Hitler's Charisma (45 page)

Still determined to kill Hitler, Tresckow then wrapped up a bomb, pretending it was two bottles of Cointreau,
¹⁷
and gave it to Heinz Brandt, a lieutenant colonel who was travelling on Hitler’s plane. Tresckow hoped the bomb would explode in mid-air, killing everyone on the flight. The advantage of this approach, according to von Schlabrendorff, was that “the stigma of an assassination would be avoided, and Hitler’s death could be attributed—officially, at least—to an accidental plane crash.”
¹⁸
But the bomb failed to go off.

The following week, Rudolf Christoph von Gersdorff—a baron—made another attempt on Hitler’s life. Gersdorff, a close confidant of Tresckow’s at Army Group Centre, planned to blow up Hitler when he attended an exhibition of captured Red Army weapons in Berlin on 21 March 1943. Under his uniform Gersdorff concealed two bombs, and then accompanied Hitler round the exhibition. But Hitler stayed for a shorter time than expected and Gersdorff—who had set delayed-action time fuses to the bombs—had to rush to the toilet and dismantle them.

For army officers admitted into Hitler’s presence, there existed an easier way to kill him than turning oneself into a human bomb. Simply take out a pistol and pull the trigger. “Many people say, ‘Were you checked for weapons?’ ” says Peter von der Groeben. “ ‘No.’ ‘So why didn’t anybody shoot him?’ I could have done it, any time. I had my briefcase with me, and of course I could have carried a pistol in there. And I was two steps away from him, I only had to draw and fire … I will tell you exactly why [I didn’t do it]. In the first place I was afraid, it would have been the end of me, and, secondly, as a colonel, I didn’t really feel it was my mission to interfere with fate in this way.”
¹⁹

For some conspirators, like Georg von Boeselager, another aristocratic German officer who wanted to see Hitler dead, it just wasn’t emotionally possible to shoot Hitler, face to face. He revealed
²⁰
that, despite his proven courage in battle, he did not feel “equal to the job.” “Even a hunter is gripped with feverish anticipation when the long awaited
object of his hunt finally appears within his sights,” wrote Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was sympathetic to Boeselager’s inability to shoot Hitler. “How much greater then is the turmoil in one’s heart and mind when, after overcoming a multitude of obstacles, and with the knowledge that the odds are unfavourable, one pulls out a gun at the risk of one’s life, fully aware that success or failure of the deed will decide the fate of millions!”
²¹
To get round this problem Boeselager proposed leading a group of soldiers against Hitler’s armed bodyguard and then killing Hitler in the subsequent fire-fight—an impractical solution that was never adopted.

If Hitler had visited Army Group Centre for a second time, then the conspirators would have tried to kill him by opening fire on him simultaneously in what they called a “collective assassination” attempt. This method of killing Hitler was designed to “help ease the burden felt by any person with a conscience.”
²²
But Hitler never returned after the March 1943 trip.

A year later, in March 1944, one conspirator finally emerged who was prepared to try and shoot Hitler face to face. Rittmeister Eberhard von Breitenbuch, an aide to Field Marshal Busch, was set to pull his pistol from his pocket and kill the Führer at a military conference at the Berghof. But, by happenstance, junior officers were not admitted into Hitler’s presence that day.
²³

Four months afterwards, the most famous assassination attempt on Hitler—the 20 July 1944 plot—was carried out by a man who decided not to shoot the Führer, but once again to try and blow him up. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg—who was so blue-blooded that he had been born in a castle—placed a bomb in a briefcase under the conference table during one of Hitler’s midday military meetings at the Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg then left to fly to Berlin in order to coordinate the resistance effort there. The bomb exploded at 12:50, but Hitler, as is well known, survived this assassination attempt with only minor injuries.

At about five o’clock that same evening Ludwig Beck appeared at the office of the German Army High Command on the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin. He had been part of the plot against Hitler—off and on—for years now and had been chosen by the conspirators as the new head of state because, as Hans Gisevius, a diplomat who had helped plan the attempted coup, wrote, “General Ludwig Beck, in truth, stood above all the parties
 … Beck was the only general with an unimpaired reputation, the only general who had voluntarily resigned.”
²⁴

The problem now was that neither Beck nor the other conspirators could be certain that Hitler was dead. Keitel, speaking from the Wolf’s Lair, had told other officers at the Bendlerstrasse that Hitler had suffered only slight injuries in the assassination attempt. But was he telling the truth? There also remained the question of the allegiance of the other soldiers in Berlin. Beck asked General Friedrich Olbricht, a fellow conspirator, about the loyalty of the guards he had posted outside the building. Beck specifically wanted to know if these men were prepared to die for Olbricht. It was a question that cut to the heart of the coup attempt. That there were still those around Hitler who were prepared to die for him was axiomatic. The SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler—the Life Guards of Adolf Hitler—had, like all of the SS formations, as its very motto,
Meine Ehre heisst Treue
(“My honour is called loyalty”). But would Olbricht’s soldiers die for him if forces loyal to Hitler attacked? Olbricht could only reply, “I don’t know.”
²⁵

Hitler’s continuing ability to generate immediate personal loyalty was demonstrated in dramatic terms that same night, when a dithering Major Otto-Ernst Remer of the Grossdeutschland regiment was handed the phone by Joseph Goebbels and heard Hitler at the other end of the line. “Do you recognise me, Major Remer,” asked Hitler, “do you recognise my voice?”
²⁶
Remer replied that he did, and Hitler then ordered him to help put down the coup. Remer immediately obeyed.

After the war, Remer said that he felt “the whole conspiracy was organised in a dilettante fashion … Any putsch such as Stauffenberg’s had to succeed in killing Hitler because it was to him that the oath [of loyalty] was sworn. This could not be achieved by cowardly placing a bomb in a corner—he should have had the courage to use a pistol and shoot Hitler. This is what a real man would have done and I would have respected him.”
²⁷
This is an unfair judgement on Stauffenberg—he was a man of considerable bravery who had not felt able to kill himself in the attempt on Hitler because he believed he was needed later in Berlin to help organise the coup. As for Remer he was undoubtably a deeply unpleasant character—after the war he was a Holocaust denier—but here his other substantive point is correct. Hitler’s death was essential for the coup to succeed. Indeed, the failure of the 20 July 1944 plot demonstrated in stark
terms how central Adolf Hitler, as one single individual, was to the Nazi state. The question potential supporters of the plot had raised after the bomb went off had been simply this, “did Hitler still live?” Field Marshal Kluge, Commander-in-Chief West, for example, had vacillated in his support for the coup attempt before, but only came firmly to the view that he could not commit to the enterprise after it appeared that Hitler had survived. So even as late as July 1944, after the near collapse of German Army Group Centre in the wake of the Soviet offensive that had begun the previous month, Hitler’s physical presence on this earth was enough to break the conspiracy. The Italians had not had to kill Mussolini to remove him from power. But only death would destroy Hitler’s hold over Germany.

By half-past nine in the evening on 20 July, less than five hours after Beck had said he was head of state, there was a fire fight at the Bendlerstrasse as soldiers loyal to Hitler attempted to retake the building. They succeeded with relative ease and Beck was captured. He then asked if he could take the opportunity to kill himself. Friedrich Fromm, commander in chief of the German Home Army, agreed. (Fromm was implicated in the planning stages of the plot, though he had refused earlier in the evening to take part.) Beck held a pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger, but the bullet only grazed him and much to his surprise Beck found he was still alive. Fromm then ordered Stauffenberg and a number of the other key conspirators taken out of the building and shot. Beck was then given a second opportunity to kill himself. Once again he pulled the trigger, and this time the bullet rendered him unconscious—but still not dead. Beck was only finally killed by a third shot, this from a German soldier loyal to Adolf Hitler.

After the war the conspirators were treated as heroes, as Germans attempted to deal with this troubled history. But at the time they were reviled—and not just by Hitler and other loyalists. “The soldiers at the front,” says Ulrich de Maizière, “the mass of frontline officers, initially had no sympathy for the assassination attempt at all because they had the feeling that the supreme commander was being murdered behind their backs. They did not know what the motive was … they only knew that the Führer of the Reich was meant to be murdered. For me it was a different thing because I knew the perpetrators and knew their motives. And so I regretted that the attempt had not been a success, but I could not say anything like this.”
²⁸

Reports compiled in the aftermath of the bomb attack by the SD, the intelligence division of the SS, confirm de Maizière’s judgement that the majority of soldiers were appalled by this attempt on Hitler’s life—and not just soldiers but members of the general population as well.
²⁹
Hitler was still seen by many as a selfless individual who was doing his best to prevent Germany’s defeat. Yes, there had been setbacks, but with the Red Army drawing near, and an Allied commitment expressed the previous year to only accept “unconditional surrender” from the Germans, many felt, to use Darges’ words, that this was no time to “to get off a moving train.”

Hitler now appointed General Heinz Guderian as Chief of Staff of the German Army to succeed the departed Zeitzler. Hitler had sacked Guderian back in December 1941, but now this previously lucky commander—who had helped conquer France and led a spectacular drive towards Moscow in the early days of the invasion of the Soviet Union—was back in favour. Hitler made plain to Guderian at their meeting on 21 July 1944 that he would never tolerate his new Chief of Staff saying he wanted to resign—Zeitzler had offered his resignation five times before he had eventually walked out, and Hitler now insisted on someone who would stick to the job.

Guderian initially found Hitler’s manner in the wake of the attempt on his life, “astonishingly calm”
³⁰
but it soon became clear that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general, and for General Staff officers and generals in particular, now became profound hatred … It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”
³¹

Guderian not only took on the job as Chief of Staff, but he served on the notorious “Court of Honour” which expelled officers from the army on suspicion of knowledge of the bomb plot, and then left them to be tried—and invariably executed—by the “People’s Courts.” This, and other actions of collaboration with the Nazi regime, have led military historians like Professor Robert Citino to form a profoundly negative opinion on Guderian’s character. “He had been given a vast estate in occupied Poland—that obviously meant the Polish inhabitants had been evicted from it—and this was a man thoroughly wedded to the regime, still receiving large bribes from the Third Reich up to the very last moments
of the war. And so I would say he’s a relatively unsavoury character and his unsavouriness only came out by the diligent work of large numbers of historians in the decades following the Second World War. As a field commander, if I were asked to take an objective—City B—and here are your forces, and who would you like to carry out the manoeuvres, I might still call Heinz Guderian—wherever he is in the hereafter—and see if we could work out some terms. As an arbiter of what is right and wrong and the notion that there still can be morality even in wartime, he’d be the last person I’d call.”
³²

But mere self-interest doesn’t fully explain Guderian’s motives in serving Hitler as Chief of Staff of the German army. Nor does the effect of any lingering “charisma” Hitler may still have possessed offer an explanation—as we have seen, Guderian was immune to this aspect of Hitler’s leadership and had lost his job back in December 1941 in large part because he was prepared to argue with the Führer. The chief reason Guderian carried on supporting Hitler to the extent he did was surely because, as he puts it in his memoirs, “the Eastern Front was tottering on the edge of an abyss from which it was necessary to save millions of German soldiers and civilians. I should have regarded myself as a shabby coward if I had refused to attempt to save the eastern armies and my homeland, eastern Germany.”
³³

Not that, as Professor Citino says, one should take at face value everything Guderian says in his memoirs. His protestations about his extreme distaste at having to serve on the “Court of Honour” and persecute his colleagues ring false. Much more sincere is his anger directed at the perpetrators of the bomb plot. Guderian felt it was doomed to fail even if Hitler had died. This was because, above all else, Guderian was focused on the looming problem of the Soviet advance—and here he has a point, since the conspirators had no more idea how to extricate Germany from the war against Stalin and prevent the Soviets taking revenge for their suffering than Hitler did.

By now, it was this fear of what the Red Army might do that dominated the minds of many Germans. “Children,” the popular soldiers’ saying went, “enjoy the war—the peace will be dreadful!”
³⁴
And just three months after the failed bomb plot Germans gained an insight into how the new occupiers of their country might behave when Soviet troops moved on to German soil in East Prussia. On 20 October 1944, the Red
Army captured the small town of Nemmersdorf and committed a series of atrocities. The exact scale of the crimes committed at Nemmersdorf has been debated ever since,
³⁵
but the fact that the Red Army murdered civilians and raped women is not in doubt. Colonel-General Reinhardt, for example, visited the area on 25 October and wrote to his wife the next day, “The Bolsheviks had ravaged like wild beasts, including [the] murder of children, not to mention acts of violence against women and girls, whom they had also murdered.”
³⁶