[CTRL] [8] Secret Germany - Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler

[Kris Millegan]

 -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
--[7]--

7

The Path of Aggression

Between 1933 and 1936, Stauffenberg returned to the cavalry school at
Hannover. During this period, he prepared for the compulsory military
district examination and for an exam in English. Both were mandatory for
admission to the General Staff College. Only 15 per cent of those taking the
exams ever reached the college, and only a third of these got as far as the
General Staff. Stauffenberg was to do both.

In September 1936, just before entering the Staff College, he spent a
fortnight in England. The journey - something to which he had eagerly looked
forward for years - was subsidised by a grant conferred on him for his scores
in his English exam. He visited the Tower of London, St Paul's, Buckingham
Palace, the British Museum, Windsor and Eton, and on 7 September, he was
invited to Sandhurst, where he met and spoke to a number of cadets studying
German.

He was admitted to the General Staff College at Berlin-Moabit at the
beginning of October, along with one hundred other young officers. Three
months later, on New Year's Day of 1937, he was promoted to captain. Among
his colleagues at this time were two who were to play significant roles in
the conspiracy of 1944: Merz von Quirnheim, his associate from earlier
military days, and Eberhard Finckh. Life in Berlin also brought him into
regular contact with others, both family and friends, who would be involved
in later events: Casar von Hofacker, for example, and the diplomat Adam von
Trott zu Solz.

It was at the General Staff College that Stauffenberg submitted two memorable
papers, one of which, awarded first prize as a competition essay, was
entitled 'Thoughts on Home Defence against Enemy Parachute Troops'.
Throughout the war, this was to remain a basic text for Colonel-General Kurt
Student, commander of the Wehrmacht's paratroops from I 93 8 on. It is the
second paper, however, advocating the continued use of cavalry, that reveals
most about Stauffenberg's personality.

The question so often asked today, Should we have cavalry or tanks, is a bad
question. The requirement is for cavalry and tanks ... a tactical or
strategic breakthrough now being hardly conceivable without the use of tanks
in mass. But this does not affect the strategic role of cavalry. Looking at
the problem quite dispassionately, the extent to which either the horse or
the mechanical vehicle is capable of giving us cavalry-type mobility depends
upon factors which have only been touched on here; among the most important
are conditions on and beyond our frontiers and the fuel supply problem.[1]

In 1937, then, when French and British military thinkers were still
questioning the viability of Armour Ed warfare, Stauffenberg regarded it as a
self-evident necessity but still argued for the retention of cavalry.
Anticipating a war beyond Germany's borders, he foresaw conditions of climate
and terrain (in Russia, for example) in which cavalry would still prove its
worth. In his mind the logistic problem of maintaining fuel supplies could
lead to the immobilisation of armour and so vindicate the existence of
cavalry formations. But the real justification of cavalry for Stauffenberg
lay ultimately in the kind of morale or 'elan vital' it inculcated, the kind
of training it had provided for leadership since the Middle Ages. Cavalry had
traditionally been the elite of all European armies, the direct descendant of
medieval knighthood and chivalry; and although infantry had been the decisive
factor on the battlefield for more than three centuries, it was nevertheless
the cavalry that most stressed esprit de corps, discipline and audacity of
command. It had therefore continued to function as it had traditionally - the
arm of the service which provided a repository for the sons of the
aristocracy, as well as for the boldest, most dynamic and resourceful
commanders.

Much was made of the fact that the cavalry leader operated on the same level
as his men, not above them like the mounted infantry officer. To be a cavalry
leader was, for Stauffenberg, less a utilitarian business than a state of
mind, a constellation of spiritual qualities:

More than any other arm of the service, cavalry is dependent on the quality
of its leaders. Without great generals, without real cavalry leaders, cavalry
is no more than an expensive impediment. The qualities of a cavalry leader
are inborn and are vouchsafed only to a fortunate few . . . Even those
fortunate few only rise to full stature in conjunction with their arm of the
service; only in their arm are they ultimately inspired to act in the true
cavalry spirit - it almost seems as if only a genius in the art of war is
capable of recognising the cavalry as the arm designed for major strategic
tasks.[2]

While the qualities of the cavalry leader might be inborn, they nevertheless
had to be cultivated and refined. This, Stauffenberg insisted, could only be
'the fruit of long training, which cannot begin early enough'.[3]

Stauffenberg of course identified himself with his own idealised conception
of the cavalry leader. In an earlier century, he undoubtedly would have
become one. Certainly he displayed the traits of gallantry, charisma, panache
and audacity associated with the great cavalry commanders of the past -
Prince Rupert of the Rhine in the English Civil War, Friedrich von Seydlitz
in the wars of Frederick the Great, J.E.B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest
in the American War between the States - but if Stauffenberg exhibited
something of their flamboyant style and flair, he exhibited nothing of their
impetuous recklessness. His own real forte was to be logistics, the ability
to grasp an 'overview' which is the hallmark of the greatest commanders, and
the practical, hard-headed business of keeping an army supplied and
maintained over long distances.

Whatever his own romantic attitudes towards cavalry and cavalry commanders,
Stauffenberg remained in other respects lucid and pragmatic. He frequently
criticised the General Staff's mentality, arguing that they concentrated too
much on tactics, not enough on logistics, on military economy and technical
matters. They seemed to regard war as something conducted in a social,
political and economic vacuum - like a boxing match, or like two warriors of
legend meeting in single combat, oblivious to the context in which their
engagement took place. Stauffenberg endeavoured to counter this blinkered
vision by studying on his own, concentrating on material neglected by his
instructors. To his extensive reading, he now added Keynesian economic theory
and geopolitics. Influenced by Keynes, he began, for a time at least, to
ascribe the catastrophes of the twentieth century - the First World War, for
example, and the revolution in Russia - to economic factors. He stressed in
particular the shift of Europe's industrial centre of gravity from Britain to
Germany, and the effect on British markets of Germany's pre-1914 economic
expansion. While at the General Staff College, he became particularly
friendly with an American exchange officer, the future General Albert
Wedemeyer, who, in 1944, would become Chief of Staff to Chiang Kai-Shek and
the Chinese army. Stauffenberg and Wedemeyer often invited each other to
meals or cocktails at their respective homes. Stauffenberg would practice his
English with the American officer, and put to him probing questions about
such matters as American steel production and its greater volume than
Germany's. He expressed admiration for Roosevelt and the drastic measures
adopted by the American president to revive the country's economy after the
Depression. In these discussions. Wedemeyer later reported, Stauffenberg
often displayed an implicit disapprobation of National Socialist policies.[4]
He could hardly, of course, have made any overt statements.

It was noted, however, that he began to grow more reticent, more reluctant
about putting his own positions forward. Such, at any rate, was the case so
far as contemporary politics were concerned. On the past, he remained
loquacious, often slipping historical allusions into his conversation. During
a cavalry exercise on the mountain of Hohentwiel, overlooking Lake Constance
and the Rhine, the regaled his companions with a vivid description of the
far-flung Hohenstauffen empire, 'in the centre of which you are now
standing'.[5] His last exercise at the General Staff College again took him
to his native region, where he used the occasion to persuade the group to pay
a joint visit to the Imperial cathedrals on the river. He acted as leader. At
the end of the trip, he made a speech on the Rhine in which he evoked the
region's century-old history. Then, turning to a time when national states
would have passed away, he forecast a new role for the Rhine as the main
artery of Europe. Of the past he spoke not like an intellectual observer but
seemed more of a co-actor, one who had been there himself and now was called
upon once again to make decisions. Thus his portrayal of the past became a
living example for the present.[6]

During this same speech, he cited the ancient antipathy between France and
Germany. The Rhine, he prophesied, was a river of destiny, where a decisive
battle would be fought for hegemony of the West. He also expressed his fear
that the self-inflicted wounds resulting from such a conflict would leave
Western Europe morally, ethically and spiritually bankrupt. Western culture,
he argued, had not collapsed after the First World War only because the final
climactic engagement on the Rhine had been averted. Whether such an
engagement could be averted in future was an open and worrying question. And
what, he asked portentously, if new developments gave the fledgling great
power to the east an opportunity to take a hand in the struggle . . . ?

During his stay at the General Staff College, Stauffenberg, through an old
associate from Stefan George's circle, made the acquaintance of a scholar and
historian, Professor Dr Rudolf Fahrner, who was working at the time on an
ambitious biography of Stauffenberg's own ancestor, Field Marshal August von
Gneisenau. It was thus inevitable that the two men would have much to say to
each other. Stauffenberg was particularly stirred by Fahrner's description of
Gneisenau as an officer ready to play a significant role in matters of state
and governmental reform: 'His was not a spirit prepared to bow to what to
others might seem the inevitable; his mind was busy thinking how, by his own
exertions, a man might liberate Prussia.'[7] And Stauffenberg made no secret
of his desire to model himself on Gneisenau. At the same time he urged Fahmer
not to depict the nineteenth-century commander as too conventional a
revolutionary, nor as the instigator of nothing more than a popular rising.
As always, Stauffenberg insisted on the importance of leadership to impart
coherence and direction to unleashed collective energies:

Any revolt against the state and its leaders is no business of the
irresponsible mass of the people and should not therefore even be discussed
in too wide a circle. If the use of force against one's own state is
unavoidable, it must be confined to men conscious of their responsibilities
and, even more important, capable of meeting them.[8]

In our own strenuously egalitarian age, such assertions must sound
shamelessly and outrageously 'elitist', but a Wehrmacht officers' mess in the
'30s was a very different environment. In any case, Stauffenberg's personal
magnetism enabled him to get away with statements that would have been
offensive coming from others. 'His charm and ease made one forgive his
forceful and uncompromising manner; and his ruthless will was made bearable
by his cheerful calm, which allowed no pathos . . . he always smiled as he
spoke.'[9] But Stauffenberg's charisma consisted of more than just a surface
effect..

What impressed observers most strongly was that he always saw a problem in
its entirety and based his judgement of details on this secure foundation.
People from quite different walks of life were his close friends. They were
all actively involved in intellectual and artistic pursuits . . . [10]

By this time, he had overcome the illnesses which had plagued his boyhood and
youth: 'his nerves and health, which he certainly did not spare, were
enviable'.[11] He would often work for as long as sixteen hours a day,
impressing others by his powers of concentration. This aptitude for
maintaining concentration while dealing with a multitude of things at once
was to become one of Stauffenberg's personal trademarks, something on which,
throughout his career, colleagues and eyewitnesses consistently and
repeatedly commented. A vivid account has been provided by his fellow officer
Erwin Topf during the French Campaign of 1940:

The 'Q' conferences which he held were unforgettable. In general they did not
take place at any set time; gradually the section heads, the commanders of
special detachments and the liaison officers arrived. Stauffenberg, tall,
slim, lively, and a man of extraordinary personal charm, would welcome us all
with genuine infectious geniality; he would make sure that everyone had
something to drink, a cigar or a pipe. He would give us the latest
information, ask questions and take interest in apparently trivial matters,
tell the latest stories covering the whole divisional area from the
reconnaissance detachment back to the field bakery, jump from one subject to
another, listen to or ask questions of the latest arrivals. This would go on
apparently for ages, and none of our questions had been answered, none of our
dispositions made for the next day or even for the next few hours, and no
orders issued. Then quite casually and conversationally would come the words,
'Well then, I think we'll do it this way.' And then in all its detail out
would come the 'Q' order, Stauffenberg with his left hand in his trouser
pocket, a glass in his right hand, wandering thoughtfully about the room,
stopping at one moment here, at another moment there, and then going back to
the map. He did not issue a formal order as one would have expected from a
General Staff officer; he was in no sense hide-bound.[12]

Colonel Bernd von Pezold isolated the characteristics underpinning this
impressive aptitude for man-management:

He was capable of seeing several moves ahead in the chess game and taking
account of all the various alternatives. He was quick to grasp a situation,
to sort out the important from the unimportant, and could spot the decisive
factor with unerring intuition. He was capable of logical abstract thought
and possessed a lively imagination, which, however, never led him to overstep
the bounds of practicability . . .[13]

With the rank of captain, Stauffenberg completed his course at the General
Staff College in the summer of 1938, his abilities having become known by all
senior officers of the Wehrmacht. He was requested by the Organisation
Section of the General Staff, but the request was turned down on the grounds
that there were already enough 'strong characters' in the section, and his
appointment might 'disturb the balance' between it and others. In
consequence, on I August 1938 he was posted as Staff officer in charge of
logistics to the 1st Light Division based at Wuppertal, just east of
Dusseldorf. His commanding officer was Lieutenant-General Erich Hoepner,
later to be one of his most active co-conspirators.

The Light Division was a hybrid formation, a compromise intended to reconcile
the intrinsic conservatism of the Wehrmacht's high command with Hitler's
insistence on the accelerated expansion of armoured units. It comprised two
regiments of motorised infantry, one reconnaissance regiment, one artillery
regiment and one tank battalion with supporting arms. Later, on the outbreak
of; war, this conglomeration would be dismantled, and the Light Division
would be reconstituted as the 6th Panzer Division.

Stauffenberg's brief was to organise logistics for the entire division. Since
it had never previously had a logistics section, he had to start from the
beginning and build one from whatever he could improvise with his own
resources. A colleague of Stauffenberg. described him at work, with the
office door wide open, puffing happily away at a black cigar, striding up and
down the room, dictating the most complicated reports straight onto the
typewriter. Despite frequent interruptions by visitors and telephone, he
would continue his report at the precise point of interruption. [14]

On 23 September 1938, the Light Division received its orders for the thrust
into Czechoslovakia. Four days later, it moved to its assembly area near the
Czech border. The infamous Munich Conference of 29 September removed all
barriers from Hitler's path of aggression, and snatched away from the army's
high command their justification for overthrowing him. Between I and IO
October, German troops proceeded to occupy the Sudetenland. The situation was
formalised on 20 November, with Czechoslovakia ceding to Germany 11,000
square miles of territory, with a population of 2,800,000 Sudeten Germans and
800,000 Czechs. A month before, however, on 21 October, Hitler had secretly
ordered the Wehrmacht to prepare to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia as
well. This new aggression began on IS March 1939. Although a flagrant breach
of the Munich Agreement, it was accepted as a fait accompli by the Western
Allies and went unchallenged.

The Light Division crossed the Czech frontier on 4 October. Its objective was
to prevent Sudeten Germans from occupying the region on their own initiative,
but this was simply a presence to mask a full-scale invasion. By 9 October,
the division had reached the town of Mies, where the German-speaking
population welcomed each vehicle with jubilation and flowers. At Nurschan,
however, just before Pilsen, the reception from the Czech population was
markedly more hostile. It was unclear whether Nurschan belonged to the zone
ceded to Hitler's Reich. Pending an answer to this question, a Czech staff
officer, supported by the British mediation commission, demanded that German
troops leave. The Light Division's command replied brusquely that any areas
occupied by its soldiers could not be relinquished, despite the principle of
self-determination according to which territory had been ceded.

The area occupied by the Light Division consisted primarily of farmland,
where agricultural methods were primitive and there was little literacy, a
low standard of living. Even greater poverty prevailed than in the adjacent
forests and mountains. As the puny Czech army mobilised for its futile
gesture of defiance, all activity in the region came to a standstill. With
everything being requisitioned, there was a dearth of horses and vehicles for
harvesting and ploughing. Supplies from elsewhere in Czechoslovakia had
ceased altogether, and those from Germany arrived only slowly.

As commander of the Light Division's logistics section, Stauffenberg embarked
on a programme characteristic less of an invasion than of a modem United
Nations aid and relief effort. At the Mies town hall, he called a meeting of
divisional officers and local authorities, and forced them to co-operate with
each other. There being no yeast available for bread-making, he instructed
the division to buy yeast in Germany and deliver it to the local people. He
placed a platoon at the disposal of an estate manager to help bring in the
potato harvest and store the wheat harvest - a rather humbling experience,
one suspects, for swaggering German soldiers intoxicated by dreams of martial
glory. He commandeered two trucks from Germany to help breweries in the
region distribute beer. For transport vital to the vicinity's economy and
population, petrol was supplied at cost price. Stauffenberg also elicited the
support of district authorities in taking measures against an outbreak of
hoof-and-mouth disease. When a shortage of brown coal threatened a glass
factory with a work stoppage and the loss of four hundred jobs, he dispatched
the factory manager to obtain coal from Army Group Headquarters in Karlsbad;
and he again made the division's resources available for moving it.

In the meantime, butter and milk from the area, destined for Pilsen, were in
danger of going bad, and inhabitants of Pilsen were unable to obtain the
essentials they required. Here, too, Stauffenberg took measures to alleviate
the situation. He distributed safe-conduct passes for working people, thus
effectively and single-handedly opening the frontier for supplies, and he
arranged, once again, for his own troops to distribute supplies to needy
areas.

It was also necessary to crack down on German personnel. Sudeten Germans were
desperately in need of German currency - German marks - and the Wehrmacht's
officers and men seized the opportunity to purchase goods at shamefully cheap
prices. Stauffenberg was indignant at this exploitation. He obtained an order
forbidding all large-scale purchases. Commodities already purchased, even by
officers of superior rank to himself, had to be returned.

On 16 October, its mission in Czechoslovakia completed, the Light Division
moved back into Germany, resuming to its base at Wuppertal. Stauffenberg's
high spirits were exemplified by his antic handling of the exercise assigned
to his section. This exercise - described by one commentator as 'a witty and
sarcastic burlesque for the senior officers'- was purely theoretical,
involving no actual troops, only paper. It posited a hypothetical armoured
force, looking neither to left nor right, driving straight ahead, with
single-minded concentration, to the Urals. As logistics officer, Stauffenberg
undertook to concoct the most improbable means of keeping the force supplied,
culminating in a strategy based on reductio ad absurdum. When the force ran
out of fuel in the Ukraine (as, of course, it was bound to do), he suggested
the immediate capture of Baku, where a land pipeline was laid. His motto for
the operation was: 'The eye of their master makes the cows fat.'[15] On one
level, this was intended as a zany non-sequitur of the sort now associated
with Monty Python, but it incorporated an implicit ambivalence of meaning
which must have had more than a few officers scratching their heads in
perplexity.

Stauffenberg's exhilaration after the Czech invasion stemmed less from any
triumphalist sense of conquest than from the fact that war had been averted -
a war for which he, like all other professional military men, recognised
Germany was not ready. The 'peaceable' occupation of Czechoslovakia seemed to
confirm Hitler's resourcefulness in diplomacy, his capacity to obtain what he
wanted through a combination of bluff and negotiation, without having to shed
blood.

Hindsight can discern only too clearly how tragically myopic such a new was,
but at the time there seemed abundant evidence to support it. In 1935, for
example, Hitler had ordered the Wehrmacht into the Rhineland, officially a
demilitarised zone. The operation was undertaken by a diminutive probing
force, a mere three battalions; and at the slightest indication of French
resistance, they were under orders to withdraw at once. According to
documents produced at the Nuremberg trials, each German soldier had only been
issued with three rounds of ammunition.[16] Yet the bluff had worked. The
French, who could easily have thwarted the German incursion, shrank from the
prospect of confrontation and did nothing.

The audacious gamble in the Rhineland had been followed, on the night of II
March 1938, by the annexation - the Anschluss - of Austria. Here again,
German aspirations had been fulfilled, German morale and self-respect had
been tremendously boosted and war had been averted. Shortly after the
Anschluss, Stauffenberg had stated to a friend his conviction that Hitler
would not do anything to risk a full-scale conflict. The friend (being in the
national defence section of the General Staff and therefore privy to more
information) intimated otherwise. Stauffenberg remained adamant, pointing out
that everything so far had been managed without recourse to arms. He had no
doubts whatever of Hitler's determination not to incur bloodshed:

[ . . .] a man who was always emphasising that, as a corporal in the First
World War, he knew only too well the horrors of war, could not, with his eyes
open, head for a war which would in all probability have to be waged against
the entire world.[17]

Events in Czechoslovakia seemed only to reinforce this belief. They had, it
was true, entailed some precarious brinksmanship, but that appeared only to
prove that Hitler had accurately taken the measure of British and French
leadership, and knew precisely how much he could get away with.

All the same, Stauffenberg was now beginning to have misgivings and
forebodings. He worried that the effortless success of the Czech occupation
might go to Hitler's head and lead, on the next occasion, to a serious
miscalculation. His general uneasiness was soon to be reinforced by events
within Germany. On 9 November
1938, shortly after the Light Division had resumed to German soil, there
occurred the notorious Kristallnacht. Two days before, in Paris, a young
Jewish refugee, bent on avenging his father's deportation to Poland, had shot
an official of the German embassy. In retaliation, Goebbels arranged for a
series of 'spontaneous
demonstrations'. Jewish property was to be destroyed. As many Jews as
possible were to be arrested on whatever grounds could be contrived. The
police were instructed not to interfere with any displays of 'healthy'
anti-Semitic sentiment.

Altogether, some 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, 195 synagogues were
partially or completely vandalised, and 20,000 Jews were arrested. The murder
of Jews went unpunished. Retribution was visited only on those who raped
Jewish women, since this violated the racial laws. The insurance money of the
Jewish community was confiscated, and the community was fined a billion marks
as a penalty for having provoked the disturbance. As Dr Hans Bernd Gisevius,
one of the later conspirators, wrote:

The conclusions that were forced upon every thinking German were grim and
depressing indeed. Not a single general had had the impulse to bring out his
troops and see to the clearing of the streets. The army leaders had played
deaf and blind. The meaning of this is clear. Everyone had long since given
up hope that the cabinet would ever do anything. From whom could decent
Germans now expect protection if these horrible excesses were followed by
others? . . . the cowed middle class stared at the Nazi monster like a rabbit
at a snake. A general psychosis had been created, under which the populace
was reduced to absolute submission.[18]

Stauffenberg was mortified by Kristallnacht. The outrage marked a decisive
turning point in his attitude towards the National Socialist regime To his
military colleagues, he commented only on the purely pragmatic repercussions:
the damage done to Germany's honour and reputation in the eyes of the world.
His primary objections, however, were personal and moral. His own brother,
Alexander, was now married to a woman of Jewish ancestry, Melitta Schiller.
Jewish members of George's circle, some of them among his closest friends,
were now under threat. The government and the Fuhrer to whom he had taken his
oath of allegiance were suddenly beginning to appear ugly in the extreme.

While based at Wuppertal during the early months of 1939, Stauffenberg would
often invite a circle of junior officers to his quarters where he would
organise, conduct or preside over discussions and lectures intended to widen
his colleagues' intellectual horizons, In January 1939, the guest speaker at
one of these sessions was Dr Rudolf Fahrner, the scholar and historian he had
met while at the General Staff College. Fahrner was still at work on his
definitive biography of Gneisenau, and this was to be the subject matter of
his lecture. Stauffenberg gave a brief introduction which, albeit obliquely,
alluded critically to current events in Germany. Fahrner then spoke for two
hours. When the presentation had concluded, Stauffenberg, with a laugh, said
pointedly of his illustrious Napoleonic ancestor: 'There, you see. Now we
have learned how he did things.'[19] What he meant by the way Gneisenau 'did
things' will become apparent in due course.

Following the lecture, Stauffenberg and Fahrner went outside and walked for a
time together in the nearby forest. Fahrner expressed profound anxiety about
the situation prevailing in Germany, and particularly about Kristallnacht and
the intensifying virulence of Nazi anti-Semitism. He probed Stauffenberg for
some information on the Wehrmacht's attitude towards such developments.
According to Fahrner, Stauffenberg spoke freely about the plans for
overthrowing Hitler which had been thwarted by the Munich Agreement. He then
spoke of possible alternative plans and enumerated which generals would be
prepared to support a coup. He cited Beck as the man around whom resistance
would have to coalesce, the key figure to oppose National Socialism from
within the Wehrmacht, even though Beck had recently been replaced as Chief of
the General Staff. About a number of other senior commanders, he expressed an
embittered pessimism, fostered in part, no doubt, by their passivity on
Kristallnacht: 'you cannot expect people who have broken their spine once or
twice to stand up straight when a new decision has to be made'.[20] As for
Hitler, Stauffenberg's previous optimism had now utterly vanished. It was
clear, he said, that 'tine fool is bent on war' end was 'prepared to squander
the flower of [Germany's] manhood twice in the same generation' [21]

By the autumn of 1939, of course, all speculation would be swept aside by
events, and the Wehrmacht, like the German nation as a whole, would be too
flushed with martial success to contemplate any change of course. The spirit
of the times is expressed convincingly by Thomas Mann's narrator in Doctor
Faustus:

War, then, and if needs must, war against everybody, to convince everybody
and to win . . . that was what fate had willed . . . We were bursting with
the consciousness that this was Germany's century, that history was holding
her hand out over us; that after Spain, France, England, it was our turn to
put our stamp on the world and be its leader; that the twentieth century was
ours [22]


On 4 September 1939, Hitler's military machine smashed its way almost
effortlessly into Poland. Equipped now with 250 Czech-built Skoda tanks, the
Light Division was part of Colonel-General Gerd von Rundstedt's Army Group
South, striking from Silesia. Rundstedt's forces formed one arm of a giant
pincer movement, the other being composed of Army Group North, under Fedor
von Bock, moving down the Polish corridor. The Light Division quickly
captured Wielun, just across the German-Polish border, then raced east
towards the Vistula, parallel to the retreating Poles. At Radom, south of
Warsaw, it turned northwards to link up with other German units and encircle
seven divisions. In a report of 10 September, Stauffenberg compared the
German pincer movement to that of Tannenburg in 1914, when Hindenburg and
Ludendorff triumphantly encircled an entire Russian army.

At the same time an ominous shadow hung Colonel-General over the German
success. By a crossroads near Wielun, news had first reached divisional
headquarters of the Anglo-French declaration of war. Albeit reluctantly,
Hitler's bluff had this time been called, and the prospect of full-scale
conflict had become reality. The morale of the troops plummeted. Stauffenberg
grimly prophesied a struggle of attrition exceeding even that of 1914-18: 'My
friends, if we're to win the war, it will depend on our capacity to hold out;
for a certainty this war will see out ten years.'[23]

The capture of Wielun provoked the first of many squabbles Stauffenberg was
to have with the military hierarchy, and especially with the mentality
seeping into the army from the SS. Two women were arrested by a
sergeant-major. They had allegedly been signalling with electric torches from
the ground floor of a house, directing the aim of Polish artillery on German
positions in the town. It was immediately obvious to Stauffenberg that the
two women were simple-minded and could not have been doing anything of the
sort. Having hidden in the house, they were merely crawling about with their
torches, terrified by the barrage. These facts would have become sufficiently
clear in any properly conducted enquiry, but the officer in charge only
glanced at the women and in an offhand manner instructed the sergeant-major
to 'get rid of them'. It is probable that he meant no more than for the women
to be taken or chased away, but the sergeant-major interpreted the
instruction as a licence to shoot them. Outraged, Stauffenberg began
proceedings to have the officer court-martialled, even though he was an old
friend.[24] Sloppy slapdash orders and the wanton shooting of civilians might
be accepted procedure in the SS, whose infamous Einsatzkommandos - 'rapid
reaction' death squads - had already begun to operate.[25] Authorised to
murder indiscriminately anywhere behind the front lines, they were already
provoking revulsion among regular soldiers, but insofar as he could do
anything about it, Stauffenberg was not going to countenance such behaviour
in the officer corps of the Wehrmacht. The matter was too important in his
eyes to make allowances even for personal friendship.

The Polish campaign involved the Wehrmacht's first serious large-scale
venture with mechanised formations, and it revealed complications, never made
apparent in exercises. Due to inadequate preparation and an excessive
reliance on improvisation, operations were beset by an extremely poor supply
situation. Had Poland managed to hold out longer, or had she been reinforced,
it is questionable how long the German Blitzkrieg could have been sustained.
There were other, unforeseen difficulties as well, problems never properly
considered by the military planners, such as feeding vast numbers of
prisoners or providing the civilian population with sustenance.

For Stauffenberg these matters were a severe test of his organising abilities
and aptitude for logistics, and extended his activities far beyond those
officially dictated by his rank and position. At the end of the campaign he
issued a questionnaire to all ranks, from privates up to the divisional
commander, which covered everything from facilities for treating the wounded
to possible improvements needed in weapons and equipment. After studying the
results of his survey, Stauffenberg synthesised them into a comprehensive
report.

After completing his own work, he would always make a point of offering
himself to the divisional commander for other jobs. In part, this served an
educational purpose for him, enabling him to extend his own spheres of
expertise and gain familiarity with a broad spectrum of responsibilities and
tasks. He was grooming himself for senior command. At the same time, more as
a by-product at first than anything else, he began to find others
increasingly dependent on him, prone to confide in him and seek out his
advice. He began to assume the role that he would perform more and more often
during the course of his career - that of 'father confessor' to men far
senior in rank and age. And by establishing so close a rapport with his
divisional commander, he became probably the best-informed officer in the
entire division. Anyone having business with the commander, anyone seeking
his ear or desiring a favour, had first to deal with Stauffenberg.

In all this Stauffenberg was not simply pursuing his own personal ambition.
Immediately after the Polish campaign, he met his uncle, Graf Nikolas von
Uxkull, and one of Uxkull's friends, Fritz von der Schulenburg, deputy
president of Upper and Lower Silesia. Uxkull described the ever more alarming
situation in Germany. Stauffenberg, he insisted, must do something - must act
or, at very least, set about attaining a position from which action would
become possible. At the moment, of course, no such action was feasible. With
the best will in the world, Stauffenberg pointed out, a mere divisional
logistics officer could not very well initiate anything of consequence.
Nevertheless, he was left shaken and thoughtful by his uncle's appeal,
feeling 'impotence, perhaps also vexation at the thought that this apparently
mighty and victorious army was incapable of ensuring that the state
maintained reasonable standards of decency'.[26]

No doubt much of the energy he displayed reflected Uxkull's injunction to
attain a position enabling him to act. He now began to question whether
traditional concepts of loyalty to a state or a government can be valid
unless subordinated to some higher ideal; and whether duty towards the nation
and allegiance to the state were not only different, but also, in the
existing context, incompatible.

In February 1940, the important post of Operations Officer for the division
became vacant. That Stauffenberg would be appointed to fill it seemed a
foregone conclusion. Somewhat mysteriously, and to everyone's angry surprise,
he was bypassed and the position conferred on another captain, Helmut
Staedke. For the first few days, Staedke found himself ostracised, confronted
by a united front of surly hostility. Despite his own disappointment,
Stauffenberg came to Staedke's aid, smoothing things over for him. He
displayed a similar generosity towards other colleagues. He spent many
evenings helping one young subaltern prepare for the military district
examinations. At Christmas, 1939, he relinquished his leave to enable a
fellow officer to spend the holidays at home.

On 18 October 1939, a week after withdrawing to Germany from Poland, the
Light Division had been reconstituted as the 6th Panzer Division. By the
following spring, it was poised for the decisive German thrust into France.
Together with the 19th Panzer Division under the famous Heinz Guderian, it
comprised the 41st Panzer Corps. This corps, along with other units which
included one SS division, was part of a detached Panzer army commanded by
General Erwin von Kleist, operating under the overall authority of Field
Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt.

At four o'clock in the morning of IO April 1940, the Blitzkrieg began, with
German paratroops seizing bridges and airfields in Holland and Belgium. For
some five weeks, the bulk of the fighting was concentrated in the extreme
west, on Dutch and Belgian territory. Then, on 10 May, the Panzer army struck
in a direction entirely different from the other German advances. Its tanks
and motorised infantry drove south-west, through the Ardennes, which French
military planners had deemed impenetrable to armoured formations. The French
were caught off guard, and on 13 May, Guderian's division, closely followed
by 6th Panzer, broke through their defences at Sedan, the site of Germany's
greatest victory in the Franco-Prussian War exactly seventy years before. In
a mere seven days, the German armour had swept two hundred miles westwards to
the French coast; then swung north to link up with German units advancing
through Belgium. Boulogne fell on 25 May, Calais a day later. British lines
of communication were cut, and the whole of the British Expeditionary Force
was threatened with encirclement. On the evening of 26 May, the evacuation
from Dunkirk began and continued until 5 June. Some 338,000 British soldiers
were rescued, along with 120,000 French, but more than a million Allied
troops were taken prisoner. France was left with only 65 depleted and
demoralised divisions to face 140 German. The campaign lasted another
fortnight. On 11 June, the French government declared Paris an open city and
fled to Bordeaux. On 14 June, German troops goosestepped triumphantly down
the boulevards of the French capital. On 17 June, France capitulated and the
articles of surrender were formally signed five days later at Compiegne,
where the Treaty of Versailles had been signed twenty-two years earlier.

Stauffenberg appears to have been less exhilarated than sobered, even
saddened and shaken, by the magnitude and completeness of the French
collapse. In a letter from field headquarters on 19 June, he wrote to his
wife: 'The French debacle is frightful. They have been totally defeated and
their army annihilated, a blow from which this people is unlikely easily to
recover.'[27] Two days later he wrote again, in an even more sombre and
meditative mood. France, he mused, had succumbed to a false sense of security
after her victory in 1918 A similar fate might easily befall any nation which
became too complacent about its accomplishments.

A week from today is the anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles. What a
change in so short a time: while rejoicing over our triumph, we should cast
our minds back over the three decades through which we have lived and realise
how little finality has been reached; abrupt change or indeed a complete
reversal of the situation is more probable than even a few years of
stability. We must teach our children that salvation from collapse and decay
lies only in permanent struggle and a permanent quest for renewal; the
greater our past achievements, the more essential renewal becomes. We must
teach them, too, that stagnation, immobility and death are synonymous. Only
then shall we have fulfilled the main part of our task of national
education.[28]

In the middle of the French campaign, Stauffenberg himself had experienced a
dramatic change of fortune. On 27 May - a day after his division had captured
Calais and the British evacuation at Dunkirk had begun - he learned he was to
be transferred from 6th Panzer to the General Staff. This was a significant
advancement, and an indication that his merits had been recognised in high
quarters, but at first it struck Stauffenberg as 'dismal news'. He had
developed a taste for combat against a worthy adversary, yet he, as well as
everyone else, was quick to recognise that with the General Staff he was
truly in his element. It was with the General Staff that he was to spend the
next two and a half years. In this milieu, at the very centre of the chain of
command, he was to prove himself. During that time his attitude was to harden
and his determination crystallise- Adolf Hitler had to be overthrown.

pp.146-64

--[notes]--
7 The Path of Aggression

1 Kramarz, Stauffenberg, pp.4s-6.
2 Ibid., p.46.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p.47.
5 Ibid., p.48.
6 Zeller, The Flame of Freedom, p. 175.
7 Kramarz, op.cit., p.48.
8 Ibid.
9 Zeller, op.cit., p.178
10 Ibid., p.177.
I I Ibid.
12 Kramarz, op.cit., pp. 50-1
13 Ibid., p. 51.
14 J. Kramarz, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, German edition: Frankfurt, 1965, p.58.
15 Kramarz, op.cit., pp.54-5.
16 Meehan, The Unnecessary War, p.115.
17 Kramarz, op.cit., p.59.
18 Gisevius, To the Bitter End, p. 334.
19 Kramarz, op.cit., p.58.
20 Zeller, op. cit., p. 186.
21 Kramarz, op.cit., p.61.
22 Mann, Doctor Faustus, p.291.
23 Kramarz, op.cit., p.57.
24 Ibid.
25 Hitler had ordered mass killings. He informed the High Command of this at
a meeting at the Berghof, 22 August 1939. He said:

'Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality; Genghis Khan has
sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light
heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the
weak Western European civilisation asserts about me, that is of no account. I
have given the command and I shall shoot everyone who utters one word of
criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching
certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so for the
present only in the East I have put my death-head formations in place with
the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women
and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living
space that we need . . . Be hard, be without mercy, act more quickly and
brutally than the others. The citizens of Western Europe must tremble with
horror.'

Following this speech, Goering, enthused, 'jumped on a table . . . [anal
danced like a wild man'. See: Documents on British Foreign Policy, 3rd
Series, Vol. VII, pp.258-9.
26 Kramarz, op.cit., p.61.
27 Ibid., p.72.
28 Ibid.

-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris

DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing!  These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically  by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html

http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Om