Plotting Hitler's Death

risk. His perfor­mance revealed a poker-faced master strategist, cold-blooded, quick to react, and gifted with sure instincts. “He pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes-Heydrich, Himmler, Keitel, Ribbentrop, even the Fuhrer himself,” a Gestapo official later lamented.³⁰

Behind the cool mask lay a high-strung disposition; Canaris was agitated and tormented by fear after each passing danger yet was still addicted to new adventures. Like most cunning people, he hated violence. He was nimble in the face of danger, witty, and sardonic. During one of his trips to Spain he would spring to attention in his open car and raise his arm in the Hitler salute every time he drove past a herd of sheep. You never know, he said, whether one of the party bigwigs might be in the crowd. He called his immediate superior, Wilhelm Keitel-his total opposite in temperament-a block­head. Some observers have deduced from all the incongruities in Canaris that he was an unprincipled cynic who sought only thrills from the resistance and who admired Hitler as an even greater gamesman than himself. These interpretations miss the mark. In his last years Canaris increasingly suffered from the conviction that he had served Hitler far too long and far too submissively, and he regretted not having turned the resources of Military Intelligence against the regime in a more determined fashion. It has been said that he was a master of the art of obfuscation, and his skill has tended to obscure his rigid adherence to a number of principles. He could not abide treason whatever the pretext, as his break with Oster shows, but neither could he bear the lack of basic humanity that made the Nazi regime so abhorrent in his eyes.

One of his colleagues recounted that while visiting the Military Intelligence offices in Paris on his way back from Spain, Canaris learned that Hitler had issued orders to have former French prime minister Paul Reynaud and General Maxime Weygand not just ar­rested but quietly killed should the opportunity present itself. At din­ner with his colleagues, Canaris sat sunk in silence until his feelings suddenly erupted in an angry denunciation of “these gangster meth­ods of Hitler and his henchmen,” who were not only committing crime upon crime in the East but now bringing betrayal and murder to the West as well. Germany would lose more than just the war, he added before leaving the table, and its future would then be too frightful to contemplate.³¹

Because Canaris understood the nature of the Nazi regime better than most and yet never crossed irrevocably into the camp of its enemies, he exemplified the dilemma of many torn between emotion and reason. They felt proud of the restoration of German might yet were well aware of the repellent ways in which it had been achieved. They took great professional pleasure in their successes yet despaired over the “gangster methods of the regime.” They recognized that a catastrophe was looming for which they bore some responsibility yet felt paralyzed by such honorable principles as duty, loyalty, and a job well done. On March 10, 1938, Chief of General Staff Ludwig Beck was summoned to the Chancellery and asked to prepare mobilization plans for the entry into Austria. Although he plainly foresaw the disas­ters to which Hitler’s ambitions would lead, he threw himself into his task when it turned out that no plans existed because Hitler had been keeping the general staff in the dark. He spurred on his staff and his chief of operations, Erich von Manstein, to produce plans as fast as possible. Five hours later they lay ready. There was no escape from the fact that if opponents of the regime wished to avoid serving Hitler they had to turn their backs on all the values they believed in and even on longstanding friendships. Hans Oster was prepared to do precisely that. Franz Halder once remarked-half in grudging admi­ration, half in disapproval-that Oster was fired by a “burning hatred of Hitler,” which caused him to conceive notions “that the sober, critically minded listener simply could not accept.”³²

6. THE ARMY GROUPS

The western campaign was barely three weeks old and still in full swing when Hitler turned his mind to new horizons. On June 2, 1940, he spoke in General Rundstedt’s headquarters about his hopes of soon concluding a peace treaty with Britain in order to gain “a free hand” for what he considered his “great, true mission: the struggle against Bolshevism.”¹ Shortly thereafter, on July 21, he ordered the army high command to begin “mental preparations” for renewed operations in the East, which he considered launching as early as the fall of that year. This time, however, in contrast to his stubbornness after the Polish campaign, he allowed himself to be easily dissuaded from such an early date.

Above all it was his concern about the difficulty of waging a two-front war that made Hitler more uncertain and receptive. He had once said that avoiding such a predicament was a fundamental princi­ple of German foreign policy. To get around it, he now elaborated a risky plan to divide the war into two phases: first the Wehrmacht would turn on the Soviet Union and conquer it in a lightning strike, then, after gathering its strength, it would turn to the task of polishing of Great Britain once and for all. Hitler’s confidence in his luck and invincibility, and his obsession with his “true mission,” which now lay so tantalizingly near, eventually laid to rest most of his concerns, and any lingering hesitation was overcome by his anxiety about timing- “Time, always time!” as he later grumbled. In mid-December he informed Alfred Jodl that “all problems on the continent of Europe” would have to be ironed out by 1941 because by 1942 “the United State s would be in a position to intervene.” To Mussolini he said that he felt like someone who had only one shot left in his rifle as night began to fall. In his haste, before the final decision to invade had even been made, he ordered that suitable locations be found in the East for headquarters and command posts for the army groups and that construction begin “as quickly as possible.”²

At the same time, he began to make his entourage aware that this would be no ordinary war waged according to the traditional rules; it was to be a war of annihilation. His annoyance at repeated complaints from military leaders about atrocities committed in the Polish cam­paign led him to summon nearly 250 senior officers to the Berlin Chancellery on March 30, 1941, in order to explain this new kind of warfare to them. Everything they had previously experienced-the “flower wars,” the easy victories gained through happy circumstance and the battles fought on the wrong battlefields-was only a prelude, he told them, in a speech that was to last two and a half hours. The real war, his war, was about to begin. According to the notes taken by one of his listeners, it would be a “struggle of two ideologies.” Bolshe­vism was “equivalent to a social criminality, a tremendous danger for the future,” the Fuhrer declared. “We must abandon the viewpoint of soldierly comradeship,” he cautioned. “What is involved is a struggle of annihilation. The commanders of the troops must know what is at stake.” He concluded by singling out Communist leaders and the secret police for special treatment. “Commissars and GPU men are criminals and must be treated as such. The fight will be very different from the fight in the West. In the East harshness is kindness toward the future. The leaders must demand of themselves the sacrifice of overcoming their scruples.”³

When Hitler finished speaking there was a moment of stunned silence. But he had scarcely left the room before the marshals be­sieged Commander in Chief Brauchitsch, talking and gesticulating wildly. No one had any doubt, it seems, about the real meaning of Hitler’s words. Brauchitsch stood firm against the waves of com­plaints and references to international law, saying he had already done all he could but Hitler was not to be dissuaded. According to a Statement that Jodl made at the Nuremberg trials, Brauchitsch and Hitler did indeed have a number of “very heated conversations.” Halder tried to persuade Brauchitsch that the two of them should resign together, but the commander in chief was incapable of making a decision of that magnitude.⁴

Hitler knew better than to rely solely on appeals for harshness. A number of preparatory guidelines were soon issued transferring the Wehrmacht’s responsibility for the administration of the occupied territories to special Reich commissioners. Heinrich Himmler and four Einsatzgruppen were commissioned to undertake “special tasks” arising “from the final battle of two opposed political systems.” The dry administrative language outlining directives for the planned “war of ideologies” could hardly disguise the extent to which the basic principles of international law and warfare were being thwarted. Two of the most infamous directives were the decree on military law and the so-called Commissar Order. The former transferred responsibility for punishing crimes against enemy civilians from military courts to individual division commanders, while the latter required that Red Army political commissars be segregated upon capture and, “as a rule, immediately shot for instituting barbaric Asian methods of warfare.” When Oster produced the documents at a meeting in Beck’s house, “everyone’s hair stood on end,” according to one who was there, “at these orders for the troops in Russia, signed by Halder, that would systematically transform military justice for the civilian population into a caricature that mocked every concept of law.” They all agreed that, “by complying with Hitler’s orders, Brauchitsch is sacrificing the honor of the German army.”⁵ In the first half of June, two weeks before the invasion was launched, the “Commissar Order” was issued to the staffs at the front as the last of a series of prepara­tory edicts.

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