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Black Orchestra: The Plan To Kill Hitler

The coming of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany was not an overnight event. His rise was slow, deliberate and carefully planned His brutal Nazi regime was originally organized along the lines of Benito Mussolini's black-shirted fascism in Italy. It differered in that it was more savage and bloodthirsty than any political movement before or since.

Throughout the 1920s, Hitler's Nazis paraded through the streets of German cities wearing self-styled uniforms, Brownshirts they were called, Hitler's Stormtroopers, a paramilitary organization that the government tolerated. It grew into the hundreds of thousands, made up of the social dregs of the country, criminals, perverts, right-wing malcontents, the sadistic, and the murderous, all were welcome to the Fuhrer's ranks.

As Hitler bullied his way to power with his Brownshirts, he had the tacit approval of industrialists and the regular German Army who thought their own ends best served by his political presence, even to the point of his assuming the chancellorship in 1933 following the death of the elderly President Paul von Hindenberg, Germany's venerable World War I general.

Within two years, Hitler's so-called elective office had been turned into a lifetime dictatorship. By then, some of those who had supported him, civilians and military leaders alike, realized their terrible error. Certain civilian groups and others in the military, all unassociated at the beginning, came into existence to plot against the monster who was then planning for world domination and world war, a fanatic whose maniacal ambitions would claim the lives of countless millions. The secret groups who opposed Hitler were all part of what was to become known as the Black Orchestra, a term created by Hitler's rabidly devoted Gestapo agents. "Black" meant anyone involved with anti-Hitler activities and "Orchestra" meant that a group was involved playing espionage "music" on short-wave radios.

At first these Black Orchestra groups met to plan the political replacement of Hitler but such an attempt was by then fruitless in that Hitler had banished and destroyed all political opposition parties. His Gestapo and SS rigidly exercised such tight security that all German citizens, nomatter their station, were looked upon as possible seditious subjects. No open display of opposition was possible by dissident forces, without facing instant arrest and either deportation (only in the middle 1930s) or imprisonment in filthy concentration camps where, by 1940, death was the only escape.

The two top German militarists who secretly opposed Hitler from the beginning of his reign of terror were Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who headed the German military espionage service, Abwehr, and Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, who was one-time chief of the German General Staff (1935-1938). Both men hated Hitler and his regime. Beck was the nominal leader of the Black Orchestra but Canaris acted as the agent for the plotters in trying the usurp the tyrant.

On one hand, Canaris served Hitler as his espionage chief, but, on the other, he worked against Hitler whenever he could, sending covert messages to leaders of the Western Allies, especially the British, informing them of top secret meetings he had attended with Hitler. When Hitler unveiled his plans for war in 1937 to the German General Staff, Beck and Canaris informed British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

They learned of Hitler's plan to annex Austria and seize Czechoslovakia in 1938 and begged Chamberlain and the Allies to intervene, to attack Hitler's untried and weak legions. Canaris pleaded with England and France to make a stand against the madman so that the Black Orchestra would be encouraged enough to somehow overthrow Hitler. He found a willing ear in Winston Churchill but Churchill was not then in power in England and Chamberlain vacillated, opting for appeasement which only encourage Hitler to take one more step toward war.

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, his blitzkrieg style of warfare surprised even this opponents in Germany. He met with one smashing success after another as Poland, then France, the lowlands, Denmark, Norway, and a dozen other countries fell into his hands. With each of Hitler's successes, Canaris and Beck lost ground, particularly with the military which was the only real force that had the ability to overthrow the tyrant.

Not until the Allies invaded the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, were the German plotters galvanized into action. It was obvious that the Allied armies would sweep across Europe and into the heart of Germany. To all but Hitler and his diehard cronies the war was lost. Beck and Canaris activated the Black Orchestra which made feverish plans to assassinate Hitler at his military headquarters in Rastenburg, East Prussia, on July 20, 1944.

Enlisted in the conspiracy were German generals who would assume command of key areas after Hitler had been killed. These generals included Henning von Tresckow, Erich Hoepner, Friedrich Olbricht, Eduard Wagner, Hans Spiedel, Karl von Stuelpnagel, Helmuth Stieff, Field-Marshal Guenther von Kluge, Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, and Germany's greatest hero, Field-Marshal Erwin Eugen Rommel, the celebrated "Desert Fox," who had earned honors for his brilliant victories in North Africa during the early days of the war, even grudging respect from his Allied opponents.

Rommel has met with Hitler and reportedly told him that unless he sought a truce with the Allies, Germany would be facing certain destruction. Hitler had refused and Rommel joined the conspirators, telling an aide that "the people in Berlin can count on me." The generals were supported by long-time civilian opponents of Hitler. These conspirators included Dr. Carl Goerdeler, one-time mayor of Leipzig and a minister in Hitler's 1937 cabinet; religious leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, a Pomeranian landowner and publisher who printed pamphlets against Hitler's rise as early as 1932; labor leader Julius Leber; liberals Ernst Niekisch, Ulrich von Hassell; and head of the Kreisau Circle plotters, Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg.

The actual Black Orchestra conspirators who set in motion the plan to kill Hitler at his military retreat in Rastenburg were a number of dedicated junior officers that included Major Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, and the most daring of them all, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg. It was Stauffenberg who was selected to carry a bomb into the conference building where Hitler was meeting with his top advisers and set it off.

Stauffenberg was an unusual-looking officer. He was missing one arm and an eye over which he wore a black patch. He had been wounded severely on the Russian front and had been decorated many times. He nevertheless despised Hitler and insisted that he be the one to set off the bomb. His presence at Rastenburg was not unusual as he was chief of staff of the Home Army and it was his duty to regularly report to Hitler.

Hitler and his retinue would have normally held the war conference in an underground bunker. Had Stauffenberg's bomb gone off in the bunker the dictator would have certainly been killed. The day of the conference, however, was hot, and the group met in a one-story building above ground and the windows had been opened to let in the fresh air. Stauffenberg arrived, gave Hitler his report, then placed a briefcase with the bomb hidden inside next to one of the large wooden blocks upon which the conference table rested. At the time, Hitler was standing next to the briefcase.

Stauffenberg left the building and waited outside to see the explosion rip the small, squat building to pieces. He immediately drove to the airport and took a training plane to Berlin where he announced that Hitler had been killed. He was wrong. Hitler had survived the bombing with only slight injuries, although several of his aides were killed or seriously wounded.

Just before the bomb exploded, Hitler had moved away from the briefcase beneath the table so that several wooden blocks absorbed the blast meant for him. The generals in Berlin, led by Beck, immediately seized control of vital buildings and communications centers, announcing that Hitler was dead. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief lackey and head of all Nazi propaganda learned that Hitler was still alive and broadcast this news which convinced many fence- sitting German generals to arrest the Black Orchestra conspirators.

The coup was short-lived and the rebellion put down. Beck, Kluge, Treskow, and others committed suicide rather than face the terrible punishments they knew Hitler and the SS would mete out to conspirators they captured. Stauffenberg did not face such tortures. He, along with Olbricht, were summarily shot in Berlin by SS troops who had regained the offices of the general staff. Others were ferreted out over many months. Arrested conspirators were tortured into naming co-conspirators before they were strangled with piano wire. Then Rommel was identified as a plotter. Since his heroic stature in Germany was enormous, Hitler allowed the "Desert Fox" to commit suicide by taking poison rather than face a humiliating trial. This was the only conspirator who was shown a measure of mercy. General Treskow, chief of staff for Army Group Center in Russia heard that the coup had failed and he immediately drove to the front lines. He crawled out into no-man's-land and pulled the pin from a grenade which blew off his head.

Canaris, the erstwhile plotter and head of the Abwehr was finally identified as a conspirator. He was arrested and imprisoned and then executed. The same fate befell almost all the top conspirators who were hanged on meathooks with pianowire after they had been debased and humiliated at the kangaroo court run by Hitler's obscene judicial henchman, Judge Roland Freisler. Field Marshal Witzleben, for instance, was forced to appear in court wearing worn-out trousers too big for his lean frame. Denied suspenders or a belt, he was forced to hold up his pants while Feisler mocked him for his hobo-like appearance, chiding: "You dirty old man, why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?"

Witzleben and all the others were executed, again by hanging with piano wire from meat hooks. More than 5,000 persons, including some of those who had actually arrested the conspirators, like General Fromm, were tortured and killed in the massive hunt by the SS. One of the last to die was the crafty old spymaster, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. No one had directly implicated Canaris but Hitler was sure that his former espionage chief had helped to mastermind the assassination attempt on his life.

When Hitler knew his own end was approaching, one of his last commands was to have Canaris murdered. On April 9, 1945, the one-time powerful chief of the Abwehr was dragged naked from his concentration camp cell and then hanged before a large throng of hooting, jeering SS thugs. The Black Orchestra ceased to exist.

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