-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994 PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane London W8 3TZ, England --[9]-- 8 Operation Barbarossa The organisation to which Stauffenberg was posted was OKH, Oberkommando des Heeres, the General Staff or high command of the army, officially designated as the Wehrmacht. There was also a distinct, separate, overlapping and often conflicting organisation, OKW, Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the high command of all the armed forces, which did not deal specifically with the Wehrmacht as such. OKH was under the supreme command of the Chief of the General Staff- who, when Stauffenberg joined it, was his old friend, Colonel-General Franz Halder, one of the guiding spirits behind the thwarted coup of 1938. OKW, on the other hand, was under the supreme and direct command of Adolf Hitler. In addition to OKH and OKW, there were a number of other chains of command: the SS and the SD; Goering and the Ministry of the Interior; the Foreign Office under Ribbentrop. The whole set-up was a chaos of competing authorities, each in its own watertight compartment . . . Hitler was obsessed by a suspicion mania. Instead of a sound, sensible organisation for war, he preferred this total confusion, since it prevented any potential concentration of power in the hands of any one authority. [1] If the situation seems hopelessly baffling now, it was almost as much so to German officers at the time. One of his colleagues described a lecture Stauffenberg gave to a group of young officers training for General Staff positions. He drew diagrams on the blackboard beside him, detailing the various command organisations and the tangled links of authority and supply between them. Before long, his diagram looked like a confused work of abstract art. Stauffenberg paused. Finally, in despair, he asked his audience if any organisation so constructed could possibly win a war.[2] On another occasion, at the General Staff College, he opened a lecture as follows: If our most highly qualified Genera! Staff officers had been told to work out the most nonsensical high level organisation for war which they could think of, they could not have produced anything more stupid than that which we have at present.[3] The muddled command structure of the Third Reich's armed forces is generally regarded as a major contributing factor to Germany's eventual defeat. It was also to be the bane of Stauffenberg's existence during the two and a half years he spent with the General Staff. Its headquarters, to which he was officially attached, were, for much of the war, frenetically peripatetic. At first OKH headquarters were shunted about between various sites in southern Germany. After the French campaign, they were established at Fontainbleau, near Paris, which enabled Stauffenberg to make frequent trips into the French capital and visit the opera. By October 1940, headquarters were back in Germany, at Zossen, near Berlin, and after the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941, they were moved to the Eastern Front. Eventually, during the latter phases of the war, they were installed in East Prussia, not far from Hitler's own (OKW) headquarters at Rastenburg. Stauffenberg was placed in charge of Group II of the General Staff's Organisation Section. The head of the section and his immediate superior was Colonel Walther Buhle, a man he did not particularly like. Subsequently, as a major-general, Buhle was to be transferred from the General Staff to Hitler's own (OKW) headquarters - and to be injured in the blast of 20 July 1944. Among Stauffenberg's colleagues on the General Staff was another friend, Albrecht Merz von Quirnheim. Stauffenberg's responsibilities involved much travel, both to the front and to support areas in the rear. He had virtually complete freedom of movement, and transport - including aircraft - was made available to him whenever he wished. At the front, he was obliged to maintain ongoing observation of various units and to monitor their battleworthiness, the state of their equipment, supply and morale. In the rear, he had to monitor training programmes in the Reserve Army, to allocate replacements, to find positions for new officers, to shunt recovered casualties back to front-line formations - and to confront the problem, increasingly insoluble as the war progressed, of keeping front-line units properly supplied, reinforced and up to strength. These and numerous other duties kept him incessantly busy. Of all the officers in his section, he is the most frequently cited in the OKH war diary for 1942. On 1 January 1941, six months after his appointment to the General Staff, Stauffenberg was promoted to major. By this time, he was deeply involved in planning the invasion of Russia, preliminary studies for which had begun as early as July 1940. From the very beginning, he had had serious misgivings about the operation, and worried about Germany's capacity to sustain the requisite military effort on an entirely new front. From a strategic point of view it was more important to him that Britain should be defeated or forced to peace talks before any trial of strength with the Soviet Union began. He considered the plans for the invasion of England to be viable, and believed them to have been abandoned prematurely.[4] In February 1941, Rommel and the tanks of the Afrika Korps made their first appearance in North Africa, shoring up the crumbling units of Mussolini's beleaguered army. In April, German forces invaded Yugoslavia and Greece, capturing Athens by the end of the month. In May, Stauffenberg visited the Greek capital, es well as Salonika and Crete, which had been taken by German paratroops in accordance with the principles he himself had outlined in his prize-winning paper for the General Staff College. According to Rudolph Fahrner, the possibility of deposing Hitler was again discussed at this time, but Stauffenberg was sceptical about success. The Fuhrer, he observed cynically, 'is still winning too many victories'.[5] On 22 June 1941, the anniversary of the French surrender, Operation Barbarossa began. In flagrant violation of the nonaggression pact signed with Stalin, 175 German divisions - more than a million and a half men - smashed their way across the frontier and into the Soviet Union. It was a massive, three-pronged offensive along a front of unprecedented length. Army Group North drove towards Leningrad, eventually to besiege that city. Army Group Centre advanced on Moscow, and would come within striking range of the Russian capital. Army Group South swept through the Ukraine towards the Caucasus. The Red Army was believed to number between 150 and 200 divisions, but during the late 1930s Stalin had purged his officer corps. In consequence, there were few senior commanders left in positions of authority, morale was poor among the troops, training inadequate and discipline slack. The Russians reeled before the speed, mobility and impact of the German offensive. They had 24,000 tanks to the Germans' 3,550, but most were obsolete and 75 per cent of their armour was unserviceable. Despite a numerical superiority of almost three to one over the Luftwaffe, most of the Red Air Force's 8,000 warplanes were hopelessly antiquated and unfit for combat. By the end of the summer, the Wehrmacht had suffered some 560,000 casualties. The Russians, however, had lost four million killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and were everywhere in retreat. Even so, Hitler and his generals underestimated the Soviet Union's resources, reserves of manpower and resilience. Industrial production, quickly relocated to beyond the Urals, was dramatically increased. New Russian units, previously unknown to the Germans, began to appear, as if from nowhere. After estimating the Soviet strength at between 150 and zoo divisions, the German high command had soon counted more than 360, and fresh ones were constantly entering the conflict. Hans von Herwarth, one of Stauffenberg's subordinates and a cousin by marriage, described how a fellow officer arrived one day with a bottle of cognac and proposed a celebration. 'Astonished, I asked him what in heaven's name there was to celebrate. He replied that he had just heard on the radio that we had just destroyed our minus-100th Soviet division. We drank to our success.'[6] In August, shortly after Army Group Centre had captured Smolensk, the German advance came to a halt while Hitler and the high command argued about how to proceed. Yet as early as July, and despite the enormous losses inflicted on the Russians, Stauffenberg had received a foretaste of what was to come, finding himself beset by requests for replacements, reinforcements and reserves. These were soon to become unanswerable. By the following year, there would be only a thousand new recruits to replace every ten thousand troops lost. No army could possibly sustain attrition on this scale for long. Stauffenberg toured the front of Army Group Centre in July, familiarising himself with the situation at first hand. At Smolensk, he paid a call on Guderian, who complained that, had the advance not been interrupted, Moscow could easily have been taken before the Russians regained their balance. He also met Tresckow and Schlabrendorff in Borissov. In August, he made a similar visit to Army Group North. At the beginning of October 1941, the German advance resumed. Army Group Centre embarked on the thrust which, after ferocious fighting, would carry it to within fifteen miles of Moscow before, on 5 December, the Russian winter brought it to a halt, achieving what the Red Army could not. In the meantime, Stauffenberg's brother, Berthold, was approached on behalf of the civilian 'Kreisau Circle' and asked to sound him out about the prospects of conspiracy. Berthold reported back: I have had a talk with Claus. He says that we must win the war first. While it is still going on, we cannot do anything like this, especially not in a war against the Bolsheviks. When we get home, however, we can then deal with the brown pest.[7] In fact, Stauffenberg was already discussing conspiracy with army colleagues and superiors. Berthold's reply would seem to have been dictated not by reluctance or even diffidence, but by the mistrust and scepticism with which the military plotters regarded the civilians of the 'Kreisau Circle', who had previously confessed themselves to be amateurs, lacking the requisite ruthlessness and expertise. Stauffenberg's colleague on the General Staff, Major Freiherr Dietz von Thungen, has given a vivid description of Stauffenberg at work: What was he like? I had some inkling from the reputation which preceded him: 'One of our very best, far above average, his character is his strong point.' This was amply confirmed if one had an opportunity of seeing him at work. I never opened Claus's door without finding him on the telephone, mountains of paper in front of him, the receiver in his left hand, turning over the files with his right, a pencil between his fingers. He always looked happy; depending upon who he was talking to, he would be laughing (that invariably came somewhere in the conversation) or cursing (that generally happened too), or giving an order, or laying down the law; but at the same time, he would be writing, either his great sprawling signature or short remarkably detailed notes on the files. His clerk was usually with him, and whenever there was a pause would take down, post haste, notes for the file, letters or circulars, Claus never forgetting to dictate with almost pedantic accuracy such tiresome accessories to General Staff work as letter heading, reference number and subject. Claus was one of those men who could do several things at once, all with the same concentration. He had an astounding capacity for working through files, in other words, reading them and sifting the important from the unimportant at a glance - an enormous advantage in his type of work. Equally astounding and equally striking were his capacity to concentrate, his clarity of expression and his sudden asides, which invariably hit the nail on the head and frequently took his listeners aback. When I used to visit him he was generally at the end of a twelve-, fourteen-, or even sixteen-hour day filled with telephoning, conferences, visits, dictation, working on files, notes for conferences, etc. He worked at an incredible pace, with unyielding concentration, and yet he appeared just as fresh late at night as he did in the moming.[8] Again and again in the reports of Stauffenberg's colleagues, one finds testimonies to a charismatic natural authority, which prompted others, even men far senior in rank, to defer to him. According to Hans von Herwarth: 'What surprised me was the manner in which those who surpassed him in rank recognised his natural superiority and yielded to it.'[9] Stauffenberg's influence among both colleagues and superiors has been effectively summed up by the biographer Joachim Kramarz: Young though he was, Stauffenberg soon came to be trusted by everybody. Anyone who got to know him, went to him whenever he wanted to pour his heart out, and this applied not merely to men of his own age and rank; even generals visiting headquarters from the front or from the replacement army would often seize the opportunity of having a talk with him. Whenever Stauffenberg was late for lunch, the word went round: 'He's got some general weeping tears in his office again.' Matters came piling in on him which were really not his responsibility. The fact that he was thereby contravening an order from Hitler did not bother him in the least. He busied himself with anything that interested him, even if outside his official competence.'[10] His position brought Stauffenberg into regular contact with his friend Franz Halder. The two men confided in each other as they could in few others. Stauffenberg's personal relationship with Halder was considered as something exceptional by his fellow officers. Major (as he then was) de Maiziere, for instance, says, 'Although two or three rungs down the ladder, Stauffenberg was the only one of the organisation section apart from the section head who from time to time did business direct with Halder and with whom Halder would discuss things personally.[11] To Halder, Stauffenberg was 'magnetically attractive . . . a born leader, one whose sole outlook on life was rooted in his sense of responsibility towards God, who was not prepared to be satisfied with theoretical explanations and discussions, but who was burning to act.'[12] After the war, Halder described Stauffenberg's hardening antipathy towards the regime: For hours at a time we would mull over and over possible methods of removing this monster without in the process seriously damaging the army now in contact with the enemy in fulfilment of its duty to defend the Fatherland, and without destroying the entire structure of the state . . . Later, when Hitler's decision to take the offensive against Russia was becoming ever clearer, and finally in the period when the war was being carried into Russia, our discussions revolved around the question of the way in which military means might be used to remove Hitler from the saddle without turning him into a martyr, and how the party's grip might be broken.[13] Stauffenberg's hostility towards the regime was now based neither on expediency nor on theoretical political grounds. According to Halder: 'His criticism was based simply and solely upon the revolt of his whole soul against the spirit of Hitlerism.'[14] This point was echoed by Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who stated that 'Stauffenberg's objection to Hitler was fundamentally a spiritual one and in no way based on a fear of impending German military defeat or any other materialistic considerations . . .'[15] A key factor in the development of Stauffenberg's attitude was first-hand experience of the work of the SS. He had seen the notorious Einsatzkommando units performing their grisly tasks in Poland. In France, he had been privy to atrocities committed by other, regular SS and Waffen-SS units, including the murder of unarmed British soldiers who had already surrendered. In a lecture at the General Staff College after the French campaign, he had posed a sarcastic question, then answered it himself: 'What is the difference between an SS division and an army division? Simply that SS divisions have better equipment but no divisional chaplains.'[16] Whatever the enormities committed by the SS in Poland and in France, they paled beside the carnage wrought by the Einsatzkommandos on the Russian front. Enjoying unchallenged authority even a few yards behind the front lines, they went about their murderous business with a zeal that revolted Wehrmacht personnel. Indeed, the scale and intensity of SS savagery began to produce an adverse effect on Wehrmacht morale. In December 1941, a report from Army Group Centre stated that 'the officer corps, almost to a man, is against the shooting of Jews, prisoners and commissars'.[17] SS activities were considered 'a stain on the honour of the German army'. In a statement typical of many others, a commander declared it to be a flagrant violation of 'our concepts of custom and decency that a mass slaughter of human beings should be carried out quite publicly'.[18] By the winter of 1941-2, OKH had established its headquarters at Vinnitsa, in the Ukraine. A fellow officer, who visited Stauffenberg at his office here, was surprised to see a portrait of the Fuhrer above his desk. Stauffenberg quietly explained: 'I chose this picture. And I put it up so that whoever comes here shall see the man's expression of madness and the lack of any sense of proportion. "9 Just before leaving, Stauffenberg's visitor asked what could possibly be done about Hitler, what might constitute a solution. 'Kill him,' Stauffenberg replied bluntly. In July 1942, Hitler paid a personal visit to OKH headquarters at Vinnitsa; and, as plate 24 in this book shows, Stauffenberg was in contact with the Fuhrer. There is no record of what precisely passed between them, or of what Hitler might have said or done to provoke Stauffenberg to an even more intense hatred, but after the visit his statements became markedly more vehement. 'Is there no officer over there in the Fuhrer's headquarters', he exploded one August morning, 'capable of taking his pistol to the beast?' [20] In the autumn, he replied to an officer worried about presenting a report to the Fuhrer: 'The point is not to tell him the truth, but to put an end to him, and I am prepared to do that.'[21] On a morning ride with a colleague, he suddenly burst out in condemnation of the mass shootings of Jews and declared emphatically that such crimes could not be allowed to continue. After that, 'during almost every ride, Stauffenberg spoke of tyrannicide. He cited Thomas Aquinas, who had maintained that in certain conditions tyrannicide was both permissible and commendable.'[22] It is very likely that Stauffenberg could have been driven to conspiratorial action as early as the summer or autumn of 1942. If he was prevented from being so, it was primarily because he found a constructive, even creative, enterprise into which he could channel both his energy and his antipathy towards the regime. This served to offset his frustrations with Hitler's policies, and to offer an alternative to despair. Had things fallen out differently, it might also have changed the course of the war and of post-war history. The speed and sledgehammer force of the German advance into the Soviet Union, coupled with Soviet unpreparedness and initial military incompetence, had yielded huge numbers of prisoners-of-war. The first week of the campaign alone brought in more than 287,000 During the following months, Russian soldiers surrendered not just by thousands or even tens of thousands, but by hundreds of thousands at a time. Soviet armies would capitulate en masse, and the tally of prisoners was soon running into millions. Much of this success could be ascribed to German military prowess, but certainly not all. When the Nazi invasion began, the population of the Soviet Union had suffered cruelly at Stalin's hands and harboured no great love for the Communist regime. In many regions, such as White Russia and the Ukraine, the advancing Germans were hailed by the populace as liberators. And if Soviet citizens were eager to welcome the invaders, so too were many units and elements of the Red Army. During the previous decade the army, and especially the officer corps, had endured particularly severe victimisation. They had little incentive to fight and die for the dictator who had persecuted them and for the system they despised. Whatever the Nazi tyranny, many felt it could not possibly be worse than what they had already experienced; and the prospect of change seemed to offer a chance of changing things for the better. In consequence, vast numbers of soldiers and officers defected voluntarily. A more astute German policy could easily have turned these defectors into loyal allies, and also eroded the morale of those who continued to resist. It would not have taken much to turn both the Soviet people and the Red Army decisively against Stalin. At very least, a renewed civil war between 'Whites' end 'Reds' could have been fomented, from which the Soviet system would not have emerged unscathed and Germany could only have benefited. But according to Nazi racial theory, Slavs, like Jews, were 'Untermensehen', sub-human inferior beings, who could not possibly be regarded as comrades. In his insane prejudice, Hitler insisted: St. Petersburg must ... disappear utterly from the earth's surface. Moscow too. Then the Russians will retire into Siberia . . . As for the ridiculous hundred million Slavs, we will mould the best of them to the shape that suits us, and we will isolate the rest of them in their own pig-styes; and anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilising him, goes straight off into a concentration camp.[23] The savagery with which such pronouncements were acted on transformed potential allies into the fiercest of enemies; and the Nazis irrevocably alienated precisely the people - the Soviet soldiers and citizens - who could have guaranteed their triumph. To the men of the Wehrmacht, the stupidity of the Party hierarchy was blindingly self-evident. Stauffenberg 'was especially outraged at the treatment given to Soviet soldiers who had surrendered or been captured; he spoke about this openly and with passion.'[24] By the spring of 1942, even Goebbels was beginning to see the errors of German policy. In April of that year, he wrote in his diary: The inhabitants of the Ukraine were at first more than inclined to regard the Fuhrer as the saviour of Europe and to welcome the German Wehrmacht most cordially. This attitude has changed completely in the course of months. We have hit the Russians, and especially the Ukrainians, too hard on the head with our manner of dealing with them. A clout on the head is not always a convincing argument . . .[25] Just over a month later, he added: 'Personally, I believe we must change our policies essentially as regards the people of the east.'[26] No such change occurred: Hitler, Himmler and the other members of the hierarchy remained blinded by their own benighted theories. A year later, Goebbels wrote again, almost wistfully: 'We would certainly be able to stir up many of the peoples of the U.S.S.R. against Stalin if we knew how to wage war solely against Bolshevism rather than against the Russian people.'[27] Despite the strictures imposed by Nazi ideology, the Wehrmacht did contrive to accommodate Russian prisoners, to employ them for its own purposes and thus spare them from extermination by the SS. At first they were taken on only in small numbers, and only for non-combat tasks - labour battalions, cooks, drivers and sundry auxiliary services--but gradually the numbers increased, and began to be assigned to combat roles as well. Battalion-sized units were formed, and these were later expanded into 'legions'. While such units were originally confined to non-Russian Soviet soldiers - Georgians, for example, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians-Russian soldiers were also eventually incorporated. There were attempts, too, to find high-ranking Soviet officers who could be employed as propaganda figures, to induce rank-and-file soldiery to desert and take up German arms. For this purpose, two organisations were established, the Russian Liberation Movement, or R.O.D., and the Russian Liberation Army, or R.O.A.[28] The 'army', of course, did not actually exist in practice, but its mere name gave Russians serving with German forces a sense of unity and identity; and they were further encouraged by being given R.O.A. patches and insignia to sew on their uniforms. By the beginning of 1943, between 130,000 and 150,000 Soviet soldiers (some 176 battalions and thirty-eight independent companies) were enrolled in the Wehrmacht. A key figure in recruiting them was Colonel Reinhard Gehlen, one of Halder's senior aides, then chief of intelligence on the Eastern front and eventually, after the war, head of the West German secret service. Working closely with Gehlen were a number of figures - Tresckow, for example - who subsequently would be involved in the conspiracy of 1944. Among Gehlen's most trusted personal friends was Claus von Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg's position with the General Staff made him more privy than most to the appalling drain and wastage of German manpower. The statistics were becoming daily more alarming. Infantry companies were being reduced from 180 men to a mere eighty. In January 1942 alone, Army Group Centre suffered losses of 95,000 and received only 10,300 replacements. By the autumn, total losses would exceed total reinforcements by 800,000, and this deficit would soon soar to more than a million. On the basis of such figures, one could calculate and project a precise date at which the entire Wehrmacht would quite simply cease to exist. The Red Army offered an attractive possible solution for Stauffenberg, who was personally saddled with the responsibility of plugging the gaping holes in Germany's troop strength. Not, of course, that he believed a clear-cut German victory against the Soviet Union was any longer possible. He had no illusions about that now. But he thought it feasible that Russian troops could at least be used as a buffer, and perhaps as a German-sponsored instrument in a civil war that might topple Stalin's regime. If nothing else, the stain on the Wehrmacht might be lessened, a respite might be obtained and an opportunity vouchsafed for Germany to restore her ebbing supplies of manpower. There might also arise some prospect of much more grandiose and ambitious designs. For Stauffenberg, 150,000 Soviet soldiers in German uniform was only the beginning. He was after something more, and knew well enough that it was there for the taking, if only bureaucracy could be neutralised and Nazi prejudice overcome or circumvented. His first step involved wresting Russian prisoners from certain death at the hands of the SS and obtaining direct authority over them. In the past, such captives, when they were enrolled in the Wehrmacht at all, were enrolled on an ad hoc basis by individual units; but as their numbers grew and their need for clothing, arms and equipment increased proportionately, Stauffenberg's section of OKH had a legitimate justification for becoming involved. It was soon in sole charge of 'organising into units all former Soviet soldiers who had volunteered to serve in the Wehrmacht'. By virtue of the 'efforts of Stauffenberg and his staff... the volunteers were made the responsibility of army headquarters and not the SS'.[29] When Hitler decreed the recruitment of Russian troops to cease, Stauffenberg managed to get the order modified and, in practice, ignored, to such a degree that the Fuhrer had to issue additional orders in the following months. When yet another order definitively forbade all further recruitment, Stauffenberg had it released to the army command three weeks before it took effect, thus enabling recruitment to be accelerated during the intervening time. Stauffenberg contrived to circumvent not only Hitler, but also lesser minions of the Reich, such as Alfred Rosenberg, the noxious racial theoretician formerly in charge of Nazi ideological training and now Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Like his master, Rosenberg hated Russians, but he persuaded the Fuhrer to sanction recruitment of non-Russian Soviet soldiers. According to Hans von Herwarth: Making use of the 'discovery' of the SS that the Cossacks were an independent people, Stauffenberg gave orders that they were exempt from Hitler's ban. We in our turn saw to it that the exception was widely publicised. As a result, thousands of POW's - many of them Russians - took the hint, identified themselves as Cossacks and left the camps.[30]" At the same time Stauffenberg was engaged in an ongoing struggle to ensure that Soviet volunteers received the same treatment as all other Wehrmacht personnel. A civilian observer speaks of a conference in June 1942, at which Stauffenberg 'gave a masterly expose, ending with an extempore draft of an instruction laying down equality of treatment for the volunteers'. When Hitler proposed a different coloured uniform for the volunteers, Stauffenberg managed to thwart the idea. Hans von Herwarth reports entering Stauffenberg's office one day and seeing an order on his desk to the effect that all Russian prisoners were to be tattooed with an identification mark on the buttocks. Stauffenberg quickly telephoned the general who was in a position to reverse the order . . . I listened in amazement as he pressed his case by assuring the general that, when next they met on Unter den Linden . . . he, Stauffenberg, would challenge the general's identity and require him to drop his trousers to prove he was not a Russian captive.[31] The order was summarily withdrawn. By the autumn of 1942, Stauffenberg and one of his colleagues had set up an umbrella organisation called the 'Russian Propaganda Section'. Under the auspices of this section, a training programme was instituted: the 'Russian Leadership Centre'. Its personnel were recruited so as to constitute 'e skeleton officer corps'. Stauffenberg 'set great store by getting the right leaders for these units under his care. He did not want them turned into hired and misused auxiliaries, but to form them into freedom-loving battle groups retaining their own customs and traditions.'[32] Primarily as a result of Stauffenberg's efforts, more than 800,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war were on active service with the Wehrmacht by 1943. It is interesting to speculate on how he himself may have conceived of deploying them. It has been suggested that he may have regarded them as the nucleus of a potential 'third force', which could be utilised against the tyranny of both Stalin and Hitler.[33] If they could have stemmed the tide, or at least stabilised the situation, on the Eastern front, they might then have been turned westwards, against the machinery of the Reich itself. Such a hypothesis is intriguing. It is difficult to believe that something of the sort did not, at one time or another, cross Stauffenberg's mind; and some evidence has been adduced to indicate that he was actually trying to implement, if only in embryo, some such design. But he, along with everyone else, was soon to be overtaken by events. By the end of 1942, the situation on the Eastern front was to have become irretrievable, almost entirely as a result of Hitler's own perversity. In August 1942 the German 6th Army under Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus, driving far to the south of Moscow, had pushed the Russians into Stalingrad, strategically sited on the Volga. Early in September, Paulus's troops attacked the city's western suburbs, fighting their way through a desperate house-to-house Russian defence. By mid-October, all but three sectors had fallen. Unknown to the Germans, however, the Russians had been secretly reinforced, and more than a million men were now mobilised in the countryside just beyond Stalingrad. On 21 September, while the Germans were still advancing, the first phase of a three-pronged Russian counter-offensive had begun, striking down from the north. The second prong struck from the south on 1 November. On 19 November, a massive artillery barrage inaugurated the third thrust, in the centre. By 23 November, twenty-two German and satellite Italian, Hungarian and Rumanian divisions - some 300,000 men - had been completely encircled. A German relief force under Field Marshal Erich von Manstein attacked the Russians from the south on 12 December, fighting to within twenty-five miles of Paulus's encircled army. By now Hitler was at his most hysterical. In September, when things had first begun to go wrong, he had petulantly sacked Halder as Chief of the General Staff and appointed a new commander, Colonel-General Kurt Zeitzler. Although certainly competent enough, Zeitzler was reduced to the status of a puppet and the Fuhrer assumed control himself. Now, in one of his increasingly frequent tantrums, he furiously forbade Paulus to break out of the Russian encirclement and link up with Manstein's approaching relief force. German soldiers could not be seen to retreat. They could only go forward. Without Paulus breaking out to reinforce and support it, Manstein's relief force was defeated and compelled to withdraw, while Paulus remained trapped, the ring of Russian steel closing tightly on him and his surrounded army. On 8 January 1943, the Russians invited Paulus to surrender. On Hitler's frenzied orders, Paulus refused, and the Russians attacked again two days later. By 16 January, the German 6th Army had been squeezed into a pocket nine miles by fifteen. In a new crescendo of manic rage, Hitler forbade either retreat or surrender. Every German unit was to fight to the last man, and any soldier who did not die in his tracks was guilty of treason, to be punished accordingly. Against starvation, cold, disease and the ferocity of the Russian onslaughts, such menacing fulminations were puerile. On 31 January, Paulus and a pitiful 91,000 troops of the battered 6th Army surrendered. On 2 February, one Panzer corps which had continued to resist was annihilated. That afternoon, a German aircraft flying over the site of the carnage radioed back that all fighting had ceased. Since November, more than 200,000 German soldiers had perished. Of the 91,000 who surrendered, only 5,000 would ever find their way back to the Fatherland. Stauffenberg had been a friend and admirer of Paulus. He had corresponded sympathetically with the hapless field marshal about the worsening situation at Stalingrad, and the stupidity on Hitler's part which had produced it. On a visit to Germany in mid-January, he met his colleague Lieutenant-Colonel Werner Reerink, who reported Stauffenberg's reaction to the imminent debacle: In the evening Stauffenberg took me for a walk through the Mauerwald, since, as he said, one could talk more freely in the open than in the office huts. He told me the detailed story of the vain efforts by OKH to persuade Hitler to order the breakout from Stalingrad and to save the lives of 300,000 men. OKH had been supported by Goebbels, who had shown himself most sensible - he had been the only party man to take the attitude that the German people must be told the truth about Stalingrad and about the general situation. With Goebbels' help they had almost got Hitler to issue the order for the breakout while there was still time. At the decisive briefing conference, however, Goering had taken the floor with the words: 'My Fuhrer, I guarantee that my Luftwaffe will keep the Stalingrad army supplied.' Hitler had thereupon decided: 'Sixth Army will remain in Stalingrad.' Stauffenberg was totally and obviously shattered by such irresponsible and treacherous behaviour. He told me this in so many words.[34] Like most other professional military men, Stauffenberg was severely shaken by events at Stalingrad. Defeat in itself would have been tolerable, but this was more than any conventional defeat, since it could have been averted. An entire German army, which in other circumstances could have retreated and lived to fight another day, had been utterly and pointlessly squandered, solely to appease the Fuhrer's vindictive wrath. In the early days of the war, many Germans, including a good many soldiers, had believed Hitler to be endowed with an uncanny intuitive military genius, an unerring aptitude for the decisive stroke that invited comparisons with Napoleon and Frederick the Great. The Russian campaign had called this belief into question. Stalingrad made it all too clear that the Fuhrer was no more than a bloodthirsty amateur, and a fool whose infantile petulance had to be paid for in German lives. Burdened with the responsibility of making good the appalling wastage, Stauffenberg found it difficult to control his temper. On one occasion, when a number of younger staff officers expressed a desire to get away from headquarters and see action at the front, Stauffenberg retorted: 'What is this sham heroism, going and getting yourselves shot like hundreds of thousands of others "in faithful performance of duty". This is nothing but cowardly evasion, no better than the field marshals who make the excuse of their duty to obey and their "purely military outlook". We have to have something quite different. When, by reason of his office or his upbringing, a man reaches high rank, a moment arrives when the man and the job are identical and no second thoughts can weigh with him; it is his duty to represent the general consensus of opinion. How few there are now who behave that way or even feel that they should do so. We have now got butchers and bakers and candlestick makers dressed up as generals. They draw their pay, do their "duty", put their trust in the Fuhrer and look forward to their next leave. What a way to run a country!'[35] He then recited Stefan George's 'Verses for the Dead', which invoked a time 'when men of the future are purged of dishonour' and 'men of this nation no longer are cowards'. Stauffenberg was loved, respected, even revered by the younger officers at OKH headquarters. His magnetism and charisma had often held them in thrall. One can imagine the effect produced by George's harsh, stark and incantatory stanzas - especially in the prevailing sombre atmosphere, the pall rendered ever darker with every fresh communique from Stalingrad. As the plight of Paulus's doomed army became grimly apparent, Stauffenberg became more outspoken. After talking to senior officers about the need to confront Hitler with the reality of the situation, he returned, disappointed. To his colleagues, he reported, with exasperation, that their superiors 'are scared shitless or have straw in their heads'.[36] On another occasion, he attended a lecture for some forty staff officers, given by a civilian functionary, on German agricultural policy in the east. At the end of the lecture Stauffenberg requested permission to speak, then proceeded to do so for half an hour. The lecturer subsequently reported: Feeling responsible for the replacement of troops in the east . . . he was watching the disastrous course of Germany's Eastern policy with horror. We were sowing hatred which would one day be avenged on our children. Any examination of the replacement issue made it absolutely clear that victory in the East was possible only if Germany succeeded in winning over the local population . . . the only thing our policy in the East was likely to achieve was to turn the masses there into Germany's enemies. It was scandalous that at a time when millions of soldiers were staking their lives not one of the leaders had the courage to speak to the Fuhrer openly about such matters, though it might be at the risk of his own life.[37] The lecturer further commented that no one had dared to mention this in public before. I was deeply impressed by Stauffenberg's arguments, especially as they were put forward with such conviction that you felt certain he himself had the courage he demanded of the leaders. I was greatly surprised that it was possible to speak so openly in a circle of General Staff officers, and even more so at the fact that the chairman of the meeting, far from refuting Stauffenberg's criticism, declared that they all felt the same.[38] By this time, it appears, Stauffenberg's outspokenness was beginning to attract attention in unwelcome quarters. Although he himself had no great respect for Halder's replacement, General Zeitzler, the general regarded him es 'e good future corps and army commander'. Such promising material could not be spared, and on I January 1943, Stauffenberg was accordingly promoted to lieutenant-colonel. Almost immediately, and-without being consulted on the matter, he was notified of his transfer to the post of Senior Staff Officer (Operations) for the 10th Panzer Division in North Africa. Zeitzler stated officially: 'I wished to give him experience as a staff officer with troops and in command, in order to prepare him for later command of a corps and an army', but the transfer was also clearly motivated by a desire to get the dangerously forthright and explicit 36-year-old officer away from the Eastern front, where he was 'making waves', and as far distant as possible from the clutches of the SS and SD.[39] Stauffenberg himself recognised the necessity for this. Just before departing for North Africa, he remarked: 'It is time I disappeared from here.'[40] And on reporting to his new divisional commander, he stated that German veil 'was slowly becoming too hot' for him.[41] After his frustrating and demoralising experience with OKH in Russia, North Africa must have seemed a welcome change for Stauffenberg. It offered the prospect of a 'clean war', waged in a traditional, even chivalrous, style, between professional soldiers and commanders who respected each other as adversaries. Compared to other theatres of operation, there were no serious atrocities. There was minimal interference, at least on the ground, from Party bosses, from politicians and even from the Fuhrer. A few Gestapo personnel operated in cities like Casablanca and Tunis, but there were no SS or SD accompanying the troops and pursuing their murderous activities immediately behind the lines. Despite these attractive considerations, Stauffenberg appears to have been not altogether free of misgivings, or perhaps just a nagging residual sense of guilt. He threw himself with zest into his responsibilities with 10th Panzer Division, but it was almost as if there were something slightly dishonourable in his transfer - an interruption of his ongoing activities elsewhere, an abandonment of his personal crusade, an attempt to evade his destiny. If, in the eyes of the gods, that was indeed the case, he was soon to be punished for it. Within two months, destiny, in the form of a strafing American P-40, was to catch up with him- and place him, maimed and desperately wounded, squarely at the centre of the situation from which North Africa had seemingly offered a refuge. pp.165-184 --[notes] 8 Operation Barbarossa 1 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, p.75. 2 Herwarth, Against Two Evils, p.217. 3 Kramarz, op.cit., pp.74-5. 4 Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, p.187. 5 Ibid. 6 Herwarth, op.cit., p.210. 7 Van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler, p.269. 8 Kramarz, op.cit., pp.66-7. 9 Herwarth, op.cit., pp.215-16. 10 Kramarz, op.cit., pp.67-8. 11 Ibid. p.69. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p.73. 14 Ibid., p.74. 15 Schlabrendorff, The Secret War against Hitler, pp.245-8. 16 Kramarz, op.cit., p.78. 17 Parker, Struggle for Survival, p.267. 18 Ibid. 19 Zeller, op.cit., p.188. 20 Kramarz, op.cit., p.91 21 Ibid. 22 Hoffmann, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg und seine Bruder, p.251. 23 Hitler, Table Talk 1941-1944, p.617, 6 August 1942. 24 Herwarth, op.cit., p.216. 25 Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, p. 135, 25 April 1942. 26 Ibid., p. 169, 22 May 1942. 27 Ibid., p.254, 14 April 1943. 28 The history of these organisations is given in Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberatian Movement. 29 Kramarz, op.cit., p.83. 30 Herwarth, op.cit., p.221. 31 Ibid., p.216. 32 Zeller, op.cit., p.181. 33 Graber, Stauffenberg, p.105 34 Kramarz, op.cit., p.96. 35 Ibid., pp.92-3. 36 Hoffmann, op. cit., p.268. 37 Zeller, op.cit., pp 189-90. 38 Ibid., p. 190 39 Kramarz, op.cit., p.97. 40 Zeller, op.cit., p.191. 41 Hoffmann, op. cit., p.259. --next-- the fascinating Part Four THE STRUGGLE FOR THE HEART AND SOUL OF GERMANY ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. 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