Soldier in the Downfall: A Wehrmacht Cavalryman in Russia, Normandy, and the Plot to Kill Hitler

253 Pages·2013·2.54 MB·English

by  Gersdorff

Soldier in the Downfall
A Wehrmacht Cavalryman in Russia, Normandy,
and the Plot to Kill Hitler
By Baron Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff
Translation with Notes by Anthony Pearsall
With an Introduction by Lory Reinach, née von Gersdorff

The Aberjona Press
Bedford, Pennsylvania
He who survives a tragedy
was not its hero.
—Stanislav Jerzy Lec
Contents
Translator’s Notes by Anthony Pearsall Introduction by Lory Reinach, née von
Gersdorff Foreword by Klemens von Klemperer Preface by Baron Rudolf-
Christoph von Gersdorff Background and Education
Soldier in the Reichswehr
Soldier in Opposition
Soldier in the Resistance
Soldier and Traitor
Soldier in the Downfall
Soldier in Captivity
Epilogue
Appendix: The Truth About “Katyn”
by Brigadier General Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff
Notes
In memory of
the most active men
in the German resistance
H O
ANS STER
H T
ENNING VON RESCKOW
C C S
OUNT LAUS VON TAUFFENBERG
Translator’s Notes
While praising the Prussian noblemen who plotted against Hitler’s life, essayist
Clive James made the necessary point that, after all, “Aristocratic recruits to the
SS were plentiful: promotion was rapid, and there were opportunities to ride
horses. (Funding an SS equestrian team was one of Himmler’s master strokes.)
Most of the young officers who developed doubts about Hitler had friends who
never developed any doubts at all.”1
This is the story of a man—an aristocratic professional soldier of impeccably
Aryan lineage who would have certainly been welcomed as one of Himmler’s
horsemen had he so chosen—who instead developed doubts and then acted upon
them, despite an oath he had pronounced, despite the likelihood of failure and
the contempt of those people he most valued, despite a training in obedience and
loyalty that would have begun, for him, at some point before his own earliest
memories.
Memories are largely what Baron Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff had to work
with when he sat down to write his memoirs. He was by then a weary paraplegic,
aging and wheelchair-bound, a dispossessed refugee from what he emphatically
regarded as his eastern Heimat (native land) along the lower reaches of the Oder
River, and limited in his research to such books and papers as might have been
available to him as a private citizen of limited means and capacities, in the
divided Germany of the mid-1970s. Fortunately his power to recollect was
strong, and his life as a German soldier through 1947 had provided him with
more memorable experiences than most.
He wrote in memory of three of the uniformed anti-Hitler conspirators whom
he knew, namely Hans Oster, Henning von Tresckow, and Baron Claus von
Stauffenberg—the three men whom another rare survivor of the conspiracy,
Baron Phillip von Boeselager (who will be met in the following pages) described
as being respectively “the mind, the heart, and the courageous arm” of the plot
that culminated on 20 July 1944.
“To save Germany was not granted to them; only to die for it; luck was not
with them, it was with Hitler. But they did not die in vain. Just as we need air if
we are to breathe, and light if we are to see, so we need noble people if we are to
live.” So wrote the German intellectual Ricarda Huch as she surveyed the ruins
of her homeland in the spring of 1946. Clive James observed that Huch “was
well aware that there were other and less charismatic people in the conspiracy
apart from the glamorously uniformed [nobles]. . . . There were obscure
commoners who had seen through Hitler in the beginning. What she meant by
nobility was the sacrificial spirit that joined, in this one instance, the beautiful
young men from the Almanach de Gotha [the genealogical bible of the German
aristocracy] and the plodding minor bureaucrats from the local council.”
In a much smaller way this book is the result of a similar collaboration, this one
between European aristocracy and American bourgeoisie: and I would like to
gratefully acknowledge Mme. Lory Reinach, née Lory von Gersdorff, the
author’s friendly and gracious offspring; Professor Emeritus Klemens von
Klemperer, survivor and scholar of those violent times; Mrs. Patti Bonn, owner
of The Aberjona Press, for instantly taking a chance on this book; and Gayle
Wurst, Ph.D., the masterful editor of the English version, and all-around
inspiration. In addition my thanks are owed to the anonymous readers who
vetted the text and endnotes at the publisher’s request. It goes without saying
that I am responsible for any surviving errors. I am likewise grateful to my wife
and daughters for their patience while I sat hunched over books and keyboards,
engaged in this project.
This is a book by another man and not mine to dedicate; but if it were I would
inscribe it to all those in every time and place who have risked that which they
held most dear, up to and including their lives, out of what the Germans call
Zivilkourage—moral courage.
Anthony Pearsall
Pacific Grove, California, 2012

[Editor’s Note: German military ranks from Generalmajor up are transposed to
United States usage; a German Generalmajor will be referred to as a Brigadier
General, and so on.]
Introduction:
Memories of My Father
In order to describe my father, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, I must
nowadays reach far back into the past. Moreover it was our fate never to live
together under the same roof for longer than a few months at a time.
Nonetheless, many events remain engraved in my memory.
On 9 February 1945—I was seven years old at the time—I was forced to leave
Schloss Matzdorf in Silesia, together with four cousins, my uncle (my father’s
older brother), and my aunt. We were fleeing from the Russians. The village of
Matzdorf (now known as Maciejowiec, in western Poland) lay in what was then
the Prussian province of Silesia, a few miles away from the town of Hirschberg
(now Jelenia Góra).
I still remember that scene, over sixty years later. In front of the manor house
stood a black carriage drawn by Max and Moritz, two black horses with cropped
tails, wearing dark blinkers. The snow-covered estate park, from which the
Riesengebirge mountain range could be glimpsed on the horizon, was a white
winter landscape. Even the chapel and the mausoleum were mantled with a thick
layer of snow. Our goal was to reach Schloss Thurnau, in the Upper Franconia
region in western Germany. Here there dwelled a distant aunt who was willing to
take us in as Flüchtlinge (refugees). At the last possible moment, my father was
able to get us places in a German Red Cross hospital train, a train that passed
through Dresden less than a week before that city was firebombed into ruins.
After two days of traveling we arrived safely at our destination.
Schloss Thurnau was a big castle, parts of which dated back to the thirteenth
century, with two interior courtyards and many wings. Among the other people
taking shelter there were the famous concert pianist Wilhelm Kempf and his
family. Before long the castle and village were both overrun by the U.S. Army.
The American occupying troops, who were mostly black men, made an
enormous impression on us children. They chewed gum and had a panicky fear
of the castle ghost, who was known as “the little gray man.”
I can only dimly recall my father from these years. Whenever I asked
somebody about him, I would be told that he was at the war, or later on, in
American captivity as a prisoner of war. All the same, I have preserved a number
of memories. I will never forget how one night, sometime after 7:00 . .—that
P M
was my bedtime, and everyone must have assumed that I was sound asleep—I
became aware of uniformed men standing next to my child-sized bed in our
Berlin apartment. They had crimson stripes running down the sides of their
trouser legs: as I learned only much later, this was one of the distinguishing
marks of army officers on the General Staff. The crimson stripes, which I
noticed very markedly owing to the position I was in, lying down in my bed,
were the reason why I later asked my father who these gentlemen could have
been. He told me that every now and then he and his friends came into my room
in the evenings. Perhaps they were exchanging secret information.
There is another story to be told from this period: an odd childhood memory, a
small thing in itself. Even as a little child, I shared my father’s enormous passion
for the German candy called Lübeck marzipan, so whenever hunger (I was
known as a “poor eater”) and the craving for sweets led me to do so, I would
search my bedroom for candies. My nanny Gretel knew this weakness of mine,
although she nonetheless continued to serve me spinach and chopped meat. She
also knew that the hiding places for bonbons and chocolate in my room were
getting steadily easier for me to find, at the age of four or five. So she simply put
whatever I wasn’t supposed to eat out of my reach.
At around 7:00 . . each night, after my dinner—which often went back to the
P M
kitchen untouched, unless it was forcibly stuffed down my gullet—Gretel would
give me my bath and then put me to bed. After I said my evening prayers, she
would leave me, and there I would lie on my back, my eyes turned toward the
ceiling. One evening, however, she wandered back in and tidied up the dresser,
on top of which there lay a packet all wrapped up in paper. Little child that I
was, all the imagination I possessed became fixed upon this packet. Marzipan,
pralines, bonbons, chocolate! But I couldn’t get at it, for I was too small. This
memory has never left me. It is engraved in my mind.
Many years later when I was visiting my father one Christmas and brought him
a box of Lübeck marzipan, I told him about this childhood memory. He gave me
a long look and then said, “You know, Lory, those were bomb fuses that I
thought would be safe on the dresser in your room.” These fuses were captured
English war materiel that had been dropped by parachute into France. They had
the very great advantage of not making any noise after being set, and were
considered especially suitable for the planned assassination attempt on Hitler. So
it is that the fuses for the attempted bombings of 23 March 1943 and 20 July
1944 were for some time probably to be found in my childhood bedroom in
Breslau.