He asked about Emil’s family, and especially about Kurt: did he still cling to his faith in the Führer? The elder brother replied that he never discussed the matter; there had come to be such a tense situation in Germany that a man couldn’t speak frankly even to his own brother. Lanny took that to mean that Kurt was still a Hitlerite; but he didn’t say any more because he saw that Emil was heartsick on the subject.
They talked about old friends in the Fatherland, and it was a melancholy roll call. Emil’s second brother, Fritz, was missing on the eastern front, and that almost certainly meant dead. The Berlin palace of Graf Stubendorf had been destroyed by bombs and fire. Lanny told how he had been in the palace of the Fürstin Donnerstein when the same fate had befallen it. He didn’t say that he had since met Hilde in the Obersalzberg, or how he had got out of Germany. Instead he remarked, “I wonder if you ever met Oskar von Herzenberg.”
“I have met him casually,” replied Emil. “Poor fellow, he undertook to fight the regime, and he was unfortunate in his choice of confidants. Himmler had him shot.”
Lanny didn’t have to pretend to be shocked. “Fürchterlich!” he exclaimed, and added, “That concerns me greatly, because my half-sister, Marceline Detaze, was his close friend, and we have had no news about her.”
“Leider, I can tell you nothing. I have heard people speak of her as a dancer, but, as you know, I am a family man, and I rarely went to night clubs. But the fact of my not having heard anything about her may be a good sign, because I heard the names of many who fell into disfavor for one reason or another. I knew practically everyone who was involved in the attempt on Hitler of last July, and it was a terrible thing. The SS went into action at the first moment, and it was enough to cause your arrest if you had ever been seen in the company of one of the conspirators, or if they had your name or number in an address book.”
Lanny now thought it safe to say, “They tell me that you had knowledge of it in advance.”
“I had been discussing the subject with a few friends for more than three years, ever since Hitler began taking control of the Wehrmacht and setting aside the decisions of the General Staff. One law that we had considered fixed was that Germany should never again become involved in a two-front war. The attack upon Russia seemed to us sheer lunacy, but we were helpless. Men who ventured to speak of tradition and experience were rudely shoved aside, and the plunge was taken.”
IX
After that the P.A. had nothing to do but listen. A Prussian officer’s dignity, his self-respect, were involved, and that of his caste, his profession, his people; the control of his country had been seized by a band of low fellows, gutter rats, frenzied malcontents born of the defeat and despair of World War I. They were criminals and degenerates, unworthy of the name of Germans; every nation had such creatures, but no nation with a civilization worthy of the name had ever before fallen into such hands.
The thing that made it hardest for Emil was the fact that his own youngest brother had been a supporter and even a friend of the head gutter rat. The elder apologized for him, saying, “Kurt is a man of genius, and they have never been distinguished for judgment about practical affairs. They mistake the intensity of their own desires for reality.”
Lanny replied humbly, “Unglücklicherweise, I haven’t the excuse of being a genius. I took my father’s word that National Socialism was Europe’s only recourse against Bolshevism.”
“To me they are the same,” said the Wehrmacht man. “And when you have won this war you will have another to fight.”
The P.A. didn’t comment on that, but asked about the conspiracy, and for hours listened to the details of a struggle which antedated the war, and concerning which he had picked up only a few hints during his visits to Germany. The anti-Nazi movement which Lanny had known had been that of the Socialists, the workers; but here was a movement of the aristocracy, the old masters of the Fatherland, and it had included some of the most highly placed personages, some whom Lanny had met without having the slightest idea of what was inside their heads.
There was, for example, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the Counterespionage Division. Lanny had met him several times at the Berlin home of Graf Stubendorf. He was a nervous little man of Levantine appearance, and was known as “the little Greek.” Lanny had taken him for a thick-and-thin Hitlerite; but now he learned that Canaris and his assistant, Major-General Oster, had been working ceaselessly upon the Wehrmacht officers, right under the noses of the Gestapo. One of their allies had been Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the Wehrmacht Generalstab. Another was Colonel-General Werner von Fritsch, whose treason was detected; the Nazis shot him on the Russian front—or perhaps he shot himself. The story given out was that he had been killed in action. Emil called a roll of such personalities, and as Lanny recalled them it seemed to him that Adi Schicklgruber had been completely surrounded by traitors in his own home.
“It wouldn’t have done any good to kill just the Führer,” the General explained. “We had to get enough of his gang and to have a sufficient organization to act at once and seize control of the government; otherwise we’d merely have exchanged Hitler for Himmler. In the early years Canaris and Oster made the mistake of thinking it couldn’t be done until the war had started. But then Hitler won so many victories that they knew it would be impossible to turn the German people against him. The opposition had to wait for defeat; which meant they had to sit helpless and see the country embarked on a two-front war.”
The man who had approached and converted Emil Meissner was General-Major Henning von Tresckow, First Staff Officer of the Central Army Group. He had seen the tragic significance of the failure to take Moscow in the autumn of 1941; and when America was drawn into the war he knew that it would be the story of 1918 all over again. Emil told about the controversy inside the movement between the civilians who were afraid of making Hitler a martyr and wanted to take him prisoner, and the military men who insisted that he must be eliminated. They worked out elaborate plans for the seizure of control in Berlin and the other principal cities. They had won over General Kluge, who commanded the Central Army Group on the eastern front; but Kluge deserved his name, which means shrewd, and backed out at the last moment, after the conspirators had lured the Führer into a visit to Kluge’s army.
“That was early in 1943,” said Emil. “We tried to get Hitler with a time bomb as he was flying back from that visit. We had a special kind of English bomb, and Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorf, a young lawyer in uniform, made a bold effort and got it on his plane returning to Berlin. But the thing failed to explode; and Schlabrendorf, who had wrapped it as a package containing two bottles of brandy, had to rush to Berlin by the next plane and try to get it before somebody opened it up.”
X
The P.A. got many surprises in the course of this talk, the strangest being when Emil mentioned the name of Heinrich Himmler. Lanny exclaimed, “Surely you don’t mean that he is involved!”
In reply Emil told him a strange story, having to do with a Berlin lawyer by the name of Langbehn, a man whom Emil knew well. Some years before the war this lawyer’s little daughter had been invited to the home of a schoolmate, and upon the father’s inquiry had said that the schoolmate’s name was Himmler and that her father “had something to do with the SS.” Out of this had grown an acquaintance, ripening into friendship; and after the German defeat at Stalingrad the lawyer had ventured to talk confidentially with the head of the SS about the tragic position of Germany, whose military affairs were in the hands of a man without military training. Herr Langbehn had made the discovery that Himmler, the ex-poultry grower, had become intoxicated by the power he was wielding and was convinced that he was better fitted to deal with the emergency than was his Führer. Out of that had grown a separate and smaller conspiracy with the aim of removing Hitler and putting Himmler in his place. One of the group was Dr. Popitz, a lawyer and Reichsminister.
“Emil, you take my breath away!” exclaimed the A
merican. “Himmler came to the New Chancellery and put me through a questioning, scaring the daylights out of me. And now I wonder—maybe he was sounding me out, with the idea of taking me into his confidence!”
“Nothing is more likely, Lanny; but you would have been in just as great danger. The Langbehn conspiracy came to the ears of Bohrmann, who is Himmler’s furiously jealous rival, and he reported it to Hitler. Himmler was able to persuade the Führer that he had been engaged in leading the conspirators on. Both Langbehn and Popitz were arrested and have been in prison for a year. Just recently I got word that they were being secretly tried; and the fear that they might mention my name was one of the reasons I decided to surrender my division. I much preferred an American jail to one of the SS.”
The Junker-minded General went on to tell the story of his own efforts. After the failure of the airplane attempt he and his friends had spent another year winning over important officers and preparing plans for a new government. Another amazing thing to Lanny: among the men they had won to their support was Lieutenant Dietrich von Bose, an official in the Führer’s field headquarters whom Lanny had met several times there and had despised as a timeserving Nazified aristocrat. Emil had twice been flown to that place, supposedly to interview Hitler, but really to get from Bose the details about the Führer’s personal habits.
Said the General, “I volunteered to try to shoot him at the military conference which took place about noon every day. It would have been difficult because he kept himself so surrounded by SS men, and everybody had to be searched. My friends insisted that it must be done by a bomb, and I had moral scruples against killing all the persons who might be in that room. They picked another man, Colonel Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg, who was Chief of Staff in the General Army Office; he came of an old Catholic family in Bavaria, and had been badly mutilated in the fighting in Italy. He carried the bomb into the conference room in a briefcase and set it by a table near the Führer’s seat. Unfortunately it was in another man’s way, and he moved it behind a pillar. That is why the evil genius of Germany is still alive.”
Lanny remarked, “I know only the story the Nazis gave out, and one never knows whether to believe that.”
“Half a dozen men were killed, and Hitler was deafened and had his right arm badly hurt. At first we thought he was dead, but then we heard him speaking over the radio, denouncing his enemies. First and last, about ten thousand men and women were arrested and questioned, many of them under torture. I thought that my time would come at any moment. Tresckow told me that he was afraid he couldn’t stand torture, and he went out and blew his head off with a grenade. Stauffenberg and Olbricht were shot immediately, and Beck was allowed to take his own life. They are still trying people and executing them; a long list: Goerdeler, Oster, Hassell, Witzleben, Hagen, Oertzen, Dohnanyi, and Werner von der Schulenburg. If your armies are having an easy time in the invasion, Lanny, you must attribute it in part at least to the fact that a madman has shot out the best brains of the Wehrmacht.”
“Yes indeed,” said the P.A. “And we also understand why a number of high officers have surrendered rather easily.” This was putting it tactfully and was balm to the wounded spirit of an extremely korrekt Prussian general.
XI
They talked about the war and how it was going and why. Lanny knew a great deal that Emil didn’t, and he was free in pouring it out. He had been in London and could convince a military man that the new victory weapon had little military significance. The big ones, the rocket bombs called V-2’s, had just gone into action; two had landed in English fields, and no doubt more would come. Many might hit London, level a few more blocks of houses and kill a few more hundreds of civilians; but they surely wouldn’t stop the war and they couldn’t be aimed at targets smaller than a city.
Emil said yes, but there was a V-3, bigger yet, and it might be better aimed. To which his friend replied, “You know, old man, my father has special information, and now and then he whispers something to me. Do not think that I am playing tricks upon you—I pledge you my good faith as a man and a friend. This is something that is probably not known to a dozen men in our armies here: American scientists with the help of those from several other countries, including Germany, are preparing a bomb upon an entirely new principle, never before known in the world. It will be capable of wiping out not a city block, but a city, killing hundreds of thousands of people in a fraction of a second.”
Lanny waited to let that sink in; and after some thought the German remarked, “I suppose that what you are suggesting is the much-talked-about atomic fission.”
“Don’t guess, Emil, because I can’t say yes and I can’t say no, and it seems rude to say nothing.”
“Can you tell me how soon this is likely to happen?”
“It may be six months, or it may be eight. If the war is still going on, some large city in Germany, or perhaps in Japan, will see the thing tried out. When I got my first hint of it I made up my mind that I wanted the war to end before that, because the power is something too awful to be trusted in the hands of the sort of men who rule our world today.”
Again the other sat in thought. Finally he said, “You have come to urge me to give information to your side?”
“I came because I was ordered, Emil, and when I got here I was told that you had mentioned my name. I won’t deceive you—I know that I couldn’t anyhow. I came over to the Allied side because I found little by little how Hitler was deceiving the German people. He has broken every promise he ever made to them, as well as to the outside world. Now I have only one thought, to get this horror of blood and destruction over with as quickly as possible. I am telling you facts and answering your questions as far as I am allowed to. I am not going to do any persuading—I leave it for you to make your own decision. You say you couldn’t bear to plant a bomb that would kill some innocent men; well, both sides are dropping bombs on thousands of innocent men, women, and children every day, and that will go on until one side or the other gives up. I can assure you there isn’t the remotest possibility of the American side giving up. We are going to clear out the Lowlands and turn the port of Antwerp into the greatest base in Europe; we’ll restore the railroads, and bring new locomotives and cars, and unload billions of dollars’ worth of ammunition and fuel and food. The men we have put ashore so far are not one-fourth of what we have in readiness; and, believe me, I have been all over America and know there is not the remotest chance of our weakening in the will to win this war.”
“Our madman has done that for us,” said Emil sadly.
“Exactly. We didn’t want to get in, but Hitler declared war on us. Now every day a few more hundreds or thousands of German factories and homes and public buildings are being turned into rubble. It is for you to wrestle it out with your conscience and decide what you can do to save that part of Germany which hasn’t yet been laid waste. Surely you know us well enough to know that we are not going to destroy anything after the surrender. All we want is to knock Hitler out and then give the people of Germany a chance to set up a decent government.”
XII
The harassed officer wanted time to think, and Lanny gave it to him. He went out and entertained himself making the acquaintance of some of the staff of “Lucky”—such was the code designation of the Third. He had discovered that armies were a curious kind of one-sexed family; rent with factions, pulled and hauled this way and that by rival ambitions, greed for fame and promotion, jealousy and spite. There was a great war going on against the enemy, and there was a string of little civil wars within the organization.
In “Lucky” everybody was in a frenzy over the ill luck which had befallen, the “sit-down” which had been imposed upon a triumphantly advancing host. They blamed it upon SHAEF, which couldn’t bear to see one army more successful than all the other armies put together. Ike, who bossed the show, was tender-minded, and under the influence of an evil spirit called Monty. This Monty, otherwise Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, was a
Scot and couldn’t bear to have Americans reap the glory. So he had persuaded Ike to let him have the gas and the guns, and had rushed his armies into the mud and mess of Holland, and got stuck there, just as at Caen. So “Lucky” had to sit down, chafing and champing, while the Germans in front of them got time to reorganize and to, bring up reinforcements. They had forty thousand slaves working on the Siegfried Line, strengthening its defenses, and now it would cost thousands of lives to take what might have been had free of charge if Georgie had been allowed to have his way.
They all called him Georgie, and all swore by him, even while they chuckled over his foibles. He had infected them all with his cockiness; they all put on fancy dress, wore ties in the field, walked with a swagger, saluted smartly, and boasted of being the best damned army in the whole world. The rest of “topside” was afraid of their commander, because he hogged all the limelight, and now SHAEF had taken to censoring his utterances, claiming that his frank language might shock the folks back home. The real reason was that the correspondents took such delight in Georgie that they gave the impression he was winning the war all by himself.
Georgie was here, there, and everywhere; flying in a cub plane from one airstrip to the next, exhorting his men and blessing out his officers if they came down off their toes for a moment. Then he would fly to Group headquarters and beg and plead and scold. They were taking whole corps away from him and giving them to his rivals; they were wasting the precious hours, and the enemy was getting its courage back, even daring to conduct reconnaissance in Patton’s territory, dropping spies by parachute all over it. Hot damn!—and add all the curses you know.