Countdown To Valkyrie by Nigel Jones

Author:Nigel Jones [Jones, Nigel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783461455
Publisher: Frontline Books, London
Published: 2013-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

General Hellmuth Stieff.

Hitler at the presentation of new field uniforms, with Stieff in the middle, early summer 1944.

Tresckow instantly recognised, on meeting the maimed young colonel, that Stauffenberg was a man after his own heart. Though physically now only half a man, his undimmed energy, enthusiasm and sheer radiant charisma put other tired and dispirited members of the conspiracy to shame. In the wake of the failures of that spring – the misfired bomb plots and the collapse of Oster’s Abwehr network – Stauffenberg’s presence came like a breath of fresh mountain air to revitalise the conspiracy. Even before he took up his post with the Reserve Army on 1 October he set to work.

His official job was to revise and update Olbricht’s officially approved plan, codenamed ‘Operation Valkyrie’, designed to counter any possible uprising staged by the armies of foreign workers who were now toiling inside the Reich. These workers consisted both of volunteers from countries such as France, and slave labourers from Russia, Poland and other conquered countries in the east, who had been drafted in to make good the enormous shortfalls in manpower caused by Hitler’s insatiable demands for German cannon fodder to throw into the Eastern Front. Thanks to the Nazis’ demented refusal to allow women to take up factory work, labour was woefully short and the war industries of the Reich were more and more dependent on these discontented foreign hordes, who now totalled more than a million.

Obviously the potential for disturbances from these unwilling workers was a real one, and Hitler had personally approved the plan that Olbricht had drawn up for dealing with it. Under it, diffuse groups of reliable military or paramilitary men – trainees, frontline soldiers on leave, guards at prisoner-of-war camps, anti-aircraft defence units and similar assorted groups – would be brought together as emergency fighting units to face down any revolt by the foreign workforce. Now, under cover of Olbricht’s original ‘Valkyrie I’ plan, Tresckow and Stauffenberg developed a secret second plan, ‘Valkyrie II’, under which officers privy to the conspiracy would take charge of these emergency reserves in the wake of a successful assassination of Hitler, and use them, not to suppress a non-existent foreign workers’ revolt, but to seize key points throughout the Reich and crush opposition from loyal Nazis – primarily the SS and what was left of the SA. That done, they would establish order so that the new government – headed by Beck, Witzleben and Goerdeler – could smoothly assume power.

Together, in sublime confidence Tresckow and Stauffenberg even drew up the proclamation – marvellous in its ambiguity as to the actual cause of the Führer’s demise – that would be issued and broadcast in the wake of a successful assassination: ‘The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear in order to seize power for themselves. [Therefore] the [new] Reich government has declared martial law in order

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