Countdown to Valkyrie : THE JULY PLOT TO ASSASSINATE HITLER

348 Pages·2009·9.01 MB·English

by  Jones

Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, as a captain of the 6th Panzer Division.

For Liam, Tom, Alfie and Milena.

FRONTLINE BOOKS, LONDON

Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assassinate Hitler

This edition published in 2008 by Frontline Books, an imprint of Pen and Sword Books Ltd, 47
Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS
www.frontline-books.com

Copyright © Nigel Jones, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-84832-508-1
Digital Edition ISBN: 978-1-78346-145-5

The right of Nigel Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in
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Contents
Introduction
Prologue: High Summer in the Wolf’s Lair

1. A Good German: The Early Life of Count Claus von Stauffenberg
2. Seizing the State: The Irresistible Rise of Hitler’s Nazis
3. Rule of the Outlaws
4. Hitler’s March to War
5. Hitler’s War
6. Lone Wolf: Georg Elser and the Bomb in the Beerhall
7. The Devil’s Luck: Henning von Tresckow and the Army’s Plots
against Hitler
8. Enter Stauffenberg: The Head, Heart and Hand of the Conspiracy
9. Valkyrie: 20 July 1944
10. Retribution: Hitler’s Revenge

Afterword with Count Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg

Dramatis Personae
Guide to Sites
Acknowledgements and Sources
Picture credits

Introduction
The story of the internal German resistance to Adolf Hitler and his
National Socialist dictatorship, the hideous regime that he called the
Third Reich, is a Classical Greek tragedy, containing all the elements
required by Aristotle in his definition of the term. Its actors performed
their deeds personally – none more so than its legendary leader, the
charismatic hero Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg – and it
encompassed terror, pity and fear in more than full measure.
By the time the anti-Nazi conspirators carried out the last and most
spectacular of their several attempts to assassinate Hitler on 20 July
1944, they knew that their self-appointed mission was doomed to almost
certain failure. For, even if they succeeded in outwitting the all-
pervasive security of the SS state that Nazi Germany had become and hit
their target, causing the violent death of the dictator, it was already too
late to save the country they loved from defeat and destruction.
Just a few weeks previously, on D-Day, 6 June, the armies of the
Anglo-American western allies, who previously had refused to encourage
the plotters by agreeing to a separate peace deal excluding Russia, had
swarmed onto the Normandy beaches and opened the long-awaited
Second Front against Germany. The Fatherland was now living out the
same nightmare it had faced in the First World War just twenty years
before – a war on two fronts. In the east, the seemingly inexhaustible
divisions of Stalin’s Red Army were hurling themselves relentlessly
against the crumbling defences of Hitler’s realm. Each passing day
brought their columns nearer to the heartland of the Reich, and by late
July they were just a hundred miles away from Hitler’s personally
chosen eastern headquarters; the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg, tucked away
among the brooding, swampy forests of the East Prussian/Polish
marches.
Almost every day and night now, fleets of American and British heavy
bombers, virtually unopposed by the depleted remnants of Germany’s
once-mighty Luftwaffe, droned overhead and pounded the cities of the
Reich, gradually grinding them into rubble. The news from the fronts –
moving ever closer – that was brought to Hitler’s twice-daily conferences
with his military staff was almost uniformly bad. The perimeters of the
Reich were shrinking, the losses of his armies could not be repaired or
replaced, his remaining allies were searching for ways to desert him, and
the inescapable truth was staring even the meanest intelligence in the
face: Hitler’s war was irretrievably lost.
But even though no move of theirs could affect the inevitable outcome
of the war, the leading conspirators were more determined than ever
that action should be taken. As one of the most clear-headed among
them, General Henning von Tresckow, put it: ‘The assassination must be
attempted at all costs . . . what matters now is not the practical purpose
of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that
the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step.
Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.’ In other
words, it was not so much the ‘practical purpose’ of an assassination and
an associated putsch to overthrow the regime that mattered any longer:
an assassination attempt was necessary to redeem the honour of the
once-proud German army, a quality that had been surrendered on the
snow-covered killing fields of Russia and eastern Europe long before.
Though opposition to Hitler and the barbaric policies he embodied
long predated the outbreak of war and even his arrival in power in 1933,
it was the actual murderous realisation of Nazi racial doctrines on the
vast Russian steppes and hidden in the dense forests east of Warsaw that
spurred some – including Stauffenberg himself – from mere grumbling
into active anti-Nazi conspiracy. This radicalisation of the resistance was
most marked among army officers who witnessed such atrocities as the
massacre of Jewish communities and the slaughter of Slav ‘sub-humans’,
both civilians and Soviet prisoners, and who gradually became aware of
similar Nazi crimes inside Germany itself, including the euthanasia of
the mentally and physically handicapped. Such flagrant trampling on the
Christian ethics that had traditionally underpinned German society
profoundly shocked the Prussian officer corps.
An activist minority of such men, however obedient to the head of
state they may have been taught to be, held a higher loyalty to the laws
of God, the teachings of Christ, or merely to codes of simple human
decency. To restore the primacy of such higher commands, and to return
Germany to the rule of law and the path of Christian civilisation, seemed
to them the highest duty of all, outweighing soldierly concepts like
obedience to their superiors’ orders and even the defence of their
country’s borders against the enemy in wartime.
With military courage, determination and energy – alas, not always
matched by military efficiency – the conspirators set about a final
attempt to murder Adolf Hitler, the man to whom they had all pledged a
compulsory oath of loyalty as their Führer, a leader combining the three
posts of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, head of the
government and head of state. In doing so, they were fully aware of
what was at stake, and what they were putting at mortal risk. Failure
would mean that the full fury of Nazi vengeance would be unleashed
against them, with all that that entailed: arrest, imprisonment, cruel and
prolonged torture, a humiliating public trial and a lonely, degrading
death. Perhaps hardest of all to bear would be the reproaches of those of
their fellow Germans, in whose name they claimed to be acting, who
would accept the Nazis’ caricature of them as traitors who had stabbed
their country in the back in its hour of greatest need. In the words of the
Irishman Roger Casement, hanged for treason in the First World War,
and equally revered in some quarters as a hero and reviled in others as a
traitor: ‘It is a cruel thing to die with all men misunderstanding.’
Notwithstanding the high price that might have to be paid, the men of
the resistance went ahead with the near-hopeless plan that was
concealed under the codeword ‘Valkyrie’. The plan was for the
simultaneous assassination of Hitler and a Reich-wide military putsch; a
coup d’état aimed at arresting the SS and loyalist Nazis, not only in
Germany itself but also in countries still occupied by Germans – France,
Czechoslovakia, Austria and Norway – and replacing Hitler’s rule with
that of a mixed civilian-military government dedicating to supplanting
National Socialism with a Rechtsstaat. This would be a Germany where
the rule of law once again reigned supreme, and German citizens would
no longer tremble in dread at the sound of a midnight knock on their
doors ushering them into the terrors of ‘Nacht und Nebel’, night and fog.