-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh,(C) 1994
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--(5)--
Part Two
The Rise of Prussia
4
Blood and Iron
By the dawn of the twentieth century, if not before, the name of Prussia had
become synonymous in the English-speaking world with everything most
quintessentially German. Among other things, it connoted militarism,
aggression, obedience, rigorous discipline and assiduous service to the
state. It often conjured up an unthinking robotlike efficiency, and it was
associated with what outsiders believed to be the nucleus of the German
aristocracy - the old, so-called 'Junker' class, the very name of which
implied something pejorative. In 1900 the terms 'Prussian' and 'German' were
habitually used by non-Germans more or less interchangeably. Even today,
something of this association lingers. In 1947, according to Law Number 46 of
the Allied Control Council, Prussia was formally and officially 'abolished':
'The Prussian State which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and
reaction in Germany has de facto ceased to exist.' Prussia exists today only
as a nebulous geographical entity, a generalised and vaguely defined region.
It no longer appears on any map, no longer has any precise delineation or
frontiers, has no political or administrative status of any kind. Yet even
today, in the English-speaking world, the word 'Prussian' evokes something
more uniquely, more distinctively and more undilutedly German than, say,
'Saxon' or 'Bavarian'.
Yet Prussia was a relatively late development, not just on the stage of world
history, but on that of German history. It was one of the most recent powers
to appear in the context of European politics. During the thirteenth century,
when England and France were already developing specific national identities,
'Germany' had nothing whatever to do with Prussia. To Western Europe, Prussia
was pretty much what the American West was to denizens of Boston and New York
at the beginning of the nineteenth century - before the California Gold Rush,
before the Civil War, before the pioneers in their wagon trains had pushed
the nation's 'manifest. destiny' even to the Mississippi, still less as far
as the Pacific. Prussia ' was an unmapped wilderness, a forbidding hinterland
peopled only by 'heathenish' tribes as divorced from Western 'civilisation'
as were the American Indians.
Between the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Prussia was part of the
territory known as the Ordenstaadt, or Ordensland. This was the unique domain
of a military-chivalric institution, the Teutonic Order or Teutonic Knights,
an offshoot of the medieval Knights Templar. It was they who colonised the
region known as Prussia, as well as the Baltic coast as far as the Gulf of
Finland, an area consisting of large parts of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia,
Latvia and north-western Russia. The process had much in common with the
colonisation of the American West. Indigenous tribes including the Balts and
native Prussians, were exterminated wholesale, and the land was parcelled out
to agricultural settlers from Christian Europe.
Like the other military-chivalric orders - the Templars, the Knights
Hospitaller, and their equivalents in Spain and Portugal - the Teutonic
Knights functioned as the vanguard of Christendom, carrying the banner of the
Church into pagan territory. The colonisation and settlement of Prussia and
the Baltic was officially described as a 'crusade' - as much so as the
'crusades' that temporarily annexed the Holy Land, that exterminated the
Cathar heretics of the Languedoc, that drove Islam from the Iberian
peninsula. And like the other military-chivalric orders, the Teutonic Knights
served as a kind of repository for Western nobles seeking to gain experience
of the battlefield, and obtain military initiation and expertise. Campaigning
in Prussia and the Baltic became a kind of blood sport. The Teutonic Knights
played host to aristocrats from all over Europe in quest of the excitement of
combat - and Papal dispensation. Among them were a number of Scots, such as
Henry Sinclair of Roslin. Henry, Earl of Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV of
England, on being exiled by Richard II, also campaigned with the Teutonic
Knights. From them, he learned many of the martial and political skills that
would enable him eventually to return to England, depose Richard and
establish his own dynasty.
At the end of the fourteenth century (the time when Bolingbroke was serving
with them), the Teutonic Knights were at the peak of their power. The
Ordenstaadt over which they presided encompassed the whole of Christianised
north-eastern Europe, a fiefdom the size of England, Scotland and Wales
combined. It was effectively remote from all other authority, spiritual or
temporal. Operating well beyond the reach of the Pope and all secular Western
potentates, the Teutonic Knights were a law unto themselves, and the
Ordenstaadt was regarded as a nation-state in its own right. It had its own
capital at Marianburg (now Malbork, in Poland), and its own political and
administrative machinery. It sent and received its own embassies to and from
Western courts, to and from Rome. The governing hierarchy, headed by the
Grand Master, was accorded the same respect, status and honours as that of
any Western European principality.
Then, in 1410, at the Battle of Tannenburg - some sixty miles from where
Hitler was subsequently to build his 'Wolf's Lair' at Rastenburg - the
Teutonic Knights suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of a combined Polish
and Lithuanian army. From that point on, their domain began to shrink, their
power to decline, although the Ordenstaadt survived for another century.
At last, in 1525, Albrecht von Hohenzollern, Grand Master of the Teutonic
Knights, came under the influence of Martin Luther and converted to
Protestantism. He was followed by others, and the Order itself was
secularised. Later that year Albrecht was made Duke of Prussia, owing
allegiance to the Polish throne, and Prussia became a defined political and
administrative entity. In the domains of the newly created duchy, brethren of
the Teutonic Knights - the younger sons of a much older German aristocracy -
began to marry, bring up families and establish their own land holdings. It
was these men, and, even more, those they had ushered into the region as
settlers and colonists, who comprised the so-called 'Junker' class.
In 1618, the duchy of Prussia passed into the hands of another branch of the
Hohenzollern family, who ruled the territory known as Brandenburg.
Brandenburg and Prussia were thus amalgamated Then, in 1701, Albrecht von
Hohenzollern's descendant assumed the title of Friedrich I and proclaimed
himself 'King in Prussia', being anointed by two Protestant bishops but
placing the crown on his head himself.
When Prussia emerged as a kingdom, Queen Anne's reign in England was about to
begin, while that of Louis XIV in France was nearing its end. French military
supremacy on the continent was soon to be challenged by the Duke of
Marlborough and his Austrian colleague, Prince Eugene of Savoy. Yet within
half a century, Prussia was abruptly to assume the role of Europe's
predominant martial power. She was to do so under only the third of her
kings, Friedrich II, better known as Frederick the Great, the single most
brilliant and resourceful commander of the eighteenth century Under
Friedrich, Prussia - a mere minor duchy only a few years before - became one
of the most important components in the shifting kaleidoscope known as the
European 'balance of power'
Her army was regarded as a model, and duly emulated by those of Britain,
France, Austria and Russia. And the Junker class, the country's military and
administrative elite, consolidated their ascendancy.
Not even by this time was Prussia synonymous with Germany. So far as Germany
was concerned, Prussia was still largely alien territory. Germany, in the
world's eyes, lay elsewhere, and the Germans resided elsewhere. Even England
- with her Saxon heritage, seventeenth-century dynastic links with the
Palatinate of the Rhine and eighteenth-century Hannoverian monarchs - was
considered more 'German' then Prussia, much of whose population consisted of
Balts, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians and Scandinavians.
And the Hohenzollerns, as well as the Junker class, were regarded, especially
by the older aristocracy of southern Germany, as mere parvenu upstarts,
backwoods yokels or semi-barbarians, only partially civilised and descruffed,
still damp with vestiges of hyperborean mist.
Despite more recent assumptions, then, the real heartland of old Germany had
nothing whatever to do with Prussia; and the original German aristocracy -
the aristocracy from which the Stauffenberg family issued - long pre-dated
that of the 'uncouth' east. Old Germany's heartland consisted of the Rhine
and its environs, particularly the region known as Schwaben or, in its
anglicised version, Swabia. Swabia lies in the northern foothills of the
Alps. On the west, it is bounded by the Rhine, on the east by the river Lech,
beyond which lies Bavaria. Its principal cities are Ulm, Augsburg and
Stuttgart. Prior to the fourteenth century, when the cantons won their
independence, Swabia included much of what is now Switzerland, as well as
Lake Constance.
The landscape is probably the most beautiful, the most majestic and most
hauntingly evocative in Germany. Vineyards alternate with thickly wooded
slopes. Rivers thread their way through deep valleys nestled between steep
forest-shagged hills, dense-foliaged mountains and stark projecting crags,
many of them surmounted by monasteries or castles. From these strategic
eminences, control could be exercised over fords, bridges, road junctions and
passes. It was from one such eminence - Castle Hohenstauffen, some
twenty-five miles to the east of Stuttgart - that the dynasty issued through
which the Holy Roman Empire, and the culture of the high Middle Ages,
attained their highest achievements.
In 800, Charlemagne had become the first ruler of the newly created Holy
Roman Empire. By means of this imperium, the Church hoped to organise Western
Europe into a pattern based on the Old Testament monarchy of ancient Israel,
which accommodated two 'Messiahs' or 'anointed ones', the king and the high
priest. The Holy Roman Empire was intended to replicate this
religio-political structure, with secular or temporal authority being
exercised by the emperor, spiritual authority by the pope. Sacred and profane
were thus, at least in theory, to be welded into a unity that facilitated the
process of administration and government - and firmly subordinated, again in
theory, secular affairs to those of the Church.
On Charlemagne's death, the secular empire he had yoked inseparably to the
Papacy w[a]s sub-divided among his sons. The temporal sphere of the intended
pan-European theocracy became increasingly more fragmented, increasingly a
law - or multitude of laws - unto itself. By the Middle Ages, France,
England, Italy, Spain and other nations had begun to evolve national,
cultural and, in some cases, political identities of their own, often with
their own autonomous rulers and administrative apparatus; and the Holy Roman
Empire, though it continued to exist under that name, had become, to all
intents and purposes, the German Empire, the first Reich. IR the language of
the time, it was accepted as commonplace to speak of the Holy Roman Emperor
as the German Emperor, and of the empire itself as simply Germany.
Swabia was created as a duchy in 917. By the end of the eleventh century, the
duchy had passed into the hands of the Hohenstauffen ('High Stauffen')
dynasty. In 1155, the Duke of Swabia, Friedrich III von Hohenstauffen, became
the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich i, also known as Friedrich Barbarossa ('Red
Beard'). When he ascended the imperial throne, he was already a veteran of
the ill-fated Second Crusade of 1147 and, in 1154, had embarked on a project
that was to occupy him for much of his life, the subjugation and annexation
of Italy. This was to bring him into conflict with the pope, who, in 1160,
excommunicated him - thus, rather embarrassingly, leaving the Holy Roman
Empire neither holy nor Roman. Friedrich responded by storming Rome itself
and, in I 166, installing his own puppet pontiff, Paschal III, a personage
still unrecognised in the Vatican's official history. For the next six years,
and with the blessing of his pet anti-pope, Friedrich busied himself
extending his domains to include Bohemia, Hungary and Poland. Then, in 1174,
he made peace with the newly elected 'official' pope, Alexander III. He had
to abase himself, kneel and kiss the pontiff's feet, in exchange for which
his excommunication was lifted. In the following year, Friedrich contrived to
get himself crowned King of Burgundy, which at that time stretched from
Marseilles to Basle. By 1184, however, his renewed designs on Italy had
brought him into conflict with the Papacy again; and when Urban III ascended
the throne of St Peter, open warfare erupted between pope and emperor.
In 1189, Friedrich embarked from Germany with an immense army, intending to
join King Richard I of England (Richard Coeur de Lion) on the Third Crusade,
but on the way to the Holy Land, while crossing the river Goksu in Turkey, he
drowned. His burial Site remains a mystery. According to later legends, he
lies sleeping in a cave deep within Mount Kyffhauser, south of the Harz
Mountains, awaiting the call to awake and rescue his country in the hour of
need.
Friedrich Barbarossa was a, vivid and archetypally evocative figure, but his
grandson, Friedrich II, was an even more flamboyant personality, who, seven
centuries later, was to exert a profound influence on the thinking of the
poet Stefan George and of the young Claus von Stauffenberg. Under Friedrich
II, the Hohenstauffen dynasty and the Holy Roman Empire attained their
zenith. He was born in Italy in 1194 and in 1220 at the age of twenty-six,
ascended the imperial throne. By that time, most of the Holy Land had already
been lost to Islam, but instead of waging war against the 'infidels',
Friedrich chose to treat with them, and obtained by negotiation what the
crusaders could not by conflict. In 1229, he was crowned King of Jerusalem,
entered the Holy City in triumph and obtained Bethlehem, Nazareth and the
surrounding countryside as well.
At their maximum extent, Friedrich's European domains were to include the
whole of what is now Italy, as far south as Sicily. They were to include
Burgundy, from Provence across the Rhine to Lorraine. They were to include
Austria, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony, Brandenburg, Brabant and other
duchies, counties and marches in what was then German territory. They were to
include Silesia, Pomerania and as much of Prussia as had been conquered and
colonised. They were to include Bohemia, Hungary and Poland. In effect, the
Hohenstauffen empire encompassed virtually the whole of Europe except for
Scandinavia, France, the Iberian peninsula and the Balkans. Friedrich's
temporal power, like that of his grandfather, inevitably brought him into
conflict with the Papacy and, like his grandfather, he was excommunicated.
Unlike his grandfather, however, he did not care, making no attempt to come
to an accommodation with Rome.
Whatever Friedrich's accomplishments in politics and diplomacy, they were to
be eclipsed, at least for posterity, by his activities in other spheres. He
was a kind of pre-Renaissance 'Renaissance Man'
and his mind was one of the most brilliant, most energetic, most insatiably
voracious and audacious of the entire Middle Ages. He was to play a crucial
role in the coalescence of modern Western culture. He spoke six languages,
wrote poetry, was impressively versed in falconry, music, philosophy,
mathematics and the spectrum of esoteric teachings available to his time. His
opulent, cosmopolitan and ultra-sophisticated court in Sicily was a centre
and a haven for Judaic and Islamic scholars; and it was through this court
that much of their knowledge - algebra, for example, and Arabic numerals -
was transmitted to the West. To propagate and disseminate such knowledge,
Friedrich founded the University of Naples. Not surprisingly, his
encyclopedic and heterodox thinking provoked as much antipathy in the Papacy
as did his territorial expansion. He was repeatedly accused of heresy and,
even worse, apostasy; and he seems, indeed, seriously to have considered
converting to Islam. Although he remained nominally Christian, his attitudes
towards most things had little in common with the orthodoxy of the era. This
included his attitude towards wedlock. His first marriage, at the age of
fourteen, was to the daughter of the King of Aragon and the widow of the King
of Hungary. His second was to Isabella, daughter of King John of England.
Neither of these dynastic alliances prevented him from maintaining a harem in
the Arab style.
>From the milieu of the Hohenstauffen emperors, and particularly from that of
Friedrich II, there sprang such phenomena as the poetic mystique of the
Rhine, as expressed in the early thirteenth-century epic The Nibelungenlied,
which provided, of course, the basis for Wagner's Ring. From the same milieu
there also sprang perhaps the supreme flowering of medieval high culture. One
especially important and durable manifestation of this was the work composed
by Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, Wolfram von Eschenbach,
Walther von der Vogelweide, as well as the Minnesanger and Meistersanger who
midwifed the epoch's great corpus of lyric, dramatic and narrative poetry. At
the court of the Hohenstauffen, poetry contests and festivals were a regular
occurrence, and bards competed with each other as they did in Ireland and
Wales centuries before. The ritual of the poetry festival spread as far east
as Marianburg, where it became a feature at the court of the Grand Master of
those supposedly ascetic and austere warrior-monks, the Teutonic Knights.
It was also from the milieu of the Hohenstauffen empire and its high culture
that the Stauffenberg family first issued. The family name, Schenk, now
usually means 'publican', but it can also signify 'cup-bearer', and this was
the sense attached to it in Hohenstauffen times. 'Cup-bearer' was an
officially recognised court title and position (rather like 'Steward' in
Scotland, which evolved into a family surname and then, as 'Stuart', into the
name of a royal dynasty). The ancestors of the modern Stauffenberg family
first appear on the stage of history as Schenken, or 'cup-bearers', to the
powerful Swabian Counts of Zollern, who, from the mid-fourteenth century on,
were known as the 'High Zollern', or Hohenzollern. Ruins of the original
Stauffenberg castle can still be seen at the tiny Swabian hamlet of
Stauffenberger Hof.
It is not known precisely how far back in time the family extends. The first
name to appear officially in the record is Werner, Schenk von Zollern, in
1257 The family's full name first appears on a deed dating from 1317 which
bears the signatures of three brothers: Burkhard Schenk von Stauffenberg,
Berthold Schenk von Stauffenberg and Werner Schenk von Andeck. It is from the
last of these, through his son, Hannes Schenk von Stauffenberg, that the
modern Stauffenberg family descends.[1]
The family produced a predictable number of military figures. At least three
Stauffenbergs served with the Teutonic Knights and at least two others with
the Knights of St John, one of them becoming a high functionary of that
order. Another served in the army of Charles, Connetable (Constable) de
Bourbon, who rebelled against Francois I, joined the Habsburg Emperor Charles
V to defeat and capture the French king at the Battle of Pavia in 151p, then
went on to besiege Rome. There were also many ecclesiastics in the family,
and a significant number of scholars. As early as 1310, two of Hannes Schenk
von Stauffenberg's brothers were enrolled at the University of Bologna, and a
tradition of learning was to persist in the line from then on. So, too, did a
tradition of piety. In 1468, two Stauffenbergs, with an entourage of forty
men, embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, visiting Bethlehem and the
Jordan. [2]
Within Germany proper, the Stauffenbergs enjoyed the status of Free Knights
of the Empire. This was denoted by the title 'Freiherr' and, like that of an
English baronetcy, was hereditary. Indeed, . 'Freiherr' is often translated
as 'baron' to differentiate it from 'Ritter', which denotes an 'ordinary'
knight. The Free Knights of the Empire were a uniquely German institution.
Some were, immensely wealthy, others poverty-stricken; some owned vast
estates, others no more than a single castle or, even less, a manor house or
fortified farm. But a Free Knight was, as the designation implies,
accountable to no one save the emperor - who was usually too far away, or too
apathetic, to exercise any control over him. A Free Knight's holdings might
lie in the domains of a count, duke or even king, but none of them could
wield authority over a Free Knight, who was deemed, technically, to be a
nobleman of equal rank. A Free Knight was exempt from all taxes save those
due the emperor, and he could flout with impunity all laws the emperor had
not personally decreed.
The Free Knights were symbolic embodiments in Germany of autonomy,
self-sufficiency and independence. They were fiercely proud of their
independence and defended it tenaciously. In many respects, they were the
stuff of legend: romantic, dashing and often buccaneering figures who
exemplified a spirit envied by much more powerful, yet also responsible,
potentates. Thus do they appear in the late eighteenth-century play Gotz von
Berlichingen, the work with which a then unknown young writer named Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe made his literary debut.
It was, of course, inevitable that a warrior caste like the Free Knights,
enjoying their exemption from constraint and seeking anything from adventure
to riches, would often enough turn to crime. By the eve of the Lutheran
Reformation, a burgeoning new middle class had begun to swell the wealth of
German cities. The Protestant 'work ethic' contributed dramatically to this
development, and money once lavishly squandered by feudal nobles and
potentates was finding its way into the coffers of such influential banking
dynasties as the Fuggers of Augsburg, or those of the Thurn-und-Taxis family,
who had established Europe's first commercial postal and courier service. For
the Free Knights, the newly prosperous class of merchants, entrepreneurs,
bankers and financiers offered enticing opportunities for plunder. Caravans
of bullion and commodities plying between such cities as Nuremberg, Augsburg
and Frankfurt became fair game for bands of freebooting Free Knights, who
would swoop on them like corsairs, or like the later outlaws of the American
West. These depredations, which prompted the first use of the term 'robber
baron', generated a state of ever intensifying friction between the Free
Knights and the cities. Attempts to neutralise them by curbing or curtailing
their hereditary rights and privileges were a primary cause of the curious
aristocratic insurrection of 1522 known as the Knights' Revolt.
The acknowledged leader and guiding hand of the revolt was the powerful and
charismatic Franz von Sickingen. For posterity, however, Sickingen's status
has been eclipsed by that of his spokesman and lieutenant, the dynamic and
resourceful young Ulrich von Hutten. Descended from a noble Franconian
family, Hutten was not only a Free Knight of the Empire, but also a wandering
scholar and soldier-poet. Learned and articulate, Hutten has sometimes been
called the 'first political German', and established a prestigious (or
notorious) reputation in the literary sphere as well. He is now held to stand
in the great humanist tradition of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but was much more
vituperative and scathing than Erasmus, boldly attacking the Church, the
venal bourgeoisie of the cities and, in particular, Italian financial and
commercial interests in Germany. His poems, polemical tracts and rasping
satirical dialogues are among the most important literature of the period.
During the first decade and a half of the sixteenth century, antagonism had
intensified between the Hutten family and the Duke of Wurttemberg. Matters
came to a head when Ulrich von Hutten's cousin, Hans, married a woman of the
Stauffenberg family. [3] Such was her beauty, according to contemporary
accounts, that the duke found her irresistible and, in 1515, murdered her
husband to obtain her. His hostilities with the Hutten family escalated into
a blood feud, in which Ulrich von Hutten was to play a prominent part. It was
with five blistering political pamphlets against the duke that he launched
his literary career, publicly castigating his enemy in print for the whole of
Germany. When the duke, stung by this humiliation, attempted to retaliate,
Hutten invoked the aid of Franz von Sickingen and other Free Knights of the
Empire. As a result of their concerted action, the duke was deposed and
driven from his lands. This incident, stemming at least in part from a
Stauffenberg woman, was to be another contributing factor to the Knights'
Revolt. It imbued the knights with an overestimated sense of their own power
and spurred them on to more reckless undertakings. Their success in toppling
a powerful secular authority generated fresh alarm and antagonism among the
urban bourgeoisie.
As for the Stauffenbergs themselves, Jakob Schenk von Stauffenberg and his
wife were early converts to Lutheranism, but other members of the family
continued to adhere to their Catholic heritage.[4] In the seventeenth
century, one Stauffenberg was a Jesuit, while another served in the Catholic
armies of the Empire during the Thirty Years War. The brother of this officer
became Prince-Bishop of Bamberg. Another Stauffenberg became Prince-Bishop
first of Konstanz, then of Augsburg. His brother rose in the Swabian
contingent of the Knights of St John to the rank of
'Generalfeldmarschalleutnant'. The family continued to have connections with
some of the most resonant names not only in German, but in European, history.
The great poet and playwright Friedrich von Schiller was descended from the
fourteenth-century Konrad Schenk von Stauffenberg.[5] Prince Metternich, that
eminence grise of early nineteenth-century continental politics, was the
nephew of a Stauffenberg.[6]
In 1874, the 73-year-old Lieutenant-General Franz Schenk, Freiherr von
Stauffenberg was raised to the rank of Graf, or count, by Ludwig II of
Bavaria.[7] Trained as a lawyer, the lieutenant-general had also had a
distinguished career in politics dating from 1837. Between I1877 and his
death in 1881 he played a salient role in the parliamentary opposition to
Bismarck. His grandson, Alfred, married Karoline von Uxkull in 1904 From this
union, the three brothers, Alexander, Berthold and Claus von Stauffenberg,
were born.
Karoline von Uxkull was of Prussian descent. Her lineage may not have been
quite as old as that of the Stauffenbergs, but it included names no less
resonant - at least two of which were to figure prominently in the minds of
the three brothers. Claus von Stauffenberg was able to claim among his
maternal ancestors two of the most distinguished commanders in German
military history, two of the most important leaders of the Napoleonic Wars.
One of these was Field Marshal Peter Yorck, Graf von Wartenburg (1759-1830).
Yorck began his career as a swashbuckling soldier of fortune. In 1779 at the
age of twenty-one, he accused a superior officer of stealing an altar cloth
from a church and thereby got himself court-martialled, imprisoned for a year
and cashiered from the Prussian army. In 1781 he migrated to Holland, took
service with the Dutch East India Company and spent a year at the Cape of
Good Hope as well. In 1794, at the beginning of the revolutionary wars with
France, he regained his Prussian commission and embarked on a prolonged
campaign to update the Prussian army - to modernise the military machine
which had rested on its laurels since Frederick the Great's time half a
century before and adapt it to the conditions of early nineteenth-century
warfare. He was too late to do much at first, but at the Battle of Jena in
1806, where the supposedly invincible Prussians were resoundingly trounced by
Napoleon, he managed to bring his regiment through the debacle intact and
with honour. He subsequently commanded a corps (half the force allowed
Prussia by treaty) attached to the French army during Napoleon's invasion of
Russia. He was to play a crucial role in bringing Prussia into the Grand
Alliance that eventually toppled the French emperor. He also participated in
the mammoth Battle of Leipzig, known as the 'Battle of the Nations', and in
the joint Prussian-Russian-Austrian-Swedish-British invasion of France which
culminated with Napoleon's capitulation in 1814.
The second of Stauffenberg's illustrious maternal ancestors was Field Marshal
August Wilhelm Neithardt, Graf von Gneisenau (1760-1831). A Saxon by birth,
Gneisenau served in the Austrian army, then in that of the small German
principality of Bayreuth-Anspach. The army of Bayreuth-Anspach was among
those recruited as mercenaries by Britain's Hannoverian monarchy for service
in the rebellious colonies of North America; and though he arrived too late
to see much action, Gneisenau was present during the final phases of the
American War for Independence.
Much later, in Prussia, Gneisenau was at the forefront of attempts to
introduce social and constitutional reform, but it was as a military reformer
that he achieved his most significant and durable success. After the defeat
at Jena and the French occupation of Prussia, Gneisenau - together with Yorck
von Wartenburg, Gerhard von Scharnhorst and their younger disciple, Karl
Maria von Clausewitz - embarked on a dramatic and radical renovation of the
entire Prussian military system. This renovation, executed secretly under the
very noses of the occupying French, was to transmute the cumbersome old
Prussian war machine into one of the most efficient, modem and sophisticated
on the continent. Among other things, Gneisenau and Scharnhorst democratised
the Prussian
officer corps, made men of non-aristocratic status eligible for commissions
and introduced universal conscription. They were also instrumental in the
creation of the Prussian (subsequently German) General Staff, the first such
institution in the world, and in the creation of the General Staff College,
prototype for Sandhurst, St Cyr, West Point and other such academies. Like
Yorck von Wartenburg, Gneisenau played a prominent part in the Grand Alliance
against Napoleon, functioning as the Prussian army's Chief of Staff. In this
capacity, he attended - and did the thinking for - the more famous and
flamboyantly eccentric Marshal Gebhard von Blucher. When Blucher's army was
defeated by Napoleon at Ligny in June 1815, it was Gneisenau who assumed
command. He prevented the retreat from disintegrating into a rout, regrouped
the scattered Prussian formations and enabled them, in the nick of time, to
come to Wellington's aid at Waterloo.
With illustrious ancestors constantly in mind, Claus von Stauffenberg and his
two brothers grew up and came to maturity. But the Germany they inhabited was
a very different Germany from that of Gneisenau's and Yorck von Wartenburg's
time. In a span of some fifty-five years, the country had undergone a
revolution as dramatic, and traumatic, as that of France in I 789 or Russia
in 1917, but the revolution was of a very different kind.
In 1789, on the eve of the French Revolution, Germany was divided into no
less than 1,789 separate domains. There were 51 Free Cities of the Empire,
including Hamburg, Bremen, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm and Frankfurt. There were
63 ecclesiastical principalities presided over by clerics. There were 200
other principalities, ranging from the demesnes of counts, through duchies,
up to kingdoms like Saxony, Bavaria and Prussia, and there were 1,475 tracts
of independent territory held by Free Knights of the Empire.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna reassembled
this bewildering jigsaw into something more manageable: four Free Cities and
thirty-five other principalities. Of these, Prussia was the most powerful
militarily, but the 'heart and soul' of Germany were still deemed to lie
elsewhere - in Saxony, in Bavaria and, especially, in such regions along the
Rhine as the Palatinate, Hesse, Nassau, Baden and Westphalia, as well as the
Stauffenbergs' native Swabia. These regions were to constitute the arena for
a new struggle between 1815 and 1866, a social, cultural and political
struggle for Germany's 'heart and soul'. The two protagonists in the struggle
were to be Prussia under the Hohenzollern dynasty and Austria (after 1848 the
dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) under the Habsburgs.
Although held only tenuously together, and grievously debilitated by the
struggle with Napoleon, the Habsburg imperium still remained a major European
power, ruled by the oldest reigning dynasty on the continent. It had on its
side the weight of tradition, of legitimacy, of nearly a thousand years of
high culture, sophistication, cosmopolitan urbanity, diplomatic experience -
and the support of the Papacy, which carried much currency in such Catholic
regions as Bavaria. Prussia could not compete in these respects, but she had
the energy of a newly discovered nationalism, a vital industrial base, an
increasingly efficient military machine and the support of the Lutheran
Church, which has been described as pretty much an adjunct of the War Office.
The role of the Lutheran Church should not be overlooked or under-emphasised,
for it was responsible for promoting the Protestant 'work ethic'. Encouraging
progress, commerce, industrialisation and material success, the dynamism of
this ethic had, two centuries before, transformed England and Holland,
catapulting both to the forefront of European affairs. Now, that dynamism was
to find a new sphere of activity in Germany.
Thus the polarity of the mid-nineteenth century took shape. For many Germans
at the time, Austria embodied culture and civilisation, but she also appeared
decadent, inert and mired in the past. Prussia, though brash, vulgar and
tactlessly self-assertive, embodied the qualities associated with youth -
energy and idealism. Compared to Austria, she could appear alluringly
dynamic. If Austria was old, Prussia appeared young and seemingly bursting
with exuberance - even though her governing regime was among the most stodgy
and reactionary in Europe.
Until I 866, the struggle between Austria and Prussia for the 'heart and
soul' of Germany remained confined to social, cultural and diplomatic
spheres. But Prussia was readying herself for more dramatic activity.
Quietly, discreetly, virtually unnoticed by the rest of Europe, she had
embarked on a process of radical modernisation. This took place under the
auspices of the monarch, Wilhelm I, but its real instigator and guiding
spirit was the king's so-called 'Iron Chancellor', Prince Otto von Bismarck.
And Bismarck, relying heavily on the institutions Gneisenau had helped to
devise half a century before - the General Staff and the General Staff
College - proceeded to forge, out of 'blood and iron', the most efficient
military machine since Napoleon's time. This machine was to be deployed with
a single focused objective in mind: the neutralisation of Austria and the
unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. Operations were entrusted
to the new Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.
In I 864, while Europe's attention was distracted by the civil war raging in
the United States, Bismarck and his Chief of Staff undertook to give their
war machine a trial run. The target for this exercise, puny little Denmark,
was hardly in a position to offer much serious resistance. The conflict
lasted six months, although it took just ten weeks to defeat the Danish
forces in the field. When Denmark sued for peace, Prussia annexed (with
nominal Austrian collaboration) the prized duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
Having proved itself against a token adversary, the martial dynamo was ready
for a more serious and consequential confrontation. At last, after half a
century of subterranean diplomatic tussling, Bismarck was intent on settling,
once and for all, the long-standing vendetta with Austria. Most outsiders at
the time would not have wagered much on his chances, but the Habsburg
imperium was militarily feeble, spending only enough on her army, as the
novelist Robert Musil later wrote, 'to ensure her position as the
second-weakest great power in Europe'. According to jokes then current, the
Prussian army made steel while the Austrian army made music; the Prussian
army wore iron helmets with spikes, the Austrian cock hats adorned with
feathers. Music and feathers were no match for Krupp steel. When war came in
1866, Austria's showing was no more creditable than Denmark's had been. Her
troops offered stiffer resistance, but the war lasted only seven weeks, and
when it was over, the struggle for the 'heart and soul' of Germany had at
last been decided in Prussia's favour. Among the spoils of war were
Hesse-Cassel, Nassau, Hannover and the Free City of Frankfurt.
Among continental powers, the only serious remaining rival was France and the
Second Empire of Napoleon III. By 19 July 1870 (a day after the doctrine of
Papal infallibility was proclaimed by the Vatican), Bismarck had skil[l]fully
manipulated the French emperor into declaring hostilities. Having thus
exonerated himself from any charge of aggression, he responded with the kind
of force and speed that would come to be known, seventy years later, as
'lightning war', or 'Blitzkrieg'. The painfully humiliating Siege of Paris
was to drag on until the end of January 1871, but effective fighting in the
field between French and Prussian armies was over by 2 September 1870, a mere
six weeks. When the conflict ended, Napoleon III had capitulated, the Second
Empire lay in ruins and France, after careening vertiginously towards
full-scale civil war, had pulled herself tenuously together into a chastened
and none-too-stable republic. In place of the Kingdom of Prussia and its
associated satellite principalities, a new political entity had appeared on
the world's maps. On 18 January 1871, while his troops formed a ring of
bayonets around Paris and his artillery shelled the helpless city at will,
Wilhelm I was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles. The reborn German
Empire, the Second Reich, was an imperium calculated to evoke echoes of the
old Hohenstauffen dynasty, but it owed no allegiance whatever to Rome, and
its capital was not on the Rhine, but in the Prussian capital of Berlin.
Prussia and Germany were now, to all intents and purposes, synonymous, and a
military model for the rest of the world even in matters of fashion. Many
infantry regiments in the British Army adopted the spiked helmet, and some
retain it even today. It also survives in the helmet of the British bobby:
essentially a Prussian helmet with an amputated -spike.
Nominally at least, the new German Empire was a confederation of kingdoms and
principalities, each retaining its own semiautonomous ruler. Thus, for
example, Ludwig II of Bavaria continued to preside over his Wagnerian
fairy-tale realm. But the Second Reich was not prepared to brook any
insubordination from its constituent components. In 1886, after defying
Bismarck, Ludwig was mysteriously and conveniently murdered - at the hands,
it is now generally believed, of Prussian agents. It has even been suggested
that Prussian policy had something to do with the death of Archduke Rudolf,
the Austrian heir apparent, whose body was found, along with that of his
mistress, at the hunting lodge of Mayerling in 1889.
The new imperium was a curious, at times hybrid, political entity. Many of
the smaller principalities continued to exist as before: enclaves of archaic
quaintness and picturesqueness out of the brothers Grimm, with gingerbread
castles and a Ruritanian lifestyle unchanged since the Middle Ages. This is
how 'Germany' appears in Thomas Mann's early novel Royal Highness, published
in 1909. But side by side with such kitsch anachronisms (of particular appeal
to British tourists), there were burgeoning cosmopolitan cities like Hamburg,
Frankfurt and Cologne - and, of course, the massive industrial centre of the
Ruhr valley.
In the years immediately preceding the creation of the empire, Prussia had
closely monitored the American Civil War. Prussian 'observers' were often to
be found hobnobbing with the staffs of both Union and Confederate forces, and
much was learned from the North American conflict about the urgent need for
industrialisation, about modern weaponry and the advantages of up-to-date
artillery, about the possibilities created by railed transport. Bismarck was
quick to translate the lessons learned into practice. While he was developing
and then flexing his military machine against Denmark and Austria, he was
also building railroads. In the scale of this enterprise, Germany rivalled
the United States and outstripped Britain, Russia and France; and while the
railroads in other countries were designed to link major urban centres, those
in Germany were geared specifically to strategic military needs.
During the conflict in the United States, the Confederate General Nathan
Bedford Forrest had been asked what constituted the key to martial success.
Forrest had replied with a memorably succinct and oft-quoted formulation of
the self-evident: 'To git thar fustest with the mostest.' Germany's railway
system was structured in precise conformity to this principle - organised to
facilitate mobilisation and deploy the maximum number of troops, in the
shortest possible time, at the frontiers. On the eve of the Franco-Prussian
War in 1870, France mobilised in a traditional leisurely fashion, not
significantly changed since the Napoleonic era. In the astonishing span of
two days, meanwhile, the German railway network had mustered a quarter of a
million soldiers at the border, poised for a concerted thrust into enemy
territory. Everyone had imagined that war, when it came, would be fought on
German soil. In fact, it was fought entirely on French soil, and culminated
with the siege and bombardment of the French capital.
Britain had taken about a century and a half to industrialise. The United
States, prompted by the needs of the Civil War, did so in roughly half that
time. France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy and other nations proceeded at a
much slower pace. Within a quarter of a century, however, Germany's
accelerated industrialisation had made her one of the age's 'superpowers',
equalling the United States and surpassed only by the British Empire. By
1900, Germany was overtaking even Britain and had the largest iron and steel
industry in Europe. By then, too, she was presuming to challenge Britain,
France and the United States in the quest for overseas colonies. Attempts
were made to establish spheres of influence as widespread as Mexico, what is
now Namibia in South-west Africa, Morocco (where a conflict with the States
was narrowly averted) and China (where German troops contributed to the
suppression of the Boxer Rebellion). By the end of the first decade of the
twentieth century, Germany had embarked on what had hitherto seemed the
unthinkable. Under her new Secretary of the Navy, Grand Admiral Alfred von
Tirpitz, she was engaged in constructing a 'blue water' battle fleet
calculated to challenge Britain's sovereignty of the waves. The so-called
'Dreadnought Race' between 1906 and 1914 established a pattern for
twentieth-century politics, and presaged the nuclear arms race of the Cold
War. Yet German industrialisation, and the power accruing from it, had
outstripped the country's social and political maturity. The result was
analogous to a precocious and long-bullied adolescent wielding a Magnum or a
submachine-gun.
pp.71-94
Notes and References
When not cited here, the full bibliographical details are to be found in the
Bibliography.
4 Blood and Iron
1 Wunder, Die Schenken von Stauffenberg, p.71.
2 Ibid., p.101
3 Ibid., p.100
4 Ibid., p.105
5 Ibid., p.80.
6 Ibid., p.462.
7 Ibid., p. 321.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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