Doomed conspiracy

In the summer of 1944 the Second World War entered its final phase. On all the frontlines of Europe and Asia, the Nazi coalition countries were switching to defensive operations. The times of dizzy military successes had sunk into oblivion, for both Germany and Japan. The withdrawal of Italy from the war marked a crisis of the Axis. Many German political and military leaders more and more often pondered on how to get out of this situation with minimal losses. That Hitler must be removed had been clear even before, but it is after the Allies’ Teheran Conference that Germany most acutely faced the problem of seeking a way out of the catastrophic situation.

UNTIL A FULL AND UNCONDITIONAL VICTORY

The term “unconditional surrender” was first brought into political use by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a communiqu they signed in January 1943 in Casablanca. Previously, this term applied to the surrender of the Confederate Army in the US Civil War of 1861—1865.

This was a novelty in international relations and in the rules of ending wars and conflicts. By this formula, the WWII Allies undertook not to sign any treaties or agreements with the governments of Germany and Japan. It was specifically noted that the winners would not consider their enemies as a party to future peace negotiations.

Incidentally, the USSR did not immediately accept this formula. Joseph Stalin was meticulously asking Roosevelt at the Teheran Conference about this formula and about how the president was going to hold peace talks with German envoys after the end of hostilities. Although the US president answered in rather broad terms, the USSR joined its allies after this conference.

The Moscow Conference of the foreign ministers of the USSR, the US, and the UK resolved in October 1943 to establish the European Advisory Commission (EAC), a standing body of the main World War II allies, which began to function in London in December 1943. It drafted instructions on the unconditional surrender of Germany, which were confirmed by the three countries’ governments.

Although German propaganda interpreted the term “unconditional surrender” as proof of the Allies-planned destruction of the German people, the leaders of the anti-Hitler coalition repeatedly stated that they fought the Nazi regime, not the German people. Stalin said in February 1942: “Historical experience says that Hitlers come and go but the German people and state remain.” Churchill noted in his speech on June 30, 1943: “We, the United Nations, demand from the Nazi, Fascist, and Japanese tyrannies unconditional surrender. By that we mean that their power to resist must be completely broken and that they must yield themselves absolutely to our justice and mercy… It does not mean, and never can mean, that we are to stain our victorious arms by inhumanity or by mere lust of vengeance…”

The Big Three conference in Teheran in November–December 1943 caused a shock in the ruling circles of Germany. Everybody was very well aware that the time to make decisions was running out. The “unconditional surrender” formula had already been applied to Italy, which did not augur well for Germany. Especially excited were those who were in secret opposition to the Hitlerite regime. What also speeded up the conspiracy was the ever-worsening frontline situation.

After the surrounding of Field Marshal Paulus’s 6th Army near Stalingrad and the fiasco of the German summer offensive near Kursk, the Red Army command took up the initiative on the Soviet-German front. The allied landing in Sicily, further advance on the Apennine Peninsula, and the subsequent withdrawal of Italy from the war made it possible for the Anglo-American troops to break through to Austria, the Balkans, and southern Germany. It was absolutely clear that, in spite of being engaged in the Pacific Theater of Operations, the Americans could still focus on Europe. The second front was a matter of time. And the point is not where it would be—in Italy, the Balkans, or France. Germany would very soon encounter a four-million-strong allied grouping in addition to a seven-million-strong Soviet one. Obviously, the prospects are not exactly rosy.

And while the military side of the situation in Germany looked bleak, the economic situation was even harder. Although the entire European industry was still under German control, a raw-material crisis was in full swing. Besides, there was a shortage of skilled workers and engineers. European Gastarbeiter could replace the Germans in agriculture, but the attempts to use higher-skilled French and Belgian workers in the German industry ended in a fiasco.

In spite of German accuracy and strict control, sabotage became a matter of daily occurrence. The output of armaments had reached its peak, but the battlefield demanded more and more. The financial situation was no better. Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American companies refused to be paid in German marks and, instead, demanded that payments be made in a harder currency, i.e., the dollar. Delayed payments caused problems in the supply of important components and ball-bearings for tanks and aircraft. Germany had to transfer dozens of tons of gold to Zurich banks, but these funds only sufficed until mid-1944.

SIX MAIN PARTICIPANTS IN THE ANTI-HITLER PLOT

German generals took a hostile attitude to Hitler after the assassination of Gen. Kurt von Schleicher during the so-called Long Knives Night. The seed of the July 20, 1944, plot was sown as far back as 1937, when Hitler first disclosed to his generals the plans of capturing Western Europe and the USSR. All the military, including the then ground forces commander-in-chief Col.-Gen. Werner von Fritsch, opined that such a war would be a reckless scheme because Germany was not prepared for one.

Then Hitler said to Rudolf Hess: “Generals are my weak point. They are all conspiring against me. I will have to fight them as if they were enemies—either I will beat them or they will beat me.”

In 1938, when Hitler announced the forthcoming capture of Czechoslovakia, Gen. Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Army General Staff, said in a memorandum: “Attacking Czechoslovakia will spark a conflict with Britain and France. This will result not only in a military defeat but also in an overall catastrophe.” Hitler was guffawing, as he was reading this. Beck had to offer his resignation.

Beck resolutely got down to organizing the Resistance Movement, which comprised Gen. Franz Halder who replaced him in his office, Abwehr (military intelligence) chief Adm. Wilhelm Kanaris, Berlin police president Wolf Helldorg, former Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, and many others most of whom were medium-level commanding officers. At first, the physical liquidation of Hitler remained a moot point. The plotters planned a putsch in Berlin, with Hitler just to be removed from power.

The Munich Agreement thwarted these plans, for Czechoslovakia surrendered without offering any resistance. Capturing Poland and a number of Western European countries boosted Hitler’s popularity in the army so much that the plotters had to lie low. The Berlin police vice-president Schulenburg had devised a scheme to kill Hitler during a parade in Paris, but the parade was canceled. This was a time of hopelessness and despair for the plotters, which was increasingly bringing them to the idea that they would be unable to change the destiny of Germany unless they killed Hitler.

Although most of the generals took a dim view of the F hrer, they confined themselves to telling jokes about the private soldier (Hitler’s rank in the WWI-time German army—Ed.) in their inner circle. All the more so that, after resounding victories, Hitler did not stint on decorations, ranks, and cash awards.

But as soon as in late 1942 senior army officers were very well aware of the real situation which was in fact a stalemate. Jokes and chats gradually gave way to discussing the eternal question: what is to be done?

The answer was all too obvious. If the Allies did not want to deal with Hitler, he had to be liquidated, a new government formed, and peace negotiations immediately launched, while the German troops were still in Belarus, Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Balkans, and on the English Channel shore. It was also clear that nobody would speak to Wehrmacht generals, so one must look for the civilians with whom the Allies would agree to negotiate.

EAST OR WEST?

The civilian plotters did not represent one organization. They were different, very often ideologically opposed, people,

A group of young intellectuals rallied around the scions of the two most renowned German aristocratic families: Count Helmut von Moltke, a relative of the field marshal who brought the Prussian army to victory over France in 1870, and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, the direct descendant of a Napoleon-era famous Prussian general.

The “Kreisau Circle,” thus called after Moltke’s mansion in Silesia, became a debate club. It comprised two Jesuit priests, two Lutheran pastors, conservatives and liberals, socialists, rich landowners, former trade union leaders, professors, and diplomats. In spite of different persuasions, they managed to work out a joint broad-based platform which allowed them to espouse the philosophical and political ideas of resisting Hitler.

Judging by the available documents, they planned to form a new government and lay the economic, social, and spiritual groundwork for new society based on Christian socialism. But these young people were extremely passive. They hated Hitler but did not try to overthrow him. The society members believed that the oncoming defeat of Germany would solve this problem, so they focused on what had to follow it.

Carl Goerdeler, a prominent figure in the right-wing German National People’s Party, at first took a positive attitude to the Nazis’ coming to power, thinking that only a strong-arm government can stabilize the political and socioeconomic situation in the country. He was the Reich Price Commissioner in 1934–1935 and the mayor of Leipzig in 1930–1937. He stood down in protest against demolishing the monument to the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Goerdeler gathered a group of oppositionists, including Johannes Popitz, the Prussian minister of finance; a well-known diplomat Ulrich von Hassel; and the economist Paul Lejeune-Jung. This group intended to appoint Goerdeler as chancellor, von Hassel as foreign minister, and Lejeune-Jung as minister of economics after the coup.

These plotters followed a hard anticommunist and right-wing line. They intended to negotiate with Britain and the US only. In April 1942 Goerdeler met in Stockholm the banker Jacob Wallenberg whom he tried to persuade to see Churchill and receive assurances from him that the Allies would make peace with Germany if Hitler were overthrown. Wallenberg rejected the mission, for was sure the British government would never accept this.

Two months later, Hans Schoenfeld of the German Evangelic Church’s foreign relation department and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer met the Anglican bishop George Bell who was informed about the plotters’ plans. Once back in Britain, the bishop told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden about the meeting. There was no reaction from the British side.

The plotters were in contact with Allen Dulles, a US Office of Strategic Services operative, via Hans Gisevius, the vice-consul in Zurich. But no encouraging news came from Washington, either.

The military members of the plotters’ group took an unprecedented step. They began to send information on the Wehrmacht’s plans to the enemy through the trusted agents of Adm. Kanaris’s Abwehr. Maj.-Gen. Friedrich Olbricht, chief of the General Army Office at the Army High Command, established transfer of information to Switzerland via the officers who sympathized with the plotters, official couriers, and through Abwehr and Wehrmacht radio stations.

All the information would ultimately reach Rudolf Roessler, a British and Swiss intelligence agent in Lucerne. Later, the Soviet intelligence group of Sandor Rado (“Dora”) would also come into contact with him. It is from Roessler that the Soviet command learned about Germany’s plans to conduct a campaign in the summer of 1943, including Operation Citadel in the vicinity of Kursk.

The information was transferred incredibly fast. In some cases, top secret German news reached Switzerland and then the Allies within fewer than 24 hours after the Reich’s top military and administrative leadership had made a decision to this effect. The military did it deliberately. “It will be horrible if Germany suffers a defeat in the war,” Abwehr chief Kanaris said, “but it will be even more horrible if Hitler wins.” A military debacle of Germany was desirable because this would speed up the removal of Hitler.

Along with the pro-Western group, there was a more liberal wing of the conspirators, the so-called young ones. An alternative version of the prospective German government included Julius Leber, a former Social Democratic Reichstag member; and Wilhelm Leuschner, a trade union activist and former interior minister of Hesse. This wing was in fact led by Col. Claus von Stauffenberg.

This part of the plotters’ group saw the former ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, as foreign minister in the future government. He came from an old noble family that dated back to the crusader knight Werner von der Schulenburg. The Saxon chamberlain Baron Heinrich von der Schulenburg was elevated to Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1786. His son Ludwig entered Russian service and retired in the rank of major-general. The Russian branch of the count’s family was formally attached to Chernihiv gubernia.

The Moscow ambassador, Friedrich von Schulenburg, was educated in the spirit of German-Russian friendship. He favored close ties with the USSR. In early May 1941, there was a meeting between him, the embassy advisor, Soviet intelligence agent Gustav Hilger, the Soviet ambassador to Germany, Vladimir Dekanozov, who was in Moscow at the time, and Vladimir Pavlov, chief of the Central European Department at the USSR People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. Schulenburg said that he had had a conversation with Hitler on April 28 and that a war between the USSR and Germany would begin in the second half of June.

This was a very risky step for the German career diplomat. The German ambassador took into account that Dekanozov had been an NKVD deputy chief before assuming his Berlin office and hoped that he would report on this meeting personally to Stalin. This is exactly what happened, but the Soviet leader did not believe that such a high-ranking diplomat could in fact resort to high treason and reveal a very sensitive state secret to the enemy. Stalin did not believe Schulenburg as well as many others.

Schulenburg regarded the war, which really began soon, as his personal tragedy. He joined the plot without any hesitations and agreed to negotiate peace in the future. After the liquidation of Hitler, the count intended to cross the Soviet-German frontline with a white flag in hand and implore Soviet leaders to agree to a ceasefire and negotiate with the new German government.

This so-called eastern part of the plotters’ group pinned its hopes on an agreement with Moscow. To this end, under the influence of the Social Democrats Leber, Leuschner, and Adolf Reichwein who was the curator of a folklore museum in Berlin, and in spite of Goerdeler’s warnings, Stauffenberg agreed to establish contact with the Communist underground in Germany. Although Stauffenberg himself was taking an anticommunist stand, he considered it necessary, first of all, to negotiate with the USSR about the future. And in this case the local Communists, on whom Moscow relied, were indispensable.

The colonel himself did not attend the secret meeting on June 22, 1944. The plotters were represented by Leber and Reichwein. Their Communist interlocutors introduced themselves as Franz Jacob, Anton Saefkow, and Rambow. The Communists knew quite a lot about the conspiracy, but they wished to see the military masterminds. But Stauffenberg also ignored the next meeting on July 4. Goerdeler had good reason to warn him that the Communist underground was crawling with Gestapo agents, the “people of victory,” as Heinrich Mueller, a great aficionado of NKVD interrogation techniques, called them. He had been briefed on these techniques in February 1940 at a Gestapo—NKVD conference in Krakow, devoted to combating Polish guerrillas. The German participants admitted the NKVD’s superiority and greater professionalism in interrogations and tortures.

As soon as Reichwein came to the July 4 meeting, he, as well as Jacob and Saefkow, were arrested, while Rambow turned out to be a Gestapo agent-provocateur. Leber was arrested the next day. All four—Leber, Reichwein, Jacob, and Saefkow—were executed. Stauffenberg was profoundly shocked at the arrest of Leber, a close friend of his, and it was immediately clear to him that all the plotters were facing fatal danger. The arrest of Leber and Reichwein prompted the plotters to take immediate actions.

ILLUSIONS

The conspirators were fatally unlucky. The bomb planted on Hitler’s airplane failed to go off. At the Wolf’s Lair, Stauffenberg’s briefcase was pushed off in the last minute, and the Fuehrer remained alive. The military part of the plot was largely thwarted, because its chief executor, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of the Army Group B in France, was wounded on July 17, 1944, when his car was strafed by a British plane. He was sent to his Ulm home in a very grave condition and, naturally, could render no assistance to the conspirators.

In the long run, the tragedy of the anti-Hitler plotters was not in the failure to liquidate the F hrer. The plotters met a terrible fate: almost all of then were either shot or executed after horrid tortures. The main problem was that nobody was going to negotiate with them no matter whether the attempt would succeed or fail.

Carl Goerdeler planned to keep a major part of the conquered lands intact rather than return to the 1937 German borders. In the plotters’ opinion, the new borders were to coincide with those of before World War I, and Germany was to include Alsace and Lorraine, as well as the “Polish corridor” with Danzig (Gdansk). They also intended to retain the Anschluss with Austria and to annex the Italian Tyrol populated by ethnic Germans and Austrians. It is rather unlikely that General Charles de Gaulle and the London-based Polish government in exile could accept this.

In May 1944 Col.-Gen. Ludwig Beck sent a memorandum to Allen Dulles in Switzerland through Gisevius in which he unveiled a fantastic plan: in the west, German generals pull their troops back within the German borders after the invasion of the Anglo-American forces (the landing in Normandy occurred on June 6, 1944—Author); in the east, the frontline is kept within the bounds of the Danube delta, the Carpathians, the Vistula, and Memel (Klaipeda). Incidentally, this Lithuanian city was to remain as part of Germany.

Beck urged the western Allies to conduct three combat operations: to drop three airborne divisions in the vicinity of Berlin to help the plotters capture the capital, to land major seaborne units onto the German coastline near Hamburg and Bremen, and to land a large force in France by crossing the English Channel. Meanwhile, the anti-Nazi-minded troops would capture Munich and its environs and surround Hitler in his mountain retreat Obersaltzberg. It is surprising that quite experienced German army officers should have drawn up such fantastic plans. The Allies had to make a Herculean effort to land a force on the Normandy coast, not very far from Britain, but how could they do the same on a remote and well-defended coast of Germany? Dulles announced on his part that there would be no separate peace.

Soviet propaganda created a legend that the Allies negotiated with the plotters behind the USSR’s back, with Dulles playing the main role. As a matter of fact, he and his elder brother John Foster, the Secretary of State in the Dwight Eisenhower administration (1953–1959), were the somber cult figures of Soviet propaganda. So many things were ascribed to them, especially visceral anticommunism.

That both of them were adversaries of communism does not at all mean that they wanted to keep Hitler and German militarism intact. Besides, one should not overestimate the degree of the brothers’ influence on the shaping of Washington’s political course. Both of them were not very high-placed officials at the time—they only followed the orders and instructions of other people. They began to determine US policies very much later, in the 1950s.

The goals of the anti-Hitler plot fundamentally differed from the intentions of the Western Allies and the USSR. Neither Moscow, nor Washington, nor London was interested in the success of the conspiracy. For if there was a new anti-Nazi government in Germany, they would not be able to demand unconditional surrender. This was not part of the Allies’ plans for a number of reasons.

Stalin wanted to invade Europe and establish puppet regimes there. Besides, he would not have been happy with the 1937 borders, which meant ceding the territories gained under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. No less acute was the Balkan question. Moscow had already drawn up plans to establish a pro-Soviet federation of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania with Josip Broz Tito and Georgy Dimitrov at the head. But, to do so, the Red Army was to reach the banks of the Danube instead of stopping in Belarus, Ukraine, or the Baltic countries. It was also important to reinforce the Soviet-Finnish border again. So Moscow had no reason whatsoever to discuss the plotters’ likely peace proposals.

Still less interested were the USSR’s Western allies. Washington was heading for worldwide hegemony, so the existence of an uncontrolled and territorially integral Germany would have been an obstacle on this way. Germany needed to be weakened as much as possible economically, politically, and militarily, while the conspirators’ proposals absolutely did not fit in with this pattern. Besides, the USSR had not yet shown its true aggressiveness, and nobody across the ocean regarded the Soviet ally as a future enemy. Nobody was so far going to use Germany as a barrier to Soviet expansion. Washington needed the Soviet ally in the war against Japan. Stalin’s territorial claims were considered quite acceptable. The face-offs over the Polish question, Trieste, Greece, and Yugoslavia were still in the future. In any case, the Roosevelt administration was convinced that a modus vivendi with Stalin would be found.

As for London, it was loath even to hear about preserving the territorial integrity of Germany. Churchill had already worked out plans to partition Germany into five states, which he would unveil at the Big Three’s Yalta Conference. The British government considered it necessary to establish a strict occupational regime in Germany.

On May 24, 1944, the US State Department sent a memorandum to the USSR Embassy in Washington. The Soviet side was notified that “US representatives in Switzerland were recently approached by two emissaries of a German group with a proposal that the Nazi regime be overthrown” (one of them was General-Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch—Author).

The list of the group included Gerd von Rundstedt, Halder, Zeitler, Goerdeler, et al. The memo went on to say: “The group will be able to wield sufficient influence on the German army to force the generals who command in the West to stop resisting the Allied landings as soon as the Nazis have been ousted. The condition by which this group agrees to act is that it should deal direct with the United Kingdom and the United States after overthrowing the Nazi regime. As a precedent for excluding the USSR from all negotiations, it gave the example of Finland which they claim used to deal with Moscow only.”

The memo concludes that “the US representative (Allen Dulles—Author) declined the proposals and confirmed that the demand for unconditional surrender still remains in force.”

It was an anti-Hitler, not anti-German, coalition. The liquidation of Hitler would have removed the cornerstone from under it. Neither London, nor Washington, nor Moscow needed this. Incidentally, as far as it is known, Moscow had never notified the allies about its contacts with the enemy. And there were things to notify of. Joachim Ribbentrop said at the Nuremberg Trial that he had established contacts with Soviet diplomats in Stockholm. The judges and prosecution attorneys did not dwell on this subject, but this statement was still recorded. It is quite possible that the attempt of Soviet propaganda to accuse the Allies in holding separate talks with German representatives was aimed at concealing similar actions of the USSR.

Col. Stauffenberg and his like-minded associates were heroes of the German Resistance. Their personal gallantry deserves admiration. It is quite natural that streets and squares in German cities have been named after them. It is their ill luck, not fault, that they were doomed to failure.

History knows no conditional mood. But in any case, regardless of the outcome of the attempts to assassinate Hitler, the 1944 plot was doomed. Wehrmacht generals should not have hesitated: they should have disposed of the F hrer in 1937–1938 before he set the world on fire. And now that their country was on the verge of a military defeat, the leaders of the countries that fought against Germany were not interested in the success of the plot. The complete and unconditional surrender of Germany and its allies was the only option that was left. The war in Europe was to end with the fall of Berlin.