AoH Book Club: Roger Moorhouse on Killing Hitler
How many plots were there against Hitler?
A book came out a long time ago that talked about 42 plots against Hitler. That book didn’t even include some of the ones that I talked about. I talk about 15. They vary in their significance and their seriousness. They all have to be sort of serious conspiracies and actually have a possibility of an effect. So you have to apply some criteria, but I came up with about 15 in the end.
Do we and did the plotters fixate too much on Hitler, i .e. ‘We have to kill Hitler and then everything will be okay.’ Because surely he would simply have been replaced by a fellow ideologue, someone like Himmler, or Heydrich had he not been killed.
I think you’re broadly right there. What’s interesting about the Stauffenberg plot that comes to fruition in the summer of 1944 is that they don’t fall into that trap for various reasons. It is a reasonably wide-ranging conspiracy based in the military, but with political angles and political participants to it. They understand, partly because of who they are, because it’s fundamentally conservative. They are coming at him from a conservative standpoint.
By that time in the war, if you kill Hitler you can expect that the Fronts will collapse and particularly the Eastern Front. This is the summer of the collapse of Army Group Centre.
Soviets are making huge gains in the East, you could reasonably expect that the Eastern Front would probably collapse. That was the last thing they wanted, particularly the military men.
If you kill Hitler and then that just brings about a Bolshevik takeover of Germany. That’s not a win as far as they were concerned. This was the problem they faced. The fundamental problem was that it wasn’t enough just to kill Hitler. You had to kill Hitler and then take power as well. So you had to have both an assassination plot and simultaneously a palace coup, which is what the wider Valkyrie plot is.
They realized that it wasn’t enough just to kill Hitler. The earlier plots, I think it’s fair to say, and that goes all the way back to his days as a rabble rouser and agitator in the 1920s, were when a few people tried to target him. Even someone like Georg Elser in 1939, and even the Abwehr plotters in 1938 and 1939, there’s such a focus on Hitler’s charisma, his dark charisma and the power of his own personality within Nazism, that the assumption is if you kill Hitler, then the thing will collapse.
Obviously by 1944 the thinking has got more strategic. In the early phase, everyone else just thinks, ‘Well, you get rid of Hitler and the whole edifice collapses anyway: Nazism is Hitler and Hitler is Nazism.
Your question is fundamentally right that there were some pretty capable certainly politicians you look at someone like Goebbels who, particularly in English language historiography, we dismiss him as a poison dwarf and propagandist and habitual liar. He was a tremendously intelligent and capable man. Evil, absolutely, but he was a tremendously clever man. Whether he had the ability to sort of step into Hitler’s shoes as that godlike leader of the movement is another question.
I think it’s a fair point that they were focusing probably too much on Hitler personally. Which I suppose is because the army have to pledge allegiance to Hitler. His name is the name that they say out loud when pledging their oath.
The Georg Elser plot in 1939 comes very close to success doesn’t it?
Elser is an interesting case. He was from Southwest Germany, from Schwaben, from the area around Stuttgart. He was a craftsman. He was a bit of a loner. He was the sort of person that across the country had formed very much the backbone of everything Nazism was.
He was an ordinary German who felt a bit crushed by the economic crisis. In their droves, people like that had gone over to the Nazis. Elser had gone the other way and had taken against Hitler, in a very sort of visceral, personal way. He saw Hitler as the enemy not only of himself, but of Germany. He sees his opportunity in the commemorations of the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, which course happened in 1923.
He has a year to plan and it’s very thorough. He collects explosives and creates the timing mechanism. He fashions a cavity in the pillar where he knows, because he watched the previous year’s events, that’s where Hitler’s lectern is going to be for the speech.
However there are some issues, the primary issue being that the weather’s turned. This is November of 1939. He would normally fly back to Berlin but there’s fog. So he has to take the train instead.
13 minutes after he leaves the building, Elser’s bomb goes off, blows out that pillar as he planned it, brings down only the gallery above, but also the roof of the whole building. It kills eight people in the room. I think there’s absolutely no doubt that had those plans not been changed and Hitler was standing at that podium, at the lectern when the bomb went off, then he would have been killed. There’s no question.
I’ve always been a bit sceptical about Stauffenberg because the plot is July 1944, the war’s been raging fve years. Many millions have died already. Is he really such a hero?
I think that’s the right question to ask. Having the moral clarity to see what was going on, not only to see it, but then to say to yourself, ‘I’m going to do something about it,’ is tremendously brave, physically brave and morally brave. By moral bravery, I mean when everyone around you is saying one thing, but your principles and your convictions say the opposite, and yet you’re unswayed. Having said that, there are elements of Stauffenberg’s own sort of makeup and his own history that are a bit more questionable. He doesn’t have the moral longevity that someone like von Tresckow had. Tresckow had been saying since the late 1930s that Hitler was a criminal, that the Nazi regime was criminal and it had to be removed. Stauffenberg was one of those people that looked on the Nazis essentially through a class lens. He was aristocracy, again, Southwest Germany, the same as Elser, but a very different world from the one that Elser grew up in. An aristocrat, Catholic, he was very much a German nationalist.
He was willing to go along with the Nazis because he saw the Nazis as raising Germany up from the abyss that it had found itself in after the First World War. He saw them as putting Germany back on top where it belonged, regaining territory that had been unjustly lost. He was willing to ride along, but he viewed them, he viewed the Nazis as something he would find on the bottom of his shoe. So his moral conversion in the end is all the more interesting. It’s a bit like Oskar Schindler in a way. There’s a narrative arc there, which makes him quite interesting, quite fascinating. He says horrible things about the Poles. He’s no liberal, let’s put it that way. He’s not on our side. And even when he makes his assassination attempt in 1944. He’s not on our side. We have to remember that.
The bomb itself, which whilst it explodes, fails to kill Hitler. Both Stauffenberg and his adjutant make a mistake, don’t they?
When Stauffenberg is in the process of fusing the time pencil, which he insists on doing himself, even though he’s only got three fingers on one hand, he’s got a thumb and an index finger and a middle finger on his left hand. That’s all he’s got. His right hand has gone and the ring finger and the little finger on the left hand have also gone from his injuries.
You can imagine he’s quite clumsy in operating a pair of pliers, for example. So he had this specially bent pair of pliers that he used. He insisted on doing it himself. His adjutant was with him who had a full set of fingers and thumbs, but he insisted on doing it himself because he was taking ownership. That took time. Obviously it was a stressful moment. One of Hitler’s adjutants bangs on the door.
So it’s stressful moment. The key problem here is that Stauffenberg forgets to put the second charge in his briefcase. One charge is put in there with a time pencil set. Had he put the second charge in, it probably would have killed everyone in the room. But he, in the stress of the moment, doesn’t do it.
I think in the stress of the moment [is key], They are officers of Hitler’s army and in 10 minutes they are about to kill Hitler and they are potentially themselves about to die. So I think you can forgive them the fact that they’re bit stressed.
If this book were to be given a new edition, what would you change?
I have thought about this particularly with this book because at the time I included Albert Speer as the last chapter. Speer is a really interesting case because he was a slippery bastard. He very much wrote his own narrative post-war. Where I was when I wrote Killing Hitler, which is now 20 years ago, I was probably more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on this issue at least than I am today.
If you read the chapter I think it’s very interesting. He certainly does have some sort of nervous collapse in 1944, partly pressure of work and partly, he was an intelligent man. He could see where Germany was headed. In the aftermath of coming back from that collapse, I think he started to ask some serious questions.
In many ways, he countermands, for example, Hitler’s Nero order in March 1945, which was to destroy everything: destroy infrastructure, factories and so on. I think it’s incontrovertible that Speer does a lot to countermand that, regardless of how slippery he was. I think there’s elements there where he obviously was thinking twice about what was going on in a genuine sense.
Now, whether that leads him to some sort of half-hearted plot, I would question more now than I did 20 years ago. I’m not throwing it out entirely, but I would at least re-write that chapter.
Roger Moorhouse is the author of Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots Against the Fuhrer. You can listen to Roger on the Aspects of History Podcast.
