Prologue

High Summer in the Wolf’s Lair

20 July 1944: Rastenburg

Thursday 20 July dawned like many another high summer’s day at Rastenburg, Adolf Hitler’s chosen Field Headquarters deep on the north Polish plain, in a region enclosed by gloomy forests of birch, beech and oak, and dotted with hundreds of small lakes. Despite its proximity to the Baltic coast, barely a breath of sea air penetrated the dark woods surrounding the complex of concrete bunkers and electrified fences housing the nerve centre of the Führer’s once formidable but now faltering war machine.

Rastenburg, a small German town in the east Prussian enclave around the ancient port of Königsberg, the birthplace of philosopher Immanuel Kant, had been chosen as a military site as early as 1940, after the victorious conclusion of the German campaign to conquer Poland. A landing strip was constructed on the edge of the Gorlitz forest, and the Karlshof Café – once a gathering place for the local people – was requisitioned by the SS. That November, Dr Fritz Todt, Germany’s chief military engineer, whose name would become synonymous with the construction of the Atlantic Wall and other defensive fortifications using slave labour, chose the forest as the perfect place to build Hitler’s eastern headquarters. The Führer, turning away from the west after his humbling of France and his less successful attempt to batter Britain into submission, was already planning what he saw as the triumphant fulfilment of his political and military mission: the smashing of Stalin’s Russia, and the conversion of its inhabitant into a race of semi-educated helots serving the Herrenvolk.

The code name chosen for the site was ‘Wolfschanze’ (Wolf’s Lair); a conceit on the part of a man usually marked by his modest, even austere style. The Führer’s forename, Adolf, was a corruption of Adelwolf (Noble Wolf) and his other wartime headquarters were the ‘Wolfschlucht’ (Wolf’s Gorge) in the Ardennes for the Battle of France, and his forward headquarters at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, ‘Werwolf’ (Werewolf). Vinnitsa was the scene of the first serious – if abortive – attempt to assassinate Hitler by officers of the Army Group Centre in 1943; a year earlier, in 1942, it had been the place where Hitler’s path first crossed that of his would-be nemesis, Count Claus von Stauffenberg.

Hitler exercises his Alsatian Blondi in the open meadow east of the Wolfschanze, probably in August 1943.

It was Colonel von Stauffenberg who was expected at Rastenburg on this broiling day in late July to report personally to Hitler on the state of readiness of the Reserve Home Army, of which he had been appointed Chief of Staff the previous autumn. The haemorrhaging of manpower on the Eastern Front – more than fifteen hundred Wehrmacht soldiers were killed daily – had, since D-Day the previous month, been boosted by a similar rate of attrition on the Normandy Front. The human resources of the Reich were being worn down ever more rapidly, and the unpalatable scraping of the manpower barrel had begun that would see old men and young boys donning ill-fitting uniforms and flung into the furnace that was consuming Germany’s future.

Even at dawn, the day promised to be a fine if muggy one, although there would be few opportunities to enjoy the sunshine. Already before the war news began to turn grim, the atmosphere here had always been oppressive. The dark forest provided a sombre backdrop to increasingly gloomy events, and the brooding menace of the place was not lightened by the ubiquitous camouflage netting, strung everywhere on tall poles in an effort to conceal the complex from Russian aerial attack; the once-distant Red Army was now only 150 kilometres away. Fear of attack was all-pervading at Rastenburg – the whole five-acre complex was protected by three concentric rings of electrified fencing, with SS sentries accompanied by savage, snarling Schaferhund guard dogs posted every thirty metres. The bunkers themselves were made of reinforced concrete, some six metres thick, making them almost impervious to even a direct hit, but rendering the living-space inside excessively cramped, adding to the oppressive atmosphere hanging heavily on the place.

Work on the complex was still proceeding, three and a half years after it had begun under the transparent cover name of the Askania Chemical Works. Hitler’s own block was still under construction, and so whenever he came to Rastenburg he stayed at the guesthouse bunker, one of a collection of buildings inside the innermost and most closely guarded section of the complex, the Sperrkreis 1. For his most recent visit he had arrived from the Berghof, his Bavarian mountain retreat in southern Germany a few days earlier, on 14 July. As well as the Führer’s quarters, this inner area also held a number of structures, including offices of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and naval liaison staff attached to the Führer, and the briefing room, its windows flung wide open in the July heat. This was where Stauffenberg would deliver his report during Hitler’s customary midday situation conference.

The Wolfschanze’s Führerbunker, which measured 37 metres across, with the east and west wings adding another 25 metres. The height was estimated at over 13.5 metres. This photograph was taken in 1974.

Also inside Sperrkreis 1 were the quarters of the SS guards, drivers, stenographers and secretaries; garages and personal bunkers for the falling and rising stars of the Reich. These included the Luftwaffe overlord Hermann Goering; Hitler’s personal Chief of Staff and gatekeeper, the self-effacing but increasingly powerful intriguer Martin Bormann; and Hitler’s favourite technocrat, the architect turned munitions minister and industrial chief Albert Speer. Here too were located the fortified underground bunkers where the Wolfschanze’s staff would retreat from the threat of air raids, and where military conferences were sometimes held. There was room for buildings catering to the limited leisure hours of Hitler and his staff: a cinema, a sauna, and a tea house where the food faddist Führer would sip his herbal infusions and munch through endless sickly Austrian cream cakes, an incorrigible appetite for which he had acquired in the Vienna of his youth. All the while he would regale his bored minions with his table talk: the interminable monologues – meticulously recorded by hidden stenographers on Bormann’s orders – setting out his views on history, politics, war and race, and tales from earlier, happier days of the Kampfzeit: his own rise to supreme power. Within a few yards of these buildings was Rastenburg’s signals centre: the hub of Hitler’s communications with his armies and the rest of the Reich, commanded by General Erich Fellgiebel, a colleague of Stauffenberg’s in the conspiracy, who would play a crucial role in the day’s events.

Goering and Luftwaffe General Karl Bodenschatz walk with Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair, with Casino I in the background, in the spring of 1942.

Stauffenberg was not the only visitor expected in Rastenburg that day. Although the colonel did not yet know it, the midday situation conference would be brought forward by an hour so that Hitler could prepare for the arrival of his fellow dictator, Italy’s fallen Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. Il Duce’s train was due to pull into the sidings at Gorlitz, the Wolf Lair’s own rail station, where three trains were kept with their steam up on permanent standby. From being Hitler’s idol in his early years as an apprentice dictator, Mussolini had fallen to the status of junior follower, failed brother-in-arms and finally deposed dictator after he had been unseated and arrested by his own Fascist colleagues a year earlier, in July 1943. Daringly rescued in an audacious raid on his secret mountain jail in the Apennines by German special forces, Mussolini, by now only a sawdust Caesar, had been propped back on the seat of power as puppet ruler of German-controlled northern Italy, the so-called Italian Social Republic. But although he was treated by Hitler with all the warmth of former times, nothing could conceal the brute fact that the once strutting Duce was now a German-controlled marionette, a broken man who had backed the wrong horse.

Even though the writing was now on the wall for the Nazi and Fascist causes for all to read, within his rapidly receding realm the realities of power – and its trappings – were still held in Hitler’s palsied, shaking hands; the grimmer the tidings from all fronts, the shriller became his insistence that he would still win the war: there must be no retreat, no going back. Anyone in the Wehrmacht who raised their voice in protest, no matter how mildly, knew that they would be unceremoniously silenced. The roll call of those who had crossed Hitler and paid for their defiance was a steadily lengthening one, and the worse the news grew, the more his paranoid suspicion of his own generals increased.

From the regime’s earliest days, the field marshals and generals who had dared defy the Führer’s implacable will had followed each other one by one into enforced retirement and semi-disgrace. Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the war minister responsible for the Wehrmacht’s supine acquiescence to Hitler’s assumption of power, had, despite his loyalty to the regime, been unceremoniously dumped in 1938 for marrying a young typist who turned out to be a former prostitute. At the same time General Werner von Fritsch, the pre-war army commander who opposed Hitler’s march to war, had been implicated by the Nazis in a trumped-up homosexual scandal; disgraced and out of sheer disgust, he had voluntarily gone to his death in the Polish campaign. Also in 1938, General Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the General Staff whose hatred for Hitler and Nazism had been enough for him to contemplate a coup against the regime even before the war, had resigned in horror, and had since devoted himself full-time to the conspirators’ cause. Beck had been joined in the anti-Nazi conspirators’ ranks by two other senior commanders fatally bruised by their encounters with Hitler’s mania: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, an outspoken anti-Nazi who had been all for arresting Hitler before the war, and had been retired by the Führer in 1941 on the grounds of ill-health; and General Erich Hoepner, a tank commander sacked for his alleged failures on the Russian Front. Beck’s successor, General Franz Halder, who had presided over the Battle of France, had shared his predecessor’s alarm that Hitler’s reckless foreign policy would lead Germany into a war with the Western Allies, and become so disillusioned with Hitler that he had wanted to produce a pistol at one of their regular meetings and personally execute him. Scorning Halder as an old woman who lacked the aggressive spirit, Hitler had fired him in September 1942.

Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, appointed with Halder to head the Wehrmacht, had only lasted until December 1941, when Hitler heard that he had been secretly discussing tactical withdrawals with his generals after the first Russian reverses. Telling Goebbels that Brauchitsch was a ‘vain, cowardly wretch’, Hitler had summarily dismissed him. Even the brilliant Erich von Manstein, a favourite of the Führer’s ever since his bold Sichelschnitt plan for a surprise attack on France through the unguarded Ardennes hills had opened the way for the fall of France, had seen his hitherto glittering career consumed by the explosive mixture of the unwinnable war in Russia and Hitler’s increasingly unstable temperament. Manstein, along with another field marshal, the tank commander Kleist, had been summoned to Hitler’s mountain retreat the previous March – decorated with the prestigious Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords to sugar the pill – and sacked. Hitler told them that their tactical talents were of no use to him any more: in the endgame that was fast approaching in Russia, he needed convinced National Socialist soldiers with the fibre to stick it out no matter how tough things became. Even the latest Chief of Staff, General Kurt von Zeitzler, tired of the Führer’s endless temper tantrums, had recently left Rastenburg on what proved to be permanent sick leave.

Hitler talks with Generaloberst Richthofen in front of Casino I, with the Keitelbunker in the distance on the left. SS-Obersturmführer Hans Pfeiffer, SS adjutant, is behind Hitler, and the latter’s chief servant, SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Linge, is just behind Richthofen.

Just as Hitler’s Russian folly – his stubborn refusal to yield a metre of territory once it had been taken – had consumed the cream of his troops, so his cavalier treatment of his senior commanders meant that he was now rapidly running out of generals too. Disaster was looming fast in the east, but if anything the news from France, where the newly opened Western Front was fast approaching Paris, was even worse. Just three days previously, on 17 July, Germany’s most charismatic soldier, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had been shot up from the air in Normandy by an Allied fighter, flying free now that the Luftwaffe had been knocked out of the skies. Rommel had suffered serious head wounds and, even if he lived, was unlikely to resume his command in the near future. Besides, there were disquieting rumours afoot at Rastenburg suggesting that even the hitherto loyal ‘Desert Fox’ had deserted his master’s side. It was said that Rommel, the simple Swabian soldier, saw clearly that the war was lost now that the Anglo-American forces had established their bridgehead in France, and had bluntly advised Hitler to make peace with the west while he still had the chance before Germany suffered any more useless destruction. If there was any substance to these reports, then the future looked bleak indeed: if the wider German public learned that even the spirited Rommel wanted to throw in the towel, then it looked very much as if it was all over.

Of the other top commanders, Field Marshal von Leeb had quit as early as January 1942, appalled like so many of his comrades by Hitler’s blank refusal to contemplate strategically essential troop withdrawals in the east. Field Marshal von Bock, the man whose advance into Russia had been stopped at the gates of Moscow in December 1941, had gone the same way in July 1942 for similar reasons. Field Marshal Siegmund List had also resigned that September, at the same time as Halder, when his offensive in the Caucasus had ground to a halt as a result of lack of supplies. The frozen furnace that was the Russian Front had consumed two more field marshals in 1943: Friedrich von Paulus, who had surrendered along with what was left of his decimated Sixth Army in February after being surrounded in Stalingrad thanks to Hitler’s crazed ‘No withdrawal’ orders, and Maximilian von Weichs, sacked in Russia and transferred to the Balkans to deal with the increasingly troublesome resistance of Marshal Tito’s Yugoslav partisans. Rommel’s nominal superior in France, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, was aged and uninspiring and moved in and out of retirement as Hitler’s whims took him. Rommel’s recently appointed successor in Normandy, Günther von Kluge, was, like Halder, a half-hearted anti-Nazi who knew in his heart and head that the war was lost, but lacked the courage and will to stand up to Hitler.

Now the generals’ larder was almost bare: almost the only commanders available and acceptable to Hitler were the yes-men surrounding him at Rastenburg – Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, and die-hard Nazis like the monocled Walter Model, the savagely cruel Ferdinand Schoerner, the brilliant tank tactician Heinz Guderian and the former street fighter turned brutally efficient Waffen SS general, ‘Sepp’ Dietrich. Even the loyal Guderian had been known to growl out rumbles of dissent. Hitler, the First World War veteran who had never risen higher in rank than a humble corporal, had always hated and distrusted the stiff-necked Prussian officer corps, with their arrogant hauteur, their snobbish rituals. He saw the barely concealed sneers contorting their thin lips when they explained in lofty terms their objections to his grand strategic plans; he heard – or thought he heard – the disloyal whispers, glimpsed the eyebrows raised in disdain at his micro-managing interventions. And time after time they had let him down: failing to take Moscow or Leningrad, failing to hold Stalingrad or the Crimea. Since Paulus’s shameful surrender – the first capitulation by a German field marshal since the time of Napoleon – the Russian campaign had turned into one long retreat.

Coupled with their blundering incompetence was rank disloyalty, even treason. Paulus had led the way: instead of committing suicide as any officer of honour would, the foxy-faced Prussian had meekly entered Soviet captivity from where he had begun broadcasting treasonable appeals on Moscow Radio. Stalin had set up something called the Committee of Free German Officers who were calling on their comrades to desert Hitler and turn their guns on the Nazis. No, Hitler was done with the Prussians: he needed new blood.

Perhaps this tall colonel who was coming from the Reserve Army would have some ideas. At least he was a Swabian rather than a Prussian, even if he still had a title and a ‘von’ before his name. Everyone spoke well of him – said he was the most brilliant staff officer of his generation. The fact that he had lost an eye and an arm at the fighting front only increased Hitler’s admiration. He hated desk warriors and defeatists. Yes, he would see what Stauffenberg could do . . .