Valkyrie: The Story of the Plot to Kill Hitler, by Its Last Member (8 page)

Departure of Army Group Center general staff for a tour of the battlefield (September 1942). General Wähler is standing; Field Marshal Kluge is in the front passenger seat; Philipp is in the middle of the back seat
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(photo credit 9.2)

One fine day in the spring, therefore, I received one of the many dispatches I was supposed to summarize for the marshal. This one came from SS Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. It pertained to the rear zone that was beyond military control, but concerned the staff of Army Group Center because it provided information on the actions the partisans had carried out against roads, viaducts, and bridges that had obvious strategic importance. The message ended with what seemed to me an enigmatic and vaguely troubling entry: “Special treatment for five Gypsies.” I couldn’t grasp the relation between this point and the other rubrics in the message. A few hours later I submitted my report to the marshal, and came to the final point: “Marshal, I cannot explain the meaning of this expression.”

July 1942: Kluge on the battlefield; Philipp is at right
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(photo credit 9.3)

The marshal replied, “Frankly, I don’t know what to tell you. We have to clarify this matter. The simplest way is to ask Bach-Zelewski for further details. As it happens, I have a meeting with him in a few days.”

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was not harmless. People trembled at the mere mention of his name. He was in his forties, a massive, rather ordinary-looking man. He was very experienced in military affairs, and no one could accuse him of incompetence in that domain. But his service record did not inspire respect. Having entered the army when he was very young, during the last years of the Great War, in 1918–19 he had allowed himself to be drawn into the activities of the
Freikorps
. There he had lost his values and any sense of humanity.
¹
Since June 1941 he had been high commandant of the SS and the police (Höherer SS und Polizeiführer) in the central Russia sector. He reigned like a satrap over a sinister empire that included Minsk and Mogilev. Ruthless, coldly calculating, he was truly a creature of the devil.
²

Among the army’s officers, Bach-Zelewski had a scandalous reputation as an unscrupulous careerist who was full of bitterness toward the military men who had expelled him from the army fifteen years earlier. But in the spring of 1942, news of the atrocities committed by his henchmen had not yet spread beyond the limited group of eyewitnesses. Moreover, in the sulfurous
rumors that swirled about him, it was hard to distinguish fiction from reality. In any case, he had been assigned to carry on the battle against the partisans that the regular army, which was busy holding the front, could not handle. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was thus an unavoidable partner.

I was present at the discussion between Bach-Zelewski and Kluge. They talked first about the guerrillas: how to limit their range, how to eliminate them from the countryside, and especially how to secure the vital connections with Germany. A discreet reminder on my part, once the technical presentation was complete, caused Kluge rather abruptly to ask the SS officer, “Oh, by the way, I was about to forget: What do you mean in your report by ‘special treatment’? You apparently gave ‘special treatment’ to five Gypsies.”

“Those? We shot them!”

“What do you mean, shot them?! Following a trial before a military tribunal?”

“No, of course not! All the Jews and Gypsies we pick up are liquidated—shot!”

The marshal and I were both taken aback. I felt the kind of internal dislocation and devastation that leads to panic. Obviously, we sensed that something was wrong. Kluge could not have been unaware that crimes, major crimes, had been committed in areas under his authority. Still, we had attributed them to the uncontrolled excesses of the SS. But here was Bach-Zelewski stating a doctrine
of extermination as though it were perfectly natural. What we had taken to be terrible blunders were, in reality, part of a coherent, premeditated plan. The shooting of Jews and Gypsies turned out to be a commonly shared war goal. According to the SS, the instructions were clear and came from the highest level of the government. The marshal got a grip on himself and controlled the trembling of his voice: “But why did you shoot them? You’re only creating new partisans by killing them like that. It’s incredible! Are you really executing them outside the military code of procedure, without trial?”

The atmosphere became more heated. The old marshal, even though used to dealing with Nazi high officials, was on the verge of exploding. The placid coolness of our interlocutor, his quiet hatred, and simply his way of expressing murderous obsession so calmly may have enraged the marshal even more than the fate of the five unfortunate Gypsies. Overwhelmed by anger, and no doubt emboldened by my presence, he protested in the name of the Geneva convention, the laws of war, and even the interest of the German armies. Bach-Zelewski grew angry as well. He was pale, and his eyes were piercing behind his round tortoiseshell spectacles; his expression, which a moment before had been unctuous, hardened. After a few minutes he put an end to the dispute with these dreadful words: “Jews and Gypsies are among the Reich’s enemies. We have to liquidate them.” And he added, his myopic eyes fixed on Kluge, without
any regard for his rank or function, “Yes,
all
the enemies of the Reich, our mission is to liquidate them!”

The threat was thinly veiled. The SS officer turned on his heel and left.

Kluge was not a man to temporize. He immediately called General Franz Halder of the Army General Staff. Leaving aside pointless humanitarian or legal arguments, Kluge tried to prove the inanity of this enterprise, which stiffened resistance instead of breaking it. The only positive result of his energetic complaints was that we no longer heard about Bach-Zelewski. Perhaps he simply stopped reporting his barbaric acts.
³

This incident changed my view of the war. I was disgusted and afraid. I had already had occasion to wonder about the meaning of this conflict, its strategic pertinence, and the Führer’s tactics. Through friends in my division’s reserve battalion who had been sent to Stargard
⁴
shortly after the invasion of Poland, I had heard rumors about the crimes committed by the SS in the conquered areas. We were surprised not so much by these rumors—there were so many young men without morals in the SS units—as by the perpetrators’ complete impunity. We told ourselves that this could not go on for long; we considered these atrocities, which were probable but never proven, to be isolated events.

Henceforth, I had the proof of the abomination before my eyes. It was no longer a matter of isolated acts committed by aberrant individuals. It was a rigorous plan
that had been sanctioned by the highest authorities. We had to face the facts: the state, as a whole, was riddled with vice and criminality. And the army, by remaining silent, was making itself the system’s accomplice. This situation now seems to us blindingly clear, yet it was not so clear for contemporaries, who were convinced that Germany was a model of civilization and that it could not be subjected to either a dictatorship or a murderous totalitarianism.

For several weeks, I remained in a state of deep perplexity. I reported the incident to Tresckow, in whom I liked to confide. But then what should be done? Speak out—to whom? To say what—denounce the perpetrators? Again, to whom? And according to what criteria? The scale of values had been corrupted: Kluge’s altercation with Bach-Zelewski had shown clearly enough how the fruit had already been rotting away from the inside.

From then on, I paid more attention to conversations among officers and to allusions I could now decode, and I came to notice that people within the staff knew about the execution of Jews. It was mentioned covertly, with repugnance, and the blame was put on foreign recruits in the SS. One fact in particular was evident, since members of the staff of Army Group Center had witnessed it directly. In October 1941, in Borissov, Latvian SS men had executed thousands of Jews and thrown them into a giant ditch. By chance, two superior officers, Carl-Hans von Hardenburg and Heinrich von Lehndorff, had seen the
massacre. Because of bad weather, the plane carrying them was flying at low altitude and the two had observed every detail of this nightmare. Hardenberg, who was then the private aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, commander in chief of Army Group Center, had appealed to his superior. The local military commandant was immediately summoned. How could he have allowed such crimes to be committed on the territory for which he was responsible? He would have to answer for this massacre of the innocents. The commandant, confronted with his own cowardice and racked with remorse, committed suicide. This affair caused two of the principal officers of the staff, Tresckow and Gersdorff, to join the resistance. Yet in the spring of 1942, I was still unaware of this radicalization among my great friends, their state of mind, and the double game they were playing.

I soon had another example of how lethal was the effect of prejudices held by the masters of Germany regarding allegedly inferior races. Tresckow had convinced Kluge to send to the Führer a small delegation of Ukrainians who had defected to our side and wanted to set up a buffer state with its own army. Hitler refused to receive them and had the unfortunate delegates immediately shot.

The second incident that contributed to my joining the conspiracy took place at the Führer’s headquarters in Vinnytsya,
¹
in Ukraine. For very important matters, the marshal called upon the commander in chief. In the summer of 1942, the critical situation in the Rzhev salient already justified a request for an audience. In July, the German army had purged the region’s southwest sector of the last Russian troops that had been infiltrated there. But the feeling of security did not last. Since August 1, Rzhev had been under attack by Soviet forces several hundred thousand men strong. The feeling of security did not last. The Soviets, now supplied by the Americans, were using unprecedented firepower. The Ninth Army,
under General Walter Model, was now in serious danger of being surrounded—a real mousetrap. Within the structure of Army Group Center, the Ninth Army occupied an important place. Kluge, fearing that it would be completely destroyed, urged that certain positions considered nonstrategic be abandoned, that the front line be shortened to make it more defensible, and especially that the troops that had been fighting nonstop since June 1941 be relieved, allowing them a little rest in the rear area to rebuild their strength. The conversation had been carefully prepared, with a series of arguments, information sheets for the presentation, and so on. I was all the more interested in this issue because I had several friends and cherished cousins in that sector. It was a matter of life and death for my old comrades in the Eighty-sixth Division, and also for my brother Georg’s comrades in the famous Sixth Reconnaissance Battalion, which was caught in the same net. Early on the morning of August 9, we flew to Vinnytsya.

For the first time, I was not allowed to take part in the discussion. At lunch, I was separated from Kluge. While he sat at the Führer’s table, I was placed at Martin Bormann’s. Bormann was the head of the party and the Führer’s partner in crime. My first impression of Bormann—brutal, careless, and violent—was of a man who immediately inspired fear. At the table were seated representatives of all the ministries. Although I was surrounded by men in various uniforms, I was among the
few genuine military men. These gaudy outfits and tinny decorations seemed to me worthy of a decadent royal court. The conversations I overheard were so dreadfully banal that I remember them perfectly.

Soon after the meal began, the representative of the Foreign Ministry, who wore an elaborate dress uniform, asked Bormann what should be done in the following case: Archduke Joseph, an Austrian marshal, was about to celebrate his seventieth birthday. Should a congratulatory telegram be sent to him? The diplomat pointed out that the marshal had married a Wittelsbach—that is, a Bavarian Catholic (he seemed not to realize that the Habsburgs themselves were Catholic). Bormann peremptorily issued his verdict: “Catholic? Then he won’t get his telegram!”

The representative of the Ministry of Agriculture asked Bormann what would happen to the former Soviet collective farms (kolkhozes) that specialized in growing
kok-sagyz
, a local variety of dandelion whose roots could theoretically produce a rubber substitute. Scientific studies would have to be done to confirm the value of growing it. Bormann, half serious, immediately passed the buck, saying only, “That’s a matter for Reichsführer Himmler!”

At dessert, some of these gentlemen complained that fresh strawberries were already unavailable in the Führer’s headquarters, so that they had had to resort to cherries—which were unpleasant because they had pits.
Finally, a few of them who’d drunk a little too much asked in loud voices who wanted to go that evening to provide gallant company for the girls in the Kraft durch Freude group that was visiting Vinnytsya.