At the Headquarters of Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front, the
First General Staff Officer, Oberstleutnant Henning von Tresckow, had
collected around himself a staff of like-minded officers - men
fundamentally opposed to the criminal Nazi regime. Even before the
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Tresckow had been shocked
and appalled by the criminal nature of the orders issued to the
subordinate commands. He recognised that such orders as the "Commissar
" and the "Barbarossa
" were clear violations of
international law, and he convinced his commander, Feldmarschall von
Bock to protest to the C-in-C of the Army, Generaloberst von
Brauchitsch – to no effect.
By the winter of 1941, he and the men
around him at Army Group Centre Headquarters had seen exactly where
these barbaric orders led: to atrocities against the helpless and
unarmed, whether prisoners of wars or Russian civilians. After becoming
witnesses to a large-scale massacre of Jews, Tresckow decided that
Hitler and his regime could be tolerated no longer. Hitler had to be
eliminated – like a mad dog.
Tresckow sent one of his staff to Berlin with the mission of finding if
there wasn't anyone left in the German capital who was as determined as
he to eliminate the Nazi dictatorship. The trail led – logically
– to Generaloberst Beck, and Beck put Tresckow in touch with both
Oster and Olbricht. Henceforth, the Conspiracy had three central
operative cells: Oster in Counter Intelligence, responsible for the
assassination, Olbricht in GAO, responsible for planning the coup that
would follow the assassination, and Tresckow in Army Group Centre,
responsible for recruiting a active Field Marschal who would lend his
name and troops to the coup.
By the autumn of 1942, however, Tresckow had still not managed to talk
his superior, Feldmarschall von Kluge, into condoning treason. Kluge
fundamentally sympathized with the sentiments of his staff, but he
shied away from treason in time of war. Olbricht, impatient for action,
suggested they could wait no longer, and must rely on the troops of the
Home Army alone to carry out the coup after a successful assassination.
At almost the same time, however, the Gestapo started showing excessive
interest in the activities of the Counter-Intelligence Department.
Oster was forced to suspend his resistance activities, and Tresckow
therefore assumed responsibility for the assassination planning.
The winter of 1942-1943 brought the reverse in Germany's military
fortunes that the military resistance leaders had long anticipated.
With the tragedy of Stalingrad already in the offing, the military
conspirators wanted to be ready to exploit the inevitable shock on the
part of the population that was due to follow. Olbricht explicitly
asked Tresckow to give him eight weeks time to get the coup plans
(which had been much neglected during the summer of German victories)
up-to-date. At the end of February 1943, Olbricht passed the word to
Tresckow: "We're finished. The trigger can be pulled."
And Tresckow was ready. He had at last succeeded in winning over the
support of GFM v. Kluge. Kluge - in despair over Hitler's dilettantish
and stubborn command style during the disastrous winter of 1942-1943 -
was ready to put himself and so his entire Army Group in the service of
the coup on the condition that Hitler was dead. More important,
however, Tresckow had managed to convince Hitler's staff that the
dictator should personally visit Army Group Centre.
Once Hitler had committed himself to visiting Army Group Centre,
Tresckow's only problem was deciding how to kill him. There were
various options. Individual officers on (or closely associated with)
his staff, notably Georg Freiherr von Boeselager, were extremely good
marksmen. Boeselager volunteered to shoot Hitler at close range. But
Tresckow knew that Hitler would be surrounded by loyal henchmen and
body guards. It would be comparatively easy to overpower a lone
assassin or disrupt his aim simply by jostling him or yanking dictator
out of danger at the right moment. The idea therefore evolved into a
joint assassination in which all members of the conspiracy attending
the luncheon for Hitler would collectively shoot him. But on the day of
Hitler's visit to Army Group Centre, 13 March 1943, Hitler ate his meal
surrounded by officers determined to murder him without suffering any
harm. Why? While it is alleged that Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge
objected to the idea of shooting a man at dinner, the more plausible
explanation is that Tresckow had a far better idea.
From Oster, Tresckow had obtained captured British plastic explosives.
These he fashioned into the shape of a cognac bottle, wrapped like a
gift, and then – having watched Hitler board the aircraft waiting
to fly him back to Berlin - asked another officer in the very act of
boarding to take the package back to Berlin as a gift to a mutual
friend. The explosive had a 30-minute fuse, and Tresckow set this off
before turning the package over to the innocent "courier."
It was the perfect assassination plan. If all had gone according to
plan, the bomb would have exploded while Hitler's plane was flying over
territory controlled by Soviet partisans. The aircraft would thus have
crashed deep inside partisan territory, and it would have taken days to
recover the pieces much less start an investigation. Meanwhile, Hitler
would have been dead, and the "Valkyrie" orders would have long since
have been issued completely legally. Furthermore, because the
explosives used were British, the initial suspicion would have fallen
on foreign saboteurs rather than domestic opponents. Meanwhile, the
military resistance would executed the secret aspects of "Plan
Valkyrie," i.e. attacking the organs of the Nazi state, while the SS
and Nazi Party were still stunned by the loss of their
"infallible leader" – if they weren't bitterly fighting one
another to succeed Hitler. The population at large would most likely
have supported the army because their faith in the Nazi leadership had
been shattered by the recent loss of an entire army at Stalingrad. The
increasing devastation of German cities caused by the Anglo-American
air offensive was also taking its toll on German loyalty to the regime.
The Army on the other hand still enjoyed immense prestige –
particularly compared to the increasingly obvious corruption and
egotism of low-level Nazi officials.
But although the detonator worked, the explosives failed to ignite. The
explosion did not take place. Hitler's aircraft landed safely. Tresckow
had to call the alleged recipient of the "gift" and retrieve the bomb
before it could be discovered and suspicions aroused.
The "perfect" assassination had failed, but the necessity of
assassinating Hitler remained. Just eight days later Tresckow found a
second opportunity to try to kill Hitler. A representative of Army
Group Centre staff was requested to be present in Berlin at the festive
opening of an exhibit of captured Soviet equipment and weapons. Hitler
was scheduled to open the exhibition, and one of the conspirators,
Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, volunteered to carry out a
suicide bombing attack on Hitler.
Gersdorff's initial plan was to attach the explosives to the podium
where Hitler was scheduled to speak. But Gersdorff was unable to get
near the podium in advance of the event. Unsure where else Hitler was
likely to linger, Gersdorff decided instead to carry the bomb in the
pocket of his greatcoat as he escorted Hitler about the exhibition. But
Hitler did not linger. He rushed straight through the exhibition
without stopping even once - despite Gersdorff's efforts to attract the
dictator's attention to one thing or the other. When Hitler departed
the exhibition, Gersdorff could no longer stay near him. The dictator's
"sixth sense" appeared to have warned him of the danger, and Gersdorff
barely had time to rush a toilet and defuse the bomb.
While this assassination plan was not so perfect as the one in the
aircraft, nevertheless it had clear chances of success given the mood
in Germany at this time, so shortly after the surrender at Stalingrad.
Again the use of English explosives would have deflected suspicions
from the German Army and certainly no one had any reason to associate a
low-level staff officer from Army Group Centre with General Olbricht
But the military conspiracy did not lose heart. Over the next months, a
number of other officers offered to sacrifice themselves in order to
kill Hitler, but for a variety of reasons, none of these men came close
to carrying out an assassination until in November 1943. Then Axel von
dem Bussche agreed to model the new uniform designed for the Eastern
Front before Hitler personally – and use the opportunity to
eliminate the dictator. Bussche wanted no English plastic explosives
with a long fuse. His plan was to pull the "plug" on a standard-issue
German hand-grenade and then clasp Hitler in his arms until they were
both blown to pieces. Bussche went to Hitler's HQ in East
Prussia, the so-called "Wolf's Lair" or Wolfschanze, and waited for the
uniform he was to model to arrive. It didn't. It was destroyed in an
air-raid. Bussche's home leave expired and he had to return to his unit
on the Eastern Front. Here he was severely wounded and soon lost a leg.
He was lying in an SS hospital – with the plastic explosives he
had decided not to use in a suitcase under his bed - on 20 July 1944.
His wounds – and the fact that other conspirators did not betray
his name even under Gestapo torture – saved his life. But until
his death from natural causes decades later, he blamed himself for his