The Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler failed and a good thing too
iif only the assassination attempted 60 years ago last Tuesday had succeeded, we have heard all this week. But what was the conspirators' idea of success? In particular, what did the awesome man whose sonorous name we have heard this week really believe? Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg was of his time and his class, we are told. What then was his attitude to, say. Slays and Jews?
But first, to recount what happened 60 years ago last Tuesday. It is untrue that Stauffenberg and the other leading conspirators resolved to kill Hitler only once they knew that Germany was going to lose the war. They had long been anti-Hitler. By 1944, Stauffenberg, aged 37, was chief of staff to Colonel-General Fromm, head of the reserve army. Stauffenberg had been called from Berlin — to brief Hitler — on 20 July at Hitler's eastern headquarters, the luridly named Wolfs Lair in East Prussia, now Poland. Stauffenberg rose early that day at his Berlin home. A staff car took him to a Berlin airstrip. A bomb was in his briefcase.
On arrival in East Prussia, he was driven the ten miles to the Wolf's Lair. He had breakfast. and set out with the chief of defence staff, Keitel, for Hitler's conference. Stauffenberg asked Keitel to excuse him for a moment, since he wanted to 'freshen up'. In fact, he went to prepare the bomb for detonation and put it back into the briefcase. Nothing could now prevent it exploding ten minutes later.
Hitler returned their salute as they entered the room. Stauffenberg placed the briefcase under the table. He had told Keitel that, while awaiting Hitler's order to speak, he might have to leave the room to take a call from Berlin connected with the briefing. He left the room and stood several yards away, smoking.
At the table a general was ending a briefing on the deteriorating situation on the Eastern front. Keitel, who liked these meetings to go smoothly, whispered irritably to a junior officer, 'Where's Stauffenberg? It's his turn now.' The officer went to look, but reported that he could not find him. This was later to set up a suspicion in Keitel's mind. Another junior officer then made perhaps history's most famous or fateful shift of an inanimate object. Finding that Stauffenberg's briefcase prevented him standing comfortably at the table, the officer pushed it to the side of a heavy wooden support, thus protecting Hitler from the full blast.
The gist of the briefing officer's remarks were eerily prophetic. 'The Russians are press
ing in towards the north with strong forces west of the Duna. . . . If our forces are not finally withdrawn from Peipussee [near the Russians] then we face a catastrophe.' The bomb exploded. Keitel shouted through the smoke, 'Where is the Ftihrer?' Hitler was still there, alive. Stauffenberg, looking in from outside, was convinced that no one could have survived. Soon he was on an aeroplane back to Berlin and the War Office in the Bendlerstrasse — now Stauffenbergstrasse — where the rest of the conspirators waited. At this point, we come to another of the day's mysteries. Fellgiebel, a signals officer in the plot, did not carry out his mission to destroy communications between the Wolf s Lair and the rest of Germany.
The English historian Wheeler-Bennett is hard on Fellgiebel, who was later executed. But the Irish-American writer Constantine FitzGibbon says that cutting the communications was not that easy. They were complex. But why did not Fellgiebel telephone the Berlin conspirators to reassure them that Hitler was dead, and that they could put into operation their full plan? Was it because he soon realised that Hitler was alive? One man who 'knew when he reached the Bendlerstrasse that Hitler was dead was Stauffenberg. But Keitel managed to secure a call to Stauffenberg's chief, Fromm, and assure him that Hitler had survived. Fromm had earlier been part of the plot. Nearly all of us, in our workplaces and in our observation of politicians and others, know Fromms. They go with the winner. You must shoot yourself immediately,' he told Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg and other officers instead arrested Fromm after a scuffle.
The conspirators sent a Major Remer — jailed for neo-Nazism postwar — to arrest Goebbels. Goebbels asked him whether Hitler had personalty decorated him with the medal he wore. He had. So Remer would recognise that voice if he heard it on the telephone? Goebbels put Remer through to Hitler, who ordered him to lead a detachment to arrest the conspirators. Remer somehow reached Fromm who finally succeeded in arresting Stauffenberg and others. It was now past midnight. Fromm had Stauffenberg and three others shot under car headlights in a dark courtyard. Stauffenberg dying with a cty of 'Long live holy Germany.' That did not save Fromm. The Gestapo discovered his earlier involvement and he was hanged.
We must remain in awe of Stauffenberg. Nonetheless, he belonged to a group of officers from some of Germany's oldest military families who could not explode a bomb correctly. They could not cut those communications. They could not spot a Fromm. Instead of shooting Goebbels, they sent a suspect officer, not part of the plot, to arrest him, Even if they had killed Hitler, they seemed disunited as to what should happen next. Some, perhaps most, wanted to make peace in the West and fight on in the East. The Western Allies would never have accepted that. On 20 July there were no enemy troops on German soil, just as there had not been at the 1918 armistice. There would have been another 'stab in the back' legend: Germany had not been defeated in the field but had been stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians and defeatist officers. We can imagine the Nazis, and the crowds, greeting the returning troops in 1944 as betrayed heroes. It is reasonable to speculate that there would have been something like civil war, with perhaps the Russians moving in to support the Communists. The Nazis would have argued that at the moment of betrayal, Hitler was perfecting the secret weapons, such as the V-rockets, which would have turned the war, and was probably about to build a nuclear bomb too. There could have been strife in Germany for years.
The July conspirators could not have imposed de-Nazification on such division. Only the occupying Allies did that. There were also ambiguities. A recent book by the German historian Hans Mommsen examines the world view of Stauffenberg and other plotters. Stauffenberg was early a believer in German colonisation of Russia. The Soviet Union would soon have known of his past beliefs. We know that he was revolted by German treatment of Jews in the East. But his caste tended to equate Bolshevism with Jewty. writes Mommsen, and this explains 'why men who later became prominent in the military opposition [to Hitler] did not consistently refuse Hitler's demand on 30 March 1941 for a war of racial extermination . • anti-Semitism in varying forms can be found in such people as . . . Claus von Stauffenberg. . . . ' Mommsen offers no further evidence and slightly retreats later. 'It has proved extraordinarily difficult to assess their position on the Jewish question. This is no less true of Claus von Stauffenberg.' Whatever the truth, such a matter, and many others, would have been gone into thoroughly in Germany, by both the conspirators' enemies and their allies. had 20 July 'succeeded'.
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