The Cost of Courage (18 page)

Christiane and her comrades sleep in leaky tents; the weather is terrible and nothing ever gets dry. On the afternoon of June 26, four hundred Nazi soldiers arrive at Dun-les-Places in cars and trucks to search for “terrorists.” Everyone’s identity papers are checked, and everyone is let go. But when the Germans leave the village, they are attacked by the Maquis.

The Germans respond by attacking the château housing the hospital. The counterattack is led by Longhi, Bernard, and Rondenay. Bernard is gravely (although not fatally) wounded. Not knowing how to fire a gun, Christiane spends the battle passing ammunition to a confederate with a machine gun, and then tending to the wounded in the infirmary.

The violent attack on the château lasts for twelve hours, until the Maquis are finally forced to abandon it. When the Germans
capture it, they burn it down. The Maquis suffer two dead and five wounded, but the rest are able to escape.

The Maquis regroup easily after the attack, but once again, the nearby villages suffer terrible reprisals. The hamlet of Vermot is burned to the ground, and twelve houses in Dun-les-Places are destroyed. Then all the men of Dun-les-Places are arrested, and all twenty-seven of them are killed. Among the dead are the mayor, the village priest, and the headmaster of the school.

Four days later, Rondenay gets a telegram from London ordering him back to Paris.

“I’m coming back with you,” Christiane tells him. “He didn’t say no, because he knew he needed me.” Jacqueline decides to stay behind with the Maquis.

As the Allies slowly fight their way south toward Paris, there is fear, near famine, and growing chaos in the still blacked-out City of Light. For Christiane, her worst nightmare is yet to come.

E
LEVEN DAYS AFTER
the Normandy invasion, Hitler travels to Margival, northwest of Paris. Here the Germans have constructed the headquarters that André Boulloche had first described to London at the end of 1940. The bunker was supposed to have served as the Führer’s headquarters when he invaded Britain, but of course that invasion never occurred.

Now Hitler is visiting for the first time to meet with Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had become the German commander in the west in the summer of 1942. The generals’ purpose is to tell Hitler that the war has become hopeless.

Four months earlier, Rommel has joined the conspiracy to remove Hitler as Führer, although he is opposed to killing him, because he thinks that would make him a martyr.

To Rommel’s chief of staff, General Hans Speidel, the Führer looks “pale and sleepless” and “his hypnotic powers seemed to have waned.”
*
After a “curt and frosty greeting,” Hitler speaks “bitterly of his displeasure at the success of the Allied landings, for which he tried to hold the field commanders responsible.”

Emboldened “by the prospect of another stunning defeat,” Rommel is remarkably frank — and accurate. He tells Hitler that
“the German front in Normandy would collapse and that a breakthrough into Germany by the allies could not be checked … He doubted whether the Russian front could be held. He pointed to Germany’s complete political isolation,” and “concluded with an urgent request that the war be brought to an end.”

Finally, Hitler cuts Rommel off. “Don’t you worry about the future course of the war,” the Führer tells his general, “but rather about your own invasion front.”

One month after this meeting with Hitler — and three days before the next attempt on Hitler’s life — Rommel’s car is strafed by a low-flying Allied Spitfire. The general barely survives the attack and then recovers slowly.
^†
Speidel believed that the anti-Hitler conspirators “felt themselves painfully deprived of their pillar of strength.”

WHEN CHRISTIANE AND RONDENAY
return to Paris at the end of June, the streets are still patrolled by German soldiers, but now many of them look like they are no more than fourteen. There are also German street signs that hadn’t been there at the beginning of June:
ZUR NORMANDIE FRONT
.

After the initial successes of the invasion, the battle in Normandy is going much slower than the planners had anticipated. But the wide incursions of the Allies in the first days of the invasion have convinced a very large number of senior German Army officers that the war is essentially over: It is now only a matter of time before the Allies will cross the Rhine and obliterate what is left of Germany.

It now seems clear that right from the start most German generals knew that Hitler was psychotic. But as long as he was winning the war, almost all of them were happy to overlook that detail — as well as the massive war crimes they were committing at his behest.

By the middle of 1944, very few of them remain under the spell of the Führer’s much diminished “magic powers.” As a result, a remarkably large number of generals and colonels are recruited for the latest plot to assassinate their supreme leader. Many more are aware of the conspiracy without participating in it — or betraying it.
^‡

Seven decades after the war, German opposition to Hitler is barely remembered. But there were actually some two dozen unsuccessful attempts on his life.

In the summer of 1944, Major General Hening von Tresckow is the chief of staff of the 2nd Army on the rapidly deteriorating Russian front. He is also a longtime opponent of Hitler. As the latest conspiracy against the Führer takes shape, the general is asked for his advice by some of the nervous young plotters. He provides them with the most compelling and prescient reason for carrying out the latest plot to kill Hitler — the attempt that will come closest to success, six weeks after the Normandy invasion: “The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should it fail, the attempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance Movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Compared with this object, nothing else matters.”
^§

The historian William Shirer points to another reason for a growing sense of urgency among the conspirators: “The threatened collapse of the fronts in Russia, France and Italy impelled the plotters to act at once.”

ON THE OTHER SIDE
of the battle, the Allies are increasingly concerned by how much the Germans have delayed the Allies’ progress — so much so that Eisenhower remembers late June as “a difficult period for all of us. More than one of our high-ranking visitors began to express the fear that we were stalemated and that those who had prophesied a gloomy fate for Overlord were being proved correct.”

Seven weeks pass after the Normandy invasion before the Allies are finally able to launch a new offensive from the area they had hoped to reach on D-day plus five: a line of cities and towns stretching from Caen through Caumont to St. Lô.

THE LATEST PLOT
to kill Hitler is led by Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, an aristocrat with many famous German generals among his ancestors. In the spring of 1943, Stauffenberg was attached to the 10th Panzer Division in Tunisia when his car drove into a minefield. It may also have been strafed by an Allied plane. Stauffenberg is gravely injured and recovers slowly — after losing one arm, one eye, and two fingers.

At end of June 1944, the anti-Hitler plotters get a boost when Stauffenberg becomes a full colonel and is appointed chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander in chief of the Home Army. This gives Stauffenberg the power to issue orders to the Home Army in his boss’s name, which will be necessary to carry out the coup d’état that is supposed to take place after the assassination. It also gives him regular access to Hitler.

By July 1944, the conspiracy, code-named Valkyrie — named for the maidens in Norse-German mythology who hovered over battlefields, choosing who would die and who would survive — includes Stauffenberg’s former boss, General Friedrich Olbricht; General Hemuth Stieff; General Eduard Wagner, first quartermaster general of the army; General Erich Fellgiebel, the chief of signals of the Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces); and General Fritz Lindemann, head of the Ordnance Office. General Paul von Hase, chief of the Berlin Kommandantur (High Command), is important because he can provide the troops needed to take over Berlin. Colonel Freiherr von Roenne, head of the Foreign Armies Section, and his chief of staff, Captain Count von Matuschka, as well as Count von Helldorf, the head of the Berlin police, are also part of the plot.

On July 20, Stauffenberg drives to the airport outside Berlin to board a plane provided by General Wagner. In his suitcase he carries a British-made bomb that is set off by breaking a glass capsule. The capsule contains acid that eats away a small wire, which releases a firing pin against a percussion cap. British fuses are favored by the conspirators because they do not make a telltale hissing noise. The thickness of this particular wire should make Stauffenberg’s bomb explode ten minutes after he shatters the capsule.

The plane delivers Stauffenberg to Rastenburg soon after ten
A
.
M
. From there he is driven to Hitler’s secret Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters, named after Hitler’s longtime Nazi code name, Wolf. It is located in a gloomy forest in East Prussia. General Alfred Jodl describes the atmosphere there as “somewhere between a monastery and a concentration camp.”

With a staff of two thousand, the complex sits in the middle of three security zones protected by mine fields, pillboxes, and an electrified barbed-wire fence, all patrolled by fanatical SS troops. The compound includes two airfields, a railway stop, a power station, saunas, cinemas, and tearooms. Hitler’s own headquarters,
the Führerbunker, has six-foot-thick concrete walls, electric heating, and air-conditioning.

At twelve thirty-two in the afternoon, Stauffenberg shatters the glass capsule in the bomb he has carried in a briefcase and marches into the conference barracks where Hitler is already being briefed about the eastern front. The Führer is sitting at the center of one side of a heavy oak table, eighteen feet long and five feet wide, which stands on two massive supports instead of legs. Its unusual construction will determine his fate.

Stauffenberg sits down at the table and slides his briefcase on the side of one of the two heavy supports — the side closer to Hitler, about six feet from the dictator’s legs. Then Stauffenberg tells a colleague, Colonel Heinz Brandt, that he has to leave the room to make an urgent telephone call.

After Stauffenberg leaves, Brandt stands up to examine the map that is sitting on the table before him. Finding Stauffenberg’s briefcase in his way, Brandt reaches down and moves it to the far side of the barrier supporting the table — farther away from Hitler. That random act will sharply change the history of the next twelve months of the war: When the bomb explodes ten minutes later, Colonel Brandt is killed — but Hitler survives.

Stauffenberg is about two hundred yards away when the bomb goes off, and he watches as bodies and debris fly out the shattered windows. He is certain everyone inside must be dead. After bluffing his way through three checkpoints, he boards the plane waiting to take him back to Berlin.

When the head of the conspiracy finally reaches the German capital late in the afternoon, he learns that his fellow conspirators know the explosion has occurred. But because they aren’t certain that Hitler has been killed, they have done nothing to put the planned coup into effect.

Hitler’s hair is singed, his legs pierced by a hundred splinters, his right arm paralyzed temporarily, his eardrums punctured,
and his back is hit by a falling beam, but he manages to stumble out of the demolished building. Four of his colleagues are killed. Initially, the Führer thinks his headquarters are the victim of an Allied bombardment, but gradually the clues accumulate implicating Stauffenberg.

From Berlin, Stauffenberg telephones Paris, where more senior German army officers are involved in the conspiracy than anywhere else. He speaks to his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, at General Carl-Heinrich von Stuelpnagel’s headquarters in Paris, and tells him that the army is proceeding with a coup.

Before darkness has fallen in Paris on July 20, General Stuelpnagel has arrested all twelve hundred SS and SD officers and men in Paris, including their commander, SS major general Karl Oberg.

But back in Berlin, the conspiracy is in total disarray. It begins to fall apart altogether when Major Otto Remer is ordered to arrest Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister and the highest-ranking Nazi official in Berlin at this moment. When Remer confronts Goebbels in his office, the minister manages to get Hitler on the telephone and puts the major on the line with him. Realizing the Führer is still alive, the major reverses his loyalties on the spot.

At six thirty in the evening, Goebbels manages to get the Deutschlandsender, a radio station powerful enough to be heard all over Europe, to broadcast a brief announcement that an attempt to kill Hitler has failed. (The conspirators’ failure to secure the radio station earlier in the afternoon is one of their many elementary blunders.) Goebbels initially blames the Allies for the bombing. Hearing the bulletin that Hitler is still alive, German Army generals in Prague and Vienna who have already started to arrest SS and Nazi party leaders begin to backtrack.

Stauffenberg’s boss, General Friedrich Fromm, who has tolerated the conspiracy against Hitler for months without actively participating it, now turns decisively against the plotters, in the hope of saving his own skin. He pretends to carry out an instant courtmartial
of Stauffenberg, as well as two generals and a lieutenant who were among his collaborators. Then he orders all of them shot immediately by a firing squad in the courtyard — to make sure they can’t implicate him in the conspiracy.

By one
A
.
M
., Hitler is on the airwaves himself, describing a plot by “a very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible, and at the same time, senseless and stupid officers … It is a gang of criminal elements which will be destroyed without mercy.”