Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (7 page)

Soon, Georg gave free voice to his anger against Hitler: “That obtuse parvenu! He’s a cheap café politician pretending to be a genius!” he suddenly exploded. “Why didn’t he stay in the background and let the generals think for him?”

“Because he is inspired,” Kageneck said slowly.

“Do you know what inspiration is?” Haape asked. “It’s an intestinal wind that rises by mistake to the head and lodges there—and that’s Immanuel Kant’s definition, not mine!”

“We can’t go on much longer, considering him and his revelations to be just a joke,” Georg grumbled, without even smiling at the physician’s quip.

The criticism Georg formulated was in fact already quite common among military officers. But Georg went much further. Lowering his voice and leaning over the table, he added, “The Nazis are destroying the heart of
the true Germany! When the war is over, it will be people like us who will have to act!”

“But whom will you have to help you?” Kageneck asked doubtfully.

“Most of the generals! From all these discussions something will eventually materialize—particularly if we have to suffer defeats.”

“Generals don’t make an army,” Kageneck interrupted. “You know as well as I do that most of the young officers coming in are confirmed Nazis.”

“And what about the troops?” Haape added. “Most of them are happy just to have a place to lay their heads and rations three times a day! They won’t do anything. They don’t care whether they are fighting for the true Germany or Hitler’s Germany.…”

Georg was not one to acknowledge self-doubt, to resolutely question himself, to sound out his fellows, to probe the depths of his thoughts, to ask others to confirm them.… When he expressed himself, he had already made up his mind. His friends had pointed out the practical difficulties involved in what he proposed. Their objections gave him food for thought, particularly regarding the generals’ involvement. But he was already fully committed to his enterprise, even if its exact outlines were not yet clearly determined.

Fifteen months later, Major General Henning von Tresckow enlisted Georg among the opponents and conspirators
of Army Group Center. In the meantime, his opinion of Hitler had become more radical, to the point that in his view it was not possible to wait until the end of the war to eliminate him.

I cannot reconstitute the reasoning that led him to this conclusion, the totality of the feelings, analyses, images, and impressions that moved him to take this decisive step. But it is clear that Georg’s assignments, starting in early 1942, left him time to observe and meditate. Chance—some would say Providence—had provided him with this strange interlude, this inexplicable parenthesis in a life that up to then had always tended toward action. Established seventy kilometers north of Bucharest, he was the only German among a population that was almost entirely Romanian. In his letters to a female friend of ours, he described his occupations:

Headquarters of Army Group Center, summer 1942: Philipp, sitting, in his duties as an orderly; Captain Bülow, standing
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(photo credit 8.1)

In a later letter he added, “I’ve quite a lot of time for reflection and writing.”
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Georg was in regular contact with the front by mail, since the postal service was still working well—and people were in the habit of writing to one another often, not only within the family, but also among fellow officers. We also communicated via telephone. I could, in fact, be reached quite easily, given my service to Field Marshal hans Günther von Kluge. And I communicated to Georg all the information I possessed that came from the various divisions. This news, put into perspective during his long periods of leisure, increased his skepticism.

In my own journey the inevitable and the predestined probably played a role. In retrospect, my involvement may seem to have been governed by a logical sequence, but I have to admit that it depended to a great extent on fortuitous circumstances. If I hadn’t been wounded in December 1941, if I hadn’t been assigned to Kluge’s staff, if I hadn’t met Tresckow, that exceptional figure, and especially if I hadn’t acquired the habit of confiding some of my thoughts to him, I would never have emerged from my reserve. I would have remained captive to private scruples and insoluble internal conflicts. To begin this intellectual and moral development was to embark upon a pilgrimage whose goal was uncertain. It was already to commit treason. To be sure, Hitler had failed many times to keep his word, and he had sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to his diabolical whims. Nonetheless, for a military
man, for whom the first requirement was obedience, starting down this road was certainly not easy.

During this period I was very busy, but I also had time to discuss things with other officers, to meditate on the course of events and the regime’s goals. That is how a kind of maturation took place in me before more decisive experiences thrust me into active military resistance. Among soldiers, there was much discussion of the sermons that Monsignor Clemens August von Galen, the bishop of Münster, had given against euthanasia almost a year earlier, in the summer of 1941; his vehemence had led the government, contrary to all expectations, to put an end to the T4 program for the eradication of the handicapped.
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These sermons had resonated with soldiers, who, after a wound or an amputation, were likely to be grouped with those allegedly useless people. I had not read the sermons, but I had heard many people talk about them, and I had listened all the more attentively because Monsignor Galen, in addition to being my distant cousin, was a compatriot. The bishop was highly regarded among officers with any sense of morality, and his influence on the resistance in the military can be seen in a brief exchange I had with Colonel Hans Oster of the Abwehr toward the end of 1942. Knowing my connection to the Rhineland and Westphalia, and although he was himself a Lutheran, he asked me about the prelate:

“Are you a relative of Monsignor Galen?”

“No, not really.…”

“Too bad. He’s a man of courage and conviction. And what resolution in his sermons! There should be a handful of such people in all our churches, and at least two handfuls in the Wehrmacht! If there were, Germany would look quite different!”

In this context, certain incidents led me to enter the conspiracy. In retrospect, compared with the horror of the war and the magnitude of the Nazis’ crimes, these incidents seem minor. Another person might have reacted coolly to these experiences, and not been affected by them. But for me, they served as a catalyst. It is time to tell about them.

By early May 1942, I had largely recovered from my wound, but I remained handicapped. Limping, unable to ride a horse, I could not resume an operational assignment. I was therefore attached to the staff of Army Group Center, as aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Kluge. My role, like that of aides-de-camp in every army in the world, varied between all-purpose handmaiden and office manager: handling the marshal’s schedule, accompanying him, participating in discussions, writing up reports on meetings, summarizing the dispatches and radio messages that had come in overnight so they could be read in the early morning, running errands, transmitting orders, and, in short, organizing the marshal’s material life in order to facilitate his direction of operations. Kluge did not mistreat me. On the contrary, he was concerned
about making full use of my abilities. The marshal, who was overloaded if anyone ever was, often asked me to write the orders for the following day—a function that obviously belonged to the operations officer, namely, Tresckow. The next day, the marshal compared Tresckow’s orders with mine, and to train me he pointed out my errors and their possible consequences.… In the afternoon, when nothing special was planned, we took tea together. In the evening I joined him on his walks. I had, in a way, become the confidant of this old military man, who was a very interesting person.

I was lodged in the same group of huts as Kluge, along with General Wöhler, who was the chief of staff, and the service personnel (the orderly, the cook, and the driver), while the rest of the staff lived in a barracks about three hundred meters away. We went on duty at 6:00 a.m. At that hour we received the night bulletin from the staff’s operations office. I was supposed to present it to the marshal at exactly 7:00 a.m. During the first weeks I found this exercise very difficult. On his 1/300,000 map, Kluge had marked only the front, with a thick, dark line. He had not indicated the limits of the respective sectors held by the divisions. At that time Army Group Center included ninety divisions, and I was supposed to indicate, using a long wand, exactly where the night’s battles—thrusts, captures, attacks—had taken place, and continue my analysis down to the level of the regiment and the village. Fortunately, I had good eyes. After this presentation came breakfast, which the marshal and I always ate separately, whereas we shared the other meals with the marshal’s staff. In the course of the morning, General Wöhler, the chief of staff; Tresckow, the operations officer; the intelligence officer; and other department heads came in to report. That was the routine on sedentary days. However, weather permitting, we boarded a plane several times a week to inspect the terrain. Then it was the local staff’s turn to make their reports. Kluge took advantage of this opportunity to visit frontline units directly exposed to the enemy.

Kluge’s office at Smolensk
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(photo credit 9.1)

The first incident that eventually led me into the resistance occurred a few days after my arrival at the marshal’s headquarters, probably in June 1942, though I am unable to determine the exact date. Until I was wounded, I had always been in advance positions, assigned to operational duties. I’d had no opportunity to observe what was happening in the areas of the East that were not under military command, and where the general commissioner, the SS, and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) exercised an unlimited authority. The military, in fact, had authority over the front—hundreds of kilometers long—and a zone two hundred to three hundred kilometers wide constituting the army’s rear
(rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet)
. Between that zone and Germany’s borders was the buffer zone under the control of the infamous Reichskommissariat Ost. In the territory under military command, the SS was authorized to act only in the framework of the battle against partisans. This accommodation to the Nazi universe might seem to be a criminal weakness, a cowardly pliability on the part of a hypocritical military hierarchy, which was blind and mute. But the partisans were conducting a merciless guerrilla war in the rear areas. Ambushes; attacks on food supply convoys; massacres of columns of wounded men being taken to the hospital; terrorist actions in villages and farms that had supported us or simply offered us lodging; infiltration of spies along the front lines, sometimes even within the families where the Wehrmacht’s soldiers were billeted: all of that not only threatened to disrupt the front, but might also lead to a breakdown of the army’s supply chain, which was already extremely vulnerable.