February 26, 2005
THE PRESIDENT WHO OPPOSED KILLING HITLER AND FIGHTING STALIN:
EXCERPT: Chapter One: The Plot to Murder Hitler (The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945 By Michael R. Beschloss)
[H]itler was burrowed in at the Wolf's Lair, his field headquarters near Rastenburg, in a melancholy, dank East Prussian forest. At noon, in a log barracks, he listened to a gloomy report from one of his army chiefs about Germany's retreat on the Eastern front. In the steamy room, Hitler took off the eyeglasses he vainly refused to use in public and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. SS men and stenographers stood around the massive, long oak table like nervous cats. Maps were unfurled. Hitler leaned over them and squinted through a magnifying glass, grimacing at the bad news.Into the room strode a thirty-seven-year-old officer named Claus von Stauffenberg. He was a Bavarian nobleman, with blond hair and sharp cheekbones, who had lost an eye and seven fingers to an Allied mine in Tunisia while fighting for Germany. Unknown to the Führer or the other two dozen people in the chamber, Stauffenberg was part of a secret, loosely rigged anti-Hitler conspiracy that included military officers, diplomats, businessmen, pastors, intellectuals, landed gentry.
Some wanted historians of the future to record that not all Germans were Nazis. Some simply wanted to spare their nation the full brunt of conquest by the Soviet, American and British armies. Still others were unsettled by Hitler's war against the Jews. For years, the plotters had tried to kill Hitler with rifles and explosives, but the Führer had always survived.
Disgusted by what he heard about Nazi brutality in Russia, Stauffenberg had taught himself how to use his remaining three fingers to set off a bomb. By luck, in July 1944, he was summoned to the Wolf's Lair to help brief Hitler about the Eastern front. When Stauffenberg entered the room, the Führer shook his hand, stared at him appraisingly, then returned to his maps.
Inside Stauffenberg's briefcase, swaddled in a shirt, was a ticking time bomb. While the Army chief droned on, Stauffenberg put the briefcase under the table. Leaving his hat and belt behind, as if he were stepping out for a moment, Stauffenberg walked out of the room and left the barracks.
About a quarter to one came a loud boom and swirl of blue-yellow flame, followed by black smoke.
Outside the barracks, Stauffenberg saw men carry out a stretcher on which lay a body shrouded by what seemed to be Hitler's cloak. Rushing to his car for a getaway flight to Berlin, he presumed that Adolf Hitler was no more. Stauffenberg hoped that next would come a public declaration of Hitler's assassination, an Army revolt and establishment of an anti-Nazi government in Berlin.
But when he arrived at General Staff headquarters on Bendler Street, there was only disarray. Fellow plotters were not convinced that Hitler had been killed. Aghast, Stauffenberg cried, "I myself saw Hitler carried out dead!"
But he was wrong. Striving for a better view of the maps, one of the Führer's aides had pushed the briefcase behind one of the table's massive supports, protecting Hitler from certain death. Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Werner von Haeften, a collaborator, had felt too rushed to put a second bomb in the briefcase. Had they done so, Hitler would have certainly been killed.
Instead, when the smoke cleared Hitler was still standing. With bloodshot eyes staring out from a soot-blackened face, he tamped down flame from his trousers. His hair stood out in spikes. His ruptured eardrums were bleeding. His right arm dangled numb at his side.
A weeping Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel threw his arms around Hitler: "My Führer, you're alive! You're alive!"
After donning a fresh uniform, seemingly exhilarated by his survival, Hitler was almost merry. "Once again everything turned out well for me!" he chortled to his secretaries. "More proof that fate has selected me for my mission!" That afternoon he showed his scorched clothes to the visiting ousted Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: "Look at my uniform! Look at my burns!" Hitler had the uniform sent to his mistress, Eva Braun, for safekeeping as proof of his historical destiny.
When generals telephoned from the far reaches of the German Reich to learn whether, as some had heard, Hitler was dead, the Führer was furious that they should even raise the question. With froth on his lips, he shouted, "Traitors in the bosom of their own people deserve the most ignominious of deaths....Exterminate them!...I'll put their wives and children into concentration camps and show them no mercy!" He even confronted his Alsatian dog: "Look me in the eyes, Blondi! Are you also a traitor like the generals of my staff?"
It did not take Hitler's men long to discover who was behind the plot. In Berlin, Stauffenberg and three fellow plotters were arrested. A five-minute trial, "in the name of the Führer," found them guilty of treason. In a shadowy courtyard, they were hauled before a firing squad.
Just before his execution, remembering his country before Hitler, Stauffenberg cried out, "Long live eternal Germany!"
An hour after midnight on Friday, July 21, Berlin time, Hitler spoke by radio from the Wolf's Lair. After a burst of military music, he declared, "Fellow members of the German race!" An "extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and foolish, criminally stupid officers" had plotted to kill him and the German high command - "a crime that has no equal in German history."
The plotters had "no bond and nothing in common with the German people." He was "entirely unhurt, apart from minor grazes, bruises or burns." Failure of the plot was "a clear sign from Providence that I must carry on with my work."
Hitler had come to power claiming that Germany had lost World War I because craven politicians in Berlin had betrayed the generals. The newest plotters, he now said, had planned to "thrust a dagger into our back as they did in 1918. But this time they have made a very grave mistake." His voice rose to a shriek: "Every German, whoever he may be, has a duty to fight these elements at once with ruthless determination....Wipe them out at once!"
Fearing for his life, Hitler never again spoke in public. By his orders, hundreds of suspected conspirators were arrested, tortured and executed. Another five thousand of their relatives and suspected anti-Nazi sympathizers were taken to concentration camps. A decree went out for Stauffenberg's family to be "wiped out to its last member."
Hitler ordered some of the chief plotters "strung up like butchered cattle." A motion picture of their execution was rushed to the Wolf's Lair for the Führer's enjoyment. By one account, Hitler and his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, watched in the Führer's private theater as the shirtless men on the screen swung from piano-wire nooses, writhing and dying while their carefully unbelted trousers fell off to reveal them naked.
Goebbels had demanded for years that Hitler's enemies be stalked with "ice-cold determination." But when the top Nazis watched the ghoulish flickering images of the lifeless plotters, it was later said, even the cold-blooded Goebbels had to cover his eyes to keep from passing out.
As Hitler finished his speech from the Wolf's Lair, Franklin Roosevelt gave his own radio address from California. Speaking from a private railroad car at the San Diego naval base, he accepted the 1944 Democratic nomination for President. For wartime security reasons, the public was told only that the base was on the "Pacific coast."
The President was taking a five-week, fourteen-thousand-mile military inspection trip of the Pacific Coast, Hawaii and Alaska. His special nine-car railroad caravan had moved slowly from Chicago to Kansas City, El Paso and Phoenix, to "kill time" before his arrival in San Diego and spare him from having to sleep at night in a moving train. Secret Service agents had tried to keep Roosevelt's exact whereabouts a secret. At each stop, the President and his party were asked to stay aboard the train. But Roosevelt's famous Scottie dog, Fala, had to be taken off to relieve himself. When Pullman porters and ticket takers saw Fala, they knew who was really aboard the train called "Main 985."
One might have expected Roosevelt to be delighted when he heard the news of a coup that might topple Adolf Hitler. If a new, post-Hitler government accepted the Allied demand for unconditional surrender, it would save millions of lives and let the Big Three - Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill - throw Allied forces fully into the war against Japan.
But Roosevelt knew that life was rarely that uncomplicated. For months, American intelligence had secretly warned him of plots against Hitler. In early July 1944, Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services reported from Bern, Switzerland, that "the next few weeks will be our last chance to demonstrate the determination of the Germans themselves to rid Germany of Hitler and his gang and establish a decent regime." Eight days before Stauffenberg set off his bomb, Dulles warned that "a dramatic event" might soon take place "up north."
Roosevelt would have certainly realized that a new, post-Hitler junta would probably demand a negotiated settlement. It might insist that certain members of the German military high command, government and other institutions stay in place. This would frustrate his declared intention to remake postwar Germany from the ground up so that it could never threaten the world again. Official Allied policy was unconditional surrender. But Roosevelt knew that if a rump post-Hitler government sued for peace, it would be difficult for Churchill and himself to persuade their war-exhausted peoples to keep fighting and lose hundreds of thousands more lives.
Dulles had reported that one group of anti-Hitler conspirators wanted "to prevent Central Europe from coming...under the control of Russia." As Roosevelt knew, Churchill might be sorely tempted by a deal with a new German government that could save British lives and block the Soviets in Europe, provoking an immediate confrontation with Stalin.
It would be one thing if, despite his conscious decision not to help hasten Hitler's fall, FDR had at least succeeded in his own scheme, but instead he lost half of Germany, which remained a flashpoint for the next half century. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 26, 2005 9:35 PM
Give it up OJ. We were lucky to get what we did. FDR and HST played guts ball for it and deserve your applause. The more likely outcome was Stalanism to the Rhine and Findlandization to the Pyrennies and the Channel.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 26, 2005 9:56 PMThis is one area where OJ is way ahead of the curve. He is mostly right in his view that "unconditional surrender" was a folly, if only from a "moral/religious" perspective.
That said, my dad, who grew up at that time (in Germany), and who missed military service by days, always said that a Stauffenburg success may have been even worse, in that the result would have been civil war that the loyalists would have won.
As a youth, he said, he would have been one of them.
Such a 'war' may have created an earlier German surrender, but Robert might be right in his view that the USSR may have benefited the most.
The time to off Hitler was in 1938, but Beck & others were too chicken.
I think this overlaps a bit with OJs view that we overplayed our hand, and I don't know the answer, but I tend to think that the German Psyche may have played a role in our demands at the time.
Posted by: bb at February 26, 2005 11:48 PMThe notion that 'German unification' is a given is hilarious. For most of its history, Germany has been minced into literally hundreds of states and there remain today vast differences from place to place. It was unfortunate that the Prussia, the Saxonies and Thuringia ended up under Soviet control and that Silesia, Posen and Pomerania were stricken from the map, but don't start wars you can't win and things like that won't happen.
The 'Nazis' would certainly have lost any German Civil War pretty handily in 1944. The realists among the German High Command and the leftover Junker class, which had never much cared for taking orders from a thuggish Austrian paperhanger and his jumped-up Bavarian street gang, would have rolled the SS up like a drunk in an alleyway. FDR wouldn't have gotten to remake Germany, but the notion that the Soviets would have just gone away with nothing defies credulity. Anyone who knows anything about the Russian psyche, especially its messianic character only exacerbated by Marxist theology, and the personality of Joe Stalin sees that.
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 6:28 AMBB: OJ has been banging this drum for a long time. Its an obsession with the Yalta sell-out theory. The problem is that it does not hold water.
1944 was too late anyway. The real mystry is why the General Staff did not pull off a coup d'etat before launching an invasion of Russia. They then could have made a peace deal with the UK that would have left them masters of Europe and gutted and filleted the Froggies.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at February 27, 2005 11:52 AMWe had the A-Bomb in 1945 and the Soviets did not. A war with the Soviet Union would have ended only one way--complete US victory. OJ is utterly right.
Posted by: Bob at February 27, 2005 12:35 PMBob,
We had no means of getting it there and our intelligence services were so penetrated by Soviet agents that it was only a matter of time before the Soviets would have had the bomb too.
Also, there was no constituency in the US for fighting the Soviets in 1945 and in Europe the Communists were getting 40+% of the vote in the first free postwar elections. Given the impact that the Soviet collaboration with Hitler had on Western European military preparedness and operations, postwar Europe would have been a hotbed of Fifth Columnists.
Believing that the war against the Soviets would have been some kind of cakewalk in 1945 requires a staggering level of ignorance of the politics of the time and of European geography.
One simple question. Do you believe that Clement Attlee would have let the Americans use Britain as a staging area for a war against the Soviets or that the French Communist party would have let the Americans use the railroads to move their equipment in such a campaign?
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 1:26 PMAt the time we bombed Hiroshima we controlled Okinawa and Iwo Jima. A bombing raid on Moscow would cross over 1500 miles of hostile land assuming we could take off from Germany, and only one shot was needed to take a plane down.
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 2:51 PMA small exaggeration. London to Moscow is 1600 air miles. Berlin to Moscow is a little over a thousand. Paris to Moscow is 1550.
In 1945, the Pacific was an American lake.
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 2:55 PMWe had control of airbases as close to Moscow as the Enola Gay flew to Hiroshima. All that unreachable guff comes from New Deal apologists.
http://www.nps.gov/wapa/indepth/extContent/usmc/pcn-190-003127-00/sec8.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0759496.html
Posted by: oj at February 27, 2005 2:55 PMBart:
We could have B-29ed the Soviets six ways from Sunday. From the Middle East, from England, from China, or from Italy. Moscow had probably not seen an enemy plane since 1942, and we would have had air supremacy from Day 1.
However, there was no stomach for fighting the Russians, certainly not in May 1945.
Robert's question is the best - why didn't the German General Staff kill Hitler in 1940? I think the answer involves the amoral character of those involved, but it's only a guess.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 27, 2005 2:56 PMjim:
What choice would anyone have had if we'd pushed East fast enough to get in a shooting war with them and/or secretly nuked Moscow?
Posted by: oj at February 27, 2005 3:03 PMJim,
It would never have happened from England as the Labourites were in charge.
Rome to Moscow 1500 miles.
Cairo to Moscow 1800 miles.
China? Beijing to Moscow 3600 miles
They were on a roll in 1940. They had beaten France, had bottled up Britain, their agents provocateurs in the US like the Dulles Brothers, Prescott Bush, Joe Kennedy, Father Coughlin, and Lindbergh were hard at work. Even at the $5 table in the casino, it's tough to walk away when you're on a roll.
OJ,
If you don't understand the difference between flying over 1500 miles of water that you control and flying over 1500 miles of land controlled by your adversary, there's nothing I can do to help you.
And in your scenario about some kind of American Drang nach Osten, depending on from whom the order came there would be courts martial or impeachments within days. The Wallaceites and the Bob Taft crowd wanted no part of a war with the Soviets. It couldn't have been 'cleared with Sidney' either. Where was that constituency for getting American boys killed in a war with Russia in 1945?
Shooting war? It took until about 1952 before we developed a bazooka that could even slow down a T-34. The Russians would have been in Paris in a week, unless we started nuking their forces in the field.
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 3:53 PMBart:
The Soviets would have gone nowhere - the P-51 would have driven them under rocks and rubble. While we couldn't match the T-34 on the ground, at that point we would not have cared. The Tigers certainly didn't stop us, did they?
Clement Attlee might have objected to England being an American platform, but what could (would) he have done? NOTHING.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 27, 2005 7:19 PMWe simply produced about 100 Shermans for every Tiger. That was not the case with the T-34.
Can you really believe that the US military would have operated in Britain without British government approval?
I noticed you avoided how it would play at home.
Posted by: Bart at February 27, 2005 8:02 PMBart:
The British totally collapsed in 1947, dropping empire, any pretense to leadership, and any overseas force projection. Why do you think they would have stood against any American decision in 1945? Were they going to start shooting Americans? No. The unionists would have raised hell (at Stalin's command), but that wouldn't have affected Curtis LeMay or Truman one bit, had we done what Orrin is always talking about.
I had previously written that no one had the stomach to keep fighting after May 1945. So the point is moot, anyway. But you and Harry seem to think that the Red Army was a fearsome invincible force, like the Sardaukar from DUNE. I do not agree, and I do not think we would have needed nuclear weapons (in 1945) to prove it. By 1947-48, we had reduced so far that the situation was different, and Truman's fears about Berlin and Europe in general led to the stasis-type thinking that dragged out the war in Korea.
And Stalin himself was not implacable, either. Remember that he moved his army out of Iran after Truman threatened to drop the big one on it.
Posted by: jim hamlen at February 27, 2005 9:43 PM"Secretly" nuked Moscow? I almost missed that line.
Posted by: ratbert at February 27, 2005 11:55 PMMy point has relatively little to do with the strength of the Russian military and a lot more to do with the facts on the ground in Western Europe in 1945-1946. One of the many reasons the French fell like a house of cards to the Nazis was the collaboration of the Communist trade unions with the Nazis as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Communist Parties in European elections were getting huge vote percentages, and none of these parties made any secret about their slavish obeidience to Stalin. A large percentage of the Parliamentary Labour Party in Britain were active Communists.
An Attlee government would have asked the Americans to leave, and we would have left because we are not Romans. Domestic political opinion would have forced us to accede to the demands of their duly elected government.
We first needed to win hearts and minds in the West, to convince the Europeans about the evils of Soviet Communism. This was an ongoing process which started in earnest during the Greek Civil War when the Communists kidnapped children from their mothers and shipped them to be re-educated in Eastern Europe but accelerated after the world saw the brutal means by which the Soviets put down the 1953 rebellion in East Germany. The downward trajectory of Communist voting percentages was quite noticeable, except in Italy where the party took great pains to separate itself from the Soviets. An American military operation in support of Poles or Hungarians in 1956 would have met with about 85-90% approval in Western Europe.
By the time Reagan took office, Communists were getting less than 10% in France, were 'Euro-Communist' in Spain and Italy, and were non-existent elsewhere. The Soviets did try to influence other parties like the British Labourites and the various nitwit Green parties but despite successful infiltration those parties had little to no impact on policy.
Posted by: Bart at February 28, 2005 6:52 AMBart:
Just start the shooting and the logic of war takes care of the rest.
The Communists failed to take power generally because the Socialists won, though they did get ministries in places like France and control of places like Greece, making Europe little help to us in the Cold War and destroying their own societies.
Posted by: oj at February 28, 2005 7:51 AMBart's objections are all technical. All were capable of being overcome. We were just too cowardly/weak to do it. OJ is still right, we should have.
Posted by: Bob at February 28, 2005 9:34 AMjim:
Don't forget, Harry's a Marxist so he has to believe in the USSR, as he thinks the New Deal would have worked but for the Court and Hitler could have won had he been as Socialist as he was Nationalist and Darwinist.
Posted by: oj at February 28, 2005 12:01 PMMitterand gave the Communists 4 ministries out of 43 in his government as a sop. He didn't need their support in the Chambre. They went from being a 10% party in 1981 to being two parties which together got 7% in the last election. The most important ministry he gave them was Vocational Education.
As for Grease, the behavior of PASOK leads me to believe that decades of emigration just bled the country of all its worthwhile people, leaving only the dregs, like Taki Fullofcrapolos behind.
Kohl, Thatcher and Mitterand all stood with Reagan against the Soviets. And that support was essential in our ability to up the ante beyond the limits of the Soviet bankroll. One of Mitterand's first moves was sending hundreds of KGB agents back to Moscow. He also put the Pershings in without a peep from anyone, not even the PCF which had been co-opted. It is a measure of European decrepitude that Kohl, Thatcher and Mitterand are replaced by Schroeder, Blair and Chirac.
It's the technical stuff that fouls up a war. Just ask Napoleon or Lee.
Posted by: Bart at March 1, 2005 8:11 AMHu-huh, & Petain secretly opposed fascism...
Posted by: oj at March 1, 2005 8:18 AMMitterand was major-league clueless about economics, and domestic policy generally. But in the Cold War he was on the side of the angels. Did we put the Pershings in France with zero hassle or not, as distinguished from Green nonsense and the ijjit women of Greenham Common? Did the Israelis find the Osirak reactor and blow it to bits without difficulty?
Posted by: Bart at March 1, 2005 5:22 PM