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During the long convalescence he had had time to reflect and he had come to the conclusion that, physically handicaped though he was, he had a sacred mission to perform.
And also some differences, for Stauffenberg was not satisfied with the kind of stodgy, conservative, colorless regime which the old rusty leaders of the conspiracy, Beck, Goerdeler and Hassell, envisaged as soon as National Socialism was overthrown. More practical than his friends in the Kreisau Circle, he wanted a new dynamic Social Democracy and he insisted that the proposed anti-Nazi cabinet include his new friend Julius Leber, a brilliant Socialist, and Wilhelm Leuschner, a former trade-union official, both deep and active in the conspiracy.
There were two or three key generals, chief of whom was Fritz Fromm, the actual commander in chief of the Replacement Army, who like Kluge, blew hot and cold and could not be definitely counted on.
This was Rommel, and his entrance into the plot against Hitler came as a great surprise to the resistance leaders and was not approved by most of them, who regarded the “Desert Fox” as a Nazi and as an opportunist who had blatantly courted Hitler’s favor and was only now deserting him because he knew the war was lost.
They were aided by an old civilian friend of Rommel, Dr. Karl Stroelin, the Oberbuergermeister of Stuttgart, who like so many other characters in this narrative had been an enthusiastic Nazi and now, with defeat looming and the cities of Germany, including his own, rapidly becoming rubble from the Allied bombing, was having second thoughts. He, in turn, had been helped along this path by Dr. Goerdeler, who in August 1943 had persuaded him to join in drawing up a memorandum to the Ministry of the Interior—now headed by Himmler—in which they jointly demanded a cessation of the persecution of the
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To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyr of him.
He was not only a soldier but a philosopher, having received summa cum laude a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tuebingen in 1925.
The three men present, Speidel, Neurath and Stroelin, were, like Rommel himself, all Swabians and this affinity appears not only to have made the meeting congenial but to have led to ready agreement.
Preparation of a “constructive peace” within the framework of a United States of Europe. In the East, continuation of the war.
The generals seem to have had no doubts whatsoever that the British and American armies would then join them in the war against Russia to prevent, as they said, Europe from becoming Bolshevik.
Dulles says he lost no time in trying to bring the Berlin conspirators down to earth. They were told there could be no separate peace with the West.
They were told there could be no separate peace with the West.
For a time they believed that it might be easier to get a better peace with Russia—which through statements from Stalin himself had emphasized in its radio propaganda that it was fighting not against the German people but against “the Hitlerites”—than with the Western Allies, who harped only of “unconditional surrender.”* But they abandoned such wishful thinking in October 1943, when the Soviet government at the Moscow Conference of Allied Foreign Ministers formally adhered to the Casablanca declaration of unconditional surrender.
Such a revolt was highly unlikely—indeed, impossible—since the foreign workers were unarmed and unorganized, but to the suspicious Fuehrer danger lurked everywhere these days, and, with almost all the able-bodied soldiers absent from the homeland either at the front or keeping down the populace in the far-flung occupied areas, he readily fell in with the idea that the Home Army ought to have plans for protecting the internal security of the Reich against the hordes of sullen slave laborers.
Also there were considerable numbers of Luftwaffe units in and around the city manning the antiaircraft defenses, and these troops, unless the Army moved swiftly, would remain loyal to Goering and certainly make a fight of it to retain the Nazi regime under their chief even if Hitler were dead.
Goering and Himmler might be able to rally them, and a civil war would ensue.
Copies of the orders and appeals were typed in great secrecy late at night in the Bendlerstrasse by two brave women in the plot, Frau Erika von Tresckow, the wife of the general who had done so much to further the conspiracy, and Margarete von Oven, the daughter of a retired general and for years the faithful secretary of two former commanders in chief of the Army, Generals von Hammerstein and von Fritsch.
In fact, they had been perfected by the end of 1943, but for months little had been done to carry them out.
Indeed, there was a growing number of conspirators, perhaps influenced by the thinking of the Kreisau Circle, who began to feel that it might be better to call off their plans and let Hitler and the Nazis take the responsibility for the catastrophe. To overthrow them now might merely perpetrate another “stab-in-the-back” legend, such as that which had fooled so many Germans after the First World War.
Severe Anglo–American air attacks continued to disrupt German depots, radar stations, V-l sites, communications and transport, but these had been going on night and day for weeks and seemed no more intense on this day than on others.
Due to an idiotic order of Hitler’s not even the Commander in Chief in the West could employ his panzer divisions without the specific permission of the Fuehrer.
Hitler’s much-propagandized Atlantic Wall had been breached within a few hours. The once vaunted Luftwaffe had been driven completely from the air and the German Navy from the sea, and the Army taken by surprise.
Rommel proposed, with Rundstedt’s assent, that the Germans withdraw out of range of the enemy’s murderous naval guns, take their panzer units out of the line and re-form them for a later thrust which might defeat the Allies in a battle fought “outside the range of the enemy’s naval artillery.”
In a display which Speidel calls “a strange mixture of cynicism and false intuition,” Hitler assured the generals that the new V-l weapon, the buzz bomb, which had been launched for the first time the day before against London, “would be decisive against Great Britain… and make the British willing to make peace.” When the two field marshals drew Hitler’s attention to the utter failure of the Luftwaffe in the West, the Fuehrer retorted that “masses of jet fighters”—the Allies had no jets, but the Germans had just put them into production—would soon drive the British and American flyers from the
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Shortly after the field marshals had departed from Margival on the afternoon of June 17 an errant V-l on its way to London turned around and landed on the top of the Fuehrer’s bunker.
This meeting took place on the Obersalzberg, where the Supreme warlord treated the two field marshals frostily, dismissing their appeals curtly and then lapsing into a long monologue on how he would win the war with new “miracle weapons.”
He seems to have wished that it would, since then the American and British governments, after such a bloody and costly setback, would be more willing to negotiate a peace in the West with his new anti-Nazi government, which in this case could get better terms.
If they succeeded they would only be blamed for bringing on the final catastrophe. Though they knew it was now inevitable, this was not generally realized by the mass of the German people. Beck finally concluded that though a successful anti-Nazi revolt could not now spare Germany from enemy occupation, it could bring the war to an end and save further loss of blood and destruction of the Fatherland. A peace now would also prevent the Russians from overrunning Germany and Bolshevizing it. It would show the world that there was “another Germany” besides the Nazi one. And—who knew?—perhaps at
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He knew, he said, how much Churchill feared the danger of “a total Russian victory.”
We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance Movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it.
From the beginning the Beck–Goerdeler–Hassell circle had declined to have anything to do with the Communist underground, and vice versa. To the Communists the plotters were as reactionary as the Nazis and their very success might prevent a Communist Germany from succeeding a National Socialist one. Beck and his friends were well aware of this Communist line, and they knew also that the Communist underground was directed from Moscow and served chiefly as an espionage source for the Russians.* Furthermore, they knew that it had become infiltrated with Gestapo agents—“V men,” as Heinrich Mueller,
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One seems to have been an almost unnecessary complication that sprang up in the minds of the now desperate conspirators.
Nevertheless the plot to kill Hitler and overthrow Nazism must be carried out at all costs, Beck argued, if only to save Germany’s honor.
The important thing, they said, was for Germans—and not their foreign conquerors—to free Germany from Hitler’s tyranny.
The Nazi despotism had endured for eleven years and only the certainty of utter defeat in a war which Germany had launched, and which they had done little to oppose—or, in many cases, not opposed at all—had roused them to action. But better late than never.
On his way he stopped off at a Catholic church in Dahlem to pray.
From the airfield a staff car drove the party to the Wolfsschanze headquarters, set in a gloomy, damp, heavily wooded area of East Prussia.
It was built in three rings, each protected by mine fields, pillboxes and an electrified barbed-wire fence, and was patrolled day and night by fanatical S.S. troops.
Apparently he had hoped too that this time the conference with Hitler would be held in the Fuehrer’s underground bunker, where the blast from the bomb would be several times more effective than in one of the surface buildings.
There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of the two fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyed the ruins of the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinking that the Axis which they had forged, and which was to have dominated the continent of Europe, was not also in shambles. The once proud and strutting Duce was now no more than a Gauleiter of Lombardy, rescued from imprisonment by Nazi thugs, and propped up by Hitler and the S.S.
Mention of this aroused Hitler—who had been sitting morosely sucking brightly colored medicinal pills supplied by his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell—to a fine fury.
It did not make too much difference to him, he said, whether the despot was alive or dead. They must go ahead and destroy his evil rule.
Not even when General Thiele brought word that the news of Hitler’s survival was shortly to be broadcast over the German national radio network does it seem to have occurred to the conspirators that the first thing they had to do, and at once, was to seize the broadcasting central, block the Nazis from getting their word out, and begin flooding the air with their own proclamations of a new government.
Had similar energy and similar direction of energy been shown in Berlin that afternoon, history might have taken a different turn.
Goebbels, who though a stupid man was extremely quickwitted, told Hagen to send Remer to him at once. This Hagen did, and thereupon passed out of history. Thus while the conspirators in the Bendlerstrasse were getting in touch with generals all over Europe and giving no thought to such a junior officer as Remer, indispensable as his job was, Goebbels was getting in touch with the man who, however low in rank, mattered most at this particular moment.
Among the talents which had enabled Joseph Goebbels to rise to his eminence in the Third Reich was a genius for fast talking in tight situations—and this was the tightest and most precarious of his stormy life.
Once more the failure of the conspirators to seize the Berlin telephone exchange or at least cut its wires compounded disaster.
The Fuehrer also promoted the major forthwith to colonel.
Why the rebelling generals and colonels entrusted such a key role to Remer in the first place, why they did not replace him at the last moment with an officer who was heart and soul behind the conspiracy, why at least they did not send a dependable officer along with the guard battalion to see that Remer obeyed orders—these are among the many riddles of July 20.
The Gestapo headquarters were virtually unguarded, as was the central office of the R.S.H.A., the nerve center of the S.D. and S.S., which, one would have thought, would be among the first places to be occupied.
