WITH HIS PENCHANT for Teutonic mythology, Hitler cast himself in the model of the wolf—strong, cunning, ruthless, a lord of the forest. Delighted that the name “Adolf” comes from the Old German word “Adelwolf,” meaning “noble wolf,” he encouraged the children of friends to call him “Onkel Wolf,” and with his own almost childlike excitement he referred to this nickname, which he had chosen for himself, in the code names for his military headquarters.
During the Battle of France in 1940, he had occupied concrete bunkers just inside the Belgian border, which he called Wolfsschlucht, Wolf’s Gorge.1 His most eastern headquarters was located in a pine forest in Ukraine and was known as Werwolf. A collection of wooden huts and concrete bunkers, it was built by Ukrainian and Russian prisoners whom Hitler had shot to maintain its secrecy.
However, his most favored base by far was the one built in a thick forest in East Prussia and known as the Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair, the complex that Kolbe had sketched for Dulles.
The Wolfsschanze was constructed by forced labor as Hitler prepared for Operation Barbarossa. He had first stayed there on June 23, 1941, and it had become his most-used home. Although it was built at a time he felt might see his greatest triumph, its thick concrete came to symbolize his sullen mood after Stalingrad. There were ten bunkers, some with concrete roofs seven feet thick, and various barracks buildings for the Führer’s guard. The complex was surrounded by concrete pillboxes, minefields, and electrified barbed wire, as well as a gloomy forest that was freezing in the winter and infested by midges during the summer months. Hitler’s bunker was inside a central “safe zone” known as Security Zone One. Here he could walk with his young Alsatian, listen to records, and spend evenings delivering monologues to his staff. There was a second complex for the Wehrmacht operations staff and an army headquarters, where Brauchitsch and Halder were based. On the railroad track nearby stood a special train on which Göring—designated by Hitler as his successor in the event of his death—spent much of his time.
The Wolfsschanze was heavily guarded and situated in one of the remotest parts of the Reich, so getting access to Hitler would now be one of the most difficult problems to overcome for Colonel Henning von Tresckow, who had vowed to kill Hitler in a bomb attack. Since the summer of 1941—with the exceptions of short visits to Berlin and his private home on the Obersalzberg—Hitler had made the Wolfsschanze his permanent headquarters. Officers below the rank of general were seldom in his company, and all had to remove their guns.
Hitler rarely ventured out. He never visited field hospitals to comfort the war wounded or walked among the bombed-out streets of a city to show solidarity with the German people. The suffering of his people seemed as remote to him as the agony of those in the concentration camps.
But with great skill Tresckow now designed a way to draw him into visiting Kluge’s headquarters at Smolensk.
Hitler was planning an attack across a narrow area of the Eastern Front in which Erich von Manstein’s army group would push forward in the south and Kluge’s in the north before closing together in a pincer and capturing a large number of Soviet troops. Hitler, who had become fixated on the war in the East, felt the attack—code-named Citadel—would give the German army the initiative through the spring and summer of 1943.
Tresckow contacted Hitler’s aide-de-camp, Rudolf Schmundt, an old classmate of his, and quietly told him that Kluge and others at Army Group Center command were against Citadel and a visit from the Führer could restore confidence and harmony. Impatient with both Kluge and Manstein, Hitler jumped at the chance to put his “weak” generals in their place. Tresckow was heartened further when he learned that Himmler was planning to visit, too—his death would weaken the SS and give the coup a great chance of success.
After discussing with Georg von Boeselager the use of his cavalry unit in a machine gun attack on Hitler and Himmler, Tresckow eventually decided that a bomb would be most effective. Tresckow’s plan was simple: to have the British plastic explosives, provided by Dohnanyi of the Abwehr, planted on Hitler’s plane when he left. The plane bomb could look enough like an accident or enemy attack to cause doubt among Hitler’s supporters and allow extra time for a coup, led by Oster and the others in Berlin, to take place.
On March 7, Canaris flew to Smolensk for a general intelligence conference. He brought with him Oster, Lahousen, Gersdorff, and Dohnanyi, who met with Tresckow and were told the details of his plan, which he code-named Operation Flash. It was set for March 13, he told them. Oster and Dohnanyi assured him that everything in Berlin was prepared for the coup.2
On March 13, as Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff awaited Hitler’s arrival at the airfield, Kluge pulled Tresckow aside. Himmler was not coming, he said. To kill Hitler now would cause a civil war, with Himmler turning the SS against the army, and would just pave the way for another Nazi despot. “For heaven’s sake, don’t do anything today,” he snapped and walked off.3
At that moment, out of a gray sky came the sound of a small fleet of aircraft. Tresckow had a decision to make, and he quickly decided that Hitler’s death mattered above all other considerations.
He nodded to Schlabrendorff, who was already on an open telephone line to the conspirators in Berlin. “Operation Flash is ready,” Schlabrendorff told the Abwehr’s captain, Ludwig Gehre.
“The ignition can be switched on,” came the reply. Berlin was prepared.
Schlabrendorff returned to Tresckow’s side to watch the planes approach. To their dismay they saw that the group included two identical Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condors with a fighter escort. If they were to plant a bomb while the planes were on the ground, they would need to know which aircraft Hitler would be leaving in.
As the planes taxied, a cold wind blew across the airfield and onto the neck of Captain Georg von Boeselager, standing at the head of a line of men from his cavalry unit. For an instant, as the pilot dropped the throttle and the propellers came slowly to a stop, he wondered whether he and his men might get a clear shot at Hitler when he stepped onto the tarmac.
Just then a fleet of SS motorcycle troops roared onto the airfield, and Boeselager—who the day before had been in action against partisans—gave up on his thoughts of shooting Hitler. The door opened and Hitler came down the steps. Seeing that Himmler was not there, Boeselager questioned Tresckow. Don’t worry, Tresckow told him, the bomb plan would go ahead as it could look like an accident. This day would not end with Hitler alive, he said.
Hitler was rushed to Kluge’s headquarters, his car flanked by the SS motorbikes. The two men met in a conference room. Tresckow was among those ordered to join them; like the others he surrendered his gun at the door. Tresckow was shocked to see that Hitler was ashen-faced, that his left hand shook, and that his speech was slow and hesitant.
Afterwards, Tresckow took Schlabrendorff aside. In his eyes there was a fleeting moment of doubt, from being so close to the others in Hitler’s entourage whom he knew would die with the Führer. “Should we really do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” replied Schlabrendorff. “We must.”
The two men then sat down to lunch with Hitler and members of his group and indulged in light conversation. To Tresckow’s right was Lieutenant-Colonel Heinz Brandt, who was in Hitler’s party and would be accompanying him on the same aircraft to the Wolf’s Lair. Tresckow casually asked him if he would mind taking two bottles of brandy to his friend General Helmuth Stieff, who was at Rastenburg. They were a payment for a lost wager. Brandt laughed and happily agreed.
Back at the airport Tresckow took the package from Schlabrendorff and handed it to Brandt. “The brandy,” he said. “For Stieff.” Brandt took the gift and placed it in the cargo hold. Hitler’s aircraft was fitted with an armor-plated central section, in which the Führer traveled, but the bomb was big enough to blow the aircraft out of the sky.
The bomb in the package had been prepared by Philipp von Boeselager. A few moments earlier Schlabrendorff had opened it and pressed a small button on the device. This released a corrosive chemical that slowly began to eat through a wire holding back a spring. An hour later the spring would cause a striker to hit the bomb’s detonator and set off the explosion.
As Hitler’s aircraft lifted off the tarmac and banked away toward Vinnitsa, Tresckow looked at Schlabrendorff. Neither man spoke. Schlabrendorff turned and lifted a telephone. Eventually getting through to Gehre again, he told him Flash had been “sparked.” Then he and Tresckow returned to headquarters and waited for news of the explosion.
For two hours they heard nothing and then the telephone rang: Hitler had landed safely in East Prussia.
The disappointment was quickly overtaken by panic. If the bomb had not gone off, it had now become evidence of an assassination plot. If it was found, Tresckow and Schlabrendorff were dead.
The two men remained calm, though. While Schlabrendorff contacted the conspirators in Berlin to confirm the assassination attempt had failed, Tresckow picked up the telephone and, calling Rastenburg, asked Brandt if he had managed to deliver the brandy to Stieff. When Brandt apologized, saying he had not yet had the time, Tresckow said that was not a problem as he had given him the wrong package. Would he please hold on to it? His aide-de-camp was due to visit Rastenburg on a regularly scheduled mail plane the next day and would exchange them.
Schlabrendorff tried to remain calm as he arrived at Rastenburg—perhaps the bomb had been discovered and he would be arrested straightaway. He found Brandt, who laughed at the mix-up and handed the bomb over to Schlabrendorff with a jerk of the hand that made the visitor wince. Schlabrendorff gave Brandt a genuine gift for Stieff.
Schlabrendorff got quickly back into his car and was driven to the neighboring railway junction of Korschen, where a siding provided overnight accommodation for visitors. Once on his train, he locked the door of his sleeper car and carefully slit open the package with a razor blade. The spring had been released and the detonator cap struck, but it had not ignited the explosive. Schlabrendorff suspected that the explosive had failed because the bomb had been stored in the hold of the aircraft and had become too cold.
TRESCKOW IMMEDIATELY PUT a second assassination plot into operation.
Hitler was due to attend a special event at the Zeughaus on Unter den Linden on March 21—Heldengedenktag, Heroes’ Memorial Day. He would be accompanied by Himmler and Göring.
Pride of place at the event would be given to Soviet weaponry that had been captured by Army Group Center. Tresckow had to nominate an officer from the army group to escort Hitler around the exhibition, explaining the weaponry on display.
He chose his coconspirator Colonel Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, his official liaison man with the Abwehr. A thirty-seven-year-old immaculately turned-out officer from the Silesian nobility, Gersdorff had grown increasingly disillusioned with the war since the death of his wife the previous year.
Walking on the banks of the Dnieper, Tresckow turned to Gersdorff and said, “Isn’t it dreadful? Here we are, two officers of the German General Staff, discussing how best to murder our commander-in-chief.” Seeing Gersdorff’s anxiety, he added, “It must be done. This is our only chance . . . Hitler must be cut down like a rabid dog.”
To his absolute credit Gersdorff did not hesitate. The next day he flew to Berlin.
The Zeughaus was a grand baroque building, close to the Lustgarten, which had been used as an arsenal since the late seventeenth century.4 Gersdorff had been there before, but when he visited the day before the event, the enormity of his role as assassin sank in.
However, he was determined to see the plan through. As he listened to his guide explain where he would meet Hitler, where to stand when he was talking to him, and the route the Führer would take around the exhibition, Gersdorff secretly sized up the opportunities for planting a bomb. Hitler would be on the move, so even if security were not so tight, it would be hard to leave a bomb on a timer designed to explode at the exact time he went past. In addition, the building was lined with guards. The lectern where Hitler was due to speak appeared to be watched at all times, and the room was busy with workmen laying out rows of chairs.
It gradually dawned on Gersdorff what would be required for the assassination attempt to work: “It became clear to me that an attack was only possible if I were to carry the explosives about my person, and blow myself up as close to Hitler as was possible,” he said later. The plot had become a suicide mission.
That evening Gersdorff went to the Eden Hotel and received the bombs from Schlabrendorff. Gersdorff knew he was spending his last night on earth, but he remained absolutely steadfast. Back in his room he realized he had only ten-minute fuses, but as Hitler’s visit was due to last half an hour, he would have plenty of time. Everything prepared, he turned off the light but could not sleep.
Arriving at the Zeughaus the next day, he was told the event would be delayed for about an hour. Gersdorff tried to calm his breathing as he waited and watched the other members of the Nazi high command arrive. Göring strode in dressed in a white uniform and wearing red leather riding boots. The Reichsmarschall, who was still assumed to be Hitler’s successor, had become a grotesque figure, a slave to his sloth, vanity, and love of luxury. His face was made up, and he carried a bejeweled baton. Himmler followed in his black uniform, his eyes cold behind his silver-rimmed glasses; then came the weak-willed head of the army, Wilhelm Keitel, who was so keen always to do the Führer’s bidding the conspirators called him “the Nodding Ass,” and the equally sycophantic Karl Dönitz, chief of the navy, who still believed Hitler had been “Heaven-sent” for the German people.
Gersdorff trembled. If he held his nerve, he could wipe out the entire rotten clique running Germany.
Then at last, at 1 p.m., Hitler arrived in an open-top Mercedes to the sounds of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. He gave a short hesitant speech from the lectern and began his tour. Gersdorff, standing close by, reached into the pockets of his greatcoat and pressed the buttons on the two bombs. In ten minutes they would explode. Ten minutes in which Gersdorff had to walk around, awaiting not only the Führer’s death but also his own. It was a torturous, selfless, and exceptionally brave act. As he tried to interest Hitler in the Russian weaponry on display, the acid burned through the wires on the devices in his pocket.
WAITING OUT IN the western suburbs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi were at the home of their friend Rüdiger Schleicher, next door to the Bonhoeffers’ house on Marienburger Allee. Like Dohnanyi, Schleicher was a top lawyer. He was married to Bonhoeffer’s sister Ursula, and they were all together to rehearse for a surprise musical performance they were planning a week later to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Bonhoeffer’s father, Karl.
Bonhoeffer played piano, Dohnanyi sang, and Schleicher played violin; all three were aware of the Gersdorff plot, as were Christine and Ursula.
Dohnanyi, who had a driver and a car waiting outside ready to rush him into the center of the city when the coup began, kept an anxious eye on the clock and waited for the telephone to ring.
His wife studied the way he bit his lip nervously. “It must go off at any moment,” she whispered to her sister.5
AT THE ZEUGHAUS, Hitler appeared not to be listening to the descriptions given by Gersdorff and others of the Soviet artillery pieces. Göring tried to enthuse him, but Hitler’s gaze remained vacant. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and led his entourage through a side door back onto Unter den Linden. He had cut his half-hour visit down to just a few minutes and was now making his way slowly along a line of almost three hundred wounded soldiers.
Gersdorff was aghast but could not follow without raising the suspicion of Hitler’s SS bodyguard. Not only had he missed his chance, but his coat was laden with explosives that were about to go off. He walked quickly to the restroom and locked the door. Carefully removing each bomb, he slowly separated the detonator from the explosives—the only way to deactivate them.
It was only afterwards, as he rushed for a drink in a nearby club, that he realized that he could not stop his hands from shaking.6
THAT NIGHT HITLER made his first speech to the German people since the defeat at Stalingrad, although, on a day dedicated to the fallen, he made no direct reference to the battle. The omission and the poor delivery of the speech—the once great orator spoke quickly and in a monotone—shocked many of the German public who had supported him.
A rumor spread that the real Führer had suffered a nervous breakdown after Stalingrad and was being kept under house arrest on the Obersalzberg. The man on the radio was an imposter.
The shine of the early victories, the making Germany great again, had dulled. War had worn down enthusiasm for hate-filled rants about Bolshevism and World Jewry. The Allies were demanding Germany’s complete capitulation, but the Nazis were determined for Germany to fight on.
For the German people there was no way out, no end in sight.
They were unaware what part destiny had played that last week in ensuring their future remained tied to that of Adolf Hitler.
It was a cold, bright spring morning in Berlin the day after the event at the Zeughaus. Oster and Dohnanyi walked in the Tiergarten, among the greens and browns of the trees, the sound of the traffic somehow reassuringly consistent on the Charlottenburger Chaussee.
It was good to be free to talk here, although their mood was subdued. When they had met Tresckow a fortnight earlier at Smolensk, he had described the difficulties of trying to reach Hitler now that he had withdrawn so far into his shell. And to the Abwehr conspirators, who had once dreamed of seizing Hitler in the Reich Chancellery, the Führer seemed very remote indeed: completely untouchable to anyone in their sphere of influence in Berlin.
In fact, although they still wondered whether they could play a part in the hunt, it was their own scent that had now been picked up by the dogs.
Wilhelm Schmidhuber, the courier in Oster and Dohnanyi’s operation to smuggle Jews into Switzerland, was in the hands of the Gestapo and was ready to talk.
The Gestapo assigned one of its finest investigators to the case. SS Second Lieutenant Franz Sonderegger was a forty-four-year-old career policeman whose work on political crime predated the rise of the Nazis. He had a nose for when a suspect was telling the truth and knew that questions to ask to make them reveal more than they cared to. But he did not need to be particularly wily with Schmidhuber.
At his very first interrogation on January 10, 1943, Wilhelm Schmidhuber told him that there were extensive links between the Abwehr and the Vatican; that there was a “treasonable association” between Beck, Goerdeler, and Dohnanyi; and that there was a “generals’ clique” that opposed Hitler. Sonderegger knew that he was on the brink of a political sensation. He kept probing, and Schmidhuber kept talking.
He confirmed that there had been peace talks with the British using the Vatican as a go-between and that the Abwehr had opened a new channel of communication with the Allies via Switzerland and Sweden. The plan used the Protestant churches and was led by Pastor Bonhoeffer, he said.
Over the following interrogations, he spilled the beans on Operation 7—Dohnanyi’s successful mission to obtain false papers for German Jews and have them moved across the border into Switzerland. Schmidhuber suggested the whole operation had been about rescuing Jews and that the official mission brief, to spread Nazi propaganda, was just a cover. Dohnanyi had sent Schmidhuber across the border with $100,000 for the escapees, he stated.
Dohnanyi, Schmidhuber told Sonderegger, was an old-fashioned conservative who regretted the “destruction of almost every civilized value on the European continent.” He believed a collapse of the fighting fronts would lead to the end of the regime, and was therefore giving thought to a “stand-by government that can bring the fronts to a standstill.”
Sonderegger had the files on all the people mentioned by Schmidhuber sent to his office, and filled in dates, names, connections, and theories on an evidence board. He also ordered that Dohnanyi’s mail and telephone calls be monitored.
After several weeks he put together a sixty-five-page full report for his chief, Heinrich Müller, who was known to all as Gestapo Müller. The report concluded that the whole Abwehr conspiracy was led by Admiral Canaris himself.
Müller put the file on Reichsführer Himmler’s desk and told Sonderegger to await further instruction.
When it came, it shocked Sonderegger to the core: The file was returned to his office with Himmler’s handwriting on the front page. He had written: “Kindly leave Canaris alone!”7
HIMMLER HAD A strange relationship with Canaris. He saw the admiral as Canaris would have liked to be seen—as a master spy with a nose for espionage. There was much he would overlook to maintain Canaris’s skills and the use of the Abwehr, which, although troubled, was still important to Germany’s war effort. Himmler reckoned on maintaining the admiral’s help while also working to bring the Abwehr into his SS empire.
In addition, Himmler knew that—in spite of his position at the head of the SS and Gestapo—there were those who saw him as a natural heir to Hitler, and he even had his spies make inquiries as to what peace terms the Allies would seek if Hitler were dead. If Canaris was making overtures to the Allies, then, the ever-pragmatic Himmler reckoned, he could actually benefit from them.
Because Schmidhuber and his co-accused, Heinz Ickrath, held Luftwaffe ranks, their file was sent to the military investigators at the Reichskriegsgericht, the Reich Court-Martial department, or RKG, which took it over. No action should be taken on Canaris, they were told, but Himmler required regular updates on progress against the others. The file remained a political hot potato, with officers unsure which way to take the investigation without getting themselves into trouble with the Gestapo or even Himmler himself. Even Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s closest military adviser, seemed “genuinely scared to death” when told about the file and refused to tell the Führer about it.8
It would require someone with keen investigative skills, a fearless sense of his own power, and a ruthless hatred of the Reich’s enemies to take this difficult case further.
It was then that someone thought of Manfred Roeder, the man who had sent the members of the Rote Kapelle to the guillotine.