I have just read a
curiously fascinating little book that has lain unread in my shelves for some
years. It is called Valkyrie: the Plot to
Kill Hitler, was written by a man called
Philipp Von Boeselager, and was first published in English in 2009, the
year after his death. He was the last remaining member of the great conspiracy
that tried many times unsuccessfully to assassinate Hitler, culminating in the
attempt on July 20 1944. Although he had always been reluctant to discuss his
experience, he finally realized it was up to him to record the details of a
plot that, had it succeeded, could have changed history, and saved the lives of
the hundreds of thousands of people who were subsequently killed as the war
continued until the German surrender on May 7, 1945.
The fascination of the
book comes not so much from the detailed story of the plotting, as from the
fact that Von Boeselager was a member of
the high German aristocracy, from a family long associated with the German
military, and his account of the war is told from the point of view of such a
rigidly proper viewpoint as to be, in
its way, almost amusing.
Great attention is paid to
the rigid requirements of citizenship placed on members of this high Catholic
family of nine children, brought up in an immense castle, fathered by a man
described as “a cultured man of letters. Originally from Brussels on his
mother’s side, he considered the European nobility a single unit. He hunted all
over the continent, and spoke four or five languages….He attached particular
importance ro learning how to make proper use of freedom --- and the capacity
for Christian discernment which was for him its corollary --- and of hunting."
Philipp was born in 1917,
his elder brother Georg, who became a
co-member of the conspiracy, in 1915: Georg is portrayed as the absolute
epitome of the military hero, a leader of men, always concerned about his
soldiers, a brilliant strategist and
fighter, who eventually fell in the service of his country after giving
everything he had to its cause. The boys
were 18 and 15 when the Nazis came to power in 1933, an event that left their
family rather indifferent, for the father was not sorry to see the end of the
Weimar republic, nor of the humiliation they had felt after the defeat in the
First World War. “My father believed in European unity before it was fashionable
to do so….as a former officer… he was a patriot and he wanted to see Germany
regain all its rights as a great nation…..We had no more need to be ashamed of
wanting to restore Germany than had the French who in1914 wanted to return
Alsace and Lorraine to France.”
Georg passed his final
exams in 1934: a man given to action, loving the outdoor life, he wanted to
become a military officer. “It seemed to
us that the army was the only institution that had remained faithful to its
principles and was capable, through its vitality and culture, of preserving its
identity and, especially, its autonomy with respect to the government.” When
Philipp’s turn came he asked the advice of his grandfather, telling him he was
leaning towards a career in diplomacy, but the old man said, “My boy, in
diplomacy it’s not always good to tell the whole truth, but with the Nazis
you’d have to simply lie, that wouldn’t be suitable for you. Choose the army
instead; war is coming.”
So, the brothers joined the
cavalry, to which they were devoted for the rest of their lives. Philipp joined
the Fourth Army which entered France in May, 1940, exhibiting an effortless
superiority to the French army. He tells a story of approaching his adversaries
on the battlefield under a white flag and making a deal with them to save
lives. When a superior arrived and ordered him into action, he refused because
of the deal he had made, and when the superior persisted, he drew his gun,
pointed it at his superior, and forced him to yield. “Everything went as
planned, without shedding a drop of blood. ..few people knew what had happened,
and we tried to keep it quiet.” His outfit was poised for the attack on England,
but when England refused to surrender, they were suddenly transferred to
Poland, very close to the USSR, which they attacked on June 23, 1941.
He became aide-de-camp to
Field Marshal von Kluge. Noticing a bald statement in a field report, “Special
treatment for five gypsies,” he asked for an explanation of the responsible
officer, a man with a scandalous reputation, embittered by his treatment during
the First War, what “special treatment” meant. “Those? We shot them!”
“What do you mean, you
shot them! After a trial before a military tribunal?”
“No, of course not. All the
Jews and Gypsies we pick up are liquidated, shot.” Philipp thought his Marshal would explode as
he protested in the name of the Geneva conventions, the laws of war, and even
the interests of the German army. But eventually he drew from the officer the rejoinder:
“Jews and Gypsies are among the Reich’s enemies. We have to liquidate them.”
The war had been raging
for three years by this time, and all of Western Europe had been conquered by
Hitler’s army, so it does seem to me rather unlikely that even a rigidly trained military officer full
of morality and fighting spunk could have found nothing, until this moment, to
arouse in him feelings of disgust at what his nation, and its army, had been
doing.
His account of the unsuccessful
advance on Moscow is accompanied by
careless references of contempt for the Russian soldiers, who, we are given to
understand, were as often as not drunk on vodka, and were thrown into certain
death by careless officers. Also, although mostly in the notes at the back of
the book, Russian citizens are recorded as protesting against the government
foisted on them by the Communist authorities.
Yet somehow or other, resistance offered by partisans, citizen militias,
proved to be a major problem as the German advance was stalled, and then
gradually turned back, this highly disciplined German army thrown into a
disastrous retreat, from which they were never rescued.
He gives a harrowing
picture of the state of the German army under the withering bombardment they
suffered, especially once the Soviet forces were armed with newly supplied
American weapons. Some severe doubts have in recent years been cast on the
behaviour of the German troops, which
some German authors and historians have claimed were stoked by massive quantities of drugs that
kept them awake as they marched back and forth across the frozen tundra.
From out of their massive retreat,
a group of dissenting officers began to conspire to assassinate Hitler, whose
crazy military decisions were making defeat almost inevitable. They realized that just to remove Hitler would not be
enough: he could be replaced by someone who might conceivably be worse. So
various planned assassination attempts were stalled because neither Himmler nor
Goering nor Goebbels were also present,
as they would need to be if a coup d’etat were to succeed.
The attempt, when it was
made by Claus von Stauffenberg, the severely wounded man whose job was made
more difficult by his injuries, did not succeed in anything except the death of hundreds of conspirators and
people connected to them. Of course, a peripheral result was the demonstration to their
adversaries that such a determined resistance to Hitler did exist.
On another point the book
is strangely silent. Neither Philipp nor his brother Georg, though deeply
committed to the conspiracy, was arrested, and no satisfactory explanation is
offered for this when virtually every other conspirator was either summarily
shot or imprisoned.
This little book does contain an account that could be used as a warning in the present day: that no matter how disciplined and well trained an army, it can nevertheless fall into the hands of unscrupulous national leaders. One does not have to look too far in the present world to envisage the possibility --- however remote it may seem --- that something similar could happen, not far from our borders, that would be a disaster for the entire modern world.
Verrry interesting indeed ... Thanks, Boyce!
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