July 17, 2004
SQUANDERED OPPORTUNITY:
Germans salute the man who tried to kill Hitler (SANDY CRITCHLEY AND ALLAN HALL, 7/17/04, The Scotsman)
On Tuesday, the 60th anniversary of the bomb plot, Germany will remember its most celebrated modern-day martyr, Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg. Gerhard Schröder, the chancellor, will lead the tributes at a ceremony at the Bendlerblock memorial, the former military headquarters planned as the nerve centre of the revolt following Hitler’s death. It became instead the execution site for Stauffenberg, who was summarily shot in the early hours of 21 July, 1944, by SS men loyal to Hitler. Many of his co-conspirators suffered a slow, bloody death, hanging from meat-hooks at Plötzensee Prison, where there will be a service of remembrance on Tuesday.At face value, Stauffenberg seemed an unlikely assassin of the Führer. Not only was he a war hero and a favourite of Hitler but he had been badly wounded at the front in North Africa. An Allied fighter-bomber attack in Tunisia the previous year had cost him his left eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left hand. [...]
[A]fter a long series of abortive operations, finally it fell to Stauffenberg to inject renewed vigour into efforts to eliminate the tyrant. Like other army officers, he initially supported some of Hitler’s actions - the reintroduction of conscription, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the Anschluss - but was gradually sickened by the excesses of National Socialism. It later emerged that he said in late 1942: "It’s not a question of telling the Führer the truth but of killing him and I’m ready to do the job."
Through contacts in Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and elsewhere, the conspirators tried repeatedly but in vain to gain support for a putsch from the UK and United States. But it was what would now be described as a "Catch 22": the Allies might have been better convinced of the worth of the opposition if more senior generals had come on board, while a critical mass of generals might have joined the plot if Allied support had been evident. The insistence on unconditional surrender, formally adopted at Casablanca, was a huge obstacle that the plotters were unwilling for a long time to accept. Many on the other side believed there were "no good Germans".
But as the Allies landed in France and embarked on their march eastwards, heading towards the Red Army forging west, the Gestapo was also closing in on the dissidents, making the need to act swiftly doubly urgent. Weeks before the eventual attack, Stauffenberg made up his mind fully to kill Hitler himself. He told his intimates: "It is now time something was done, but he who has the courage to do it must do so in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. But if he does not do it, then he will be a traitor to his own conscience."
The conspirators planned to subvert a carefully set up cover plan, an exercise to mobilise reliable sections of the reserve army to suppress a potential revolt by the millions of foreign workers in Germany. The reserve army would then itself be used to topple the Nazi government. The operation was codenamed Valkyrie and after two false starts, on 11 July and 15 July, Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, boarded an aircraft in Berlin on the morning of 20 July, 1944, to fly east to brief Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair. They carried two bombs, only one of which Stauffenberg managed to activate on arrival, because he was interrupted by a phone call.
To make matters worse, a colleague insisted on helping the disabled Stauffenberg by carrying the briefcase containing the live bomb into the room, placing it on the floor with a massive table leg between it and Hitler.
Stauffenberg left the room on the pretext of taking a phone call and shortly afterwards, heard an ear-splitting explosion. As he and Haeften were driven away from the scene, they saw a body covered with Hitler’s cloak carried from the wrecked briefing room.
Stauffenberg was certain Hitler was dead - but although his eardrums were perforated and his uniform shredded, the Führer was very much alive. [...]
But what if Allied support had been forthcoming? What if the coup d’état had succeeded and a government of decent men had managed to take over the Germany of July 1944? Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives could have been saved: in the cities later bombed, in the death camps, on the battlefields.
If Germany at that stage had surrendered on all fronts, as the Allies wanted, and the war had ended before the Red Army overran eastern and much of central Europe, how different might the maps have looked in the second half of the 20th century?
But the putsch failed and the conspirators’ sacrifice was derided by the western Allies as merely an attempt to save something from the ruins. The Times of 22 July, 1944, described the generals who had rebelled as "champions not of liberty but of militarism". In Parliament Churchill said dismissively: "The highest personalities in the Reich are murdering one another."
A very stupid, if not outright shameful, moment for the Allies, whose political leadership had bought its own anti-German propaganda so thoroughly that they failed to seize several; golden opportunities to end the war earlier, at a time when every passing day left more and more of Eastern Europe under a Bolshevism indistinguishable from Nazism. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 17, 2004 9:11 AM
Dedicated communists in British counter intelligence surpressed overtures from Germany, probably in hopes of keeping the war going until Stalin overan all of Eastern Europe and Germany itself. Communist domination of Europe was undoubtably their shared objective, in my opinion.
Posted by: genecis at July 17, 2004 9:48 AMLord Vansittart wasn't a communist, just an anti-German racist loon who had Churchill's ear: "Eighty % of the German race are the political and moral scum of the earth."
Posted by: oj at July 17, 2004 9:53 AMWhat were these dudes doing, when the going seemed good? Apparently these Germans took action when it became clear that they were going to lose the war. So maybe they were cutting their losses, you propagandist. Yes, this is know-it-all propaganda grounded in hindsight: just what has been employed lately in second-guessing the war on terror. Spare me your sob story and opportunistic finger-pointing, you fraud.
Posted by: LarryH at July 17, 2004 10:12 AMLarry:
Yes, what George H. W. Bush, Jim Baker, and Colin Powell did to the Shi'ites and Kurds in '91 was certainly worse than what FDR and Churchill did, but the disastrous effects were more easily dealt with.
Posted by: oj at July 17, 2004 10:17 AMUnconditional surrender prevented another "stab in the back" legend. Only a defeat of such magnitude could serve to discredit any revanchist sentiment.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at July 17, 2004 6:41 PMChris:
So we must tell ourselves to justify what we did. Of course, it's damned inconvenient to your theory that we spent the next fifty years at war with half of Germany anyway.
Posted by: oj at July 17, 2004 6:58 PMOne-fourth, and we weren't at war.
You and Reagan fell for the 'good German' argument. In fact, all Germans, with the possible exception of a few isolated farmwives in Bavaria or something, were the Nazi criminals. If Naziism was bad, then no one associated with it was eligible to take over and run a legitimate post-Hitler government.
The moral distance between a Nazi SS Obergruppenfuhrer and a fine, conservative,
Christian German Army general wasn't a millimeter.
Most of the crimes of the Germans were committed by the regular Army.
Anyhow, men who controlled an army of millions who were serious about removing Hitler would have found a bigger stick than a crippled staff officer.
At the time when unconditional surrender was announced, tens of millions of Europeans were risking their lives to defeat German Naziism and militarism. The number of Germans who had joined them could have been seated comfortably in a bus.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 18, 2004 12:35 AMOdd that you think there were good Southerners, though their society was just as repellant, or more so.
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 12:49 AMOrrin:
Leaving aside Harry's hyberpoles, I suggest the mistake you are making is seeing this all in ideological terms, i.e. the West vs. fascism, the West vs. communism, etc. But, unlike with the USSR, the fight with Germany transcended ideology. We were fighting German nationalism and militarism which had been expressed through Prussian Junkers and a decaying aristocracy as well as through fascism, and in living memory. If Russia had found a way to shuck off communism, no one would have seen them as a particular threat. Not so Germany, any more than Rome would have been satisfied by a new party in power in Carthage.
Can you imagine the negotiations? Immunity for atrocities, we'd like to keep Austria and the Sudetenland, let's talk colonies, etc. Impossible. And even from an ideological perspective, why, in 1944, would anyone have seen communism as the greater threat and been able to convey that to the public? You might as well argue that the States should have stopped short of Baghdad again and tried to do a deal with dissident Sunnis so everybody could take on Iran.
Harry is dead wrong that they were all Nazis, but they were almost all nationalists ready to fight for the "defence" of the fatherland. The world had had more than enough.
Posted by: Peter B at July 18, 2004 6:15 AMI wish to change the subject, somewhat.
It's widely believed that The Holocaust - or the Gulag, or Mao's Great Leap Forward - was "the worst" event in the 20th century. The event of far greater import, of far more ominous consequence, was .... that a seemingly "top-tier" country could become such a renegade nation in the span of only a quarter-century.
This will affect foreign relations for several centuries. EVERY resposible nation ought to continually develop its spy networks, most especially within the most powerful nations, because of the (remote) possibility that this god-awful pattern could recur -- so much is at stake.
We Americans boast about our dynamism, but the other side of that double-edged sword is that things can rapidly go to hell. Fear of the USA stems, at least somewhat, from that terrible experience in Europe.
The "what-ifs" about these generals is, by comparison, so picayune.
Posted by: LarryH at July 18, 2004 7:42 AMPeter:
That is all of course quite wrong. Germany can never be much of a threat because of its size and geography, while de Tocqueviulle had accurately predicted the rise of America and the USSR in the previous century. Communism was incidental.
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 9:08 AMLarry:
That's absurd. You don't need spies to tell you that all of the isms lead to the exact same place. The worst event of the 20th century was the French Revolution of the 18th.
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 9:10 AMOrrin:
"Germany can never be much of a threat"
Yes, well there were a few hundred million Europeans, Russians and North Americans who just weren't able to see the sunny long term view lurking behind the stormtroopers.
Posted by: Peter B at July 18, 2004 9:35 AMThey lost, right? And their thousand year Reich was on the offensive for what? four years?
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 9:43 AMAnd Napoleon for not much longer. So, the Brits shouldn't have bothered fighting him?
Posted by: Peter B at July 18, 2004 10:03 AMWhy did they? He'd already shot his wad.
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 10:06 AM"They lost, right? And their thousand year Reich was on the offensive for what? four years?"
Perhaps you've picked late 1939 to approximately late 1943 as the "offensive" period. The Third Reich was on the offensive before the outbreak of combat operations in Poland.
re: "...their thousand year...four years " - - Timothy McVeigh demonstrated how an even MORE BRIEF occurrance can be band-aided over following the soothing ointment of "we won." After all, McVeigh LOST, right oj? Since, in the long term, we all end up dead, Pol Pot merely expedited the inevitable.
I believe there was a destructive, evil side of Hitler that significantly won. That's why we need to take on these folks even if we're secure in North America or secure based upon our station in life.
Unfortunately, Hitler effectively utilized that thousand year SALES PITCH just as Osama bin Laden utilizes the destruction of America - - the proponent knows that it's hyperbole, but it's used to keep the folks riled up. So oj, I'll provide you with your necessary self-congratulatory stroking regarding Nazism: we won!!
Fear that a respected country can transform into a criminal nation - that fear will understandably last for a while.
Larry:
You can't seriously imagine the militia movement to have been a threat to the Republic?
Posted by: oj at July 18, 2004 11:06 AMWhere is that fear most likely to be realized? In any Socialist nation that develops a large powerful bureaucracy, replaces individuality with collectivism for effeciency and control, eventually becomes dominated by a strong charismatic leader during a time of crises who eventually becomes Dictator. Remember history, read Hayek and watch India and China.
Posted by: genecis at July 19, 2004 10:56 AMI dunno where you got the idea, Orrin, that I think there were 'good Southerners.' Those were very rare.
My greatgrandfather fought the Klan with guns, but that was because he thought they were low-rent. He was as racist as they were, and, in fact, was one of the 'Glorious Eight' that returned So. Carolina to white supremacy when the federal garrison was withdrawn in 1876.
Hitlerism was a sort of cancerous growth of an already diseased organ, German nationalism/militarism, which was, undoubtedly, a threat to non-Germans. (And to Germans as well, had they only been intelligent enough to figure it out.)
Despotisms do not fall of their own weight.
Peter's questions about the deal we could have offered Germany, instead of unconditional surrender ('You want to keep Elsass AND Lorraine. No, you naughty boys. You get only Elsass.') is cogent, but we already know the answer.
In 1918, when the German Army collapsed, the higher command expected to be rewarded for its 'suffering' with a big chunk of its sometime conquests.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 19, 2004 3:39 PMSo there were some, just not including any Eagars?
Posted by: oj at July 19, 2004 3:43 PMNone to speak of. It was a horrible place and time.
Most Eagars continued as Birchers up through the 1960s.
Times do change, though. All that marching for integration that I did had a noticeable effect on the next generation.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at July 19, 2004 9:29 PMAh, thankfully there's one good Eagar, and to all our surprise it's you.
Posted by: oj at July 19, 2004 9:43 PM