The next day, Rommel wrote an assessment of the western front for Hitler. This warned that the Allies would soon break through rapidly all the way to the German border. The paper ended with the words, ‘I must request you, mein Führer, to draw the conclusions from this situation without delay. Rommel, Field Marshal.’ After Rommel handed over the message for dispatch, he said to Speidel, ‘I have given Hitler one more chance. If he does not draw the necessary conclusions, we shall act.’
On 17 July, during their meeting at the headquarters of Panzer Group West, Rommel asked Eberbach for his views on the situation when they were alone. ‘We are experiencing the overwhelming disaster of a war on two fronts,’ Eberbach replied. ‘We have lost the war. But we must inflict on the western Allies the highest possible casualties to bring them to a ceasefire and then prevent the Red Army from breaking through to our Germany.’
‘I agree,’ Rommel replied, ‘but can you imagine the enemy engaging in any negotiations with us so long as Hitler is our leader?’ Eberbach had to accept the point. ‘So things cannot continue as they are,’ Rommel continued. ‘Hitler must go.’ The panzer divisions were desperately needed on the eastern front. In the west they would withdraw to the Siegfried Line while trying to negotiate.
‘Would it not then lead to a civil war,’ Eberbach asked, ‘which is worse than anything else?’ This was the great fear of most officers. It brought back memories of November 1918 and revolutionary uprisings in Berlin, Munich and the mutiny of the fleet in Wilhelmshaven. An hour later, Rommel suffered a fractured skull during the attack by Spitfires near Sainte-Foy-de-Montgommery. He had no idea that an assassination was planned for three days later.
Attempts on Hitler’s life had been made before, but they had failed through bad luck.[45] Hitler had evaded death by changing his movements at the last moment, almost as if he had a feral sixth sense. Yet the plotters faced a more fundamental problem of which they seemed to be unaware: what would be the attitude of the Allies?
The British were far from convinced that removing Hitler would be an advantage. His direction of military affairs since just before the Battle of Stalingrad had been disastrous for the Wehrmacht. Six weeks before D-Day, 21st Army Group summed up the position: ‘The longer Hitler remains in power now, the better are Allied chances.’ Yet during June, there was a subtle shift. ‘The Chiefs of Staff,’ Churchill was informed, ‘were unanimous that, from the strictly military point of view, it was almost an advantage that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy, having regard to the blunders that he has made, but that on the wider point of view, the sooner he was got out of the way the better.’ Special Operations Executive took this pronouncement as a green light to start planning Operation Foxley, their own assassination attempt on Hitler. The idea was to ambush Hitler near the Berghof, but it was never seriously pursued. Hitler had in any case left Berchtesgaden, never to return, but, more importantly, Churchill became convinced that this time Germany had to be utterly defeated in the field. The Armistice in November 1918, and the consequent failure to occupy Germany itself, had provided the opportunity for the stab-in-the-back myth among nationalists and Nazis. They had convinced themselves that the German Army had been betrayed at home by revolutionaries and Jews.
In 1943, Stalin had cancelled his own plans to assassinate Hitler, although for rather different reasons.[46] After Stalingrad, the Soviet Union no longer faced defeat, and he had suddenly begun to fear that if Hitler were removed, the western Allies might be tempted to come to a separate peace with Germany. There is absolutely no evidence that this was ever considered, but right up to the end of the war Stalin, who tended to judge others by himself, was haunted by the idea of a Wehrmacht rearmed by American industry, turning back the victorious advance of the Red Army. In fact, Churchill and Roosevelt were totally committed to the principle of forcing unconditional surrender on Germany.
Stauffenberg, Tresckow and most of their comrades might be considered naïve for expecting the western Allies to enter into negotiations on the death of Hitler. Their planning and preparation were also astonishingly amateur, when one considers their general staff training. A few had been early admirers of Hitler, until they were forced to face the criminal reality of the regime. Yet nobody can cast doubt on their courage and self-sacrifice. They longed somehow to preserve their idealized image of Germany, a high-minded, less nationalistic version of the pre-1914 Wilhelmine era. And they may have hoped to save family estates from Soviet destruction, although they probably recognized it was far too late. Their overriding motive, however, had become a moral compulsion. They knew that there would be very little popular support for this act, so they and their families would be treated as traitors by everyone, not just the Gestapo. The chances of success were slim. But, as Stauffenberg put it, ‘Since the generals have up to now managed nothing, the colonels have now to step in.’ It was their duty to attempt to salvage the honour of Germany and the German Army, despite the danger of laying down another stab-in-the-back legend for the future.
During his interrogation by Allied intelligence officers at the end of the war, General Walter Warlimont described events in East Prussia on 20 July. The midday situation conference took place as usual in the long wooden hut. Hitler entered at about 12.30. The room was bare save for a few chairs and a heavy oak table twenty feet long which ran the length of the room. Among those present were Field Marshal Keitel, Generaloberst Jodl, General Warlimont, General Buhle, Gruppenführer Fegelein and Hitler’s adjudants: General Schmundt, Admiral von Puttkamer and Oberstleutnant von Below.
General Heusinger, representing the chief of the army general staff, had begun his briefing when Stauffenberg entered. He was the chief of staff of the Replacement Army, the Ersatzheer. Stauffenberg, according to Warlimont, was carrying a ‘strikingly large briefcase’, which he placed under the oak table not far from Hitler, who had his back to the door. Because of the briefing, nobody noticed that Stauffenberg left the room a few minutes later.[47]
At 12.50 hours, ‘There suddenly occurred a terrific explosion which seemed to fill the whole room in dust, smoke and fire, and throw everything in all directions.’ When Warlimont recovered his senses, he saw Hitler being ‘led backwards through the door, supported by several attendants’. Casualties were remarkably few, only because the blast was dissipated through the windows and the thin walls. Hitler had been saved by Stauffenberg’s failure to arm the second bomb and by the heavy oak table support between the briefcase and him when the explosion took place.
At first, suspicion focused on the Organisation Todt workers, but during the early afternoon, a sergeant on the staff mentioned that Oberst von Stauffenberg had arrived with a briefcase and had been seen to leave without it. He had flown back to Berlin.
Stauffenberg, convinced that nobody could have survived the blast, had driven straight to the airfield. Meanwhile, a garbled message from a co-conspirator at the Wolfsschanze left the conspirator generals waiting in Berlin in a terrible state of uncertainty. They had congregated at the Bendlerblock, the headquarters of the Replacement Army in the Bendlerstrasse. Nobody knew for sure whether the bomb had gone off or not, or whether Hitler was alive or dead. Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm, the commander of the Replacement Army, refused to trigger the coup with the codeword ‘Valkyrie’ until he was sure that Hitler was dead. Without his certain elimination, a coup d’état stood virtually no chance of success.
45
Resistance within the army and plans to remove Hitler began with the Sudeten crisis of 1938. Attempts to kill him also included a failed attempt by a Swiss theology student in 1938 and the Bürgerbräu-Keller explosion of 8 November 1939 by a left-wing Swabian joiner acting alone. Most attempts, however, involved the military resistance. Speidel was part of a plan to seize Hitler at Poltava in February 1943, just after the Stalingrad disaster. Another planned attack failed to take place a month later. Then a bomb was put on Hitler’s Condor aircraft but failed to go off. A third attempt that month, with Gersdorff detonating a suicide bomb, again failed because Hitler changed his programme at the last moment. Another three plans in December 1943 and in the spring of 1944 also came to nothing.
46
The NKVD directorate under General Sudoplatov planned several attempts to kill Hitler, including one at Vinnitsa in the Ukraine, and another in Germany with an ex-boxer called Igor Miklashevsky and the composer Lev Knipper, the brother of the actress Olga Chekhova. None of these ever came close to being activated.
47
The two bombs, only one of which Stauffenberg had time to arm, used British fuses. These had been dropped by SOE to a Resistance group in France, and later captured by the Germans. They had then been passed on to the conspirators by a supporter within the Abwehr in September 1943. Stauffenberg had gone with his bomb to Rastenburg twice before, on 6 July and 15 July, but the right opportunity did not arise.