The July 20 Plot Against Hitler
ECKARDT, W. V.
Ten years ago, a group of moderate German civilians and Army leaders attempted to overthrow the Nazis The July 20 Plot Against Hitler By W V Eckardl Shortly after noon on July 20, 1944, a young...
...While the spirit of freedom was never extinct among the German people (as witness the spontaneous student uprising in Munich in the spring of 1943), the issue was never as clear under Nazi rule as it was to East Berliners last summer...
...About this time, in January 1943, the Allied leaders met at Casablanca...
...None of them, least of all Stauffenberg, a Bavarian Catholic, was a "national Bolshevist," as some would have it...
...Hitler's enemies soon realized that there was little hope for a people's rebellion...
...As the war and the conspiracy approached their climax, a few of the conspirators tried to knock at Stalin's door...
...Nor did our war propaganda to Germany help matters...
...Roosevelt is reported to have first uttered the two historic words at a dinner...
...A few days before he died, Stauffenberg sent a message to some of his friends asking if the plot should proceed now that the enterprise seemed to have lost much of its political purpose...
...The men of July 20 were first ready to strike in the early fall of 1933...
...A moderate civilian coalition stood ready to take over the German Government...
...The mysterious Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Hitler's chief of military intelligence, provided the group with his unique facilities and protection...
...The efforts of this group began many years before July 20, 1944...
...Hitler perversely flattered the national pride of his subjects...
...Before each new military adventure, the anti-Nazi generals warned of dire consequences...
...For some months to come, people in the Western democracies largely shared this view...
...Again, Hitler was to be seized during a visit to a command post just before the Nazi tide rolled West, but he suddenly canceled the trip...
...Most of the tradition-conscious German generals did not overly admire their plebeian Fuehrer...
...Ten years ago, a group of moderate German civilians and Army leaders attempted to overthrow the Nazis The July 20 Plot Against Hitler By W V Eckardl Shortly after noon on July 20, 1944, a young Wehrmacht colonel briskly left Hitler's staff meeting to answer a prearranged phone call...
...Since the swastika was raised over Germany, we had been convincing ourselves that only Germany's utter defeat could remove the threat of Nazism...
...It called for the dissolution of Prussia and a federalized Germany as a first step toward European union...
...Had the Fuehrer's war council been held as planned in a concrete underground shelter, world events would have been different...
...They considered Hitler's mad insistence on risking Armageddon for a slice of Czechoslovakia an ideal occasion to secure broad popular support for a revolt...
...As one of the conspirators, General Henning von Tresckow, put it: "The assassination must be attempted at any cost...
...The Army planned to rise as marching orders against Poland were issued, but Hitler's abrupt moves foiled this plan...
...The majority stuck to the alibi that soldiers should never mix in politics...
...But the Allies availed themselves of these secret and dangerous rendezvous primarily to extract intelligence information, not to negotiate...
...he provided employment and good social conditions...
...In totalitarian Germany, the story of the resistance was the story of a struggle for the soul of the Army...
...The German Army, he said, would refuse to fight against Czechoslovakia...
...In 1938, the trade-union leader Wilhelm Leuschner had attempted to organize a railroad strike, but found lethargy and the Gestapo too strong...
...Stauffenberg ardently hoped for the liberation of Russia as well as Germany, and attempted to organize anti - Soviet volunteers among Russian prisoners of war...
...A few more were willing to act once disaster was imminent...
...In addition, our war leaders had the Soviets to consider...
...Only when the Russian victory at Stalingrad heralded disaster were some of them again disposed to listen to the conspirators...
...Secret and separate negotiations with Germans would have given Moscow cause for offense and an excuse to do the same...
...The intent of the resistance, of course, was to save their country, not betray it...
...The civilians elected this man," they would say...
...A former Mayor of Leipzig of moderately conservative views, Friedrich Goerdeler...
...Under cover of night on September 5, 1938, Erich Kordt, German charge d'affaires in London, was let in at the back door of No...
...When he heard the expected explosion, he left the secret headquarters in East Prussia, hopped a waiting plane for Berlin, and, together with his co-conspirators in the German War Office, issued orders to selected Army leaders to break the grip of Nazi tyranny and end World War II...
...Again, the German opposition appealed to the West for understanding...
...Perhaps, as some assert, we fell victim to our own propaganda...
...Now a number of top commanders at the Eastern Front willingly joined in the hectic scheming and plotting...
...A general, Ludwig Beck, an intellectual as much as a soldier, formed the center of the conspiracy...
...By the time the young colonel, Count Glaus Schenk von Stauffen-berg, faced his executioners in the back yard of the War Office later that evening, a badly bruised Hitler was ranting over the radio about the attempt on his life...
...The coup d'etat could succeed only if the British stood firm...
...The only feasible way to end the police state, the German opposition concluded, was to play one of its four supporting pillars off against the others...
...The Fuehrer's luck, if luck it was, had held in the early stages of the war...
...It was easy for Germans to confuse fanaticism and patriotism and to accept the sacrifice of civil liberties for the sake of "national security...
...We were in no mood to credit the German resistance with any significance...
...Hitler's edifice, like those of Mao Tse-tung and Malenkov, was built on the military, the state bureaucracy, the Party and the secret police...
...Even while the diplomats talked, however, Neville Chamberlain was packing for Bad Godesberg...
...Our new Germany will not take revenge on the seduced and misguided...
...Only a Very few wanted to remove the dictator no matter what...
...Let the civilians get rid of him...
...There were three other attempts to remove Hitler before 1944...
...By the time their armies were victoriously deployed from the Bay of Biscay to the Caucasus, they had lost confidence even in their military judgment...
...The men and women of July 20 came from all walks of life...
...10 Downing Street...
...He urged Lord Halifax that the West take an unqualified stand against Hitler's plan to use force...
...But, at the last moment, the generals lost heart...
...The German generals, understandably, vacillated even more...
...Albrecht von Kessel, who survived his resistance activity and is now with the German diplomatic mission in Washington, noted in his diary that the unconditional-surrender formula "jeopardized and possibly destroyed" six years of work by the anti-Nazi opposition...
...The lack of Allied response to the pleas of the resistance was obviously in large part conditioned by public opinion at home...
...Yet, there is abundant evidence that the core of the July 20 conspiracy had no notion of playing off one side against the other...
...The bomb which almost killed Hitler in 1944 was not exploded by a spontaneous uprising like last summer's revolt in East Germany...
...Our aim is: a strong, powerful democratic state sovereign and independent and free of control by other nations...
...The explosion of Stauffenberg's time-bomb, which he had concealed in his briefcase and deposited two yards from Hitler's feet, was dissipated in a flimsy wooden barracks...
...They ended with the torture and death of about 5,000 men and women and the arrest of thousands more...
...A group of deeply religious young intellectuals, who met secretly on the Silesian estate of the lawyer Hell-muth von Moltke, supplied a program...
...Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a young lawyer, smuggled a time-bomb into Hitler's plane on March 13, 1943, but it mysteriously failed to go off...
...Churchill, later in the evening, proposed them as a toast: "Unconditional surrender...
...At any rate, this recipe for total victory provided Goebbels with excellent propaganda ammunition...
...While we made clear to the Germans that they were all, Nazi or not, in the same boat, the Soviets appealed to them through an impressive group of captured German officers, brought together in the Free Germany Committee...
...As Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge explained to the resistance leaders: "The German soldiers and the world would not understand...
...galvanized Catholic and Protestant clergymen, university professors, union leaders, diplomats and civil servants into action...
...In the heat of war and its aftermath, "Nazi" and "German" were often taken as synonymous...
...He insisted that the civilians take over as soon as the Army cleared the decks...
...Compared with this object, nothing matters...
...Their plan, worked out in detail and later related by General Franz Haider at Nuremberg, was for the military to arrest Hitler the minute he issued marching orders...
...The answer was "Yes...
...Hitler blamed the plot on "an extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and criminally stupid officers...
...The appeal was strong at the time...
...They asked in despair, not out of love of his system...
...We must prove to the world that the men of the German resistance movement dared to take the decisive step...
...Voices which bore some of the most famous names in German and Prussian history told the Germans over Radio Moscow: "The Soviet Union does not identify the German people with Hitler...
...There was to be a dramatic generals' strike at the front...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 30
