2RHPZ
07-24-2004, 03:33 AM
Why my friends felt they had to kill Hitler
Sixty years after the bungled attempt by the German resistance to kill the Führer, a survivor, Inga Haag tells David Smith and Walter Harris of her role in the plot
Inga Haag vividly remembers shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler - and spending the next five years plotting to kill him. Men close to her were executed after the failed plan to assassinate the Führer 60 years ago next week. But Inga survived and, now nearing 86 and a grande dame of London embassy gatherings, is virtually alone in having memories of the botched attempt to decapitate the Third Reich.
On 20 July, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a German count, planted a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table during a meeting at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. It exploded, wounding many, but Hitler escaped with damaged ear drums, burns to his left side and a missing trouser leg. Stauffenberg was executed without trial. Other 'July plotters', including Inga's cousin, Adam von Trott, and her former boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, were killed.
Sipping cava in her discreetly furnished apartment in Marylebone, central London, Inga last week gave a rare interview recalling her days in the German resistance and her meeting with the man it wanted dead.
'I remember Hitler had very bad skin,' she said. 'He had bad manners and no charm. He was not good-looking: he had a chicken-skin neck with large pores. He was almost revolting.
'I was at a social occasion for diplomats, just at the outbreak of war, and Hitler went around. I was standing next to the Belgian ambassador and his wife, and she was stretching out her hand, but he didn't want it and turned to my hand. I was a very unprominent woman there, but he wanted to make the point he was not shaking the hand of the wife of the Belgian ambassador.'
She continued: 'I've tried to think, now what makes this man so attractive to the masses? You could understand little Goebbels: although he was rather an unprepossessing person and physically not much, he was quite brilliant and had more attraction that Hitler. Göring was fat, but he had a certain personality and presence and one could understand a certain amount of attraction. As a child I'd seen Mussolini two or three times, and you could understand in a way why people were impressed.
'Hitler had none of that about him. I am still absolutely puzzled how he could get where he was. I've talked to many people who've seen Hitler quite often, and talked to him and so on, and hardly any ever saw in him the attraction. I couldn't ask Eva Braun. It must have been people got fascinated by power.'
Inga, who still describes herself as Prussian, was raised to be fiercely anti-Nazi by her parents, Otto, a lawyer and banker, and Bertha, and sent to school in London. 'My father said: "German teachers all tend to be Nazi and I don't want my daughter being exposed to that indoctrination".'
But just before the outbreak of war she returned to Germany and became a secretary to Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service. His nickname for the beautiful 21-year-old was 'The Painted Doll'.
After the invasion of France, she followed him to Paris and delivered passports to Jews and other persecuted minorities whom Canaris wanted to protect. 'He said, you look like a French school-leaver so you can go without alerting the French police, who were rather in favour of the Nazis. I took passports to various people and most survived.'
The admiral was among German military and civilians involved in a number of major plots against Hitler, who seemed to have an animal instinct for danger and always escaped.
Inga recalled: 'Canaris said Germany will never be forgiven unless some action is taken against these criminals. The plots were in the minds of most of my friends most of the time. I knew almost everybody in the July 1944 plot and also happened to be good friends with them. My husband, Werner Haag - we married in 1942 - was among them.
'But it was a case of trying to get someone close to Hitler who could do it. General Halder, who was the Chief of General Staff at one point, always said: "Whenever I go and see the Führer, I've got a loaded pistol in my pocket." I wish he had used it at that point, but the organisation had not yet developed. You lived in fear you were going to be arrested, so I took my father's advice to try to know as little as possible, because what you didn't know you couldn't talk about and betray under torture.'
On 20 July, 1944, Stauffenberg left a briefcase in the conference room at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, whispering something indistinctly as he left the room as if making an excuse. According to historian Joachim Fest's Plotting Hitler's Death, just after 12.40pm there was a deafening explosion, throwing all 24 people to the ground, some with their hair in flames. Hitler had just leaned far over a table to examine a map and his chair was torn from under him. His trousers hung in ribbons from his legs and as he stumbled to his feet one general took him in his arms and cried: 'My Führer, you're alive, you're alive!'
But Stauffenberg, climbing into a getaway car, had seen a body covered by Hitler's cloak carried from the barracks on a stretcher and concluded his mission was accomplished. All day rumours spread that Hitler was dead. But that night, with the dictator back in control, the conspirators were executed by firing squad. When the squad took aim, writes Fest, Stauffenberg shouted: 'Long live sacred Germany!' Canaris, implicated in the plot, was sent to a concentration camp and put to death.
Historians agree a great opportunity had been wasted because Stauffenberg had actually had two bombs. But he did not know that he should have placed the second one alongside the one whose timer had already been activated. According to experts, the detonation of one would have set off the other and magnified the blast many times, wiping out everyone in the room. A coup was supposed to follow the assassination, but the plotters did not even cut the communications from Wolf's Lair.
'It wasn't a masterpiece of organisation,' Inga said candidly. 'This was one of the plots discussed for quite some time, but it was obviously rather confused. Lots of people wanted to do it and much was improvised. People said they couldn't talk about it too much. You had to be careful what you said over the phone. In operas on the stage plots are better planned.
Of Stauffenberg, whom she met two or three times, she observed: 'Anybody could have done a better job.'
She added ruefully: 'If the plot had really been a success, and Hitler and two or three of the others were dead, I think that would have been the end of the regime, because then all those who loathed the regime but couldn't come forward would have done it. Thousands of lives could have been saved.'
By 20 July, Inga and her husband were in Romania. He was away that day, leaving her alone to await the result of what she and the rest of the fragmentary resistance prayed would prove the decisive plot. To divert suspicion, she invited two Gestapo officers to lunch at the chteau where the Haags were stationed. 'In order not to alert everybody, you had to see them socially. It also meant you found how much they knew.
'A phone call came through. You prayed all the time the Gestapo man would say: "The Führer is dead." But the Führer was alive and I had to feign a sigh of relief. I thought maybe there will be a next time.'
Inga and her husband were soon recalled to Berlin and at the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans before being released. Inga was one of the first Germans to get top security clearance for political work in Nato. The couple lived in France and Britain, where they adopted a son. Inga eventually earned a living by giving children horse-riding lessons. A year ago she was awarded the German Cross of the Order of Merit.
She is now frail, but her eyes still burn intensely with intelligence and resolve. She mused: 'The 20th of July was a manifestation of a spirit when intelligent and well-educated people in Germany took the risk of their lives.
'It had to happen - what had gone before was too terrible. The date should be remembered first for the great people who endangered their lives, and second as a warning to humanity that this must never happen again. It is a symbol of the best of our convictions against evil.'
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer
Source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1258691,00.html)
Sixty years after the bungled attempt by the German resistance to kill the Führer, a survivor, Inga Haag tells David Smith and Walter Harris of her role in the plot
Inga Haag vividly remembers shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler - and spending the next five years plotting to kill him. Men close to her were executed after the failed plan to assassinate the Führer 60 years ago next week. But Inga survived and, now nearing 86 and a grande dame of London embassy gatherings, is virtually alone in having memories of the botched attempt to decapitate the Third Reich.
On 20 July, 1944, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a German count, planted a briefcase containing a bomb under an oak table during a meeting at Hitler's headquarters in East Prussia. It exploded, wounding many, but Hitler escaped with damaged ear drums, burns to his left side and a missing trouser leg. Stauffenberg was executed without trial. Other 'July plotters', including Inga's cousin, Adam von Trott, and her former boss, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, were killed.
Sipping cava in her discreetly furnished apartment in Marylebone, central London, Inga last week gave a rare interview recalling her days in the German resistance and her meeting with the man it wanted dead.
'I remember Hitler had very bad skin,' she said. 'He had bad manners and no charm. He was not good-looking: he had a chicken-skin neck with large pores. He was almost revolting.
'I was at a social occasion for diplomats, just at the outbreak of war, and Hitler went around. I was standing next to the Belgian ambassador and his wife, and she was stretching out her hand, but he didn't want it and turned to my hand. I was a very unprominent woman there, but he wanted to make the point he was not shaking the hand of the wife of the Belgian ambassador.'
She continued: 'I've tried to think, now what makes this man so attractive to the masses? You could understand little Goebbels: although he was rather an unprepossessing person and physically not much, he was quite brilliant and had more attraction that Hitler. Göring was fat, but he had a certain personality and presence and one could understand a certain amount of attraction. As a child I'd seen Mussolini two or three times, and you could understand in a way why people were impressed.
'Hitler had none of that about him. I am still absolutely puzzled how he could get where he was. I've talked to many people who've seen Hitler quite often, and talked to him and so on, and hardly any ever saw in him the attraction. I couldn't ask Eva Braun. It must have been people got fascinated by power.'
Inga, who still describes herself as Prussian, was raised to be fiercely anti-Nazi by her parents, Otto, a lawyer and banker, and Bertha, and sent to school in London. 'My father said: "German teachers all tend to be Nazi and I don't want my daughter being exposed to that indoctrination".'
But just before the outbreak of war she returned to Germany and became a secretary to Canaris, head of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service. His nickname for the beautiful 21-year-old was 'The Painted Doll'.
After the invasion of France, she followed him to Paris and delivered passports to Jews and other persecuted minorities whom Canaris wanted to protect. 'He said, you look like a French school-leaver so you can go without alerting the French police, who were rather in favour of the Nazis. I took passports to various people and most survived.'
The admiral was among German military and civilians involved in a number of major plots against Hitler, who seemed to have an animal instinct for danger and always escaped.
Inga recalled: 'Canaris said Germany will never be forgiven unless some action is taken against these criminals. The plots were in the minds of most of my friends most of the time. I knew almost everybody in the July 1944 plot and also happened to be good friends with them. My husband, Werner Haag - we married in 1942 - was among them.
'But it was a case of trying to get someone close to Hitler who could do it. General Halder, who was the Chief of General Staff at one point, always said: "Whenever I go and see the Führer, I've got a loaded pistol in my pocket." I wish he had used it at that point, but the organisation had not yet developed. You lived in fear you were going to be arrested, so I took my father's advice to try to know as little as possible, because what you didn't know you couldn't talk about and betray under torture.'
On 20 July, 1944, Stauffenberg left a briefcase in the conference room at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters in Rastenburg, whispering something indistinctly as he left the room as if making an excuse. According to historian Joachim Fest's Plotting Hitler's Death, just after 12.40pm there was a deafening explosion, throwing all 24 people to the ground, some with their hair in flames. Hitler had just leaned far over a table to examine a map and his chair was torn from under him. His trousers hung in ribbons from his legs and as he stumbled to his feet one general took him in his arms and cried: 'My Führer, you're alive, you're alive!'
But Stauffenberg, climbing into a getaway car, had seen a body covered by Hitler's cloak carried from the barracks on a stretcher and concluded his mission was accomplished. All day rumours spread that Hitler was dead. But that night, with the dictator back in control, the conspirators were executed by firing squad. When the squad took aim, writes Fest, Stauffenberg shouted: 'Long live sacred Germany!' Canaris, implicated in the plot, was sent to a concentration camp and put to death.
Historians agree a great opportunity had been wasted because Stauffenberg had actually had two bombs. But he did not know that he should have placed the second one alongside the one whose timer had already been activated. According to experts, the detonation of one would have set off the other and magnified the blast many times, wiping out everyone in the room. A coup was supposed to follow the assassination, but the plotters did not even cut the communications from Wolf's Lair.
'It wasn't a masterpiece of organisation,' Inga said candidly. 'This was one of the plots discussed for quite some time, but it was obviously rather confused. Lots of people wanted to do it and much was improvised. People said they couldn't talk about it too much. You had to be careful what you said over the phone. In operas on the stage plots are better planned.
Of Stauffenberg, whom she met two or three times, she observed: 'Anybody could have done a better job.'
She added ruefully: 'If the plot had really been a success, and Hitler and two or three of the others were dead, I think that would have been the end of the regime, because then all those who loathed the regime but couldn't come forward would have done it. Thousands of lives could have been saved.'
By 20 July, Inga and her husband were in Romania. He was away that day, leaving her alone to await the result of what she and the rest of the fragmentary resistance prayed would prove the decisive plot. To divert suspicion, she invited two Gestapo officers to lunch at the chteau where the Haags were stationed. 'In order not to alert everybody, you had to see them socially. It also meant you found how much they knew.
'A phone call came through. You prayed all the time the Gestapo man would say: "The Führer is dead." But the Führer was alive and I had to feign a sigh of relief. I thought maybe there will be a next time.'
Inga and her husband were soon recalled to Berlin and at the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans before being released. Inga was one of the first Germans to get top security clearance for political work in Nato. The couple lived in France and Britain, where they adopted a son. Inga eventually earned a living by giving children horse-riding lessons. A year ago she was awarded the German Cross of the Order of Merit.
She is now frail, but her eyes still burn intensely with intelligence and resolve. She mused: 'The 20th of July was a manifestation of a spirit when intelligent and well-educated people in Germany took the risk of their lives.
'It had to happen - what had gone before was too terrible. The date should be remembered first for the great people who endangered their lives, and second as a warning to humanity that this must never happen again. It is a symbol of the best of our convictions against evil.'
Sunday July 11, 2004
The Observer
Source (http://www.guardian.co.uk/germany/article/0,2763,1258691,00.html)