Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (14 page)

With Lieutenant Schulte (right) at Patrykozy (fifteen kilometers north of Second Army headquarters at Petrikov), 1944
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(photo credit 18.1)

We covered the 250 kilometers by train. On the night of December 31, 1943, the train stopped in the snow. Not a sound, no one around, no lights—just an icy wind, blowing through the forest powdered with frost. It was 11:30 p.m. The closest German defense posts were more than six kilometers away, and the men were concerned that there might be a mechanical problem. But soon my order was passed from one car to another: all batteries were to be set up to test the cannons. At least, that was the official reason—my boys needed comforting, and this huge fireworks show (as many as twenty-five cannon shots) would please my cavalrymen and dissuade Russian partisans from attacking our convoy. The sector we were entering was desolate. In the tireless struggle against the
partisans infesting the region, the SS had devastated, massacred, and burned down whole villages. Only a few inhabitants were still holed up in cellars.

On January 9, 1944, the battalion was assigned to repel a Russian breakthrough. The squadron commanded by Lieutenant Hidding, which had been sent to the site and entrenched, was supposed to resist, with only 60 men, three squadrons of enemy cavalry equipped with a number of light machine guns and an antitank battery. Russian losses were dreadful but, subjected to a storm of artillery fire, our forces were soon reduced to about 40 individuals. Then I arrived with the two other squadrons. Our counterattack succeeded in less than three-quarters of an hour, thanks to the effectiveness of the machine pistols we had just received. The next day, the fighting favored us less. On the evening of January 10, I radioed Kolodichi to request 150 men to replace those I had lost over the preceding two days. In the Third Cavalry Squadron alone, there were 44 dead. I was wounded again, for the fifth time since the beginning of the war. On January 11, a plane sent by Tresckow evacuated me to the military hospital in Minsk.

Georg’s health and my own became so much a matter of concern that the high command got involved. Georg, whose doctors couldn’t keep him in bed, had started riding again too soon. His wounds had reopened, and the loss of blood nearly killed him. At the suggestion of Field Marshal Ernst von Busch, the new commander in
chief of Army Group Center, we were both transferred to a hospital in Germany. Then began two long months of inactivity, in the hands of calm and vigilant nuns, in a fairy-tale town, in the shadow of the monastery’s bronze bell tower. Münstereifel was only a few dozen kilometers away from Heimerzheim. In that little town, which was hardly threatened by air raids, we felt at home; we received visits from our friends and relatives, and the war seemed infinitely far away

I was able to resume my command in March 1944, after having handed it over for two months to Wilhelm König. Georg remained on bed rest until Easter 1944. Two weeks later, still not fully recovered, he set out for Russia. At only twenty-eight years of age, he had to use a cane to walk, and was emaciated. When he reached the front on April 25, he went back to work with all his old vigor. In his absence, important details had been neglected, and errors had been committed. He dismissed three officers the day after he returned. Although he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel the preceding December, he was no longer the sole master of his unit. Since February, the Thirty-first Cavalry Regiment had been integrated into a cavalry brigade. It had been decided not to offer the command of the new brigade to Georg, who was not yet thirty, but rather to an experienced cavalryman of forty-one, Baron von Wolff, who was of Baltic origin. The Third Cavalry Brigade (two other brigades were constituted at the same time, one in
the north and one in the south) was in reality scarcely any stronger than Georg’s old regiment. Each brigade had been reduced from three to two regiments, and each regiment from three to two battalions, so that Wolff commanded only four battalions.

In early June 1944 the Russian front seemed for a time to have been stabilized; it was the calm before the storm. But the situation of the Third Cavalry Brigade was hardly enviable. With fewer than three thousand men, it was supposed to defend fifty-five kilometers of the front and guard eighteen bridges; it took the supply column ten hours to make its daily deliveries. The administration was deficient, certain specialities were no longer represented, the men were not always well trained, and, crucially, by the end of the fifth year of war, equipment delivered to us was sometimes unusable—like the three hundred saddles we received without girths. The invasion of Normandy exacerbated a situation already extremely unfavorable to Germany. On June 12, after the Allies had landed 326,000 soldiers on the coast of France, it was
clear that a breakthrough on the eastern front was imminent. On June 22 the Soviets launched a gigantic frontal attack against Army Group Center; no fewer than 2.5 million men advanced on one-sixth as many German troops.

On June 26, with the situation extremely critical, Georg went on leave. Why did he, known for his devotion and his acute sense of responsibility to his men, leave the front at a time like that? Faced with the magnitude of the task, had he become discouraged? No. For the past eighteen months, Georg had known that collapse was imminent, and he sought only to delay it with the minimum of losses. For the moment, he wanted to devote all his energy to a maneuver Tresckow had asked him to carry out. After spending a few hours at Heimerzheim, he said farewell to our family, perhaps with a premonition that he would never see them again. Then he went to Paris on the fatuous pretext, still taken seriously despite the gravity of the military situation, that Lord Wagram (a stallion of ours, which would be confiscated by the French a few months later) was running at Longchamp!

In Paris, at 8:00 p.m. on July 3, Field Marshal Kluge took command of the western front. As soon as he arrived, Georg was received by the marshal. He set forth Tresckow’s proposal: first, to eliminate Hitler; second, not to oppose the Allies’ breakthrough but to surrender unconditionally on the western front, and then to shift the war effort entirely to Russia to prevent Germany
from being crushed by the Soviet war machine; third, to make a peace offer to the Allies, for which purpose Georg agreed to go to England. Kluge sharply rejected this proposal on every point, irritated by what he considered Tresckow’s irresponsible conduct: “It is pointless to offer the Allies points of entry, because their breakthrough is imminent, and the collapse of the western front is now only days away!” It was pointless as well, he added, to think about going to England: he couldn’t find a pilot reliable enough to carry out such a delicate operation while fighting raged on the shores of the English Channel. Sick at heart, Georg returned to Russia.

In the East, our marshals had a single concern: to simplify the front line. The bulges and indentations had to be removed to facilitate defense and make up for the shortage of men, which was becoming more and more manifest. The front had to run along straight lines in order to gain hundreds of kilometers and delay the enemy’s implacable advance. Hitler had decided, against all strategic requirements, that the existing positions had to be held at any cost. He declared several particularly exposed cities to be “fixed strongpoints.” In a few days the Russians swept the front away and pulverized the so-called strongpoints. In less than three weeks, the German army lost 350,000 men on the Russian front. Within Army Group Center, the Fourth and Ninth armies were annihilated, and the Third Panzer Army was scattered in all directions. Of my brother Georg’s old Sixth Infantry
Division, there remained but a few remnants. Only the Second Army, with ten divisions and one cavalry corps, remained more or less intact, but it was still vulnerable. At its head, Tresckow, still assisted by Schlabrendorff, had succeeded in stopping the enemy and defending his positions. But the cavalry brigade was particularly exposed and frequently called upon, for it was ideally suited to covering a retreat. Georg could have asked to command it, because know-how was needed. Baron von Wolff had been killed during an exercise on June 28, and my brother’s claim to the position was all the stronger because Field Marshal Busch was arguing for his appointment. But he now had other priorities. He therefore voluntarily remained on the staff, at Tresckow’s disposal. The last act of the conspiracy was at hand.

It was in this context that the gamble of July 20, 1944, took place. On July 1 the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg as chief of staff of the Reserve Army gave him access to the Führer. None of the conspirators had ever before been able to get so close to the target. On July 11, Stauffenberg made a first attempt by bringing a bomb into the Berghof, Hitler’s residence in Berchtesgaden. The absence of Himmler and Göring, however, led him to abort the attempt, though in Berlin his accomplice, General Friedrick Olbricht, had already launched Operation Valkyrie. Not without difficulty, this operation was stopped, and the first steps toward a coup d’état and the mobilization of troops stationed in Germany
were disguised as a simple exercise. On July 15 Stauffenberg tried again—and again stopped short, for the same reasons. He would have only one more chance; if he failed again, Operation Valkyrie would inevitably be compromised.

At the beginning of July, I went to Second Army headquarters to say hello to Tresckow. As he saw me off, he warned, “Take care of yourself! We are soon going to need your services!” Georg and I realized that the assassination attempt was about to be made. We knew our roles by heart, but we didn’t know exactly what the others were to do. We weren’t told what part Stauffenberg would play, or precisely how the assassination in the Führer’s headquarters would take place. This was perfectly normal; to be effective, a conspiracy has to remain compartmentalized.

Georg had assigned me to be ready to discreetly withdraw the equivalent of six squadrons (about 1,200 men) from the front. The goal was to transfer them to Berlin just after the assassination, in order to provide security in particularly sensitive parts of the capital. On July 14 or 15 Georg confirmed these instructions. It was not, properly speaking, an order, because at headquarters he did not have authority over the Thirty-first Cavalry Regiment, and still less over the brigade. That was what made my situation uncomfortable. I had to act on my own initiative, without formal instructions. Obviously, I would be covered by Tresckow if asked to explain what I was doing,
but it was up to me to determine the exact modalities for the retreat and the transfer of troops. The operational situation of the Second Army, which was threatened on all sides, was totally unpredictable. Therefore I had to improvise and work against the clock. Providing 1,200 men was not an easy task!

On July 6 the Second Army’s Twentieth Corps had been ordered to retreat. The cavalry brigade, aided by a few Hungarian hussars, was supposed to cover the withdrawal of parts of the infantry. From July 11 on, my regiment was constantly engaged with the enemy north of the two ground links—the road and the rail line—between Pinsk, which had just been evacuated, and Brest-Litovsk. Georg followed these operations with extreme vigilance; he was obsessed with preventing his cavalrymen from being caught in a trap. At 4:00 a.m. on July 16 my regiment arrived in Dohoty, after having ridden half the night. At 8:00 a.m. Dohoty was attacked again by Russian forces much superior in numbers to ours. Soviet fighter planes constantly streaked across the sky, while we had no air cover at all. It was no longer a question of whether we should retreat, but how. The next day, this catastrophic scenario began all over again.

On July 15 I had taken the precaution of withdrawing a squadron of two hundred men from the front. They had already started for Berlin. I told the brigade’s second in command about the withdrawal of these men from combat, and later had great difficulty in explaining their
reappearance—which was necessary, however, in order to acquire sufficient provisions. I claimed that I had written one too many zeroes … for although twenty soldiers can easily appear or disappear, the same does not go for a whole squadron.

I then requisitioned the five additional squadrons we had in mind for Operation Valkyrie and assembled them in the morning, near Rybno, eight kilometers southeast of the town of Kobryn. These were three of the four squadrons under my command, and two of Captain Gollert-Hansen’s. On July 18, after giving the units a short rest, we distributed munitions and food supplies for two days, and set out. The officers were very surprised, for these marching orders canceled others received only hours earlier.

The administrative officer of the Third Cavalry Brigade, Lieutenant Gigas, saw to it that Army Group Center put forty large-capacity trucks at our disposal. Gigas knew enough about the plot to realize that this directive had to be carried out perfectly, but he did not know about the assassination itself. The trucks were to assemble at Konopka. From there they would carry about one thousand men, piled under tarps, toward an aerodrome in the former Poland. Then they would immediately fly to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Finally, they would go to Prinz-Albert-Strasse and Wilhelmstrasse, where they would take control of the buildings occupied by the state security police and the Ministry of
Propaganda. But first of all, they had to ride on horseback the two hundred kilometers from Rybno to Konopka.