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Had the Italians, as Goebbels noted in his diary, blown the Alpine tunnels and bridges, the German forces in Italy, some of them already heavily engaged in Sicily by Eisenhower’s armies, would have been cut off from their source of supplies.
But the Italians could not suddenly turn on the Germans overnight. Badoglio had first to establish contact with the Allies to see if he could get an armistice and Allied support against the Wehrmacht divisions.
The King of Italy, like the kings of Norway and Greece, had escaped the clutches of Hitler, who took what revenge he could by arresting his daughter.
According to a secret clause of the armistice agreement he was to be turned over to the Allies, but for some reason Badoglio delayed in doing this and early in September the “valuable object” was spirited away to a hotel on top of the Gran Sasso d’Italia, the highest range in the Abruzzi Apennines, which could be reached only by a funicular railway.
Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitler warmly when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was by now a broken man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much to Hitler’s disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascist regime in German-occupied Italy.
He is so bound to his own Italian people that he lacks the broad qualities of a world-wide revolutionary and insurrectionist.
With his true love once more in his arms, the fallen dictator seemed to care for little else in life. Goebbels, who had had not one mistress but many, professed to be shocked.
A month later, on September 25, three hundred miles to the northwest, the Germans were driven out of Smolensk, from which city they, like the Grande Armée, had set out so confidently in the first months of the Russian campaign on the high road to Moscow.
But by the beginning of 1943 the Allies had gained the upper hand over the U-boats, thanks to an improved technique of using long-range aircraft and aircraft carriers and, above all, of equipping their surface vessels with radar which spotted the enemy submarines before the latter could sight them.
He quickly learned that it was not treason but radar which was causing the disastrous losses.
In 1917 in the First World War, when her armies had become stalled, Germany’s submarines had almost brought Britain to her knees.
And though the news from Russia, the Mediterranean and Italy grew increasingly bad, it dealt after all with events that were transpiring hundreds or thousands of miles distant from the homeland. But the bombs from the British planes by night and the American planes by day were now beginning to destroy a German’s home, and the office or factory where he worked. Hitler himself declined ever to visit a bombed-out city; it was a duty which seemed simply too painful for him to endure.
Although considerable damage was done to specific German war plants, especially to those turning out fighter planes, ball bearings, naval ships, steel, and fuel for the new jets, and to the vital rocket experimental station at Peenemunde on which Hitler had set such high hopes,* and though rail and canal transport were continually disrupted, over-all German armament production was not materially reduced during the stepped-up Anglo–American bombings of 1943.
The greatest damage inflicted by the Anglo–American air forces, as Goebbels makes clear in his diary, was to the homes and the morale of the German people.
But after four years of war it was all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and with their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.
The state of German morale as the result of the defeats and the bombings of 1943 was vividly described by this authoritative source, who on this occasion was speaking for the Fuehrer. Up and down the country the devil of subversion strides. All the cowards are seeking a way out, or—as they call it—a political solution. They say we must negotiate while there is still something in hand…*
I am rather inclined to regard Stalin as more approachable, for Stalin is more of a practical politician than Churchill. Churchill is a romantic adventurer, with whom one can’t talk sensibly. It was at this dark moment in their affairs that Hitler and his lieutenants began to clutch at a straw of hope: that the Allies would fall out, that Britain and America would become frightened of the prospect of the Red armies overrunning Europe and in the end join Germany to protect the old Continent from
from Bolshevism.
Butcher points out, in defense of his chief, that insufficient landing craft limited Eisenhower’s plans and that to have launched a seaborne invasion as far north as the vicinity of Rome would have put the operation beyond the range of Allied fighter planes, which had to take off from Sicily.
The King, Badoglio and the government, much to Hitler’s anger, escaped from Rome and a little later established themselves in Allied-liberated’ southern Italy.
In May 1943, an R.A.F. reconnaissance plane had photographed the Peenemunde installation following a tip to London from the Polish underground that both a pilotless jet-propelled aircraft (later known as the V-l, or buzz bomb) and a rocket (the V-2) were being developed there. In August British bombers attacked Peenemunde, badly damaging the installation and setting back research and tests by
by several months.
Paulus, as we have seen, responded by sending a flood of radio messages of devotion to his Fuehrer, experiencing an awakening only after he got to Moscow in Russian captivity.
The Kreisau Circle, for instance, was unalterably opposed to any such act of violence. This was a remarkable, heterogeneous group of young intellectual idealists gathered around the scions of two of Germany’s most renowned and aristocratic families: Count Helmuth James von Moltke, a great-great-nephew of the Field Marshal who had led the Prussian Army to victory over France in 1870, and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, a direct descendant of the famous General of the Napoleonic era who, with Clausewitz, had signed the Convention of Tauroggen with Czar Alexander I by which the Prussian Army
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Judging by the documents which they have left—almost all of these men were hanged before the war’s end—which included plans for the future government and for the economic, social and spiritual foundations of the new society, what they aimed at was a sort of Christian socialism in which all men would be brothers and the terrible ills of modern times—the perversions of the human spirit—would be cured.
But they were not interested in overthrowing him. They thought Germany’s coming defeat would accomplish that. They turned their attention exclusively to the thereafter.
It was a penetrating question, and the answer seems to have turned out to be that Moltke and his friends had the courage to talk—for which they were executed—but not to act.
The Gestapo also took note of this meeting and at the subsequent trials of the participants turned up a surprisingly detailed account of the discussions.
In the Swedish capital Goerdeler often saw the bankers Marcus and Jakob Wallenberg, with whom he had long been friends and who had intimate business and personal contacts in London.
These were Dr. Hans Schoenfeld, a member of the Foreign Relations Bureau of the German Evangelical Church, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an eminent divine and an active conspirator, who on hearing that Dr. George Bell, the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, was visiting in Stockholm hastened there to see him—Bonhoeffer traveling incognito on forged papers provided him by Colonel Oster of the Abwehr.
To impress the bishop that the anti-Hitler conspiracy was a serious business, Bonhoeffer furnished him with a list of the names of the leaders—an indiscretion which later was to cost him his life and to help make certain the execution of many of the others.
Similar information had been conveyed to the British government by alleged German plotters since the time of Munich and nothing had come of it.
One would have thought that if they considered Nazism to be such a monstrous evil as they constantly contended—no doubt sincerely—they would have concentrated on trying to overthrow it regardless of how the West might treat their new regime.
The R.A.F. had dropped a number of these weapons over occupied Europe to Allied agents for sabotage purposes—one had been used to assassinate Heydrich—and the Abwehr had collected several of them and turned them over to the conspirators.
But this would have killed some of the very generals who, once relieved of their personal oaths of allegiance to the Fuehrer, were counted upon to help the conspirators take over power in the Reich.
With incredible courage Schlabrendorff flew to Hitler’s headquarters and exchanged a couple of bottles of brandy for the bomb.
But because of the near-freezing temperature in the glassed-over courtyard of the Zeughaus it might take from fifteen to twenty minutes before the weapons exploded.
It was led by a twenty-five-year-old medical student, Hans Scholl, and his twenty-one-year-old sister, Sophie, who was studying biology.
By means of what became known as the “White Rose Letters” they carried out their anti-Nazi propaganda in other universities; they were also in touch with the plotters in Berlin.
On February 19 a building superintendent observed Hans and Sophie Scholl hurling their leaflets from the balcony of the university and betrayed them to the Gestapo.
But most serious of all, with the breakup of the Abwehr the plotters lost their “cover” and the principal means of communication with each other, with the hesitant generals and with their friends in the West.
To it came often a number of distinguished guests, who included Countess Hanna von Bredow, the granddaughter of Bismarck, Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, the nephew of the German ambassador to the United States during the First World War, Father Erxleben, a well-known Jesuit priest, Otto Kiep, a high official in the Foreign Office, who once had been dismissed as German consul general in New York for attending a public luncheon in honor of Professor Einstein but who eventually had got himself reinstated in the diplomatic service, and Elisabeth von Thadden, a sparkling and deeply religious woman
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Unfortunately for them Dr. Reckse was an agent of the Gestapo, to whom he turned over several incriminating letters as well as a report on the tea party.
Knowing what fate was in store for them, they refused, got in touch with the British secret service at the beginning of February 1944 and were flown to Cairo and thence to England.
By this time the plotters had come to the conclusion that Hitler’s technique of constantly changing his schedules called for a drastic overhauling of their own plans.
Henceforth he would not only take over the job of killing Hitler by his own hand in the only way that now seemed possible but would breathe new life and light and hope and zeal into the conspiracy and become its real, though never nominal, leader.
He had a passion for horses and sports but also for the arts and literature, in which he read widely, and as a youth came under the influence of Stefan George and that poetic genius’s romantic mysticism.
Though, like most of his class, a monarchist at heart, he was not up to this time an opponent of National Socialism. Apparently it was the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 which first cast doubts in his mind about Hitler, and these
increased when in the summer of 1939 he saw that the Fuehrer was leading Germany into a war which might be long, frightfully costly in human lives, and, in the end, lost.
Almost any other man, one would think, would have retired from the Army and thus from the conspiracy.
