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

THE ALLIED INVASION OF WESTERN EUROPE AND THE ATTEMPTTO KILL HITLER 923counted to appear were his twice-daily military conferences with the generalsof OKW and OKH. He would have to be killed at one of them. On December26, 1943, a young officer by the name of Stauffenberg, deputizing for GeneralOlbricht, appeared at the Rastenburg headquarters for the noon conference, atwhich he was to make a report on Army replacements. In his briefcase was atime bomb. The meeting was canceled. Hitler had left to have his Christmason the Obersalzberg.This was the first such attempt by the handsome young lieutenant colonel,but not the last. For in Klaus Philip Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, the anti-Nazi conspirators had at last found their man. Henceforth he would not onlytake over the job of killing Hitler by his own hand in the only way that nowseemed possible but would breathe new life and light and hope and zeal intothe conspiracy and become its real, though never nominal, leader.THE MISSION OF COUNT VON STAUFFENBERGThis was a man of astonishing gifts for a professional Army officer. Born in1907, he came from an old and distinguished South German family. Through hismother, Countess von Uxkull-Gyllenbrand, he was a great-grandson of Gneisenau,one of the military heroes of the war of liberation against Napoleon andthe cofounder, with Scharnhorst, of the Prussian General Staff, and through heralso a descendant of Yorck von Wartenburg, another celebrated general of theBonaparte era. Klaus’s father had been Privy Chamberlain to the last King ofWuerttemberg. The family was congenial, devoutly Roman Catholic and highlycultivated. With this background and in this atmosphere Klaus von Stauffenberggrew up. Possessed of a fine physique and, according to all who knew him,of a striking handsomeness, he developed a brilliant, inquisitive, splendidly balancedmind. He had a passion for horses and sports but also for the arts andliterature, in which he read widely, and as a youth came under the influenceof Stefan George and that poetic genius’s romantic mysticism. For a time theyoung man thought of taking up music as a profession, and later architecture,but in 1926, at the age of nineteen, he entered the Army as an officer cadet inthe 17th Bamberg Cavalry Regiment – the famed Bamberger Reiter.In 1936 he was posted to the War Academy in Berlin, where his all-roundbrilliance attracted the attention of both his teachers and the High Command.He emerged two years later as a young officer of the General Staff. Though,”why ninety per cent of the historic assassinations have been successful. The only preventivemeasure one can take is to live irregularly – to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular tines andunexpectedly . . . As far as possible, whenever I go anywhere by car I took off unexpectedlyand without warning the police.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 366.)Hitler had always been aware, as we have seen, that he might be assassinated. In his warconference on August 22, 1939, on the eve of the attack on Poland, he had emphasized to hisgenerals that while he personally was indispensable he could ”be eliminated at any time by acriminal or an idiot.”In his ramblings on the subject on May 3, 1942, he added, ”There can never be absolutesecurity against fanatics and idealists . . . If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with abomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” He thought, though, that ”the numberof fanatics who seek my life on idealistic grounds is getting much smaller . . . The only reallydangerous elements are either those fanatics who have been goaded to action by dastardlypriests or nationalist-minded patriots from one of the countries we have occupied. My manyyears of experience make things fairly difficult even for such as these.” (Ibid,, p. 367.)