Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (12 page)

These two failures, which occurred a week apart, were not enough to destroy our morale. We knew we could count on one another; that was what mattered. But looking back, I have to admit that Kluge was right. In March 1943, our conspiracy was not yet mature enough to succeed. The simple physical elimination of the Führer would have solved nothing without a well-planned coup d’état. We would only have paved the way for another despot, who might have been still more bloodthirsty. It was in fact highly unlikely that the elite anti-Nazi elements would agree to expose themselves in order to organize the immediate and coordinated reaction required.

When the fighting on the eastern front began, German officers felt that they represented civilization in a battle against a barbarous nation. What is barbarism? First of all, it is a complete disrespect for the rights of individuals, brutality in human relations, savagery in the conduct of everyday life, and finally, indifference to all the attainments of culture and comfort, to everything of beauty that centuries of labor and the progress of the human spirit have produced. These Communists whose agents would not hesitate to shoot soldiers in retreat; these officers without conscience who sent hastily raised ragtag groups of women, old men, and children toward us to be mowed down by our machine guns just to exhaust German munitions; these enemies who systematically executed the wounded, put out the eyes of prisoners, and
didn’t deign even to bury their own dead—they all seemed barbarians to us. We had heard many stories, and we had seen many instances of macabre proof that they were true. But for months now we had also known that the Russians had no monopoly on barbarism: bestiality had taken hold of the SS and their auxiliaries, and even regular soldiers sometimes acted with senseless cruelty. And so we had not only to prevent the Russian steamroller from crushing eastern Europe, but also to curb the SS’s capacity for destruction. This conviction, at first vaguely felt, was quickly confirmed for me.

In the early spring of 1943, when I had just taken command of my battalion, Bettermann, who commanded the artillery group, asked to speak to me privately. He seemed very upset. For two days, on his way back from leave, he had traveled in the same railway car with SS men and men from the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and had had to put up with their endless conversations. The SS men were loudly bragging about having liquidated, in Army Group South’s sector, no less than two hundred fifty thousand Jews. Drunk on brandy, they took pleasure in recounting the massacres, mixing cruel and obscene details. Though he turned away in disgust, my artilleryman still heard that they were soon to move into Army Group Center’s sector to ply their trade there.

I didn’t hesitate for a second; I called Georg on the phone. “I have to see Kluge, immediately!”

“What’s wrong?” Georg asked, astonished by my agitation.

“Major, I’ll tell you later. Nothing to do with the regiment!”

“All right, go ahead,” Georg said, hanging up; he had understood the gravity of the situation by my tone and the official address.

Less than an hour later, I was at headquarters. The marshal saw me immediately, and took what I said very seriously. “We absolutely have to prevent such a catastrophe. Go see Tresckow and take care of it.”

True to his reputation, Tresckow provided the solution to a problem that appeared insoluble. It was impossible to prevent the SD from coming in, or to prevent its members from committing atrocities. The ground had to be cut out from under them; they had to be deprived of the means of conducting roundups. Tresckow therefore ordered all local commandants to prohibit any assembly of citizens within their areas. Without the ability to gather their victims together before putting them into the trucks, the SS would be seriously hindered. In fact, the SD’s anti-Semitic atrocities were more limited in this zone than in others on the eastern front, and especially in the Ukraine. I was able to confirm this when visiting the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem a few years ago.

During a lecture I, along with other members of the German and the French resistances, gave in Paris in January 2004 before a group of secondary school students, a young man asked me, “But why, after all, didn’t you organize other conspiracies? Why didn’t you try again and again?”

“It was wartime!” I replied. “Our primary role, as officers, was to make sure our men survived and returned home.”

It seems to me important to repeat this point here. It is true that our objective was to eliminate the Führer and to overthrow the regime. We were doing our duty, fulfilling our ultimate obligation. But we also had an immediate operational assignment, a responsibility toward the men we commanded that could not be evaded. The eastern
front took virtually all our energy, our concentration, and our physical and psychological capacities. The dates planned for assassination attempts were intertwined with the requirements of the operational calendar. That is why, the day before the Führer visited our headquarters in March 1943, Georg and his men had been far more absorbed in an engagement with guerrilla forces than with the material preparation for the assassination.

In May the cavalry group was still heavily involved in fighting with the partisans around Staiki, between Vitebsk and Orsha. During the retreat, it was one of the few units to remain mobile, while the trucks were floundering in the melting snow, their advance halted by streams that had turned into torrents. Then the regiment was given a supplementary battalion commanded by Captain Bassewitz. Fortunately, the operational necessities left us a few moments for relaxation. In June, for example, we organized an equestrian tournament and a Roman chariot race, with drivers wearing togas.

When we had nothing else to do, we performed intensive training exercises in dismounting to fight on foot
(Absitzen zum Kampf)
. The horses had long since become accustomed to the din of gunfire, the sound of explosions, and the shouts of the combatants; they showed an amazing placidity. But they remained vulnerable to fire. In each battle, the cavalry had to be ready to dismount at short notice, leaving their animals without unsettling brusqueness and handing them over to one of
their comrades who was assigned to take them a few hundred paces toward the rear. Each man responsible for this maneuver, who remained in the saddle, had to be able to hold the bridle of one horse in his right hand and the reins of two more in his left. He would depart at a trot, under the direction of an experienced adjutant, to wait out the fighting in the shelter of a forest or behind a hill. The little group of horses was then brought back to the combatants, sometimes guided by radio when the circumstances of the battle had forced the unit to move. These maneuvers had to be carried out in a few minutes at most. The quality of the training explains why the loss of mounts was minimal—so much so that in 1945, I was able to return home with Moritz and Oter, the horses that had been with me since 1939.

Soon, however, the fighting became more serious. On July 5, 1943, Hitler launched Operation Citadel, which was supposed to reduce or even annihilate the formidable offensive potential the enemy had assembled in the Kursk salient, an area between Army Group Center and Army Group South. The cavalry regiment was to play a decisive role. A visiting fireman, as Field Marshal Kluge wished it to be, the regiment’s mission was to stay continually on the move putting out fires.

On July 12, 1943, eighty Soviet rifle divisions, supported by air cover and 3,500 tanks, counterattacked from the west and north Orel-Briansk panhandle, where large numbers of German troops had been concentrated for the attack on the Kursk salient, farther to the south. Two hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow, the Orel salient, an indentation penetrating into Russian territory, was symmetrical to the Kursk salient, which bulged into the positions held by the Wehrmacht.

Operations briefing, Russia, July 1943. Georg is in the middle; Philipp is at left
.
(photo credit 16.1)

Tresckow foresaw that we would be in danger of being surrounded if the Red Army succeeded in seizing the Orel-Karachev-Briansk railway line. He decided to send one of our battalions to the sector of Tereben, a large village northeast of Karachev. The infantry’s ability to resist was exhausted there, and the line of defense was in the process of collapsing. Georg designated me for the operation. We put our six hundred men on a train camouflaged with whole birch trees, along with 62 light machine guns, 12 heavy machine guns, 1 antitank gun, and 1 antiaircraft gun.

Going ahead of our troops, Georg and I arrived at the command post in Tereben during the night of July 17. We found it in a state of total confusion. Two commandants were arguing over who was to take the initiative. Georg reconciled them by depriving both of any authority over their seven battalions. Then gunshots rang out north of the village. The troops, panicked, began running down the streets. Georg, his pistol in his hand, worked his way up the human stream, managing to turn the flow around and to rally the defenders. The men recovered their courage, but the adversary’s numerical superiority was incontestable. To hold Tereben, we had to temporarily
abandon the defense of the village of Kudrjavez, four kilometers to the southeast. The next day, however, Georg was ordered to retake this village. We had to catch the enemy by surprise. I left with my men at 8:00 a.m. on July 20, went around the village on the west side, continued a few kilometers farther south, and then, suddenly changing direction, headed north and penetrated enemy territory, destroying a Russian supply column on the way. Georg, who had taken up a position north of the village, guided our movements by radio. In two hours, the village had been retaken along with important booty, especially intelligence materials. Our casualties were three dead and twenty-one wounded. The respite was short.

At dawn on July 23, the enemy resumed the offensive. Seven Russian rifle regiments attacked the defense line, which had been hastily set up and was only lightly manned. Georg used his units as emergency reinforcements. When our infantrymen weakened at a point, he brought in one or two detachments of forty cavalrymen who dispersed the Russian infantry, reestablished the line, and then went to deal with another hot spot. The whole defense would no doubt have collapsed had it not been for Georg, who was fighting alongside his troops.

The Third Cavalry Squadron found itself in the worst difficulties. It had lost contact with the troops on its left and right. Reduced in half an hour to 110 men, it seemed doomed to be completely wiped out. Then Georg suddenly emerged from a thicket, accompanied by his driver.
Wearing his forage cap while bullets whistled around his ears and armed only with a pistol stuck into his belt and a stick in his hand, he went to join the head of the squadron. With total composure, he asked for a report on the situation, as if the drama playing out all around him were only a training maneuver. When the men saw him, his obvious assurance was enough to reinvigorate them. Like a teacher, Georg then asked, “All right, now, what would you do? Would you make a frontal attack? Or would you prefer to infiltrate laterally between the two enemy regiments?” The leader of the squadron opted for a frontal advance. Georg took a few moments to think: “Fine, stay here, and don’t give up an inch of terrain; reestablish connection with the unit on your left, and I’ll take care of the rest.” Thirty minutes later, with the squadron placed under his direct command, he attacked the enemy regiment’s flank, forcing a retreat. Georg immediately returned to the Third Squadron and ordered it to resume an all-out offensive in coordination with the lateral attack. The operation worked perfectly. The Russians were driven back. But we had gained only a few hours, because the enemy’s firepower was overwhelming. Soon Tereben was in flames. Our three battalions were much diminished. Two battalions were still more or less able to fight, but exhausted by the incessant battles of the preceding days, they would not hold out for long. The cavalry, which was still operational, saw the number of its able-bodied men cut in half.

By 4:00 p.m. on July 24, we had to face facts and give up Tereben and Kudrjavez. The new objective was the bridge over the Resseta, a little to the west. At the risk of cutting off their own retreat, Georg’s men blew up the bridge at 6:00 p.m. The remaining troops were supposed to move about fifteen kilometers to the southwest along the river, while at the same time protecting the rail line; the Russians pursuing them were threatening to pass them by on the left flank. Between the adversary and the German units there was a marshy area. Here and there little thickets grew on the spongy soil. The rest was a broad marsh, sometimes a meter deep, infested with mosquitoes and leeches. On July 27 we were ordered to attack. In two hours of fierce but prudent fighting, we routed an enemy battalion, capturing dozens of Russian soldiers caught in the watery trap.

By July 29 the situation had been stabilized. We were relieved by two neighboring divisions. Georg and I remained in reserve in the sector until August 8. These two weeks of intense fighting had resulted in a limited number of losses to our unit: 7 percent dead, 29 percent wounded.