rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

THE ALLIED INVASION OF WESTERN EUROPE AND THE ATTEMPTTO KILL HITLER 915against Hitler. Other German visitors included Dr. Schoenfeld and Trott zuSolz, the latter a member of the Kreisau Circle and also of the conspiracy, whoonce journeyed to Switzerland to ”warn” Dulles, as had so many others, that ifthe Western democracies refused to consider a decent peace with an anti-NaziGerman regime the conspirators would turn to Soviet Russia. Dulles, thoughhe was personally sympathetic, was unable to give any assurances. 1255One marvels at these German resistance leaders who were so insistent ongetting a favorable peace settlement from the West and so hesitant in getting ridof Hitler until they had got it. One would have thought that if they consideredNazism to be such a monstrous evil as they constantly contended – no doubtsincerely – they would have concentrated on trying to overthrow it regardlessof how the West might treat their new regime. One gets the impression that agood many of these ”good Germans” fell too easily into the trap of blaming theoutside world for their own failures, as some of them had done for Germany’smisfortunes after the first lost war and even for the advent of Hitler himself.OPERATION FLASHIn February 1943, Goerdeler told Jakob Wallenberg in Stockholm that ”theyhad plans for a coup in March.”They had.The preparations for Operation Flash, as it was called, had been worked outduring January and February by General Friedrich Olbricht, chief of the GeneralArmy Office (Allgemeines Heeresamt) and General von Tresckow, chief of staffof Kluge’s Army Group Center in Russia. Olbricht, a deeply religious man, wasa recent convert to the conspiracy, but, because of his new post, had rapidlybecome a key figure in it. As deputy to General Friedrich Fromm, commanderof the Replacement Army, he was in a position to rally the garrisons in Berlinand the other large cities of the Reich behind the plotters. Fromm himself,like Kluge, was by now disillusioned with his Fuehrer but was not regarded assufficiently trustworthy to be let in on the plot.”We are ready. It is time for the Flash,” Olbricht told young Fabian vonSchlabrendorff, a junior officer on Tresckow’s staff, at the end of February. Earlyin March the plotters met for a final conference at Smolensk, the headquartersof Army Group Center. Although not participating in the action, AdmiralCanaris, the chief of the Abwehr, was aware of it and arranged the meeting,flying Hans von Dohnanyi and General Erwin Lahousen of his staff with himto Smolensk ostensibly for a conference of Wehrmacht intelligence officers. Lahousen,a former intelligence officer of the Austrian Army and the only plotterin the Abwehr to survive the war, brought along some bombs.Schlabrendorff and Tresckow, after much experimenting, had found that Germanbombs were no good for their purpose. They worked, as the young officerlater explained 1256 , with a fuse that made a low hissing noise which gave themaway. The British, they discovered, made a better bomb. ”Prior to the explosion,”Schlabrendorff says, ”they made no noise of any kind.” The R.A.F.had dropped a number of these weapons over occupied Europe to Allied agentsfor sabotage purposes – one had been used to assassinate Heydrich – and theAbwehr had collected several of them and turned them over to the conspirators.