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Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.
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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
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 Hitlers 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 Victorias Guardian Angel, Baron Stockmar, who was the Queens 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 ancestors 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 conspiratorshigh-ranking German officers, civil servants, industrialists, scholars, and labor leaderstheir 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 sisters 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.
