Long before any approach by a publisher, I felt fated to write this book. For as far back as I can remember, I have been fascinated, appalled and frankly obsessed by the tragic and heroic story of the doomed German resistance to Hitler’s Nazism. And when, from my teenage years, I began first to visit and finally to live and work in both Austria and Germany, I lost no time in seeking out and listening to those ‘ordinary people’ who had experienced life in the Third Reich, and surviving participants – alas, all now dead – on both sides of the events of 20 July 1944.
I would, therefore, belatedly like to thank publicly (and sadly, posthumously), and in no particular order, the following for the gift of their memories: the late Ernst Jünger; Otto John; Otto Ernst Remer; Axel, Freiherr von dem Bussche; Leon Degrelle; Hans Bernd Gisevius; Frau Lore Beck; and General Hans Speidel.
My greatest debt in Germany, however, is to General Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, eldest son of Claus, who has been more than generous in enlightening me at length, both in person at his home and by phone and email, on all aspects of his parents, his extensive family and his own experiences both before and after July 1944. As well as granting me his hospitality over an extended interview, Count von Stauffenberg also kindly made available to me his memoir of the ordeal he and his younger siblings went through in the final months of the war, which I have translated – with his amendments and approval – and which is published here for the first time. It is wholly understandable that, after a lifetime of fielding such impertinent enquiries, Count von Stauffenberg now wishes for ‘closure’ – and a tribute to the nobility of spirit that his name embodies that he bore my quizzing with such grace.
During the writing of this book my gratitude has been particularly owed to friends and family who answered my questions, sought solutions to my problems and generally endured my anxious hand-wringing as an already overdue book elongated exponentially and, seemingly, endlessly. So now it is done, many thanks to friends and fellow historians of Nazism, Roger Moorhouse and Chris Hale, and above all to my publisher and editor, that model of patience, Michael Leventhal, who (I hope) will remain a friend even after all the trials I have put him through.
The literature on the German Resistance in general, and on Claus von Stauffenberg and the July Plot in particular, is enormous and ever growing. I list here only those books and documents that I have myself read and consulted in preparing this book. For an English readership, I have confined myself to books available in English. For translated works I have given their original German or French date of publication first, followed by the date of translation.
Early biographical studies of Stauffenberg by Joachim Kramarz (1967), Christian Mueller (1972) and G. Graber (1973); though useful and informative, have now been entirely superseded by Peter Hoffmann’s monumental Stauffenberg: A Family History 1905–1944 (1992, 1995, 2003). Hoffmann is a German – indeed, like Stauffenberg himself, a Swabian – academic historian, now based at a Canadian university, who has devoted his professional life to the study of the Resistance and to Stauffenberg’s biography. And it shows. As the subtitle suggests, Hoffmann sets his subject firmly in the context of his family and his deeply rooted south-west German heritage, giving due, but not excessive, weight to the influence of the Stefan George cult. If, especially in his recounting the minutiae of Stauffenberg’s military career, his writing gets somewhat dense, this is balanced by the sheer profundity of his research. Like Martin Gilbert’s massive biography of Churchill, this book will not necessarily be read for the felicities of its prose style (German historians as a rule don’t do that), but for its unimpeachable authority. It is a definitive treasure house of facts that will be mined by Stauffenberg scholars for many years to come.
The same author’s German Resistance to Hitler (1988) similarly brings his trademark dogged, wood-rather-than-trees approach to an equally fact-heavy history of the Resistance, which by its sheer accumulation of detail bids fair to be definitive. The late Joachim Fest’s Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler (1994, 1996, 1997) is the best popular account – wide-ranging, comprehensive and fair – although it can be a little dry. It is admiring, but by no means uncritical of these brave men and women. Fest, of course, is also the author – among many distinguished works – of the best German biography of Hitler (1973).
More recently, Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006) is a fluently written, authoritative, detailed yet concise and very readable account of all the serious attempts on the Führer’s life – not only those organised by Stauffenberg, Elser, Oster and Tresckow, but those planned by the Russians, the Poles – and even the British too. Highly recommended.
Two books written by active participants in the Resistance who – almost uniquely – survived the experience, and which remain indispensible, despite their antiquity are Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s The Secret War Against Hitler (1965); and Hans Bernd Gisevius’s To The Bitter End (1948). Both reflect the personalities of their authors. Schlabrendorff’s memoir is that of the judge and jurist: courageous, precise, and shot through with Christian faith and charity – even to those who tortured him. Gisevius, appropriately for one who was long involved in the world of secret service, is cynical, bitter, mocking, ruthless – and unsparing of reputations, particularly that of Stauffenberg himself, with whom Gisevius did not get on, finding him arrogant and impetuous, and whom he unhesitatingly criticises. Despite doubts about Gisevius’s credibility – most of those whom he quotes were no longer around to contradict him - his memoir is a useful corrective to an otherwise nearuniversal chorus of praise for Stauffenberg.
The official post-war federal German government ‘white book’ Germans Against Hitler: July 20th, 1944 (1964) published on the twentieth anniversary of the plot, is an exceptionally informative collection of documents and photographs of the infamous People’s Court trials and those executed after those obscene hearings. Intensely moving for a government document, it includes statements collected by the Gestapo investigators from witnesses such as Remer and his cohorts, Olbricht’s secretary in the Bendlerblock, Delia Ziegler and letters written by the condemned to their loved ones on the eve of execution.
Early accounts of the plot written in English include Guardian journalist Terence Prittie’s Germans Against Hitler (1964), which covers such resistants as the White Rose group as well as the July Plot, and is perhaps over-anxious to emphasise that not all Germans were Nazis; and the highly ambiguous work of the self-taught historian and diplomat Sir John Wheeler-Bennett: The Nemesis of Power: the German Army and Politics 1918–1945 (1952). From being a pre-war friend to some of the plotters, Wheeler-Bennett reverted by the time of the plot to a cynical critic, even praising the SS in a Foreign Office memo for making the Allies’ post-war task easier by purging the plotters. In this huge book, he critically traces the decisive role of the army in German history from the Kaiser to the end of Hitler’s war. He castigates the army for combining plotting against the benign regime of Weimar with fawning obeisance to Hitler, and comes close to applauding the failure of Stauffenberg’s plot. He concludes by warning that rearming Germany risks a repeat of the inter-war years. Well, he was wrong about that. An interesting work, but one deeply flawed by the author’s prejudices.
Constantine Fitzgibbon’s The Shirt of Nessus (1956) was later re-issued as To Kill Hitler: The Officers’ Plot, July 1944 (1994). Considering that it was written barely a decade after the events it describes, it is remarkably accurate, and a fast-moving, journalistic narrative. The July Plot (1964) by those tireless Anglo-German chroniclers of the Third Reich, Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel is, like all these authors’ works, brisk, informative and very readable; as is the same authors’ The Canaris Conspiracy: The Secret Resistance to Hitler in the German Army (1969), which concentrates on the conspirators working inside the Abwehr.
There have been several biographies of Admiral Canaris, reflecting the central but still deeply mysterious and contentious role played by this enigmatic figure throughout the Third Reich. The huge Canaris (1976, 1979) by Heinz Hohne – like Fest, a respected German journalist-historian with great expertise on the Nazi period – while respecting the courage and cleverness of the little admiral, is highly critical of his early fostering of violent German nationalism, and his later cynical and duplicitous double gamesmanship. In stark contrast, Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery by Richard Bassett (2005) almost deifies this quintessential spymaster as a hero and martyr who conducted a lonely secret war against Hiterism throughout his Abwehr career. American academic Terry Parssinen has written the best available account of the abortive Abwehr/military attempt to overthrow or even assassinate Hitler on the eve of the Munich conference in The Oster Conspiracy of 1938 (2004), in which he goes into minute, almost microscopic, detail to suggest that this was the most serious threat to Hitler until the advent of Stauffenberg.
If the conspirators themselves are to be believed, the main reason why the Oster conspiracy failed in 1938 was the readiness of the Western powers – especially Britain – to appease Hitler at Munich. The whole sorry story is comprehensively covered by Patricia Meehan in The Unnecessary War: Whitehall and the German Resistance to Hitler (1992) which records the desperate – and, alas, unavailing – efforts of the conspirators to secure British support for their plan to oust or eliminate Hitler. Sadly, Whitehall had other plans and priorities. Richard Lamb’s The Ghosts of Peace 1935–1945 (1987) covers much the same ground – extending the story to the war’s end.
The Venlo Incident – the SD ‘sting’ that coincided with Georg Elser’s Munich beerhall bomb in 1939, and fatally innoculated the British authorities against any meaningful dealings with the genuine Resistance thereafter, is covered by one of the participant/victims in Sigismund Payne-Best’s The Venlo Incident (1950). Fascinating in its detailed account of how it felt to be abducted at gunpoint and then interned throughout the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the book also recounts the author’s dramatic race with death at the end of the war when he and other VIP prisoners of the Nazis – including many associated with the July plot – were ferried around a dying Germany by their SS captors, expecting execution at any moment. Another account of Venlo is to be found in Leo Kessler’s Betrayal at Venlo (1991). The memoirs of the slippery SD spymaster who organised the kidnap and many other dirty deeds are to be found in The Schellenberg Memoirs by Walther Schellenburg (1956). To be treated with even more caution than that applied to almost anything written by anyone from the murky world of espionage, but fascinating nonetheless.
One of the moving spirits behind the 1938 plot, and an unyielding opponent of Nazism from first to last, was General Ludwig Beck, sometime chief of the German General Staff, whose tragic story is told in a fine biography by American soldier Nicholas Reynolds: Treason Was No Crime (1976). Beck’s botched suicide in the Bendlerstrasse on the night of 20 July 1944 was, alas, all too symbolic of the incompetence of the whole plot, which relied too much on wishful thinking, and too little on hard-headed ruthless realism. Beck’s successor as Chief of Staff, the wily Franz Halder, although finally arrested and confined in a concentration camp, survived to write his War Memoirs (1962, 1976). His colleague in caution, Hitler’s one-time economic wizard, Hjalmar Schacht, had the unique distinction of being imprisoned by the Nazis for his suspected opposition, then – much to his outrage – being tried at Nuremberg with other Nazi leaders. He was acquitted and returned to a high-level finance career. His memoirs were published as My First Seventy-Six Years (1955).
Popular, journalistic accounts covering the military conspiracy include two American works, Code Name Valkyrie: Count von Stauffenberg and the Plot to Kill Hitler by James Forman (1973) and To Kill Hitler by Herbert Molloy Mason (1980). Although aimed at a mass audience, with Forman in particular writing in a novelistic style – for instance reproducing verbatim conversations that he can only have imagined – both are serious works containing plenty of authentic detail. The same can hardly be said of Secret Germany: Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade against Hitler by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (1994, 2006). Written by two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, this is an attempt to present Stauffenberg as the front man of a secret cult around the poet Stefan George. While there is no doubt that Stauffenberg was heavily influenced by his youthful intellectual infatuation with George, on which the book is quite informative, this was not the main motive behind his actions; nor, pace the authors, were his last words ‘Long live secret [geheim] Germany’, but, as several witnesses attested, ‘Long live sacred [heilige] Germany.’
The initially entirely successful Paris part of the Valkyrie putsch on 20 July is well covered in several books, of which Conspiracy Among Generals (1953, 1956) by Wilhelm von Schramm, one of the surviving plotters, is the earliest, and as an inside account, invaluable. Another plotter, General Hans Speidel, survived to write his memoirs, Invasion 1944: Rommel and the Normandy campaign (1950, 1981).This too is an invaluable insider’s account, especially important as Speidel was successively Rommel’s and then Kluge’s Chief of Staff, privy to the vacillations of both Field Marshals as they teetered on the edge of resistance. Hitler Lives – and the Generals Die (1981, 1982) by French journalist Pierre Galante covers the entire July conspiracy – including its Paris end – and benefits from Galante’s interviews with General Adolf Heusinger, the Wehrmacht’s operations chief, who was present in the conference room when Stauffenberg’s bomb exploded. Although critical of Hitler’s war policy and an intimate friend of some of the plotters, Heusinger was not himself a member of the conspiracy, and was indeed injured by the bomb. Nevertheless, he was arrested in hospital, detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, before being grudgingly released. He was restored to the army, but found himself demoted, and was never fully trusted by Hitler again.
Another general present in the conference room on the fatal day, who was also injured by Stauffenberg’s bomb, was Walter Warlimont, Heusinger’s deputy, whose memoirs Inside Hitler’s Headquarters (1962, 1964) give a vivid picture of how it felt to be at the Führer’s side as the great tragedy unfolded. Similarly, Nicolaus von Below’s At Hitler’s Side (1980, 2004) offers the memoirs of Hitler’s Luftwaffe liaison officer, a loyalist who remained at his post until the Berlin Gotterdammerung in 1945. Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven was another young officer – an aide to General Heinz Guderian – who remained close to Hitler until the last days. His In The Bunker With Hitler: The Last Witness Speaks (2005, 2006) contains valuable eye-witness evidence of the aftermath of the plot at Rastenburg – including the author’s vain efforts to protect his cousin, one of the conspirators.
The German Resistance to Hitler (1966, 1970) is valuable because it is an early work on the Resistance by German historians, covering Resistance foreign policy (Hermann Graml); the constitutional plans of the Resistance (Hans Mommsen); resistance in the labour and trades union movement (Hans-Joachim Reichhardt); and the political and moral motives behind the Resistance movement (Ernst Wolf). An even earlier account from a German source is Hans Rothfels’s The German Opposition to Hitler (1948). The German General Staff (1953) by Walter Goerlitz describes the effects of the July plot on Hitler’s surviving senior officers.
Biographies of the two central figures in the Confessing Church’s resistance to Hitler record the enormous importance of the moral element in the Resistance: the ponderous but immensely detailed and moving Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eberhard Bethge (1967, 1970) is, as one would expect from a close colleague and relative of the pastor and theologian, uncritical – but inspiring and interesting on Bonhoeffer’s wartime role as a representative of the Resistance to an uncomprehending Anglo-Saxon world. Martin Niemöller by James Bentley (1984) is a concise life of the turbulent pastor who turned from nationalist U-boat commander to one of the sharpest thorns in the sides of Hitler’s regime.
Writings by participants in the July plot and its associated offshoots are, for obvious reasons, few and far between, but Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison (1971) is an indispensible text for anyone interested in the life of this modern martyr. A German of the Resistance (1948) contains the intensely moving last letters from the cell of the condemned Helmuth von Moltke – the leading figure in the Kreisau Circle – together with a brief biography. Gerhard Ritter was a conspirator, and a German historian who has written a sympathetic biography of his one-time cellmate, Carl Goerdeler, the ‘holy fool’ of the Resistance: The German Resistance: Carl Goerdeler’s Struggle Against Tyranny (1956, 1958). Ulrich von Hassell’s The Von Hassell Diaries 1938–1944 (1947) gives a rare insight into the evolution of a conservative mind towards active, subversive opposition to the state he had once faithfully served. A Mother’s War by Fey von Hassell (1990) is the memoir of Ulrich von Hassell’s daughter, detained by the SS after 20 July and forcibly separated from her two small sons. It is one of the most vivid accounts of the Nazis’ savage Sippenhaft decree, and is all the more remarkable for having been written by a victim.
Other valuable and moving eye-witness accounts of the events surrounding 20 July written by women witnesses related to the plotters by ties of family and friendship are: The Berlin Diaries 1940–1945 by Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov (1985), a White Russian émigré drawn into the plot through her friendship with Adam von Trott zu Solz, and The Past Is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg (1968). Adam von Trott zu Solz himself is the subject of a biography, A Good German by Giles MacDonogh (1991) and an interesting recent fictional representation in the novel The Song Before It is Sung by Justin Cartwright (2007). Another interesting novel – this one about Stauffenberg himself – is Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (1980).
Finally, Tapping Hitler’s Generals: Transcripts of Secret Conversations, edited by Sönke Neitzel (2005, 2007) is a very revealing volume detailing the secretly recorded private conversations of senior German officers captured by the British towards the end of the war. This includes their uncensored reactions to the news of Stauffenberg’s bomb; their disgust with the SS; disillusionment with Hitler’s regime and their assessments of Stauffenberg.
Picture Credits
After the Battle Magazine: 2, 3, 4, 7, 194 (bottom)
Archiv H.P. Melle, Lautlingen: 11, 12, 13
Count Berthold von Stauffenberg: 274
German Resistance Memorial Centre: 158, 252, 292, 294
Greenhill Books, At Hitler’s Side: 216
Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg: 14, 20, 155, 280
Taylor Library: ii, 18, 21, 22, 23, 26, 28, 29, 34, 38, 39, 44, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 68, 79, 80, 83, 84, 91, 95, 96, 103, 105, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117, 121, 124, 126, 128, 132, 135, 139, 146, 149, 151, 154, 156, 161, 163, 170, 172, 178, 180, 183, 184, 193, 194 (top), 195, 196, 198, 200, 203, 205, 206, 217, 218, 227, 237, 245, 247, 249, 250, 251, 255, 258, 263, 266, 267, 268, 270
Michael Leventhal: 292
Bob Millard: 188
Lory Reinach Collection: 125
Ullstein Bild: 68, 72, 89, 213
Werner Reerink/Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg: 87