terms, as did many
other people of his social cohort: Did he have the right, on the pretext of belonging to the aristocracy, to disdain this vast movement of national renewal? Did he have the privilege of not joining in this groundswell that was carrying millions of Germans in its wake? Did he, whom the local population considered a true gentleman, have good reasons for preserving a detachment that might look like arrogance or folly, or even scorn for the popular elements that constituted most of the movement’s membership?

These concerns notwithstanding, our father quickly returned to his feelings of reservation and even outright hostility concerning the regime. In 1937 the government, which was violating with increasing frequency the concordat signed with the Holy See in July 1933, decided to remove crucifixes from the schools. This attack, even if only symbolic, on Germany’s Christian identity seemed unacceptable to him. Since 1919, the Weimar Republic had been trying to find, region by region, a delicate balance in the relations between church and state.
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More generally, the church’s discreet influence persisted at all levels in young people’s education. The Nazis’ sabotage threatened to destroy all these achievements. Moreover, it said a great deal about the regime’s totalitarian aims. Therefore, our father resigned from the party in 1938, at a time when the annexation of Austria was leading many people to join it. The Nazis responded by forcing him to resign from organizations of which he was the president, notably the National League for the Defense of Hunting.

Another ground for concern was the regime’s anti-Jewish policy. From legal restrictions, which had rapidly become so numerous that it was difficult to tell which ones were marginal and which were essential, it progressed to physical intimidation, and finally to routine violence. There were three Jewish families in our little town of Heimerzheim. Our father, seeing the danger, advised them to flee the country. He even offered to pay their travel expenses. Two of the families followed his advice and emigrated to the United States. The father in the third family, whose name was Moses, elected not to go. He thought the Iron Cross he had been awarded for service in the trenches in 1914 would ensure his safety. He was sadly mistaken. A few years later, he was arrested along with the rest of his family. We never saw them again.

Even if the information available in the barracks was limited, Kristallnacht, in November 1938, did not escape our attention. I remember that it was talked about quite freely among officers and students. In the local newspaper, we read only that “three shops were ransacked on Westendstrasse.” At first, we did not realize that this was part of a more general phenomenon that was affecting all of Germany. Further information dribbled in over the next few days, especially through correspondence between our men and their families in different parts of the country. For us, public order was nonnegotiable, and a pogrom was an unprecedented violation of rights and
public peace, inadmissible in a civilized country. We all agreed—perhaps with a certain naïveté—that if we had been present in town when exactions were being made, we would have cited the criminal code regarding legitimate self-defense. Our commandant assured us that the courts would take action. Later on, when we realized the full measure of the atrocities, we were for a time persuaded that the generals would act. For us, it was unthinkable that the law could be violated with impunity in Germany, without anyone doing anything about it. But nothing was done, apart from our commandant’s assurances and consolations.

The cavalry regiment was hermetically sealed off from much of the outside world. Constructing a spirit of comradeship was more important for us than pretending to be citizens of the world. Sports were far more important than political discussion. Jumping and dressage were our daily occupations. Having fewer physical abilities than Georg, I had to catch up. To lose weight and so as not to receive humiliating scores on the racecourse, I even had to fast from Tuesday to Saturday. A hard school! But a good one, for my captain was Rudolf Lippert, the Olympic equestrian champion at the 1936 games.

The days were long and the training was vigorous and encouraging. Each morning, summer and winter, we left on our motorcycles at dawn and headed for Quelle, forty-eight kilometers away, near Bielefeld, where there was a fine racecourse. The regiment kept racehorses there, which were made available to officers in order to improve our skills. The horses would be waiting for us, already saddled up. We would leap into the saddle, make two or three circuits around the course, then hand the reins to a groom and hop back on our motorcycles to hurry back to school and shower. Our orderlies were waiting for us with towels and fresh clothes. Then we reported, more or less in good spirits, for the morning roll call, and by seven-thirty we were ready to begin the workday proper, which included several more hours of equestrian exercise.

Berlin, September 1938: parade of the Paderborn Fifteenth Cavalry Regiment honoring Mussolini
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Georg leads the detachment; Philipp is the last on the right in the first row
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(photo credit 2.1)

When war broke out on September 1, 1939, the Paderborn Cavalry Regiment—which was for us almost a second family—was dissolved, like the thirteen other units of mounted cavalry in the Wehrmacht before mobilization. We were divided up into fifty-two squadrons scattered over thirty-three infantry divisions. We were supposed to be integrated into reconnaissance battalions whose mission was—by reconnoitering, establishing bridgeheads, and, in short, performing all kinds of bold actions—to prepare the way for the less-mobile units of heavy infantry. The reconnaissance battalions, each consisting of about a thousand men, included a staff to handle support functions (administration, food supplies, intelligence), a cavalry squadron, a cycle squadron, and a
heavy motorized squadron. The battalions had excellent communications equipment, especially radios.

The first months of the war passed rather peacefully. Georg and I were assigned to the area along the borders with Luxembourg and France, Georg in the Sixth Infantry Division, and I in the Eighty-sixth. Georg became head of the Sixth Cavalry Squadron, with our elder brother Tonio, who was a reservist, under his command. Tonio in turn headed a detachment of about fifty cavalrymen. To tell the truth, this “phony war” was not without fighting, even on a front that was said to be quiet. On September 8, no less than six divisions of the French Fourth Army advanced several kilometers into German territory, between Forbach and Bitche, and were about to enter into contact with the Siegfried Line, which was situated at some distance from the border. Georg’s unit was involved in a few skirmishes with the French troops. As for me, I was assigned to retake a French position in the middle of the night. The enemy’s disarray was complete, because they hadn’t anticipated that we would approach it by the most difficult side. The French withdrew from our sector in October.

This period of semi-inactivity allowed the officers to complete the training of the reservists who had been mobilized during the summer and—a temptation not to be resisted when autumn came—to hunt in the game-filled forests along the banks of the Moselle.

Incorporated into the Fourth Army, part of Army Group B, the Sixth Infantry Division entered France on May 16, a few days after the large armored and motorized groups that had overwhelmed the French defenses. By May 28, it had reached the Somme and was beginning to tack toward the southwest. Paris was caught in a sling on the north and west, while Army Group A, crossing the Aisne, threatened the capital’s eastern flank and then headed for Burgundy. On June 9, the Sixth Division forced its way across the Seine and set up bridgeheads around Les Andelys.
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At noon, the French blew up the bridge at Les Andelys, which a German advance unit had tried to seize. For the Germans, the day had begun in confusion; the Sixth Reconnaissance Battalion moved a few kilometers
up the Seine, but toward three o’clock in the afternoon, the French blew up the bridge at Courcelles.

It was then that Georg’s sense of initiative came fully to the fore. He had noticed an organizational weakness in the French defenses. Opposite the hamlet of Les Mousseaux, there were only a few isolated troops, and they lacked heavy artillery. At that place, the river narrowed slightly and was only about 180 meters across. The banks of the river were muddy, spongy, unstable, and covered with tall grass, reeds, and even brambles—no place to go swimming! But Georg quickly made a decision. It was pointless to wait for inflatable boats; precious minutes would be lost. He selected a group of good swimmers. Led by my brother, twelve men rapidly undressed and moved into the river, armed with a few rifles and hand grenades. The rest of the unit was assigned to provide cover for their attack. Three of these men drowned almost at once, probably as a result of the shock of the cold water and exhaustion after almost four weeks of constant activity. In addition, for the past two days, the squadron had been without food supplies.

The French were taken completely by surprise. They could not have anticipated an attack by a small group of cavalry that had made itself amphibious. Georg’s little squad had caught its breath on a tiny island in the middle of the river. A few French snipers were hidden in the vegetation on the opposite bank, but the fire from a German
machine gun set up on the east bank quickly dislodged them from their hiding place. The west bank of the Seine was now undefended. Georg and his men rapidly occupied it, and climbed a few meters up the embankment. They had to stop when they reached the top. The village of Grandvillers, which lay in front of them, still had a few defenders, and it would have been madness to operate in the open. The alert had no doubt been sounded, and French reinforcements would be on their way. But the little group had established a bridgehead. Inflatable boats were now bringing men and matériel from the other side of the river. In a few minutes, sixty men and some light artillery had been unloaded on the west bank. An hour later, the whole cavalry squadron, both men and horses, had passed over.

Shortly afterward, a detachment led by our brother Tonio took Grand-Villiers. Georg and his men stopped a French motorized column dead in its tracks as it advanced along the road to Les Andelys. Twenty minutes later, they intercepted an artillery column. During the fifteen hours that followed, the French made four attempts to retake Grand-Villiers, all in vain.

Even if, on June 9, the victory was already won, Georg’s exploit nonetheless entered the annals of the Wehrmacht and made my brother famous for a few days. It was, in a way, another version of the seizure of Sedan on May 10. Crossing the Seine made it possible to attack
Paris from the opposite side and to deprive our enemies of any hope of turning the military situation around—if they still entertained such hopes.