Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

MANSTEIN: Then you want to kill him?

ME: Yes, Herr Field Marshal, like a mad dog!

At this point Manstein leapt up and ran excitedly around the room shouting, “Count me out! That would destroy the army!”

ME: You said yourself that Germany will go down to defeat unless something is done. The army isn’t the main concern. It’s Germany and the German people.

MANSTEIN: First and foremost, I’m a soldier…

When, after a bit more discussion, I conceded that it was point­less to carry on, I remembered a modest proposal that Kluge had asked me to convey.

ME: Field Marshal Kluge also asked me to inquire whether you would agree to become chief of the army general staff after a successful coup.

Manstein bowed slightly and said, “Tell Field Marshal Kluge that I appreciate the confidence he shows in me. Field Marshal Manstein will always be the loyal servant of a legally constituted government. 43

As it turned out, Manstein had had a similar conversation just a little earlier, in the days following the capitulation in Stalingrad. Visit­ing Count Lehndorff at his castle in East Prussia, Tresckow had met a lieutenant colonel on the general staff named Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and had described to him several vain attempts to win Manstein over. Stauffenberg himself wanted to give it a try, and Tresckow arranged for him to meet Manstein. But then, too, the field marshal merely dodged the issue. In response to Stauffenberg’s reproaches about the impending disaster and the responsibility of highly placed officers to consider the entire picture, Manstein recom­mended only that Stauffenberg have himself transferred to a general staff position at the front, in order to escape “the unpleasant atmo­sphere at Führer headquarters.” Manstein subsequently told close associates that he had had a “very brilliant conversation” with Stauf­fenberg, “but he wanted me to believe that the war was lost.”

Of their meeting, Stauffenberg remarked that, whatever Manstein’s answers were, they “were not the answers of a field marshal.” 44

By 1943 the situation had grown more ominous-and not just at the battle fronts. Almost all the resistance groups sensed a gathering storm. Rumor had it that another Night of the Long Knives was in the offing. 1Both Ulrich von Hassell and Hans von Dohnanyi were tipped off that they were being shadowed everywhere they went. In early March Colonel Fritz Jäger, who played a key role in Olbricht’s coup plans, was arrested on allegations that he was “con­spiring.” Schulenburg also found himself in difficulty after he was reported to have said that he was on the lookout for reliable, young officers for a putsch. Admiral Canaris, too, was feeling the pressure, and when he was asked by a friend from his Freikorps days to save a Dutch Jew from deportation by claiming the man was needed by Military Intelligence-a favor he had occasionally extended in the past-he felt compelled to refuse. Himmler, he said, had informed him that “he knew full well that leading circles in the army were considering plans for a coup. But it would never come to that. He would intervene.” Furthermore, Himmler professed to know who was “actually behind it”—and mentioned Beck and Goerdeler. 2When the first blow fell, however, it was not on these men.

On April 5, 1943, senior judge advocate Manfred Roeder suddenly turned up at Military Intelligence on Tirpitzufer, accompanied by criminal secretary and SS UntersturmFührer Franz Xaver Sonderegger. They asked to be taken to Canaris, to whom they presented papers authorizing both the arrest of special officer Hans von Dohnanyi and a search of his office. He was suspected, they informed Canaris, of numerous currency violations, corruption, and even trea­son. Stunned, Canaris neither objected nor contacted his superior officer, Wilhelm Keitel, though the search order violated all Military Intelligence secrecy regulations. Without a word he led the two agents to Dohnanyi’s office, which was located immediately adjacent lo Hans Oster’s.

Canaris had been warned more than once, most recently that very morning, that trouble was brewing. And in almost every case the fingers pointed at Brigadier General Oster. His anxiety growing, Canaris had ordered that his closest associate immediately dispose of any incriminating documents. Whether Oster failed to realize the urgency of the warning or was simply too busy meeting endlessly with Olbricht, Beck, Gisevius, Schlabrendorff, and Heinz is not known; in any event he did not carry out his orders. In the course of their search Roeder and Sonderegger caught Dohnanyi trying to remove some papers from files that were being seized. When he was prevented from doing so, Dohnanyi was heard whispering “The notes!” to Oster, who also attempted to remove them. As the indictment later stated, Oster was “immediately asked to explain himself and required to produce the notes.” Roeder ordered Oster out of the room and re­ported to his superiors what had happened. As a result, Oster was placed under house arrest, and a few days later he was dismissed from his position at Military Intelligence. Shortly thereafter Canaris called a meeting of department heads and “officially informed them of or­ders to avoid any contact with Oster.” 3

This was a terrible blow to the resistance-the worst it had suf­fered so far. In Schlabrendorff s words, it “lost its managing director.” Gisevius spoke of a “psychological shock” that stunned everyone and left a “conspiratorial vacuum.” Oster explained his admittedly foolish act by saying that he had assumed at first that Dohnanyi meant cer­tain notes coded “U7,” referring to a Military Intelligence operation to spirit Jews out of Nazi-occupied Europe by disguising them as agents. At least as disorienting as Oster’s removal was the fact that, for the first time, the previously inviolable inner sanctums of Military Intelligence had been invaded. To add to the grim news, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested the same day, as were Dohnanyi’s wife, Christine, in Sakrow, near Berlin, Josef Müller in Munich, and another Military Intelligence employee in Prague.

The papers for whose sake Dohnanyi and Oster had risked so much were actually totally unrelated to the U7 operation. They were hardly less compromising, however, and they prompted Roeder to announce triumphantly after reading them, “I’m going to clean up that shop!” 4Most important, one of the seized “notes” contained references to an issue that was becoming of great concern to almost all opponents of the regime, arising repeatedly in the course of their discussions-namely, the relations between the German resistance and the Allies and the possibility of negotiating a last-minute peace agreement.

Since the spring of 1942 the opposition had debated whether the Allies would be willing to negotiate a peace treaty after a coup in Germany and whether that would even be desirable. Some members of the Kreisau Circle in particular opposed any attempts to negotiate such a treaty. With their decidedly religious cast, they felt that Hitler and his minions should be dispatched, metaphorically, to the inferno that had spawned them. But most of the opposition figures agreed, though they might differ on the details, that it was their duty to save as much of the “substance” of Germany as possible from political and moral corruption and now, in the midst of the unprecedented Allied bombing campaign, from outright physical destruction. This group therefore insisted that everything possible be done to contact the Allies. They feared that time was running out: Germany’s remaining bargaining power was quickly evaporating as its military strength de­clined and the ever more dominant Allies forged ahead.