Posted on 07/20/2014 10:25:50 AM PDT by WXRGina
This week marks the 70th anniversary of a plot whose success might well have spared millions of lives, while claiming that of history’s most infamous mass-murderer, Adolf Hitler.
The elaborate conspiracy centered on Claus von Stauffenberg was the most well-prepared and organized attempt to put an end to Hitler, but it was scarcely the first. The number of serious attempts on Hitler’s life would fill a book and indeed have; Roger Moorhouse’s Killing Hitler (2006), for example, covers the ground of several such attempts from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933, at which time his security detail was remarkably small and haphazard. Early, amateurish attempts, however, put him on his guard and before the Second World War had begun, Hitler never moved anywhere without a phalanx of security. Weaknesses in his security were nonetheless identified and exploited by attempted assassins –– yet fortune favored Hitler.
Thus, one of the most remarkable attempts on Hitler’s life was carried out in November 1939, just weeks into the Second World War. The idea was brilliantly conceived, painstakingly prepared, carried into execution and ought to have succeeded but, because it failed, its author is largely forgotten today. Johann Georg Elser, a carpenter from a humble family of lumber traders, had decided Hitler was a menace to Germany and the world who had to be eliminated. He conceived his plan the previous November in Munich, watching commemorations of Hitler’s abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. This event was a fixture of the Nazi calendar and thus followed a fixed, ceremonial pattern which included Hitler delivering an address in the Bürgerbräukeller.
Elser planned to kill Hitler at the next commemoration during his speech. In the course of the next twelve months, Elserstole gunpowder, obtained a job which gave him access to explosives and detonators, and taught himself the rudiments of their use. He dined nightly at the Bürgerbräukeller, secreting himself upstairs when it closed, and set to work by night, hollowing out a cavity in the pillar beside the dais used by Hitler each year in order to [install] a bomb inside it. Elserin geniously modified a clock to enable him to have a timer that could be set 144 hours in advance, and lined the cavity with cork to conceal the sound of its ticking, before sealing the cavity and sedulously concealing all evidence of his work. He timed the bomb to detonate at 9.20 PM on November 8, 1939, in the middle of Hitler’s speech.
Elser’s bomb worked perfectly, exploding punctually and bringing down the gallery supported by the detonated pillar on the appointed date at 9.20 PM –– except Hitler had altered his schedule, shortened his speech, delivered it early and thus departed the scene 13 minutes earlier. Taken in for questioning at the Swiss border while seeking to cross it, Elser’s possessions were self-incriminating and under interrogation he eventually confessed all. He was kept as a special prisoner until April 1945 when, in the dying days of the war, he was murdered along with other special prisoners warehoused by the Third Reich.
Elser’s attempt was not bettered for nearly the rest of the war. In June 1942 the Polish underground attempted to attack Hitler’s personal train but ended up derailing another. The Soviet leader Josef Stalin sought to assassinate Hitler but, by 1943, as Germany began losing the war, gave up the idea as counter-productive: Hitler’s death might lead to a better-led German war machine or a separate peace with the West. So it fell to the anti-Nazi senior German officers to take matters into their own hands, initially led by General Henning von Tresckow, chief of operations for Army Group Center on the eastern front.
Tresckow was the core of an expanding coterie of officers who had either been repelled by Germany’s paganistic and barbarous turn under Hitler or else had revised their earlier acceptance of it, the more so as Germany’s catastrophic military defeat now loomed. Tresckow did not accept that Germany’s impending defeat obviated the necessity to act against Hitler; millions more innocents would yet die if the war was allowed to take its course. He thought it imperative that decent Germans do what they could to end Hitler and with him the war. A plan for a coup took shape and a clandestine, anti-Nazi cabinet-in-waiting was formed to assume the reins of power when the moment came.
All that remained was to devise the means to dispose of Hitler. Hitler was perpetually secreted in high-security locales; only his lair at Berchtesgarden was relatively lightly guarded and this locale presented obstacles of its own. As to method, poison was out of the question, as all his food was pre-tasted by his doctor, while no-one could usually enter Hitler’s entourage carrying a firearm. The only practicable way to kill Hitler, therefore, was to penetrate the inner circle of the regime and kill him –– and preferably the other most senior Nazi officials, like Himmler and Goebbels –– with a bomb.
Tresckow made two attempts. On the first occasion, in March 1943, he arranged for British-made plastic explosives to be camouflaged in a bottle of Cointreau and placed with Hitler’s luggage on the Fuhrer’s plane, but the bomb failed to detonate; whether the fuse was defective or the extreme cold in the plane occasioned by a malfunctioning heater prevented the bomb from exploding has never been determined. A week later, another conspirator, a senior intelligence officer, Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, volunteered to become a suicide bomber. With explosives placed on his person and equipped with ten-minute fuses, the plan was for him to set the fuses when accompanying Hitler on a scheduled tour of captured Soviet weaponry during the annual Heroes’s Day celebrations in Berlin. But Hitler, due to stay for half an hour, was distracted by who knows what and left after two minutes; Gersdorff had no choice but to beat a hasty path to a lavatory to secretly defuse the bombs. Yet again, luck had saved Hitler. A few months later, in October 1943, Tresckowlost his access to Hitler when he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Second Army and was thus off the scene in the east. His task thereupon devolved upon Claus von Stauffenberg, another aristocratic officer who had been inducted into the conspiracy only months earlier.
Some controversy has surrounded his motives, but the balance of evidence suggests that Stauffenberg’s deep patriotism went hand-in-hand with a strong moral conscience fostered by his devout Catholic upbringing. The potential dissonance between the two had first emerged during Kristallnacht, the Nazi-orchestrated nationwide pogrom against Germany’s Jews on the night of November 9, 1938. His growing revulsion for Nazism had not yet attenuated his sense of duty to his commander-in-chief; he learned of anti-Hitler conspiracies the following year and thought to report the ringleaders, but decided against it. Stauffenberg’s service on the eastern front during 1941-3, however, made him witness to German atrocities; an eyewitness account of one massacre of Jews in the Ukraine that he received in May 1942 might have been a turning point. Revolted, he saw no other outlet at this stage other to seek a transfer, which took him to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, now driven back to Tunisia from Egypt by ascendant Allied forces. There, in April 1943, Stauffenberg was severely wounded in action, losing his left eye, his right hand and all but the thumb, index and middle fingers of his left hand. A long convalescence in Munich brought him into contact with Tresckow and the other officers involved in the anti-Hitler conspiracy.
Stauffenberg could have been invalided out of active service and turned his back on the developing conspiracy. Instead, he returned to duty and rapidly took charge of it. He believed he had been spared for a providential reason and he was a determined man; even with now only one hand, he often insisted on dressing himself and tying his own shoelaces unaided. With his appointment to the Reserve Army in Berlin, he became perfectly placed to advance Tresckow’s assassination and coup plan: to him fell the task of updating Operation Valkyrie, a Hitler-approved emergency plan for deploying Wehrmacht forces at the word of the German High Command to secure the capital in the event on internal revolt or unrest. Stauffenberg altered the plan, its trigger being now the assassination of Hitler.
The lack of an officer with access to Hitler seemed filled when Stauffenberg recruited still another aristocratic officer, Axel von dem Bussche. Bussche was a man of similarly deep conviction and sense of purpose and he agreed to sacrifice himself by arming himself with a bomb and detonating it when he would have an opportunity to embrace Hitler at a formal inspection of the new eastern front winter uniforms at the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfschanze), Hitler’s headquarters in east Prussia. But the new uniform consignment went up in smoke the night before in a British air raid the inspection was postponed and Bussche returned to the front. Before the inspection was rescheduled, Bussche was badly wounded in combat, losing a leg, and was laid up for the rest of the war.
Another of Stauffenberg’s recruits, Captain Ewald von Kleist, volunteered to do the deed when the inspection was rescheduled in February 1944, but Hitler then cancelled the event altogether . Another officer, Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, who offered his services to Tresckow in March 1944, soon had what appeared to be his chance when he accompanied his superior, Field Marshal von Busch, to a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgarden. Breitenbusch, deciding to shoot Hitler with a concealed pistol, arrived at the anteroom with his weapon undetected –– but, at the last minute, he was not admitted to the conference room, being only a junior aide. Hitler again had been saved and the conspirators frustrated.
But then a new door opened: on June 20, Stauffenberg was promoted to full colonel and appointed chief-of-staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Berlin-based Home Army. Stauffenberg’s duties included reporting to Hitler; thus, out of the blue, the chief conspirator himself had suddenly obtained the vital, regular access to the Führer. They had met for the first time two weeks earlier, on June 7, the day after the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Hitler had greeted the decorated and maimed war hero warmly; Stauffenberg withstood the test of having to peer into Hitler’s eerie, penetrating eyes. Far from being mesmerized, he found a void –– “Nothing! ... as if veiled” he later said.
Stauffenberg soon determined that he would have to do the deed himself. No one else seemed up to the task; not co-conspirator, General Helmuth Stieff, who lost had his nerve about carrying in and placing a suitcase containing explosives in one of Hitler’s staff meetings. This changed matters. Stauffenberg’s original intended role had been to orchestrate the coup in Berlin following the assassination and to convince army heads to arrest the Nazi apparatus. This vital role now had to be devolved to others. No one could have guessed the baleful consequences of this development.
Stauffenberg’s first attempt came at Berchtesgarden on July 11, when he brought the British-made explosives and pencil fuses to a meeting with Hitler. But, fatefully, Stieff persuaded him to postpone the attempt, as Himmler was absent, so the opportunity was lost.
Stauffenberg made a second attempt on July 15 when attending a staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair. Preparatory orders for Valkyrie had been issued that morning. No one knows for certain why Stauffenberg did not proceed with the attempt. Whether he lacked the opportunity to set the fuses, whether the attempt was aborted because Goering and Himmler were absent, we are unlikely to ever know. The Valkyrie orders had to be rescinded and the troop movements explained away as a drill; the sort of excuse that can be proffered only once.
Time was running out for the conspirators: two of its members had already been arrested by the Gestapo and could be expected to crack under torture before long and reveal other members. Stauffenberg was keenly aware of the enveloping danger and knew that, on the next occasion, he must not fail. That occasion arrived on July 20, when he again attended a staff meeting at the Wolf’s Lair.
The meeting proceeded, not in the usual cavernous confines of the underground concrete bunker, where the force of the explosion would be greatly multiplied, but in an outdoor wood-and-fiberglass briefing room. Nonetheless, the two plastic explosives concealed by Stauffenberg in his briefcase should have been ample for the job.
During the meeting, Stauffenberg excused himself on the pretext of needing to freshen up and change his shirt. Assisted by his adjutant, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, the three-fingered Stauffenberg put the bombs together behind closed door in an officer’s room, but had only set the fuses for one of these when they were interrupted and Stauffenberg forced to return instantly to the meeting. Thus he returned to the briefing room with only one bomb in his case, primed to explode in ten minutes.
Seated routinely next to Hitler on the pretext of being still somewhat deaf from his injuries in Tunisia, Stauffenberg placed the case only a few feet from Hitler, then left to supposedly make an urgent phone call. This was nothing irregular in meetings of this kind and no suspicions were aroused. Minutes later, the bomb exploded. Stauffenberg witnessed it from a distance and, confident that he had finally succeeded, left in the resultant confusion and boarded his plane back to Berlin to assume command of the coup.
But it had all gone wrong. Before exploding, the briefcase had been moved to the other end of the heavy conference table, behind a thick base affording Hitler some protection. In the explosion, one participant was killed, three more mortally wounded, but Hitler and the rest, though injured in varying degrees, were alive and would survive.
Stauffenberg arrived two hours later in Berlin. Finding no one awaiting him at the airfield, he made his own way to Home Army command, only to find that his co-conspirators had been largely paralyzed by indecision in the absence of definite news from the Wolf’s Lair. The troops had been called out to surround various organs of the state, but otherwise little had been done; the telephone exchanges and radio headquarters had not been seized. Thus, the Nazi hierarchy was able to communicate the news that Hitler was alive and not seriously injured, though Stauffenberg refused to believe it. But it was over. Stauffenberg’s directives were exposed as a coup and countermanded and the conspiracy melted away into impotence. Goebbels, surrounded in the Propaganda Ministry by troops called out by the Valkyrie order, summoned their commander, Major Otto Remer, who thought he was carrying out the Führer’s command, only to be disabused by Hitler’s voice on the end of the telephone Goebbels handed him.
Stauffenberg and his cohorts were surrounded and captured after a brief shoot-out in the Home Army headquarters. His superior and co-conspirator, General Fromm, thereupon arrested Stauffenberg, who had been wounded in the shoulder during the shoot-out, and the others. In a bid to cover his own tracks, Fromm had them shot by firing squad in the early hours of the following morning, though this deed failed to save him from arrest, trial and eventual execution. Staufffenberg’s adjutant Hauften threw himself in front of the bullets intended for Stauffenberg, who was simply shot seconds later. Other conspirators were less fortunate: after conviction in show trials, some 200 were done to death by slow strangulation in Berlin’s Plötzensee prison and thousands more were also killed or dispatched to concentration camps.
The news of the attempt by Stauffenberg and the other German officers stunned and heartened people across Europe. Anne Frank, living for two years in hiding with her family in Amsterdam, wrote in her diary, “I’m finally getting optimistic. Now, at last, things are going well! They really are!” (It was her penultimate diary entry. Two weeks later, her family’s hiding place was discovered and she was deported to her eventual death at Bergen-Belsen).
Stauffenberg’s failure meant that the war in Europe lasted nine further months, with millions of lives lost. Germany itself suffered the worst of its losses; of Germany’s 7.4 million dead in the Second World War, some 4-5 million lost their lives in the last six months. Thus, did a concatenation of chances on occasion after occasion –– personalities, changed circumstances, poor choices, indecision, bad luck –– determine the lives and deaths of millions.
(I was on vacation last week and it was re-read Stephen E. Ambrose week.)
.....; "Wasn't the Arado Ar 234 a jet bomber?"...true but only a light bomber.....I was thinking they would have produced something large that could launch from Germany and have attacked England, North Africa, or Normandy at will....and beyond the allies ability to stop
My Father was in the combat engineers and their bridge across the Rhine was attacked by jets.
He said a nearby anti-aircraft battery claimed to have shot it down but all they knew was that it flew away looking healthy.
Of course it would hinge on when Hitler went down.
There were several brilliant Generals and Admirals who could have greatly turned events around.
Maybe not to win, but could have presented such a threat as to have kept much of Europe in German hands as part of a settlement, leaving a future threat to come...
Marx and Engels were both connected to the Rothchilders who wanted get rid of the Czar and his control of Russia. Both men and the Rothschilds were willing to join in doing such even though their ultimate ends were different.
HA..., I've read fighter pilots accounts like that, by the time you pulled the trigger it was gone.
They said instead they would linger around Nazi Air Fields and when they tried to land the P-51s would pounce.....
I agree with Kirk, in a sense.
The American Revolution was a continuation and extension of the Whig Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whigs were a group of (mostly) nobles and gentry who were basically the heirs of the Roundheads. They believed nobles, gentry and other “free men” had the right to live their lives freely, as they saw fit. The GR to a considerable extent institutionalized these notions in the English system.
America was in an odd situation, because the English class system didn’t really make the trip across the water. The aristos had it pretty darn good in England, and had little motivation to cross. The leading citizens of America, particularly in the South, may have aspired to aristocracy, but by English standards they were at best gentry.
Thus by default the “aristocratic freedom” that was the base of Whig ideology wound up being a “white man’s freedom” in America. Everybody in America expected the freedom that in England was still largely considered as appropriate only for “gentlemen.”
But when America was established, the founding documents didn’t say anything about “white men freedom.” They spoke of “all men,” which be extension over time came to include black men, Indians, women, etc.
All political systems down through history and the revolutions that attempt to overthrow them have had one thing in common: Their purpose is to determine which individual or group gets to dominate and push around everybody else. Till the last century this domination was limited in practice by logistics, but in theory was generally absolute.
Only the American Revolution proposed that no group should be able to dominate the others, that the people should be left alone to live their lives as they saw fit. However imperfectly this principle was at first applied.
That is why I see the American Revolution as both profoundly revolutionary and profoundly conservative. It was revolutionary from the perspective of world history. It was conservative in that it attempted to conserve and in practice extended the revolutionary (whether they realized it or not) of the English Whigs.
Because we ate the apple and decided that we wanted to be like gods, choosing for ourselves what is right and what is wrong, and he honored that decision.
The title proposes the question but the article proceeds to explain that yes, in fact, there were a number of people that tried to kill him. They merely all failed.
It’s curious to imagine what the 20th century would’ve looked like if Hitler hadn’t used the German war machine to attempt such a broad conquest. Say, instead somebody else merely developed Germany into a strong economic power. It’s entirely likely then that the U.S. would not have grown into it’s postwar “superpower” status. The U.S. economy would have been strong and recovered fully from the depression but not explosively so as it did after the war. Germany, undoubtedly would have been the major player in Europe. What would have happened in the USSR? Hard to say... they’d have had many millions more people than they did post-war. It’s kind of imponderable what Stalin would have done differently, if anything.
True, it wasn’t a large bomber. I know it flew over London, but I don’t know whether that was out of a German airbase or not.
That's an amazing statistic and shows what the Germans themselves lost when Hitler survived that briefcase bomb. Also, I wonder if the Germans had surrendered in the summer of '44 would the Russian Army advance had been halted... or would Roosevelt have encouraged them to continue marching Berlin anyway. After all, FDR was madly in love with Stalin.
“It was radical. “
I suppose it depends on how you define it. Russell Kirk describes the American War of Independence as anything but revolutionary. It was waged to retain rights that the colonials believed that they already had and which George III was trampling upon.
The colonials had already been governing themselves and would have happily remained British subjects if George III had butted out.
“America’s War of Independence was “a revolution not made, but prevented,” Kirk explains. Britain’s American colonies had grown accustomed to and rather liked that the mother country had permitted them to govern themselves. Our Founders sought to conserve the societal order that had bestowed the blessings of liberty on the fledgling commonwealths. It was King George, the Founders felt, who was infringing on the “chartered rights of Englishmen.” When our Framers mustered in Philadelphia, they constructed little that was innovative but rather conserved the best of the constitutional bequest from our British heritage. An independent judiciary empowered with a check on the executive and legislative branches was certainly a new creation, but Americans were not caught up in the radical philosophies which were catching fire in and burning down France. Instead of desiring to create some new sentimental egalitarianism, Americans were concerned with preserving the existing order and restating long observed principles of law.”
My dad was in an anti-aircraft artillery battery in WWII, and the first time that they encountered a Luftwaffe jet they knew that they a had a problem.
The electric motors that kept their guns locked on target weren’t fast enough to keep up with the jet. If they were going to shoot one down they were going to have to explode shells ahead of it and hope the jet ran into something.
Fortunately the Germans didn’t have enough jets for them to take advantage of their speed.
There were a number of peace overtures made to the West by senior German military officers. From what I’ve read these all involved surrendering to the West but not to the Soviet Union. All were turned down by FDR who insisted on unconditional surrender. This did have the effect of lengthening the war in Europe.
Not enough jets. Not enough pilots to fly them. Not enough time to train new pilots. Not enough fuel to train the pilots or fly the jets they had.
Germany had the technology and the military know how to conquer and hold Europe if they hadn’t been ruled by a genocidal madman. His destruction of his armies on the Russian front gave the West a chance to defeat him. Of course a leader other than Hitler likely wouldn’t have embroiled the world in a huge war a mere twenty years after the previous one.
How about Margaret Sanger?
By comparison, our forebears went from monarchal subjects in a hierarchal society to republican citizens in a comparative blink of an eye.
Way radical.
I read somewhere that the Birsmarck’s anti aircraft guns had problems with the British Swordfish torpedo bombers because they were so slow.
True...but in the spirit of mass genocide- the Romans were hard to beat.
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