They Almost Killed Hitler

By Fabian von Schlabrendorff

Originally published in 1947, this book chronicles the assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, both of which Fabian von Schlabrendorff, a major leader in the resistance against Hitler, played a direct role.

The first attempt took place on 13 March 1943: During a visit by Adolf Hitler to Army Group Center Headquarters in Smolensk, Schlabrendorff smuggled a time bomb, disguised as bottles of cognac, onto the aircraft which carried Hitler back to Germany. The bomb detonator failed to go off, however, most likely due of the cold in the aircraft luggage compartment. Schlabrendorff managed to retrieve the bomb the next day and elude detection.

A further attempt followed on 20 July 1944: Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators, including Schlabrendorff, attempted to kill Hitler inside his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia, in what would become known as Operation Valkyrie. The plot was the culmination of the efforts by several groups in the German resistance to overthrow the Nazi German government. The failure of the assassination and the military coup d’état which was planned to follow led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo—including Schlabrendorff—of whom 4,980 were executed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcole Publishing
• Release date: Jul 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787207189

Fabian von Schlabrendorff

FABIAN LUDWIG GEORG ADOLF KURT VON SCHLABRENDORFF (1 July 1907 - 3 September 1980) was a German jurist, soldier, and member of the resistance against Adolf Hitler. He was trained as a lawyer and later joined the German Army. As a lieutenant in the reserves, he was promoted to serve as adjutant to Col. Henning von Tresckow, a major leader in the resistance against Adolf Hitler. He joined the resistance and acted as a secret liaison between Tresckow in Russia and Ludwig Beck, Carl Goerdeler, Hans Oster, and Friedrich Olbricht in Berlin, taking part in various coup d’état plans and plots. On 13 March 1943, his attempt to assassinate Hitler by smuggling a bomb onto his aircraft failed, and he managed to elude detection; however, he was arrested following the next failure, the 20 July Plot. He was sent to Gestapo prison and was brought before the Nazi People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) on February 3, 1945, but an American air raid killed Judge-President Roland Freisler. Between February-May 1945, Schlabrendorff was moved from one concentration camp to another: Sachsenhausen, Flossenbürg, Dachau, Innsbruck. In late April 1945. He was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates of the Dachau concentration camp, where the SS-Guards fled after being confronted by a regular German Wehrmacht unit led by Wichard von Alvensleben. He was eventually liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on 5 May 1945. From 1967 to 1975, he was a judge of the Constitutional Court of West Germany, the country’s highest tribunal. He died in 1980, aged 73. GERO VON SCHULZE-GAEVERNITZ (27 September 1901 - 6 April 1970) was a German economist. He became a crucial assistant of Allen Dulles in Europe and was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1945 for his skillful negotiations in Ascona, Switzerland, for the surrender of a million Nazi forces in World War II, with specific reference to Italy (Operation Sunrise).

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Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.

© Arcole Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THEY ALMOST KILLED HITLER

Based on the personal account of Fabian von Schlabrendorff

PREPARED AND EDITED BY GERO v. S. GAEVERNITZ

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

INTRODUCTION 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

I — BETWEEN CASERTA AND CAPRI 7

II — PRE-WAR SKIRMISH 11

III — HITLER CAN’T BE CHECKED 19

IV — OPPOSITION ON THE EASTERN FRONT 22

V — THE RESISTANCE LEADERS: BECK AND GOERDELER 32

VI — THE UNKNOWN ATTEMPT 36

VII — HOW TO OVERTHROW THE NAZIS 45

VIII — CIVILIANS IN THE RESISTANCE 52

IX — HOW TO KILL HITLER 60

X — OPEN REVOLT: JULY 20, 1944 69

XI — BEFORE THE PEOPLES COURT" 78

XII — LIBERATION 93

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 96

INTRODUCTION

By Major-General William J. Donovan Former Director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

THE story of how They Almost Killed Hitler points a moral to Americans and other freedom-loving peoples everywhere. It demonstrates that once a democratic people permits the fundamental principles of free government to be violated there is no limit to the consequences. It leads to the persecution of minorities and religions, to concentration camps and always to the specter of the gallows. However determined or courageous individuals within a totalitarian state may be, lacking organization within and support and assistance from without they will be unable to contend against the ruthless mechanism of modern organized terror.

Many have doubted the existence within Hitler’s Germany of an Underground. That such a Resistance was operating in the Third Reich was known to us in the Office of Strategic Services during the war. Some people may wonder why the books on the German Resistance are being published now and why nothing was said about it during the war or immediately thereafter. The Resistance groups inside Germany had to be kept so very secret that only the absolutely essential was reported. The members of the German Resistance with whom our representatives worked requested that we not tell their activities except to the very highest authorities, since it would endanger their work and their persons. The reports on their activities, however, have since been documented. Many thousands of Germans, among them high-ranking officers, prominent civil servants, labor and church leaders, lost their lives in the fight against the Nazi dictatorship.

Gero v. S. Gaevernitz, who prepared and edited this book, is well known to me through our service together during the war. He settled in the United States more than twenty years ago, and became an American citizen. Throughout the war he did invaluable work for the United States as Assistant to Allen W. Dulles, OSS Mission Chief, in Berne, Switzerland.

Mr. Gaevernitz established communication with anti-Nazi groups in Germany and maintained these contacts from Switzerland during the war, to the considerable advantage of the Allied war effort. In the last year of the war Mr. Gaevernitz played a decisive part in the negotiations which led to the capitulation of all German forces in Italy.

The narrator of this heroic account, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, whose personal experiences in the fight against Hitler are related here, is one of the handful of survivors of this fight for freedom within Germany. Prior to the war he was a lawyer in Berlin, and already at that time an active member of a group of Germans seeking to remove Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Schlabrendorff is a great-grandson of Queen Victoria’s Guardian Angel, Baron Stockmar, who was the Queen’s private physician, close friend, and confidential adviser. When the Gestapo tried to confiscate the letters which Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had written to his great-grandfather, Schlabrendorff secretly gave them to Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin, as a present to the British Crown. In return, an invitation was extended to him in the summer of 1939 to spend some time at Windsor Castle and examine there the records of his ancestor’s life.

This book, in addition to pointing a lesson to us Americans, reminds us of the self-sacrifice of brave men who died on the gallows, under torture, or in concentration camps because they dared against hopeless odds to plot the downfall of a tyrant.

WILLIAM. J. DONOVAN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For making the publication of this story possible I am particularly indebted to Mr. Allen W. Dulles, from 1942 to 1945 Chief of the Mission of the Office of Strategic Services to Switzerland; also to Major-General L. L. Lemnitzer, United States Army, Deputy Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean.

Valuable assistance has been given, in preparing the material for publication, by Miss Lidih Maschmeijer, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Miss Molly Bessermann, Basel, Switzerland, Mrs. Lina A. Richter, London; also by Mr. Geoffrey Winthrop Young, London, Mr. Brooks Peters, New York, and Dr. Curt L. Heymann, New York. To all of them I wish to express my sincere thanks and appreciation.

As this book primarily contains the experiences of one individual, many persons who played an important part in the German anti-Nazi Resistance movement are not mentioned. For the same reason it is not a complete story of that movement.

GERO v. S. GAEVERNITZ

I — BETWEEN CASERTA AND CAPRI

THIS is a book about the barely known German Resistance, a movement of anti-Nazi Germans within the Third Reich who, even before World War II began, were plotting to overthrow Hitler and National Socialism. The efforts of the group culminated in the abortive attempt of July 20, 1944, to kill Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime, an action which cost most of the conspirators—high-ranking German officers, civil servants, industrialists, scholars, and labor leaders—their lives at the hands of the Gestapo.

The extraordinary story which is told in these pages was disclosed to me in May, 1945. The German armies in Italy had just surrendered, and almost a million German soldiers and SS men were streaming into Allied prison camps.

The capitulation had been preceded by two months of secret negotiations in neutral Switzerland, where Allied generals and German emissaries had met as early as March, 1945, to bring about this first large-scale German surrender. As assistant to Allen W. Dulles, the brilliant Chief of the American Office of Strategic Services Mission to Switzerland, I had taken an active part in this delicate operation.

To secure utmost secrecy we had chosen as a place for these extraordinary meetings my sister’s small house at Ascona, a lake resort in southern Switzerland. Ascona is rather deserted at that time of year and was therefore well suited for our purposes. The Allied military representatives at these meetings were two high-ranking generals in the Mediterranean Theater, the American Major-General L. L. Lemnitzer, Deputy Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander, and Major-General Terence Airey of the British Army, Chief Theater Intelligence Officer, who both had entered Switzerland in civilian clothes under assumed names.

Now—at AFHQ, the Supreme Allied Headquarters in the Mediterranean Theater at Caserta in the imposing summer palace of the former Kings of Naples—we were enjoying the fruits of months of arduous and nerve-racking endeavor. But the war was not yet over, and so it did not surprise me when Major-General Lemnitzer one morning remarked:

Some hundred Germans and Austrians have arrived from the north. They are Germans of a special brand, liberated by our troops in the Italian Alps where they had been held by the Nazis under special SS guards. They happen to be in this theater, because of the sudden surrender of the German armies in Italy. We know little about them. They all seem to be of some prominence and are supposed to be ardent anti-Nazis. Pastor Niemöller is among them, also the former Chancellor of Austria, Schuschnigg. You know more about them than we do. Your opinion would be helpful to us.

General Lemnitzer was referring to my work with the OSS in Switzerland, where I had established and maintained contact with underground anti-Nazi forces in Germany.

Your task will be pleasant, for you will go to the beautiful island of Capri where these Germans are being held. They were taken there in order to isolate them and are now occupying a hotel evacuated for the purpose, the general said.

The next morning a motor launch of the United States Navy took me across the Bay of Naples. Rather odd, I thought, to go to this famous island of honeymooners to work.

The jeep rattled over the road up the steep and winding hill. The view was superb. We passed near the house where Axel Munthe had written his famous Story of San Michele. It was easy to see how he had been inspired by the island’s beauty.

The Hotel Paradiso was located at Anacapri in the upper part of the island. The white helmets of the military police guarding the hotel became visible. Though my travel orders were signed By the order of the Field Marshal, the guards fulfilled their duty so assiduously that it was difficult to enter the building.

Once within the hotel, I was surrounded instantly by an agitated group of men and women. As I knew the personal background of some of them, my appearance caused considerable excitement. Many of these prisoners had gone through hell, and their nerves were still shaking from their experiences, the most recent of which had been escape from death at the hands of an SS execution squad. As by a miracle, the SS guards had suddenly been withdrawn, and the group had been liberated soon after by American troops.

This was the explanation of the miracle: The highest SS commander in northern Italy, General Karl Wolff, against Hitler’s will and without his knowledge had played a decisive part in bringing about the surrender of the German armies in Italy. At the time of his first contact with Allied representatives Wolff had promised to protect the lives of political prisoners in the area under his command. Later when the surrender was taking place he sent a message, through a clandestine OSS radio operator smuggled into his headquarters, asking Field Marshal Alexander to take over these prisoners in order to assure their safety. A relative of the King of England, a cousin of Churchill, a nephew of Molotov, and the former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, had been among them. No doubt, the Nazis had intended to use these men as hostages during a last stand in the Alps.

My family does not know that I am alive, said one of the prisoners. The Gestapo has announced my execution.

Never mind my clothes, said a thin-looking young girl next to him. I have been dragged through twelve concentration camps, and made this garment from the few pieces of material I found on the way.

In the group was a young woman of lovely profile who was bewailing the fact that her two little boys had been kidnaped by the Gestapo. She was the daughter of the former German Ambassador Ulrich von Hassell, who had been involved in the plot to kill Hitler and had been executed.

Also among them was a prominent Catholic lawyer