Somewhat tiresomely for the subject of this interview, we will begin with Tom
Cruise. Right at this moment the bouncy 45-year-old American Scientologist
is trussed up in eye-patch and replica German army officer uniform, circa
1944, in the process of completing his own cinematic tribute to Claus Schenk
Graf von Stauffenberg, the best-known member of the Nazi resistance.
Stauffenberg’s oldest son, Berthold, who turned 73 last month and was 10 when
his father was shot for having tried and failed to assassinate Adolf Hitler
with a bomb in a briefcase, has already spoken out about what he thinks
about Cruise’s decision to direct his interpretive gaze towards his father –
whether or not Cruise practised for the part by parading in uniform in a
suite of the Regent Hotel in Berlin, which he has hired for the duration of
filming. Cruise “should go surfing in the Caribbean”.
Today, when the actor’s name surfaces, the younger Stauffenberg first pauses
for several seconds, then breaks his own silence with a disparaging: “I’ve
heard he is quite small.”
Stauffenberg was, of course, notably tall, not as tall as his firstborn son,
who at over 6ft 3in looms while remaining seated in an armchair, but still
tall, extremely handsome and charismatic even in photographs. One suspects
that the “good Nazi’s” startling looks – he was described by his
contemporary Colonel General Franz Halder as “magnetically attractive” – as
well as his intellectual and social pedigree, his vision and bravery, helped
to draw Cruise to the role. Still, this father’s son is doubtful.
A devout Catholic, he dislikes the thought of his father portrayed by a man
who seems to believe that an alien ruler of a galactic confederacy brought
billions of people to Earth in a spaceship 75 million years ago. “I can’t
imagine it myself. People say that his beliefs should have nothing to do
with it. Would it be acceptable if he was a member of a far-right party?”
Yet there is a strong case for a big-screen adaptation of the events of July
1944, even if the facts are subjected to some Hollywood simplification. Few
periods in history have been so obsessed about, deplored, raked over and
deconstructed as Nazi Germany. But only a minority of the public are aware
of its resistance movement.
Stauffenberg was a 36-year-old army colonel by the time of his death. His name
is fairly well known. But Axel von dem Bussche or Ewald von Kleist? These
men also prepared to risk their lives in separate plots to assassinate
Hitler. It is hoped that an accurate portrayal of the events surrounding the
July Plot – Operation Valkyrie – will, in the words of Florian Henckel von
Donnersmarck, the German director , “do more for the image of Germany than
ten football World Cups.”
The younger Stauffenberg, the eldest in a brood of five, has mixed feelings
about his father. He admires him greatly, but knew him only briefly. And it
must be strange to lose a parent so early on, especially if the parent
posthumously goes on to embody, for an entire country, the only postwar
get-out-clause, the only strand from which a wounded and defensive
population could justify itself. His son says: “Our family policy is not to
speculate publicly on the motives of the resistance,” but draws a parallel
between postNazi Germany and postcommunist Eastern Europe. “It is true now,
and I’m sure it was true then, that most people try to extricate themselves.
You have to find reasons to justify not only others but yourself. That way
the picture becomes more tolerably rosy. It is why people condemned the
resistance – on grounds that the conspirators were breaking an oath and
betraying Germany.”
In 1952 only 20 per cent of the German population approved of the Nazi
resistance. That figure has now increased, according to a survey in 1994, to
around 40 per cent.
It’s not easy to prise from Stauffenberg’s son his thoughts on the matter. As
a teenager he decided to join the German Army – an extravagant ambition at
the time, considering that the German Army no longer existed, but he waited
until it did in 1954. Like his father he rose through the ranks. Like his
father, he joined the cavalry and enjoyed a spectacular military career,
retiring in 1994 with the rank of Generalmajor, Germany’s oldest soldier
after 38 years of service. Yet he denies his father inspired his choice of
career: “I just thought that this was a career that I would enjoy. Fun,
varied.” Where is his own allegiance on the July plot? “I don’t know. I mean
Germany in a way. And I’m a Catholic, which complicates things. What he did
was a very brave thing. He knew the chances of success were slim. It was a
very good thing that happened. Because the truth was that not all Germans
were Nazis. It didn’t suit the Allies at the time because it was contrary to
their propaganda and they played it down.”
The son still has memories of growing up: summer 1943 when his father returned
wounded after his vehicle was strafed by British fighter-bombers in Africa,
his left eye and right hand missing, only three remaining fingers on his
left. The unexpected Christmas visit the same year. After that, he saw his
father only twice: “Once at my grandmother’s funeral and once when he was on
leave in June 1944. Well, of course he was absent. And this was a normal
situation in those days. And then he didn’t come back, of course.”
At the time of his father’s death, the younger Stauffenberg was living in
Bamberg with his mother, a nanny, a maid, three younger siblings and various
members of his mother’s extended family.
He first caught wind of the catastrophe that had befallen his father listening
to the radio on July 20. “I’d heard something on the radio of an attempt on
Hitler’s life that had failed. But no names were given then. But I wanted to
know more. My family tried to keep us from the radio.
“Later my mother broke the news. She said the attempt had been carried out by
my father and that he’d been shot and, of course, we were shocked, we
started crying. There were only two of us, not the younger ones. And we
said, why, why an attempt on the Führer? And my mother said well, he thought
he had to do it for Germany. And I couldn’t understand it.” While his father
had been plotting to kill Hitler with a briefcase containing two small
bombs, his son was pestering his mother to let him to enrol for the Deutches
Jungvolk, a subdivision of the Hitler Youth for the under 14s. “There was a
deadline of June 30 and I born on July 30. You could volunteer. My mother
sabotaged that. She made an agreeement with me that I was growing too fast
and that I was thin. If our doctor said it was OK I could go. He didn’t.
“So when my mother told me what had happened to my father. I couldn’t
understand it. I couldn’t understand my father, anybody, wanting to kill the
Führer because the Führer was – I wouldn’t say he was an idol – but he was
the undisputed head of Germany and I suppose in those days they still
believed in a German victory. And I was a child at the time and I went to
school and there was propaganda everywhere. It shows how the thinking of the
young can be corrupted. People, young people, find it difficult to put
themselves in the situation. What it’s like to live in a dictatorship.
There’s fear everywhere and you can end up in a concentration camp. An
environment where you didn’t dare speak up, where you feared children, your
own children, in case they said something unwise.”
It took years for the younger Stauffenberg to establish the facts
surrounding his father’s death. Now we know that around midday on July 20,
1944, his father entered the briefing room in Albert Speer’s wooden barrack
hut in East Prussia where he was expected for a meeting with Hitler. Having
excused himself from the room, he had time only to arm the first bomb, his
hand injuries made him clumsy. The briefcase was placed under the conference
table and Stauffenberg left the meeting room pretending he had a phone call.
The explosion tore through the hut, but Hitler survived, shielded from the
blast by one of the legs of the heavy oak conference table. When
Stauffenberg arrived in Berlin late in the day, an SS countercoup was
already rounding up most of the conspirators. At about midnight Stauffenberg
and three others were taken to a courtyard at the War Ministry and shot, the
colonel shouting at the last: “Long live our sacred Germany.”
The bodies were buried near by, but on Himmler’s orders the corpses were dug
up and burnt, their ashes scattered over a sewage work. Joseph Goebbels
announced on the radio that an unsuccessful attempt on Hitler’s life had
been made – it must have been the same broadcast overheard by the young
Stauffenberg in Bamberg.
Hitler’s vengeance was swift and savage: 5,000 people are thought to have been
arrested and many were shot or strung up with piano wire. It was Himmler’s
intention to wipe out all of Stauffenberg’s relatives, but most of them
wound up in concentration camps, which they survived. “My mother [pregnant
with her fifth child] was then picked up the following night by the Gestapo
and I didn’t see her until July 1945. And my grandmother was arrested the
night after.”
Stauffenberg himself was sent to an orphanage where his name was changed to
Meister. Until June 1945 when he was reunited with his mother, Stauffenberg
was sealed off from the world “no school, no newspapers, no radio. Mother
was first cross-examined in Berlin then moved to Ravensbruck cell building
for prisoners held for questioning by the Gestapo and there she stayed until
she was due to give birth. She was taken to a clinic and evacuated, taken to
another, had the baby and then had to be evacuated because the Russians.
Under the name of Shank, she was taken to a Catholic hospital in Potsdam
under Gestapo supervision.” Towards the end of the war a village policeman
took her home back to his family.
Where were the Gestapo? “It’s wrong to think the Germans are always well
organised. Some things did go wrong. Her guard went home once he had got her
to write a confirmation that he had done his utmost to fulfil his duty. A
few days later the Americans came. We got home in the middle of June. And
life went on. That was all.”
Still it’s unclear why the family wasn’t executed. Possibly because Nazi
leaders intended to deal with them after a victory that never came. And
possibly because the family’s deep roots and important connections. The
Stauffenbergs are an aristocratic Roman-Catholic family from Swabia. As a
young man, the young Claus and one of his brothers had become followers of
the mystical poet, Stefan George, who a new biography argues, preached that
pederasty was the highest form of existence. Stauffenberg shared with George
a vision of Germany ruled by an aristocratic and intellectual elite. It had
little to do with democracy.
What if his father had lived? The younger Stauffenberg describes himself as a
more committed Catholic than his father and has no time for the mysticism
that surrounded the George set. Did he regret what his father did? “Well, in
a way, of course. It would have been nice to have had a father. But I can’t
say, and nobody else can say, how we might have fared together. There might
have been conflict. Or later we might have had different ideas. He might
have changed too through experience. He was a disciple of George to whom I
have no relationship whatsoever.
“My mother adored my father. He had socialist friends and was probably less
conservative than some of the others. He was not one to put thoughts on
paper. So one can only speculate. I suppose that he also thought that an
intellectual elite should rule Germany.”
The son now lives outside Stuttgart with his wife of 49 years and a dachshund.
A bust of his father sits on a drawing-room table, beneath that several
pictures of his father at home with his children. When it's time to go the
younger Stauffenberg offers us a lift to the station. In his car a tape of
military marching tunes is playing. A couple of hundred miles north one can
imagine Tom Cruise still marching away in his Berlin hotel room.
The historian: It was better that the bomb failed
A number of scenarios might have unfolded if Stauffenberg’s bomb had killed
Hitler on July 20, 1944. One is that the SS and parts of the army would have
put down the coup d’état that was to be triggered by Hitler’s death, and
that Himmler would have taken over the German leadership. This is unlikely.
With Hitler dead, the coup would have had a good chance of success.
What then? The successful plotters would have tried to end the war by reaching
a separate peace with Britain and the US. But a deal with the plotters would
have broken the alliance with the Soviet Union, held together only by the
sole aim of defeating Germany and destroying Nazism. And it would have
placed in power those in Germany, especially in the Wehrmacht, whom many
Allied leaders thought implicated in German aggression. The result could
have been a hot, not cold, war, and maybe an atom bomb directed at Moscow.
It seems unlikely, however, with the war in the Far East still unfinished,
that the Western Allies would have risked war with the Soviet Union.
Probably, they would have resisted the overtures for peace and stuck to the demand
for unconditional surrender. It is doubtful that the plotters would have
acceded to this, at least immediately, given the fear and detestation of the
Russians. So the war in Europe would have continued until Germany’s defeat
or capitulation. This, though, would almost certainly have come much earlier
with Hitler dead. Millions of lives and immense destruction would have been
avoided had Stauffenberg been successful.
What about within Germany? Perversely, the chances of democracy being rapidly
established might have been diminished rather than enhanced by a successful
coup. There would certainly have been a new “stab-in-the-back” legend, of
the sort that had bedevilled German democracy. And the leading figures in
the antiHitler plot, divided among themselves apart from the need to be rid
of Hitler and end the war, were not democrats. Some even wanted to hold on
to Nazi territorial gains. A natural human reaction is to regret
Stauffenberg’s failure to kill Hitler. But it was probably better that
Germany’s defeat was total, and inflicted from outside, so that Germans,
too, could see the full extent of the disaster which Nazism had inflicted
upon their country, and on the world. SIR IAN KERSHAW
Professor Kershaw is author of Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the
World, published by Penquin
