Plotting Hitler's Death

7. STAUFFENBERG

By 1943 the situation had grown more ominous-and not just at the battle fronts. Almost all the resistance groups sensed a gathering storm. Rumor had it that another Night of the Long Knives was in the offing.¹ Both Ulrich von Hassell and Hans von Dohnanyi were tipped off that they were being shadowed everywhere they went. In early March Colonel Fritz Jäger, who played a key role in Olbricht’s coup plans, was arrested on allegations that he was “con­spiring.” Schulenburg also found himself in difficulty after he was reported to have said that he was on the lookout for reliable, young officers for a putsch. Admiral Canaris, too, was feeling the pressure, and when he was asked by a friend from his Freikorps days to save a Dutch Jew from deportation by claiming the man was needed by Military Intelligence-a favor he had occasionally extended in the past-he felt compelled to refuse. Himmler, he said, had informed him that “he knew full well that leading circles in the army were considering plans for a coup. But it would never come to that. He would intervene.” Furthermore, Himmler professed to know who was “actually behind it”—and mentioned Beck and Goerdeler.² When the first blow fell, however, it was not on these men.

On April 5, 1943, senior judge advocate Manfred Roeder suddenly turned up at Military Intelligence on Tirpitzufer, accompanied by criminal secretary and SS UntersturmFührer Franz Xaver Sonderegger. They asked to be taken to Canaris, to whom they presented papers authorizing both the arrest of special officer Hans von Dohnanyi and a search of his office. He was suspected, they informed Canaris, of numerous currency violations, corruption, and even trea­son. Stunned, Canaris neither objected nor contacted his superior officer, Wilhelm Keitel, though the search order violated all Military Intelligence secrecy regulations. Without a word he led the two agents to Dohnanyi’s office, which was located immediately adjacent lo Hans Oster’s.

Canaris had been warned more than once, most recently that very morning, that trouble was brewing. And in almost every case the fingers pointed at Brigadier General Oster. His anxiety growing, Canaris had ordered that his closest associate immediately dispose of any incriminating documents. Whether Oster failed to realize the urgency of the warning or was simply too busy meeting endlessly with Olbricht, Beck, Gisevius, Schlabrendorff, and Heinz is not known; in any event he did not carry out his orders. In the course of their search Roeder and Sonderegger caught Dohnanyi trying to remove some papers from files that were being seized. When he was prevented from doing so, Dohnanyi was heard whispering “The notes!” to Oster, who also attempted to remove them. As the indictment later stated, Oster was “immediately asked to explain himself and required to produce the notes.” Roeder ordered Oster out of the room and re­ported to his superiors what had happened. As a result, Oster was placed under house arrest, and a few days later he was dismissed from his position at Military Intelligence. Shortly thereafter Canaris called a meeting of department heads and “officially informed them of or­ders to avoid any contact with Oster.”³

This was a terrible blow to the resistance-the worst it had suf­fered so far. In Schlabrendorff s words, it “lost its managing director.” Gisevius spoke of a “psychological shock” that stunned everyone and left a “conspiratorial vacuum.” Oster explained his admittedly foolish act by saying that he had assumed at first that Dohnanyi meant cer­tain notes coded “U7,” referring to a Military Intelligence operation to spirit Jews out of Nazi-occupied Europe by disguising them as agents. At least as disorienting as Oster’s removal was the fact that, for the first time, the previously inviolable inner sanctums of Military Intelligence had been invaded. To add to the grim news, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested the same day, as were Dohnanyi’s wife, Christine, in Sakrow, near Berlin, Josef Müller in Munich, and another Military Intelligence employee in Prague.

The papers for whose sake Dohnanyi and Oster had risked so much were actually totally unrelated to the U7 operation. They were hardly less compromising, however, and they prompted Roeder to announce triumphantly after reading them, “I’m going to clean up that shop!”⁴ Most important, one of the seized “notes” contained references to an issue that was becoming of great concern to almost all opponents of the regime, arising repeatedly in the course of their discussions-namely, the relations between the German resistance and the Allies and the possibility of negotiating a last-minute peace agreement.

Since the spring of 1942 the opposition had debated whether the Allies would be willing to negotiate a peace treaty after a coup in Germany and whether that would even be desirable. Some members of the Kreisau Circle in particular opposed any attempts to negotiate such a treaty. With their decidedly religious cast, they felt that Hitler and his minions should be dispatched, metaphorically, to the inferno that had spawned them. But most of the opposition figures agreed, though they might differ on the details, that it was their duty to save as much of the “substance” of Germany as possible from political and moral corruption and now, in the midst of the unprecedented Allied bombing campaign, from outright physical destruction. This group therefore insisted that everything possible be done to contact the Allies. They feared that time was running out: Germany’s remaining bargaining power was quickly evaporating as its military strength de­clined and the ever more dominant Allies forged ahead.

This was the crux of the matter, the issue that many believed would make or break the resistance. If the leverage Germany still had, how­ever weak it might be, could not be used to negotiate a peace treaty, then the resistance might as well avoid the extremely dangerous, if not suicidal, risk of a coup attempt and simply watch the regime go down in flames. The opposition’s foreign policy experts-primarily Ulrich von Hassell but also Adam von Trott and others-decided after much deliberation that in view of all the Nazis’ broken promises, violence, and crimes, there was no certainty that an “acceptable peace” could be negotiated, but that at the very least it remained a possibility.⁵

Such a hope was inconceivable unless the Allies were prepared to distinguish between Hitler and the German people. The conspirators based the plans for their own uprising entirely on the belief that this distinction existed and on the need to emphasize it for the benefit of everyone, so as to expose the falsity of the Nazi propaganda cam­paigns that depicted the Führer and the Volk as one. It is true that that hope for a negotiated peace revived many of the opposition’s shattered illusions and unrealistic aspirations, but despite the criti­cism that has in hindsight been levied against it, the resistance did have a legitimate basis for the way it proceeded. Neither the keenness nor the morality of its opposition to the regime is diminished by the fact that it continued to take the national interest into account. One could even say that those who combined their moral outrage at Hitler with an awareness of the political disaster he was heaping on Ger­many understood more thoroughly than anyone else the nature of the regime and the possibilities of taking action against it.

From a practical point of view, this meant they needed to be clear about the prospects facing a German government once the Nazis had been overthrown. Realizing that many concessions and guarantees would inevitably be extracted from Germany, the members of the resistance wanted to find out what the Allies’ maximum demands might be and to ensure that they themselves would be recognized, in theory at least, as equal partners in a European peace plan. What they did not want was to become the managers of a “liquidation commis­sion” that simply carried out the dictates of the Allied powers. The opposition fully realized that such a situation would leave it standing “right in the middle of all the filth,” in the dramatic words of one member.⁶

The resistance continued to pin its hopes on London, despite the misunderstandings, exasperation, and devastating setbacks that had characterized its overtures in the late 1930s. In focusing on this relationship, the German resistance considerably overestimated Britain’s role and influence in the Allied coalition; for quite some time London had not had the power to sign agreements of its own with anyone. Most of the conspirators felt, however, that Britain was somehow closer to them-and not just geographically. In comparison with the other two great powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, Britain seemed to stand for a less foreign, more European world. Just as opposition emissaries had traveled to the British capital in the late thirties, they now sought to pave the way for talks with London through British posts in neutral countries.

Theo Kordt had already attempted to do so at the outset of the war, having been dispatched by the Foreign Office to Bern, Switzer­land, for precisely that purpose. All his efforts came to naught, how­ever, as did those of Josef Wirth, the former German chancellor, who had emigrated to Switzerland; Carl Jacob Burckhardt; Willem Adolf Visser’t Hooft, the secretary-general of the provisional World Council of Churches in Geneva; and many others. In May 1941 Goerdeler passed along to the British government a peace plan approved by Brauchitsch; the cabinet declined even to acknowledge it. The British middleman informed his German contact that he had been forbidden to accept any such documents in the future.

Another series of attempts to establish contact had been under way in Stockholm since the early 1940s and revolved largely around Theodor Steltzer, a key member of the Kreisau Circle. In May 1942 Bishop George Bell of Chichester met with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his fellow clergyman Hans Schönfeld in Stockholm. Without knowing anything about the plans of the other, the two Germans had both decided to go to Sweden when they learned that Bell would be there. They told him about the opposition and the Kreisauers’ ideas for peace and expressed the hope that some token of encouragement might be offered. Bell was quite well acquainted with Bonhoeffer, who had been a pastor in the German church in London during the 1930s, and knew that he was one of the leading figures in the Confes­sional Church in Germany. A man of radical religious conviction, Bonhoeffer had repeatedly insisted that Hitler had to be “extermi­nated” regardless of the political consequences. At a secret church conference in Geneva in 1941 he had gone even further, announcing that he prayed for the defeat of his country because that was the only way Germany would be able to atone for the crimes it had commit­ted.⁷ Schönfeld, on the other hand, brought only one question: Would the Allies adopt a different stance toward a Germany that had liber­ated itself from Hitler than they would toward a Germany still under his rule? Bell forwarded a report to the British Foreign Office, but Anthony Eden wrote back only to say he was “satisfied that it is not in the national interest to provide an answer of any kind.” When Bell approached the British Foreign Office again, Eden noted in the mar­gin of his reply, “I see no reason whatsoever to encourage this pesti­lent priest!”⁸

One year later Helmuth von Moltke went to Stockholm for a week, taking with him some information about the White Rose and one of its leaflets, as if he felt impelled to prove the seriousness of his opposition to the Nazi regime. Eugen Gerstenmaier, the theologian, and Hans Lukaschek, a lawyer who had joined the Kreisau Circle, also traveled to Stockholm, as on a number of occasions, did Adam von Trott, whose words sounded a desperate appeal for help: “We cannot afford to wait any longer,” he pleaded to a Swedish friend. “We are so weak that we will only achieve our goal if everything goes our way and we get outside help.”⁹

But there was to be no help or any sign of encouragement, just a deep, persistent silence. The Allies did not even trouble themselves to reject the various attempts to contact them; they simply closed their eyes to the German resistance, acting as if it did not exist. Men like Bonhoeffer, Trott, Gerstenmaier, and Steltzer felt united with the Allies in their abhorrence for their common “archenemy” and their realization of the danger that he posed. They therefore imagined themselves closely affiliated with the Allied struggle against this mon­strous tyranny, which, in Churchill’s words, had never been surpassed in the “dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.” This was an illu­sion for which the conspirators would pay with countless humiliations. Perhaps they were ahead of the times in their moral internationalism, which had met with such deep incomprehension in the conversations of 1938-39. At any rate, the sense of common ground on which they based their appeals was not shared by the British, who could never free themselves of the suspicion that they were dealing with a bunch of traitors, or Nazis in disguise. The phenomenon of committing “trea­son” for high moral or philosophical purpose, which has become so characteristic of the twentieth century, was an enigma to them.

The extensive postwar literature justifying Britain’s policy of distancing itself from the German resistance revives the very arguments on which the prewar attempts to make contact foundered. It points as well to the general lack of success with which the resistance did indeed seem cursed. Three further reasons are often adduced: with Winston Churchill’s appointment as prime minister, Britain focused all its energy on the military effort, leaving no time for complicated political initiatives and prompting Churchill to call for “perfect si­lence”; in addition, the British were concerned that entering into negotiations with Germans, even anti-Nazi Germans, would jeopardize their alliance with the Soviet Union; finally London wished lo avoid the error that the Allies had made after the First World War, when they forged commitments that later gave rise to demagogues like Hitler. Even if every possible allowance is made for these mo­tives, however, something is still left unexplained-especially since the messages from the German emissaries provide no justification whatsoever for the most frequently mentioned concern, namely, the much-feared fracturing of the Allied coalition.

The real reasons for the attitude of the British probably lay in their lack of flexibility, their hostility, their blindness, and a political obtuseness that for all intents and purposes represented “an alliance with Hitler,” to quote Hans Rothfels.¹⁰ If a policy consisting of peri­odic cautious gestures of support had been pursued-which was, in fact, all that the German opposition now wanted-it might well have been possible gradually to drive a wedge between the Nazi regime and the people. Instead, Allied policy drove them into each other’s arms. In early 1942 Goebbels noted in his diary with unmistakable satisfaction that this time the enemy had not set forth “any Wilsonian Fourteen Points” to sow unrest and confusion among the German public.¹¹

Attitudes hardened even more after the United States entered the war in December 1941, and it was precisely the memory of Wilson’s Fourteen Points that made America so unapproachable. The ill-fated promises of yesteryear seemed to be all that Roosevelt had learned and remembered from his nation’s involvement in Eu­ropean affairs. The crude and narrow inference he drew was that even the most noncommittal conversation with Germans must be rejected, regardless of who they were or what the discussions were about. When an American correspondent in Berlin, Louis P. Lochner, returned to Washington in June 1942 with a secret code that German friends in the resistance had given to him in the hope of establishing a permanent link with U.S. government officials, the administration rejected the approach, saying that these contacts had put it in an “awkward” position.¹²

This attitude was strengthened with the Casablanca declaration of January 24, 1943, when Roosevelt vowed in Churchill’s presence that the Allies would “continue the war relentlessly” until they achieved “unconditional surrender.” The cold-shoulder approach to the resistance was thus given the seal of official strategy by both governments. Its effect would be to achieve the opposite of what Adam von Trott had said was the “primary purpose” of his last visit to the United Stales, namely, “to ensure that the planned war of annihilation does not drive those elements that have just begun to join forces against Hitler into the hands of the National Socialists.” A furious Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin said he would like to see both Hitler and Roosevelt roast, each in his own vat in hell.¹³

Casablanca therefore posed another serious setback for the resistance and was particularly troubling to those who still hesitated or had not quite made up their minds. The policy of unconditional surrender led many to feel that to oppose Hitler would be to betray their own country, and only a very few were prepared to go that far, especially in wartime. It was only with great difficulty that Helmuth von Moltke managed to carry on in the aftermath of Casablanca. On the other hand, like many of his friends, Trott never got over his bitterness and accused the Allies of indulging in “bourgeois prejudice and hypocritical theorizing.” When he surfaced again in Stockholm in early 1944, still searching for influential intermediaries, he had devel­oped, according to one of his Swedish friends, a look of “despera­tion.”¹⁴

The lesson of Casablanca, as of all the vain attempts of these years to communicate with the Allies, whether through Spain, Portugal, Turkey, or the Vatican, was that the resistance was on its own. The conspirators grew accustomed to “staring into the void” when they contemplated the prospects for a coup-both the void within Ger­many and, as was now plain, the one beyond. This strengthened their resolve not to predicate their enterprise on any national, political, or even material interest. They carried on not in the hope of success but solely as an act of self-purification.

There are many reasons for the impending failure of the German resistance: errors, inhibitions, clumsiness, indecision, and the vastly superior power of the opponent. Any fair-minded assessment must, however, also take into account the brusque dismissal the resistance received from those with whom it believed-mistakenly, as it turned out-that it was safely in league.

After the near exposure of Oster, Canaris barely managed to slip out of the tightening noose. Roeder may have been a skillful, experienced investigator, but he never succeeded in penetrating the clouds of deception created by the masters of that art at Military Intelligence. Where he expected to find a massive political conspiracy with ele­ments of high treason, he could only uncover evidence of question­able dealings in foreign currencies, bogus exemptions from military service, and lax handling of money. When a few unguarded com­ments escaped his lips, Military Intelligence counterattacked with a fog of accusations, complaints about the investigation, and counterinquiries. They finally prompted Keitel, the most highly placed official in the department’s chain of command, to turn to Himmler. In the end, as the entire affair became hopelessly clouded and obscure, Dohnanyi and Bonhoeffer were merely indicted for a few nonpolitical offenses and Oster for being an accomplice.

Canaris sensed, however, that the fate of Military Intelligence was sealed, and that the bureau, with the maze of dark corridors that had been his fiefdom, could not long withstand the kind of scrutiny to which it would now be subjected by suspicious officials. In an early sign of what lay in store for it, Military Intelligence was ordered to relocate to Zossen. The official explanation was the disruption and destruction caused by the bombing of Berlin, but Keitel ordered si­multaneously that the agency be reorganized and almost all its de­partment heads replaced.

Only now did the severity of the blow suffered by the resistance on April 5 become clear. Along with its “managing director” it had lost its very core and with it went much of its internal cohesion. Months would be needed to repair the damage, but time was already short. There were further setbacks during that spring of 1943. Beck fell seriously ill and was incapacitated for several weeks. In addition, the opposition’s troubled relations with the Allies became generally known, undermining its attempts to influence the generals, though there were a few individual successes. Once again, profound pessimism began to spread among the conspirators. The certainty that an indomitable fate was at work and would follow its predestined course regardless of what they might say or do gave rise to bouts of resignation. As General Fritsch had written years earlier, Hitler was “Germany’s destiny for better or worse, and this destiny will run its course. If he tumbles into the abyss, he will take us all with him. Nothing can be done.” Erich von Manstein, too, explained his refusal to join the conspirators with the fatalistic comment that it was impossible to resist Hitler. General Edgar Röhricht remarked to Tresckow that one could not escape one’s fate, and even Canaris occasionally described Hitler as a “scourge of God” that must be endured to the end. General Adolf Heusinger, the chief of army operations, responded to invitations to join the conspiracy by claiming that an uprising would not change anything but only delay the inevitable and that Germans should simply resign themselves to the idea that there would be no rescue.¹⁵

The resistance experienced so many disappointments and anxieties, it saw so many valiant efforts turn to dust, that few of its members could help but be overcome by feelings of despair. Jens Peter Jessen, for instance, fell increasingly prey to such emotions and at times withdrew from society altogether. Tresckow, Olbricht, Hassell, and Johannes Popitz, by contrast, were less affected, while the irrepress­ible Goerdeler even began dreaming of what he called a “partial action,” by which he meant the assassination of a more accessible Nazi of secondary rank or some other spectacular deed that, if accom­plished at just the right moment, would bring “the whole house of cards crashing down.” He was persuaded not to press ahead with his plans at a dinner in the home of former state secretary Erwin Planck, where the attorney Carl Langbehn, Hassell, General Thomas, and others argued that “Hitler’s prestige is still solid enough that if he’s left standing he’ll be able to launch a counterattack that will end in at least chaos or civil war.”¹⁶

At the fronts, the tides of war had now begun to turn. In early July Hitler attempted to regain the upper hand in the East through Oper­ation Citadel, a massive panzer offensive against a Russian salient near Kursk; it ended in failure. A few days later the Allies landed in Sicily, creating a second front, and on July 25 Mussolini was over­thrown. Tresckow, just released from his position on the staff of Army Group Center, canceled a vacation he had planned to take for health reasons and went to Berlin. Shortly after arriving he told Rüdiger von der Goltz, a cousin of Christine von Dohnanyi, that the war was lost and that “everything therefore must be done to end it soon.” That meant “the leadership would have to go.”¹⁷

At about the same time, Tresckow finally succeeded in convincing Colonel Helmuth Stieff, the only conspirator who had access to Hitler in the regular course of his duties, to keep his pledge to participate in an assassination attempt. This was a promising turn of events. Warned by Schlabrendorff that Kluge seemed to be backsliding in his ab­sence, Tresckow then managed to persuade the field marshal to come to Berlin, where Tresckow sought to keep him in the conspiracy. He also arranged for Kluge to meet with Olbricht and Goerdeler, as well as with Beck, who had recently been released from the hospital. At the end of a long conversation about foreign affairs and the policy of the government to be formed after the coup, Kluge stated with sur­prising firmness that since Hitler would not make the necessary deci­sions to end the war and was unacceptable to the Allies as a negotiating partner he had to be overthrown by force. But now it was Goerdeler who voiced his adamant opposition, once again swept away by his optimism and his belief in the power of reason. He reminded the conspirators of the duty of the army commanders and the chief of general staff “to speak frankly with the Führer.” After that, he said, everything else would fall into place: “Anybody can be won over to a good cause.” Kluge and Beck could no longer be dissuaded, however, and shortly thereafter Goerdeler, suddenly fired with new enthusi­asm, informed the Swedish banker Jakob Wallenberg that a putsch was planned for September. Schlabrendorff would then be sent to Stockholm to initiate peace negotiations.¹⁸

This announcement, like so many before it, was not to be fulfilled. First of all, Goerdeler probably cited far too early a date. The coup was apparently planned for the second half of October at the earliest. Then on October 12 Kluge was badly injured in an automobile accident and was laid up for a considerable period, which meant that no assassination attempts would be staged in the foreseeable future by the armies at the fronts. After so many failed attempts, Olbricht now turned with renewed vigor to an idea that had already been consid­ered: using the home army for both the assassination and the coup.

What was lacking above all was an assassin. Around August 10, how­ever, Tresckow had been introduced at Olbricht’s house to a young lieutenant colonel who would be taking up the duties of chief of staff of the General Army Office on October 1. He had been badly wounded in a strafing attack while serving on the North African front in April. He had lost his right hand as well as the third and fourth fingers of his left, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. After a lengthy stay in the hospital, he had asked the surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, how much longer he would need to recuperate. On hear­ing that two more operations and many months of convalescence would be necessary, he shook his head, saying he didn’t have that much time-important things needed to be done. While still in the hospital he explained to his uncle and close confidant Nikolaus von Üxküll, “Since the generals have failed to do anything, it’s now up to the colonels.”¹⁹ His name was Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg imbued the resistance with a vitality that had long been lacking but that now served to encourage Olbricht’s cautious deliberations and heighten Tresckow’s determination. He seemed to send an electric charge through the lifeless resistance networks as he quickly and naturally assumed a leadership role. This effect stemmed not only from the infectious energy that so many of his contemporaries have described but also from his unusual combination of exuberant idealism and cool pragmatism. He was familiar with all the complex religious, historical, and traditional reasons that had repeatedly stood in the way of action, but he had not lost sight of the far more basic truth that there are limits to loyalty and obedience. He was therefore able to put aside scruples about treason and the breaking of solemn oaths. Possessed of a finely honed sense of what was appropriate under the circumstances, he dismissed the foreign policy concerns of almost all the other members of the resistance, simply assuming that a German government that had overthrown the Nazis would be able to negotiate a peace treaty despite the Casablanca declaration. Most important, he was determined to act at all costs. Like Tresckow, he rejected the tendency of the resistance to make its actions contingent on circumstance-a failing that had first become apparent in 1938 and had resurfaced that spring in the collapse of the Oster group.

Stauffenberg was a scion of the Swabian nobility, related to the distinguished Gneisenau and Yorck families. When he was seventeen he and his brothers had joined the circle of intellectuals and students led by the famous poet Stefan George. Although he stood vigil at George’s deathbed in December 1933, along with some friends, he was not a true disciple. Like many other young officers, he had welcomed Hitler’s nomination as chancellor in 1933 and had agreed, in theory at least, with some of the Nazi platform, especially unification with Austria and hostility to the Treaty of Versailles. By the time of the Blomberg and Fritsch affairs, however, he had already begun to have serious doubts about the Nazis, doubts that Hitler’s recklessness during the Sudeten crisis only hardened, “That fool is headed for war,” he said. But when war was finally declared he threw himself into his chosen profession like a devoted soldier. His response to the numerous atrocities was that once the war was over there would be plenty of time to get rid of the “brown plague”—a reaction he shared with many of his colleagues.²⁰

Stauffenberg proved to be a brilliant staff officer and was promoted to the army high command in June 1940. Since the launching of the Soviet campaign he had become familiar with the army’s organiza­tional inefficiency and the complicated tangle of competing military hierarchies. Moved by his sense of “outrage that Hitler… was too stupid… to do what was required,” he strove stubbornly, though ultimately in vain, to form units composed of Russian volunteers so as to undermine the Nazis’ senseless policies toward the “peoples of the East.” At first his critical view of the regime was spurred by technical, military, and national concerns. Gradually, though, moral issues came more and more to the fore, and in the end all these considerations played their part in a decision best summarized by his laconic answer to a question asked of him in 1942 about how to change Hitler’s style of leadership: “Kill him.”²¹

The historian Gerhard Ritter has written that Stauffenberg had “a streak of demonic will to power and a belief that he was born to take charge” without which “the resistance was in danger of becoming bogged down in nothing but plans and preparations.”²² Once, when a member of the high command, appalled by the needless sacrifice of German soldiers and the staggering brutality being inflicted on the Soviet civilian population, asked Stauffenberg if it was possible to impress upon Hitler the truth of the situation, the young officer shot back, “The point is no longer to tell him the truth but to get rid of him,” a remark that sharply repudiated Goerdeler’s incurable opti­mism.²³ At headquarters in Vinnitsa in October 1942 Stauffenberg spoke out openly before a gathering of officers about the “disastrous course of German policy in the East,” saying that everyone had re­mained silent even though it sowed hatred on all sides. Many wit­nesses have also reported his criticisms of generals who considered honor, duty, and service to be not binding ideals but simply grounds for making excuses; one report speaks of his contempt for all the “carpet layers with the rank of general. ^2I

Stauffenberg’s entry into resistance circles caused an enormous shift in the distribution of power and influence without his doing anything in particular. It was inevitable that he would spark conflicts as well as hopes. Goerdeler and his close associates were particularly vexed by the eclipse of the civilian groups, which they felt should dominate the resistance, and began to mutter derisively about Stauffenberg’s lofty political ambitions and vaguely socialist tendencies. Soviet and East German historians later turned this grumbling to their advantage by depicting Stauffenberg as having moved close to Moscow in his political sympathies. But this myth, its somewhat grotesque origins, and the intentional exaggerations it underwent have all been investigated and disproved.²⁵

What is clear is that Colonel Stauffenberg was far from the flunky whom the sell-confident Goerdeler had always expected and previ­ously always found in his collaborators from the military. In Stauffenberg a far more politically minded officer stepped forward, one who had no intention of simply putting himself at the beck and call of some group and its “shadow chancellor.” What distinguished Stauffenberg from Goerdeler was less the former mayor’s conservative, bourgeois values than his reluctance to employ violence and his ra­tionalist delusion that Hitler could be made to see the error of his ways. Stauffenberg considered this as far-fetched as the highly con­templative opposition shared by many in the Kreisau Circle, which he derided as a “conspirator’s tea party.” As the man who would soon lead the actual coup attempt, he almost inevitably found himself at odds with both groups of conspirators, although for different reasons. On the whole, he felt closest to Julius Leber, the undogmatic Social Democrat with whom he shared the realistic political views and nor­mative pragmatism of a man of action.

In early September 1943 Stauffenberg and Tresckow set about revis­ing Olbricht’s plans for a coup once again, with an eye to correcting the inadequacies that had become apparent during the March attempt. Ironically, the original plans were based on a strategy that had been designed by Olbricht’s staff and approved by Hitler for dealing with “internal disturbances”—that is, an uprising by the millions of so-called foreign workers in Germany, possibly at the instigation or with the help of the Communist underground or enemy paratroopers. Under the code name Operation Valkyrie, the diffuse, scattered ele­ments of the “reserve army”—trainees, soldiers on leave, and training staff and cadres-would immediately be united and transformed into fighting units. After the experiences of March Olbricht developed a second stage of this plan and had it approved in late July 1943. Henceforth “Valkyrie I” designated a strategy to ensure the combat readiness of all units and “Valkyrie II” provided for their “swiftest possible assemblage” into “battle groups ready for action.”

Tresckow and Stauffenberg hit upon what many have called the “brilliant” idea of further tailoring these official plans, which Olbricht apparently considered adequate, to the specific needs of a coup by adding a secret declaration, to be issued immediately upon Hitler’s assassination. It would begin: “The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situa­tion by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear in order to seize power for themselves!” The Reich government, the announce­ment continued, had “declared martial law in order to maintain law and order.” Simultaneously, government ministries and Nazi Party offices would be occupied, as would radio stations, telephone offices, and the concentration camps. SS units would be disarmed, and their leaders shot if they resisted or refused to obey.

Thus the conspirators succeeded in standing Operation Valkyrie, and the plan for dealing with “internal disturbances,” on its head. Stauffenberg and Tresckow’s additional declaration would pin the blame for the uprising that they themselves were staging on the Nazi Party, a strategem intended to pacify those who would probably op­pose the coup if they knew the true situation. The entire plan to overthrow the regime, therefore, depended on an enormous hoax carried out in large part by scores of officers and troops obliviously following orders.

Since the success of the undertaking relied considerably on the element of surprise which, in turn, would set in motion blind adher­ence to the automatic chain of command-secrecy was of the es­sence. All written information was handled by Tresckow’s wife, Erika, and by Margarete von Oven, who had been Hammerstein’s secretary during his days as chief of army command. Both women wore gloves when they worked so as not to leave fingerprints. All meetings were held out of doors at various locations in the Grunewald, but they often had to be canceled and then, with great difficulty, rescheduled because of Allied air raids, breakdowns in public transportation, or other unforeseeable events. One evening a group of conspirators were returning from one of their meetings in the Grunewald when an SS van came screeching to a halt directly beside them on Trabenerstrasse. Margarete von Oven was carrying all the documents about the uprising under her arm, and “when the SS men poured out, each of them thought the conspiracy had been discovered and they would be arrested at once. But the SS men paid no attention to the three passersby and disappeared into a house.”²⁶

Despite the conspirators’ efforts, the Valkyrie plan had a serious and possibly fatal flaw: neither Olbricht nor Stauffenberg was authorized to order its implementation. Hitler had expressly reserved this authority for himself, with the commander of the reserve army, General Friedrich Fromm, authorized to give the cue only in an emer­gency. Therefore Olbricht or Stauffenberg had either to win Fromm over or else to usurp his position and set Valkyrie in motion in his name. Olbricht was prepared to take Fromm into custody if necessary and sign the orders himself, but that risked questions about the chain of command and delays that might imperil the entire enterprise. It has also been pointed out rightly that this was a tactic that could work only once. If the conspirators failed to usurp Fromm’s position “the first time around, there would be no second chance.”²⁷

General Fromm was a large, shrewd man who liked to boast that he “always came down on the right side.” When Halder asked him earnestly in the fall of 1939 to support the generals’ coup that was being plotted, Fromm evaded the issue at first and then requested lime to consider the matter. He was torn by doubts about the chances of success and tormented by the fact that he had compromised him­self by responding to Halder at all. Finally he formally absolved him­self of involvement by recording the affair in his official diary.

Fromm certainly did not number among “Hitler’s generals,” and to his friends he frequently expressed his distaste for the Nazis. He was also clever enough to deduce what Olbricht and Stauffenberg were up to from all the secretive activity in their offices and the visitors whom they received, he always acted, however, as if it was none of his business. He slipped up only once, in mid-July 1944, when, in a particularly buoyant mood, he told Olbricht to be sure, in the event of a putsch, not to forget Wilhelm Keitel, whom Fromm hated.²⁸ Al­though Fromm did nothing to hinder the uprising, no one who knew him had any doubt that he would not assist it either and, most important, that he would definitely not sign the Valkyrie orders. The question of how he should be handled therefore remained open. By the end of October all other preparations were ready. Tresckow gave Witzleben the orders declaring martial law, and Witzleben, who was to assume command of the Wehrmacht once a coup was under way, affixed his signature.

Scarcely had these preparations been completed, however, when Tresckow was ordered back to the front. Thus it was Stauffenberg who look on responsibility for igniting the “initial spark.” It was hoped that Tresckow would again assume a pivotal position in the military command from which he could provide support from the front as soon as the home army initiated the uprising, but this was not to be. The army personnel office had recommended him, along with other candidates, to serve as chief of staff for Army Group South under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, but Manstein rejected him. Instead, Tresckow assumed command of an infantry regiment in a division led by Manstein. Rumor had it that he was being put in “cold storage.”²⁹

The problem now as ever was to find an officer who had access to Hitler and was determined to kill him. Stieff had recently declared himself ready, but when Stauffenberg sought him out he stalled. He did, however, take possession of the explosives Stauffenberg brought him and finally demanded the assistance of an accomplice, apparently in order to help steel himself. Stauffenberg turned to Colonel Jo­achim Meichssner, the head of the organizational section of the OKW operations staff, who had tentatively promised in September to be the assassin. At the same time, Stieff was apparently considering making an attempt with two young officers on his staff, Major Joachim Kuhn and First Lieutenant Albrecht von Hagen; but after further consider­ation, he again backed out, explaining that it was impossible to carry explosives into a briefing without being noticed. In truth, it was prob­ably fear that deterred this lively and somewhat unstable man from action.

These harrowing efforts to find someone who would set off the “initial spark” prompted Stauffenberg to make contact, through Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, with one of the “reliable young officers” he had heard about in the spring. Axel von dem Bussche was a highly decorated twenty-four-year-old captain. His initial naive enthusiasm for Hitler and National Socialism had already dimmed considerably when, in early October 1942, he happened to witness the mass execution of several thousand Jews at the Dubno airfield in the Ukraine, a shock he never recovered from. There were, he said, only three possi­ble ways for an honorable officer to react: “to die in battle, to desert, or to rebel.” When Stauffenberg now asked him if he would be will­ing to kill Hitler, Bussche accepted without hesitation.

The plan was to use a previously scheduled presentation of new uniforms and equipment to lure Hitler from his bunker at headquarters, where he increasingly ensconced himself. Bussche was to explain the features and advantages of the new items and then, at a suitable moment, to set the fuse on the bomb, leap on Hitler, and hold him tight for the three or four seconds until the explosion. Toward the end of November the presentation seemed likely to take place at any moment. Bussche traveled to Führer headquarters in East Prussia and waited. “The sunny late-autumn days amid the forests and lakes are imbued with the heightened intensity a soldier feels before an attack,” he wrote.³⁰ But the presentation was postponed again and again. Finally Stieff informed the other conspirators that the model uniforms had been in a railroad car that was destroyed in one of the bombing raids on Berlin. Replacements would probably not be ready before January. Bussche returned to the front, where he was severely wounded early in the new year, losing a leg, which disqualified him from further attempts.

An unexpected complication now arose. Bussche was left with a bomb in his suitcase and no way of disposing of it. He found himself transferred from one hospital to another, all the while carrying his secret along with him. Not until the fall of 1944 did he finally find a sympathetic officer who threw it into a lake for him.³¹ Stieff, too, had been left with explosives on his hands when he backed out of killing Hitler. He assigned the disposal of “the stuff” to Kuhn and Hagen, who came up with the ill-advised idea of burying the explosives and detonators in the woods under a watchtower within the boundaries of Führer headquarters. As it happened, a military police patrol spotted them, but they managed to escape without being recognized. Had the incident been brought to light it might well have had serious consequences for the entire resistance. Fortunately, however, the investiga­tion was assigned to a close confidant of Hans Oster’s named Lieutenant Colonel Werner Schrader, and thus a conspirator ended up investigating the conspiracy.³²

In January, after Bussche had been wounded, Stauffenberg approached Lieutenant Ewald Heinrich von Kleist. Once again, the plan was to assassinate Hitler during the presentation of new uni­forms. Stauffenberg did not press Kleist, saying only that the earlier attempt had failed. Kleist said he wanted first to speak with his father, the same Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin who in the summer of 1938 had traveled to London at the behest of Oster and Beck to meet with Vansittart and Churchill. When the son appeared at the family estate the next day and asked his father’s opinion, the elder Kleist immedi­ately responded that this was a task he could not refuse. The son pointed out that he was being asked to do nothing less than blow himself up with Hitler. His father stood up, went to the window, and after a moment’s thought, replied, “You have to do it. Anyone who falters at such a moment will never again be one with himself in this life.”³³

But this brave resolution also failed, once again the date of the presentation was repeatedly postponed. Stauffenberg next turned to his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, who agreed in principle to carry out the task but was then dissuaded by his brother, Hans-Bernd, who raised vehement objections on religious grounds. These pangs of con­science, excuses, concerns about Hitler’s security precautions, and struggles to procure explosives and then dispose of them generated anguish and despair in the ranks of the conspirators-while mean­while the slaughter continued on all sides. All these pressures burst forth one day when Paul Yorck von Wartenburg screamed at Gersdorff, “That swine does, after all, have a mouth that somebody could just shoot into!”³⁴

This very approach was adopted by Eberhard von Breitenbuch, a cavalry captain who now declared that he would do the deed. Tresckow had arranged for Breitenbuch to join Army Croup Center, where he became adjutant to the new commander in chief, Field Marshal Ernst Busch, following Kluge’s accident. On March 11 Busch was summoned to a briefing on the Obersalzberg and, as usual, look along his adjutant. Breitenbuch, not informed of the briefing until that very morning, agreed on the spot to make the attempt. While the participants in the briefing waited to see Hitler, Breitenbuch took the opportunity to write his wife a farewell letter and send her the few personal effects he had with him. Finally the door to the great hall of Hitler’s Berghof swung open and an SS man invited the waiting party to enter. Keitel, Jodl, and Goebbels led the way, while Breitenbuch, as the lowest-ranking officer, drew up the rear. Just as he was about to step into the hall, the SS man intercepted him, announcing that the briefing would be held without adjutants. Busch protested that he needed his aide, but Breitenbuch, with the cocked Browning revolver in his pocket, was turned aside. Although he later had similar opportunities he turned them down, saying, “You only do something like that once.”³⁵

The preceding is only a condensed account of the best-known of the assassination attempts. Although there were many other clandestine discussions and a number of attempts that also failed, little is known about them, because virtually all those involved were discovered and executed. It is said, for instance, that Stauffenberg attempted to kill Hitler on December 26, 1943, in the “Wolf’s Lair,” as Führer headquarters at Rastenburg was called. Stauffenberg’s original plan, apparently, was to blow himself up with Hitler, but Beck and Olbricht objected so vehemently that Stauffenberg agreed to spare himself. He was waiting in Hitler’s antechamber for their meeting to commence when he was informed that it had been canceled.

Be that as it may, it was at about this time that Stauffenberg first began to consider taking the assassination into his own hands. Only in this way, he felt, could he break the curse that seemed to haunt the resistance.

In retrospect it may seem that the inner strength of the resistance had already begun to ebb by late 1943 and early 1944 and that Tresckow’s failed plot in March 1943 was the turning point in this drama. If so, Stauffenberg joined too late, forced as he was to struggle not only against the Nazi regime but also, to a greater extent than any of his predecessors, against mounting exhaustion and pessimism among the conspirators. Moreover, the state security apparatus began taking greater interest in the opposition after the raid on Military Intelli­gence, and bad news seemed to pour in from all directions.

Tresckow, however, remained determined to escape the backwater in which he found himself as an infantry commander and to improve his chances of gaining access to Hitler. In December 1943 he con­tacted his old regimental comrade General Rudolf Schmundt with a proposal to establish a department of psychological and political war­fare at Führer headquarters, with himself as head. Tresckow’s “nega­tive attitude” had become so widely known in the meantime, however, that Schmundt, the chief of army personnel, who was still well-disposed to his old friend, quietly let the matter drop. Tresckow also applied to become General Heusinger’s delegate in the OKH operational section but failed at that, too, apparently for the same reason. Heusinger only glanced at the letter, which Schlabrendorff delivered to him, before saying, “It doesn’t require an answer.” Tresckow also wrote to Colonel Stieff, who was still hesitating, beg­ging him to take action at last. When he read the letter, Stieff “burst into approving laughter” and promptly destroyed it.³⁶

The conspirators suffered another blow in December when Carlo Mierendorff died in a building that collapsed during a bombing raid on Leipzig. According to witnesses, his final word, shouted from the burning cellar, was “Madness!”³⁷ At about the same time the Gestapo honed in on members of an opposition group that had formed around Hanna Solf, the widow of the former German ambassador to Tokyo, and that provided support for people who were persecuted or living underground. Suspicion was probably aroused by the involvement of three officers from Military Intelligence: Nikolaus von Halem, the former legation secretary Mumm von Schwarzenstein, and Otto Kiep. The Security Service had begun systematically to put all Military In­telligence officers under surveillance in the hope that Canaris’s de­partment would continue to crack and could then be absorbed into the expanding empire of the SS. On January 12, 1944, the members of the Solf Circle were arrested while at afternoon tea. One week later Helmuth von Moltke, who had attempted to warn Otto Kiep of the danger, was also picked up. The flood of bad news continued on February 11, when Canaris was dismissed from his job and impris­oned in the Lauenstein fortress, while Himmler’s henchmen, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Walter Schellenberg, and Heinrich Müller, began to dismantle Military Intelligence piece by piece.

The ascendancy of Heinrich Himmler and the SS state led to a bizarre episode that concluded just as the new year began. Spurred by the repeated failure to overthrow the regime by force, Johannes Popitz had hit on the idea of encouraging a “palace revolution” or at least of exacerbating the tensions that existed among the leading members of the Nazi Party in order to speed up the already percepti­ble disintegration process. At first Popitz considered approaching Göring, Hitler’s designated successor and the prime minister of Prussia, in whose cabinet he still officially sat as minister of finance. He soon concluded, however, that Göring had become too self-indulgent and corrupt, too preoccupied with his flamboyant social life to function even as the figurehead of a serious uprising. Popitz turned therefore to none other than Heinrich Himmler in his perilous venture to destroy the regime from within.

Popitz had no reason at all to assume that Himmler would prove amenable. After a brilliant early career Popitz had become state secretary in the Ministry of Finance while still quite young, working for a time under the Social Democratic minister Rudolf Hilferding, whom he helped escape Germany after the Nazis seized power. His close bonds with Hilferding may explain why he leaned toward a policy of strong governmental control of the economy, which recommended him to some of the younger members of the Kreisau Circle despite his reputation as a “reactionary old Prussian.” Having made friends with Hans Oster in 1935, Popitz had become deeply involved in the resistance to Hitler even before the war; indeed as a sign of protest against the persecution of Jews, he submitted his resignation as minister to Goring in November 1938, explicitly requesting that Hitler be informed of the reasons. He never received a response, however, and in the end remained in office.

Popitz was also acquainted with Carl Langbehn, who had joined the opposition in the late 1930s. It turned out that Langbehn knew Himmler personally both as a lawyer and as a neighbor in the Dahlem neighborhood of Berlin. Through this connection Popitz now con­tacted the powerful chief of the SS, who had recently been appointed minister of the interior. They met on August 26. In a conversation conducted with Machiavellian cunning, in which he skirted the edge of the abyss more than once, Popitz suggested that no one but Himm­ler could resolve the desperate situation that had befallen the regime both at home and at the front. Such a suggestion was not totally devoid of promise, as the clear-headed, coolly calculating SS leaders had themselves already begun to entertain serious doubts about whether Germany could win the war and to wonder how their inter­ests might best be served. Popitz avoided referring directly to “over­throwing” Hitler, although that was his ultimate aim, instead making oblique references to “lightening the burden” the Führer had to bear. In general Popitz gained the impression that Himmler had long doubted that Germany could win the war. At the end of their conversation the two agreed to meet again soon.

This second meeting never took place. The next month Langbehn was arrested after his contacts with the Allies through Swiss intermediaries were exposed. Popitz found himself increasingly marginalized within the civilian resistance despite the leading role he had played until this point. His daring initiative was, of course, an act of despera­tion, predicated on the belief that Himmler could be elbowed aside after he had served his purpose. That idea seemed an eerie echo of the illusions of the spring of 1933, when it was thought that Hitler could be controlled once in power. But Popitz’s greater error was his failure to realize that the SS leader did not act independently and exercised only delegated authority. Furthermore, he overlooked how damaging it would have been for the opposition to be maintaining contact, for whatever reason, with a man who was widely believed to epitomize Nazi terror. Gerhard Ritter was not far off track when he described Popitz as the type of intellectual who has “pure intentions but few sure political instincts.” It was this shortcoming that gave rise to the general feeling within resistance circles that Popitz had overstayed his welcome in the role o leader. At any rate, Goerdeler felt that Popitz had gone too far and, after hesitating at first, decided that he didn’t want to hear so much as a word about the conversation with Himmler At Stauffenberg’s urging Goerdeler, too, abandoned the finance minister. The circle had been “blown apart,” Hassell wrote in late February. “Everything is going to hell.”³⁸

What tore this “band of brothers” apart more than anything else were their repeatedly dashed hopes for an assassination. In February Goerdeler wrote to Beck complaining about Stauffenberg’s failure to keep his promises and proposing to revive his own pet project of a bloodless coup. Through a number of intermediaries Goerdeler managed to contact Chief of General Staff Kurt Zeitzler to request that Hitler arrange an interview with Hitler or even a debate between them to be broadcast over the radio, during which Goerdeler in­tended to “eliminate” the Führer by prompting him to give up or resign. When this initiative failed, Goerdeler wrote Zeitzler an epistle of more than twenty pages outlining his ideas. Fortunately, Goerdeler’s staff did not forward it.³⁹

Such initiatives aroused only scorn and contempt from Stauffenberg, and though they were a genuine expression of Goerdeler’s irrepressible confidence and courage, they only served to widen the gulf between the two men. Differences in age and temperament figured, of course, in their disagreements, but so did the fact that Goerdeler was a skillful, cosmopolitan bureaucrat, and Stauffenberg an impatient and still young man of action. The deeper reason for the discord was that Stauffenberg, conscious of the key role he was play­ing and encouraged by Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, the former regional commissioner in Silesia, drew increasingly close to Wilhelm Leuschner and Julius Leber, without concerning himself with how much Goerdeler “suffered from his distant attitude,” in the words of one contemporary. “Again and again Goerdeler complained, They’re trying to cut me out. They don’t tell me anything anymore.”⁴⁰

Stauffenberg was indeed becoming convinced that Leber would make “the better chancellor,” although Leber himself, along with Wilhelm Leuschner and the trade unionist Jakob Kaiser, believed that the persistence of the stab-in-the-back myth from World War I made it inadvisable to place a Social Democrat or a labor leader “all too visibly in the front rank of those responsible” immediately following the removal of Hitler. Moreover, although Stauffenberg was closer to Leber on domestic policy, he knew that in foreign affairs he had more m common with Goerdeler, who had developed an eleven-point program that he wanted to present to the Allies, still believing, even in the summer of 1944, that a negotiated peace was possible. This pro­gram stipulated that Germany would retain its 1914 borders, as well as Austria and the Sudetenland, and that it might even secure the return of parts of South Tyrol.⁴¹

Julius Leber took a much more sober view. He thought that unconditional surrender was inevitable, and therefore adopted an ever-cooler attitude toward Goerdeler. The main points of contention re­veal how pronounced the divisions within the resistance had become. Leber, for instance, who was no friend of conservatives, came quite close to advocating the strong authoritarian state that Jessen, Hassell, and Popitz envisaged for the transition period; he agreed with them that “a dictatorship cannot be put on a democratic footing over night.”⁴² Meanwhile, for this very reason, the conservatives distanced themselves from Goerdeler, whose blind faith in democracy and sympathy toward the trade unions made them distrust him as the leader of a strong interim regime. In foreign policy Trott may have shared many of Goerdeler’s opinions, but Moltke and most of the Kreisau Circle did not. They continued to see Goerdeler as a man linked to business circles that would not be sufficiently accepting of a govern­ment that, in Yorck’s words, “included the working class and even left-wing Social Democrats.” And so, little by little, the resistance tore itself apart in controversies that bore little connection to the real world until everyone alternately agreed and disagreed with everyone else in one way or another, and the majority support for Goerdeler that had existed a year before was now gone. Indeed, the Gestapo agents who interrogated the conspirators after July 20 were not far wrong when they concluded that the attempts of the diverse resistance circles “to build a united front” had produced “a political monstrosity,” and that the conspirators were united “only in a negative sense, in their rejection of National Socialism.”⁴³ The ties that bound them had in fact been broken.

This state of affairs was not overly apparent in the early summer of 1944, however, because at that point the dominant concern continued to be foreign policy-specifically, how the Allies would respond to a coup. Most opponents of the Nazi regime still found it hard to accept that they did not have a shred of hope. Even Stauffenberg harbored illusions about a negotiated peace, hurrying off to seek solace from Trott after some particularly sobering conversations with Leber. And when an embittered Trott returned from a trip abroad convinced that there was “no genuine desire on the part of the British and Ameri­cans to reach an understanding”—especially since the demand for unconditional surrender first expressed in the Casablanca declaration had just been underscored at the Teheran Conference-dreams of a separate peace with the Soviet Union surged briefly to the fore.

The resistance based its hopes on Stalin’s well-known comment of February 1942 that although individuals like Hitler might come and go, the German people would remain. If the Soviet dictator was hint­ing at some disagreement with the intransigent policy of the Western powers, he took a step further in this direction in the summer of 1943 when he began approaching the German opposition through their contacts in Stockholm and through the National Committee for a Free Germany established in Krasnogorsk, near Moscow, by German prisoners of war and emigrants. Like the attempts to forge ties in the West, however, these contacts were soon undermined by distrust and suspicion. Heretofore the activities of the Communist-inspired groups led by First Lieutenant Harro Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack had gone virtually unnoticed by the rest of the resistance, despite a few personal ties between them. The group known collectively as the Red Orchestra (after its Gestapo nickname) consisted of both hard-core Communist ideologues on one side and a motley assortment of dreamers and visionaries on the other. Their arrest in August 1942 aroused little more than feelings of empathy among the rest of the resistance, which cared little for their use of political theory to mask the many concrete similarities between Hitler and Stalin. The leftists’ continued embrace of the old dream of a historic mission shared by the “profound” German and Russian cul­tures, as opposed to the “superficial” Western cultures, further alien­ated the other factions. As a result not even the loosest of ties were forged, especially as Moscow itself was apparently not interested in developing this group into a cell or even a center of political resistance. Rather, the inner circle of the Red Orchestra was used as an intelligence-gathering service for the Soviet Union.

Thus the question of establishing contacts with the Soviet Union arose at this point only as a tactical ploy to elicit more interest from the Western powers. But the resistance soon dropped this plan too. One of the strongest pieces of evidence against Stauffenberg’s alleged Communist sympathies is that he turned down the appeals of the National Committee for a Free Germany with the comment, “I am betraying my government; they are betraying their country.”⁴⁴ Stauffenberg not only supported the attempts of men like Goerdeler, Trott, and Gisevius to reach some kind of understanding with the Western powers but later joined in those efforts himself. Although the Gestapo was eager after July 20 to find some evidence of collusion between the conspirators and the Soviet Union or one of its agents, they failed to find any.

There was yet another aspect to this question-namely, the resistance’s connections with the Communist underground. Only isolated remnants had survived the shocking announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact, so that it was difficult to determine their strength. The uncertainty prompted Leber to respond positively to various Commu­nist overtures. Although there was still no question of including the Communists in the conspiracy, there was talk of an “opening to the left,” and of determining how the Communist leadership would react to a coup.

After much argument, a discussion of the issue was finally held in Yorck’s house on June 21. There were violent differences of opinion. Leuschner opposed any sort of rapprochement, insisting that the Communist apparatus had been infiltrated by the Gestapo. The Kreisauers Theodor Haubach and Paulus van Husen were also dead set against establishing any contacts. Only Adolf Reichwein advocated “a kind of socialist solidarity,” the outgrowth of his “almost embit­tered socialism.” The reticence of many of the participants was greatly reduced, however, when Leber reported that he had been contacted by “two well-known Communists” and pointed out that “he had shared a bunk with the two men in a concentration camp for five years.” Although the misgivings abated, it is still not clear whether they were totally dispelled. Stauffenberg, at any rate, seems to have favored a meeting.⁴⁵

The next day, June 22, Leber and Reichwein went to meet two members of the central committee of the Communist Party, Anton Saefkow and Franz Jacob, in the apartment of a Berlin physician. When they arrived, however, they found that Saefkow and Jacob were accompanied by a third man, who had not been mentioned in the agreement. More disturbingly, one of the Communists greeted Leber by his full name, though this, too, ran counter to their agreement. Leber must have regarded their salutations as a sort of kiss of Judas. In any case, he apparently realized immediately that the meeting was a terrible mistake that posed an enormous danger not only to him but to the entire conspiracy, just as it was gathering its strength for an­other, perhaps final attempt on Hitler’s life.

Although both sides had previously agreed to meet again on July 4, Leber did not attend. Reichwein showed up alone and was arrested along with Saefkow and Jacob. The next morning the Gestapo nabbed Leber in his apartment.

By this time the war was entering its final phase. On June 6, 1944, the Allies had begun their invasion of Normandy. Just over two weeks later they had firmly established a beachhead and shipped one million men, 170,000 vehicles, and over 500,000 tons of materiel across the Channel. What is more, on June 22 four Soviet army groups, outnum­bering the Germans six to one, broke through the thin, porous line of Army Group Center between Minsk and the Beresina River. They drove deep behind the German positions, isolating three pockets con­taining twenty-seven German divisions-far more than at Stalin­grad-which they surrounded and quickly destroyed.

Henning von Tresckow, who had been restored to his position as chief of general staff of the Second Army on the southern flank of Army Group Center, was once again pressing for immediate action against Hitler. Stauffenberg had always believed that the invasion of France was a point of no return, alter which a coup would be only a futile gesture any hope for a negotiated “political” settlement would die. The fear of having arrived on the scene too late dominated all his thoughts and made him extremely impatient.

Stauffenberg sent Tresckow a message through Lehndorff asking whether there was any reason to continue trying to assassinate Hitler now, since they had missed their last opportunity and no political purpose would any longer be served. Lehndorff returned promptly with Tresckow’s response, which signaled a final break from all concern with external circumstances, which had so often paralyzed the conspirators, as well as from political goals of any kind: “The assassination must be attempted, coûte que coûte. Even if it fails, we must take action in Berlin. For the practical purpose no longer matters; what matters now is that the German resistance movement must take the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, nothing else matters.”⁴⁶