Operation "Valkyrie": A Military History of the 20 July 1944 Plot 9783110699333, 9783110699180

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Winfried Heinemann Operation “Valkyrie”

De Gruyter Studies in Military History

Edited by Jörg Echternkamp and Adam Seipp

Volume 2

Winfried Heinemann

Operation “Valkyrie”

A Military History of the 20 July 1944 Plot

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association. First published in German with the title “Unternehmen ‚Walküre‘. Eine Militärgeschichte des 20. Juli 1944“ by De Gruyter Oldenbourg (Zeitalter der Weltkriege 21), Berlin/Boston 2019.

ISBN 978-3-11-069918-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-069933-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-069947-0 ISSN 2701-5629 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943127 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover Image: Mussolini and Hitler examine the destroyed conference room in the Führerhauptquartier »Wolfschanze«, 20 July 1944. (akg-images) Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface Debates about the German military resistance against National Socialism, which culminated in the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944, are an essential element in understanding the history of today’s Bundeswehr (the name of the German Armed Forces since 1955). Many Bundeswehr service members were the descendants – professionally, if not personally – of those who fought for Germany in both world wars, some of whom continued to fight to the very end. But also among Bundeswehr service members were the descendants of those involved in the conspiracy to overthrow Adolf Hitler and his regime, or who made other contributions toward hastening the end of the Second World War. For a long time, both groups could only serve together on the basis of an uneasy compromise. Nevertheless, the conspirators of 20 July were eventually recognized throughout the post-war West German military establishment, and later German society as a whole, as examples of moral courage and resolve. Initial attempts by scholars to approach the topic from a more detached academic perspective met with invective and personal attacks by traditionalists. The Bundeswehr’s Military History Research Office (MGFA) took a long time approaching the topic; it first had to grapple with the larger questions of Germany’s role in the Second World War as well as the Wehrmacht’s role within the Nazi system. In 1984, the MGFA prepared a touring exhibition entitled Aufstand des Gewissens (with an English version entitled Revolt of Conscience) which proved to be a popular success not only as a component of the Bundeswehr historical and political curriculum but also with the German and international public. The book accompanying it is still worth reading today. In 2004, the author of the present monograph summarized the state of research on military resistance at that time in a major chapter of volume IX/1 of the Germany and the Second World War series, which was published in 2008. In 2019, the Bundeswehr Center for Military History and Social Sciences (ZMSBw – the successor to the MGFA) marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the events by re-examining the specifically military aspects of the national-conservative resistance. This fresh examination is a comprehensive synthesis of research so far, and again it met with a number of very positive reviews. Winfried Heinemann’s book – first published in German in 2019 – revealed that 20 July 1944 is not only a seminal date in the history of the Second World War but also that the plot’s doctrinal roots can be traced back to much earlier traditions of the German military. Furthermore, the effect that the attempted coup had on

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the armies of both East and West Germany, and on the Austrian Bundesheer, merited further study. We are pleased to present this translated version in order to acquaint a wider international audience with this research. The funding provided by the Geisteswissenschaften International program for the translation of this volume into English is a recognition of both this work in particular and the efforts of the ZMSBw in general to familiarize international readers with the results of its research in military history and the social sciences – support for which I express my gratitude. We hope that this work will continue to inspire stimulating discussions around the globe. Colonel Dr. Frank Hagemann Commanding Officer (Acting), Bundeswehr Center for Military History and Social Sciences

Acknowledgements This book is in some ways the product of a life-long learning process. One of the first seminar papers I wrote back in 1978 was about the military resistance to Hitler. Ever since, the subject has haunted me. Many people accompanied me on the way to this summa (if it is not too arrogant to call it that) of my academic work. Sadly, some of them did not live to see this book. First to be mentioned here is my academic mentor, Professor Hans Mommsen. Although the PhD thesis I wrote under his supervision was about NATO history, he constantly admonished me not to lose sight of the military conspirators against the Nazi regime. Another name that needs to be remembered here is that of my immediate superior at the MGFA, Colonel Dr. Norbert Wiggershaus, who also published on the long-term consequences that the coup d’état had on the early Bundeswehr (the postwar West German armed forces). In addition, Dr. Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen was both an eyewitness to some of the events and a noble colleague in the best meaning of the term. I remember them all fondly and with deep gratitude. Others who deserve mention will be able to hold this volume in their hands: from my first years at the MGFA, Dr. Georg Meyer was always willing to share his inexhaustible knowledge of the conspiracy. Dr. Reinhard Stumpf taught me the value of meticulous methodology. Exchanges with other colleagues in the field provided an endless source of inspiration. Professor Joachim Scholtyseck and Dr. Christoph Studt of Bonn University invited me to many of their conferences on resistance in Königswinter (Bonn). Professor Johannes Tuchel allowed me access to the holdings of the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand archives in Berlin, showered me with valuable books on the subject, and eventually read large parts of my manuscript thoroughly, critically, and constructively. Professor Johannes Hürter of the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich shared some of his valuable time to discuss with me the conspirators’ involvement in war crimes on the eastern front as well as Hitler’s real or perceived manipulation of the army’s elite. Professor Randall Hansen of the Munk School, University of Toronto, invited me three times to research and lecture there; Robarts Library is a treasure trove for the resistance historian. Dr. Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein, director of archives of the Military History Museum, Dresden, let me read her methodically innovative manuscript on network analysis and also granted me access to the museum’s large collection of manuscripts; I owe her my thanks. I also benefitted from a series of exchanges with Thomas Karlauf. Among those who accompanied the manuscript’s genesis by word and deed https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-002

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were Dr. Torsten Diedrich and Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Thorsten Loch of the ZMSBw (the Bundeswehr Center of Military History and Social Sciences), as well as Hofrat Dr. Erwin Schmidl from the Austrian National Defense Academy, Vienna, and Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Agilolf Keeling, Adjunct Professor at the Finnish National Defense University, Helsinki. Professors Leo Schmidt and Axel Klausmeier, both at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus and Senftenberg, became good colleagues and trusted friends; my ideas about the architectural remains (or lack thereof) of the failed Putsch originated in my many discussions with them. In 2017– 8, the ZMSBw allowed me to take a sabbatical and concentrate on my book, after many years in academic management. I must thank Colonel Dr. Hans-Hubertus Mack for proposing this idea, and his successor, Captain (Navy) Dr. Jörg Hillmann, for supporting it. The ZMSBw Department of Publications under Dr. Christian Adam helped me transform my manuscript into a publishable book. My highest praise must go to my editor, Mag. phil. Michael Thomae. The map found in these pages was created by Yvonn Mechtel, Bernd Nogli and Frank Schemmerling. Among the many archives and libraries I consulted, four emerge as the most relevant: the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (Federal Military Archives) in Freiburg led by Michael Steidel, the archives of the Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) Munich, led by Dr. Klaus A. Lankheit, and the ZMSBw library, directed by Dr. Gabriele Bosch. Despite the COVID-19 crisis, the staff of the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz were untiring in their zeal to provide me with the latest English-language literature, whether from their own holdings or via interlibrary loan. A special thanks must be reserved for the ZMSBw archivist in Freiburg, Cynthia Flohr, without whose help many an important document would have been left uncovered. Over many years, Frau Pilz from the ZMSBw made sure I was not disturbed while working on this project, and she also supported me by scanning innumerable articles. This English version would not have seen the light of day had Martin Rethmeier of de Gruyter Oldenbourg not continued to encourage me. The English-language manuscript was also made possible through the generous financial support of Geisteswissenschaften International, a cooperative effort of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the VG Wort, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, and the German Foreign Ministry. Colonel (ret.) Will Buckley of Auckland, New Zealand, went through the trouble of reading the manuscript. Last, thanks are due to the two editors of the English version, Joseph Hawker and John Ryan, who with immense patience and knowledge refined a solid manuscript into a readable text. Jana Fritsche, of Oldenbourg/de Gruyter publishers, unwaveringly accompanied the process of converting the manuscript into a book.

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My older son, Patrick, is a lawyer and a reserve officer, and his dissertation on the legal history of the Reichswehr was an invaluable source. My younger son, Kieran, studied history in Berlin and Cambridge but wrote his PhD thesis in the field of social history. Both suffered lengthy monologues about the resistance without complaint and also read my drafts, even during their own busy periods. Since finishing the manuscript for this book, I have become a grandfather to four lovely children. May Charlotte, Theodor, Paula, and Selma grow up in more peaceful times than those this volume discusses. My partner is a historian and a professor of early modern history at the University of Porto. During all the ups and downs of this project, she accompanied me lovingly, but she also opened my eyes to the fact that history has more to offer than just the twentieth century. Not least, her critical remarks informed the English edition. Without Amélia Polónia, this book would not have been written, and for that reason, I dedicate it to her.

Contents  . .

Resistance and Military History 1 The German Resistance Movement in Military History A Modern Concept of Military History 2

 . . .

Opposition and Resistance against Hitler 6 Broadening and Narrowing Definitions 6 Studies in Postwar Germany: Moral Appraisal or Scholarly Research? 9 17 Historicizing – Overcoming moralizing approaches

 . . . . . . .

Military and Politics in the Weimar Republic 29 The Army: Large and Universal or Small and Professional? A State within the State 40 The Reichswehr: A Forum for Frank Debate 47 51 The Early Nazi Party Hitler’s Own War Experiences 52 The Nazi Party and the Reichswehr before 1933 53 59 The Party and the Military after 1933



The Military in the Polycratic Structures of the Third Reich, 1939 – 1944 77 77 Army, Navy, Luftwaffe, and Waffen-SS The Command Structure 91 Amateurish: Hitler as Commander 100 Elite Manipulation: Hitler’s Interference in Army Personnel Policies 108 Resistance in the Luftwaffe, the Air Ministry and the German Navy 115

. . . . .

 . . .

1

Military Experts: The Army General Staff 127 The General Staff’s Traditional Role and Beck’s Resignation in 1938 127 Advice in War: Facts and Figures, or Fanatical Belief? 141 No Total War 145

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 . . . . .

Contents

.

Resistance and War 148 148 Depletion of Resources War Aims, Social Darwinism, and Options for Peace 152 Crimes in the Occupied Territories 162 A Crime against the German Nation 169 Tresckow, Gersdorff, Boeselager, Stauffenberg, Schmidt von 173 Altenstadt: The Resistance and Russia 197 The “People’s War” of 1813 – 1815

 . . . . . .

Military Planning for a Coup d’État 202 Whether or Not to Assassinate Hitler: The Oath No Time to Lose 212 The Organization 218 230 The Plan Communications 260 A Realistic Plan? 267

 . . .

Consequences of the failed coup d’état 270 The Army “Court of Honor” 270 Power Shifts within the Nazi System 279 296 Fighting to the End and Individual Refusal

 . . . . . . .

Political, Military, and Ethical Goals of the Resistance 301 301 Creating Stable Structures Resistance and Parliamentary Democracy 304 Ending the War in the East? 310 Ending the War in the West 315 Contacts with the Western Allies 327 An End to the Crimes 335 The “Final Solution of the Power Struggle”– The Shadow of 1918/19 337 “Common Civility”? Military and Civilians 341 Realism and Idealism: Lack of Political Perspectives and Ethical Motivation 348

. .

202

Contents



.

The Military Resistance in the West German Bundeswehr, the 355 National People’s Army and the Austrian Bundesheer The Federal Republic, the Bundeswehr and the tradition of the resistance 356 The resistance in the tradition of the East German National 393 People’s Army The Austrian Bundesheer and the military resistance 401



Conclusion

. .

405

Sources and Bibliography 410 Unpublished Sources 410 Bibliography 411 Index

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1 Resistance and Military History 1.1 The German Resistance Movement in Military History Shortly after noon on 20 July 1944, a bomb detonated in Hitler’s Führerhauptquartier, his headquarters near what was then Rastenburg in East Prussia and is today Kętrzyn in Poland. About a kilo of explosives interrupted the military briefing on Germany’s swiftly deteriorating military situation in World War II. The bomb failed to kill the Führer, who escaped with only minor injuries; four others present at the briefing were killed immediately or died of their wounds later. The consensus seemed to be that a crime had been committed by an unknown perpetrator, so the Secret State Police, the Gestapo, was ordered to dispatch a murder squad toward Rastenburg. After a brief medical examination, Hitler changed into fresh clothes and went on to receive his most important ally, the Duce, Benito Mussolini – as it would turn out, for the last time. It was only during the late afternoon that telegrams arrived indicating to the Nazi dignitaries assembled at the headquarters that there was reason to suspect there might be more to this. Tanks were rolling in the Berlin streets, troops had been mobilized, the government district had been cordoned off. In Paris, the leading representatives of the Nazi system were being arrested, and the sandbags for their execution had been laid ready. As it turned out, a group of conspirators had formed among army officers. Developed in concert with politicians, civil servants, clergymen, and diplomats, the attempt on Hitler’s life and the ensuing uprising had been planned long beforehand. This was a military coup d’état. The idea had been not only to kill Hitler but to overthrow the entire Nazi regime and to bring the war quickly to an end. The Wehrmacht was fighting a world war, and as Nazi propaganda continued to emphasize, Germany was fighting for its survival. How could it be that such a large conspiracy, let alone a full-scale coup d’état, could have been hatched at the same time that most Germans, and indeed most soldiers, still supported their Führer?¹ How could a comprehensive operation to ensure control of the Reich’s capital have been planned and executed without being detected by the regime’s ever-watchful police? Opposition to the Nazi regime had its origins in the political opposition that formed against the Nazi Party (NSDAP) before and as result of its 1933 seizure of  Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 654– 655, 666 – 690. See also Kühne, “Zwischen Akribie und Groteske,” and Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe, 34– 39. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-003

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power. After this point, despite the utter pervasiveness of the party’s dominance, the opposition continued as a silent counteragent in a dialectic process with Nazi rule.² Resistance during the war developed in a similar dialectic process with the military developments: the course of war influenced the trajectory of the military resistance and vice versa. The military conspirators must be seen as a part of the military apparatus they had been socialized in; for today’s historian, that requires perceiving the changes in the military organization before and during the war as the parameters of oppositional activities. This does not mean that the opposition in uniform consisted of reactionaries who resented any kind of change, but a working hypothesis might be that military resistance against the Führer also represented a reaction to the way Hitler was planning to effect change in military institutions. At the very least, these changes would have influenced officers’ attitudes toward both the regime and the army. To understand military resistance during the war, it must be analyzed within the context of the war’s development as well as in the context of the resisters’ military socialization. The history of the military resistance will have to be written as part of German military history: “The attempt on Hitler’s life was truly a caesura in World War II history.”³ This connection has been largely overlooked in German resistance research. Resistance on the one hand, and cooperation or even complicity on the other, were usually not only separated conceptually, but also presented strictly apart. There was no correlation between these artificially separated spheres, nor were historical individuals, institutions or factual complexes simultaneously regarded from both angles. This resulted in too narrow foci which in turn hindered a deeper understanding of the historical phenomena.⁴

This book will attempt to bridge that gap for the history of the military coup d’état of July 1944, understood as an act of resistance against Hitler and the Nazis, by situating it in its social, political, and military contexts, in order to produce a better analytical understanding of the long established facts.

1.2 A Modern Concept of Military History If the history of the military opposition against the Third Reich is to be treated as a part of German military history, then the term of “military history” must be de Broszat, “Zur Sozialgeschichte,” 296 – 267; Broszat, “Social and Historical Typology,” 25.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, 131.  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” 9. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German into English are the author’s.

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fined with precision and according to today’s academic standards. There is a long-standing but seemingly ineradicable tradition, not least in the Englishspeaking world, to equate it with “war history,” that is, the history of military operations in war, or perhaps the history of military strategy or technology. Even after the end of World War I, German military history maintained its existing traditions: it was written by military officers, was designed primarily for military instruction, and was based on usually classified military archives, and kept a conspicuously aloof distance from the general academic historical discourse.⁵ This was the concept propounded after 1945 by the group of former Wehrmacht officers under the guidance of retired Colonel-General Franz Halder, the former army chief of staff. This group wrote military history studies for the United States Army into the early 1960s.⁶ This group’s avowed aim of historiography in the post-World War II era was to promote an image of an untarnished German general staff. It also provided an opportunity to avoid prosecution by the Allies for alleged war crimes and thus lay the foundations for life in the early Federal Republic. It will therefore come as no surprise that the military resistance against the regime was not addressed in these works, as any mention of it would have inevitably raised the question of why so many general staff officers had refused to take part in the conspiracy or – like Halder – had participated initially but later withdrawn. In addition, Halder and his colleagues did not consider the attempt to overthrow the regime to be a “military operation,” an analysis of which might have been of some interest to the US Army bankrolling them. In contrast to that approach, the new German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, created the Military History Research Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, or MGFA, initially in Langenau, near Ulm, and later relocated to the southwestern university city of Freiburg). Its founding director, Colonel Hans Meier-Welcker,⁷ advocated for a radically different approach. He too had been a World War II general staff officer,⁸ but, after the war, went on to earn a PhD in history from the University of Tübingen. His most influential professor there was Hans Rothfels, a German Jewish historian who had returned from exile in the United States soon after the war ended. Meier-Welcker was determined to produce a “new” military history that would contribute to general academic historiography and satisfy general scholarly standards. Meier-Welcker

 Lange, Hans Delbrück.  For this and for the following see Howell, Von den Besiegten lernen?, 240 – 299.  German officers indicate their role in the general staff by adding “i.G.” (im Generalstab) to their military rank. This work generally omits the designation unless necessary.  Meier-Welcker, Aufzeichnungen eines Generalstabsoffiziers 1939 – 1942.

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weathered substantial criticism for his approach – including from his own staff,⁹ – but his concept gradually gained traction. This process was further hampered by the fact that the general academic historiography produced and taught in German universities was for a long time extremely reluctant to address military topics, meaning that the “new” military approach to history, despite its desire to adhere to academic standards, was not always welcomed. Compounding these difficulties was the practical matter of access to Wehrmacht documents, which had been seized by the Allies and shipped off to Great Britain and the United States. (As was discovered after 1990, smaller holdings had also been sent to the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia.) It was only in the late 1960s that the central holdings were returned to Germany and made available for historical research.¹⁰ Such debates are now part of the history of historiography. The editors of a volume entitled What is Military History?, published in 2000, received a response from another group of scholars in 2013 under the title, This is Military History! (the provocation did not go unnoticed by the editors of the 2000 volume).¹¹ This “modern” or “expanded” military history has generally received international acceptance since then.¹² Although it is perhaps no longer contentious, its genesis is relevant if we want to understand how post-1945 German society viewed the resistance movement. The present book, therefore, defines “military history as the scholarly analysis of military structures and events in their political, social, economic and even cultural contexts, produced according to the standards of, and perceiving itself as part of, academic historiography in general.¹³ In this sense, German military resistance against Hitler and his regime is an integral part of German military history. A military history of the Third Reich cannot overlook the fact that the Wehrmacht was an integral part of the Nazi apparatus and was broadly implicated in its crimes. On the whole, the military continued to support Hitler’s claim to  Documented in Meier-Welcker, “Unterricht und Studium”; Heidegger, “Kann Kriegsgeschichtsunterricht heute noch einen praktischen Nutzen haben?” For further texts from the debate, see Messerschmidt, Militärgeschichte.  Eckert, Kampf um die Akten, 316 – 351.  Kühne and Ziemann, Was ist Militärgeschichte?; Müller and Rogg, Das ist Militärgeschichte! See Benjamin Ziemann’s review of the latter title at H-Soz-u-Kult, 26 November 2013, http:// www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-18870?title=neuere-synthesen-der-militaerund-kriegsgeschichte&recno=38&q=milit%C3 %A4rgeschichte&fq=&sort=newestPublished&page=2&total=250, accessed 3 May 2017.  See e. g. Morillo and Pavkovic, What is Military History?  See also Echternkamp et al., Perspektiven der Militärgeschichte.

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power until the very end, but it is also no contradiction to observe that the military was also the organization to have bred the only act of resistance that came close to toppling the regime. Parsing these distinctions requires careful methodological attention. The study of contemporary history usually relies on eyewitness accounts, occasionally physical artifacts, and an array of other, variable sources – but above all on the archival evidence left behind by bureaucracies, agencies, and military command authorities. Conspiracies hoping to overthrow a totalitarian regime, however, do well not to create files and documents, and that applies to the resistance plot against Hitler. The plotters’ activities cannot be retraced through written sources alone, as they left hardly any trace in the Wehrmacht’s vast collections. More than with other subjects, the resistance historian must take into account oral testimonies or use the records developed by the prosecuting authorities. That, however, requires a particularly critical view of one’s sources. Though it seems obvious that the Third Reich’s police and prosecutors had a very specific view on the men who had tried to assassinate the Führer, the conspirators’ postwar accounts also need to be seen in the light of their individual interests at the time they were given. Yet, limiting the source base to the official military records, as has been suggested,¹⁴ would result in an almost automatic predisposition of the researcher in favor of the regime that created the files – a change of perspective obviously unacceptable in this specific case.¹⁵ Seeing the problems inherent in eyewitness accounts, biased archival evidence, and a general dearth of sources, a combination of all available information, weighed with a critical mind, will be required to arrive at reliable conclusions.

 See, e. g., Gerlach, “Men of 20 July,” 127.  Heinemann, “Der Widerstand gegen das NS-Regime und der Krieg an der Ostfront,” 49.

2 Opposition and Resistance against Hitler 2.1 Broadening and Narrowing Definitions In West Germany, the memories of “resistance” to the Nazi regime soon after the war focused on the national-conservative groups whose oppositional activities culminated in the assassination attempt and the failed coup d’état of 20 July 1944. The term “national-conservative” was coined by structuralist historians such as Hans Mommsen and Klaus-Jürgen Müller and remained highly contentious for a long period. Today, there seems to be a broad consensus that the term refers to political movements that date back to the Weimar Republic and whose political positions ranged from national-liberal to authoritarian, many of which had in fact supported Hitler’s rise to power.¹ It is used as an analytical tool to distinguish this group from others and is not meant to discredit in any way the individuals to whom it is applied or to sanctify those to whom it is not. For a long time, other groups and their tendencies – in particular workingclass resistance – were largely neglected, both in public perception and in the academic discourse. This tendency was reinforced when the term “resistance” became part of the ideological exchanges between East and West Germany during the Cold War.² The surviving relatives as well as the few remaining survivors themselves were intent on having “their” resistance treated differently from that of other groups.³ They preferred an interpretation of the term close to that expressed by the doyen of today’s resistance research, Peter Hoffmann: “resistance” implies activity designed to bring about the overthrow of the Nazi regime from within; in general terms it was carried on by those groups directly or indirectly involved in the assassination attempt of 20 July 1944.⁴

The early 1970s then saw West German historiography slowly expanding the term’s definition, or gradually developing distinctions between “resistance,” “opposition,” “oppositional behavior,” and a variety of other terms. Research began to discover communist resistance⁵ and working-class opposition more generally.⁶ The analysis of youth opposition, which had been focused until then on the

     

For a critique see Schwerin, Dann sind’s die besten Köpfe, die man henkt, 14– 15. Danyel, Die geteilte Vergangenheit; Klein and Walz, Der Widerstand. Conze, “Aufstand des preußischen Adels,” 490. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, x. Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945; Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand. Mühlen, “Die SPD zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand.”

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group of Munich students known as the “White Rose,” began to take in other, more loosely formed examples as well.⁷ A major international conference held in West Berlin in the summer of 1984, given its timing around the fortieth anniversary of the 20 July coup attempt, demonstrated the continuing relevance of that particular event in resistance history. Yet, both the conference and the proceedings published afterwards⁸ reflected the wide variety of oppositional groups during the Nazi period as well as the rich diversity of research projects which had sprung up by then.⁹ This should not have come as a surprise to contemporary observers, as one of the chief organizers (and editor of the proceedings) was Peter Steinbach, the newly appointed director of an exhibition in the Bendlerblock (the military office complex where Stauffenberg and other core conspirators had met their death during the night of 20 July 1944), and later the founding director of the German Resistance Memorial Center. Steinbach had based his concept for the memorial and the exhibition on a comprehensive definition of resistance. In particular, he had decided to include the resistance in exile and, more specifically, the “National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD),” created by the Soviets among German prisoners of war, a decision which earned Steinbach the opprobrium of conservatives, not least among the Stauffenberg family.¹⁰ Seeing that every definition has an arbitrary element, what makes it useful is that it classes together phenomena which should be viewed together, while distinguishing them from other phenomena, thus permitting analytical differentiation. For a long time, the definition of the term “resistance” had been expanded to such a degree that all kinds of oppositional activities – talking or even thinking about opposing the regime –were covered by it: Under the circumstances, the borders between partial criticism, open enmity, and active resistance were necessarily fluid. That is why it seems methodically unproductive to use different terms for active resistance and other forms of resisting or oppositional behavior.¹¹

 Hellfeld, Edelweißpiraten in Köln; Breyvogel, Piraten, Swings und Junge Garde.  Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus.  See also Broszat, “Social and Historical Typology,” 25 – 26.  Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, xxii; Steinbach, “Widerstand hinter Stacheldraht?”; Lohse and Wehner, Guttenberg, 75 – 76, 224; Klausa, “Die Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand,” 78 – 80; Morré, “Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland,’” 541– 543.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 11– 12.

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A definition as broad as that rendered the term meaningless and, for an academic analysis, useless.¹² In contrast, the term “resistance” in recent years has begun to focus again on the events around the 20 July plot. Historian Eckart Conze observes: There are good reasons to limit memorialization [of resistance in general] to 20 July. Even if it did not succeed, the act as such deserves it, as does the moral rigor exhibited by the conspirators and, finally, the fact that no other group came as close to a regime change as the conspirators of 20 July.¹³

Peter Steinbach himself wrote in 2016: “There wasn’t a single [academic] event, school lesson, or radio program that didn’t emphasize ‘There’s more [to remember] than 20 July!’ Soon, however, one had to emphasize, “Remember 20 July too!’”¹⁴ The almost endlessly expanded definitions of the term eventually faded, notes Kroener: Resistance cannot limit itself to an attitude but requires the will and the readiness to act. It finds its legitimacy and its driving force in the desire to actively contribute to ending the regime’s criminal rule.¹⁵

Therefore, in this book the term “resistance” will be used to refer to all those endeavors which were aimed at ending the lawless National Socialist regime and which intended to terminate the war that regime started. This definition excludes all other forms of oppositional behavior, even if they incurred severe risks and were perceived as significant threats by the regime. This limitation of the term, and therefore the scope of this book, are due exclusively to theoretical and methodological requirements, and should not be understood as a depreciation of the actions and personal sacrifices of those many unknown victims of Nazi rule, from the working class, from within the churches, or individual men and women who made a decision to act alone. This also applies to the many forms of conduct by military members that ran counter to

 See, e. g., the editor’s introduction to Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung; Wentker, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und der Krieg,” 4, referring to historians from Rothfels to Broszat. See also Kershaw, “Widerstand ohne Volk,” 781, or Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 66 – 67. For a more recent work, see Deák, Kollaboration, Widerstand und Vergeltung, 264– 266.  Conze, “Aufstand des preußischen Adels,” 484.  Steinbach, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, 15.  Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse,” 24. For a similar work, see Benz, Der deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler, 8 – 10.

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the war’s aims and the regime’s efforts at annihilation. Public debate as well as academic research have paid attention to the “saviors of Jews”¹⁶; the West German Bundeswehr twice named one of its barracks after Sergeant Anton Schmid from Vienna who had been shot for allowing Jews to escape from the Vilnius ghetto (see Chapter 10.1).¹⁷ Others, like Kriegsmarine (Navy) Sublieutenant Oskar Kusch, were executed for having openly voiced their doubts about the “final victory.”¹⁸ Even after the July 1944 plot had failed, there were other cases of oppositional activities within the Wehrmacht, which will be discussed later. None of these men or women who opposed Nazi policies – most of whom paid with their lives – are to be denied recognition of their moral value or their historical relevance. However, this book concentrates on the movement which culminated in the bomb that came within inches of killing the Führer and the ensuing attempt to replace the Nazi regime with a new government that would seek a quicker end to the war. These were the most relevant form of resistance because they came closest to success and because they had an impact on the course of World War II.

2.2 Studies in Postwar Germany: Moral Appraisal or Scholarly Research? To the German public, Nazi propaganda had characterized the conspiracy as a “very small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and at the same time criminally stupid officers,”: and as a “very small coterie of criminal elements which would now be eradicated without mercy.”¹⁹ The idea was to create the impression that it had been only a very small revolt involving solely officers, and initially, this perception caught on with the controlled German public opinion.²⁰ Yet, this impression proved impossible to maintain in the long term. The first show trials before the People’s Court demonstrated to the select audience as well as to the readers of the national dailies that far more people had been involved

 Wette, Retter in Uniform. For an overview of research, see Wette, “Helfer und Retter in der Wehrmacht.”  Wette, “Entsorgte Erinnerung.”  Walle, Die Tragödie; Kühne, “Der Judenretter,” 34.  NSDAP daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, 22 July 1944, quoted in Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 72.  Boberach, Meldungen aus dem Reich, 6699 (10 August 1944); Geilen, “Das Widerstandsbild in der Bundeswehr,” 63; Schollwer, Potsdamer Tagebuch, 41; Echternkamp, “At War, Abroad, and at Home,” 31– 32.

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than the regime was ready to admit, and that many of those actually came from the traditional Prussian and German military elites. Further reporting in the media was therefore quickly suppressed.²¹ Even so, the impression created by the Nazi media did not dissipate fully; for a long time, the label fixed upon the conspirators’ legacies by President of the People’s Court, Freisler, stuck: Eidbrecher (breakers of the oath). It is misleading to claim that after the war, the Western Allies attempted to suppress knowledge of the “other Germany” in their zones of occupation.²² The Western media had reported the attempted coup d’état immediately, and even the Soviet-controlled NKFD had published an appeal discussing the attempt on Hitler’s life.²³ After 1945, the issue was covered widely, even if not always from the same perspective. In its very first issue, the Südkurier, a daily paper in the Frenchzone city of Constance, reprinted an affidavit by Manfred Rommel, the surviving son of the late field marshal, detailing the last hours of his father’s life; another affidavit by Erwin Rommel’s widow followed soon after.²⁴ Most papers, however, followed the general line of demilitarization and therefore played down the role of the military in the resistance, or alleged that the officer caste had just tried to save its privileges.²⁵ The weekly Die Zeit, published in Hamburg (British zone), was unique in casting a positive light on the national-conservative resistance, not least under the influence of Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, one of the staff journalists who had been friends with several of the military conspirators.²⁶ In the Anglo-Saxon countries, it was mostly German émigrés – such as Hans Rothfels, Klemens von Klemperer, and Fritz Stern – who tried early on to explain to those societies which had harbored them during their exile that there had been an “other Germany,” emphasizing in the process criteria such as “character” or “conscience.”²⁷ These efforts were supported by members of Allied intelligence services (above all Allen Welsh Dulles, later director of the CIA), whose agenda, though, consisted largely in underlining their own merits.²⁸  Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,” 141; Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 32.  See, e. g., Ueberschär, “Von der Einzeltat,” 102.  Adam, Die Generalsrevolte, 26 – 27 (Document 4) and passim.  Rommel, “Rommels Tod”; Rommel, “Der Tod des Generalfeldmarschalls Rommel.” See also Lieb, “Erwin Rommel.”  Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe, 62– 70.  Conze, “Aufstand des preußischen Adels,” 486 – 487.  Lamberti, “The Search for the ‘Other Germany,’” 403 – 405; Klemperer, “Sie gingen ihren Weg,” 1100; for Klemperer, see also Klausa, “Klemperer. Ein Lebensbild,” as well as Kettenacker, “Der nationalkonservative Widerstand aus angelsächsischer Sicht,” 712.  Dulles, Germany’s Underground.

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Even so, early postwar German society had its problems acknowledging the various forms of resistance against Nazi rule,²⁹ and this was not modified substantially by the first publications of academics and eyewitnesses whose aim was more a change of perception in the general public than a critical historical analysis. In 1946, Hans Rothfels had published an English-language treatise “The German Opposition to Hitler,” with the rather telling subtitle, “An Appreciation.”³⁰ In a similar vein, a 1952 book by Eberhard Zeller, Der Geist der Freiheit (in English, The Flame of Freedom) emphasized the moral quality and the spirit (Geist) of the conspirators; this should not surprise as, in his youth, Eberhard Zeller had attended the same school as Claus Graf von Stauffenberg. In 1956, the famous historian Gerhard Ritter published a so-far unsurpassed biography of his late friend Carl Goerdeler, which was also first and foremost an appreciation; in 1958, an English translation was published in London.³¹ To commemorate the tenth anniversary of the failed coup in 1954, the widow of murdered Social Democrat Julius Leber, Annedore Leber, published a volume containing 64 biographical sketches of victims of Nazi persecution. The provocative title, Das Gewissen steht auf (Conscience in Revolt), indicated the general direction in which the public discourse was headed for decades to come; a subsequent volume was published in 1957.³² Despite all these efforts, in 1952, two thirds of all West Germans still believed that Germany would have won the war if the military resistance had not interfered. Among former career officers, 59 percent viewed the attempt on Hitler’s life and ensuing coup in a negative light.³³ In view of all this, it is important not to underestimate “the achievement of the German political class during the 1950s in enforcing, at least in principle, the legitimacy of the resistance against Hitler.”³⁴ Soon after the war ended, surviving relatives of the conspirators re-established contact with each other in order both to commemorate collectively their murdered husbands, sons or fathers as well as to support each other in a period in

 For the perception of the resistance in postwar Germany there is by now quite a wide range of publications; to list but a few: Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe; Tuchel, Der vergessene Widerstand; Steinbach, Widerstand im Widerstreit.  Rothfels, The German Opposition. The German version was published in 1949 under the same title: Rothfels, Die deutsche Opposition gegen Hitler. Eine Würdigung.  Ritter, The German Resistance.  Leber, Das Gewissen steht auf; Leber, Das Gewissen entscheidet. This first title was published in English, co-edited with Willy Brandt and Karl Dietrich Bracher, as Conscience in Revolt.  All figures according to Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe, 86 – 87. For an overview, see Mommsen, “Die Geschichte des deutschen Widerstands,” 4.  Frei, Erinnerungskampf, 504.

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which some of them faced destitution. They also sought help from abroad, given that the German authorities were not always very forthcoming with support for the families of former “traitors” who had been “legally” sentenced to an ignominious death.³⁵ Central among them from the start was the family of Graf (Count) Hardenberg, a former lieutenant colonel in the reserves, who had survived both the war on the eastern front and Gestapo arrest but was subsequently evicted from his lands in Neuhardenberg (soon renamed “Marxwalde”) by the East German communist authorities and found refuge in West Germany. Those were the origins of the Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944 (Mutual Aid Organization 20 July 1944), soon reconstituted for technical reasons as the Stiftung (Foundation) Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944. ³⁶ Starting in 1951, the federal government paid its financial support to the conspirators’ families through this foundation, thus avoiding legal proceedings about who might or might not be entitled to support and leaving such questions to the foundation to decide. By the mid-1950s, the most pressing financial needs had been met, and the question of an appropriate appreciation and commemoration of the resistance among the German public became more urgent. In the summer of 1952, the West Berlin senate held a memorial event in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock at which Mayor Ernst Reuter spoke; the foundation saw the event as an indication of their efforts’ success. In the same vein, on the tenth anniversary of the coup, in 1954, the execution chamber in Berlin-Plötzensee prison was converted into a memorial site,³⁷ and when Federal President Theodor Heuss spoke in Berlin on 19 July 1954, it had been at the suggestion of the foundation’s board.³⁸ The foundation was also hoping to lay the groundwork for an academic publication that would be acceptable to the survivors. One of those associated with the foundation was historian Gerhard Ritter, a professor at the University of Freiburg and a friend of the late mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, who had been hanged by the Nazis for his central role in the plot. The foundation asked Ritter, Alexander Graf von Stauffenberg (brother of Claus and Berthold), and a professor of ancient history in Munich, to start collecting all available material.³⁹ This collaboration, however, does not seem to have been very fruitful: the surviving

 Toyka-Seid, “Gralshüter, Notgemeinschaft oder gesellschaftliche ‘Pressure Group’?”; Aretin, Die Enkel des 20. Juli 1944, 49 – 60.  Hardenberg, Auf immer neuen Wegen, 136 – 137. Lier, Das “Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944,” 87– 163.  Schuppener, “Das Gedenken an den 20. Juli 1944,” 105 – 106.  Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944. Minutes of Board Meeting on 28 November 1953. GDW Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, vol. 67: Kuratorium/Vorstand.  Stiftung 20. Juli 1944: Minutes of a meeting on 4 February 1950; IfZ, ED 715/1: Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944. Rundschreiben 1946 – 1971, vol. 1, fol. 2.

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Stauffenberg brother was more interested in ancient history,⁴⁰ and though Ritter located plenty of relevant material, most of it ended up in his biography of Goerdeler rather than in the foundation’s planned publication. It was only in the early 1960s that the foundation attempted a fresh start by approaching a disciple of Tübingen history professors Hans Rothfels and Franz Schnabel, Peter Hoffmann.⁴¹ Over several years the foundation paid Hoffmann a continuous grant in addition to covering his expenses. There had been an implicit assumption that his sponsors would be able to exercise editorial discretion over the contents of Hoffmann’s work and that Hoffmann would be required to repay all or some of the grant from the royalties of the eventual book. A dispute over these questions almost led to a court case,⁴² but thanks to the negotiating skills and legal savvy of the foundation’s “legal adviser,” Fabian von Schlabrendorff – a surviving conspirator from Army Group Center and by then a judge on West Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court – a public scandal was avoided.⁴³ The eventual outcome was the publication of the monumental work, Widerstand – Staatsstreich – Attentat in 1969, with an English-language version published eight years later as The History of the German Resistance. The book was much more thorough than the foundation had initially intended it to be, its scope expanding far beyond the initial focus of the conspirators themselves. As it turned out, this was to be the definitive book, and in many ways, it remains so to this very day. In 1952, another, rather unexpected opportunity to influence German public opinion arose following a campaign of the Sozialistische Reichspartei (SRP). The party, apparently seeing itself as a successor to the Nazi Party, was particularly strong in Lower Saxony, and its best candidate there was a retired Generalmajor named Otto Ernst Remer, who – as a major – had commanded the Berlin Guard Battalion on 20 July 1944.⁴⁴ He had always pointed out (and exaggerated) his

 Christ, Der andere Stauffenberg, 62– 80.  Letter from Dr. Walter Bauer to Professors Bergsträsser, Eschenburg, and Rothfels, 25 June 1962; Letter from Rothfels to Bauer, both in GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, vol. 117: Peter Hoffmann.  Agreement between Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944 and Dr. Peter Hoffmann, 5 May 1967. GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944 vol. 117: Peter Hoffmann.  Letter from Hoffmann, Cedar Falls, Iowa, to Dr. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, dated 5 September 1968. GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944 vol. 117: Peter Hoffmann.  German officers’ ranks differed at the time from those in Anglo-American militaries. The German military then had no brigadier generals as such, but the rank of Generalmajor was effectively the same. The remaining German ascending ranks were therefore one rank lower than what their English cognate would suggest: a Generalleutnant equalled a major general, a General der Infanterie (Kavallerie, Flieger, etc.) ranked with a lieutenant general, and a Generaloberst would be the equivalent of a “four-star” general. In an effort to minimize confusion due to these small

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own role in the suppression of the attempted coup, all the while defaming the members of the opposition: “To a large degree, those conspirators are traitors paid by foreign powers!”⁴⁵ The public prosecutor in Braunschweig was Fritz Bauer, a Jewish lawyer returned from exile, and he took this phrase as an opportunity to indict Remer for slandering the deceased, despite substantial opposition from within his own office.⁴⁶ Bauer sought to use the opportunity to transcend that specific case in order to obtain a court decision that would officially legitimize the resistance against the Nazi regime and the war and thereby provide a moral justification by legal means.⁴⁷ With this moral aim in mind, he called a number of expert witnesses, who included three theologians but only one historian. To make matters worse, the historian was Percy Ernst Schramm, a professor of medieval history at the University of Göttingen who had been the official war diarist of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW – Wehrmacht High Command) during most of the war. Though he may have been an eyewitness, he was obviously no academic specialist on the Third Reich or the Second War.⁴⁸ Nonetheless, Schramm gave testimony on whether the war could still have been won in the summer of 1944 and came to the conclusion that defeat had by then become inevitable: “Whichever way one looks at it, from what level or what sector whatsoever one might regard the war, it was lost by 20 July 1944. The final catastrophe was certain – its date might still be discussed.”⁴⁹ This eyewitness statement was matched by the theologians. Two Protestant professors – Hans-Joachim Iwand, from Bonn, and Ernst Wolf, from Göttingen, as well as their Catholic colleague Rupert Angermair, from Freising took the stand and opined on the legitimacy of tyrannicide. With unsurprisingly few nuances between them, they agreed on what Angermair summarized: “As far as

but significant differences, German general officers’ ranks will be given in the German original and in italics. See Stumpf, “Der Krieg im Mittelmeerraum,” 569 n1. As the postwar Bundeswehr introduced the rank of brigadier general, Bundeswehr ranks will be given as brigadier general, major general, lieutenant general, and (four-star) general. Note that the East German NVA used the Wehrmacht rank designations.  Ruling by the Braunschweig District Court on 15 March 1952 against Generalmajor Remer for slander, Az 1 K Ms 13/51, published in Kraus, Die im Braunschweiger Remerprozeß erstatteten moraltheologischen und historischen Gutachten, 105 – 136, at p. 107. Rütters, “Zur Instrumentalisierung des ’20. Juli 1944’,” 533.  For Bauer see Wojak, Fritz Bauer, above all 265 – 283.  Kleine, “Der geschichtspolitische Ort des 20. Juli 1944.”  Greiner/Schramm, Kriegstagebuch des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht.  Testimony of Prof. Dr. Percy Ernst Schramm, in Kraus, Die im Braunschweiger Remerprozeß erstatteten moraltheologischen und historischen Gutachten, 63 – 81, 80.

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their moral intentions and actions are concerned, the men of the 20 July [can be considered] justified.”⁵⁰ The trial culminated with Bauer making an impassioned plea, alluding to Friedrich Schiller tragic hero, William Tell: On 20 July, the German nation was completely betrayed, betrayed by its government, and a completely betrayed nation cannot be a victim of treason, no more than a dead man can be stabbed to death with a dagger.⁵¹

Some nonetheless protested Bauer’s position: the historian Hans Rothfels claimed that Bauer had failed to focus on the “moral and political core of the problem.”⁵² Remer was sentenced to three months in prison. For the first time, a German court had taken the side of the conspirators and had confirmed that their actions had been honorable.⁵³ The other important consequence of this judgment, particularly in the military context, is that the arguments defending the conspirators took on a largely moral dimension: during the trial, the focus of attention had been less on the exact events of 20 July 1944 than on an evaluation of their moral worth. Freisler’s tirades against the “dishonorable traitors who had violated their oaths” were still framing the discourse – even if they now defined what had to be rebutted. This shift continued throughout the 1950s, as evidenced by the book titles mentioned above. When President Heuss spoke at the 1954 anniversary event, his speech followed the same line of thinking.⁵⁴ “The purpose of this hour cannot be to draft a historical picture of the events which led to 20 July 1944, nor to characterize the contributions and attitudes of the individual men.” Like Bauer two years before, Heuss invoked the work of Schiller: No, there’s a limit to a tyrant’s power When men oppressed cannot find justice, when The burden gets to be unbearable, Then they with confidence and courage reach To Heaven and fetch their eternal rights

 Prof. Dr. Rupert Angermair: Moraltheologisches Gutachten über das Widerstandsrecht nach katholischer Lehre, in: Kraus, Die im Braunschweiger Remerprozeß erstatteten moraltheologischen und historischen Gutachten, 29 – 39, 38.  Bauer, Eine Grenze hat Tyrannenmacht.  Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 81, with further references.  Wassermann, “Zur juristischen Bewertung.”  Heuss, “Bekenntnis und Dank.”

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From where they hang as indestructible And as inalienable as stars themselves.⁵⁵

He ended on a political note: “The legacy is still in abeyance; the obligation has not been met yet.” Again, the discourse emphasized moral legitimacy, maybe even a moral obligation to resist and implicitly avoided a scholarly approach. This did not only apply to the military resistance and the 20 July plot. Inge Aicher-Scholl, surviving sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl, who had both been executed in 1943, had assumed the role of steward of her siblings’ memory, collecting all available material and hoping to control and direct the discourse about the “White Rose” student resistance group. Throughout her life, she was at war with professional historians and their specific approach to their common topic.⁵⁶ It is difficult to separate the evolving historical research at particular points in time from prevailing views of the public, social, and military perceptions (which will be discussed later in chapter 10.1) in which they were developed, as academic work does not occur in a vacuum. Research questions in resistance history repeatedly arose from public controversies. It became obvious that the two German states as well as churches, civic associations, and even specific German regions attempted to create their own traditions related to resistance history. These attempts variously influenced research, were reactions to public debates, and for more than seven decades, kept the image of the resistance in a gradual but constant state of flux.⁵⁷

Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) was revived after the war and in the 1950s began to emphasize that the uprising of 20 July 1944 had transcended classes and social strata, thus implying that social democrats, too, had a claim to that heritage. In 1951, SPD chairman Fritz Erler wrote that a “legend” was being created that “the resistance had been a cause of the conservative reactionaries and the clergy.”⁵⁸ After all, men like the Social Democrat Julius Leber had been part of the conspiracy, and the ideas developed within the Kreisau Circle had had a distinctively socialist flavor. But by insisting on its share of credit for the conspiracy, the SPD also had to accept that the genuinely working-class resistance was still largely overlooked.⁵⁹ Such a position could only be main    

Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, act II, sc..2. Hikel, Sophies Schwester. Steinbach, “Gescheitert, aber nicht erfolglos!,” 737. Meyer, Die SPD und die NS-Vergangenheit, 197. Meyer, Die SPD und die NS-Vergangenheit, 192– 199.

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tained, though, as long as the details of the conspirators’ political and social aims were not subjected to more rigorous historical analysis. Despite all this, polls throughout the 1950s showed that a substantial (albeit decreasing) share of the West German population disapproved of both the attempt on Hitler’s life and the coup d’état as “treason,” and that this disapproval of them was about twice as high among former military officers as among the general population.⁶⁰ The effects of the military conspiracy on the early history of the new West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, will be discussed later in greater detail. Bundeswehr Chief of Staff General Adolf Heusinger had been chief of the Operations Department in 1944, had been injured by Stauffenberg’s bomb, and later spent several weeks in custody for his alleged part in the conspiracy. In an “order of the day” given in the summer of 1959, he placed the Bundeswehr in the tradition of the “conscience in revolt”: “The act of 20 July 1944 – an act against injustice and bondage – is a ray of hope in Germany’s dark times. […] It was guided by Christian and human responsibility, and the martyrdom which ensued consecrated it.”⁶¹ Along the same lines, the German Forces’ Center of Military History named its 1984 exhibition on the military resistance “Revolt of Conscience,” (and not “Revolt of the Military”!). However, the accompanying book offered a wide range of learned academic analysis.⁶²

2.3 Historicizing – Overcoming moralizing approaches First and foremost, research in contemporary history is always dependent on the availability of sources at any given moment.⁶³ Along with early history books (such as those by Hans Rothfels and Gerhard Ritter), the first memoirs of surviving members of the conspiracy came out. These included the first-hand accounts, published in 1949, of Generalleutnant Dr Hans Speidel, Rommel’s last chief of staff. Working with the aid of author Ernst Jünger, Speidel depicted Rommel as

 Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens, 165 – 171.  Heusinger, “Tagesbefehl.”  First published in 1984, Aufstand des Gewissens ran for five editions (the last in 2000). Later editions, as a rule, offer more material than earlier ones, which is why in this book we will routinely refer to the last, fifth edition.  Schulz, “Nationalpatriotismus im Widerstand.” For basic considerations on source criticism in our context see Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 528, as well as Heinemann, “Der Widerstand gegen das NS-Regime und der Krieg an der Ostfront,” 49.

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one of the core conspirators, creating the impression that if Rommel had not been severely injured on 17 July 1944, the former “Desert Fox” might have unilaterally made peace with the Allies and ended the war in the West.⁶⁴ The Gestapo had not made major inroads in Army Group Center during their investigation of the conspiracy, so several officers from that group survived who could publish their version of events after the war had ended.⁶⁵ Yet, their memories were quickly contested: Even from his British prison, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein forced Fabian von Schlabrendorff to amend some of his statements in later editions, a conflict which still saw their children feuding as late as 1984.⁶⁶ Although Schlabrendorff and another survivor, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, always claimed to have had no or only belated knowledge of crimes on the Eastern Front, more recent research has unearthed evidence to contradict this.⁶⁷ Gersdorff’s memoirs in particular should be used only judiciously or, to paraphrase one historian’s observation, they should be considered to be no more than what they actually are: the accounts of a witness from the the postwar period.⁶⁸ As already mentioned, in the history of the resistance, more than in other contexts, reports of eyewitnesses require a particularly critical eye.⁶⁹ The leading diplomat among the elderly conservative conspirators had been the former ambassador to the Quirinale in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell. In 1946, his family published an amended version of his diaries;⁷⁰ the unabridged text was only made available to the public in 1988.⁷¹ An even greater factor that determined the available sources was the fact that very few conspirators from the core of the group had survived. Most of the core conspirators either had been executed or felt compelled to commit suicide, as one of the few survivors, Gottfried Baron von Falkenhausen, pointed out

 Speidel, Invasion 1944.  The most relevant published sources are Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, and Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang (1st ed., 1959). For the various public appearances of the surviving Major Philipp Frhr. von Boeselager see Meding and Sarkowicz, Philipp von Boeselager, and Heinemann, “Georg und Philipp von Boeselager.” For the sources available for the resistance on the eastern front in general, see Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 165.  Breithaupt, Zwischen Front und Widerstand, 83, 119, FN 9.  Hürter, “Militäropposition und Judenmord,” 138 – 139.  Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 82.  See the poignant remarks in Ringshausen, “Kuriergepäck und Pistolen,” 416.  Hassell, The Von Hassell Diaries 1938 – 1944 (1947).  This book quotes the critical edition of Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher.

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as early as November 1945 in a letter to the Constance Südkurier, which had repeatedly reported on resistance issues.⁷² Other surviving eyewitnesses had lived through the events without having themselves been part of the conspiracy. It comes as no surprise that as the public attitude toward the uprising became more positive, those who had been active in ending the coup began to downplay their roles. Karl Pridun had received a preferential promotion to full colonel in August 1944 as a reward for his role in the Reserve Army Headquarters in the Bendlerblock on the afternoon of 20 July. In 1953, he wrote to author Eberhard Zeller: “If, for reasons I do not know, some literary works represent my actions as having actively organized a so-called counteraction, it would be a perversion of the facts and an evil slander.”⁷³ In 1961, a right-wing, self-styled Archiv Peter (in fact an individual who had obtained copies in the United States) published the Kaltenbrunner-Berichte under the title of Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung. ⁷⁴ These were the reports the investigators composed from their various witnesses’ statements, which were to be forwarded to Hitler. These documents would have required far more critical care. Witnesses, subjected to great torture, had made statements trying to exculpate themselves, so that even their original testimony might well be questioned. The documents published in the “reports” were not, however, the testimonies as such but, rather, how the Gestapo had interpreted them – and the Gestapo certainly had good reason to want to hide its own gross failures in the period leading up to the coup, and it was determined to improve its standing in the final stages of the regime.⁷⁵ The experts were unanimous in their criticism of the publication, which obviously sought to discredit the anti-Hitler movement.⁷⁶ Among the most vociferous critics were some of the conspirators’ relatives:

 G. Freiherr von Falkenhausen, Badenweiler, to the editor of Südkurier, Constance, 29 November 1945 (copy); IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 31– 36.  Generalsekretär Karl Pridun, Bregenz, re.: 20. Juli 1944. Letter to Eberhard Zeller, undated, and Zeller’s reply dated 30. Oktober 1953; IfZ, ZS 1769, fol. 9.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung. References to this are to the slightly improved, commented, emendated, but otherwise unchanged version. For the historiographic background of the editor, Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, see Fröhlich, “Der Generaloberst.” Sadly, there still is no English translation. See also Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 35.  Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 35.  Booms, “Bemerkungen zu einer fragwürdigen Quellenedition”; Jacobsen, “Die ‘Sonderkommission 20. Juli.’” More recently, see Ramm, Kritische Analyse.

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the author is Obersturmbannführer von Ki[e]lpinski. His reports are designed to show Hitler the danger he had been in, he wants to denigrate the conspirators, and he wants to damage some groups in the Nazi leadership: Ley, Göring, and others. The reports are clever, but not objective.⁷⁷

Hans Rothfels rallied around the critics, although the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Contemporary History) he had founded and directed in Munich also had access to the material and had foregone the option of publishing a reliable scholarly edition.⁷⁸ After the end of the Cold War, the sources available for research on the military resistance broadened again. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the political developments it triggered led former Soviet archives to make available some documents, the sheer existence of which had been previously unknown in the West. This is particularly true of papers related to Major Joachim Kuhn who had delivered himself into Soviet captivity rather than endure the fate he faced if arrested by the Gestapo.⁷⁹ Thorough archival research yielded more depositions, indictments, and other judicial records related to the proceedings faced by members of the conspiracy.⁸⁰ Once the children of those murdered had died, in a number of instances the grandchildren were willing to part with their grandparents’ papers. The secret transcripts of German officers’ conversations while in British captivity allowed some glimpses into the thinking of high-ranking military personnel and, in some cases, even added details to our knowledge of the events.⁸¹ Despite this expansion of the scope of the sources, the growth was more in its breadth than its depth; there were no major revelations. Today’s sources allow a better and more substantiated understanding of the resistance, but they have not led to a basic reappraisal of those military members who rose to overthrow Hitler. The 1960s in general were characterized by first steps toward historicizing the Third Reich. West German historians began, “in the name of sober objectivity,

 Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944: Presentation by Emil Henk: “Der 20. Juli 1944 mit den Augen der Gestapo” [Frankfurt, April 1962]; IfZ, ED 715/2. Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944. Rundschreiben 1946 – 1971, vol. 2, fol. 8.  Holler, 20. Juli 1944, 142.  Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen”; Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg”; Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow.” An overview can be found in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 42– 61.  Neitzel, Abgehört; Neitzel and Welzer, Soldaten.

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to define research as a task in which memory must be transformed and transmuted into history.”⁸² In our context, this point came when two historians at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich, Hermann Graml and Hans Mommsen, published two items in which they asked, for the first time, about the foreign and domestic political aims of the national-conservative resisters.⁸³ Graml could point to the fact that the foreign policy concepts of resisters such as Ulrich von Hassell and Carl Goerdeler dated back, in fact, to the pre-1914 period, and had become completely unrealistic by the summer of 1944. Although the national-conservative opposition to Hitler did indeed wish to end the war peacefully, it was looking to settle it in a European context, which at that point had always been thought of as requiring German hegemony.⁸⁴ In a similar vein, Hans Mommsen demonstrated that, in view of its reactionary political and social ideas, the uprising of 20 July 1944 had by no means been a direct forerunner of the Federal Republic’s parliamentary democracy. To the contrary, the conspirators had hatched ideas in their agonizing nightly debates of a corporate or perhaps a monarchical system. In fact, the political ideas varied greatly; the Kreisau Circle, for example, had flirted with socialist ideas and Catholic social teaching. Among the conspirators, there had been widespread agreement that the parliamentary system had pandered to “the masses,” dissolving individual responsibility, and that that was the reason why it had failed in almost all central European states.⁸⁵ This started the first great phase of historicizing the resistance.⁸⁶ Ger van Roon published the first major work on the Kreisau Circle.⁸⁷ Facing massive protests led by Inge Aicher-Scholl, Christian Petry wrote the first truly academic book about the White Rose,⁸⁸ and in 1969, Peter Hoffmann presented his seminal history of the civil and military resistance.⁸⁹ On the whole, the studies of this period led to the conclusion that “the conspirators in general intended to be politically relevant in their days,” and that “it is misleading to represent them as ep-

 Berg, “The Holocaust and West German Historians,” 96. See also Mommsen, “The political legacy,” 151, and Müller, “The military opposition to Hitler,” 100.  Graml, “Resistance Thinking”; Mommsen, “Social Views and Constitutional Plans.”  See also Heinemann, “Außenpolitische Illusionen des nationalkonservativen Widerstands.”  For the contemporary context, see Wildt, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, 8 – 10. More details on the historiography in Mommsen, “The political legacy.”  Klemperer, “Der deutsche Widerstand – Gestaltwandel,” 231.  Roon, German Resistance to Hitler.  Petry, Studenten aufs Schafott; for the role of Inge Aicher-Scholl see Hikel, Sophies Schwester, 183 – 188.  Hoffmann, Widerstand – Staatsstreich – Attentat. The book is not fully identical with Hoffmann’s English-language book The History of the German Resistance.

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ithets of moral rectitude, erasing everything from memory that does not fit that image.”⁹⁰ This represents the thinking of the 1960s, and for our purposes, it is striking that it rather glaringly omits the military dimension altogether. One point about the national-conservative opposition’s political thinking, however, had been cautiously left aside during all those discussions: What had been the attitude of the resistance toward the segregation, and then eventually the extermination, of German and then other European Jews? It was Christof Dipper who opened up this pandora’s box by publishing an article in the highly respected journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft. ⁹¹ He took it up again during the 1984 conference mentioned before, expanding upon his theory that the members of the conspiracy had been as mildly antisemitic as most bourgeois Germans of the time.⁹² Obviously, this led to protests and to a lengthy debate;⁹³ it did not end with Ekkehard Klausa’s constructive suggestion to distinguish between “light” and “serious” antisemitism,⁹⁴ nor with Peter Hoffmann’s 2013 attempt at salvaging Carl Goerdeler’s reputation.⁹⁵ Again, the demand that the conspirators should be shown in their respective social context ran afoul of a tradition which reduced them to “resisters” on the moral high ground, thus depoliticizing their activities.⁹⁶ The same can be said about a controversy that played out between two major historians of the resistance, Peter Hoffmann (by then in Montreal) and Klaus-Jürgen Müller (in Hamburg), in the late 1980s. Müller had pointed out that General Beck, when resigning over Hitler’s war policies in 1938, had acted well within the traditions of the German Army’s General Staff.⁹⁷ Hoffmann, in turn, interpreted Beck’s resignation as his first step on the road to the resistance.⁹⁸ Müller had approached his subject from a comprehensive history of the Wehrmacht within the Nazi system⁹⁹ and insisted that Beck had pursued

 Mommsen, “Neuordnungspläne,” 202– 203 (not included in Mommsen, Alternatives to Hitler).  Dipper, “Der deutsche Widerstand und die Juden”; see – later – Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 253.  Dipper, “Der Widerstand und die Juden.”  Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation.”  Klausa, “Ganz normale Deutsche.”  Hoffmann, Carl Goerdeler; see also my book review in Sehepunkte (2014): 4.  Klausa, “Ganz normale Deutsche,” 184.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente.  Hoffmann, “Generaloberst Ludwig Becks militärpolitisches Denken.”  Müller, Das Heer und Hitler.

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military politics, not military opposition.¹⁰⁰ Müller saw it as inappropriate to view Beck always from the point of view of his later activities in the opposition. Emphasizing for the first time the military dimension of the officers’ resistance, Müller called for an analysis not measured by the political yardstick of the 1960s but that took into consideration Beck’s military socialization and his role within the power system of the time.¹⁰¹ The controversy between Hoffmann and Müller had been fortiter in re but suaviter in modo. Things became more heated in 1995 after historian Christian Gerlach contributed a chapter to a book accompanying the controversial exhibition, “War of Annihilation. Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941 to 1944” (known in German as the “Wehrmachtsausstellung”). In his paper, he claimed that the members of the opposition in Army Group Center had been involved in, or had significant knowledge of, the crimes committed in its area of responsibility after the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.¹⁰² This was the beginning of a discussion in which resistance martyrs qua victims suddenly became irredeemable perpetrators (see chapter 6.3). Here, too, the standards were moralistic; at the end of his paper, Gerlach finally revealed his intentions: “The tributes of the year 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of the attempted assassination of Hitler, demonstrated that ‘the 20th of July’ is an affair of state significance in the Federal Republic of Germany. And the participants will continue to be honored, including all the resistance fighters from Army Group Center. But everyone should know who is being honored.”¹⁰³ In the guise of an exhibition and a book, Gerlach’s objectives were ends in themselves – the “questions” about honor were opportunities to shame and accuse; they had little relation to the objectives they were dressed in, namely, research, education, and historical analysis. Any research into the military resistance against National Socialism could only make sense within the framework of the overall history of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This in turn became possible only once the Western Allies had returned the German documents they had taken as war booty during and after 1945. The return of these materials began only in the 1960s and was not finished before the early 1970s. Until then, the memoirs of German field marshals and generals had dominated the perception of what

 Müller, “Militärpolitik, nicht Militäropposition!”  Lamberti, “The Search for the ‘Other Germany,’” 417.  Gerlach, “Men of 20 July”; in 2000 Gerlach responded to his critics: Gerlach, “Hitlergegner bei der Heeresgruppe Mitte.”  Gerlach, “Men of 20 July,” 140.

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had happened during the war.¹⁰⁴ Another source for the early perception of the Second World War were the former German generals who, under the guidance of former Generaloberst and Chief of the Army Staff Franz Halder, were maintained by the US Army to write operational studies, and who took the opportunity to keep the memory of the German Army and its general staff “clean.”¹⁰⁵ Academic historians, on the other hand, for a long time were extremely reluctant to scrutinize the actual campaigning during the war. For lack of sources, the “official” historiography, sponsored by the Bundeswehr, started its review of the Wehrmacht’s history with studies of the pre-war years, from 1933 to 1939.¹⁰⁶ Similarly, the publications of the period covering a history of the resistance could not embed it into an overall history of the Second World War. As early as 1949, Gerhard Ritter had deplored the awful lack of sources, writing, “All sources and documents of the 1919 to 1945 period have been taken abroad (Washington, London, Moscow), so that we here in Germany are not even able to write the history of our own catastrophe.”¹⁰⁷ The result of this was the separation between “military history” and an “integral resistance history” which Klaus-Jürgen Müller would continuously regret.¹⁰⁸ However, following the example of the Anglo-American “official histories,” and certainly in competition with the analogous Soviet series, “The Great Patriotic War,” the German Center of Military History was tasked with compiling a comprehensive account based on original sources. The first volume was published in 1978.¹⁰⁹ Volume IV in particular led to acrimonious debates: for the first time in western academic historiography, it systematically detailed German war crimes in the Soviet Union, including the “criminal orders” preceding them.¹¹⁰ Even so, the participation of officers later involved in the resistance

 The most important titles in this context are Manstein, Lost Victories; Guderian, Panzer Leader; and, edited posthumously by Basil H. Liddell Hart, Rommel, The Rommel Papers.  Wegner, “Erschriebene Siege”; more recent and more comprehensive: Howell, Von den Besiegten lernen?  Fundamental: Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, and Müller, Das Heer und Hitler.  Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944 [Minutes of a board meeting in Wiesbaden on February 7, 1949, date illegible]; IfZ, ED 715/1. Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944. Rundschreiben 1946 – 1971, vol. 1.  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” 9; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 13.  A summary of this project is in Müller, “Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg,” in particular 312– 315. An English translation is currently being published by Oxford University Press as “Germany and the Second World War.”  Förster, “Operation Barbarossa.” For a polemic criticism see Proske, Wider den Missbrauch der Geschichte. Much later, it was claimed repeatedly that the Wehrmachtsausstellung (the exhi-

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was never mentioned specifically, either in the “official” series or in monographs covering aspects of the problem in greater detail.¹¹¹ In view of the standards of the series Germany in the Second World War series, it certainly was regrettable that after a few volumes were published in the 1970s, it was put on hold for many years and was almost discontinued, and volume IX, which contains a long chapter on the military resistance, became available only early in the twenty-first century.¹¹² But even some of the earlier volumes had laid the groundwork for a better understanding of the German military resistance, even if the connection is not obvious at first sight. Volumes V/1 and V/2 contained major contributions on the Reich’s management of human resources.¹¹³ These chapters covered the system’s handling of its limited means as part of a broader history of Germany during the war, but a central role in this management process had been played by the commander of the Replacement Army, whose staff had become the hub for coordinating the military resistance activities starting in 1943. Expanding this approach, the author, Bernhard R. Kroener, followed up with a voluminous biography of that commander, Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm. This opened historians’ eyes to how far back some of the underlying conceptual and even personal conflicts went, and which considerations by the military expert Fromm had led him to pursue alternative policies within the Nazi system – before some of his subordinates, certainly with his knowledge, went further and planned to do away with that system altogether.¹¹⁴ Kroener’s biography of Fromm must be taken in conjunction with another highly relevant book published soon after: the definitive biography of Generaloberst Ludwig Beck by Klaus-Jürgen Müller, sadly since deceased.¹¹⁵ Both books are about protagonists who, long before 1933, were involved in military and political controversies, many of which continued right into the summer of 1944.

bition entitled War of Extermination) was first to bring up the subject (see, e. g., Herbert, “The Holocaust in German Historiography,” 80), but this overlooks an important part of German academic history.  For example: Streit, Keine Kameraden.  Heinemann, “Der militärische Widerstand und der Krieg” (2004); the English translation Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War” was published four years later.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” and Kroener, “Management of Human Resources.”  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet. See also my review: Heinemann, Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift (MGZ) 65 (2006): 649 – 650.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, and my review in MGZ 67 (2008): 560.

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Around the same time, the author of the present volume published a detailed account of the resistance during the war as part of the Germany in the Second World War series.¹¹⁶ The editors decided to approach the subject within the framework of the two volumes on German society in the period 1939 – 45, which limited the options for placing the resistance in the context of the actual military events on the front lines. In addition, the wealth of knowledge contained in the Beck and Fromm biographies was not yet available at that point, not to mention works that have been published since. The aim of this book, therefore, is to incorporate the additional knowledge that has been developed over the past 15 years, to contextualize it, and to approach its subject from a specifically military point of view. In the same way the resistance in general was historicized (in the sense of submitting it to scholarly analysis rather than using it as a political tool), this volume will undertake to apply the same to the history of the military resistance against Hitler.¹¹⁷ Third Reich historiography was long marked by a tendency to perceive the Nazi system as the personal creation of the “Führer.” To put matters (too) simply, Hitler was assumed to have laid out his views and his intentions in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf, and then to have turned them subsequently into reality. In Germany, the leading writer who emboldened such notions was Joachim Fest, with his influential Hitler biography and an equally influential book on the resistance.¹¹⁸ In contrast, historians like Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen started asking questions about the circumstances and structural preconditions which had allowed Hitler and his cronies to put their criminal policies into action – an approach labeled as “structuralist” or, maybe better still, as “functionalist.” Early on, Hans Mommsen had written a weighty book on the German civil service and Hitler in which he had expounded his ideas about the structure of Nazi rule, thus laying the groundwork for the description of the Nazi system as “polycratic.”¹¹⁹ However, his work does not apply this paradigm to the military elements of the Third Reich.¹²⁰ The concept of “polycratic rule” is not without its critics,

 Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War.”  See the methodological discussion in Wette, “Wir müssen etwas tun,” 74– 75.  Fest, Hitler; Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death; for an in-depth critique of Fest, see Brechtken, “Joachim Fest.”  Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich; ibid., “Hitlers Stellung im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem.”  Nolzen, “Von der geistigen Assimilation,” 71; siehe auch Wildt, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, 8 – 10.

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either.¹²¹ Even so, we will apply it to the Third Reich, because it denotes just that dissolution of state structures which led civil servants, diplomats, and military officers alike to stand up against the Nazi system. Resistance shown by officers and soldiers to the National Socialist regime had to operate within such structures. We will have to ask, therefore, where exactly in the military apparatus such resistance arose, which internal conflicts within the system encouraged it, and how it eventually impacted upon the Third Reich structures of power. If the various organs of the Nazi state vied with each other in their attempts of “working toward the Führer,”¹²² thus resulting in a “cumulative radicalization,”¹²³ then the progressive disempowerment of the military, the way it was gradually kept away from the centers of Nazi power, will have to be part of a history of the military resistance as well as the acceleration of this process after the failed overthrow of the regime. At the time, the national-conservatives perceived this process intuitively, even if they did not understand it, let alone analyze it, systematically. The pattern of increasing extemporization, the intensifying attacks that gradually widened to take in groups originally well within the Volksgemeinschaft (national community), in particular the “reactionaries,” all contributed to the war being quite different from the kind of war the national-conservatives had been willing to fight. From the very beginning, Hitler advertised the war as being one that would also be fought against the “enemy within.” In his Reichstag speech of 1 September 1939, he said: “Whoever … thinks he can oppose this national command, whether directly or indirectly, shall fall.”¹²⁴ The structuralist view of the Third Reich has been criticized from its inception as covering up, or at least not accounting for, individual responsibility by unduly prioritizing anonymous structures. Instead, during recent years the focus has changed to the various groups of “perpetrators,” and the way they were embedded into the Volksgemeinschaft. ¹²⁵ Following this methodological approach, we will have to ask to what extent the members of the military “opposition were indeed part of the group of “perpetrators,” or how far they were actually outside the postulated “national community.”

 See, e. g., Herbert, “The Holocaust in German Historiography,” 74– 75; Fröhlich and Kranz, “Generäle auf Abwegen?”  Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer.”  For this term see Mommsen, “Der Nationalsozialismus. Kumulative Radikalisierung,” 786.  Hitler’s speech before the Reichstag, 1 September 1939: Domarus, Hitler, 1316 – 1317 (author’s translation); see also Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 322– 323.  Bajohr and Wildt, Volksgemeinschaft; Wildt, “‘Volksgemeinschaft.’ Eine Antwort.”

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From here, we will ask where and how the attempt on Hitler’s life and the associated failed military coup fit into German military history from the end of World War I (at the latest) onward. We will attempt to understand how the overlapping elements of military expertise, political sense, and ethical or moral motives combined to move some very few among the millions of Wehrmacht personnel to try to overthrow their government and to terminate the war—and the dire consequences that most of them faced.

3 Military and Politics in the Weimar Republic 3.1 The Army: Large and Universal or Small and Professional? The multifarious forms of opposition to the Nazi regime do not admit easily of simple dichotomies, but among the few that can withstand analysis, at least for the civilian opposition, is the straightforward distinction between “older” and “younger” variants of civilian resistance to the Nazi regime.¹ It is not, however, particularly useful when applied to a military context because the socialization of the officers involved in the conspiracy occurred under significantly different conditions. To account for this, Bernhard R. Kroener has suggested that the valuable analytical distinctions should be made between (1) the officers who had joined the military prior to 1914 and who had fought in World War I; (2) those who first embarked on a military career in the years after 1918, and, finally, (3) those who were commissioned as officers before the summer of 1944.² However, the last cohort, which had received most of their military training during the Third Reich (often referred to in the literature as “Hitler Youth officers”³), yielded only a small minority of conspirators. All of the officers who participated in the conspiracy had come up through the ranks of the Weimar-era Reichswehr, and the more senior officers had initially entered military life through one of the various armies that constituted Imperial Germany’s military apparatus. Generaloberst Beck, for example, had received his commission before the nineteenth century had even drawn to a close (1898). General der Infanterie Olbricht had joined a regiment of Saxony in 1907⁴ – the year Claus Stauffenberg was born. Stauffenberg, in turn, joined the Reichswehr in 1926 and thus had no direct experience as an officer in the monarchy. Henning von Tresckow represented something of an exception to this usual career pattern: he had volunteered for service only in 1917, at age 16, and yet was commissioned even before the war was over. Although he left the army in 1920 in order to attend university, he re-enlisted in 1926. All the leading figures of the 20 July plot had thus served in the Reichswehr. The few very young officers who were involved – such as Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin (born 1922) who joined the army only in 1941, had naturally

 Schwerin, Dann sind’s die besten Köpfe, die man henkt, 9 – 16; Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli; Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand.”  Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse,” 31.  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 62; Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 370.  Page, General Friedrich Olbricht, 17– 18. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-005

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not seen duty in the Reichswehr, but they also came from families with long military traditions that predated even Imperial Germany, to say nothing of the 1933 seizure of power. Stauffenberg’s most important biographer, Peter Hoffmann, makes much of his young subject’s involvement with the circle of friends around the poet and author Stefan George.⁵ He devotes far fewer pages describing Stauffenberg’s military education, both through his family and, subsequently, in his somewhat elitist regiment, the 17th Cavalry Regiment, based in Bamberg and known as the “Bamberger Reiter”⁶ (referring to the horseman on the only equestrian statue inside a German church, in Bamberg Cathedral). Hoffmann is rather vague as to how much this may have influenced Stauffenberg’s decision to oppose the Nazi regime and to attempt to assassinate the Führer. It has been pointed out both that the 1944 conspiracy had its origins “in a period and in events well before the seizure of power”⁷ and that the ideas and political motivations of the conspirators can be traced back in many instances to national-conservative thought of the Weimar period.⁸ Hence, use of the term “national-conservative” to describe this group accurately characterizes their political positions rather than being defamatory.⁹ For the opposition’s military thinking, no such analysis has been undertaken so far. A military history of the plot against Hitler therefore must consider these officers’ experiences in Imperial Germany and, later during the Weimar years; their training and their individual perspectives on military theory; and, finally, how all of these factors influenced their intentions and planning. To accomplish this, a review of some basic elements of Reichswehr history is in order.¹⁰ The history of the Reichswehr was the subject of much academic research during the 1960s and 1970s, including work done by, for example, German-British historian Francis L. Carsten, the German-American Michael Geyer and the German historian Wilhelm Deist.¹¹ During the early twenty-first century, work on the Reichswehr was limited to a few case studies¹² and biographies of officers  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 30 – 46.  Metzger, Offiziersehre und Widerstand.  John, “Am achten Jahrestag.”  Mommsen, “Political Legacy,” 160.  This was the conclusion Retter drew with respect to the Kreisau Circle in 2008. TheologicalPolitical Resistance, 91.  Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 66.  Deist, “de Gaulle et Guderian” (1977); Geyer, Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit (1980); and Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics (1966).  Particularly valuable are Reichherzer, Alles ist Front!; Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik; Keller, Die Wehrmacht; and Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr.

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who had played a role in the Reichswehr.¹³ One might also count a few works which looked at the Reichswehr as part of larger, diachronic studies of German military history.¹⁴ Further relevant studies may be published in the years to come, as the various hundred-year anniversaries of events in the Weimar era draw nearer, but for the moment, our study will have to rely on the current state of research. The forerunners of the Reichswehr were the contingent armies of Imperial Germany made up of troops from the kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg and – above all – Prussia as well as some smaller elements, such as the colonial troops. These various components were largely consolidated between 1914 and 1918. Under the harsh limitation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, the new, restructured and much smaller Reichswehr had to find an answer to the question of what had gone wrong with respect to morale, politics, and doctrine that had led to its eventual defeat. The answer to that question would guide the scant hundred-thousand-strong military in preparing for the next war.¹⁵ One of the most pressing questions was that of mobilization, both in the sense of developing modern motorized and mechanized technologies and in a more general sense of marshaling all the state’s resources, including popular support for the war effort. Discourses among officers and in the interested public during the 1920s and early 1930s focused on the relative merits of a small, elite, professional army versus those of an army as a national institution, preparing the entire nation for war. Both ways of thinking can be shown to have had an influence on the opposition’s military thinking. However, on a higher level of abstraction, we will also see how freely such military-political discussions were conducted in the Reichswehr; this freedom was not without effect on the modes of communication within the military that remained in place right through to the creation of conspiratorial structures during World War II. Following that examination, we will take a closer look at how the Reichswehr viewed the then-emerging Nazi Party began to exploit the death throes of the Weimar parliamentary system. If political resistance to Hitler grew out of political opposition in the early 1930s,¹⁶ then it seems appropriate to test the hypothesis that military opposition within the Reichswehr grew in parallel to the political resistance and in direct proportion to the growth of Hitler’s movement. As a last step, and reaching beyond the end of the Weimar period, we will  Such biographies include: Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck; Schönrade, General Joachim von Stülpnagel.  Above all, see Groß, Myth and Reality, and Pöhlmann, Der Panzer.  Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 66.  Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 744.

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look at the increasingly complicated relationship between army and party during the “peaceful” first six years of the National Socialist regime. Corporal Hitler had experienced the war almost exclusively on the western front; the war he knew was one of stagnated front lines with dugouts and trenches, where firepower was by far more relevant than the ability to maneuver. The German Army’s attempt to break the deadlock and return to maneuver warfare during the winter of 1917/18 obviously did not much affect Hitler’s thinking, probably because he spent the larger part of that period in hospital.¹⁷ Yet, the Entente, too, had reintroduced an element of tactical mobility and crushed the German front lines with their newly developed tanks.¹⁸ Soon after the war, German observers debated whether they had lost the war due to the Western Allies’ – and particularly the Americans’ – technological and numerical superiority, or whether the reason for defeat lay elsewhere. German military expert George Soldan, for example, postulated in 1919 that the opening moves in the early phases of a future war might take the form of highly mobile military operations; should this prove indecisive, politics and diplomacy would have to come in and put an end to the fighting before it led to another stalemate in the trenches.¹⁹ The alternative explanation was the “stab in the back” theory, which was premised on the assumption that morale among the civilian population had collapsed first, and lacking the vital moral support from the home front, the army – “unvanquished in battle” until that point – began to waver as well.²⁰ These alternative explanations for defeat are presented here in an admittedly oversimplified manner. The importance of this choice, however simplified, was that the explanation, once it was chosen, then determined which possible outcomes could logically follow. And since all agreed that an eventual military resurgence was the only acceptable consequence, the only question left unresolved was what form that resurgence would take: in the one instance, a mobile, highly technical army would have to be created, with a superior leadership (real or perceived) able to balance the adversary’s quantitative superiority.²¹ Otherwise, the entire population would have to be militarized – that is, trained to defend its country in an all-consuming war. In this second scenario, the political relevance

 Weber, Hitlers erster Krieg; Simms, Hitler, 12– 15; Chapoutot, “Nous ne capitulerons jamais!,” 55.  Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 60 – 83.  Pöhlmann, “Von Versailles nach Armageddon,” 342– 343.  Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 81; Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 66; Groß, Das Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs, 127– 141.  Groß, Myth and Reality, 123 – 176.

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of the labor force, which would be working in the armaments industries, would grow in tandem with industrial potential.²² The army’s peacetime role before the next war arrived would therefore be to lead this national educational process. The aim of uniting all “national forces” – military, civilian, and industrial – against a common foe would eventually result in what Ludendorff and others had termed “total war,” appropriating a term coined by Clausewitz.²³ Germany was not alone in conducting this debate. In France, the young Colonel Jean de Lattre de Tassigny insisted upon preparing for another “popular war” and called for an army which would prepare the nation for the same type of total war. Much like it did in World War I, this would mean preparing every man in France to serve as a poilu (the French analogue of the American doughboy).²⁴ At the same time, a combative colonel named Charles de Gaulle advocated for the opposite, demanding a small, highly mobile, professional, and mechanized army, a strategy encapsulated by the title of his 1934 book, Vers l’Armée de Métier. ²⁵ In Britain, the widely held conviction that the course of the war would be determined by morale at home as much as by the army’s fighting power led British leaders to develop a doctrine that assumed its own greatest strength was also its enemy’s greatest weakness. Accordingly, the means chosen – a strategic air war – set its sights squarely on civilian morale.²⁶ In the Reichswehr, these debates resulted in the competing concepts of a Führerheer (an army of leaders) and a Massenheer (an army of the masses).²⁷ Stretching the Treaty of Versailles to its limits, the most influential military personality of the period, Army Commander in Chief Generaloberst Hans von Seeckt, was determined to create an officer corps of the highest quality and to produce a reliable army that would remain unaffected by the internal strife of the Weimar Republic. When he spoke of the Army’s “internal coherence”²⁸ the operative German word – Geschlossenheit – could also be read as “closeness.” What Seeckt desired was a socially and politically homogeneous officer corps largely removed from society. Seeckt had pursued this idea rigorously ever since the end of World War I, which stood in sharp contrast to the more general

 Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 83.  Pöhlmann, “Der ‘moderne Alexander im Maschinenkrieg.’”  Boniface, “De Lattre.”  De Gaulle, Vers l’Armée de Métier; Cambre, “L’action d’influence en faveur des chars.”  Boog, “Der strategische Bombenkrieg”; Hansen, Fire and Fury, 27– 31; Böhm, Die Royal Air Force, 76 – 95.  For the following see Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik”; Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 96; Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft.”  Meier-Welcker, Seeckt, 307– 308.

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and economically oriented theories propounded by then-Major Kurt von Schleicher and others.²⁹ Proponents of a mass army could point to the fact that Germany was not allowed to have any armaments industry, and that the technological capabilities of the Reichswehr of the 1920s would even have been outpaced by Germany’s own pre-1914 military.³⁰ There was hardly any relationship between industry and the military, and most officers did not have the slightest idea how the economy worked. Their focus on operational thinking made them blind for general strategic and economic questions.³¹ One of the few officers who continually busied themselves with questions of “national defense” – that is, the preparation of state and society for the next war – was Captain Friedrich Fromm, who would become Commander of the Replacement Army as well as Chief of Army Equipment (Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres und Chef Heeresrüstung) in World War II. As early as November 1925, Fromm called for an “economic dictator” to coordinate all efforts in a future war, a dictator who would also steer distribution of the available “able-bodied population” between the military and industry.³² Years later, Hitler came to resent Fromm’s insisting on facts and figures, but throughout almost all of World War II, Fromm nonetheless proved his indispensability, as he was one of only very few officers with a grasp of the complex questions involved in wartime economic coordination.³³ In the early 1920s, Fromm belonged to a group sometimes even called a “conspiracy.” This group congregated around Lieutenant Colonel Joachim von Stülpnagel, director of the Army’s branch of the Truppenamt, which was the barely disguised revival of the old General Staff that had been prohibited by the Versailles treaty. In February 1924, Stülpnagel briefed his fellow officers with a presentation entitled Der Krieg der Zukunft (the war of the future).³⁴ In contrast to Seeckt and his fellow traditionalists caught in classic operational thinking, Stülpnagel foresaw a “war of the people” (Volkskrieg). Preparing the entirety of Germany’s state, society, and industry for this trial would be of far

 Meier-Welcker, Seeckt, 200; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 115; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 93.  Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 149.  Meier-Welcker, Seeckt, 636.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 162.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 145 – 146.  Presentation by General Joachim von Stülpnagel to officers of the Reichswehr Ministry. BA N 5/10.

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higher priority than any plans for sweeping mobile operations.³⁵ His suggestion of involving the entire population in a fight against an invading enemy at the very least prefigured the state of total war that developed later; the corresponding possibility is that it created some of the intellectual preconditions not only for (the acceptance of) total war but indeed for its eventual radicalization into a war of outright annihilation that dispensed with any contemplation on the legitimacy of unlimited violence. What Stülpnagel was calling for was no less than “the transformation of the Weimar Republic into an authoritarian state unreservedly committed to the war of liberation – a state that eliminated anything pacifistic or atypically German; a state that raised its youth to hate the foreign enemy; and a state that systematically committed the civilian population to war.”³⁶

This was a surprising attitude in view of the fact that, only a few months earlier, an attempt by the West German population at “passive resistance” (against the Belgian and French military occupation of the Rhineland) had failed disastrously.³⁷ His opinion was shared by then-Captain Friedrich Fromm, from the Staff of the Third Division, who argued against Seeckt: “Even if they are the best of leaders, the Reich cannot win a war with only 100,000 men [it can win] only with millions of trained soldiers.”³⁸ One might ask why an analysis of the military resistance should pay attention to the opinions of the man who had the chief resisters shot in the middle of the night following 20 July 1944. However, one of the prime merits of Bernhard R. Kroener’s biography of Fromm is that it highlights the general’s attitude to the conspiracy. Fromm always kept all his options open; he knew what was going on among his staff, and he shared the conspirators’ basic concerns, which is why he let them carry on. It was only when, during the evening of 20 July, Fromm found out that Stauffenberg, Mertz and the others had usurped his authority, and when they eventually physically detained him, that he felt his personal honor had been violated so egregiously that the conspirators had to die.³⁹ Initially, Seeckt knew how to suppress insidious ideas like those voiced by Stülpnagel and his friends. Yet, he was consternated to see that the 1924 “con Groß, Myth and Reality, 148, referring to Geyer, Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit, 84– 97, and Vardi, “Joachim Stülpnagel’s Military Thought.” See also Schönrade, General Joachim von Stülpnagel, 83 – 119.  Quotation from Groß, Myth and Reality, 149. See also Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 85 – 86, and Strohn, The German Army, 171– 176.  Strohn, “Les Jeunes Turcs allemands,,” 222– 223.  Cited text in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 164.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 704– 708.

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spiracy” included a sizable number of younger general staff officers. The coterie included old supporters of the “total war” concept, such as Ludendorff and Waldemar Pabst as well as younger men, such as Kurt von Schleicher (who was motivated more by career ambition than by principles), causing the increasingly isolated Stülpnagel to ask for retirement as a General der Infanterie at the end of 1931.⁴⁰ The new chief of the Truppenamt, Colonel Werner von Blomberg, was a disciple of the last Prussian minister of war, General Walther Reinhardt, who had also supported mass armies.⁴¹ In his own war games and command post exercises, though, Blomberg realized Stülpnagel’s concept of a people’s war only very haltingly.⁴² The field manual (Heeres-Dienstvorschrift) No. 100 Commanding Combined-Arms Formations, published in 1933 and written largely by Generalmajor Ludwig Beck and Lieutenant Colonel Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, was infused with the prerogative of command at the operational level,⁴³ although Beck, in a section about the education of general staff officers before World War I, had himself pointed out the failures of the system, and that a sound understanding of grand strategic questions, including those of politics and the economy, was essential for an aspiring general staff officer.⁴⁴ During the 1920s, the emphasis on operational thinking rather than on strategic defense had been reflected structurally in the leading role of the Truppenamt. However, once Seeckt resigned, that emphasis began to diminish. The Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Agency) began to play a more important role, because any kind of rearmament would place huge demands on the military and constrain its ability to cooperate with industrial research, and to solve budgetary problems which the Truppenamt could not be expected to handle. It was these conditions in the late 1920s that later proved to have been fertile ground for the seeds of resentment that eventually grew into the infighting between General Staff and the director of Army Armaments which was so characteristic of World War II and which was the setting for much of the resistance movement.⁴⁵ Initially, it seemed even as if the Versailles limitations and the limited financial means would favor the logisticians against the operational commanders, the rep-

     

Kilian, “Wir wollen die geistige Führung der Armee übernehmen”, 178 – 182. Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 37– 38. Groß, Myth and Reality, 155; Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 39 – 66. Groß, Myth and Reality, 160 f; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 97– 98. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 71. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 115.

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resentatives of a broadly-based long-term armaments plan against those favoring a swift rearmament which might, however, not be sustainable in the long term.⁴⁶ A mobile, highly technocratic “army of leaders” would also require that Germany be able to avail itself of the various technologies, even if by the Versailles Treaty it was prohibited from owning them. This describes especially the ways in which tanks and aircraft were procured. Seeckt had started his career in the Alexander Guards Regiment, named after the late Tsar, and if for no other reason, had always had a penchant for Russia. His deployments on the eastern front of World War I equipped him with personal experience in the country, and although he was violently anti-Bolshevist, he was enough of a realist to see the need to cooperate with the Soviet Union on political matters and questions of technology.⁴⁷ He could also rely on much older pro-Russian sentiments among German conservatives which dated back to the Napoleonic Wars and the period of Romanticism; even the October Revolution and its annihilation of the traditional Russian elites were not able to dull those sentiments completely.⁴⁸ Now, Seeckt hoped for cooperation in sensitive armaments projects so as to allow the young Reichswehr to keep up with technological progress. Despite the Reichswehr’s generally reluctant acceptance of technological and social progress, there were some officers who supported Stülpnagel’s revolutionary theses, at least in part. Among them were Blomberg, as we have seen, and other officers who later became field marshals, such as Keitel and Reichenau. They urged the Reichswehr to promote sports education for youth – though the particular word they chose in this context was “Wehrsport,” i. e., paramilitary training.⁴⁹ They were concerned that if the Reichswehr was to limit itself to breeding military specialists, few in number, the general population’s “will to fight” might suffer.⁵⁰ Once Hitler came to power, his “storm troopers,” – the paramilitary soldiers of the SA, the Nazi Party’s private militia under the command of Ernst Röhm – saw themselves in the future as the eventual replacement of the elitist Reichswehr. In the end, the tension between the Führerheer of the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht and the would-be levée en masse under party auspices was only resolved by the Night of the Long Knives, in the summer of 1934.⁵¹

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 179 – 180.  Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee, 31– 32.  Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee, 37; Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht, 204.  Geyer, “Professionals and Junkers,” 90, 102.  Geyer, Aufrüstung oder Sicherheit, 400 – 402.  Wette, “Ideology, Propaganda, and Internal Politics,” 130; Geyer, “Professionals and Junkers,” 111.

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And even after that, both positions could be maintained with great vehemence and sometimes in surprising combinations. Claus Graf Stauffenberg, when he was still only a first lieutenant during his time at the Kriegsakademie wrote a study, later published, in which he analyzed the options for airborne (parachutist) units, including a analysis of strategy. Assuming that “enemy propaganda was successful in our country during the World War,” he opined that “apart from a unified command, the strictest organization and centralization of the entire administration will be necessary” – a clear allusion to the theories of total war in a paper which otherwise favored highly mobile warfare with fastmoving forces.⁵² Stauffenberg’s second major paper, on army cavalry, exhibited a tendency toward taking elitist positions: the army, he argued, must not be subjected to the “democratization” that he felt would occur through complete motorization.⁵³ What we have here is a junior officer combining questions of technology and more general assumptions about the army’s role in politics, fitting seamlessly with the debates about the war of the future.⁵⁴ Even after World War II had started, this discussion was not considered closed. To the contrary, as part of its internal radicalization, some in the SS hatched ideas to turn the army into a conventional and largely immobile infantry force designed to cover specific spaces, whereas the SS itself should become a “permanently mobile force about the size of one army group with great technological ability.”⁵⁵ One of the conspirators, Roland von Hößlin, later explained, under interrogation by the Gestapo, his expectations regarding the end of the war: After the field army’s fighting power had been exhausted, I thought it madness to conduct a partisan war within Germany on two fronts against heavily armed mobile armies.⁵⁶

This was an outright refusal of Joachim von Stülpnagel’s concepts which the Nazi Party was planning to revive in order to continue the war within the Reich’s borders. This wide range of concepts for a future war, as it developed during the Reichswehr period, influenced the later military opposition to the Third Reich in various ways.⁵⁷ First and foremost, World War II turned out to be in almost

     

Stauffenberg, “Gedanken zur Abwehr feindlicher Fallschirmeinheiten,” 461– 462. Krolak, “Der Weg zum Neuen Reich,” 551. Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 168. Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, 146. Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 373 (9 September 1944). See for this Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 72– 73.

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all its phases a mechanized, mobile war. Basing his strategic views on his own limited war experience, Hitler was intellectually incapable of a holistic understanding of strategy, which of course was one of the most obvious reasons for accusing him of dilettantish leadership (see chapter 4.3). At the same time, World War II was a war of extremely large numbers which put the existing human and industrial potentials of all parties to a severe test. The concern with the “staying power” of the “rear,” – i. e., the population of the Reich – preoccupied the regime throughout the war and conditioned its policies. The differing concepts of war also led to different concepts of the military organization, one of which – the mass or “national” army – best suited the Nazi ideological feature of the “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft; see Chapter 3.7). Hitler failed to grasp this, too. Even within the military resistance, there were rival perspectives on the military: Beck of course favored the prioritization of operational matters, in the mold of Seeckt and, originally, Schlieffen. Stauffenberg, however, ended up being a close collaborator of Fromm and knew more than most about the demographic, economic, and logistical limitations of the German war fighting machinery. If one looks at Stauffenberg’s class at the war academy, there is a surprising number of officers who ended up in what one might term “strategic logistics,” i. e., handling questions of overall economic and industrial resources connected with the Reich’s warfighting capabilities.⁵⁸ This included Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, Stauffenberg’s successor as chief of staff in the Allgemeines Heeresamt (AHA, General Army Office), Colonel Eberhard Finckh, Quartermaster General of all German forces in France (Oberbefehlshaber West), both of whom perished in the resistance, as well as Colonel Frans Nordenskjöld, who was Quartermaster of VIII. Army Corps and later of the Eleventh Army. Another classmate at the time was Albert C. Wedemeyer, who later became a four-star general in the US Army and was chief author of the 1941 Victory Program.⁵⁹ Although this class was taught operations planning and tactics, it seems it also received a substantial dose of strategic warfare instruction. Both concepts, the Führerheer and the Massenheer views of military forces can be found within the resistance against Nazi injustice as well: Beck represented the prerogative of operational planning, following in the footsteps of Seeckt, who had himself followed in the footsteps of Schlieffen. Stauffenberg, on the  A complete list of his classmates can be found in a Lehrgangszeitung (memorial brochure) created at the end of the course, a copy of which is held by the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, Berlin. I owe the use of this source to my friend and colleague Professor Johannes Tuchel, the director of the GDW.  Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer reports!, 55 – 56.

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other hand, ended up working for Beck’s long-standing rival, Fromm, and thus knew more about the logistic and economic limitations of the German war-making machine.

3.2 A State within the State During the 1920s, the perceived choice between an “army of leaders” and an “army of the masses” also led to differing assumptions about the relationship between the state and its armed forces. The early post-World War II historiography characterized the Reichswehr as a “state within the state.”⁶⁰ More recent research has produced compelling arguments of a military less autonomous or self-sufficient than that phrase would suggest. It has been established, for example, that the Reichswehr obtained consent for its armaments programs by accommodating to some extent the Weimar parliamentary system, which reciprocated by bending the rules so that the military could maintain certain capabilities not permitted under the Versailles treaty. The term for this is a “bellicistic republic”⁶¹ whose civilian agencies were far more involved in preparing for war than had hitherto been assumed. Still, the military retained a “para-constitutional” status“⁶² which derived directly from its extraconstitutional role in Imperial Germany. The Weimar constitution originally envisioned the military as part of the regular executive and had therefore placed it under command of a minister of war responsible to parliament. Article 47 of the constitution, however, designated the Reich president as head of state and supreme commander of the forces, despite making no provision for an institutional apparatus that would equip him to fulfill this role. As a result, the military, without a tether to a specific constitutional mooring, drifted apart from all other bodies of the executive into its “para-constitutional position.”⁶³ The latitude enjoyed by the military was further exaggerated by the tendency to aggrandize the president in his capacity as military figurehead and the concomitant downplaying of parliamentary authority. This was true even when Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert was president, but these tenden-

 For this discussion see Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex, 429. One of the first authors was Wheeler-Bennett, who first pointed out in The Nemesis of Power (1953) the connection between the Reichswehr and the military resistance.  Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 8.  Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex, 434; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 103, 116.

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cies took on even greater significance after the aging World War I field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, succeeded him. This was largely the influence of Seeckt, whose concept of modern technology, and of the erstwhile General Staff as a functional elite, avoided parliamentary oversight as much as possible and provided for maximum separation between military men and the “noxious” influence of civilian society. This is why Seeckt also abhorred the paramilitary associations which had sprung up during the first years of the Weimar Republic and which had seemed indispensable at that time to protect it from dangers from within and without. Obviously, those groups perceived themselves as a sort of “nation in arms,” and Seeckt suspected a willingness among them to lash out at the republic whenever they felt it was time to do so. In Bavaria, the Nazi-sponsored SA as well as the other associations had been so closely intertwined with the Reichswehr that when Hitler and Ludendorff instigated their Beer Hall Putsch, in November 1923, broad segments of the Reichswehr refused to move against the rebels.⁶⁴ Seeckt and the Reichswehr troops positioned outside Bavaria assumed executive powers throughout the Reich, and for the first time – but by no means the last – the president transferred these executive powers, passing over even the minister of war, to Seeckt, as the commander in chief of the army.⁶⁵ The officer corps saw itself not as serving the republic, and certainly not as serving the government of the day, but believed their loyalty was due to “the state” or “the nation,” independent of the prevailing constitutional structure. Such thinking could of course lead to a situation in which Reichswehr leaders would have to choose between the constitutional form of government and the interests of “the nation” as the generals perceived them.⁶⁶ It seemed as if the military leaders “reserved the right to disobey, without actually making use of it for the moment, remaining in a standby position.”⁶⁷ This meant that the military inevitably remained indifferent to the constitution while revering the state as an abstract moral value.

 Dornberg, Der Hitlerputsch; Hürten, Das Krisenjahr 1923; Heinemann, “Eduard Dietl,” 101– 102.  Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 186 – 187; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 84.  Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 219 – 220.  Sauer, “Die Mobilmachung der Gewalt,” 698. See also Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 219. Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 98, calls this Seeckt’s “attentism”.

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The alignment with such an abstract ideal of statehood had very concrete consequences in that it helped stabilize the republic as the current “vessel” of a metaphorical state, but did not tie the officer corps closer to the parliamentary system.⁶⁸

If it has been attributed accurately, the then-Chief of Staff of the Army, General der Artillerie Franz Halder perhaps expressed this best when he wrote to Goerdeler in 1939: “The Army will do its duty to the country, even against Hitler’s government if the situation so requires.”⁶⁹ Yet, this attitude of conservative officers was markedly different from the later tendency of the Nazi regime to do away with existing state structures altogether in order to replace them with ad hoc organizations and parallel party structures, and thus to hasten the demise of the failing organs of state before supplanting the state from its functions altogether.⁷⁰ Plans for the attempted coup d’état of 20 July 1944 were built on the assumption that the army would assume control of the civil authorities. These plans kept with a tradition that included such terms as “state of siege,” “state of emergency,” and “martial law.” “The assumption of civil authorities by the Army” was a phrase used in Prussian-German military history before. Plans for an operation “Valkyrie,” which would deploy the home army in case of internal unrest (such as a communist uprising, strikes among forced laborers, enemy airborne landings, or a combination of those) were developed during the summer of 1943 without Army officers suspecting anything unusual.⁷¹ Most of the applicable legal framework was based on the Prussian law on the military state of emergency of 4 June 1851.⁷² For lack of any superseding legislation following unification of Germany, this Prussian law remained in force throughout the Reich, with the notable exception of Bavaria, until 1919. It distinguished external from internal threats. In the event of an external threat, the commanding generals and the commandants of fortresses could declare a state of emergency for their respective areas of responsibility; in the event of “unrest,” however, the state of emergency would have to be declared by the civilian government. But even then, the generals would be able to act independently and have their actions endorsed afterwards. The meaningful consequence in both cases was that all civilian and military authorities were ultimately subject

 Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 73.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 168  Mommsen, “Politische Perspektiven des aktiven Widerstands,” 29 – 30; Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 104; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 422.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 338.  For this and the following see Deist, “Der Kriegszustand,” XXXI–XXXIV.

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to the orders of the commanding general or, as the case might be, the commandant of a fortress. At the same time, courts martial would take over from the civilian judiciary. It was a long-standing Prussian tradition to entrust internal security to the military.⁷³ Article 68 of the 1871 Reich Constitution gave the emperor as the “Supreme Warlord” the right to declare a “State of War.” Although the terminology had changed, the context made it plain that the regulation was aimed at the suppression of internal unrest – at the time, pointing specifically to social democrats – especially as the police would hardly have had enough forces to quell a major uprising.⁷⁴ During the First World War, the commanding generals had duly assumed control of the civil authorities. Whether this was an efficient command structure for the Reich was debated even then.⁷⁵ The military saw its role in particular in assuring sufficient food supplies for the civilian population (something the “state of siege” of old had obviously always included as well) and thus in preventing the civilians from getting restless.⁷⁶ It was these clauses which gave the military the legal veneer for its counterrevolutionary activities during the years of 1918/19.⁷⁷ In 1920, the first parts of the “Collected Regulations on the Use of the Military within the Reich in case of Public Emergencies or Internal Unrest” were printed; they detailed how Seeckt hoped the army would proceed in such cases.⁷⁸ In the years after, the young republic repeatedly made use of the state of emergency to ensure its survival, especially because Article 48 of the new Weimar constitution expressly provided for this instrument. On the other hand, when parts of the military, led by Ludendorff, General Walther von Lüttwitz, and the high-ranking civil official Wolfgang Kapp staged a coup against the republic, they also invoked the tradition of the military state of emergency.⁷⁹ The military adventure failed when the socialist workers were called out on a general

 Hürten, Reichswehr und Ausnahmezustand, 6 – 7.  Keller, Die Wehrmacht, 29 – 30; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 24.  Handbuch zur deutschen Militärgeschichte, V, 125 – 127; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, 184– 185; Hürten, Reichswehr und Ausnahmezustand, 8; Müller, “The Mobilization of the German Economy”; Keller, Die Wehrmacht, 32.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 93 – 94.  Schmidt, Heimatheer und Revolution, 25 – 41.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 25 – 28, 91.  Möllers, “Reichswehr schießt nicht auf Reichswehr”; Wette, Gustav Noske, 627– 685; Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 581– 582; Meinl, “Das gesamte bewegliche und unbewegliche Vermögen,” 54. For the context of the Reichswehr history in general see Broszat, Die Machtergreifung, 75 – 78.

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strike. For many officers, it was a traumatic experience to have lost the confrontation with the workers which, after all, had constituted one of the central tasks of the imperial military. On his deathbed in 1943, Generaloberst von Hammerstein, an avowed enemy of the Nazi regime from the beginning, implored the officers he knew to support the opposition, “For God’s sake, boys, don’t do another Kapp Putsch!” (the failed military coup d’état of 1920).⁸⁰ When Stauffenberg bypassed the civilian and political head of the conspiracy, Goerdeler, and directly contacted Julius Leber as a representative of the working classes, he did so with the intention of ensuring that there would be no repetition of 1920.⁸¹ As we have seen above, the Beer Hall Putsch staged by Ludendorff and Hitler in Munich in 1923 resulted in another state of emergency. As the President, Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, transferred the executive power to Seeckt and the Reichswehr, ⁸² some generals toyed with the idea of staging a countercoup, under Seeckt’s leadership, against the democratic government in case it was excessively accommodating of the Allies.⁸³ One of the National Socialists shot in Munich had with him the draft of an “emergency constitution” which would have resulted in a “military dictatorship of the economy.” Paragraph Nine read: “A state of siege will be declared for the entire Reich.”⁸⁴ The Weimar constitution had, however, brought with it one essential modification: the military (i. e., the commanders in the military districts) were no longer entitled to declare the state of siege themselves; they could only act after being ordered to do so by the civil authorities. In October 1919, Seeckt informed the relevant commanders that if the need were to arise, they should apply for such orders, so that the initiative would still rest with the military. Minister of War Noske simultaneously worked on a draft of the detailed emergency regulations which would be required in such a situation.⁸⁵ The possibility of the Reichswehr assuming power in an emergency was a thought that hung over the Weimar years. In 1926, during a Berlin meeting of the conservative Heimatbund (“homeland federation”), the monarchist HansCarl Graf von Hardenberg (later a leading member of the conspiracy) highlighted the Communist threat. In case of need, he concluded, the President would have

 Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 356 (28 March 1943); Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse,” 32.  Tuchel, “Kontakte zwischen Sozialdemokraten und Kommunisten”; Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War”, 874.  Pyta, “Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand,” 387.  Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 204.  Meinl, “Das gesamte bewegliche und unbewegliche Vermögen,” 44– 47, 54.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 48 – 53.

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to be able to invoke Article 48 of the constitution and deploy the Reichswehr to suppress a Communist uprising. If the capabilities of the military turned out to be insufficient, the “patriotic associations” would have to be called in. There was a close cooperation with the military district command even then – District Command III (Berlin and its surroundings) being represented by Captain Friedrich Fromm who argued along similar lines.⁸⁶ In 1938, the strongly conservative Prussian minister of finance, Johannes Popitz, drafted “Guidelines for Enactment of the State of Emergency Law.” By then, he clearly was part of an oppositional movement, although the year before, he had still allowed Hitler to decorate him with the “Golden Party Badge.”⁸⁷ He, too, took it for granted that the military would only be deployed if called in by the political leaders – a point on which the plans of the 1944 conspirators differed notably. Unlike Popitz’s concept, the 1944 Valkyrie orders provided for “political representatives” to advise their respective district commanders, but to be subordinate to them.⁸⁸ In most other respects, these orders used, at times verbatim, earlier drafts by Popitz and his closest associates (Ulrich von Hassell). As just one example, one of the original texts by Popitz read: Irrespective of the rigorous measures required according to the circumstances, anyone will have to act in a way which will illustrate to the populace the distance to the arbitrary methods of the former rulers.⁸⁹

On 20 July 1944, the orders issued read: The populace will have to be made aware of the distance to the indiscriminate methods of the former rulers.⁹⁰

The Nazi Party had assumed responsibility for caring for the victims of the Allies’ intensifying aerial bombing raids, but the large-scale attacks on the Reich’s cities during the second half of the war soon showed the incompetence of the Gauleiters and the party apparatus in coordinating the necessary interventions of air defense batteries, fire brigades, Replacement Army, police, and party agencies. Again, it was suggested that the Replacement Army and its command structure

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 170 – 171.  https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz96822.html#ndbcontent, accessed 22 November 2017.  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 581– 585.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 465.  Teletype message KR – HOKW 02155 dated 20 July 1944. The German text was first published in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 67– 69 (Enclosure to report dated July 27, 1944). As a rule, we will quote from Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 756 – 757.

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would be best suited to this job, while Himmler maneuvered to have control assigned to the Higher SS and Police Leaders (Höhere SS und Polizeiführer). Eventually, in this quarrel over competences, Goebbels and Bormann jointly managed to keep the matter in party hands so that its functionaries could keep dispensing favours.⁹¹ Essential to our context is that even in the summer of 1944, the generals could safely assume that a military usurpation of power in a crisis of the Reich would not seem totally absurd. During the afternoon and evening of 20 July 1944, many district commanders were reluctant to execute their Valkyrie orders, usually questioning the underlying premise (“The Führer is dead”), but it is significant that none of them ever questioned the basic right of the military to act and assume control. The politics of the covert rearmament were “para-constitutional” also because they continually required military officers and civilian officials to break the law. The Versailles peace treaty and its limitations on German armaments had been forcibly enshrined in German law, but circumventing it soon became a common pastime in the Weimar Republic: The Pomeranian lumberjack who, during the German-Polish postwar conflicts discovered an illegal weapons cache in a barn, and reported it to police, was perceived as a “national traitor” by nationalists.⁹²

The street fighting during the revolution and the constant lawbreaking had made the bands of soldiers accustomed to valuing the “right of the strongest” over the “majesty of the law”⁹³ (as the national-conservative resistance would later describe it).⁹⁴ This went also for some who later perished in the resistance: the then-Naval Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris had been on the jury during the trial of the murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and had helped one of those sentenced to prison to escape.⁹⁵ Founding and maintaining a secret “State Protection Organization” had no other aim but to create a reservoir of trained military personnel close to the borders, and in excess of the limits imposed by the “Versailles Diktat.”⁹⁶ Captain Fromm played a key role in this while assigned to Military District Command III  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 629 – 631.  Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, 14.  Schramm, Beck und Goerdeler, 233.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 22.  Mueller, Canaris, 99; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 39; Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939 – 1945, 9.  Nakata, Der Grenz- und Landesschutz.

3.3 The Reichswehr: A Forum for Frank Debate

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(Berlin). His activities included arms smuggling as well as covert collusion with the civilian agencies which in turn were required to disregard budgetary legislation. Throughout the Reichswehr, and indeed the Weimar Republic, breaking the law became a “national obligation.”⁹⁷ Seeing that the Reichswehr had sworn an oath to the constitution, it also meant that “among Army and Navy officers, breaking your oath of allegiance became fashionable.”⁹⁸ For a history of the military resistance, it is worth noting that the Reichswehr was already breeding a tradition of disregarding the law, and even the constitution, in favor of an overarching, yet rather nebulous “public good.” On the one hand, this facilitated the Nazi practice of employing the military as a tool to commit mass murder. On the other hand, among the few officers who found themselves confronted with a policy that would lead the nation into ruin, it also led to a decision to act contrary to the positive law, and to attempt a coup d’état with military means. It seemed a matter of routine to them that, even after 1939, the military should have a role to play in politics at home.

3.3 The Reichswehr: A Forum for Frank Debate Stauffenberg’s study on the use of airborne troops can serve to illustrate something else as well: even in the Wehrmacht of 1938, officers were able to discuss topics of professional interest very openly and to express an array of opinions on them. In a further study (never published, an ultimately wise decision), Stauffenberg argued in favor of maintaining a combat role for troops on horseback in the next war. The proposal was dismissed several times as being “anachronistic,” but the young author’s career continued apace.⁹⁹ This frankness could also be heard in the debates about the “war of the future.”¹⁰⁰ Due to the armament limitations, the Reichswehr was barred from conducting practical trials in key areas of modern warfare, such as tank deployment, air forces development, and the use of heavy artillery. As a result, these debates, which otherwise would have played out during the course of practical exercises, were moved “from the auditorium or the training grounds into the

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 156, 162; Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, 27.  Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 67. See, however, the critical position taken by Lange, Der Fahneneid, 110.  Bentzien, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, 80 – 81.  Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 83.

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forum of the professional journal.”¹⁰¹ Periodicals such as the Militärwochenblatt (the most widely read military weekly) or Wissen und Wehr (“Knowledge and Defense”) reflected controversial uncensored points of view.¹⁰² This was by no means a matter of course in that era; around that same time, a US Army major by the name of Dwight D. Eisenhower found himself under threat of a court martial for publishing an opinion on the independent role of modern tanks.¹⁰³ This willingness to debate, which covered strictly military matters as well as issues regarding the role of the army in politics, reflected the increasing professionalization of the Reichswehr. Most officer cadets still hailed from the “desirable circles” of society, but the relevance of brilliant operational or tactical skill was beginning to outweigh the merit of noble birth. The culture of debate also kept the Reichswehr informed of developments in other nations. In addition to its armaments deals with Sweden and Russia, the Reichswehr also enhanced its potential by monitoring publications from Britain, France, Italy, and other nations.¹⁰⁴ Articles published in military journals served as prime conversation material in the various regiments. It was an unwritten rule that whatever was said in the mess would remain there and that even preposterous ideas, or minority opinions, would not be sanctioned. Because of the Reichswehr’s intentional detachment from the general public, the messes, in particular those of very traditionminded regiments – such as the Ninth Infantry in Potsdam or the Seventeenth Cavalry in Bamberg, evolved into sites of high-level internal intellectual exchanges on topics including political, social, or economic questions.¹⁰⁵ The tradition of a relatively open discourse within the military was part of the Reichswehr milieu, and it was actively supported by the War Ministry.¹⁰⁶ The existence of this military discourse, which remained detached from civil society yet internally remarkably open, continued into the Third Reich. In fact, the military journals were the only printed media exempt from Goebbels’ censor-

 Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 148. See also Diedrich, Paulus, 93.  Heinemann, “A artilharia na Primeira Guerra Mundial”; Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 166 – 169.  Ty Seidule, “Eisenhower pendant l’entre-deux guerres,” 267.  Geyer, “Professionals and Junkers,” 82; Groß, Groß, Myth and Reality, 139; Haller, Militärzeitschriften in der Weimarer Republik, 487. Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 42, does not differentiate sufficiently between the concepts of mobile versus mass warfare.  Finker, “Das Potsdamer Infanterieregiment 9 und der konservative militärische Widerstand,” 455 – 456; Metzger, Offiziersehre und Widerstand.  Haller, Militärzeitschriften in der Weimarer Republik, 215 – 229.

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ship. Military units were similarly off limits to the Gestapo (secret police) because soldiers were subject to reintroduced military justice.¹⁰⁷ Like Stauffenberg, most of the conspirators were too young to have published much of consequence prior to 1933. Many of them, however, came from the milieu which had conducted debates about the war of the future. Among the most widely published was former General Dr. Hermann Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, President of the Reich Archive and father of Colonel Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim, who was executed the night of 20 July 1944. A further connection to the conspiracy is found in Mertz’s successor in the Reichsarchiv, Generalmajor Hans von Haeften, also an author of considerable accomplishment – who lost both his sons, Hans-Bernd and Werner, in the aftermath of the failed coup. This emergence of a military culture explains why some of the most prestigious regiments, such as the two mentioned above, were significantly overrepresented in the military opposition, and in the concrete plans for a military coup.¹⁰⁸ It was this milieu which in 1938, and again in 1943/44, provided officers a setting in which they could speak openly about the chances and the direction of the war and even to voice pessimist opinions, because it could safely be assumed that any such comments would not be relayed further.¹⁰⁹ Regiments proved to be more important as durable social networks than was a common social or class background.¹¹⁰ After 20 July 1944, the Gestapo interrogators voiced their incredulity: What is striking is the openness with which the clique of conspirators could discuss the military situation for months with an extremely pessimistic attitude. Apart from those directly involved, like Beck and Hoepner, a wide circle of individuals, some known to each other personally, some relatives, was engaged in discussing problems of the military situation in this way. In the Bendlerstraße, it seems to have been common to dispense with all notions of professional tact and to disregard all due caution.¹¹¹

In the run-up to the 20 July coup, such critical discussions about professional questions were in turn used in attempts at recruiting additional conspirators

 Haller, Militärzeitschriften in der Weimarer Republik, 492; Mühleisen, “Das letzte Duell.”  For Reiterregiment 17 see now the volume accompanying the new exhibition in the Bavarian Army Museum, Ingolstadt: Metzger, Offiziersehre und Widerstand.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 4.  In 1984, Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 8 – 9, put a different touch on this; more recently, see Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 19, 191.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 49 (25 July 1944).

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without unduly endangering the “recruiter” or the coup organization already in existence. The number of participants is impressive, as is the fact that the many recruitment attempts virtually never turn up in the sources. Indeed, not a single one of these efforts resulted in a denunciation or an arrest.¹¹² Hans Fritzsche survived because he had operated only in the margins of the resistance; he describes the course of one such “recruitment interview” in which the potential recruit refused to become involved, but which never had any consequences before or after 20 July 1944.¹¹³ When Roland von Hößlin, from Stauffenberg’s regiment, was asked why he had not reported Stauffenberg’s activities, he replied simply, but probably quite honestly, that “the idea never entered his head.”¹¹⁴ In the same way that the long-standing social networks of the military gave shape to the conspiracy, these sorts of years-old acquaintances also explain some of the entrenched rivalries – for example, between Keitel, Fromm, and Beck – which had their effect until 20 July 1944. They were the result both of conflicting personal ambition and of sharply differing philosophies of the Army’s role vis-a-vis the state, and their contemporaries were well aware of this.¹¹⁵ In particular, Keitel’s repeated attempts to limit Fromm’s responsibilities affected all planning for a coup d’état.¹¹⁶ The Gestapo later attacked the officer corps’ internal openness as well as its habits of isolating itself and excluding “outsiders.” Although this surely had more to do with deflecting blame for their failure to detect the conspiracy early enough, at least to have prevented the attack on Hitler’s life, the Gestapo nonetheless got one part right. ¹¹⁷ Their investigators accurately identified the social coherence of the traditional officer corps as a prerequisite for a coup achieving this order of success. Quoting Stauffenberg first, they explained: “This is the hour when the officer, and the officer alone, must persevere.” What Stauffenberg proclaimed here was an officer corps with ties which, free from any political liability to National Socialism, would constitute a unified body, easy to control with a few orders. This implied the hope that, due to its manifold social, familial, military and privileged connections, it would act as a closed and politically largely indifferent unit.¹¹⁸

 Graml, “Militärischer Widerstand,” 92.  Fritzsche, Ein Leben im Schatten des Verrates, 41, 71.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 375 (9 September 1944).  Note from Generalmajor Carl-Erik Koehler, Chief of Staff BdE/Chef HRüst, regarding a conversation with Generalleutnant Rudolf Schmundt in his official diary for July 1942, as quoted in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 455.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 150, 323.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 296 (24 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 298 (24 August 1944).

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3.4 The Early Nazi Party The detachment and vague mutual distrust with which Weimar Germany’s military and government viewed each other produced a type of officer with a similarly skeptical if not suspicious view of his political counterparts. It follows the same logic, then, that the ambivalence with which the Reichswehr and the NSDAP of the 1930s would also produce this type of officer, unafraid of occasional disobedience. Under its original name, Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, the Nazi Party was a Bavarian fringe movement with an incoherent collection of right-wing, anti-parliamentary ideas that combined nationalist and socialist elements. From the beginning, it was marked by strong antisemitic inclinations, although none of these elements was unique among the political turmoil of the period. What set it apart from other political groups was its early focus on the World War I corporal Adolf Hitler as its “Führer” and its marked willingness to use violence for political ends.¹¹⁹ This “movement” (it preferred to see itself as such rather than as a political party) proved to be attractive to current and former soldiers. After World War I ended, Hitler continued to serve in the military as a propagandist, and among his earliest followers were officers such as Army Captain (later Generaloberst) Eduard Dietl.¹²⁰ Yet, after 1921 the Reichswehr law prevented members of the military from joining political parties, so that after that time, the party no longer had any active military members. This did not stop serving officers and men from sympathizing with the party and its “Führer,” and its nationalist, racist ideas. In keeping with the “bellicistic” structure of the Weimar Republic, the army saw the paramilitary “National Associations” (largely from the political right, and including the SA among others) as a reservoir of trained fighters against enemies from within as well as from outside. In the summer of 1923, for example, Captain Dietl had been officially assigned by his commander to supervise the SA’s paramilitary training.¹²¹ During the preceding spring, the Reichswehr and the “Cooperative of National Combat Organizations” had participated in joint training and exercises in full public view. These practices contravened explicit

 Wildt, Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus, above all 20 – 21. However, see also the highly critical review by Hans Mommsen in NPL 1/2008, 15; Kershaw, Hitler 1889 – 1936, 131– 212.  Heinemann, “Eduard Dietl,” 99 – 101.  “Order Nr. 3 of the ‘Reichsflagge’ Führer, Röhm, dated 10 April 1923,” as quoted in: Münchner Post, Nr. 89, 17. April 1923 in: StA München, Pol.Dir. 6697: “National Socialists to be on the southern part of the parade ground […] Captain Dietl, Infantry Regiment 19, 1st battalion, will report at 11:30 a.m. to the leader of the National Socialists.”

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orders from the Reichswehr high command in Berlin,¹²² but they were authorized by the Bavarian Seventh Division command in Munich. In the context of the French and Belgian occupation of German (including Bavarian) territory, the aim was to “shape soldiers qualified for service in the forces”; any training for civil war was expressly forbidden.¹²³ This explains why, in November 1923, elements of the Bavarian Reichswehr, Dietl among them, refused to put down the Beer Hall Putsch being led by their comrades-in-arms from the SA. Contacts had become far too close for any action against the “Führer” and the “war hero,” World War I General Erich Ludendorff, who had effectively been the military dictator during the later phases of World War I.¹²⁴

3.5 Hitler’s Own War Experiences Hitler himself had experienced World War I in the trenches of the western front. Contrary to his claims in his semi-autobiographical book, Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), he had not served on the actual frontlines but had been a runner with the regimental staff.¹²⁵ He had received the Iron Cross, both second and first class, and while the former was by no means rare, the latter was far less commonly awarded. Yet, in Hitler’s case it seems to have been less an indication of bravery (as he himself always insisted), but rather due to his good contacts with the officers in the regimental headquarters.¹²⁶ Another decisive factor was that Hitler had been in the hospital, and not with his unit, when the war ended. In Mein Kampf, he later claimed that the lack of willpower on the “home front” had stabbed the valiant, unbeaten army in the back, but this was not only due to the book being written in the isolation of a prison cell but also to the fact that Hitler had not experienced directly the plummeting morale and increasing rates of desertion during the autumn of 1918.¹²⁷ Which is why for Hitler, throughout World War II, maintaining “morale” within the Reich population remained of the utmost importance. If feeding the “Germans” meant exploiting the populations of the occupied territories, then

 Münchner Post, 3. April 1923, in: StA München, Pol.Dir. 6697.  Training Directive. Draft Signing-up Form; both in: BA-MA RH 53 – 7/388.  Gordon, Hitlerputsch, 304– 306. Memo Commander I.R. 19, LTC v Wenz. BA-MA, RH 37/213a, parts printed in: Hürten, Das Krisenjahr 1923, Nr. 72 and 102.  See, e. g., Weber, Hitlers erster Krieg; this has effectively rendered earlier accounts such as Kershaw, Hitler 1889 – 1936, 91– 97 and certainly Longerich, Hitler, 33 – 45, obsolete.  Weber, Hitlers erster Krieg, 285 – 286.  Kellerhoff, Mein Kampf, 122.

3.6 The Nazi Party and the Reichswehr before 1933

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so be it. It also meant that, to maintain “discipline,” Hitler would forever insist on draconian punishment of deserters, “shirkers,” etc. Hitler had known war only as stagnant; he never had first-hand experience of highly mechanized maneuver warfare or of the large, sweeping operations on the eastern front of 1914– 1917. The Austrian-born corporal had also seen duty only in a Bavarian regiment and had never become acquainted with the other contingents of the German military apparatus; perhaps most notable was that he never had contact with any Prussian troops. His concept of what war was like, formed between 1914 and 1918, would inform his thinking to the very end as supreme commander of the Wehrmacht. They resulted in a deeply felt antipathy against General Staff officers, especially those from the Prussian nobility, and even more so those who began their military service in the artillery. Instead, he preferred infantry officers, such as Rommel or Dietl, who were of humble origins, preferably from southern Germany, and had had frontline experience in World War I. On the whole, he noted that “it seems the Bavarian officer corps was far more progressive and more amenable to National Socialism than the so-called Prussian officer corps.”¹²⁸

3.6 The Nazi Party and the Reichswehr before 1933 Most politicians or military officers of the national-conservative ilk found the National Socialist movement to be too plebeian, especially the crude brutishness of the party’s SA and its storm troopers. Future 20 July conspirators Ulrich-Wilhelm Graf von Schwerin, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg, and Eduard Brücklmeier had witnessed Hitler’s 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and had tried to stop their fellow students, whom the Nazis had incited to violence. They had also helped evacuate the world-famous surgeon, Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch, out of the university after he had unsuccessfully tried to quell the militant mob of students.¹²⁹ Schwerin later represented the interests of Germans in those territories that had been ceded to Poland after 1919. It was there that he first witnessed Nazi violence, against Poles, and thus fully understood the criminal nature of the movement even before it came to power in 1933.¹³⁰ Throughout the 1920s, the Nazi Party largely avoided contact with the Reichswehr. Hitler and his “movement” made constant demands for a “power-

 Engel, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 33.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 42– 43.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 45.

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ful” Germany, but what exactly that should mean, and what role the conventional Reichswehr was to play in it, remained unclear. The 25 Point Program adopted by the party in February 1920 was supposed to be an immutable constitution of sorts, but its Point 22 (“We demand the abolition of the mercenary troops [Söldnerarmee, or “army for hire”] and the formation of a people’s army“¹³¹) never had any concrete political consequences. Even if one were to read Mein Kampf as a programmatic document (which would be a highly problematic undertaking¹³²), it does not offer any indication of intended policies regarding the military. This lack of specificity was an essential characteristic of Hitler’s political mindset, and it would not change before or after 1933. Hitler saw the failure of his 1923 putsch as an indication that provoking a civil war against the Weimar Republic was not going to get him anywhere. Upon his release from prison, and despite all the rhetoric of violence, he realized he had no choice but to seek his fortunes with the voters. To that end, the SA, which had gained a modicum of independence, was strictly subordinated to the party again, and Franz Pfeffer von Salomon, who was appointed “Supreme SA Führer,” undertook the task of binding the organization more closely to Hitler’s person as Führer of the party.¹³³ Pfeffer von Salomon was replaced in early 1931 by Ernst Röhm, Hitler’s faithful friend, who oversaw the organization’s growth and renewed militarization. The SA’s rank designations, instead of merely indicating functions within the party, assumed parallels with Army ranks, which set the stage for future rivalries between the militaries of party and state.¹³⁴ More than a few Army officers viewed the SA’s activities with growing unease. Even among those whose duties included formal, para-constitutional cooperation with the “defense associations” (the euphemism for the various paramilitary right-wing formations) or who were sympathetic toward the idea of a mass army, the SA had a dubious reputation. Captain Fromm, attached to the Berlinbased Military District Command III, sharply objected to the SA’s repeated demands to be recognized as the sole representative of the various paramilitary or-

 Das 25-Punkte-Programm der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei [24 February 1920] http://www.documentarchiv.de/wr/1920/nsdap-programm.html, accessed 16 January 2017. See also a speech by NSDAP member of the Reichstag Hans Dietrich on 27 May 1927, quoted in Löffelbein, Ehrenbürger der Nation, 112.  Glaser, Adolf Hitlers Hetzschrift; Kellerhoff, Mein Kampf. For a critical edition of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, see Hartmann, Hitler.  Bessel, “Militarismus,” 208 – 209.  Bessel, “Militarismus,” 210.

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ganizations throughout Germany. Rather, he preferred to cooperate with those associations which were affiliated with the democratic parties.¹³⁵ Even as late as 1928, Hitler seemed quite prepared to confront the Republic’s military with his party apparatus. The unedited manuscript of his “second book” indicates again that he wanted to see the “mercenary” Reichswehr (the Nazi’s derogatory term for the fully professional military) replaced by a “truly German people’s army” which would simultaneously have to be the “most socialist organization of the state.”¹³⁶ A year later, he was even more outspoken on the topic. Seeckt and Defense Minister Otto Geßler had repeatedly stated that the Reichswehr soldier would have to be apolitical. Speaking in Munich on 15 March 1929, Hitler declared: General von Seeckt and the former Reichswehr Minister Geßler, in a speech on 5 March 1929, voiced an opinion which still puts into doubt whether the German soldier may be allowed to be a political, or whether, to the contrary, he will have to be apolitical. […] For us National Socialists, the Reichswehr, as a militia, as a people’s army, or as a standing army, will never be more than a means to an end.¹³⁷

According to Hitler, the party desired to mount a large, highly politicized national army which would instill in the masses a willingness to fight. In 1930, he went so far as to call the Reichswehr a “republican-democratic parliamentary guard,”¹³⁸ squarely confronting the Reichswehr high command’s self-perception as a largely autonomous organ of the state.¹³⁹ Konstantin Hierl, who served as Hitler’s “military expert,” worked to influence public debate on the topic. A former officer, World War I veteran, and a confidant of General Ludendorff, Hierl had been forced to resign his commission after the failed 1923 putsch and had become a member of the Nazi Party in 1929 and soon rose to the role of advisor. In debates about the army of Germany’s future, he rejected out of hand highly mechanized forces because the Nazis preferred the opposing concept of a national mass army. Instead, he advocated for what his mentor, Ludendorff, would call in the mid-1930s, “total war.”¹⁴⁰ Under pressure from President Hindenburg, the center parties undertook in the early 1930s to edge a bit closer to the National Socialists.¹⁴¹ Thus ended the

      

Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 166 – 167. Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 314. Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 46 – 47 (Dokument 6). Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, 10. Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 70 – 71 (Dokument 6). Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 192. Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 190.

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“defense consensus” which had included the Social Democrats and which was succeeded by an ad hoc cooperative relationship between the Reichswehr and the SA, a policy with an openly anti-socialist drive. One of the main representatives of this change was the chief of staff of Military District I (Königsberg, East Prussia), Colonel Walther von Reichenau, who had always been sympathetic to the idea of a “people’s army.”¹⁴² Soon, other officers, too, were unwilling to ostracize Hitler’s party completely. At a time when the Reichswehr’s personnel resources were drying up as the soldiers of World War I vintage were beginning to retire, Nazi calls for rearmament and a people’s army held a seductive allure for some in the officer corps.¹⁴³ The advances made by the Nazi Party in winning over the Reichswehr, or at least those in the army who favored a mass army, became public knowledge in 1930 when three lieutenants from the Ulm-based Fifth Artillery Regiment were arrested and tried for attempted high treason and conspiracy.¹⁴⁴ The regimental commander, Colonel Ludwig Beck, had initially hoped to handle his officers’ dealings with the Nazi Party as a simple disciplinary case. When the three offenders were instead arrested by the civilian police on behalf of the civilian judiciary, Beck felt personally offended. He was of the opinion that anti-republican misdemeanors by his officers should be handled as internal military matters, and he was certainly not alone in that opinion. First Lieutenant Hellmuth Stieff, later a co-conspirator of Beck, wrote to his wife: “This matter belongs before a council of honor”¹⁴⁵ – the “councils” being the thinly veiled successors of the “courts of honor” proscribed by the Weimar Constitution.¹⁴⁶ The ensuing public trial offered a public opportunity for Hitler, who had been called as a witness, to state his position. He publicized his change of strategy, denounced violence, and swore to use only legal means in his quest to change the “system.” He added, however, that he was still determined to adapt the political system to National Socialist ideas.¹⁴⁷ Again, his idea of mili-

 Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 426; Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, 185 – 186; Mueller, Canaris, 167.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 91.  Unsurpassed Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess. See also Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 364– 367.  Letter from Stieff to his wife, dated 10/11 October 1930, in: Stieff, “Ausgewählte Briefe,” 63; siehe auch Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, 123.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 323 – 336.  Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, 84– 88.

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tary forces could be boiled down to his stated desire to establish and lead a people’s army.¹⁴⁸ The Nazi Party’s recurring success at the polls after 1930 culminated in its landslide victory in July 1932, and the failure of the Weimar Republic became obvious. The Nazis began to attract middle-class voters, as it began to appear that policies of violence were the only alternative to the Communist threat.¹⁴⁹ Bourgeois reactionaries complained that Hitler had “relapsed into parliamentary methods,”¹⁵⁰ resulting in a certain ambiguity similar to that experienced within the Reichswehr officer corps. Those who favored Seeckt’s Führerheer tended to be critical of the Nazis, whereas influential figures such as Reichenau saw no reason to refuse cooperation with the party entirely.¹⁵¹ During the summer of 1932, Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen and his highly conservative camarilla began to consider ways by which Hitler could be prevented from becoming chancellor. As the Nazi Party had the single largest bloc of seats in the Reichstag, the idea was to develop an option for the president to act against parliament, thus openly violating the constitution. After all, when talking to Papen, Hindenburg had shown interest, at least in principle, in a solution along those lines.¹⁵² To deal with the legal ramifications, the military called on an expert in constitutional law, Carl Schmitt, who in turn brought in his disciple, Ernst-Rudolf Huber.¹⁵³ On 18 November 1932, the director of the Reichwehr minister’s office, Colonel Ferdinand von Bredow, invited a highly selective group of officers for a war game, “Planspiel Ott,” in which the Reichswehr high command would examine the option of the military assuming power. The understanding was that the president would invoke Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which provided for a state of emergency. The top-secret exercise was held on 25 and 26 November 1932. However, the outcome revealed that several Reichswehr commanders in the Berlin region were unwilling to take part in a putsch against a majority of the population. Among them was Colonel (later Field Marshal) Busch, then

 Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, 86.  Wildt, “Nationalsozialismus oder deutscher Faschismus,” 109 – 110; Kershaw, “Der 30. Januar 1933,” 277– 278.  Mommsen, “Regierung ohne Parteien,” 8.  Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 26 – 27; see also Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, 10 – 11.  Pyta, “Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand,” 385 – 386; Berthold, Carl Schmitt und der Staatsnotstandsplan, 16 – 17.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 368 – 369, 378; Krüger, Hans Speidel und Ernst Jünger, 25.

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the commander of Ninth Infantry Regiment in Potsdam, and Lieutenant Colonel Hoepner, who commanded the Potsdam-based Fourth Cavalry Regiment.¹⁵⁴ The numerically inferior 100,000-man Reichswehr would be unable to stand up to the Nazis if simultaneously confronted with a general strike (as in 1920) supported by the Social Democrats and Communists. At the same time, an internal weakness of the Reich might well invite external threats as well.¹⁵⁵ Nonetheless, the war game still had some real effect. In January 1933, the Reichswehr finalized its plans for the state of emergency. On 27 January, it issued the military district commanders a revised version of Army Regulation 469, “Collected Regulations concerning the Use of the Reichswehr within the Reich Borders in Cases of Public Emergencies and Internal Unrest.” Hindenburg eventually opted in favor of “taming” Hitler and against a military coup, but the idea had been born, and the conceptual basis had been developed.¹⁵⁶ According to Hans-Bernd Gisevius, then a young police officer and later the civilian conspirators’ contact in Zurich, all plans and orders had to be drafted again from scratch when the military began to plan a coup again in 1938; after the Night of the Long Knives (the June 1934 purge in which Generals Schleicher and Bredow of Planspiel Ott fame had been murdered), War Minister Blomberg had ordered all files to be handed over to the police.¹⁵⁷ General Beck, the Army chief of the General Staff, however, had mentioned in 1935 to some close friends that the option of a military coup against the Führer indeed existed, so this never seems to have been fully excluded.¹⁵⁸ Beck knew that the Reich Defense Law of 1935 provided for the Army’s takeover of the executive within the Reich during wartime.¹⁵⁹ For the Reichswehr officers, it must have been a traumatic experience that “the strength of the military would not suffice to bring about a violent regime change against the resistance of a majority of the people”¹⁶⁰ – and all that

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 197.  Pyta, “Vorbereitungen für den militärischen Ausnahmezustand,” 390; John, “Am achten Jahrestag”; Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 24– 25.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 380; Kolb and Pyta, “Die Staatsnotstandsplanung,” 179.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 317. This has to be taken with a pinch of salt; Gisevius has always been treated as a highly problematic source. See, e. g., the critique in Keyserlingk-Rehbein, “Nur eine ‘ganz kleine Clique’?,” 126, footnote 32. According to Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 382, the documents were recalled.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 88.  Reichsverteidigungsgesetz dated 21 May 1935, RGBl. I, 1935, 375; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 285.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 199.

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with a chancellor and a president who were at least generally favored by the military. A coup against a single charismatic Führer would cause vastly greater problems.¹⁶¹

3.7 The Party and the Military after 1933 Relations between the National Socialist Party and the military were ambivalent when Hitler was named chancellor. Even though the Army was soon perceived as being one of two pillars the regime was built upon (the other being the party), postwar historians were in no hurry to acknowledge the military’s role as an integral part of the Nazi system: Although it should be undisputed among historians that National Socialism and war fundamentally belong together, broad overviews of Third Reich history still focus on the peacetime years much more than the war years. Even in standard reference works, the Wehrmacht is not shown to be a central, structural element of the regime but instead is dismantled into individual case studies.¹⁶²

Although this statement was made in the context of a conference on the resistance, the historiography of the opposition, too, has so far failed to take the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht into account as major elements of the framework within which military opposition had to operate. In 1969, Peter Hoffmann wrote that the Reichswehr “took no action” when Hitler assumed power;¹⁶³ today, we cannot fail to notice that a substantial part of the military actively supported Hitler’s way to power. Hitler’s government was the first in three years to have attained a majority in the Reichstag, the national parliament.¹⁶⁴ The fact that this long-persisting stalemate was broken, however, produced significant reservations among ultra-conservatives. Not that they objected to liquidation of the Weimar Republic – it had obviously failed anyway – but men from the national and conservative elites such as publicist Edgar Jung, lawyer Fabian von Schlabrendorff, landowner Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, and reserve officer Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg, to name just a few, found the new government rather uncouth, even if they

 Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus,” 19.  Förster, “Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Ein grauer Fels,” 99 – 100.  Hoffmann, Widerstand – Staatsstreich – Attentat, 43; Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 25.  Klausa, “Zu wenig und zu spät?,” 260.

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agreed with aspects of its political agenda. They, but not many others, seemed to have noticed the element of the social revolution in National Socialism, which aimed to radically transform German society.¹⁶⁵ These reservations eventually informed these individuals’ motivation to join the national-conservative resistance: Both the ultra-conservative conspirators and the nationalist wing of the Goerdeler circle, as well as [Admiral] Canaris and [Colonel] Oster saw themselves as the executors of the 1932/33 “national revolution” which they bemoaned as having regressed to a party regime.¹⁶⁶

Initially, the conflict between the various ideas for the future military seemed to escalate. The Reichswehr’s leaders, under the influence of General Beck as Army chief of the General Staff, knew how to exploit the emerging rearmament efforts for their purposes. Hitler eventually decided to reintroduce conscription for the regular Wehrmacht – thus rejecting Schleicher’s idea of creating a militia-like component to the military, which would have found co-existence with the elitist Reichswehr challenging – which strengthened Beck’s sympathies for the new regime accordingly.¹⁶⁷ In contrast, the new minister of war, Blomberg, rediscovered his earlier sympathies for Joachim von Stülpnagel’s ideas; on 3 February 1933, he called for “reinforcement and strengthening of the Wehrmacht through militarization of the masses.”¹⁶⁸ Enlarging the Army without a militia cleared the way for the future pursuit of sweeping maneuver warfare. This possibility was reflected in the field manual on “Leadership,”¹⁶⁹ largely written by Beck and Lieutenant Colonel Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, issued in October 1933. The preemptive attack reemerged as the most desirable form of combat and thus signified another step by the military toward harmonization with Nazi ideology.¹⁷⁰ Beck, like many of his brother officers, was selective in how he perceived this relationship, leading to a “partial identity” based on common goals. Inconvenient incompatibilities where political aims diverged were simply disregarded, as was the Nazi penchant for political violence.¹⁷¹ Foremost among those officers

 Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 8 – 9; Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 20; Hardenberg, Auf immer neuen Wegen, 33, 61– 63; Klausa, “Politischer Konservativismus und Widerstand,” 222– 228; Thamer, “Die Erosion einer Säule,” 420.  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 573.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 91.  Quoted in Thamer, “Die Erosion einer Säule,” 421,  H.Dv. 300: Truppenführung.  Groß, Myth and Reality, 160, 162.  Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, 1; Deist, “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” 528; see, however, Kroener, “Strukturelle Veränderungen,” 270 – 271, who points out the limited usefulness of the concept.

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were Reichswehr Minister von Blomberg, whom Hindenburg had nominated even before Hitler, and his closest political adviser, Reichenau, who was soon promoted to Generalmajor. For all of them, securing the role of the Army in the new state and its incipient rearmament were the essential points.¹⁷² The Reichswehr’s most threatening rival during the first months of the Third Reich were the Nazi street-fighting militias, the Sturmabteilungen (SA) under their so-called chief of staff, Ernst Röhm, one of Hitler’s earliest followers. Röhm was the embodiment of the remaining revolutionary elements within the Nazi Party following Hitler’s embrace of conservatives and the middle classes. He was steadfast in his repeated calls for a “second revolution” that would complete the work started with Hitler’s “seizure of power,” not least in order to meet the lofty expectations of his storm troopers, who generally came from modest social backgrounds.¹⁷³ Röhm dreamed of seeing his party-based army as the core of a new national militia. In other words, he represented the concept that the Reichswehr had consistently rejected over the preceding decade. Röhm’s representative in Berlin was Wolf-Heinrich Graf Helldorff, despite his noble birth one of the most thuggish of SA leaders. Rumors constantly circulated that he planned a violent uprising in Berlin to bring about that “second revolution.”¹⁷⁴ Despite all this, Hermann Göring made Helldorff, his minion, not only the head of the Nazi parliamentary group in the Prussian state legislature but also put him in charge of the Berlin police. When the bon viveur Helldorff had problems paying his debts, Göring repeatedly bailed him out.¹⁷⁵ Beck, promoted in 1933 to head of the general staff, (still just barely disguised as the Truppenamt) saw Röhm’s plans as a direct challenge to Hitler’s assurances in 1933, according to which the party and the Army would be the two chief pillars of the new state.¹⁷⁶ Hitler was well aware of the fact that, for the time being, he depended on the Reichswehr, and that he would have to accede to its demands to some extent.¹⁷⁷ In a carefully planned purge, he had Röhm and several other political rivals murdered, including two Reichswehr generals: Kurt von Schleicher and Ferdinand

 Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 93, 103 – 104.  Mau, “Die ‘Zweite Revolution’”.  Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 393, and – based on this – Kroll, “Ein nationalsozialistischer Aktivist.”  Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure, 37.  Mommsen, “Militär und zivile Militarisierung in Deutschland,” 275 – 276; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 133; Thamer, “Die Erosion einer Säule,” 423.  Kershaw, Hitler 1889 – 1936, 499 – 517.

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von Bredow – the two who had been the brains behind the Planspiel Ott. ¹⁷⁸ Schleicher is also alleged to have contacted several officers, including Fromm, for the purpose of recruiting them for an anti-Hitler coup.¹⁷⁹ Removing the SA leadership seemed to have solved the conflict between Führerheer and Massenheer in favor of the operational thinkers who supported a military elite. However, this also bore the seed of its own decay. General conscription reintroduced in 1935 and the creation of nascent SS armed units around the same time marked the beginning of a process which would eventually transform the Army into a “National Socialist Volks-Wehrmacht,” emphasizing the centrality of the “people.”¹⁸⁰ By the summer of 1938, these SS formations had become independent enough to be placed on an equal footing with the Army.¹⁸¹ During the annexation of Austria, the SS operated alongside Army units: the men wore SS insignia on their collars to distinguish themselves, but they also donned army-style epaulets.¹⁸² Thus, the military was also caught in the process of the “pseudo-modernization” that characterized the entire Nazi system.¹⁸³ What had been a “state within the state” gradually became part of the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) and, in the process, altered its own identity as well. The “exclusionary effects of the Volksgemeinschaft” became apparent when Blomberg assiduously applied the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” to the military – despite the forces not being mentioned in it – and had the few Jewish officers and soldiers cashiered. The few protests, including those of Colonel Erich von Manstein, were brusquely dismissed, so as not to lose Hitler’s favor in the infighting against the SA.¹⁸⁴ Despite Hitler’s stated intention to shake up Army personnel policies, which he had expressed already prior to 1933,¹⁸⁵ the Army was able to avert such intervention for the time being, and those who opposed a two-prong military (i. e. including the SA) remained in control. But the “decision against a mass military force was at the same time a decision against an elite military force such as

 Strenge, Kurt von Schleicher, 168 – 170, 224– 225.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 211.  Förster, “Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Ein grauer Fels,” 103.  Besson, “Zur Geschichte,” 77.  I owe this detail to Hofrat Dr. Erwin Schmidl, Vienna.  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung”; for the military in particular see Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 311, and Kroener, “Strukturelle Veränderungen,” 267.  Wildt, “Nationalsozialismus oder deutscher Faschismus,” 115; Messerschmidt, “Juden im preußisch-deutschen Heer,” 56 – 59; Wrochem, Erich von Manstein, 38 – 39; Syring, “Erich von Manstein,” 330; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 143.  Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 52 (Doc. 6).

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Seeckt had advocated.”¹⁸⁶ It achieved the army of the masses not only in numbers, but also in Nazi influence on army personnel, which was becoming increasingly obvious. The growing incidents of verbal and physical aggression toward Army soldiers and officers by Nazis and SS presaged worse, especially as all attempts to get the head of state to intervene proved futile.¹⁸⁷ The Night of the Long Knives also meant that the Army generals had accepted – without protest – the murder of two of their own. Admittedly, Schleicher had been a “political general” somewhat outside the mainstream of Army thinking (over which Seeckt still cast a long shadow), and Bredow had been his close associate. Even so, the fact remained that the Reichswehr leadership had compromised itself through its own failure to speak up. Years later, Stauffenberg was asked why the generals did not resist Hitler, and his reply was: “You can’t expect people who have already had their backbone broken once or twice to be able to stand upright.”¹⁸⁸ The first instance of this sort of broken backbone had emerged in June 1934. Henning von Tresckow, then an Army captain, began to distance himself from National Socialism after that summer, and when Generalmajor Oster was questioned by the Gestapo, he stated that, in his view, which he shared with a circle of general staff officers, the Reichswehr should have stood firm at that time and put an end to the “ways of that band of robbers there and then.”¹⁸⁹ In one of his memoranda of July 1938, Beck wrote: “For the Führer! Against war! Against the fat cats (Bonzokratie)! Peace with the church! Free speech! An end to the Cheka methods! Back to the rule of law!” The “Cheka methods” of course referred to the murders of June 1934. But even in 1934, the Reichswehr leaders had their doubts as to whether their troops would have followed them had they endeavored to preserve Army honor and march against Hitler.¹⁹⁰ In 1935, Blomberg lamented that, in the Army, there was “a lack of understanding that in the Third Reich, there is only one Party, and that the Party is identical with the state, and that today the state is being shaped by the Party.” In other words, Blomberg had already given up on the “two-pillar” illusion of a distinction between the two. By the mid-1930s, the apolitical Reichs-

 Groß, Myth and Reality, 163.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 66, 77.  Müller, Oberst i.G. Stauffenberg, 148.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 451 (16 October 1944); see also Ueberschär, “Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow,” 257; Thun, Der Verschwörer, 47.  Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 370.

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wehr had ceased to exist.¹⁹¹ But this also marked the point where tradition-minded officers like Beck were unwilling to follow Blomberg, as they saw clearly the threat to the independent role of the military vis-à-vis the state, and to its specific political relevance.¹⁹² Talking to a confidant of General Ludendorff in 1935, Beck again raised the idea of declaring a military dictatorship.¹⁹³ The notion of a “clarifying confrontation between Wehrmacht and SS” then resurfaced – long before the summer of 1944 – in the memorandum of 16 July 1938 which Beck hoped would cause the commander in chief of the Army to stand up against Hitler’s warmongering. Interestingly, Beck refers to the Party and the SS as “the radical side”: The radical side will claim that the Führer’s intention could not be realized because of the incompetence of the Wehrmacht and its leadership. There will be renewed and stronger defamations. It will be necessary to keep eyes and ears open. […] A decision will have to be taken to bring about a clarifying confrontation between Wehrmacht and SS, simultaneously with, or following, a protest.¹⁹⁴

The policy pursued by Blomberg and Reichenau met with considerable opposition from within the officer corps and in particular among the more senior officers whom he had passed over when appointed minister. Behind his back, they would refer to him as the “rubber lion” for his political “flexibility”; others were worried about Reichenau’s ill-concealed ambition for which he was obviously willing to sacrifice any of his principles.¹⁹⁵ One might well doubt if a unified Reichswehr officer corps still existed in 1933, but all the infighting, cabals, and intrigues continued to blossom after that. None of this ever led to an open revolt against Blomberg, largely because that would have been a revolt against Hitler himself. The one who stood to profit most from these conflicts was Himmler, who was permitted to train and equip his SS in order to shape it into a military force. This process had its roots in the Night of the Long Knives, but that did not stop Himmler from proclaiming later, soon after 20 July 1944, that the 1934 purge had been a setback in the development of a National Socialist people’s army. “Back then,”

 Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 156 (including the quotation); Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 111– 114.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 78.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 88.  Memorandum Beck of 16 July 1938, quoted in Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, Nr. 50, pp. 552– 553.  Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 126; Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 427– 429.

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he said, “Röhm and his SA could have gained much influence on the Army. The 30 June 1934 destroyed this opportunity.”¹⁹⁶ National-conservatives such as Goerdeler, the Chief of the Abwehr (Military Intelligence Service) Rear Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and his close collaborator, Major Hans Oster; and even Hans-Bernd Gisevius, one of the earliest Gestapo officers, initially hailed Hitler’s “initiative” as a liberation of socialist tendencies – and yet they found the new regime’s extremely violent methods repugnant. The Night of the Long Knives buried the notion of a conservative coup d’état, at least for a while. However, in 1937/1938 the “hitherto largely undamaged state machinery including the top levels of the Reichswehr began to be eroded by the intrigues and the ambition of the National Socialist satraps” which went hand in hand with a radicalization of Nazi policies both at home and abroad.¹⁹⁷ On 2 August 1934, the 86-year-old president, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, died peacefully. The next day, the entire Reichswehr was sworn in with a new oath that created a metaphysical and direct link between every soldier and the Führer. Despite what might seem today to be a mere formality, the significance of this act was preceded by centuries of practice of military oaths. A promissory oath is a solemn promise to do or not to do something specific. On its own, it has no direct legal effect, but creates a relationship based on (usually mutual) loyalty. In its earliest forms, officers and soldiers would swear personal loyalty to the monarch. Thus, the military oath always had a transcendental quality: its power was derived not from the law of man but, rather, was subject to a higher being.¹⁹⁸ Military oaths emerged in the early modern period and resulted from the existence of standing armies, where every soldier was required to promise to serve faithfully the person of the monarch. In the event of the monarch’s death, the oath’s bond would be dissolved, and the troops would have to swear their allegiance to the new monarch in a great hurry – in some cases, even in the middle of the night. Even in Imperial Germany, soldiers would swear an oath both to their respective prince and to the Kaiser as the Reich’s supreme commander (Kriegsherr, literally “lord of war,” but perhaps better likened to the aura cast by “warrior king.”) It is in this context that the term “unconditional” (“unbedingt”) obedience was introduced. But in neither its German nor its English rendering does “unconditional” mean “unlimited.” What it meant was that the Kai-

 Himmler, “Die Rede,” 366; for the context see also Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 145.  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 572– 573.  For this and the following see Heinemann, “Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid.”

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ser, in his capacity as Kriegsherr, enjoyed a supreme right to demand obedience from the military, and that such obedience superseded all loyalties to any of Germany’s many regional princes and dukes.¹⁹⁹ On the contrary: the text of the oath expressly referred to the articles of war, indicating that the obligations of soldiers – as well as the monarch’s authority of command – would be circumscribed by and subject to the laws of the Reich. When the Reichswehr was established as the first all-German military force, it replaced the disparate oaths taken by officers and soldiers – the two groups were sometimes subject to different versions! – of Germany’s various military contingents. In November 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II had expressly nullified all oaths sworn to his person. The Prussian constitution of 1850 had stated that the military would not swear its allegiance to the constitution,²⁰⁰ but in 1919, troops were required to do just that, using a text formulated by President Ebert himself: I swear allegiance to the Reich Constitution, and vow that I, as a brave soldier, shall at all times protect the Reich and its lawful institutions, and that I shall obey the President and my superiors.²⁰¹

This formulation was modified slightly after the unrest of 1923 to include reference to the respective constitutions of the federal states – a sop to Bavarian separatism – but in essence it remained in force until 1933. What should be noted is not only that it still contained an element of personal allegiance (to the president as the holder of an office, however, and not to an individual per se) but also that it followed the Weimar Republic’s general tendency to diminish the elements of representative governance and to more clearly distinguish church from state by removing references to God. For those who had strong religious ties, as many officers did, this change significantly detracted from the oath’s relevance.²⁰² A more substantial change came in 1933. The Reichstag fire decree (“Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of People and State,” 28 February 1933) as well as the Enabling Act (“Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich,” 23 March 1933) had in fact rendered the Weimar Constitution void, and the Nazis had in any case always polemicized against the military’s oath to the constitu-

 Lange, Der Fahneneid, 75 – 76.  Constitution for the Prussian State, 31 January 1850, Preußische Gesetzsammlung 1850, 17– 35. See also Art. 64 Para 1 of the Constitution of the German Reich 1871; both quoted in Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 134, footnote 147.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 135; Lange, Der Fahneneid, 100.  Lange, Der Fahneneid, 99 – 100.

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tion. All officers and men joining the Army after December 1933 were made to pledge: I swear by God this sacred oath, that I shall always serve my people and country faithfully and honestly, and as a brave and obedient soldier, I shall always be willing to defend this oath with my life.²⁰³

All this is to show that making the Reichswehr swear a new oath to the person of Adolf Hitler was certainly not without precedent in German military tradition. Moreover, it did not represent a putsch from above by Adolf Hitler: the initiative had been Blomberg’s,²⁰⁴ who sought to consolidate the military’s position after the SA’s defeat six weeks earlier. The new text had been devised by Blomberg and Reichenau.²⁰⁵ I swear by God this sacred oath, that I shall pay unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and people, and as a brave and obedient soldier, I am at all times prepared to defend this oath with my life.²⁰⁶

It is notable that the reference to God reappears at this point. Reichenau himself had stated categorically that an oath without God was no oath.²⁰⁷ However, the reference to God in the text might also be read as meaning that all promises made here would be under God’s word, and that the oath could not create obligations which would obviously contravene the Lord’s commandments. Even in 1939, swearing an oath to a specific person by name seemed to many a breach of tradition, but as we have seen, it was not without precedent. What was new was that the text no longer referred to faithfulness (Treue), that is, loyalty and trust, but to one-sided “obedience.” In addition, the term “unconditional” had lost its original meaning. In the present context, it could only be read as “unlimited.” Even if the legal basis of military service – including the articles of war (Militärstrafgesetzbuch, or military penal code) and the limits of obedience defined in them – remained the same, the oath created a potential conflict between the obligations it established and those defined by law. But, as we have seen, the Reichswehr had continuously lived in a state of conflict between obe-

 Lange, Der Fahneneid, 113.  The position in Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 27– 28, has been superseded by more recent research such as Lange, Der Fahneneid, 115 – 117.  Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 151– 156. For the intentions of the Reichswehr leaders see also Volkmann, “Von Blomberg zu Keitel,” 60.  Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 152; same text in Lange, Der Fahneneid, 118.  Lange, Der Fahneneid, 118, drawing upon Foertsch, Schuld und Verhängnis, 64.

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dience to the constitution and obedience to orders, so this situation was not entirely novel. Requiring the military to take an oath to Hitler by name might have had one consequence which most leading figures obviously overlooked at the time: should Hitler at some point be unable to exercise his functions (e. g., due to his death, capture, or resignation), the oath would cease to be binding. No succession was envisaged here, as the “Third Reich” in general made no provision for a line of succession to the Führer. The new oath represented another step toward Nazi control of all aspects of life. Although its doctrine was not very well defined, the Nazis’ penchant for self-radicalizing violence effectively and inescapably supported an extreme interpretation of the oath.²⁰⁸ The creation of a Luftwaffe in 1935 as a third branch of military service brought with it the question of how in the future to advise the Führer regarding military matters – in other words, the problem of an appropriate higher command structure. Traditionally, it had been the Army General Staff that had assumed an advisory role in providing expertise for all plans related to the comprehensive conduct of war; ever since the days of the elder Moltke, the chief of the Army General Staff could see himself as the primary adviser to the head of state, insofar as the head of state was still at least nominally in command. However, this system precluded the formulation of a comprehensive strategy, which would have needed to include the navy, as there was no overarching expertise. This experience had led some to think, even in the early 1920s, about a “Wehrmacht Staff,” but due to the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, this had to be abandoned.²⁰⁹ With the emergence of a third service, which occurred at the same time the Versailles restrictions began to fade into obscurity, the idea was bound to resurface. What’s more, the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, was one of the most important Nazi leaders, extremely vain and certainly unwilling to act according to plans devised by the Army alone. After all, such plans resulted in allocations of staff and matériel, thus defining the position of men and institutions within the polycratic structures of the Third Reich. Since 1933, Blomberg was now officially the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht. Certainly, Hitler had succeeded President von Hindenburg upon the latter’s death and was now the “Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht,” but de facto control of the military rested with the minister of war. For the Army, this meant that Blomberg might well ally himself with plans for the creation of a

 Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner.”  Groß, Myth and Reality, 178 – 181.

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Wehrmacht general staff. With increasing vigor, the Army chief of the General Staff warned against such trends which might disadvantage the Army in future conflicts in matters of resource allocation.²¹⁰ There was even more reason for Army leaders to worry as the man responsible for the allocation of material resources, Generalleutnant Fromm, Chief of Army Equipment, was beginning to side with Blomberg.²¹¹ Fromm was hoping to realize the rearmament Beck was planning for, in particular the acquisition of fast-moving tanks, in a way that would be conducive toward reviving an armaments industry that could be sustained over the long term. He feared that a sudden upsurge in demand for armaments might result in an industry too specialized to remain useful once its goals were reached.²¹² Fromm (in whose staff the 20 July 1944 conspiracy plan was later prepared) was unwilling to limit armament policies to military considerations alone. Not least among his worries was that an overly ambitious rearmament program might drive the Reich into economic chaos and endanger its internal stability. The General Staff, on the other hand, pushed for speedy rearmament that would permit a swift victory in war, for the very reason that internal stability might suffer in a protracted conflict. Both sides referred to the themes of popular unrest and internal instability – precisely the ideas that underpinned the “Valkyrie” plans implemented more than five years later.²¹³ Fromm viewed himself as being in agreement with the Foreign Office: German diplomats also saw the danger in rapid rearmament, which might provoke military intervention by the Versailles Treaty powers. The Foreign Office preferred a gradual policy that would protect the hard-won concessions it had extracted by diplomatic means from Germany’s former enemies. In several long conversations, the State Secretary Wilhelm von Bülow tried to win Beck over to this position.²¹⁴ Beck instead sought to achieve his rearmament goals before the Allies had time to organize a strong response. It took the influence of Beck’s close confidant, Generalmajor Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, the German military attaché in London, who was able to gradually bring Beck to understand the complexity and growing momentum of the problem. Even then, Beck agreed only half-heartedly.²¹⁵ In the end, Beck’s concept of a swift “broad armament” policy won the day over a slow, systematic “deep” policy. This comported with the General Staff’s notion of a modern war of maneuver in which superior German tac-

     

Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 125. Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 245. Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 257. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 204. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 198. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 200.

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tical and operational leadership would come into its own. Fromm must have realized, at the latest by 1940, that a continuation of this policy would pose a dilemma to the Reich: it would be faced with the choice of reducing supply by curtailing armament industries’ output or by increasing demand – which meant war.²¹⁶ We see General Beck here as a classic Prussian General Staff officer with little or no understanding of the political or strategic economic dimension of war.²¹⁷ We do not yet see a personality with a grand, overarching plan for balancing political and military considerations within a circle of conspirators with varying interests.²¹⁸ Beck’s professional disagreement with Fromm and Keitel had its origins in their differing concepts of the “war of the future” that were debated among officers during the 1920s, but these debates persisted into the “peacetime” years of the Nazi regime. Those debates eventually developed into intense mutual disdain that would shape the relationships among all three until July 1944. The excessive goals of this armament program caused problems in other fields as well. The increased demand for officers, for example, could not be met by conventional methods. First World War officers who had been sent home after 1919 were reactivated,²¹⁹ officers from various provincial police units were transferred to the military, and senior NCOs were made officers. Entire units were transferred from the former Austrian Army (Bundesheer), but not before the Germans “cleansed” their officer corps. Some of those ejected, however, were eventually reinstated.²²⁰ “Out of the 22,600 who formed the active Wehrmacht officer corps by the end of 1938, only one seventh had been officers in the Reichswehr.”²²¹ This social de-homogenization corresponded to Nazi ideology and was part of the attempt to create a broader “people’s community.” It also meant, however, the beginning of the end of the Reichswehr officers corps as a sheltered communicative space.²²² On the fourth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, on 30 January, 1937, Hitler decorated the chiefs of the three military services (Werner von Fritsch,

 Groß, Myth and Reality, 164– 165; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 224.  So Groß, Myth and Reality, 173; see, however, Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 218.  See, e. g., Thun, Der Verschwörer, 77.  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 55 – 58.  Schmidl, Der “Anschluß” Österreichs, 220 – 222.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 838, Boehnert, “The ‘Third Reich,” 204, 207.  Wohlfeil, “Heer und Republik,” 175; Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 315; Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 346; Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 8.

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Army; Erich Raeder, Navy, and Erhard Milch, Luftwaffe) with the National Socialist Golden Party Badge.²²³ One year later, in early February 1938, Hitler replaced Blomberg, the minister of war and commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht as a whole, and Fritsch, the Army commander-in-chief, by promoting Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch to commander in chief of the Army; Hitler retained the office of minister of war and commander in chief of the Wehrmacht for himself. This change was precipitated by Blomberg having married “beneath himself”, i. e. a woman who had worked as a prostitute years earlier. To the horror of the Nazi elite, the hapless Blomberg had invited Hitler to be his best man. At the same time, the Gestapo submitted material to Hitler which seemed to indicate that Fritsch was homosexual and had been seen in the gay circles of Berlin – at the time, a crime that often resulted in a prison sentence.²²⁴ The more details became known, the more obvious it became that Blomberg’s fate was sealed: the consensus among officers was clear that the field marshal would have to go. Blomberg was one of the senior officers who had led the Army into the servitude of the “Führer and Reich Chancellor,” hoping that the “People’s Army” sought by Hitler would in fact realize Blomberg’s own idea from the 1920s. For the present discussion, further analysis of the so-called Blomberg-Fritsch affair as such is of little utility. The way the regime dealt with Fritsch in particular, however, is relevant to and with regard to the genesis of the military resistance. Fritsch was an artillery officer and was well acquainted with many of Hitler’s critics in the officer corps. Fritsch had been the then captain Hans Oster’s regimental commander when they both served in the Second Artillery Regiment in Schwerin. Oster, Admiral Canaris, and Erwin von Witzleben (later promoted to field marshal) formed a circle of close military friends which also included Quartermaster General (and therefore the Deputy Army Chief of Staff), Generalleutnant Franz Halder, also from the artillery.²²⁵ Yet, the relationship between Fritsch and his chief of staff, Beck (yet another artillery officer) seems to have been characterized largely by mutual respect. In the Army General Staff, it was soon common knowledge that the allegations against Fritsch were entirely fabricated. Oster, still assigned to the Abwehr

 Heeresverordnungsblatt 19 (1937): 49.  The best overview is still Janßen and Tobias, Der Sturz der Generäle; see also Mühleisen, “Die Fritsch-Krise.” For Blomberg, a particularly good and extensive biography is available: Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg. There is no equivalent biography for Fritsch; see Mühleisen, “Generaloberst Werner Freiherr von Fritsch”; or Murray, “Werner Freiherr von Fritsch.”  Thun-Hohenstein, Der Verschwörer, 31– 34.

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but now reactivated as an officer, knew the former Gestapo officer Hans-Bernd Gisevius, who passed on the relevant information. Even Wolf Graf von Helldorff, the infamous SA thug and head of the Berlin police, was incensed by Fritsch’s treatment at the hands of the SS in general, and Himmler in particular. He, too, contributed a few documents, and when Fritsch demanded an official court martial against himself, his counsel also demanded full access to all files.²²⁶ Fritsch was eventually fully acquitted, but Hitler did not allow this to be made public, nor did he reinstate Fritsch. Humiliated and broken, Fritsch sought and found an officer’s death on the front lines during the early days of the war in Poland.²²⁷ General der Artillerie Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Wehrmacht Office (Wehrmachtamt), and Hitler took this opportunity to shake up the entire top echelon of the military command structure. Hitler, as we have seen, assumed direct command of the Wehrmacht: in addition to being the titular “Supreme Commander” (as head of state), he was now also its commander in chief. At the same time, Keitel’s staff was upgraded and henceforth known as the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), or Wehrmacht High Command. This created a duality of command with the existing Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), or Army High Command, which complicated the Third Reich’s command structure until its final days and which will be discussed further in Chapter 4.4. In fact, the tension created by these competing organizations was one of the chief motivating factors of military resistance.²²⁸ The changes to the military in February 1938 occurred in parallel to similar disruptions to all other segments of the regime. Career diplomat Konstantin von Neurath was dismissed as foreign minister and replaced by a party official, Joachim von Ribbentrop, signaling a “de-professionalization” of the diplomatic service. In the same vein, Hitler’s bid for full control of the military, in addition to the obvious politicization of an allegedly apolitical institution, indicated a similar degradation of professionalism, as centuries of collective expertise were relegated to an advisory role – precisely at a time when the German General Staff was convinced that its superior leadership qualities could guarantee victory.²²⁹ Hitler seems to have understood fairly well that, all “partial identity of aims” notwithstanding, the tradition-minded elites of the officer corps, with

 Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 413; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 292.  Brausch, “Der Tod des Generalobersten Werner Freiherr v. Fritsch.”  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 128.  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 413; see also Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 31, 35; and Knox, “1 October 1942,” 815.

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their systematic modes of thinking and operating, would at some stage oppose his revolutionary ideas; among his confidants, he explained Fritsch’s dismissal as having been part of this process.²³⁰ If there had ever been “two pillars” of the regime, Hitler had by this point demolished one of them, and the more clear-sighted among the conservative officers did not fail to notice this.²³¹ When Hitler perpetuated the disgrace brought upon General Fritsch by refusing to rehabilitate him publicly, the idea of an act of defiance by the Army against Hitler began to resurface, this time in the form of a joint protest of all generals. It would have been headed by Brauchitsch, the new commander in chief, who obviously could not have been expected to call for a reinstatement of Fritsch. However, the use of the term “Cheka” in this context indicated that the planned protest was designed as a conflict with Himmler, the Gestapo, and the SS, both of which he oversaw. Actually, the SS even expected the Army to act against the Gestapo.²³² The shameless way in which Hitler dishonored the highly respected general officer, and thus the Army officer corps as a whole, was repeatedly cited as a motive for resistance activities, even by civilians such as Carl Goerdeler.²³³ Fritz Dietlof von der Schulenburg later declared to the Gestapo: In my opinion, the roots of the development which led to the 20 July action reach far back. I see their origins on 4 February 1938, together with Fritsch’s dismissal from active duty. This divided the Army.²³⁴

Stauffenberg’s bon mot about the generals whose backbone had already been broken twice clearly refers to the Night of Long Knives and then to Fritsch’s dismissal. The Army generals’ reaction to the episode indeed offered no suggestion of overthrowing the National Socialist system. Rather, it shows that, in 1938, the generals still held their traditional beliefs about the role of the officer corps in the state; they were convinced they were best able to pursue their own goals by aligning themselves with Hitler. Such a temporary coexistence of opposition and partial cooperation was a transitional stage on the road to fundamental resistance, typical for the development of the nationalconservative opposition… [It was] typical of this phase of development that in some

    

Engel, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 24. Klausa, “Zu wenig und zu spät?,” 277. Janßen and Tobias, Der Sturz der Generäle, 188 – 192. Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIX. Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 87 (28 July 1944), 273 (20 August 1944).

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ways national-conservative opposition reflected an internal power struggle between competing, or in some cases even antagonistic, elites.²³⁵

Until 1938, there had been a civilian opposition around Goerdeler, Hassell, and Popitz, which had had little or no contact with the national-conservative military around Beck. The Fritsch affair also had the effect of bringing the two together for the first time, and thus created a basis for all future resistance activities.²³⁶ The initial aim of the military action had been to have their former commander in chief rehabilitated, but with the military and the civilian opposition finding common ground, by September of the same year (1938) this resulted in the joint planning of a putsch. The initiative came from Oster in the Abwehr and included other members of the intelligence service, such as Captain Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz, Major Helmuth Groscurth, and Kapitänleutnant Franz Liedig. Canaris, their superior officer, had a general knowledge of what was going on in his department, but never clearly identified with the conspirators’ plans.²³⁷ The Amt Ausland Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence and counterintelligence service, gradually became the center of military opposition and continued to play that role until it was taken over by the SS in 1943/1944.²³⁸ Even after that point, some intelligence officers continued to support the military resistance, for example, by creating a financial reserve abroad for a post-Nazi German government.²³⁹ None of the developments discussed in this chapter led directly to a form of resistance aimed at overthrowing the entire political system. The road that eventually led to that radical decision was by no means clearly mapped out before or even after 1933. Although all officers of this generation underwent similar forms of socialization in the Reichswehr and shared similar experiences under the Weimar political system and the first six years of Nazi rule, individual actors came to different conclusions. Some, like General Staff officer Peter Sauerbruch, were able to appreciate the Weimar Republic only in hindsight. As reported by Peter Hoffmann, toward the end of 1943 and in early 1944, Stauffenberg remarked to Sauerbruch that many who had been political leaders in the Weimar

 Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” quotation p. 29, see also p. 33.  John, “Am achten Jahrestag”; Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 982.  Mueller, Canaris, 219; Meyer, “Staatsstreichplanung,” 334– 338. For Heinz see Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler, in particular 268 – 298.  Thun-Hohenstein, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 83.  Joerges, “Die Finanzierung des 20. Juli 1944.”

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era had not understood the significance of that period. “An opportunity had evidently been missed in the Weimar Republic.”²⁴⁰ Nonetheless, the many strands of history leading up to 1939 are hardly irrelevant. For many of those involved, the decision to join a conspiracy against the Führer started as a series of small steps, many of which were taken in the early 1930s, or at least in 1938. Each of these elements – the traditional social mores of more senior officers, their notion of a close-knit, secretive corps out of reach of any particular political interest but in service to the state as highly professional advisors in all questions of war and peace –were individually sufficient but perhaps not necessary motivations to join the radical opposition once it became clear that Hitler’s criminal war was beginning to threaten the very existence of Germany as a nation. This became clear to the Gestapo after 20 July 1944. In their reports to Hitler they noted the following: The consequence of this “apolitical” military attitude is that a certain part of the officer corps feels in no way duty-bound to the National Socialist Reich and the Führer… Their obligation toward Hitler is no greater than it was toward Ebert. If ordered to do so, they would march against anyone designated as the enemy… In the mind of the officer corps, the Wehrmacht is an organism that lives according to its own laws. The intentional separation from the political life found its expression in remaining “among themselves” even when off duty, and that any social and friendly ties remained limited to contacts between officers… This introverted corps, which wished to remain “apolitical” under any circumstances, defended itself as best as it could against any political intrusion. In their depositions, all older officers see themselves as “soldiers only,” using only a very narrow and shallow view of politics. National Socialism and the Nazi Party made a difference from the Weimar period only inasmuch as they pursued general national aims, threw off the yoke of the Versailles diktat, encouraged military thinking and rebuilt a large Wehrmacht etc. […] Upon closer inspection, the seemingly apolitical attitude of these “soldiers only” turns out to be a stubborn adherence to the worldviews and conceptions of the nineteenth century and the period before the First World War.²⁴¹

This text deserves to be quoted extensively because it would be difficult to describe more succinctly the lasting effects of the conspirators’ pre-Nazi socialization. In reading this source, however, one should not overlook the fact that it dates from the final throes of the Nazi regime’s cumulative radicalization; this  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 193.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 273 – 274 (20 August 1944).

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was a period when the social revolutionary aims of the “movement” everywhere emerged one last time. In its reports, the Gestapo openly used the term “socialist revolution”: His [Oster’s] account, which represents the views of a whole group of older officers, proves that the National Socialist Reich was compelled to wage its ideological campaign to enact a socialist revolution at least in part with officers who had in no way understood the historic meaning of this revolution.²⁴²

If this creates the impression that the military opposition was one-sidedly reactionary, nothing could be further from the truth. Both the civilian and the military conspirators pursued aims more complex and differentiated than the Gestapo cared to admit. Almost all officers who participated in the conspiracy had been socialized by the Reichswehr to varying degrees. They resented the expansion of the Army into a mass force, not least because on the horizon, they saw the SS looming as the elitist, highly mechanized, mobile formation which would also be designed to provide internal security. These officers’ loyalty was toward an abstract “state” or “Germany,” not toward any specific political regime. The Reichswehr’s supposedly apolitical attitude, which before 1933 was one of the destabilizing factors leading to the Weimar Republic’s collapse, also led some officers to maintain an equally distant attitude to the Nazi state. Of those, a tiny minority eventually chose the path of planning a military coup d’état. The homogeneous communicative space of the socially elitist Reichswehr officer corps played an important role by providing the framework in which conspiratorial structures could be created. The Reichswehr, now renamed the Wehrmacht, had become an integral part of the Third Reich and had to redefine its role within that new system. This, too, resulted in conflicts that did not necessarily have to end in conspiracy – again, only a scant few went this way – but they did at times encourage individuals to move in this direction.

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 303 (encl. 1 to report dated 25 August 1944).

4 The Military in the Polycratic Structures of the Third Reich, 1939 – 1944 4.1 Army, Navy, Luftwaffe, and Waffen-SS “Wehrmacht” had become the official name of the German military according to the “Reichswehr Law” of 1935 which thereby became an instrument of the Third Reich and its warmongering policies. This of course meant that it would be the essential element in the potential fight against external enemies, and as an essential element, it was not excluded from the internal power struggles that characterized the Nazi regime until its very end. The Wehrmacht itself was a heterogeneous entity, and the complex command structures discussed above resulted in rivalries between the service branches over personnel and matériel right up to their surrender in May 1945.¹ These divergences and discrepancies had their roots even in the Versailles Treay, which placed different restrictions regarding armaments on the army and navy, assigning them detailed and differentiated personnel ceilings.² During the Weimar Republic, both fell under the purview of the same minister of the Reichswehr, but they otherwise had led largely separate existences, and even then occasionally competed against each other over allocations. Without any legal regulation, it was clear that all planning for the Reich’s overall capacity for war rested with the Truppenamt – the General Staff’s Weimar-era sobriquet – which served as the army’s think tank. As before the First World War, this resulted in characteristically reductive thinking even among civilian policymakers, that limited planning to a land war and therefore lacked any overall strategic planning.³ The Versailles restrictions of 1919 had largely prevented major rivalries between the army and the navy during the Weimar period, but the question of who would take priority in case these restrictions were ever lifted (as most Germans hoped they would be) loomed in the background without ever being addressed.⁴ Since 1935, General Fromm, as Chief of the Allgemeines Heeresamt (AHA, or General Army Office) formed part of the OKH and was responsible

 This chapter develops further arguments I published first in chapter II of Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War.”  Reichsgesetzblatt I, 1919, 687, Part V, paras I and II.  Salewski, “Die bewaffnete Macht im Dritten Reich,” 173; Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 88; Rahn, Reichsmarine und Landesverteidigung, 146 – 161.  Geyer, “Professionals and Junkers,” 104– 105. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-006

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for equipping the land forces. However, his job also included responsibility for allocating personnel resources to all three Wehrmacht branches, and in this capacity, he reported to the OKW. The complex arrangement within the top command structure reflected the obvious clashes of interest.⁵ All this suited the Führer. Hitler’s resentment, or even scorn, however, was reserved for the top brass of the army, as Hitler believed himself to possess knowledge about land warfare whereas he had little idea of the war at sea or in the air. The question of whether the army would remain the central element of the Nazi warfare apparatus was an obvious one in view of the Führer’s scathing comments about it (which long predated 1939), his treatment of Blomberg and Fritsch in particular, and his widely known preference for the OKW.⁶ Intra-Wehrmacht rivalries soon worsened following the war’s start in September 1939. During the winter of 1939/1940, it was unclear what course the conflict would take, and all parties vied for Hitler’s attention to support their particular interests. Fromm attempted to influence Hitler in favor of prioritizing the needs of the army, but the Führer and his loyal servant Keitel felt this was an “outrageous form of blackmail”; among other reasons, this was why Fromm became unwelcome at Hitler’s headquarters during the second half of the war.⁷ Again, the Third Reich’s military closely reflected the Nazi system in general in that it was governed by means of the same polycratic structures as all the other organs of the Third Reich and in many cases by the same individuals.⁸ The “infighting to ensure individual positions within the inner circle of power”⁹ was bound to give rise to principled criticism about the Nazi state’s structural weaknesses, and this criticism came largely from the ranks of the army, whose central position had been unassailable before 1933. However, contrary to what the army had expected, it was not the Kriegsmarine (navy) that turned out to be the most formidable adversary in questions of rearmament and the allocation of limited resources. Hitler’s perspective was so focused on land warfare that the navy’s commander in chief, Admiral Erich Raeder, scarcely managed to make his voice heard by the Führer. Even if examples such as the attack by all three military branches on Norway, could be seen

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 223; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 120.  Mueller, Canaris, 216.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 354– 355; 417– 419.  Nolzen, “Von der geistigen Assimilation,” 71; see also Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 408 – 409.; Heinemann, “Der Wert funktionalistischer Erklärungen.”  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 474.

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as a successful joint effort, the ensuing campaign in France left the Kriegsmarine on the margin once again. The navy also did not have any role to play in a potential internal power struggle. Berlin, given its geographic location, was home base to significant numbers of Luftwaffe units but none of the navy. So, while there was some competition – regarding steel allocations, for example – the navy was not involved in any of the major internal conflict, and it did not have any significant influence upon the military resistance or the planning of its 1944 putsch.¹⁰ Another factor to keep in mind was that the navy had a reputation for being at least as conservative as the army, while also not thoroughly “Nazi.” It still bore the stigma, however, from the 1918 mutiny by sailors in Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, that had sparked the revolution that put an end to the imperial era.¹¹ Ever since, and until the very end of the Second World War, the navy imposed draconian standards of discipline and resented any kind of internal criticism. It is indeed indicative of the Kriegsmarine as a whole that only three of its officers, one of whom was a reservist lawyer and not an active-duty officer, found their way into the military resistance culminating in the events of 20 July 1944.¹² Things were different, however, between army and the air force. The Luftwaffe had been created as a separate service not for doctrinal reasons but to accommodate Hermann Göring’s vanity.¹³ During the 1930s, Göring was undoubtedly the most important Nazi leader after Hitler. During the First World War he had been a fighter pilot and commanded the famous “Richthofen” squadron. He was the obvious choice for the head of the emergent air forces, but as it seemed unthinkable to subordinate him to an army general, the structural separation and creation of the Luftwaffe as a separate service was inevitable. National Socialism presented itself as a youthful, dynamic movement, and Hitler preferred to be photographed or filmed being driven in large cars or disembarking from airplanes in order to cultivate that aura. From the Luftwaffe’s inception, Göring’s purview (both civilian and military aviation) differed not

 Deist, “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” 456 – 460; Schulze-Wegener, “Seestrategie und Marinerüstung.”  Neitzel, “Der Bedeutungswandel der Kriegsmarine,” 245.  For commander Alfred Kranzfelder see Moll, Zeugen für Christus; for Navy Judge Berthold Schenk Graf Stauffenberg: Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, passim; and for Commander Sidney Jessen see his own account: Bericht Dr Sydney Jessen (1946), “Der Anteil der Kriegsmarine am Attentat”; IfZ, ZS A-29-II, Nr. 32.  For Göring, see above all Overy, Goering; Martens, Hermann Göring; for a substantive critique of Irving, Göring, see Horst Boog’s review of the German edition in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 48 (1990): 207– 211.

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only structurally but also ideologically from the “reactionary” army and navy. Unlike those services, the Luftwaffe was so ideologically charged that it did not even have a military chaplaincy. But even if the creation of military aviation as a separate branch was in itself modern and progressive, the Luftwaffe needed trained staff, of which the army had an abundant supply. Although he never hid his disdain for the Army General Staff, Göring recruited a significant number of its highly qualified officers, simply because no one else had experience in commanding large formations. Albert Kesselring, for example, had been an artillery officer before being promoted directly from General der Flieger to field marshal (Generalfeldmarschall) in 1940, thus skipping over the rank of Generaloberst. This was due to Göring’s demand for “equal treatment” for his Luftwaffe and serves to illustrate that the new branch offered many more career opportunities.¹⁴ It was only when selecting junior officers as the next generation of leaders that the Luftwaffe found it possible to follow Nazi doctrine and recruit from a broader social base in order to educate its officers in its own “spirit.”¹⁵ Much later, however, Hitler commented bitterly to Goebbels that Göring had allowed the Luftwaffe to fail: it had fallen behind and had become as bureaucratic and inflexible as the army.¹⁶ Göring also held the Prussian offices of minister-president and minister of the interior and therefore head of Prussia’s police force, including its paramilitary Bereitschaftspolizei (riot police). In the course of German rearmament during the 1930s, these units were transferred to the Luftwaffe and converted into ground troops which, by the end of the war, had grown to form a Fallschirmpanzerkorps “Hermann Göring” (literally, “Parachute Tank Corps Hermann Göring”).¹⁷ This was the starting point for the creation of ground forces under the umbrella of the Luftwaffe. It was followed soon after by the first parachute units which, other than in most countries, came to be part of the Luftwaffe and not the army. During the war, these were joined by Luftwaffenfelddivisionen (Luftwaffe field divisions) raised from ground personnel (mechanics, etc.) no longer needed as massive losses drastically reduced the number of Germany’s available aircraft. In September 1942, Göring himself announced Hitler’s decision, declaring that “the Führer has charged me with raising a strong force from members of

 Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 36, 65.  Hürter, “Konservative Akteure,” 51.  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, part II, vol. 12, 520 (22 June 1944).  While it is highly problematic in its political bias (see my review in Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 54 (1995): 626), Kurowski, Von der Polizeigruppe z.b.V. “Wecke” zum Fallschirmpanzerkorps “Hermann Göring”, is still the only publication specifically about this unit.

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my [!] Luftwaffe to join the ground fighting on the Eastern Front.”¹⁸ The decision also demonstrated the OKW’s unwillingness to represent adequately the interests of the army, and that the OKH had lost any influence with Hitler. This move deprived the army not only of some 200,000 men but also of sizeable quantities of vehicles, arms, and equipment. It was one of the chief weaknesses of the entire Nazi system: “Even when faced with unbearable deficiencies in personnel and matériel, Hitler was obviously unwilling to counteract service egotism and prestige struggles within his inner circle.”¹⁹ Stauffenberg was not against Luftwaffe ground forces in principle. In fact, he had taken a favorable view of airborne troops in the study he wrote during his Kriegsakademie days.²⁰ However, from his perspective as a specialist in organization and resource management, he saw the dilution of the few remaining reserves as a waste incompatible with a concerted total war effort.²¹ Yet, the reputation of the Luftwaffe was shattered in the eyes of many Germans, both civilian and military, when it failed to protect German cities against the increasingly heavy air attacks by the Allies. Unrest at home eventually infected morale at the front, and it was another argument that the conspirators would use in their attempts to recruit participants in their putsch.²² For the army, the fiercest competition was not posed by the Luftwaffe but, rather, the SS and the ever-growing Waffen-SS in particular. In October 1943, the plans for a coup d’état provided for an entire battalion to cordon off and seize Himmler’s headquarters in Arys (East Prussia, now Orzysz, Poland), whereas Göring’s headquarters in Rominten (now Krasnolesye, Russia) merited only a patrol of officers. Obviously, Göring and his entourage were expected to put up far less of a fight than Himmler’s SS formations.²³ It remains unclear to what extent the conspirators took into account the prospect of sectional infighting among the surviving top brass of the regime after Hitler’s death, or whether they envisaged their “enemy” as a monolithic structure.²⁴

 Stumpf, “Die Luftwaffe als drittes Heer,” quotation pp. 876 – 877. There is as yet no adequate history of the German parachute troops in the Second World War.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 470 – 471.  Bentzien, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, 80; see above chapter 3.3.  “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, fol. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186‑210, at p. 190; also in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 314 (29 August 1944).  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 350.  Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” is purely speculative in assuming the surviving Nazi leaders would have automatically acted in concert with one another.

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As early as 1938, when the Gestapo engineered the sidelining of Generaloberst Fritsch, there had been concerns among Himmler’s fiefdom that the army might put up an armed resistance against the Gestapo and the SS.²⁵ From the Gestapo’s perspective the army could, if necessary, maintain its apolitical attitude from the Seeckt years even by force. As its report to Hitler surmised: [Army officers] assumed that even after the seizure of power, there would be no interventions that might interfere with the Wehrmacht’s autarky, and that the Wehrmacht’s influence would increase once the revolutionary ideas began to wear off in daily business.²⁶

Again and again, the Gestapo’s reports to Hitler on the results of their investigations emphasized the lack of inner cohesion between the army and Nazi thinking. This served not least, of course, to gloss over the fact that, on the afternoon of 20 July 1944, the Gestapo and the SS (and the Luftwaffe as well) had remained passive while it had been army officers in the Bendlerblock who had seized the initiative and put an end to the coup.²⁷ The conflict between the national conservatives and the National Socialists was by no means a new phenomenon that might be interpreted as a consequence of wartime conditions. But the increasing preference accorded to the armed SS formations threatened to result in a situation in which the military would be at a clear disadvantage when facing the various armed forces supporting the regime. If in the Planspiel Ott, the Reichswehr had decided it was too weak to win an internal conflict, then by 1944, the balance was tilting even more to the detriment of the military. Gisevius, himself a former political police officer, later claimed that the army had seen the Gestapo’s campaign against Fritsch in 1938 as a putsch against the military: We say: This is it. For years, we have been expecting the great SS coup against the War Ministry. […] This is a covert coup d’état, and it means war! It means we must act, and at once! The Wehrmacht must anticipate the Gestapo. It must occupy the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße [Gestapo headquarters].²⁸

Gisevius suspected Himmler and his personal empire had systematically set about controlling the entire Reich territory:

 Müller, Das Heer und Hitler, 155; Janßen and Tobias, Der Sturz der Generäle, 192.  Statement [Walter] Huppenkothen, Verhältnis Wehrmacht – Sicherheitspolizei [I.], undated [probably before 1947]; IfZ, ZS 249/1, fol. 1‑15, at fol. 1. Huppenkothen had been in charge of the Gestapo investigation after the 20 July 1944 plot.  Heinemann, “Das Ende des Staatsstreichs,” 9.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 241.

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Only now did we understand how skillfully the SS Ordensburgen [training centers], cadet schools, the concentration camps with the armed formations guarding them, not least the Waffen-SS garrisons, had been spread all over the Reich. Oster inquired discreetly and found out that not even the War Ministry had a clear overview of all this.Very stealthily, the SS had erected its heavily armed key positions.²⁹

This was shortly after Hitler had substantially improved the armed SS formations’ position in August 1938 by removing any limitations on their maximum strength: a “conscious decision by the Reich leadership to expand the SS’s role so as to be able to play an important military role within the regime as well.”³⁰ This remained a problem right into the summer of 1944. All army plans for a seizure of power would have to take into account that little was known about the strength of the Waffen-SS within the Reich, in particular as its strength might vary considerably over time.³¹ Army soldiers generally bore a degree of hatred towards the SS; its unequal share in personnel and matériel during the war, and the generally preferential treatment Himmler’s allegedly elite formations received everywhere thoroughly antagonized members of the oldest service.³² Most of them could be expected to fight against the SS – but not against Hitler as long as the Führer was still alive. In the internal squabbles over manpower, Himmler had an additional asset: the inmates of his concentration camps, who were supposed to have been “annihilated through work” but whose potential, he found, could be utilized better to stabilize the tottering war economy. The SS’s attempt to create its own armaments industry had failed due to its own incompetence, combined with resistance both from the civilian industrialists and from Reich Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. Starting in 1942/1943 the SS therefore made use of its additional “labor force” by making inmates available to existing factories. This led to the mushrooming of subcamps in which inmates could be housed closer to their workplaces.³³ Apart from its political and military clout, the SS began to gain economic power as well. As the war went on, Himmler worked to gain control of the Third Reich’s prestigious arms projects.³⁴ Separately, or even in competition with each other,  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 317.  Quotation from Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten, 264– 265; see also Deist, “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” 526.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 68.  Müller, Das Heer und Hitler, 147– 148.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 686 – 687.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 687– 689.

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the army and the Luftwaffe had developed two long-range weapons systems designed to bombard London. Army artillery had devised a highly complex ballistic missile (“V-2”), and the Luftwaffe had constructed an unmanned aircraft that, although it was much simpler to build was also much easier to intercept in flight (“V-1”). In effect, these were the precursors to today’s ballistic and cruise missiles. Both projects had been pursued in Peenemünde, on the island of Usedom, off the German Baltic coast.³⁵ Hitler soon preferred the far more spectacular Army project, albeit with varying degrees of intensity, which also promised better propaganda value. Responsibility rested with the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Agency), which in turn reported to General Fromm in his capacity as Chief of Army Equipment. Himmler knew of course about the ongoing conflicts between Fromm and Field Marshal Keitel and kept trying to convince the latter that the entire project would be better off in his (Himmler’s) hands. The mastermind behind the rocket development was Wernher von Braun, whom Hitler had made a professor at the age of 28. Himmler in turn made the aspiring physicist a Sturmbannführer (major) in the SS, initially, however, without the hoped-for increase of SS influence over the project.³⁶ Himmler’s aim was a stable, permanent role for the SS in the future Reich, and thus also for himself personally: His notion of elite formations for the racist war of annihilation corresponded with the desire to control the weapons systems that might prove decisive in the future. The conflict over the [V-2] program was thus part of Himmler’s plans to form the Waffen-SS into the military and ideological spearhead of the Nazi regime, both in personnel and equipment.³⁷

In March 1944, Göring, hoping for greater support from Himmler for his own position, transferred responsibility for the production of the “flying bomb” (V-1) to Waffen-SS General Hans Kammler. However, this resulted neither in the faster production of the weapon nor in the enhanced position desired by Reichsmarschall Göring.³⁸ The conflict with the SS reached its first peak during the winter of 1939/1940 when Himmler announced his intention to triple the size of his armed forces. Again, the OKH suspected that its own role might be curtailed accordingly.³⁹  For the context see Boog, “The Strategic Air War in Europe,” 420 – 426. The “V 2” development is described in greater detail in Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich; for the Peenemünde site see Schmidt and Mense, Denkmallandschaft Peenemünde.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 508.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 509.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 689.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 355.

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And indeed, by May 1942 Himmler’s troops had grown enough to constitute a Waffen-SS corps, commanded by SS-Obergruppenführer (later SS-Oberstgruppenführer, equivalent to an army Generaloberst) Paul Hausser. The divisions required for it were styled “SS-Panzergrenadier” divisions and received the most modern vehicles available. In August 1942, Himmler obtained permission from Keitel to triple his force once more, again, naturally, at the army’s expense.⁴⁰ The SS also raised its own replacement units, providing it with an independent military force within the “home” territory of the Reich itself.⁴¹ When the military opposition drew up its plans for seizing control of Berlin, the replacement units of the Waffen-SS “Leibstandarte” division in the suburb of Lichterfelde were seen as the most dangerous potential supporter of the regime (see chapter 7.3). By the summer of 1944, the balance was shifting even more against the army. When Stauffenberg made his second trip to Hitler’s headquarters, with a bomb in his briefcase, on 15 July 1944, Himmler was not there because he had insisted on briefing the Führer separately later, as he hoped to be given responsibility for raising the next “wave” of army divisions, to be called Volksgrenadierdivisionen. These would be army units but under Himmler’s disciplinary and ideological control. Moreover, Himmler wanted to be made responsible for combating possible enemy airborne landings in the Reich. This came remarkably close to the “Valkyrie” scenarios and therefore threatened to pull the rug from under all the military conspiracy’s plans.⁴² The clashes over personnel resources were not limited solely to the ethnically German population of the Reich; notwithstanding theories of “Aryan” descent, the SS was busy recruiting soldiers from outside its borders. Stauffenberg, on the other hand, had for a long time been involved in plans to raise non-German formations from among Soviet prisoners of war.⁴³ Even here, he had warned as early as December 1942 that the SS planned to tap this resource as well and recruit these “volunteers” for itself.⁴⁴ The Waffen-SS made ever more sweeping claims, and when Himmler eventually succeeded Wilhelm Frick as minister of the interior in the summer of 1943, it was clear that he would attempt to complete his fiefdom by taking over General Fromm’s role. This would then leave

 Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 601; see also Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1059 – 1064.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 955.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 383; Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann”; for the context see Stumpf, “Die Luftwaffe als drittes Heer,” 892– 895.  See below, Chapter 6.6.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 155; see also Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 672– 673.

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him in control of the agency allotting all personnel and matériel resources, as well as the single most important power factor within the Reich. Goebbels continued to denounce Fromm and his Replacement Army “bureaucrats” to Hitler as unreliable and defeatist, and this could only help Himmler to profit from the demise of the veteran logistics expert, Fromm.⁴⁵ Himmler had always hoped to distinguish himself as a wartime military commander; his seizure of the position as chief of the Replacement Army and of Army Equipment seemed imminent.⁴⁶ What the conservative opposition found particularly distasteful was the Bonzokratie (“bigwigism”) – i. e. the nouveau-riche demeanor of many of the new elites – and their unlimited tendency to enrich themselves.⁴⁷ One of the most obnoxious profiteers was Berlin Police President (and SA thug) Graf Helldorff, one of Göring’s protégés. The Reichsmarschall had helped Helldorff on several occasions by paying off his debts incurred through womanizing, gambling, and alcoholic excesses. Helldorff in turn was an acquaintance of Gisevius, because the two had coordinated police operations during the 1936 Berlin Olympic games.⁴⁸ Even Göring’s generosity had its limits, and Himmler distrusted him as a police commander, causing Helldorff to become embittered, eventually turning toward the oppositional thinking Gisevius had infused him with.⁴⁹ In his conversion, Helldorf was supported by the Police Vice-President, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg.⁵⁰ Many among the opposition, however, had their doubts about Helldorff: Stauffenberg would not talk to him more than was absolutely necessary,⁵¹ and it seems the intention was to get rid of Helldorff once the coup had succeeded.⁵² Even with the Western Allies, the fact that a man like Hell-

 See below chapter 5.3, and Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann,” 182. The Western Allies had a similar perception: Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 111, Doc. 1– 130, Telegram 5240.  See also Weinberg, A World at Arms, 478 – 479.  Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure.  Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”.  Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 410 – 411.  Heinemann, Ein konservativer Rebell, 46 – 48; for Schulenburg see also Keyserlingk, Der 20. Juli.  See the report by Urban Thiersch, former 1st Lieutenant in the Artillery, about his meeting with Oberst Graf Stauffenberg in July 1944 (written in Munich in 1949); IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 333 – 336; Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 506 – 509; Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 418; Statement FritzDietlof von der Schulenburg to the Gestapo: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 99 (30 July 1944).  Vassiltchikov, The Berlin Diaries, 94 (11 September 1943), 134 (13 January 1944). For Schulenburg’s Gestapo statement see Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 99 (30 July 1944); Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 269 – 270.

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dorff should be involved only served to increase their skepticism about the conservative opposition.⁵³ The third police officer within the conspiracy was Arthur Nebe, who was a highly problematic man who, since 1937, had been chief of the German Criminal Police. He had made a name for himself by arresting “social parasites” and “gypsies,” by successfully prosecuting the inquiry into Georg Elser’s bomb attempt on Hitler’s life in November 1939, and by maintaining an active involvement in operation “T4,” the euthanasia (that is, mass murder) of psychiatric patients, among others. This last example had included the development of gassing as a means of mass killing. Yet Nebe had also been involved in the 1938 attempts to clear Fritsch, and he had known about the planned coup in November of that year.⁵⁴ When German troops attacked the Soviet Union, Nebe assumed command of Einsatzgruppe B, an SS unit of some 650 men, which during Nebe’s tenure murdered at least 45,000 civilians, most of them Jews.⁵⁵ Nebe had grown up in deeply conservative circles and had known Gisevius, Schlabrendorff and Tresckow for a long time. That he should be assigned Einsatzgruppe B, which was to operate in the rear areas of Army Group Center, was supposedly due to Tresckow’s or maybe even Beck’s influence.⁵⁶ Nebe suffered from frail health, and his time in the Soviet Union weighed heavily on him. On the one hand he was an extremely cautious conspirator, but on the other, he endangered himself and others through his extensive womanizing. Stauffenberg kept Nebe at a distance, at least as much as Helldorff; if one is to believe Gisevius, Nebe resented this treatment enough to have considered withdrawing from the conspiracy.⁵⁷ Even in Army

 Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 385.  Parssinen, The Oster Conspiracy, 26, 111.  For Nebe, see Kiess, Der Doppelspieler (for the crimes of Einsatzgruppe B see pp. 195 – 197; the figure of 45,000 victims is in Weise, “Reichskriminaldirektor Nebe,” 245. Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung, relies heavily on a series about Nebe in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel of 1950. The reports of Einsatzgruppe B about its own activities yield a figure of 45,467 for the time until 14 November 1941: Klein, Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion, 62; Krausnick, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 179 – 186.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 533.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 508. Gisevius wrote his memoirs soon after the war, at a time when Nebe’s role commanding one of the Einsatzgruppen was not yet public knowledge; Gisevius does not go into detail regarding his friend’s share of mass murders. Instead Gisevius emphasizes the conflicts between Nebe and Stauffenberg with the intention of damaging the latter’s public image; his memoirs are altogether a highly problematic source.

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Group Center, some had been wondering about Nebe’s close links with Tresckow, considering that “one knew what a criminal he was.”⁵⁸ The involvement of such dubious characters as Gisevius, Helldorff, and Nebe again raises, with some urgency, the question of whether the resistance should be seen more from an academic, detached viewpoint or as a moral institution. As a “conscience in revolt,” the conspiracy is seriously compromised by the participation of these men. For their fellow conspirators, however, it was above all a matter of expediency; they felt that these men’s professional positions were sufficiently important to a successful coup d’état to warrant their inclusion. One might wonder how the Gestapo could have managed to overlook the vast conspiracy which slowly developed. One reason is that the Nazis had reintroduced a separate military justice system;⁵⁹ this meant that the Gestapo basically had no jurisdiction over military personnel, nor was it allowed to recruit informers in the armed forces. However, if members of the Wehrmacht committed crimes against the state in concert with civilians, they might have attracted the Gestapo’s attention. During the war, the Gestapo persistently tried to erode this distinction by pursuing investigations within the Wehrmacht as well. Very early on, the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) gained the impression (correctly) that elements of the Abwehr were illicitly creating secret networks inside the Reich, and that they were supporting opposition movements. The SD was also aware of the fact that someone had betrayed the date of the German offensive in the West, and again, Himmler’s secret service suspected their rivals from the Abwehr.⁶⁰ In 1943, members of the Abwehr (Oster, Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer, among others) were suspected of illegal transfers of currency in support of “Operation 7,” which provided covert aid for Jewish families fleeing to Switzerland.⁶¹ To better coordinate the investigation into the civilian and military sides of the affair, the military prosecutors were supported by Gestapo officers. Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of the OKW, had himself agreed to this encroachment upon military prerogatives.⁶² It was no coincidence that for this case within the purview of the OKW,

     ten

Interview with Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, Kreuzberg/Ahr, 21 July 1997. Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939 – 1945, 43 – 47. Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 350 – 351. For this, see Meyer, Unternehmen Sieben, and Fliess, “Unternehmen Sieben.” Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 27– 28; Sälter, Phantome des KalKrieges, 174.

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Luftwaffe prosecutors were appointed, led by the infamous Colonel (later Generalrichter) Manfred Roeder.⁶³ The Abwehr remained the organizational backbone of the military conspiracy until spring 1943.⁶⁴ For the secret intelligence service, it was relatively easy to obtain explosives, to maintain contact with the outside world, and to hatch top secret plans. The Abwehr also knew enough about German war crimes to permit prosecution once the regime was ultimately overthrown. All this must not give the impression that the Abwehr was swarming with men opposing the regime; here, too, only very few had an inkling of what Hans Oster – their chief and, above all, the director of the Central Department – was up to. When the SD finally managed to absorb the Abwehr, a gradual process begun in the spring of 1943 and largely completed by early 1944, the conspirators were compelled to envisage wholly new structures and procedures⁶⁵ – the starting point for the conspiracy’s reliance on the Commander of the Replacement Army, and the “Valkyrie” plans. All the plans indicate that the conspirators saw the armed SS units as by far the greatest threat to their planned putsch.⁶⁶ The armored units from the Panzertruppenschule II (Second Armored School) in Krampnitz (near Potsdam) had orders for “Day X” to assemble in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s large park just north of the Bendlerblock, and to send out armored patrols to reconnoiter towards the south, i. e. to check possible moves by the SS Leibstandarte replacement units in the Lichterfelde barracks. The replacement units of the Großdeutschland army division, stationed in Cottbus, some 65 kilometers south of Berlin, were tasked with penetrating the capital from the south in order to pin down the SS forces in the rear. The main objective of all these moves was to make sure the powerful and highly mobile SS units would be neutralized.⁶⁷ All this was quite realistic. Internal security was what Hitler envisaged as the “peacetime” task for the SS – which, in turn, meant that in the long term, the

 Bergander, Die Ermittlungen gegen Manfred Roeder; Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 27.  There is a wealth of literature about the Abwehr, not all of it scholarly. However, there are some recent titles which meet all scientific criteria: Scholtyseck, Das “Amt Ausland/Abwehr”; Müller, Das Amt Ausland/Abwehr; Mühleisen, “Die Canaris-Tagebücher”; Mueller, Canaris; Mühleisen, “Das letzte Duell.”  For Himmler’s goals in this situation see Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 350 – 351.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 350; Nagel, Johannes Popitz; and below, Chapter 6.3.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 430 – 431, 434– 435.

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army would not have any internal security role – not in war, and even less in peace.⁶⁸ It seemed obvious that in a “final solution” of the power struggle at home, the army would be the loser. In the squabbling over scarce manpower, there was yet another competitor: the Nazi Party itself. During the regime’s “peacetime” years, from 1933 to 1939, its power and influence had diminished, but as the war gained momentum, it succeeded in carving out a more prominent role for itself. It assumed care of bombed-out families and was an important factor in the “cumulative radicalization” at home.⁶⁹ As the Gauleiters in their capacity as Reich Defense Commissioners (Reichsverteidigungskommissare) were made responsible for general and home administration, the Party increasingly assumed public functions.⁷⁰

However, this required additional personnel who had to be made available by classifying their jobs as “reserved occupation,” exempting them from Wehrmacht conscription, so that further conflicts were inevitable.⁷¹ At the same time, Goebbels kept hinting to Hitler that the Wehrmacht maintained unnecessarily large and bloated bureaucracies, and that its “blatantly luxurious use of manpower” had to be stopped immediately.⁷² However, that would be possible only by replacing the prevailing top brass of the military. That was aimed not only at the much-despised Fromm but also at Hitler’s long-serving “lackey” Keitel, chief of the OKW. In the authoritarian Führer state, the competition for men in the modern industrialized mass war inevitably leads to rivalries […] In war, the decision which individuals or groups of able men can stay behind is one of the most controversial political subjects.⁷³

The military responsibility for this rested with the very agency that had come to form the center of the conspiracy: The General Army Office (AHA, under General Olbricht) had a strained relationship not only with several interest groups outside the Wehrmacht but was also at the center of competing competences within the Wehrmacht itself.

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 517, but regrettably without proper source references.  Nolzen, “The NSDAP,” 163 – 171; Blank, “Wartime Daily Life,” 437– 445.  Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 314.  For the details see Nolzen, “Von der geistigen Assimilation,” 76.  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher II.12, 519 (22 June 1944).  This and the following quotation in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 269.

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As the war neared its catastrophic end, the Nazi Party went back to positions held during its founding era; it radicalized itself and began to conflate the internal with the external enemy. More and more, the “reactionaries” were seen as the foe, and this included Army High Command (OKH).⁷⁴ Unlike in Italy, it was inconceivable that in this hour of need the party might revolt against its Führer and remove him from power. Not even the most basic structural prerequisites existed: there was no body which might have compared to the Italian “Grand Council of Fascism” that might have coordinated such a move. Hitler had hinted he might appoint a “senate,” which would eventually see to his succession, but he never got around to nominating members to occupy it. The party had “burned all its bridges.”⁷⁵ That left the military as the sole organization that might bring about regime change.⁷⁶ The party, from its own point of view, did not want to give the “reactionary” army an opportunity to dilute the “revolutionary spirit” that the Nazis were beginning to rediscover.⁷⁷ The conspirators from the army were not working to maintain their traditional social and professional privileges, but they saw clearly that the tide was turning against them in the “final struggle” for power inside the Reich, while the main components of the National Socialist apparatus, the party organization and the SS, were in the ascendancy. If there was to be any hope of success at all, swift action was of the essence.⁷⁸

4.2 The Command Structure The structures throughout the Nazi system were a strange combination of modern and backward-looking elements, and organization at the top of those structures in particular reflected Hitler’s personal style of leadership. As Mommsen describes, “The modern bureaucratic institutional state is based on the principle of the division of labor and of separated responsibilities. [In the case of the Third Reich,] it was replaced by a personalized type of rule, which relied on the unconditional loyalty of a small elite of followers. This was a backward-looking utopia

 Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 313.  Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner,” 16. See also Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 110.  Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 108 – 110.  Statement [Walter] Huppenkothen, “Verhältnis Wehrmacht – Sicherheitspolizei [I.]” [undated, probably before 1947]; IfZ, ZS 249/1, fol. 1‑15, for this see fol. 1.  Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 69.

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with some particularly atavistic traits.”⁷⁹ Hitler also imposed this system of polycratic structures onto the military. Thus, the question of the Reich’s supreme civilian and military command structure played a decisive role in many discussions among officers.⁸⁰ If thought through to the very end, a conventionally effective command structure separating civilian and military capacities would mean that Hitler would have to relinquish Supreme Command of the Army, if not of the entire Wehrmacht. In view of this, such a topos could be discussed freely in the safety of homogeneous communicative spaces of officers’ messes, and it offered ideal opportunities for pursuing the recruitment of conspirators. In 1933, Generalleutnant Beck had assumed that Hitler would free the Reich from the shackles of the Treaty of Versailles and that the Truppenamt, under Beck’s leadership, would soon be reestablished as the Army General Staff, thereby restoring it to its traditional role as the prime source of military expertise and advice for the head of state, as it had been in Prussia for over a century. Beck was sure that Hitler would decide the long-standing feuds between the Truppenamt and the other main agencies in the command structure, such as the Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Agency), in favor of the operational thinkers and their ideas about the future of warfare. The chief of the Army General Staff would be reinstated in his rightful role, and the primacy of operational thinking would be ensured.⁸¹ The creation of the Luftwaffe in turn led to the establishment of the OKW,⁸² a process driven in part by the personal ambitions of Generalleutnant Walther von Reichenau, who had always been close to the Nazis.⁸³ Hitler had always intensely disliked the General Staff with its old Prussian traditions and its largely aristocratic, intellectual officers. For him, creating a new, more “modern” Wehrmacht general staff seemed to offer an opportunity to loosen the grip on power held by the old elites. According to Keitel and his deputy, Alfred Jodl, the Führer did not need the vast bureaucracy of the General Staff to inform his decisions but, rather, a staff that could swiftly implement his orders without questioning them. The demands of Nazi ideology thereby began to affect the military command structure.⁸⁴ During the 1938 Czechoslovakia crisis, Beck drafted another

 Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 419.  Förster, “Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Ein grauer Fels,” 102– 103; see also the introduction to Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, xxv, as well as Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 109.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 114– 117, 124– 125.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 121– 122.  Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 427.  Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 429.

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memorandum addressing these basic questions, which extended well beyond the problems of the day. However, the effect was rather counterproductive, as it left Schmundt, Keitel and the Führer “greatly agitated.” Hitler flatly rejected the suggestions, viewing them as “the reactionary ideas of Beck’s ilk” which sought to “sabotage the Führer’s political aims.”⁸⁵ The 1938 “military seizure of power”⁸⁶ – as distinguished from the 1933 Machtergreifung – i. e. Hitler appointing himself commander in chief, deprived the Reich’s overall leadership of a comprehensive, competent advisory body. Many officers, both with or without links to the resistance movement, criticized this with increasing severity throughout the war.⁸⁷ Another divergence from the existing command structure occurred immediately before the war began. A new position, “commander in chief of the Replacement Army” replaced “commander in chief of the Home Army,” a term of First World War vintage. “Replacement Army” no longer contained any connotation of internal security. The responsibilities of the new position were reduced exclusively to personnel management.⁸⁸ Nobody had forgotten that, in 1918, the “Home Army” had been used to secure the prevailing political system and had been deployed to crush the “Bolshevist revolution” of the Kiel sailors.⁸⁹ The Reich Defense Law, which was passed in 1935, provided for the commander⁹⁰ of the Replacement Army to assume executive powers within the Reich during war time. Beck therefore tasked Generalmajor Erich von Manstein to draft a memorandum stating that a unified Reich Security Office (Reichssicherheitsamt) was to be created in time of war. This office’s purview would also include the Gestapo and the SS – a notion wholly unacceptable to Himmler.⁹¹ Instead, in 1936, Himmler was made chief of the German Police, nominally “in the Ministry of the Interior” but in practice with direct responsibility to Hitler. Witzleben, the commanding general of Military District III (Berlin), understood immediately that this would severely restrict the Replacement Army’s responsibilities and room for maneuver.⁹² After the Blomberg-Fritsch crisis of 1938, the Reich Defense Law was  Engel, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 29.  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 315.  Wegner, “Einführende Bemerkungen,” 138.  Keller, Die Wehrmacht, 32; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 285 – 287.  Schmidt, Heimatheer und Revolution, 16 – 17.  What had originally supposed to be an Oberbefehlshaber (“Commander-in-Chief”) eventually became a mere Befehlshaber (“Commander”).  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 134. After the Second World War, Manstein also served as military adviser to the West German Ministry of Defence in questions of the top command structure, see Wrochem, Erich von Manstein, 332.  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 79.

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amended. The revised version no longer made any mention of the army’s responsibilities to provide security at home or to mobilize the population. These roles had been ceded to Himmler and his police apparatus, so it was no coincidence that Himmler continuously strove during the war to bring the Replacement Army, the single most important force within the Reich, under his control.⁹³ Command of the Replacement Army was supposed to have been given to General der Infanterie Joachim von Stülpnagel, who had been Seeckt’s rival in the 1920s. Stülpnagel’s ideas about a mass army and total war had been influential during the 1920s and therefore seemed open to Nazi thinking on military subjects. He had retired in 1932 but was to be mobilized at the outbreak of war. Aged 57, Stülpnagel assumed his duties on 27 August 1939; however, on the thirty-first, Generaloberst von Brauchitsch informed him that, by order of the Führer, he had been relieved of his post “for reasons of age.”⁹⁴ In his memoirs, Stülpnagel surmised that Hitler saw him as a “political general” and as a former associate of Kurt von Schleicher and, therefore, did not want to see Stülpnagel in such a powerful position.⁹⁵ From Hitler’s point of view, stabilization of Nazi rule at home was to be the party’s job, not the army’s; there was nothing left of the “two pillars” of the regime.⁹⁶ Compared to the context of the First World War, the responsibilities of the commander of the Replacement Army had been drastically curtailed, and they were now added to those of the commander of General Army Office (AHA) and director of Army Armaments, General der Artillerie Fromm. However, in February 1940, Fromm was able to transfer direct responsibility for the AHA to General der Infanterie Friedrich Olbricht, who reported directly to him. Fromm now wore, in today’s NATO parlance, “two hats.” As commander of the Replacement Army, he was in charge of all troops within the Reich in addition to bearing responsibility for the entire Wehrmacht’s personnel needs. At their peak, these numbered up to 1.8 million men, making them the Reich’s strongest military force.⁹⁷ As director of Army Armaments, Fromm was responsible for equipping the army and, in many respects, the entire Wehrmacht.⁹⁸ “Total war” required putting operational and logistical control on equal footing, something Fromm

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 350; Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann,” 183.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 847.  Schönrade, General Joachim von Stülpnagel, 138, with further sources.  Strohn, The German Army, 176.  Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann,” 171.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 352– 353, 368.

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had always striven for, in particular against Beck; now, it seemed, he had achieved it.⁹⁹ In the autumn of 1938, the conspirators hoped they could forestall an outbreak of war. After 1 September 1939, this had been overtaken by events. The Wehrmacht’s early successes did not encourage any debate about whether its command structure made sense or not. Relations began to fray again when Hitler brusquely rejected the Army General Staff’s recommendations during the campaign against the Soviet Union. A case in point was the August 1941 decision to transfer the main effort of the attack south, away from Moscow.¹⁰⁰ The Reich’s supreme command structure resurfaced as a topic of debate among officers after Hitler assumed the office of commander in chief Army on 19 December 1941.¹⁰¹ Up until this point, Fromm’s two roles had reported directly to the commander in chief of the army. Hitler’s self-appointment to that role thus meant that Fromm would have had a direct line of communication with the Führer. Keitel, Fromm’s old rival, knew to forestall this and subordinated Fromm to the OKW instead. Technically, reporting to Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) rather than to Army High Command (OKH) might have seemed preferable or more prestigious, but it in fact meant a demotion.¹⁰² The example illustrates the absurdities and contradictions of the unsystematic command structure. The officer corps as homogeneous communicative space still remained intact. It allowed critical reflections even among politically fairly neutral officers. Ulrich de Maizière, then a major in the General Staff (later a four-star general and chief of staff of the Bundeswehr), explains in his memoirs that these changes were perceived as a “systemic change.”¹⁰³ The chief of the Army General Staff’s Operations Department, Generalmajor Heusinger (also later a four-star general in the Bundeswehr and its first chief of staff) held “Hitler’s perennial distrust of the army” responsible for this change.¹⁰⁴ Even among the National Socialist Leadership Officers– essentially a group of Nazi political commissars appointed to reinforce the army’s ideological reliability – saw some negative impact upon the  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 352; Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 109 – 112.  Groß, The Myth and Reality, 239 – 240.  For the operational context see Klink, “The Conduct of Operations. The Army and Navy,” 716 – 718.  [General der Kavallerie] Carl-Erik Kohler und [Generalmajor a.D.] Hellmuth Reinhardt, Der Chef der Heeresrüstung und Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres im Rahmen des Oberkommandos des Heeres. Study P-041dd [1950], BA-MA, ZA 1/1932, fol. 140, 180 – 181; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 219.  Maizière, In der Pflicht, 79.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 168.

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morale of regular army officers. Hitler’s insistence on retaining command of the army was perceived as “a negative evaluation of the current military leadership’s quality.”¹⁰⁵ For Colonel Henning von Tresckow, the operations officer of Army Group Center, the disempowerment of the General Staff and its expertise was a major incentive for bringing about a change, by force if necessary, in the command structure.¹⁰⁶ However, it seems that the criticism was most widespread among the Army General Staff in Berlin, as some conspirators confirmed under interrogation after 20 July 1944. One Gestapo document reports: Blumenthal states in the Bendlerstraße [i. e., the General Staff’s offices], the conduct of the war and position of the Wehrmacht in the National Socialist state were criticized uniformly. All critics agree that the position of the Wehrmacht was not what it should have been right from the beginning of the war. Lieutenant von Haeften [Stauffenberg’s adjutant] told Blumenthal several times that it was necessary to allow the officer corps more influence, in particular to the General Staff. [Blumenthal:] One example is that we have no minister of war. This creates difficulties for the entire defense of the Reich. […] As early as the end of 1941 there were rumors in the OKH and the OKW that the war would end badly if specific changes in the Wehrmacht leadership and in the way the war was conducted did not occur.¹⁰⁷

A situation such as this obviously ran counter to the General Staff’s efficiencyminded way of thinking. Major Graf Stauffenberg, assigned to the General Staff’s organizational department, occasionally presented lectures on command structure, frequently beginning his presentation by claiming that “the German command structure was even more absurd than what the most qualified General Staff officers could have produced if they had been asked to invent the most absurd command structure possible.”¹⁰⁸ The audience would consist of sizeable numbers of officers, but without ever anyone taking offense at the young upstart’s frankness. An August 1942 memorandum drafted by Fromm for Hitler demanded a policy designed to end the war, and in the interim, “a workable command structure.”¹⁰⁹

  297.   

Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 634. Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 122 – 123; Aretin, “Henning von Tresckow,” Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 334– 335 (1 September 1944). Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 145. Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 458 – 459.

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Many changes at the top of the command structure also came at the expense of the army.¹¹⁰ When Fromm, responsible for all personnel and matériel allocations, was transferred from the OKH to the OKW, the army lost immediate control over vital resources.¹¹¹ Reorganization at all levels was of course due initially to the unfolding series of crises in the war, but they implied long-term consequences: “various leading figures in the regime seized the opportunity to strengthen their own positions in the power struggle.” This “administrative infighting” led Hitler to issue a decree about the legal position of the Nazi Party “which made the machinery of state subordinate to the party apparatus… As it had in the spring of 1940 and in December 1941, the regime adroitly exploited a position of military weakness to undermine further the old centers of power.”¹¹² Eventually, in the autumn of 1943, some of the field marshals made up their minds to recommend to Hitler the nomination of a “commander in chief east,” along the lines of the Oberost that had existed during the First World War. But this timid approach accomplished nothing.¹¹³ Field Marshal von Manstein had also repeatedly urged Hitler in that direction, but he would not in any way exert pressure, let alone support any act of violence against the Führer.¹¹⁴ Heusinger was annoyed by the persistent nuisance and unnecessary friction created by the separation of the military command between OKW and OKH.¹¹⁵ In early June 1943, Tresckow tried to implicate Heusinger in the conspiracy that was to put an end to this nuisance. Heusinger would have none of it, but he also did not take it as an opportunity to denounce Tresckow.¹¹⁶

 Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 94.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 424– 425; Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 305; [General der Kavallerie] Carl-Erik Kohler and [Generalmajor a.D.] Hellmuth Reinhardt, “Der Chef der Heeresrüstung und Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres im Rahmen des Oberkommandos des Heeres.” Study P-041dd [1950], BArch, ZA 1/1932, fol. 181.  Both citations from Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 905.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 6 – 7, 227– 228; Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 135. According to his own post-war testimony Guderian tried in March 1943 to get Goebbels to talk Hitler into a viable command structure which would imply a “Chief of Wehrmacht General Staff” with competences at the operational level – Guderian no doubt had himself in mind for the job; Guderian, Panzer Leader, 293 – 294.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 160 – 161; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 88 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 348 – 349; Generalmajor Freiherr von Gersdorff: “Beitrag zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944,” Oberursel, 12.1.1946, IfZ, ED 88, fol. 93 – 104, at fol. 94; Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 135; Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 6.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 224; Stumpf, “Die Luftwaffe als drittes Heer,” 858; Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1067; Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 95.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 273, 277.

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In late August 1943, Generalmajor Hellmuth Stieff attempted to recruit Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, commander in chief Army Group Center, using the same subject to initiate the conversation – again, without success, but also without any negative consequences for Stieff.¹¹⁷ When Beck first met the unemployed Field Marshal von Witzleben, he discussed the same subject, as Witzleben later told the Gestapo. Our conversation went so far as to criticize the military decisions of the Führer. In particular, we were annoyed that men as able as Brauchitsch, Halder, List, and others had been eliminated… We deplored, above all, the elimination of the commander in chief of the Army. We both agreed that something needed to be done to reinstate qualified people [in such roles]. In this context, I mentioned that I was quite willing to make myself available as commander in chief of the army, when the time came.¹¹⁸

When Major Joachim Kuhn was questioned by his Soviet captors in the autumn of 1944 regarding his motives for opposing Hitler, one of the first things he mentioned was that in 1942, he had worked under Stauffenberg’s command in the Army General Staff Organizational Department, and that he had been responsible for the Army’s top command structure.¹¹⁹ Even then, Stauffenberg had called for a massive change, for the elimination of Hitler, and had declared himself ready to do it.¹²⁰ After incurring severe injuries in Africa in October 1943, Stauffenberg returned to this issue as his chief argument in favor of an action against Hitler: In the ensuing months, Stauffenberg was busy debating the question of whether a military state of emergency might create a situation … and how the Führer’s immediate control of the war might be reduced in a way the top commanders thought appropriate… The state of emergency should be used to replace all the agencies which had gained influence over the conduct of the war by those military authorities which were originally responsible.¹²¹

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 88 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 348 – 349. Kluge in turn mentioned this to Admiral Canaris when the latter was with Army Group Center in Smolensk in 1943: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 424 (29 September 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 46 (24 July 1944); IMT, vol. 33, Doc. 3881-PS, 352.  Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 9; Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn vom 2.9.1944, fol. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210 at p. 189; similarly Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 377.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 154.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 335 (1 September 1944); see also 291– 294 (23 August 1944, encl. 1). However, even when Stauffenberg was still in the Organisation Branch, he had asked brother officers: “How can this go on under this leadership, and where is it going to end?” Report by Dietz Freiherr von Thüngen about Stauffenberg, 25 January 1946, IfZ, ED 88 – 2, fol. 352– 357, at fol. 353.

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In almost exactly the same words, Captain Ludwig Gehre, of the Abwehr, described the conspirators’ aim as an alternative policy to increase the Reich’s warfighting capacity: It will be necessary to replace all those agencies that have begun to interfere with the conduct of the war with the military authorities who properly should be in charge of them. The means to that end was the state of emergency.¹²²

This was no longer only about placing the operational command on the eastern front on a new, purely military footing. This was about ending the Nazi Party’s control of all other aspects of strategic, total war, and leaving all that to the military, which, in a way revives Seeckt’s thinking. Late in 1943, Stauffenberg recruited an officer from his own regiment, Major Ludwig Baron von Leonrod, for the opposition: “Leonrod was aware of the fact that the government was to be disposed of, and that the Wehrmacht was to assume the executive power within the Reich.”¹²³ This regiment, the Seventeenth Cavalry, from Bamberg, was of course Stauffenberg’s most intimate communicative space.¹²⁴ When speaking to other officers, he might have been drastic in his criticism but was more reticent regarding his aims. In a conversation with Captain Friedrich Scholz-Babisch, Stauffenberg only mentioned a “unification of the military leadership” – that was something that Scholz-Babisch was willing to support.¹²⁵ As late as 23 June 1944, Stauffenberg approached his comrade and classmate at the Kriegsakademie, Colonel Eberhard Finckh. Without swearing Finckh to secrecy in any way, Stauffenberg explained his evaluation of the military situation: “We have no real field marshals anymore. They’re all scared shitless and don’t talk back when Hitler gives them an order. They do not clearly state their opinion about how serious the situation is.”¹²⁶ The Gestapo investigators, obviously with little understanding of the army officer corps’ inner workings, reported to Hitler: “It seems to have been quite common in the Bendlerstraße to talk like that in excess of any necessities and with a complete disregard for caution.”¹²⁷

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 527 (15 December 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 54 (26 July 1944).  See Loeben, Graf Marogna-Redwitz; Sauerbruch, “Bericht.”  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 312 (29 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 313 (29 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 49 (25 July 1944); see also pp. 291– 294 (23 August 1944, enclosure 1).

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It seems striking that these insights came mostly to junior yet promising officers, such as lieutenant colonels, colonels, and some newly promoted Generalmajore. The claim that “on the whole, there was no professional opposition against the dictator”¹²⁸ may well be true for the Wehrmacht generals, especially the top ranks, but it applies less obviously to the next generation of officers.¹²⁹

4.3 Amateurish: Hitler as Commander Both for the conspirators and for many other realistically minded officers, an appropriate command structure was an essential precondition for efficient conduct of any war. In 1866, King Wilhelm I had authorized General Moltke, Chief of the General Staff, to issue orders that created a de facto separation between the head of state and the head of the military. This was an important step in the professionalization of the military that is still present today.¹³⁰ When Hitler first assumed command of the Wehrmacht and then also of the army, he placed himself in the tradition of the roi connétable (Prussian King Frederick the Great who had still personally commanded his armies in the field) and, by doing so, displaced one of the essential modernizing elements of the preceding 75 years in German military history.¹³¹ The process had started long before the war, and the “de-professionalization of the government system”¹³² was an experience that affected both the civilian administration and the military. The enormous, modern, and highly technical intricacies of war called for more than just the “leadership from the front” that Hitler so admired in officers like Rommel.¹³³ Hitler would rant against the alleged tendency of the General Staff “to breed only intellectual acrobats and athletes” and “mental athletes”; he would demand repeatedly that “one should take valiant young men who are willing to risk their lives like any other soldier,”¹³⁴ thus revealing the reac-

 Hürter, “Konservative Akteure,” 56.  Heinemann, “Les officiers de la résistance militaire allemande.”  Groß, The Myth and Reality, 43 – 44.  Hürter and Uhl, “Hitler in Vinnica”. This subchapter, too, expands on ideas first published in Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” Chapter II.  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 405.  For Rommel see the most recent publication: Lieb, “Erwin Rommel”; still valid is Stumpf, “Erwin Rommel und der Widerstand.” The biography by Irving, The Trail of the Fox, is tendentious and in some instances false; its wealth of primary sources is however unsurpassed; see the detailed criticism in Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen.”  Hitler in the situation conference of 1 February 1943: Heiber, Hitlers Lagebesprechungen, 128. See also Absolon, “Das Offizierkorps des Deutschen Heeres,” 255 – 256.

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tionary tendencies of his military thinking. His remark, “Anyone can do that little bit of operational leadership!” grotesquely highlights his utter lack of comprehension of the qualifications that were needed to coordinate the mass armies of the twentieth century. Without relying on the competence of the General Staff and its broad range of specialists, no more than a dilettantish conduct of the war could be possible. Even before 1938, the basic question of responsible administration of war and peace loomed behind the structural question of the chain of command. All this had only been exacerbated by the conduct of the war up until the summer of 1944. During the initial period of the major victories, very few realized how much Hitler owed to luck, to the professional savvy of the much-despised General Staff officers (Manstein, for example, who had had the brilliant idea of the “Sickle Cut” plan that had led to the 1940 victory over France) and to some of the traditional Prussian-German command axioms.¹³⁵ One of those few was Henning von Tresckow, who expressed his disdain in 1940 and again in 1941 of the “madness” of the top German military leaders.¹³⁶ Especially among the General Staff officers, this did not go unremarked. Then-Colonel (later Generalmajor) Hellmuth Stieff wrote to his wife in August 1941: “By God, this bloody dilettantism, supported by such glorious characters as Keitel and Jodl, might well lose us the war.”¹³⁷ (It is maybe indicative of the attitudes of immediate postwar historians that when this letter was published, in 1954, this sentence was relegated to a footnote.¹³⁸) This was of course a reaction to Hitler’s operational blunder to split the axis of attack against the remaining Soviet forces in two¹³⁹ – in blatant disregard of the maxim laid down in field manual H.Dv. 300 Truppenführung, written largely by Beck and Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in October 1933: “One can never be too strong at the decisive point. All attempts to guard very position, and all diversion of forces to secondary tasks, is in contravention of this.”¹⁴⁰ Soon after, Beck’s successor as the army’s chief of staff, Generaloberst Franz Halder, one of the driving forces behind

 Frieser and Greenwood, The Blitzkrieg Legend, 326 – 329.  Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 449.  Stieff, Briefe, 123 (Nr 69, 23 August 1941).  It was originally published by Hans Rothfels in the egregious Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte: Stieff, “Ausgewählte Briefe,” 301.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 59; Klink, “The Conduct of Operations. The Army and Navy,” 569 – 594.  H.Dv. 300: Truppenführung, Nr. 28.

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the opposition during 1938 and 1939, also resigned – accelerating the process of de-professionalization.¹⁴¹ Accordingly, attempts to recruit high-ranking generals for the conspiracy (e. g., Manstein, Kluge) emphasized Hitler’s amateurish leadership as well as the distorted command structure.¹⁴² It was no longer structures alone that were the problem, but the person of Adolf Hitler himself. In September 1942, the Führer visited the headquarters of Army Group Center in Vinnytsia, in western Ukraine. While there, he had to finally accept that the German push into the Caucasus (Operation Blue) had failed. He blamed the General Staff, sacked Halder, and appointed Generalmajor Kurt Zeitzler – a surprise choice, given his lack of seniority, meaning Zeitzler had to be promoted General der Infanterie without having been a Generalleutnant. ¹⁴³ Hitler also sacked the commander in chief of Army Group A, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, and took over that role himself (until November 1942). He insisted that any of his pronouncements, down to the tactical level, had to be treated as immediately valid military orders. To show his deep distrust of the army generals, he also insisted that all future situation conferences be recorded by stenographers.¹⁴⁴ Zeitzler, too, tried to convince Hitler of the merits of mobile warfare in order to prevent losses. But before long, he was forced to conclude: “There was no way he could be pushed from his course of rigidly holding on to every foot of ground.”¹⁴⁵ Hitler was wedded to his ideas that originated between 1914 and 1918. The chief of the Operations Department, Heusinger “called it just a joke that the most important statesmen of the Axis should … see to the use of companies or the deployment of five tanks, while he lets everything else run its course.”¹⁴⁶ But junior officers as much as the field marshals noted the “systemic change.” As de Maizière later recounted, “Hitler preferred young, tough advisers. The intellectual, calculating General Staff officer who takes into account the uncomfortable real-

 Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 883.  For Kluge, see Thun, “Generalfeldmarschall Kluge,” 46; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 291; with slightly differing views Steinbach, “Hans Günther von Kluge,” 309 – 310. For Manstein, see Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 135; as well as – more recently – Ueberschär, “Die Auswirkungen,” 128 – 130.  Wegner, “The War Against the Soviet Union,” 1057– 1059.  Hürter and Uhl, “Hitler in Vinnica,” 597; Wegner, Bernd: “The War Against the Soviet Union,” 1211– 1212.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 230.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 224; see also the comments by Generaloberst Heinrici in his diary on 23 January 1943: Heinrici, Notizen aus dem Vernichtungskrieg, 204– 205.

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ities was not to his liking. Optimism, trust, and faith were prioritized over sheer expertise.”¹⁴⁷ Major Joachim Kuhn, the conspirator who survived in Soviet captivity, told his interrogators, “Even in 1942, the daily routine showed the numerous mistakes the supreme command made in operational and organizational matters.”¹⁴⁸ Stauffenberg was surprised, while visiting Peter Sauerbruch as the latter lay wounded in a Munich hospital, that Sauerbruch “should be so concerned about the mindless holding orders. Did I not have enough opportunity at headquarters to observe the style of leadership, so that I could have foreseen the catastrophe at Stalingrad?”¹⁴⁹ In July 1943, it was Stauffenberg who was laid up in a Munich hospital, after suffering wounds in Africa. When Kuhn came to see him, conversation soon turned to Hitler’s military blunders. “Conditions need to be created,” Stauffenberg said, “which will allow peace to be concluded at the earliest possible date. That can only be accomplished by eliminating the Führer.”¹⁵⁰ Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff had joined the headquarters of Army Group Center in April 1941 and remained there until he was promoted to colonel. In his memoirs, he recounts an episode in which Hitler, against Field Marshal Kluge’s advice, ordered the Second Panzer Army into an attack that “failed with heavy losses of men and equipment [and] caused the senseless death of German soldiers.”¹⁵¹ This focus on operational and even tactical matters due to his First World War mentality led to a blatant disregard for the rear areas. Consequently, these “thinning out” campaigns deprived the logistics services of so many men that when forced to retreat, the units were unable to take much heavy equipment with them.¹⁵² The nefarious effects of Hitler’s lack of competence drew attention not only from the military; even university students noticed. The last leaflet printed and distributed by the group of Munich students known as the White Rose stated: Shaken and broken, our people behold the loss of the men of Stalingrad. Three hundred and thirty thousand German men have been senselessly and irresponsibly driven to

     

Maizière, In der Pflicht, 79. Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 9 (statement Kuhn). Sauerbruch, “Bericht,” 269. Quoted in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 32– 33. Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 81, 123. Kroener, “‘Frontochsen’ und ‘Etappenbullen’”, 377.

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death and destruction by the inspired strategy of our World War I Private First Class. Führer, we thank you!¹⁵³

Ineffectual leadership was not, however, limited to the Reich’s top echelon. In February 1943, the General Staff dispatched a lieutenant colonel entirely unconnected with the resistance, Ulrich de Maizière, to evaluate the command of SSGruppenführer (Generalleutnant) Sepp Dietrich, who commanded the SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler. Horrified, he noted: Proper training has been arrogantly neglected. Brave but ideologically misled young men were being sacrificed senselessly, without the leaders of this Waffen-SS division taking much notice. Faith in the Führer to them was far more important than professional savvy.¹⁵⁴

When creating his Luftwaffe “field divisions” (Felddivisionen) Göring expressly encouraged his troops to ignore the “reactionary” army’s experience and to replace training hours with ideological indoctrination. He exhorted them to use “revolutionary methods in training and fighting, contrary to all regulations.”¹⁵⁵ The Army General Staff reaction was hardly one of surprise. As observed during one OKH meeting, “A partially (if at all) qualified corps of strangers is being equated with the professionally trained military officer corps and its long-term expertise. This is an almost unbearable burden.”¹⁵⁶ Hitler’s tendency to interfere with operational and tactical details led to a growing estrangement between him and some military leaders around him. Field Marshal von Kluge had succeeded Field Marshal von Bock as commander in chief of Army Group Center in December 1941.¹⁵⁷ When Hitler meddled in Kluge’s army group, Gersdorff took the opportunity to win Kluge over to the military opposition, at least for some time.¹⁵⁸ Quartermaster General Generalmajor Eduard Wagner began to have similar doubts when Hitler divided and diluted

 http://libcom.org/library/white-rose-leaflet-6, accessed 3 February 2020. See also Scholl, The White Rose, 91– 93. For the military experience some of the medical students had had on the Eastern Front see Vollmuth, Grunwald, and Müllerschön, Die Weiße Rose.  Maizière, In der Pflicht, 77– 78.  Stumpf, “Die Luftwaffe als drittes Heer,” 881, see also p. 879.  From an OKH meeting on 25 June 1942, quoted in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 528 (15 December 1944).  Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 430; Mühleisen, “Fedor von Bock,” 74.  This is Gersdorff’s own version, Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 123. Gersdorff is, however, a highly unreliable source.

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the German offensive in the summer of 1942,¹⁵⁹ and with Stieff, it was much the same: “when someone becomes megalomaniacal and no longer listens to advice, then he will eventually have to be eliminated”¹⁶⁰. Clear-eyed officers back home shared that impression. Regarding a conversation he had with Admiral Canaris, Fromm noted: “Nobody seriously considers telling the Führer the truth. In Wehrmacht High Command, the worst kind of dilettantism has taken hold.”¹⁶¹ Field Marshal Rommel, then in Africa, had been one of Hitler’s most faithful minions. During the Battle of Alamein, he had had to witness as Hitler interfered with leadership of Panzer Army Africa, which prevented him from withdrawing in time. Rommel later severely criticized Göring, suggesting that the Reichsmarschall was “militarily intoxicated on opium” (a particularly scathing remark in view of Göring’s well-known drug addiction). But Rommel went further and included the hitherto sacrosanct Hitler in his bitter comments: “I began to realize that Adolf Hitler did not want to see things as they were, and that he refused to believe emotionally what his reason must have told him was true.”¹⁶² When talking to his naval liaison officer in Normandy, Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge, in the summer of 1944, Rommel commented further on the “dilettantish conduct of the war”¹⁶³. Colonel Alexis Freiherr von Roenne was the General Staff’s director of Foreign Armies West and was convinced that the “almost effortless success of the invasion” was due to Hitler’s mistakes.¹⁶⁴ This overarching theme was to be prominently used after a successful coup d’état, evidenced by one fiery passage of a speech to the German nation drafted by Goerdeler that included the following passage: Germans! Monstruous scenes have been played before our eyes. Hitler, against the advice of his expert advisors, has sacrificed whole armies to his vanity, his arrogant desire for power, his profane delusions. With deadly certainty, his supposed expertise as a military commander has led our valiant sons, fathers, husbands, and brothers to their doom.¹⁶⁵

And in his draft of an “Appeal to the Wehrmacht,” he went even further:

 Wagner, Der Generalquartiermeister, 219 – 221; Peter, “General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner,” 206; Heinemann, “Wagner.”  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 344.  Quoted in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 437.  Remy, Mythos Rommel, 170; see also Stumpf, “The War in the Mediterranean Area 1942– 1943,” 789 – 790, as well as Stumpf, “Erwin Rommel und der Widerstand.”  IfZ, ED 100/188 (Depositum Irving), Copy of Ruge’s Diary.  Pahl, Motive und Ziele, 41.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 139 – 140 (4 August 1944).

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Something else is threatening to deprive you of the spoils of the victories you could have won if you had been led by experienced, well-trained men: Hitler’s “military genius” which he in his mad delusions claimed for himself and which his bootlickers lauded in such a repulsive fashion. Anyone wanting to resole a shoe needs to have learned how to do so. Anyone wanting to lead an army of millions must have acquired the ability to do so in many years of hard military service, gradually climbing the ladder of promotion. Hundreds of thousands of valiant soldiers have paid with their lives, limbs or loss of liberty for the presumption and vanity of one single man.¹⁶⁶

On the very evening of 20 July 1944, Beck, as the designated head of state, took the appropriate measures: Army Group North had been condemned by one of Hitler’s mindless holding orders to being cut off in Courland (in present-day Latvia), and Beck ordered it to withdraw immediately. In view of the swiftly evolving situation, this order remained unimplemented, but had it been carried out, it would have saved hundreds of thousands from death, injury, or capture. The army group duly noted the order in its war diary but added later that they believed it had come from an enemy agent.¹⁶⁷ The next morning, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, the newly appointed chief of the General Staff, demonstrated to the remaining officers in his charge just how little the Third Reich’s conduct of the war was guided by expertise and sober judgement. He decried the roundly skeptical assessment of the situation on the eastern front as “defeatism and pessimism,” threatened to have officers arrested and shot, and called the work of the General Staff so far “utterly useless.”¹⁶⁸ Although the intention of senior career officers was to get German warfare back on track, a moral argument began to hold sway: the “useless sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of valiant soldiers”¹⁶⁹ was increasingly perceived as a “crime against one’s own nation.”¹⁷⁰ Hitler’s holding orders caused avoidable losses, thus contributing to the rapid depletion of the Wehrmacht’s fighting power (see Chapter 6.6). “For men like Tresckow and Stauffenberg, maintaining the army was the focus of all considerations.”¹⁷¹ They were not seeking to win a war that had been lost long ago; these were officers to whom the welfare and

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 200 (11 August 1944, enclosure 3).  Telcom Oberst Graf Stauffenberg to Chief of Staff Army Group North [GM Kinzel], Nr 541. BArch, RH 19 III/20, fol. 178; telcom Chief of Staff to Ia/OpAbt [GenStdH], Nr. 542, BArch, RH 19 III/20, fol. 179. See also Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 366; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 523 – 524.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 369; Meyer, “Generaloberst Guderian,” 15.  Quotation from General Friedrich Olbricht: Page, General Friedrich Olbricht, 181.  Wette, “Zwischen Untergangspathos und Überlebenswillen,” 13.  Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 125.

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survival of their men mattered. “The preservation of the Army,” however, was also important because its role was by no means supposed to be over once the war had ended. Historical research has come to assess Hitler’s military qualifications in different ways. For a long time, most authors indeed characterized him him as an incompetent amateur.¹⁷² More recently, however, authors have opposed such criticism: “In politics and in warfare, Adolf Hitler did not have just some smattering [of expertise] but, rather, had worked diligently to acquire a broad basic knowledge.”¹⁷³ This debate is not relevant to the present discussion. The varied interpretations of today’s and tomorrow’s historians notwithstanding, the fact remains that the officers in the military conspiracy of 20 July 1944 (as well as many outside it, and not just a small circle of elitist General Staff officers) perceived Hitler’s leadership as amateurish. This was one of the driving forces behind their opposition: to act against a man they saw as Germany’s greatest threat. It was patently obvious that none of the Allies would conclude peace with Hitler or his cronies. With the prevailing cadre in command, neither a longterm continuation of nor an end to the war was possible. Replacing the regime thus became a moral imperative for officers whose intellect was sharp enough to think things through to their logical conclusion. Thus the seemingly “harmless” topic of the supreme command structure reached far beyond theoretical debates in officer messes. Taken to their logical conclusion these innocuous chats led to the inevitable result that Hitler and his regime had to be eliminated.¹⁷⁴ Stauffenberg, a charismatic leader and brilliant intellectual, was not one to spare any of his interlocutors the logical conclusion.

 Frieser and Greenwood, The Blitzkrieg Legend, 347– 348.  Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 486, with reference to Haffner, Anmerkungen zu Hitler, 31– 56, and Pyta, Hitler, 25, 585. This begs the question what exactly marks the difference been “smattering” and “basic knowledge.” Fritz, The First Soldier, 370, claims that Hitler had “a keen strategic understanding” whereas his generals “often proved adept at operations and tactics” – without, however, explaining why Hitler loved to interfere on the tactical and operational level.  Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, XXV (Introduction).

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4.4 Elite Manipulation: Hitler’s Interference in Army Personnel Policies The “preservation of the army” was not merely a matter of numbers. The phrase also referred to the preservation of the prevailing social structures of the Reichswehr’s officer corps, which became increasingly endangered by Nazi policies. “The military equivalent of the Volksgemeinschaft [national community] concept was the Volksarmee [people’s army].”¹⁷⁵ Attempts by National Socialists to alter the social coherence of the army officer corps threatened to erode the traditional ties and thereby intrude upon the communicative space described above. In view of the “partial identity of aims,” many officers of national-conservative views had for a long time overlooked the “plebeian” traits of the Nazi movement, but when these policies threatened to “revolutionize” the army from within, they were almost uniformly rejected.¹⁷⁶ Still, significant numbers of officers had absorbed National Socialist thinking early on, causing Heusinger to state much later that, even after 1933, a “unified, homogeneous officer corps in the old sense had ceased to exist.”¹⁷⁷ Warfare had become a highly technical matter during the First World War: artillery had taken on a vast importance, and it was perhaps no coincidence that a “modern” (i. e., amenable to Nazi thinking) officer like Reichenau had come from artillery, and had also served – like Guderian – for a period in the signals service, another high-tech branch at the time.¹⁷⁸ After 1935, this process of social change was reinforced by the sheer numerical expansion of the Wehrmacht in general and the officer corps in particular. The target for that year was to raise a peacetime army of 36 divisions (as a first step); that required a fivefold increase in the number of officers that had until then stood at about 4,000.¹⁷⁹ The director of the Army Personnel Office (Heerespersonalamt), Generalleutnant Viktor von Schwedler, opposed any further expansion, claiming that:

 Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 313.  Klausa, “Zu wenig und zu spät?,” 536.  Quote in Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 169; see also Geyer, “Professionals and Junkers,” 83; Heinemann, “Vom Verlust gemeinsamer Wertmaßstäbe und Verhaltensweisen,” 105.  Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 425; Meyer, “Generaloberst Guderian,” 2; Macksey, “Generaloberst Heinz Guderian,” 80. On the other hand, Keitel, Jodl, and Warlimont as well as Beck and Fromm were artillery officers as well.  Absolon, “Das Offizierkorps des Deutschen Heeres,” 247; Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 315.

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the necessity to transfer inactive officers and NCOs, and to promote cadets with only short and therefore insufficient training has resulted in a diluting effect such that there can be no talk of an officer corps in the true sense until about a year has elapsed so that the army and its commanders have had time to forge their men into a coherent whole.¹⁸⁰

The Wehrmacht now began to recruit cadets from social strata that earlier would have been deemed unsuitable. This was due not only to the rapid expansion and the resulting demand; it was also in line with Nazi ideology: For millions of Germans, the allure of the new political program was the promise of equality within… Programmatically, the Nazi movement combined social and national homogenization. Soon after 1933, a so-called Aryan was not allowed to engage with a so-called Jewish woman, but for the first time in German history, an officer could marry a girl from a working-class family.¹⁸¹

Even high-ranking officers actively encouraged the social “opening” of the “military Volksgemeinschaft”: “The new Wehrmacht was defined as a German ‘National Army’… rooted in the German nation and without the kind of separate existence in the old sense, but which would serve as an example of German character and nature to the entire nation.”¹⁸² Ludwig Beck advocated for a rapid, even precipitous rearmament, and he swept aside any reservations regarding personnel recruitment as well as Fromm’s concerns regarding the armaments industry.¹⁸³ His example illustrates the paradox: the massive move to rearm fulfilled a dream of many national-conservative officers, but in the long term, it threatened their own traditional assumptions about their profession as well as their own social and political status.¹⁸⁴ The change would obviously also affect the Wehrmacht hierarchy. In 1938, according to Beck’s notes, Hitler had announced “the war against Czechoslovakia would have to be fought with the old generals, but the war against England and France I’ll conduct with a new generation of leaders.”¹⁸⁵ Hitler’s vision of the

 Chief, Army Personnel Office, Nr. 450/35, gKdos. PA (1), 15 June 1935, BArch, RH 12/1019, fol. 85 – 88, quoted in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 239. See also Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 210.  Aly, “Hitlers Volksstaat. Anmerkungen.” More extensively in Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat, 28 – 29; see also Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 919.  Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 316. The quotation is from a directive by the Commanding Officer, 1. Panzerdivision about the education of the officer corps dated 2 March 1937.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 214.  Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 370.  Memorandum Beck dated 16 July 1938, published in Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, Nr. 50, 553. See also Weinberg, “Rollen- und Selbstverständnis,” 68.

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ideal officer owed to his own frontline experience in the First World War, and it envisaged the young, energetic shock-troop infantry officer of the western front. The exact antithesis of this was the typical Prussian General Staff officer, especially if they were – like Fritsch, Beck, and Halder, but also Keitel and Jodl – from the artillery and often of noble birth.¹⁸⁶ Although Hitler was constantly unhappy with his generals, this did not stop him from awarding them generous financial bonuses (“donations”), with sums between 500,000 and 1 million Reichsmarks (and sometimes in excess of even that fantastic sum).¹⁸⁷ Field Marshal von Kluge, whose dithering was to doom the revolt in Paris ten months later, accepted 250,000 Reichsmarks from the Führer on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, in October 1943. His operations officer, Colonel von Tresckow, repeatedly warned Kluge – in vain – against accepting the money, calling such a gift “odious”.¹⁸⁸ In the words of First Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an officer in Tresckow’s department on Kluge’s staff: “Hitler had tied his higher-ranking generals to a golden, but very efficient leash.”¹⁸⁹ During the war, the changes in the social composition of the officer corps were accelerated by enormous losses in officers as well as enlisted men. The proportion of reserve officers, most of them from the “Hitler Youth generation,” grew steadily. A separate career was created for Sonderführer, specialists who could be employed at the officer level without any training as a cadet.¹⁹⁰ The few remaining professional officers watched these changes with growing concern, as both developments debased professional standards and produced officers more susceptible to Nazi ideology.¹⁹¹

 For Hitler’s attitude to the nobility see Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 170; Engel, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler, 24; Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 167; Heinemann, “A artilharia na Primeira Guerra Mundial,” 190 – 193.  Steinbach, “Hans Günther von Kluge,” 293; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 271, and footnote 49 with more sources; Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure, 36; Grunberger, The 12-year Reich, 141.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 350 (6 March 1943).  Bajohr, Parvenüs und Profiteure, 36.  See for this the groundbreaking work of Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, as well as volumes V/1 and V/2 of Germany and the Second World War: Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” and Kroener, “Management of Human Resources.” Höhne, “Canaris und die Abwehr,” 411, rightly points out, however, that the Sonderführer career opened the door for a number of resistance members (Dohnanyi, Delbrück) to be recruited into military intelligence, even if – like Dohnanyi – they were highly critical of the military in general: Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 22.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 972; Hoerkens, Unter Nazis?, 313.

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Anyone who had shown charismatic leadership in critical situations was qualified for promotion. Officer-like behavior over a longer period had only to be displayed by those who served at home or on quiet sectors of the front.¹⁹²

Already in 1929, Hitler had demanded that officers should be politically minded (that is, they should support him).¹⁹³ During the war, he repeatedly complained that the generals were lying to his face, and that the heldover Weimar-era officers had failed to adapt to life in Nazi Germany.¹⁹⁴ The Gestapo reports written after 20 July 1944 confirm this. The roots of the development that resulted in the operation of 20 July go far back, I believe. I see their beginning on 4 February 1938, in the context of the dismissal of General Fritsch from active duty. This divided the army. On the one side was a group of officers who unconditionally followed the Nazi leadership [and] was promoted, on the other was a group of officers opposed to [the regime] who saw the interventions in the Wehrmacht as contravening its internal laws.¹⁹⁵

Until 1941 “the army officer corps had largely succeeded in maintaining its traditional mechanisms of selection.”¹⁹⁶ Even so, the inflationary promotions to field marshal after the victory over France in 1940 presaged Hitler’s intentions to disregard the army’s restrictive traditions in this matter.¹⁹⁷ Hitler obviously preferred the Waffen-SS over the army, not least because it offered opportunities for social advancement whereas the Army “due to its remaining feudal traditions, seemed outmoded and reactionary” to many contemporaries.¹⁹⁸ The chief of the General Staff at any level had “borne part of the responsibility for command ever since the Prussian reforms [of the early nineteenth century]. He was obliged and entitled to advise his commander.” That this principle should now be undermined (see above Chapter 4.3) had to be interpreted as “in-

 Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 1032.  Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 52 (Doc. 6: 15. March 1929: “Wir und die Reichswehr – Unsere Antwort an Seeckt und Gessler” [Us and the Reichswehr – Our reply to Seeckt and Gessler]. Speech at an NSDAP meeting in Munich).  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher II.12, 521 (22 June 1944). Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 627– 635.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 273 (20 August 1944). The Gestapo quotes here a statement by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 942.  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 140 – 141.  Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten, 320.

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terfering with the internal structure of General Staff responsibilities” and thereby as an extremely efficient form of “elite manipulation.”¹⁹⁹ These changes became more radical once Hitler appointed his adjutant, Generalmajor Rudolf Schmundt, as head of the Army Personnel Office on 1 October 1942. Hitler expressly charged Schmundt with changing the social composition of the army officer corps.²⁰⁰ Obviously, this change was already underway as a consequence of the massive losses,²⁰¹ but it also matched the ideological aims of revolutionizing the German society including its elites.²⁰² Part of this was a new regulation whereby General Staff officers due for promotion first had to demonstrate their qualification to lead at the front. In the second half of 1943, Tresckow, until then an operations officer in Army Group Center, was to be appointed chief of the General Staff of the Second Army, a Generalmajor’s post. First, however, he had to go through “frontline probation” by commanding an infantry regiment. Paradoxically, this suited the conspiracy, as it provided Tresckow lengthy periods of leave spent in Berlin during which he worked with Stauffenberg on reorganizing the military coup.²⁰³ Overall, the reversal of the fortunes in the war led to a generational change at the top levels of the army. The time of the Blitzkrieg victories was over, and Hitler felt that the generals who had won them were not up to the demands of a stubborn defense. [Hitler] replaced them with younger officers who, he believed, were also closer to him ideologically. The commanders in chief of army groups, von Reichenau (South), von Kluge (Center), and von Küchler (North) were still representative of the middle generation of field marshals, who were of noble birth but were more ready to adapt to the “new times.”²⁰⁴

 I owe these ideas (and the quotations) to my friend and colleague Lieutenant Colonel Dr. Thorsten Loch, see his book Deutsche Generale. The term “elite manipulation” was first introduced by Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 303 – 350.  Absolon, “Das Offizierkorps des Deutschen Heeres,” 262. On 20 July 1944, Schmundt was seriously injured by Stauffenberg’s bomb and eventually died on 1 October 1944. The state funeral in the Tannenberg Reichsehrenmal was commanded by the then Colonel Otto Ernst Remer: Völkischer Beobachter, Munich edition, 9 October 1944; IfZF, F 13612: 03.07.-31.12.1944.  This interpretation in Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” and Kroener, “Management of Human Resources.”  This is the original interpretation in Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, later seconded by Knox, “1 October 1942.” See also Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 337.  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 311.

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Any officers who did not unquestioningly obey were removed. On 8 January, 1942, the famous Panzer leader, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner, commander in chief of the Third Panzer Army, met this fate. As he had ordered a withdrawal without authorization, he was summarily dismissed – something unheard-of until then.²⁰⁵ This elite manipulation corresponded to the Nazi conviction that “putting the right man in the right place would solve any problem; there was a hypertrophic belief in the feasibility of everything as long as sufficient will power was there.²⁰⁶ It is certainly true that the successors Hitler nominated were also selected from within the classical General Staff trajectory, and that as far as their social background was concerned, they did not differ too much from their predecessors.²⁰⁷ Nowhere else could suitably qualified candidates be found. The sources, however, indicate Hitler’s intent to bring about social change. The older generals were products of the Reichswehr, and often the pre-1914 German military; they had been happy to support an attack on the Soviet Union but were hesitant regarding Hitler’s more far-reaching aims.²⁰⁸ Some of the conspirators referred to these subtle changes as a “bolshevization”²⁰⁹ of the army, even when communicating with international contacts,²¹⁰ and accused young officers who had thus joined the Army of having a “subaltern standpoint.”²¹¹ Roland von Hößlin, a co-conspirator from Stauffenberg’s Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment, informed his parents of his promotion to major on 1 August 1944, just before he was arrested in his new garrison, Meiningen (Thuringia): Here, I found my promotion to major. Under the prevailing general circumstances, it does not really affect me that much, but it is convenient when dealing with other agencies. Otherwise, I might have to salute the [civilian] director of the garrison administration and address him as “sir” [“Herr Stabsintendant”]. That these shady characters should have been put on par with officers is another element in this revolutionary inflation of titles, the same as these insane early promotions.²¹²

 Mitcham and Mueller, “Generaloberst Erich Hoepner,” 96.  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 419.  Hürter, “Konservative Akteure.”  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 311; see also Chapter 6.6.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 529 (15 December 1944).  Heideking and Mauch, “Das Herman Dossier,” 591.  Officer Education. Meeting with CinC 9. Army on 12 November 1940, handwritten notes LTC Josef Windisch, BArch, RH 20 – 9/361, quoted in Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 972.  Letter Roland von Hößlin to his father, 2 August 1944 (copy in author’s collection). For the transfer of civil servants into officers in a special career see Absolon, “Das Offizierkorps des Deutschen Heeres,” 257– 258.

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In the First World War, suitable sergeants had been promoted to “deputy officer” in order to make up for officer losses while not upsetting the social structure of the actual officer corps. In the Third Reich, losses in the officer corps were compensated for by promoting sergeants who were merely able to take and implement orders. This led to increased social mobility, but it also weakened the NCO corps. On 1 December 1943, Hitler appointed Generalleutnant (later General der Infanterie) Wilhelm Specht as Inspector of Education in the Army; on 1 March 1944, this post was redefined as Inspector-General of Leadership Recruitment. The term indicated that, from then on, recruiting officers and NCOs would be coordinated by one single body. Eventually, a unified “corps of leaders” was to take the place of the elitist officer caste.²¹³ Stauffenberg had noted these gradual changes in the officer corps and in the overall Reich leadership: “The way the new class of leaders primarily pursues its own egotistic interests, the increased corruption… means it is ruled by inferior characters”²¹⁴. The social changes meant a substantial modernization,²¹⁵ but they were designed to create the conditions necessary for revolutionizing the army from within and for its eventual integration into the National Socialist state with the SS as its elite shock force.²¹⁶ “The rapid enlargement of the officer corps led to a loss of the traditional class consciousness, internal cohesion and homogeneity, an effect which, in view of creating a “Volksgemeinschaft”, was quite deliberate.”²¹⁷ Resistance to elite manipulation by National Socialists did not mean preserving the social privileges of a doomed elite. The social changes intended by Hitler were bound to remove any social counterbalance to the Nazis’ crimes, and that was what the opposition was willing to take a stand against. Gestapo reports contain frequent references to the subject of the “apolitical attitude” among large segments of the officer corps. Indeed, as we have seen, many officers were imbued with the spirit of the Seeckt period. From the point of view of the Nazi state, the events of 20 July 1944 proved that this attitude persisted and that Nazi ideology had not yet percolated sufficiently; manipulating the elite had obviously not yet been sufficient to achieve the desired results.²¹⁸

 “Leaders,” in this case, not coincidentally referred to Führer (plural). Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 186.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).  Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 311– 312; see also Griffin, Modernism and Fascism, 1– 6.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 931.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 99.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 273 – 274 (20 August 1944); 485 (8 November 1944); 525 (15 December 1944).

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Resistance, the attempt on Hitler’s life, and the coup d’état can thus be interpreted as an attempt to stop this revolutionary process before it was too late.²¹⁹

4.5 Resistance in the Luftwaffe, the Air Ministry and the German Navy The German air forces, under the leadership of Hermann Göring, had been given the ideologically charged name of Luftwaffe, and were generally considered to be thoroughly nazified, or “brown.” These origins in National Socialist tradition were sufficient for Hitler to agree that, once aircraft losses mounted and the demand for ground personnel shrank, Göring would not have to transfer his excess manpower to the army but that they would remain, as ground forces, under Göring’s command; The Reichsmarschall’s “National Socialist boys” certainly could not be expected to don an army uniform.²²⁰ Existing historiography generally assumes that that the Luftwaffe played no role worth mentioning in the resistance against Hitler.²²¹ That assumption, however, is misguided. Long before 20 July 1944, Göring’s domain within the Nazi empire was hit by an affair which today is usually known by the name that the Gestapo assigned it: the Red Orchestra. As a matter of fact, the terms “Harro Schulze-Boysen Group” or “Harnack-Schulze-Boysen Group” are far more apt, in addition to being more precise.²²² Under the term “Red Orchestra” the Gestapo subsumed several groups, some of which spied on behalf of the Soviet Union; the links between these groups, however, were often merely tenuous.²²³ In the eyes of the secret police, this included the discussion circle which had formed around Luftwaffe First Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen and the government official and economist Arvid Harnack. This group combined socialist and communist ideas with concepts of a national revolution; SchulzeBoysen himself had at a time belonged to the “Young Conservatives” around

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 529 (15 December 1944).  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 891.  de Libero, “Tradition und Traditionsverständnis,” 17.  From out of the innumerable titles published on the subject, only the more relevant and more recent should be mentioned here: Nelson, Red Orchestra; Roloff, Die Rote Kapelle; Coppi, Danyel, and Tuchel, Die Rote Kapelle im Widerstand; Danyel, “Ein Endsieg.” For Roewer, Die Rote Kapelle und andere Geheimdienstmythen see my “scorcher” in Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 70 (2011): 216. Höhne, Kennwort: Direktor, used to be very influential but is no longer up to date.  Coppi, Danyel, and Tuchel, Die Rote Kapelle im Widerstand, xiii.

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Edgar Jung and Artur Mahraun.²²⁴ To these “National Bolshevists,” the war against the Soviet Union appeared to presage Germany’s ultimate and certain doom.²²⁵ The group was also loosely linked to other oppositional circles throughout Germany: Harnack was a cousin of the Bonhoeffer brothers and their sister, Ursula, who was married to Rüdiger Schleicher, a professor for aviation law at the Berlin Technical University.²²⁶ Harnack’s older brother Falk, on the other hand, lived in Munich and had befriended Hans and Sophie Scholl. After their arrest and execution, Falk Harnack was also tried before the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) but was, surprisingly if not shockingly, acquitted. The unexpected non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, concluded days before the German attack on Poland, had left German Communists consternated. Even so, Schulze-Boysen and Harnack passed on information about an imminent German attack on the USSR to the Soviet embassy in Berlin (as well as to the US embassy). As early as October 1940, Harnack warned his contact that Hitler was planning war.²²⁷ But the circle around him and Harro SchulzeBoysen mostly conducted political and theoretical debates but also aided victims of persecution and distributing leaflets. Any intelligence work for the Soviet Union came to an end after the German attack in the summer of 1941, as a stable wireless link with Moscow turned out to be impossible to install.²²⁸ Whatever information the group did transmit was mostly obtained by Harro Schulze-Boysen through his position in the Luftwaffe High Command, which was nearly synonymous with the Ministry of Aviation (Reichsluftfahrtministerium).²²⁹ However, the group was also linked to Albrecht Haushofer of the German Foreign Ministry.²³⁰ During the course of 1942, the Gestapo succeeded in breaking up other groups throughout occupied Europe which had been loosely associated with the Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group. In September/October 1942, it finally arrested Harnack, Schulze-Boysen, and their associates.²³¹

 Schulz, “Nationalpatriotismus im Widerstand,” 337; Bahar, Sozialrevolutionärer Nationalismus, 5; Paetel, Versuchung oder Chance?, 189 – 199.  Danyel, “Ein Endsieg,” 467.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 166; Brunckhorst, Die Berliner Widerstandsorganisation, 20.  Danyel, “Ein Endsieg,” 479.  Danyel, “Ein Endsieg,” 465 – 466; Brunckhorst, Die Berliner Widerstandsorganisation, 5; The Rote Kapelle, 150 – 154, has further information about what intelligence was actually transmitted to Moscow.  Boog, Die deutsche Luftwaffenführung, 215 – 217.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 33.  Herlemann, “Kommunistischer Widerstand,” 39.

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It soon became clear that the main sources of confidential information leaked to the Soviets had been inside the Luftwaffe High Command and the Ministry of Aviation; even a higher-ranking officer, Colonel Erwin Gehrts, had provided snippets. Yet at the same time, Allied bombardment of German cities had increased markedly. In May 1942, Cologne had been the target of the first 1,000bomber aerial attack by the Western Allies and, afterwards, Essen and Bremen met with a similar fate.²³² This meant that Göring’s prestige in the German public as much as within the party hierarchy suffered severely.²³³ Had it become public knowledge that the most serious espionage affair up to that point in the war had taken place within Goring’s purview, his standing might have been fatally damaged.²³⁴Hitler was quick to impose swift and severe punishment, and as some of the group’s activities had been noted in public, the Führer wanted a public trial by the People’s Court.²³⁵ Göring, on the other hand, insisted on a discreet handling of the sensitive case; he tasked the Luftwaffe’s fiercest prosecutor, Colonel Manfred Roeder, with conducting the investigation and pressing the charges.²³⁶ He was to emphasize the intelligence dimension of the affair, as men like Harnack and Schulze-Boysen were from an upper-class background and did not come from those working classes which the Nazis primarily expected to oppose them.²³⁷ By far most of the defendants were civilians, but even so the HarnackSchulze-Boysen group was tried before the Reichskriegsgericht (Reich Court Martial) which sat in camera. ²³⁸ In 19 separate cases, a total of 77 charged individuals were tried and most of them were condemned to death, including a pregnant 19year-old woman named Liane Berkowitz. The court itself recommended mercy, but Hitler flatly refused. In contrast, Mildred Fish-Harnack, Arvid Harnack’s

 Boog, “The Anglo-American Strategic Air War,” 558 – 569.  Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 110; Boog, “The Anglo-American Strategic Air War,” 622– 628.  Weinberg, A World At Arms, 545.  Nelson, Red Orchestra, 272– 273.  For Roeder’s personality and career see Bergander, Die Ermittlungen gegen Manfred Roeder, 7– 11.  Brunckhorst, Die Berliner Widerstandsorganisation, 19. GDR historiography gladly took up this slant as, during the 1950s, any activity in support of the Soviet war effort was seen as positive. This then characterized the East and West German public perception of the group, right down to the highly influential book mentioned above: Höhne, Kennwort: Direktor. See also Danyel, “Ein Endsieg,” 470 – 471.  Brunckhorst, Die Berliner Widerstandsorganisation, 12, 31; Brysac, Resisting Hitler, 350, 36. In this respect, Overy, Goering, 220 – 221, is surprisingly weak with regard to detail.

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US-born wife, was sentenced to six years in prison – a sentence Hitler refused to affirm; he insisted on the death penalty instead.²³⁹ In the context of the present discussion, the Harnack-Schulze-Boysen group is of interest because it shows that there was indeed some resistance in the Luftwaffe and in Göring’s fiefdom, even if the Red Orchestra case occurred much earlier and with only loose connections with the 20 July 1944 plot. The Red Orchestra was tried, and most of its members were executed. This was carried out, however, with a view to keeping things out of the limelight, the idea being to protect Göring and his Luftwaffe at a time when his public image was at an all-time low; we will see the same thing again after 20 July 1944. In December 1943, Moltke sought contacts with American partners, and he referred to the Red Orchestra as evidence that there was a pro-Soviet faction within the Luftwaffe. After all, the German aviators had cooperated rather well with the USSR during the 1920s. Moltke hoped to gain support from the Western Allies by hinting at the possibility that Germany’s postwar government might otherwise seek cooperation with Moscow.²⁴⁰ The best-known Luftwaffe officer in the resistance is certainly Lieutenant Colonel (Reserve) Caesar von Hofacker, who was assigned to the staff of the Military Commander in France. But although Hofacker wore the rather chic Luftwaffe uniform, he was by no means a typical representative of that military branch. His father, Eberhard, had been a general in the Württemberg Army (and had been Rommel’s divisional commander in the First World War²⁴¹); Caesar’s mother, born Gräfin (Countess) Albertine von Üxküll-Gyllenband, made him a descendant of Prussian field marshal Neidhardt von Gneisenau (of the Napoleonic period) and Stauffenberg’s cousin.²⁴² Hofacker had studied law and politics and was involved in various nationalist and racist movements during the Weimar Republic (which he heartily detested); he was also a militant antisemitic. Having served as the general manager of the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (United Steel Works), he was a successful industrialist who nonetheless insisted on the priority of politics over the economy. During the First World War, he left the cavalry to join the emergent flying corps and, on the basis of that service, was reactivated in 1939 as a reserve officer in the Luftwaffe. Due to his experience in industry, he was employed within the

 Brysac, Resisting Hitler, 361– 362.  Hoffmann, “Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,” 633 – 635; Heideking and Mauch, “Das Herman Dossier,” 574– 575.  Hofacker, Cäsar von Hofacker, 20.  Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozess,” 451– 452.

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military administration of occupied France. As his primary responsibility was to organize the exploitation of the French steel industry, he did not perceive of himself primarily as a soldier: “my real vocation still is political.”²⁴³ He resented the harsh Nazi policies toward France. He hoped that a durable economic alliance between France and Germany could be established over the long term. He also objected to the execution of French hostages and earned many enemies in the Reich Ministry of Economics when he saved some of them. At his own suggestion, he was removed from his post in the autumn of 1943 and from then on worked for the Military Commander of France, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, officially as his special adviser, but effectively charged with preparing the uprising in Paris.²⁴⁴ After meeting him again at a family event in October 1943, Hofacker also developed closer ties with his cousin Stauffenberg, who soon came to see Hofacker as his man in Paris. From then on, Stauffenberg’s lines connecting him to the Paris conspiracy ran through Hofacker, leading the Gestapo to assume initially that Hofacker had been the “real head” of the conspiracy in the French capital.²⁴⁵ Hofacker had not been in the opposition from its very inception. Ulrich von Hassell, the diplomat, used to refer to men like him as the “Sauls,”²⁴⁶ that is, late converts. For Hofacker, realist political motives certainly weighed more heavily than any moralist considerations: If only my new job once gave me an opportunity to speak to Minister Speer who is currently the most powerful man and persona gratissima with the Führer! One hour with him alone about political affairs would be far more important to me than anything else connected with my new office. What use is all the economic detail work if the political construction is all wrong?²⁴⁷

Much later, the Gestapo qualified him as follows: “deliberate, quiet man, but the type of deliberate revolutionary, typical intellectual, representative of reactionary politics.”²⁴⁸

 Letter Caesar von Hofacker to his wife, Düsseldorf, 30 December 1939, Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, C2/8/S/MWid Schublade 13/6686, quoted after the copy in MHM, Dresden.  Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozess,” 459 – 460. For the economic exploitation of France during the Second World War, see now Laub, After the Fall, which is, however, sadly reticent about the connection between the policies described and the resistance in France.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 92 (28 July 1944).  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 347 (22 January 1943).  Letter to his wife, August 1942, quoted in Hofacker, Cäsar von Hofacker, 16.  Quoted in Hofacker, Cäsar von Hofacker, 54.

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On 9 July, Hofacker visited Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Commander-inChief Army Group B at the front in Normandy, which was made possible by Rommel’s acquaintance with Hofacker’s father. Hofacker was seeking an untainted view of the military situation on the front that he could report back to Stauffenberg. What exactly was said during this meeting – above all, whether Hofacker really attempted to win Rommel over for the conspiracy, and whether he succeeded in persuading the field marshal – will probably remain forever an open question.²⁴⁹ The Gestapo very quickly established Hofacker’s central role in the conspiracy and arrested him on 25 July 1944. Together with his Commander-in-Chief, Stülpnagel, he was tried on 30 August 1944. However, while Stülpnagel was hanged the same day, Hofacker was not executed until 20 December 1944; obviously, the Gestapo hoped to extract more information from him.²⁵⁰ Another Luftwaffe officer for whom there were at least indications that he knew about the opposition was General der Flieger Dr. Robert Knauß, commandant of the Air Academy.²⁵¹ However, Knauß had been retired in June 1944 and escaped to Switzerland. He survived the war and was part of the committee of experts who in October 1950, in the monastery of Himmerod, drafted basic guidelines for a new West German military (see below Chapter 10.1). What we know about Knauß we owe to Olbricht’s son-in-law, Friedrich Georgi, himself also a Luftwaffe officer. After the failed uprising Georgi was taken into custody as Sippenhaft (“kith and kin liability”), but as the Gestapo could not even prove any advance knowledge, they had to let him go. Neither Knauß nor Georgi had been allotted any specific functions during the putsch, whereas Hofacker had

 About Rommel and the resistance, there has been an extended controversy, initiated by Irving, The Trail of the Fox. See, e. g., Stumpf, “Erwin Rommel und der Widerstand”; Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 895 – 904; Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen”; Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker,” 86, and most recently the overview in Lieb, “Erwin Rommel.” Generalleutnant Dr. Hans Speidel, Rommel’s Chief of Staff, later claimed the two spoke alone: Irving, “Note on an Interview with GenLtn a.D. [!] Hans Speidel,” Bad Honnef, 24 October 1975, IfZ, ED 100/188 (Depositum Irving); Speidel’s brother-in-law, Dr. Max Horst, at the time counsellor on Rommel’s administrative staff, claims, however, that he was present, and that there was no word of any planned coup d’état: Irving, Niederschrift eines Interviews mit Herrn Dr. Max Horst, Bonn, 7 November 1975, ibid.  Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozess,” 465, assumes that they sought information incriminating Rommel. However, that alone cannot have been the reason as Rommel was forced to commit suicide on 14 October 1944.  Georgi, “Wir haben das letzte gewagt…”, 54, see also for the following passage.

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had a meeting with Stauffenberg immediately before 20 July and played a leading role during the events of the day in Paris.²⁵² Over and beyond the Luftwaffe officers (among whom only Hofacker had been central to the conspiracy), there were quite a number of conspirators who had worked in a civilian capacity in either the Reich Aviation Ministry or the Lufthansa. Central to this complex is the Bonhoeffer family. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor, had been drafted to serve in the Abwehr, but his brother Klaus Bonhoeffer worked as the chief company lawyer for Lufthansa.²⁵³ Their sister Ursula had married Rüdiger Schleicher, like Klaus Bonhoeffer a specialist in aviation law. For a while Schleicher had directed the Reich Aviation Ministry’s legal department, but when he insisted on the norms of international law, he was shunted off to become a professor in the Berlin Technical University.²⁵⁴ Schleicher was a member of the International Law Committee of the Academy for German Law (Akademie für Deutsches Recht), and that is where he came to know Helmuth James Graf von Moltke. They supported each other in the debates about the legal position of Poles living in the “General Government” (Generalgouvernement).²⁵⁵ Another Bonhoeffer daughter, Christine, had married Hans von Dohnanyi who, together with Hans Oster, formed the core of the resistance within the Abwehr. Klaus Bonhoeffer’s wife Emmy, née Delbrück, was a niece of Adolf von Harnack, so that the couple was related at some distance with members of the “White Rose” and the “Red Orchestra.” When Schleicher left the Ministry and took over the Institute of Aviation Law, he hired a research assistant by the name of Hans John, whose brother Otto John in turn was a close collaborator of Klaus Bonhoeffer in the Lufthansa.²⁵⁶ As early as 1938 Klaus Bonhoeffer asked Otto John to “look for reliable and determined men within aviation”²⁵⁷ – the wording again hints at how closely interwoven civilian and military aviation

 Hofacker, Cäsar von Hofacker, 9.  The small dual biography by the theologian Moltmann, “Klaus und Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” understandably pays more attention to Dietrich than to Klaus Bonhoeffer whose role in the planned uprising is not mentioned. See also Wachtel and Ott, Im Zeichen des Kranichs, 306 – 307.  For Schleicher, see above all Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher. The article Bracher, “Rüdiger Schleicher,” is based on the manuscript of Gerrens’ book. Its author, a famous professor of history, was married to Schleicher’s daughter. See also Sifton and Stern, No Ordinary Men, 31.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 122; for the entire subject, see Heinemann, “L’esercito e l’aeronautica nella resistenza”; Budrass, Adler und Kranich, 433 – 434.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 151.  John, “Am achten Jahrestag”; Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 22; Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 21– 26, is based mostly on John’s own versions in the literature and in the Nuremberg trials. See also Hett and Wala, Otto John.

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were. While working for Lufthansa, Otto John befriended Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia who was employed there as an “adviser on transport policies.” When his older brother Wilhelm was fatally wounded in 1940, Louis Ferdinand became Head of the House of Hohenzollern (and therefore presumptive Crown Prince); as there were quite a few monarchists among the national-conservative conspirators, this was a useful connection. John established the link between the Hohenzollern and Goerdeler.²⁵⁸ During the war, Otto John represented Lufthansa in Madrid, but of course the neutral capital was known to have turned into a center of espionage and other intelligence activities. Back in the autumn of 1927, none less than Canaris himself had negotiated with the Spanish about creating a “joint air transport monopoly [! ].”²⁵⁹ Otto John, too, served several masters: Lufthansa, the Abwehr, and the military resistance. Although he did not meet Stauffenberg before January 1944,²⁶⁰ very soon he was the colonel’s liaison with the Western Allies (see Chapter IX).²⁶¹ On the other hand, Schleicher knew the military judge, Colonel Manfred Roeder – the man who had led the investigation into the Red Orchestra case and who had represented the prosecution in court. Roeder had at some time worked under Schleicher’s guidance, but other than his erstwhile boss had imbibed the annihilating ideology of the Nazi system and had thus been promoted swiftly. When Schleicher attempted to learn more about the case against the Harnacks, then against Oster, Dohnanyi and the other Abwehr members, Roeder fobbed him off. The Nazi lawyer may have suspected even then that, in a wider sense, Schleicher might belong to these oppositional movements, but had not been able to prove anything against his erstwhile chief.²⁶² The involvement of high-ranking Lufthansa staff opened entirely new perspectives for the planners. Klaus Bonhoeffer was only arrested on 1 October 1944, but the Gestapo soon found out that he had promised to make the civilian planes of the Lufthansa available to the uprising. This had only been on 17 June 1944, so at a very late date, and he had also added that it would not be easy to  Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 31.  Mueller, Canaris, 152.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 246.  Hett and Wala, Otto John, 26 – 27.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 168 – 172; Gerrens (174) also points out that before 20 July 1944 the Dohnanyi family, including Klaus Bonhoeffer, could at times visit Hans who, although in custody, had been moved to the Charité, the Berlin university hospital. This had been arranged by Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, assistant to Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch. In 1954 it was Wohlgemuth who drove Otto John, the President of the West German counterintelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) into East Berlin; the circumstances of the ensuing scandal have never been fully cleared up; Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 40 – 41.

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do.²⁶³ When the Soviet Army approached Berlin during the very last days of the war, Klaus Bonhoeffer was finally shot; him, too, Himmler had obviously “spared” until the last minute. In 1990, the postwar Lufthansa honored Klaus Bonhoeffer by naming its conference center in Seeheim after him.²⁶⁴ Alexander Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was Claus Stauffenberg’s older brother and Berthold’s twin. He was married to Melitta, née Schiller, and after the aborted coup d’état he and his wife were interned as Sippenhaft. This was particularly risky for Melitta, as she was a “half-Jew,” but as she was a Luftwaffe test pilot (the first female test pilot to have a degree in engineering!), Hermann Göring had obtained for her a warrant, signed by Hitler himself, that she was to be treated as an Aryan. In this instance, too, it seemed expedient to avoid any scandal that might affect not only Göring, but also his Führer. Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg was released fairly quickly (but had to adopt another name), and soon she was flying again out of Rechlin and Berlin-Gatow as part of the Luftwaffe test program. At the same time, she kept the family together by flying to prisons and concentration camps, delivering food parcels as well as crucial information on who was alive and who had been executed. The tragedy of it all is that while her husband and most members of the Stauffenberg family survived the war, “Melitta Gräfin Schenk” (the name she had been forced to adopt) was shot down over Bavaria by an American fighter in April 1945 and died from her wounds.²⁶⁵ None of the Luftwaffe units stationed in Berlin (above all the replacement units of the 1. Fallschirmpanzerdivision Hermann Göring) had any influence on events on 20 July 1944.²⁶⁶ In any case, the conspirators had been far more concerned about the replacement units of the Waffen-SS division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (see Chapter 7.4) – that in itself shows which combat value they attributed to Luftwaffe ground formations. Altogether, the Luftwaffe as such was involved in the 20 July 1944 plot only through Caesar von Hofacker. However, this is counterbalanced to some extent by the substantial involvement of civil aviation. The fact that a sizable number

 Bill of indictment against Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Hans John, Justus Perels and Hans Kloss, Berlin, 20 December 1944. Copy, IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 36‑44, at fol. 39.  http://www.lh-seeheim.de/de/lufthansa-seeheim/klaus-bonhoeffer/, accessed 11 September 2018. It seems the name has since been dropped again.  For Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg, see Medicus, Melitta von Stauffenberg.  The one-sided, biased, and glorifying account in Kurowski, Von der Polizeigruppe z.b.V. “Wecke” zum Fallschirmpanzerkorps “Hermann Göring”, does not even mention these events.

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of Lufthansa staff, above all some of its lawyers, were privy to the conspiracy sheds a different light on an aspect which has long been doubted by researchers. Army Group Center had formed back in 1942 a cavalry regiment, Reiterregiment Mitte (“Cavalry Regiment Center”), ostensibly to hunt down partisans. Its commander was Lieutenant Colonel Georg Baron von Boeselager from an ancient family of Catholic noblemen; his brother Philipp also served in this unit.²⁶⁷ However, the regiment had an undercover role as well: when the time came, it was to dispatch some 1,200 troopers and fly them to Berlin. The only source for this plan had long been Philipp von Boeselager’s personal account, but new evidence seems to indicate that this did indeed happen.²⁶⁸ Added to that, the realization that the conspirators were well-connected in the Reich Aviation Ministry may indicate that the idea of airlifting a sizable force into Berlin was not as far-fetched as it might seem at first sight. We will see below that the deployment plans for the putsch placed particular emphasis on the control of major airfields in and around Berlin. After the event all sorts of persecution were very low-key whenever Luftwaffe personnel were concerned. In general Luftwaffe soldiers had a higher chance of having sentences commuted than any others,²⁶⁹ although that did not apply in this case. Even in the summer of 1944, it seemed inopportune to implicate the discredited Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief any further. To this day, the notion persists that Göring’s fiefdom had no part in the conspiracy over and beyond Caesar von Hofacker; this can only be understood as the continuing effect of the contemporary effort at anti-Army propaganda and censorship. Out of the Kriegsmarine as well, only very few officers took part in the uprising. Names worth mentioning in this context are the naval judge Berthold Schenk Graf Stauffenberg, Lieutenant Commander Alfred Kranzfelder, as well as Lieutenant Commander (Reserve) Dr Sidney Jessen. Berthold Stauffenberg (Claus Stauffenberg’s brother)²⁷⁰ had made a name for himself in international law. Although Berthold Stauffenberg’s professional role did not really warrant this, Rüdiger Schleicher had managed to extend membership in the Committee on Aviation Law of the Akademie für Deutsches Recht to him.²⁷¹ Alongside his

 John, Philipp von Boeselager; Heinemann, “Georg und Philipp von Boeselager.” The organizational side had been covered by Generalmajor Hellmuth Stieff: Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 354– 355.  Reuther, “Soldaten für den Staatsstreich.”  Knippschild, “Deserteure,” 241.  For Berthold Graf Stauffenberg, see above all Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history; as well as Meyer, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 106 – 107.

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brother, Berthold became one of the central thinkers in the conspiracy. He had been drafted into the navy to serve as a legal adviser in the Naval High Command (Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine), where he met Kranzfelder and, later, Jessen.²⁷² Berthold Stauffenberg lived in a house near Wannsee station, in the south-west of Berlin. That was quite far from “Koralle,” the Naval High Command Headquarters near Bernau, north-east of the capital, but it was very convenient for meeting in small circles. This applied even more once Berthold’s brother Claus had also moved in. Berthold Stauffenberg, Kranzfelder, and Jessen were privy to the plans for the uprising (even if to varying degrees), but they had no active roles assigned to them. The coup d’état was to be commanded and controlled by the Replacement Army, and Kranzfelder was only supposed to be present in “Koralle” so as to assess the Kriegsmarine’s reaction once Hitler was dead. In a way, he was to be the informal equivalent to the liaison officers which the Replacement Army was deploying to its subordinate command authorities, but which the Navy of course would not accept so as to preserve its highly prized independence. That Kranzfelder was expected to continuously report developments in the Navy High Command²⁷³ is also an indication that the conspirators expected to be able to respond in some ways to such reports – in other words, they were expecting internal fighting which would last for a few days at least. During the evening of 20 July 1944, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Commanderin-Chief of the Kriegsmarine, had Berthold Stauffenberg arrested; later, Kranzfelder and Sidney Jessen followed. Kranzfelder also stated that he had never thought about denouncing the Stauffenberg brothers, “as he valued them very highly as persons and as comrades-in-arms”²⁷⁴ – even in the naval officer corps, proud of its traditions, some residual homogeneous communicative spaces had survived. Berthold Stauffenberg and Kranzfelder were sentenced to death on 10 August 1944, and hanged the same day; Sidney Jessen survived, but deeply scarred by jail and torture. The homogeneous communicative space did not persist everywhere in the Navy, though. An example is Lieutenant (Oberleutnant) Oskar Kusch, commanding a U-boat. While at sea, he had made some imprudent remarks about the prospects of the war. A member of his crew reported him, and Kusch was sentenced

 Report Dr. Sydney Jessen (1946), “Der Anteil der Kriegsmarine am Attentat,” 8; IfZ, ZS A-29II, Nr. 32; Hillmann, “Der 20. Juli 1944 und die Marine,” 32– 35.  Walle, “Marineoffiziere im Widerstand,” 496 – 497; Meyer, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, 73 – 74; see also below Chapter 7.4.  Walle, “Marineoffiziere im Widerstand,” 496 – 497.

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for Wehrkraftzersetzung (“undermining morale”) and shot.²⁷⁵ If one applies a sufficiently broad definition of the term “resistance,” one would include him and other Navy officers or men who fell victim to the increasingly harsh repression in this category.²⁷⁶ During the Second World War (and even long after!), the German Navy was traumatized by the fact that the ignominious revolution of 1918 had been sparked by its sailors in Kiel. No other service was as determined to apply draconian severity in order to prevent similar developments from occurring. In the Luftwaffe, it was mostly the true Nazi spirit that kept its soldiers away from any opposition; in the basically very conservative Kriegsmarine, it was the trauma of 1918 which stemmed any kind of resistance. The failed coup d’état of 20 July 1944 was borne by parts of the Army, in particular the Replacement Army. But even there, although many were embittered about competition from the SS or about the “big wigs” from the Nazi Party, only very few had the moral courage to draw the right conclusions from their insights into the many grievances. It was not “the Army” that rose up, but a few – very few – from within the Army. There were cogent professional reasons why officers should stand up against their Führer, and quite a number of high-ranking officers saw these reasons. But only the very few were willing to risk their own lives and reputations by acting on their knowledge and analysis.

 Walle, Die Tragödie.  This is the position of Walle, “Marineoffiziere im Widerstand.”

5 Military Experts: The Army General Staff 5.1 The General Staff’s Traditional Role and Beck’s Resignation in 1938 According to the 1937 Hossbach memorandum, Hitler made clear to political and military leaders in November of that year the foreign policy aims that he had announced in more general terms after assuming office in 1933. He would, “if necessary,” be willing to use force against Czechoslovakia.¹ German rearmament had begun – against Fromm’s advice and upon Beck’s insistence – without any diplomatic safeguards in place.² Hitler had declared that “time was working against Germany; the other powers would soon have matched or even overtaken Germany’s lead”³ Foreign Minister Konstantin Baron von Neurath, Minister of War Generaloberst von Blomberg, and the Commander in Chief of the Army Generaloberst von Fritsch had all protested heatedly, but Hitler’s intentions nonetheless became clearer during the winter of 1937/1938 and were, if anything, underscored by the annexation of Austria in March 1938. After all, the quite substantial Czechoslovak defensive lines were far less fortified along the Austrian border than they were along its frontier with Germany, meaning any attack would now be able to strike at Czechoslovakia’s weakest spots.⁴ In January 1938, Neurath, Blomberg, and Fritsch all lost their jobs, and Hitler replaced them with successors who, he believed, would pose less of an obstacle to his warmongering. Thus General der Artillerie Beck was the most prominent member of the leadership that had steered the Wehrmacht and, above all, the Army through the years of rearmament since 1933. Beck was disgusted by the way in which Hitler dropped Generaloberst von Fritsch, despite his many merits and based on little more than rumors. After Hitler took over the War Ministry and installed himself commander in chief of the Wehrmacht (see above Chapter 4.2), he chose Keitel, one of Beck’s lifelong rivals, as his military head clerk.⁵ Then, after a cabal staged by Keitel, Hitler appointed General der Artillerie von Brauchitsch as commander in chief of the Army, even though Goebbels had recommended

 Steinbach, “Zwischen Gefolgschaft, Gehorsam und Widerstand,” 273; Messerschmidt, “Foreign Policy and Preparation for War,” 618; Smith, “Die Überlieferung der Hoßbach-Niederschrift.”  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 241.  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” 14.  Pfaff, “Die Modalitäten der Verteidigung der Tschechoslowakei.”  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 277. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-007

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Beck. All this formed the basis on which planning a military operation against Czechoslovakia was to be resumed. Beck was thoroughly convinced that Britain and France would never accept change by force of the European order created by Versailles; in case of a German attack, they would undoubtedly come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. That is why from an early stage he kept protesting against Hitler’s war plans.⁶ Seen from the perspective of a German military history of the interwar years, or from that of a structural history of the Third Reich, this was about keeping Germany out of a war which according to the General Staff’s best expertise it could not win – but it was also about cementing the Army Staff’s role as the primary advisory body to the head of state in matters of war and peace. Even in 1935, Beck had flatly refused Blomberg’s wish to plan an attack on Czechoslovakia (Unternehmen Schulung, or Operation “Training”), but largely because it had been Keitel’s Wehrmachtamt that had tasked the Army with this, and Beck refused to take orders from it.⁷ He did not object in principle to a war against the hybrid state created in 1919; it would be anachronistic to expect any chief of the General Staff in that period to be a pacifist at heart. Nor would he think too deeply about the ramifications of such plans from the perspective of international law.⁸ For Beck, war was still part of “God’s world order,” but it represented not necessarily the only, but rather the ultimate means of politics, the “ultima ratio.” He believed he was at one with Hitler in that both wanted to create a German hegemony in Europe.⁹ But Beck did not feel that the rearmament he had pursued had achieved the desired results by 1938. As long as this was the case, Beck believed any resulting war to be irresponsible, as it might well provoke the Western powers. The situation the Reich was in now was due largely to the hasty armaments policy Beck himself had pursued which had war as its logical consequence, but with his preoccupation with operational matters, Beck probably never realized that this would be the result.¹⁰

 See Chapter 2.3.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 229 – 236.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 235.  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” 13.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 332; Kettenacker, “Der nationalkonservative Widerstand aus angelsächsischer Sicht,” 712; Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 60; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 257.

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Beck ordered a war game to test these questions in depth, but even when the results did not fully support his own position, he stuck to his guns.¹¹ He was supported in this by Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, who ordered his analysts to exaggerate their estimates of the Czechoslovak army and fortifications so as to advise against war.¹² Beck wrote: All upright and serious German men in positions of responsibility in the state must feel called upon and duty-bound to use all conceivable means and ways down to the ultimate consequence, in order to avert a war against Czechia, which in its consequences must lead to world war, which would mean finis Germaniæ. The most senior leaders of the armed forces are called and qualified for this first and foremost, because the armed forces are the executive instrument of force of the state leadership in the prosecution of a war. The ultimate decisions about the existence of the nation are at stake here; history will indict these commanders of blood guilt if they do not act according to their professional and political knowledge and conscience. The soldier’s duty to obey ends when his knowledge, his conscience and his sense of responsibility forbid him to carry out a certain order. If their [the military commanders’] advice and warnings in such a situation are not heard, then they have the right and the duty before the nation and before history to resign from their posts. If they all act thus with a common will, the execution of an act of war will be impossible. They will have thereby protected their Fatherland from the worst, from its ruin.¹³

In the context of a military history of the resistance, it is important to note that the reference here is to the “professional and general political expertise and conscience” – Beck’s reasoning is that of a professional and less that of a moralist. Nor is there any mention of an “uprising,” of a “general strike” or a “strike of the generals,” but just of “advice and warnings.” Beck was still thinking within the framework of traditional general staff operations. And yet, there are first indications that he might step outside that narrow framework, as hinted at in an addendum to his memorandum: In cases where the objections of men of standing were to succeed in preventing war, considerable internal political tensions would have to be reckoned with.

 Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 73; Hoffmann, “Generaloberst Ludwig Becks militärpolitisches Denken,” 116; Müller, “Militärpolitik, nicht Militäropposition!,” 362.  Mueller, Canaris, 241.  Memorandum Beck, dated 16 July 1938, cited in: Hoffmann, Behind Valkyrie, 324.

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The radical side will declare that the execution of the Führer’s intentions failed because of the incompetence of the armed forces and its commanders. Renewed and intensified defamations will begin. It will be necessary to keep a vigilant eye and ear…. It will therefore be necessary to take a decision to bring about a clarifying confrontation between the armed forces and the SS immediately with or subsequent to a protest.¹⁴

Beck perceived the Party and the SS as being “the radical side” that was nudging Hitler toward war. Beck foresaw an internal clash with the SS – which would, however, be a clash over their respective positions with Hitler, not a clash with Hitler himself.¹⁵ In an addendum dated 19 July 1938, he expanded the potential internal conflict as also encompassing the Party that he called Bonzokratie (“bigwigism”).¹⁶ The question of competences was more than just one of vanity; disregarding the expertise assembled in the Army General Staff might have disastrous consequences for the Reich. Beck did not suggest replacing the by-then neutered Reichstag (parliament) with the General Staff in a system of checks and balances,¹⁷ but hoped to avoid major political mistakes by providing well-argued, balanced expertise. The Army commander in chief, Brauchitsch, who had just taken up his post, did not see fit to pass Beck’s position on to Hitler. The Führer in turn had increasingly made Beck the butt of his scathing criticism, defamed him as a representative of the 100,000-man army – overlooking the fact that Beck had been the architect of Hitler’s rearmament.¹⁸ Beck, who was familiar with Hitler’s diatribes, offered his resignation as chief of the Army General Staff on 18 August 1938. Hitler accepted it on 21 August but insisted that, due to the international crisis, it had to be kept secret. At the end of that month, Beck handed over his post to Halder, his designated successor.¹⁹ Some passages in Hitler’s speech to the Nuremberg Party Rally on 12 September 1938 escalated further the German relationship with Czechoslovakia. Things seemed to be heading for war, and France ordered a partial mobilization. Beck’s confidant, Generalleutnant von Stülpnagel, recently made Oberquartiermeister I

 Memorandum Beck, dated 16 July 1938, cited in: Hoffmann, Behind Valkyrie, 325.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 343 – 344.  Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 556; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 345 – 346.  Thus Hoffmann, “Generaloberst Ludwig Becks militärpolitisches Denken,” 106; see Müller, “Militärpolitik, nicht Militäropposition!,” 359.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 350.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 350 – 352.

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(i. e., deputy chief of the Army General Staff), called Hitler a “gambler.”²⁰ But then Mussolini brokered the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938, after the British and French governments had backed down, giving Hitler a major diplomatic success and permitting the military occupation of the Sudetenland, the Czechoslovak border regions. Hitler’s successes in annexing Austria and occupying parts of Czechoslovakia were the result of political pressure backed by military threats. Beck’s thinking had been focused, along the lines of classical General Staff lines, on the operational level. He could never have imagined that Hitler’s all-or-nothing policies might create the political conditions for his expansionist aims. When Beck tendered his resignation as Army chief of staff he had by no means intended to leave active service altogether. On the contrary, according to letters that resurfaced recently, he had arranged with Brauchitsch that he should take over one of the army groups, which would also entail a promotion to Generaloberst. That is why after leaving office he initially remained on the active list. However, on 18 October, Brauchitsch penned a handwritten letter to Beck: It is extremely hard for me to write to you today and to inform you that I will be unable to realize my intention of employing you as Commander in Chief of Army Group III. Although at the time the Führer agreed to you being posted to Army Group III, he now expresses his expectation that you draw the consequences of your position of last July. He believes that the degree of confidence that should exist between him and the Commanders in Chief of the Army Groups cannot be restored to the necessary degree.²¹

This left Beck with only one option: post-haste, he replied in scathing brevity:

 Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 15; Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 31; Roon, “Widerstand und Krieg,” 58; Stahl, “General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 241. The Stülpnagel biography by Bücheler, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, does not meet scholarly standards and is hagiographic; see review in MGM 47 (1990): 242– 245.  Handwritten note ObdH (Generaloberst Walther von Brauchitsch) to Beck dated 18 October 1938, MHM, PSF 786 BBAR 7932. Klaus-Jürgen Müller relates this event based on Beck’s letter to his confidant Hossbach (Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 360 – 361, and footnotes 160 and 161). Dr. Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein was able to obtain the original documents for the Military History Museum Dresden from private ownership; the same goes for all documents quoted below from MHM, PSF 786.

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In reference to the letter I received, dated 18 October 1938, I request to be retired with the pension provided for by law. Beck, General der Artillerie ²²

A week later, he received his official dismissal: General der Artillerie Beck leaves active service as of 31 October 1938, with the title of Generaloberst and the right to wear the uniform of Fifth Artillery Regiment.²³

Beck had not wanted the worthless promotion to Generaloberst (he would hold the title but not draw the pension), but he felt unable to oppose Hitler. In public, the regime made it look as if Beck had retired of his own volition, and Hitler allowed himself to be quoted with fulsome words of gratitude.²⁴ Beck’s attitude was in no way apolitical. He had believed in Hitler’s phrases about the two pillars of the Nazi state, and he had taken it for granted that the Führer shared his convictions about the relationship between the state, the army, and society.²⁵ It was this perception of Beck’s role that Hitler’s belligerence was beginning to put into question. Beck’s notion, that a common démarche of the entire Army top brass might force Hitler to change his mind, overlooked two essential points. First, the officer corps would have to have been unified to a degree that had probably not even existed during the Seeckt era; even then, personal rivalries and conceptual differences had been too great. Hitler’s polycratic style had further exacerbated personal animosities (such as those between Beck, Keitel, and Fromm) and thereby minimized any chance of a united stance among the generals. Second, it was absurd to think that it might be a “mild” form of resistance to force the Führer into doing something. This theme continued, as we will see, right to Kluge’s and Rommel’s “ultimatum” of July 1944. A dictator who allows his generals to dictate to him ceases to be a dictator. Even if Bock or Kluge, Manstein, or Guderian might have been willing to join such a scheme – a solution within the system, but against Hitler’s will, was unthinkable even in 1938. Any alternative to Hitler’s policies would require overthrowing the entire regime.

 Handwritten note Beck to ObdH GenO von Brauchitsch dated 19 October 1938, MHM, PSF 786 BBAV 5850.  Dismissal Beck Az. 21 c PA/GZ (I) GenStdH Nr. 3004/38 dated 28 October 1938, MHM, PSF 786 BBAR 7928.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 360 – 361.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 108.

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That is why, in the run-up to the Munich Agreement, the first concrete plans for a military coup d’état emerged.²⁶ There had been some indicators already in May 1938. However, Beck was then still waging his memorandum campaign and refusing any suggestion by Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr to use force against Hitler.²⁷ In 1938, the national-conservative conspirators, among them many officers, hoped to stay Hitler’s hands before he could start a major European war. On the other hand, revising the “Versailles diktat” by undoing the Czechoslovak Republic was an element of the “partial identity of aims”²⁸ between the national-conservative elites and the National Socialists. The 1938 conspiracy against war brought together two groups of motives: there was one group of opponents who were antagonized by the social revolutionary tendencies within the Nazi movement; “plebeian methods” might refer to the disempowerment of industrial magnates as much as to the increasingly violent harassment of German Jews. This group planned to make use of the fear of war to remove the Führer altogether. Among these persistent enemies of Hitler was the estate owner Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin; in view of Hitler’s expansionist rhetoric, and long before any clear indications of a campaign against Czechoslovakia, he urged the British journalist Ian Colvin to pressure his government into taking a tough stance against Hitler. On the other side were those, especially among German diplomats and the Army General Staff, who were convinced that in the case of a German attack on Czechoslovakia, a British and French intervention would be unavoidable. Beck played a leading role among those who did not think it feasible to beat the highly armed Czechoslovak state decisively before France would bring its superior military forces to bear on the Reich’s western frontier. But even if that did prove possible, for economic and geostrategic reasons Germany would be unable to stay the course of the protracted war that was bound to ensue. As a consequence, the opposition movement intensified its contacts with Britain and repeatedly urged Whitehall to persevere in view of Hitler’s territorial claims. The most dramatic mission certainly was Kleist’s journey to London in the second half of August 1938. But even he did not get beyond some medium-level Foreign Office bureaucrats, and he never stood a chance of talking Prime Minister Neville

 There is a concise account of this conspiracy in Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 49 – 96, as well as a monographic account, Deutsch, Hitler and his Generals. More relevant information in Thun, Der Verschwörer, 81– 133. See also Parssinen, The Oster Conspiracy.  Thun, Der Verschwörer, 89 – 90.  The term is used in Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat, 1; for the concept see also Hoffmann, “Generaloberst Ludwig Becks militärpolitisches Denken,” 108 – 109.

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Chamberlain out of his appeasement policies. German diplomat Theodor Kordt did obtain an interview with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, but in matters of substance had no success either.²⁹ Neither did the opposition’s national-conservative attitudes help. After all they too were working toward a revision of the territorial changes caused by the Treaty of Versailles; through his contacts in the Foreign Office, Goerdeler went so far as to open up the “colonial question.”³⁰ Both Paris and London were not sure why they should support revisionists such as Goerdeler or Undersecretary of State Ernst von Weizsäcker against the other revisionist, Hitler. Robert Vansittart, until earlier in 1938 Permanent Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and then Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty’s Government, saw Goerdeler as “merely a stalking-horse for German military expansion.”³¹ By that time, Oster had found the right head for the military planning: General der Infanterie Erwin von Witzleben, General Commanding III. Army Corps and simultaneously Commander of Army District III (Berlin).³² Witzleben in turn relied largely on the commander of the Twenty-Third Infantry Division in Potsdam, Generalmajor Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt. Part of this division was the Ninth Infantry Regiment (also in Potsdam), where many of the members of the wartime conspiracy had their origins.³³ The basic concept of the putsch was that, upon Witzleben’s orders, units stationed in and around Berlin would seize power, arrest Hitler and other Nazi Party top brass, and eventually bring them to trial. The practical planning was still far from finished and seemed even amateurish to some contemporaries;³⁴ it was far from a systematic preparation. Some of the literature mentions a “conspiracy within the conspiracy,”³⁵ relying largely on a version of events initially related by Hans-Bernd Gisevius in which Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz, a former Freikorps fighter and later a member of the underground right-wing “Organization Consul,” was to form an assault group who would shoot Hitler dead during the “attempt” to arrest him. Heinz

 Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 66; Mommsen, “Neuordnungspläne,” 192.  Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” XLIV.  Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler, 114.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 86 – 88; Witzleben, “Wenn es gegen den Satan Hitler geht …”, 100 – 102.  Finker, “Das Potsdamer Infanterieregiment 9 und der konservative militärische Widerstand”; Klausa, “Preußische Soldatentradition.”  For details, see Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 86 – 96, based on Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 317; Gisevius, however, was always overly critical of the military.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 91– 93; Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 39 – 40.

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was the man for the job: in 1922, he had already been involved in the fatal shooting of the then-Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau.³⁶ The episode shows that, in any case, even in 1938, some of the more realistic conspirators did not believe a military coup against Hitler would be possible as long the Führer was alive. On the whole, when Hitler managed to prevail with his warmongering policy against the assembled political and military elites, and when he eventually achieved his territorial aims, he was able to consolidate his own position as the sole decision-maker so that any form of “fencing him in” had become illusory. The dissolution of all traditional state decision-making procedures was mirrored by the lack of any kind of military or civilian opposition.³⁷ Military planning depended on the system of military subordination. Even five years after the Nazis’ coming to power, after a substantial enlargement of the Wehrmacht, and after first attempts by the Führer to change the Army from within, Witzleben and Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt took it for granted that their units would march if ordered to do so, even if it was to be against the Nazi government and even if the top rung of the Wehrmacht were to refuse any participation.³⁸ Generaloberst Fedor von Bock was alone in supposedly having said as early as this that his own soldiers would shoot him dead if he tried to deploy them against Hitler.³⁹ All these considerations came to naught when the British and French governments accommodated Hitler and ceded major parts of the Czechoslovak territory as part of the Munich Agreement of 30 September 1938. In the end, the opposition neither toppled Hitler nor averted war. The Munich success boosted Hitler’s national and international prestige. It also aborted the first serious attempt to overthrow National Socialist rule, just one year before the Second World War started. In addition, the experience of Western appeasement stymied all further initiatives for a military coup to preclude a conflagration in 1939.⁴⁰ Eventually, the fixation of both the civilian and the military resistance on sup-

 Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler, 42– 65; Thun, Der Verschwörer, 107– 108.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 93.  Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand,” 444. There are some sparse indications that even in 1938, the conspirators planned to represent the whole operation as a reaction to an SS putsch. See Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 87; Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 316 – 317; Fest, Staatsstreich, 111.  Krausnick, “Vorgeschichte,” 234, see also Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 216.  See the sources published in Young, The “X” documents, as well as Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” XLIV–XLV.

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port from abroad, and in particular from Britain, was to remain one of its weak spots. Resistance of the national-conservative elites developed over time, as a kind of continuum out of alternative concepts still within the framework of the National Socialist state, or from an opposition still conforming to some basic tenets of Nazi ideology. However, 1938 brought about fundamental changes in the role of the armed forces within the structure of the Reich which facilitated Hitler’s irresponsible warmongering; this is where the core of the resisters crossed the Rubicon and engaged in potentially revolutionary oppositional activities that meet even the strictest definition of “resistance.”⁴¹ Another element making itself felt here was influence of foreign attitudes. All plans relied on cooperation of the British, and to a lesser degree, the French governments. Their unyielding antagonism to Hitler was essential if fear of war was to form the basis of military action at home. This dependency as well as the reliance on the classical system of military subordination, abstracting from any ideological factors, at least initially, characterizes the German resistance from 1938 to 1944.⁴² During the decisive months of 1938, the head of the military conspiracy, Witzleben, had been incapacitated due to illness.⁴³ However, Joachim Fest’s explanation that this was the decisive reason for the failure of the opposition, is far too personality-centered (as is characteristic of Fest’s approach altogether).⁴⁴ As we have seen above, there were other, far more relevant factors that conditioned military opposition. In 1938, Beck had not yet crossed into a military opposition aiming to overthrow the entire system.⁴⁵ At the same time that Beck wrote memoranda hoping to oppose Hitler’s war policies and to win the Army commander in chief, Walther v. Brauchitsch, for a strike of the generals, a group of officers in the Abwehr was frantically working to prepare an attempt on Hitler’s life and a coup d’état. However, this group did not dispose of a single regiment. Thus,

 Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 37– 38; Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand,” 443.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 93 – 94, 100 – 101; Fest, Staatsstreich, 111; Wentker, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und der Krieg,” 7.  Mueller, “Generalfeldmarschall Erwin von Witzleben,” 266; Witzleben, “Wenn es gegen den Satan Hitler geht …”, 96 – 99.  Fest, Staatsstreich, 139.  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” 15.

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the coup planning could not be converted into reality, which is why the basically sound plan to kill Hitler had to remain that – a plan.⁴⁶

However, these parallels began to converge. Also in 1938, Beck established contacts with other conspirators who – albeit somewhat later – progressed from carrying on a struggle over Hitler to conducting one against him. Yet, even in 1939 many still explained Hitler’s drive to war by thinking that he was “under the control of his SS advisers.”⁴⁷ Only very few among those involved in the conspiracy of the autumn of 1938 remained unswerving in their determination to act against the Nazi system. Foremost among them was the core of the conspiracy in the Abwehr around Colonel Hans Oster, but also General Olbricht, the new commander of the Allgemeines Heeresamt (AHA – General Army Office). Hitler had announced early and often his determination to attack in the West and to violate Benelux neutrality. To his opponents, this seemed another step toward the abyss. In this phase, the driving force behind the opposition was Beck’s successor as Army Chief of the General Staff, General der Artillerie Franz Halder.⁴⁸ Halder, however, was prone to violent mood swings, especially once the hoped-for support from the Army commander in chief, Brauchitsch, failed to materialize.⁴⁹ When talking to Beck, he refused to become involved in a Kapp Putsch, and he wrote to Goerdeler that a coup d’état in wartime would be irresponsible.⁵⁰ In a conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Groscurth from the Abwehr, Halder went so far as to say that if the Abwehr wanted a putsch it should do one itself. Disconcerted, Groscurth noted in his diary, that this was soon after Halder had told him that he was carrying a pistol on his person permanently so as to be able to shoot Hitler at the next opportunity.⁵¹ At the end of March 1940, when the conspiracy’s chief diplomat, Ulrich von Hassell, a former ambassador to Rome, wanted to meet Halder to discuss his “X plan” for secret negotiations with the West via the Vatican, the Army Chief of the General Staff refused to even see him.⁵²

 Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 371.  Mueller, Canaris, 284– 285.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 128 – 130; Hartmann, Halder, 162– 172; a lot less useful is the small volume Ueberschär, Franz Halder.  Groscurth, Tagebücher, 224– 225 (5 November 1939).  Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 351.  Groscurth, Tagebücher, 246 – 247 (14 February 1940).  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 166.

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The commanders in chief of the German armies were deeply concerned by Hitler’s insistence on an attack in the West in the autumn of 1939. They knew about the lack of preparations and about the possible consequences of winter weather.⁵³ Even a general usually thought to be “Nazi,” Walter von Reichenau, tried to talk Goerdeler into revealing the date of attack to the Allies in order to thwart Hitler’s plans.⁵⁴ Oster, now a Generalmajor, eventually took the step of informing the Dutch military attaché, Colonel Bert Sas, of the various dates set by the Führer for an attack on France in addition to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg. Tragically, the repeated last-minute cancellations of the attack plans resulted in Sas’s warnings being believed less and less in The Hague, so that in the end, the Dutch military was not alerted in advance when the attack finally came.⁵⁵ Also, even the Dutch authorities and potential beneficiaries of Oster’s “treason” were quite willing to disqualify him morally; the commander in chief of the Dutch Army, General Henri Winkelmann, referred to Oster as a “miserable fellow.”⁵⁶ For many national-conservatives, Hitler’s successes legitimized his policies. After all, he had achieved what they too had stood for: rescinding the Versailles order and its territorial consequences, victories over Poland andFrance, all in a short period of time and with a minimum of losses. Hardly any high-ranking officer was willing to act against the head of state in the course of a successful war.⁵⁷ This was even truer as there were no concessions whatsoever from the Western powers as to how they would react to a coup, and whether they would not try to exploit a period of internal weakness.⁵⁸ Among the very few who never wavered in their determination were Beck, Oster, Groscurth, and Gisevius. However, they were no longer hoping just to limit the regime’s worst excesses: “the change from loyal alternative policies to fundamental opposition is beginning to take shape.… This was no longer about a struggle for power within the system, but about a coup d’état.”⁵⁹

 Messerschmidt, “Militärische Motive,” 107.  Simms, “Walther von Reichenau,” 436.  Thun, Der Verschwörer, 98 – 99, 152– 157, 191– 193.  Graml, “Der Fall Oster,” 39, based on a statement Winkelmann made to a Dutch committee of inquiry in 1948; see also Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 170 – 172.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 6; Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 143.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 114– 115; 124, 131.  Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 41; Graml, “Militärischer Widerstand,” 87. See, however, the diverging view in Klemperer, “Nationale oder internationale Außenpolitik,” 642.

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At the center of all deliberations was a violent stop to all further expansion of the SS and the Gestapo in the military field: “The aim was not regime change in principle, but – via a rehabilitation of Generaloberst Fritsch – to secure and reinforce the Army’s position within the system.”⁶⁰ Yet, along with Halder, most high-ranking supporters opted out, narrowing the remaining conspirators’ leeway even further; where the military wherewithal for a successful coup should come from remained a mystery.⁶¹ Hitler’s decision not to place the Army in charge of internal security (as it had been during the First World War)⁶² deprived its leadership of essential assets, such as the police. Even in the occupied territories, the military would assume control only initially; before long, it was deprived of executive powers, not least because there were protests from among the military against the repressive measures against the populace. For Army officers with a sense of tradition, all these developments indicated a disempowerment of the Army in favor of the Party.⁶³ Nor were these simply power games: For General Beck, the frivolous and slipshod planning and decision-making in 1938 regarding questions of war and peace was a moral question, which is what added an edge to his controversy with Hitler about which was the better-suited policy. He found it just immoral that in questions of war and peace, life and death, Hitler should not leave practical planning to the well-trained and competent specialists from the General Staff, would not even consult with them, but that in such central questions should himself arrogate advisory and decision competencies.⁶⁴

All deliberations during 1938 had already revealed how difficult a coup d’état might be under the conditions of the Third Reich. In view of the influx of ideologically “sound” young men, one could no longer be sure of the Wehrmacht units. Moreover, with the many armed formations and agencies of the SS, the Gestapo, the infamous Sicherheitsdienst (SD) as well as the remaining elements of the SA, the Army would have to face several dangerous enemies at home. The planners of the overthrow – men such as Oster, Gisevius, Schacht, Witzleben,

 Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 33.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 143 – 144; Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 120; Fest, Staatsstreich, 130; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 360. For Halder see Hartmann, Halder; the earlier biography by Halder’s granddaughter, Schall-Riaucour, Aufstand und Gehorsam, must now be considered outdated. See also Roon, “Widerstand und Krieg,” 60 – 61.  Schönrade, General Joachim von Stülpnagel, 138; see above Chapter 4.2.  Stahl, “Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz,” 22.  Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 31.

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and Halder – even believed they could discern a very sophisticated deployment of Nazi forces to counteract a military putsch.⁶⁵ The generals had demanded that the Army Economic Office (Wehrwirtschaftsamt) under Generalleutnant Georg Thomas should be expanded to form a kind of “war economy’s general staff,” but here, too, the polycratic concept of a self-organizing armaments industry prevailed.⁶⁶ The multiple institutions of state administration, armaments management, personnel management (discussed above as part of the ineffective senior command structure) – all these combined to make a seizure of power by the Army more difficult. As Captain Ludwig Gehre put it to the Gestapo in 1944, even in late 1941, a military putsch had been envisaged as a panacea against the fragmentation of the war effort.⁶⁷ Starting with the war against Poland, another aspect of opposition emerged. Especially the Abwehr soon received information about the crimes and atrocities committed by Germans. However, while the venerable Field Marshal August von Mackensen and Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz protested, none of the conspirators did. As the cases of Mackensen and Blaskowitz were to show, such protests had no effect anyway.⁶⁸ Instead, Oster tasked Hans von Dohnanyi with creating a network of informers throughout the Reich. This went beyond what the Abwehr was allowed to do according to an agreement concluded with the SD in January 1935,⁶⁹ but the aim was to collect sufficient evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial after the regime had been overthrown.⁷⁰ The excesses against the German Jews of 9 November 1938 (Kristallnacht) had frightened many national-conservatives. Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, first a member of the Kreisau Circle and later involved in Stauffenberg’s conspiracy, told the Gestapo that “the measures of extermination against German Jewry in excess of the Nuremberg laws, as well as the behavior which we adopted at times in the occupied territories” had estranged him from the Nazi system.⁷¹ The Nuremberg laws

 Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 317– 318.  Müller, “The Mobilization of the German Economy,” 432.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 335 (1 September 1944).  Stahl, “Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz,” 22– 23; Ludewig, “Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz,” 12– 14; Schwarzmüller, Generalfeldmarschall August von Mackensen, 370 – 372. For the role of Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth see Messerschmidt, “Motive der militärischen Verschwörer,” 1023.  Mühleisen, “Das letzte Duell,” 399.  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 22; Smids, Hans von Dohnanyi, 145; no mention of this in Chowaniec, Der “Fall Dohnanyi.” For the context see Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 292.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 110 (31 July 1944).

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themselves, one will have to deduce, did not meet with a comparable disapproval, but even Yorck’s moderate attitude was probably not shared by most of his contemporaries. Among the few who did think along these lines, the crimes in Poland and later in the Soviet Union, as well as the deportation and systematic extermination of German and European Jews, heightened their moral outrage. Some who joined the conspiracy later were still far from doing so in 1939/ 1940 and, in fact, were serving in the Wehrmacht. Were they also involved in serious war crimes, as has at times been alleged?⁷² Such claims have so far turned out to be entirely without hard evidence in the sources, even if they cannot be positively disproved either.⁷³ The failure of all plans aiming at overthrowing the regime, as well as the way in which the Army repeatedly acquiesced to Hitler’s war plans and to his interventions in Army personnel policies, were indicators of a gradual shift of power within the Reich. Back in the 1920s, the military had been a largely independent power elite, functioning as a “state within the state.” Now it had degenerated into a mere functional elite – alongside other protagonists within the Third Reich.⁷⁴

5.2 Advice in War: Facts and Figures, or Fanatical Belief? The functioning of the supreme command structure has been discussed above (see Chapter 4.2). The problem of how to provide the Führer with appropriate expert advice is of course intricately linked to the command structure, but they are not wholly identical considerations. Before examining this in detail, it is important to understand that, according to his closest advisers, Hitler was in no need of advice anyway. He preferred to use the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) as his tool, because Keitel and Jodl were agreed that “it was consonant with the concept of the authoritarian Führer state that the head of state would lead in all  See recently Olex-Szczytowski, “The German Military Opposition.”  This cannot be the place to discuss Olex-Szczytowski’s theses in detail, but his claim that “Nuremberg indicted numerous people with seniorities comparable to or below those of our protagonists” is patently absurd: Stauffenberg was a captain, and no officer of that rank was ever tried in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Olex-Szczytowski usually gives no details of a specific document he purports to quote from, but rather limits one of his footnotes to giving the abbreviation for the Radom State Archive (“APR,” footnote 48). Even in his text, he avoids laying any specific crime at the feet of a particular (later) member of the conspiracy. A close scrutiny of the archival records pertaining to Stauffenberg’s role reveals that none of Olex-Szczytowski’s claims has a sound basis in the sources. See Heinemann, “Stauffenberg in Polen.”  Kershaw, Hitler 1936‑1945, 94.

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fields of policy, i. e., would give orders.”⁷⁵ There can hardly be better proof of Keitel’s “subaltern loyalty.”⁷⁶ The long-standing antagonism between “operational thinkers” and “logisticians” continued well into the war, and it also affected expectations of how long the Reich could afford to continue the war.⁷⁷ It seems striking that quite a few among Stauffenberg’s fellow course members from the Kriegsakademie who perished in the resistance – such as Mertz and Finckh – had been working in what might be called “strategic logistics.” ⁷⁸ The young captain’s reaction in 1939 to seeing Polish prisoners of war was that “the thousands of prisoners of war will be good for our agriculture,” and he also estimated that the “untold spoils” would be “invaluable for Germany”; this would be “a hard blow from behind” for the enemies in the West as they must have been hoping to cut Germany off from its resources.⁷⁹ This is not only anti-Polish; it also indicates a peculiar interest in matters of overall strategy and resource management, even in a very junior officer. Stauffenberg supposedly said later to his confidant, Joachim Kuhn, that “from the moment when we made the mistake of attacking Russia, Germany was unable to sustain the war effort both regarding manpower and material resources.”⁸⁰ This insight derives of course from Stauffenberg’s professional experience in the management of these resources, but it seems to mark him out as having a different, i. e., strategic view of the war from a very early stage. By October 1941 it became clear that the war against the Soviet Union would not be terminated as soon as originally expected. Additional personnel were needed. The commander of the Replacement Army was required to create more divisions, a program code-named “Rheingold.” Immediately after, still in the same month, more divisions were raised from among the alert units of the Replacement Army which would be mobilizable even more quickly; the codename for this was Walküre (“Valkyrie”). These units had initially been scheduled

 Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 122, with reference to a statement by General der Artillerie Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy on the OKW.  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 413.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 1000.  Die Schule des Sieges [Informal journal of Stauffenberg’s class at the Kriegsschule], 23 June 1938. GDW. Other officers in the class whose career involved logistics rather than operations included Franz Nordenskjöld (later colonel and Quartermaster-General, 2. Panzer Army) and Hermann Teske (later colonel and responsible for transport in Army Group Center). Another course participant at the time was from the U.S. Army: Albert C. Wedemeyer, later a four-star general, and a staunch supporter of the feasibility of the Berlin Airlift.  Letters Stauffenberg to his wife, dated 25 and 30 September 1939, quoted in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 115 – 116.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 19; see also for the following quotation.

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to be available in case of airborne landings within the Reich, or of internal unrest such as an uprising of communist workers.⁸¹ On 26 October 1941, Generaloberst Fromm, Commander of the Replacement Army, personally briefed Hitler on the strategic supply situation, based on a memorandum about the “Army resources situation based on the allotted contingents.” As Fromm explained, further mechanization of the Army, even maintaining the status quo, would be possible only if it received higher priorities in raw materials and industrial capacities.⁸² The figures were quite plain, and by autumn of 1942 it became clear that the major losses the Army had incurred during the summer could no longer be made good. About one million positions would remain unfilled of which three quarters would be on the eastern front. Manning the Luftwaffenfelddivisionen would exacerbate these shortfalls even further.⁸³ Again and again, Fromm made suggestions to his commander-in-chief, Hitler, of options to improve the situation somewhat. However, his suggestion to free up to 180,000 German soldiers by employing Russian volunteers did not meet with approval, nor did the idea to dissolve worn-out divisions altogether and make their personnel available elsewhere.⁸⁴ Hitler was not willing to lose face by admitting that the cries of victory in the autumn of 1941 and the summer of 1942 had been premature. He and his Nazi milieu were haunted by the memory of November 1918; they feared the worst for “morale” on the “home front,” and these fears overrode all rational considerations regarding an appropriate organization of the field army. To what extent the Wehrmacht had lost influence on the allocation of personnel resources became evident when none of its representatives was even invited to a discussion about a general service obligation for women.⁸⁵ Fromm now saw no alternative but to point out quite officially that in the long run Germany would be unable to sustain the war effort both in matters of personnel and materiel. He collated the many details into several memoranda.⁸⁶ When the number of losses rose again in the autumn of 1942, Hitler, true to his First World War experience, criticized the over-staffed agencies in the rear and demanded that they be “weeded out.” That alone however would not be sufficient to provide the required manpower in the long term. Fromm, still con-

     

Kroener, Kroener, Kroener, Kroener, Kroener, Kroener,

“The Manpower Resources,” 1021– 1022. Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 417. “Management of Human Resources,” 881. “Management of Human Resources,” 827– 828. “Management of Human Resources,” 848 – 849. “Management of Human Resources,” 822.

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vinced that the Führer had to be open to rational argument, therefore ordered his staff to draft another memorandum, called “At the height of power.” Its basic premise was: it will not be possible to bring about a military victory in this war. In a briefing by the commander in chief, this was to be underpinned and made clear, combined with the request to conclude an armistice by political means within three months, and to leave control of operations entirely to the military during that period.⁸⁷

The figures were assembled in the Organization Department of the OKH by two General Staff officers, Ulrich de Maizière and Robert Bernardis. Bernardis was eventually hanged at Plötzensee; de Maizière, as we have seen, went on to become Chief of Staff of the West German Bundeswehr.⁸⁸ Hitler, however, abhorred such rational arguments. His antipathy toward the General Staff was common knowledge; he had repeatedly ranted against the “Zossen spirit,” referring to the OKH’s wartime headquarters, located to the south of Berlin.⁸⁹ Hitler trusted neither the operational thinkers such as Beck or Halder nor the “logisticians” like Fromm. Most likely, it was 29 September 1942 when Fromm briefed Hitler with the report, “At the height of power” – in other words, immediately after Hitler’s major clash with his top generals in Vinnytsia. The dictator reacted with icy silence. Even though Goebbels kept agitating against Fromm,⁹⁰ until 20 July 1944, Hitler refused to dismiss him because the general’s expertise was irreplaceable. But from 1942, Fromm was persona non grata at Hitler’s headquarters, and not before July 1944 was he permitted again to brief Hitler personally – then accompanied, or even replaced, by his chief of staff.⁹¹ When Stauffenberg eventually placed his bomb under Hitler’s map table, he was supposed to brief the Führer about raising more infantry divisions.⁹² Fromm was by no means alone in his skepticism: During 1942, the offices of the Abwehr as well as the Army Economic Office (Wehrwirtschaftsamt) and the OKH Foreign Armies East intelligence branch, and not least the Commander of the Replacement Army never failed to warn Hitler. Yet, in the stra-

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 429.  Maizière, In der Pflicht, 80.  Absolon, “Das Offizierkorps des Deutschen Heeres,” 255.  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher II.12, 51 (22 April 1944).  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 457– 493; Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 306.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 665.

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tegic guidelines for 1943, which Jodl had been responsible for and which were published on 10 December 1942, none of this was mentioned in the least.⁹³

Hitler just refused to be advised. He was surrounded by typists and Martin Bormann, who was proud to bear the title of “Secretary to the Führer.” With regard to officers, Hitler preferred simple infantry leaders from the front line: “This model of the fighting frontline officer replaced the traditional elite of the General Staff officers.”⁹⁴

5.3 No Total War Goebbels’ infamous Sportpalast speech of 18 February 1943 – his masterful propagandistic reply to the Stalingrad catastrophe – culminated in his screaming demand for “total war.” The Reich Minister for Propaganda took up a phrase which went back to the First World War and which had been revived in 1935 by Ludendorff’s pamphlet of the same title.⁹⁵ Ludendorff, the gray eminence and secret dictator during the First World War, had meant combining all efforts of the state under military control⁹⁶ – not unlike the concepts propagated by Joachim von Stülpnagel during the 1920s (see chapter 3.1). By the start of World War II, German officers essentially associated total war with a combination of a national-totalitarian ideology and the strategic preparations of the war economy, rather than ideological warfare as advocated by National Socialist dogma.⁹⁷

That was not what Goebbels had said in his hate-filled speech. If Goebbels – and Hitler – used the term “total war,” it meant mobilizing all available resources within the framework of the Nazi system both internally and externally, including the military accepting the primacy of (highly criminal) politics. Sadly, the Wehrmacht met this expectation almost without exception. For the political sphere and for state administration, all this has been stated long ago:

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 475.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 105.  Volkmann, “The National Socialist Economy,” 195.  Pöhlmann, Der “moderne Alexander im Maschinenkrieg”; for the related term “absolute war” see Heuser, Reading Clausewitz, 25 – 29.  Groß, The Myth and Reality, 162. See also Ulrich de Maizière’s dictum quoted above, Chapter 4.3, footnote 146.

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This applied in particular under the conditions of war which laid bare the huge and chronic waste of effort while at the same time making it appear as a necessary corollary. As a consequence, only very few contemporary observers fully understood its systemic causes. Permanent improvisation, the neglect of scarce resources, the social Darwinist encouragement of rival initiatives, the decreasing bureaucratic control, the lack of a financial system which, with a sufficient degree of authority might serve as a corrective, the disregard for institutionalized procedures as well as the penchant for single-handed measures on all levels disguised as Menschenführung (human resources management) – all these stamped an improvising character on the Nazi political system from its earliest days.⁹⁸

The Reichswehr had once perceived itself as serving an abstract state; now, it had to look on as Hitler completely eroded all state structures.⁹⁹ As we have seen, the same can be stated for the military. For Germany, the Second World War was a “total war” only to the extent that it affected all areas of life. However, if the term was to denote a functional unified control of the entire war effort coordinated by the military, if corresponding tendencies and theories during the Weimar Republic were to be continued into a “bellicistic” Third Reich, then the way Germany waged the Second World War was not “total.” The polycratic structures of both the political and the military leadership obstructed exactly that.¹⁰⁰ Some of the conspirators also mentioned to the Gestapo that the extravagance exhibited by many Nazi leaders was also in obvious contrast to the “total war” demands made on the rank and file. It is worth noting that the Gestapo included the term “widespread disaffection among the population” in its report.¹⁰¹ This was to continue even after 20 July 1944 and into the death throes of the regime. Goebbels, in his capacity as “Plenipotentiary for Total War,”¹⁰² Himmler as commander in chief of the Replacement Army and (at least temporarily) of an Army Group, Keitel at the head of the OKW, Speer as Minister of Armaments, all worked independently of and at times against each other.¹⁰³

 Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 407.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 370.  The same can be said for the war economy: Abelshauser, “Kriegswirtschaft und Wirtschaftswunder,” 527. Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 60, points out that during the First World War, such a centralized control by the military had not led to the desired results, but that even such intelligent observers as Beck had failed to comprehend this.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 325 – 328 (30 August 1944).  Nolzen, “Von der geistigen Assimilation,” 76.  Different interpretation in Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 132.

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For quite a few officers, understanding this was their chief motivation to join the resistance. When Stauffenberg’s friend Peter Sauerbruch (a lieutenant colonel on the General Staff from Stauffenberg’s regiment) asked him if the war could still be won, the answer was: “for that we would first need to create a unified leadership which – according to him [Stauffenberg] was the precondition for totalizing the war effort.”¹⁰⁴ The very first order that went out from Replacement Army Headquarters on the afternoon of 20 July 1944 announced that the military had taken over executive power, and that it had been immediately transferred to the commanding generals of the Military Districts. This was to create the same conditions as in the First World War, so as to terminate exactly that serious deficit in coordination which the conspirators had deplored as resulting from the irrational command structure.¹⁰⁵ In the draft for his first address to the nation, Goerdeler noted: “Our care for the frontline must combine the greatest possibly clarity with simplicity”¹⁰⁶ – this too was driven by the intention of reuniting the centrifugal elements within the Reich. Military opposition before the war and during its first phase gave rise to insights into these root causes of the various grievances. Eventually, an understanding of these “systemic” failures converted some officers into a conscience-driven decision to stand up against what was threatening the very existence of their own nation – if necessary, by force.

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 402 (18 September 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 65 – 66 (27 July 1944, enclosure 1).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 155 (5 August 1944, enclosure 1).

6 Resistance and War 6.1 Depletion of Resources During the phase of rearmament in the 1930s, General Fromm insisted that Germany would need to take a long term approach to preparing for a lengthy war; supported by Beck, Hitler had disregarded any such advice.¹ It has been claimed that the country consequently experienced a “munitions crisis” in 1939 – as it had at the beginning of the First World War – but this does not stand up to scrutiny.² Despite the smooth functioning of short-term logistics, it should have been obvious that the capacity to wage a long-term war did not exist. In November 1940, Goerdeler wrote a long memorandum entitled “The Situation At Large” in which he too explained in detail why the Reich’s raw materials could not sustain a drawn-out conflict.³ Once the campaign against the Soviet Union began, it became obvious that personnel resources were overextended by the conflicting demands of the Wehrmacht, industry, and the ever-growing party bureaucracy. This was most obvious in the institution responsible for the “management of human resources,” on the fault line between the military and “civilian” society. The commander of the Replacement Army, who was simultaneously the chief of Army Armaments, was the military expert with oversight for all equipment requests⁴ for representing the military in the clashes with industry over the distribution of manpower. In his earliest assignments during the 1920s, Fromm had dealt with logistical matters, territorial defense, and cooperation with industry, as well as with the supplies for both military forces and civilians.⁵ He was an indispensable expert but had lost some of his original competences as a result of infighting with Göring (in his role as plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan); with the minister of trade, Walther Funk; and above all with the minister of armaments, Albert Speer.⁶ Fromm tried to compensate for the Army’s loss of status by investing in innova-

 Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 204, 218, and passim; Groß, The Myth and Reality, 164; Schulz, “Nationalpatriotismus im Widerstand,” 350.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 152.  Published in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 828 – 846 (Document 5.2.6), see also Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIV.  For the genesis of this dual function see Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, 149; see also Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann,” 171.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 152.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 509. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-008

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tive technologies such as missiles and nuclear weapons, but that course, too, failed in the long run.⁷ Lieutenant Colonel Claus Graf Stauffenberg from the OKH Organizational Department confided in his former colleague, Captain Joachim Kuhn: “from the moment we made the mistake of attacking Russia, Germany was unable to sustain the war with personnel and regarding material resources.”⁸ The Nazi regime was increasingly relying on makeshift solutions, and that included the OKH Organizational Department. Contrary to what its racist ideology would dictate, it began employing Russian “volunteers” (Hilfswillige) within the Wehrmacht, and the distinction between recruiting and training units became increasingly blurred. Training was largely done on occupied territory, so that formations that had been used up until that point for occupation duty could be transferred to the front line. However, this meant largely untrained soldiers as well as divisions consisting of elderly men, often with physical handicaps, were being deployed against battle-hardened partisans, and Soviet frontline units. All this in turn compounded losses, while the thinning-out of the Army within the Reich weakened internal security.⁹ Organizationally, the system of direct coordination between field and replacement units, which had functioned quite well up until that point, began to collapse at the end of 1941.¹⁰ Hitler’s reaction to Fromm’s “At the Height of Power” memorandum was incomprehensible to all experts involved. It played an important role in motivating the officers in the resistance because it made crystal clear that the regime did not have any overall strategy to meet its aims.¹¹ Even in a crisis, Hitler was unwilling to agree to solutions designed to rationalize German warfare. There was no longer a question of “if only the Führer knew,” of blaming some lower-level functionary for the many grievances.¹² One of the few who saw this clearly and did not hesitate to say it out loud was Stauffenberg: “I now realize that the ultimate cause is the person of the Führer and National Socialism.”¹³ As early as the winter of 1942/1943, this brilliant General Staff officer knew which consequences to

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 509.  “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, p. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210, quotation p. 190; also in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 1029; ibid., “Management of Human Resources,” 885.  Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 305.  Wegner, “Einführende Bemerkungen,” 138.  Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus,” 19.  Stauffenberg to Kuhn, Vinnytsia, August 1942; Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378.

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draw: “Hitler is responsible. No fundamental change is possible until he is removed. I am ready to do it.”¹⁴ The winter of 1942/1943 was in no way the end of the catastrophes. The fall of Stalingrad, the surrender of the German troops in North Africa (a theatre Stauffenberg knew well from his own experience), and then the failure of the German offensive at Kursk made 1943 the real turning point of the war.¹⁵ In September 1943, the chief of the General Army Office, General der Infanterie Olbricht, declared that 75 percent of the personnel replacements planned after Stalingrad had been achieved – but 200,000 out of 800,000 posts could not be filled.¹⁶ Generalleutnant (later General der Artillerie) Fritz Lindemann, then responsible for artillery within the OKW, had previously been a divisional commander on the eastern front. For him, the experience of losing so many men without replacement was one of the chief motives for joining the military opposition.¹⁷ Again, the ten Luftwaffenfelddivisionen must be mentioned here: these required not only the latest equipment, but also a full supply of recruits, which of course came at the expense of the Army. In the autumn of 1942, Stauffenberg and Kuhn were united in their scathing criticism.¹⁸ More even than the question of the command structure, the mounting losses were a topic which could safely be discussed among officers. Lieutenant Colonel Sauerbruch had a long and exhaustive talk with his friend (from the same regiment) Stauffenberg who first developed some organizational solutions, but eventually claimed the war was irrevocably lost and that a “fundamental break” with the current regime was required.¹⁹ Bavarian monarchist and separatist Franz Sperr attested to the Gestapo that Stauffenberg had told him this on 6 June 1944.²⁰ As territorial losses piled up on either side of the Reich, there were ever fewer ethnic German or local pro-German populations from which new recruits could be drawn. Understandably, there was dwindling willingness to identify

 Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 113; quoted also in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 154.  Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 308 – 309. In 1946, the co-conspirator Rudolf Christoph Baron von Gersdorff, however, did not see the military catastrophes, and Stalingrad, in particular, as the real motives for the military opposition: Generalmajor Frhr. von Gersdorff: Beitrag zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944, fol. 83 – 104, at fol. 95; IfZ, ED 88/1.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1023.  Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 380, 433 – 434; Mühlen, Sie gaben ihr Leben, 37.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 16.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 402 (18 September 1944, enclosure 4).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 331 (31 August 1944).

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with an obviously lost cause.²¹ Thus, it became necessary to draft younger and older recruits from within the Reich. In the summer of 1944, the “very young” recruits already constituted the majority of replacements – another unsustainable solution.²² As Beck had foreseen in 1938, the basic demographics of the “existence of the nation” was now at stake.²³ Stauffenberg had jotted down a declaration for the day of the overthrow: “If the present course continues, defeat and the annihilation of Germany’s physical [blutsmäßig] substance will be inevitable.”²⁴ But losses were to increase further: by the summer of 1944 roughly the strength of an entire infantry regiment on the eastern front was killed every single day; between July and September, this figure tripled again. “The collapse of Army Group Center – which Stauffenberg had predicted – resulted in 215,013 fatalities in July 1944, and 348,960 in August – the second highest in any month of the war, with only January 1945 (451,742 dead) exceeding it.”²⁵ Altogether, fatal casualties from 20 July 1944 to the end of the war roughly equaled those of the preceding five years of conflict.²⁶ Most of these losses could have been avoided had the coup d’état succeeded. It is probably no coincidence that once the Abwehr ceased to function as the organizational center of the conspiracy, the commander of the Replacement Army took over – this was where the depressing figures were better known than anywhere else.²⁷ There now spread among the organizational experts – who, because of their special insight into the internal conditions of the army, tended to be rather skeptical – on the one hand resignation, and on the other, resistance, taken to its ultimate consequence, against a regime that in ruthlessly pursuing its criminal aims was beginning to destroy the whole basis of its own people’s lives.²⁸

 Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1052, 1962; Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 218 – 219.  Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 223.  Steinbach, “Zwischen Gefolgschaft, Gehorsam und Widerstand,” 276.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944); Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 125.  Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 238, see also p. 279.  Wette, “Zwischen Untergangspathos und Überlebenswillen,” 9 – 10.  [General der Kavallerie a.D.] Carl-Erik Köhler und [Generalmajor a.D.] Hellmuth Reinhardt, Der Chef der Heeresrüstung und Befehlshaber des Ersatzheeres im Rahmen des Oberkommandos des Heeres. Study P-041dd [1950], BArch, ZA 1/1932, fol. 234; Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1066.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1066.

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For a long time, the population at home and the fighting soldiers at the front did not fully realize this, but that was because the regime was intent on stabilizing its power base at home by “exploiting the occupied countries economically and financially so as to keep the Reich proper supplied to a reasonable degree.”²⁹

6.2 War Aims, Social Darwinism, and Options for Peace The aim of a war is a peace that will be better than that which could be achieved without war – this, at least, was Clausewitz’s view: War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.³⁰

The national-conservative officers who had been brought up in this mindset took it for granted that war should lead to peace, and they initially believed that their head of state and government would look at things the same way. Another reason to take up violent resistance was the realization that Hitler decidedly did not share this mindset. On 22 August 1939, he had addressed the Wehrmacht leadership and, ten days before war actually came, expressed his concern that some kind of “sod” or “swine” might propose a last-minute compromise, as had happened the year before, regarding the Sudetenland, and deprive him of “his war.”³¹ In his crude social Darwinist thinking, war was the real aim, and every man for himself was the normal state of humankind.³² Even in his 1929 speech (see chapter 3.6), he had declared “In truth, there is no difference between peace and war,”³³ and the racial-ideological war of annihilation was in a way Hitler’s real aim in life.³⁴ This goes a long way toward explaining the striking absence of any real war aims. “War aim” in the sense of the modern term “end state” implies that when this aim is reached, the war will be ended. Hitler, however, kept coming up with new demands and claims; his war aims were in fact boundless, so that no end of the war would ever be in sight.³⁵ In line with this, even after his successful campaigns Hitler never concluded any peace, with Poland, with Denmark or Norway,

      

Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus,” 19. Clausewitz, On War, Book One, Chapter One. Baumgart, “Zur Ansprache Hitlers.” Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 366. Hitler, Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen, 48 (Document 6). Fest, Staatsstreich, 119; Kroll, “Geschichte und Politik,” 332. Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 148 – 149; Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 157.

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with the Benelux countries or France, or even with Yugoslavia or Greece.³⁶ Generalmajor Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, later one of the founders of the National Committee “Free Germany” (see chapter 2.1) wrote to his wife after the victory over France: “By this war, and by the generous peace which I am sure will follow, Hitler will certainly be the greatest man in three millennia”³⁷ – indicating that Hitler’s “greatness” depended on a “generous” peace that never came. Until 1938, it had been possible to believe that Hitler’s policies were maybe daring, but not foolhardy, a sort of unconventional diplomacy – on the verge of but still within the framework of established procedures.³⁸ Even the Munich compromise had been made on that basis, leading Neville Chamberlain to misinterpret it as “peace for our time,” whereas Hitler felt betrayed; he had been hoping for a “military triumph upon which he had been concentrating all his energies for months.”³⁹ After the war began in 1939, Oster did not hope to bring about a peace too soon, as that might permanently stabilize Hitler’s regime.⁴⁰ It was only later that international politicians began to question the rationality of Hitler’s policies or to wonder whether he was in full possession of his faculties.⁴¹ Abroad, too, it took some time for people to understand that National Socialism only really came into its own in time of war.⁴² Nazi ideology was “principally unfit for peace”; a “rational peace,” as Clausewitz would have suggested it, was a priori unacceptable to the Führer.⁴³ One of the first to understand this was Fromm. However, he saw it only for his narrow specialist field, without comprehending that it applied in principle. As we have seen, the policy of a rapid rearmament resulted in a situation in which, once the essential targets had been reached, either substantial parts of the armaments industry would have to be wound down, causing an economic crisis – or else demand would have to be sustained artificially, i. e., by instigating a war. Against the background of rearmament and general conscription, hardly any other officer was so aware that the ideological aim of a society based on struggle as its chief raison d’être

 Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 415.  Letter to his wife Ingeborg, dated 21 May 1940, quoted in Diedrich, “Walther von SeydlitzKurzbach,” 351.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 89.  Deist, “The Rearmament of the Wehrmacht,” 533.  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 98.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 90.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 325.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 429; Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 420.

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would, from a certain point anyway, have to result in a confrontation with the military and its understanding of its own role within the state.⁴⁴

Fairly early on, the opposition had realized that the entire National Socialist government would need to be toppled; none of the enemy powers would be willing to negotiate with Hitler, as he himself fully understood.⁴⁵ The many crimes committed by Germans had made the entire nation accomplices of the Nazis; “the genocide served as the decisive psychological barrier against all considerations to terminate the war along the patterns of 1918.”⁴⁶ There was no “forum that might have been responsible for discussing these questions, which were after all essential for the existence of the regime and the survival of the Reich”; Hitler’s daily situation conferences were strictly limited to operational and tactical questions. Even when Germany’s allies insisted on a strategy for achieving a peace this did not produce any lasting results.⁴⁷ After his arrest, Lieutenant Colonel Bernardis repeated to the Gestapo how Stauffenberg had put this into words: Due to its political measures so far, the present government is incapable of bringing about diplomatic change. There will only be options to negotiate in the field of foreign policy if the current regime has been replaced by another.⁴⁸

As long as Hitler was at the helm, there would be no peace, and the Germans would have no other option than to rally around him.⁴⁹ Any alternative would require risking one’s own life. Hitler himself, as we have seen, was waging

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 225; similarly Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 224– 225. See also Fromm’s memorandum about the structure of the Army in peace and war (1st copy), dated 1 August 1936; MHM, XBAA1497.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 93 (29 July 1944) and 402– 403 (18 September 1944); Statement Kuhn on 2 September 1944 in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378 – 379; Rommel, The Rommel Papers, 427, and based on that Remy, Mythos Rommel, 178 as well as Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 307. On the other hand, Goerdeler seems to have believed for a long time that it would be possible to convince Hitler of the need for a political solution to the war; the statements in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 100 – 101 (30 July 1944), are, as far as this is concerned, consistent with all other sources.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 507; see also Gersdorff’s statement in US captivity in February 1946: “the realization by certain Army officers that […] now they were identified with war crimes and atrocities.” Questioning Gersdorff at the Military Service Intelligence Center, HQ U.S. Forces European Theater OI-IIR/34, IfZ, ED 100 (Bestand Irving), Gersdorff.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 494– 496, quotation p. 496.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 19 (24 July 1944).  Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner.”

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war both against external and internal enemies, both with a “cumulative radicalization.”⁵⁰ The steady deterioration of the military situation served Hitler merely as an opportunity to take more radical measures back home, hoping to achieve as many of the revolutionary changes in German society as the dwindling time would permit.⁵¹ If the German people were not able to win this struggle, then it would have to go down with its leader, not as a kind of collateral damage, but because that was the logical consequence of Hitler’s social Darwinist thinking. Ulrich von Hassell, the diplomat among the conspirators, wrote in his diary: “All these people do not realize that it is Hitler’s intention to take Germany with him into the abyss if success escapes him.”⁵² The finis Germaniae which Beck had feared in 1938 would be the eventual result.⁵³ The merciless persecution of all those who in any way doubted Hitler’s policies, of anyone who dared to use the word “peace” or, worse still, “surrender,” was no accident. Anyone thinking along those lines opposed Hitler’s principal, even if rarely clearly voiced war aim: a racial restructuring of Europe.⁵⁴ Hitler’s course may be interpreted as his way into total annihilation (“choreographed nemesis”)⁵⁵; others see it as the precondition for Germany’s eventual rise from the ashes.⁵⁶ Whichever may be closer to the truth: anyone not willing to follow the Führer along this path would eventually have to take part in the attempt to overthrow him. The young cavalry major Roland von Hößlin put it succinctly when questioned by the Gestapo: “In my opinion, for a people of 80 million there can be no Last Battle of the Vesuvius.”⁵⁷ Colonel Alexis Baron von Roenne insisted that his own motives and those of his co-conspirators were driven by “the greatest love of the fatherland and a most acute sense of honor,” as well as by the “responsibility to the German nation, its children, and coming generations.”⁵⁸ Stauffenberg had noted to himself: “The present regime has no right to drag the entire German nation with it into its

 Wegner, “Hitler,” 506.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 506; Wette, “Zwischen Untergangspathos und Überlebenswillen,” 13; Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 323.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 383 (15 August 1943).  Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 157.  Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 153.  Wegner, “Hitler”; see also Wegner, “Wann begann und wann endete der Zweite Weltkrieg?” as well as Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 466.  Chapoutot, “Nous ne capitulerons jamais!”  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 373 (9 September 1944). Hößlin referred here to the Battle of Taginae (552 AD) in which the last of the Ostrogoths were beaten by Byzantine troops under Narses.  Pahl, “Motive und Ziele,” 43.

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own downfall.”⁵⁹ That was the point: anyone thinking along national-conservative lines, anyone attempting to preserve the nation, would have to be able to expect a bearable peace as the outcome of the war. That was exactly what Hitler did not want, and the realization of that marked for some national-conservatives the step from formulating alternative policies, still within the system, to principled resistance. There were, apart from the opposition’s plans for achieving an armistice following a coup d’état, some vague notions within the Nazi system of how to terminate the war.⁶⁰ But as the Third Reich had no structures which would have enabled discussions of this without or even against Hitler, such ideas remained individual initiatives, and with some of them, it is difficult to say how serious they were. We know of some who internally spoke up in favor of a political way out of the war – be it in concert with the Western powers, be it by agreement with Moscow – or who at least were thinking about it. Among them were, on the civilian side, [Foreign Minister Joachim] Ribbentrop and his state secretary [Ernst von] Weizsäcker, and above all Todt, Speer, Goebbels, Bormann, and, lastly, even Himmler.⁶¹

All these points of contact between leading Nazis and foreign countries were similar not only in that they were not authorized by the Führer but also that they aimed at retaining a position of power, or maybe just guarantee of survival, for those seeking them. This is where they differ in principle from the nationalconservative resistance. However, the conspirators’ contact missions abroad were always seen in the context of the many other advances. From the Allies’ perspective, it was difficult to see the difference between Nazi feelers and those of the true opposition – a difficulty that many among the resistance movement found hard to comprehend. All this did not change the principle that the Nazi regime was fundamentally unable to make peace; for that, a national-conservative opposition would have to successfully overthrow the regime. The last among the Nazi top leadership who, until the end of the war, seems to have envisaged a role for himself in postwar Germany was Himmler. On 25 April 1945, the Reichsführer-SS, next to Hitler the individual chiefly responsible for the regime’s countless heinous crimes, made the Allies an offer of surrender. The Allies, however, made this public, causing Hitler to disown Himmler as a “traitor.”⁶² After the German surrender, Himmler was taken into British custody    

Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944). Wegner, “Hitler,” 494– 495; Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 229. Wegner, “Hitler,” 494. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 727– 728; Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 165.

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and only when he realized that the Western Allies were on no account willing to strike a political deal with him, but would try him alongside the other war criminals, did he commit suicide.⁶³ Himmler had known about SS and Wehrmacht plans to bring about a separate surrender of German forces in Northern Italy, so as to forestall a takeover by Communist partisans in the region. He had intended to be part of that deal.⁶⁴ This leads us to the question whether Himmler also planned to use his control of the Gestapo and therefore of the way the conspirators were prosecuted for his own political and personal ends. This is not to support the rather absurd theory that Himmler had known beforehand about the attempt on Hitler’s life and about the planned coup d’état, as was claimed in the 1960s and again more recently in a biographical sketch.⁶⁵ This would imply that Himmler knowingly allowed Stauffenberg to trigger a bomb in Hitler’s situation room with the intention of assuming power himself afterwards. This has never been properly substantiated with evidence. In view of what else we know about Himmler’s loyalty to Hitler (at least at that point in time), it lacks credibility.⁶⁶ Himmler owed his rise in the final stage of the war not least to the fact that Italy switched sides in September 1943 – an event that had demonstrated to the German public that it might be possible to end the war, even against the dictator’s will, as many perceived Mussolini’s demise to be a military putsch.⁶⁷ Immediately thereafter, Himmler became minister of the interior, an indication that Hitler doubted whether German “morale” might not decline in a similar fashion

 While describing Himmler’s suicide, the most recent Himmler biography (Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 733 – 736) is surprisingly reticent as regards Himmler’s peace feelers prior to 20 July 1944, and even before January 1945.  Dulles and Schulze-Gaevernitz, Unternehmen “Sunrise”; Agarossi and Smith, Operation Sunrise. For the role of Karl Wolff, Supreme SS and Police Leader Italy and before that Himmler’s Chief of Staff, see: Lingen, Allen Dulles, 54– 90, in particular 71– 73, as well as Simms, “Karl Wolff.” See also Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 716, and Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 14.  Maier, “Die SS und der 20. Juli 1944”; Rohland, Bewegte Zeiten, 93; Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 218; Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner.  Interestingly, Gotthard von Falkenhausen objected to this notion as early as November 1945. Falkenhausen had been part of the conspiracy in Paris. However, he would not exclude that the Gestapo might have monitored Goerdeler’s “at times rather careless travelling and propaganda”; due to Stauffenberg’s tighter security and increasing distance from Goerdeler, according to Falkenhausen the secret police never managed to break into the military conspiracy. G. Freiherr von Falkenhausen, Badenweiler, to the editor, Südkurier, Konstanz, 29 November 1945 [carbon copy], IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 31– 36. See also Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 350 – 351.  Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 93, Doc. 1‑101, Telegram 4544 dated 28 July 1943.

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and that he intended to use draconian measures against all signs of disintegration.⁶⁸ Soon after, Himmler met Prussian Minister of Finance Johannes Popitz.⁶⁹ Neither was honest with the other: Popitz knew of the existence of a nationalconservative opposition but was not privy to any details of the military planning. Himmler, on the other hand, was not willing to let this typical representative of the “reactionaries” in on any of his secrets. The meeting had been arranged by Kurt Wolff, chief of Himmler’s personal staff, and the lawyer Carl Langbehn (Langbehn was arrested soon afterwards).⁷⁰ That does not mean however that Himmler was not thinking about ending the war by way of an agreement with Stalin, or else the Western Allies.⁷¹ On trial before the Volksgerichtshof, Helldorff mentioned the possibility that Himmler might have been involved with the coup d’état and the attempts to pursue peace; Freisler, however, immediately interrupted. Although Helldorff held an SS rank, he was in no way Himmler’s confidant. The wording of his remarks suggests that he believed it possible that Himmler might jump on the bandwagon after a successful coup, so that the entire episode does not necessarily reflect on Himmler’s own thinking.⁷² From the conspirators’ point of view, the idea of involving Himmler was a non-starter: if the eventual aim of the entire coup was to terminate the war through negotiations with the Allies, the Reichsführer-SS, more heavily involved in all the German crimes than anyone else, would have been a major liability.⁷³ There are thus no robust indicators that Himmler knew about the conspiracy before 20 July 1944, and that he planned to harness it for his own purposes. This does not mean that his own political aims did not have an impact on the opposition. After 20 July 1944, he continued to pledge loyalty to Hitler while simultaneously establishing contact with the “West” behind Hitler’s back.⁷⁴

 Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 310; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 696.  Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 23; Nagel, Johannes Popitz, 178 – 179; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, does not discuss this meeting at all, but just mentions that in a boastful speech after 20 July 1944, Himmler claimed to have been “up to Popitz’s plans” for a long time.  Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 23; Langbehn, Das Spiel des Verteidigers, 129 – 140.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 494.  Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 417. Maier, “Die SS und der 20. Juli 1944,” 309, emphasizes above all the restrictive handling by Freisler. What she seems to overlook is that for the whole thing to be a well-thought-out plan, Freisler would have had to be in on it – and that can almost certainly be excluded.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 368 – 369 (9 June 1943); Langbehn, Das Spiel des Verteidigers, 127– 128.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 716.

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Practically all attempts by the opposition to establish contact with the Western Allies even after the war’s start had made use of the intelligence apparatus, usually through officials in the Abwehr, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer or Josef Müller, or by contacting Allied intelligence officers, such as Dulles in Zurich⁷⁵ or Otto John’s contacts in Madrid.⁷⁶ However, for Western policymakers and intelligence specialists, it was hard to determine whether the German probes were genuine or whether they were part of an attempt to obtain British or American concessions which might then be made public so as to compromise relations between the West and Stalin. Was it not true that German secret agents, purporting to be representatives of some opposition movement, had captured two British agents at Venlo in the Netherlands in November 1939?⁷⁷ Incidentally, this operation had been the first time that Himmler’s secret service, the SD, had interfered with the competences of the Abwehr, much to the annoyance of Admiral Canaris.⁷⁸ On the other hand, Hitler and Himmler firmly believed that the two British officers captured in Venlo, Major Richard Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, were the men behind Georg Elser’s bomb attack on Hitler on 9 November 1939. Their assumption was that the whole thing had been initiated by former Nazi politician Otto Strasser and organized by British intelligence, reinforcing Hitler’s belief that the Anglo-American “plutocrats” were conducting a campaign against him.⁷⁹ After 20 July 1944, Himmler seems to have hesitated for a long time before he allowed members of the conspiracy with contacts abroad to be executed. This goes for Popitz and Goerdeler (the latter being kept alive until his execution on 2 February 1945⁸⁰), but particularly for the conspirators from the Abwehr (Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi) who were tried in an SS flying court, and hanged immediately before the arrival of the Western Allies.⁸¹ Two reasons for this late execution are usually given in the literature: In the OKH headquar-

 For more detail on this, see Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 886 – 890, and the literature quoted there.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 179.  Jones, Countdown to Valkyrie, 299.  Brissaud, The Nazi Secret Service, 238 – 260; Klemperer, German Resistance Against Hitler, 162; Schulz, “Nationalpatriotismus im Widerstand,” 355, with further bibliography; Thun, Der Verschwörer, 174. See also Chapter IX.5.  For Elser, see Steinbach and Tuchel, Georg Elser, 135– 137. For Hitler’s perception and the link with the Venlo Incident, see also the recent book Simms, Hitler, 366.  Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 244.  Perels, “Die schrittweise Rechtfertigung der NS-Justiz”; Thun, Der Verschwörer, 269 – 272.

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ters, the documentation of Nazi crimes kept by Hans von Dohnanyi had been found (the “Zossen file hoard”), and Canaris’s diaries had also turned up.⁸² The material that had been discovered was indeed explosive: there were details of the resistance’s contacts abroad, lists of executions, and a study claiming Hitler should be arrested alive and then checked for his mental health. During the flying courts martial in Flossenbürg (Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer) and Sachsenhausen (Dohnanyi), this material constituted the bulk of the prosecution’s “evidence.” But these documents had been found on 22 September 1944, and in view of the great haste in executing other members of the conspiracy, one cannot help but notice that six months had since passed. In March 1945, Chief Prosecutor (Oberreichsanwalt) Ernst Lautz hinted that the members of the Abwehr would not be tried in the People’s Court, but would “be dealt with by the State Police [i. e., the Gestapo].”⁸³ In other words, they would not be subject to the judicial apparatus, but to Himmler’s opportunism. The Reichsführer-SS would try anything to avoid internal details of the intelligence apparatus (which now was under his control) being discussed in an outside forum. Hitler is supposed to have decided during the midday situation conference on 5 April 1945 to have those members of the Abwehr executed who were still in custody. The reasons for this are said to be Canaris’ diaries which had been found immediately before.⁸⁴ But as we have seen, there had been more than enough evidence available for over six months, so why had they not been exe-

 Dulles, Germany’s Underground, 73 – 74. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 710 (not in the English-language edition!) relates without further comment that Kaltenbrunner had ordered in the autumn of 1944 to shoot them, and that therefore Dohnanyi had been transferred into the Gestapo Headquarters in Berlin’s Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, without asking why Kaltenbrunner’s order was eventually obeyed with so much delay; see also Mühleisen, “Die Canaris-Tagebücher”; Chowaniec, Der “Fall Dohnanyi”, 132; Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 301– 303. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 698, tells us, without commenting further: “The Gestapo did, however, see to it that opponents of the regime in their custody, either prominent ones or those the Gestapo considered the most dangerous, did not survive the war.” Only Smid, Hans von Dohnanyi, distinguishes clearly between the discovery of the “file hoard” (pp. 432– 434) and then the finding of the Canaris diaries and the execution (pp. 453 – 455).  Letter of Solicitor Kurt Behling to Therese von Guttenberg, dated 12 March 1945, quoted in Tuchel, “…und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 344– 346.  This is the version in Chowaniec, Der “Fall Dohnanyi,” 132; see also Mühleisen, “Die CanarisTagebücher,” 183, whose source basis for the decision-making process is, however, rather thin. He relies on the post-war memoirs of Christine von Dohnanyi who had, however, been in prison at that time, and on the dubious Buchheit, Der deutsche Geheimdienst. With a similar tendency: Thun, Der Verschwörer, 270. Disappointing again in this context Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 698.

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cuted long ago? The “flying court martial” proceedings did not meet any basic standards of justice,⁸⁵ so one can safely assume that the quality of the incriminating evidence no longer really mattered. It would require a rather astonishing belief that the Nazi system would observe legal procedures even in these last, desperate days of the war, to argue that only the discovery of the Canaris diaries made a conviction of the accused possible. Himmler implored Hitler not to execute Potsdam District President Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen, who was also suspected of having been involved in the conspiracy; Himmler claimed that executing the Iron Chancellor’s grandson would have serious repercussions abroad. Bismarck instead remained in a concentration camp and therefore within Himmler’s clutches.⁸⁶ It is common knowledge that Himmler had selected a group of Jews, held in Bergen-Belsen, whom he had excepted from the general genocidal extermination program.⁸⁷ In a similar way, he kept a group of prominent inmates in separate “safe custody” in the concentration camp at Dachau, including several relatives of conspirators held under Sippenhaft. Only after a hazardous odyssey which eventually led them into the Southern Tyrol could this group be liberated first by the German, then by the US Army. Among them were the two British officers from the Venlo incident, several members of the Stauffenberg family (including Alexander; Berthold’s wife, Maria (“Mika”); and a cousin, Marie-Gabriele, who had been engaged to Claus Stauffenberg’s friend Joachim Kuhn).⁸⁸ Many of the conspirators’ children were held in Sippenhaft in a home in Bad Sachsa, Thuringia, and they too claimed later that they had had the impression that “something had been planned for them.”⁸⁹ Altogether, there is strong evidence that Himmler – earlier than any of the other top Nazi figures – began to have serious doubts about the victorious outcome of the war,⁹⁰ and that he therefore surreptitiously attempted to obtain some bargaining chips and to keep open his options for postwar negotiations. To what extent the treatment of the conspirators and their families belongs in this cate-

 Perels, “Die schrittweise Rechtfertigung der NS-Justiz.”  Möckelmann, Hannah von Bredow, 161– 162.  Kolb, Bergen-Belsen, 19 – 30.  Richardi, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung, 14, 30; for Alexander Graf Stauffenberg, see Christ, Der andere Stauffenberg.  Behrens and Tuchel, “Unsere wahre Identität sollte vernichtet werden..”  Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, 206 – 209.

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gory, and whether he had detailed plans for what he could use them for, must for the time being remain unknown.⁹¹

6.3 Crimes in the Occupied Territories The war against Poland had already shown the Third Reich’s destructive energy. Even if one leaves aside occasional tendentious diatribes without any basis in the sources,⁹² it is widely acknowledged that German Army troops were heavily involved in atrocities committed there. Protests by individual officers had not resulted in a mitigation of the crimes but, rather, in the disempowerment of Army commanders.⁹³ On 7 February 1940, the commander in chief of the Army issued a directive in which he called upon his soldiers to show “understanding” for measures required for the “solution of national political tasks as ordered by the Führer.”⁹⁴ German rule in France was similar to the occupation of other countries in that it was largely designed to exploit the vanquished nations’ resources; aside from the economic exploitation, French Jews were persecuted, deported, and eventually murdered.⁹⁵ For some of the members of the German resistance in France, this treatment of the Grande Nation was a motive for their opposition; they understood that any durable peace between the two nations would be impossible to achieve if these policies continued. Hofacker’s notion of keeping Alsace-Lorraine for Germany and, in exchange, to cede Wallonia (the Frenchspeaking part of Belgium) to France, may sound absurd to today’s ears. Hofacker, however, was convinced that “all of France would applaud us. The continent would be united, and a great, true peace with England would not be prejudiced in any way.”⁹⁶

 Both Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, and Zelle, Hitlers zweifelnde Elite, disappoint in this respect.  For a discussion of Olex-Szczytowski, “The German Military Opposition,” see above, Chapter 5.1, footnote 74.  For the state of the art, see Böhler and Lehnstaedt, Gewalt und Alltag im besetzten Polen 1939 – 1945, as well as the sources published in Lehnstaedt and Böhler, Die Berichte der Einsatzgruppen aus Polen 1939.  Quoted in Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 356; Order of the Commander-in-Chief, Army, Nr. 231/40 Secret dated 7 February 1940. IMT, vol. 9, NOKW-1799.  Umbreit, “Towards Continental Dominion”; Seibel, Macht und Moral.  Quoted in Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozeß,” 457; see also Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker.”

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Until December 1941, General der Infanterie Otto von Stülpnagel had been “Military Commander, France” (Militärbefehlshaber–Frankreich), until Hitler had found him too weak in matters of reprisals and replaced him in February 1942 with his distant cousin, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who had been Beck’s closest collaborator during the early 1930s. After the German victory over France, Carl-Heinrich had headed the German armistice commission and had tried to keep the exploitation of France to a minimum, hoping to win the support of Marshal Pétain’s government for the war against Britain.⁹⁷ During the German attack on the Soviet Union, Stülpnagel had been in command of Seventeenth Army. He earned the Knight’s Cross after issuing several harsh orders encouraging atrocities against the Jewish population: “The Jewish Komsomolets in particular must be seen as the supporters of sabotage and partisan warfare,” and the Wehrmacht was to make use of the population’s “excited mood” against the Jews.⁹⁸ In France, too, Stülpnagel bore some responsibility for shootings of hostages and for the deportation of Jews into eastern ghettos, including orders he gave in 1942 to hand over internees to the police and the SD.⁹⁹ As the war wore on, however, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel also faced criticism for being “too mild” when it came to executions.¹⁰⁰ Like others before him, he had realized that a continuous reign of terror would obviate any peace bearable for Germany. The intensity of annihilatory warfare multiplied again with the German attack on the Soviet Union, and not primarily as a reaction to the rapidly developing partisan war. Rather, the criminal orders had been drafted and distributed weeks before the offensive. This included above all the “Barbarossa Decree” (Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlass) of 13 May 1941,¹⁰¹ according to which crimes com-

 Heinemann, “General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 55 – also for the following information.  Förster, “Securing ‘Living Space’”, 1199 – 1200; see also Messerschmidt, “Militärische Motive,” 110. The attempts to explain this away in Koehn, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, are unconvincing; see my review in Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 68 (2009): 227– 228.  Order Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, Kommandostab, Abt. III, Tgb.Nr. 85/42 dated 28 May 1942, Military Archives Prague, RKG, quoted in Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939‑1945, 123 – 124.  Umbreit, “German Rule,” 183, 216, 238 – 239.  Erlass über die Ausübung der Kriegsgerichtsbarkeit und über besondere Maßnahmen der Truppe, dated 13 May 1941, see http://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0093_kgs&l=de, accessed 13 September 2018. See also BArch, RH 22/155, fol. 304– 306; Brauchitsch’s comments when forwarding the order in ObdH. Gen zbV ObdH (Gr. RWes) Nr. 80/ 41gKdos. Chefs. Behandlung feindlicher Zivilpersonen […] dated 24 May 1941, BArch, RH 22/155, fol. 302– 303.

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mitted by the German military against the Soviet civilian population were not to be prosecuted.¹⁰² Effectively, it meant German soldiers were free to commit any atrocities they wanted against civilians, without fear of reprisal. The other criminal order which led to resentment in some higher staffs in the east was the “Commissar Order” of 6 June 1941,¹⁰³ which called for Soviet political commissars to be “liquidated” on the battlefield.¹⁰⁴ In the “Academy for German Law,” Rüdiger Schleicher, Hans von Dohnanyi, and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke had worked together on a critical legal assessment of these two orders.¹⁰⁵ But not only these two orders meant large-scale crimes in the occupied territories. In April 1941, the chief of the Defense Economy and Armament Office in the OKW (Wehrwirtschaftsamt), General der Infanterie Georg Thomas, had drafted a “Hunger Plan” to exploit to the maximum Russia’s food resources, and added: “Tens of millions of people will undoubtedly starve to death if what we need is taken out of the country.”¹⁰⁶ In the summer of 1941, Hitler ordered the preparation of a Generalplan Ost. On 16 July, he detailed his intentions to a select group including Keitel and Jodl.¹⁰⁷ At the same time, it was decided that Army Group North should encircle Leningrad, but not take it.¹⁰⁸ Both stood for the Nazi regime’s absolute will to annihilate Russia, to which the Wehrmacht became a willing accessory. In Army Group Center, Ia (operations officer) Colonel Henning von Tresckow assembled a group of critically minded conservative officers. As Gersdorff remarks in his memoirs, in 1941 Tresckow made an effort to get his uncle, Field

 For genesis and original intention see Förster, “Operation Barbarossa,” 496 – 507. Jürgen Förster’s chapter in volume 4 of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Germany and the Second World War), published in 1983, was the first major academic publication which analyzed the “criminal orders” as part of the overall complex of “Operation Barbarossa,” and badly reviled by conservative critics of the time.  The full title was: Richtlinien für die Behandlung politischer Kommissare, see http:// www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0088_kbe&l=de, accessed 26 September 2018.  For this, too, see Förster, “Operation Barbarossa,” 507– 513; more recently and with quantitative details about the degree to which it was executed: Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl; with additional sources see also Römer, “Die Wehrmacht und der Kommissarbefehl.”  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 122.  Müller, “From Economic Alliance,” 174.  Minutes Martin Bormann of a meeting in the Führerhauptquartier on 16 July 1941, published i.a. in the online source edition of the German Historical Institute Washington: germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/deu/German59.pdf, accessed 13 September 2018. See also Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”, 359 – 376.  Ganzenmüller, Das belagerte Leningrad, 20 – 21.

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Marshal Fedor von Bock, to lodge a protest with Hitler against the criminal orders: Gersdorff, if we do not get the Field Marshal to fly to Hitler immediately and ask him to rescind theses orders, then the German people will have to bear a guilt which the world will not forget in a hundred years. This guilt will not only be Hitler’s, Himmler’s, Göring’s or their comrades,’ it will be yours and mine, your wife’s and my wife’s, that of your children and my children.¹⁰⁹

However, there is no evidence that the Army Group did actually protest;¹¹⁰ the orders remained in force unchanged. The units in the field generally observed both the “Barbarossa Decree” and the “Commissar Order”; any claims to the contrary, in particular with regard to Army Group Center, must be considered overtaken by the research of Felix Römer.¹¹¹ In Army Group Center, the criminal orders were passed on and executed on the lower echelons as much as in any other army group on the eastern front; no one can doubt that the Army Group General Staff knew about this. Even if the Army Group was not responsible for passing these orders on to the corps and divisions, as OKH had routed this through the army staffs (bypassing the army groups), the officer responsible in the Army Group Center General Staff, i. e., Gersdorff himself as the Ic (intelligence officer) in some instances passed the order on orally, and duly noted that for the record.¹¹² In Army Group Center’s area of responsibility, the livelihood of the local population was plundered to ensure food supplies for Germans back home in the Reich. Most officers, including the senior ones, subordinated their reminiscences of the traditional German-Russian friendship to the “necessities of war,” although it might have been preferable to win over the anti-Stalinist elements in the occupied territories.¹¹³ At least some sooner or later saw the wholesale murder of Jews, commissars, and the local populations for what it was: war crimes. But only very few ever questioned the “necessity of war” which condemned large segments of the Soviet population to starvation. The Army Quartermaster General, General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner, who also later perished in the resis-

 Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 87.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 529; Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 73 – 74.  Such claims can be found in the book by Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 36 – 37 (whose author later became a judge on the Federal Constitutional Court). More extensive, but without being closer to the truth, Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 89 – 90.  Römer, Der Kommissarbefehl, 106 – 108.  Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 378 – 379.

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tance, played a leading role in the “exploitation of the country according to an elaborate plan,” and he was well aware that a large part of the prisoners of war as well as the citizens of Leningrad would starve to death.¹¹⁴ However, genocidal warfare “in the East” always had a dual character, and that also applied to the “Commissar Order”: The Commissar Order was due to both ideological as well as functional deliberations. The Commissar Order represented a program of politically motivated murder, which within the eventual “annihilation of Bolshevism” was an end unto itself. At the same time, the systematic elimination of the “mainstays of resistance” within the Red Army also served the purpose of accelerating the Soviet military collapse.¹¹⁵

More or less the same can be said for the fight against the partisan groups which soon began to operate behind the German lines. In the army groups’ rear, responsibility for this rested with the commanders of the Army Group Rear Areas; in the case of Army Group Center, this was Generalleutnant Max von Schenckendorff. Among the units under his command were the Einsatzgruppe B under Arthur Nebe, even if the Army dealt only with its transport and supply matters; in all other respects, especially regarding “discipline,” the Army no longer had any control over SS units (except in Poland).¹¹⁶ On 19 June 1941, three days before the attack, SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Knoblauch, chief of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS (“Command Staff Reichsführer-SS,” Himmler’s military command authority), discussed details of the cooperation with the general staff of the Army Group; one of Tresckow’s later co-conspirators, Gersdorff, was responsible on the part of the Army Group.¹¹⁷ The sheer size of the partisan movement as well as the increasing quality of their training, equipment, and organization, came as a surprise to the Army Group and required action.¹¹⁸ As a consequence, from 24– 26 September 1941

 Gerlach, “Deutsche Wirtschaftsinteressen,” 268 – 269; Peter, “General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner,” 274; Heinemann, “Wagner”; Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 985.  Römer, “Die Wehrmacht und der Kommissarbefehl,” 245; Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 529 – 530, comes to a similar conclusion.  Heeresgruppe [Army Group] B Ia Nr. T 491/41 g.Kdos. Daily reports, 20 June 1941; BArch, RH 19 II/116, fol. 149; Ob des Heeres [OKH]/Gen.St.d.H./Gen.Qu./Kriegsverwaltung Nr. 2101/41 geh. dated 28 April 1941; BArch, RH 20 – 16/1012; Förster, “Operation Barbarossa,” 496; Krausnick, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 131– 132; Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 94.  War Diary KdoStab RF-SS Nr. 1, 19 June 1941, BArch NS 33/43 fol. 11.  War Diary Nr. 1, Heeresgruppe Mitte [Army Group Center], vol. 2, 1– 31 August 1941, entry for 10 August 1941, BArch RH 19 II/386, fol. 283; Befehlshaber des rückw. Heeres-Gebietes Mitte [Commander of the Army Group Center Rear Area]. Ia. Korpsbefehl Nr. 52, dated 14 September 1941, BArch, RH 22/225, fol. 48.

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the Befehlshaber des rückwärtigen Heeresgebietes Mitte (commander of the Army Group Center Rear Area) organized an “exchange of experiences in the form of a course.”¹¹⁹ The Army officers present limited their presentations to technical aspects, but SS-Gruppenführer (Major General) Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski lectured on “Registering Commissars and Partisans in Mopping-up Operations,” while Arthur Nebe chose to address “The Jewish Question with Special Regard to the Partisan Movement.”¹²⁰ From the very beginning, the combination of “military” warfare to secure rear areas and “genocidal” war to exterminate entire nationalities characterized anti-partisan warfare (Bandenkampf, literally “anti-gang warfare”; the use of the term “partisan” had been forbidden weeks after the war had started, as its connotations seemed too positive).¹²¹ The Army, on the other hand, was not unhappy to be able to leave the dirtiest aspects of the campaign to the SS. To some Army officers, the problem seemed a result of German occupation policies. Murdering large numbers of people and pillaging their villages would obviously drive the survivors into the partisan movement. Even many years after the war, Gersdorff, Ic of Army Group Center and, as we have seen, responsible for rear are security in Byelorussia, formulated the way the military conspirators had perceived this problem in practical rather than moral terms: Hitler’s policy in the east created the basis for a national Russian fight against the German conquerors that led not only to heavy losses in the Wehrmacht, but also worsened the problems of supply.¹²²

There was no clear division of labor in the sense that the Wehrmacht was to be responsible for the “military” war while the SS would handle the genocidal aspects; the close, even inseparable connection between these two rendered the distinction meaningless. In the campaign against France, the structural diversity and the ideological differences among the Nazi leadership had prevented any coherent policy aimed

 Befehlshaber des rückw. Heeres-Gebietes Mitte [Commander of the Army Group Center Rear Area]. Ia. Korpsbefehl Nr. 53, dated 16 September 1941, BArch, RH 22/225, fol. 63 – 64.  Befehlshaber rückw. Heeresgebiet Mitte [Commander of the Army Group Center Rear Area], Ia, Agenda for the Course “Anti-Partisan Warfare” and List of Participants, dated 23 September 1941, BArch, RH 22/225, fol. 70 – 77; Report Befehlshaber rückw. Heeresgebiet Mitte [Commander of the Army Group Center Rear Area], Ia, to OKH GenQu Br.B. Nr. 909/41 geh., dated 30 September 1941, BArch, RH 22/227, fol. 37– 39.  Wegner, “The War Against the Soviet Union,” 1005 – 1021; for the term Bandenkampf see Umbreit, “Das unbewältigte Problem,” 134.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 103.

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at concluding peace. This applied even more so to the war against the Soviet Union: the various rival organizations fought for their respective competences, in a process which radicalized each of them and resulted in cumulative violence against the inhabitants of the occupied territories.¹²³ The murder of the Jews also was a prominent issue for the White Rose. Their second leaflet, dated June or July 1942, read: “Here we see the most frightful crime against human dignity, a crime that is unparalleled in the whole of history.¹²⁴” The text goes back largely to Alexander Schmorell, an Orthodox Christian born in Orenburg (Russia).¹²⁵ Claus and Berthold Stauffenberg knew about the genocide of the Jews, at least from mid-1942. For both of them, this knowledge contributed to their decision to act against the regime.¹²⁶ Carl Goerdeler supposedly learned only in early 1943 about the full extent of the murder of the European Jews.¹²⁷ The discussion of “antisemitism” among the national-conservative resisters seems more or less concluded.¹²⁸ It concerned almost exclusively the politicians, and in its later stage focused largely on Carl Goerdeler. There can be no doubt that the position of the civilian as well as of the military conspirators differed fundamentally from that of the Nazi regime. Whatever the concepts may have been in detail, in any case the Jews living in Germany were to have had a defined legal status; the indiscriminate murder of Jews in the occupied territories was to be stopped immediately. This also implied that the conspirators distanced themselves from some of the more radical antisemitic tendencies of the right-wing parties during the Weimar period.¹²⁹ In sum, the war in Russia was both a major crime aimed at achieving Hitler’s genocidal aims, and a “conventional” war against the Soviet Union; the crimes committed were not a regrettable “collateral damage,” but racist mass murder.¹³⁰ If the officers among the opposition wanted to secure the foreign political aims of the resistance, they had to continue fighting the “conventional” war which, however, was inseparably linked with the “genocidal” war. This concerned

 Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 415.  Quoted according to http://libcom.org/library/white-rose-leaflet-2, accessed 7 May 2020.  Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner,” 29; Moll, “Acts of Resistance,” 173.  Vitzthum, “Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg”; Hoffmann, “The German Resistance and the Holocaust,” 109 – 110.  Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LX.  For an overview, see Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews.”  Meinl, “Das gesamte bewegliche und unbewegliche Vermögen.”  Boll, “Aktionen nach Kriegsbrauch,” 781.

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above all the group of officers conspiring within the general staff of Army Group Center, as it meant that they were all necessarily entangled in the racial and ideological war of annihilation. During the last years their role in this context has been the subject of substantial research which also yielded new insights.¹³¹ Their share of the crimes, or at least their knowledge about them, will need to be discussed in greater detail later.

6.4 A Crime against the German Nation Stauffenberg had referred to Hitler as “a fool and a felon” as early as 1942, when he was working in the Organizations Branch of the OKH.¹³² It is important to understand that he held both labels to be equally damning; he had perhaps learned this from the Roman Catholic bishop of Berlin, Konrad Graf Preysing, whom Stauffenberg knew well and who had made similar remarks even before 1933.¹³³ Hitler’s dilettantish leadership and the reckless waste of German soldiers’ lives that resulted from it were the first factors to contribute to this opinion of the dictator. The policies against the inhabitants of the occupied territories were perceived by both civilian and military national conservatives as a “great crime against their own nation”¹³⁴ They cost unnecessary losses, tarnished Germany’s reputation abroad, and thus obviated (perhaps intentionally) any prospect of peace. The longer the war went on, the more the regime’s repressive policies turned inward, against alleged “enemies of the people” back home, making the Wehrmacht an accomplice of the regime’s fight against its own people.¹³⁵ Simultaneously, the brutal war crimes the Wehrmacht had been involved in began to undermine discipline, which rendered it – as in 1923 – an “absolutely reliable instrument in the hands of its leaders” in an uprising and a potential civil war.¹³⁶

 The stimulus initially provided by Gerlach, “Men of 20 July,” resulted in an extensive debate. See, i.a., Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War”; Gerlach, “Hitlergegner bei der Heeresgruppe Mitte,” as well the literature cited in Chapter 6.6, particularly works by Johannes Hürter, Felix Römer, Klaus-Jürgen Arnold, Hermann Graml, and Horst Mühleisen.  IfZ, ED 88: Collection Zeller, vol. 2, 353.  Müller, Oberst i.G. Stauffenberg, 391– 392; Riebling, Die Spione des Papstes, 94.  Wette, “Zwischen Untergangspathos und Überlebenswillen,” 13, possibly based on Speidel, Invasion 1944, 66.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1070.  Proclamation Chef der Heeresleitung [Commander-in-Chief, Army] to the Reichswehr, dated 4 November 1923, quoted in Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 96. For an example see XXXXVII. PzKorps [Panzer corps], War Diary Nr. 2, 25 May – 22 September 1941, entry for

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After a regime change, the most important aim [of a new government] was to make sure Germany still figured as a power in the international game and that, above all, the Wehrmacht remained an absolutely reliable instrument in the hands of its leaders.¹³⁷

In September 1942, Army Group Center forwarded to the OKH a report on “spiritual care and ideological leadership” from the commander of the Third Panzer Army (Panzer-AOK 3) with some additional comments by Gersdorff and Tresckow. The two emphasized the main objective of such care: decisive point must be education of straightforward and decent soldiers. The fierce fighting and the particular circumstances of the countries and peoples [affected by] the Eastern campaign are apt to endanger the basic convictions of the German soldier. That is why, more than any other campaign, this one requires firm view of and repeated emphasis on these convictions. It is the job of leaders at all levels, despite the bitterness of battle and problems of everyday life to keep pure the German soldier’s shield of honor.¹³⁸

It was hardly possible to distance oneself more clearly from National Socialist doctrine,¹³⁹ but a careful analysis shows that this should serve to maintain the Army’s internal coherence, which would enable it to be the central element of the planned coup d’état. Some authors believe that the conspirators’ national-conservative thinking was an obstacle on the road to joining the opposition. Hoffmann, for example, writes that “Some firm principles of soldierly obedience had to be overcome to arrive at the conclusion that the success of their own arms, the unconditional protection of their own nation and state had to be subordinated to the struggle against such crimes.”¹⁴⁰ This is the reduction of motives to an ethical dimension that contrasts with national-conservative convictions. But this misses the point: if, as on the staff of the commander in chief of the Replacement Army, one had understood that “continuing on the present course will inevitably result in defeat and the annihilation of materiél and [demographic] substance,” as Stauffenberg had worded it in a memorandum,¹⁴¹ then this realization was a central motive for joining the resistance. One might also refer to Hößlin’s and Roenne’s remarks, quoted above, regarding the “last battle of Vesuvius” and reponsibility to the na14 June 1941, BArch, RH 24– 47/2; interpretation in Hürter and Römer, “Alte und neue Geschichtsbilder,” 313. Fromm held a similar position: Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 529.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).  ObKdo HGr Mitte [CinC, Army Group Center], Abt. Ic/AO Nr. 1036/42 geh. With enclosure, dated 8 September 1942, BArch, RH 19 III/489, fol. 72– 82.  Heinemann, “Der Widerstand gegen das NS-Regime und der Krieg an der Ostfront,” 51.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 283.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).

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tion and its future; to these tradition-minded nationalist officers, some of whom had supported the conservative revolution of the 1920s, “the national interest took center stage,”¹⁴² and preserving their beloved nation eventually required acting against its “debaucher.” As we have already seen, the “ensnarement of the Wehrmacht [and with it the entire German nation] into the racial-political final aims of the Nazi leadership”¹⁴³ had minimized prospects of peace on German terms, so that to many, a finis Germaniae seemed unavoidable. The military occupation of German territory as a result of a misguided policy was already on the horizon, and the east would be occupied by Soviet troops. For some Germans, this seemed to be the logical consequence: Stieff, writing in 1939 as he surveyed the ruins of a bombarded Warsaw, stated, “I am ashamed to be a German.”¹⁴⁴ In early 1942, he wrote to his wife: “I can see the coming judgment only as just atonement for the outrages which we Germans have committed or allowed to happen during the last years.”¹⁴⁵ Colonel Wilhelm Staehle, talking to Beck, Goerdeler, and Oster, said he “was almost ashamed to be wearing the uniform of a German officer.”¹⁴⁶ Nikolaus Graf Üxküll-Gyllenband, Stauffenberg’s uncle, found even more drastic words: “Only through death can I dissociate myself from this gang of thugs.”¹⁴⁷ This included the regime’s unprecedented crimes against German Jews. A certain dissimilatory antisemitism had long been common in conservative German society, and this was true of most of the national-conservative resisters.¹⁴⁸ Attempts to refute this in individual cases would at times result in a compilation of sources purporting to confirm a “mild” antisemitism.¹⁴⁹ As far back as 1916 the Prusso-German military had shown its antisemitic tendencies when it ordered Jews in the army to be counted separately;¹⁵⁰ quite a few of the conspirators had at some stage sympathized with the “conservative revolution” or had been members of the formations responsible for the murders of Karl Liebknecht,

 Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 253 – 254.  Steinbach, “Zwischen Gefolgschaft, Gehorsam und Widerstand,” 277.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 343; Stieff, Briefe, 108 (Nr. 63, 21 November 1939).  Letter to his wife, 10 January 1942, published in Stieff, “Ausgewählte Briefe,” 304.  Roon, “Widerstand und Krieg,” 64.  Quoted in Graml, “Militärischer Widerstand,” 96.  Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 255; Klausa, “Ganz normale Deutsche.”  Hoffmann, Carl Goerdeler; see also the highly critical review by Magnus Brechtken of the German edition in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 29 July 2013 and my more balanced review in Sehepunkte 14 (2014): 4.  Picht, “Zwischen Vaterland und Volk,” 746 – 749.

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Rosa Luxemburg, and Walther Rathenau (Wilhelm Canaris and Friedrich-Wilhelm Heinz were among those numbers). Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg claimed he had been driven into the resistance by the “extermination measures against the Jews which went beyond the bounds of the Nuremberg Laws”¹⁵¹ – but that implied of course that the laws as such had not greatly disturbed him. Others had resented the vandalism of the Kristallnacht pogroms of 9 November 1938 for being “plebeian.”¹⁵² In August 1941, Major Carl-Hans Graf Hardenberg witnessed a massacre as Latvian SS units murdered the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto in Barysaw (Belarus). As he said later, “together with Lieutenant Heinrich Graf Lehndorff, personal aide to Field Marshal [Fedor von] Bock, he was determined immediately to defend his personal and professional honor.”¹⁵³ The national conservatives saw these massacres above all as an injury to Germany’s international standing and a violation of a specific code of honor. Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin-Schwanenfeld had provided in his will for money to be set aside to erect a cross (!) for the Christians and Jews murdered in a sandpit on his lands. When Roland Freisler, President of the People’s Court, inquired during his trial about his reasons for opposing Hitler, he courageously said, “I was thinking of the many murders in Germany and abroad.”¹⁵⁴ Altogether, one must distinguish between an annihilatory antisemitism as the Nazi regime practiced it, particularly during the war, and the social and legal separation or exclusion of Jews. Ekkehard Klausa introduced the categories of a “‘serious’ antisemitism, which was close to Nazism,” and “lesser cases which, on a scale of antisemitism, tended toward zero.”¹⁵⁵ To claim that Goerdeler, for example, was antisemitic requires a definition of what the term is supposed to mean. Goerdeler had studied law, and his main aim after the overthrow was to re-establish functioning legal processes. That, as far as Goerdeler was concerned, should also have applied to German Jews; as citizens of a real or imagined “Jewish state” they should have enjoyed a separate status that was guaranteed by law. This would today be considered antisemitic, but at the time, the legal status it would have provided might have meant some protection for German Jews rather than render them helpless in the face of industrial and systematic genocide. What Goerdeler stood up against were policies depriving German Jews of any rights, their humiliation, expropriation and eventual physical anni-

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 110 (31 July 1944).  Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation.”  Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 427.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 58 – 59.  Klausa, “Ganz normale Deutsche,” 186. For an alternative position see Hoffmann, “The German Resistance and the Holocaust.”

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hilation.¹⁵⁶ In this entire context, the national-conservative resistance opposed mostly those kinds of persecution that affected German Jews, above all the Jewish families who, in many cases, had resided in Germany for centuries, were religiously liberal, and had converted to Christianity during the nineteenth century. That is why criticism became less muted after 9 November 1938. The fate of the “Eastern” (i. e. Orthodox) Jews in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union was of much less concern to them.¹⁵⁷ The national conservatives called for a “restoration of the inalienable divine and natural right of every human”¹⁵⁸ and wanted to re-establish “the full majesty of the law.”¹⁵⁹ This included of course an end to the dehumanization of German Jews and the wholesale murder of Jews in the occupied territories. To say this, and to highlight the difference between it and Nazi annihilatory antisemitism, is part of historicizing the national-conservative resistance. It cannot be understood superficially as a moral undertaking or teleologically as the precursor of the post-1945 West German constitution and its (ever-changing) “order of values,” but simply as the “contemporary alternative to fascism.”¹⁶⁰

6.5 Tresckow, Gersdorff, Boeselager, Stauffenberg, Schmidt von Altenstadt: The Resistance and Russia The German military had long held ambivalent views of Russia and the Soviet Union. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, remembered in Germany mostly as the “Wars of Liberation” of 1812– 1815, Russia was perceived to have been the traditional ally against the French “archenemy.”¹⁶¹ Over and beyond the merely nostalgic, this had found expression in military tradition. Seeckt’s military origins, to quote but one example, had been in the Kaiser-Alexander-Gardegrenadierregiment (Guards Grenadier Regiment) Nr. 1 named after the tsar of the Napoleonic period, who had been its colonel-in-chief. In the 1920s, Seeckt had repeatedly

 Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation.”  Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 264.  Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 270.  Draft for Goerdeler’s first state of the nation address; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 147 (5 August 1944, encl. 1).  Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation.” For the opposing view see, however, Whalen, Assassinating Hitler, 17, 19.  Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht, 204; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 112, points out how, in 1919, this applied to the then Captain Fromm.

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called for a political as well as a technological rapprochement with the nascent Soviet Union.¹⁶² The families of quite a few members of the Reichswehr and, later, Wehrmacht officer corps had roots in the old tsarist empire. Among those who died in the resistance, Colonels Alexis Baron von Roenne and Wessel Baron Freytag von Loringhoven were of Baltic extraction and had both been born in Courland, as were Colonel Nikolaus von Üxküll-Gyllenband and his sister, Stauffenberg’s mother. The brief occupation by Cossacks¹⁶³ of parts of East Prussia in the very first weeks of the First World War had provoked the resurgence of a primeval fear of “the Russians” which may well have originated in the final stage of the Napoleonic Wars.¹⁶⁴ On the whole, however, alongside racist anti-Slavic prejudice, many national conservatives had romantic sympathies for Russia and the Russian people.¹⁶⁵ This informed the universal antipathy against “Bolshevism” as an ideology and against the Soviet Union, which in some ways carried on the antisocial democrat attitudes of Imperial German Society. The uncertainty of Weimar’s early years had caused many middle-class Germans to dread the spread of “Bolshevism” to their own country. The idea of revising the post-1919 German border in the east was common currency among German national conservatives, and it was understood that this would again liquidate any independent Polish state. The result was more or less open German support for the Soviet side during the Polish-Soviet War.¹⁶⁶ In a memorandum from February 1920 entitled “Germany and Russia,” Seeckt stated: “Only in close cooperation with a Greater Russia can Germany maintain any expectation of regaining its position as a Great Power.”¹⁶⁷ That post-revolutionary Russia should continue to thoroughly study Clausewitz created a minimum of congenial thinking.¹⁶⁸ Seeckt strongly and generally supported close cooperation with the Soviet Union. While the Weimar government relied on the Treaty of Locarno, German membership in the League of Nations, and a generally western orientation, Seeckt promoted the project of armaments cooperation with the Soviet Union,

 Schäfer, Die Militärstrategie Seeckts, 205 – 224; see above, Chapter 3.1.  Lakowski, Ostpreußen 1944/45, 28, with further literature.  Zamoyski, 1812, 501– 520.  This is extensively demonstrated in Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East, which sadly neglects the military aspects. Seeckt or Stauffenberg, e. g., are not mentioned at all.  Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920 – 1933, 31.  Quoted in Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920 – 1933, 32.  Rose, Carl von Clausewitz, 127– 163.

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anticipating much later political reorientations by Foreign Minister Julius Curtius, among others.¹⁶⁹ The projects supported by Seeckt included the development of tanks and airplanes as well as poison gas. They also allowed a number of German officers to experience the vast Russian plains in person, even if the technological insights into the construction of tanks gained in Russia turned out to be fairly useless for the Blitzkrieg Panzer design.¹⁷⁰ At the end of the day, even the Reich government and the Reichsbank supported these secret and illegal armaments projects.¹⁷¹ Furthermore, Reichswehr officers could not agree on the evaluation of what they had seen: some, including Blomberg, felt that the Red Army was mimicking Reichswehr training and procedures, with a professional and unideological approach, whereas others emphasized the relevance of Communist indoctrination.¹⁷² Conceptually, the exchanges with Soviet officers and their thinking on highly mobile warfare did not yield any major new insights for the Reichswehr.¹⁷³ After he had retired, Seeckt’s successors, Generaloberst Wilhelm Heye and General der Infanterie Kurt von HammersteinEquord, continued to pursue the pro-Russian policies.¹⁷⁴ During the early 1930s, some of the officers who later joined the military opposition had formal contact with the Soviet Union. They included Colonel CarlHeinrich von Stülpnagel, who in April 1933 became director of the “Army Statistical Branch T 3” (later and more revealingly referred to as Fremde Heere – Foreign Armies), making him responsible for contacts with the Soviet military.¹⁷⁵ Even during the Second World War, some German soldiers clung to this romantic fascination with the vastness of the Russian countryside and its inhabitants. Willi Graf from Munich, a sergeant in the medical corps and a member of the White Rose, wrote to his parents while serving an internship on the eastern front that he had come to “know and appreciate” Russians – however, at that time a positive attitude to Russians such as his had surely become a minority phenomenon.¹⁷⁶

  221.   42.    

Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 95, 362. Heinemann, “The Development of German Armoured Forces,” 54; Pöhlmann, Der Panzer, Bergien, Die bellizistische Republik, 23. Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920 – 1933, 304– 305; Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, Groß, The Myth and Reality, 274– 275. Carsten, The Reichswehr and Politics, 275 – 284. Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920 – 1933, 205. Ueberschär, “Zum ‘Rußlandbild’”, 77.

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As late as May 1944, Goerdeler still hoped to be able to regain the “Reich’s 1914 frontier in the east,”¹⁷⁷ which incidentally would have meant that Poland would not have survived as an independent state. This matches Stauffenberg’s anti-Polish attitude, revealed in a letter to his wife dated 13 or 14 September 1939: “The inhabitants are an unbelievable rabble, many Jews and very much mixed population. A people which surely is comfortable only under the knout.”¹⁷⁸ Such widespread anti-Polish attitudes did not necessarily imply a favorable view of genocide. The best example of this is probably Ulrich Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, who also perished in the resistance (see subchapter 6.4). He was lord of the manor of Sartowitz (West Prussia), a property he had successfully defended during the interwar years against several Polish attempts at expropriation, despite having been on Polish territory since 1919. He had thus ended up being a prominent representative of the German minority in Poland. At the end of September 1939, he was faced with the fact that a “self-protection unit” under SS guidance was using a gravel pit on his property to shoot people (it remains unclear whether they were psychiatric patients or Polish Jews). Although Schwerin had spent many years defending German interests against Poles, in his testament he set aside a sum of money to erect a cross on the site to commemorate the victims of these murders. The text on it was to mention “Christians and Jews”.¹⁷⁹ Most of the national-conservative conspirators would draw a sharp distinction between their romantic image of “Russia” and that of “Bolshevism,” and that distinction informed their actions while they were deployed there. This distinction is central to understanding their attitude toward the 1941 war. In early October 1939, Carl Goerdeler and Ulrich von Hassell met and quickly shared their disgust at the German-Soviet Pact. Hassell felt it marked a “complete intellectual confusion.” Even in “far-away Spain,” communism had been fought “tooth and nail,” but now, even in the Reich itself, the “left-wing elements in the Party will soon have the upper hand”¹⁸⁰ – the same elements which Beck, one year before, had called “the radical side.” Lieutenant Colonel Groscurth, a central player in the 1938 putsch plans, called the pact a “gruesome friend-

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 126 – 127 (2 August 1944); Heinemann, “Außenpolitische Illusionen des nationalkonservativen Widerstands,” 1061.  Quoted in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 115.  Schwerin, “Dann sind’s die besten Köpfe, die man henkt,” 45 – 61, above all 59 – 60.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 126 (11 October 1939). See also Schöllgen, Ulrich von Hassell, 100.

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ship.”¹⁸¹ Yet, men like Goerdeler, Hassell, and Groscurth found themselves opposed by high-ranking officers such as Brauchitsch and Halder (himself also quite anti-Nazi), who saw the Soviet Union as a valid partner in foreign politics and therefore tried to prevent war in the East.¹⁸² In December 1943, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, one of the leading figures of the Kreisau Circle, left his American interlocutors in Istanbul with the impression that the founding of the National Committee Free Germany (Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, or NKFD) and the Federation of German Officers (Bund Deutscher Offiziere, BDO) hinted at the existence of a majority faction within the military opposition which sympathized with “the East,” i. e., Russia. His argument may have been clouded to some degree by his hope that such a juxtaposition might make his own, pro-Western faction even more indispensable to the US emissaries.¹⁸³ This is also why the attack on the Soviet Union met with widespread approval. Seeing that the “Bolshevist” enemy was “of a different kind” anyway, and basically untrustworthy, it did not seem to matter that the offensive was a blatant breach of international law. Strategic considerations, such as Germany’s ability to withstand the long-term strain of a war on two fronts (which had been carefully avoided until then) might raise some skepticism here or there. Only a very few (such as Blomberg or Olbricht) had in fact developed some respect for the professional talents of the Red Army.¹⁸⁴ Far more followed Nazi racist ideology, leading to a dangerous undervaluation of Soviet capabilities and a similar overestimation of allegedly supreme German leadership qualities (again the preference give to operational “leadership” as compared to quantitative logistical considerations!). Most, including the many General Staff officers who thought along the traditional lines of operational maneuver war, felt that there was only minimal risk involved with starting another war in the east at a time when the conflict in the west was not yet solved.¹⁸⁵ Stauffenberg’s remark to Joachim Kuhn that “from the moment we made the mistake of attacking Russia, Germany was unable to sustain the war effort both regarding manpower and material re-

 Groscurth, Tagebücher, 202 (10 September 1939).  Ueberschär, “Zum ‘Rußlandbild’”, 74; see also Haffner, Der Teufelspakt, 134.  Balfour, Frisby, and Moltke, Helmuth von Moltke, 274– 279; Heideking and Mauch, “Das Herman Dossier,” 590 – 591; Hoffmann, “Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,” 633 – 634.  Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920 – 1933, 305; Ueberschär, “Zum ‘Rußlandbild’”, 75 – 79. In 1930, Olbricht had travelled widely within the Soviet Union: Page, General Friedrich Olbricht, 77– 82.  Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 357; Frieser and Greenwood, The Blitzkrieg Legend, 349 – 353; Groß, The Myth and Reality, 274– 275.

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sources”¹⁸⁶ dates – according to Kuhn – from August 1942. It reflects the experience gathered up to then on the Soviet Union’s ability to sustain its war effort as well as regarding the steadily increasing operational qualities of its higher commanders. This is not a principled or a moral objection to war as such but the sober evaluation of a brilliant General Staff officer with an eye for strategic, not merely operational questions. Stalin and the Soviet regime knew how to exploit the traditionally friendly attitude of many German officers toward Russia. It is no coincidence that they should have placed an officer at the head of the NKFD, General der Artillerie Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, one of whose ancestors had served as adjutant to General Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg when the Convention of Tauroggen was signed.¹⁸⁷ Opposition to Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union was hampered by the deep-seated “anti-Bolshevism” in German conservative circles. For many, war against Stalin’s rule seemed inevitable, and when the summer of 1941 brought a series of easy victories, there was little room for those who viewed Operation Barbarossa with skepticism.¹⁸⁸ During the campaign, “unbelievable and unscrupulous corruption and personal greed of many involved”¹⁸⁹ further reduced any willingness to stand up against the Nazi regime and its war. Though most officers were quite prepared to wage a war against “Bolshevism,” they found it much harder to identify with the struggle for Lebensraum (“living space”), whatever the term might designate in detail. They were even less willing to accept a racial ideological war of annihilation.¹⁹⁰ While the General Staff’s conventional aim was to defeat the enemy’s military strength and thus win the war, Hitler waged an ideological war of conquest with the aim of redesigning all of Europe and especially German society; the aporia was unbridgeable.¹⁹¹

 Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 19; see also for the following quotation.  Signed in December 1812, the convention signaled the Prussian Army’s shift away from an alliance with France in favor of one with Russia. Diedrich, “Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach,” 320 – 322. For General Graf Yorck, see Droysen, Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Yorck von Wartenburg.  Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 357.  Mommsen, Das NS-Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums, 208.  Ueberschär, “Zum ‘Rußlandbild’”, 69 – 70.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 157.

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Baron Wladimir Kaulbars, a Baltic aristocrat in exile whom Admiral Canaris had recruited for the Abwehr, put it to the Gestapo succinctly: “As during 1942, the fight against Bolshevism emerged increasingly as a war against ‘Russia’”¹⁹² Not all conspirators comprehended simultaneously that the Reich’s wars were perpetrating crimes of global historic significance against the conquered peoples. And even when this realization eventually set in, some still deluded themselves into believing that the atrocities were the result of excesses by local junior commanders. Only later did some of the officers in the opposition accept that the orders calling for mass liquidations were traceable back to Hitler himself.¹⁹³ Einsatzgruppe B did commit such atrocities in the rear area of Army Group Center, and recent research has by now reached a consensus that the men around Henning von Tresckow knew about the mass murders and initially did nothing to stop them. These disturbing findings require further examination, the urgency of which becomes even clearer if the resistance is viewed from a primarily moral viewpoint. But even if one leaves aside the “Conscience in Revolt” perspective, the question begs an answer why the same officers began to protest against the genocide only after about three months, if much later it was one of their main motives to try and overthrow the entire regime. Knowledge of the massacre of 20 October 1941 in Barysaw (Belarus), mentioned above, seems to have played a central role in all this. The SS units involved did not report to Nebe’s Einsatzgruppe. Major Carl-Hans Graf Hardenberg had witnessed the murders only by chance, and it was this experience that drove him and Bock’s aide, Lieutenant Graf Lehndorff, into the resistance.¹⁹⁴  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 426 (29 September 1944, enclosure 1).  Roon, “Widerstand und Krieg,” 60; Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 97.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 533, 547; see also Römer, “Das Heeresgruppenkommando Mitte,” as well as Hürter and Römer, “Alte und neue Geschichtsbilder.” However, see also Arnold, “Offiziere der Heeresgruppe Mitte,” 167– 168; Arnold, “Verbrecher aus eigener Initiative?”; Graml, “Massenmord und Militäropposition”; Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 427; and Ringshausen, “Der Aussagewert von Paraphen.” The unqualified and sweeping charges which Christian Gerlach made in the context of the exhibition “War of Extermination” in 1995 (Gerlach, “Men of 20 July”) did not stand up to a more differentiated and source-based analysis (see, e. g., the book review by Ruth-Bettina Birn in Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 58 (1999), 180). This is not the place to open up again the controversy between Johannes Hürter and Felix Römer on the one hand, and historians such as Klaus Jürgen Arnold, Hermann Graml, and Heinz Mühleisen on the other. Refuting opposing views, and based on new sources, Hürter has shown convincingly that Tresckow, Gersdorff, and Schlabrendorff were fully aware of the mass crimes committed within Army Group Center’s area of responsibility, and their knowledge went well beyond initialing reports. If Schlabrendorff and Gersdorff claimed ignorance after the war (going so far as to insist that the word “Jew” was never used in Army Group Center

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What was new about this particular massacre was that – at least for Army Group Center – it marked the shift from a “fight” against all male and able-bodied Jews toward all-out genocide. Until then, the prevailing assumption – even among those who later opposed the regime – was that Jews and Communists were more or less identical and constituted a major danger for the Army Group’s rear areas. After all, that is what had been declared official policy at a major meeting of General Staff officers, SS, and police commanders in Berlin on 6 June 1941.¹⁹⁵ One did not have to wait long for this basic assumption to have its effects: on 30 July 1941, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel issued an order to his Seventeenth Army: “The Jewish Komsomolets in particular have to be seen as the supporters of sabotage and partisan warfare.”¹⁹⁶ Generaloberst Erich Hoepner, designated on 20 July 1944 as commander in chief of the Replacement Army, told his Panzer Group on their way into Russia, “This struggle must have as its aim the destruction of today’s Russia and must therefore be conducted with unheard-of harshness…. In particular, there can be no quarters given to the bearers of today’s Russian-Bolshevist system.”¹⁹⁷ One should note, however that the word “today’s” is used twice in this short passage, marking again the differentiation of a “timeless” Russia from the Communist regime of the day. Almost 20 years later, Gersdorff still held such views. In a statement to the Munich prosecutor’s office, he wrote: At the time, one might readily have believed that the executions were due to the war. This applies even more as my personal experience showed that among the agents, there were many Jews, and that among the Jewish population, crime was more widespread and more active than among the rest of the Russian population.¹⁹⁸

in the summer of 1941), this (as some other protestations) does not correspond to the truth. Hürter, “Militäropposition und Judenmord,” 136, suggests treating this debate as closed; so does Jureit, “Spekulatives von der Ostfront,” and I agree.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 532, 538.  Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer, 571; Förster, “Securing ‘Living Space’”, 1199 – 1200; but also Stahl, “General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 242.  Mitcham and Mueller, “Generaloberst Erich Hoepner,” 95; for an evaluation, see also Messerschmidt, “Militärische Motive,” 1026 – 1029.  Letter Gersdorff to the Munich prosecutor’s office, dated 6 May 1959, quoted in Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 541. See similar statements during Gersdorff’s time in the Oberursel PoW pen; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 83 – 104. By 1979, Gersdorff’s memory had changed to the effect that the crimes committed had been the central incentive to join the military resistance: “I would like to state clearly that the chief motive, not only for myself, but for all of us, had not been the changing fortune of war or any other military reasons, but exclusively the crimes of the National

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One can confidently call this kind of attitude a “national-conservative anticommunism with some antisemitic elements.”¹⁹⁹ However, to quote a “delayed onset of morality”²⁰⁰ as a cause is one of several possible interpretations. At the root of this explanation lies a premise combining ideological and racist motives: The national-conservative opposition to communism was part of the natural makeup of the German officer corps that, during the summer of 1941, motivated Tresckow, Gersdorff, and their confidants. Along with it, there was a widespread sense of racist superiority over “the East” and its inhabitants, together with an antisemitic attitude, in particular against nonassimilated “Eastern” Jews. During the first months of Operation “Barbarossa,” these ideological caveats constituted an unholy combination and worked against large parts of the “enemy” civilian population.²⁰¹

Another possible explanation could be that, apart from a “sense of racist superiority,” there might have been a hope, nurtured by traditional sympathy for Russia, to liberate the Russian people from Bolshevism and to win them over for the German side. Within the framework of a war against “Jewish Bolshevism,” summary executions of potential troublemakers and their ringleaders in the rear of the fighting units might seem legitimate, even if regrettable. The indiscriminate murder of all Jews in the occupied territories, however, and on top of that the deportation of Jews from Germany into Army Group Center’s area, indicated a form of warfare which was not only morally unacceptable but also precluded any form of negotiated peace for the entire German nation. And although the Army Group did not stop protesting, more and more “Jewish trains” were destined for Smolensk. The Army Group’s repeated warnings that, during the winter crisis of 1941 all the limited transport capacities available were urgently required for the Army Group’s logistics went unheeded.²⁰² The murders of Jews by Einsatzgruppen also hindered supply efforts because the Army would have preferred to use them for forced labor within its logistics system.²⁰³ These priorities remained the same throughout; even when Army Group Center collapsed during the summer of 1944, the regime still found sufficient transport capacity to deport

Socialist regime.” Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85.  Hürter, “Militäropposition und Judenmord,” 146.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 549.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 549 – 550.  Army Group Center, War Diary Nr. 1, vol. 5: 31 October‑30 November 1941, BArch, RH 19 II/ 387, fol. 6364, 71 (14. and 15 November 1941).  Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 153; Kiess, Der Doppelspieler, 196 – 197.

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the Hungarian Jews to the extermination camps.²⁰⁴ All this made far-sighted officers realize that the aspect of racial ideological extermination was more relevant than sustaining ongoing military operations. Genocide overruled Wehrmacht logistics, revealing what the war was really about.²⁰⁵ However, there is no denying Hürter’s observation that early October 1941 was also the point at which the German offensive toward Moscow resumed, after Hitler’s operational blunder of temporarily diverting his Schwerpunkt (concentration point) south had decisively delayed the strategically important push toward the Soviet capital.²⁰⁶ We have already seen that this resulted in some early doubts about Hitler’s abilities as a military commander.²⁰⁷ Hitler’s fantasies of total annihilation diverged in principle from the traditional war aims of national-conservative officers, even if the latter initially did not always see this very clearly – including most of those who later opposed Hitler. Many officers, even top-ranking ones, had developed a utilitarian attitude toward the war in the east. They had accepted that, in the war against the Soviet Union (much as in the war in Poland or even in some ways the eastern front of 1914– 1917), there were no rules.²⁰⁸ The Führer himself had emphasized how different this war was to be from all previous wars: “This was about the annihilation of an ideology and the extermination of its supporters, as Hitler revealed to the commanders in chief of the Army in the East on 30 March 1941.”²⁰⁹ Even before the attack on the Soviet Union, this showed the regime’s fundamental inability to make peace. It was the “criminal perversion of war into genocide”²¹⁰ which made these national-conservative officers violently oppose Hitler. This boundless genocidal war had no aim and no limit, and the Army would therefore eventually not be able to sustain it. This was a professional insight that led to morally sound actions. Files from Army Group Center show that its general staff knew about the gradual increase in the number of murders committed by Einsatzgruppe B.

 Chapoutot, “Nous ne capitulerons jamais!,” 58.  For this, see the recent publication: Pasher, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht, in particular parts 1 and 4 (Moscow 1941/2 and the extermination of the Hungarian Jews).  Stahel, Operation Typhoon; Klink, “The Conduct of Operations. The Army and Navy,” 569 – 594; Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 544. Hans Mommsen used a similar argument in 2000: Mommsen, “Anti-Hitler resistance and the Nazi persecution of Jews,” 265.  See above, Chapter 4.3.  Hürter, “Konservative Akteure,” 57; Lieb, “Der deutsche Krieg im Osten,” 468.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 531, referring to Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, 336 – 337 (30 March 1941); see also Mueller, Canaris, 358. For a source criticism of Halder’s diaries see Fröhlich, “Der Generaloberst.”  Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 8.

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Nebe, its commander, tried to camouflage this development in order to hide it from the military.²¹¹ The Barysaw massacre then marks the point when Tresckow, Gersdorff, and Schlabrendorff (a lawyer who after 1933 had come under Nazi pressure for his highly conservative views²¹²) became aware of this distinction. Their objections were not to war in principle but, rather, to this specific war and its “hypertrophic strategic aims.”²¹³ This needs to be understood as a process that took quite some time to unfold. Even if Barysaw marked the end of this process,²¹⁴ it means that at its beginning, officers held a less skeptical view of the war in the east as a more or less “conventional” conflict. This kind of analysis runs the risk of attributing purely opportunistic motives to the military resistance, and this did indeed happen sometimes. As historian Gerd Ueberschär notes Without a doubt, the attitude of those who opposed Hitler’s policy of expanding the scope of the war resulted less from a principled motivation than from criticism of Hitler’s assessments and risky decisions. This is obvious in their respective reactions to National Socialist measures and orders as well as in their willing cooperation as functionaries of the Third Reich during the first two war years, when Hitler was enjoying a series of successes.²¹⁵

Even if the author admits that the “resistance attitude of some select members of the opposition at the end of 1941 [… was] of a principled nature,” this does not describe the matter properly. The critical minds on the staff of Army Group Center had established contact with the civilian opposition back in Berlin by late September or early October 1941, i. e., before the offensive against Moscow had reached a standstill. Its failure alone can therefore not explain this change. Rather, the officers’ resistance was triggered by a war whose nature was vastly different from what they had expected, and which had created, “by 1941 at the latest, what Hitler saw as an indissoluble link between military and genocidal war.”²¹⁶ Men like Tresckow realized this too late.

 Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 358, Document 1.  Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand,” 446.  Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 122.  Gillessen, “Unsere letzten Zweifel und Hemmungen,” and Jureit, “Spekulatives von der Ostfront,” 196.  Ueberschär, “Militäropposition gegen Hitlers Kriegspolitik,” 361, also for the next quotation.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 506 – 507; see also Weinberg, A World at Arms, 480 – 481; Roon, “Widerstand und Krieg,” 62– 63; Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 984– 985.

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Many of the officers who lost their lives in the resistance played at least some part in the crimes committed by Germans. This is not a new insight; Peter Hoffmann put it into words as early as 1969: even the assailants themselves did not think that they were entirely “innocent,” quite apart from their plans for murder and a coup d’état. Hardly anyone who knew about the Nazi crimes and held his tongue could claim “innocence”; anyone, for instance, who knew about the Commissar Order and said nothing was morally partially responsible and anyone who protested in vain and then felt himself innocent was in fact guilty. There was no black and white in this business, only grey, and even the conspirators felt themselves to be in that category.²¹⁷

In letters to his wife, Colonel Stieff wrote in 1941 and 1942: We have all assembled so much guilt – because we are all responsible – that I can see the coming judgment as no more than a just atonement for all the felonies that we Germans committed or just tolerated during these last years.²¹⁸

This can shock only those who view the history of the resistance primarily from a moral perspective, or from the point of view of its applicability to today’s political education or its value as military tradition. The academic historian will have grown used to the realization that all those who acted (and all those who failed to act) became guilty in some way. The military opposition had been hoping for a “different kind of war” in Russia. This is underscored by a multitude of suggestions that the inhabitants of the occupied regions should be treated differently. The “liberated” people, in particular the prisoners of war in German hands, ought to be given an opportunity to fight against the “Bolshevism” which they themselves hated so fiercely. As early as August 1941, i. e., long before the manpower shortages made such suggestions much more urgent, Army Group Center had tried to press for such measures: “Not least, good military conduct by units, and an end to the wild ‘requisitioning,’ will have a positive influence on the morale of the population, and will thus deprive the partisans of their bases and their support.”²¹⁹ By the winter of 1941 at the latest, the mass murders behind the frontline met with sharp criticism from individual members of the Army Group Center’s staff. Major von Gersdorff wrote in the official war diary:

 Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 272– 273.  Letter to his wife dated 10 January 1942, published in Stieff, “Ausgewählte Briefe,” 304.  Army Group Center. Ic/AO Nr. 174/41 geh.: Defence against partisan warfare behind the lines. BArch RH 21– 2/656 fol. 54– 56.

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I have gained the impression that the shootings of Jews, of prisoners and political commissars meet with general disapproval in the officer corps….The shootings are viewed as violating the honor of the German Army, and of the German officer corps in particular.²²⁰

What counted was “honor,” not the lives or the dignity of the victims. That the motives were predominantly professional military even informs Gersdorff’s memoirs many years after the war: “This stimulated the Soviet forces’ will to resist to the utmost, and thus cost the German troops huge amounts of blood.”²²¹ But in December 1941, Gersdorff had clearly demanded a change in Germany’s policy toward Russia: “Effective propaganda […] aimed at recruiting the Russian people for positive cooperation in the German interest can be achieved only if the current guidelines are changed.”²²² And indeed, the mass murders alienated the Belarussian and Russian populations and drove them to join the partisans instead.²²³ When the Gestapo interrogated Canaris long after 20 July 1944, the admiral stated “the SS had impeded the pacification of the hinterland.”²²⁴ Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, commander in chief of an entire army, who had encouraged his troops to enact harsh measures against the local Jews, also demanded in August 1941 in a memorandum to Army Group South a political outlook for the Russian population of the conquered areas: “if it is to make its own contribution to ending the war, the Russian people will need to know what Germany intends to do with Russia.” This would require treating the local inhabitants decently.²²⁵ Stauffenberg, talking to Kuhn, said: The daily reports from staffs about the treatment of the Russian population at the hands of the German civilian administration, the lack of any political aims for the occupied countries, the treatment of the Jews – they all prove that Hitler’s claims that he is waging war for a new European order are false. That means that this war is monstrous.²²⁶

 Report Major i.G. Frhr. von Gersdorff, 9 December 1941; BArch RH 19 II/127, fol. 171– 173.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 88.  Army Group Center I b Nr. 2562/41 geh. to OKH/Gen.St.d.H./Gen.Qu.: Situation of Prisonersof-War, dated 7 December 1941; BArch, RH 19 II/127, fol. 139 – 140.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 93, 102– 103.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 425 (29 September 1944).  BArch, RH 20/17– 280, quoted in Stahl, “General Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 243; see also Heinemann, “General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 57.  Statement Kuhn on 2 September 1944, in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378; Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 9. A similar statement by Stauffenberg is reported in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 151.

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Of course, a policy of giving the local population a view of the future would have run counter to Hitler’s concept of gaining Lebensraum in the east. Rather, the Führer’s intention was to largely depopulate the conquered territories in order to settle Germans there, which is why he opposed any promises to the existing inhabitants.²²⁷ Stauffenberg “was watching the disastrous course of Germany’s eastern policy with horror. We are sowing hatred which would one day be avenged on our children.”²²⁸ This theme continued right to the six-page memorandum which Stauffenberg carried on 20 July 1944: An important element of the bad overall situation is the treatment of the occupied countries. The beginning of the end was the Russian campaign which had started with the order to kill all commissars, that continued with the starvation of the prisoners of war, and then the manhunts to generate forced civilian labor.²²⁹

Even so, Army Group Center did not order a reduction in violence in its rear area before August 1942; then “shooting women and children, except armed women” was prohibited.²³⁰ But even this had to be relativized a few days later: “This does not affect the regulation according to which the SD Einsatzgruppen and Einsatzkommandos are entitled under their own regulations to take executive measures independently against the civilian population.”²³¹ There were some scattered attempts to allow the occupied territories a limited degree of self-administration, but these did not enjoy any overarching success. This subject was by no means restricted to officers who would end up in the conspiracy. Even General der Infanterie Max von Schenckendorff, at the time the commanding general of rear areas of Army Group Center, commented later that never before had it been so easy for a conqueror to win over a nation as for the Germans after invading Russia,²³² but German policy had then driven the locals into the arms of the partisans.²³³ Another officer who kept thinking about how to deal with the “liberated” populations was Major (later Colonel, and posthumous-

 Mommsen, “Umvolkungspläne”; Förster, “Securing ‘Living Space’”, 1237– 1238.  Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, 189 – 190.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).  General Commanding Rear Areas of Army Group Center, Ia, dated 3 August 1942. BArch, RH 22/233, fol. 66 – 67.  General Commanding Rear Areas of Army Group Center, Ia, dated 14 August 1942. BArch, RH 22/233, fol. 113.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 156.  See the recent account in Helmecke, “Generaloberst Rudolf Schmidt,” 17; also, Helmecke, “Ein anderer Oberbefehlshaber.”

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ly Generalmajor) Hans Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, responsible within the quartermaster general’s staff for the occupied territories and for prisoners of war. Schmidt von Altenstadt worked closely with Stauffenberg in all this, and in discussions with fellow officers he would quite openly advocate violent measures against Hitler; he was transferred to Italy in October 1943, though, and from then on played no discernible role in the coup plans.²³⁴ Obviously drawing upon his experience from the First World War, and referring to the October Revolution, Schmidt von Altenstadt demanded: Whoever solves the question of land will win over the Russian people, as the Bolsheviks did after 1917… Use the national aspirations of the non-Russian peoples (domestic military units). The ultimate struggle against Bolshevism must be fought in the depths of the Asiatic territories by Russian forces…. Exploit the religious needs of the population.²³⁵

Ultimately, this was the strategic question of war aims. Even so, neither Stauffenberg nor the like-minded officers in the OKH expected their military superiors or Hitler to change their policies. At that time – autumn 1942 – there was not yet any indication of a proper conspiracy. Yet, among those discussing these ideas, there were men such as Colonel (later Generalleutnant) Reinhard Gehlen (Foreign Armies East), Lieutenant Colonel Alexis Freiherr von Roenne (first with Foreign Armies East, later head of department in Foreign Armies West²³⁶), Schmidt von Altenstadt, Generalmajor Stieff (as of October 1942 head of the Organizational Department), Lieutenant Colonel Bernhard Klamroth (Stauffenberg’s successor in the Organizational Department), and Quartermaster General Wagner, all of whom later joined the conspiracy or at least knew about it.²³⁷

 Bräutigam, So hat es sich zugetragen, 482– 483; for Schmidt von Altenstadt in general see the not entirely disinterested collection of sources in: Schmidt von Altenstadt and Bauer, Eid und Gewissen, in particular p. 9.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 150. Schmidt von Altenstadt’s role on the fringe of the conspiracy is still far from clear. In any case, it is obvious that he – like Stauffenberg – hoped to rely more on the local population in the interest of the German war effort.  After the war, Gehlen wrote about Roenne (who had been executed after the failed coup): “He probably was one of our most gifted General Staff officers who had great merits in the raising of the Vlassov Army which never came to anything but which could have decisively changed the course of the war in the East.” Letter from Reinhard Gehlen to Ursula von Roenne, 20 June 1974. MHM PSF 958, BBAT 3657.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 154– 155; for Klamroth see also Bruhns, My Father’s Country, passim.

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At the end of the day, all deliberations about gaining the support of pro-German elements were nugatory because Hitler intended to exploit all conquered territories as far as the Urals, including Ukraine, and to use the inhabitants as forced labor. That left no room for cooperation with Russian or Ukrainian nationalists, not even those who had long been living in German exile.²³⁸ Himmler was charged with “securing the newly-conquered eastern territories politically,” and the General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment, Fritz Sauckel, became responsible for the deportation of forced laborers.²³⁹ The chief Nazi ideologue, Alfred Rosenberg, whose role within the regime’s power structure was however minimal, had to make do with a meaningless “Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.”²⁴⁰ All this indicated the overall trend in Nazi policies. This was a hopeless war because it had no defined aim. Anyone who found this counterproductive in a military sense could not see it leading to any peace; anyone who viewed it as simply immoral, would have to either support it anyway or join the opposition. Heinrich Graf Lehndorff told the Gestapo about his motives for opposing Hitler: his negative attitude toward the National Socialist state [was founded on the conviction] that he … believed the ethnic policies in the East, in particular the lack of any concessions in the Ukrainian question, to be wrong.²⁴¹

A political outlook was even more important if Germany wished to turn prisoners of war and inhabitants of occupied regions into soldiers fighting in regular units alongside the German military. As Wehrmacht losses continued to grow, this seemed to be one way of making up for them.²⁴² But without firm commitments regarding their future, in the long run even those who had initially welcomed the Wehrmacht as a liberator would not be willing to fight for the Reich. Department II of the Abwehr (Sabotage and Diversion), directed by Colonel Erwin Lahousen, found this out early on when dealing with Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera.²⁴³

 Meyer, Klatt, 165.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 845; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 660 – 661.  Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 155.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 256 – 257 (18 August 1944).  Later publications by Joachim Hoffmann (not to be confounded with the resistance historian, Peter Hoffmann!) are highly problematic because of their revisionist tendencies. However, his publications on the subject of foreign “legions” fighting alongside the Wehrmacht are still relevant. For an introduction, see Hoffmann, Die Ostlegionen.  Mueller, Canaris, 355 – 356; also involved in this was Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, who had been part of the 1938 conspiracy against Hitler as well: Meinl, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,” 68.

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The idea of conducting the war in the East largely with formations of local units reflected schemes developed by the last “Oberost” (Supreme Commander in the East) of the First World War, General Max Hofmann, who had continued to promote this throughout the Reichswehr period.²⁴⁴ To start, the Army recruited “volunteers” who in some instances made up some 20 percent of its divisions. To secure the vast and largely uninhabited territories, they were joined by companysized squadrons of Cossacks, independent units formed out of local men. The German offensive into the Caucasus was best suited to attempts at self-administration, as the inhabitants were not Slavs, and Hitler did not have the same reservations about them as he had about the “sub-humans” – on the other hand, that was where the German occupation was shorter-lived than anywhere else.²⁴⁵ So, already in 1941 Georgians, Armenians, and Caucasians could be recruited for combat units.²⁴⁶ Later still, and only grudgingly, Hitler consented to have a unit of Tartars fight on the front lines.²⁴⁷ Even so, in sheer numbers Russian and Ukrainian prisoners were by far the largest recruitment pool. As long as he was working in the OKH Organizational Department, Stauffenberg was the driving force behind the creation of the Osttruppen (Eastern Legions).²⁴⁸ In September 1942, the Organizational Department claimed that employing locals in the rear areas could free up some 180,000 German soldiers for frontline duty.²⁴⁹ In their respective areas, the General Staff officers ensured they had sufficient expertise at their disposal. Stauffenberg recruited Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld for his branch, a former member of the German embassy in Moscow who was also a quarter Jewish and an expert on life in the Soviet Union.²⁵⁰ Alexis Freiherr von Roenne, later executed for his participation in the conspiracy, made sure that the professor of pre-history, Bolko Freiherr von Richthofen, a captain in the reserves, was seconded to the headquarters of the Sixteenth Motorized Infantry Division, as this division had been tasked with raising Kalmyk units.²⁵¹

 Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht, 204– 205.  Hoffmann, Die Ostlegionen, 23 – 24; Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken, passim; Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 381; Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 150.  Förster, “Securing ‘Living Space’”, 1223; Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 1029.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 150.  Hoffmann, Die Ostlegionen, 51; Förster, “Management of Human Resources,” 1055; Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht, 214.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 885.  Schlie, “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland”, 89.  Hoffmann, Deutsche und Kalmyken, 19.

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For many years, General der Kavallerie Ernst-August Köstring had been the German military attaché in Moscow. In September 1942, Stauffenberg succeeded in having him appointed “Army Group A Commissioner for Questions pertaining to the Caucasus” (where Army Group A was operating); Köstring was thus responsible for the local formations. Hans Herwarth von Bittenfeld, who until then had been working with Stauffenberg, was transferred to the role of Köstring’s adjutant.²⁵² The concepts developed in the OKH, with some input from the foreign ministry, agreed largely with the ideas of employing the local populations as they had been developed “on site.” Tresckow and Gersdorff had briefed their commander in chief, Field Marshall Fedor von Bock, in a similar vein, and Gersdorff’s remarks from December 1941 pointed in the same direction.²⁵³ In September 1942, Stauffenberg inspected the 162nd Infantry Division, with its elements formed out of various nationalities and commanded by the eccentric Generalmajor Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer. Stauffenberg’s uncle, Nikolaus Graf Üxküll-Gyllenband, commanded the Azerbaijani Legion, one of the division’s constituent formations; he too was later executed after the failed uprising.²⁵⁴ Rival structures again made themselves felt: While the Waffen-SS exploited the resources of the Baltic states, Stauffenberg aimed to make use of the potential offered by the non-“Aryan” Slavic populations. To command the various formations, usually no larger than a battalion, the post of an “OKH General of the Volunteer Forces” was created.²⁵⁵ Initially, the population of the “greater German” areas and from the German settlement areas in the East were underrepresented in the Wehrmacht, but starting in early 1942, they made up a disproportionate share of recruits – the need for manpower necessitated their recruitment. From 1944 however these figures declined sharply again, as these territories were no longer under German control. Also, in the face of the looming defeat, the willingness of potential recruits to risk life and limb for the Reich dwindled quickly.²⁵⁶

 Hoffmann, Die Ostlegionen, 51.  Report Major i.G. Frhr. von Gersdorff, 9 December 1941. BArch RH 19 II/127, fol. 171– 173; see above.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 152, and passim for Üxküll-Gyllenband; for Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer, see the biography written by a former German ambassador to Afghanistan: Seidt, Berlin, Kabul, Moskau.  Müller, An der Seite der Wehrmacht, 215.  Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 218 – 219.

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On the whole, it can safely be assumed that non-German soldiers made up about 13 percent of the Wehrmacht’s troops,²⁵⁷ but these units of various origins and designations fighting alongside the Germans never gained a weight comparable to that of the partisan units quickly forming on the Soviet side. With some national minorities that had traditionally been anti-Soviet, German propaganda might have had a limited effect, but as it existed alongside a reality of pillage, murder, and looting, it could never rival the nationalist appeal of the Soviet “Great Patriotic War.”²⁵⁸ The fact that Stauffenberg, Tresckow, the Boeselager brothers, or Gersdorff should have been involved in the creation of local units is therefore in no way incompatible with their central role in the military opposition, and they indeed stemmed from the same origin: as we have seen, for them a war against “Bolshevism” was in no way reprehensible.²⁵⁹ There may well have been a measure of “political wishful thinking … and a Christian-nationalist perception of history”²⁶⁰ in all this; this would not have been atypical of the more tradition-oriented officer corps of the time. The criminal character of the war that was actually being fought was also highlighted by Hitler’s refusal to do what made sense militarily, as operational considerations contravened his far-reaching racial and ideological war aims.²⁶¹ If anyone in the Wehrmacht leadership still harbored doubts as to who was behind the mass murders, Himmler dispelled them with his remark that he did not “do anything the Führer does not know about.”²⁶² This deep-rooted conceptual differentiation between a “conventional” war against the Stalinist regime and a racial-ideological war of extermination also provides an answer to another question: could it be that Stauffenberg’s pro-Russian activities while in the OKH later led him to envisage a separate peace with Stalin, once the coup had succeeded? It is the very disdain for communism at the root of his professional activities that would have precluded such an option.²⁶³ When the Army leadership accepted the outrageous crimes more or less without protest, the few resisters who remained after Hitler’s great successes

 Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1052.  Schulz, “Nationalpatriotismus im Widerstand,” 370.  For a different view see Messerschmidt, “Motive der militärischen Verschwörer,” 113.  Messerschmidt, “Militärische Motive,” 1030.  Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation,” 15; Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 985.  Krausnick, Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges, 105; Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 97.  Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1014, as well as Chapter 9.3 of this book.

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in 1939 and 1940 (such as Tresckow, Oster, and Groscurth) felt vindicated in their principled opposition. They were no longer content with merely putting on record their objections to specific atrocities, such as when Hitler ordered the shooting of hostages following a partisan raid on the railway station in Slavnoe, Belarus.²⁶⁴ In the course of 1942, the critically minded officers around Tresckow came to form a real conspiracy, even if Tresckow initially inducted only very few officers.²⁶⁵ Among those few, however, was his cousin Schlabrendorff; as we have seen, in the autumn of 1941 Tresckow sent the archconservative lawyer to Berlin to re-establish those links with the civilian conspirators which had first been formed in 1938.²⁶⁶ By early 1943, Tresckow realized that any fundamental change could only be brought about once Hitler was dead. As a consequence, the conspirators in Army Group Center planned in quick succession a number of attempts on Hitler’s life. Making the most of an Abwehr visit to Smolensk that also included Admiral Canaris, Colonel Lahousen and Hans von Dohnanyi provided the necessary explosives from Abwehr stocks and delivered them to the conspirators.²⁶⁷ However, the commander in chief, Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, forbade several officers from carrying out the attack with pistols.²⁶⁸ Instead, a bomb was successfully smuggled on board the plane that was to take Hitler back to Rastenburg, but it failed to explode.²⁶⁹ In his memoirs (and even as early as in his hearings

 Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 818.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 31– 32; Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 82, 94. – However, Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 72, points out that during the post-war years, Gersdorff’s lists of who was in fact initiated varied greatly over time; Hiemann (p. 84) calls this “a so-called second history of the resistance, one of reprocessing, memorialization and tradition-building.”  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 278 (4 October 1941).  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben,” 25 – 26; Mueller, Canaris, 388; based on Schlabrendorff. Höhne, “Canaris und die Abwehr,” 412– 413, rates Canaris’ personal role rather lower.  For the succession of assassination attempts by pistol and explosives, see Ringshausen, “Kuriergepäck und Pistolen,” 423 – 429.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 57– 61. Doubts are occasionally raised about Schlabrendorff’s account (see, e. g., Letter Berndt von Kleist to Hesse dated 27 April 1965, IfZ, ZS/A 31, vol. 2: Kleist; Heinemann, Ein konservativer Rebell, 149). Even so, we will assume here that this bomb attempt did take place. For evidence, see Hearing Gersdorff at Military Service Intelligence Center, HQ U.S. Forces European Theater OI-IIR/34 on 18 February 1946, IfZ, ED 100 (Holding Irving). Further evidence in Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 85, which in turn is based on Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, and Kaiser, Mut zum Bekenntnis. Again, a detailed account of the events can be found in Ringshausen, “Kuriergepäck und Pistolen.”

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as a prisoner of war in American captivity in January 1946²⁷⁰), Gersdorff recounted another bomb attempt that took place only a few days later, during the presentation of enemy weapons in the Berlin Zeughaus. There are reasonable doubts, however, as to whether this did in fact occur.²⁷¹ Hardly anything has come to light regarding plans for the overthrow that was meant to follow Hitler’s death. The conspirators obviously planned to make use of the structures of the Abwehr, yet around the same time, the military intelligence apparatus began to lose autonomy due to Gestapo interference following Dohnanyi’s arrest, meaning it could no longer serve as the military opposition’s “central office.” In addition, from April 1943, the two regiments that had made up the Abwehr’s “Brandenburg” light infantry division were sent to the eastern front.²⁷² Soon after, the remaining Abwehr elements were integrated into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Office), but their commander remained involved with the conspiracy, if only to a lesser degree due to clashes with Stauffenberg, so that from then on he “conducted a foolhardy double-cross between his new masters from the SS and his co-conspirators.”²⁷³ Goerdeler had first met Tresckow on a visit to Army Group Center in September 1942.²⁷⁴ This contact notwithstanding, the center of gravity of the entire national-conservative resistance began to drift away from Berlin, and the influence of Goerdeler and his civilian friends began to diminish correspondingly. Attempts on Hitler’s life orchestrated by members of the Army Group Center staff were all characterized by preparations back in the Reich which were not particularly detailed.²⁷⁵ After his visit to Smolensk, Hitler never again made visits to the “front” (if one is willing to call a trip to the headquarters of an army group a visit to the front). Consequently, no further opportunities for assassination attempts arose,

 Generalmajor Freiherr von Gersdorff, Beitrag zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 93‑104.  Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 86, answers the question of whether this ever happened with a “cautious ‘probably.’” Based on an affidavit by Gersdorff’s brother from the immediate postwar period, she can however prove that the detailed account given in Soldat im Untergang is not correct (87– 88). I am grateful to this brother’s grandson, ErnstAlexander von Gersdorff, for having provided me with a copy of this affidavit. In the introduction to his source publication, Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 432, does not question Gersdorff’s account, although the source he publishes does not support it, either.  Roth, “Von der Offiziersopposition zur Aktionsgruppe,” 137.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 41.  Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LVII–LVIII; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 349 (4 September 1944); Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 108.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 334– 335.

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even if the group around Tresckow seems to have planned for that eventuality until the autumn.²⁷⁶ Captain Axel von dem Bussche had joined the opposition after having witnessed a massacre near Dubno in early October 1942; in November 1943, he was willing to shoot Hitler dead during a presentation of new uniforms, but the event was cancelled at the last minute.²⁷⁷ When Kluge, Tresckow, and Gersdorff were eventually transferred out of Army Group Center, the conspiracy there ceased to exist. From then on, the initiative rested with General der Infanterie Friedrich Olbricht and his Allgemeines Heeresamt (General Army Office, or AHA). This, however, enabled the opposition to make use for their own ends of the “Valkyrie” plans, which had originally been designed for entirely “legitimate” purposes in the eyes of the Nazi system; this placed the organizational preparations for the coup d’état on an entirely new footing.²⁷⁸ Army Group Center had, as we have seen, formed a mounted unit led by a few handpicked officers; its commanding officer was Lieutenant Colonel (posthumously Colonel) Georg von Boeselager, whose brother Philipp was a captain and commanded one of the squadrons.²⁷⁹ Officially, suppression of partisan activities was to be the raison d’être of what later became known as Kavallerieregiment Mitte (Cavalry Regiment Center), but this again illustrates the characteristic ambiguity of resistance under the conditions of war in the Soviet Union: the regiment was to serve as a reserve force for overthrowing the regime, but the military role against partisans, initially only a pretext, eventually became the regiment’s main activity. Starting in the summer of 1943 Boeselager’s formation gained “valuable experience” fighting Soviet irregulars, resulting in an extensive report. In it, Georg von Boeselager recommended a partition of the army group’s rear areas into three sectors: (1) pacified areas, (2) areas threatened by rebels, and (3) areas “infested” with rebels. The term Bandenkrieg (“rebel war”) had been ordered to replace “partisans,” as the connotations of the latter term seemed too positive. In the areas classified as “infested with rebels,” all men up to the age of 50 were to be seized and deported to Germany as forced labor; any men found in these areas afterwards would be summarily shot. At the same time, Boeselager clearly stated – as Gersdorff, Schmidt von Altenstadt, and Stauffenberg had done before him – that a

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 224 (15 August 1944).  Dönhoff, “Axel von dem Bussche,” 33 – 34; Engert, “Er wollte Hitler töten,” 151– 152; Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 42– 43; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 351.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i.G. Henning von Tresckow,” 338.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 354– 355; Witte and Offermann, Die Boeselagerschen Reiter.

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permanent solution could only be achieved by political means: “Even if the above-mentioned proposals are adopted, an area can only be permanently pacified if the Russians are given a political objective.”²⁸⁰ This is again a clear plea to abandon the racial ideological war of extermination and to conduct the war in a way that made sense militarily (even if not morally according to today’s standards). These suggestions implied a halt to the indiscriminate shootings; Tresckow endorsed them fully and passed them on. Boeselager’s cavalry unit was to play a role again in the 1944 plans for securing power after a regime change.²⁸¹ Tresckow never fully succeeded in winning over his commander in chief, Field Marshal von Kluge, to the idea of taking violent steps against Hitler; following a serious car accident, Kluge was incapacitated and lost to the conspiracy.²⁸² At the same time, several members of the military opposition attempted to recruit the commander in chief of Army Group Don (later, “Army Group South”), Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. After all, Manstein had been one of the few officers who, at an early date soon after Hitler had seized power, had protested against the removal of Jewish soldiers from the ranks of the Reichswehr. In all deliberations regarding changes to the supreme command structure, Manstein had been thought of as the ideal commander for the entire eastern front.²⁸³ Not only had Manstein known Tresckow for a long time, but there were a few officers on his staff who belonged to the opposition, such as Colonels Georg Schulze-Büttger and Eberhard Finckh (the latter had been in the same Kriegsakademie class as Stauffenberg), both later executed for their resistance activities.²⁸⁴ In the end, Manstein refused, even after Stauffenberg had come in person to talk to him; Manstein most probably still thought a command structure might be possible in which Hitler would limit his role to the political level of warfare. Gersdorff put it in a nutshell, quoting Manstein as having said “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny.”²⁸⁵ It is maybe characteristic of Manstein that he should revert to the concept of Prussia that had framed his childhood, some 20 years after he had begun service in an all-German Reichswehr. Very much in Seeckt’s tradition, Manstein saw himself as serving the country, no matter under which government. After the 20 July 1944 putsch failed, Manstein assured his Führer

 Army Group Center I a Nr. 6810/43 to OKH GenStdH/Op.Abt. et al. dated 27 June 1943, BArch, RH 19 II/172, fol. 40. See also Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 819.  See below Chapter 7.3.  Thun, “Generalfeldmarschall Kluge”; Steinbach, “Hans Günther von Kluge.”  See above Chapters 3.8 and 4.2.  Wrochem, Erich von Manstein, 99; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 603.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 133 – 137.

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of his loyalty.²⁸⁶ However, Manstein never made an attempt to report any of the overtures made to him, or to have any of the resistance officers arrested.²⁸⁷ Similarly, in January 1942, Field Marshal von Kluge listened attentively over a dinner to what Lieutenant Colonel Graf Hardenberg had to tell him, namely that the Army would have to act against Hitler. Kluge responded, “For words like that I ought to have you arrested!” – but he did nothing.²⁸⁸ Manstein and Kluge could well envisage changes to the supreme command structure. They shared Tresckow’s and the others’ view that Hitler’s style of leadership was catastrophic. It was simply that they were not prepared to stand up to Hitler on their own initiative.²⁸⁹ On the whole, the Wehrmacht top brass showed little willingness to oppose Hitler. We have already seen Stauffenberg’s cynical reply to the question of why the generals were so timid (“You can’t expect people to stand upright who have already had their backbone broken once or twice”).²⁹⁰ Equally bitter was Hassell’s reference in his diary to the generals, as being the “Josephs”²⁹¹ – an allusion to Genesis 37 (“He wore gaudy clothes and thought himself better than his brothers.”).²⁹² It was not that the officers in question “consciously put on hold their morality for some time”²⁹³ and then rediscovered it. Rather, they saw a war against “Bolshevism” and its supporters (who they believed were largely Jews and commissars) as morally justified. But the perception began to spread that this was not the war they were fighting, and that the war they were actually in was in fact something else completely and that they were being used as an instrument for crimes on a global scale – a war without end for Germany. Some of those who came to this insight found their way into a fundamental resistance, and their willingness to go down this road might well have taken some time to solidify.²⁹⁴

 Wrochem, Erich von Manstein, 100.  Even from British captivity, Manstein took Schlabrendorff to court and forced him to correct some lines in his memoirs regarding Manstein’s interviews with several conspirators (Breithaupt, Zwischen Front und Widerstand, 83, footnote 9), which reflects badly on the veracity of the entire They Almost Killed Hitler.  Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 451. See also Gisevius’ estimation of Manstein in Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 72, Doc 1– 70, Telegram 3545.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 88 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 348 – 349; Stieff, Briefe, 173 (105, 21 August 1943); Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 227.  Müller, Oberst i.G. Stauffenberg, 148; see above, Chapter 3.7.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, Introduction, 35 – 36.  See Altmann, “Ein Attentat als politisches Programm,” and Heinemann, “Les officiers de la résistance militaire allemande,” 251– 252.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 550.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 5.

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It is crudely reductionist to charge these few with having shown “remarkable indecision.”²⁹⁵ Tresckow and his co-conspirators drew consequences that were based on ethics of responsibility, not on ethics of conviction. They might have tried to be posted away from the eastern front. But their sense of responsibility made them realize that no one had emerged blameless, and that they now therefore had to overthrow the dictator who had made them all complicit.

6.6 The “People’s War” of 1813 – 1815 Many members of the civilian and military resistance drew a connection between their plans and the period of the “Prussian Reforms” of 1806 – 1812, or the “popular uprising against Napoleon” of 1813 – 1814.²⁹⁶ They did so in quite different ways, however, and it is worth looking at how the various groups within the resistance looked back at that period, how they used its memorialization, and what this tells us about their aims and intentions. On 29 June 1931, the city of Leipzig held a major ceremony in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of the death of Heinrich Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom Stein, one of the most important reformers of the Prussian state. The city’s mayor, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, gave a speech and touched upon subjects that had always been important to him. He described Stein as the man who had given the cities their self-administration, an important element in Goerdeler’s national-conservative world view. His image of Stein was conservative and corporatist. According to Goerdeler, it had been Stein who had saved the Prussian state after its shattering defeat by Napoleon’s armies in 1806 by establishing a new, more modern government and administration. It was a subject Goerdeler liked to come back to again and again.²⁹⁷ Claus Schenk Graf Stauffenberg formed part of an esoteric circle around the poet Stefan George;²⁹⁸ if the young man (born in 1907) had any political ideas at all, he was most likely close to the “conservative revolution.” But he, too, liked to

 Roth, “Von der Offiziersopposition zur Aktionsgruppe,” 136.  This sub-chapter expands upon ideas which I first developed in Heinemann, “Stein, Gneisenau und Yorck.”  Speech on the 100. Anniversary of the Death of Freiherr vom Stein. Typescript, undated [29.6.1931], Staatsarchiv Leipzig, NL Schöne A Nr 4, fol. 72– 76, published in Goerdeler, Politische Schriften, 28, 1.1.3. See also Tomberg, Weltordnungsvisionen, 79, a book whose Marxist approaches cannot convince in many other respects.  Karlauf, Stefan George; Raulff, Kreis ohne Meister; Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, Chapter 2 and passim.

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come back to the Napoleonic Wars, often referred to in Germany as the “Wars of Liberation.” After all, he was a great-grandson of Field Marshal August Wilhelm Antonius Graf Neidhardt von Gneisenau, and Gneisenau had been one of the most radical military reformers of the time. Rudolf Fahrner, Stauffenberg’s friend from the Stefan George group, had written a manuscript on the field marshal.²⁹⁹ Gneisenau was a Prussian officer who had attended university for a few semesters prior to gaining overseas experience in the American War of Independence. Commanding the Prussian fortress of Kolberg (today, Kołobrzeg in Poland), he managed to hold out after his country’s disastrous defeat at Jena and Auerstädt until the armistice was signed in summer 1807. The secret to his success had been to call the citizens to arms to defend their own city.³⁰⁰ In 1815, he was chief of staff to Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, and when Blücher was wounded during the Battle of Ligny (15 June 1815), it was Gneisenau who decided not to lose contact with the British Army, thus laying the groundwork for the Allied victory three days later at La Belle Alliance (a battle known to English-language historians as Waterloo).³⁰¹ Stefan George’s disciples took a lively interest in Gneisenau. Stauffenberg’s close friend Fahrner drafted a book on the Wars of Liberation, but the others in the group approved only of the chapter on Gneisenau. They worked toward a conservative revolution that would put an end to the “massification” of the Weimar era (as they saw it); for that, Prussia’s resurrection during 1806 – 1813 seemed the best example.³⁰² Whether Stauffenberg was aware of it or not, here too he was in line with Joachim von Stülpnagel, who had at times referred to his 1920s concepts as a “war of liberation.”³⁰³ Social Democrat Julius Leber, whom Stauffenberg befriended during the war, encouraged such ideas because he himself liked to refer to the other great Prussian military reformer of the period, Gerhard von Scharnhorst.³⁰⁴ Both Goerdeler and Stauffenberg had long memorialized the Prussian wars against Napoleon, albeit each in their own ways. What both men were hoping for  Müller, Oberst i.G. Stauffenberg, 296; Hoffmann, Stauffenberg, A family history, 107.  For the genesis of the term “people’s war” see Hagemann, Revisiting Prussia’s Wars, 63 – 64.  For details on Gneisenau, see the unsurpassed biography by Delbrück, Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neidhardt von Gneisenau.  Krolak, “Der Weg zum Neuen Reich,” 551; Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 99 – 100. Incidentally, the students of the “White Rose” also referred to this period; the last of their leaflets quoted Theodor Körner, a nationalist and liberal poet of the period: “Courage, my people! The beacons are burning!” http://white-rose-studies.org/Leaflet_6.html, accessed 17 March 2020.  Deist, “Die Reichswehr und der Krieg der Zukunft,” 85.  Mommsen, “Politische Perspektiven des aktiven Widerstands,” 34; Beck, Julius Leber, 184.

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in a future Germany can also be answered with reference to how conceived used Prussia’s resurgence after the disaster of 1806 and subsequently modeled their own thinking. Goerdeler planned to recreate Germany by replacing the arbitrary, corrupt, polycratic, and inefficient Nazi system with an efficient, incorruptible, and constitutional government – but not necessarily along the lines of a parliamentary democracy.³⁰⁵ This kind of government would have to be achieved by changing the status quo, but the authoritarian-minded Goerdeler conceived of it as a change of government and a process controlled from above.³⁰⁶ From the very beginning, it would be necessary for the uprising to distance itself from the Nazi’s revolutionary methods, which was the chief reason Goerdeler always resented attempts on Hitler’s life. He would have much preferred to arrest the “Führer” in order to put him on trial in a German court. An important element of his political thinking was remodeling the state into “small, manageable structures” – the opposite of parliamentary democracy, which for Goerdeler meant “massification.” Applied to the state, this would mean local self-administration as far as possible, and that was where he saw himself continuing in the vein of Baron vom Stein. In his great memorandum, “Das Ziel” (“The Goal”) of 1941, he wrote: All implementation rules concerning the Gemeindeordnung (municipal code) are revoked with immediate effect, as they stealthily countermand the principle of communal self-administration enshrined in the 1934 Gemeindeordnung. This is the same as Hardenberg did to Stein’s legislation, to the detriment of the state.³⁰⁷

Many of the conspirators were unconvinced by Goerdeler’s highly conservative concepts. Moltke referred to Goerdeler as a “Kerenski solution,” comparing the former mayor of Leipzig to the leader of the February 1917 bourgeois Russian revolution who had been ousted by Lenin’s subsequent October Revolution. Stauffenberg, on the other hand, dreamed of a “popular uprising” and identified himself with his illustrious ancestor: as Gneisenau had called the citizens of Kolberg to take up arms in defense of their city, so now another movement

 Mommsen, “Neuordnungspläne,” 191.  Mommsen, “Der 20. Juli und die Arbeiterbewegung,” 302 (not included in Mommsen, Alternatives to Hitler).  Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 6.1.1, 873 – 944, at 931– 932. See also the plans for reorganizing self-organization which Goerdeler wrote while in prison: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 876.

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would have to envelop the entire nation.³⁰⁸ In Stauffenberg’s eyes, the Army was “the institution most closely interwoven with the nation” and must never again lose, as it had done in November 1918, contact with the people – a clear reference to Scharnhorst’s dictum that “every inhabitant of a state is its natural defender.”³⁰⁹ That Stauffenberg and Goerdeler should be so different in the way they placed themselves in the tradition of 1813 – 1815 reflects their widely divergent political conceptions (see chapter 9.8). Their relationship was far from easy, and Beck (whose overarching authority both accepted) had a hard time maintaining the coherence of the opposition. They were not the only ones to claim the inheritance of the Prussian Wars of Liberation for themselves: one of the last films shot under the aegis of Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was entitled Kolberg and emphasized Gneisenau’s role in broad terms. The Reich’s supreme demagogue had always been suspicious of the military, and days before 20 July 1944, he utilized the memory of the military reformers against the Third Reich’s top brass: in his diary, he noted that he had told Hitler that “the Führer has now more need of a Scharnhorst or of a Gneisenau, but not of a Keitel or a Fromm.”³¹⁰ Neither the Prussian Goerdeler nor the Swabian Stauffenberg hesitated to use the resurrected Prussia as their role model, even if the regime – whose main protagonists were Austrian, Bavarian, and Rhinelanders – also did so. On the whole, the history of the failed coup d’état of 20 July 1944 can only be understood as part of the overall history of Germany in the Second World War. The military conspirators worked in posts where they quickly gained the insight that the war was lost. This applied both to the exhaustion of the personnel and materiel resources which was nowhere more obvious than in the staff of the commander of the Replacement Army, and Chief of Armaments (Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Mertz), and to the failure of the operational concept for the war against the Soviet Union which culminated in the collapse of Army Group Center (Tresckow). The purpose of this war, contrary to what many national conservatives had thought initially, was not to rid Russia of Bolshevism but in fact to eradicate entire nations. The purpose of racial and ideological extermination rated far higher than the operational and logistic needs of conventional warfare. The conspirators clearly saw that the participation of the Wehrmacht (and at times even

 Mommsen, “Neuordnungspläne,” 191.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 206 (12 August 1944, encl. 1).  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, Part II, vol. 12, 520 (22 June 1944).

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their own personal involvement) in heinous crimes had rendered Germany incapable of obtaining peace. Hitler would never want to define a possible postwar peace order, nor were the Allies willing to negotiate with a Nazi government, still less to conclude a peace with it. Anyone with national-conservative leanings whose aim was to preserve the nation had to admit that the war could no longer be won and that it could not be ended with Hitler still at the helm. But even among those who acknowledged this, only very few were prepared to draw the necessary radical conclusions – and to act.

7 Military Planning for a Coup d’État 7.1 Whether or Not to Assassinate Hitler: The Oath Roland Freisler was the president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof). During the conspirators’ trials, he would frequently rant about the oath to Hitler they had broken; the term eidbrüchig (“oath-breakers”) appears in a several of the verdicts. The death sentence against Hermann Kaiser, handed down on 17 January 1945, may serve as an example: Instead of manfully [mannhaft] fighting to victory, Hermann Kaiser and Busso Thoma dishonorably violated their oath and betrayed their people the Führer, and the Reich.

This wording had become more or less standard by that late stage of the war. The court found that Hermann Kaiser had broken his oath three times: “as a civil servant, as a Party member, and as an officer!”¹ This wording is all the more unnerving because violating the oath as such was not legislated under Germany’s penal code. Even today, the same distinction exists between the oath sworn by German civil servants, judges, holders of political office, etc. and the oath taken by witnesses in court; the latter does in fact have legal consequences. An officer contravening his oath of allegiance may well be charged with a crime under military law, such as desertion, disobedience, or treason. The prosecution and sentencing, however, would be determined by the relevant law, not by the oath. Traditionally, the oath of allegiance established a personal link of loyalty between the person swearing it and the person it was sworn to. This link was not subject to human law, but to a higher power, which is why it was traditionally sworn with reference to God. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, involved in the conspiracy in Army Group Center, later served as a judge on the German Federal Constitutional Court. In a dissenting vote in 1972, he referred to the oath as a “minimum of religion.”²

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 726 – 727; Kroener, “Hermann Kaiser,” 47. This subchapter consolidates some thoughts that I expand upon more fully in Heinemann, “Ich schwöre bei Gott diesen heiligen Eid.”  Abweichende Meinung des Richters Dr. v. Schlabrendorff zum Beschluss des Zweiten Senats des Bundesverfassungsgerichts vom 11.4.1972, 2 BvR 75/71, quoted in http: //www.servat.unibe.ch/dfr/bv033023. html#Rn031, accessed 17 September 2018. For this and the following see Lange, Der Fahneneid; Stein, Symbole und Zeremoniell, 86 – 106; the Gospel, however, prohibits https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-009

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Swearing an oath to a particular ruler’s person resulted, however, in an “oathless” interim after that ruler’s death, which would have to be kept as short as possible by requiring officers and men to swear their allegiance to the successor. In the late-nineteenth century, Imperial Germany continued this practice, making every officer and soldier swear loyalty to his respective regional ruler as well as to the German emperor in the event of war. Prussia, Bavaria, Württemberg, and Saxony maintained separate armies (the Prussian Army included contingents from lesser principalities), but in times of war, the king of Prussia and German emperor would assume the role of oberster Kriegsherr (“supreme warlord”). It is in this context that the term “unconditional obedience” – not “unlimited obedience” came into being as a way of placing the empire and the emperor above the many regional rulers and loyalties that made up the “Second Reich.”³ The creation of the Reichswehr in 1920 brought a radical change that reformers had previously been unsuccessful in achieving: the entire army swore an oath to the constitution. And as the Weimar Constitution also provided for a (limited) separation between church and state, this oath did not contain a religious element, and many who swore it felt far less bound by the republican formulation.⁴ After President von Hindenburg died in August 1934, the Reichswehr was required to swear an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler.⁵ As we have seen, this was not without precedent in German military tradition. The Reichswehr itself and the minister of war, Werner von Blomberg, hoped to reinforce their position with Hitler after their rival institution, the SA, had lost its standing in the Night of the Long Knives; the suggestion to reformulate the oath had come from the military itself. The new formula was: I swear to God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, Supreme Commander of the armed forces,

swearing by the name of God, see Matthew 5, 34– 36: “But I say to you, Do not swear at all […] Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”  Lange, Der Fahneneid, 75 – 76.  Lange, Der Fahneneid, 99 – 100.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 27– 28, writes: “This new hurriedly organized oath-taking process was more than a mere coup by Hitler, analogous to a coup d’état, designed to take the Reichswehr by surprise as in the Fritsch crisis of 1938; it was also intended as a powerful obstacle to any form of resistance to the deified ‘command.’” This does not represent today’s state of the art anymore.

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and that, as a brave soldier, I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.

Reintroducing a religious element at least ostensibly fortified the binding character of the oath, but it also implied that God’s commandments came into play in questions of ethics (see chapter 3.7).⁶ For most of those who had taken the decision to actively pursue resistance against Hitler by violent means, their oath does not seem to have been a central element of their deliberations. At their very first encounter, Stauffenberg and Axel Freiherr von dem Bussche agreed that the “oath implied mutual faith, that Hitler had broken it, and that it was therefore invalid.”⁷ Captain Hans Karl Fritzsche from the Potsdam-based Ninth Infantry Regiment later said about his regimental comrade: Axel [von dem Bussche] later took a conscious decision to break this oath together with Graf Stauffenberg. This certainly meant more than honoring the oath sworn to Hitler, who continued to reveal himself to be a criminal annihilator of the fatherland.⁸

Further evidence that the oath was not a central issue for the conspirators was a rather anodyne phrase that Goerdeler included in his draft appeal to the Wehrmacht: “We are determined to prevent [a national catastrophe]. We hereby make this your oath and duty.”⁹ This obviously did not imply an actual oath ceremony. Stauffenberg and his friends from the circle around Stefan George had drafted an “oath” or “vow” (Schwur);¹⁰ We desire a New Order which makes all Germans supporters of the state and guarantees law and justice, but we scorn the lie of equality and bow before the hierarchies established by nature.¹¹

 Schäfer, Werner von Blomberg, 151– 156. For the intentions of the Reichswehr leadership see also Volkmann, “Von Blomberg zu Keitel,” 60.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 227; for a similar argument see Dr. Constantin von Dietze, Das Recht zum Widerstand. Vortrag auf der Tagung des Kongresses für Freiheit der Kultur über “Widerstand und Verrat” in Köln, 15. ‑17 November 1962; IfZ, ED 715/2: Hilfswerk 20. Juli.  Fritzsche, Ein Leben im Schatten des Verrates, 33.  Draft Appeal to the Wehrmacht, Summer 1944, published in Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, 13.5: https: //www.gdw-berlin.de/fileadmin/themen/b13/pdf/13_5_Faksimile_d.pdf, accessed 18 March 2020.  Zeller, Oberst Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 387; Karlauf, Stauffenberg, 297– 299. Text published in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 293 – 294 (Appendix VI).  Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, 395 – 396; translation in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 293.

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Nothing, however, has ever been uncovered about plans to implement it once the regime was finally overthrown. Some historians mistook this text, which was first published in 1952 by Eberhard Zeller,¹² as the draft text of a new oath to be sworn by the Wehrmacht.¹³ A closer examination, however, reveals that this is meant as the self-commitment of an elitist group and not as a formula for an entire army; one can hardly imagine troops in the barracks square reciting in unison such sweeping pronouncement. In his early postwar declarations, Gersdorff never mentioned the question of breaking the oath; in his 1977 memoirs however, he devotes quite some space to it.¹⁴ It is perhaps an indication of how little interest historians have had in the military dimension of the resistance movement that no one seems to have investigated seriously the issue of whether and when the loyalty of the Wehrmacht to a new German government would have come into question. “It was not the oath as such, but the different views about the legitimacy of governance which were the criterium for action.”¹⁵ The prosecutors at Gestapo headquarters took a similar view. For them, the ease with which the military opposition had refused to treat their oath as binding was largely due to the many new oaths they had been made to swear in the preceding decades. The consequence of this “apolitical” attitude of the soldier is that a certain part of the officer corps feels no inner duty to the National Socialist Reich and Führer. They swore an oath because they had to, and in the same way one had sworn during the Republic, in order to become an officer. One has absolutely no reservations about swearing a new oath if the regime changes and the Wehrmacht as a whole goes along with it.¹⁶

It was Freisler who exaggerated the entire question after the event; the conspirators had come to the conclusion long before 20 July 1944 that their oath was not

 Zeller, Flame of Freedom, 395 – 396.  Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 200, and based upon Kramarz, see Klemperer, “Mandat zum Widerstand,” 49.  Freiherr von Gersdorff, Generalmajor, Beitrag zur Geschichte des 20. Juli 1944, Oberursel, 12 January 1946; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 83 – 104, at fol. 96; Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 82.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 131, quotes the commander of Reichswehr Infantry Regiment 18, Colonel Leopold Baron von Ledebur, who said in 1920: “If need be, from eight to nine I’ll break any oaths I may have sworn from seven to eight.” A similar argument in Weinberg, A World at Arms, 481– 482.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 273 (20 August 1944).

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binding them in any way.¹⁷ The Saxon-Germanic tradition so revered by Freisler, Himmler, and the SS, however, did not envision unlimited obligation constituted by an oath but, rather, implicated a right to oppose a king under certain conditions.¹⁸ As a “religious person,”¹⁹ Goerdeler resented the idea of assassinating Hitler. Apart from religious and ethical reasons, he also had sound political arguments: his intention to reconstitute the “majesty of the law” did not align very well with a coup initiated by a political murder.²⁰ Others who thought like Goerdeler included his liaison with the Allies in Geneva, Gisevius,²¹ as well as Admiral Canaris and the deeply religious, scrupulous Generalmajor Stieff.²² When Field Marshal von Witzleben discussed coup plans with Beck and Olbricht in November 1943, they also agreed that it would be best to take the Führer alive – at least that is how Witzleben explained it to the Gestapo afterwards.²³ Generaloberst Fromm – like many old-school officers of his generation – seems to have believed that, once the failure of Hitler’s “statesmanship” and “military genius” became obvious, the Führer would clear the way for a new beginning by committing suicide.²⁴ What had to be taken into account, however, was the oath taken by many other officers and men – regardless of whether they really felt bound by it, or

 This was the position of Ehlers, Technik und Moral einer Verschwörung, 59 – 60, as early as 1964; based on Ehlers see also Holler, 20. Juli 1944, 152. Mommsen, “Die Geschichte des deutschen Widerstands,” 6, calls it the “minor question of breaking the oath.” Vitzthum, “Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg,” 109 – 111, acknowledges in principle a legally binding quality of the oath, yet without citing a legal norm that would constitute it, but claims the Wehrmacht oath was only apparently legal.  Kannowski, Die Umgestaltung des Sachsenspiegelrechts, 249 – 250.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 101 (30 July 1944, Statement Hermann Kaiser).  Schramm, Beck und Goerdeler, 233; Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LII–LIII.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 520. Gisevius’ American contact in Switzerland, Allen W. Dulles, reported to Washington several days after the event: “The heart of the scheme was either to isolate or do away with the Fuehrer.” Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 343 – 344, Doc. 4– 28, Telegram 851– 55 dated 23 July 1944.  Fest, Staatsstreich, 131; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 351.  Statement Witzleben during Gestapo interrogation on 23 July 1944, published in Trofeiye Dokumenty. Nam Legqe Nati Soglaxenie Sobtami [“We will find it easier to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union.”] Unknown material about the participants of the Hitler conspiracy of 20 July 1944, in Istornik. Dokumenti russkoj historii 32 (1998): 142– 153 (translated back into German by Erik Radisch). I owe this source which in other passages agrees with the text printed in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, and can therefore be taken as reliable, to my colleague Dr Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 603.

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whether they just used it as an excuse for inaction. Heusinger is supposed to have told Stieff: “For God’s sake! That is treason! We are bound by oath and military duty!”²⁵ Even here, the oath is mentioned only within the broader context of military duty. In view of this widespread attitude, there was only one option: Schmidt von Altenstadt (see Chapter 6.5) reportedly said as early as 1942 that the obligation created by the oath could only be broken if Hitler was killed.²⁶ The founders of the National Committee “Free Germany,” German prisoners of war in Soviet camps, also believed many of the Wehrmacht soldiers still felt bound by their oath, and pointed out to them the historic example of the Convention of Tauroggen of 1812/1813: General Yorck von Wartenburg, they wrote in their manifesto, “broke his oath to the king in favor of the overriding raison d’état”²⁷. Stauffenberg quoted Thomas Aquinas to justify tyrannicide but no longer mentioned the oath in this context.²⁸ Those who had served in the Reichswehr had faced the dilemma more than once of having to choose between respecting the rule of law and obeying their superiors. Ultimately, the military always came down on the side of obeying orders; the phrase “absolutely reliable instrument in the hands of its leaders” was certainly an apt one.²⁹ However, the calculus would change under conditions of war. If faced with a choice between obeying their officers or supporting Hitler, most Wehrmacht soldiers and junior officers would choose the latter.³⁰ This was increasingly the case by the summer of 1944: Nazi ideology had permeated the Army, its politicization was reaching new dimensions, and its manipulation of elites was taking effect. By that time, a coup d’état against a living Hitler, as Goerdeler had been hoping for, had become fully illusionary. Under these conditions, assassinating the dictator was an imperative. Independent of the problem posed by the oath – the power of which has become overvalued in hindsight –

 Finker, Stauffenberg, 216, drawing in turn upon Job von Witzleben, “Nochmals: Heusinger und der 20. Juli 1944,” in Mitteilungsblatt der AeO [Arbeitsgemeinschaft ehemaliger Offiziere – Working Group of former Officers], 3/1963, 8. The quotation is not in Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 270 – 276.  Bräutigam, So hat es sich zugetragen, 482– 483; Weinberg, A World at Arms, 481– 482.  Morré, Das Nationalkomitee “Freies Deutschland”, 546.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 152.  Graml, “Die Wehrmacht im Dritten Reich,” 370. See also Proclamation Chef der Heeresleitung [Commander-in-Chief, Army] to the Reichswehr, dated 4 November 1923, quoted in Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 96. See above, Chapter 6.4. For Stauffenberg’s use of this formula see Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).  Bräutigam, So hat es sich zugetragen, 482– 483.

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it would have been impossible to eliminate the integrating effect of the Führer myth in any other way.³¹

Goerdeler’s proclamation, scheduled to be made once the regime had been toppled, would also have mentioned the oath: Such leadership, be it insane or fully competent, has lost any… claim on obedience, as it has itself broken the oath which it once swore to the fatherland. To that, it is bound like any other citizen, and it has trampled the loyalty it owes [to its followers].³²

Lieutenant Colonel Pridun was one of the officers who put down the insurrection in the Bendlerblock. When asked why he had allied himself with several other officers against Olbricht and Stauffenberg, he answered that his brother-officers “clearly expressed their opinion that they could not deviate from their soldierly oath.” This statement, however, dates from 1953, i. e., a time when the discussion about the relevance of the oath had already begun to excite the German public.³³ The option of carrying out a putsch without an assassination attempt was discussed exhaustively among the conspirators; Halder had debated it at length with Beck and Goerdeler.³⁴ There had been repeated suggestions that Hitler should be arrested (possibly in conjunction with an Allied airborne landing at a strategic site, most likely meaning Berlin).³⁵ This brings to mind the plans for the 1938 coup d’état, and perhaps even notions from 1932, when there had been hushed discussions about discreetly removing the senile Reich President von Hindenburg to East Prussia³⁶. It also bears similarities to scenarios generated by the Allied command authorities, codenamed “Rankin,” which Goerdeler’s contact Gisevius was supposed to help developing.³⁷ Beginning in the summer

 Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 7.  Draft “Appeal to the Wehrmacht”, in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 200 (11 August 1944, enclosure 3).  Generalsekretär Karl Pridun, Bregenz: Note [stamped “Sicherheitsdirektion 31. Okt 1953 21/6/ 53,” illegible initials]; IfZ, Zs 1769, fol. 2– 10, for this see fol. 10.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 90.  “Memorandum from OSS Director William J. Donovan to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 22.7.1944,” published in: American Intelligence and the German Resistance, Doc. 53, 240 – 243; a matching proposal is dated May 1944. OSS contact with the German opposition was through Allen W. Dulles and Hans-Bernd Gisevius in Zurich; Gisevius was very much Goerdeler’s man.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 395 – 396.  Heideking, “Die ‘Breakers’-Akte,” 24– 25.

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of 1943, Goerdeler lost influence within the conspiracy, which may have had to do with his hope to keep Hitler alive being quashed by the military.³⁸ The rejection of an assassination attempt is a recurring theme which almost all of Goerdeler’s many interlocutors share. Rommel had come into contact with Goerdeler through the mayor of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin, and Rommel’s chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel,³⁹ and he, too, was against an attempt on Hitler’s life. The idea of “seizing Hitler using reliable Panzer units and then putting him on trial in a German court”⁴⁰ is absurd from a military point of view, and it is hard to believe Rommel, as the former commandant of the Führerhauptquartier, would ever have entertained it. More likely, Speidel credited Rommel with this after the war, when there were few who might contradict him. Stauffenberg’s aide during 20 July 1944, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, had discussed the question of an attempt on Hitler’s life with Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer advised against an assassination attempt as long as there was no viable plan for a coup d’état to follow Hitler’s death.⁴¹ Later, von Haeften’s brother, Hans-Bernd, who also knew about the secret plans, opposed killing Hitler, but for religious reasons – Hans-Bernd was to blame himself later for this advice. On the other hand, he was tormented by his conscience for having disregarded the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill”; both brothers were killed after 20 July 1944.⁴² Among the conspirators in Paris, the question of tyrannicide was “discussed again and again, very seriously.”⁴³ Major Ludwig Freiherr Leonrod, a Catholic officer from Stauffenberg’s regiment, asked his confessor, Vicar Hermann Wehrle, whether tyrannicide might be justified; both men were later hanged.⁴⁴ Among the Protestants, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became an important spiritual advisor for men like Dohnanyi and Oster; as we have seen, in contrast to Moltke, he voiced no principled disapproval of tyrannicide.⁴⁵ No one mentioned the oath in this context.

 Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LVII–LVIII.  Remy, Mythos Rommel, 229; Speidel, Invasion 1944, 63; Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 169 – 170.  See contribution by Speidel in Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” Broadcast of RIAS Berlin on 19 and 22 July 1979, 12, IfZ, Ms 200/85.  Thiel, “Widerstand im Schatten Stauffenbergs,” 93.  Meding, “Barbara von Haeften,” 272; Retter, Theological-Political Resistance, 92.  Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/ 1, fol. 44.  Moll, Zeugen für Christus, vol. 1, 390.  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 24; Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 123.

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But this was not 1938 anymore. The regime’s manipulation of the military elite had affected the Army’s internal cohesion. If in 1938 one could still have hoped that military obedience would make the units garrisoned in and around Berlin march against the government, by the fifth war year, there was little chance the Wehrmacht would act against Hitler if he were still alive. That is why Stauffenberg had noted: “There is no point in speaking the truth to him; what matters is to kill him.”⁴⁶ In a similar vein, the Paris conspiracy was agreed: Any attempt by a general – whether in Germany or on the western front – to proclaim an alternative government and to march against the center of the Hitler regime would soon enough have been stopped by the insubordination of his troops. The only option was a military operation which would start by assassinating Hitler.⁴⁷

This did not only apply to the military; it went for a broad majority of the population as well. Only the violent elimination of the dictator could disrupt the ties of loyalty which the National Socialist propaganda had systematically nurtured. That is why the initial plan of the military opposition to prevent Hitler from going to war, and to moderate his policies at home by means of a joint representation of the generals, was doomed from the start.⁴⁸

As Marion Gräfin Dönhoff observed, “the Army, the civil service, and all manner of officials would have to be rendered ‘oath-free’ at the decisive moment.”⁴⁹ In the final analysis, political murder was nothing unheard-of for many officers, most of whom had lived through the unrest of 1919; the period 1930 to 1932, when Germany verged on civil war; and finally, the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.⁵⁰ These debates persisted right up until 20 July 1944 itself. The Gestapo reported extensively on a major meeting in the house of the two Stauffenberg brothers in Tristanstraße, Berlin-Wannsee. Again, the question was whether the uprising could take the form of ending the war in the west (the “Western solution”), or

 Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 113; quoted also in Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1005.  Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/ 1, fol. 45. Similarly in Schlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, 67 (but not in the English version, Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler).  Mommsen, “Politische Perspektiven des aktiven Widerstands,” 25 – 26.  Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, Entwurf [draft – no further title], Brunkensen, July 1945; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 9‑24. For all of this also see Vitzthum, “Stauffenberg,” 113 – 122.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 215.

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whether it might be feasible to isolate the Führer by cutting off his communications (the “Berlin solution”). “After much back and forth, there remained the ‘central solution,’ which would culminate in the plan to assassinate the Führer.”⁵¹ It has been alleged that Stauffenberg departed for his mission in the early hours of 20 July 1944 but was persuaded in flight by the scrupulous Stieff to place the bomb only “symbolically” close to Hitler and in such a way that the dictator would not be killed; this, however, seems absurd.⁵² For the resolute Stauffenberg, the discussion was over long before. He was fully determined and was in fact certain until the evening hours that he had achieved his aim. The assassination attempt was therefore imperative, but the conspirators felt they could only justify it morally if it were the starting point for something bigger, i. e., the coup d’état itself. Unlike the bomb planted by Georg Elser in 1939, Stauffenberg’s device had not been an end in itself, but a means to an end: overthrowing Nazi rule, and terminating the war. In 1969, Peter Hoffmann entitled his great book (in German) Widerstand – Staatsstreich – Attentat (“Resistance – Coup d’État – Assassination Attempt”), a title which gets the priorities right: the bomb attempt comes last. The emphasis is misplaced when the German public routinely refers to 20 July as “the anniversary of the attempt on Hitler’s life”; it would be far more appropriate to call it the anniversary of the coup d’état or of the putsch. After the attempt failed, the discussions about its moral legitimacy continued. Some of those arrested distanced themselves from the bomb plot, and some (such as Roland von Hößlin) even declared they had not known about it beforehand.⁵³ These reactions can of course be explained by the dire circumstances and consequences that the conspirators faced in the aftermath. But in October 1944, Colonel Alexis Freiherr Roenne managed to have a message to his wife smuggled out of his prison cell, in which he wrote: “God has decided against them! He has shown again that even the greatest patriotic aims do not justify the sin needed to reach them!”⁵⁴ That the bomb attempt was only a means to an end had important practical implications for the execution of the plot. Stauffenberg was the only conspirator who still had access to the Führer, and time was running out (see Chapter 7.4).

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 175 (8 August 1944).  Schmidt-Hackenberg, 20. Juli 1944, 10 – 11, 106 and passim. One of the points the author overlooks is that Stieff never alleged anything like this when questioned by the Gestapo, although he could well have hoped to exculpate himself by doing so.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 372– 375 (9 September 1944).  Secret message by Alexis von Roenne dated 1 October 1944; MHM, PSF 958 BBAT 4501.

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However, he was also needed to oversee the military takeover from Berlin, so that a suicide bombing like the one Gersdorff is supposed to have planned (see Chapter 6.5) was out of the question, no matter the consequences. The events also proved that the conspirators had predicted accurately that the Wehrmacht would not move against the Führer as long he was still alive: Once it became clear that Hitler had survived, the military putsch collapsed like a house of cards.⁵⁵

7.2 No Time to Lose By the spring of 1942, clear-eyed Wehrmacht officers understood that Germany did not have the wherewithal to conduct a war on two fronts, let alone to win simultaneous wars against both the Soviet Union and the United States. That is how Canaris put it to Fromm, commander of the Replacement Army.⁵⁶ More than a year later, in August 1943, the Kreisau Circle drafted as part of its plans for a postwar Germany a set of “Special Regulations for Reich Administrators” which included the following provision: “The Reich government will do anything in its power to prevent enemy forces from penetrating the Reich,” followed immediately, however, by instructions to follow should enemy forces manage to do so.⁵⁷ In early July 1944, shortly before Roland von Hößlin transferred his battalion of cadets from Insterburg, East Prussia, to Meiningen, in Thuringia, he wrote home that at night, one could already hear the rolling thunder of artillery from the frontline – Soviet occupation of East Prussia had become an imminent possibility.⁵⁸ By the summer of 1944, therefore, the view from within the Reich was becoming desperately urgent; there was little time left for carrying out a change in regime, whatever it might be. The situation on all fronts was deteriorating rapidly, and if a new German government was to win any concessions at all from the Allies, it would have to occur before Germany’s military situation became any

 Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 483 – 484. Similarly Stülpnagel’s son Walter in July 1979 in a RIAS broadcast: Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” Broadcast of RIAS Berlin on 19 and 22 July 1979, 12, IfZ, Ms 200/85, fol. 10. For a diverging view see John, Falsch und zu spät, 43.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 437– 439.  Sonderweisung für die Reichsverweser, 9 August 1943, published in Roon, Neuordnung im Widerstand, 570 f; not in the English version, Roon, German Resistance to Hitler.  The same went for Steinort Manor in East Prussia, the residence of the co-conspirator Lieutenant Heinrich Graf Lehndorff; Vollmer, Doppelleben, 248.

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more obviously hopeless. At that time, the Stauffenberg brothers supposedly stated “the only hope of being able to negotiate with one of the two enemies [the Soviets or the Western Allies] was if both fronts remained intact.”⁵⁹ The Berlin planners’ close links with sympathetic officers like Tresckow and Kuhn meant they were kept updated regarding what was happening on the eastern front. On 22 June 1944, the third anniversary of the German attack on the Soviet Union, the Red Army commenced Operation Bagration, a move which eventually resulted in the annihilation of Army Group Center.⁶⁰ Although there were no conspirators left in Army Group Center headquarters, Tresckow had become chief of staff of Second Army, which belonged to that army group. The military opposition was thus well aware that the greatest catastrophe in German military history was approaching: the months of July and August brought the greatest Wehrmacht losses of the war so far, even accounting for the heavy losses suffered as the Western Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy in June. The figures became astronomical: each day, the equivalent of three regiments lost their lives. The staff of the commander of the Replacement Army, of course, knew better than anyone that these losses could not be made up for.⁶¹ The ensuing rapid Soviet advance caused Stieff to lament, “On 23 and 24 June, the eastern front was ruptured, in my old Fourth Army’s sector. This is the end. It will take no more than three months.”⁶² No one would have predicted that the Soviet pincer attack would come to a halt outside Warsaw and that the Wehrmacht would succeed in delaying the capture of the Reich capital until May 1945. Even if the aim of overthrowing the regime was no more than to prevent “the Russians from being in Berlin before the Allies,”⁶³ the opposition would have to act immediately. At the same time, Stauffenberg obtained first-hand information regarding the situation on the western front. His liaison officer there was his distant cousin, Lieutenant-Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, who had met with Rommel on 9 July 1944. It remains unclear to what extent Hofacker actually informed Rommel about the planned assassination attempt and coup, or whether he explicitly recruited the field marshal for the resistance. What is important in the present context is that Hofacker flew to Berlin immediately after that meeting, bringing the news that Rommel believed the western allies would break out of their bridge-

    

Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 116 (1 August 1944). Frieser, “The Collapse of Army Group Center.” Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 238 – 239. Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 357. Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 410 – 411; Ritter, The German Resistance, 278 – 279.

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heads within a fortnight; Army Group B had no forces left to oppose them.⁶⁴ Lieutenant-Colonel Georg von Boeselager implored the Oberbefehlshaber West (Supreme Commander West), Field Marshal von Kluge, to unilaterally put an end to the war in that theater; the two men knew each other well from their time in Army Group Center. Kluge “sent him the answer that there was no need to do so, as the western front would collapse shortly anyway.”⁶⁵ Stauffenberg had initially hoped to launch the uprising before the Normandy invasion came. As the Western Allies were by no means certain in advance that Operation Overlord would be successful, they might well have been more receptive to an offer to negotiate if it had been received before, rather than after, the amphibious assault that ultimately succeeded, albeit at a great cost. In discussion with Otto John and Julius Leber, Stauffenberg had opined that there was a 50 percent chance the Allied landings might be thrown back into the sea.⁶⁶ As it turned out, this was a gross underestimation of Allied strength which, however, was not uncommon among German officers, both within and without the opposition.⁶⁷ Post-20 July Gestapo reports quote Helldorff as having pressurized his coconspirators on the evening of 16 July to act immediately: “The situation in the West requires the utmost haste in executing all plans.” He was not alone in this. Some of the co-conspirators were beginning to wonder whether, in view of the hopeless situation in the west, there was any point left in acting at all.⁶⁸ This is the context in which Tresckow is said to have written the much-quoted phrases: The assassination must take place coûte que coûte [at any cost]. Even if it does not succeed, the Berlin action must go forward. The point now is not whether the coup has any practical purpose, but to prove to the world and before history that German resistance is ready to stake it all. Compared to this, everything else is a side issue.⁶⁹

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 360 (6 September 1944).  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 252.  John, “Am achten Jahrestag”; John, Falsch und zu spät, 56.  Ringshausen, “Hans-Alexander von Voß”, 69.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 360 (6 September 1944).  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 375; Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 103. The use of the term “resistance movement” (Widerstandsbewegung) requires some explanation, as no other contemporary documents use that word (see Klemperer, “Sie gingen ihren Weg,” 1098). This cannot be a verbatim quotation, but only analogous, as is attested by the fact that in the very first edition of his book (Zurich 1946, copyright Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz), Schlabrendorff uses the oft-quoted French term “coûte que coûte,” but in all later editions relates the German translation, koste es was es wolle. What is more, in his first edition Schlab-

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Such was the pressure generated by the developments on the various fronts. It came at a time when the daily workload of the Replacement Army chief of staff continued its grueling pace, and even increased in view of the losses and the military crises. Otto John noted, “The surprise effect was complete. Stauffenberg and the officers on his staff were drawn into the maelstrom of the large military developments, had to improvise and organize a lot, and were not available anymore.”⁷⁰ In the autumn of 1943, the military conspirators had escaped discovery by a hair’s breadth: after the failed attempts on Hitler’s life, Major Joachim Kuhn and Lieutenant Albrecht von Hagen decided to bury the explosives at night inside the OKH headquarters in East Prussia at Mauerwald (today Mamerki, Poland). Working in the dark, they had been hailed by a patrol but escaped unrecognized. The incident served as a warning of how risky the entire undertaking was.⁷¹ Even though the military retained control over its own jurisdictions, meaning the Gestapo was not permitted to investigate military resisters, and although there were no informers within the officer corps, the close link between the civilian and the military opposition kept the risk of discovery high, especially as the organization grew larger and more complex. This was true even though the regime itself still expected the most dangerous resistance to come from inside the working classes, and only as part of “cumulative radicalization” it began to detect the “reactionaries” as “enemies of the people.”⁷² In March 1944, Captain Ludwig Gehre of the Abwehr had been arrested because of his links with Moltke. Gehre knew plenty about the conspiracy but had managed to escape the police while being transported. He lay quiet in a succession of hideouts, but of course might have been arrested again at any moment.⁷³ Far more damaging was the arrest of Julius Leber on 5 July.⁷⁴ To counterbalance Goerdeler’s reactionary leanings, Stauffenberg had established his own contacts with representatives of the working classes and had even formed a friendship with Leber, a former reserve officer and prominent Social Democrat. Leber, in turn, had also planned to involve a few Communists and had met some of them, obviously underestimating to what degree the Gestapo, forever haunted by the specter of a Communist revolution, had infiltrated the few remaining cir-

rendorff gives the impression that this was an answer Stauffenberg gave to Tresckow rather than the other way around. See Karlauf, Stauffenberg, 224n13.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 58.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 45.  Mommsen, “The German Resistance against Hitler,” 156.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 51.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 377– 378.

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cles of former Communist Party members. In any case, en route to a planned second meeting, Leber was taken into custody and held in a Gestapo prison. The Gestapo was of course infamous for its ability to make its captives speak eventually, but miraculously, by 20 July, they had not extracted any useful information from Leber.⁷⁵ The conspirators were ever fearful of rumors that the Gestapo was on their heels. When the famous historian Friedrich Meinecke met Beck in May 1944, he came away with the impression that Beck believed the jig was up and that arrests were imminent.⁷⁶ In June, Colonel Wilhelm Staehle, who had previously worked in the Abwehr, was indeed arrested. When the judge advocate general, General Karl Sack (also involved in the opposition) visited him in prison, he was appalled to learn that Staehle had been questioned about Goerdeler – another ominous sign.⁷⁷ Commander Sidney Jessen, one of the few resisters in the German Navy, had heard a rumor circulating in Berlin salons to the effect that the Gestapo was about to expose a major conspiracy against Hitler. Like most rumors, it turned out to be a noxious mix of misunderstandings and exaggerations, but such information nonetheless amped up the the pressure on Stauffenberg to acty.⁷⁸ On 17 July, Nebe brought even worse news: a warrant had been issued against Goerdeler. The information was not quite correct – just before the twentieth, a police commissioner (Kriminalrat), Herbert Lange, had indeed suggested to Himmler that Goerdeler should be arrested, but that Himmler had refused⁷⁹. In any case, Nebe’s warnings were enough to cause Goerdeler to go into hiding in Germany, even though his confidants within the Bosch firm and in Württemberg in general had prepared to exfiltrate him to neutral Switzerland.⁸⁰ The search for him intensified after 20 July 1944, but he briefly succeeded in evading capture until finally being arrested on 12 August. The literature has addressed the situation on the various fronts at this point in the war as well as the threat posed by the ever-vigilant Gestapo, but scholars  Beck, Julius Leber, 195 – 198.  Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf’s Lair, 343.  Haase, “Generalstabsrichter Karl Sack,” 206 – 207.  Report by Dr. Sydney Jessen (1946): Der Anteil der Kriegsmarine am Attentat; IfZ, ZS A-29-II, Nr. 32, S. 4‑8. Möckelmann, Hannah von Bredow, 150 – 153, bases his account on this source as well as on the statements by Philippa Gräfin Thun-Hohenthal. Jessen assumes that Stauffenberg’s decision to act on 20 July 1944 was largely motivated by this rumour. He overlooks, however, that Stauffenberg depended on when he was actually summoned to a briefing at the Führerhauptquartier.  Tuchel, “Anmerkungen zur Haftzeit.”  Bähr and Erker, Bosch, 242; Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch, 503 – 504.

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have neglected to examine thoroughly one important factor at play here. The Wehrmacht’s massive losses of personnel were beginning to make Fromm’s “system of improvisations” look more and more fragile. At the same time, the regime’s criticism of Fromm and his staff’s handling of the crisis continued to heat up. Himmler above all sought to profit from this, hoping to gain control of the Reich’s personnel and materiel resources, in addition to gaining complete control of Germany’s internal security. He meant to pocket the Reich’s top technologies, such as the “V”-weapons program, but was also determined to halt the practice of sending what few new recruits remained to the Army rather than to his beloved SS (see Chapters 4.1, 8.2). Hitler had delegated to Himmler the competences of the Army commander in chief with regard to the Volksgrenadier divisions (the term itself was only introduced later) but had refrained from formally appointing Himmler to that post, which Himmler had secretly coveted for some time.⁸¹ However, according to intelligence picked up by US authorities on 19 July, it was expected that, sooner or later, Himmler would be appointed commander of the Replacement Army.⁸² That, however, meant that Stauffenberg, too, would be relieved of his post, as Himmler would certainly not accept an army officer as his deputy and chief of staff, but would instead bring one of his own men. As a result, Stauffenberg’s access to the Führerhauptquartier would be cut off entirely. The question of which alternatives remained for Stauffenberg and his allies by mid-July frequently crops up in the literature, but lacking a more recent, thoroughly researched, and comprehensive account, it is often discussed in lessthan-scholarly terms. These debates usually do not take into account that Stauffenberg could not kill Hitler in a suicide mission, as he had to escape alive in order to lead the coup d’état from his desk in Berlin. Moreover, there was no time left to wait for better opportunities, e. g. when a single bomb could also take out Himmler, Goebbels, or Göring at the same time. The attempt had to be made now, coûte que coûte. As Hofacker wrote to his wife on 17 July:

 Enclosure 2 to questionnaire [Generalmajor] Dr. -Ing. Werner Kennes, February 1947; BArch, MSg 1/2936. See also Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 699; Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 321; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 524; Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm. Der starke Mann,” 182– 183.  Heideking and Mauch, USA und deutscher Widerstand, 95; Franz Neumann, “Der Attentatsversuch auf Hitler und seine Folgen” (27 July 1944), published in Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer, Im Kampf gegen Nazideutschland, 197– 212, at 201.

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I could easily leave the “iron business” [Hofacker had worked for the United Steelworks/ Vereinigte Stahlwerke] for a few days and in good conscience, but today, to allow even a few hours to pass unused for this purpose, would have been a sin against the Holy Ghost.⁸³

7.3 The Organization As the ultimate goal was overthrowing the regime, a proper organization had to be created to replace it, and within that organization, suitable personnel had to be found to take on specific functions. Here, too, sources are sparse and problematic: whenever conspirators who had initially survived 20 July were questioned by the Gestapo, they were careful to blame only those they knew were already dead, and not to name names which the police might not know about so far. Even so, prosecutors’ reports contain a wealth of information on methods of recruitment and planning for “Day X”; we know a lot less about the many recruitment attempts in which Stauffenberg (and others) failed to convince their “targets” to cooperate with the opposition. War had a deleterious effect on the structures of the conspiracy that had been created with so much diligence: officers were frequently reassigned to new posts, units would be reorganized or deployed to the front, etc. Each such unanticipated change would upend part of the putsch plans even if the individual’s willingness to act never failed. Despite all these handicaps, by 20 July 1944, a largely stable organization had been created in which most, even if not all, functions had been assigned to individual persons. Not everybody, however, who had been assigned a specific task actually knew all the details of what was planned, and quite a few were listed somewhere without their knowledge or consent.⁸⁴ On the whole, the conspirators’ recruitment strategies can be only partly reconstructed, although Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein’s highly meritorious work has provided valuable new insights in this field.⁸⁵

 Caesar von Hofacker to his wife, 17 July 1944, Haus der Geschichte Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, C2/8/S/MWid, Schublade 13/6685, quoted after the copy in MHM Dresden. Part of the translation from Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 243.  This would apply more often to persons Stauffenberg had scheduled for a particular job, and less often to Goerdeler’s interlocutors, as the former Mayor of Leipzig was given to rather careless talking; Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 510.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”? For the methodology, see, more concisely, Keyserlingk, “Erkenntnisgewinn.”

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It is well known that, until 1943, Goerdeler was the undisputed head of the civilian opposition.⁸⁶ Goerdeler would contact people he knew or who had been recommended to him and who he had reason to believe were opposed to the Nazi regime. He had thus assembled a group of trusted friends who would debate political ideas, even though, at least initially, this did not include planning to take any action. For a putsch, he relied on active or retired officers such as Beck or Halder, and later Olbricht, whom he had come to know through his manifold contacts.⁸⁷ After leaving government service, Goerdeler had found a job with the Württemberg firm of Robert Bosch which not only earned him a salary but also enabled him to travel freely.⁸⁸ The Goerdeler circle would have very principled and at times quite acrimonious political debates; the Gestapo noted the open conflict within this group more than anywhere else in the national-conservative resistance.⁸⁹ This group was quite diffuse, with some persons on the margins whose opposition was less clearly defined. Estimates of the group’s size, therefore, are difficult to ascertain. It included officers and trade union leaders, diplomats, high-ranking civil servants, and professors. On the whole, the epithet “resistance of the notables” (Honoratiorenwiderstand) is not far off the mark. Moltke’s comment after a long night of bitter debates that Goerdeler’s political aims amounted to a “Kerenski solution” reveal the depth of the group’s disagreement.⁹⁰ Tresckow is believed to have used his connections with the Army Personnel Office (whose chief, General der Infanterie Rudolf Schmundt, also hailed from the Ninth Infantry Regiment) to have politically “acceptable” officers transferred into the staff of Army Group Center. This would be all the more surprising since Tresckow was by no means the chief of staff (whose purview of course included personnel questions), but only the chief of the operations department (“Ia”). In any event, he got his way; Fabian von Schlabrendorff, General Staff officer Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, and later, the two Boeselager brothers formed a tightly knit group. Lieutenant Colonel Carl-Hans Graf Hardenberg was another reserve officer from an old, aristocratic Prussian family who later joined them. Overall, the role of the many reserve officers as a kind of link between the professional military and the civilian conspiracy should not be under-

 Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” L.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 283 (21 August 1944).  Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch, 473 – 476; Bähr and Erker, Bosch, 237– 243.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 257; Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIII–LIV.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 99. For an evaluation, see Blasius, “Von Moskau nach Casablanca,” 733.

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estimated.⁹¹ From early on, Tresckow strictly observed the rules of conspiratorial work: according to his own account, Gersdorff was only inducted after the 13 March 1943 bomb attempt on Hitler’s airplane had failed and Gersdorff was to make another attempt during a presentation of enemy weaponry to Hitler in the Berlin Zeughaus. ⁹² Following that, Tresckow recruited a new potential assassin, Major Axel von dem Bussche, who was to blow himself up together with Hitler during a presentation of new uniforms on 23 November 1943; the presentation was eventually cancelled.⁹³ Tresckow finally tried to be posted somewhere where he would have personal access to Hitler, but to no avail.⁹⁴ As the center of gravity of the military conspiracy moved east into the headquarters of Army Group Center (if only because no opposition group within the Reich had the means necessary to carry out a putsch), Beck’s role became more important as he had to serve as the hinge between its military members in the Abwehr and on the Eastern Front as well as with civilian politicians and diplomats.⁹⁵ Not least did he have to assuage the “sanguineous” Goerdeler, who at times could not understand why the military did not act.⁹⁶ Tresckow recruited more General Staff officers from the OKH. such as General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner and Colonel (later Generalmajor) Hellmuth Stieff. Both, however, remained ambivalent in their attitude to the conspiracy and in particular to an attempt on Hitler’s life. Eventually, it was Wagner who, knowing full well what Stauffenberg was planning, provided him with a courier plane that took him to the Wolf’s Lair.⁹⁷ In the same vein, though Heusinger was a friend of Tresckow, his attitude to the conspiracy seems to have remained uncertain; he was never fully brought into Tresckow’s plans.⁹⁸  Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 122; Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 228 – 229, 277.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 82, 126 – 129. For the debate about whether or not this attempt was ever made, see above Chapter 6.5.  Dönhoff, “Axel von dem Bussche,” 33 – 34; Engert, “Er wollte Hitler töten,” 151– 152.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 335.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 288 – 289; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 347– 348; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 439 (4 September 1944) and 88 (28 July 1944).  Ringshausen, “Kuriergepäck und Pistolen,” 419; Roth, “Von der Offiziersopposition zur Aktionsgruppe,” 138, based on Kaiser, Mut zum Bekenntnis, 444 (19 February 1943) claims that Goerdeler was about to quit altogether (Roth’s wording “threat of resignation” seems, however, slightly flippant). March 1943 is then, after all, the month in which an attempt on Hitler’s life is actually made but fails.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 87 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 345; Peter, “General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner,” 266 – 267; Heinemann, “Wagner.”  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 275 – 276.

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After Tresckow spent the autumn of 1943 in Berlin, Goerdeler commented that this had “given a new impulse” to the conspiracy,”⁹⁹ though this seems to overlook how Stauffenberg’s role had begun to expand after he had taken up his duties as Olbricht’s chief of staff in the AHA. But even when the conspiracy’s focus had begun to shift from Army Group Center to the staff of the Replacement Army was Tresckow involved in staffing questions. Major Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen served with Army Group Center, but upon Tresckow’s insistence, he was detailed to work with Stauffenberg in the Berlin Bendlerblock as of the autumn of 1943, to assist in drafting the complex “Valkyrie” orders.¹⁰⁰ Oertzen again used his old contacts in the army group and recruited Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, Field Marshal Busch’s personal aide, to make a pistol attempt on Hitler. This failed when Busch reported to the Führer on the Obersalzberg, outside Berchtesgaden; what thwarted the plan was that aides were not admitted to the meeting.¹⁰¹ In the end, the various attempts on Hitler’s life planned in the autumn of 1943 did not materialize. When, on top of this, Field Marshal von Kluge (who had indicated qualified supported for the conspiracy) left Army Group Center after a serious car accident, a feeling of resignation spread among the plotters.¹⁰² The Gestapo was first to note that, within the conspiracy, two separate groups could be identified which, though they had not operated fully apart from one another, had maintained a certain distance: The investigation revealed more clearly that the clique of conspirators was clearly divided into two circles, the military circle around Stauffenberg, and the civilian circle around Goerdeler. However, there was no sharp distinction between the two groups of individuals, but relations often intersected. It is becoming clear that the main actors held their cards close to their respective chests.¹⁰³

Historian Klaus-Jürgen Müller rejected the suggestion that this implied “a distinct and separate place”¹⁰⁴ for the military within the conspiracy as being “opposed to the historical facts.”¹⁰⁵ From the point of view of Beck’s biographer, this may be justified to some extent, as Beck’s historical achievement was to have

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 283 (21 August 1944).  Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 98; Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 109.  Breitenbuch, Erinnerungen eines Reserveoffiziers, 119 – 124; Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 118.  Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 101, 103.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 177 (8 August 1944).  Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 919.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 754, footnote 103.

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bridged the ever-growing gap between the two groups around Goerdeler and Stauffenberg. The results of more recent quantitative research, however, have indeed confirmed the finding that the two groups need to be understood as structurally different. This will have to be considered again when discussing the relation between civilian and military resistance (see Chapter 9.8).¹⁰⁶ During the autumn of 1943, Stauffenberg clearly became the center of the military opposition. This is now supported by quantitative research (which cannot come as a surprise), but can also be shown that Olbricht and Tresckow, who had before dominated the military conspiracy, now lost their central roles.¹⁰⁷ As we have seen, quite a number of Goerdeler’s links with other conspirators were characterized by conflict, and that was true in particular for his interactions with Stauffenberg. Even in prison, Goerdeler emphasized those clashes to the Gestapo (knowing of course that he could not cause any harm to Stauffenberg, who was dead by then).¹⁰⁸ Of course, one possible explanation might be that the differences were purely personal, or that Goerdeler could not come to terms with losing his prominent and central role. However, Goerdeler’s importance to the conspiracy had begun to wane during the summer of 1943, that is, before Stauffenberg appeared. After the latter joined the existing group, he soon became the chief communicator and organizer, and along with Goerdeler, the most important recruiter for the resistance.¹⁰⁹ However, the Gestapo’s assumption that both had pursued more or less the same strategy does not comport with what we know now.¹¹⁰ It has been established that Goerdeler would talk to anyone who he believed shared his oppositional views, and was trying to find candidates suitable for political office in general,¹¹¹ whereas Stauffenberg made a point to approach officers who could take on specific functions within a coup organization.¹¹² Early in 1944, Stauffenberg also began to seek allies among politicians and diplomats such as Julius Leber and Adam von Trott zu Solz, who he knew were connected to the nation-

 Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 225 – 228, especially the illustration on pp. 226 – 227. This does not diminish the author’s great respect for the invaluable research done by Klaus-Jürgen Müller, especially his seminal biography on Beck, and for his unwavering scholarly support for the research that eventually resulted in this book.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 229.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 257.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 287, 510.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 313 (29 August 1944). The Gestapo did not fail to notice, however, the difference in methods between the two: ibid., 314.  Beck, Julius Leber, 184.  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 110; for empirical confirmation see Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 510.

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al-conservative resistance. His aim was obviously to sound out options for policies other than Goerdeler’s highly conservative approach in order to avoid alienating working-class interests.¹¹³ The memory of the Kapp Putsch, which had failed in the face of a general strike, remained vivid in Stauffenberg’s mind. His “functional” recruitment strategy was also the reason why he continued to count on rather complicated personalities from the SS and the Gestapo, Nebe and Helldorff.¹¹⁴ At the decisive moment, Nebe was supposed to deploy detective officers to enforce the planned arrests;¹¹⁵ one can surely speculate as to how reliably they would have conducted themselves if it had come to putting the handcuffs on Göring or Goebbels. Stauffenberg, all military and with little knowledge of the inside structures of the SS and the police, may well have overestimated the influence either Nebe or Helldorff had in the force.¹¹⁶ He maybe knew about how in 1932, the then-Generalleutnant Gerd von Rundstedt had had the “intractable President of the Berlin Police, Albert Grzesinski (SPD), put under arrest until he signed a declaration that he would carry out no further official duties.”¹¹⁷ By way of contrast, we will probably never know why Stauffenberg did not include Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, who had played a major role in the 1938 conspiracy and was now in charge of the Wehrmacht military police in Berlin (Wehrmachtstreifendienst).¹¹⁸ Stauffenberg tried to recruit officers with whom he had either family or professional connections, which explains the high ratio of aristocrats within the conspiracy as well as the relatively large number of officers from Stauffenberg’s own regiment, the Seventeenth Cavalry (Bamberger Reiter).¹¹⁹ However, as the regime’s manipulation of elites wore on, “the social circles opposed to the regime began to be in the minority”¹²⁰ which further reduced the opportunities for recruiting. All those who knew him described Stauffenberg as an extremely charismatic personality. The Gestapo emphasized in its report that he had reserved for him-

 Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LVIII; Klemperer, “Adam von Trott zu Solz,” 211; Krusenstjern, “daß es Sinn hat zu sterben,” 485.  Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung, 143 – 144; Harrison, “Alter Kämpfer,” 410; Gisevius, Bis zum bittern Ende, 2, 342 (not in the English translation, To the Bitter End).  Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung, 143.  Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung, 143.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 373.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 216, 228; Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler, 332– 333; Meinl, “Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz,” 68 – 69.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 8; Metzger, Offiziersehre und Widerstand.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 931, 941.

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self the final recruitment of individuals for the most important roles.¹²¹ Only those intended to be recruited for lesser roles were allowed to be approached by someone else. His brother Berthold, for example, recruited Commanders Sidney Jessen and Alfred Kranzfelder, who were to establish whether the naval communications system could be temporarily paralyzed.¹²² Another exception was that the head of the Wehrmacht signals services, General der Nachrichtentruppe Erich Fellgiebel, recruited his own deputy, Generalleutnant Fritz Thiele.¹²³ In any case, according to Heusinger’s later characterization, Stauffenberg was the “engine of the movement.”¹²⁴ Not without a certain degree of admiration, the Gestapo related how Stauffenberg, in his initial approaches, had dazzled his interlocutors with his position and his rank, and then overwhelmed them with his eloquence.¹²⁵ One such example was Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Otto Erdmann of Military District Command I (East Prussia)¹²⁶, and others might be added from different sources,¹²⁷ not least that of Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, who joined Stauffenberg’s group after the Kreisau Circle had been broken up.¹²⁸ Stauffenberg did not inform all of his “recruits” concerning every detail of his plans and seems to have operated on a strict need-to-know basis. As a result, many of those who had been involved only on the margins of the conspiracy later convincingly claimed they had never known about an attempt on Hitler’s life, and with hindsight distanced themselves from the “murder.” Roland von Hößlin stated when questioned, “The amount of information Stauffenberg gave me was limited. It seemed I was to learn only what was necessary to win me over. I was never given any names.¹²⁹ Caesar von Hofacker, Stauffenberg’s cousin, was reported to have been seriously offended by this.¹³⁰  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 43 (24 July 1944). A case in point is the forever procrastinating Stieff whom Stauffenberg repeatedly tried to win over: IMT vol. 33, Doc. 3881PS, 309.  Report by Dr. Sydney Jessen (1946), Der Anteil der Kriegsmarine am Attentat. Gerüchte um ein bevorstehendes Attentat gaben Stauffenberg den Anlass zum sofortigen Handeln; IfZ, ZS A-29II, 32, fol. 2.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 225 (15 August 1944).  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 272.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 305 (26 August 1944) and 312– 314 (29 August 1944), citing the example of Captain Friedrich Scholz-Babisch who was “hardly given time to think, and even less to get a word in.”  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 307 (26 August 1944).  See the long list of names in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 17– 18.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 110 (31 July 1944); Childers, The Kreisau Circle, 107, tends to overestimate Yorck’s role after Moltke had been arrested.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 522 (12 December 1944). It is obviously unclear to what extent this was the truth, or whether it was part of Hößlin’s defence strategy.

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The Wolfschanze and the various other headquarters (of the Army, the SS, Göring, etc.) were situated in East Prussia, which was therefore of primary importance to the conspirators. So, Stauffenberg contacted First Lieutenant Heinrich Graf Lehndorff, whose country manor in Steinort was host to the “field headquarters” of Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.”¹³¹ Lehndorff had been approached by Tresckow in October 1943, but in the spring of 1944, Stauffenberg contacted him again. At the end of April or early in May 1944, Stauffenberg himself instructed Lehndorff about the details of his tasks as his liaison officer with the Military District Command.¹³² In July 1944, Stauffenberg told Lieutenant (Reserve) Urban Thiersch (a sculptor in civilian life and, like Stauffenberg, a disciple of Stefan George): “Let’s come to the point: with all the means at my disposal, I’m committing high treason.”¹³³ Roland von Hößlin, from Stauffenberg’s old regiment, introduced to him Captain Hubertus Schulz, whom Stauffenberg “gave very clear instructions as to what had to be done on Day X, as well as before that.”¹³⁴ Others, such as Berlin city commandant Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, were initiated only at the very last minute. Hase was known to be critical of the Nazis. Schulenburg, the Deputy Police President of Berlin, had discreetly obtained information about the general, and there was no doubt that he would be “in,” as he eventually was, on both 15 and 20 July.¹³⁵ Far more difficult was the situation in the Military District Command III, to which Hase reported directly. The commanding general, General der Infanterie Joachim von Kortzfleisch, had the reputation of being a full-throated Nazi. In the event of a successful coup, he was to be succeeded by his deputy and chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans-Günther von Rost. But the recurring problem of repostings again got in the way: in June 1944, Rost was given command of a Panzer division; his successor, Generalmajor Otto Herfurth, was considered unreliable for the purposes of the conspiracy, so Stauffenberg ended up dispatching a liaison officer, Major Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, who was fully briefed on details

 Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker,” 83.  For details see Dönhoff, Namen, die keiner mehr nennt, and Vollmer, Doppelleben.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 257 (18 August 1944); Vollmer, Doppelleben, 259 – 261. See also the report about the attempted recruitment of Captain Baron Truchseß von Wetzhausen in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 312– 313 (29 August 1944).  Report Urban Thiersch, ehem. Oberleutnant der Artillerie, über seine Begegnung mit Oberst Graf Stauffenberg im Juli 1944 (written in Munich in 1949); IfZ, ED 88/2: Sammlung Zeller, fol. 333 – 336.  Schulz, Persönliche Erinnerungen, 49 – 50.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 205 – 207, 213.

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of the plot. He was to make sure the orders emanating from the Bendlerblock would be carried out, but after Kortzfleisch had been arrested temporarily in the Bendlerblock on the afternoon of 20 July, another general had to be found. Eventually, Generalleutnant Karl Baron Thüngen (also from the Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment) was phoned and told to proceed to the Military District Command.¹³⁶ Some of the units close to Berlin were alerted directly by the headquarters of the Replacement Army, bypassing the District Command. However, in Frankfurt/Oder, to take only one example, the alert orders arrived only very late in the day.¹³⁷ All this is an indication that staffing was far from complete by 20 July 1944, and it probably never could have been considered complete at any other point in time. The one officer who never fully committed to the conspiracy was Stauffenberg’s (and Olbricht’s) superior, Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm. He had certainly understood that Germany’s precarious military position could not hold out much longer, but it had always been in his nature to cover himself in all directions. Notwithstanding repeated entreaties from Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Field Marshal von Witzleben, and Police Vice President Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg to take a side, Fromm, who was fully aware of what was going on around him, allowed preparations to continue in his headquarters but refused to become personally involved.¹³⁸ Stauffenberg’s conspiratorial methods also meant that fellow conspirators would be systematically cut off once they ceased to be useful. Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sauerbruch had been close friends with Stauffenberg since they had been lieutenants together in Seventeenth Cavalry.¹³⁹ When Sauerbruch visited the convalescening Stauffenberg in his hospital room in February 1943, Stauffenberg spoke bluntly but would not involve Sauerbruch in his plans until the end of 1943.¹⁴⁰ The next spring, however, Sauerbruch was made General Staff officer (Ia) of a Panzer division on the eastern front; Stauffenberg abruptly broke off contact. That probably saved Sauerbruch’s life: he was arrested shortly after 20 July but released shortly thereafter.¹⁴¹ In this context, we need to come back to Stauffenberg’s remark (cited in Chapters 3.7 and 4.1) about the generals’

 Kopp, Paul von Hase, 211; Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 144– 152.  Schollwer, Potsdamer Tagebuch, 41.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, passim, and in particular pp. 414, 600, 604– 605.  When Stauffenberg was seriously wounded in Africa, Sauerbruch arranged for his father, the famous surgeon, to operate on Stauffenberg.  Sauerbruch, “Bericht,” 269.  Sauerbruch, “Bericht,” 267; oral interview of Sauerbruch with author.

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broken backbone that prevented any steadfast commitment.¹⁴² In the present context, it explains why Stauffenberg preferred recruiting field officers, once all his attempts at enrolling one of the eastern front field marshals had come to nothing.¹⁴³ As opposed to Goerdeler and Stauffenberg, Beck had no role in recruiting new members of the conspiracy; his contacts were limited to a close circle of acquaintances. One can only speculate as to whether this was due to his high rank and prestige, to the cancer he was battling at the time, or to his insistence on a maximum of caution in carrying out the conspiracy.¹⁴⁴ The Gestapo never fully rooted out every part of this diverse, wide-reaching putsch organization.¹⁴⁵ However, what they did discover certainly surprised them: “One must be unsettled by the scope of this entire organization, and that its reach extended far into civilian agencies and political circles of the ‘system era’ [the Weimar period].”¹⁴⁶ In occupied France, too, officers and civilians encountered others who were to take part in the coup d’état, or at least who knew about it.¹⁴⁷ France was of the utmost strategic importance, as there was a broad consensus among the conspirators that the termination of the war in the west should be a priority (see below Chapter 9.4), which is why control of the military units in that theater was particularly relevant. The division of the conspiracy into two groups centered around Goerdeler and Stauffenberg respectively can also be seen in France. On the one hand, there was the group around Rommel’s chief of staff, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel, which also included some members of the military administration staff.¹⁴⁸

 Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 148.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 283; Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand,” 450; Heinemann, “Les officiers de la résistance militaire allemande.”  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 289.  Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 329 – 410.  [Oberregierungsrat Friedrich Freiherr von Teuchert,] Aufzeichnungen; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 95.  A more detailed account as well as a discussion of the theses in Irving, The Trail of the Fox, can be found in Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War.” No comprehensive publication has discussed this since, but some papers deserve mention here: Stumpf, “Erwin Rommel und der Widerstand”; Stickler, “Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel,” and, above all, Lieb, “Erwin Rommel,” which very ably sums up the current state of research while at the same time pointing out the need for further investigation on the basis of all available sources. Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen” give detailed proof of David Irving’s “creative” handling of sources, many of which he had himself unearthed before.  Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen,” 160, claim that “it is an urgent task of historiography to close this gap and determine the exact places of Hofacker, Spei-

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Like all of Rommel’s chiefs of staff before, Speidel was a Swabian; his link with Goerdeler had been established through the mayor of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin.¹⁴⁹ Speidel’s own memoirs are available in two versions, of 1949 and 1977 respectively, which vary in some decisive points.¹⁵⁰ They do reveal, in any case, that Speidel tried to push Rommel to terminate the war on the Normandy front unilaterally – a recurring point of discussion among Goerdeler and his friends (see Chapter 7.1).¹⁵¹ Stauffenberg’s contact in Paris, on the other hand, was Caesar von Hofacker,¹⁵² who was in a way his liaison officer with the Military Commander of France, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Under the Supreme Commander West, Field Marshal von Kluge, Army Group B (Rommel) fought in Normandy while Army Group G (commanded by Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz¹⁵³) defended the Mediterranean coastline. Stülpnagel in turn was responsible for the internal security of occupied France. That made him the ideal officer to plan an upheaval. Hofacker had joined the military opposition in the summer of 1943, that is, before his cousin Stauffenberg took on a leading role in the conspiracy; Hofacker had long been a close friend of Schulenburg. The contact with Stauffenberg was firmly established only during a family reunion at the end of October 1943. In general, the importance of family ties for establishing conspiratorial contacts should not be underestimated.¹⁵⁴ Stauffenberg kept intensifying his connections with headquarters in France. Colonel Eberhard Finckh, who had been in the same class as Stauffenberg at the Kriegsakademie, recounted to the Gestapo,”One needs to have known Stauffenberg to understand. When he had one of his eruptions of temper, as was the case then, the effect was so fascinating that one had no chance to think, let alone give a deliberate reply.”¹⁵⁵ Finckh was responsible for logistics in the headquarters of the Supreme Commander West (not in Rommel’s Army Group B); that he should have explained to the “Desert Fox” the details of the planned assassination at-

del, Rommel, and others, within the resistance, on the basis of today’s knowledge and to overcome such interpretations as David Irving and Hans Speidel published them decades ago.” This plea for a scholarly analysis of the entire complex is, alas, all too justified.  Krautkrämer, “Generalleutnant Dr. phil. Hans Speidel,” 248.  In English: Speidel, Invasion 1944; Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit.  Statement Speidel in: Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” Broadcast of RIAS Berlin on 19. and 22 July 1979, 11– 12, IfZ, Ms 200/85.  See above Chapter 4.5.  Stahl, “Generaloberst Johannes Blaskowitz”; Vogel, “German and Allied Conduct,” 636 – 662.  Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker,” 80, 83.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 306 (26 August 1944).

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tempt, and even before Rommel’s much-cited interview with Hofacker on 9 July,¹⁵⁶ seems however highly unlikely. Stauffenberg’s entire scheme was far too secretive for that. The course of events on 20 July showed how much Speidel was on the sidelines of the conspiracy: Finckh, Hofacker, and Stülpnagel knew early that morning that the bomb was to go off that day. According to his own memoirs, Speidel learned about the failed assassination attempt in the late afternoon and from a radio broadcast.¹⁵⁷ Another point of conflict between Stauffenberg and Goerdeler was the politician’s lax handling of sensitive information.¹⁵⁸ Goerdeler regularly disregarded even the most basic rules of conspiracy and thus became a serious liability to the entire organization. After his very first contacts with Goerdeler, Ulrich von Hassell had jotted down some apprehensive remarks in his diary. Beck, he wrote, felt Goerdeler was “good, but rather sanguine and imprudent.” Hassell shared this view: “This man is a refreshing personality and highly active, but dangerously sanguine”.¹⁵⁹ Things took a turn for the worse when, in 1941, his fellow-conspirators learned that Goerdeler had written a typically unguarded letter to a friend in Great Britain.¹⁶⁰ Some of his closest associates, such as Beck and even Nebe, increasingly insisted on taking all possible precautions to avoid detection by the Gestapo and, as a consequence, reduced their contacts with Goerdeler to an absolute minimum.¹⁶¹ Goerdeler’s job with Bosch in Stuttgart enabled him to travel widely without the Gestapo getting suspicious. Within the firm, a “Bosch Circle” began to meet, with Goerdeler as its leader. Discussions were handled so carelessly that some of the other participants found the whole situation quite dangerous.¹⁶² At the same time, some of those whom Goerdeler contacted (the former mayor of Cologne,

 Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 56.  Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 189. According to Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 87– 95, the Chief of the General Staff, Supreme Commander West, General der Infanterie Günther Blumentritt, informed Speidel by telephone at about 2 p.m. about Hitler’s death. Speidel is said to have been “unprepared”; Hofacker, who had returned from Berlin the day before, had not told him anything.  For the respective emphasis on organization and conspiracy, secrecy and recruitment, see Keyserlingk, “Ein geheimes Netzwerk,” 215.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 131– 133 (both 22 October 1939); see also Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” XL.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 263 (2 August 1941).  Rathert, Verbrechen und Verschwörung, 140 – 142.  Bähr and Erker, Bosch, 239; Scholtyseck, Robert Bosch, 475, 485.

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Konrad Adenauer, among them) realized how risky links with the former mayor of Leipzig could be and refused to be involved any further.¹⁶³ Thus, apart from Goerdeler’s reactionary political views, his indiscreet behavior was another reason for conflict within the national-conservative opposition.¹⁶⁴ Many of those who had had risky talks with Goerdeler never played a role in the actual coup d’état as they could not be entrusted with a specific, responsible role.¹⁶⁵ In the end, he was limited to nominating the “Political Representatives” in all the Military District Commands;¹⁶⁶ what role they would have played in coordinating military and civilian control after the coup had succeeded remains open to speculation, however. Stauffenberg’s organization was designed along the lines of traditional military command structures; the Gestapo found this much harder to penetrate, even after the event.¹⁶⁷ As time went on, Stauffenberg, too, was unwilling to maintain contact with Goerdeler and did not keep him informed of the details of the coup before it began. Even Beck kept his distance.¹⁶⁸ Goerdeler seems to have sensed this, and to have complained bitterly.¹⁶⁹ Altogether, the authorities did not find out soon enough about the conspiracy to have prevented the attempt on Hitler’s life and the coup d’état. After 1933, all the civilian and military agencies toed the line. In all likelihood, that is why the security organs never mistrusted them and kept their eyes rather on the original enemy, Communists, Social Democrats, trade union leaders, and suspicious individuals in the churches.¹⁷⁰

7.4 The Plan The military plans for a putsch can be roughly divided into three phases: In 1938, the basic idea was that troops stationed in and around Berlin, in particular the Potsdam-based Twenty-Third Infantry Division under Generalleutnant Walter von Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, should occupy the capital. This was still in peacetime; the

       

Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” XLIX. Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 269. Mommsen, “Bürgerlicher (nationalkonservativer) Widerstand,” 59. Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 522 (12 December 1944). Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 229. Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 522 (12 December 1944). Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 374, 434; Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” L, LIII. Fest, Staatsstreich, 169 – 170; Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” I.

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conspiracy could rely on a specific unit under a commander who was privy to the plans.¹⁷¹ All this obviously changed when the Wehrmacht mobilized, and the division was sent to the front, so reformulated coup plans were required. The second phase was powered largely by the Abwehr, and on the question of available forces, it was marked by a high degree of uncertainty. All wartime plans suffered from the fact that, in view of the continuous troop movements – divisions being thrown into battle, being sent home for regeneration, and then being sent out again – no combat units were permanently available within the Reich. Even the highly trained special forces regiments of the Abwehr’s own Brandenburg Division ended up being used as cannon-fodder on the eastern front, i. e., as regular infantry, meaning they were no longer available to support the coup d’état. In any case, after the spring of 1943, military intelligence ceased to be the center of the military resistance; several of the conspiracy’s leading officers were arrested, and by February 1944, the entire organization had been merged with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or Security Service) of the SS.¹⁷² For any military planning, the “enemy situation” is of the utmost importance. However, the OKH did not have a complete picture of the deployment and strength of forces in and around Berlin that could be expected to remain loyal to the regime, especially as those comprised a wide variety of elements, ranging from the Waffen-SS through the SS proper (e. g., the formations guarding concentration camps), SA, party formations, police, to the Luftwaffe. What was more, those too, much like the Army units, were subject to continuous reorganization and redeployments. The “resistance of notables” which had sprung up largely around Beck and Goerdeler had initially been “extremely isolated”; only after establishing contact with the military opposition around Tresckow in 1941/1942 (and later with Stauffenberg) did it have any realistic perspective of actually overthrowing the Nazi system.¹⁷³ The third phase of the planning for a military putsch was then based on making use of the units and authorities of the Replacement Army throughout the Reich’s military districts, including whichever elements of the field army happened to be present in the Reich at any given moment. For that, the contingency plans known by the codeword, Operation “Valkyrie,” would have to be

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 70 – 71, 86 – 88. For even earlier plans see Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 79.  Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation, 350 – 351; Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 100; see above, Chapter 6.6.  Mommsen, Die Stellung der Sozialisten, 16.

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adapted in such a way that, on “Day X,” they could be used for the purposes of the military insurrection. After Germany’s initial victory over Poland, and in view of the large numbers of prisoners of war, the Replacement Army had begun to prepare for a situation in which it might have to react to “possible mass uprisings of prisoners of war, foreign labor forcefully brought into the Reich, or enemy airborne landings.” Planning was established, code-named “Valkyrie,” to gather available replacement army units and convert them quickly into readily available combat formations should the need arise.¹⁷⁴ However, Hitler had soon understood that the Valkyrie system provided readily available troops. During the winter crisis of 1941/ 1942, he had forced Fromm, as the commander of the Replacement Army, to form these units into four divisions which were then, despite being poorly trained and equipped, thrown into battle.¹⁷⁵ Whether or not Fromm briefed the Führer during a nighttime conference regarding the true quality of these improvised divisions is unclear.¹⁷⁶ Even after this, the alert plans remained in force. In the event they were needed, the required units were to be formed out of what forces and agencies remained: The composition of the “Valkyrie” units meant they were suited for missions at home or in occupied areas. Possible enemies were assumed to be rioting prisoners of war or forced laborers, maybe airdropped agents or saboteurs.¹⁷⁷

However, with these plans the command of the Replacement Army was stretching the limits of what Hitler and Himmler were willing to concede. Hitler had already announced that, after the war was over, Himmler alone (who already controlled the police) would be responsible for internal security – and not the Army. Deploying the Waffen-SS for internal security is also in the Wehrmacht’s own interest. Never again can it be acceptable that the Wehrmacht, recruited by general conscription, should be used against its own compatriots.¹⁷⁸

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 421; Kopp, Paul von Hase, 201, does not distinguish between the original “Valkyrie” system (which was entirely loyal to the Nazi system), its two-fold abuse by Hitler, and the way the military opposition made it part of its plans as of the summer of 1943.  Rathke, “Walküre”-Divisionen, 55 – 56.  Rathke, “Walküre”-Divisionen, 55 – 56; Halder, Kriegstagebuch, vol. 2, 269.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 421.  Quoted in Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 517.

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Whether for this reason, or born out of sheer necessity, in July 1942, Hitler ordered another three divisions to be formed out of the “Valkyrie” units and had them deployed in France against a possible Allied invasion there. Fromm had envisaged this drastic measure, but only “in the hour of Germany’s greatest need,” and had to acknowledge now that Germany’s need had already become that great.¹⁷⁹ His memorandum, “At the Height of Power” (see Chapter 5.2) had also been a reaction to this development. A further thinning of Army forces within the Reich resulted from the decision to split the Replacement Army in two. The replacement units belonging to the frontline divisions remained within Germany and were responsible for inducting recruits. Training formations, however, would now be employed as occupation troops (“Reserve Infantry Divisions”) outside Germany, and would free up field divisions, so far stationed in occupied territories, for frontline duty.¹⁸⁰ Once again, the “Valkyrie” plans had to be re-written and adapted to the new circumstances.¹⁸¹ The general trend was that both the quality and quantity of troops available to the Army within the Reich declined continuously. Yet, when General Olbricht joined the conspiracy in March 1942, this opened up the possibility of “hijacking” the Valkyrie plans for the purposes of the opposition. After all, despite all the cuts, Fromm’s area of responsibility was in sheer numbers still the single largest anywhere in the entire Wehrmacht. The “brilliant”¹⁸² idea to adapt this barely legal contingency plan to the purposes of the military opposition, by issuing some top-secret sealed additional orders, for the first time gave the conspirators access to some real means of military power. Without this access, and coming just from command authorities on the eastern or western fronts, a coup would not be possible.¹⁸³ However, even the Valkyrie units continued to diminish in number, were subject to continuous rotation, and were of only limited use for a putsch, as Olbricht explained to Goerdeler.¹⁸⁴ We have already discussed the special role that Fromm, as commander of the Replacement Army, played in this context.¹⁸⁵ The Generaloberst was highly critical of Hitler and saw the overthrow of the Nazi regime as a necessity. Most likely,

 Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 880.  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 890.  Chef HRüst und BdE, AHA/Ia(I) Nr. 2830/43 gKdos, dated 31 July 1943, BArch, RH 12– 21/v. 56.  Fest, Staatsstreich, 223.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 584.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 283 – 284 (21 August 1944).  This has been elucidated way beyond anything known so far by Bernhard R. Kroener in his Fromm biography (Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet).

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he knew quite well what men on his own staff or within his area of responsibility like Stauffenberg and Mertz, Olbricht and others, were planning, and he did not intervene to stop them. But he also had a tendency to indemnify himself as much as possible against any blowback. At the very least, if one is to follow his biographer, he felt the burden of office and of responsibility for his subordinates: The Replacement Army was the sole armed element within the Reich which was not under the direct control of the regime. One did not need much imagination to see that, should this regime ever feel threatened by the Replacement Army, it would react swiftly to close this gap by whatever means.¹⁸⁶

In view of these considerations, Fromm did not want to provide the Nazis with any pretext for taking over his basis of power – a consideration, however, which had to recede as Himmler was about to take control of the Replacement Army, anyway. All things considered, the image of the “stone-faced guest” at the table of those who were planning high treason is maybe the most appropriate epithet. Tresckow had been to see Olbricht in the spring of 1943 without either of them mentioning the Valkyrie contingency plans.¹⁸⁷ As it seems, the re-writing of all Valkyrie orders caused by the repeated withdrawal of forces seems to have suggested the option of using them as a much-improved basis for the military coup. As of mid-April 1943, Tresckow was on home leave, allowing him to address the problem of how to organize a coup d’état; the first versions of the many orders and directives originated in the period between April and July 1943. The 31 July 1943 order of the commander of the Replacement Army (quoted above) seems to have marked the beginning of plans for a putsch based on “Valkyrie.”¹⁸⁸ As a first step, on 20 August 1943, all military districts were ordered to report the available manpower on a weekly basis.¹⁸⁹ The Gestapo later wrote that Stauffenberg “based his putsch plans largely on ‘Valkyrie’.”¹⁹⁰ That, however, is only partly true; when the severely injured Stauffenberg became Olbricht’s chief of staff on 1 October 1943, the original “Valkyrie” orders had already been written and distributed long before.¹⁹¹ Even so, the conspiratorial planning had not advanced very much by the summer. Then, however, events on all fronts escalated.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 601 (also for the following quotation).  Aretin, “Henning von Tresckow,” 301.  Chef HRüst und BdE – AHA/Ia (I) Nr. 3830/43 gKdos., dated 31 July 1943 re: “Walküre,” also contained in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 160 – 163 (6 August 1944, encl. 2).  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 109.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 157– 158 (6 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 88 (28 July 1944).

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The overthrow of the Mussolini regime suddenly suggested that a similar scenario might be feasible in Germany, too. This may have helped Tresckow in getting the sometimes-phlegmatic Olbricht to push ahead with planning more energetically, and with Tresckow’s able support. The civilian conspirators, too, (Goerdeler, Hassell, as well as Beck) believed the uprising was about to take place. Stauffenberg, who had already been selected as Olbricht’s new chief of staff, but who was still in a Munich hospital for another operation on his wounded hand, checked himself out and travelled to Berlin instead. In the first days of October, Stauffenberg had firm plans when he first went to East Prussia. In the OKH Mauerwald headquarters, he saw his friend Joachim Kuhn who had been engaged to one of Stauffenberg’s cousins, Marie-Gabriele (until differences between Kuhn’s Protestant mother and Marie-Gabriele’s Catholic family put an end to that). Knowing about Kuhn’s position, Stauffenberg had a clear-cut assignment on Day X for his friend: Your role will be: To operate as General Stieff’s Ia [operations officer] who will personally undertake the assassination, i. e., to prepare a proper mobilization schedule for the headquarters. Also, as my permanent representative you will push things ahead here in the headquarters. Further, during the putsch you will look after Field Marshal von Witzleben, the future Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht.¹⁹²

Seeing that Stauffenberg had only taken up his new post on 1 October (he had effectively assumed his new duties already in September), the concrete planning had progressed significantly. One notable element here would characterize Stauffenberg’s entire planning until the next summer: he deployed liaison officers who were to represent him in important command authorities. Kuhn, then, was to operate in Mauerwald. Major Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen was to liaise with Military District III under its Nazifriendly commander, General von Kortzfleisch, ¹⁹³ while Major Egbert Hayessen would liaise with the city commandant.¹⁹⁴ Also in October 1943, Stauffenberg detailed Major Hans-Jürgen Graf Blumenthal as liaison officer for Military District II (Stettin, now Szczecin, Poland); Stauffenberg knew Hayessen well as the major had served in the AHA. In December, Stauffenberg informed Major Ludwig Freiherr Leonrod (from old Bavarian nobility stock, and also from Stauffenberg’s

 Statement Kuhn on 2 September 1944, in Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 9.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 145 (5 August 1944); Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 144– 152; Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 158.  IMT, vol. 33, doc. 3881-PS, 485 – 486; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 417. According to Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 47 (24 July 1944), and Kopp, Paul von Hase, 213, Hayessen was not fully briefed about his role in the insurrection until 15 July 1944.

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Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment) that he would be the liaison officer to Military District VII (Munich).¹⁹⁵ In a way, Caesar von Hofacker, too, was part of this system as Stauffenberg’s a quasi-liaison officer to the Military Commander of France. At the same time, the “military group” (and we can safely believe this was Stauffenberg’s faction) urged Goerdeler to nominate a “political representative” to every military district.¹⁹⁶ An extraordinary discovery in the early 2000s of previously unknown documents revealed significant new insights into these plans. The conspirators had disposed of some of their documents by burying them at night inside the OKH Mauerwald headquarters in East Prussia. After the region had been taken by the Red Army and Major Kuhn was taken into captivity in the winter of 1944/ 1945, he led Soviet intelligence to the cache. The documents are today held in a Russian archive and were published by Peter Hoffmann with the help of Matthias Uhl.¹⁹⁷ These documents are not in themselves “Valkyrie” orders but, rather, a systematic compilation of measures envisaged as necessary to secure the various headquarters located in East Prussia. Therefore, we can assume these few sheets of paper were only the tip of the iceberg: there must have been similar plans for Berlin, the Obersalzberg headquarters near Berchtesgaden, and possibly for other sites as well.¹⁹⁸ The documents reflect the planning as of September or early October 1943. The central formation to support the putsch in the East Prussia region was supposed to have been the Eighteenth Artillery Division, which had been formed to enable Army Group Center to concentrate artillery at a Schwerpunkt (concentration point); its commander was expected to be reliable from the conspiracy’s point of view.¹⁹⁹ However, once the division had been fully formed by December 1943, it was sent to the front and was no longer available for the planned uprising. In the

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 145 (5 August 1944); Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 144– 152; Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 158. For further examples, see Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 333 – 334 (1 September 1944).  See Chapters 3.2 and 7.3; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 357– 361 (6 September 1944).  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 332. The article does not state, however, in which archive and under which archival identifier these documents are being kept.  A similar assumption in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 35.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 347; Tessin, Verbände und Truppen, 4, 347– 348. The commander in question, Generalleutnant Karl Thoholte, went on to be promoted General der Artillerie, and survived the war.

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spring of 1944 (but not before March), Captain Roland von Hößlin took over as commander of a battalion-sized school for cavalry cadets (PanzeraufklärungsAusbildungs-Abteilung für Offizierbewerber)²⁰⁰. We do not know whether the conspirators had another unit they could rely on during the intervening period, but the example is another illustration of how much clandestine work went into keeping plans updated in view of the continuous redeployments and reorganizations. An entire battalion was to be deployed to cordon off Himmler’s Hochwald headquarters – noticeably more troops than for any other installation in East Prussia. This highlights again that even in the summer of 1943, the conspirators saw the SS as the most serious threat in an internal struggle for power. This battalion was also listed by name; it was to be provided by Jägerersatzregiment 1 which was part of the Replacement Army and could also have been detailed under “Valkyrie” orders.²⁰¹ The planning “calendar” (more like a schedule) foresaw certain measures which would have to be released some time before the official alert signal was given. Above all, key personnel (Tresckow, Oertzen) had to be summoned at least 24 hours in advance. In other words, the planning was based on the assumption that the time of an assassination attempt would be known a day before, if not earlier. Some items were still unclear, and the “calendar” provided specifically for “filling in missing points in calendar and orders” 12 hours before the alert.²⁰² There is no obvious connection between this “calendar” and the Valkyrie orders which were being redrafted at about the same time. As of 6 October 1943, however, all units of the field army temporarily stationed within the Reich were to be used in “Valkyrie” planning as well. As in the 1938 plans, this schedule envisages the use of specific units (even of the field army), in convenient locations and usually commanded by officers deemed to be critical of the regime. The responsible authority, Military District Command I in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) is not mentioned anywhere, nor is the codeword “Valkyrie.” The calendar may indicate that, in the summer and autumn of 1943, the conspirators still planned two separate chains of command: (1) tasking directly formations whose commanders were sympathetic to the opposition and (2) deploying all others under the “Valkyrie” system.

 This is the name used by Hößlin himself in his letters; other sources use different terms but must be deemed unreliable. See, e. g., Gostomski and Loch, Der Tod von Plötzensee, 215.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 350.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 349, 354.

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In his memoirs, Otto John claims that, according to Captain Ludwig Gehre, it was Stauffenberg who “got the coup d’état moving again,”²⁰³ and this is certainly consistent with the other sources analyzed here. In the ensuing months, the Valkyrie orders were continuously updated. On 11 February 1944, Stauffenberg signed an order that the forces provided by the military districts had to be prepared to operate in neighboring districts as well.²⁰⁴ Although it is obvious now that this served to allow for a concentration of Army forces (e. g., around a major SS stronghold), it would not have been so obvious then. Such orders could safely be issued, as many other Valkyrie orders were, so that Army officers could read them. A specific problem was the inclusion of armored troops. These “belonged” to Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, the “Inspector of Armoured Troops,” and Guderian had obtained a decree from Hitler that “his” units were not to be used without Guderian’s own consent.²⁰⁵ During the 1943 preparations for a coup, the Military District Commander III (Berlin) held an “exercise for deployment of armoured formations in case of a catastrophe in the government district,” which had attracted heated protests from Goebbels.²⁰⁶ By 1944, no such maneuver would have been possible anymore. However, Guderian’s demands were observed with a degree of flexibility. In mid-July 1944, the battalions belonging to the Panzertruppenschule II (Second Armored School) in Krampnitz, between Berlin and Potsdam, were to be deployed to the front, but a simple phone call by Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, Stauffenberg’s successor as chief of staff of the AHA, on 19 July sufficed to postpone the date of departure. Mertz’ reasoning was that the troops were needed for a “Valkyrie” exercise, and no one questioned it.²⁰⁷ The Panzertruppenschule in Wünsdorf, southeast of Berlin, however, had been moved to the Bergen-Hohne training area in August 1943, with its instruction regiment following soon after to Fallingbostel, both on the Lüneburg

 John, Falsch und zu spät, 29 – 30.  Thun, “Wehrmacht und Widerstand,” 109; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 302.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 594.  Walküre [“Valkyrie”], [Order] OKH Chef HRüst und BdE AHA Ia(I) Nr. 5413/43 gKdos., dated 6 October 1943; BArch, RH 53 – 17/396, published in Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 343.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 202. For the difficulties about mobilizing the Panzertruppenschule II (2nd Armoured School) in Krampnitz, see Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 435 (515). This also refutes the curious speculation in Dirks and Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle, 170 – 172, that Stauffenberg might not have known about Guderian’s prerogative.

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Heath, in Lower Saxony.²⁰⁸ As the armored formations could not be easily dispatched, the Valkyrie infantry divisions had to “fill the gaps,”²⁰⁹ and were accordingly used more often, thus compounding the planners’ difficulties. This has led to polemical commentary, such as: “All hopes to have a moderately reliable contingent of troops with at least some commanders who knew about the putsch plans, available for Operation ‘Valkyrie’ in the Berlin region were thus dashed at the first attempt.”²¹⁰ This kind of armchair generalship misses the point. The basic idea of a coup d’état based on “Valkyrie” was, on the contrary, to make use of such formations which had not been initiated into the plans at all, including stationary installations and elements such as the reserve Landesschützen Battalions 311 and 320, in the Ruhleben and Lichtenberg suburbs, respectively.²¹¹ A separate point was how to procure ammunition for the assassination attempts, and where to store it.²¹² Even in the middle of a major war, it was far from easy for military officers to obtain the necessary explosives and fuses. What complicated matters further was that German time fuses were clockworks, which made a noise. Noiseless fuses were less reliable (as the bomb attempt on Hitler’s plane had shown in the spring of 1943), were only produced by the British, and could therefore only be procured out of Abwehr stocks. As long as the military intelligence was (partly) on the side of the opposition, that remained the preferred source of explosives.²¹³ Major Joachim Kuhn later played an important role in this context. He knew a German engineer major, Gerhard Knaak, through whom he attempted to obtain German explosives in November 1943.²¹⁴ In the long term, secretly storing high explosives in offices or living quarters became too dangerous; we have already heard about the adventurous night action when Kuhn and Lieutenant Albrecht von Hagen buried papers and explosives near the fence of the Mauerwald com-

 E-Mail by Hans-Albert Hoffmann, Wünsdorf, to the author, dated 21 July 2014.  “infanteristische Füllsel” (Stauffenberg): Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 646.  Roth, “Von der Offiziersopposition zur Aktionsgruppe,” 137– 138.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 67; Kopp, Paul von Hase, 223; Tessin, Verbände und Truppen, vol. 9, 114, 136.  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 613 – 615, discusses in detail the account presented in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, of where the various explosives came from and when they were supposed to be used. Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 225 – 233, offers an updated account, without, however, discussing Müller’s version; see also Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 44– 45.  As early as November 1939: Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 136.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 318 (30 August 1944).

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pound.²¹⁵ The incident illustrates very well the difficulties of creating a largescale putsch organization under wartime conditions. Although there were obvious continuities among the personnel involved, this was a new form of organizing the military opposition that was clearly distinct from earlier ones.²¹⁶ Secrecy was of the utmost importance but at the same time not easy to achieve.²¹⁷ For all these preparations, Neuhardenberg Palace, the seat of the House of Hardenberg located halfway between Berlin and the Oder river granted to the family by the king of Prussia in the early nineteenth century, became an important meeting site. One could talk rather freely there, as the servants were entirely trustworthy, there was always enough to eat (which was not to be assumed in Germany’s fifth year of war), at night, one could sleep undisturbed by bombing raids.²¹⁸ Over time, Neuhardenberg grew to be a center of conspiracy.²¹⁹ Peter Hoffmann insists that, even after the autumn of 1943, Henning von Tresckow remained the true head of the conspiracy,²²⁰ but one can doubt that with good reason. When the situation became desperate in the summer of 1944, Stauffenberg is supposed to have asked Tresckow whether the attempt should still be made. Tresckow, according to this account, had Heinrich Graf Lehndorff answer Stauffenberg that the assassination and coup d’état should go ahead, coûte que coûte. This would indicate Tresckow’s centrality. However, as we have seen, this entire episode is corroborated only by the memoirs of Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a close friend of Tresckow, and therefore not a reliable source.²²¹ What illustrates the change of the center of gravity away from Tresck Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 346; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 353, footnote 81; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 128 (3 August 1944); Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 334; IMT, vol. 33, doc. 3881-PS, 331– 332.  This describes the case better than my earlier wording “a new and distinctive group” (Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 854); see the critique in Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 484.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 66 – 67.  Graf Hardenberg’s three attractive daughters also seemed to add to the allure of the estate as a destination for the officers. One of them, nicknamed “Wonte,” was actually engaged to Stauffenberg’s aide Werner von Haeften. After the war, she became the driving force behind the Stiftung (Foundation) Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944.  Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 433; Hardenberg, Auf immer neuen Wegen, 68 – 102; statement by Ludwig Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord: “Bei Hardenberg traf man keinen Nazi” [“At the Hardenberg’s you would not meet any Nazis”], in Agde, Carl-Hans Graf von Hardenberg, 209 – 211; Goebel, “Ein Preuße im Widerstand.”  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 353.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 103; for the source criticism see above Chapters 2.3 and 7.2

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ow and towards Berlin and Stauffenberg is that Stauffenberg could not blow himself up together with his intended target, but had to escape alive to Berlin and the headquarters of the Replacement Army in order to control Operation “Valkyrie” from there; Tresckow had planned to operate as a “suicide bomber.” On 6 July, 11 July, and then again on 15 July, Stauffenberg had been summoned to Hitler’s situation conference and had brought the explosives along.²²² Whether he intended to actually ignite the bomb on 6 July is unclear; possibly he hoped Generalmajor Stieff would plant it. He did not detonate the device on the 11th and on the 15th, either. Most probably, the reason was that while Hitler was present, none of the other Nazi leaders (Goebbels, Göring, Himmler) was.²²³ It just might be that Stieff, rather scrupulous on religious grounds, tried to counteract the political “murder.”²²⁴ No substantial military preparations have ever become known for 11 July. By the 15, conditions had changed in that the Führerhauptquartier had been transferred from the Obersalzberg in Bavaria to the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia – a reflection on the growing crisis on the eastern front. Stauffenberg hardly knew his way around the complex. Also, the flight back to Berlin would take about 30 minutes longer than from Berchtesgaden.²²⁵ The “special briefing” was to address the creation of an “intercepting organization” (Auffangorganisation), i. e., the aggregation of all rear area units with military police functions into one structure, directly subordinate to the respective commanders-in-chief and with the task of “intercepting” all stragglers and deserters. This came into being only in early 1945, but even in the summer of 1944, Hitler obviously was concerned that there might be similar symptoms of

 An eyewitness, a former member of the guard unit on Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden in Bavaria named Schäfer, later claimed that a bomb attack involving up to three packs of explosives in three knapsacks had been planned in connection with the funeral for Generaloberst Eduard Dietl in Munich on 10 July 1944. This, however, was met with disbelief among historians. Förster, “Bombe im Tornister.”  This version in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 43 (24 July 1944) and 130 (3 August 1944); also in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 381 (451); Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 253 – 254; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 360. See also Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 272. That Stauffenberg should have planned a pistol assassination attempt on 14 July is not reflected in any source, and in view of his serious handicaps this seems even more unlikely; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 359.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 359.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 265 – 266; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 359. The distance from Berchtesgaden to Berlin is about 530 kms, while that from Wilhelmsdorf airfield near the Wolfschanze to Berlin is about 560 kms; Kaule, Wolfsschanze [!], 14– 15.

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disintegration as he had himself witnessed back in 1918 and which he held responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War.²²⁶ On 15 July, the conspirators in the AHA and in the OKH made thorough preparations for the uprising.²²⁷ A series of preliminary measures prior to giving the “Valkyrie” alert were ordered early in the morning, about the same time Stauffenberg flew out to East Prussia, which was at least five hours before the bomb was expected to go off.²²⁸ Troops were dispatched, headquarters were put on alert. Only with great difficulty could all this be covered up afterwards and explained away as an “exercise.” Fromm, who knew quite well what really had been happening, had been away in East Prussia. He gave Olbricht a dressing-down but left it at that. Any reconstruction of how the uprising was really scheduled to take place cannot limit itself, therefore, to recounting the events of 20 July 1944 itself, but will have to take into account all those measures which were to have been initiated at some time “X minus,” – in other words, some time relative to and before the “Valkyrie” alert would have been officially given. After the events of 15 July, these measures could not be released again in advance on 20 July. For example, Helldorff and Nebe had promised plainclothes policemen who would arrest the most important figures of the Nazi regime; they arrived on 15 July, having been told they would be required for a manhunt.²²⁹ On 20 July, however, they did not show up, so that questions were being raised as to who was responsible for making arrests – the Army or the police?²³⁰ Not all the preparatory measures were actually taken on 15 July. Some parts of the “calendar” remained unused. General der Artillerie Fritz Lindemann, to give but one example, had been told to be ready to make radio announcements, but was not called to the Bendlerblock on either date.²³¹

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 383; Schütz, Die Vorläufer der Bundeswehr-Feldjäger, 179 – 181. I am grateful to Thomas Karlauf for having pointed this out to me.  Letter Colonel Alexis Freiherr von Roenne to his wife, dated 14 July 1944; MHM, PSF 958 BBAT 3630.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 259. The events of 15 and 20 July 1944 are reconstructed here – for lack of a better or more recent source basis – largely on the account in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, as well as on some accounts of survivors, and on the reports in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung. A detailed account of what exactly happened when, based on the knowledge accumulated since Peter Hoffmann’s seminal The History of the German Resistance was published, would be eminently desirable.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 424; Kopp, Paul von Hase, 143; Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 417.  Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 419; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 424.  Mühlen, Sie gaben ihr Leben, 47– 48.

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There is no denying the fact that preparations were still incomplete, causing “improvisation and confusion”²³² both on 15 and 20 July. However, if “preparations were never again as thorough as those worked out by Tresckow and Stauffenberg in the autumn of 1943,” that is because in view of the hectic evolution of the military and political situation, the same kind of preparation was no longer possible, and the conspiracy had to rely more on the flexible instrument of “Valkyrie.” However, those plans would depend entirely on Hitler actually being dead, and on the Army believing that his death was the work of the Party or the SS. At the very least, the 15 July 1944 “exercise” created an opportunity to test the effectiveness of some of the measures. The units stationed at some distance from Berlin were visited by Olbricht in person or one of his representatives (e. g., Major von Oertzen drove to Cottbus to inspect the replacement units of Panzerdivision Großdeutschland. The main criterium inspected was the ability to move motorized elements rapidly).²³³ Obviously, the conspirators wanted to ascertain when these elements could intervene in any fighting in Berlin. Olbricht himself went on a tour of inspection which included the Panzertruppenschule in Krampnitz – another indication that the armored troops might not insist too much on Guderian’s veto over their deployment.²³⁴ Only on the occasion of this “exercise” was the city commandant of Berlin, Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, fully informed about the real purpose of the Valkyrie plans. It seems that the conspirators did not even provide for keeping general officers commanding elements essential for the coup d’état informed in advance.²³⁵ The various fragments of sources, in particular the Valkyrie orders as collected by the Gestapo,²³⁶ allow us to reconstruct the basic outlines of the coup plan. All plans envisaged “a relatively long time for preparation to coordinate measures at the front, at home and the assassination attempt.”²³⁷ At least 24 hours in advance, the time of the bomb explosion was to be known – as Stauffenberg’s first visits to the Führerhauptquartier had shown, this alone was quite a challenge.

 Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 252, also for the following quotation.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 158 (6 August 1944); Page, General Friedrich Olbricht, 271– 275.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 387.  IMT, vol. 33, doc. 3881-PS, 482– 484; Kopp, Paul von Hase, 213.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 37– 41 (24 July 1944, enclosures).  Statement [Ewald-Heinrich] von Kleist, Ebenhausen, 14 February 1946; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 13 – 14.

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Some units, in particular Panzertruppenschule II in Krampnitz and the Infantry School in Döberitz, were to have been put on alert 24 hours in advance; both were to have liaison officers who would arrive at about the same time.²³⁸ Both schools were eventually alerted by Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim on the early afternoon of 20 July 1944, around 14:00 – further evidence of their central role in all Valkyrie plans.²³⁹ Once Hitler was dead, the prepared orders were to be issued, both the regular Valkyrie orders and the top-secret addenda. They all presupposed the situation explicitly described in the first teletype message actually sent that afternoon; this was, of course, one of the secret addenda and not part of those orders which had been distributed for many Army officers to see. The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! An irresponsible gang of Party leaders, far behind the front, has tried to exploit this situation to stab the hard-pressed army in the back and seize power for its own ends.²⁴⁰

This led to consequences detailed in the message text: II. In this hour of supreme danger, the Reich government, to maintain law and order, has proclaimed a military state of emergency and has entrusted to me both supreme command of the armed forces and executive power in the Reich.

Mentioning a “Reich government” was of course revealing: This was a radical renunciation of the Nazi style of government; the state of emergency was not only about stabilizing the internal order after the Führer’s unexpected death and about containing the Party and the SS. Something entirely new was about to begin. This sense would be reinforced in the next passages: III. I therefore order: I transfer executive powers … to the commander of the Replacement Army, who is concurrently appointed Commander in Chief, Home Front,

 Lehndorff, liaison officer for Military District I, was picked up by a staff car on 19 July 1944; the car had been provided by Fellgiebel: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 258 (18 August 1944). Graf Hardenberg had parallel instructions: Mühleisen, “Patrioten im Widerstand,” 434. Hayessen, scheduled to act as liaison officer to the city commandant, informed Generalleutnant von Hase: IMT, vol. 33, doc. 3881-PS, 485 – 486.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 220.  Teletype message FRR – HOKW 02165, 20 July 1944. The German original is published in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 24– 25 (24 July 1944, encl. ). For an English translation see Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 755 – 756 – see also for following quotation.

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The entire Waffen-SS is integrated into the Army with immediate effect. The Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht – signed v. Witzleben, Field Marshal²⁴¹

The term “Commander in Chief, Home Front” (Oberbefehlshaber im Heimatkriegsgebiet) signaled an elevation in status, as it implied that, following the First World War practice, the military would assume responsibility for internal security again, countermanding the continuous reduction of his competences during the Nazi period.²⁴² Integrating the Waffen-SS was designed to both weaken the most fearsome formation supposedly loyal to the regime, and concentrate all warfighting capabilities in Army hands again. The announcement continued: In this hour of the greatest danger for the nation, the coherence of the Wehrmacht and maintaining the strictest discipline are of the utmost importance.

This takes up the idea of maintaining “the Wehrmacht as an absolutely reliable instrument in the hands of its leaders”²⁴³ as much as reflecting the conspirators’ doubts about whether this would still be possible. This teletype message from the new Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht was followed by a second, which was directed only at the Replacement Army, and in particular the Military Districts.²⁴⁴ This was signed by “Commander in Chief, Home Front” – nominally Generaloberst Fromm. On his behalf, orders were said to have been signed by his chief of staff, Stauffenberg, with Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim certifying the correctness of the copies; as a matter of fact, it had been Mertz who had issued the orders before Stauffenberg had even arrived back at the Bendlerblock. Fromm’s name contrasts oddly with the fact that the conspiracy had wanted to name Generaloberst Erich Hoepner as Fromm’s successor. This order contained more detailed regulations but started by stating that the military district commanders would regain, with immediate effect, all the competences which had been ceded to the Gauleiters in their capacity as Reich Defense Commissars. There was a summary list of Nazi functionaries who were to be arrested forthwith, but the message ended on a different note:  Teletype message FRR – HOKW 02165, 20 July 1944, published in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 755 – 756, but with author’s amendments as Hoffmann’s translation does not distinguish between “Commander” (Befehlshaber) and “Commander-in-Chief” (Oberbefehlshaber).  See above, Chapter 4.2.  See above, Chapter 6.4; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944).  Teleprint message HOKW 02155 geh., 20 July 1944, 18:00 [to Military District Commands], published in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 756 – 757.

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No arbitrary acts or sheer vengeance must be tolerated in the use of these executive powers. The population must be aware that this differs from the arbitrary measures of the former rulers.

Here again, there is the need to emphasize how the new government would be different, even if this contradicted to some extent the fictional situation the new regime was trying to “sell” to the public. The most detailed plans were obviously those for the Berlin region which we also know from the Gestapo reports. Again, at least 24 hours before “Valkyrie” was to be executed, the preparatory measures should have been completed. This would include an exercise for the Panzertruppenschule as well as other schools stationed around Berlin. Key personnel were to be called in, first of all the liaison officers and the political representatives. The units stationed further away were to be ready to move, even if their actual movement orders could not yet be issued. After all, and again, if preparations in advance were too obvious, this would endanger belief in the underlying scenario that the seizure of power came in reaction to a coup by the Nazi Party and SS. A group of young officers, most of them from the Potsdam-based Ninth Infantry Regiment, who were to support the Bendlerblock staff as aides, were waiting to be called in the nearby Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz.²⁴⁵ Top priority was accorded to alerting the units in the larger Berlin garrison area, including those in the old fortress and garrison town of Spandau; the draft orders, however, did not name any specific units beyond the immobile schools. As in the 1943 plans for East Prussia, it was clear in the documents used on 20 July 1944 where the enemy’s main effort was expected to be. Item 12 in the order to the city commandant instructed him to have the Luftwaffe units in the General-Göring-Kaserne, close to Tegel Airfield, ready to be alerted (that is, not even put on full alert!); their commanding officer was to report to the city commandant.²⁴⁶ This was nothing compared to what was provided for in a separate “Instruction for Dealing with the Waffen-SS.” This meant, above all, the replacement formations of the Waffen-SS division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler ²⁴⁷. Ac-

 Fritzsche, Ein Leben im Schatten des Verrates, 76.  Order Nr. 3: 2. Order to the Wehrmacht Commandant of Berlin (when reporting in person[…]), Nr. 12. a) und b), published in: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 39 (24 July 1944, encl. ).  There is a detailed history of the division, Lehmann and Tiemann, Die Leibstandarte, which is, however, rather apologetic; it has nothing to say about the role of the division’s replacement units in this context.

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cording to this order, heavy weapons were to be deployed.²⁴⁸ The “energetic officer” in charge (the order to the city commandant stated that this should be a general) was to coerce the SS officer in charge to give the necessary orders so as to effect the integration of the Waffen-SS into the Army, threatening to use force: “In case of refusal or resistance the SS officer is to be shot, the guard is to be disarmed, and the disarmament of the entire unit is to be enforced. At the slightest sign of resistance, weapons are to be used ruthlessly.” The deployment of forces within Berlin reflected this. The armored formations from Krampnitz were to reconnoiter “to the south,” i. e., towards Lichterfelde, and the reinforcements expected to come from Cottbus were to push into Berlin from the south – tying the SS units down in the rear. It was obvious that the main effort of the military opposition was aimed against the SS division’s replacement units in the former Cadet School in Lichterfelde, and certainly not against the Luftwaffe’s infantry units. First among the “own” forces the putsch could reckon with was the Berlin Guard Battalion in Moabit, motorized infantry, and as the “exercise alert” on 15 July had shown, available almost immediately. However, the battalion was commanded by Major Otto Ernst Remer, an ultra-loyal Nazi. Nebe had warned against Remer, but his immediate superior, the city commandant Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, believed Remer could be relied upon as long as he believed what he was told about the situation. Hase felt confirmed in his optimism when he evaluated the “exercise” of 15 July together with Remer: 27 minutes after the alarm had been raised, the battalion had been ready to move.²⁴⁹ The three battalions from the Döberitz Infantry School were motorized as well, but would be available only after mobilization, and then after covering a distance of some 25 kilometers. As they were stationed outside Berlin proper, they came directly under Military District Command III, whose commanding general (as we have seen) could not be expected to support the uprising. These units were tasked with reinforcing the units securing the government district, and with occupying the Berlin radio station on Masurenallee as well as the broadcasting stations in Tegel and Nauen (see Chapter 7.5). Panzertruppenschule II in Krampnitz was expected to dispatch two armored battalions which, however, would also have to be mobilized first and would then

 Dirks and Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle, 178, translate this as the intention of “gunning down the Leibstandarte with heavy artillery.” Now apart from the fact that “heavy weapons” are not necessarily “heavy artillery,” and that no heavy artillery was available anywhere near Berlin, and that the Leibstandarte was not in Berlin (only its recruits were), the source states that the heavy weapons were to be deployed, not necessarily to be used.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 215 – 216; Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer’”, 417.

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have to approach over a distance of some 30 kilometers; as we have seen, in principle the consent of the Inspector of Armored Troops would have been required. These heavy forces were to form an armored reserve in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s vast central park close to the Bendlerblock headquarters. Their lighter units were to reconnoiter south against the SS in Lichterfelde. The Army Ordnance School (Heeresfeuerwerkerschule), also in Lichterfelde, as well as the Army Armorers’ School (Heereswaffenmeisterschule) in Treptow would not account for a sizeable number of forces. They were composed mostly of sergeants with frontline experience who were undergoing additional training, but the units were not mobile and might have to arrive at their destination by tram.²⁵⁰ The city commandant was to use them to secure the Stadtschloss (Berlin Palace, on Unter den Linden) and his own, immediately adjacent headquarters.²⁵¹ Quite another dimension were the replacement units of the crack Army division Großdeutschland, garrisoned in Cottbus, some 120 kms south of Berlin. They would not be able to influence events in Berlin until about 24 hours after being alerted, but they consisted of between 7,000 and 8,000 men, quite a substantial force. On 15 July, they had been mobilized and had actually taken to the field.²⁵² Within 12 hours, they had been able to seize the radio transmitters in Herzberg and Königs Wusterhausen. These elements were also to secure Rangsdorf airfield, which served the wartime Army headquarters at Zossen. Most of the forces, however, were to push into Berlin from the south, engage the Waffen-SS in Lichterfelde, and secure Tempelhof airport. The Großdeutschland division’s replacement brigade was of particular importance to Stauffenberg; for 19 July, he ordered its acting commander to Berlin to discuss in detail the results of the “exercise” four days before: availability, numerical strength, marching schedules. Lieutenant Colonel Stirius chanced to remark that his brigade had many volunteers; what this meant for its reliability was difficult to say.²⁵³ Securing Tempelhof and Rangsdorf airfields would be important for ensuring Stauffenberg’s unhindered return to Berlin, seeing that his presence in the Bendlerblock was indispensable. Klaus Bonhoeffer and Otto John had been promised that Tempelhof would be secured within 24 hours.²⁵⁴ The conspirators

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 436.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 224.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 251.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 393, based on a conversation with Stirius on 2 February 1967. Stirius was one of the few officers whose application to serve in the postwar West German Bundeswehr was refused (see Chapter 10.1).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 442 (12 October 1944).

7.4 The Plan

Map 1a: Operation Valkyrie: Planned Deployment of Military Forcec

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Map 1b: Operation Valkyrie: Planned Deployment of Military Forcec

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expected further reserves to be brought in by air. That Bonhoeffer and John, both working for Lufthansa, should have been mentioned in this context is an indication that the airline was expected to provide the necessary transportation.²⁵⁵ A “Cavalry Regiment Center” had been formed within Army Group Center (see above, Chapter 4.5), and on 20 July, some 1,200 cavalrymen were indeed withdrawn from frontline fighting and sent riding westward. Once the failure of the assassination attempt and of the coup d’état became known, the squadrons made a pivot and made for their regiment again.²⁵⁶ In the present context, the provisions that were made for securing airfields, for reserves from Cottbus, and for the eastern front are important because they indicate that the conspirators expected a lengthy period of fighting in and around Berlin. Dispatching a liaison officer to Koralle naval headquarters near Bernau, northeast of Berlin (see Chapter 4.5) also made sense only if no immediate end to the internal conflict was envisaged. The uprising was not expected to be a quick coup which would be brought to an end within a few hours and without bloodshed. In Paris, too, a coherent plan for the day of the uprising had been elaborated. After all, the first major consequence of the putsch was to be achieved in France: ending the war in the west as a matter of urgency. For that, freedom of action was essential. On the eve of 20 July, the Paris conspirators around Caesar von Hofacker – i. e. those who had been informed about Stauffenberg’s plans – met to review all the details a final time.²⁵⁷ In Italy, by contrast, there seem to have been no preparations for joining the coup d’état. Colonel Hans-Georg Schmidt von Altenstadt, who had known Stauffenberg from their time together in the OKH Organizations Department, was by then chief of staff of XIV. Panzerkorps fighting there; he might well have attempted to bring about a separate surrender in Italy, which eventually occurred in May

 Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 158. It must be said, though, that after Hans von Dohnanyi and Klaus’s brother Dietrich had been arrested, the conspirators had reduced contacts with Klaus Bonhoeffer; John, Falsch und zu spät, 49.  See the recurrent, even if slightly varying, account of the most prominent eyewitness, Philipp Baron von Boeselager, e. g. in Meding and Sarkowicz, Philipp von Boeselager, 25 – 36; John, Philipp von Boeselager, 184– 196; Witte and Offermann, Die Boeselagerschen Reiter, 252. See also Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 442 (12 October 1944); Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 252; Boeselager, Der Widerstand, 21– 23. The last doubts about the veracity of these accounts were only dispelled by the source-based publication Reuther, “Soldaten für den Staatsstreich.”  Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 83. See also Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli, [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 51.

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1945.²⁵⁸ There is no real indication, though, that Stauffenberg should have entrusted Schmidt von Altenstadt with a role in the conspiracy. Taken as a whole, this was a circumspect and appropriate plan – in any case the best that could be achieved under the circumstances. However, it all hinged on two preconditions: the attempt on Hitler’s life would have to be successful, and Stauffenberg would have to escape alive and reach Berlin so as to take control of the military uprising. These objectives, however, undermined each other: if Stauffenberg had blown himself up alongside Hitler, the Führer almost certainly would have been killed as well. Then, however, the uprising would have lost the one officer who could issue orders to the Replacement Army, it would thus have been hopeless and therefore pointless, in turn eroding the moral justification for the “political murder.” The conspirators and planners were quite aware of this conundrum. Tresckow’s assertion, cited before, that the assassination attempt would have to be made, “coûte que coûte,” implies resolution although these conflicting aims limited prospects of success. Why, then, did the putsch fail? The essential facts are well known and easily summarized: Around 8:00 on 20 July, Stauffenberg took off from Rangsdorf airfield for the Wolfschanze headquarters, where he was to take part in Hitler’s situation conference. In his luggage were two parcels of explosives, each with its own fuse. Due to Mussolini’s visit later that day, however, the conference had been brought forward to 12:30, and it was not held in a bunker as expected but, rather, in the “briefing hut” (Lagebaracke), where it had taken place five days earlier. Due to his severe disabilities, Stauffenberg did not manage to insert and trigger both fuses but placed only one of the parcels, about one kilogram of explosives, under the meeting room’s heavy oak table. He then excused himself and left the room. Once the bomb had gone off, he succeeded in talking his way through the various checkpoints and reaching the airfield. After landing in Rangsdorf, his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, rang the assembled conspirators in the Bendlerblock to enquire how the putsch was progressing. By that time, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim had just issued the first Valkyrie orders, without Olbricht or, of course, Fromm’s knowledge.²⁵⁹ Only after Stauffenberg’s arrival in the Bendlerblock, at about 16:30, did the coup begin to gather momentum.²⁶⁰ By 17:00, however, the German radio stations began to report that there had

 rise;  

Schmidt von Altenstadt and Bauer, Eid und Gewissen; Agarossi and Smith, Operation SunSchiemann, Der Geheimdienst beendet den Krieg. IMT, vol. 33, doc. 3881-PS, 400 – 401. Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 22 (24 July 1944).

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been an attempt on the Führer’s life, which Hitler was said to have survived with only slight injuries. This slowed the execution of the “Valkyrie” orders down considerably, until the countermove of the officers within the Bendlerblock gained the upper hand; around midnight, Fromm – who had been placed under arrest for a short time – ordered the leaders of the conspiracy to be executed.²⁶¹ In the final analysis, it is striking that the regime itself had not cut a particularly good figure. The security services had not managed to prevent an attempt on Hitler’s life that came close to succeeding. Nor did anyone in the Führerhauptquartier get the impression that there might be more to it than the actions of a single officer. Only when the first teletype messages arrived announcing the release of Operation Valkyrie; and when an excited Goebbels rang who put Major Remer through to Hitler (around 19:00), did Hitler and his entourage begin to realize that this was a full-blown military putsch. The regime’s reactions were initially slow and anything but a swift mobilization of its power apparatus.²⁶² Goebbels in particular did not contribute much to putting down the coup, at least not until he saw more clearly which way the scales were tipping.²⁶³ Even in Paris, the SD and Gestapo officers were oddly reluctant to shed light on what had happened there; they did not put up much of a fight as they were summarily arrested and obviously had no interest in spreading that knowledge too widely.²⁶⁴ Even months after the event, the Gestapo reacted with a surprising degree of irritation when confronted with charges that it had failed to protect the Führer and the rest of the regime.²⁶⁵ Military officers known to be faithful to the party were arrested in the Bendlerblock, some of them by force. One of them was the commanding general of Military District III, General der Infanterie von Kortzfleisch, who had been ordered to proceed to the Replacement Army headquarters in Bendlerblock to be instructed personally. Kortzfleisch decried the actions as a coup d’état and refused to cooperate. He was arrested accordingly and released during the night once it had become obvious that the attempt had failed.²⁶⁶ SS Colonel (Oberführ Heinemann, “Das Ende des Staatsstreichs.”  Broszat, “A social and historical typology,” 32, calls this “an underestimation of the energy of the Nazis,” but this misses the point entirely. For the failure of the pro-Nazi forces to act see Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 77– 78; and Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 697. It is maybe indicative that even a comprehensive publication such as Paul and Mallmann, Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg, does not discuss the secret police’s investigation after the failed coup d’état.  Sösemann, “Verräter vor dem Volksgericht,” 154– 155.  [Oberregierungsrat Friedrich Freiherr von Teuchert] Aufzeichnungen; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 154– 155.  Bielenberg, The Past Is Myself, 238 – 239.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 234; Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 145.

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er) Humbert Achamer-Pifrader arrived at the Replacement Army headquarters around 18:00 with orders to arrest Stauffenberg but was instead arrested himself – another clear indication that, by that time, the Gestapo harbored no suspicion of a proper coup d’état involving the Replacement Army.²⁶⁷ Bormann informed all Gauleiters by teletype message: It is necessary that you immediately draw all consequences necessary in this situation, and that you exercise extreme caution. Only orders by the Führer Adolf Hitler or his men are valid, not orders from renegade reactionary generals. The Führer has transferred all necessary authority to the Reichsführer-SS. Therefore, contact immediately your locally responsible police commanders. It is your responsibility under any circumstances to keep control of your Gau [district] in your hands. Heil Hitler! M. Bormann²⁶⁸

By that time, however, it was already 20:00. A short time later, Bormann reinforced his previous message: The Führer’s orders are that all Gauleiters, acting in concert with their respective police commanders, immediately arrest all persons who are involved in the complot of the reactionary criminal mob: Fromm – Huebner [!] – Witzleben – Freiherr von Staufenberg [!]. You will inform all relevant Party authorities accordingly so that under no circumstances criminal elements can succeed in their attempt to seize control of the nation. Heil Hitler! M. Bormann²⁶⁹

The military schools, already on alert, quickly mobilized their motorized units and dispatched them according to plan.²⁷⁰ The commandant of the Krampnitz Panzertruppenschule, Colonel Harald Momm, had been the chef d’équipe of the

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 45 (24 July 1944); Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 425.  Teletype message Bormann, Führerhauptquartier, to all Gauleiter (Extremely Urgent – To be Serviced Immediately); IfZ, Fa 116, fol. 1.  Teletype message Bormann, Führerhauptquartier, to all Gauleiter (Extremely Urgent – To be Serviced Immediately); IfZ, Fa 116, fol. 2. Note that Fromm is listed first, and that several names are misspelt, indicating that the Führerhauptquartier was still not clear about who exactly was involved.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 434– 435.

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German dressage team at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; when the news of Hitler’s death reached him, he shouted across the busy officers’ mess: “Orderly, a bottle of champagne! The swine is dead!”²⁷¹ That remark could well have cost him his head. He was indeed arrested, but was eventually released in September 1944.²⁷² The Guard Battalion’s conduct was more ambivalent: The city commandant had reacted swiftly and alerted the battalion; Remer met Generalleutnant von Hase’s expectations and did as he was told.²⁷³ By 18:00, the soldiers under his command had sealed off the government district and therefore fulfilled their primary task. Just shortly after that, however, the Reich radio services started broadcasting the news of an attempt on Hitler’s life, and that the Führer had survived. Remer then proceeded to see Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels, who also held the position of Gauleiter of Berlin. From Goebbels’ office, around 19:00, Remer spoke on the telephone with Hitler, who ordered him to put down the insurrection in the capital. However, Remer’s first units did not arrive in the Bendlerblock until about midnight, even though the Replacement Army headquarters were only about a quarter of an hour’s walking distance from Goebbels’ office. They arrived just in time to provide the firing squad that executed the four officers whom Fromm had sentenced to death in a “summary court martial.” Even the Waffen-SS units in Lichterfelde, which had given the planners so many headaches beforehand, had done nothing, nor had any of the other “faithful” formations such as the Luftwaffe, the SD or the Gestapo, lifted a finger to support Nazi rule. Unlike on 15 July, the plainclothes police officers, promised by Nebe to carry out the arrests of Party leaders, never showed up. Nebe had overheard that a special squad had been dispatched to East Prussia to investigate the assassination attempt; he was one of the first in Berlin to realize that it had failed.²⁷⁴ Here, the role of Generaloberst Fromm deserves further analysis. As we have seen, Fromm was well aware of what some officers on his staff were plotting, although it does not seem certain that he knew his chief of staff was himself going to attempt to kill Hitler. According to his biographer Bernhard Kroener, Fromm, as always, had tried to safeguard himself against all eventualities. Kroener surmises that the Generaloberst begrudgingly accepted the fact that Stauffenberg acted without informing Fromm, his immediate superior. However, the fact

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 435.  HPA [Army Personnel Office] Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (2) to P3, c/o Herrn Oberstleutnant i. G. Kinitz (undated, mid-September 1944); BArch, RH 7/30.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 428 – 430.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 416; Harrison, “‘Alter Kämpfer,’” 419.

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that Stauffenberg arrested him at gunpoint and then locked him up, so Kroener believes, was an affront to Fromm’s self-image as an officer and a gentleman.²⁷⁵ After securing the Bendlerblock complex, the conspirators then proceeded to conduct the putsch according to the Valkyrie plans. Long before the first troops loyal to the Nazi regime arrived in the compound’s courtyard, however, a number of officers not involved in the putsch plans decided to put an end to the activities being carried out by Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Mertz. Foremost among them were the (General Staff) lieutenant colonels Herber, Pridun, and von der Heyde.²⁷⁶ As early as 21 July, Herber made a statement to the Gestapo regarding his own role, and not only was he promoted to colonel for it, but was also decorated by Hitler with the Iron Cross, First Class, for his “exemplary conduct while putting down the revolt of 20 July 1944.”²⁷⁷ Only a few months earlier, Stauffenberg had written positive assessments for Pridun and Herber. About the former, he had noted: “Strong, energetic personality. Firm demeanor, deft negotiator, ambitious … Faultless attitude to National Socialism … At times risks too much in pursuit of his ambition.”²⁷⁸ Regarding Herber, Stauffenberg had noted: “Clear, genuine personality with excellent technical knowledge and a purposeful will. Staunch National Socialist.”²⁷⁹ Delia Ziegler, Stauffenberg’s former secretary, later wrote a letter to the editor of the daily Die Welt in response to an article on von der Heyde. She insisted that Herber and von der Heyde had been promoted ahead of schedule, due to their role in putting the uprising down, and added: Heyde had been with Stauffenberg at the Kriegsakademie. No one can understand that he should have taken part in leading the countercoup. One has to ask why this particular officer could have been released as being in Class IVb [of de-Nazification procedures]?²⁸⁰

It may have helped von der Heyde that he had established contacts with the Organisation Gehlen, the budding postwar German intelligence service, then still

 Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 183 – 184. See also the very recent Neumärker and Tuchel, Der 20. Juli 1944.  For a more exhaustive account, including the three officers’ post-war careers, see Heinemann, “Das Ende des Staatsstreichs.”  OKH/HPA to Chef HRüst und BdE dated 26 August 1944; BArch, RW 59/191, fol. 7– 8; see also Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 698 – 699.  Assessment Oberstlt. d. G. Pridun, 1 March 1944; BArch, Pers 6/59047.  Assessment Oberstlt. d. G. Herber, 1 March 1944, BArch, Pers 6/276591.  Delia Ziegler, Minden, to the editor of Die Welt, Hamburg, undated [but reacting to an article on 31 July 1947]; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 370.

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under US control.²⁸¹ Olbricht’s son-in-law, Luftwaffe Major Friedrich Georgi, who was present in the Bendlerblock on the evening of 20 July 1944, is another eyewitness who insisted that these three officers had spearheaded the counteraction.²⁸² After the war, all three tried repeatedly to downplay their role in suppressing the uprising. Herber, above all, spared no effort to disprove allegations that he had been promoted to colonel because of this, even after the German Federal Archives’ Zentralnachweisstelle (the archive then holding it) had given him access to his personnel file. In a similar way, von der Heyde was told in 1962 that his job in the General Army Office had only been a lieutenant colonel’s posting, and that therefore, his promotion to colonel had indeed been ahead of the regular schedule. In 1953, Pridun sent an 11-page letter to Eberhard Zeller (the first Stauffenberg biographer), protesting his innocence and, in tearful prose, claiming Olbricht had abused his trust and that of the other officers – a charge not entirely without foundation. Contrary to the truth, he also claimed that the Guard Battalion (which he referred to as “Guard Regiment”) had shown up before he and Herber could have acted, anyway.²⁸³ But that is inaccurate: in October 1944, Generalleutnant Ernst Maisel, Deputy Head of the Army Personnel Office, had spoken to personnel officers, emphasizing the “arrest of traitors by Herber.”²⁸⁴ The shoot-outs in the hallways of the Bendlerblock compound were over by then, and Fromm had been released long before the first of Remer’s soldiers made an appearance after 23:00.²⁸⁵ All three personnel files reveal that the three officers were promoted in October 1944, effective 1 August, under the refer-

 Schmidt-Eenbom, “Der innenpolitische Einfluß,” 199.  Friedrich Georgi, Verlagsbuchhändler, Berlin-Dahlem, 26 September 1947, Betr.: Augenzeugenbericht über die Ereignisse im OKH Bendlerstrasse am 20. Juli 1944 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der entscheidenden Rolle der Obersten i. G. Herber und v.d. Heyde bei der Niederschlagung des Umsturzversuchs. [Eyewitness account about the events in the OKH Bendlerstraße on 20 July 1944 with special reference to the decisive role of colonels Herber and v.d. Heyde in suppressing the attempted coup d’état – Carbon Copy], IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 91r–92v.  Generalsekretär Karl Pridun, Bregenz, re: 20. Juli 1944. Covering letter to Eberhard Zeller, undated, and attached memorandum, dated 30 October 1953; IfZ, ZS 1769, fol. 3 – 13.  Memorandum, Adjutantenbesprechung 14 to 17 October 1944 at the HPA [Heerespersonalamt, Army Personnel Office], 16 October 1944; BArch, RH 7/978.  Friedrich Georgi, Verlagsbuchhändler, Berlin-Dahlem, 26 September 1947, Betr.: Augenzeugenbericht über die Ereignisse im OKH Bendlerstrasse am 20. Juli 1944 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der entscheidenden Rolle der Obersten i. G. Herber und v.d. Heyde bei der Niederschlagung des Umsturzversuchs. [Eyewitness account about the events in the OKH Bendlerstraße on 20 July 1944 with special reference to the decisive role of colonels Herber and v.d. Heyde in suppressing the attempted coup d’état – Carbon Copy], IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 91r–92v., at 92 r.

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ence number 1602/44 PA/Ag P 1/1, as a “Special Measure 20 July 1944.”²⁸⁶ Together with these three, a Lieutenant Colonel Kuban was also promoted, about whom little else is known.²⁸⁷ In a similar fashion, Major Remer was promoted, also to full colonel, skipping over the rank of lieutenant colonel entirely.²⁸⁸ In January 1945, while commanding at the front, he was promoted further to Generalmajor. ²⁸⁹ As opposed to the other three officers from the General Army Office, Remer would later inflate his own role on 20 July and allowed himself, with the aid of Goebbels’ propaganda, to be fêted as the savior of Nazism (the publicity of course never failed to point out that it had been from the Propaganda Minister’s office that the “decisive” call had been made). In August 1944, Remer also received the key to his home city, Neubrandenburg.²⁹⁰ Apart from these field-grade officers, a number of sergeants were commissioned as lieutenants, and a few privates and NCOs were promoted to higher ranks as well, but as far as the sources reveal, only staff from the General Army Office (AHA) and other agencies stationed in the Bendlerblock buildings, plus a lieutenant from Thirty-First Infantry Division, whose link to the events remains unclear.²⁹¹  Promotion to colonel with effect of 1 August 1944, Az Nr. 1602/44 PA/Ag P1/1; BArch, Pers 6/ 59047 (Pridun), Pers 6/276591 (Herber); Letter BA-ZNS II 17. Nr. 1929/62 H to Bolko v.d. Heyde, Friedrichsdorf ü. Bielefeld dated 16 November 1962, ibid., Pers 6/277104; Vorzugsweise Beförderungen aus Anlass der Ereignisse des 20. 7. 1944 [Preferential Promotion due to the Events of 20 July 1944 – Memorandum Bundesarchiv, ZNS Kornelimünster] dated 20 April 1977; BArch, RW 59/191, fol. 10.  Possibly, he is Oberst i. G. Hans Heinrich Kuban, until 5 March 1945 I a, 15. Army, http: //www.lexikon-der-Wehrmacht.de/Gliederungen/Armeen/15Armee.htm, retrieved 19 September 2018.  His personnel file does not seem to have survived. See, however Krüger, “Otto Ernst Remer,” 119 – 120. Nor is the personnel file of Hans-Werner Stirius still extant, who was still a lieutenant colonel on 20 July 1944 but had been promoted colonel by the end of the war. Molt, Von der Wehrmacht zur Bundeswehr, 171n42. See also this volume, Chapter 10.1.  Vorzugsweise Beförderungen aus Anlass der Ereignisse des 20. 7. 1944 [Preferential Promotion due to the Events of 20 July 1944 – Memorandum Bundesarchiv, ZNS Kornelimünster] dated 20 April 1977; BArch, RW 59/191, fol. 10.  Heinemann, “Das Ende des Staatsstreichs,” 17– 19.  Allgemeines Heeresamt, IIa: Festsetzung des RDA für die mit Wirkung vom 26. 8.1944 beförderten Angehörigen des AHA dated 5 September 1944; BArch, RW 59/191, fol. 9; in conjunction with Vorzugsweise Beförderungen aus Anlass der Ereignisse des 20. 7. 1944 [Preferential Promotion due to the Events of 20 July 1944 – Memorandum Bundesarchiv, ZNS Kornelimünster] dated 20 April 1977; BArch, RW 59/191, fol. 10. Most likely, this list is not complete, e. g., it does not include Remer’s aide Lieutenant (reserve) Hagen, who in civil life had been working in the Ministry of Propaganda. He had brought Remer and Goebbels together and was promoted

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Once he had been freed from his arrest, Generaloberst Fromm declared that an impromptu flying court (consisting of himself only) had sentenced Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz, and Haeften to be shot. Hoepner begged for mercy, claiming he would be able to justify himself, and was therefore arrested (The next day, Himmler interviewed him in person.²⁹² He was then tried in the People’s Court and hanged immediately afterwards). Beck, the former chief of the Army General Staff, was given an opportunity to shoot himself, and when he failed twice, Fromm instructed a sergeant to finish him off. Fromm’s objective does not seem to have been to get rid of officers who might implicate him in the plot but, rather, he seems to have felt that he could wipe off the “ignominy and injury to his personal honor only through the death of the officers involved.”²⁹³ The fact remains that it had been neither the SS nor the Gestapo, nor any Party agencies which had put an end to the plot, but “loyal” elements within the Army itself,²⁹⁴ and Himmler himself was well aware of this.²⁹⁵ The head of the Reich Main Security Office, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, went so far as to explain away his inactivity by claiming he had not wanted the Army and the SS to shoot at each other, which might have driven Army units into the arms of the conspirators.²⁹⁶ From the moment it became clear that a putsch was underway, and once the fiction of an Army preventing a take-over by the Party and the SS could no longer be maintained, the consequences were exactly what Stauffenberg and the military conspirators had predicted: The Army itself refused to be involved in any activity against Hitler. That, however, did not prevent the regime from quietly promoting some of the loyal officers involved, but otherwise making the Army appear in public as the driving force of the failed coup.²⁹⁷

captain for his efforts – thus further enhancing the role of the Propaganda Ministry in these events.  Uhl et al., Die Organisation des Terrors, 809 (21 July 1944).  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 701.  Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, 160 – 162.  In a speech to Army officers in Grafenwöhr on 25 July, Himmler had stated expressly: “positive: situation rectified by Army”: Uhl et al., Die Organisation des Terrors, 815 (25 July 1944).  Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, 161.  Friedrich Georgi, Verlagsbuchhändler, Berlin-Dahlem, 26 September 1947, Betr.: Augenzeugenbericht über die Ereignisse im OKH Bendlerstrasse am 20. Juli 1944 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der entscheidenden Rolle der Obersten i. G. Herber und v.d. Heyde bei der Niederschlagung des Umsturzversuchs [Eyewitness account about the events in the OKH Bendlerstraße on 20 July 1944 with special reference to the decisive role of colonels Herber and v.d. Heyde in suppressing the attempted coup d’état – Carbon Copy], IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 91r‑92v.

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7.5 Communications Those with an interest in the 20 July 1944 uprising usually remember three news items: (1) The conspirators’ teletype message beginning with the much-quoted words, “The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead!” (2) the phone conversation between Hitler and Major Remer, re-enacted in every movie made about the events, with Hitler’s voice enquiring: “Remer, do you recognize my voice?!” And (3) Hitler’s radio speech, late at night, preserved in a low-quality recording, with the infamous claim that it had been a “very small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous, and criminally stupid officers”²⁹⁸ which had been responsible. The analysis of this subchapter is focused on the means by which these messages were transmitted, rather than their content. Is it a coincidence that the military should have sent teletype messages while the regime would use the telephone and, above all, the most effective mass medium of the day, the radio?²⁹⁹ It is nothing new that the Nazis were masterly in their use of the radio. The coup planners had taken that into account, but on that fateful day, they could not prevent Hitler and Goebbels from using all channels available to them to foil the uprising, which the chief Nazis eventually succeeded in doing. The idea of an “uprising without assassination” (see Chapter 7.1) had initially included a plan to “isolate” Hitler by cutting his communications. The pious hope was that it might be possible to disrupt the Führerhauptquartier’s links to the outside world for about 24 hours, and to use this period to issue orders to all fronts and thus create an irreversible situation. As the head of the Wehrmacht signals services, 57-year-old General der Nachrichtentruppe Erich Fellgiebel was involved in these aspects of the plans, as was his deputy, Generalleutnant Fritz Thiele. At first glance, this seemed logical: Fellgiebel was an accomplished communications specialist, having taken over from General (later Field Marshal) von Kluge control of all Army communications in 1934; the Wehrmacht communications web that eventually emerged thereafter had been largely his creation.³⁰⁰ In the spring of 1943, Fellgiebel had the feasibility of this scheme analyzed. The result was that the attempt would require preparations on a scale which could in no way go unnoticed.³⁰¹ In other words: the whole idea was not practi-

 NSDAP daily newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter on 22 July 1944, quoted in KeyserlingkRehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 72.  This sub-chapter is based largely on my paper: Heinemann, “General Erich Fellgiebel.”  Report by Dr. Hellmut Arntz, Fellgiebel’s aide; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 1. For Fellgiebel see also Keil, “Erich Fellgiebel.”  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 329 (31 August 1944).

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cable. To make matters worse, the SS began to create its own communications network independent of the Army’s. As the Waffen-SS was organizing its own army command (i. e. a command authority between corps and army-group levels), a signals regiment had to be established, mostly recruited from staff of the postal service (Reichspost) which was in charge of all civilian communication networks. The head of the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt), SS Generalleutnant Gottlob Berger, with a bit of double entendre, pointed out to Himmler that even if the plan for an SS Army did not materialize, it would be possible with these communication units to control the whole of the Reich communications system in the event of any kind of disturbance.³⁰²

Naval Judge Berthold Graf Stauffenberg and Lieutenant Commander Sidney Jessen quietly asked Captain Max Kupfer, who they knew was trustworthy, to what extent it would be possible to disrupt the Kriegsmarine communications network, but to their chagrin, they were obliged to report back to the Bendlerblock that a full block would not be feasible.³⁰³ Olbricht tasked his head of signals, Colonel Kurt Haßel, with securing signals installations in the Greater Berlin region, saying as a pretext that they might be in danger in case of internal unrest. In late April and early May 1944, Haßel had to confirm that the plan was still feasible, in case of damage from air raids, changes due to troop deployments, etc.³⁰⁴ Following all this, the planners focused on preparing for the situation after Hitler’s death. As long as the Führer lived, it would be impossible to deny him the use of the communication networks for any length of time. In early July 1944, Fellgiebel again briefed a limited circle of plotters on how he planned to control the various channels.³⁰⁵ However, in yet another meeting, on 14 July, he had to admit that even if Hitler was killed, it would be impossible to cut the Führerhauptquartier off entirely.³⁰⁶ From this point of view as well, all alternatives to an assassination attempt were clearly illusory, and this reinforced the view that the Führer would have to be eliminated by force. Even then, it would be necessary to swiftly obtain control of the means of communication. To achieve that, Fellgiebel was to disconnect the Wolfschanze in East Prussia from all networks while his deputy, Thiele, was to deploy  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1064.  Report Dr Sydney Jessen (1946), “Der Anteil der Kriegsmarine am Attentat,” 8; IfZ, ZS A-29II, Nr. 32, fol. 2– 3.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 376 (11 September 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 91 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 357; IMT vol. 33, Doc. 3881-PS, 317– 319.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 329 (31 August 1944).

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about 20 signals officers around Berlin where the network was to remain available for the military opposition to use. With the support of the Valkyrie combat units deployed from Döberitz and Cottbus, they were to seize both the civilian and military nodes as well as the essential broadcasting installations, stopping the latter from making any further broadcasts. One of their targets was the “Broadcasting House” (Haus des Rundfunks) on Masurenallee (still today the regional Berlin/Brandenburg radio station), together with the transmitters in Nauen, Tegel, Königs Wusterhausen, and – further south – Herzberg. Taking them off the air would be an essential precondition for a successful coup. Here as well, all plans foresaw a certain advance alert which could not be risked again after the events of 15 July: “Things developed so quickly that an advance alert on a grand scale could no longer be guaranteed.”³⁰⁷ The autumn 1943 plans provided for seizing the radio transmitter in Heilsberg, East Prussia (now Lidzbark Warmiński in Poland) in order to use it for the new government’s broadcasts.³⁰⁸ Once the conspiracy’s center of gravity had shifted to Berlin, however, occupying Broadcasting House would open up the possibility of spreading the conspirators’ version of the coup narrative throughout the Reich on a wider scale. In early July, another major meeting in Berchtesgaden (the Führerhauptquartier was still in Bavaria at that point) discussed again “insulating the means of communication in favor of the conspirators.”³⁰⁹ On the fourteenth, Wagner had a similar meeting with Thiele, now under the new premises of Hitler’s headquarters having relocated to East Prussia.³¹⁰ On 15 July, the signals officers promised by Thiele were available as planned. As a consequence, alerting them in advance was another one of those measures which could not be immediately repeated.³¹¹ Like the entire coup planning, the communications part was hampered from the beginning by the fact that all measures could only be initiated once it was confirmed that the assassination attempt had actually taken place – i. e., much later than originally planned. It is unclear whether the coded message that the attempt would be made that day was transmitted to the conspirators in the Zossen OKH headquarters at 11:00

 Report by Dr. Hellmut Arntz, Fellgiebel’s aide; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 3.  Hoffmann, “Oberst i. G. Henning von Tresckow,” 350.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 91 (28 July 1944); Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 357; IMT vol. 33, Doc. 3881-PS, 317– 319.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 329 – 330 (31 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 226 (15 August 1944) and 377 (11 September 1944).

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or at noon. In any case, following that, all lines from Zossen to Wolfschanze were cut until late in the afternoon.³¹² Stauffenberg’s bomb detonated at 12:42 p.m. Following the explosion, the Führerhauptquartier security apparatus set in motion all measures planned for such an emergency and sealed off the entire compound. That included cutting all telephone and teletype links – not because the conspirators initiated it, but because it was an automatic measure provided for by the regime itself. After all, it was in the Nazi’s own interest to prevent rumors of such an event from spreading uncontrollably throughout the Reich, causing potential uncertainty and instability. In a similar way, the SS had shut down its repeater stations in Rastenburg and Insterburg (now Chernyakhovsk, Russia). The large OKH operator station “Anna” and the Lötzen repeater station had been shut down by Fellgiebel’s officers.³¹³ Nonetheless, soon after the smoke of the explosion cleared, Fellgiebel knew that Hitler had survived, a fact that he passed on immediately to Zossen and Berlin.³¹⁴ He reached Thiele in Berlin, whom he informed using the ingeniously ambiguous phrase: “Something awful has happened. The Führer lives.”³¹⁵ Obviously, Fellgiebel assumed that Thiele would inform the other members of the conspiracy. In Zossen, he reached the Quartermaster General, Wagner; he clearly voiced his opinion that, nevertheless, the coup d’état should go ahead as planned.³¹⁶ Thiele had other ideas. He knew that nothing could be achieved as long as Hitler was alive. Now it was time to save his own skin, first by making himself unavailable throughout the afternoon. By 14:00, Wagner seems to have passed on the news about the failed bomb attempt to Olbricht, who was in the Bendlerblock. On 15 July, Olbricht had initiated the alert measures envisaged in “Valkyrie,” and had been dressed down by Fromm about it. Now, he decided to do nothing. Only at about 15:00 did his chief of staff, Mertz, make sure that the Valkyrie orders were being distributed. More than two hours had passed since the bomb had exploded; the orders should have gone out more than five hours earlier. The entire course of the day confirmed the predictions that cutting off the Führerhauptquartier would be impossible as long as Hitler was alive. At no point were the Wolfschanze’s communications with Zossen and Berlin interrupt-

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 407.  Report by Dr. Hellmut Arntz, Fellgiebel’s aide; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 4.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 98 – 99 (30 July 1944).  Report Dr Hellmut Arntz, Fellgiebel’s aide; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 4; similarly, Gisevius, Bis zum bitteren Ende [1960], 561– 562 (not in the English edition, Gisevius, To the Bitter End).  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 411– 412.

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ed completely, and the restrictions ordered by the regime itself, limited in scope as they were, had been rescinded by 16:00.³¹⁷ Around that time, Thiele reported to Olbricht and Mertz that a radio communiqué was being prepared about Hitler surviving an attempt on his life. By that time, Thiele must have also known that Hitler had decided to speak to the nation on the radio as soon as possible. However, a mobile studio would have to be brought up from Königsberg first and lines had to be laid. All this would take time, so the Führer’s message would not be broadcast immediately. When Stauffenberg’s courier plane, a fast Heinkel He 111, had landed in Rangsdorf and once he had established telephone communications with this headquarters, he was shocked to hear that the elaborate alert measures had hardly been initiated. On the other hand, the Nazi system apparently had felt no need to be proactive, either. As we have seen, the bomb was initially believed to be the act of a lone assailant, and even when it transpired that Stauffenberg had escaped and taken a plane to Berlin, the Gestapo did no more than send a single officer to arrest him in the Bendlerblock. But then the teletype messages from Berlin drew the Führerhauptquartier’s attention to the fact that there was more behind this. Simultaneously, Stauffenberg was energetically driving the putsch from his headquarters in the Bendlerblock. What ensued was a race between the regime and the conspirators. It turned out to be decisive that, after 18:00, the radio kept broadcasting the news of the failed attempt on Hitler’s life (even if not yet naming a perpetrator) and reiterated that the Führer would speak later on that night. This again leads us back to the question of why the radio stations had not been brought under control as planned. After being alerted, the Infantry School in Döberitz had dispatched a patrol commanded by one of its instructors, Major Friedrich Jakob, who had been decorated with the Knight’s Cross. Following his instructions, he led his companysized unit to Broadcasting House in Masurenallee and demanded that all programs be cancelled forthwith. While his men began to set up heavy weaponry outside, even including some mortars, Major Jakob allowed himself to be taken to a central control room, and soon enough, all indicators turned to zero.³¹⁸ However, the infantrymen did not know much about the technical aspects of the radio operations, and the signals officers had not shown up. This

 Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 363; Kopp, Paul von Hase, 246; Report by Dr. Hellmut Arntz, Fellgiebel’s aide; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 4; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 330 (31 August 1944).  Schober, “Eine Chance blieb ungenutzt,” 55 – 56.

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had been Thiele’s job, but he by then had decided to abandon the conspirators. So, while the Döberitz infantrymen believed they had successfully interrupted further broadcasting, the radio staff, intensely loyal to Goebbels and the Nazi Party, kept working from an alternative control room nearby.³¹⁹ The patrol that had been sent to seize the Tegel transmitter had a similar experience. (After 20 July 1944, Major Jakob was posted as battalion commander to the eastern front and for a while led even a regiment. He also received the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross.) Throughout the afternoon of 20 July 1944, nobody in the Bendlerblock paid much attention to securing the broadcasting stations. Neither the Military District Command (whose cooperation was less than assured) nor the city commandant inquired whether this part of the Valkyrie orders was being carried out. After 18:00 Stauffenberg “mentioned rather casually to Colonel Kurt Haßel (responsible for signals within the AHA) that the German radio [Deutschlandsender] was still broadcasting, someone should go and stop them.”³²⁰ Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators now made use of the conventional military means of communication. It took time to issue the alert orders by teletype, as they were classified “Top Secret” (Geheime Kommandosache), meaning each had to be encoded separately, a complicated process which took time. In Military District Command I (Königsberg), one of the more important recipients due to the many headquarters stationed there, and because the eastern front was perilously close to its borders, the first “Valkyrie” order arrived only at about 18:00.³²¹ By that time, Keitel had already telephoned from Wolfschanze, transmitted his version of the events, and given orders to dispatch at once a mobile studio so that Hitler could speak on the radio. Lieutenant Colonel von Erdmann at the Military District Command and Captain Roland von Hößlin had arranged Möwe II (“Seagull II”) as codeword for Hößlin’s units to proceed to Königsberg, but as it happened, the password was never used because the main precondition – Hitler’s death – had not been met. One of those who spread the news of Hitler’s survival was Major Ernst Ferber on Generalmajor Stieff’s staff.³²² Informal contacts like this (and in many instances, it is impossible to determine the exact flow of information) in combination with the broadcast news fed the growing doubts among the officers in the Bendlerblock that eventually resulted in the counterinsurgency within its hallways.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 432– 433.  Kopp, Paul von Hase, 232.  Hoffmann, “Zum Ablauf des Staatsstreichversuches,” 382– 385.  Ferber went on to become a four-star general in the Bundeswehr and NATO Commander-inChief of Allied Forces Central Europe.

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By 15:00, more than two hours after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded, Himmler ordered an alert for all SS formations within the Reich; the SS teletype network was unaffected by any disruptions. Even so, as we have seen, the SS never intervened anywhere. There has been a continuing debate about whether National Socialism had modernizing influences on German economy, architecture, infrastructure, and whether it allowed for upward social mobility.³²³ For many conspirators in the national-conservative resistance to Hitler, the social engineering undertaken by the Third Reich to bring about its much-vaunted Volksgemeinschaft was a central motive for their decision to join the conspiracy. At first glance, the hugely different use of the means of communication can also be subsumed under categories of a “fast,” “modern” Nazi “movement” versus the much slower, conservative military. It is certainly true that the conspirators used more conventional means of military communication (which included the liaison officers we discussed earlier), and that they lost time while trying to compete with the much faster radio broadcasts. But that is not why the uprising failed. The conspirators had made sure to include in their planning provisions to deny the regime the use of its mass media apparatus. All surviving orders and plans (“calendars”) devote much attention to this aspect. Stauffenberg, the young colonel, knew as much as the seasoned politician Carl Goerdeler about how important it would be to reach the masses first in order to control the message. Texts for radio broadcasts had been prepared, and General der Artillerie Fritz Lindemann was waiting to read them out later in the evening.³²⁴ If the uprising came off to a slow start on the afternoon of the 20 July, that was at least partly due to the fact that the conspirators had an excellent communications plan in place. These channels, however, were first to transport the news that Hitler had survived, so that all signals officers who should have been involved, and Thiele in particular, backed out upon the news that Stauffenberg’s bomb had failed to take out its target. Again, the basic tenet of the military coup planning turned out to be true: as long as Hitler lived, the opposition stood no chance against him. On 21 July, Thiele succeeded Fellgiebel, who had been arrested during the night. He addressed the officers on his staff, reviling his predecessors in the worst terms. It did not save him, though: on 11 August, Thiele, too, was relieved of his command and arrested. Ten days later, he was sentenced and executed.

 Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung”; Frei, “Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?”, 378 – 379.  Mühlen, Sie gaben ihr Leben, 46 – 47.

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General Fellgiebel played an important role as one of the compelling forces of the conspiracy. He does not deserve to be characterized, in films shot decades later, as a phlegmatic alcoholic.³²⁵

7.6 A Realistic Plan? It is trite to call the failed uprising, with the benefit of hindsight, amateurish or “dilettantish,”³²⁶ especially when serious factual inaccuracies support this sort of armchair generalship.³²⁷ Nor is there any point in listing which units would have remained “faithful to the Führer”; as we have seen, the conspirators themselves knew that the Wehrmacht would not march against Hitler as long as he was alive. A more relevant question might be whether the coup d’état would have had a chance of succeeding if Hitler had been killed by Stauffenberg’s bomb. In 1974, the historian Eberhard Jäckel asked it – and replied in the negative. Any counterfactual historiography is problematic, and that applies to Jäckel’s speculative paper as well. The Stuttgart professor was right in stating that it was not Remer’s famous phone conversation with Hitler that changed the fortunes of war. However, he postulates that “the decisive center of power [was] in any case not Berlin, but the Führerhauptquartier in Rastenburg.”³²⁸ He departs from the premise that Hitler’s potential successors – Göring, Himmler, and Bormann (Goebbels was, after all, in Berlin), all assembled in East Prussia – would have quickly agreed on who was to take up the torch, and could then have started a concerted nationwide countermove. This premise, though, seems doubtful. While Hitler had indeed nominated Göring as his potential successor in 1934 and then again in 1941, Jäckel probably overstates the relevance of this arrangement in

 Above all in “Operation Valkyrie” (2008) where Tom Wilkinson played the role.  Dirks and Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle, 172; or see Jones, Countdown to Valkyrie, ix: “With military courage, determination and energy – alas, not always matched by military efficiency – the conspirators set about a final attempt to murder Adolf Hitler.”  Generaloberst Beck did not spend the evening in the Bendlerblock in civilian clothes because Generaloberst Hoepner had accidentally donned Beck’s tunic, as claimed in Dirks and Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle, 176, but because he wanted to emphasize his role as the new civilian head of state. For their volume, see Christian Hartmann’s review in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 4 September 1999: “Contemporary and military history seem to degenerate into a self-service store where anyone can help themselves. Especially when it comes to the Wehrmacht, it seems to be common knowledge that no attempt at differentiation is worth the effort.”  Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 70.

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1944. Under the conditions prevailing in the summer of 1944, neither Himmler nor Bormann nor Goebbels would have allowed the drug-addicted failed commander in chief of (what was left of) the Luftwaffe to overtake them in their quest for power. The Third Reich’s polycratic structures made it highly unlikely that Hitler’s minions would have agreed on a joint response to the coup. It also seems questionable whether East Prussia, perilously close to the front line, would have been the preferred location for an internal power struggle rather than the capital, Berlin, with its concentration of government institutions. It also seems safe to assume that the conspirators had made plans for securing East Prussia and the headquarters there; the fact that we know nothing about them does not in itself prove that they did not exist. What could have been the 1944 rationale for not assigning troops to this purpose after everything had been prepared so painstakingly in the preceding autumn? The motorized battalion which Roland von Hößlin commanded had been destined for Königsberg, but it seems reasonable to assume that other units, probably stationed closer to the headquarters, had been detailed to secure them and, above all, to arrest Himmler. Jäckel has a valid point in saying that “control of the mass media”³²⁹ played a decisive role. However, he underestimates the conspirators’ preparations to seize control of the broadcasting network. As we have seen, they had been quite circumspect in this regard (as in many others), but here as elsewhere, the failure was due to the fact that Hitler had survived. When all is said and done, Jäckel’s paper reflects the state of scholarship of the 1970s. On the basis of what we know now, it seems reasonable to state that the conspiratorial plans for a military putsch achieved the maximum of what was possible at the time. The fact that the bomb did not kill the Führer was also due to the fact that Stauffenberg did not ignite both fuses and did not pack both bombs. Was this a simple mistake? One will probably have to look deeper and accept that the severely handicapped General Staff officer was not the ideal assassin but had to assume the role as there was no one else available. Seen from this perspective, the failure of the 20 July 1944 uprising has its root cause in it being a venture of the very few – both civilians and military. Relative to that, the internal conflicts and contradictions are far less relevant in explaining why the resistance did not achieve its aim.³³⁰ Those very few who remained determined to proceed with the coup were well aware of the probabilities of failure. Still, it seems safe to say that the up-

 Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 72.  Cf. Schieder, “Zwei Generationen im militärischen Widerstand,” 438.

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rising was not entirely doomed from the very beginning.³³¹ The “Valkyrie” plans relied on the proven speed with which the Replacement Army could be mobilized as well as on the widespread antipathy within the Army against the Waffen-SS and the Nazi Party in general. It was a genuine putsch attempt and not merely a symbolic act.³³² But if it had succeeded, would it have made the difference, militarily and politically? Or would it have had to bear the stigma of having been a “stab in the back,” as Jäckel notes?³³³

 Kopp, Paul von Hase, 229.  Entirely absurd on this is Schmidt-Hackenberg, 20. Juli 1944, see above Chapter 7.1.  Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 76.

8 Consequences of the failed coup d’état 8.1 The Army “Court of Honor” Four of the officers at the center of the conspiracy (Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz, and Haeften) were executed on the night of 20 – 21 July; Beck had chosen suicide earlier. Others were arrested almost immediately afterwards, and the Gestapo investigations soon revealed that far more people had been involved in the conspiracy than had been initially assumed. The Third Reich “justice” apparatus spared no detail in finding ways to prosecute this “treason.” It is characteristic of the Nazi system that even in such high-profile, blatant case, it was not willing to do away with legalistic formalities. On 28 July, the new head of the Army Personnel Office, General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf, noted in his war diary that a flying court martial was to try the “traitors.”¹ General der Infanterie Walter Schroth was to be the presiding officer, and Generalleutnante Heinrich Kirchheim, Karl-Wilhelm Specht, and Otto Hitzfeld should act as judges. General der Infanterie von Kortzfleisch (who, as commander of Military District III, had opposed the uprising) was to lead the prosecution.² Those plans, however, never came to pass. Instead, the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) would hear the first cases on 7 and 8 August 1944. In order for the military conspirators to be tried in that venue, a process had to be found by which they could be removed from military jurisdiction and made subject to the infamous, (technically) civilian “People’s Court”.³ On 30 July, Himmler took the matter up with Keitel and Hitler.⁴ The next day, Minister of Justice Otto Thierack informed Reich Chief Prosecutor (Oberreichsanwalt) Ernst Lautz of the newly formulated plans.⁵ Two days later, on 2 August, Hitler consti-

 Burgdorf’s predecessor, Schmundt, had been severely injured by Stauffenberg’s bomb and eventually succumbed to his wounds on 1 October, after having been promoted General der Infanterie by Hitler on 1 September.  Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 180 (fol. 184, 28 July 1944).  The “People’s Court” under its President Roland Freisler had been created to try politically sensitive cases.  Note Heinrich Himmler for briefing with the Führer; GDW, Doc. 88. See also Himmler, “Die Rede,” 383. In Nuremberg, Keitel claimed that he had initially insisted on the competency of the Reichskriegsgericht (the supreme military court – Görlitz, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, 335), but this seems to be no more than a defensive lie.  Hett and Tuchel, “Die Reaktionen,” 379; Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, 70. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-010

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tuted an “Army Court of Honor” (Ehrenhof), which was to recommend to him those officers convicted of having been involved in the assassination attempt and who therefore should be expelled forthwith from the Wehrmacht. Over and beyond that, the “Court of Honor” was to nominate those who were simply suspected of involvement and who were to be “discharged”;⁶ from the beginning, the differentiation between “expulsion” and “discharge” was purely semantic. Gerd von Rundstedt, the Army’s oldest field marshal, would preside, even though Hitler had dismissed him – for a second time – only a few weeks before, on 2 July.⁷ He would be joined on the court by Field Marshal Keitel, the Army’s highest-ranking officer, as well as Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, whom Hitler had made Chief of Army General Staff on the evening of 20 July. In practical terms, this job had been reduced to the day-to-day running of the eastern front, but it still carried substantial prestige that dated back to the days of Moltke the Elder.⁸ This is relevant in view of the fact that several of the officers who were to be expelled or discharged came from within the ranks of the General Staff, in particular from the OKH. ⁹ Another member of the court was 62-year-old General der Infanterie Walter Schroth, whom Hitler had decorated with the Knight’s Cross in 1941. In early 1942, however, Field Marshal von Kluge, at the urging of Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, had relieved him of his command for giving criminal orders.¹⁰ Beginning in April 1942, Schroth commanded the Dresden Military District and, later, took the helm of Military District Command XII, Wiesbaden. At the trials, he represented the Replacement Army, another central element of the military conspiracy. Himmler met him personally on 26 July,¹¹ but on 6 October 1944, Schroth was killed in a car accident. Finally, Hitler appointed Generalleutnant (later General der Infanterie) KarlWilhelm Specht to the panel. Born in 1894, he was conspicuously younger than the other judges. In September 1942, he had taken over the Döberitz Infan Order by Hitler to Keitel, Rundstedt, Guderian, Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, and Kirchheim, dated 2 August 1944, IfZ, Fd 44, fol. 95 – 99, also in the holdings of GDW. See also Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 186 (fol. 190, 2 August 1944).  Huber, Gerd von Rundstedt, 287– 288, is rather apologetic about this aspect.  Macksey, “Generaloberst Heinz Guderian”; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 369.  Meyer, “Generaloberst Guderian,” 14– 15, assumes that Guderian’s prime motive for serving on the Court of Honor was to prevent Himmler from gaining even more influence over the Army. See also Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 369.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 112. I am grateful to my long-standing colleague Dr Georg Meyer, Freiburg, for pointing out this context to me.  Uhl et al., Die Organisation des Terrors, 817 (26 July 1944).

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try School and had been promoted Generalleutnant there. As of December 1943, he was the Inspector of Army Education, representing an essential part of elite manipulation. Specht was a prime example of the young, bourgeois general whom Hitler wished to serve as an archetype for remodeling the Army both ideologically and socially.¹² He was also one of the officers who were believed to have “successfully … resisted the revolt.”¹³ Finally, two deputies were appointed, General der Infanterie Karl Kriebel, born in 1888 and commanding Military District VII (Munich), as another representative of the Replacement Army, and Generalleutnant Heinrich Kirchheim from the OKH, born 1882, who stood in for Guderian during sessions when the latter was unavailable.¹⁴ The Court of Honor met for the first time on 4 August 1944 in Berlin-Dahlem. The deputy head of the Army Personnel Office, Generalmajor (later Generalleutnant) Ernst Maisel, was also present as secretary; in later sessions, the new head of personnel, General der Infanterie Burgdorf, took part himself taking notes.¹⁵ At the first session, a list of 22 officers was submitted for expulsion. This included, however, nine who had been shot on the night of 20 July or who had since committed suicide, as well as Major Joachim Kuhn, who was by then in Soviet captivity. Hitler confirmed the proposal the next day, 5 August. All 12 remaining officers were sentenced to death by the People’s Court during its August sessions. Another four who had been “only” discharged were tried later and also executed.¹⁶ Altogether, the Court of Honor was convened four or five times; it recommended 55 Army officers to be expelled and another 29 to be discharged. In all instances, Hitler accepted these “proposals” which had been cleared before with him, anyway.¹⁷ Three further sessions were held on 14 and 24 August and on 14 September. At each of the sessions, representatives of the Gestapo, the investigating authority for all the cases, presented evidence; this was handled either by SS-Obergruppenführer (General) Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Head of the Reich Main Security Office, or by SS-Gruppenführer (equivalent to a Generalleutnant) Heinrich Müller (also

 Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 311.  Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 168, fol 172 (20 July 1944).  In this, I follow the account in Guderian, Panzer Leader, 345 – 347, even though in other respects it is hard to reconcile with the main body of sources.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 525.  HPA Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (1) 124/44 gKdos. dated 16 September 1944: Betr. 20. Juli 1944; GDW. Confirmation in Görlitz, Generalfeldmarschall Keitel, 334.  Hett and Tuchel, “Die Reaktionen,” 379.

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known as “Gestapo Müller”), the chief of the Gestapo. ¹⁸ In cases where the accused’s involvement in the conspiracy was obvious or where admissions of guilt had been obtained by whichever means, the court did not take long to reach a decision. The defendants themselves were not permitted at the proceedings; as a rule, they learned about their expulsion from the Wehrmacht when they received the written charges against them, usually the night before their trial. It is still open to debate to what extent the Army officers on the Court of Honor made an effort to save the accused chief of staff of Army Group B, Generalleutnant Hans Speidel. By 25 August, the Army Personnel Office knew about the allegations against Speidel, but Field Marshal Model, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Group, rejected all potential successors nominated by Personnel, so Speidel remained in his post until 4 September.¹⁹ Even then, he was allowed to visit the convalescing Field Marshal Rommel in his home in Herrlingen, near Ulm, on 6 September before he was arrested the next morning. Speidel’s case was discussed at a subsequent session of the court on 10 October, but the judges found that he should be neither expelled nor discharged.²⁰ David Irving claims that Speidel could only be saved by the court placing all responsibility on Field Marshal Rommel, intensely disliked among general staff officers anyway,²¹ while Speidel insisted until his death that he never implicated Rommel²²; no final clarification will most likely ever be possible. There were cases when an initial arrest did not necessarily mean expulsion or discharge from the Army, or subsequentlyto trial and execution. Head of the General Staff’s Operations Department Generalleutnant Adolf Heusinger (who had himself been injured by the bomb blast) and Stauffenberg’s regimental comrade, Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Sauerbruch were arrested for having had knowledge of the plot but were eventually released.²³ Some other officers were “handed over to Army Personnel Office for further proceedings”²⁴ – a category not envisaged initially. These officers would not normally have to leave the Wehr-

 See Kirchheim’s account in Neitzel, Abgehört, 370 – 371, although in some other instances, his statements are hard to reconcile with the truth.  Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 222, fol. 226 (25 August 1944).  Written report Keitel to Hitler dated 10 October 1944, http: //wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/ de/nodes/2288#page/1/mode/grid/zoom/1, accessed 30 October 2018. I am grateful to Professor Johannes Tuchel of the GDW for having pointed this out to me.  Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 435 – 439.  Speidel, “Gegendarstellung.”  Ueberschär, “Der ‘Ehrenhof’”, 24; Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 266 – 290; Feldmeyer and Meyer, Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, 31– 34; Sauerbruch, “Bericht.”  Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 253, fol. 256 (14 September 1944); Ueberschär, “Der ‘Ehrenhof’”, 24.

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macht; a case in point is Colonel Johann-Adolf Graf Kielmansegg who did not return to General Staff duty but was given command of a frontline regiment instead.²⁵ The Court of Honor was a perfidious instrument to deprive officers involved in the conspiracy of their status and, as we will see, to further subdue the Army. We will probably never know why, even so, none of the high-ranking officers refused to serve on it. In his memoirs, Guderian claims that he made an unsuccessful attempt to avoid this imposition.²⁶ Rundstedt voiced some resentment but claimed later that he felt the proceedings were in the Army’s best interest.²⁷ However, this should be seen in the light of Rundstedt’s later morale-boosting slogans.²⁸ At Rommel’s elaborate military funeral, for example, Rundstedt (who most likely was not aware of the real circumstances of Rommel’s death) claimed that Rommel’s “heart belonged to his Führer,” and thus became became an agent of the Third Reich’s mendacious propaganda.²⁹ Four days before the court’s fourth session, on 14 September, Keitel informed all Army officers that it had concluded its work.³⁰ Two days after the session, on 16 September, a list of names of the officers who had been expelled or discharged was transmitted to a select group of Army recipients which included the commanders in chief of army groups as well as the commanders of the military districts.³¹ This was a clear indicator that no further sessions were expected (the session regarding Speidel, on 10 October, had to be specially scheduled). The highly restricted group of recipients and the classification as geheime Kommandosache (above even Top Secret) are an indication that this information was not to be disseminated too widely within the Army. Obviously, the regime was concerned that the large number of names, many of them quite well known, might contradict the official line of the plot having been the work of a “very small clique of dishonourable traitors.” Also, in view of the increasingly desperate situation on all fronts, it seemed advisable not to unsettle the officer corps

 Feldmeyer and Meyer, Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg, 34; Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 189, fol. 193 (4 August 1944).  Guderian, Panzer Leader, 345 – 346.  Huber, Gerd von Rundstedt, 289; see also Vogel, “Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt,” 230.  Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939 – 1945, 410, 416.  Völkischer Beobachter, 20 October 1944; IfZF, F 13612; Reuth, Erwin Rommel, 130; Remy, Mythos Rommel, 331.  OKH/GFM Keitel, HPA Ag P2/Chefgr Ia, dated 10 September 1944, Betr.: 20. Juli 1944; BArch, MSg 1/48, fol. 15; also in the holdings of GDW. Meyer, “Auswirkungen,” 298 – 299.  HPA Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (1) 124/44 gKdos. dated 16 September 1944: Betr. 20. Juli 1944, GDW Holdings. See also Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 256, fol. 259 (17 September 1944).

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even further.³² A document held in Russian archives indicates, though, that the 10 October session mentioned above did indeed take place.³³ By the end of October, the field marshals not on active duty were also informed, but without the document being classified as geheime Kommandosache. ³⁴ It is generally accepted in the literature that the reason for this procedure was that the Army officers in question were subject to military jurisdiction and could therefore not be tried before the People’s Court. Removing the accused from the Wehrmacht first was thus a legal necessity.³⁵ The existence of separate military jurisdiction had been part of Prussian military tradition, but it was eliminated during the Weimar period. The three lieutenants charged in the Ulm Reichswehr trial in 1930 (see chapter 3.6) had been arrested by the civilian police, and had been tried before the Reichsgericht (Reich Court of Justice), leading to futile protests from a few officers including their regimental commander, Colonel Ludwig Beck.³⁶ Only under the Third Reich was a separate military jurisdiction reintroduced. During the war, the Reichskriegsgericht (Reich Court Martial) had maintained its competences rather successfully. As we have seen, the members of the Red Orchestra group, both Luftwaffe officers and civilians, had been sentenced to death by that court in December 1942 and January 1943.³⁷ The soldiers active in the White Rose group, on the other hand, had been expelled from the Army without much ado, and were then tried, attended by extensive publicity, before the People’s Court.³⁸ Hitler mistrusted the military justice system and even alleged that it attempted to shield soldiers from prosecution.³⁹ Probably in reaction to the Red Orchestra and White Rose trials in August 1943, Hitler issued a decree concerning the

 Schmundt, Tätigkeitsbericht, 208, fol. 212 (17 August 1944).  Written report from Keitel to Hitler dated 10 October 1944, http://wwii.germandocsinrussia.org/de/nodes/2288#page/1/mode/grid/zoom/1.  HPA Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (2) Maisel to Field Marshal Ritter von Leeb dated 31 October 1944; BArch, RH 19-III/20, published in Walle, Aufstand des Gewissens (1984), 187– 189.  Ueberschär, “Der Ehrenhof,” 22; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 624– 625. The otherwise very lucid publication Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, passim, is normally rather positivist in its approach; at this point, however, it never asks which legal norms required the formation of a court of honor.  Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 367; Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939 – 1945, 43 – 51; Domarus, Hitler, 2136; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 84– 85; Bucher, Der Reichswehrprozess, 47– 52.  Nelson, Red Orchestra, 273; Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 119.  Messerschmidt, “Vier Soldaten,” 166.  Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, 69, with further details in footnote 6.

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prosecution of political crimes by members of the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS, and the police. The measure met with strong protest from Göring and Grand Admiral Dönitz, who were unwilling to accept this encroachment upon their prerogatives as commanders in chief of the Luftwaffe and the Navy, respectively – but significantly, no such protest by Keitel or anyone else from the Army was recorded.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, in April 1944, the high-profile treason trial of General der Artillerie Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, founder of the National Committee “Free Germany,” was held before the Reichskriegsgericht. When the court seemed satisfied with having Seydlitz declared insane, Keitel threatened to transfer the proceedings on to the People’s Court. This induced the Reichskriegsgericht to toe the line and to sentence Seydlitz to death.⁴¹ (As he was in Soviet captivity, however, it made little practical difference.) The 20 July plot had been largely, but not exclusively, borne by Army officers. The two Navy officers involved – Berthold Graf Stauffenberg and Alfred Kranzfelder – as well as the single Luftwaffe conspirator, Lieutenant-Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, were removed from the Wehrmacht by a simple decree by their respective commanders in chief. Rendered civilians again, they could then be tried before the People’s Court.⁴² Göring and Dönitz’s counterpart as Army commander in chief was, of course, Hitler himself (since 1941/1942). He could have unilaterally dismissed or expelled the conspirators from within the Army in the same summary fashion. As we have seen, the Court’s findings had in themselves no legal quality, but were mere “proposals”. As time went on, some Army officers were tried before the People’s Court without the Court of Honor having convened again to recommend their removal from active duty. Cases in point are Captains Gotthard Freiherr von Falkenhausen (from the staff of the Military Commander, France) and Hermann Kaiser (from Fromm’s staff).⁴³ Finally, one should not overlook the circumstances under which the conspirators from the Abwehr were put to death in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg, most of them in the final days of the war. The Court of Honor never took up

 Messerschmidt, “Vier Soldaten,” 173.  Warth, Verräter oder Widerstandskämpfer?, 172– 174; Diedrich, “Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach,” 393 – 394.  For Berthold Stauffenberg, see Vitzthum, “Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg,” and Vitzthum, “Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften,” 458; Koch, Volksgerichtshof, 447. For Hofacker, see Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker,” 89.  Wagner, Der Volksgerichtshof, 710 – 711.

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the prosecutions of Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer, or Dohnanyi. Interestingly enough, the legal farce which condemned them to death was again based entirely on the assumption that the Reichskriegsgericht was the competent venue, thus permitting proceedings in camera (closed to the public). ⁴⁴ The question that should interest us here is not why Hitler insisted that the Army officers involved in the conspiracy be tried in a civilian court rather than in a court martial. It should be, instead, why a special Court of Honor was created for the purpose of handing the accused over to the civilian authorities. There was no legal need to handle these cases before this ad-hoc institution, nor was its competence defined in any law, nor did it help to speed up procedures. If, then, there was no cogent legal reason for its creation, one must look to Hitler’s political motives. The most important aspect here is that this institution was created as a measure directed solely against the Army. Rundstedt later tried to exculpate himself by claiming that the court had been Hitler’s way of allowing the badly mauled Army to purge itself and thus to re-establish its credibility in the eyes of the regime and the publiculation. By arguing along these lines, Rundstedt inadvertently confirmed that the rationale for the Court of Honor was not a legal one, but was part of the political in-fighting characteristic of the Nazi regime.⁴⁵ After all we have seen so far, the 20 July 1944 plot was also the culmination of a long-standing conflict between parts of the traditional national-conservative elite, mostly in the Army and in particular its General Staff, and the social revolutionary tendencies in National Socialism. This conflict had intensified as the war went on and formed part of the regime’s cumulative radicalization.⁴⁶ The initiative to set up the Court of Honor did not originate with the Army (as was suggested in public). The sources indicate that this procedure was due to Keitel’s and Himmler’s influence; both had their own interest to further reduce the Army’s weight within the war-making structures of the Third Reich.⁴⁷ When Heusinger had just been released from custody in September, Hitler told him “I have often regretted bitterly that I did not cleanse my officer corps

 Perels, “Die schrittweise Rechtfertigung der NS-Justiz.”  Huber, Gerd von Rundstedt, 289.  For this and the following paragraphs see Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” Chapters V and IX. See also Mommsen, “Der Nationalsozialismus. Kumulative Radikalisierung,” 785, 789; Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus.”  Müller, “Generaloberst Ludwig Beck,” passim; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 696 – 704; Kroener, “Menschenbewirtschaftung,” 998; and Wegner, “Hitlers politische Soldaten,” 307– 308.

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the way Stalin did. But now, I have to, and I will do so.”⁴⁸ Hitler felt he had to avail himself of the opportunity of a general reckoning with the Army top brass, as can also be seen from other examples, such as Himmler’s nomination as commander of the Replacement Army, or the introduction of the National Socialist guidance officers (NS-Führungsoffizier – see Chapter 8.2), discussed below. After the war, the Court of Honor and its rulings were did not attract much attention within public debate. As far as its victims had been sentenced and executed by the People’s Court, their expulsion from the Wehrmacht was later perceived as having been comparatively irrelevant. The only case in which an expulsion had practical consequences was probably that of Major Joachim Kuhn, who was one of the very last prisoners of war to be released, in 1956, from Soviet captivity. The West German authorities ruled that, due to his expulsion from the Wehrmacht, he had not been a member of the military until 8 May 1945 and was therefore not entitled to any emoluments. But even this incredible opinion, although formally correct, was based not on the Court of Honor’s session of 4 August 1944, but on Hitler’s subsequent decision, dated the following day.⁴⁹ The court’s name represented a return to feudal or corporate concepts of honor and resembled similar institutions in the Prussian military and the Reichswehr. ⁵⁰ It was hardly a natural complement to the social dynamics of the classless Volksgemeinschaft. In that sense, its use to enforce the social revolutionary concepts of National Socialism was paradoxical.⁵¹ There are at times references to a “Wehrmacht Court of Honor,” but using such a label confuses the facts.⁵² The only Court of Honor was that of the Army, and it existed as a political weapon. It was designed to disadvantage the Army further in the internal power struggles of the Nazi regime. That this has not been acknowledged sufficiently in scholarly literature⁵³ is in keeping with another finding: the German media controlled by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry reported in almost 50 articles about the putsch attempted by Army officers; Luftwaffe officers were not mentioned in public at all, and civilians only in

 Quoted in Meyer, “Auswirkungen,” 308. See also Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 107. For Heusinger’s release, see HPA [Army Personnel Office] Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (2) to P3, c/o Herrn Oberstleutnant i. G. Kinitz (undated, mid-September 1944); BArch, RH 7/30.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 137– 138.  Showalter, “Conscience, Honor and Expediency,” 72; Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 321– 336.  Burkhart, Eine Geschichte der Ehre, 111– 112.  The German Wikipedia includes an entry “Ehrenhof (Wehrmacht)” which, however, states in the text that the “Court of Honor” applied to the Army only; there is no English entry.  Ueberschär, “Der ‘Ehrenhof’”; Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 525.

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nine instances. Even Goerdeler was named only twice: once when he was reported as being wanted by the police, and then again following his trial.⁵⁴ After 20 July, Göring claimed in a fiery speech that “his” Luftwaffe had not been involved; it had been him as well who had proposed to Hitler to introduce the Nazi salute into the entire Wehrmacht. Göring’s ploy seemed to have some effect, but in private, most observers agreed even then that he would not have succeeded Hitler had Stauffenberg’s bomb been more successful.⁵⁵

8.2 Power Shifts within the Nazi System From its beginnings, the Nazi movement had known how best to exploit favorable situations once they presented themselves. The attempted coup d’état on 20 July 1944 created another such situation which enabled Hitler to intensify the struggle against internal “enemies” which, as he had announced in the Reichstag in November 1939, was to be part of the war.⁵⁶ He was now determined to align the Army with Nazi ideology in order to make it an inhospitable destination to those seeking “internal emigration,” and to do away with occasional sociological or ideological niches.⁵⁷ As the mouthpiece for that ideology, the party’s Völkischer Beobachter reported, just one day after the event, who had been behind the assassination attempt: “It was the leaders of the plutocratic-Bolshevik world conspiracy who handed the explosives to their henchmen.”⁵⁸ The newspaper’s coverage of the trials before the People’s Court revealed more clearly still the extent to which Nazi Party aimed to transform social and class structures: In our Thirty Years’ War [referring not to the period 1618 – 1648 but to 1914– 1944], the bourgeois-feudal world collapsed. Despite its superficial liberalism, it had been founded entirely on castes and classes based on birth and money. For those who have enjoyed privilege thus far, this process has been most uncomfortable and even embarrassing for – specifical-

 Count by the author in Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi Party daily newspaper) and the Dortmund newspaper Tremonia, both available in Institut für Zeitungsforschung der Stadt- und Landesbibliothek Dortmund (IfZF). Göring’s address to the Luftwaffe on 21 July, on the other hand, was given substantial attention: Völkischer Beobachter. Munich edition dated 22/23 July 1944; IfZF, F 13612; “Fahndung nach Goerdeler,” ibid., 3 August 1944.  Manvell and Fraenkel, Goering, 305; Irving, Göring, 659.  Thun, Der Verschwörer, with reference to IMT, vol. 26, 327– 336.  Weinberg, A World at Arms, 483.  Völkischer Beobachter. Munich edition dated 21 July 1944; IfZF, F 13612.

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ly – those who were too lazy, too stupid or too vain to work hard to acquire again the privileges held through birth or property up until 1914.⁵⁹

Hitler and Goebbels had been circumspect enough not to subvert the the military’s morale by generalizing their opprobrium to include the entire Army or even the Wehrmacht as a whole⁶⁰, but their true intent became clear in a series of farreaching measures. Seeing that Fromm’s position had been successively eroded during the preceding months, it can come as no surprise that the Führerhauptquartier believed the putsch during the afternoon of 20 July 1944 had been staged largely by him. No one doubted that orders allegedly signed “Fromm” originated from the Generaloberst. ⁶¹ That Fromm should be dismissed and replaced by Himmler had not only been expected; it also matched the general assumption that Stauffenberg had acted on behalf of his commander when he placed the bomb. On 20 July 1944, at 20:35, Bormann sent a teletype message to all Gauleiters referring to “Fromm-Huebner-Witzleben-Freiherr v. Staufenberg [!].”⁶² Both the selection and the order of names of perpetrators, and the misspellings are indicative of how little leading Nazi officials in East Prussia knew about the conspiracy at a time when, in Berlin, the balance was already tilting in favor of the regime. All these circumstances combined to make it impossible later to reinstate Fromm, despite his role in stabilizing Nazi rule during that fateful evening, and before later investigations revealed that his role in the run-up to the event had been ambiguous at best. Himmler, who was already Reich Minister of the Interior and Head of German Police, was nominated to succeed Fromm in his dual capacity as commander of the Replacement Army and as chief of Army Equipment.⁶³ thus expanding even further His competences now included Army armaments, military justice for the entire Army, prisoners of war, recruitment, as well as education, i. e. all Army schools. In the summer of 1944, the Replacement Army consisted of almost two million men.⁶⁴

 Völkischer Beobachter. Munich edition dated 7 August 1944; IfZF, F 13612.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 135.  See, e. g., statement [Generalmajor Dr Kennes] to Wolfgang Müller: “Gegen eine neue Dolchstoßlüge” [“Against a new stab-in-the-back lie”], 27 August 1947; BArch, MSg 1/2938.  Teletype message Bormann, Führerhauptquartier, to all Gauleiter (Very urgent – To be serviced immediately); IfZ, Fa 116, fol. 2.  Teletype message to Chef Seekriegsleitung – To be serviced immediately – initialled 21 July 1944; MHM, Permanent Exhibition.  Kunz, “Die Wehrmacht in der Agonie,” 102– 121; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 698 – 699.

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This development had been expected. Hitler had already tasked Himmler with raising the next “wave” of Army divisions (see Chapter 4.1). Himmler now held a monopoly of power within Germany: the secret police (the Gestapo) was part of his empire, as was secret intelligence (what was left of the Abwehr); as minister of the interior, he controlled the entire civilian administration, and as commander of the Replacement Army, he was now in charge of all military forces within the Reich – “a reinvention of the old idea of a state protection corps, though one now operating under the conditions of war and of positively gigantic proportions.”⁶⁵ However, this must not be misinterpreted as the beginnings of a truly concerted “total war” effort by the Nazi system.⁶⁶ In the event that enemy should penetrate into the Reich itself (and this was obviously only a matter of time now), executive power within the area of operations was transferred to the Gauleiters in their capacity as Reich Defense Commissioners (Reichsverteidigungskommissare). This highlights another division of power between Himmler, Goebbels as “Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort,” and Bormann representing the Party. References in the literature to a “Gang of Four” (which would have included Göring) misses the point entirely; rather, it was part of the regime’s cumulative radicalization that after years of insignificance, the Nazi Party was now entrusted with maintaining internal morale and discipline.⁶⁷ The Party-controlled media not only emphasized that Himmler had all the necessary qualifications for his new jobs (thus obviating further claims of dilettantism) but also pointed out that he “enjoyed popular trust” – hinting at a call for internal cohesion.⁶⁸ Himmler’s control of the Replacement Army was also the end point of a development which had transferred increasing control of personnel resources from the military to the Party and Himmler in particular. Even in his last days in office, Fromm had been ordered by Keitel to prepare for Army soldiers to be transferred to the SS to serve against their will in its concentration-camp guard units.⁶⁹ In the autumn of 1944, Himmler ordered recruitment offices for Army and SS officer cadets to be integrated into each other, “to increase efficiency.” The real point was to make it more difficult for able-bodied qualified young men to escape pres-

 Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 700.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 700 – 701; see also for the following.  Orlow, The Nazi Party, XIV–XV; Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 314– 316; Wagner, “Die letzte Schlacht der ‘alten Kämpfer’”.  Tremonia, 22. /23 July 1944; IfZF, F 11080.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 524.

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sure to join the SS by applying as an Army cadet instead.⁷⁰ Earlier in 1944, an Army officer, General der Artillerie Heinz Ziegler, had been tasked with finding ways of saving personnel by combining Army and SS efforts; after assuming control of the Replacement Army on 20 July 1944, Himmler sidelined him.⁷¹ Even under the new conditions, the structures of the Luftwaffe and the Navy remained unassailable. But Himmler’s aim was not efficiency; before long, he stated publicly that he intended to use his new powers for ideological purposes. In an order of the day dated 1 August 1944, he proclaimed: We will never waver in our loyalty and our faith, we will obey without hesitation, remain decent in our convictions, and never tire in our zeal. By diligently fulfilling our duty, our deeds and our achievements we will obliterate the shame of 20 July, so that we will become the people’s army [Volksarmee] of our Führer and his people.⁷²

The choice Volksarmee as a term is a clear indication that the SS saw itself as the elite armed forces of the future, whereas the Army of the Wehrmacht would remain an immobile force designed for area defense (see Chapter 3.1). After the war, the Waffen-SS would consist of some 100,000 men. With the various police forces added to that, Himmler would then command a total of about 400,000 men.⁷³ Raising formations of Russian volunteers, though, was still left to the Army, as Slavic men in the SS would have been unacceptable to Himmler’s racist ideology.⁷⁴ As Himmler had also taken on Fromm’s other “hat” as Chief of Army Equipment, he had also assumed responsibility for the Army’s technological innovations during the war. Above all, this involved the “V” weapons or, more precisely, the development and production of “V-2” ballistic missiles designed to reach London.⁷⁵ The Luftwaffe’s “V-1” project and the Army’s “V-2” had long competed for raw materials and labor allotments. The Luftwaffe’s system was effectively an unpiloted jet airplane, a kind of early cruise missile, which was easy and inexpensive to produce, and which used regular aircraft fuel. However, launching

 Reichsführer SS and BdE [undated, signed]; BArch, RH 14/50, fol. 5 – 6; Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 138; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 702.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 139.  Des Führers und seines Reiches nationalsozialistische Volksarmee, in Tremonia, 3 August 1944; IfZF, F 11080.  Wegner, Hitlers politische Soldaten, 304– 305.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 701– 702.  For the project as a whole see Petersen, Missiles for the Fatherland, and Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich.

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the rockets required immobile ramps which could be seen (and therefore destroyed) from the air; on their way to their target, these missiles were also rather easy to intercept. The missile’s technical reference was “Fi-103,” but as Nazi propaganda usually preferred the Luftwaffe over the Army, this project had been presented to the German public as Vergeltungswaffe 1 (“Vengeance Weapon 1”); the state-controlled media accorded it preferential treatment.⁷⁶ By contrast, the liquid-fuel medium-range ballistic missile developed by Army artillery as “A-4” (“V-2” was the name given by Goebbels’s propaganda machine) was a technological revolution. It was a highly intricate design, difficult to assemble, and for the numbers demanded by Hitler, the entire Reich’s production of liquid oxygen – which it used as fuel – would never have sufficed. On the other, to be launched, the system needed little more than a few square meters of solid ground, and once in the air, it could not be intercepted. It would strike the target area at such speed that no air raid warning was possible – a detail which particularly endeared it to Hitler.⁷⁷ To put an end to the eternal rivalry between both systems, their actual deployment was entrusted to a corps staff created particularly for the purpose; it comprised both Army and Luftwaffe personnel and reported directly to the OKW. Thus, when Himmler took over Army Equipment, he initially controlled only the production of the more innovative and more labor-intensive Army system, “V-2.” And even production was to a large part the responsibility of the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer. However, Speer in turn was also dependent on Himmler whose concentration camps had to provide the labor force. In mid-October 1944, Himmler finally succeeded in having operational control for both systems transferred to Obergruppenführer (SS-General) Hans Kammler.⁷⁸ In Gestapo custody, Roland von Hößlin claimed to another inmate that the failure of the attempt to overthrow the regime had “broken the Army’s back… There was not a single courageous man who dared to act against this criminal leadership.”⁷⁹ Even so, the regime felt it necessary to strengthen the “morale” of the forces by additional means; here, too, the 20 July resulted in an intensification of measures initiated earlier. On 22 December 1943, Hitler had ordered the institution of National Socialist guidance officers (NS-Führungsoffiziere, NSFO) as well as the creation of an OKW department specifically designed to oversee them. In June  See, e. g., Völkischer Beobachter. Munich edition dated 18 October 1944; IfZF, F 13612.  Hölsken, Die V-Waffen, 87– 93.  Hölsken, Die V-Waffen, 161– 163, 203 – 205.  Letter Counsellor-at-law Dr Franz Reisert, Prettelshofen, to Roland von Hößlin’s mother, dated 15 December 1945; copy in the author’s possession.

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1944, Hitler tasked Bormann with overseeing this task, apparently after extensive squabbling within the party about who was to be in charge. The NSFO ultimately played a systematic role only in the Army,⁸⁰ but it took the failed putsch to precipitate the complete politicization of the Wehrmacht. ⁸¹ On 29 July 1944, at the Führerhauptquartier, Himmler spoke to a select group of NSFOs. It was obvious that he was unwilling to leave this business to Bormann and the party; he was determined to have a to have a say in the matter. In his eyes, the fact that many Army officers lacked ideological rigor had caused the crisis on the eastern front that later culminated in the collapse of Army Group Center.⁸² The assembled NSFOs were told that the members of the “clique of conspirators” had clung to reactionary thinking and to the outdated concept of an “apolitical” officer; a more forceful politicization of the Army was accordingly a sensible move.⁸³ In September 1944, the Army Law (Wehrgesetz) was modified to permit Wehrmacht personnel who had been Party members before joining the military to retain their membership. If military setbacks up to that point had been due to insufficient ideological indoctrination, following the Party logic, it was to rectify that problem by changing the Army from within.⁸⁴ In the long term, and in a possible peacetime arrangement, the Army was thus to become the “school of the nation,” or, as Himmler had called it, a true Volksarmee, not too far from the concept envisaged by Joachim von Stülpnagel and his associates in the mid1920s. In a study submitted to the OKW in March 1945, SS-Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner referred to the 20 July 1944 as a “caesura in the history of the National Socialist revolution.” In his view, the Army was to degenerate into a training force adapted to the needs of territorial defense. The Waffen-SS, on the other hand, was to develop into a “permanently mobile, highly mechanized force about the size of an Army Group “ which would deliver the decisive victory.⁸⁵

 Besson, “Zur Geschichte,” 80 – 81.  Order by General der Infanterie Hermann Reinecke, Chief of NSFO Control Staff, dated 3 August 1944, quoted in Besson, “Zur Geschichte,” 83. See also Thamer, “Die Erosion einer Säule,” 434, who interprets the NSFO as the endpoint in a development which had started with the Night of Long Knives, 30 June 1934. Reinecke also sat, as auxiliary judge, on the People’s Court during the trials against the conspirators.  Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 652.  Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 654.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 137.  Förster, Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat. Eine strukturgeschichtliche Analyse, 146; Förster, “Vom Führerheer der Republik,” 321.

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Viewed from this perspective, the 20 July 1944 events must be seen as an important step on the way towards political Gleichschaltung of the Army which eventually resulted in an opportunist compromise with the crippling ideological demands of the regime, prompted solely by a desire to secure its position within the country and to retain power. This set in motion a self-perpetuating and fatal process which gained momentum as the army faced the inevitable consequences of defeat.⁸⁶

If Guderian and others like him had really expected to reestablish the Army’s standing in Hitler’s eyes, and to “make up” for the 20 July events, in order to stabilize the Army’s position within the Nazi regime,⁸⁷ then they would be disappointed. Even Allen W. Dulles, the Zurich-based resident of the US intelligence agency, the OSS, had reason to report that, in the future, the Army would be subordinated to the SS to an even greater degree.⁸⁸ Further subjugation would not be necessary. The Army and its officers, like the population at large and in particular most civilian workers, continued to support Hitler, his government, and the war effort. Until the end of 1944, they would all maintain their “quasi-religious” faith in their Führer. ⁸⁹ After 20 July 1944, Army personnel was required to give the Nazi salute, but even that met with little resistance.⁹⁰ Hitler himself sought to calm the situation by countermanding any party excesses against the Army and the officer corps in particular in a communique on 24 July: In matters related to the events of 20 July 1944, the Führer desires there to be no in corpore attacks or insults of the officer corps, generals, nobility, or individual Wehrmacht services. It must be be emphasized again and again that those involved in the putsch were a clearly defined, relatively small cabal of officers… When this clique’s attitude is discussed, it must also be emphasized that the comportent of the Army and the Wehrmacht was unobjectionable.⁹¹

This view held the conspiracy responsible for “the backward movements of our troops in the East as well as the series of accidents from Todt to Dietl” (both of  Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 942.  Meyer, “Generaloberst Guderian,” 15.  Reports of 27. and 28 July 1944; NA, RG 226 E 99 B 14 fol. 58a, quoted in Heideking, “Die ‘Breakers’-Akte,” 30 and 46 (footnote 57).  Kühne, “Zwischen Akribie und Groteske,” 411.  Förster, “Ideological Warfare,” 650 – 651; Jacobsen, 1939 – 1945, 482, Document 139.  Teletype Leiter der Parteikanzlei Reichsleiter M. Bormann to all Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, Verbände-Führer dated 24 July 1944, published in Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 597.

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whom had been killed in Luftwaffe aircraft!). That meant also, however, that the many soldiers who held fast to their belief in the Nazi system now expected a swift improvement of the situation: The nomination of the Reichsführer-SS to command the Home Army [!] generally raised hopes that the time has now come to really “muck out”; there are calls for a general purge.⁹²

This attitude was shared at all levels, from many privates up through the generality, which had remained faithful to Hitler. The commander in chief of Army Group Center, Field Marshal Model, wrote in an order to all subordinates: Therefore, the Führer calls upon us to show the greatest tenacity in holding until reinforcements of personnel and materiel, held back so far by the conspirators now liquidated, reach us.⁹³

Himmler, however, Hitler’s “Faithful Heinrich,” knew how to use his new position for his own ends. More than any of the other top Nazis, he sought to define a position for himself in a postwar order, including making contact with the enemy powers.⁹⁴ Once the dust settled following the bomb in the conference hut and it was clear that Hitler had not been seriously wounded, attention became focused on identifying a perpetrator. By 14:00, an hour and a half after the detonation, most were convinced: “That was Stauffenberg.”⁹⁵ Yet, it had not been an assassination attempt committed by a single officer, but a carefully planned attack involving a large number of individuals through-

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 7 (22 July 1944). See also report of Jena outpost of SD section Weimar, dated 27 July 1944, Die Meinung und Stimmung der Bevölkerung hinsichtlich des 20. 7. 1944. Reaktion auf die Ernennung Himmlers zum OB des Ersatzheeres [Opinion and Morale of the Population re 20 July 1944. Reactions to the nomination of Himmler to Commanderin-Chief [!] Replacement Army]; IfZ, MA 95 – 2: “Not only the soldiers themselves (NCOs and men), but all well-disposed German citizens, and the higher-ranking Party members in particular, have the highest expectations now that the ReichsFührer-SS has been made Commander-inChief Home Army [!]” – note that (erroneously) reference is now to “Commander-in-Chief” (Oberbefehlshaber) rather than Befehlshaber (Commander), and to “Home Army,” not just to “Replacement Army”; see above Chapter 4.2.  Teletype message OB HGr Mitte [Model] to AOK 2 et al., dated 25 July 1944, excision by hand; BArch, RH 19 II/203, fol. 45.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 716 – 717.  Lieutenant-Colonel Otto Lechler to Major Ernst Ferber, quoted in Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 363.

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out the Reich and beyond. The investigation and persecution began the same night, not least to deflect interest from the failures the security apparatus (for which Himmler bore responsibility) and to preempt separate investigations by the Army’s own justice system.⁹⁶ The Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) under SS-Obergruppenführer (General) Ernst Kaltenbrunner came into its own, with the Gestapo und SS-Gruppenführer (Generalleutnant) Heinrich Müller (the “Gestapo Müller” mentioned above) as its main executive instrument. A special commission of some 400 police officers was established.⁹⁷ Later, Goebbels called it a “godsend” that Stauffenberg had not been arrested upon his return to Berlin; only after the coup d’état had been fully put into motion could the regime recognize the scope of the conspiracy as a whole. Otherwise, the “putschist felons who have been shot… would most likely still be in their exalted positions.”⁹⁸ The lists of liaison officers and “political representatives” prepared with so much care by the conspirators turned out to be fatal for many of those named in them.⁹⁹ The Gestapo were not willing to make any exceptions on the basis of military need; even general staff officers of frontline divisions were to be arrested, irrespective of any protestations by their superiors that they were irreplaceable. One of them was Stauffenberg’s friend Major Joachim Kuhn, serving on a divisional staff. His divisional commander, Generalleutnant Gustav Heisterman von Ziehlberg allowed him the opportunity to seek death on the battlefield, whereas Kuhn ended up in Soviet captivity. For this, Heisterman was brought before the Reichskriegsgericht (Reich Court Martial), which, however, acquitted him. The general returned to his division, but an irate Hitler refused to affirm the acquittal, so Heisterman was arrested and tried again. This time, he was sentenced to death and shot.¹⁰⁰ In addition, several individuals who had given General Lindemann shelter while he was evading arrest, but were otherwise not involved in any way with the conspiracy itself, were also tried and executed.¹⁰¹ Others avoided capture by committing suicide. Major Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen blew himself up with a grenade which he had previously hidden in a fire extinguisher bucket.¹⁰² General der Artillerie Eduard Wagner, the Quartermaster

 Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 697; Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 502.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 662, 697.  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher II.13, 139 – 140 (23 July 1944); see also Schlie, “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland”, 24– 25.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 256 – 257 (18 August 1944).  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 60 – 78.  Mühlen, Sie gaben ihr Leben, passim.  Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, 147– 150.

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General, shot himself in his office on 23 July 1944. Three days later, Colonel Wessel Freytag von Loringhoven took the same way out; his farewell letter to his wife is now part of the permanent exhibition of the Military History Museum in Dresden. The head of the conspiracy on the eastern front, Generalmajor Henning von Tresckow, went to the front lines on 21 July 1944 and blew himself up. Days later, the Gestapo still believed that he had been killed in an enemy attack, and Tresckow was buried with military honors. The fact that he was not available for questioning may explain why relatively many members of this group (Gersdorff, Schlabrendorff, Philipp von Boeselager, and others) survived the war.¹⁰³ Not all those sought by the police could be arrested quickly. Goerdeler had been on the “wanted” list even before 20 July but managed to stay in hiding in West Prussia until a woman recognized and denounced him, so that he was arrested on 12 August. Alexis von Roenne managed to write a letter to his wife in which he hinted at what had happened: You will be preoccupied with the awful events of yesterday. They are on all our minds, incomprehensible and of the greatest negative consequences. A terrible mistake, due, I believe, to Stauffenberg’s wound to the head (in Africa, where he also lost one-and-a-half hands). Luckily, none of the valuable participants of the meeting (particularly Heusinger!) seem to have suffered substantially.¹⁰⁴

To count Heusinger among the “valuable participants” was to reflect, of course, on the relative value of Hitler who had been the target of the bomb. But on 23 July, Heusinger was arrested as well, in hospital, on suspicion of having known about the preparations. He was discharged later without any charges ever being brought against him.¹⁰⁵ Roenne himself was hanged on 12 October. Although Roland von Hößlin had mobilized his battalion on 15 July and began moving towards Königsberg, he also remained unharmed for several weeks. Whether his arrest on 23 August was due to the “more intense interrogation” of Lieutenant-Colonel Hans Graf Lehndorff which had started a few days earlier (Lehndorff had been listed as the “political representative” for East Prussia) is unknown.¹⁰⁶ Arthur Nebe was caught only in January 1945, again after having been denounced, and was executed in March.¹⁰⁷

 For this, see Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 270 – 272; also Aretin, Freiheit und Verantwortung, 29.  Letter Oberst Alexis Baron von Roenne to his wife, dated 21 July 1944; MHM, PSF 958 BBAT 3631.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 266.  Vollmer, Doppelleben, 302– 306.  Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 709 (not in the English edition).

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Like Lehndorff, many of those arrested were brutally tortured.¹⁰⁸ About Goerdeler we know that he gave quite expansive and comprehensive evidence.¹⁰⁹ In other instances, it is more difficult to discern who said what or who implicated whom; the tenacity and brutality of the Gestapo officers often met with the knowledge of the prisoners about who had already been sentenced and murdered, and could therefore not be harmed anymore by damaging statements. Altogether, some 700 individuals were arrested at some point as a result of the 20 July 1944 plot.¹¹⁰ About 85 of them were officers, of whom 25 were released by mid-September 1944, including Heusinger, Colonel Graf Kielmansegg (later to be a four-star general in the Bundeswehr), the commander of the Krampnitz Panzertruppenschule, Colonel Momm, as well as the recently-promoted Pridun, listed already as “Colonel,” who had played a leading part in putting down the uprising in the Bendlerblock; much later, he was to claim that his preferential promotion had also been a kind of compensation for his unjustified arrest.¹¹¹ Initially, the media reported in great detail about the assassination attempt, but with noticeably less interest in the coup d’état. Not long after 20 July, it became obvious that the state-controlled press had been instructed not to drive a wedge between the nation and its armed forces: The German people has an extremely fine intuition that this gang passed its own sentence. The German people does not want anything to come between it and its Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht is the German people! It was not for nothing that throughout the course of the war the Wehrmacht became more and more political while the National Socialist Party developed increasingly along military lines.¹¹²

Goebbels was reported to have mentioned in a public speech three generals whose names were, however, not printed (probably Beck, Hoepner and Olbricht),

 Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 128 – 133.  Kiesel, “SS-Bericht,” 32.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 512; more recent and more precise Tuchel, “…und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 37.  List published in Tuchel, “… und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, Document 8, 440 – 441; for Pridun see his correspondence with the Zentralnachweisstelle Aachen-Kornelimünster (where his personnel file was being held); BArch, Pers 6/59047, and HPA [Army Personnel Office] Ag P2/ Rechtsgr. (2) to P3, c/o Herrn Oberstleutnant i. G. Kinitz (undated, mid-September 1944); BArch, RH 7/30.  Tremonia. Westdeutsche Volkszeitung, 24 July 1944; IfZF, F 11080.

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but not a word was mentioned about the involvement of a field marshal (Witzleben).¹¹³ In a few cases, suspected officers were forced to commit suicide – the bestknown example being Rommel. Obviously, the regime had little interest in Hitler’s most popular field marshal having to explain himself to the People’s Court. Instead, Schmundt’s successor as Head of the Army Personnel Office, General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf, and his deputy, Generalleutnant Ernst Maisel, appeared at Rommel’s home near Ulm on 14 October 1944 and instructed him to say his farewells to his wife and son and get in their car. As they drove off, the officers informed Rommel that he had the choice of taking the poison they had brought along or of facing face the “People’s Court.”¹¹⁴ Even if he had refused to oblige his visitors, it is unclear whether Rommel would have made it alive to neighboring Ulm, where preparations for his state funeral had already begun. The Völkischer Beobachter explained Rommel’s unexpected death as the result of his serious injuries – which seemed quite plausible at the time.¹¹⁵ Rommel’s superior, Field Marshal von Kluge, was relieved of his command under particularly undignified circumstances (his successor, Field Marshal Model, showed up at the headquarters without any prior warning), was ordered back to Berlin, and swallowed poison on his way there.¹¹⁶ The Military Commander in France, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who had been a key figure in the Paris conspiracy, attempted to shoot himself on the Verdun battlefield (where he had fought in the First World War), but was “saved,” tried, and hanged.¹¹⁷ The fury of the regime was not only directed against the conspirators themselves. Following its racist delusions and alleged Germanic traditions of Sippenhaft (“kith and kin liability”), the Gestapo also arrested their close – and at times not-so-close – relatives.¹¹⁸ First of all, this targeted the wives:¹¹⁹ Nina Gräfin Stauffenberg, e. g., gave birth to her fifth child, a daughter, while in custody.¹²⁰

 Goebbels, Speech on 26 July 1944, quoted in Tremonia. Westdeutsche Volkszeitung, 27 July 1944, IfZF, F 11080.  Manfred Rommel, Rommels Tod, in: Südkurier, Constance, 8 September 1945; Lieb, “Erwin Rommel,” 339 – 340.  Völkischer Beobachter, 17 October 1944, 1 (Leader), IfZF; F 13612.  Steinbach, “Hans Günther von Kluge,” 319 – 320.  Heinemann, “General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” 62.  For the ideological basis see Salzig, Die Sippenhaft, 45 – 95.  For an overview see Meding, Mit dem Mut des Herzens. For eyewitness accounts and further scholarly literature see also Hase, Hitlers Rache.  Schulthess, Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg, 87– 101; Richardi, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung.

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In Chapter 4.5 above, we have already seen the fate of her sister-in-law, Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg. The children were taken away from their mothers, given pseudonym names and concentrated in a home in Bad Sachsa in the Harz mountains. The older children among them, however, soon realized that what united them all was their common fate as “conspirators’ offspring.”¹²¹ At the same time, this constituted an additional psychological burden for the mothers who had no idea where their children had been taken to. Here again, the Third Reich had no regard for military necessities or expedience. Among those arrested as Sippenhaft, there were several officers who had known nothing of their father’s or brothers’ oppositional activities. The Gestapo measures were totally unpredictable: Roland von Hößlin’s father served as a Generalmajor in the Wiesbaden Military District Command; he was never taken to task, but was discharged from active duty on 31 December 1944, aged 62.¹²² But he fared no better than many others whose relatives had been arrested: the Gestapo left him in the dark as to the whereabouts of his son; even his personal contacts with members of the “Court of Honor” did not help him much.¹²³ But Sippenhaft also had a more general deterrent function: the Military Commander of Paris, General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz, had been told about it by an SS officer during a train journey; when Choltitz had to decide about whether or not to surrender the French capital to the Allies, the potential fate of his family weighed heavily on his mind.¹²⁴ When dealing with its victims, the Third Reich construed an odd parallel between the 20 July 1944 putsch attempt and the activities of the National Committee “Free Germany” and its twin organization, the League of German Officers (Bund Deutscher Offiziere, or BDO). And indeed, in one instance there was a link between the two: Generalmajor Otto Korfes of the National Committee was married to a sister of Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim who had been shot during the night of 20 July. The Nazi regime sought to downplay the importance of both the National Committee and the BDO by focusing its opprobrium on General von Seydlitz, who had been sentenced to death in absentia. ¹²⁵ However, as long as he and

 Behrens and Tuchel, “Unsere wahre Identität sollte vernichtet werden.”  Auszug aus den Personalveränderungen Nr. 8201/44 PA Ag P 1/1 (Zentral‐)Abt. III b (1) dated 15 December 1944; BArch, RW 59/174, fol. 78.  Letter Generalmajor von Hößlin to General der Infanterie Schroth, dated 28 September 1944; copy in the author’s possession.  Choltitz, Soldat unter Soldaten, 226, 265 – 266.  Heider, “Reaktionen in der Wehrmacht,” 626 – 627; Seydlitz on 26 April 1944, published in Diedrich and Ebert, Nach Stalingrad, 53.

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his fellow officers were in Soviet captivity, they remained beyond the regime’s reach. Seydlitz’s wife nonetheless divorced him because the Army Personnel Office had convinced her that doing so would protect her daughters.¹²⁶ After 20 July 1944, the families of members of the National Committee were also arrested. When Himmler met with Hitler on 30 July to discuss the prosecution and punishment of the “traitors,” his agenda was “1. Trial, 2. Stauffenberg family, 3. Members Seydlitz family.”¹²⁷ Obviously, at that time the regime assumed some sort of link between the national-conservative uprising and the national communist organizations.¹²⁸ Interestingly, though, in both instances only the families of the main protagonists are mentioned. Relatives of the National Committee and BDO officers were, however, handled separately from the “traitors” of the 20 July plot; their younger children, on the other hand, were all taken to the same home in Bad Sachsa.¹²⁹ Altogether, it appears that some 180 adults were arrested in connection with the plot under the Sippenhaft policy; an additional 40 family members of the National Committee or the BDO, plus the about 60 abducted children.¹³⁰ There is no indication what the regime’s long-term plans were for these detainees. The threat of violence could be employed to put pressure on conspirators who refused to speak under interrogation; still, that alone does not suffice as an explanation because many of the victims of Sippenhaft were not released until months after their father or husband had been executed. Some died as a result of the harsh conditions they were subjected to, but none of those detained was executed. Others were freed even during 1944, sometimes because of the intervention of high-ranking Nazis such as Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg, whose release was arranged by Göring.¹³¹ Some were part of the group of prominent “special prisoners” interned at Dachau which was forced to wander a circuitous route through Bavaria until it was eventually liberated from the SS, first by the German Army and then by the US Army, in South Tyrol.¹³² Among this group were the two British officers from the Venlo incident (see Chapter 6.3); Himmler may have

 Diedrich and Ebert, Nach Stalingrad, 395; Warth, Verräter oder Widerstandskämpfer?, 183.  Uhl et al., Die Organisation des Terrors, 821 (30 July 1944); also quoted in Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,’” 134, footnote 11.  Heider, “Reaktionen in der Wehrmacht,” 630 – 631.  Diedrich/Ebert, Nach Stalingrad, 395; Warth, Verräter oder Widerstandskämpfer?, 183 – 184.  Tuchel, “…und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 452– 454 (comment to Document 10); Salzig, “‘Sippenhaft’ als Repressionsmaßnahme,” 174– 175.  Bracke, Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg, 189 – 190; see Chapter 4.5.  Richardi, SS-Geiseln in der Alpenfestung, passim.

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hoped that these valuable assets might serve as leverage when establishing contact with the enemy. The People’s Court sentenced to death 104 individuals accused of having links with the 20 July 1944 plot; a further 175 suspects were either acquitted or released by the Gestapo. Another 25 men were murdered during the final days of the war or took their own lives.¹³³ The president of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, presided over the trials personally and in a way that must be considered a travesty by any measure of due process of law. The proceedings were designed as show trials along Stalinist lines; the defense was a farce, and the death sentences, foregone conclusions even before the trials began, must be viewed as murders justified by a perverted system of justice.¹³⁴ The sessions were filmed with a hidden camera, and most of the footage has survived. Some of Freisler’s screaming tirades, however, were beyond the means of any sound engineering available at the time.¹³⁵ Initially, there seem to have been no plans to exploit the trials for propaganda purposes; Goebbels had not been invited to the first conferences on how to orchestrate the sessions.¹³⁶ He had to personally intervene with Hitler to be included in the preparations and to obtain the right to report broadly in all the media.¹³⁷ The footage shot during the trials was made available to a very restricted group of viewers. Freisler’s management of the proceedings would have made the character of a show trial blatantly obvious to a wider audience, so that showing the film to the general public might well have been counterproductive.¹³⁸ On the other hand, some of the sequences show defendants facing Freisler fearlessly. When Freisler told the deeply Catholic lawyer Josef Wirmer that he would soon go to hell, Wirmer is said to have replied: “It will be my pleasure if you follow me soon, Your Honor.” Ulrich-Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, when asked why he had joined the resistance, replied, “I was thinking of the many murders…” before Freisler shouted him down. Field Marshal von Witzleben was forced to appear before the court not wearing a belt, so that he had

 All figures according to Tuchel, “…und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 37– 38.  A short and rather superficial account can be found in Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof. Koch, Volksgerichtshof, is highly problematic due to its right-wing nationalist slant. See my review in MGM 48 (1990), 224– 226. The quotation is from Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,’” a concise and nevertheless highly reliable account.  Sösemann, “Verräter vor dem Volksgericht,” 156.  Sösemann, “Verräter vor dem Volksgericht,” 155.  Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, II.13, 210 – 214 (3 August 1944); Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,’” 138 – 139.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 526.

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to keep holding his trousers up. Even so, he is reported as having told Freisler in his concluding statement: “You can hand us over to the hangman now. Three months from now, the tortured and exasperated masses will hold you to account and will drag you alive through the dirty streets.”¹³⁹ Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who had opposed the assassination attempt for religious reasons, confronted Freisler with the statement that, for him, Hitler was “the great executor of evil.”¹⁴⁰ In the first trial, held on 7 and 8 August 1944 in the Kammergericht building in Berlin, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner, Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, Generalmajor Hellmuth Stieff, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bernardis, Captain Friedrich Karl Klausing, and Lieutenants Albrecht von Hagen and Peter Yorck Graf Wartenburg appeared before the court.¹⁴¹ As could be expected, all were sentenced to death. The same day, they were taken to the prison at Plötzensee and hanged. Many officers were aghast that their high-ranking comrades should have been ignominiously hanged rather than shot, as befitted an officer.¹⁴² The executions were filmed, but the footage was lost in the final stage of war, and that may be just as well. Whether Hitler viewed them (as has been claimed repeatedly) is at least doubtful.¹⁴³ Despite rather large audiences for the first trials, subsequent sessions were only attended by a select “public.” On 7 September 1944, this included the Luftwaffe First Lieutenant Helmut Schmidt, who was so disgusted by Freisler’s handling of the case that he asked his superior officer to be excused from attending subsequent sessions; this example alone may suffice to show that the intended propagandistic effect did not materialize.¹⁴⁴ Of the 156 defendants 33 received prison sentences, 19 were acquitted.¹⁴⁵ Although only 95 of 104 death sentences were actually carried out, some of the condemned waited weeks or months for their executions (among them Goerdeler, Popitz, Hofacker).¹⁴⁶ Another seven were shot dead in Berlin on the night of 22/23 April 1945, just before Soviet troops arrived in the city center.  Witzleben, “Wenn es gegen den Satan Hitler geht…”, 214. There is no conclusive proof for this remark, though.  Haeften, “Nichts Schriftliches von Politik”, 86; See also Ramm, Der 20. Juli vor dem Volksgerichtshof, 249.  Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,’” 139.  Neitzel, “Die deutschen Generäle und der Widerstand,” 233.  Sösemann, “Verräter vor dem Volksgericht,” 157.  Pamperrien, Helmut Schmidt und der Scheißkrieg, 254– 261.  Tuchel, “Die Verfahren vor dem ‘Volksgerichtshof,’” 143 – 144.  Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozeß,” 465; Maier, “Die SS und der 20. Juli 1944,” 308 – 309.

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Others, such as Rommel and the members of the Abwehr opposition, were denied a trial before the People’s Court – most likely because the regime did not want their involvement in the conspiracy to become public knowledge. “Whenever other defendants before the People’s Court wanted to discuss the involvement of these four persons [i. e. Canaris, Oster, Dohnanyi, Bonhoeffer], Freisler intervened energetically.”¹⁴⁷ Dohnanyi was murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp; the other members of military intelligence (Canaris, Oster, Bonhoeffer) were hanged just before the Americans liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp.¹⁴⁸ Among those shot in the back in the final days of Berlin were Rüdiger Schleicher, Klaus Bonhoeffer, and Hans John.¹⁴⁹ A separate matter, the Gestapo’s Operation Gewitter (“Thunderstorm”), had only very vague links to the 20 July plot. At the end of August 1944, the regime had a larger number of Weimar period politicians arrested, mostly Communists and Social Democrats, but also members of the former Catholic “Center” Party.¹⁵⁰ These arrests, however, were not part of the persecution of the civilian elements of the national-conservative opposition but, rather, were made on the basis of hastily assembled lists of politicians from the parliamentary era. The chronological proximity is no coincidence, though. Until the summer of 1944, the Nazi regime had been concerned almost exclusively about an uprising of Communists, or of the working class in more general terms. The 20 July events had shown that the traditional elites of German society might also pose a danger to National Socialist rule. As the war against the internal enemy intensified, those who had been subjected to harassment in the early weeks and months of Nazi rule, back in 1933, but had then been largely left alone, were now in the regime’s crosshairs, despite not having been engaged in political activity since.¹⁵¹ One of those affected was the Center politician from Cologne, Konrad Adenauer. In the mid-1930s, he had refused Jakob Kaiser’s invitation to become involved in an opposition group, probably because Adenauer knew that he was being watched.¹⁵² Adenauer was arrested as part of Operation Gewitter but managed to escape. After the Gestapo threatened to harm their two daughters, Adenauer’s wife disclosed his whereabouts and then attempted suicide. Only

 Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 519.  Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 710 – 712 (not mentioned in the English edition); Tuchel, “…und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 245 – 247.  Tuchel, “… und ihrer aller wartete der Strick”, 250 – 259.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 12; Hammer, “Die ‘Gewitteraktion’”; Kißener, “Die Aktion ‘Gewitter’”.  Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 104, 113.  Schwarz, Adenauer. Der Aufstieg, 405 – 407.

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through sheer luck the man who later became the first chancellor and founding father of the Federal Republic of Germany escaped being murdered shortly before the war came to an end.¹⁵³ No executions are known to have taken place within the scope of Operation Gewitter. Even so, this escalation of the war against the “internal enemy” resulted in a number of fatalities among its victims who were often elderly and in uncertain health; Adenauer’s wife, Gussie, died in 1948 from the long-term effects of her suicide attempt. The 20 July plot had been the work of national-conservative politicians and military officers, most of whom did not live to see the end of the war. As against this, Operation Gewitter targeted the representatives of the Weimar political system and the supporters of parliamentary democracy. The survivors of these groups would shape postwar West Germany.

8.3 Fighting to the End and Individual Refusal Even after the alleged “saboteurs” had been eliminated, Operation Gewitter marked the limits of the Third Reich’s “war against the internal enemy,” and it never achieved its aim of a true totalization of its war effort, for reasons immanent to its political system. Until 1942, the Nazi leadership used the formula of “total war” not so much to step up the repression of the whole population as to give a propaganda boost to fading expectations of victory. After the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, a “total” grip on all areas of public life was central to the efforts of the Party, judiciary, and police.¹⁵⁴ After the failure of the uprising, there were no further attempts at toppling the regime as a whole. The initial but limited rise in public morale has been described in the literature.¹⁵⁵ Many Wehrmacht officers might have been well aware of the criminal nature of the war they had been fighting, and they might have justifiably feared Allied retribution after being defeated; in that sense, the crimes, too, tended to perpetuate the war.¹⁵⁶ Even so, forms of oppositional behavior by soldiers existed in a wider sense both before and after the summer of 1944, and they deserve mention. These individual cases lead us to the question of why large segments of the German pop-

   

Schwarz, Adenauer. Der Aufstieg, 414– 420. Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 1070. Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 905 – 911. Kunz, “Die Wehrmacht in der Agonie,” 98.

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ulation remained committed to the regime and its war effort to the very end. In other words: why did only very few refuse to be part of Hitler’s destructive policies, even after the persecution of the 20 July conspirators had laid bare the regime’s brutality, while almost everybody “held out” to the very end? Was this due to the Nazis’ “terrorizing threat”¹⁵⁷ against its own countrymen, or were there other motives involved? What was the effect of the “masculine”-idealized model of perseverance?¹⁵⁸ Or was the main factor “unit cohesion,” as American military sociologists insisted after the war?¹⁵⁹ Not least, the 20 July events themselves showed how fervent belief in the Führer still was among Wehrmacht soldiers.¹⁶⁰ Those who objected to orders of a purely destructive character saved invaluable cultural assets. Their efforts included evacuating art from the combat zone, such as when, in autumn of 1943, German soldiers relocated the library of Monte Cassino Abbey as well as the holdings of the Neapolitan museums stored in the vaults under the monastery to the Vatican. Lieutenant Colonel Schlegel, part of the Panzerdivision Hermann Göring (a Luftwaffe formation), was responsible for the evacuation. One might object that these acts constituted theft, and there are indications that Göring expected some of the treasures to end up in his collection of looted art. Still, the fact remains that these invaluable artefacts were indeed saved from annihilation due to the unauthorized actions of a few individual officers.¹⁶¹ Paris was saved from large-scale destruction in August 1944 as the result of blatant insubordination. General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz surrendered to the regular French forces, hoping to save his troops from the far worse fate they could expect if they fell into the hands of the Résistance. Choltitz himself went into captivity and was thus safe from Hitler’s ire, but he nonetheless still faced the possibility of Sippenhaft reprisals against his family (see Chapter 8.2). The risk was particularly great as Choltitz had been nominated “Commanding General and Commander of Military District of Paris” to succeed Generalleutnant Hans von Boineburg-Lengsfeld, who had come under suspicion after his role on 20 July.¹⁶²

 Mommsen, “Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus,” 20 – 21.  Zimmermann, Pflicht zum Untergang, 463 – 472.  Shils and Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration.”  Echternkamp, “At War, Abroad, and at Home,” 31.  For opposing interpretations see Klinkhammer, “Die Abteilung ‘Kunstschutz’” and Kubin, Raub oder Schutz?.  Hansen, Disobeying Hitler, 73 – 84; Vogel, “German and Allied Conduct,” 614.

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Others disregarded the regime’s “scorched earth” orders, at times just on a local scale. One should not think first of Albert Speer who seriously inflated his own role after the war, with the eager assistance of German publicist Joachim Fest.¹⁶³ Dozens of smaller-scale sabotage activities became known afterwards which, it can be assumed, were only the tip of the iceberg. Failing to blow up port facilities or letting a bridge fall into enemy hands (such as the one at Remagen) could have cost those responsible their lives.¹⁶⁴ There were instances where officers who had been in contact with the French in hopes of a swift end to the war once the 20 July coup had succeeded, found suicide as their only remaining option once it had failed.¹⁶⁵ The same could happen to those who risked their own safety to save other humans. Vienna-born Sergeant Anton Schmid was shot in Vilnius in April 1942 because he had helped Jews escape from the local ghetto.¹⁶⁶ Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who saved the lives of many Jews in Warsaw, survived the war but died in Soviet captivity in 1952.¹⁶⁷ The “forces of social cohesion were by no means totally effective,”¹⁶⁸ but they were indeed strong. In view of this, the example of the few who did resist such ideological and group pressure deserves even greater respect and are all examples of individual and humanitarian bravery. From a moral point of view, no history of the Second World War can afford to overlook them. Their impact on history, however, was usually limited – most of the Jews saved by Sergeant Schmid at the cost of his own life were killed later. Yet another group are the cases of desertion, each of which objectively and adversely affected the Third Reich’s warfighting capacities. If one is to define specific groups of deserters, according to their motives and intentions, distinctions are called for: there were those who objected to the regime on political or religious grounds, those who were unwilling to commit war crimes, and, last, those who tried to escape prosecution for other (civilian) offenses.¹⁶⁹

 Brechtken, Albert Speer, 13 – 14, 555 – 579, claims Speer was “ignorant and devoid of knowledge” (chapter heading p. 555).  Hansen, Disobeying Hitler, 134– 152; Zimmermann, “Die deutsche militärische Kriegführung im Westen,” 723 (no English translation published yet); Sylvan and Smith, Normandy To Victory, 324– 336.  Hansen, Disobeying Hitler, 150.  Ganglmair, Feldwebel Anton Schmid; Lustiger, Feldwebel Anton Schmid; with more detail Wieninger and Pabst, “Feldwebel Anton Schmid”; more recently Wette, Feldwebel Anton Schmid.  Hosenfeld, “Ich versuche jeden zu retten”; Heinrichs, “Hauptmann d. R. Wilm Hosenfeld.”  Kühne, “Der Judenretter,” 33.  Knippschild, “Deserteure,” 229 – 238.

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Thus, after 20 July 1944, there were no more organized efforts to overthrow the regime or end the war as a whole, but there were a series of individual offers of surrender. Some of them – such as Choltitz – were driven by the desire to avoid further unnecessary losses or to secure their own survival. Others were already preparing for a postwar order. An example of this is the separate German surrender in Northern Italy, which was intended to prevent a further advance of Communist partisans from Yugoslavia into the highly industrialized north Italian plain, with its traditionally left-wing working-class population. (The threat of a strong Communist presence on Switzerland’s southern border explains the active involvement of Swiss authorities in this scheme.) Operation Sunrise was driven jointly by the German Army and the Waffen-SS; only the Supreme Commander West and South, Luftwaffe Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, refused to sign the partial surrender – but allowed two of his subordinates to do so on his behalf.¹⁷⁰ Commerce and industry within the Reich also had a vested interest in ending the war sooner, but they lacked the means to actively work towards this end.¹⁷¹ They hoped for, above all, an armistice with the Western Allies that would end the bombardment of German cities – and the destruction of their assets. Some of the leading SS and Gestapo figures followed Himmler’s example and took care to ensure to their own survival, or even their future in a postwar Germany. A few, with Hitler’s personal doctor Felix Kersten among them, tried to establish contacts with the British or Americans, above all via Allen W. Dulles in Zurich.¹⁷² To the very end, Himmler as well as Gestapo chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner hoped to obtain favorable terms for themselves by using the Jews held at BergenBelsen (and possibly also the persons in “protective custody,” described in Chapters 6.3 and 8.2) as negotiating chips.¹⁷³ When Hitler learned this on 28 April 1945 in his Berlin bunker, he reacted with a fit of rage – that could no longer affect Himmler, though.¹⁷⁴ The regime was continuously haunted by the spectre of 1918, fearing the revolution unleashed by the end of the First World War. On an organizational level, this led to the concentration of all elements with military police functions. What had until then been the Geheime Feldpolizei (Secret Field Police), Heeresstreifen-

 The most recent and most reliable account is in Lingen, Allen Dulles, in particular pp. 79 – 82. See also Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 463, Document 5 – 50, Telegram 6329 dated 5 March 1945, and 471, Document 5 – 61, Telegram 6829 dated 12 March 1945.  Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 365, Document 4– 99, Telegram 537 dated 7 November 1944.  Breitman, “A Deal with the Nazi Dictatorship?”, 416 – 419; Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten, 720 (not in the English edition).  That was what Dulles reported to Washington as well.  Kershaw, Hitler 1936 – 1945, 816 – 819; Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 733 – 736.

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dienst (Army Patrol Service) and other units were now converted into the Feldjäger, co-opting an ancient Prussian term, who were ordered to collect stragglers and send them back to the front, filling the units which had been bled to death. On the other hand, these police elements were to maintain “law and order,” handing over real or suspected “deserters” to improvised military courts which would sentence them to death in swift “trials”; offenders would then be hanged in public in order “to maintain morale of the troops.”¹⁷⁵ The images of soldiers hanging from the lampposts, with makeshift placards around their necks stating their “guilt,” are part of the memorialization of this final phase of the war. In this context, it seems highly questionable that the founding fathers of the West German Bundeswehr should have reverted, without anyone questioning it, to the term Feldjäger for their military police force, the reason being that the states, responsible within the federal system for police matters, objected to the creation of a federal “military police” organization.¹⁷⁶ The 20 July 1944 did not result in the hoped-for swift end to the war, but it did affect its course. Initially, the failed assassination attempt and coup d’état stabilized the regime because the population within the Reich and the soldiers on all fronts came together in solidarity with their Führer. Himmler and Goebbels managed to expand further their power bases within the Nazi system. Göring succeeded in covering up the extent to which his part of the Nazi empire had been involved in the events, thus preventing a further erosion of his public standing.

 Garbe, “Von ‘Furchtbaren Juristen’”, 52.  Schütz, Die Vorläufer der Bundeswehr-Feldjäger, 24– 27, 171– 262. For the Wehrmacht flying courts see Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 112, 121; Messerschmidt, Die Wehrmachtjustiz 1939 – 1945, 401– 430.

9 Political, Military, and Ethical Goals of the Resistance 9.1 Creating Stable Structures What, then, was supposed to have happened once the coup d’état had succeeded? In view of the conspirators’ emphasis on a workable top-level command structure, it seems appropriate to examine how they intended to reorganize it for the purposes of ending war and eventually achieving peace. Beck had drafted a “Decree on the Provisional Command Structure” which was based on his earlier concepts.¹ It provided for a Great General Staff (Großer Generalstab), a Reich War Ministry, an “Officer Bureau” (i. e., a personnel office for the Army and Luftwaffe, but not the Navy) and a commander in chief Eastern Front. Even in its terminology, the “Great General Staff” recalled the structures that existed between 1914 and 1918. It was to include Jodl’s Wehrmachtführungsstab (the operational department of the OKW), a portion of the Army General Staff, the Luftwaffe General Staff and the Abwehr. Also in the tradition of Imperial Germany, this would not have been an instrument of comprehensive strategic warfare, as the Navy was not represented. The chief of the Great General Staff was to be subordinate to the Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, together with the commander in chief of the Navy and the head of the Personnel Office. The “Home Army” (Heimatarmee) (instead of “Replacement Army,” or Ersatzheer) was to have a “Commander in chief” – an indication that it should again assume executive control within Germany. Its commander in chief was also to be the deputy war minister – an obvious elevation in rank and importance. Implicitly, the chief of the Great General Staff was also to be commander in chief of Army and aerial forces, while the ministerial functions (administration and logistics) were to be handled by secretaries of state within the War Ministry. This would include most of the competencies that until then belonged to Albert Speer and his apparatus. As a consequence, Speer’s Ministry of Armaments would become part of the War Ministry. Due to the prevailing military situation, a commander in chief of the Eastern Front (Oberbefehlshaber Ost) was to be created (again, the term evoked memories of the First World War position Oberost ²).

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 31– 33 (24 July 1944, encl. 7); see also Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 204, with further sources.  Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, 255 – 256. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-011

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With a staff consisting of the remaining elements of the OKH, he was to command the Army, the Luftwaffe, and the remaining foreign troops. Beck’s draft was in essence a return to the structures in place during the First World War. In reintegrating military aviation into the Army, and in its strict separation between Army and Navy, his plan was strikingly retrograde. It underlines Beck’s general tendency to “maintain or even reinforce the position of traditional ruling elites.”³ It overlooked completely the experience in triphibious warfare during the opening phases of the Second World War – such as the attacks on Norway, Eben-Emael, and Crete, to name but a few. Beck’s concept also disregarded the fact that the First World War structures had failed conspicuously at the interfaces between military and civilian administration.⁴ Like Beck, Stauffenberg had criticized the existing command structure during his time in the Organization Branch, and he objected in particular to the dualism of OKW and OKH. Like other General Staff officers, he had agitated in favor of a “unified Wehrmacht general staff” to support the Army, Navy, and Luftwaffe – a far more innovative approach than Beck’s. According to Gestapo reports, even the highly conservative Johannes Popitz saw in Beck’s concept an irresponsible underestimation of the role of airpower in modern wars.⁵ All of these elements were essential to the new command structure contained in the teletype messages that emanated from the Bendlerblock on the afternoon of 20 July. The first, signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben,⁶ stated the first objective – “The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead!” – and then continued: An irresponsible gang of Party leaders, far behind the front, has tried to exploit this situation to stab the hard-pressed Army in the back and seize power for its own ends. In this hour of supreme danger, the Reich government, in order to maintain law and order, has proclaimed a state of military emergency and has entrusted to me both supreme command of the armed forces and executive power in the Reich.

This implied, first of all, the existence of a Reich government. It had been over 11 years since the cabinet was last convened; Hitler of course made most decisions himself and made individual arrangements for delegating authority only when necessary.⁷ Simultaneously, a separate military commander in chief had been in-

 Müller, General Ludwig Beck. Studien und Dokumente, 53. For 1938 plans involving the Navy, see Dülffer, “Überlegungen von Kriegsmarine und Heer.”  Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, 781– 782.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 291– 293 (23 August 1944, enclosure 1).  For Witzleben, see Mueller, “Generalfeldmarschall Erwin von Witzleben.”  Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 409 – 410; Kershaw, “Working towards the Führer,” 106; Longerich, Hitler, 501.

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stituted for the Wehrmacht. The unholy parallelism between Army and WaffenSS was abolished – “The whole of the Waffen-SS is incorporated into the Army with immediate effect” – and a separate directive had been prepared on how to deal with Waffen-SS units. There was no suggestion that the Luftwaffe would be integrated into the Army. To the contrary, “all commanders of Army, Luftwaffe, and Navy” were explicitly exhorted to do their duty.⁸ It is impossible to say which of these concepts would have come to be realized should the uprising have succeeded. During his Gestapo interrogation, Berthold Graf Stauffenberg is said to have stated that “no new commander in chief of the Luftwaffe would have been named, and the Luftwaffe command staff would have been attached to the General Staff,” and that the Navy should have been placed under the Great General Staff.⁹ Berthold Stauffenberg’s mention of the Navy here is certainly due to the fact that he wore its uniform. In any case, the sources about the Stauffenberg brothers’ concepts are too diffuse and – in the case of the Gestapo reports – too unreliable to allow us to construe a basic antagonism between Stauffenberg and Beck. It seems undeniable, though, that the former chief of the Army General Staff, who had himself served on the Great General Staff of the First World War, was leaning more towards concepts and wordings of that period, whereas the younger officers had themselves experienced the fundamental changes in the face of war. The Gestapo interpreted this as being merely a question of power politics: A purely power political point of view is evident. The designated circle of generals and the officer corps see themselves limited in their competencies by the Führer as Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht. [Tresckow: …] Only once a fully independent Wehrmacht General Staff under a general has been put in place would things look different. Only then could the Wehrmacht implement practically the power political consequences which seemed necessary.¹⁰

Rather, the idea was to coordinate the Reich’s military efforts more efficiently and to match Goebbels’ talk of “total war” with action by making a unified, rather than polycratic, effort.¹¹

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 24– 25, 41 (24 July 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 20 – 21 (24 July 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 526 (12 December 1944). A similar interpretation can be found in Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 983: “The motivation of the military and civilian ‘national-conservative’ opposition was, despite all its criticism of the treatment of the Jews, marked by the fact that at first, conflicts over leadership seemed more important than the fundamental rejection of the acts of injustice.”  Mommsen, “Die Rückkehr zu den Ursprüngen,” 313.

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9.2 Resistance and Parliamentary Democracy The aims of the national-conservative resistance in the field of domestic and social politics have been the object of scholarly analysis since the 1960s. It can be assumed to be common knowledge today that out of this group, only very few supported the basic concept of parliamentary democracy.¹² Parliamentary and democratic governance seemed to have been refuted conclusively by the course of events. The Weimar Republic was not only discredited in the eyes of the conspirators; it was held responsible for the rise of National Socialism.¹³

This interpretation of National Socialism as the quasi-logical continuation of Weimar mass democracy was not too far removed from those explanatory patterns which exiled German sociologists such as Fritz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse used to explain German fascism to their employer at the time, the United States’ OSS.¹⁴ Rather than proponents of liberal democracy, the resistance movement included members of the various right-wing and nationalist groups of the Weimar period;¹⁵ others – Hans John, for example – had entertained positions of the far left and contributed their views to the political discussions.¹⁶ It was Hans John who established tentative contact with Ernst von Harnack, the trade unionist Wilhelm Leuschner,¹⁷ and former Social Democrat member of parliament Julius Leber.¹⁸ Among the military, too, there were only very few who saw themselves in the tradition of Reichswehr officers like General der Infanterie Walther Reinhardt who had been determined supporters of a parliamentary system.¹⁹ As we have seen, most of those who later joined the military opposition had their start in

 The contributions in Part V of Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus, can be considered a conclusion to the debates about this subject.  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 571.  Neumann, Marcuse, and Kirchheimer, Secret Reports on Nazi Germany, 4– 6; Müller, Krieger und Gelehrte, 41– 49; Middendorf, “Verstoßenes Wissen.”  For a good overview see Meinl, Nationalsozialisten gegen Hitler.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 152– 153. Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 994, sees the politicians at the center of the conspiracy (with Julius Leber as a key example) as typical representatives of the Weimar Republic, but this is not necessarily the case; in his own Social Democrat Party, Leber was rather an outsider: Mommsen, “Neuordnungspläne,” 164.  For Leuschner, see Ulrich, Wilhelm Leuschner.  Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 159.  Mulligan, The Creation of the Modern German Army, 36 – 85, 221– 224.

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a Reichswehr that considered itself to be above any particular form of government. That is what gave them the inner freedom to act against the regime now at the helm. Somewhere between civilians and career officers were the reserve officers.²⁰ There were some among them who, like Caesar von Hofacker, saw the Weimar Republic as the “object of egotistic interests, a prey to materialistic powers, in short: a soulless apparatus which can generate mechanical compromise but never rise up to creative achievements.”²¹ This often came hand in hand with the search for a “third way” between capitalism and communism which would provide a specifically German option. The political direction of a post-Nazi government was the subject of substantial clashes between “younger” and “older” thinkers, i. e. the more restorationminded group around Goerdeler and the Christian socialist members of the Kreisau Circle. That Moltke should have referred to Goerdeler’s nomination to head a new government as a “Kerenski” solution (see Chapter 7.3) is indicative of how deep-rooted the antagonisms were, resulting in heated debates.²² Ulrich von Hassell, an old-school diplomat who was in essence close to the Goerdeler group and who also heartily disliked Moltke, nevertheless jotted down in his diary that Goerdeler was, after all, “a kind of reactionary.”²³ Goerdeler’s conservatism was not, however, aimed at a simple restoration of the Weimar system or – more likely – a monarchy. Rather, he envisaged a basic reorganization, including the self-administration of small entities along the lines of an authoritarian corporate state. The many documents drafted by Goerdeler or the Kreisau Circle conspicuously avoid the topic of the military’s role in a future state. Goerdeler’s voluminous and extremely detailed memorandum, “Das Ziel” (“The Goal”), is rather vague on this point: Preserving the German Wehrmacht is so important that it must be at the fore of any plans regarding when and how to end the war. The Wehrmacht is also indispensable as a means of internal cohesion and for the education of the nation; for this, reconstituting the respect of all soldierly virtues will be required.²⁴

 Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 152– 154.  Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozeß,” 454.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 99.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 347 (8 January 1943).  Goerdeler’s memorandum “Das Ziel” (probably autumn 1941), published in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 6.1.1 (pp. 873 – 944), 888.

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Item 11 then opens a separate, but again rather brief, section entitled “Wehrmacht,” the first sentence of which is revealing: Nothing need be said here about the Wehrmacht…. From the point of view of total politics, all that is required is that national economic and political education will need to have a broader basis in General Staff training.²⁵

Seeing the Army as an institution of national education seems closer to the concepts of a mass army than to those propagated by Seeckt. Emphasizing grand strategic aspects over those of operation-level warfare probably did not reflect the position of General Staff officers, certainly of those who had been brought up along the lines of traditional general staff thinking. There is no archival evidence of whether this ever led to clashes with Beck, but we also do not know whether Beck ever knew about this memorandum in the first place. Another passage reads: “It seems necessary that epaulettes in their traditional shape and color be reserved once again exclusively for military officers.”²⁶ Though this may seem absurd, it highlights the fact that the uniforms of civilian Wehrmacht personnel, railway personnel, and police officers (all the “shady characters” in Hößlin’s estimation; see Chapter 4.4) all featured officer-like epaulettes.²⁷ Even in 1941, Goerdeler perceived a threat in the egalitarian elements in the National Socialist military policies and took them seriously enough to include them in this, the most relevant documentation of his thoughts. He had also drafted an appeal which he planned to read once the coup had succeeded and which was to include a reference to “our valiant Wehrmacht guarantors of law and order” – a clear hint that the military was to play a long-term role in internal security; the police are mentioned only much later.²⁸ The debates in the Kreisau Circle about the future state and its structure, or the relationship between individual and state, hardly ever mention the role of the military. A remark such as that “bearers of arms” (Waffenträger) should be excluded from general suffrage is, however, an indication that the armed forces were to play a separate role, outside of politics.²⁹ In a memorandum entitled “Starting Point – Objectives – Problems,” dated 24 April 1941,³⁰ Helmuth  Goerdeler’s memorandum “Das Ziel” (probably autumn 1941), published in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 6.1.1 (pp. 873 – 944), 919.  Ibid.  Stumpf, Die Wehrmacht-Elite, 173 – 177.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 140 (4 August 1944, enclosure 3).  “Basic Principles of the Reconstruction,” 9 August 1943, published in Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 347– 354, see here p. 351.  Published in Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 317– 328.

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James Graf Moltke, a lawyer by training, provided for a “defense minister” as part of the state structure as well as assigning spiritual care of the forces to the churches, and among the necessary measures to be taken he listed “strength of the fleet” and even “the air force.”³¹ But despite the coherent plans Moltke formulated for the rebuilding of the economy, he offered no such detail on these points. However, in his draft “First Instructions to the Provincial Commissioners,” dated 9 August 1943, we find an informative remark. In the event that a state of siege or state of emergency was declared, the political representatives were to keep in mind that “the military authorities in the area are under instructions to obey your orders.”³² Even under conditions of extreme turmoil, Moltke would have insisted on the civilian control of the military. In this context, however, it must be borne in mind that the Kreisau group rejected the notion of any kind of uprising, whether military or civilian, and focused instead on formulating ideas for the time after the Nazi regime had run its course to the very end. The officers who formed part of the coup d’etat were not much given to political debates. Stauffenberg’s thinking had been shaped by his aristocratic family’s background, his role in the Stefan George group, as well as his Catholic upbringing. He never attempted to hide his “rather vague, socially romantic, and corporatist set of values,” but he refrained from drafting political statements.³³ This is not to say he did not engage in political activities, a point which alienated him from Goerdeler. In the winter of 1943/1944, Stauffenberg stated that “many who had been political leaders in the Weimar era had not understood the significance of the Republic; in particular, General von Seeckt, the Chief of Army Command, had isolated the Army politically and socially.”³⁴ This went along with a growing openness for personal contacts with Social Democrats, in particular with Julius Leber. From an early stage, Stauffenberg had objected to mere “restoration”; “the change that must come had to be ‘new.’”³⁵ What exactly that change should consist of, however, remained vague. The “oath” Stauffenberg formulated together with other disciples of Stefan George also does not offer much clarity in this respect (“We desire a New Order which makes all Germans supporters of the state

 Ibid., 328.  “First Instructions to the Provincial Commissioners,” 9 August 1943, published in Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 354– 357, at 355.  Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 123. See also Krolak, “Der Weg zum Neuen Reich,” 548 and passim; Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, passim.  Statement Sauerbruch, quoted in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 197.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 152.

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and guarantees the law and justice, but we scorn the lie of equality and we bow before the hierarchies established by nature.”³⁶) It would be premature to take this source as proof that Stauffenberg, demonstrating some sort of noble restraint, should have accepted the primacy of politics and left political matters to the civilians in order to avoid a military dictatorship.³⁷ According to the statements made by his friend Kuhn while the latter was in Soviet custody, Stauffenberg had argued in February 1943: “The consequence that we often asked for means setting up a military dictatorship, even if only temporarily” – and Kuhn specified further that the term “military dictatorship” was “indicative of our future joint actions.”³⁸ The importance of involving “workers” in the preparations for a coup seems to have been consensus among all officers in the conspiracy. They were all aware of how the military had attempted to seize executive power within the Reich during the Kapp Putsch of 1920, and how it had been defeated by the workers’ opposition. On his deathbed, the former chief of the Army General Staff, Generaloberst Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, urged Ulrich von Hassell to warn Goerdeler: “For God’s sake, boys, don’t do another Kapp Putsch!”³⁹. As a result, Stauffenberg as well as most of his confidants saw the need to transcend the “resistance of notables” (Honoratiorenopposition) and to put the entire undertaking on a broader footing. Kuhn, for example, stated as late as June 1944: “The organization is too narrow; somehow the masses have to be integrated into the preparations.”⁴⁰ By that time, however, Stauffenberg had al-

 Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 293 – 294 (Appendix VI).  See, e. g., Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1015.  “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, fol. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210, at p. 191; also in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 379. Compared to this, the source value of Schlabrendorff’s statement in They Almost Killed Hitler, 77– 78, that a temporary military dictatorship “should be reduced to a minimum” and “on no account should last longer than three months”, seems considerably less, given that Schlabrendorff first claimed this when facing his US interrogators (and also taking into account his general unreliability). On the other hand, Kuhn’s claim that the military dictatorship should have “laid the groundwork for a democratic state” (Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 194; Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 382) should also be read with some skepticism; this seems to be the only instance of the word “democratic,” and the term may well go back to Kuhn’s Stalinist interrogators.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 356 (28 March 1943); Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 599.  “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, fol. 22, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210, at 208; also in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 396.

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ready established contact with Julius Leber, precisely with the hope of remedying this major weakness of the opposition. The national-conservative conspirators around Goerdeler, Popitz, and Hassell had initially done little to cooperate with working-class politicians. They did not see any point, and the former labor leaders of the Weimar period did not see any reason for political cooperation with their erstwhile antagonists either. On the other hand, men like Carlo Mierendorff, Theodor Haubach, and Adolf Reichwein had taken part in the deliberations of the Kreisau Circle from a very early stage.⁴¹ Ulrich von Hassell was an archconservative diplomat who fundamentally resented any cooperation with trade unionists and Social Democrats. He nonetheless understood early enough that any conspiracy relying solely on the support of the generals would be discredited abroad in short order; involving working-class politicians therefore was a necessity.⁴² At the same time, the Social Democrats active in the Kreisau Circle had also come to understand that a simple return to Weimar politics was out of the question and that the times called for the development of entirely new ideas. Even so, the political left long remained highly skeptical of the military. After their first contacts, Hermann Maaß took Stauffenberg and his elitist views to be “rather reactionary”; on the other hand, the former trade unionist’s political ideas had obviously taken Stauffenberg aback.⁴³ For Stauffenberg, his contacts with Leber marked the first substantial exchange with an established workingclass politician. It may have helped that Leber was a First World War reserve officer with whom the general staff officer from the old Swabian nobility had something in common. Stauffenberg seems to have seen in Leber the indispensable “man of the people” who alone would be able to ensure the new government’s success in a plebiscite – something that one could not have said of Goerdeler…. Stauffenberg conceived of a constellation which would repeat November 1918, but in inverted order: an alliance of the Army and the workers was to lay the foundations of a new order based on social balancing.⁴⁴

That Stauffenberg should seek direct contacts with working-class politicians, thereby bypassing Goerdeler (and eventually even questioning the former may-

 Mommsen, “Der 20. Juli und die Arbeiterbewegung,” 290 – 292.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 289 (21 December 1941); Mommsen, “Social Views and Constitutional Plans,” 95, 111.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 205 – 206 (12 August 1944).  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 588; see also Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 370 – 371.

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or’s role), resulted in a lasting alienation between the civilian and the military heads of the conspiracy.

9.3 Ending the War in the East? Like Stauffenberg, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg was also a descendent of the Prussian General Ludwig Graf Yorck – who in view of the military situation in 1812, had initiated his country’s swing away from the alliance with Napoleon towards one with Russia.⁴⁵ Was the old Prussian field marshal’s memory a guiding star for the young General Staff colonel? After the war, it was suggested occasionally that Stauffenberg had planned a separate peace with Stalin. The prime source for this is the dubious account of Hans-Bernd Gisevius, Goerdeler’s liaison with the OSS. Gisevius had met Stauffenberg once, on 12 July 1944, and got the impression that the colonel preferred an “Eastern solution.” This assertion is not supported by other sources and is undercut by the fact that Stauffenberg had been highly annoyed that Gisevius had disregarded the integrity of the conspiracy by traveling from Zurich to Berlin in the first place.⁴⁶ According to Gisevius, the negative attitude of the Western Powers, together with the aerial destruction of the German cities, had pushed segments of the opposition to tend towards a “militant socialism”⁴⁷ – with corresponding leanings in their foreign policy. Gisevius also used the alleged sympathies of the opposition for Moscow to put pressure on Dulles – and eventually Western governments – to obtain binding concessions for a post-Nazi German government.⁴⁸ Goerdeler as well as Captain Theodor Strünck (from the Abwehr) both stated to the Gestapo that Gisevius was rather optimistic regarding the Western Allies’ willingness to negotiate.⁴⁹ Gisevius was very clearly part of Goerdeler’s faction, and he generally tended to portray the military within the conspiracy in a rather dim light; charging them with pro-Soviet tendencies fits into that pattern. Gisevius himself placed the postwar debate about a possible “Eastern orientation” of the military resistance in the context of the Cold War – his allegations in the

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 317.  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 434.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 480.  Dulles, Germany’s Underground, 133 – 138; based on that, Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 182. See also Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 364– 365, Doc. 4– 58, Telegram 4443 – 46 dated 11 August 1944; according to this source, Gisevius talked about Stauffenberg’s socialist leanings and orientation towards Moscow very soon after the putsch had failed.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 248 (17 August 1944).

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1950s were obviously designed to detract from Stauffenberg.⁵⁰ SS-Obersturmbannführer Georg Kiesel, a Gestapo officer who had interviewed Goerdeler extensively, referred to Stauffenberg and his followers after the war as “the socialist group.” But even he stated categorically, “All claims that a combination of the opposition with members of the [National] Committee [Free Germany] brought about the collapse of Army Group Center in the summer 1944 are false.”⁵¹ Dulles had to create a composite view of the situation that he could transmit to Washington, and that meant integrating many such reports and snippets of information. SD officer Maximilian von Hohenlohe told his American interlocutor about the impending total collapse of Army Group Center,⁵² and in April 1944, Adam von Trott zu Solz had disclosed similar information.⁵³ Dulles was a staunch anti-Communist – in the late 1950s and early 1960, he served as director of the CIA – and even during the war, he had been prepared to leave all consideration of the Soviet allyship aside in order to set up a parallel organization to the National Committee “Free Germany” among German prisoners-of-war in US hands, but had been called off by his political superiors.⁵⁴ In the autumn of 1943, Tresckow allegedly suggested smuggling the former German ambassador to Moscow, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, through the front lines. Schulenburg, politically close to Goerdeler, was supposed to sound out peace options with Stalin after the Soviet leader had indicated his willingness to negotiate with Schulenburg the year before. However, it seems Goerdeler objected to this plan.⁵⁵ Ulrich von Hassell, who had far more experience in matters of foreign policy, was clearly more open-minded and viewed oscillating between east and west as a game of “nine-men’s morris.” In his diary, he wrote:

 Gisevius, Bis zum bitteren Ende [1960], 451 (not in the English edition).  Kiesel, “SS-Bericht”, 24. See also Pahl, “Motive und Ziele,” 41.  Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 94, Doc. 1– 103, Telegram 534 dated 2 August 1943.  Krusenstjern, “daß es Sinn hat zu sterben”, 491; Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 304– 305, Doc. 3 – 146, Telegram 3787– 91 dated 10 June 1944.  Heideking, “Die ‘Breakers’-Akte,” 37; Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 182.  For Stalin’s willingness to negotiate in 1942, see Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 123, regrettably with no sources named. For the 1943 plan see Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 308 (28 August 1944); Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 24. See also the account in Röhricht, Pflicht und Gewissen, 206.

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Really, there can be only one gimmick left: to get either Russia or the Anglo-Americans to understand that maintaining Germany is in their own best interest. I prefer the Western goal, but in a pinch, I could live with an understanding with Russia.⁵⁶

This is certainly not a “preference” for an eastern solution, either. Probably under torture, Canaris told the Gestapo: There was occasional talk about peace prospects. Above all, whether it would be possible to make peace with the Western powers and then fight together with them against Bolshevism…. There were similar deliberations re a peace with Russia.⁵⁷

Again, it is interesting to note that a war against “Bolshevism” was considered possible at the same time a peace was to be concluded with “Russia.” The other source that seems to indicate a certain willingness on Stauffenberg’s part to consider an “Eastern solution” is Kuhn’s statement in Soviet captivity. According to this, General Fellgiebel insisted on “an understanding with the USSR as soon as possible” after the regime change, as the Soviet Union “alone had an interest in maintaining, and cooperating with, a viable Germany.” Stauffenberg is said to have shared the general’s opinion but insisted that there were “no evidence of Russia having an accommodating attitude toward Germany after a coup,” and that this also applied to the National Committee “Free Germany.”⁵⁸ Based on this, Peter Hoffmann revised to some extent his former position that there had been no “eastern orientation.”⁵⁹ However, thorough source criticism cannot overlook the fact that the language reflects Soviet usage (note the otherwise uncommon use of “USSR”), as Kuhn’s statements were made to his Soviet captors; they might well be tainted by a desire to satisfy his interrogators, or by a tendentious translation from Kuhn’s German into “official” Russian. The Western Allies perceived the National Committee “Free Germany” as Stalin’s offer of a separate peace with Germany. They believed Stalin to be perfectly capable of another turnaround similar to that of 1939, and suspected the Germans of leaning towards a repetition of their Rapallo policies of the 1920s.⁶⁰ Im-

 Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 382 (15 August 1943). For Hassell’s position, see also Schöllgen, Ulrich von Hassell, 131– 132.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 407 (21 September 1944).  “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, fol. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210, at pp. 195 – 196; also in Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 383 – 384.  Hoffmann, “Tresckow und Stauffenberg,” 8.  Bungert, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen, 298 – 301; Paetel, Versuchung oder Chance?, 248.

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mediately following the coup attempt, the top Nazi leadership itself believed there must have been an understanding between the conspirators and the National Committee. That night, Bormann wrote to the Gauleiters: This mob of reactionary criminals obviously staged this attempt on the Führer and on those officers faithfully dedicated to the Führer after consultation with the “National Committee Free Germany” in Moscow (General von Seydlitz and Graf Einsiedel).⁶¹

Much later, in the 1980s, the GDR used Stauffenberg’s alleged willingness to come to an agreement with the Soviet Union as the ideological rationale for including him in the “progressive” traditions of the “socialist nation on German soil.”⁶² In political opposition groups such as the Red Orchestra, the left-wing political orientation matched the preference for a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. As discussed above, that attitude was not alien to parts of the political right, either.⁶³ However, this did not apply to the bourgeois national-conservative opposition. During his last visit to Istanbul, Moltke (possibly after consultation with Stauffenberg) declared to his American partners that there was a strong pro-Russian group in the opposition. “Pro-Russian,” however, did not necessarily mean “Pro-Soviet,” as can be seen in the fact that, in the same breath, Moltke referred to the “Bolshevization” of Germany as the greatest danger.⁶⁴ As we have seen above, the latently pro-Russian attitude of many German conservatives had also formed the motivation for the militant anti-Stalinist warfare in the east.⁶⁵ Even a reference to General Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg’s radical step in 1812 did not necessarily imply cooperation with “Russia” (Stalinist or not) but,

 Teletype message Nr. 4, Bormann, Führerhauptquartier, to all Gauleiter (Very urgent – To be serviced immediately); IfZ, Fa 116, fol. 1.  Finker, Stauffenberg, 208; more sceptical Bentzien, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, 330.  Danyel, “Ein Endsieg,” 467, 481.  Heideking and Mauch, “Das Herman Dossier,” 571, 574– 577, 589 – 591. When speaking to his Western counterparts earlier, Trott had argued along similar lines, but that had lost him even more credibility in their eyes: Klemperer, “Die ‘Außenpolitik’ des deutschen Widerstandes,” 197. See also Ruchniewicz, Kreisau neu gelesen, 75.  See Chapter 6.5, and Hildebrandt, “Die ostpolitischen Vorstellungen im deutschen Widerstand,” 216 – 217.

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rather, any manner of independent, decisive action against the Führer in the interest of national survival.⁶⁶ After the Kreisau Circle was broken up, Adam von Trott zu Solz established contact with Stauffenberg and his network. Trott zu Solz knew Churchill personally and for a long time expected the British to relent.⁶⁷ Even in June 1944, Trott unsuccessfully tried to establish contact with the Soviet ambassador in Stockholm, Aleksandra Kollontaj, via the German Socialist Willy Brandt, who was then living in exile there.⁶⁸ As Lieutenant Commander Kranzfelder told the Gestapo, the two Stauffenberg brothers had taken the position that any hope to enter into negotiations with one of the two enemies could only exist as long as the fronts held. A war on two fronts would eventually become unsustainable. At the time, nobody thought about the option of talks with the Soviets. The danger of Bolshevism was such that any alignment with the Soviet Union would have meant disaster.⁶⁹

It does not seem entirely impossible that, during the final weeks before the uprising, Stauffenberg became more open to the idea of an “Eastern solution,” which perhaps indicated the influence of Julius Leber, who had a fairly firm grasp of the international situation.⁷⁰ Mentioning such a solution during potential talks with the Western Allies was obviously a pressure tactic, and it was a maneuver that the Americans and British saw through easily. As no assurances about a willingness to enter into political talks were forthcoming from either Washington or London, contact with the Soviets was a necessary consideration – but preference was always for peace to be made first with the Western Allies.⁷¹ To what extent Stalin might have felt bound by any assurances remains anyone’s guess; his chief interest obviously lay in securing his own grip on power.⁷²

 Cf. Hofacker in late June 1944: Memo Dr Elmar Michel, Chief of Military Administration France, 15 October 1945; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 16‑33, at fol. 18. See also Morré, “Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’”, 546.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 41– 42.  Hoffmann, “Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,” 639 – 640; Krusenstjern, “daß es Sinn hat zu sterben”, 501– 502; Macdonogh, A Good German, 278; Klemperer, “Adam von Trott zu Solz,” 210 – 211. See also Sonnenhol, Untergang oder Übergang?, 109; and Wuermeling, “Doppelspiel”, 189 – 191.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 116 (11 August 1944).  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 441; Leber, Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, 285 – 286.  Blasius, “Waiting for Action,” 280.  Gaddis, The Cold War, 6, 11.

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If Stauffenberg accepted the need to establish some sort of liaison with German Communists, the aim was not to prepare concerted action with the Soviet Army, but on the contrary, to calm conditions within Germany in order to stabilize the eastern front, at least temporarily.⁷³ When all was said and done, the findings of the 1932 Planspiel Ott still held true: the military would be unable to fight against both Communists and National Socialists while at the same time warding off an outside threat. The differences between Goerdeler’s and Stauffenberg’s groups endured even long after the war. Former Captain Hans Karl Fritzsche claims in his memoirs that Professor Gerhard Ritter, Goerdeler’s friend and biographer, denied him a scholarship because he had been part of Stauffenberg’s organization and therefore a “National Bolshevist.”⁷⁴

9.4 Ending the War in the West As a result of this ideologically based refusal to cooperate with Stalin’s Soviet Union, the opposition clearly preferred a solution which would include a swift cessation of hostilities in the West once a new government had been established. How exactly this was to be achieved, though, was the subject of heated debate.⁷⁵ From the Allies’ point of view, the national-conservative conspiracy was still thinking in by-then obsolete notions of international power and never seriously considered the only realistic alternative, i. e. a simultaneous surrender in east and west.⁷⁶ In the same way the concepts of a coup d’état with or without an attempt on Hitler’s life differed greatly between Goerdeler and Stauffenberg (see Chapter 7.1), the two could not agree on how to create a mass base of support at home or – as we will see here – on what might still be obtainable militarily and diplomatically. The opposition expected an internal power struggle (see Chapter 7.3) which would last for some time, and this of course fed fears that the Allies in east and west would exploit that opportunity. Whenever the conspirators tried to recruit officers or civilians for their plans, they had to answer the question of

 Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1010 – 1014.  Fritzsche, Ein Leben im Schatten des Verrates, 117.  It is misleading to call this a “lack of ideas” (Martin, “Das außenpolitische Versagen des Widerstands,” 1038); the problem rather resides in an excess of ideas.  Mauch, Schattenkrieg gegen Hitler, 167.

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whether creating such a period of weakness in the face of determined enemies, without any guarantees for a future Germany, was really a responsible policy.⁷⁷ The Kreisau Circle had never had a problem with this, but had stipulated as a prerequisite for its plans: Germany has been defeated, i. e., she is no longer in a position to continue the war. This situation could be the result of a variety of factors: the physical exhaustion of the population, the industrial exhaustion of the nation, political changes within Germany, or disruptions and rebellions in the occupied territories which, because of the extent of the occupied areas and the way in which they have been treated, could not be stemmed and would lead eventually to an armed invasion by the Anglo-Saxon powers.⁷⁸

Even in the autumn of 1943, Hassell and the lawyer Carl Langbehn had discussed plans to “give up the West without a fight, and throw all our forces toward the Eastern Front; the Western Allies would then be left facing the choice between prolonging the war or supporting Germany’s course.”⁷⁹ In Goerdeler’s undated draft of an address to the nation, ending the war was not the first priority; “restoring the full majesty of the law” held that place of prominence. The optimization of the war effort was not mentioned until item 11, followed by the final point, item 12, which stated: “We warned against this war,” and “it is more important that we seek peace.”⁸⁰ Captain (Res.) Hermann Kaiser, who served on the staff of the commander of the Replacement Army, was Goerdeler’s link to Stauffenberg.⁸¹ On 25 May 1944, he drafted a plan on Goerdeler’s behalf featuring 11 points on questions of foreign policy which he then submitted to Stauffenberg.⁸² The document indicates clearly how grossly the civilian head of the opposition overestimated the Reich’s

 Gotthard von Falkenhausen, as cited in Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 28 – 30; Mommsen, “German anti-Hitler resistance,” 184.  Helmuth James Count Moltke, “Starting Point – Objectives – Problems,” 24 April 1941, published in Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 317– 328; quotation p. 322.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 390 (13 September 1943); Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 490.  Draft for Goerdeler’s first state of the nation address; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 147– 156 (5 August 1944, encl. 1), at 155.  Kroener, “Hermann Kaiser,” 43 – 46.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 126 – 127 (2 August 1944). The wording of this source (“Kaiser drafted a note for Stauffenberg”) has occasionally been understood as meaning that Kaiser had worked at Stauffenberg’s request. Kaiser undoubtedly was part of the Goerdeler group; that and the document’s obvious parallels with Goerdeler’s thinking only permit the above interpretation of its origin.

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diplomatic options two months before the attempted putsch. In this, he was most likely guided by Gisevius’ overly optimistic views transmitted from Bern.⁸³ Only at the very last moment did Goerdeler arrive at a more realistic assessment of Germany’s international position. He held out hope, however, that even if the Allies had so far refused any negotiations before a coup d’état, they might be willing to negotiate with a new government once it had established itself.⁸⁴ This led to first deliberations regarding a military cooperation with the Western Allies which, in early May 1944, included ideas of amphibious or airborne landings in strategic areas such as Berlin.⁸⁵ Obviously, this plan was closely linked to Goerdeler’s notion of seizing Hitler alive and trying him in a German court. This cannot be attributable to Stauffenberg’s group which, by that time, had firmly decided in favor of an assassination attempt. From a military point of view, the plan was hare-brained, and could hardly have been dreamed up by an officer, and even less by one who had any appreciable knowledge of airborne combat (see Chapter 3.1). Even the persistently optimistic Goerdeler eventually resigned himself to the inevitability of unconditional surrender – but still with the pious hope that the Western Allies would not hand Germany over to the Soviets. It is not entirely clear what aims Goerdeler intended to pursue in the east. We do not know whether he planned to conclude a subsequent armistice there as well, or whether he hoped to fight the Soviets with the Western Allies’ support. Gisevius claims that when he met Goerdeler on 12 July, he warned him that the most that could be hoped for was a surrender in the west which might ensure that the Western Allies reached Berlin before the Soviets did.⁸⁶ Though Gisevius claims that Goerdeler eventually accepted this dire outlook,⁸⁷ the former mayor himself stated in custody that he had worked towards an agreement with the Western Allies which would allow the German Army in the West to reverse course and march to the eastern front.⁸⁸ Nothing better illustrates Goerdeler’s illusions than the fact that, even after his arrest, he believed in a separate armistice in the

 For this complex, see Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 502– 504.  Ritter, The German Resistance, 274.  “Memorandum from OSS Director William J. Donovan to General George C. Marshall, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Attempt on Hitler’s Life, Conclusions and Propositions,” 24 July 1944, published in American Intelligence and the German Resistance, Doc 57, 253 – 254. See also Ritter, The German Resistance, 272– 273.  Ritter, The German Resistance, 273.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 522.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 495 (21 November 1944).

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west, in winning over the German public, and in a Wehrmacht which would act against Hitler while he was still alive. But by that time, Goerdeler was not in charge anymore. Once it was clear that the Allied landings in Normandy had succeeded, Colonel Hansen, commanding the military department in the Reich Main Security Office (the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, i. e. what was left of the former Abwehr), ordered his (and Stauffenberg’s) liaison in Madrid, Otto John, to establish a link with Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The idea was to eliminate Goerdeler from possible negotiations for an armistice.⁸⁹ Trott and Yorck made similar statements to the Gestapo, that Stauffenberg had planned negotiations “from military leader to military leader”⁹⁰ – which matches exactly the instructions which John in Madrid received. Klemens von Klemperer refers to these “Janus-faced” illusions which dated back to Germany’s old hegemonic past, and the parallel deliberations about a future Europe⁹¹. In fact, this was the result of several groups and factions (Kreisau, Goerdeler, Stauffenberg) operating parallel to each other, combined with the course of the war and the many disappointed illusions about the Western Allies’ willingness to accommodate the resistance. Stauffenberg took the advice of his realistic friends Trott and Leber. As opposed to Goerdeler, by mid-June 1944 at the latest, he was fully aware of the fact that “a total occupation of the Reich can no longer be avoided, no matter whether preceded by a change of government or not.”⁹² In the end, the only remaining option was an assassination attempt followed by a military coup d’état, as the Gestapo reports summed up the outcome of a final major conference on 16 July 1944 in the house in Berlin-Wannsee where the two Stauffenberg brothers were living. Caesar von Hofacker emphasized to the group his skepticism that ending the war in agreement with the Western Allies was possible. “After much back and forth, [only] the ‘Central Solution’ remained, which was to culminate in the plan to assassinate the Führer.”⁹³  Otto John, Ein Augenzeugenbericht vom 20. Juli 1944 vom missglückten Anschlag auf Adolf Hitler (re-translation from English); IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 1‑8, at fol. 1; Bill of Indictment against Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Hans John, Justus Perels, and Hans Kloss, Berlin, 20 November 1944. Copy; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 36‑44, at fol. 39. Stöver, “Der Fall Otto John,” 167, claims that John had received this task much earlier, in November 1943, but gives no source for this.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 111 (31 July 1944).  Klausa, “Klemperer, Ein Lebensbild,” 23, referring to Klemperer, “Nationale oder internationale Außenpolitik,” 645 – 646.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 211 (14 August 1944).  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 15 (8 August 1944), 57 (26 July 1944). See also Klemperer, “Adam von Trott zu Solz,” 211.

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That meant that both Stauffenberg’s hope of a “Western solution” through Rommel or John, and Goerdeler’s “Berlin solution” without bloodshed – arresting and trying Hitler – were discarded; in view of the situation, they were just not feasible. Stauffenberg would have preferred a western solution, though. According to the information Hofacker had obtained from Field Marshal Rommel, at that point the commander in chief of Army Group B, the western front would not hold out for more than two weeks. Stauffenberg’s position represented that of most of the national-conservative conspirators. Colonel Alexis von Roenne, Head of “Foreign Armies West,” wrote to his wife on 1 October 1944: “It was all about Germany and about the crucial question: how to save the country and the nation from Russian invasion and from being dismembered.”⁹⁴ In view of the Western Allies’s refusal to budge on the question of unconditional surrender, these were lofty hopes. The uncertainty of whether a putsch would be accepted, at least in the long run, by a majority of the German population, was coupled with the unstable diplomatic situation: Trott, Stauffenberg’s adviser in questions of foreign policy, reportedly told the Gestapo that the head of the military conspiracy had acted “into a void” diplomatically. The term seemed important enough for the Gestapo to quote it twice in its reports.⁹⁵ Stauffenberg and his advisers were obviously clinging to the hope that, once a coup had taken place and a new government was effectively installed, and under pressure of their respective public opinion back home, the Anglo-Americans might end up accepting a “compromise solution between East and West.”⁹⁶ Along with the new re-organization of the uprising during the first half of 1944 came a more clear-eyed assessment of the political situation with regard to ending the war. Goerdeler’s demands made way for Stauffenberg’s far more moderately worded pleas. But until shortly before 20 July, even he was not willing to end the war at any price and it seems that he gave up any remaining hopes of obtaining concessions only in the final days before the assassination attempt.

 Quoted in Pahl, “Motive und Ziele,” 43.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 111 (31 July 1944), and 198 (11 August 1944, enclosure 1). However, several remarks in these reports suggest that Trott was severely tortured (pp. 173 – 8 August – and 249 – 17 August). For the relationship between Stauffenberg and Trott see Krusenstjern, “daß es Sinn hat zu sterben”, 494, and Macdonogh, A Good German, 277– 278.  Klemperer, “Adam von Trott zu Solz,” 212; Klemperer, “Die ‘Verbindung zu der großen Welt’”, 151; Mommsen, “German Anti-Hitler Resistance,” 183, Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 231. Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 75, takes the opposition’s hopeless position as a given and never considers this rather plausible notion.

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Goerdeler’s plans to impose a new government from above, with the support of some prominent field marshals, had been stymied by Kluge’s political naivety (and personal weaknesses) and was now being stalled by Rommel’s ambivalence. The national-conservative opposition believed that there would be some shared interests between a new German government and the Western Allies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Behind this lay the belief that the Second World War had resulted from an aberration in the European system resulting entirely from Hitler’s policies. National-conservative resistance was always motivated by the hope to be able to preserve at least the core of the “Lesser Germany” as established by Bismarck.⁹⁷ “Despite all their protestations of faith in a future European peace settlement, Goerdeler and Hassell in particular remained trapped in a dream world of nationalist aspirations.”⁹⁸ In that they differed markedly from, for example, the Kreisau Circle.⁹⁹ In France, a separate cell of the military resistance had formed back in 1943 (see Chapters 4.5 for Hofacker as well as Chapter 8.3).¹⁰⁰. As the primary aim of the uprising was to terminate the war in the West, the conspirators sought to quickly establish contact with the Allies, and that, in turn, would require eliminating throughout France all elements loyal to Nazism. In analogy to what was envisaged in the Reich, the coup planners focused on gaining the support of the territorial command structure, above all that of the Military Commander of France, General der Infanterie Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who had been one of Beck’s closest collaborators back in the days of the Truppenamt.¹⁰¹ By the end of 1942, Stülpnagel had begun to trust Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, who served on his staff.¹⁰² During the winter of 1943/44, Hofacker was tasked with drafting plans for a putsch in the French capital.¹⁰³ In the summer of 1943, Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg took the opportunity of an official visit to France to encourage the opposition there; whether there was al-

 Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1011.  Mommsen, “Der deutsche Widerstand gegen Hitler und die Überwindung,” 182.  Lüdicke, Griff nach der Weltherrschaft, 160.  A more detailed account can be found in Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War.” In particular, this includes a detailed rebuttal of the speculation in Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 386 – 387, that at the beginning of the Battle in Normandy, “the resistance” held back two Panzer divisions. See also Ose, Entscheidung im Westen, 111– 113; Vogel, “German and Allied Conduct,” 593 – 596; Mönch, Entscheidungsschlacht, Chapter VIII.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 199.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 135 (4 August 1944); Memo Dr Elmar Michel, Chief of Military Administration France, 15 October 1945; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 16‑33, at fol. 21.  Hiller, “Cäsar von Hofacker,” 83.

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ready a “forceful circle of conspirators” in France,¹⁰⁴ however, remains doubtful. Largely independent of the territorial administration, a different group of officers critical of the regime had formed in the field army, and in particular in the staff of Army Group B under Field Marshal Rommel. This group was linked to Goerdeler rather than to Stauffenberg. In 1943, “an independent action of the Army in the West” was considered but soon discarded. At the time, an uprising of the Army back in France would have been unthinkable for a soldier serving on the eastern front.¹⁰⁵ In March 1944, Hofacker told writer Ernst Jünger (a captain on Speidel’s and Rommel’s staff), without mincing his words: The catastrophe has now become unavoidable, but we can mitigate and modify it, as a collapse in the East is more horrible than in the West and would certainly entail large-scale murder. Therefore, negotiations in the West are necessary, and before the Allied landing; contact has been established in Lisbon. The precondition is that Kniébolo [Jünger’s pseudonym for Hitler] will have to disappear, he will need to be blown to kingdom come.¹⁰⁶

Stauffenberg had long been optimistic regarding the chances of driving an Allied landing back into the sea, although he himself had studied the use of airborne troops at the Kriegsakademie (see Chapter 3.1), and although no Allied landing since September 1943 had failed. But Stauffenberg felt certain that once the Allied invasion had been stopped, a new German government’s negotiating position would have much more leverage.¹⁰⁷ Once the Allies had landed in Normandy, however, it soon became obvious that the Wehrmacht would not be able to push back the Americans, British, and Canadians. At an early stage, Hofacker pointed out that – irrespective of the situation on the beaches – the combination of Résistance and Allied air raids would render “operational warfare no longer possible.” All that might be hoped for would be “an early surrender” to “maintain for Germany a reasonably bearable position

 For some time, Schulenburg was part of the “Unruh Commission,” which combed the rear areas with an eye to who could be spared for frontline duty. Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozeß,” 461462; Kroener, “‘Frontochsen’ und ‘Etappenbullen,’” 378.  Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 51; Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 22.  Jünger, Strahlungen, 496. See also Krüger, Hans Speidel und Ernst Jünger, 50 and in particular footnote 50.  John, “Am achten Jahrestag,” 2; John, Falsch und zu spät, 56; Leber, Ein Mann geht seinen Weg, 286. The Allies’ perception was largely identical: Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 269, doc. 3 – 93, telegram 2966 – 69.

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in central Europe.”¹⁰⁸ The diverging views held by Goerdeler and Stauffenberg regarding a postwar settlement can to some extent be explained by the respective dependence on the more realistic reports the colonel received from John and Hofacker, whereas Goerdeler relied on Gisevius’s far more optimistic predictions, which were themselves inspired by Dulles. Goerdeler’s hope that the field marshals in the west might take action ignored Kluge’s and Rommel’s preference to procrastinate. Hofacker was quite clear in his prediction that none of them would act before they received orders from Berlin.¹⁰⁹ It was an open secret that Kluge had refused to ask for Tresckow to be transferred to his staff in the west. Probably in July 1944, Tresckow dispatched Lieutenant Colonel Georg von Boeselager to see Kluge and to urge his old commander in chief from the east to open the western front. Boeselager implored Kluge to fight not against the British and the Americans, but against Hitler – but all that was to no avail.¹¹⁰ There would be no solution which would include Field Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge. By early July 1944, Rommel at least had become convinced that the war needed to end, even if he himself was not yet prepared to act against Hitler. Speidel claimed later that Rommel planned to “secure Hitler using reliable Panzer formations, to then try him in a German court and sentence him for his crimes against the German nation and against humanity,”¹¹¹ but that seems hardly credible. Rommel was a hard-boiled infantry officer and, moreover, had once been the commandant of the Führerhauptquartier; he would have known that this was a sheer impossibility. This notion (which Speidel dates May 1944) also has far too much in common with Goerdeler’s pipe dreams of the same period for us not to notice. Most likely, Speidel knew about Goerdeler’s preferences (whether he learned them directly from the former mayor, or through Strölin), and much later quietly assumed that Rommel would have supported them. As for what would come then, Speidel noted: “The armistice – no unconditional surrender! – was to be followed by peace negotiations which would have to

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 136 (3 August 1944, enclosure 2); see also Heinemann, “Widerstand als politischer Lernprozeß,” 464.  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 594, footnote 148, based on tape recordings of Hofacker’s trial in the People’s Court.  Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 103. See also Scheurig, Henning von Tresckow, 186. Schlabrendorff – and Scheurig, based on his own account – date this at the end of June. This is, however, impossible, as Kluge assumed his new command only on 3 July, and to everyone’s surprise (Graeger, “Field Marshal Günther von Kluge,” 60). Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 252, dates this as 7 July.  Speidel, Invasion 1944, 66; Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 174– 175.

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show the way for a new order and not into chaos”¹¹² – obviously excluding a repetition of the 1919 Versailles “Diktat.” In October 1944, the Gestapo assumed that Rommel had known about the assassination plans,¹¹³ which is also the version Speidel gave in his book Invasion 1944, published immediately after the war.¹¹⁴ Strikingly, he did not repeat this claim in his memoirs published much later, in 1977.¹¹⁵ There is no affirmative evidence that shows Rommel was aware of the fact that, in Berlin, preparations were underway to kill Hitler. Speidel, who shared Goerdeler’s enthusiasm for a coup d’état without an assassination, and who similarly did not belong to Stauffenberg’s inner circle, would not have told his field marshal about an attempt on Hitler’s life. But based on the latest research, it appears safe to assume that Rommel did know about plans in Berlin to overthrow Nazi rule by some means.¹¹⁶ In a conversation with Vice Admiral Friedrich Ruge on 11 June, Rommel had opined that “the current strength of our position is still the conflict between Russians and Anglo-Americans.” Only very cautiously had he distanced himself from Hitler: “Top [leadership] regrettably not untainted; slaughters [are their] great guilt. Warfare dilettante … first interfering with every detail, and now major reproaches.”¹¹⁷ These thoughts highlight Rommel’s motives: the war crimes, the amateurish warfare, and the absurd command structure – Hitler’s interference with operational and even tactical decisions and his habit of denying his subordinates any freedom of action – were all familiar to the “Desert Fox” from his combat service at El Alamein.¹¹⁸ In another talk with Ruge, Rommel is supposed to have opted clearly for a solution “with the Anglo-Americans.”¹¹⁹ On the evening of 9 July 1944, Rommel had the conversation with Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker mentioned previously. According to Counsellor Friedrich von Teuchert, who worked with Hofacker on Stülpnagel’s staff, that

 Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 174– 175.  Lieb, “Erwin Rommel,” 337– 339.  Speidel, Invasion 1944, 66.  Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 174.  Lieb, “Erwin Rommel,” 341– 342.  Ruge diary, 11 June 1944, afternoon. However, see also Irving’s (probably justified) source criticism in a note dated 21 September 1975, both in IfZ, ED 100/188 (Deposit Irving), unnumbered. Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 398, translates the first phrase, whose German version Oben nicht sauber clearly refers to Hitler, as “Nazi leaders did not have clean hands,” in line with his general tendency to exculpate the Führer.  Stumpf, “The War in the Mediterranean Area,” 784– 790.  Copy Diary Ruge, 2 July 1944; IfZ, ED 100/188 (Deposit Irving), unnumbered.

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evening, Rommel “ordered Hofacker to draft a letter to the [Allied] Commander in Chief West [the context makes it clear that this meant Field Marshal Montgomery whom Rommel had faced before, at El Alamein], offering a surrender with honorable conditions.”¹²⁰ This letter is supposed to have been drafted by Walter Bargatzky from the same staff ¹²¹ but was never sent – allegedly, because Hofacker left for Berlin the very next morning, 10 July. To what extent Hofacker fully informed Rommel about his cousin Stauffenberg’s plans will probably never be known; as stated already, this concerns above all the question of whether Rommel knew about the assassination plans. One might well ask whether an interview with a semi-civilian like Hofacker, a mere lieutenant colonel, and from the Luftwaffe at that, was actually in a position to make the famous field marshal rethink his entire position – or whether Hofacker’s enthusiastic report upon arriving in Berlin was unfounded, as Irving claims: “The interview left Rommel unchanged and unimpressed.”¹²² On 10 July, Rommel ran into Colonel Hans Lattmann, whom he had known since their days in Africa. When interviewed by David Irving,¹²³ Lattmann recounted Rommel as saying: “I’m going to use my good name with the enemy to make a deal with the west, against Hitler’s will – but only on condition they agree fight side by side with us against Russia.”¹²⁴ This is a clear indication that Rommel had not remained totally unimpressed by what Hofacker had had to say. On 15 July, Rommel sent a memorandum in which he called upon Hitler to draw the conclusions of the worsening situation.¹²⁵ Speidel later claimed that  Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85.  Bargatzky, Hotel Majestic, 129 – 130.  Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 425. See, e. g., Speidel’s far more muted account in Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85, fol. 13 – 14 and 20.  Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 433.  This is the first time Rommel acknowledged the possibility of acting against Hitler. For the complete record, see Interview David Irving – Hans Lattmann dated 15 June 1975, in Selected Documents, Reel 1. In his book, Irving does not state a date but places this conversation in a very different context, insinuating it took place almost immediately before Rommel was seriously wounded on 17 July. Yet, Lattmann is positive that the conversation took place on 10 July, i. e., the morning after the Rommel-Hofacker interview. Irving withholds this information from his readers, most probably, because it contradicts his claim that Hofacker “left Rommel unchanged and unimpressed.” For Irving’s working methods, including other cases of source falsification, see also Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen,” 154– 155, and Dülffer, “David Irving,” 689.  BArch, RH 19 IX/8, fol. 97‑99; Ose, Entscheidung im Westen, 322– 324.

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Rommel initially wrote that Hitler would have to draw the “political conclusions”;¹²⁶ this is unsubstantiated by other sources. Be that as it may, Rommel himself saw this memorandum as an “ultimatum,” and it originated around the same time that he first spoke about ending the war unilaterally in the event that Hitler was unwilling to follow Rommel’s advice: “Then I’ll open up the Western Front, because there is only one important decision left; we have to make sure that the Anglo-Americans get to Berlin before the Russians!”¹²⁷ Of all the field marshals still in command positions at that time (Witzleben had been left without a command for a long time), Rommel, who had always seen himself reduced to the operational level of warfare, now turned out to be the one who would transcend operational thinking and choose a strategic perspective. Hitler viewed this as Rommel overstepping his authority, and it surely helped seal the latter’s fate. This is “resistance,” even if it had only a loose connection with the national-conservative conspiracy, as no Führer could tolerate being given an ultimatum. In other words, Rommel put into question Hitler’s claim on power as much as the 20 July putsch did.¹²⁸ The increasingly divided structure of the Berlin opposition was reflected in the conspiracy in France as well: Stülpnagel and Hofacker had created a subcell of Stauffenberg’s well-organized conspiracy, while Speidel represented the loosely knit oppositional groups centering around Goerdeler. Hofacker’s contacts knew a day in advance when the bomb was to go off, whereas Speidel learned about the attempt only on the afternoon of 20 July.¹²⁹ What is important in the context of this chapter is that the two groups in France also held diverging views about the need for an assassination attempt, and about how to bring the war in the west to an end. For both factions, the aim was just that: terminate the war.¹³⁰ Even the events of 1938 (Beck’s opposition against Hitler’s warmongering during the Munich cri-

 Speidel, Invasion 1944, 115 – 117.  Both quotations are from the minutes of an interview David Irving and Dr Elmar Warning, Munich, 11. November 1976; IfZ, ED 100/188 (Depositum Irving), Interviews and Eyewitness Accounts.  Dülffer, “David Irving,” 687.  Walter Bargatzky, Berlin-Halensee, and Baden-Baden, 20 October 1945: “Persönliche Erinnerungen an die Aufstandsbewegung des 20. Juli 1944 in Frankreich”; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 5‑16, at fol. 11; Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 189. Dowe and Hecht, “Von Mythen, Legenden und Manipulationen,” 160, rightly deplore that there is still no scholarly Speidel biography, and also the lack of a more recent, comprehensive account of the national conservative resistance in France.  Walter Bargatzky, Berlin-Halensee, and Baden-Baden, 20 October 1945: “Persönliche Erinnerungen an die Aufstandsbewegung des 20. Juli 1944 in Frankreich”; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 5‑16, at fol. 11.

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sis) showed us that this opposition consisted of professional officers, not pacifists (see Chapter 5.1). Similarly, in the summer of 1944, the officers did not object to war as such, but wanted to put an end to a conflict which could not be won anymore and had thus become a crime against the German nation. The crimes against the population of the occupied territories had rendered any negotiated peace impossible. Planning an uprising meant, therefore, securing power at home so that a new government would have time to contact the enemy powers. In France, that meant arresting and probably shooting the chief figures of the Nazi regime – i. e. the heads of the SS and the SD – as well as plans for how to bring about an end of hostilities. For that, it was envisaged that the Commander in Chief West (Rundstedt, and later Kluge, but not Rommel as the subordinate commander in chief Army Group B) would establish a communication channel with the Anglo-American commanders. That would be what Stauffenberg had referred to as negotiations “from military leader to military leader.”¹³¹ Nowhere did the uprising of 20 July succeed as well as it did in Paris. That evening, Stülpnagel drove from Paris to the headquarters of Army Group B (whose command Kluge had assumed in addition to being Commander in Chief West when Rommel had been incapacitated) and reported that he had had the entire Nazi leadership arrested. That meant that all options were available to Kluge – no one could have stopped him had he decided to open up the western front there and then, effectively putting an end to the war. Yet, “Clever Hans” procrastinated. Instead, he rang Stieff in East Prussia, who had once served under him, and obtained confirmation that Hitler had indeed survived.¹³² At the same time, the chief of staff, Generalleutnant Speidel, did what he could to stabilize the front.¹³³ What mattered to Kluge was that Hitler was alive. according to Gersdorff, his comment was: “Well, if the swine was dead….” But as that was not the case, Stauffenberg’s prediction came true: Faced with the reality of Hitler’s survival, Kluge chose to remain loyal to his Führer, ordered Stülpnagel “to disappear somewhere,” and like his fellow field marshals, eventually sent Hitler a message of devotion.¹³⁴ But this made little difference, as weeks later, Hitler suspected Kluge of just the kind of treason that the field marshal had refused

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 111 (31 July 1944); Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 51– 52 ; Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85, fol. 13.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 367.  Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 191.  Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85, fol. 17– 22.

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to commit on that fateful night, relieved him of his command, and drove him to commit suicide.¹³⁵ As a result, we have to state that even immediately before the 20 July 1944, at a time when the putsch had been almost initiated at least twice, there was no clear concept for how to continue or terminate the war. Goerdeler’s opinion differed from that of Gisevius, and Beck seems to have sided more with Stauffenberg and Leber.¹³⁶ Even if the bomb had not failed to kill its intended victim, and even if the ensuing coup d’état had toppled Nazi rule, a swift decision about this central element of an alternative policy would not have been easy to reach.

9.5 Contacts with the Western Allies Starting during the Munich Crisis of 1938, the national-conservative opposition had repeatedly attempted to establish contact with the Western Allies and to obtain assurances of support for their cause.¹³⁷ This would not only be about “bearing testimony and thus ensuring that the ‘other Germany’ would have a say in the reformation of Europe after the coup d’état,” as the great expert on the resistance’s diplomatic contacts, Klemens von Klemperer, once phrased it.¹³⁸ The opposition’s aims were rather to change the diplomatic constellations so that the war in the west could be ended immediately after a regime change, and on conditions that would ensure some degree of acquiescence among the German public and thus a broader base for a post-Nazi government. The illusions propagated by men like Goerdeler or Hassell would have meant consolidating Hitler’s military gains via diplomatic means; the Western Allies obviously had little interest in supporting this.¹³⁹ On the other hand, the members of the national-conservative opposition differed greatly in the diplomatic aims

 Memorandum Bormann to Pg. Friedrichs dated 17 August 1944; IfZ, Fa 116, fol. 35 – 38; Hanno Kremer, “Der 20. Juli in Paris.” RIAS Berlin broadcast on 19 and 22 July 1979; IfZ, Ms 200/85, fol. 21– 22; Speidel, Aus unserer Zeit, 198; Steinbach, “Hans Günther von Kluge”; Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 904.  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 286, 435.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 56 – 61, 108 – 110 and passim; for Goerdeler’s contacts which go back even further, see Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” XLIV.  Klemperer, “Die ‘Verbindung zu der großen Welt,’” 153.  Kettenacker, “Der nationalkonservative Widerstand aus angelsächsischer Sicht,” 713; Klemperer, “Nationale oder internationale Außenpolitik,” 641.

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they sought to achieve abroad. They reflected the differences in foreign, European, and social policies pursued by Hassell, Goerdeler, the Kreisau Circle, and the military officers, above all those of the Abwehr. On top of that came the oppositional policies pursued by parts of the German Foreign Ministry, particularly by Undersecretary of State (Staatssekretär) Ernst von Weizsäcker. Resistance among diplomats first included Adam von Trott zu Solz, who formed part of the Kreisau Circle and later became Stauffenberg’s diplomatic adviser, and later, Otto Carl Kiep, Hans-Bernd von Haeften (brother of Werner von Haeften, Stauffenberg’s aide), Eduard Brücklmeier, Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff, Albrecht von Kessel, and brothers Erich and Theodor Kordt.¹⁴⁰ Up until the war began Goerdeler was still able to travel abroad on account of his job with Bosch.¹⁴¹ After September 1939, the possible contacts were reduced to a handful of destinations, such as the neutral capitals of Stockholm and Madrid as well as Istanbul and Zurich, but even these required hard-toget visas. In May 1943, Goerdeler made use of his post with Bosch one last time to travel to Stockholm.¹⁴² From an early stage, the opposition had the means of contacting the Western governments and made good use of them. The responses, however, were uniformly disappointing. The Allies would concede nothing regarding an ultimate peace or, later, a dilution of their demand for “unconditional surrender.” In early 1940, Captain Dr. Josef Müller, a Catholic lawyer working for the Abwehr and an acquaintance of Pope Pius XII from the latter’s days as the nuncio in Munich, had brought some optimistic news from the Vatican about possible concessions by the Chamberlain government: Should the offensive in the West be abandoned and the dictatorial regime replaced within reasonable time by a decentralized democratic government (and provided the French consented as expected) the British government would guarantee that no military offensive would be undertaken during the putsch, that in a peace settlement the 1937 German borders would remain untouched, and that the question of Austria becoming part of the Reich would be put to a referendum in Austria.¹⁴³

At the time, Brauchitsch and Halder had been unwilling to act on that basis but had preferred to loyally organize the attack on France and the Benelux countries.

 Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 63. For Brücklmeier, Kessel, and Yorck, see also Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli.  Bähr and Erker, Bosch, 238.  Bähr and Erker, Bosch, 241.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 162.

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Only the most determined conspirators were willing to subordinate their hopes for a victorious campaign to the need for regime change. Müller used his Vatican channels to inform his contacts about the impending offensive,¹⁴⁴ and Colonel Hans Oster kept the Dutch military attaché in Berlin, Colonel Gijsbertus Sas, informed.¹⁴⁵ Hitler, however, kept pushing back the date for the attack, first from the autumn of 1939 to the spring of 1940, sometimes on extremely short notice, so that Oster’s and Sas’s repeated warnings met with growing skepticism in The Hague. As the war went on, and after Chamberlain had been replaced by Churchill, assurances like those of early 1940 were no longer on the table. The opposition put out “diplomatic” feelers again during the summer of 1942 – around the time the British government had reasserted its “absolute silence” policy regarding all attempts at establishing contact.¹⁴⁶ In early 1943, Canaris spoke with the US naval attaché in Istanbul, George H. Earle;¹⁴⁷ in Sweden, the Protestant pastors Hans Schönfeld (Kreisau Circle) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Abwehr) sought contact with the pro-German Bishop of Chichester, George Bell;¹⁴⁸ and in the Vatican, Josef Müller, also from the Abwehr, used his contacts¹⁴⁹ – but most of these were, one way or the other, in the employ of the Abwehr. Bishop Bell and Allen Dulles, in Zurich, pleaded with the British and US governments for their respective contacts within the German opposition,¹⁵⁰ but Churchill’s cabinet and the Roosevelt administration in its wake could not afford to commit themselves in any way. Their main concern was that any binding concession on their part might be made public, turning it into an explosive charge to destroy irrevocably the Western-Soviet alliance. They could never be sure whether the feelers came from a genuine opposition movement within the Reich or whether they were part of an intelligence game; the memories of the Venlo incident (see Chapter 6.3) were still sufficiently fresh to foster suspicion.¹⁵¹ Stalin had already demonstrated his ability to change sides abruptly in 1939. Should he realize that

 Müller, Bis zur letzten Konsequenz, 131– 139.  Thun, Der Verschwörer, 169 – 193.  Blasius, “Von Moskau nach Casablanca,” 728.  Heideking and Mauch, “Das Herman Dossier,” 572; Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer reports!, 416 – 418.  Blasius, “Waiting for Action,” 287– 288.  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 23; Riebling, Die Spione des Papstes, 102– 111; Müller, Bis zur letzten Konsequenz, 80 – 92; Meyer, “Staatsstreichplanung,” 329 – 330.  Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 24– 25, Doc. 1– 4, Telegram 5688 dated 6 December 1942; 129, Doc. 2– 19, Telegram 763 – 67 dated 21 September 1943.  Meyer, “Staatsstreichplanung,” 329.

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the Western Allies were conducting peace negotiations behind his back, he might well make another U-turn. What was more, after 1918 it had taken Germany an astonishingly short time to regain its capacity to threaten its neighbors. This time, London was determined to demilitarize Germany completely. President Roosevelt was also unwilling to repeat the mistakes Woodrow Wilson had made in 1918/1919, thus his unwavering demand of unconditional surrender.¹⁵² The thinking of anti-Nazi politicians like Goerdeler and Hassell, who were still dreaming of Germany’s role as a major power, were not that far off from those of, say, Göring; obviously, they could no longer be acceptable as partners in negotiations.¹⁵³ British politicians had come to equate uncritically “militarism” and “the military,”¹⁵⁴ but this was the result of cogent analysis and not simply of “immobility, hardening and blindness which guided England.”¹⁵⁵ Neither could Dulles in remote Zurich claim to have had a major influence on decision-making processes within the German military or civilian opposition regarding questions of the planned uprising.¹⁵⁶ US intelligence analysts such as Franz Neumann and Herbert Marcuse, in Washington, as well as the director of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Labour politician Hugh Dalton, in London, hoped that Germany’s working classes rise up in revolt, possibly with the assistance of some suitable covert operations; that would have fitted much better into their political worldview than an alliance with a circle of national-conservative notables.¹⁵⁷ The OSS had not tasked Dulles with supporting the “Breakers” (his code word for the national conservative opposition) but, rather, with reporting back to Washington whether a postwar Germany was more likely to align with the east or the west.¹⁵⁸ Dulles  Mauch, Schattenkrieg gegen Hitler, 129, 133.  Blasius, “Waiting for Action,” 296; Weinberg, A World At Arms, 482– 483; Mommsen, “The Political Legacy,” 158.  Kettenacker, “Der nationalkonservative Widerstand aus angelsächsischer Sicht,” 719; Showalter, “Conscience, Honor and Expediency,” 63.  Fest, Staatsstreich, 213. A similar line can be found in Meehan, The Unnecessary War, but the book does not take into account Lothar Kettenacker’s important contributions to the subject nor the Hassell diaries. It can therefore not be taken seriously.  Grose, Gentleman Spy, 200.  Mauch, “Subversive Kriegführung gegen das NS-Regime,” 52; Mauch, Schattenkrieg gegen Hitler, 14– 15; Heideking, “Die ‘Breakers’-Akte,” 16 – 17; “Probabilities of a German Collapse,” 9 and 23 September 1943 (British) and 21/25 October 1943 (U.S.), published in Heideking and Mauch, USA und deutscher Widerstand, Numbers. 8 and 9. This relativizes the version in Klemperer, “Die ‘Verbindung zu der großen Welt’”, 150, according to which Dalton was an ally of the German resistance.  Heideking and Mauch, USA und deutscher Widerstand, 8; Heideking, “Die ‘Breakers’-Akte,” 23.

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himself interpreted his responsibility rather liberally, and above all, he was more willing to trust his German contacts than British intelligence was: I have the feeling from my dealings with Zulu [British] that their services, because of the legpulling they suffered in gloomy times of 1940 – 41, are unaware on occasion of the degree to which the situation has been reversed, even in the field of intelligence. Several of my finest sources would have been lost to me had I pursued their course.¹⁵⁹

By 1940, the Kreisau Circle had established a link with Sweden via the World Council of Churches.¹⁶⁰ It took until May 1942 and Bishop Bell’s visit to Sweden for the first meaningful attempt to make contact with the British government through this channel.¹⁶¹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer seems to have taken the opportunity to inform the bishop about the deportation of European Jews, which had just started.¹⁶² During the war, former Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen was the German ambassador in Turkey. When Canaris was in Istanbul in the autumn of 1943, he used Papen’s contacts to approach the US naval attaché.¹⁶³ As the news from all sides was equally disappointing, this seems to have led to a temporary slow-down of travel abroad, not least to avoid undue suspicion. At least Oster, when questioned by the Luftwaffe prosecutor, Colonel Manfred Roeder, on 29 April 1943 (i. e., long before the failed putsch), stated that “he forbade Bonhoeffer’s last two journeys to Switzerland, to save on foreign currency, but also in agreement with the co-director for Switzerland, Gisevius, who felt they might endanger his own operations.”¹⁶⁴

 Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 286, Doc. 3 – 119, Telegram 3377– 79 dated 8 May 1944; “legpulling” obviously refers to the Venlo incident.  Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 182.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 218 m-225; Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, 183.  See, for example, Gerrens, Rüdiger Schleicher, 140 and footnote 25 with further sources.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 598, footnote 8, accepts the version given in Buchheit, Der deutsche Geheimdienst, 427– 428. This, in turn, relies on Papen, Der Wahrheit eine Gasse, 594– 595, and on Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer reports!, 417. Though Papen recounts this episode at some length, he does not name Canaris as being involved, but the book obviously served to justify his own role. Wedemeyer mentions this only very briefly and in an aside, but he does mention Canaris as the instigator. Wedemeyer does not name any source, but most likely had his information from Earle who in 1950 had published an article about the incident in the “Philadelphia Enquirer.” How Buchheit came to know that “Canaris remained outside the intimate discussions of those involved” remains unclear.  Interrogation Hans Oster by Manfred Roeder. Extract, 29 April and 5 May 1943; MHM, PSF 420-BBAR6711.

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Apart from the contacts controlled by the conspiracy’s center in Berlin, there were also regional and local initiatives. For 1943, there is a report about members of the military administration in Paris contacting the French Résistance: The aim of these negotiations was to get the fighting units of the French Résistance to take a more conciliatory position towards a new German government should the Hitler regime be overthrown. Also, in the course of political and military events after a possible coup d’état, a certain cooperation with the French Résistance might be made possible.¹⁶⁵

During the first days of July 1944, direct contact was apparently made between a German unit, the Second Panzer Division, commanded by Generalleutnant Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz, and Allied staffs, after the latter had suggested the exchange of seriously wounded prisoners for a group of female nurses.¹⁶⁶ Whether Rommel or Kluge decided to keep this channel of communication open to be able to use it again in case they decided to act against Hitler’s orders, remains unclear. So, by the time Stauffenberg restructured his resistance organization in the autumn of 1943, there had been a number of different contacts. On the other hand, the Abwehr was no longer available to facilitate such links, so the new head of the conspiracy had to establish new, independent links. One of the most important was the Lufthansa representative in Madrid, Otto John, who belonged to the group of oppositional minds from within civilian aviation (Air Ministry, Lufthansa) introduced above in Chapter 4.5. His superior, Klaus Bonhoeffer, had recruited him as well as his brother Hans for the conspiracy.¹⁶⁷ John had already contacted the British Embassy in 1942, at the time on Goerdeler’s behalf, and he also maintained links with de Gaulle’s “Free French.”¹⁶⁸ In October 1943, he got to know Stauffenberg, who already had a reputation of being “headstrong and keen on establishing his own links with General Eisenhower, independent of the ‘politicians and diplomats in the conspiracy’ to start talks about an armistice once the cop d’état had succeeded.”¹⁶⁹ John offered his services to the young lieutenant colonel, whom Captain Gehre had described as the man who was “getting the coup d’état moving again.” By mid-November, John saw himself as Stauffenberg’s confidant and

 Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 20 – 21.  Speidel, Invasion 1944, 113; Schramm, Aufstand der Generale, 70; Irving, The Trail of the Fox, 420 – 421, 426.  Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 22.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 29.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 29 – 30.

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had approached the US military attaché in Madrid, Colonel William Hohenthal. He reported to Berlin that the link with Eisenhower had been established and that he could reactivate it whenever needed. Obviously, this was the contact Stauffenberg meant to use for negotiations “from military leader to military leader” – John’s firm impression being that Stauffenberg wanted to cut Goerdeler out of the picture.¹⁷⁰ But John, too, had initially worked for the Abwehr¹⁷¹, as US intelligence was well aware. Therefore, the Washington political establishment reacted rather cautiously: My fear is that attempts will be made by German intelligence groups to create some situation which they can later represent to the Soviets as preliminary steps to a separate peace…. You may also wish to consider informing the Soviet representatives.¹⁷²

In his memoirs, John highlights his American contacts, but he had established a link with the British as well, as he had told his brother Hans in the autumn of 1943.¹⁷³ It is probably no coincidence that, when John was forced to escape arrest and extradition by the Spanish authorities after 20 July 1944, he should have gone to London via Lisbon. He went on to work for the BBC and, later, the British prosecutor in Nuremberg. Finally, it was the British government again which made sure he was appointed the first president of the Federal German Counter-Intelligence Authority (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz).¹⁷⁴ According to the records of Goerdeler’s interrogation by the Gestapo, Stauffenberg told him that “he assumed that his messages would be on Mr. Churchill’s desk after about a week.”¹⁷⁵ Goerdeler assumed, though, that Stauffenberg had

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 111 (31 July 1944); John, Falsch und zu spät, 59 – 60. See also Trott’s statements to the Gestapo, probably after torture: Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 174– 175 (8 August 1944). In view of the complex preparations, vouchsafed by a sizeable number of sources, it is hard to understand why Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, 501, assumes that these were “illusions” which Beck did not share. What seems possible, though, is that Beck may not have approved of such diplomatic single-handedness on Stauffenberg’s part; see below, Chapter 9.8.  Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 34.  Dulles, From Hitler’s Doorstep, 595, footnote to Doc. 2– 133, dated 2 February 1944. We will not go into the question of whether John also spied (then or later) for the British or even for the Soviets, as discussed in Gieseking, Der Fall Otto John, 28 – 30.  Bill of Indictment against Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Hans John, Justus Perels and Hans Kloss, Berlin, 20 November 1944. Copy; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 36 – 44, at fol. 41.  John, Falsch und zu spät, 179; James P. O’ Donnell: “Otto John. Idealist, Träumer, Überläufer,” in Die Welt, 10 November 1956, 19; IfZ, ZS A-29-II, 32.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 248 (17 August 1944).

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established this link through the president of the Potsdam District Administration, Gottfried von Bismarck-Schönhausen, who in turn was in contact with Raoul Wallenberg in Sweden – a channel which Goerdeler himself made frequent use of. However, nothing else is known about a link between Stauffenberg and Bismarck, so that it seems safe to assume that this claim, too, was based on John and his connections in Madrid (and maybe was even meant to obscure the details of Stauffenberg’s foreign connections from Goerdeler, who was perceived as a security risk). Through John, Stauffenberg obtained a far more realistic picture of Germany’s international situation than Goerdeler could obtain from his contact through Gisevius with US intelligence in Zurich.¹⁷⁶ John flew to Madrid on 19 June 1944 to talk to Hohenthal again, but the uncompromising reply he had received was that, though Hohenthal would ensure that Stauffenberg’s messages would reach Eisenhower, there would be no other form of ending the war than an unconditional surrender to all Allies, including the Soviet Union. On 11 July, John sent another middleman to repeat this information to the Berlin conspirators.¹⁷⁷ Adam von Trott zu Solz, who had advised the rather inexperienced Stauffenberg in international matters from an early stage,¹⁷⁸ had warned him that there would be no way around a surrender, although the head of the military conspiracy kept pointing at his contacts through John. However, as time went on, Stauffenberg understood more clearly that hopes for concessions after a putsch were most likely in vain; in the course of this, he gradually alienated himself from Goerdeler as well. These disparate assumptions about Germany’s situation led to the major differences in the two men’s political aims discussed above, and they formed a major bone of contention between these two hugely different characters. That Stauffenberg should have planned to negotiate “from military leader to military leader,” specifically excluding Goerdeler and his conservative friends, offended the senior politician further. In Gestapo custody, he once referred to Stauffenberg as a “high-minded General Staff officer, seriously wounded in Africa, who later

 Heinemann, “Außenpolitische Illusionen des nationalkonservativen Widerstands”; Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 411.  Indictment of Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Hans John, Justus Perels, and Hans Kloss, Berlin, 20 November 1944. Copy; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 36‑44, at fol. 39.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 110 (31 July 1944) and 173 – 174 (8 August 1944; the phrase “partial confession which Counsellor Adam von Trott zu Solz was willing to make now” hints, however, that he did so under torture).

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turned out to be a strange customer as he wanted to dabble in politics.”¹⁷⁹ However, in a private letter to a prison warden he had come to trust, Goerdeler also referred to Stauffenberg as his “friend.”¹⁸⁰ Seen realistically, there was no reason to believe the Allies might make any kind of concession before the regime had been overthrown. Any hopes this position might change once a non-Hitler German government had been installed, as long-term cooperation with Germany against the Soviet Union would be in the Western Allies’ own best interest, had to remain only hypothetical. On the other hand, the apodictic statement that the governments in London and Washington, dependent as they were on democratic consensus at home, would have withstood popular pressure to terminate the war once the Germans had cast out the Nazi regime, is similarly speculative.¹⁸¹

9.6 An End to the Crimes All the conspirators were agreed that a new government would have to restore the “majesty of the law,” even if all parties did not have detailed knowledge of the crimes committed by Germans. When he was already in prison, Goerdeler wrote about Hitler: “He murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews,”¹⁸², but in another document from around the same time, he wrote that Hitler had “bestially annihilated millions of Jews”¹⁸³ – which was closer to the truth. But in principle, everybody knew that the population of the occupied territories as well as European Jewry in general had been (and still were) subjected to unheard-of atrocities. In its second leaflet, the White Rose had made that fact public, calling the mass murder of Jews “unparalleled.”¹⁸⁴ Stauffenberg had learned about the large-scale executions on the eastern front in May 1942.¹⁸⁵ Not only were such

 Memorandum “Our Idea” (Unsere Idee, after 9 November 1944); BArch, N 1113, Bd 26, fol. 1, quoted in Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIII.  Letter Goerdeler to Wilhelm Brandenburg, in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 7.2.4, at p. 1196.  Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 73 – 75.  Appeal to All [Appell an alle Menschen], dated 27 January 1945, published in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 7.2.7, 1236; Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIX.  Comment on a speech by the Reich Foreign Minister on 11 December 1944, published in Mommsen and Gillmann, Politische Schriften und Briefe Carl Friedrich Goerdelers, 7.2.5, 1201.  http: //libcom.org/library/white-rose-leaflet-2, accessed 7 May 2020; see also Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner.”  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 151– 152.

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crimes immoral, they also “dishonored” Germany’s reputation and thus formed a major obstacle to ending the war along conventional lines. Any new government would have to distance itself clearly from such atrocities, or risk disqualifying itself as a negotiating partner for any foreign power.¹⁸⁶ Himmler deduced from the external threat the need for repression at home;¹⁸⁷ inversely, a non-Nazi government would have to end all these genocidal activities in order to be capable of international action at all. For Goerdeler, the German crimes constituted an ideal topic with which to commence recruitment conversations. To assist, Hans von Dohnanyi collected evidence in the safe of his Abwehr office.¹⁸⁸ Concrete help for individuals, on the other hand (for the Munich Abwehr’s “Operation 7,” the smuggling of Jewish families into Switzerland; see Chapter 4.1), might have endangered the military conspirators, as it provided Himmler’s Gestapo with opportunities to encroach on the Abwehr’s prerogatives.¹⁸⁹ As a result of all this, the planners of the military opposition intended to create the preconditions for putting a swift end to the atrocities. Often, steps to secure power and steps to end the murders coincided. Among the immediate measures ordered by teletype on 20 July was an item that read: “c) Concentration Camps: Concentration Camps will be occupied at once, camp commandants arrested, guard personnel disarmed and confined to barracks.”¹⁹⁰ This has to be seen primarily in the context of item d), the determined action against the armed SS formations. After all, in the autumn of 1939, the concentration camp guards had formed the core of the SS Totenkopf Division, and they still had substantial fighting value. Based in places such as Sachsenhausen, Neuengamme, or Dachau, their potential was dangerously close to Germany’s major cities as well.¹⁹¹ Even so, the camps were first on the list, with the other SS elements only afterwards; this may also indicate the priority accorded to ending the outrages. This was of such vital importance that it even justified breaching the central tenet of the entire operation, i. e., the fiction justifying the Army’s intervention:

 Draft for Goerdeler’s first state of the nation address; Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 147– 156 (5 August 1944, encl. 1), at 149.  Longerich, Heinrich Himmler, 647.  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 22.  Dohnanyi, “Mir hat Gott keinen Panzer ums Herz gegeben”, 24.  Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 756.  Kroener, “The Manpower Resources,” 826 – 827.

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V. The people must be made aware of the difference from the arbitrary methods of their former rulers.¹⁹²

This was a clear statement that there was no longer any question of securing the regime against Party and SS machinations, but that the former “rulers” – and who but Hitler could that be? – were being replaced by new ones. Still, the national-conservative conspirators had other priorities than we might expect today. Among Captain Kaiser’s possessions, the Gestapo discovered a memorandum, “Plans for the Justice System,” whose first item read: Cleansing of public administration. Regardless of rank or position, and with the utmost expedition, the Chief Reich Prosecutor or special prosecutors will initiate criminal proceedings against such individuals who are known or suspected of having embezzled public funds, having enriched themselves, having abused their authority or having committed other offenses.¹⁹³

If the Gestapo henchmen did not misquote the conspirators’ views, embezzlement and corruption ranked above “other offenses,” which would have to include the mass murder of Jews and Soviet prisoners of war.¹⁹⁴ This aspect in particular shows how for some of the most determined members of the opposition, the uprising was a necessity even if the prospects of success were anything but rosy. As Stauffenberg’s uncle Nikolaus Graf Üxküll-Gyllenband put it: “Only through death can I dissociate myself from this gang of thugs.”¹⁹⁵ The point was no longer whether the massacres of the self-radicalizing regime affected Jews, Russians, Germans, or French. Schwerin’s words, in the face of death, pointed in the same direction: “I was thinking of the many murders…”¹⁹⁶

9.7 The “Final Solution of the Power Struggle”– The Shadow of 1918/19 The conspirators’ premise was that their coup d’état would form the climax and endpoint of a long-standing conflict between National Socialists and national-

 Teletype message KR – HOKW 02155 dated 20 July 1944, published in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 757.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 138 (4 August 1944, enclosure 2)  See also Dipper, “Der deutsche Widerstand und die Juden,” 349.  Quoted in Graml, “Militärischer Widerstand,” 96.  Hiller, “Johanniter,” 3.

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conservatives, a conflict which otherwise would need to be resolved after the war had ended, whichever way that might happen. Their ideas of what would ensue once the fighting was over was obviously shaped by the experiences of 1918/19, when the military collapse had been followed by a struggle at home between the political right, representatives of parliamentary democracy, and those who supported a Soviet-style republic.¹⁹⁷ Only after a painfully slow process of adaptation did the Reichswehr managed to survive.¹⁹⁸ Some of the older conspirators had themselves until 1920 fought during these troubles, for example, in one of the Freikorps. Beck had witnessed the collapse of the monarchy at close range and concluded from that, “The officer corps must retain a central role in state and society; after all, the officer is the symbol and the guarantor of the state.”¹⁹⁹ As a junior officer, Generaloberst Fromm had taken part in the fighting on the Polish border and had experienced there what chaos could result from a lost war.²⁰⁰ Stieff had joined as an officer cadet in 1917, and had been deeply affected by the “collapse”; during the winter crisis outside Moscow in 1941, he exclaimed: “Chaos. I do not want to live through another 1918!”²⁰¹ In a similar way, then-Corporal Adolf Hitler had been traumatized by the November Revolution; his policies aimed at retaining the affection of the German population²⁰² while simultaneously radicalizing the persecution at home, hoping to avert in the same time a repetition at any price.²⁰³ Although the commander of the Replacement Army had repeatedly demanded a general labor obligation for women, it was never introduced because, as Bormann worded it, that “would [have] place[d] an extra burden on the people which they could not reasonably be expected to bear.”²⁰⁴ Exploiting the population in the occupied territories in east and west was designed to secure a minimum of provisions for Germans within the Reich and thus preclude hunger revolts. That the military justice system should repress more and more brutally any sign of “disintegration” also had its reason here, and even judges like

 Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 17.  Keller, Die Wehrmacht, 282– 283.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 60.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 112– 113, 175.  Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 340, based on an interview with (Bundeswehr) Lieutenant General Cord von Hobe.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 584.  Wegner, “Hitler,” 506; Chapoutot, “Nous ne capitulerons jamais!”, 53.  Quoted in Kroener, “Management of Human Resources,” 906.

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Generalrichter Karl Sack, who was part of the military conspiracy, were no exception to that.²⁰⁵ As Roland von Hößlin told the Gestapo, Stauffenberg had shown him the figures regarding personnel losses, and had added: We were drifting towards a military collapse. As a consequence, one day chaotic conditions might occur as in 1918. The officer corps must not fail again and have the initiative wrestled from its hands as it had in 1918 but had to act out of its own ethical responsibility.²⁰⁶

As late as 15 July 1944, Beck and Goerdeler clashed again about the respective priorities of foreign and domestic policies after the putsch. Goerdeler, ever the politician, demanded that the military must not be allowed to blackmail the politicians into making an armistice demand again.²⁰⁷ Including a number of trade unionists had not originally been intended but was designed to gain working-class support in a civil war scenario. The premise was that the “domestic tabula rasa created by the Nazi regime, including the prohibition of the Communist Party, would continue to exist.”²⁰⁸ Only after the establishment of the National Committee “Free Germany” in July 1943 did the fear emerge that the German Communists might also play a role in this conflict.²⁰⁹ And indeed, the Soviets had initially envisaged deploying armed forces provided by the National Committee to buttress Communist positions during negotiations for an armistice: The Corps was not to be deployed against the Wehrmacht but ensure a seizure of power within Germany. During negotiations for an armistice, the Corps was to have been landed on eleven airfields around Berlin and then transported to the centers of power to fight off countermeasures by the Nazis, the SS, or the SA.²¹⁰

– and, one might add, against the national conservatives and those elements of the Wehrmacht which they would then control. The League of German Officers (BDO), a parallel organization, had Soviet assurances that Germany was to be

 Garbe, “Von ‘Furchtbaren Juristen’”, 52, and, above all, Haase, “Generalstabsrichter Karl Sack,” 205.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 373 (9 September 1944); similarly, but without giving Hößlin’s name: 529 (15 December 1944).  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 510 – 511.  Mommsen, “Bürgerlicher (nationalkonservativer) Widerstand,” 58 – 61.  Morré, “Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’”, 542– 543; for the U.S. perception, see Bungert, “Ein meisterhafter Schachzug,” 90 – 93.  Diedrich, “Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach,” 388.

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maintained within the borders of 1937, provided the League managed to incite the Wehrmacht leadership to rise up against Hitler and end the war.²¹¹ Eventually, it was out of considerations like these that, in July 1944, Stauffenberg agreed to a meeting between Julius Leber, Adolf Reichwein, and Communist representatives.²¹² If, as after the First World War, there were an armed conflict with the “Bolsheviks,” and if these could count on the support of the Soviet military (including possible airborne landings), of the National Committee as well as of the many prisoners-of-war and forced laborers held captive within the Reich, then things might look very different from 1918/19: “Chaos, and in its wake the Bolshevization of Central Europe could only be avoided if the Wehrmacht was not eliminated completely as a factor of power and order.”²¹³ Acting upon a suggestion by the staunchly anti-Communist Allen W. Dulles, the OSS tried to use the forced labor elements within the Reich as a justification for overthrowing the regime, but that was only after the summer of 1944 and met with little success.²¹⁴ The Nazi authorities had postponed the solution of a number of “questions” until after the war, one of which was the “church question.”²¹⁵ Only for the “Jewish question,” a “final solution” had been undertaken during the war itself. The question of who held power, however, would also come up soon. Yet, should there be a victorious outcome of the war, it would not have been easy to act against an officer corps that had fought hard and, in the end, successfully. Similarly, many officers were quite willing to postpone the final solution of that fight for power until after the war: Maybe it will come to pass, after all, that a victorious Army will take drastic steps and remove all the uncouth elements from the administration, rebuild schools and universities, cleanse the economy, and respect the churches as the highest authority of a faithful nation which had to pass through the valley of the shadow of death to be purged.²¹⁶

There was widespread grumbling, but only a few understood that the many abuses were anything but individual cases, that they rather had systemic causes –

 Morré, “Das Nationalkomitee ‘Freies Deutschland’”, 545; see also Bungert, Das Nationalkomitee und der Westen, 298.  Mommsen, “Der 20. Juli und die Arbeiterbewegung,” 306. For national Bolshevist tendencies in the Harro Schulze-Boysen resistance group (see Chapter 4.5), see Bahar, Sozialrevolutionärer Nationalismus.  Kettenacker, “Der nationalkonservative Widerstand aus angelsächsischer Sicht,” 720.  Mauch, “Subversive Kriegführung gegen das NS-Regime,” 68 – 69.  Blaschke, Die Kirchen und der Nationalsozialismus, 214– 217.  Quoted in Roon, “Hermann Kaiser,” 265.

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among those who understood this was the core of the conspiracy. “There was a general belief that, once the war was over, the system would need to be thoroughly reformed, but depending on political attitudes, this belief went in widely different directions.”²¹⁷ In a way, the national-conservatives were again facing a scenario not unlike that of the Planspiel Ott war game (see Chapter 3.7) when the military had faced a clash with both National Socialists and national Communists under conditions of external threat. That the military planning envisaged reinforcements which would be available in Berlin only after several days (see Chapter 7.3) was due to the expectation of a lengthy civil-war-like conflict which would eventually be won by the faction which had more reserves and could hold out longer. It seems highly improbable that the military would have been willing to hand over power to the civilian politicians during this phase of a civil war. Rather, we must assume that Stauffenberg would have wanted to determine himself when the temporary military dictatorship would come to an end, as well as which politicians the victorious Wehrmacht would select to take over. This brings us to the core question of the relation between civil and military powers in the national-conservative resistance.

9.8 “Common Civility”? Military and Civilians This radical military opposition therefore had a series of military motives. The perception of Hitler as a dilettante war leader, the absurd command structure, the impossible pace of crimes in the occupied territories – as well as the fundamental “crime against the German people,” i. e. sacrificing hundreds of thousands in a pointless war – all coagulated into a cluster of motives which were noticeably different from those of the civilians. After Stauffenberg assumed control of the military conspiracy during the autumn of 1943, if not even earlier, the national-conservative resistance began to drift apart, as the Gestapo itself diagnosed soon after starting its investigation.²¹⁸ Stauffenberg began to create a stringent organization for the prospective coup d’état, which Goerdeler increasingly perceived as a rival to his rather loosely structured circle of men with substantial political, economic and diplomatic ex Mommsen, “Nationalsozialismus als vorgetäuschte Modernisierung,” 419.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 177 (9 August 1944); Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LVII–LVIII. See also the explicit diagram in Keyserlingk-Rehbein, Nur eine “ganz kleine Clique”?, 225 – 226; and, with more detail, Keyserlingk, Das Netzwerk, 107; Finker, Der 20. Juli 1944, 297.

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perience. Unlike the Goerdeler group, und unlike the Kreisau Circle, the emphasis in this organization was not on long-term concepts of state, society, and foreign policy. Rather, it hatched plans for the medium term and focused on what the disciples of Stefan George would have called “the liberating act.” An indication of this may be that Stauffenberg and his confidants would usually talk about an “armistice,” and far less about “peace.” Stauffenberg hoped to bring about this armistice through military channels, without involving Goerdeler or Hassell. There is no indication that Stauffenberg might have questioned himself as to whether Eisenhower or Montgomery would have been equally free to negotiate without political control. As far as the sparse sources indicate, these armistice negotiations were not supposed to include any settlements regarding the structure of a future Europe, Germany’s role in it, or the country’s future borders (see Chapters 9.4 and 9.5). In his own draft proclamations, Goerdeler had always put to the fore his moral indignation about Hitler’s “vanity” and “arrogance,” about the corruption and nepotism of the Nazi leadership. The text Stauffenberg had with him on the day of the insurrection was far more sober, but also more existential: His themes were the “annihilation of the material and blood substance” or the notion that “after a regime change the most important aim was to make sure Germany still represented a factor of power in the international power play, and that above all, the Wehrmacht remained an absolutely reliable instrument in the hands of its leaders.”²¹⁹ At the same time, a period of civil-war-like internal conflict was expected during which a temporary military dictatorship would be in control.²²⁰ Although there were no detailed plans exactly as to when, in what ways, and to whom in particular power would be transferred, this must not mislead us into thinking that the colonels planned to usurp power and then create a permanent military dictatorship. The horizon of their professional and cultural experience encompassed a number of examples when the military had in fact, after a state of emergency, ceded power again to the politicians without much complaint. In his thinking, shaped by the reminiscences of Gneisenau, Stauffenberg saw the military as an elite above politics with a separate, overarching responsibility for the

 Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 34 (24 July 1944); Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 125. See, however, the opposing view in Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, 77– 78.  See Stauffenberg’s remark to Kuhn: “Eigenhändige Aussagen des Kriegsgefangenen der deutschen Wehrmacht Major Joachim Kuhn,” dated 2 September 1944, fol. 5, published in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 186 – 210, at p. 191; for unknown reasons, Chavkin and Kalganov, “Neue Quellen,” 378, reproduce this in a mutilated version.

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nation. In 1942, he told Major Dietz Baron Thüngen (son of the lieutenant general who was to assume command of the Military District III on 20 July, and like his father from Stauffenberg’s regiment): “Well, we’re also the leadership of the Army and that of the people, and we shall take control of this leadership.”²²¹ Several traditions were at play here: in the Reichswehr, it had been quite common to “permanently break the law” and disregard political guidance.²²² Referring to the Army as “leading the nation,” however, also evokes memories of Joachim von Stülpnagel’s “war of the future.” For Stauffenberg, the national-conservative notables were far too timid, and not up to their historical roles of bringing about the “New Reich,” which the Stefan George circle had long dreamed about. At times, Stauffenberg ridiculed Goerdeler’s political concepts as “a revolution of doters.”²²³ Beck most likely thought along similar lines: during the troubles after the German monarchy had ended, he had written to his sister: “And the worst they can do is undermine the authority of the officer; it leads to absolute anarchy.”²²⁴ The orders that had been prepared and actually went out on the day of the coup left no doubts about where the real power would reside, at least initially.²²⁵ Although a “Reich government” was indeed mentioned, who exactly would constitute it remained unsaid, and executive powers were transferred completely and without a specified limit. Whether Goerdeler expected to be head of a permanent Reich government or whether he saw himself as a temporary chancellor (as Walter Bargatzky, involved with the fringes of the Paris conspiracy, later claimed²²⁶) remains unclear as well. There was, however, Moltke’s vicious talk of a “Kerenski solution”²²⁷ suggesting the latter.

 Quoted in Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 19; see also Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 159, and Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 479.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 161.  Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, 232, translates the German Revolution der Greise as “revolution of old men,” which does not have the same connotation of disdain, though.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 60. In 1984, Peter Hoffmann still maintained that “neither Beck nor Goerdeler, nor Leber, nor Moltke would have accepted such a dictatorship” (Hoffmann, “Stauffenberg und die Veränderungen,” 1015); nobody (probably including Peter Hoffmann himself) would claim that today.  Teletype message FRR – HOKW 02165, 20 July 1944, published in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 755 – 756; Teleprint message HOKW 02155 geh., 20 July 1944, 18:00 [to Military District Commands], published in ibid., 756 – 757.  Walter Bargatzky, Berlin-Halensee, and Baden-Baden, 20 October 1945: “Persönliche Erinnerungen an die Aufstandsbewegung des 20. Juli 1944 in Frankreich”; IfZ, ZS A 29/1, fol. 5‑16, at fol. 6.  Schwerin, Die Jungen des 20. Juli, 99.

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Within the military districts, power would clearly reside with the military: To deal with all political questions arising out of the state of military emergency, I [i. e. the commander in chief of the Home Army, and not the Reich government!] attach to each Wehrkreis commander a Political Representative. Until further orders, he will be responsible for administration. He will advise the military district commander on all political matters.²²⁸

It had cost Goerdeler a lot of thought and more than a few conflicts to select the “political representatives,” and only some of them ultimately survived. Their role, however, would have been reduced to that of heads of administration with an advisory function vis-à-vis their generals; this, too, was how it had been during the First World War.²²⁹ It seems that, at least at the very end, there was no agreement about who exactly “the politicians” would have been, and to whom the military would have handed over power. For a long time, Goerdeler had been the undisputed political head of the conspiracy and took great care to ensure that he would be chancellor of a new government. He had already drafted an address to the nation,²³⁰ but as power within the conspiracy shifted, “there [was] no telling whether Stauffenberg would have used the material prepared by Goerdeler, or whether he would have preferred Julius Leber as chancellor.”²³¹ Much earlier, the Kreisau Circle had attempted to persuade the trade unionist Wilhelm Leuschner to take the leading role in a post-Nazi government, but their efforts were in vain. Stauffenberg, too, had contacted Leuschner, which had resulted in yet another clash with Goerdeler.²³² Another question debated without a definitive conclusion was that of an appropriate role for Field Marshal Rommel, should he openly support the new regime.²³³ To Goerdeler’s mind, the officers had always been little more than the executive branch of the conspiracy; after the coup had succeeded, they would revert to their ancillary status. In this, Goerdeler was entirely within the limitations of a

 Teletype message KR – HOKW 02155 dated 20 July 1944, published in Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance, 756 – 757, at 757.  Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 582.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 155 (5 August 1944, enclosure).  Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIX; Beck, Julius Leber, 184.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 118 (1 August 1944), 234 (16 August 1944); Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LVIII.  Memo Dr Elmar Michel, Chief of Military Administration France, 15 October 1945; IfZ, ED 88/2, fol. 16‑33, at fol. 20.

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traditional concept of civil-military relations.²³⁴ However, even with the involvement of Tresckow and the conspirators within the Army Group Center staff in September 1942, this concept began to crumble. When Stauffenberg took center-stage in the autumn of 1943, it became entirely obsolete.²³⁵ Intruding into the field of politics in this way, the national-conservative officers did nothing more than refer back to concepts which had influenced the German military at least since the end of the First World War.²³⁶ In reality, this tradition went back even further: Stauffenberg saw himself as belonging to a line tracing back to his forefather Gneisenau (see Chapter 6.7) who had also, as an officer, influenced his country’s policies.²³⁷ Upon retirement, Beck had been promoted Generaloberst, but on 20 July 1944, he made a point of showing up in the Bendlerblock in civilian clothes, as he was supposed to become acting head of state.²³⁸ However, the few instances when he intervened in the course of events that night concerned above all operational decisions, not political ones – most tellingly, his orders to Army Group Courland to withdraw.²³⁹ This may be taken as yet another indication that separating political and military responsibilities did not rank highly on many conspirators’ list of priorities. Beck’s position was singular in that his task was to hold the various elements of the conspiracy together, fighting off centrifugal tendencies, and none of those affected (Goerdeler, Popitz, Hassell, Stauffenberg) ever questioned this. Like many others, he stood for a “concept of politics defined by military categories.”²⁴⁰ Even so, it was obvious to everybody that the job of moderating a meeting between Goerdeler and Moltke (on 8 January 1943) to clarify their divergent political views should fall to Beck.²⁴¹ The members of the conspiracy perceived the underlying conflict as one between the military and the politicians. Hans von Dohnanyi later explained why

 Mommsen, “Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsreformpläne,” 583.  Ritter, The German Resistance, 271; Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 121.  Broszat, Die Machtergreifung, 74; Groß, The Myth and Reality, 155.  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 296 – 297.  According to Dirks and Janßen, Der Krieg der Generäle, 176, Hoepner inadvertently donned Beck’s uniform tunic, but there is no substance to that.  Telcom Oberst Graf Stauffenberg to Chief of Staff Army Group North [GM Kinzel], Nr 541. BArch, RH 19 III/20, fol. 178; telcom Chief of Staff to Ia/OpAbt [GenStdH], Nr. 542, BArch, RH 19 III/20, fol. 179. See also Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 366; Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 523 – 524. See Chapter 4.3.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 93.  Hassell, Die Hassell-Tagebücher, 347 (22 January 1943); Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 459, see also 485 – 486.

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he had, contrary to orders, not destroyed his collection of incriminating documents about Nazi war crimes: The reason I did not destroy those papers was that I wanted to be able to prove that the civilians had done something, too. If the thing had worked out, then I’m sure the generals would have done it all, and us civilians nothing. I wanted to avoid that.²⁴²

The Gestapo, too, soon began to understand that, as time had gone on, the balance between civilians and military had begun to tilt towards the latter; some of the civilian resisters, as the secret police reported, “never lost their mistrust that Stauffenberg concealed many things from the civilians.”²⁴³ If Goerdeler referred to Stauffenberg as a “high-minded General Staff officer” who “dabbled in politics,”²⁴⁴ he was by no means alone in his criticism. Hermann Maaß, a trade unionist, said similar things when interrogated; he had noted that when Stauffenberg had been accused of planning a military dictatorship, he had always evaded the question.²⁴⁵ The rift between Stauffenberg and Goerdeler was more than an age gap. Stauffenberg resented Goerdeler’s arch-conservative and illusionary political concepts, and he objected to the highhanded way in which the former mayor of Leipzig disregarded all conspiratorial procedures. Where the one saw the planned overthrow of the Nazi regime as a “popular uprising from below,” the other hoped for a “revolution from above.” They differed in their attitude to the assassination attempt as much as in their views of the role of the military in a future Germany. It seems largely due to Beck’s skilled mediation that all this never led to a total rift before 20 July. For a long time, West German historiography avoided approaching this subject in greater detail. From the beginning, as we have seen, it rather preferred reducing the military resistance to its undisputed moral dimension. Or else, the “cumbersome history of the resistance was shaped so as to become coherent and meaningful.”²⁴⁶

 Quoted in Mühleisen, “Die Canaris-Tagebücher,” 176 – 177, who in turn relies on Höhne, Canaris. Patriot, 402.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 205 (12 August 1944).  Memorandum “Our Idea” (Unsere Idee, after 9 November 1944); BArch, N 1113, Bd 26, fol. 1, quoted in Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIII.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 206 (12 August 1944); Mommsen, “Carl Friedrich Goerdeler,” LIII.  Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse,” 25.

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The military resistance in particular is an indication of self-limitation and of how the primacy of politics was accepted. It is only on this basis that the resistance as a whole could embody the political consensus which began to form gradually after 1945 and which allowed a value-oriented discourse about the resistance related to the tenets of the constitution.²⁴⁷

This is how Peter Steinbach put it in 1984/85, and it reflects the state of research in that period. However, in the same volume, Klaus-Jürgen Müller stated: As National Socialist rule became more openly violent…, a cluster of motives came to the fore whose main ingredients were moral indignation and personal concern. One cannot overlook the fact though, that at times the opposite was true as well: men in the resistance who approved of the anti-Bolshevist “crusade.”²⁴⁸

With this, Müller intentionally distanced himself from premises which he felt were too “integrationist.” Even later, in 1992, Martin Broszat wrote: Even within the more closely associated groups that attempted to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, there were serious disagreements concerning everything from how to assassinate the Fuhrer and how to divide responsibility for the various tasks connected with the plot to the future domestic and foreign policies of a post-Nazi government.²⁴⁹

This highlights the internal tensions within the national conservative opposition. At about the same time, Hans Mommsen put it like this: independent of the progress in research it seems desirable to view the military opposition against the Nazi regime as a discrete movement, and not to conceive of it as an appendage of the group of conspirators around Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler, and Ulrich von Hassell.²⁵⁰

Our analysis has shown that the officers in the resistance, largely due to their Reichswehr education, harbored thoughts about the future relationship between the military and politics which differed widely from those of their civilian partners. Nor did these concepts agree with today’s understanding of civil-military relations in modern democracies, with the way the primacy of politics is defined in the German constitution, or with the basic tenets of internal leadership (Innere Führung) as practiced in the (West) German Bundeswehr after 1955.  Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 994; see, in 2001, Steinbach, “Soldatischer Widerstand,” 43.  Müller, “Nationalkonservative Eliten zwischen Kooperation und Widerstand,” 41– 42.  Broszat, “A social and historical typology,” 31.  Mommsen, “Die Stellung der Militäropposition,” 119.

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9.9 Realism and Idealism: Lack of Political Perspectives and Ethical Motivation Initially, the resistance had been appreciated in the post-war public for the moral motives of its uprising against Hitler (“Conscience in Revolt”). As time went on, the focus changed to the political, social, and diplomatic reasons behind the attempted putsch. Those in the military who were the central supporters of the opposition were the colonels and junior generals; they had less interest in debates about the principles of foreign or internal politics, but they had their own professional military reasons to work towards an end to the war. The question, then, is whether the moral dimension of their actions can be discarded altogether, or what the balance was between ethical, often religious, and military-professional motives. In their vast majority, the officers and men of the Reichswehr and Wehrmacht belonged to one of the two major Christian denominations (Protestants and Catholics) in Germany. Only some officers closely associated with National Socialism (such as Rommel) had dropped out of their respective churches and had themselves listed generically as “believers in God” (gottgläubig). As the categories of “believers” and “non-denominational” were usually chosen by National Socialists only, it seems safe to assume that almost all members of the national-conservative opposition had some kind of Christian background, and this is supported by the sources. Like the last-minute exchange of messages between Tresckow and Stauffenberg about whether the uprising should attempted in the face of adverse circumstances (see Chapter 7.4), Tresckow’s farewell words to Fabian von Schlabrendorff are only documented in the latter’s memoirs, which raises some issues of source criticism. Even so, after all we know about Tresckow’s attitude, these words seem to represent a clearly religious orientation: Now they will heap abuse on us all. But I am convinced, now as much as ever, that we have done the right thing. I believe that Hitler is the archenemy, not only of Germany, but of the entire world. In a few hours’ time I shall stand before God and answer both for my actions and the things I failed to do. I think I can with a clear conscience stand by all I have done in the battle against Hitler. Just as God once promised Abraham that he would spare Sodom if only ten just men could be found in the city, I have reason to hope that, for our sake, he will not destroy Germany. No one among us can complain about his death, for whoever joined our ranks put on the poisoned shirt of Nessus [in Greek mythology, the poisoned shirt that the dying centaur Nessus tricked Hercules into wearing]. A man’s moral worth is established only at the point when he is prepared to give his life for his convictions.²⁵¹

 Tresckow to Schlabrendorff, immediately before his suicide on 21 July 1944, as related in

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With all due skepticism regarding the reliability of this source, this can be taken as reflecting how deeply rooted in scripture a Protestant officer like Tresckow was and how he obviously expected the same of his interlocutor. Any residual doubts can be swept aside by the text of the speech he gave at his two sons’ confirmation in the Potsdam Garrison Church in April 1943, of which the original manuscript has survived: Right now, one cannot emphasize enough how German-Prussian thinking is inseparably linked to Christian thinking. It is its foundation, and our old Garrison Church is its symbol.²⁵²

While Stauffenberg was Catholic, his involvement with Stefan George and his disciples is undeniable, and some authors have hinted that this esoteric circle in fact constituted Stauffenberg’s chief ideological horizon.²⁵³ A central category in that group was the notion of a “Secret Germany,” and most likely what Stauffenberg shouted immediately before being shot was “Long live secret Germany!”²⁵⁴ Stauffenberg’s mother was never pleased about her sons becoming involved with this group,²⁵⁵ and it can come as no surprise that even today, his descendants warn against emphasizing this aspect of Stauffenberg’s complex personality too much.²⁵⁶ On his desk in Vinnytsia was a crucifix,²⁵⁷ he would argue quoting Thomas Aquinas, and on the evening of 19 July he asked his driver to halt outside the Holy Rosary Church in Berlin-Steglitz so that he could go in for a moment of prayer.²⁵⁸ Roland von Hößlin told the Gestapo that he had acted “on the basis of a religiously founded morality.”²⁵⁹ We have already mentioned Stieff’s scruples origSchlabrendorff, Offiziere gegen Hitler, 153. English translation according to Jones, Countdown to Valkyrie, 242.  Grabner and Röder, Henning von Tresckow, 52. For Tresckow’s motives, see also his daughter’s account: Aretin, Freiheit und Verantwortung.  Karlauf, Stefan George, 638 and passim.  See Kraus, “Das Geheime Deutschland” [“The Secret Germany”], 385 – 386, for a history of the term and a discussion of the various versions of what Stauffenberg really shouted. See also Riedel, Geheimes Deutschland, 5 – 6. Karlauf, Stauffenberg, 320, assumes that Stauffenberg’s shout was Es lebe das geheiligte Deutschland! [“Long live sacred Germany!”].  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 20 – 31.  See, above all, Bechtolsheim, Stauffenberg; the author is Stauffenberg’s granddaughter.  Report Dietz Freiherr von Thüngen about Stauffenberg, 25 January 1946, IfZ, ED 88 – 2, fol. 352– 357, at fol. 355.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 263; Kniebe, Operation Walküre, 161– 163.  Jacobsen, Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung, 435 (5 October 1944).

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inating from his Protestant faith (see Chapter 6.6). We have also seen that Major Ludwig von Leonrod consulted his confessor before taking part in the preparations for a “tyrannicide” (see Chapter 7.1), the term “tyrant” itself, used with a certain regularity, indicating that one had to go back to categories of scholasticism and the Reformation, as more modern legal, philosophical, or theological terminology was obviously inadequate to the “monstrosity of the Nazi state.”²⁶⁰ On the other hand, a religious conscience could also be a hindrance to resolute opposition: Even in his farewell letter from prison prior to his execution, Hans-Bernd von Haeften regretted having contravened the sixth commandment by taking part in the preparations for an assassination attempt.²⁶¹ Denominations, however, whether Catholic or Protestant, had begun to lose their significance. As mentioned previously, Joachim Kuhn and Stauffenberg’s cousin Marie-Gabriele had to break off their engagement in the summer of 1943 because the Stauffenberg family, following the rules of their church, demanded a Catholic wedding ceremony while Kuhn’s mother insisted that eventual children would have to be brought up Protestant; that was already perceived by many as bigoted.²⁶² In general, the Nazi regime’s growing repression against both churches resulted in an “Ecumenism in times of terror”²⁶³ which even staunch representatives of one of the churches such as the Vicar General of the Catholic Wehrmacht military chaplaincy, Monsignor Georg Werthmann, acknowledged: During the National Socialist period, Catholics and Protestants everywhere found themselves in the same political space; their mutual relationship was no longer within the sphere of political relevance and the Kulturkampf [culture struggle] attitude as it had resulted from the former relationship had become entirely meaningless.²⁶⁴

If officers with a solid background in one of the Christian churches thought the situation through to the very end, they might well see the conflict with a political

 Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner,” 27; see also Gotthard von Falkenhausen, Bericht über Vorgänge in Paris am 20. Juli [undated]; IfZ, ED 88/1, fol. 44.  Retter, Theological-Political Resistance, 92. For the relevance of religion to explain the resistance, see also Klausa, “Klemperer. Ein Lebensbild,” 24– 25; for Klemperer, however, the term “ecumenism” denotes, above all, the links German Protestants had in the worldwide movement of Protestant churches.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 21– 30.  Following the title of a book by two theologians, one Protestant, the other Catholic, both of whom have also published on the anti-Nazi resistance: Mertes and Vollmer, Ökumene in Zeiten des Terrors.  Quoted in Pöpping, Kriegspfarrer an der Ostfront, 13.

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system which was working towards “dissolving the (Christian) dualism between Church and State, eventually a return to the undifferentiation between religion and politics as in ancient history.”²⁶⁵ This is not to say that idealist or ethical motives were to be found only among those conspirators with denominational ties. Although Ludwig Beck was from a Protestant family, his biographer, Klaus-Jürgen Müller, attributes to him an “ethos of intellectual honesty”²⁶⁶ without having to resort to a religious dimension. On the other hand, a devout Protestant like Moltke could formulate his aims without using religious terminology: the point was “how the picture of man can be re-established in the breasts of our fellow-citizens.”²⁶⁷ To understand this better, it will be necessary to look at the relationship of “knowledge” and “conscience” over time. None of those involved had been born as a planner of military coups d’état; going down the path to armed resistance always took its time.²⁶⁸ At its end, most officers had resolved to maintain the Army as a fighting force to be used in the inevitable struggle for power, and to end the war as soon as possible because only a swift end of hostilities would prevent the “annihilation of the material and blood substance” of the Army. In that sense, both sets of motives eventually coincided in their ultimate intentions. That is also how the apparent paradox between the conspirators’ national conservative education and attitude on the one hand, and their acting against the authority of the state, on the other, can be synthesized.²⁶⁹ As time went on, the opposition had to acknowledge that the Allies could not be expected to make any concrete concessions, and that in matters of foreign policy, it had to act “into a void.” A non-National Socialist government would also not be able to avert a surrender, followed by a military occupation of the entire Reich territory. Nor were prospects any better at home: time was running out, as the Gestapo might make decisive inroads into the conspiracy at any moment, and whether the forces available would suffice to keep the upper hand in a lengthy civil war might well seem doubtful. At this very late point, at a time when the Red Army was poised to enter East Prussia and when the Western Allies had landed in Normandy, the military and civic resistance by men like Beck, Goerdeler, Stauffenberg, and Leber was no longer an attempt to salvage elitist

 Maier, “Das ‘Dritte Reich’ im Visier seiner Gegner,” 17.  Müller, Generaloberst Ludwig Beck. Eine Biographie, 32.  Moltke, A German of the Resistance, 28.  Meding, “Barbara von Haeften,” 268; Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 5; Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 601; Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 920 – 924.  See, e. g., Aretin, Freiheit und Verantwortung, 6.

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privileges, but a politically almost hopeless revolt against tyranny and holocaust, a signal to their countrymen and to the nations of the world that there still was shame and decency left in Germany; it was a sign of life of the Other Germany and a highly visible indication that, if the Germans had not succeeded in overcoming the rule of violence, they had not surrendered to it meekly, either.²⁷⁰

As it happened, no concrete political or military advantages following a successful putsch could be hoped for; that was the core element of Stauffenberg’s question to Tresckow which the latter answered with his “coute que coûte” phrase (see Chapter 7.4). However, it is not true that Stauffenberg acted solely out of professional motives, and without any reference to his religious beliefs, as the antimilitaristic Gisevius would have us believe later.²⁷¹ Rather, the more the professional expertise revealed the hopelessness of the situation, the more the basic ethical and often religious reasons for continuing in the opposition came to the fore.²⁷² As Berthold Graf Stauffenberg observed, “The most terrible thing is knowing that we cannot succeed and yet that we have to do it for our country and our children.”²⁷³ At about the same time, his brother Claus stated: It is now time that something was done. But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.²⁷⁴

An analysis of the military conspirators’ reasoning which would narrowly focus on their purely technical motives would make them appear as no more than unhappy grumblers who resented the modernizing potential inherent in National Socialism and aimed to secure their own interests (and those of their caste). To quote Ekkehard Klausa: Was it a conscience in revolt against tyranny and holocaust?… Or was it a calculated attempt to save the firm from bankruptcy by replacing the principal? Was the idea to put an end to the firm’s most evil and intolerable practices, and to place some of the criminal accessories behind bars in order to obtain new credit abroad? Was the aim to save as much of the firm’s capital as possible to continue pursuing the firm’s old power-political aims with slightly better-educated methods? That is how, in 1944, Churchill interpreted it in

 Klausa, “Zu wenig und zu spät?,” 279.  Gisevius, To the Bitter End, 479.  Hürter, “Auf dem Weg zur Militäropposition,” 551, describes this process earlier, i. e. in the context of the crimes committed on the Eastern Front, see Chapter 6.6.  Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 243.  Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 201; English text in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 243.

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the Commons. And that is roughly the picture devised by the 1968 generation of historians; the image the critical and debunking 1960s and 1970s created of the national conservative resistance.²⁷⁵

For the military opposition, the changes brought about by Nazism had eroded the moral foundations of all political and social life, and not least the end of the Army which for them represented a moral value in itself. Above all, they saw the inevitable end: Germany would not be able to sustain this warfare any longer, and every day this war continued cost unnecessary human sacrifices. Under the circumstances, opportunists and career-minded officers did well to keep their distance from a highly uncertain putsch plan. Even those who sincerely rejected Nazi rule sometimes decided that it would be better if the regime stayed in the saddle until the very end, rather than be toppled by the opposition which would lead to the inevitable stab-in-the-back legend. On the one hand, all this resulted in a situation where “resistance could be mobilized only out of an ultimately utopian and deeply religious mindset”²⁷⁶ (the implication being that “religious” and “utopian” are largely identical). On the other hand, the evidence shows that the specific “social and political ideas of the Resistance” were not limited to “a radical moral protest against lawlessness and violence,” but sought a “real alternative”²⁷⁷ to the National Socialist policies of war and annihilation, and this applies to the military as well. Christian Müller, author of a 1970 Stauffenberg biography, states that his protagonist’s “ethical and religious motives became eminently political in the Third Reich.” At the same time, the biographer quotes Stauffenberg’s dictum that “Not for nothing, I was an officer within the nation”²⁷⁸ (which puts a noticeably distance between the head of the conspiracy and traditional Reichswehr thinking). It is this dual motivational structure which characterizes the military resistance movement. Today, Claus Schenk Graf Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow represent, more than any others, a moral rigidity which cannot be explained out of their military tradition alone.²⁷⁹

 Klausa, “Zu wenig und zu spät?”, 276.  Mommsen, “Der Widerstand gegen Hitler und die deutsche Gesellschaft,” 14; for the “stabin-the-back” see Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 382.  All quotations from Mommsen, “Social Views and Constitutional Plans,” 57 (highlighting in the original).  Müller, Oberst i. G. Stauffenberg, 296.  Steinbach, “Zum Verhältnis der Ziele,” 987.

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This formulation implies that acting out of professional insight and acting out on moral impulses are mutually exclusive. In the light of what we have seen, this premise, however, is absurd. Those national-conservative officers who found their way into the military opposition, starting from professional motives, did not only do what their training dictated, but also what was morally right. Military expertise can lead to morally justified actions. The concern about a resurgence of the stab-in-the-back legend may not have been unfounded. But during the ten months from July 1944 to May 1945, roughly the same number of German lives were lost as during the five preceding war years.²⁸⁰ This period saw the annihilation of cities like Dortmund, Potsdam, or Dresden. Such human, material, and cultural losses could have been avoided, and that should lead us to at least a balanced position in this question.

 This concern is prominent in Jäckel, “Wenn der Anschlag gelungen wäre,” 76. For the losses, see Wette, “Zwischen Untergangspathos und Überlebenswillen,” 9 – 10; Overmans, Deutsche militärische Verluste, 238 – 239.

10 The Military Resistance in the West German Bundeswehr, the National People’s Army and the Austrian Bundesheer Even before the post-war West German army had been formed within the framework of NATO,¹ and then with renewed vigour once its first soldiers had been recruited, there were intensive debates about which tradition the Bundeswehr would see itself in.² In this sense, “tradition” was always understood as forming part of the Bundeswehr corporate philosophy, “internal leadership” (Innere Führung). The public debate, as well as scholarly approaches, usually left out the context of the other two states which had formed on what remained of the territory of the former Reich, i. e. the East German, Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Austria, although, at least at first sight, the continuity of military elites seems to have been roughly similar.³ Did the comparable continuities in personnel result in a comparable form of memorialization, and if not, why were there differences? It is in this context that the question arises of how the three political systems and their respective military handled the memory of the resistance against Hitler. The three military formations operated within three vastly different political frameworks: both the Bundesheer and the Bundeswehr within liberal democracies, but whereas the Bundesheer served a country which was defined as neutral in its own constitution as well as in international treaties, the West German Bundeswehr formed, from its very beginnings, an integral part of NATO.⁴ The National People’s Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA), on the other hand, formed from its inception part of the Soviet-dominated alliance system (the Warsaw Pact), and its ideological basis was the Marxist theory of history. Even so, most officers and soldiers serving in all three armies shared the experience of having fought in the Second World War.

 See, e. g., Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens; Echternkamp, Postwar Soldiers; Thoß, Vom Kalten Krieg zur deutschen Einheit; Wiggershaus, “The Other ‘German Question’”; Wiggershaus, “The Decision for a West German Defence Contribution.”  For these debates until 1965 see the seminal study by Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross.  Stumpf, “Die Wiederverwendung von Generalen.” Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Thorsten Loch of the German Ministry of Defence has since revisited Stumpf’s findings and submitted them to a methodologically advanced analysis for the Bundeswehr and the GDR’s military: Loch, Deutsche Generale. See also Niemetz, Das feldgraue Erbe, 140 – 272.  See for this context Wiggershaus, “The Other ‘German Question’”. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-012

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Another major difference was how the three states defined themselves. Both the Federal Republic and the GDR saw themselves as “German” states, even if in different ways, so that their armies also defined themselves as German (the East German military even had the term “National” as part of its official designation, and used German-style uniforms and helmets,⁵ whereas the Bundeswehr had adapted US-style helmets and a more “modern” uniform style). The Republic of Austria, on the other hand, insisted on being a non-German political entity (in this respect it differed from its pre-1938 predecessor). For the Austrian state and military, it was easier to define the years from 1938 to 1945 as an “alien” period which would in no way be part of their tradition.⁶ It is necessary here to distinguish between “tradition” and “military history.” Military history is an integral part of the academic discipline of historiography and aims at a maximum degree of objectivity. Military tradition, on the other hand, is a value-oriented selection from history of phenomena deemed “worthy” of being commemorated.⁷ We have seen in Chapter 2 that both the public appreciation of, and scholarly research into, the resistance against Hitler can only be understood within the framework of how the entire “Third Reich” period was understood, and that this took its time developing. The specific subject of “military resistance,” however, gained additional relevance once the three states created within the former Reich started to raise troops. The spiritual and intellectual relationship between these new forces on the one hand, and the Nazi system, the Wehrmacht (and even the Waffen-SS), and of course the resistance against them, on the other, needed to be clarified from the start. The question was intricately linked to the loyalty and reliability of the new forces. It cannot surprise us, then, that in the Bundeswehr, in the NVA, and in the Austrian Bundesheer memorialization of the resistance varied substantially according to the sets of values in society at large.

10.1 The Federal Republic, the Bundeswehr and the tradition of the resistance Soon after the war had ended, the “Organisation Gehlen,” or Org for short, had been formed, headed by the former Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen, who had

 Niemetz, Das feldgraue Erbe, 125 – 140.  This consideration I owe to my friend and colleague, Hofrat Dr Erwin A. Schmidl, Vienna.  For a more detailed discussion, see Heinemann, “Kasernennamen.”

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been Chief of “Foreign Armies East” in the General Staff (OKH). Created under American auspices, the Org was later converted into the West German intelligence service, Bundesnachrichtendienst. At an early stage after 1945, it had begun to develop plans for creating a new German army. Planning included ideas about who might serve on a future German general staff, and in that context “integrating former SS members or members of the 20 July putsch etc.”⁸ was also explored – that both should be listed on a par might seem frightening. Immediately after constituting his first cabinet in the autumn of 1949, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer tasked the Minister for Housing, former Colonel Eberhard Wildermuth of the Liberal Party (FDP), with drafting the concept of a future defence policy.⁹ Wildermuth was from Swabia (in Southwest Germany), so he talked to his fellow-Swabian, former Generalleutnant Dr Hans Speidel, who in turn involved former Generalleutnant Adolf Heusinger; both Speidel and Heusinger were at the time secretly working for the Org which turns out to have played a central role in the early history of the Bundeswehr.¹⁰ Within a short time, Speidel submitted an “Agenda” in which he sketched the essential question to be discussed.¹¹ As we can see, the central officers involved in the earliest planning stages for West German rearmament had earlier spent time in Gestapo jails for complicity in, or at least cognizance of, the 20 July plot; most likely, Speidel had been more involved than Heusinger who had probably never been more than an accessory.¹² Following an invitation by the Chancellor’s office, a number of “defence experts” met for a conference in the Cistercian Abbey of Himmerod, stashed away in a small valley in the Eifel mountains. The group discussed such questions as recruitment, armaments, equipment, and operational planning, but also the “internal texture” of the new forces and their place within the newly founded Federal Republic. Of course, Speidel and Heusinger took part, as well as the former Colonel Johann Adolf Graf Kielmansegg.¹³ General der Flieger Dr Robert Knauß had been commander of the Air Academy and been involved on the fringes of the conspiracy; unlike Kielmansegg, however, he had not been arrested¹⁴; he

 Letter Graf Nostitz dated 10 January 1950, quoted in Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 116, see also 119 – 120.  Keßelring and Loch, Der “Besprechungsplan,” 202– 203.  Keßelring and Loch, “Himmerod war nicht der Anfang.”  Keßelring and Loch, Der “Besprechungsplan,” 203 – 206.  de Libero, “Trentzsch,” 197, claims that both Speidel and Heusinger had “remained loyal to their oath,” but as we have seen, that is not true. See also Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 633.  Rautenberg, “Zur Standortbestimmung,” 777– 785.  Georgi, “Wir haben das letzte gewagt…”, 54– 55.

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now attended the Himmerod Conference as well. Added to this was a young major from the former Ninth Infantry Regiment in Potsdam, who counted many of his former comrades who had lost their lives among his friends (including Henning von Tresckow): Wolf Graf Baudissin. Baudissin had been made a prisoner-of-war in Africa in 1941 and spent the rest of the war in a camp in Australia. During that time, and even in the earliest post-war years, he had had an ambivalent attitude to the attempt on Hitler’s life. In 1947, he had written: the state, of whichever nature, is set by God. However, there is always a duty to oppose by words; a right to resist violently can only exist in particularly crass cases, if a tyrannical government demands acts which obviously contravene God’s word.¹⁵

This acknowledged only the right to oppose a specific criminal order, but not to act against the entire criminal system as such. One will have to concede the young officer, just returned from the other end of the earth, a certain lack of personal insight into the recent events; out of personal ties with some of the officers who had been part of the conspiracy, Baudissin at least sought for himself a balanced position. In Himmerod, former General der Infanterie Hermann Foertsch was supposed to be in charge of questions regarding the “internal texture” of the new forces. Foertsch was a very political officer; during the Reichswehr period, he had for some time been press spokesman for the Reichswehr Ministry; he, too, was now in the pay of the Org. ¹⁶ However, Baudissin, too, took a growing interest in the subject. By October 1950, the brilliant intellectual had learned his lessons. Not all participants had: it took Baudissin a major effort to have a passage included in the final document to the effect that “it is now essential to create something substantially new, without imitating the form of the old Wehrmacht.”¹⁷ Here, the term “Wehrmacht” did not mean the Third Reich’s military as it had existed in 1935 – 1945; the “Himmerod Memorandum” used the term generically for all German armies including the one that was to be created anew. That the Reichswehr was being rejected as rigorously as the wartime Wehrmacht can be gleaned from the postulate: “The German Contingent must not develop into a

 Baudissin, Der Widerstand, 10, footnote 12.  Keßelring and Loch, Der “Besprechungsplan,” 206, 209.  Rautenberg and Wiggershaus, “Die ‘Himmeroder Denkschrift’”, 185.

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‘state within a state.’”¹⁸ Nevertheless, the document envisaged that members of the forces would not be allowed to vote in local elections, and would be barred from standing as candidates for parliaments on all levels – a provision which, only four years later, the West German parliament was not willing to accept; instead, German soldiers and officers enjoy the same voting rights as any other citizen. The command structure, too, was designed largely along Weimar lines: the President of the Federal Republic was to be the commander in chief of the military, but for any orders, he would need the Chancellor’s countersignature – with an express statement that this was “due to the adverse experience with the command structures applied in Germany so far.”¹⁹ The right to resistance was defined largely by limitations to the duty to obey orders. It was discussed in the context of paragraph 47 of the old military penal code which had provided for military personnel not to be prosecuted for disobeying criminal orders. The underlying assumption was that resistance should be open to legal definition and was not an extreme case outside the scope of human justice.²⁰ Both the drafting of the new West German constitution (Grundgesetz) in 1948/1949, and the amendments accommodating the creation of armed forces passed six years later, were informed by an interpretation of the Third Reich as an anomaly of German history resulting from the weaknesses of the Weimar constitution (in the process conveniently overlooking the responsibility of large parts of the German population and particularly its elites). In the context of this legalistic reasoning, the much-used phrase “Bonn is not Weimar” indicated a willingness not to repeat those “faults” of the 1919 constitution which had made the Nazi regime possible, and that went also for the military. If the Social Democrat opposition kept demanding that the new West German army must not become a “state within the state,” that was entirely along those lines of reasoning.²¹ However, the Himmerod Memorandum departed from traditional Weimar and Reichswehr concepts and was oriented more towards ideas of a total, unlimited war not unlike that envisaged by Joachim von Stülpnagel in the 1920s – an almost compelling shift after the experience of the Second World War, even if the officers assembled in Himmerod had only the vaguest ideas of what nuclear war-

 Rautenberg and Wiggershaus, “Die ‘Himmeroder Denkschrift’”, 185. The phrase occurs, almost verbatim, also in Speidel’s 1948 “Agenda”; Keßelring and Loch, Der “Besprechungsplan,” 215.  Rautenberg and Wiggershaus, “Die ‘Himmeroder Denkschrift’”, 173.  Baudissin, Der Widerstand, 13. See also Heinemann, Rechtsgeschichte der Reichswehr, 310 – 311.  Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex, 429 – 431.

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fare would mean. They called for a “socialization of warfare, the levelling of barriers which used to exist in warfare between civilian society and the military”²² – effectively a militarization of society which turned out to be politically unacceptable in post-war Germany. What was to be new was to be the unreserved inclusion of the minister of defence into the cabinet discipline; he was also to have both military command authority and administrative control; that in turn was meant to ensure parliamentary control of the entire military apparatus.²³ Personnel management was to be removed from the military chain of command, and be assigned to the ministerial level. This was a favorite subject for Ernst Wirmer, brother of Josef Wirmer who had been hanged by People’s Court. Wirmer went on to be the Bundeswehr’s first civilian director of administration; he argued that this solution would facilitate the creation of a democratic-minded officer corps.²⁴ This was to include opening it for cadets from a broader social background, a deliberate continuation of modernizing tendencies of the Wehrmacht²⁵; even the “Agenda” which had preceded the Himmerod conference had included an item “Promoting NCOs and men to officers!”²⁶ In that respect, too, the founding fathers of the early Bundeswehr were not fully in line with the rather elitist notions of the late military opposition, even if reintroducing the requisite of a higher school certificate (Abitur) for a career as an officer to some extent countermanded the desired social opening.²⁷ It has been pointed out how much the German economic “miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) of the post-war years owed to the social and economic modernizing tendencies of the “Third Reich.”²⁸ Similarly, the early Bundeswehr seems to have profited from some of the innovative aspects of the Nazi period as well.²⁹ The new Bundeswehr was to respect political control without reservation – obviously another consequence of the Reichswehr years. As for the Wehrmacht, it had respected the primacy of politics almost to perfection – of highly criminal policies, that is. The only time the Wehrmacht had in fact opposed political guid Nägler, Der gewollte Soldat, 3.  Ullrich, Der Weimar-Komplex, 434– 435.  Rautenberg, “Zur Standortbestimmung,” 793.  Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie, 426; Nägler, Der gewollte Soldat, 7. See also the discussion in Fritzsche, Ein Leben im Schatten des Verrates, 31.  Keßelring and Loch, Der “Besprechungsplan,” 228.  I would like to thank Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Thorsten Loch, German Ministry of Defence, for pointing this out to me; see his book, Loch, Deutsche Generale.  Abelshauser, “Kriegswirtschaft und Wirtschaftswunder.” See also Frei, “Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?”, 378 – 379.  Kroener, Der starke Mann im Heimatkriegsgebiet, 291.

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ance had been the 20 July 1944 uprising. That did not make it easy to fit this part of the then most recent German military history into the tradition of the young West German forces, especially as many of its senior personnel had served in the Wehrmacht or even the Waffen-SS unquestioningly until the very end. A core problem of creating new military forces was recruitment. How could young men be enticed to sign up in times of total nuclear war, if in October 1950 one half of their cohort had declared an unwillingness ever to take up arms again, even in case of a Soviet attack?³⁰ So, in times of the “economic miracle,” with the need to recruit foreign labor in Italy and elsewhere indicating a shortage of able-bodied men anyway, much would depend on whether the German public’s widespread prejudice against uniformed service could be overcome. The war crimes trials and the fate of high-ranking German officers at the hands of the de-Nazification process had impacted severely on many former officers’ sense of honor. Once they realized their military experience would be required yet again, they insisted on a “declaration of honor” both by the competent German authorities and by the Allies before they would ever take up arms again. More precisely, they expected such a declaration from Chancellor Adenauer and from the former Allied Commander in chief, now the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Along with that came the call to release all “war convicts” (Kriegsverurteilte), i. e. those former commanders still being held in Allied prisons.³¹ The former general staff officers within the Org formulated these demands and made sure they were adequately distributed. In the summer of 1950, Heusinger drafted a “proposal” on the subject, which had been cleared with the CIA beforehand, and which eventually guided discussions in Himmerod.³² The former soldiers began to organize themselves in associations with the aim of promoting their immaterial as well as their financial interests, particularly “adequate” pensions. They, too, knew that their government and the Allies would need them to man the military units envisaged for the near future. On the one hand, this resulted in an unforeseen side-effect: the former military

 Nägler, Der gewollte Soldat, 5.  Memorandum Graf Nostitz, “Ideas on Questions of Remilitarization,” 1 November 1949, quoted in Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 91– 92. Crimes under German laws were, however, expressly excluded. For pointing out this source to me, and for much additional advice, I am grateful to Lieutenant-Colonel (res. ) Dr Agilolf Keßelring, Finland.  Heusinger Proposal, probably July 1950, published in Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 161‑164.

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learned to understand the mechanisms of parliamentary democracy.³³ On the other hand, there was one point on which they could hardly agree among themselves, and that was their attitude to the 20 July 1944 complex. Those who had “kept their oath” and the “oath-breakers” (and this is where the oath became the dominant subject in public discourse) often faced each other with irreconcilable positions. The leading figures in the more important associations, in particular the board of the Verband Deutscher Soldaten (VDS) (League of German Soldiers), soon realized they would never obtain the “declaration of honor” they so much desired as long as the League roundly condemned the members of the military opposition as “oath-breaking traitors” rather than distance themselves from National Socialism. As early as 1949, both Kielmansegg and former Colonel Eberhard Graf Nostitz therefore called for a consensus among the former military on how to assess the 20 July event and those who had supported it.³⁴ However, this consensus turned out to be almost impossible to achieve. On 21 September 1951, the newly elected chairman of the VDS, former Generaloberst Johannes Frießner, justified to the media the German invasion of Poland, gave a declaration of honor for the former Waffen-SS, and also proclaimed that “as a soldier and as a Christian” he could not condone the “political murder of the head of state.”³⁵ An outcry in the national and international media ensued, forcing Frießner to resign immediately, and indicating to the former military in general that they would have to develop at least a reflected attitude to the military resistance. On the other hand, there were some officers who, together with historians, theologians, and lawyers, planned publications designed to help modify the public perception of the resistance. The resulting volume, however, was only published in 1960; it was a collection of individual papers which were more concerned with defending the conspirators against charges of “treason” rather than with scholarly research.³⁶ The trend towards a compromise came to a first conclusion with a formula attributed to the new chairman of the VDS, Admiral (ret.) Gottfried Hansen: The 20 July led to a rift in our midst which needs to be bridged. Someone might have remained faithful to his oath, while someone else, with a more comprehensive awareness

 Manig, Die Politik der Ehre; Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens, 165 – 168; Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 21.  Letter Kielmansegg, 16 November 1949, published in Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 206.  Manig, Die Politik der Ehre, 412; Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 25.  Europäische Publikation, Vollmacht des Gewissens, vol. 1, 9.

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of all that was going on placed loyalty to his nation higher than the duty constituted by his oath. None of them should be blamed for his attitude if his action was driven not by selfinterest but by a noble motive. Acknowledging the other’s motives leads to an understanding of his actions.³⁷

In 1944, the question had been about what specific behavior was ethically legitimate; now the focus had shifted to the motives. As we have seen, their oath had not concerned the conspirators themselves all that much, rather, it had been Roland Freisler of the People’s Court who had brought this up. In the 1950s, the question of keeping or breaking the oath became far more important than the military situation in the summer of 1944 or any of the other military motives for resisting Hitler. The “Hansen formula” of March 1951 denotes a compromise, acknowledging both the resistance and “faithful service,” allowing both groups, the “loyal” and the “oath breakers” (the terminology as such is of course biased), to serve in the new Bundeswehr; what was more, it was acceptable both in German and international politics. Yet, Adenauer had still not issued the desired “declaration of honor,” and another compromise wording about 20 July 1944 was required for that, especially since the U.S. had used their contacts via the Org to transmit their expectation that the former soldiers would distance themselves unambiguously from National Socialism. In practical terms, this was not easy, as no association and no individual could claim to represent all former Wehrmacht personnel. Eventually, Generalmajor (ret.) Erich Dethleffsen, working for the Org, brought about a meeting of three board members of the Christian Democrat party with himself, Nostitz, Generalmajor (ret.) Heinz Trettner (in the 1960s to be Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr), Generalmajor (ret.) Rudolf-Christoph Baron von Gersdorff, Major (ret.) Axel von dem Bussche (both formerly of the resistance cell in Army Group Center), and three former Waffen-SS officers whose names are unknown. While Adenauer himself was not present, he kept himself informed about what was being said and which way towards the hoped-for declaration of honor was being sketched. Eventually, all participants agreed that the conspirators of the 20 July plot had acted “in good faith” (bona fide) – a legal term acknowledging

 Meyer, “Zur Situation der deutschen militärischen Führungsschicht,” 668; de Libero, “Trentzsch,” 193. In his foreword to Baudissin, Der Widerstand, Claus von Rosen claims Hansen drafted this text at the instigation of the Federal Government. He cites de Libero, Tradition in Zeiten der Transformation, and Reuther, Widerstand und Wehrmacht, 197– 198, but nothing is said about this in either publication. See also Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens, 175 – 176, and Manig, Die Politik der Ehre, 300.

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moral integrity but implying an error of judgement rather than that the resulting action had been right.³⁸ A number of high-ranking former officers from the Army, Navy, Luftwaffe, and Waffen-SS wrote letters to express their consent, followed on 3 December 1952 by Adenauer’s speech in parliament which included the long-sought “declaration of honour.”³⁹ The “loyalists’” acceptance that the military opposition had acted in “good faith” had played an essential role in paving the path to this declaration. At least formally, it marked a degree of conciliation between “loyalists” and “anti-Hitler officers.” Not much later, the West German parliament debated whether or not members of the new military forces were to swear an oath, and if so, what should be its wording. The experience of the Wehrmacht oath, in particular its focus on the person of Adolf Hitler, and its use of the term unbedingt (“unconditional”) played an important role in these discussions. The eventual solution was to have volunteer soldiers swear an oath of allegiance to the constitutional system of the Federal Republic, with an optional religious affirmation, while conscripts would only be required to give a “solemn promise” (without a religious element) though with almost exactly the same wording. This was the result of long, often agonizing parliamentary debates during which the relation between the military oath and the resistance against Hitler came into focus again and again.⁴⁰ More than ten years later, in 1967, the influential conservative defence journalist Hans-Georg von Studnitz wrote a much-acclaimed book, Rettet die Bundeswehr [Save the Bundeswehr], in which he postulated that “invoking the 20 July leads the soldier into insoluble contradictions”⁴¹ – the obvious way out being not that the soldier should try to discuss these contradictions, but rather, that 20 July should not be invoked in the first place. The aporia consisted not least in the latent conflict between the military resistance and the demand to respect the primacy of politics; only a soldier who obeys the democratically elected government and executes its decisions is compatible with democracy. Such publications, however, had by then become the exception. By the end of the 1960s, the military opposition against Hitler was viewed with positive connotations both in society and the Bundeswehr leadership; in fact, it had been

 Note Horst von Mellenthins dated 4 December 1952, quoted in Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 211; for the context see ibid., 206 – 223. For the development leading to this meeting see also Manig, Die Politik der Ehre, 524– 532.  Stenografische Berichte des Deutschen Bundestages [Records of Proceedings], 1. Session Period, 240. Session, 3 December 1952, 11141.  Lange, Der Fahneneid, 202– 219.  Studnitz, Rettet die Bundeswehr, 55.

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made into one of the “founding myths” of the Federal Republic.⁴² Inside the barracks, and particularly among elderly officers and NCOs who had still fought in the Second World War, this still met with a degree of unease, as it seemed to put into question their own biographies and their performance as Wehrmacht soldiers.⁴³ In 1964, Major-General Ulrich de Maizière, at the time commanding the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College (Führungsakademie), addressed the subject quite frankly: Does our reverence for the men of the 20 July mean a negative sentence upon all those who did not take part in it? Certainly not, or the majority of those present today would not be here. Thousands, millions even of German soldiers were convinced that they were fulfilling their duty by conscientiously obeying orders within the purview of their field of responsibility. With a few exceptions, their motives were honourable. Often they would not even know what was behind the façade of National Socialism, and even if they suspected something, they believed they had to give priority to defending against the external enemy, to protecting family and home, and to military discipline. Often, this decision, too, was taken with a heavy conscience.⁴⁴

In a way, this was an extension of the “Hansen formula” and the “Dethleffsen compromise”; and it corresponded to the pensive position de Maizière had assumed immediately after the attempted coup d’état, when he had confided to a few close friends: If one had known Stauffenberg – and he, de Maizière, had worked alongside him for quite some time – one would be more careful judging him. There must be reasons for his actions which might not be apparent at first sight.⁴⁵

However, while this 1944 comment indicated a willingness to concede honorable motives to the resistance (and Stauffenberg in particular), in 1965 it was those who had not stood up against the Nazis that needed to be defended against criticism – the paradigm had shifted noticeably. Starting in 1984, the German Armed Forces’ Military History Office (Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, MGFA) ran a travelling exhibition called Aufstand des Gewissens (“Revolt of Conscience”). Although the title sounded rather moralizing, the exhibition sought to present the scholarly insights into the subject

 Rütters, “Zur Instrumentalisierung des ‘20. Juli 1944’”, 534.  For more detail, see Heinemann, “Der Widerstand gegen das NS-Regime im Traditionsverständnis der Bundeswehr.”  Speech Major-General Ulrich de Maizière on 15 July 1965 to all academy officers, civil servants, course members, and NCOs, quoted in Zimmermann, Ulrich de Maizière, 92.  Allmayer-Beck, “Herr Oberleitnant, det lohnt doch nicht!”, 446.

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without undue pathos. In 1994, it was completely redesigned and kept being shown in barracks and in public locations; well into the 2000s, it remained the Bundeswehr’s central element in memorializing the military resistance both internally and in the public mind. To this day, the substantial volume accompanying it is an important handbook on the subject.⁴⁶ With the support of German historians in exile such as Fritz Stern and Klemens von Klemperer, an English-language version (“Against Hitler: German Resistance to National Socialism, 1933 – 45”) was produced in 1994 and shown in a number of important U.S. locations after being opened in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., by the then Chief of Staff of the Bundeswehr, General Klaus Naumann.⁴⁷ To expand the new West German army quickly enough after 1955, it was necessary to recruit a sufficient number of former Wehrmacht soldiers into the nascent Bundeswehr. The new military was being watched closely, and care needed to be taken that there would be no scandals such as the one which had rocked the re-constituted foreign ministry and which had even brought about the firstever post-war parliamentary committee of inquiry.⁴⁸ Selecting the right kind of senior officers was not to be left to the military themselves. The German Bundestag instituted a separate Personnel Advisory Committee (Personalgutachterausschuss, PGA) which was to assess every candidate ranking colonel or above; for the re-employment of all ranks below that, the PGA was to define general guidelines.⁴⁹ Three members of the committee had had direct links with the resistance against Hitler: Philipp Baron von Boeselager and Fabian von Schlabrendorff had been in Army Group Center, while Annedore Leber was the widow of the Social Democrat, Julius Leber. Another member was former General der Flieger Robert Knauß who had already been part of the Himmerod Conference. Also, Konrad Baron von Woellwarth had served as an officer in Stauffenberg’s Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment and had known several of the conspirators from that unit, and the politician Walther Hensel, another member, had spent several years in prison for oppositional activities during the Third Reich.⁵⁰ There was no procedure laid down for the interviews, as each case was to be handled on its merits, but one particular question was obligatory: every candidate had to state his attitude to the military resistance. Every future officer had to demonstrate a clear distance between himself and the National Socialist regime, and

 It ran into five editions: Vogel, Aufstand des Gewissens.  Lamberti, “The Search for the ‘Other Germany’”, 425  Conze et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, 475 – 488.  Meyer, “Zur inneren Entwicklung der Bundeswehr,” 1034– 1119; Heinemann, “Vom Verräter zum Freiheitskämpfer,” 157.  A recent publication for Hensel is Schröder, “Paul Franken,” passim.

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without at least a balanced attitude to the 20 July complex, no one would be accepted for the new West German military. Yet, even this procedure did not prevent a number of middle-ranking officers being re-appointed who had no critical distance to their own “achievements” during the war. Nor can this surprise – most of the officers presumed that the reason they were being recruited was that their war experience, especially against the Soviets, was what qualified them for their new/old job.⁵¹ Elsewhere, too, former officers (former Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen among them) held skeptical views about members of the military opposition, even if Gehlen had recruited men like Speidel and Heusinger who had played at least supporting roles on the fringes of the conspiracy. Gehlen’s intelligence organization had been forbidden to conduct secret intelligence at home (that was to be the purview of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), but notwithstanding that, he expanded his own counterintelligence. For that, he recruited a large number of former Gestapo officers; they obviously saw the former resisters as “traitors.”⁵² This was of course reinforced when on 19 July 1954 Otto John, once Stauffenberg’s man in Madrid and now President of the counter-intelligence agency, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, went to West Berlin to attend the ceremonies to mark the tenth anniversary of the event (including a speech given by the Federal President, Theodor Heuss), and soon after disappeared. Days later, he resurfaced in East Berlin and agitated against Adenauer’s rearmament policies via the East German media. That of course made it easy for his many detractors among the officer corps to discredit him personally, and with him all the other conspirators;⁵³ Gehlen is said to have commented “Once a traitor, always a traitor.”⁵⁴ To his dying day, John would insist that he had “gone into the Eastern sector” to take up the political legacy of Julius Leber, meaning the fight against former Nazis and for the inclusion of Communists in a post-war German state.⁵⁵ That was a provocative statement at a time when everybody else kept emphasizing the anti-Communist thrust of the national conservative resistance, right through to the “White Rose” group.⁵⁶ Even though John was sen-

 Meyer, “Zur inneren Entwicklung der Bundeswehr”; Meyer, “Auswirkungen”; Baur, Das ungeliebte Erbe, 203 – 204, 217.  Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, passim.  Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, 431; Schaefer, Der Prozess gegen Otto John; Wala, “Gegenspieler,” 125; Goschler and Wala, “Keine neue Gestapo”, 141– 152; Conze et al., Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, 547.  Zolling and Höhne, Pullach intern, 244.  Stöver, “Der Fall Otto John,” 110.  Hikel, Sophies Schwester, 124– 128; Lockenour, Soldiers as Citizens, 172.

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tenced to four years in jail, the “Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944” (“Foundation 20 July 1944”) supported him financially afterwards.⁵⁷ The first head of intelligence in what would later be the Ministry of Defence (the “Amt Blank” originated as a department in the Chancellor’s Office), Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz, had also been in the military resistance (see Chapters 3.7 and 5.1). Eventually, he lost the power struggle against Gehlen, not because his past in the resistance but because, in January 1951, it became public that he was working for the CIA. Gehlen did recruit a number of sons from resistance families.⁵⁸ In his memoirs, Gersdorff claimed later that he had not been accepted into the Bundeswehr because he had been involved in the military opposition.⁵⁹ Based on a solid array of primary sources, this has since been shown to be “incorrect.”⁶⁰ Is it true, though, that the early Bundeswehr did not suffer any members of the military opposition among its officers? The Bundeswehr’s first two four-star generals were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger; both of them were, as we have seen, associated with the resistance. Heusinger’s temporary replacement at the head of the Operations Department of the Army General Staff during the war, Colonel Johann Adolf Graf Kielmansegg, had also been arrested as an accessory, but later released. He, too, was recruited into the Bundeswehr and retired a four-star general.⁶¹ One of the very few to be rejected by the PGA was Colonel Hans-Werner Stirius, who, on 20 July 1944, had been in charge of the Großdeutschland replacement brigade in Cottbus. As the PGA’s files were destroyed, we can only speculate about why the committee failed Stirius.⁶²  Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944, Minutes of Board Meeting, 30. April 1960, GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, vol 67: Kuratorium and Vorstand. See also Lier, Das “Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944”, 183 – 187.  Keßelring, Die Organisation Gehlen und die Neuformierung des Militärs, 331– 337.  Gersdorff, Soldat im Untergang, 211– 213.  Meyer, “Zur inneren Entwicklung der Bundeswehr,” 1120, footnote 231. See also the more recent account in Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff” which alleges that Gersdorff had become unacceptable following the messy failure of his second marriage.  HPA [Army Personnel Office] Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (2) to P3, c/o Herrn Oberstleutnant i. G. Kinitz (29 August 1944), and HPA Ag P2/Rechtsgr. (2) to P3, c/o Herrn Oberstleutnant i. G. Kinitz (undated, mid-September 1944); both BArch, RH 7/30; Mühleisen, “Hellmuth Stieff,” 363 – 364; Feldmeyer and Meyer, Johann Adolf Graf von Kielmansegg. Kielmansegg had already contributed to the earliest preparations for a re-armament (“Agenda”): Keßelring and Loch, “Himmerod war nicht der Anfang,” 63 – 64.  Meyer, “Zur inneren Entwicklung der Bundeswehr,” 1070. During the night of 20/21 July, Stirius had also provided troops to put down the insurrection: Amtsgruppe P1 [handwritten remark: “Chronology 20.7.”] dated 8 August 1944; BArch, RH 7/786.

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In some instances, sons of the resisters hoped for a career in the Bundeswehr. At least two of them, Achim Oster and Berthold Maria Graf Stauffenberg, made general. The memory of Hans Oster was still tainted for many by his “high treason,” i. e. informing the Dutch about the impending attack in the West, and the Bundesnachrichtendienst (the successor intelligence organisation of the former Org) believed for many years that his son Achim belonged to a still-extant branch of the “Red Orchestra.”⁶³ Even so, Achim Oster was to play a central role in the 1962 Spiegel affair; he was the German Military Attaché in Madrid who engineered the arrest of the journalist Conrad Ahlers, at the time vacationing in Spain, on behalf of the Minister of Defence, the Bavarian Christian Democrat Franz Josef Strauß.⁶⁴ Achim Oster was married to the secretary of former solicitor Dr. Josef Müller, another Bavarian Christian Democrat; Müller had served in the Abwehr and had been the resistance’s contact with the Vatican (see, Chapter 9.5).⁶⁵ At the end of his career, Major General Achim Oster retired as the Military District Commander in Wiesbaden. In a similar way, after a brilliant career which included a posting as the Military Attaché in London, Berthold Maria Graf Stauffenberg retired as a Territorial Commander, ranking Major General. There is no truth in the allegation that a past in the resistance would harm an officer’s career in the Bundeswehr. During the 1950s, pressure grew for the Bundeswehr high command to officially endorse the resistance tradition. When President Theodor Heuss spoke in the Command and Staff College (Führungsakademie) in Hamburg on 12 March 1959, demanding authoritatively that the Federal Republic’s armed forces should “create new traditions oriented along the ethos of the military resistance,”⁶⁶ the Chief of Staff, General Heusinger, however, was still procrastinating – an attitude which the German public noted with growing impatience. After all, Heusinger had himself been injured by Stauffenberg’s bomb, but had also spent time in custody for alleged cognizance. On 20 July 1959, on the fifteenth anniversary of the insurrection, he issued an order of the day which constituted an unambiguous affirmation of the military resistance. It had taken a while, but for its time, it was pathbreaking even for the debate in the general public⁶⁷:

 Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 392– 394, and passim.  Doerry and Janssen, Die Spiegel-Affäre, 403 – 410.  Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 385.  Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross, 185 – 186; based on that Becker, “Soldatentum und demokratischer Neubeginn,” 475.  Meyer, Adolf Heusinger, 628 – 636; see also Nägler, Der gewollte Soldat, 452– 453; Geilen, “Das Widerstandsbild in der Bundeswehr,” 65.

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The act of 20 July 1944 – an act against injustice and bondage – is a bright spot in Germany’s darkest time. Facing the tragic probability of failure, liberal-minded elements of all walks of life, with men from the ranks of the military in the front line, attempted to overthrow the tyrant. Their martyrdom is anointed by the Christian-humanist sense of responsibility which led to it. We soldiers of the Bundeswehr stand in honour before the sacrifice of those men, whose consciences were called to act by their knowledge. They are the best witnesses against the collective guilt of the German people. Their attitude and spirit are an example to us all.⁶⁸

In the prestigious weekly, Die Zeit, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff praised the order of the day as “an important moment.”⁶⁹ The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung commented: This high-profile statement by General Heusinger will become influential in the debates within the Bundeswehr officer corps [… ] unlike an ex cathedra teaching, it will not be able to assuage the differences of opinion about this act of insubordination and of breaking their oaths, justified however by higher motives; these differences will continue to characterize the cadres of the new Bundeswehr which, after all, largely derive from the old Wehrmacht.⁷⁰

The same year 1959, the Bundeswehr first sent an official delegation to the memorial celebrations in the Bendlerblock. In 1957, it had not yet been invited, and Chief of Staff Adolf Heusinger had asked the Berlin Senate to allow the West German military to take part – in civilian clothes, though, due to the demilitarized status of Berlin.⁷¹ The delegation was headed by Brigadier General Cord von Hobe, who also delivered the keynote speech; other participants were Major Georg Lejeune-Jung, as well as first lieutenants Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Georg-Erich Heisterman von Ziehlberg.⁷² Hobe was the son-in-law of former Generaloberst Franz Halder who was then actively trying to control the German discourse about the Army’s role during the Second World War⁷³. Like Halder, Hobe had been arrested soon after 20 July 1944,⁷⁴  Order of the Day, Bundeswehr Chief of Staff General Adolf Heusinger, dated 20 July 1959, at https: //20-juli-44. de/reden/tagesbefehl-adolf-heusinger-20071959, accessed 29 September 2018. English text in part in Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross, 191.  Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, “Heusingers Tagesbefehl,” in Die Zeit, 17 July 1959, http: //www.zeit.de/1959/29/heusingers-tagesbefehl, accessed 20 February 2018.  “Gedenkfeier für den 20. Juli in Westberlin,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21 July 1959, 1; StaBi Berlin, Zeitungsabteilung, M 501.  Copy of letter General Heusinger to Annedore Leber, dated 24 October 1957; GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, vol. 67: Kuratorium and Vorstand.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 78.  Howell, Von den Besiegten lernen?, passim.

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and since 1952, he had repeatedly taken part in the ceremonies, although in a private capacity. The fathers of Lejeune-Jung and Berthold Maria Graf Stauffenberg had been executed for taking part in the failed coup, and Heisterman’s father, Kuhn’s divisional commander on the Eastern Front, had been sentenced to death because he had not prevented Kuhn from going into Soviet captivity (see Chapter 8.2). Hobe went on to become a lieutenant-general; during the 1960s, he was several times again asked to give the memorial speech at the 20 July events.⁷⁵ Very soon, naming barracks after eminent officers became one of the core elements of Bundeswehr tradition. The first military installation requiring a new name was the former SS-Ordensburg (schooling center) in Sonthofen, Bavaria. Most former barracks were being used by Allied troops. German cities had been razed to the ground by Allied air raids and needed to be rebuilt; the capacities of the German building industry, however, were stretched to their limits, so that initially the Bundeswehr had to use what was there. One of the few available facilities was the Sonthofen Ordensburg. It was Chancellor Adenauer himself who took the initiative to find a suitable name which would take away the odium of the Nazi past. While Minister of Defence Theodor Blank had initially favored the Bavarian General Ludwig von der Tann as a patron, the eventual choice was Generaloberst Ludwig Beck.⁷⁶ A first batch of newly built facilities was then given names by Blank’s less pusillanimous successor, the Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauß.⁷⁷ In 1961, barracks were named after Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (Sigmaringen), Henning von Tresckow (Oldenburg), Erwin Rommel (Augustdorf), Julius Leber (Husum) und Alfred Delp. The latter, a Jesuit priest from the Kreisau Circle, had had no direct link with the military, so that naming the barracks in Donauwörth (Bavaria) after him stands out somewhat. It should also be noted that the stigma of “high treason” stuck to Generalmajor Hans Oster; the Bundeswehr never named an installation after him.⁷⁸ Even the post-1955 navy was still traumatized by the 1918 experience and for long after the Second World War remained highly suspicious of anything that might in any way smack of revolution. A controversial speech by Captain Karl-

 Hobe, Mit Menschen erlebt, 50 – 51.  1962, 1963, 1965, 1967: https: //20-juli-44. de/reden, accessed 29 September 2018.  de Libero, “Trentzsch,” 198.  Heinemann, “Kasernennamen,” 164; Möllers, “Der neue Streit um alte Namen.” For Giordano, Die Traditionslüge, 54, however, the fact alone that Strauß’s name is being mentioned in this context suffices to render the entire operation “questionable.”  Mertes, Hingabe – Verrat – Gewissen.

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Adolf Zenker had in fact led to the first parliamentary debate about questions of military tradition; Zenker had called for the release of the two admirals sentenced in Nuremberg, Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, but even so ended his career as the commander of the Federal German Navy.⁷⁹ In 1964, the navy did name the port facility in Eckernförde on the Baltic after Lieutenant-Commander Alfred Kranzfelder. Yet, it never managed to include either Admiral Canaris or the naval lawyer Berthold Graf Stauffenberg in its active tradition.⁸⁰ The post-war Luftwaffe retained its pre-1945 name, but never publicly acknowledged Caesar von Hofacker or any other anti-Nazi, nor of course a woman like Melitta Gräfin Stauffenberg.⁸¹ At times, naming institutions after members of the resistance was not without its problems, either. An example might have been the Generaloberst Hoepner Barracks in Wuppertal, once more information became available about Hoepner’s responsibility for war crimes in the East. Before a discussion could develop, however, the barracks was closed due to the downsizing of the Bundeswehr. However, Hoepner’s former school in Berlin had been named after him in 1956. Although its headmaster had massively opposed the re-naming, the combined efforts of the Mayor of Berlin, Otto Suhr, the Minister of the Interior Joachim Lipschitz (both Social Democrats), and the Minister of Education Joachim Tiburtius (Christian Democrat) eventually overrode him; it was only after an intervention of the “Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli 1944” (“Foundation 20 July 1944”) that the headmaster was allowed to remain in office.⁸² In 2008, the school received another name after a campaign had highlighted Hoepner’s role in the 1941 genocidal warfare.⁸³ To this day, the Bundeswehr retains a GeneralmajorFreiherr-von-Gersdorff-Kaserne (Euskirchen), although Gersdorff’s memoirs about his role in the resistance have long since been revealed as highly problematic, tendentious, and self-serving.⁸⁴ Several attempts to subject questions of military tradition to a general regulation came to naught. Chief of Staff General Heusinger had several drafts pre-

 Krüger, “Das schwierige Erbe”; Köster, “Aus Liebe zur Seefahrt!”; Hillmann, “Die Deutschen Marinen des 20. Jahrhunderts,” 238 – 239.  Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 67; Hillmann, Der 20. Juli 1944 und die Marine, 56 – 60.  de Libero, “Tradition und Traditionsverständnis,” 17.  Copy of letter from Counsellor Dr. H.K. Fritzsche to Minister of the Interior of Berlin Joachim Lipschitz dated 16 October 1956; GDW, Stiftung 20. Juli 1944, vol. 67: Kuratorium/Vorstand.  Part of this campaign was the pert booklet Gemser, Darf eine Schule diesen Namen tragen?; see also my critical review in MGZ 65 (2006), 660 – 661.  Hiemann, “Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff,” 84, 88.

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pared, but they all met with insurmountable resistance. An uncontrolled growth resulted. Only West Germany’s third Minister of Defence, Kai-Uwe von Hassel, succeeded in 1965 in enforcing a “Decree on Tradition,” hoping to preclude at least the worst abuses.⁸⁵ In 1982, Social Democrat Minister of Defence Hans Apel released a new decree which, however, still refrained from excluding the Wehrmacht in general from the Bundeswehr tradition. In 1999, another Social Democrat minister, Rudolf Scharping, sought to define three “lines of tradition” for the Bundeswehr: these were to be the Prussian military reformers during the Napoleonic period, the military resistance against Hitler, and the history of the Bundeswehr itself. In a speech to the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College (Führungsakademie) in Hamburg, he focused on Wolf Graf Baudissin (who had retired as a Lieutenant General in 1967 and died in 1993). Baudissin, the minister claimed, had hoped to bring the Prussian reformers’ ideas to fruition for the Bundeswehr.⁸⁶ At the same time, Baudissin was said to have been close to the military resistance which allowed the minister to construe some degree of cohesion between his three “lines.” What he overlooked to some extent was that this Prussian-oriented perspective did not fit well with a federal German Army which included, after all, far more than Prussian traditions. Nor was this appropriate to its main protagonists: Scharnhorst had been from Hanover, Stauffenberg was Swabian, Beck Hessian, and the Counts of Baudissin originated from Saxony. Seeing the resistance against Hitler as specifically Prussian, however, had started much earlier – Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, e. g., had fuelled it with her writings in the 1950s.⁸⁷ Similarly, the generalizing term “military resistance” is highly problematic. Just what exactly is it supposed to denote? Does it include all those who lost their lives fighting against Hitler, even those like Hoepner and Stülpnagel who, in 1941, passed on criminal orders and even reinforced them with their own incitements at hate? What about Fromm and Kluge who both helped put down the insurrection on 20 July 1944, but who both lost their lives afterwards? During the 1960s, evoking the memory of the 20 July plot became a staple element in defining the Federal Republic’s identity. However, the focus gradually widened. In 1964, Federal President Heinrich Lübke spoke on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary, explicitly including working class resistance and Germans

 Abenheim, Reforging the Iron Cross, 165 – 224.  Rudolf Scharping, “Empathie und militärisches Können – zwei Seiten einer Medaille.” Speech at the Führungsakademie der Bundeswehr on 17 February 1999, https: //docplayer.org/ 38942205-Rudolf-scharping-emphatie-und-militaerisches-koennen-zwei-seiten-einermedaillerede-an-der-fuehrungsakademie-der-bundeswehr-am-17. html, accessed 29 September 2018.  Conze, “Aufstand des preußischen Adels,” 494– 496; similarly Conze, “Der Junker ist tot.”

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in exile⁸⁸ – which was also noted abroad.⁸⁹ In later years, speakers such as the first Social Democrat President, Gustav Heinemann, reinforced this trend. Bit by bit, the military resistance lost its exclusive quality, but retaining 20 July as the date of the annual memorialization events accorded the attempt on Hitler’s life and the ensuing coup d’état a privileged status.⁹⁰ The Bundeswehr, on the other hand, did not always live up to its own premises: in April 1965, the battalions of the Army received their new colors; many Bundeswehr generals were present, the old Prussian Army, the Reichswehr, and the Wehrmacht were represented by Field Marshal von Manstein, after all a convicted felon⁹¹ – but nobody had been invited on behalf of the resistance. A number of historians warned against a renewed narrowing of that focus after the 1982 change back to a Christian Democrat chancellor, Helmut Kohl, himself a historian. It was maybe no coincidence that the 1984 conference in Berlin commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the 1944 events, but made a point of covering anti-Nazi resistance in all its forms.⁹² Complaints about an inappropriately narrow focus were, however, repeated in the context of the fiftieth anniversary in 1994.⁹³ The compromise reached in 1952 which included both the “loyal” Wehrmacht soldiers and the resistance in West German military tradition remained in force until late in the 1990s, although increasingly, questions were being asked about whether the Wehrmacht could constitute a good example for soldiers serving a democratic state. Eventually, Christian Democrat Minister of Defence Volker Rühe ended the deadlock when he declared in the German parliament, in 1997, that the Bundeswehr did not see itself in the same tradition as the Wehrmacht.⁹⁴ That was exactly the unambiguous distancing which the 1982 decree had not yet provided. At the same time, however, Rühe did insist on the

 Heinrich Lübke, “Zeugnisse sittlicher Größe und edlen Muts. President’s Speech on 19 July 1964 in the Auditorium Maximum of the Free University of Berlin,” https: //20-juli-44. de/reden/ zeugnisse-sittlicher-grosse-und-edlen-muts-dr-heinrich-lubke-19071964, accessed 9 September 2018.  “Gedenkfeiern zum 20. Juli 1944,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 21 July 1964, Bl. 2, StaBi Berlin, Zeitungsabteilung, M 501.  Cornelißen, “Der 20. Juli 1944 in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur,” 32– 33.  Molt, Von der Wehrmacht zur Bundeswehr, 558.  As reflected in the conference volume: Schmädeke and Steinbach, Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus.  Frei, Erinnerungskampf, 493.  Stenografische Berichte des Deutschen Bundestages [Records of Proceedings], 13. Session Period, 14721 (13 March 1997).

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military resistance as a central element of Bundeswehr tradition – and that despite the allegations that Tresckow, Gersdorff, the Boeselager brothers, and the other conspirators within Army Group Center had been co-responsible for the crimes committed there which had surfaced at exactly that time.⁹⁵ This was the period when the Bundeswehr was being transformed from a Cold-War army into one that could be deployed worldwide. All units operating abroad reported to the Bundeswehr Operations Command, located in a facility near Potsdam which had originally been built to accommodate the Third Reich Luftwaffe headquarters and had then housed the East German Army ground forces command. The Bundeswehr, however, had decided on a designation with a regional context and named the barracks after Henning von Tresckow.⁹⁶ Ever since the fifty-fifth anniversary in 1999, every year the Bundeswehr swears in recruits of all branches, in particular those of the Berlin guard battalion, on 20 July. The site is the square behind the Bendlerblock which now accommodates the Ministry of Defence, in the immediate vicinity of where the events of 20 July 1944 unfolded. This, too, met with some objections, both from pacifists and from some families of the former conspirators, but it has since become a permanent element of the annual memorialization.⁹⁷ Two trends can be noted which, in a way, run counter to one another. Academic research and a critical, at times anti-militarist public have taken an increasingly skeptical view of the military resistance (see Chapter 2.3). On the other hand, within the Bundeswehr, memorializing the 20 July 1944 has developed into a formalized ritual which also signifies a clear rejection of the Wehrmacht as such, and of right-wing political tendencies.⁹⁸ This self-evident acceptation of the military resistance was only put into question again when on 28 March 2018 Minister of Defence Ursula von der Leyen published yet another decree on tradition. In it, the military resistance during the Third Reich ceases to be an automatic element of Bundeswehr tradition. Rather, while the decree rejects any links with the Wehrmacht as such, it defines a group of former Wehrmacht personnel which can be “accepted into the Bundeswehr tradition only after a case-by-case review,” and this includes

 Gerlach, “Men of 20 July” (the German version, Gerlach, “Männer des 20. Juli”, had been published in 1995).  Nachtwei, “Gedenkadresse”; Bröckermann, Henning-von-Tresckow-Kaserne.  Schuppener, “Ihr trugt die Schande nicht”, 152– 160.  Showalter, “Conscience, Honor and Expediency,” 63 – 64.

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“participation in the military resistance against the Nazi regime”⁹⁹ – obviously a reaction to the various revelations about members of the conspiracy who had also been responsible for wartime atrocities. Public memorialization of the 20 July 1944 increasingly neglected the military dimension of what happened. On 1 July 2014, Chancellor Angela Merkel opened the new exhibition in the “German Resistance Memorial Center,” also in the Berlin Bendlerblock. In her speech, she honored any kind of resistance against national socialist rule, mentioning the most important officers by name: “Only a few steps from here is the courtyard in which Claus Schenk Graf Stauffenberg, Friedrich Olbricht, Mertz von Quirnheim and Werner von Haeften were shot.”¹⁰⁰

Figure 1: Memorial plaque in the courtyard of the German Resistance Memorial Center, Bendlerblock, Berlin.

 Published online at https: //www.bmvg.de/de/aktuelles/der-neue-traditionserlass-23232, accessed 24 September 2018.  Angela Merkel, “Sie sind uns Vorbild, Mutmacher und Mahner.” Chancellor’s speech at the opening of the German Resistance Memorial Center of the new permanent exhibition, on 1 July 2014 in Berlin, https: //20-juli-44. de/reden/sie-sind-uns-vorbild-mutmacherund-mahner-dr-angela-merkel-01072014, accessed 29 September 2018.

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The next paragraph refers to, i.a., Henning von Tresckow (while, quite surprisingly, Ludwig Beck is not mentioned at all), but none of the officers mentioned is referred to by rank. In the 1950s, this would have been unusual: the plaque that honors the four officers shot in the courtyard (and Beck) not only gives their ranks but also lists them accordingly. The events of 20 July 1944 happened in real places: largely in Berlin itself, its immediate surroundings, and the region between Berlin and Cottbus. Most of the remaining sites, however, show no traces of what happened there. The military events of 20 July 1944 are not memorialized at the specific sites.¹⁰¹

Figure 2: General-von-Alvensleben-Kaserne, Cottbus.

The replacement units of the Großdeutschland division were stationed in the General-von-Alvensleben Barracks in Cottbus. Today, the compound houses public administration and some cultural institutions. It does not deny its military past at all; on the contrary: a plaque outside evokes the memory. That it also played a role in the context of the military resistance does not seem to deserve a mention, though.

 For a more detailed account, see Heinemann, “Unternehmen Walküre.”

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Figure 3: Memorial plaque, General-von-Alvensleben-Kaserne, Cottbus.

During the war, the Berlin city commandant’s headquarters, Unter den Linden 1, were severely damaged; afterwards, they were removed completely. After the end of the GDR, Bertelsmann/Random House Publishers built their headquarters there, combining the reconstructed classicist façade with a modern interior. However, again there is nothing to indicate the role this building played during 20 July 1944. The same must be said about the former headquarters of Military District III, on Hohenzollerndamm in southwest Berlin, now used by industry. Motorized infantry from the Döberitz Infantry School intervened in Berlin, and the Cavalry School in Krampnitz also deployed two armoured battalions. Parts of the Döberitz barracks have already been demolished completely. The Olympic Village in Elstal, built after 1934, which borders on Döberitzer Heide and was used by the school as well still lies dormant. It is supposed to be converted into an upmarket housing area. Once the Soviet Army vacated the Krampnitz barracks, they remained deserted and were left to rot. They, too, are to be converted into accommodation, and work has started. Yet again, there is nothing that would evoke the memory of the troops sent from here to Berlin – or of Colonel Momm and his bottle of champagne. The units from Berlin occupied, i.a., the radio transmitters in Nauen (which is still operating) and Tegel (of which little remains), as well as Radio House in

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Figure 4: Former Berlin City Commandant’s Headquarters (rebuilt after complete destruction during the Second World War), Unter den Linden, Berlin.

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Figure 5: Krampnitz Cavalry School, near Potsdam.

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Figure 6: Krampnitz Cavalry School, Barracks Gate.

Masurenallee, today used by the regional Berlin/Brandenburg radio station. Here, too, there is no mention of the resistance against Hitler. The radio transmitters in Herzberg and Königs Wusterhausen were to be secured by units operating from Cottbus. At these sites as well, there is no mention of any of this, but one should add that of the Herzberg transmitter, little more remains than a street sign and a few blocks of concrete, anyway. Things are somewhat different in Rangsdorf. The airfield from which Stauffenberg and Werner von Haeften left on the morning of 20 July 1944, and where they landed again in the afternoon, is supposed to be built over, but so far, the surrounding buildings are in ruins. What was once the airfield’s expansive officers’ mess, though, is now the center of an exclusive private school. On the outskirts of its grounds, the school erected a memorial stone with a plaque that reads: In memory of Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, who gave their lives for the aims of the German resistance, to end the war and the Hitler dictatorship. On 20 July 1944, they started from Rangsdorf Airfield to make an attempt on Hitler’s life and landed here again.

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Figure 7: Radio House, Masurenallee, Berlin.

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Figure 8: Herzberg radio transmitter: Street sign.

Another exception is the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz in former West Berlin, which contains some architectural remains of the Esplanade Hotel. Not far from the Bendlerblock, this was the place where a number of junior officers were to wait for things to happen, among them the then 22-year-old Lieutenant Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, later the founder and convenor of the Munich Security Conference; the hall has been preserved.¹⁰² In the basement, a series of photographs recounts the history of the complex, and while it does refer to the events on 20 July 1944, it is obviously not true that Stauffenberg himself should have been waiting here (as the text claims). Finally, another lieu de mémoire is the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg. A headstone marks the grave where the five bodies from the Bendlerblock were buried during the night of 20/21 July 1944. Although they were disinterred soon after, cremated, and the ashes spread over the fields, this site is maintained as a “grave of honor” by the City of Berlin (most likely the only “grave of honor” where nobody is buried). The five names are given, but again without military rank. Seeing the limited space on the headstone, and

 See Kleist’s account in Vollmer and Keil, Stauffenbergs Gefährten, 220 – 235.

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Figure 9: Former officers’ mess, Rangsdorf Airfield: Plaque mounted by private initiative.

Figure 10: Berlin: Sony Center: Erroneous inscription.

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Figure 11: Headstone in the Alter St. Matthäus-Kirchhof cemetery in Berlin-Schöneberg.

the large number of entries, this may seem excusable, but in view of the Berlin tradition of listing every kind of professional title it is worth noting.

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The Nazi past is often used to make a point in political debates in Germany. At times, however, some arguments betray a surprising lack of historical knowledge. An example is the recurrent debate about the use of the military for purposes of internal security. The press wrote: As a matter of principle, the military defend the country against an external threat, while the police ward off dangers at home. The strict separation between police and the military has historical reasons. It goes back to the repeated abuse of the armed forces during the Weimar period and the Third Reich.¹⁰³

While this does refer to the Weimar Republic, it does not mention the Reichswehr’s 1932 plans to intervene against a Nazi dictatorship. The electronic media made the point with even less differentiation: That, unlike the military in other countries, the Bundeswehr cannot be used in an internal security role is due to historical reasons: the inglorious role the military played in the Third Reich.¹⁰⁴

No one seems to have asked when exactly during the Third Reich the Army is supposed to have played this “inglorious role” (obviously within the Reich) that would now prevent its deployment for homeland security. As we have seen, Hitler was quite determined to limit the military’s competences at home. The only time the military did try to interfere in politics and assume control of the state was the 20 July 1944 putsch, and that is certainly not what informs today’s political debate. West German courts found it difficult initially to come to terms with the phenomenon of armed resistance during wartime. In early April 1945, Walter Huppenkothen had presided over the executions of Hans von Dohnanyi, Admiral Canaris, Generalmajor Oster, former judge advocate general, General Karl Sack, and Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer; in the early 1950s, he faced criminal charges for this. In a first ruling, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in 1952 that the flying court martial’s sentences had flown in the face of any legal procedure. In a turnaround ruling in 1956, the same court declared that the conspirators had been sentenced to death in a proper trial.¹⁰⁵ This meant that men like Dietrich Bonhoeffer were considered to have been justly executed until a law passed by par-

 Berliner Morgenpost, 7 March 2017.  Focus-Online, 2 August 2016, http: //www.focus.de/archiv/politik/02– 08 – 2016/, accessed 11 May 2017.  Perels, “Die schrittweise Rechtfertigung der NS-Justiz,” 194– 197.

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liament in 1998 summarily declared all rulings by the People’s Court and by flying court martials as “in contempt of the most elementary concepts of justice” and therefore null and void.¹⁰⁶ Judge Advocate General Manfred Roeder had conducted the investigations against the “Red Orchestra” and later against the defendants from the Abwehr (see Chapter 4.5). He, too, was investigated by police and then the Lüneburg prosecutor, because Secretary of State Adolf Grimme of the Hamburg city government had filed proceedings against Roeder. However, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Hans-Jürgen Finck, soon decided not to press charges. Finck was also on the payroll of the Org which was convinced the “Red Orchestra” was still operating in West Germany and therefore highly interested in what Roeder might still know about it.¹⁰⁷ In the same way, many authorities responsible for emoluments for victims of the past refused to award pensions to the few survivors or the families of those that had been executed. In some cases, applicants had to sue for years before having their pension rights assured, while the judges and civil servants from before 1945 had long since been reinstated. One of the very last to return from Soviet captivity in 1956 was Joachim Kuhn. In the Soviet camps, he had developed schizophrenia and had taken to calling himself the “Count of the Palatinate of Zweibrücken,” a non-existing title. He was hardly back in Germany before he had to face criminal charges for abuse of title. Also, he was told he could not claim any pension from his service as an officer because the Court of Honor had expelled him from the Wehrmacht prior to the end of the war.¹⁰⁸ A committee for indemnification of war damages set up by the federal parliament stated in 1956: Alarmed and appalled, the committee learns of decisions by authorities and courts which express a way of thinking that results in a total failure of indemnification, if not in the exact opposite of it.¹⁰⁹

 Law on annulling National Socialist injustice (Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege) dated 25 August 1998 (BGBl. I, S. 2501).  Endrass, Bonhoeffer und seine Richter; Grosse, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer”; Sälter, Phantome des Kalten Krieges, 173 – 175; 382.  Hoffmann, Stauffenbergs Freund, 137– 138; Heinemann, “Selbstreinigung der Wehrmacht?”, 128. For the way the authorities treated the widow of Generaloberst Fromm (who had been shot in 1945), see Kroener, “Friedrich Fromm – ‘Unser Verräter’?”; for the fate of General Erich Fellgiebel’s widow, see Lier, “‘Ohne einen Pfennig Einkommen oder Vermögen’”.  Quoted in Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 111.

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The underlying question for the legal system of the entire Federal Republic was who might claim a right to resistance against oppression, and under which circumstances. More basically still: could such a right to resistance be codified at all, or was it entirely beyond human legislation, as stipulated by the influential law professor Gustav Radbruch? The public focus on the national conservative “resistance of notables” that characterized the 1950s resulted in the concept of an “elitist right to resistance,”¹¹⁰ i. e. only a small group of particularly qualified individuals could claim the right to stand up against state injustice. However, as the scope widened to include working-class resistance and other forms of opposition, it led to a broader theoretical approach as well. In 1968, the Grundgesetz was modified; the right to resist was now codified in the constitution. The context was that, almost 20 years after it had been created, the Federal Republic still did not have full responsibility for internal security. No “state of emergency” legislation had originally been included in the constitution, as the Western Allies, fearing a resurgence of Nazism or a Communist coup, had retained the right to control internal security.¹¹¹ By 1968, this was to be remedied, but against widespread public protest. The trade unions were concerned their right to strike was being undermined, and they cited the Kapp-Putsch of 1920 to show how a right-wing coup d’état had only been halted by the workers’ resistance.¹¹² On the other hand, in the context of the Cold War, the West German political establishment was concerned that a right to armed resistance might be used by Communists to topple parliamentary democracy. In the end, the clauses governing a state of emergency were inserted into the Grundgesetz, but they were balanced by the addition of a paragraph 4 into Article 20: All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.¹¹³

The decisive point is that the right to armed resistance enters into force only once all other remedies have been exhausted. On the other hand, all German citizens (but not foreigners!) enjoy this right, not just a small elite. The years after 1968 saw the emergence of substantial internal unrest, right down to the terrorist activities of the “Red Army Faction.” Often, the left-wing critics of the West German political system would use the term “resistance” to

 Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 232– 233.  Avenarius, Die Rechtsordnung, 63 – 65.  Johst, Begrenzung des Rechtsgehorsams, 214.  Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, as last amended on 28 March 2019, https: //www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.html#p0111, accessed 9 June 2020.

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describe their attitudes and actions, obviously trying to usurp the positive connotations of the term as they had been firmly established by then. That, however, met with massive criticism from friends and families of the conspirators: In one respect, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff would forever react sharply to any reference to the resistance: That was when anyone attempted to place the articulation of protest against West German society in the tradition of the 20 July. For her, “resistance” was forever the struggle with “evil incarnate,” “upholding unconditionally the highest moral standards even if at the risk to one’s own life.” With this highly moralizing definition of resistance she would always object to any attempts to link the 20 July plot or the “White Rose” to RAF terrorism, to house squatting or the peace movement’s blockade demonstrations. She did not deny that the latter were justified to some extent. But to call them “resistance” was, for her, “simply arrogant and misleading.”¹¹⁴

Inge Aicher-Scholl always saw herself as the trustee of her murdered siblings’ heritage. In later editions of her “White Rose” book, she even modified the text of one of the Munich students’ leaflets so that it would fit better her political aims and her post-war interpretations of the events of 1943.¹¹⁵ In 1984, Antje Vollmer, a politician of the then nascent “green” political party, insisted: “Today as well political resistance is necessary, … because the resistance against the Nazis was not the private property of some national conservative elites.” As opposed to that, the Social Democrat Minister of Justice, Gerhard Jahn, warned against instrumentalizing the right to resist against parliamentary democracy: “There must be no resistance against the order created by the Grundgesetz.”¹¹⁶ For the Bundeswehr the tension persists between the obligation to obey orders (which, after all, is the logical continuation of the primacy of politics) and the individual’s right to act according to her or his conscience – even if that individual wears a uniform. In 2005, a major was facing charges of disobedience because he had refused to comply with an order which he feared might implicate him in the U.S. campaign in Iraq (which he felt was against international law). The major invoked Article 4 of the Grundgesetz which stipulates the freedom of conscience, and the court upheld his position that this was more important than military discipline.¹¹⁷

 Conze, “Aufstand des preußischen Adels,” 507.  Hikel, Sophies Schwester, 203.  Both quotations from Cornelißen, “Der 20. Juli 1944 in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur,” 34. See also Steinbach, “Gescheitert, aber nicht erfolglos!”, 740.  Ruling 2. Wehrdienstsenat on 21 June 2005, BVerwG 2 WD 12.04, http: //www.bits.de/NRANEU/others/2wd12-u-04. pdf, accessed 24 September 2018.

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In May 2017, a lieutenant-colonel had criticized the then Minister of Defence, Ursula von der Leyen, and exclaimed to brother officers: “If anything is to change, we, the military, will have to speak up – or else stage a putsch!” While the civilian prosecutor was quick to state that this had not constituted a criminal offence, the officer was nonetheless disciplined internally.¹¹⁸ One cannot help but wonder what would have happened if he had concluded with “… or heed Stauffenberg’s example!”¹¹⁹ From its very inception, the Bundeswehr was created as part of an alliance. Integrating post-war West Germany and its new military had been facilitated greatly by the tradition of resistance against Nazi injustice and war: Foreign misconceptions about the Germans – unreserved faith in authorities, subservience, monolithic cohesion – were thus if not eradicated completely, but at least modified to some extent. … These decisive corrections of the largely undifferentiated image of Germany abroad were an essential precondition for a future Germany acting within the family of nations.¹²⁰

However, the new German military’s modern concept of “Internal Leadership” did not meet with approval of all Allied officers.¹²¹ Some found the limitations placed on military discipline and obedience problematic, some would object to a positive appreciation of the military resistance against Hitler. Adelbert Weinstein, the military correspondent of the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, recounted a meeting with French officers: Some officers mention the 20 July to us. They believe that the German officers’ actions cannot be condoned, as Germany was at war at the time, and during a war an attempt on the life of the supreme commander is a crime.¹²²

On the other hand, there were several uprisings by the military in countries allied to Germany, such as in Turkey and Greece. On 25 April 1974, the Portuguese Army overthrew the remains of the reactionary-authoritarian regime of the Esta-

 Thorsten Jungholt, “Wenn sich etwas ändern soll, dann müssen wir, die Soldaten, endlich den Mund aufmachen. Oder putschen.” Die Welt, 12 December 2017, 8.  http: //www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/ich-habe-das-vertrauen-verlor-marine-kommandeurrechnet-mit-von-der-leyen-ab-15512280. html, accessed 25 September 2018.  Wiggershaus, “Zur Bedeutung und Nachwirkung,” 470.  Meyer, “Zur Situation der deutschen militärischen Führungsschicht,” 670 – 671; MeierDörnberg, “Die Planung des Verteidigungsbeitrages,” 681– 688; Fröhling, Innere Führung und Multinationalität, 149 – 150.  Adelbert Weinstein, “Köpfe einer Armee. Französische Offiziere in Algerien”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 11 July 1959.

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do Novo which António de Salazar (who died in 1970) had created in the 1920s. The officers wanted more than just a regime change; they called for an immediate end to the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, not least because the continuation of these wars threatened to isolate Portugal internationally.¹²³ Another point was that when the Portuguese Army had had to surrender to vastly superior Indian troops attacking the Portuguese possession of Goa in 1961, the military’s public and social reputation had suffered considerably.¹²⁴ The inevitable defeats in Africa would likely multiply that effect. Another parallel to the 20 July plot can be seen in the fact that the huge losses in Africa had forced the Estado Novo regime to open officering to a broader social spectrum, thus placing the privileges of the proud professional officer corps in question – also a form of elite manipulation.¹²⁵ Struggles for power erupted for more than a year, but eventually the military handed over power to the civilian politicians.¹²⁶ In spite of all these obvious similarities, neither did the Portuguese officers overthrowing the regime refer at any time to the German example, nor did German observers draw the parallel.¹²⁷ The book which had helped trigger the Portuguese revolution, General António de Spínola’s Portugal e o futuro, was soon published in a German edition. Professor Hans-Adolf Jacobsen of Bonn University, who was also the convenor of the Ministry of Defence’s advisory board for questions of “Internal Leadership,” and in 1984 editor of the republished Gestapo reports to Hitler about the 20 July plot, wrote a foreword – but not once did he mention the German military resistance, although 1974 had also marked the thirtieth anniversary of the 1944 events.¹²⁸ Again, it fell to Adelbert Weinstein to establish a link: he referred to the Portuguese officers’ putsch as a “revolt of the conscience of many officers,” using exactly the term by then common for the German military opposition; Weinstein also gave the “dirty war” on both sides in Africa as one of the reasons for the military revolt.¹²⁹

 Spínola, Portugal e o futuro, 61– 102.  Wenzel, Die Vorgeschichte, 52.  Afonso, “Caracterização sociológica,” 21– 22; Braeckman, Portugal, 72– 73; Wenzel, Die Vorgeschichte, 54. As opposed to that, Chilcote, The Portuguese Revolution, 91, sees the “highly politicized university students drafted as junior officers” as the driving force of the revolutionary movement within the Army.  Rezola, Os Militares na Revolução, 125.  For the Portuguese historiography, see Rezola, Os Militares na Revolução; for a Marxist interpretation see Loff, A Memória da Ditadura.  Spínola, Portugal und die Zukunft, 5 – 18.  Adelbert Weinstein. “Portugals Putsch gegen den Krieg. Die Streitkräfte fürchteten einen Verfall ihres Ansehens.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 27 April 1974, 10.

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Apart from all the similarities, there were marked differences as well: While the German population had still largely backed Hitler and his war even in the summer of 1944, Salazar’s Estado Novo had lost popular support, particularly in urban areas. The military’s action was therefore not aimed against the people as well as the regime. Also, Portuguese military history was rich in examples of mutinies and insurrections,¹³⁰ and the 1974 revolution did not have to start with an assassination attempt. In short, the young Portuguese officers of the Movimento das Forças Armadas had no reason for such moral and religious qualms as those that had plagued men like Moltke or Leonrod. When, on 15/16 July 2016, the Turkish military attempted a coup, the German public reacted instinctively by greeting its failure.¹³¹ Although the anniversary of the 20 July events followed only days later, none of the commentators drew a comparison – if only to highlight the differences. The traditional, ritualized memorialization of the events in Berlin in the summer of 1944 seems to stand in the way of any lessons to be learned for evaluating current political developments. In 1989, the then Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki and the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had attended a “Mass of Reconciliation” in Krzyżowa (the former Kreisau in Silesia, Poland), which at the time had had significant political relevance as an indication of improved German-Polish relations at a critical juncture in history.¹³² Today, the political relevance of memorializing the resistance seems to have dwindled noticeably. The forms of collective memorialization that developed in West Germany after the Second World War are in themselves the product of their times and need to be seen in the light of their political context. Accepting fundamental opposition against a regime as part of its tradition sets the Federal Republic as well as the Bundeswehr apart from their international partners – just as their attitude to the history of the Second World War is different from that of others, and rightly so.

 Harsgor, Portugal in Revolution, 11.  See, e. g., Gerd Appenzeller. “Die Türkei – ein Unruheherd.” Der Tagesspiegel, 16 July 2016, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/putsch-gegen-erdogan-die-tuerkei-ein-unruheherd/ 13885552.html, accessed 6 September 2018.  Ruchniewicz, Kreisau neu gelesen, 107– 112.

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10.2 The resistance in the tradition of the East German National People’s Army In a similar way, the other German military, the GDR’s Nationale Volksarmee (NVA), had to determine how it would handle the heritage of the “anti-fascist” resistance; after all, according to its own understanding, “anti-fascism” was one of the GDR’s defining characteristics.¹³³ An appropriate analysis, however, requires a brief look at the ideological basis of the East German state. National Socialism had always been a “movement,” and rather anti-intellectual. As opposed to that, the GDR was founded on the highly intellectual, coherent, but also hermetical ideology of Marxism, in its specific Leninist version as propagated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.¹³⁴ But Marxism-Leninism was by no means the only conceptual basis the GDR was built on. Very soon, even before the East German state was founded, the rather open discussion of Marxist theory was steadily replaced by a Stalinist cult of personality and the uncritical adoption of Soviet thinking; anyone who objected had to face severe repression.¹³⁵ So, apart from Marxism, idolizing the Soviet Union was the second tenet of GDR thinking, accompanied by the typically Leninist central role of the Communist Party. Yet, as the GDR went on, functional necessities tended to limit the role of ideology, in particular in areas such as industry, but also in the military.¹³⁶ By the mid-1950s, both blocks which were to characterize the Cold War had been formed. In 1961, the building of the Berlin Wall indicated the end of the expansionist phase of Soviet policies in Germany. There would be no socialist united Germany, and the GDR could no longer see itself as the spearpoint of that development.¹³⁷ Instead, during the 1970s it had to redefine itself as the “socialist nation on German soil,” with a specific regional identity. With these three elements, Marxism-Leninism, the reliance on the Soviet Union, and the GDR’s role within Germany, the East German state’s intellectual foundation was by no means as homogeneous as it might seem at first sight, and what was more, it tended to change over time.

 Schmidt, “Sieger der Geschichte?”, with additional literature.  Weber, Die DDR, Mählert, Kleine Geschichte der DDR.  Leonhard, Child of the Revolution, 456 – 522; Weber and Weber, Damals, als ich Wunderlich hieß, 274– 410; Finker, Der 20. Juli 1944, 9.  Autorenkollektiv, Armee für Frieden und Sozialismus, 227– 236; Heinemann, Die DDR und ihr Militär, 73 – 79; Hagemann, Parteiherrschaft, 206 – 229.  Heinemann and Wilke, “Kein Krieg um Berlin.”

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After 1945, National Socialism had to be fitted into the dichotomic pattern of class struggle, as proffered by dialectic historic materialism. Marxist teaching, and not in the GDR alone, was that “fascism” (a term much preferred over “National Socialism”) was the logical culmination point of capitalism. In that sense, the Third Reich was no more than a continuation of the Weimar Republic; the real turning-point in German history had been not 1933 but 1919, when the bourgeoisie had succeeded one last time in stopping a Soviet-style republic.¹³⁸ Only the founding of the GDR, the “first workers’ and farmers’ state” had opened up the path for the socialist era in Germany which was to follow capitalism. From its beginning, the GDR placed itself among those movements which had fought against the Hitler regime. While the Federal Republic saw itself as the legal successor to the Reich, assumed its responsibilities, paid damages to former forced laborers, to the State of Israel, or to Poland, its East German counterpart refused to acknowledge any continuity. The GDR liked to denounce West Germany and its reemployment of former functional elites,¹³⁹ but that studiously overlooked that in its system, too, there was a degree of elite continuity, even if a qualitative analysis will reveal a more differentiated picture, due largely to the insertion of Communist cadres, usually trained in Moscow during the war and brought to Germany after hostilities had ended.¹⁴⁰ Throughout its existence, its heavy reliance on the Soviet Union characterized the GDR, and nothing showed this more clearly than the popular uprising on 17 June 1953 which could only be crushed by Soviet tanks.¹⁴¹ This was also the determining factor when it came to memorializing the opposition against the Nazi system. Victory in the “Great Patriotic War” had turned into one of the founding myths of the Stalinist regime, and remained a central asset even after the dictator’s death in 1953. As the Soviet Union had paid for this victory with hecatombs of dead, it saw itself as first among the victorious powers.¹⁴² A criterium for memorialization was therefore whether a group or an individual had contributed to the eventual Soviet triumph; the “objective” result was at least as important as the subjective motivation.

 Weber, Die DDR, 130 – 137; Böttcher, “Fortschrittlich” versus “reaktionär”, 61– 101.  For the campaign in general, see Braunbuch. For the allegations specifically against General Hans Speidel, see Thorndike, Thorndike, and Raddatz, Unternehmen Teutonenschwert, and the “documentary” film of the same name.  Mählert, Kleine Geschichte der DDR, 11– 34; Weber, Die DDR, 15 – 27; Richter, Die DDR, 11– 25; Hammerstein, Gemeinsame Vergangenheit, 49 – 56.  Diedrich, Waffen gegen das Volk, in particular 202– 216.  Jahn, Stalingrad erinnern, 24– 36; 118 – 165; Pieken, Rogg, and Wehner, Stalingrad. Eine Ausstellung, 352– 369.

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That is why, from the earliest post-war period, all those who had worked for the Soviet Union were included in GDR memorialization: the National Committee “Free Germany” as well as the group around Arvid von Harnack and Harro Schulze-Boysen which the Gestapo had referred to as the “Red Orchestra” (see Chapters 4.5 and 9.3).¹⁴³ The GDR historians distorted the history of the “Red Orchestra” no less than their Western colleagues, and surprisingly enough in much the same direction, even if for a different motive. The rather bourgeois group centered around the educator Adolf Reichwein and the Luftwaffe Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen had discussed socialist theories, but was now represented as a spy ring working for the Soviets – except of course that this had positive connotations in East Berlin and negative ones further West. The chief witness for all this was Greta Kuckhoff, widow of Adam Kuckhoff who had been executed in 1943 for belonging to this group; his wife had escaped the scaffold by a hair’s breadth. In her memoirs Greta Kuckhoff emphasizes to what lengths the group went to aid the Soviet war effort.¹⁴⁴ This, however, has to be read with a certain amount of source criticism: after the war, Greta Kuckhoff lived in the GDR and rose to be the President of the Deutsche Notenbank (the GDR central bank) from 1950 – 1958. Her leading role in the GDR political and economic nomenklatura goes a long way towards explaining why her account differs so widely from the group’s real aims, i. e. to bring about the revolution in Germany with leaflets and a small journal; its covert communication link with Moscow that would have allowed the transmission of intelligence had never worked properly, anyway.¹⁴⁵ The Harnack/Schulze-Boysen group suited GDR political aims in another way as well: It had included not only Communists, but also Social Democrats, centrists, even the odd member of the nobility. The GDR state party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED) claimed to be a “Socialist Unity Party,” encompassing just that symbiosis of all “progressive elements” which the German Communists had hoped to bring about even before 1939 in the form of a “Popular Front.”¹⁴⁶ According to GDR historians, groups like the “Red Orchestra” showed the way towards this unified popular front, especially as they had never questioned the Communist Party’s leading role in all this. Trotskyist groups or such Social Democrats who had refused to cooperate with the Communists (Neu beginnen, SADP) were permanently excluded from GDR tradition.

   

Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse,” 23 – 24. Kuckhoff, Vom Rosenkranz zur Roten Kapelle, 276 – 320. Barth/Müller-Enbergs, “Kuckhoff.” Doehler/Haufe, Militärhistorische Traditionen, 74.

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In the same way, the GDR claimed for itself the heritage of the National Committee “Free Germany,” although it had originated as a means of integrating national-minded German prisoners-of-war. Here, too, appreciation in the GDR corresponded to rejection in the Federal Republic.¹⁴⁷ In this way, GDR historiography could combine various forms of anti-Nazi activities, right down to the espionage activities of Richard Sorge in Tokyo, into an “anti-fascist resistance movement.” If this encouraged West German observers to disqualify all those forms of resistance as “treason,” then that again provided the required evidence that West German academia was still in the hands of unreformed Nazis. Until the end of its existence, the GDR failed to solve two fundamental problems: in August 1939, Stalin had made an about-turn and concluded an agreement with Hitler. This had snubbed both Communists within the Reich and Germans in exile in Moscow. GDR historiography could never explain why, during the period of 1939 – 1941, the Soviet Union had refused to support Communist anti-fascist resistance, and for that reason, preferred not to discuss the problem at all. As late as 1989, the NVA’s Press published a book on “Military history traditions of the GDR and the NVA” in which no mention is made of this phase.¹⁴⁸ The other problem is that, after all, the much-vaunted forms of popular, workingclass resistance had remained ineffective. Until the very end, the Germans had served Hitler and the Nazis, and the armed uprising or the revolution predicted by Marxist ideology had never materialized. The national conservative resistance group centered around Carl Goerdeler was consistently viewed negatively. In 1945, two streets in Leipzig had been named after the city’s former mayor who had been murdered in February of the same year. By 1953, both streets bore different names again. Only in November 1991, after the GDR had ceased to exist, was one of them renamed yet again: what had been Friedrich Engels Square was now Goerdeler Circle (Goerdelerring).¹⁴⁹ For GDR historians, the Goerdeler group represented exactly those capitalists who had made Hitler possible in the first place: the bourgeoisie, banks, heavy industry, and the military top brass. From a socialist perspective, fascism was the logical continuation of capitalism, so that in this view the difference between Hitler and Goerdeler (who had lost his life fighting against the Führer) largely disappeared. After all, the highly conservative opposition had worked for nothing but the survival of bourgeois class rule. What had been a fundamen-

 Warth, Verräter oder Widerstandskämpfer?, 259.  Doehler/Haufe, Militärhistorische Traditionen, 78.  Reich, “Erinnern und verweigern,” 355.

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tal opposition against National Socialism dwindled into “anti-Hitlerism,” more or less one out of several factions in the imperialist camp.¹⁵⁰ At times, that even applied to Social Democrats like Julius Leber who had been in contact with Goerdeler or Stauffenberg. In the early 1950s, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED), which had come into being by fusing the Social Democrat and the Communist Parties, was busy fighting “Social Democratism” so as to align it completely with Stalinist teaching. In this context, even non-Communist left-wing resisters were derided. Starting in 1948, the SED took part in the annual memorial events for the various forms of opposition; the ceremonies were then still all-German. More and more, however, the SED usurped the celebrations and converted them into a memory of all “Victims of Fascism.” The survivors and families of those who had led the 20 July plot eventually decided in 1952 to hold their own, separate event in West Berlin – the beginning of memorial ceremonies in the Bendlerblock courtyard.¹⁵¹ This period of the late 1940s and early 1950s was characterized not only by the strict enforcement of Stalinist doctrine, but also by a general condemnation of all forms of national conservative resistance which was by then defamed as “reactionary.” The 20 July uprising suddenly became a “palace revolution” of disgruntled officers who, so it was said, had not intended to end the war at all. What is striking, though, is that a sizeable number of historians during the GDR’s early years preferred to do regional studies; this could motivate students more directly, and it obviated the need to enter into long discussions of ideology with the inherent risk of being in trouble once the Party line changed. This led to publications about individual groups, or about the resistance in Saxony¹⁵² which opened the door for work about Goerdeler’s time as mayor of Leipzig, after all.¹⁵³ GDR historiography made a point of distancing itself from the positive view of the national conservative opposition which had by then become the norm in West Germany. Almost reflexively, any group or individual who was the object of public veneration in the West was rejected in the East, while at the same time West German historians refused to acknowledge those left-wing resistance groups which were at the core of memorialization in the GDR. The Bundeszen-

 Cornelißen, “Der 20. Juli 1944 in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur,” 26 – 27; Showalter, “Conscience, Honor and Expediency,” 63.  Reich/Finker, “Der 20. Juli 1944,” 534; Schuppener, “Das Gedenken an den 20. Juli 1944,” 165.  Merlio, “La résistance allemande,” 399, footnote 6.  Axel Laise. Das Wirken Carl Goerdelers in den Jahren 1930‐1936. Staatsexamensarbeit, Leipzig University 1962, quoted in Reich, “Erinnern und verweigern,” 374, footnote 48.

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trale für Heimatdienst, i. e. the West German institution for psychological warfare and political education, had large numbers of Inge Aicher-Scholl’s book about the “White Rose” printed and distributed to East German students, because the Munich group had stood up “for freedom” – an illustration of how the disparate memories of the resistance had become part of the Cold War ideological conflict.¹⁵⁴ Yet, the differences between the two systems stood out soon: during the 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Republic saw the beginnings of a more critical debate about the national conservative resistance, while at the same time other, more left-wing resistance groups were beginning to come into focus.¹⁵⁵ This kind of relaxation turned out to be impossible in the GDR. A small group of younger East German historians started to make use of those sources that were available in the GDR and to discuss individual aspects – but always within the limits of party lines of thinking. The GDR never wavered in its criticism of Goerdeler, but Stauffenberg was eventually discovered as having been the older politician’s opposition, not unlike what more recent research has found out about the relationship between the two. As a consequence, GDR historians began to judge the head of the military conspiracy more leniently. What helped in this context was that (as we have seen in Chapter 9.3) Stauffenberg had at times been alleged to have prepared for a separate peace with the Soviet Union. In 1964, a first cautiously positive account of the military resistance was published in Moscow.¹⁵⁶ Taking his cue, in the same year Armeegeneral Heinz Hoffmann, GDR Minister of National Defence, speaking at a memorial ceremony, claimed Stauffenberg for the NVA’s military heritage.¹⁵⁷ In 1967, the first Stauffenberg biography written in the GDR was published, even if only in the rather low-key East German Christian Democrat Party’s press.¹⁵⁸ Its author was Kurt Finker who had only shortly before been appointed professor of contemporary German history in Potsdam and who went on to be the leading GDR expert on the history of the resistance. Even though Finker did approach his protagonist from a Marxist point of view, his book met with ideological criticism. In the West, none less than Hans Rothfels himself reviewed it in positive terms in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – which did not help Finker in Potsdam much. The book was sold out

 Hikel, Sophies Schwester, 124– 139; more generally, see Mommsen, “The German Resistance against Hitler,” 151; and Heiniger, Exil, résistance, héritage, 13 – 14.  Duhnke, Die KPD von 1933 bis 1945; Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand.  Melnikov, Zagovor; German version: Melnikov, 20. Juli 1944.  Cornelißen, “Der 20. Juli 1944 in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur,” 27.  Finker, Stauffenberg.

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almost immediately and remained out of print, and a second edition was only permitted in 1971, and had to include a different conclusion. The 1970s marked a new phase in GDR history in general, which also affected its politically controlled historiography. The politics of détente initiated by West German Chancellor Willy Brandt led to internationally binding agreements between the two German states, affirming the division of Germany. As foreshadowed by the building of the Berlin Wall, this meant that the GDR could no longer define itself as the spearpoint of Communism in all of Germany. What, then, would be its identity, including its history? GDR historians began to construe their country as the “socialist nation on German soil,” as stipulated in Article 1 of the 1974 constitution, whereas the 1968 constitution had still referred to the “socialist state of the German nation.”¹⁵⁹ While the publication of Klaus Mammach’s massive Die deutsche antifaschistische Widerstandsbewegung both in East and West Germany in 1974¹⁶⁰ indicated where the emphasis would continue to lie, the new line permitted references to several “progressive” traditions in history, including some who had until then been anathema. One of the new developments was that, in 1983, the GDR actively participated in the festivities to mark Martin Luther’s five hundredth birthday. Back in the 1960s, it had been Thomas Müntzer who had been upheld as the paragon of socialism in the Early Modern period, while Luther had been portrayed as the traitor of the masses. Finally, in 1980 a magisterial biography of Frederick the Great of Prussia was published (who was, of course, only referred to as “Frederick II.”).¹⁶¹ The same year, the equestrian statue of the great king (which had barely escaped being melted down 20 years earlier) was brought back to Berlin’s boulevard Unter den Linden. This is the context in which a more positive attitude to the military resistance became possible.¹⁶² In 1984, the GDR organized a conference to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the failed coup, but the new openness had its limitations: Kurt Finker and other GDR historians did not get permission to accept an invitation to attend the international conference on the same subject in West Berlin.¹⁶³ For a few years during the 1960s, Hans Bentzien had been Minister of Culture of the GDR, before he fell victim to a political cleansing and was demoted

    

Reich/Finker, “Der 20. Juli 1944,” 550 – 551. Mammach, Die deutsche antifaschistische Widerstandsbewegung. Mittenzwei, Friedrich II. Reich/Finker, “Der 20. Juli 1944,” 543. Finker, “Der 20. Juli 1944 und die DDR-Geschichtswissenschaft.”

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to work for GDR television. During the 1980s, he discovered the resistance against Hitler for himself and for his TV station. He obtained permission to produce a 30-minute piece on a member of the conspiracy every year. In 1989, he was finally allowed to shoot a feature on Stauffenberg himself, including permission to film in the West Berlin Bendlerblock. The result was so convincing that he was even permitted to expand it into a 45-minute film which was, for the purposes of the GDR, surprisingly sober and objective.¹⁶⁴ It seemed that in history, too, the old restrictions could not continue any longer. The GDR’s ideological collapse had finally impacted upon its perception of the resistance as well. One of the aims of military tradition within the NVA, apart from upholding the values of the working classes, was to suppress the periodic outbreaks of right-wing extremism and neo-Nazi incidents; in this, the GDR was not much different from the Federal Republic.¹⁶⁵ After the first free elections in the GDR in March 1990, the only truly democratic government in the state’s history took office. This permitted the tentative realization of some reform concepts which had been hatched by a few creative minds during the final years of the socialist regime but had not been permitted to come to fruition.¹⁶⁶ One of them was an unambiguously positive attitude to the 20 July 1944 complex. Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière and Minister for Disarmament and Defence Rainer Eppelmann made a point in selecting 20 July 1990 as the date on which all career soldiers of the NVA would swear a new oath on the democratic constitution, without reference to Socialism, the Party, or the alliance with the Soviet Union. The military resistance against Hitler had finally arrived in the failing GDR and its military forces, even if the intention of naming a regiment after Stauffenberg never came to anything before the GDR ceased to exist on 3 October 1990.¹⁶⁷ During this period of change, even leading GDR historians felt free to describe in public the limitations under which they had been forced to work.¹⁶⁸ That some of them had at the same time formed part of the oppressive political apparatus came to light only much later.¹⁶⁹ In this case,

 Böttcher, “Fortschrittlich” versus “reaktionär”, 402– 448, 489 – 516. This passage relies also on a lecture by Hans Bentzien in the Potsdam Filmmuseum on 13 November 2007 at a panel discussion to commemorate Stauffenberg’s hundredth birthday.  Wenzke, Staatsfeinde in Uniform?, 330.  Wenzke, Geschichte der Nationalen Volksarmee, 135– 146; Heinemann, Die DDR und ihr Militär, 60 – 62.  Storkmann, “Die ‘Roten Preußen’?”, 72.  Reich/Finker, “Der 20. Juli 1944.”  Eckert, “Der verratene Verräter.”

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too, the rapid rapprochement between East and West was supported by channels of communication established long before the Berlin Wall had come down.

10.3 The Austrian Bundesheer and the military resistance Starting in 1949, those provinces of Austria that had come under Western occupation began to raise riot police formations which were later called the “B-Gendarmerie.”¹⁷⁰ By 1952, they consisted largely of NCOs and officers who had seen service in the Second World War; they formed the core of the Austrian Republic’s armed forces, the Bundesheer created in 1955. As in the Bundeswehr and the NVA, their pre-1945 experience had a marked influence on everyday life in barracks. As opposed to the West German Bundeswehr, however, due to a clause in the State Treaty of 15 May 1955 no Wehrmacht officers ranking colonel or above were to serve in the Austrian Bundesheer. Even so, this was disregarded in a small number of cases¹⁷¹ – here as elsewhere the need to reemploy the old functional elites was overwhelming. Added to this was the self-perception of the new Austria (and its army) as a neutral, but pro-Western state which could easily connect with the myth of the pre-1945 “anti-Bolshevik war.” In a way, this was comparable to the Bundeswehr, but post-war Austria clearly rejected any pan-German ideas. Its distancing from any kind of all-German identity made it easier to exclude 1938 – 1945 from official and military memorialization. Members of the armed forces found it difficult to mention their own “achievements”; Wehrmacht decorations could not be worn with Austrian uniforms, not even in a sanitized form (i. e. without a swastika).¹⁷² On the other hand, Bundesheer delegations regularly attended memorial services organized by the Kameradschaftsbund, whose membership consisted mainly of the wartime generation. Official memorialization related therefore to the specifically Austrian past, i. e. the Imperial (later “k.u.k”) Army which went back to 1618. This corresponded with Austrian tradition during the interwar years. The period of 1918 – 1938, usually referred to as “the First Republic,” was the other part of Austrian tradition. The first “Regulations for Tradition” dated from 25 November 1967;¹⁷³ they stated

 Blasi/Schmidl/Schneider, B-Gendarmerie. I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Hofrat Dr. Erwin A. Schmidl, for substantial advice on this chapter.  Barthou, Der “Oberstenparagraph.”  Kossatz, Traditionsnamen, 64– 65. I am grateful to Felix Kossatz M.A. for permission to quote from his unpublished M.A. thesis.  Verlautbarungsblatt des Bundesministeriums für Landesverteidigung 18 (1967), Nr. 199.

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unequivocally: “Only the former Austrian-Hungarian forces – the ‘Old Army’ – and the Bundesheer of the First Republic can be considered part of tradition.” In many ways, the regulations did not differ too much from their West German counterpart of 1965. But together with the 1938 – 1945 period, any memory of the resistance against Hitler was also excluded. The reason stated was that this resistance had not been “pro-Austrian,” but rather “pan-German.” “Austrian resistance” meant exclusively the protest against the annexation of Austria by Germany. Some barracks received names of Austrians who had fallen victim to the Nazi regime, such as Lieutenant-Colonel Franz Heckenast. During 1934– 1938, he had presided over the court cases against Austrian National Socialists who had attempted to overthrow the government; Heckenast had been arrested, taken to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, and murdered there. Also honored were those who, like Feldmarschallleutnant Alfred Jansa, had objected in advance to the annexation. Jansa, until 1938 the Austrian Chief of the General Staff, had even developed a defense plan against a German invasion, and had been confined to the central German city of Erfurt, with reduced emoluments, after 1938. Until the mid-1980s, the Austrian public had largely blended out their country’s share in the Third Reich’s wars. It was only the affair over Federal President Dr Kurt Waldheim and the investigation by an international commission of historians that led to a sustained debate in Austria about how to deal with contemporary history, the role of Austria and of Austrians in the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht.¹⁷⁴

When all was said and done, what was at stake was Austria’s self-perception as the first victim of Nazi expansion.¹⁷⁵ Yet, there were noticeable differences between the “official” narrative and the memories of the war veterans. As a result, a working group was instituted in 1985, chaired by Manfried Rauchensteiner, later for many years the director of the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Army Historical Museum) in Vienna, to analyze questions of military tradition, but without drafting a consensual new version of the regulations governing them. On the contrary, even if only for administrative reasons (under Austrian law, regulations expire after 20 years), the 1967 text was republished in 1987, but as regards the Third Reich and the resistance,

 Trauttenberg/Vogl, “Traditionspflege im Spannungsfeld der Zeitgeschichte,” 407. For the Waldheim affair, see Gehler, “Die Affäre Waldheim,” 68.  Hammerstein, Gemeinsame Vergangenheit, 57– 67; Gehler, “Die Affäre Waldheim,” 68.

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without modification.¹⁷⁶ However, ideas developed by the working group eventually informed the 2001 “Regulations for Tradition” which were very clear about the Third Reich and the resistance: The Third Reich as a regime of injustice and the German Wehrmacht as its misused tool cannot be included in the Bundesheer tradition, because service in the Austrian armed forces of the Second Republic is based on the principles of the Austrian constitution and of international law. However, in individual cases exemplary actions by Austrians in the Wehrmacht or of men or women in the pro-Austrian resistance may be an element of tradition.¹⁷⁷

The first sentence was clearly formulated along the lines of the German debate. It transcends the 1982 regulation, though (which was still in force then!), by clearly distancing the Austrian military not only from the Third Reich, but also from the Wehrmacht – something the West German regulation of 1982 had still failed to do (see Chapter 10.1). Now, “resistance” was mentioned specifically. Yet, only the pro-Austrian resistance was as such included; resistance by Wehrmacht officers or men without a pro-Austrian dimension could only be accepted after a case-by-case evaluation. This opened up new questions: what about Austrians who had served in the Yugoslav “Freedom Battalions” towards the end of the war, or among the Slovenian partisans in Carinthia between 1943 and 1945 – both formations had fought against Nazi rule but had also supported the cessation of Austrian territory (southern Carinthia including the state capital of Klagenfurt/Celovec) to Yugoslavia. In any case, those Austrians could be honored who had fought as part of the Western Allied forces for reconstituting a separate, independent Austria.¹⁷⁸ In the 2000s, the public debate in Austria gained momentum, in particular with reference to naming barracks after members of the resistance. In December 2004, the National Defence Academy in Vienna held a symposium to discuss the phenomenon of “resistance” at a national and international level, from a theological, legal, and historical perspective.¹⁷⁹ Now, Austrians could be included in the Bundesheer tradition even if their actions had not been decidedly “pro-Austrian.” In 2000, the German Bundes-

 “Anordnungen über die Traditionspflege im Bundesheer […] Wiederverlautbarung.” Verlautbarungsblatt des Bundesministeriums für Landesverteidigung 65 (1987), Nr. 168.  Anordnungen für die Traditionspflege im Bundesheer – Neufassung. Verlautbarungsblatt des Bundesministeriums für Landesverteidigung 2001, 53, Nr. 117, Item 2b. These regulations were re-published largely unchanged in 2010.  Traussnig, Militärischer Widerstand von außen.  The proceedings were published as Der Ruf des Gewissens.

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wehr had named a barracks in Rendsburg, later another one in Blankenburg in the Harz mountains, after Anton Schmid (see Chapter 8.3). The sergeant from Vienna had been court-martialled and shot for saving Jews. In 2012, the Austrian NCO Academy in Enns named an auditorium after Schmid, after dedicating, in 2004, a plaque to Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bernardis who had been executed for his participation in Operation “Valkyrie.”¹⁸⁰ A year Major Carl Szokoll’s death in 2004, the courtyard of the Rossauer Barracks, the Austrian Ministry of Defence, was named after the officer who had been part of a resistance group in Vienna in 1945. Among the Austrians in the national conservative resistance was also Generalmajor Erwin von Lahousen¹⁸¹; other members of the opposition were stationed in Vienna, such as Colonel Rudolf von Marogna-Redwitz from the Seventeenth Cavalry Regiment, also killed after 20 July 1944.¹⁸² They might be included in Austrian military tradition as much as the Austrian Lieutenant-Colonel (Reserve) Josef Ritter von Gadolla who had saved the (German) city of Gotha from destruction and had been court-martialled and shot for it.¹⁸³ Originally, Austria’s selfperception as the “first victim of Nazi aggression” facilitated a distancing from the Third Reich past, but at the price of excluding the resistance as well from Austrian heritage. Like almost all other armed forces, the Austrian Bundesheer faithfully reflected the society it was recruited from: “One does not like to say it aloud, but tradition is anything but apolitical.”¹⁸⁴ Compared to the Federal Republic of Germany, Austria came to terms with its share of the Nazi past somewhat later, as it had long focused on the 1918 – 1938 period. The French historian Gilbert Merlio, one of his country’s best experts on the German-speaking world, may have simplified things a bit, but put them in a nutshell by stating that Austria externalized National Socialism, the Federal Republic internalized it, and the GDR universalized it: “that was someone else” – “that was us” – “that was international capitalism.”¹⁸⁵ These patterns informed the attitudes of the public and the armed forces alike.

 Binder, “Zwischen Modernisierung und ständestaatlicher Apologetik,” 398 – 399; Hoy, “Tradition und Traditionspflege im Österreichischen Bundesheer,” 493.  Schaub, Abwehr-General Erwin Lahousen.  For Marogna-Redwitz and his opposition activities see the recent publication Meyer, Klatt, 409 – 652.  Brissa, “Josef Ritter von Gadolla”; Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities and the War,” 909 – 910.  Hoy, “Tradition und Traditionspflege im Österreichischen Bundesheer,” 493.  Merlio, “La résistance allemande,” 391. Similarly: Steinbach, Nationalsozialistische Gewaltverbrechen, 8.

11 Conclusion This book started with the assumption that approaching the resistance against Hitler and the 20 July 1944 plot from the specific point of view of the military historian promises some added value for the scholarly state of the art. The political, social, economic,¹ and cultural dimensions of the attempted coup d’état have long been the subject of extensive research. Compared to them, the military dimension of the conspiracy has met with little interest. As we have seen, the anti-Nazi resistance could draw on older traditions, going back to the Reichswehr and in some ways even to the Imperial period of 1871– 1918 or the Prussian Army before that. This cannot surprise us as this is no more than the equivalent of what we have known ever since the 1960s about the resistance’s political roots. The ideas of the politicians and diplomats such as Popitz, Hassell or Goerdeler were derived from the pre-1914 period, or from national revolutionary concepts of the Weimar years. Yet among the younger officers (and it was not a resistance of the generals, but rather one of the colonels) the political concepts of the “notables” met with some skepticism. The plans for the role and place of a future military differed even between Beck and Stauffenberg. The Reichswehr had been a small and elitist force. Expanding it into the Wehrmacht as an army of millions had deprived it of some of its characteristics – but also modernized it. However, as a result the resistance remained an extremely small group within the military as well. Much like the resistance at large the military opposition lacked a mass basis² even after Goerdeler and then Stauffenberg sought to garner support from working-class leaders. Resistance by officers, and this has never been stated as clearly, is first of all “the military in revolt”. By 1943 at the latest Hitler’s disregard for all the expertise assembled in the General Staff had led to a situation where a continuation of the war constituted “a crime against the German nation” that had to be stopped. However, ending the war while Hitler was still at the helm was impossible for three reasons: the mass murder of people in the occupied territories, in particular the European Jews, had placed Germany outside the community of civilized nations; secondly nobody abroad would be willing to negotiate with Hitler any more; and thirdly the Führer had indicated that he was not pursuing a conventional “war aim”, but that for him, war was the natural state of affairs. The weak-

 Rüther, Der Widerstand des 20. Juli; see also Joerges, “Die Finanzierung des 20. Juli 1944”.  Kroener, “Erinnerungen, Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse”, 24; Kershaw, “Widerstand ohne Volk”, 795; see also Grunberger, The 12-year Reich, 142– 143. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-013

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est would go to the wall, and if that were to be the German nation, then so be it in his crude Social Darwinist world view. Understanding this in its complexity led some very few national conservative civilians and officers to take action. The military opposition also has to be understood within the polycratic structures of the Third Reich. This was not about retaining “privileges” but rather about preventing the Party and the SS from taking over completely once the war had ended. For the first time, we have shown to what extent the military thinking of the opposition referred back to the end of the First World War and to the internal unrest all over Germany during the first years of the Weimar Republic. Against this background the conspirators envisaged a situation at the end of the Second War that would be quite like that of 1918 – 1923. In this civil warlike conflict the national conservatives might have to confront not only the National Socialists but possibly also the national communists supported by the Red Army. The 20 July 1944 coup d’état is also an attempt to bring about this seemingly inevitable clash at a time when the “own” forces were as ready as they could possibly be, while the Army as opposed to the Luftwaffe, the Navy, and the Waffen-SS had not yet been weakened to the point where any uprising was obviously pointless. All those involved were well aware that the chances were limited and the risks high. But 20 July does not only stand for a symbolic act, to show the world that the “other Germany” existed. It was a genuine putsch plan, long prepared and drafted by some of the most brilliant general staff officers of their cohort. It is not true as is sometimes alleged that these were amateurs at work, and yes, there was a chance of success as well. Whether they would have succeeded in convincing the Allies of the need to modify their “Unconditional Surrender” demand must remain speculative. By the summer of 1944 skepticism had grown among the conspirators, probably for good reason. The relations between civilians and officers among the conspirators were not without friction and the personal animosities between Goerdeler and Stauffenberg were a symptom (not the cause!) of that. The officers did not see their role limited to being executive organs of the civilian politicians and diplomats but planned to establish a military dictatorship. However, this would only be for a limited period of time, again as in the Weimar Republic, and would eventually lead to a civilian government. But the military were quite determined to have some say as to whom they would hand over power to, and Goerdeler was certainly not Stauffenberg’s (and many others’) favourite choice as head of government. Beck’s pivotal role was to hold the centrifugal groups around Goerdeler and Stauffenberg together. As a consequence one cannot present the officers at the heart of the 20 July 1944 conspiracy as the direct forerunners of the West German Bundeswehr as it came into existence in 1955. In military history as well as in history in general,

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historic relevance does not consist in having foreshadowed what happened later. They were not signposts on the road to the post-war liberal parliamentary democracy including its military structures, but they were the “alternative to fascism of their time”³ – and, one should add, to the fascist way of war. This explains why at least initially it was not easy to integrate the resistance into the traditions of the emerging new West German military. They did not represent the primacy of politics, but rather the “state within the state” whom the politicians and civilian bureaucrats of that period detested so heartily. Yet in political discourse both at home and abroad the resistance against Hitler began to be connotated positively during the 1950s. The emerging Bundeswehr came under pressure to include the military conspiracy in its own heritage and tradition. Again the problem was the same as that of honoring the civilian opposition whose political positions had not been fully compatible with the 1949 Grundgesetz constitution, either. The problem could only be solved by synthetizing it at a higher level of abstraction, i. e. elevating it to a moral and ethical plane. In public discourse the military and political opposition gradually gave way to the “Conscience in Revolt”. For the military resistance that also involved a slow “de-militarization”. An indication might be the recurrent use of the term “civic courage” for what those officers had done: Rüdiger von Voss’ father HansAlexander von Voss, a Lieutenant Colonel in the general staff, had died in the opposition; on the seventieth anniversary of the failed coup, the son insisted that the uprising had proven that “a lack of civic courage was harmful for democracy”.⁴ Abstracting the specific military properties from the conspiracy does not, however, facilitate a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. Maybe the Bundeswehr is that part of the German political system least encumbered by the presence of former Nazis among its ranks. Despite all the contradictions, it purposefully placed itself in the continuity of the resistance, both conceptually and in the continuity of its personnel. Nowhere were checks as strict as in the military (at times to the very limits of what was compatible with the constitution) as to who would be allowed to serve in the post-Nazi army; at least a balanced and well-reasoned attitude to the opposition against Hitler was a condition sine qua non for being accepted. However, the reduction of the military resistance to a moral dimension created new problems once historians could show that some of the officers in the  Mommsen, “Die moralische Wiederherstellung der Nation”.  Stauffenberg-Attentat: Wie aus Verrätern Helden wurden. In Deutsche Welle, 20 July 2014, http://www.dw.com/de/stauffenberg-attentat-wie-aus-verr%C3 %A4tern-heldenwurden/a17786441, accessed 25 September 2018.

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conspiracy had had a share in the crimes perpetrated by Germans in the occupied territories. Hitler’s “trivialization and aestheticization by the entertainment industry”⁵ is today being matched by a codification and then also trivialization of the resistance⁶ that is in danger of also falling victim to a widespread tedium of moralizing arguments. While German soldiers are supposed to see the resistance against Hitler as part of their tradition, their actual knowledge of history is steadily decreasing – but then that goes for most Germans anyway. Even the interest of professional historians in the resistance has declined noticeably. Research publications are usually limited to the two (very commendable) book series published by the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial) in Berlin and the Forschungsgemeinschaft 20. Juli 1944 that unites families and academics and is closely linked with the Stiftung Hilfswerk 20. Juli. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the events might have provoked more than just well-meaning speeches about the resistance’s moral legacy, but more research and more open-minded investigation were slow in coming forward. Research in military history still promises new and advanced knowledge, even today. Biographies about Henning von Tresckow and Erwin Rommel are supposed to be forthcoming. On the civilian side, an up-to-date scholarly biography of Carl Goerdeler would be highly desirable. The aim cannot be “constructing the myth”⁷ but an academic contribution to an overall history of the German military within state and society. All this cannot detract from our findings that those officers who risked (and often lost) their lives in standing up against Hitler did what was morally right. Military motives do not per se preclude a moral quality. If Stauffenberg, Tresckow, and Beck sought to put an end to the war because they hoped to prevent the pointless deaths of millions both on the front and at home – then that was the decent thing to do. The almost limitless expansion of the term “resistance” in German public discourse has led many to see the motives of those acting against the Nazi tyranny as irrelevant; what counts alone is that someone objectively detracted from the Nazi war-making machine. If it does not matter for today’s evaluation whether someone was working towards a Stalinist dictatorship or parliamentary democracy, then national conservative motives, or recourse to

 Kühne, “Zwischen Akribie und Groteske”, 414, also for the next quotation.  See the cartoon version Schröder, 20. Juli 1944, and, recently, the essay Korenke, Widerstand aus Loyalität, which expressly excludes “dashing soldiers in uniform […] on Sepia photographs” (p. 11) from its focus.  I heartily agree here with Hürter/Römer, “Alte und neue Geschichtsbilder”, 302– 305.

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categories of the nation state, cannot justify an exclusion from the pantheon of heritage, either. The realistically minded among the conspirators had begun to understand that there was little diplomatic room for maneuver left, and that there would most likely be no way around unconditional surrender and a military occupation of the entire Reich. They were well aware that they would be charged with having stabbed the fighting fronts in the back. They might well have decided to give up, lean back, and let the catastrophe run its course. Most of them did not. Their decision to carry on highlights the ultimately moral and ethical, often also religious motives underlying their decision to act – motives that had always been there underneath the professional military reasons. We have already quoted Stauffenberg as having said: But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not do it, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience.⁸

In the end, joining the opposition was a question of conscience and courage. That, then, is where it runs parallel with the post-war West German constitution that states categorically: Freedom of faith and of conscience and freedom to profess a religious or philosophical creed shall be inviolable.

Article 4 of its constitution places today’s Germany in the tradition of the 20 July 1944.

 Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, 201; English text in Hoffmann, Stauffenberg. A family history, 243.

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Index Achamer-Pifrader, Humbert 254 Adenauer, Gussie 295 f. Adenauer, Konrad 230, 295 f., 357, 361, 363 f., 367, 371 Ahlers, Conrad 369 Aicher-Scholl, Inge 16, 21, 389, 398 Angermair, Rupert 14 f. Apel, Hans 373 Arntz, Hellmut 260, 262 – 264 Bach-Zelewski, Erich von dem 167 Bandera, Stepan 188 Bargatzky, Walter 324 f., 343 Baudissin, Wolf Graf von 358, 373 Bauer, Fritz 14 f. Bauer, Walter 13 Beck, Ludwig 2, 22 f., 25 f., 29, 36, 39 f., 49 f., 56, 58, 60 f., 63 f., 69 – 71, 74, 87, 92 f., 95, 98, 101, 106, 109 f., 127 – 139, 144, 148, 151, 155, 163, 171, 176, 200, 206, 208, 216, 219 – 222, 227, 229 – 231, 235, 259, 267, 270, 275, 289, 301 – 303, 306, 320, 325, 327, 333, 338 f., 343, 345 – 347, 351, 371, 373, 377, 405, 406, 408 Bell, George 329, 331 Bentzien, Hans 399 f. Bergstraesser, Arnold 13 Bernardis, Robert 144, 154, 294, 404 Bernstorff, Albrecht Graf von 328 Best, Sigismund Payne 159 Bismarck, Otto Fürst von 161, 320 Bismarck-Schönhausen, Gottfried Graf von 140, 161, 285, 334 Bittenfeld, Hans-Heinrich Herwarth von 189 f. Blank, Theodor 368, 371 Blaskowitz, Johannes 140, 228 Blomberg, Werner von 36 f., 58, 60 – 64, 67 – 69, 71, 78, 93, 127 f., 175, 177, 203 Blücher, Gebhardt Leberecht von 198 Blumenthal, Hans-Jürgen Graf von 96, 235 Blumentritt, Günter 229 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110699333-015

Bock, Fedor von 104, 132, 135, 165, 172, 179, 190 Boeselager, Georg Freiherr von 124, 173, 191, 194 f., 214, 219, 322, 375 Boeselager, Philipp Freiherr von 18, 88, 124, 173, 191, 194 f., 219, 251, 288, 366, 375 Boineburg-Lengsfeld, Hans von 297 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 88, 116, 121, 159 f., 209, 277, 295, 329, 331, 386 Bonhoeffer, Emmy 121 Bonhoeffer, Klaus 116, 121 – 123, 248, 251, 295, 318, 332 – 334 Bormann, Martin 46, 145, 156, 164, 254, 267 f., 280 f., 284 f., 313, 327, 338 Bosch, Robert 216, 219, 229, 328 Brandenburg, Wilhelm 335 Brandt, Willy 11, 314, 399 Brauchitsch, Walther von 71, 73, 94, 98, 127, 130 – 132, 136 f., 163, 177, 328 Braun, Wernher Freiherr von 84 Bredow, Ferdinand von 57 f., 62 f. Brockdorff-Ahlefeldt, Walter Graf von 134 f., 230 Broszat, Martin 26, 347 Brücklmeier, Eduard 53, 328 Buchheit, Gert 331 Bülow, Bernhard Wilhelm von 69 Burgdorf, Wilhelm 270, 272, 290 Busch, Ernst 57, 221 Bussche, Axel Freiherr von dem 194, 204, 220, 363 Colvin, Ian 133 Canaris, Wilhelm 46, 60, 65, 71, 74, 98, 105, 122, 129, 159 – 161, 172, 179, 185, 192, 206, 212, 277, 295, 312, 329, 331, 372, 386 Carsten, Francis L. 30 Chamberlain, Sir Neville 134, 153, 328 f. Choltitz, Dietrich von 291, 297, 299 Churchill, Winston S. 314, 329, 333, 352

460

Index

Clausewitz, Carl von Curtius, Julius 175

33, 152 f., 174

Dalton, Hugh 330 Deist, Wilhelm 30 Delbrück, Justus 110 Delp, Alfred 371 Dethleffsen, Erich 363, 365 Dietl, Eduard 51 – 53, 241, 285 Dipper, Christof 22 Dohnanyi, Christine von 121, 160 Dohnanyi, Hans von 121, 140, 160, 164, 193, 209, 251, 277, 295, 336, 345, 386 Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin 10, 210, 370, 373, 389 Dönitz, Karl 125, 276, 372 Dulles, Allen W. 10, 159, 206, 208, 285, 299, 310 f., 322, 329 f., 340 Earle, George H. 329, 331 Ebert, Friedrich 40, 44, 66, 75 Einsiedel, Heinrich Graf von 313 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 48, 318, 332 – 334, 342, 361 Elser, Georg 87, 159, 211 Eppelmann, Rainer 400 Erdmann, Hans Otto 224, 265 Erler, Fritz 16 Eschenburg, Theodor 13 Fahrner, Rudolf 198 Falkenhausen, Gottfried Freiherr von 18 f., 157, 209 f., 251, 276, 316, 321, 326, 350 Fellgiebel, Erich 224, 244, 260 – 264, 266 f., 312, 387 Ferber, Ernst 265, 286 Fest, Joachim 26, 136, 298 Finck, Hans-Jürgen 387 Finckh, Eberhard 39, 99, 142, 195, 228 f. Finker, Kurt 398 f. Fish-Harnack, Mildred 117 Foertsch, Hermann 358 Frederick II., King of Prussia 399 Freisler, Roland 10, 15, 158, 172, 202, 205 f., 270, 293 – 295, 363 Freytag von Loringhoven, Wessel Freiherr 174, 288

Frick, Wilhelm 85 Frießner, Johannes 362 Fritsch, Werner Freiherr von 70 – 74, 78, 82, 87, 93, 110 f., 127, 139, 203 Fritzsche, Hans Karl 50, 204, 315, 372 Fromm, Friedrich 25 f., 34 f., 39 f., 45 f., 50, 54, 62, 69 f., 77 f., 84 – 86, 90, 94 – 97, 105, 108 f., 127, 132, 143 f., 148 f., 153 f., 170, 173, 200, 206, 212, 217, 226, 232 – 234, 242, 245, 252 – 257, 259, 263, 276, 280 – 282, 338, 373, 387 Funk, Walther 148 Gadolla, Josef Ritter von 404 Gaulle, Charles de 33, 332 Gehlen, Reinhard 187, 256, 356 f., 367 f. Gehre, Ludwig 99, 140, 215, 238, 332 Gehrts, Erwin 117 George, Stefan 30, 197 f., 204, 225, 307, 342 f., 349 Georgi, Friedrich 120, 257, 259 Gerlach, Christian 23, 169, 179 Gersdorff, Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von 18, 97, 103 – 104, 150, 154, 164 – 167, 170, 173, 179 – 181, 183 – 185, 190 – 195, 205, 212, 219 f., 288, 326, 363, 368, 372, 375 Geßler, Otto 55 Geyer, Michael 30 Geyr von Schweppenburg, Leo 69 Gisevius, Hans-Bernd 58, 65, 72, 82, 86 – 88, 134, 138 f., 196, 206, 208, 310, 317, 322, 327, 331, 334, 352 Gneisenau, August Graf Neidhardt von 118, 198 – 200, 342, 345 Goebbels, Joseph 46, 48, 80, 86, 90, 97, 127, 144 – 146, 156, 200, 217, 223, 238, 241, 253, 255, 258, 260, 265, 267 f., 278, 280 f., 283, 287, 289, 293, 300, 303 Goerdeler, Carl Friedrich 11 – 13, 21 f., 42, 44, 60, 65, 73 f., 105, 122, 134, 137 f., 147 f., 154, 157, 159, 168, 171 – 173, 176 f., 193, 197 – 200, 204, 206 – 209, 215 f., 218 – 223, 227 – 231, 233, 235 f., 266, 279, 288 f., 294, 305 – 311, 315 –

Index

323, 325, 327 f., 330, 332 – 336, 339, 341 – 347, 351, 396 – 398, 405 f., 408 Göring, Hermann 20, 61, 68, 79 – 81, 84, 86, 104 f., 115, 117 f., 123 f., 148, 165, 217, 223, 225, 241, 246, 267, 276, 279, 281, 292, 297, 300, 330 Graf, Willi 175 Graml, Hermann 21, 179 Grimme, Adolf 387 Groscurth, Helmuth 74, 137 f., 140, 176 f., 192 Grzesinski, Albert 223 Guderian, Heinz 97, 106, 108, 132, 238, 243, 271 f., 274, 285 Guttenberg, Karl Ludwig Freiherr von und zu 53, 160 Guttenberg, Therese Freifrau von und zu 160 Haeften, Hans-Bernd von 294, 328, 350 Haeften, Hans von 49 Haeften, Werner von 96, 209, 240, 252, 259, 270, 328, 376, 381 Hagen, Albrecht von 215, 239, 294 Hagen, Hans W. 258 Halder, Franz 3, 24, 42, 71, 98, 101 f., 110, 130, 137, 139 f., 144, 177, 182, 208, 219, 328, 370 Halifax, Edward Lord 134 Hammerstein-Equord, Kurt Freiherr von 44, 175, 240, 308 Hansen, Georg Alexander 318 Hansen, Gottfried 362 f., 365 Hardenberg, Carl-Hans Graf von 12, 44, 59, 172, 179, 196, 219, 240, 244 Hardenberg, Karl August Fürst von 199 Harnack, Adolf von 121 Harnack, Arvid 115 – 118, 122, 304, 395 Harnack, Ernst von 304 Harnack, Falk 116 Hartmann, Christian 54, 137, 139, 267 Hase, Paul von 223, 225 f., 232, 235, 239, 242 – 244, 247 f., 253, 255, 264 f., 269, 290, 294 Haßel, Kurt 261, 265 Hassel, Kai-Uwe von 373

461

Hassell, Ulrich von 18, 21, 44 f., 74, 110, 119, 137, 155, 158, 176 f., 192, 196, 229, 235, 305, 308 f., 311 f., 316, 320, 327 f., 330, 342, 345, 347, 405 Haubach, Theodor 309 Haushofer, Albrecht 116 Hausser, Paul 85 Hayessen, Egbert 235, 244 Heckenast, Franz 402 Heinemann, Gustav 374 Heinz, Friedrich Wilhelm 74, 134, 172, 188, 223, 368 Heisterman von Ziehlberg, Georg-Erich 370 Heisterman von Ziehlberg, Gustav 287, 371 Helldorff, Wolf-Heinrich Graf von 61, 72, 86 – 88, 158, 214, 223, 242 Hensel, Walther 366 Herber, Franz 256 – 259 Herfurth, Otto 225 Heusinger, Adolf 17, 95, 97, 102, 108, 207, 220, 224, 273, 277 f., 288 f., 357, 361, 367 – 370, 372 Heuss, Theodor 12, 15, 367, 369 Heyde, Bolko von der 256 – 259 Hierl, Konstantin 55 Himmler, Heinrich 46, 64, 72 f., 81 – 86, 88 f., 93 f., 123, 146, 156 – 161, 165 f., 188, 191, 206, 216 f., 232, 234, 237, 241, 259, 261, 266 – 268, 270 f., 277 f., 280 – 284, 286 f., 292, 299 f., 336 Hindenburg, Paul von 41, 55, 57 f., 61, 65, 68, 203, 208 Hobe, Cord von 338, 370 f. Hoepner, Erich 49, 58, 113, 180, 245, 259, 267, 280, 289, 294, 345, 372 f. Hofacker, Caesar von 118 – 121, 123 f., 162, 213, 217 f., 224, 227 – 229, 236, 251, 254, 276, 294, 305, 314, 318 – 325, 372 Hoffmann, Albert 239 Hoffmann, Heinz 398 Hoffmann, Joachim 188 Hoffmann, Peter 6, 13, 21 – 23, 30, 59, 74, 170, 184, 188, 211, 236, 240, 242, 312, 343 Hohenthal, William 333 f. Horst, Max 120 Hoßbach, Friedrich 127

462

Index

Hosenfeld, Wilm 298 Hößlin, Hubert von 291 Hößlin, Roland von 38, 50, 113, 155, 170, 211 f., 224 f., 237, 265, 268, 283, 288, 291, 306, 339, 349 Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Maximilian Egon, Prinz zu 311 Huber, Ernst-Rudolf 57 Huppenkothen, Walter 82, 91, 386 Irving, David 79, 100, 105, 120, 154, 192, 227 f., 273, 320, 323 – 325 Iwand, Hans-Joachim 14 Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf 19, 391 Jahn, Gerhard 389 Jakob, Friedrich 264 f. Jansa, Alfred 402 Jessen, Sidney 79, 124 f., 216, 224, 261 Jodl, Alfred 92, 101, 108, 110, 141 f., 145, 164, 301 John, Hans 121, 123, 295, 304, 318, 333 f. John, Otto 121 f., 159, 214 f., 238, 248, 251, 318 f., 322, 332 – 334, 367 f. Jung, Edgar 59, 116 Jünger, Ernst 17, 321 Kaiser, Hermann 202, 206, 276, 316, 337 Kaiser, Jakob 295 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst 19, 160, 259, 272, 287, 299 Kammler, Hans 84, 283 Kapp, Wolfgang 43 f., 137, 223, 308, 388 Kaulbars, Wladimir 179 Keitel, Wilhelm 37, 50, 70, 72, 78, 84 f., 88, 90, 92 f., 95, 101, 108, 110, 127 f., 132, 141 f., 146, 164, 200, 265, 270 – 277, 281 Kersten, Felix 299 Kessel, Albrecht von 328 Kesselring, Albert 80, 299 Kielmansegg, Johann Adolf Graf von 274, 289, 357, 362, 368 Kielpinski, Walter von 20 Kiep, Otto Carl 328 Kiesel, Georg 311 Kinzel, Eberhard 106, 345

Kirchheim, Heinrich 270 – 273 Klamroth, Bernhard 187 Klausa, Ekkehard 22, 172, 352 Klausing, Friedrich Karl 294 Kleist, Ewald-Heinrich von 29, 243, 383 Kleist-Schmenzin, Ewald von 59, 133 Klemperer, Klemens von 10, 318, 327, 330, 350, 366 Kloss, Hans 123, 318, 333 f. Kluge, Hans Günther von 98, 102 – 104, 110, 112, 132, 192, 194 – 196, 214, 221, 228, 260, 271, 290, 320, 322, 326, 332, 373 Knauß, Robert 120, 357, 366 Knoblauch, Kurt 166 Koehler, Carl-Erik 50 Kohl, Helmut 374, 392 Kollontaj, Aleksandra 314 Kordt, Erich 328 Kordt, Theodor 134, 328 Korfes, Otto 291 Kortzfleisch, Joachim von 225 f., 235, 253, 270 Köstring, Ernst-August 190 Kranzfelder, Alfred 79, 124 f., 224, 276, 314, 372 Kriebel, Karl 271 f. Kroener, Bernhard R. 8, 25, 29, 35, 233, 255 f. Kuban, Hans Heinrich 258 Küchler, Georg von 112 Kuckhoff, Adam 395 Kuckhoff, Greta 395 Kuhn, Joachim 20, 81, 98, 103, 142, 149 f., 154, 161, 177 f., 185, 213, 215, 235 f., 239, 272, 278, 287, 308, 312, 342, 350, 371, 387 Kupfer, Max 261 Kusch, Oskar 9, 125 Lahousen, Erwin von 188, 192, 404 Langbehn, Carl 158, 316 Lange, Herbert 216 Lattmann, Hans 324 Lattre de Tassigny, Jean de 33 Lautz, Ernst 160, 270 Leber, Annedore 11, 366, 370

Index

Leber, Julius 11, 16, 44, 198, 214 – 216, 222, 304, 307, 309, 314, 318, 327, 340, 343 f., 351, 366 f., 371, 397 Lechler, Otto 286 Ledebur, Leopold Freiherr von 205 Leeb, Wilhelm Ritter von 275 Lehndorff-Steinort, Heinrich Graf von 172, 179, 188, 212, 225, 240, 244, 288 f. Lejeune-Jung, Georg 370 f. Leonrod, Ludwig Freiherr von 99, 209, 235, 350, 392 Leuschner, Wilhelm 304, 344 Liddell Hart, Basil H. 24 Liebknecht, Karl 46, 171 Lindemann, Fritz 150, 242, 266, 287 Lipschitz, Joachim 372 List, Wilhelm 98, 102 Louis Ferdinand, Prince of Prussia 122 Lübke, Heinrich 373 f. Ludendorff, Erich 33, 36, 41, 43 f., 52, 55, 64, 145 Lüttwitz, Heinrich von 332 Lüttwitz, Walther von 43 Luxemburg, Rosa 46, 172 Maaß, Hermann 309, 346 Mackensen, August von 140 Mahraun, Artur 116 Maisel, Ernst 257, 272, 275, 290 Maizière, Lothar de 400 Maizière, Ulrich de 95, 102, 104, 144 f., 365 Mammach, Klaus 399 Manstein, Erich von 18, 62, 93, 97, 101 f., 132, 195 f., 374 Marcuse, Herbert 304, 330 Marogna-Redwitz, Rudolf Graf von 404 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz 392 Meier-Welcker, Hans 3 Mellenthin, Horst von 364 Merkel, Angela 376 Merlio, Gilbert 404 Mertz von Quirnheim, Albrecht Ritter 35, 39, 49, 142, 200, 234, 238, 244 f., 252, 256, 259, 263 f., 270, 291, 376, Mertz von Quirnheim, Hermann Ritter 49 Meyer, Georg 271

463

Michel, Elmar 314, 320, 344 Mierendorff, Carlo 309 Milch, Erhard 71 Model, Walter 273, 286, 290 Moltke, Helmuth James Graf von 118, 121, 164, 177, 199, 209, 215, 219, 224, 305, 307, 313, 316, 343, 345, 351, 392 Moltke, Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von 68, 100, 271 Momm, Harald 254 f., 289, 378 Mommsen, Hans 6, 21, 26, 49, 91, 182, 347 Montgomery, Bernard Law 324, 342 Müller, Christian 353 Müller, Heinrich 272, 287 Müller, Josef 159, 328 f., 369 Müller, Klaus-Jürgen 6, 22, 24 f., 131, 221 f., 347, 351 Müntzer, Thomas 399 Mussolini, Benito 1, 131, 157, 235, 252 Naumann, Klaus 366 Nebe, Arthur 87 f., 166 f., 179, 183, 216, 223, 229, 242, 247, 255, 288 Neumann, Franz 304, 330 Neurath, Konstantin Freiherr von 72, 127 Niedermayer, Oskar Ritter von 190 Noske, Gustav 44 Nostitz, Eberhard Graf von 357, 361 – 363 Oertzen, Hans-Ulrich von 221, 225, 235, 237, 243, 287 Olbricht, Friedrich 29, 90, 94, 120, 137, 150, 177, 194, 200, 206, 208, 219, 221 f., 226, 233 – 235, 242 f., 252, 256 f., 259, 261, 263 f., 270, 289, 376 Oster, Achim 369 Oster, Hans 60, 63, 65, 71, 74, 76, 83, 88 f., 121, 133 f., 137 – 140, 153, 159 f., 171, 192, 209, 277, 295, 329, 331, 369, 371, 386 Pabst, Waldemar 36 Papen, Franz von 57, 331 Perels, Justus 123, 318, 333 f. Pétain, Philippe 163 Petry, Christian 21

464

Index

Pfeffer von Salomon, Franz 54 Pius XII., Papst 328 Popitz, Johannes 45, 74, 158 f., 294, 302, 309, 345, 405 Preysing, Konrad Kardinal Graf von 169 Pridun, Karl 19, 208, 256 – 258, 289 Raeder, Erich 71, 78, 372 Rathenau, Walther 135, 172 Rauchensteiner, Manfried 402 Reichenau, Walter von 37, 56 f., 61, 64, 67, 92, 108, 112, 138 Reichwein, Adolf 309, 340, 395 Reinecke, Hermann 284 Reinhardt, Hellmuth 95, 97, 151 Reinhardt, Walther 36, 304 Reisert, Franz 283 Remer, Otto Ernst 13 – 15, 112, 247, 253, 255, 257 f., 260, 267 Reuter, Ernst 12 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 72, 156, 225 Richthofen, Bolko Freiherr von 189 Ritter, Gerhard 11 – 13, 17, 24, 315, Roeder, Manfred 89, 117, 122, 331, 387 Roenne, Alexis Freiherr von 105, 155, 170, 174, 187, 189, 211, 242, 288, 319 Röhm, Ernst 37, 51, 54, 61, 65 Rommel, Erwin 10, 17 f., 53, 100, 105, 118, 120, 132, 209, 213, 227 – 229, 273 f., 290, 295, 319 – 326, 332, 344, 348, 371, 408 Rommel, Lucie 10, 290, 295, 319 – 326, 332, 344, 348 Rommel, Manfred 10, 290 Roon, Ger van 21, Roosevelt, Franklin D. 208, 329 f. Rosenberg, Alfred 188 Rost, Hans-Günther von 225 Rothfels, Hans 3, 8, 10 f., 13, 15, 17, 20, 101, 398 Rühe, Volker 374 Ruge, Friedrich 105, 323 Rundstedt, Gerd von 223, 271, 274, 277, 326 Sack, Karl 216, 339, 386 Salazar, António de Oliveira

391 f.

Sas, Gijsbertus 138, 329 Sauckel, Fritz 188 Sauerbruch, Ferdinand 53, 122, 226 Sauerbruch, Peter 74, 103, 147, 150, 226, 273 Schacht, Hjalmar 139 Scharnhorst, Gerhard von 198, 200, 373 Scharping, Rudolf 373 Schenckendorff, Max von 166, 186 Schlabrendorff, Fabian von 13, 18, 59, 87, 110, 165, 179, 183, 192, 196, 202, 210, 214 f., 219, 240, 288, 308, 322, 342, 348, 366 Schleicher, Kurt von 34, 36, 58, 60 – 63, 94 Schleicher, Rüdiger 116, 121 – 124, 164, 295, 318, 333 f. Schleicher, Ursula 116, 121 Schmid, Anton 9, 298, 404 Schmidt, Helmut 294 Schmidt von Altenstadt, Hans Georg 173, 187, 194, 207, 251 f. Schmitt, Carl 57 Schmorell, Alexander 168 Schmundt, Rudolf 50, 93, 112, 219, 270, 290 Scholl, Hans 16, 116 Scholl, Sophie 16, 116 Scholz-Babisch, Friedrich 99, 224 Schönfeld, Hans 329 Schramm, Percy Ernst 14 Schroth, Walter 270 f., 291 Schulenburg, Friedrich-Werner Graf von der 311 Schulenburg, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der 73, 86, 111, 225 f., 228, 320 f. Schulze-Boysen, Harro 115 – 118, 340, 395 Schulze-Büttger, Georg 195 Schwedler, Viktor von 108 Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Ulrich- Wilhelm Graf von 176, 293 Seeckt, Hans von 33 – 37, 39, 41, 43 f., 55, 57, 63, 82, 94, 99, 111, 114, 132, 173 – 175, 195, 306 f. Seidt, Ulrich 190 Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Ingeborg von 292

Index

Seydlitz-Kurzbach, Walther von 153, 178, 276, 291 f., 313 Sorge, Richard 396 Specht, Karl-Wilhelm 114, 270 – 272 Speer, Albert 83, 119, 146, 148, 156, 283, 298, 301 Speidel, Hans 17, 120, 209, 227 – 229, 273 f., 321 – 326, 357, 359, 367 f., 394 Sperr, Franz 150 Spínola, António de 391 Staehle, Wilhelm 171, 216 Stalin, Iosif V. 116, 158 f., 178, 191, 278, 310 – 312, 314 f., 329, 396 Stauffenberg, Alexander Graf Schenk von 12 f., 123, 161 Stauffenberg, Berthold Graf Schenk von, 79, 123 – 125, 161, 168, 213, 261, 276, 303, 314, 318, 352, 372 Stauffenberg, Berthold Maria Graf Schenk von 369 – 371 Stauffenberg, Claus Graf Schenk von 7, 11 f., 17, 29 f., 35, 38 f., 44, 47, 49 f., 63, 73 f., 81, 85 – 87, 96, 98 f., 103, 106 f., 112 f., 114, 118 – 125, 140 – 142, 144, 147, 149 – 151, 154 f., 157, 161, 168 – 171, 173 f., 176 f., 185 – 187, 189 – 191, 193 – 200, 204, 207 – 211, 213 – 218, 220 – 231, 234 – 236, 238 – 243, 245, 248, 251 f., 254 – 257, 259, 263 – 268, 270, 273, 279 f., 286 – 288, 302 f., 307 – 319, 321 – 328, 332 – 335, 337, 339 – 346, 348 – 353, 365 – 367, 369, 371, 373, 376, 381, 383, 397 f., 400, 405 f., 408 f. Stauffenberg, Maria Gräfin Schenk von 161 Stauffenberg, Marie-Gabriele Gräfin Schenk von 161 Stauffenberg, Melitta Gräfin Schenk von 123, 291 f., 372 Stauffenberg, Nina Gräfin Schenk von 290 Stein, Heinrich Friedrich Karl Reichsfreiherr vom und zum 197, 199, 202 Steinbach, Peter 7 f., 347 Steiner, Felix 284 Stern, Fritz 10, 366 Stevens, Richard 159

465

Stieff, Hellmuth 56, 98, 101, 105, 124, 171, 184, 187, 206 f., 211, 213, 220, 224, 235, 241, 265, 294, 326, 338, 349 Stirius, Hans-Werner 248, 258, 368 Strasser, Otto 159 Strauß, Franz Josef 369, 371 Strölin, Karl 209, 228, 322 Strünck, Theodor 310 Studnitz, Hans-Georg von 364 Stülpnagel, Carl-Heinrich von 36, 60, 101, 119 f., 130 f., 163, 175, 180, 185, 228 f., 290, 320, 323, 325 f., 373 Stülpnagel, Joachim von 31, 34 – 38, 60, 94, 145, 198, 284, 343, 359 Stülpnagel, Otto von 163 Stumpf, Reinhard 355 Suhr, Otto 372 Szokoll, Carl 404 Tann, Ludwig von der 371 Teuchert, Friedrich Freiherr von 227, 253, 323 Thiele, Fritz 224, 260 – 266 Thierack, Otto 270 Thiersch, Urban 86, 225 Thoma, Busso 202 Thomas, Georg 140, 164, 349, 399 Thomas Aquinas 207, 349 Thüngen, Dietz Freiherr von 98, 343, 349 Thüngen, Karl Freiherr von 226, 343 Tiburtius, Joachim 372 Todt, Fritz 156, 285 Tresckow, Henning von 29, 63, 87 f., 96 f., 101, 106, 110, 112, 164, 166, 170, 173, 179, 181, 183, 190 – 197, 200, 213 – 215, 219 – 222, 225, 231, 234 f., 237 f., 240 f., 243, 252, 288, 303, 311, 322, 345, 348 f., 352 f., 358, 371, 375, 377, 408 Trettner, Heinz 363 Trott zu Solz, Adam von 222, 311, 313 f., 318 f., 328, 333 f. Truchseß von Wetzhausen, Dietrich Freiherr 225 Uhl, Matthias 236 Üxküll-Gyllenband, Albertine Gräfin von 118

466

Index

Üxküll-Gyllenband, Nikolaus Graf von 174, 190, 337

171,

Vansittart, Robert, 1. Baron Vansittart Vollmer, Antje 389 Voss, Hans-Alexander von 407 Voss, Rüdiger von 389

134

Wagner, Eduard 104, 165 f., 187, 220, 262 f., 287 Waldheim, Kurt 402 Wallenberg, Raoul 334 Warlimont, Walter 108, 142 Warning, Elmar 325 Wedemeyer, Albert 39, 142 Wehrle, Hermann 209 Weinstein, Adelbert 390 f. Weizsäcker, Ernst von 134, 156, 328 Werthmann, Georg 350 Wildermuth, Eberhard 357 Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia 122 Wilhelm I., King of Prussia 100

Wilhelm II., King of Prussia and German Emperor 66 Wilson, Woodrow 330 Winkelmann, Henri 138 Wirmer, Ernst 360 Wirmer, Josef 293, 360 Witzleben, Erwin von 71, 93, 98, 134 – 136, 139, 206, 226, 235, 245, 254, 280, 290, 293 f., 302, 325 Woellwarth, Konrad Freiherr von 366 Wohlgemuth, Wolfgang 122 Wolf, Ernst 14 Wolff, Kurt 157 f. Yorck von Wartenburg, Ludwig Graf von 178, 207, 310, 313 Yorck von Wartenburg, Peter Graf von, 140 f., 172, 224, 271, 294, 310, 318 Zeller, Eberhard 11, 19, 205, 257 Zenker, Karl-Adolf 371 f. Ziegler, Delia 256 Ziegler, Heinz 282