The story of the internal German resistance to Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist dictatorship, the hideous regime that he called the Third Reich, is a Classical Greek tragedy, containing all the elements required by Aristotle in his definition of the term. Its actors performed their deeds personally – none more so than its legendary leader, the charismatic hero Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg – and it encompassed terror, pity and fear in more than full measure.
By the time the anti-Nazi conspirators carried out the last and most spectacular of their several attempts to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944, they knew that their self-appointed mission was doomed to almost certain failure. For, even if they succeeded in outwitting the all-pervasive security of the SS state that Nazi Germany had become and hit their target, causing the violent death of the dictator, it was already too late to save the country they loved from defeat and destruction.
Just a few weeks previously, on D-Day, 6 June, the armies of the Anglo-American western allies, who previously had refused to encourage the plotters by agreeing to a separate peace deal excluding Russia, had swarmed onto the Normandy beaches and opened the long-awaited Second Front against Germany. The Fatherland was now living out the same nightmare it had faced in the First World War just twenty years before – a war on two fronts. In the east, the seemingly inexhaustible divisions of Stalin’s Red Army were hurling themselves relentlessly against the crumbling defences of Hitler’s realm. Each passing day brought their columns nearer to the heartland of the Reich, and by late July they were just a hundred miles away from Hitler’s personally chosen eastern headquarters; the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, tucked away among the brooding, swampy forests of the East Prussian/Polish marches.
Almost every day and night now, fleets of American and British heavy bombers, virtually unopposed by the depleted remnants of Germany’s once-mighty Luftwaffe, droned overhead and pounded the cities of the Reich, gradually grinding them into rubble. The news from the fronts – moving ever closer – that was brought to Hitler’s twice-daily conferences with his military staff was almost uniformly bad. The perimeters of the Reich were shrinking, the losses of his armies could not be repaired or replaced, his remaining allies were searching for ways to desert him, and the inescapable truth was staring even the meanest intelligence in the face: Hitler’s war was irretrievably lost.
But even though no move of theirs could affect the inevitable outcome of the war, the leading conspirators were more determined than ever that action should be taken. As one of the most clear-headed among them, General Henning von Tresckow, put it: ‘The assassination must be attempted at all costs . . . what matters now is not the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.’ In other words, it was not so much the ‘practical purpose’ of an assassination and an associated putsch to overthrow the regime that mattered any longer: an assassination attempt was necessary to redeem the honour of the once-proud German army, a quality that had been surrendered on the snow-covered killing fields of Russia and eastern Europe long before.
Though opposition to Hitler and the barbaric policies he embodied long predated the outbreak of war and even his arrival in power in 1933, it was the actual murderous realisation of Nazi racial doctrines on the vast Russian steppes and hidden in the dense forests east of Warsaw that spurred some – including Stauffenberg himself – from mere grumbling into active anti-Nazi conspiracy. This radicalisation of the resistance was most marked among army officers who witnessed such atrocities as the massacre of Jewish communities and the slaughter of Slav ‘sub-humans’, both civilians and Soviet prisoners, and who gradually became aware of similar Nazi crimes inside Germany itself, including the euthanasia of the mentally and physically handicapped. Such flagrant trampling on the Christian ethics that had traditionally underpinned German society profoundly shocked the Prussian officer corps.
An activist minority of such men, however obedient to the head of state they may have been taught to be, held a higher loyalty to the laws of God, the teachings of Christ, or merely to codes of simple human decency. To restore the primacy of such higher commands, and to return Germany to the rule of law and the path of Christian civilisation, seemed to them the highest duty of all, outweighing soldierly concepts like obedience to their superiors’ orders and even the defence of their country’s borders against the enemy in wartime.
With military courage, determination and energy – alas, not always matched by military efficiency – the conspirators set about a final attempt to murder Adolf Hitler, the man to whom they had all pledged a compulsory oath of loyalty as their Führer, a leader combining the three posts of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, head of the government and head of state. In doing so, they were fully aware of what was at stake, and what they were putting at mortal risk. Failure would mean that the full fury of Nazi vengeance would be unleashed against them, with all that that entailed: arrest, imprisonment, cruel and prolonged torture, a humiliating public trial and a lonely, degrading death. Perhaps hardest of all to bear would be the reproaches of those of their fellow Germans, in whose name they claimed to be acting, who would accept the Nazis’ caricature of them as traitors who had stabbed their country in the back in its hour of greatest need. In the words of the Irishman Roger Casement, hanged for treason in the First World War, and equally revered in some quarters as a hero and reviled in others as a traitor: ‘It is a cruel thing to die with all men misunderstanding.’
Notwithstanding the high price that might have to be paid, the men of the resistance went ahead with the near-hopeless plan that was concealed under the codeword ‘Valkyrie’. The plan was for the simultaneous assassination of Hitler and a Reich-wide military putsch; a coup d’état aimed at arresting the SS and loyalist Nazis, not only in Germany itself but also in countries still occupied by Germans – France, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Norway – and replacing Hitler’s rule with that of a mixed civilian-military government dedicating to supplanting National Socialism with a Rechtsstaat. This would be a Germany where the rule of law once again reigned supreme, and German citizens would no longer tremble in dread at the sound of a midnight knock on their doors ushering them into the terrors of ‘Nacht und Nebel’, night and fog.
What happened during the course of that dramatic day forms the core of this book. But 20 July 1944 was the climax to years of plotting, and abortive attempts to arrest and/or assassinate Hitler (whether it was morally right to kill Hitler, or merely to detain him and bring him to trial was the subject of agonised debate among the conspirators). While concentrating on the military conspiracy that reached its final, tragic culmination in the last summer of the war, I have also told the stories of other plots against the Führer’s life, and other centres of opposition to Nazi rule, since these were inextricably intertwined with the longmeditated military plot that reached its final, fatal fruition on 20 July. Inevitably the story centres on the main actor on that fateful day: the shining personality of Claus von Stauffenberg, who – just as Hitler was the ungodly trinity of Nazi rule – embodied in his single dynamic personality the head, hands (or rather hand, since Stauffenberg had lost one of his) and heart of the conspiracy.
Stauffenberg was the man who, entering the conspiracy relatively late in the day, quickly assumed the leadership of the whole tangled enterprise, infusing the plot with his own unquenchable drive, energy and enthusiasm. He reinvigorated more senior officers: generals like Tresckow, Beck and Olbricht, who, frustrated by the repeated failure of their previous attempts to eliminate the evil that Hitler represented, had lapsed into a state of near fatalistic resignation. I will examine the factors that formed Stauffenberg’s remarkable character: his family, upbringing, military career, the evolution of his quasi-mystical religious and political philosophy, and his transformation from an elitist nationalist with more than a sneaking sympathy for the Nazi Weltanschauung, into the Hitler regime’s most implacable and convinced opponent.
The form that seems most convenient for telling this story is that of a timeline. The story forms a chronological narrative that begins with Stauffenberg’s youth and the Nazi rise to power, takes on momentum as the regime tightens its grip and embarks on the road to war and genocide, and reaches its shattering climax as Hitler’s increasingly desperate internal enemies reluctantly wrestle with their own Christian convictions forbidding them to kill the man they know is leading their people – and the world – into the abyss.
In telling their story, I hope that – without sparing criticism of the resistance where it is justified – I can make their actions comprehensible and admirable to readers unfamiliar with German history in general, and in particular to all those lucky enough never to have lived under a ruthless, cruel and ultimately utterly insane dictatorship. The men of the resistance were genuine heroes and the world still needs their unconquerable spirit. It is a spirit that made one of the few of them who survived, the jurist Fabian von Schlabrendorff, when asked how he had endured the fiendish tortures of the Gestapo, write:
We all made the discovery that we could endure far more than we had ever believed possible. The two great polar forces of human emotions, love and hate, together formed a supporting structure on which we could rely when things became unbearable. Love, the positive force, included our faith in the moral worth of our actions, the knowledge that we had fought for humanity and decency, and the sense of having fulfilled a higher duty. Those among us who had never prayed learned to do so now, and discovered that in a situation such as ours prayer, and prayer alone, is capable of bringing comfort and lending almost superhuman strength. One also finds that love in the form of prayers by relatives and friends on the outside transmits currents of strength.
Hate, the negative force, was just as important in sustaining us. The consuming, unqualified hatred, made up of equal parts of revulsion, contempt, and fury which we felt for the evil of Nazism, was so powerful a force that it helped us endure situations which otherwise would have been intolerable.
Thanks to Schlabrendorff and his colleagues in the resistance who refused to endure the intolerable situation that was Nazi rule, the flame of humanity they lit in the darkness of Hitler’s Reich was never entirely extinguished. They may have failed to kill Hitler, but in the mere fact of making the attempt these brave men snatched the soul of their tortured country from the pit – and saved it.