The Plots Against Hitler

Danny Orbach

Head of Zeus, £25

Review by Brian Morton

THE plural in Danny Orbach’s title is both important and subtly misleading. While there were, indeed, many attempts to end Adolf Hitler’s life, and at all stages of his leadership, including one meticulously planned lone-wolf bid by a carpenter called Georg Elser on November 8, 1939, that came very close to success, the main and most shocking thrust of The Plots Against Hitler is that there was a single, close-knit conspiracy against the Fuhrer almost from the moment of his accession to power in 1933. Its members, mostly army officers, are the main characters in Orbach’s account. It can be difficult to maintain drama when the outcome is known – Hitler died after only a dozen years of his Thousand Year Reich, and by his own hand – but the whole narrative of hair’s breadth escape, courage, foolishness and principle is surrounded by such profound questions about the nature, motives and methods of the German opposition that Orbach comes close to describing a whole culture in miniature.

The best known of the attempts on Hitler’s life was, of course, the “July plot” of 1944, in which a bomb placed by Claus von Stauffenberg detonated close to Hitler in his East Prussian lair, wounding the Fuhrer but also reinforcing in him the belief that it was his destiny to lead Germany to the end. At that moment, the conspiracy came bloodily but inconsequentially overground. It remains a puzzle. Successive film and television versions, ranging back from Tom Cruise’s patchily subtle Stauffenberg in 2008’s Valkyrie to John Carson’s more nuanced version in a landmark 1964 “Wednesday Play”, have portrayed the plotters as brave and principled.

For my generation, Roger Manvell’s The July Plot was the defining version of the story, premised on a heroic but doomed resistance to Hitler’s insane rule. There was a touch of Julius Caesar about Manvell’s version, with the single, vital difference that Hitler is not a bloodied ghost but a remotely living presence. Stauffenberg, a walking symbol of German courage and vulnerability, was cast as a Brutus left to wield the knife alone. Within a decade or so, revisionist historians had stepped in and overturned that heroic paradigm, suggesting instead that the conspirators were not Teutonic knights fighting for the honour of what Stauffenberg called with his last breath “Sacred Germany”, but simply Nazis who didn’t like the particular brand of Nazism that was in office.

This was a necessary corrective, but it did not tell the whole story. Orbach makes it clear that while some of the leading conspirators did continue to play a double game, following Hitler’s orders, or in the words of one sceptic “the resistance was fighting a regime with which it essentially concurred”, most were appalled by the brutal implementation of the Third Reich and, most particularly, by the systematic persecution of the Jews. That is not to say that there were not anti-Semites who also wanted to get rid of Hitler. For some, opposition seemed to be a matter almost of snobbery, a reaction against the Austrian upstart who seemed to have hijacked German history. For others, and this did provide fodder to the revisionists, the alternative model was even more Roman and traditionalist, with dreams of a return to monarchy and absolute rule.

Stauffenberg’s emergence as the leading conspirator happened relatively late. General Ludwig Beck, who was allowed the dignity of suicide rather than firing squad or piano wire when the July plot failed, had been at the heart of the opposition from the beginning. And there had been other mesmerising figures in the conspiracy before Stauffenberg appeared. Colonel (later Major General, opposition didn’t rule out promotion) Henning von Tresckow seems to have had that mysterious quality of being able to bend others to his vision, which was, simply, that Hitler should be killed “like a mad dog”.

The mystery is why such an apparently simple act was not pulled off. In reality, Hitler survived on a combination of paranoia, blind luck and, more subtly, because of the narrowed vision and cultural constraints of the plotters. Hitler was surrounded by a tight bodyguard and wore a bullet-proof vest. He also understood, as the US Secret Service failed to in Dallas in 1963, that publishing plans and routes is doing an assassin’s job for him. Hitler’s tendency to change plans at the last minute meant that he was not in the beer hall when Georg Elser’s bomb exploded. There were other occasions when lone, often suicidal, assassins were denied their chance because the Fuhrer declined to follow the script. (A bomb in Cointreau bottles didn’t work because of air temperature.) And it’s well known, though insufficiently well-examined, that Hitler survived the explosion in the Wolf’s Lair because the windows were left open.

It was a great deal more complicated than that, and the actual explosion less important than what went on around it. For much of the dozen years that the conspiracy fomented, there was constant debate about how Hitler should be dealt with – crudely, should he be killed, or put on trial? – and what kind of Germany should be allowed to emerge following either of those conclusions. Inevitably, the background context changed as Germany first drifted toward war, which old hands like Beck regarded as stupendous folly, and then first thrived and subsequently suffered disastrous setbacks. There is some difference between a conspirator who wants to assassinate Hitler even when the war is going well and one who regards the war as already lost. The latter might be considered mere damage limitation.

As he gloated over film footage of plotters strangling slowly on piano wire hung from meat hooks, Hitler denounced his attackers as unprofessional traitors to German military tradition. As Orbach shows, the opposite is the case. It was a lack of flexibility, a critical inability to improvise, that defeated the July plot. Its complex contingencies were never put in place. Basic, even childish mistakes were made. Stauffenberg had no need to prime a second bomb. He just needed to place it beside the first. He worked throughout on the assumption that the bomb would either go off or it would not, and if it did, that Hitler would be killed. On the latter, he was wrong, but could not accept the possibility. The Gestapo and SS, who seem to have had major blind spots all through the years of conspiracy, were actually in a further weakened position in July 1944 and could quite easily have been neutralised in Berlin, if not elsewhere. The conspiracy could, with some ease, have taken the capital, even with Hitler alive. But because he was alive and able to speak to the nation like Caesar’s ghost, he took back the initiative from an increasingly confused and hapless conspiracy. Those who had sat on the fence, like Friedrich Fromm, were caught up in the backlash and died with the more active plotters. Georg Elser, who might have ended Hitler’s life and Reich six years earlier, was only taken out and shot on April 9, 1945 by which time, it was pretty much all over anyway. He stands as the great exception to the general story, but also a reminder that with patience, application, decisiveness and luck the nightmare could have been over very much sooner, and millions saved. Orbach tells a vital story and tells it with unflagging vividness.