3	Rule of the Outlaws

Within an astonishingly short space of time, the Nazi dictatorship fixed its immovable clutches around the country’s throat. In a ruthless process known as Gleichschaltung (coordination) all institutions and individuals in Germany were subordinated to the new regime: free trade unions and employers’ organisations were submerged into Nazi-run ‘Fronts’; all political parties except the NSDAP were banned.

For young people, membership of the Hitler Youth and its female equivalent, the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BDM) became all but compulsory. A range of repressive new laws made criticism of the regime and its Führer a criminal offence punishable by a spell in one of the feared new concentration camps, where beatings, torture, starvation and hard labour became the order of the day. For millions of Germans, fear of the midnight knock on the door became all-pervasive; the shorthand name for the regime’s secret police – the ‘Gestapo’ (Geheime Staatspolizei – secret state police) entered the language. By July, Hitler was able to proclaim his national revolution complete. After the Stauffenbergs returned from their honeymoon, plebiscites in November 1933 returned 96 per cent rates of approval for the new policies.

There is little evidence one way or the other on Stauffenberg’s attitude to the demise of the republic whose armed forces he had joined. Under its compliant leader, Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, the army tamely submitted to the new order, benignly viewing the Hitler government as a reliable bulwark against Bolshevism, and rejoicing at the new chancellor’s evident ambition to expand and rearm the armed forces – the Luftwaffe and navy as well as the army – in order to reassert Germany as a major player on the world stage. Meanwhile, Stauffenberg was continuing with the serious business of becoming a soldier. In a progress report of October 1933 on the somewhat priggish but popular officer, Stauffenberg’s squadron leader, Hans Walzer, noted in the credit column that he was ‘reliable, independent minded, highly intelligent and of above average ability, both tactically and technically’. Walzer described his handling of both horses and men as ‘exemplary’. After this glowing praise, however, Walzer listed on the debit side that Stauffenberg, as well as the old complaint about being ‘somewhat sloppy in dress’, was also too well aware of his superior intellect and was liable to ‘adopt a somewhat overbearing attitude towards his fellow officers, frequently evidenced by sarcasm’.

In December 1933 Stauffenberg had suffered a loss so great that it amounted to a close family bereavement: his Master and mentor, Stefan George, died in Swiss exile at the age of sixty-five. George’s attitude to the coming of the Third Reich had been ambiguous. On the one hand, he specifically refused a Nazi invitation to join the Prussian Academy of Arts after it had been purged of anti-Nazi writers such as Thomas Mann. On the other hand, he disowned two of his Jewish followers who had spoken out against the increasingly vicious anti-Semitism of the regime, although some of his disciples who stated that the Third Reich was indeed the ideal Germany that George had been calling for were not similarly disavowed. His departure for Switzerland was not a flight into exile on political grounds: he was on holiday there when overtaken by his fatal illness, and there is no evidence that he did not intend to return to Germany. All three Stauffenberg brothers would continue to revere the poet and seek to live by his precepts for the rest of their lives.

The year 1934 was dominated by the showdown between the army and the SA. The swaggering, bullying, brown-shirted storm troopers under their beefy Chief of Staff, Ernst Röhm, had been an important – if blunt – instrument in opening up Hitler’s path to power. Once that power had been attained, however, the SA became simply an embarrassment. The Nazi Kampfzeit – ‘time of struggle’ – had been marked by street brawls, beerhall battles and gun and knife fights as the SA took on their Communist and Socialist opponents. Their vulgarity and brutality had always appalled the German middle and upper classes; and now these were the very groups that Hitler needed to cement his grip on the levers of state.

Moreover, the old soldier Röhm seemed unable to grasp the realities of running a state. No sooner was Hitler in the Reichs Chancellery than the battered bruiser was making aggressive speeches calling for a ‘second revolution’ that would boot the hated stiff-necked, glassy-eyed Prussian officer corps out of power and substitute the storm troopers as Germany’s new army. This was a threat to the Wehrmacht’s role as the state’s sole bearer of arms; it was a threat that not even the army chief, war minister Werner von Blomberg, could ignore. Nicknamed ‘Gummilowe’ (‘Rubber Lion’) for his normal stance of slavish subservience to Hitler, Blomberg left the new chancellor in no doubt that Röhm’s insolent demands must be resisted, and that the menace that his rowdy, three million-strong paramilitary force posed to the order and stability of the new state must be crushed.

Ernst Röhm in his Brownshirt uniform in the early 1930s.

There was another issue too: a major reason why Röhm and his cohorts were detested by the army’s conservative officer corps was his more-or-less open homosexuality. Not only were the pot-bellied SA leadership generally of rough-hewn proletarian origins, but many of them also shared Röhm’s sexual tastes and were despised by the officer caste, who feared that the nation’s soldierly spirit was about to be debauched by sexual degeneracy, just as the army would be swept away in a brown flood if Röhm’s plans to merge the two forces into a new People’s Army ever came to pass.

Hitler himself felt torn as the storm clouds of the SA-versus-army conflict gathered. He was uneasily aware that it was the fists and boots of the SA that had propelled him into power. He also knew that it was Captain Röhm, his oldest party comrade, who had, as an intelligence officer in the post-war army, originally plucked him from the ranks when he recognised the gawky corporal’s uncannily persuasive power as a demagogue. Moreover, Hitler shared in full measure Röhm’s distrust for the snobbish, effete officer corps. On the other hand, he knew of Röhm’s seething resentment of his own dominance. Jealous aides had reported Röhm’s indiscreet jeers at what Röhm called ‘this ridiculous corporal’s’ newly acquired airs and graces, and Hitler was determined that now power had fallen into his hands he would not let it go: had he not pledged that once inside, the only way that he would be removed from the Berlin Chancellery would be as a corpse? Even so, throughout the long brooding spring and summer of 1934 Hitler dithered, waiting for someone to show their hand, waiting for the right moment, waiting for the fruit to ripen and fall rotten from the branch.

It was then that the personal jealousies that always bedevilled the Nazi hierarchy came into play. Hermann Goering, First World War flying ace turned flamboyant Nazi paladin, and Heinrich Himmler, the deceptively mild-mannered, bespectacled former chicken farmer who now headed the SS (the black-uniformed party security service), were united in little more than deep personal animosity. Yet on one subject they both agreed: the loathsome Röhm was a danger to their ambitions and he had to go. As the overlord of Prussia’s police, Goering had the legal power to gather surveillance reports on the drunken boasts and threats uttered by Röhm and his cohorts. Himmler had always wished to supplant the inefficient brutishness of the SA with his own elite force of young, tough, ruthless Aryan recruits. Himmler, whose crackpot racism even outdid that of Hitler, was in the early stages of building the SS into the core of the Nazi state: a Praetorian Guard responsible for policing the population and eliminating threats – real and imagined – to Nazi rule. Removing Röhm would be a giant step towards his goal.

Goering and Himmler put their heads together in a rare show of co-operation, and set about drenching Hitler’s already suspicious mind with poison about his old comrade. Röhm was planning a putsch, they whispered. The SA had always been an undisciplined rabble, and now they were threatening to undermine the smooth Nazi takeover of the state and to eliminate Röhm’s rivals physically. The threat had to be nipped in the bud. Only by striking first and with ruthless violence could they thwart Röhm’s wild ambitions, reassure the broad mass of the public – and cow it into submission. Hitler allowed himself to be persuaded and as June turned into July he struck, lashing out not only at Röhm, but at a host of other enemies too.

Hitler travelled to one of his favourite hotels, the Dreesen at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine, ostensibly to attend the nearby wedding of Essen’s Nazi Gauleiter, Joseph Terboven. From there, he flew south through the night of 30 June 1934 to Munich. There, the accumulated tension burst: the first SA man that he saw was arrested after a furious tirade from Hitler in which he accused the hapless man of treason. Hitler, accompanied by Goebbels and a group of armed SS men, then drove out of Munich to Bad Weissee on the Tegernsee, the lakeside resort where Röhm and a group of his closest cronies were taking the cure for their various dissipations. The official Nazi line that the SA chief was planning a putsch is disproved by the fact that Röhm had just stood his legions down and sent the entire SA on a month’s leave.

Hitler arrived at the hotel, the Pension Hanselbauer, soon after 6 a.m. and stormed into the lobby. Röhm received a rude awakening; Edmund Heines, SA commander in Silesia, after being found in bed with a boy, was summarily shot in the hotel’s grounds along with his unlucky partner. Röhm himself and the other SA leaders were arrested and packed into Munich’s Stadelheim prison, where most were shot in the prison yard. Goebbels sent a pre-arranged signal ‘Colibri’ (‘Hummingbird’) for the slaughter to begin in Berlin. Here SS men, provided with arms by the army, set about their work. Firing squads killed scores in the SS barracks at Lichterfelde, while other victims were shot in their own homes by death squads. During a long weekend’s bloodletting, many old scores were settled. Not only was the entire leadership of the SA eliminated, but Hitler also put to death those who had at some point impeded his path to power. His memory went back a long way.

Gustav von Kahr, the Bavarian Regent who had gone back on his promise – extracted by Hitler at pistol point – to support the Nazi Beerhall Putsch in November 1923, paid dearly for his volte face. Though aged seventy-two, and long since retired from politics, he was abducted from his home by SS thugs, hacked to death with pickaxes, and his body thrown into a swamp near Dachau, soon to become the site of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. Others who had deviated from the path of unquestioning obedience to Hitler suffered similar fates: Gregor Strasser, once the head of the Nazis’ national organisation and who had extended the party from its Bavarian birthplace across the whole Reich, was, like Röhm, a Nazi who took the ‘socialism’ of the party’s title seriously. In the late 1920s Strasser had challenged Hitler’s control of the movement and now he paid the price for his temerity. He was gunned down through his cell window, the same fate that would befall Röhm himself after Hitler had finally been persuaded to authorise the killing of his old comrade. General Kurt von Schleicher, the creepy intriguer who had become Weimar’s last pre-Nazi chancellor and had plotted with Strasser to keep Hitler out of office, was shot down at his study table. His wife, who opened the door to her husband’s killers and tried to stop their bloody work, died in the same hail of fire. One of Schleicher’s closest colleagues, the army general Ferdinand von Bredow, was also killed: he was bludgeoned to death in a police van and his body slung into a ditch.

Hitler’s vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, the conservative who had preceded Schleicher as chancellor, and then successfully manoeuvred to put Hitler into power in his place, miscalculating that he could control the new chancellor and corral him in a safely conservative direction, only narrowly escaped death himself. He was held under house arrest in his own office for three days as Hitler – enraged by a speech Papen had given at Marburg University in mid-June in which he had called for an end to Nazi lawlessness and excesses – debated whether to have him killed. In the end he was satisfied by having Papen’s three closest associates in Catholic conservative circles, including his secretary, and the man who had written his Marburg speech, murdered. Papen himself was demoted to become Germany’s ambassador to Austria, charged with the task of smoothing the way to Hitler’s early takeover of his homeland. Shaken by the slaughter of his closest aides, Papen would make sure that he never again uttered a squeak of dissent. The illusion that he could manage and manipulate Hitler had been brutally shattered.

At the close of that long summer weekend of blood and terror Hitler himself admitted that seventy-four victims were dead, though unofficial tallies point to a death toll of four hundred or more. Hitler had struck to his left and right, eliminating the SA, Nazi ‘socialists’ and reactionary generals and conservatives alike in one fell swoop. He had left no one – within Germany or in the wider world – in any doubt that he had taken on the role of judge, jury and executioner. Reaction in the army was mixed: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, always an implacable opponent of Hitler and destined to be nominated as the new army Commander-in-Chief by the July plotters in 1944, cried ‘Splendid!’ when he heard that the SA leadership had been shot. While Witzleben’s delight that the SA enemies had been eliminated was widely shared in the army – an act facilitated a couple of days before the purge by the army’s formal expulsion of Captain Röhm from its ranks – more perceptive officers were aware that the lawless executions, and especially the insensate violence with which they had been carried out, were the hallmarks of a viciously barbaric regime that had buried the rule of law in the graves of its victims. As they looked ahead with foreboding, several far-sighted officers feared that in associating themselves with Hitler’s first public act of mass murder the army had irretrievably forfeited its honour, staining itself with the blood of its own members, Generals Schleicher and Bredow. They had unleashed a beast they could not halt.

Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben.

These early stirrings of unease among the army’s leadership were shared by Stauffenberg, who nonetheless welcomed the purge as ‘a clean-up’. Two incidents, both from early in 1934, show the seeds of Stauffenberg’s later moral revulsion at the Nazi regime. Both events centre on the unsavoury figure of Julius Streicher. Streicher was the notorious Jew-baiting Gauleiter of Franconia: a grotesque figure whose manic anti-Semitic ravings in his gutter weekly Der Stürmer invariably revolved around his own psycho-sexual pathology. In the first incident Stauffenberg attended a Nazi party rally in Bamberg as a representative of the army. Streicher was the guest speaker and launched into his usual pornographic tirades, despite the blushing presence of teenage BDM girls around the podium. Appalled, Stauffenberg and his colleague staged a public walkout. In the second incident, in March 1934, Stauffenberg publicly leapt to the defence of his idol Stefan George, after the poet was accused by Streicher in the pages of Der Stürmer of being Jewish and his poetry damned as ‘Jewish Dadaism’. Stauffenberg wrote to Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry – responsible for licensing Streicher’s rag – complaining about the Gauleiter’s rant, which, he told his brother Berthold, was the work of ‘inferior National Socialists’. Stauffenberg still made a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Nazis.

Julius Streicher, c.1933.

Hitler followed up his gruesome triumph in the Blood Purge by making his victory over the army explicit. On 2 August 1934 the aged President Hindenburg, in whose name the purge had been officially approved, finally died. Immediately Hitler moved to make his absolute dictatorship official, by combining the posts of president, chancellor and chief of the armed forces – head of state and of government – in his own person as a single, all-powerful ‘Führer’. To underline his supremacy, every member of the armed forces, from Blomberg down to the humblest private, was obliged to take a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. ‘I swear before God this sacred oath: I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the German nation and people, supreme Commander of the armed forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.’ Many officers later made their fealty to this oath a convenient reason for not joining the anti-Hitler conspiracy.

Another institution of the German state feeling an icy breeze that would become a raging tornado was the Christian Church. Both the Catholic and Protestant denominations recognised early on that in the ideology of National Socialism, Germany’s Christian traditions faced a mortal rival, and that the battle between the two incompatible faiths would be a fight to the death. As Roland Freisler, the savage judge of the Nazi People’s Court, would tell Helmuth von Moltke, a member of the Christian resistance, at his trial in 1944: ‘National Socialism and Christianity have this in common: we both demand the whole man.’

As early as September 1933, one of Germany’s best-known Protestant pastors, Martin Niemöller, would found a Pfarrernotbund or Pastors’ Emergency League of fellow Evangelical ministers, deeply concerned at the direction in which Hitler was taking Germany. At first sight, Niemöller was an unlikely opponent of the Nazis: a staunch nationalist, in the patriotic traditions of Prussia’s Lutheran faith, he had been commander of a U-boat in the First World War and, after wreaking huge damage on Allied shipping in the Mediterranean, he had been awarded Germany’s highest decoration, the Pour le Mérite medal. Niemöller was from a deeply conservative background, and while he was a theology student at Münster University he had raised his own Freikorps and helped put down the Red Rising in the Ruhr that followed the 1920 Kapp Putsch. At first sympathising with Hitler’s avowed aim of restoring Germany’s greatness, and sharing the anti-Semitism that had traditionally disfigured Lutheranism, Niemöller had nevertheless been disturbed by what he perceived as the movement’s paganism, and sought a meeting with Hitler to allay his doubts.

As a pastor in the fashionable Berlin suburb of Dahlem in 1933, Niemöller became increasingly concerned by what he saw as a false and Godless ideology, and attracted some six thousand pastors – roughly one-third of all Protestant clergy – to his Emergency League. The following year Niemöller and like-minded ministers broke away from the official Lutheran Church, which under Bishop Ludwig Müller had warmly welcomed Hitler’s advent to power, to found the Confessing Church at Ulm on 22 April 1934. The new Church was explicit in its condemnation of the ‘mortal danger’ posed by Nazism, with its false claim to be a ‘new religion’. The Catholic Church, too, registered its disapproval of the Nazi takeover of faith schools and its assault on church youth movements, which were forcibly incorporated in the Hitler Youth and the BDM. Catholic bishops issued memoranda to Hitler on the subject, a foretaste of battles to come.

In 1935 and 1936, as Stauffenberg ascended through the army’s ranks, successfully rode and jumped in equitation tournaments, learned English and even made a brief visit to England, the Nazis tightened their remorseless hold on German life. A huge portion of Hitler’s regeneration of German industry was devoted to rearmament. Mechanisation of the army meant that Stauffenberg’s regiment abandoned their beloved horses in favour of tanks and other armoured vehicles. In March 1935, Hitler delightedly tore up the disarmament clauses of the hated Treaty of Versailles forbidding Germany more than token armed forces, and stridently proclaimed what was already an open secret: Germany was rearming, fast and strong. At the same time, compulsory conscription was introduced. The new German air force – the Luftwaffe – would become the most Nazified of the three services, and would absorb the lion’s share of the substantial military budget. The new service was Goering’s baby, and he relinquished his control of the police and Gestapo to Himmler’s SS, which was quietly augmenting the power it had accrued since the Röhm purge. In a taste of things to come, also in March, the SS were permitted to form an armed wing – the Waffen SS – which would one day challenge the army as the weapons bearer of Hitler’s new state.

At the same time, the regime’s anti-Semitism became codified law with the passing in November of a National Citizenship Law that limited full German citizenship to pure-blooded ‘Aryans’. Jews, or those with one Jewish parent – Mischlinge – were denied the right to hold public office, and marriage between Aryans and Jews or Mischlinge was officially forbidden. Jews were now second-class citizens in their own country. The serpent was laying its poisoned eggs.