Plotting Hitler's Death

Poland of abandoning conquered territories to the violence of the Einsatzgruppen and con­spicuously washing its hands of any responsibility for what would follow.

It is true, of course, that opposition would have had little more than a delaying effect. This is no excuse, however, for either Brauchitsch or the other commanders. They failed to see that the restoration of the long-lost moral integrity of the army was at stake. Their failure to act seems even more egregious in the light of the unanimous sense of outrage expressed by the officers, of which so much was made following the war. It illustrates not only the wide­spread awareness of criminal activity but also the broad support that a determined commander who refused to carry out orders would have enjoyed. It is difficult to comprehend why three or more command­ing generals could not agree to protest the orders as a body. It has repeatedly been argued that such a gesture would have been point­less, but it must be said that it was never really tried. Rundstedt’s aide, Hans Viktor von Salviati, remarked shortly before the Russian campaign began that almost all the field marshals were well aware of what was happening, “but that’s as far as it goes.”¹²

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At 3:15 a.m. on June 22, 1941, Hitler launched the war against the Soviet Union under the code name Operation Barbarossa. He had enjoyed an unbroken string of victories, including the last-minute campaigns against Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia and the brilliant expedition in North Africa, where Rommel had succeeded in less than twelve days in reconquering all of the Libyan territory lost by Germany’s Italian allies. Although these victories had fueled a wide­spread feeling of invincibility, a nagging sense of foreboding began to arise for the first time. “When Barbarossa starts, the world will hold its breath and keep still,” Hitler crowed just a few days before the invasion.

Most of all, though, it was the Germans who held their breath. Everyone sensed that the mission that had been embarked on was too ambitious even for Hitler’s formidable nerves of steel, his keen intu­ition, and his eerie ability to stride from one triumph to the next. For the first time, the feeling arose that he was setting out to achieve the impossible. “Our German army is only a breath of wind on the end­less Russian steppes,” said a staff officer who knew the terrain well. Almost all contemporary reports of the mood of the German people speak of “dismay,” “agitation,” “paralysis,” and “shock.” Occasionally, as one of the secret agents noted, there were “references to the fate of Napoleon, who was vanquished in the end by the vast Russian spaces.”¹³

As the German armies advanced, so did the Einsatzgruppen. They set about their work with such brutality that Colonel Helmuth Stieff wrote in a letter that “Poland was nothing by compari­son.” He felt as if he had become the “tool of a despotic will to destroy without regard for humanity and simple decency.” A gen­eral staff officer with Army Group North reported that in Kovno, Lithuanian SS squads had “herded a large number of Jews to­ gether, beaten them to death with truncheons, and then danced to music on the dead bodies. After the victims were carted away, new Jews were brought, and the game was repeated!”¹⁴ Officers in this army group besieged their superiors with demands that the mas­sacres be halted. Similarly, the members of Army Group Center’s general staff, who had by this lime been transferred to Smolensk, urged Field Marshal Bock “with tears in their eyes” to put a stop to the “orgy of executions” being carried out by an SS commando unit about 125 miles away in Borisov and witnessed by Heinrich von Lehndorff from an airplane. Attempts were immediately made to stop the massacre, but they came too late. Bock demanded that the civilian commissioner in charge, Wilhelm Kube, report to him immediately and turn over the responsible SS commander for court-martial. Kube responded curtly that Bock ought rightly to be reporting to him and that he had no intention, in any case, of pro­ducing the SS commander. The army group could not even deter­mine his name; the commandant of army headquarters at Borisov, whom the army group accused of failing to prevent the slaughter, committed suicide.¹⁵

As a result of the massacres in the East, relations between Hitler and the officer corps, which had always been cool, despite a momentary reconciliation at the time of the great triumphs in France, began to deteriorate rapidly. “By nature I belong to an entirely different genus,” Hitler had once said-and the feeling was mutual.¹⁶ Hitler’s speech to the assembled officers on March 30 and the subsequent orders putting his message into legal language had conclusively re­futed the belief that Nazi excesses were the work of “lower- level authorities” carrying on behind Hitler’s back, a misapprehension that had long inhibited action. Now the resistance gathered strong new support. Yorck showed up at Army Group Center headquarters pas­sionately voicing his anger; Gersdorff finally overcame his lingering abhorrence of treason; Stieff turned away from the regime, sickened by what was happening. And it was apparently at this time, too, that Stauffenberg resolved to do everything in his power to remove Hitler and overthrow the regime.¹⁷ The biographies of several members of the resistance, especially the younger conspirators, show just how crucial the horrendous crimes in the East were in motivating them to act.

Differences of opinion over military operations soon erupted between Hitler and his army commanders, exacerbating the latent tensions that already existed. German units had succeeded, to be sure, in slicing deep into the Soviet Union and running up an impressive series of victories. Yet it was becoming increasingly apparent that each triumph only carried them further and further into the endless expanses of the Soviet Union, while the front was becoming more and more disjointed.

Attention therefore turned to how the army could use its available forces most effectively. Whereas the OKH and Army Group Center advocated a concentrated assault on Moscow, Hitler insisted on “pushing through the Ukraine into the Caucasus” and beyond to the oil fields of the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf. At the same time he ordered the troops to advance in the north so as to cut the enemy off from the Baltic Sea. The fractious dispute that ensued did not revolve around two rival strategies so much as around one strategy and one fantasy, consisting of Hitler’s faith in his own invincibility, concern about increasingly noticeable shortages of goods and raw materials, and an unrestrained lust for land. By August 1941 general staff officers were already muttering about Hitler’s “bloody amateurism.”¹⁸

After a long spell in the doldrums the resistance was buoyed by rapidly spreading rumors about the tensions in Hitler’s headquarters. In the early autumn General Georg Thomas visited the army groups to assess their willingness to take action. He learned that the swift advance through the Soviet Union and the unease it was creating in the various headquarters prevented any serious planning for a coup. The idea of striking from France with Witzleben’s help was raised briefly but soon dropped. In late September Tresckow decided to send Fabian von Schlabrendorff to Berlin to let the circle around Ludwig Beck know that Army Group Center was “prepared to do anything” if a coup was launched. There is no doubt that this message vastly exaggerated current sentiments in the army group and was more an expression of the sense of mounting exasperation in the face of the increasingly pointed conflict between honor and obedience, the oath of allegiance and the barbarous methods of war. Schlabrendorff conferred in Berlin with Hassell, who noted in his diary the one truly notable feature of Tresckow’s project: for the first time in the history of the resistance “an initiative of sorts” for overthrowing the regime had come from the army rather than the civilian opposition.¹⁹

A few days later General Thomas and General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander in Belgium and northern France, went to see Brauchitsch. They both found him surprisingly receptive to their ideas, probably not least because he was exhausted from the interminable wrangling with Hitler. According to an entry in Hassell’s diary, Brauchitsch acknowledged “what a bloody mess ev­erything had become and even came to see that he himself must be held partially responsible.”²⁰ As if a signal had gone out, activity within opposition circles immediately picked up. At meeting after meeting, “the overall situation was discussed,” Hassell recorded, “just in case…” Other preparatory steps were taken as well: ties were established with Trott, Yorck, and Moltke, and Hassell was requested shortly thereafter to visit Witzleben and Falkenhausen. After the somber mood of the previous months, spirits within the opposition finally began to lift. Tresckow even felt sufficiently encouraged to make a last, although ultimately futile, attempt to draw Bock into the resistance.

At this point the great Russian winter descended on the troops in the field, who were left without appropriate provisions, having charged ahead on the assumption that there would be “no winter campaign,” as Hitler had assured skeptics only shortly before. The German offensive literally froze in its tracks, and confusion spread across the front. With every ounce of the general staffs strength devoted to dealing with the situation of the troops, all planning for a coup ceased. The members of the resistance fell once again into such despondency that they even interpreted Hitler’s dismissal of Brauchitsch on December 19-undertaken in the hope of ending the festering conflict with the OKH-as a blow. The incessant swinging from high to low had so frazzled them that the few strong words Brauchitsch had spoken to Thomas and Falkenhausen had raised their hopes in him, making