Those Who Opposed Hitler

As he learned that the officers’ bomb plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler had failed, just slightly wounding the Fuehrer, lead conspirator Major Gen. Henning von Tresckow knew he had not long to live. Tresckow had designed Operation Valkyrie and a year earlier, on March 13, 1943, had planted a bomb on Hitler’s plane during his visit to Army Group Center at Smolensk on the Eastern Front. Tresckow waited, stopwatch in hand, for a radio report from the explosion.

The British-made bomb did not ignite due to the low temperatures in storage. The blast would have saved millions of lives and perhaps saved Eastern Europe from 45 years of Soviet domination.

Now, on July 21, 1944, Trekscow faced vengeance and retribution hard to imagine from any civilized leader. He would be tortured, hauled before the People’s Court, harangued by political judge Roland Freisler, and hanged using piano wire. Instead, he chose to go out into no-man’s land, on the front, and pulled the pin on a grenade.

The young Prussian officer predicted the outcome, once telling fellow conspirators:  “It is almost certain we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal?” 

Who didn’t have the courage? Field Marshal Eric von Manstein, a brilliant field commander who argued strategy with Hitler, responded to overtures with a curt: “Prussian field marshals do not mutiny.” Tresckow’s commander (and relative) Fedor von Bock turned down a plea to fly to Hitler’s HQ and demand an immediate halt to the carrying out of the dictator’s order by SS Einsatzgruppen death squads. The commandos were gunning down Jews, Russian peasants, and all captured Soviet officials. His eyes on capturing Moscow, Bock turned him down.

The officers’ anti-Hitler conspiracy has always fascinated me. Two emigre refugees from Nazi Germany, Waldemar Gurian and Gerhart Niemeyer, helped shape government studies at Notre Dame, where I attended.

Both professors decamped from the Third Reich due to the purging of academics and state dictates on curriculum. A social democrat in his youth, Niemeyer became an activist conservative in America. He taught appreciation for the U.S. Constitution as an instrument of rule by law, individual rights, due process, and a wise division of powers. 

The officer-plotters, I found in researching a senior essay, were deeply religious, repelled by atrocities of death squads which followed Army Groups into battle on the Eastern Front. Eintzgruppen commandos murdered 33,771 Jews and Ukrainians at Babi Yar, a pit outside Kiev.

“I don’t understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime … We have to show that not all of us are like him,” Trecsckow told subordinates..

The bomb planted by Tresckow was disguised as a package of brandy, allegedly to pay off a wager. It was carried aboard the Condor aircraft by an unsuspecting Col. Heinz Brandt. With extraordinary bravery, aide Fabian von Schlabrendorff flew to Fuehrer HQ in East Prussia and substituted a real bottle of brandy.

The plotters nearly succeeded a week later, on March 21, 1943. Hitler was slated to tour an exhibit of captured Soviet war trophies. Another courageous officer, Col. Rudolf von Geirsdirff, would trigger a bomb and blow up himself and the dictator. He set the bomb’s ten-minute timer, but Hitler exited after two minutes. Giersdorff headed for a rest room and barely defused the bomb in time.

Tresckow was transferred back to frontal command, but plotters found a new leader in Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. He gained access to Hitler’s midday military conference, planted his bomb, hastily departed, and flew to Berlin to take command of the ensuing coup.

Reenter Col. Brandt, a gofer in the Hitler entourage. He readjusted a briefcase carrying the bomb, giving Hitler the protection of an oak table leg. The gesture cost Brandt his life and saved Hitler. The Fuhrer recovered enough to welcome Mussolini to headquarters the following day. He erupted with promises of retribution and vengeance. Back in Berlin, with quick thinking by Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels, the coup was suppressed.

A few years ago, I stood at the spot in a Berlin courtyard where Col. Stauffenberg (played by Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie) and lead plotters were executed by firing squad. It is a quietly moving place, along with a small nearby museum. Stauffenberg’s son survived the war to become a Bundeswehr general in post-war Germany and helped craft the exhibit.

Others have shared similar experiences. At morning coffee, local Catholic Bishop Daniel Mueggenborg (now Bishop of Reno) spoke of his recent visit to the German gravesite of Graf Clemens von Gehlen, the Bishop of Munster. Bishop Gehlen took to the pulpit of his cathedral and blew the whistle on (and forced the regime to halt) the Nazi’s euthanasia of the mentally ill. The Gestapo dared not touch Gehlen but executed several young priests who had distributed his sermons.

 Plot leaders were berated at show trials, strangled at the gallows with piano wire, their death agonies filmed for nighttime viewing by Hitler and his toadies. A key potential ally of the plotters, popular Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (the Desert Fox) was allowed to swallow poison — to save his family. The German people were told Rommel had succumbed to war wounds.

Miraculously, Schlabrendorff, the timely aide, survived. He was going in front of the People’s Court on a morning early in 1945 when Allied bombers struck Berlin with their heaviest-ever air strike. A bomb destroyed the building. Struck by a falling beam, Judge Freisler died clutching the accused’s file.

The coup survivors went on to lead splendid lives. Schlabrendorff aided the Nuremberg prosecution. He would become a judge of the West German Federal Constitutional Court. He and Geirsdorff worked to assist refugees with the (Protestant) Order of St. John.

Geirsdorff had one other gift to give. He was involved in unearthing graves of 4,000 Polish officers murdered by the Soviet NKVD, under Stalin’s orders, after occupation of eastern Poland under the Nazi-Soviet Pact.  He first convinced the CIA and then exposed the atrocity to the world.

Such were the treacherous, lethal times. The experience and tragedy of the anti-Hitler plotters carry lessons for the 21st Century, including lessons for this Republic approaching its 250th birthday. It can happen here.

When the Nazis consolidated power, many conservatives and ordinary citizens thought they were making Germany great again. The Reich was undergoing a national revival. Only later did they realize authoritarian rule comes drip by drip.

As civilized, aristocratic folk with codes of honor, they were not used to dealing with the savage and utterly ruthless. They often went along with Nazism, even in early stages of the Soviet invasion. There was the greed of short-term gain. Only too late did they become very worried. They finally realized, having taken an oath to Hitler, that they had higher obligations of loyalty — to their people, to civilization, to God. To stay silent was to approve, and just going along was participating.

I end with a reflection by German philosopher Karl Jaspers on obligations of citizenship and sustaining liberty: “That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen and it remains possible for it to happen again. At any time.”

Authoritarian retribution doesn’t stop at the grave. Nor do dictators like real heroes. Tresckow made it appear he had died in combat. When Nazis eventually knew his full role, Hitler ordered his body dug up and burned.