Boeselager, sure that he was mentally equipped to shoot down a person — even Hitler — in cold blood. It was an entirely different proposition, he felt, from firing at an anonymous enemy in war.22
Nevertheless, Boeselager made preparations for a group of officers, who had declared themselves ready to do so, to shoot Hitler on a visit which, it was hoped, he would soon pay to Army Group Centre headquarters at Smolensk. The visit eventually took place on 13 March. The plan to shoot him in the mess of Field-Marshal von Kluge, commander of Army Group Centre, was abandoned since there was a distinct possibility of Kluge and other senior officers being killed alongside Hitler. Given Kluge’s wavering and two-faced attitude towards the conspiracy against Hitler, more cynical plotters might have thought the risk well worthwhile. As it was, they took the view that the loss of Kluge and other leading personnel from Army Group Centre would seriously weaken still further the shaky eastern front. The idea shifted to shooting Hitler as he walked the short distance back to his car from headquarters. But having infiltrated the security cordon around him and set up position to open fire, the assassination squad failed to carry out their plan. Whether this was because Hitler took a different route back to his car, or whether — the more likely explanation — the danger of killing Kluge and other officers from the Group was seen as too great, is unclear.23
Tresckow reverted to the original plan to blow up Hitler. During the meal at which, had the original plans been carried out, Hitler would have been shot, Tresckow asked one of the Fuhrer’s entourage, Lieutenant-Colonel Heinz Brandt, travelling in Hitler’s plane, to take back a package for him to Colonel Hellmuth Stieff in Army High Command. This was in itself nothing unusual. Packages were often sent to and from the front by personal delivery when transport happened to be available. Tresckow said it was part of a bet with Stieff. The package looked like two bottles of cognac. It was, in fact, two parts of the British clam-bomb that Tresckow had put together.
Schlabrendorff carried the package to the aerodrome and gave it to Brandt just as he was climbing into Hitler’s Condor ready for take-off. Moments before, Schlabrendorff had pressed the fuse capsule to activate the detonator, set for thirty minutes. It could be expected that Hitler would be blown from the skies shortly before the plane reached Minsk. Schlabrendorff returned as quickly as possible to headquarters and informed the Berlin opposition in the Abwehr that the ‘ignition’ for the coup had been undertaken. But no news came of an explosion. The tension among Tresckow’s group was palpable. Hours later, they heard that Hitler had landed safely at Rasten-burg. Schlabrendorff gave the code-word through to Berlin that the attempt had failed. Why there had been no explosion was a mystery. Probably the intense cold had prevented the detonation. For the nervous conspirators, ruminations about the likely cause of failure now took second place to the vital need to recover the incriminating package. Tresckow rang up Brandt to say a mistake had occurred, and he should hold on to the package. Next morning, Schlabrendorff flew to Army High Command with two genuine bottles of cognac, retrieved the bomb, retreated to privacy, cautiously opened the packet with a razor-blade, and with great relief defused it. Mixed with relief, the disappointment among the opposition at such a lost chance was intense.24
Immediately, however, another opportunity beckoned. Gersdorff had the possibility of attending the ‘Heroes’ Memorial Day’, to take place on 21 March 1943 in Berlin. Gersdorff declared himself ready to sacrifice his own life in order to blow up Hitler during the ceremony. Tresckow, for his part, assured Gersdorff that the coup to follow Hitler’s assassination would lead to an agreement with the western powers for capitulation while continuing the defence of the Reich in the east and introducing a democratic form of government. With some difficulty, problems of ensuring that Gersdorff would be close enough to Hitler to bring off the assassination, and problems of establishing precisely what time the ceremonials would begin — given security precautions, betrayal of this fact was in itself dubbed sufficient to warrant the death penalty — were overcome. The timing of the attempt was a third problem. The best fuse that Gersdorff could come up with lasted ten minutes. The ceremony itself, in the glass-covered courtyard of the Zeughaus, the old arsenal, on Unter den Linden, the beautiful tree-lined boulevard running through the centre of Berlin, presented no possibility of detonating an explosion in his close proximity. And once Hitler was outside, inspecting the guard of honour at the war memorial on Unter den Linden, laying the wreath, speaking to selected wounded soldiers, or conversing with guests of honour, Gersdorff would have no cause to be near him. His chance would have gone.
The attempt had to be made, therefore, while Hitler was visiting the exhibition of captured Soviet war-booty, laid on to fill in the time between the ceremony in the Zeughaus and the wreath-laying at the cenotaph. Gersdorff positioned himself at the entry to the exhibition, in the rooms of the Zeughaus. He raised his right arm to greet Hitler as the dictator came by. At the same moment, with his left hand, he pressed the detonator charge on the bomb. He expected Hitler to be in the exhibition for half an hour, more than enough time for the bomb to go off. But this year, Hitler raced through the exhibition, scarcely glancing at the material assembled for him, and was outside within two minutes. Gersdorff could follow Hitler no further. He sought out the nearest toilet and deftly defused the bomb.25
Once again, astonishing luck had accompanied Hitler. Whether it was concern about the possibility of an allied air-raid, which, as we saw in an earlier chapter, had been anticipated; whether Hitler’s security advisers had given a hint of concern for his safety at a public appearance, given the uneasy atmosphere after Stalingrad, when, following the ‘White Rose’ protests of the Munich students Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friends, rumours of an attempt to overthrow the regime were circulating; or whether Hitler himself, ill-attuned to having to give a public performance in sensitive circumstances while the country was reeling from such a military disaster, had scant feeling for the ceremonials and simply wanted to get them over with: whatever the reason, yet another attempt, conscientiously planned despite the difficulties, and undertaken at notable risk, had failed. A new opportunity would not rapidly present itself.
The depressed and shocked mood following Stalingrad had probably also offered the best possible psychological moment for a coup against Hitler. A successful undertaking at that time might, despite the recently announced ‘Unconditional Surrender’ strategy of the Allies, have stood a chance of splitting them. The removal of the Nazi leadership and offer of capitulation in the west that Tresckow intended would at any rate have placed the western Allies in a quandary about whether to respond to peace-feelers.
Overtures by opposition groups to the western Allies had been systematically rebuffed long before this time. For example, for his pains in liaising with German churchmen belonging to the resistance who wanted to sound out the British government about their attitude towards a Germany without Hitler, Bishop George Bell of Chichester was described by Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, in words redolent of those once allegedly used by King Henry II to usher in the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, as a ‘pestilent priest’.26 Despite long-standing contacts with leading figures in the conspiracy — including Carl Goerdeler, Adam von Trott, and the radically-minded evangelical pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (who had spent some time in ministry at the German church in south London) — the resistance was regarded by the British war-leadership (and the Americans shared the view) as little more than a hindrance. A successful coup from within could, it was felt, endanger the alliance with the Soviet Union — exactly the strategy which the conspirators were hoping to achieve — and would cause difficulties in establishing the post-war order in Germany. The key criterion was how far action by those within Germany who opposed Hitler would contribute to the Allied war effort. A British government internal memorandum written little over a month before Stauffenberg’s bomb went off in Hitler’s headquarters gave a clear answer: ‘There is no initiative we can take vis-a-vis “dissident” German groups or individuals, military or civilian, which holds out the smallest prospect of affording practical assistance to our present military operations in the West.’27
Though prepared to distinguish between the Nazi leadership and the German people, Allied thinking was less ready to separate Hitler and his henchmen from his military leaders and from the Prussian traditions which, it was thought, had been a major cause of two world wars. Now, with the war turning remorselessly in their favour, the Allies were less than ever inclined to give much truck to an internal opposition which, it appeared, had claimed much but achieved nothing, and, furthermore, entertained expectations of holding on to some of the territorial gains that Hitler had made.28
This was indeed the case, certainly with some of the older members of the national-conservative group aligned to former Reich Price Commissar Carl Goerdeler whose break with Hitler had, as we have seen, already taken place in the mid-1930s. Goerdeler and those loosely aligned to him — notably former Chief of Staff Ludwig Beck, one-time German Ambassador in Rome Ulrich von Hassell, Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz, and ex-Nazi enthusiast and Berlin professor of politics and economics
