One of the Greatest -- and Least Appreciated -- Commanders of WWII: Air Chief Marshal Dowding

 To the extent that we consider the Battle of Britain pivotal to Allied success in WWII, the mastermind behind the RAF's success deserves far more credit and fame than he has been given to date. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding

ACM Dowding was not only the commanding officer of Fighter Command during the entire Battle of Britain, he was the man who had envisioned, created, shaped and molded Fighter Command into an instrument capable of withstanding the onslaught of the Luftwaffe in 1940. Dowding had been instrumental in Training Command in the inter-war years, and for six years headed the Supply and Research Office of the Air Ministry, in which capacity he was instrumental in fostering the development of radar. He was directly responsible for inviting private tenders for ‘the fastest machines they could build’ resulting in the design of the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire respectively. (Hurricanes are in the photo above; below the Spitfire.)

But technology and weapons are nearly worthless if they are improperly used or misused. Neither fighter nor radar would have saved England from invasion in 1940, if the institutional structures and fundamental strategy for the defense of Great Britain had not be evolved by Sir Hugh Dowding. In 1936, Dowding was appointed the first commander of the newly created Fighter Command. In this capacity, he ensured both the establishment of coastal radar stations (then known as RDF), and evolved the system of communications and control that linked that early warning system to the fighters that needed to respond. 

The complex yet efficient system in which radar stations were connected by telephone directly with Fighter Command HQ, where a Filter Room sifted through and made sense of the plethora of reports and this information was converted into comprehensible plots on a map, was Dowding’s invention. The segmentation of British airspace into sectors, each protected by designated squadrons controlled and directed from a Sector Airfield with its own Control Room, was Dowding’s concept.

All the technology in the world and the best fighters would have been worthless it the information was not brought together in a timely and coherent manner that enabled commanders to make intelligent and informed decisions. The RAF did not — anc could not build with the resources at hand — sufficient fighters to patrol the skies of the UK at all times. Without this system and the military doctrine behind it, Fighter Command would have been overwhelmed in 1940.

Dowding also demonstrated foresight in advocating the training of women on radar and employing them as plotters and filterers. Women (WAAF) proved to be extremely competent, reliable and unflappable.

Last but not least, Dowding must be given credit for withstanding the immense political pressure to send more and more RAF fighter squadrons to France as the German offensive systematically overwhelmed French defenses. Had Dowding not vehemently insisted on the need to retain sufficient squadrons in Britain to ensure the defense of the realm, too many British aircraft and pilots might have been squandered in the lost Battle of France.

For all these reasons, Dowding deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest military leaders of the 20th century along with Air Vice Marshal Park, who commanded 11 Group during the Battle — but that is a different story and would require a second entry. 

Dowding has only a cameo role in "Where Eagles Never Flew" which views the battle from the perspective of the frontline rather than HQ.

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A Tribute to Friedrich Olbricht and the "General's Plot" Against Hitler

General Friedrich Olbricht was the first of literally thousands of Germans to fall victim to the National Socialist purge that followed the failed coup of 20 July 1944. It is fitting that he should die first, because -- with the exception of Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, who died almost simultaneously -- no other figure in the German Resistance to Hitler had been such a consistent and effective opponent of the regime.

Olbricht was an opponent of Hitler from before he came to power. This was because on the one hand he recognized Hitler's demonic and dangerous character; and on the other hand he had been one of the few Reichswehr officers who served the Weimar Republic with conviction and sincere loyalty.  Because he did not view the Republic as a disgrace and long for some kind of national 'renewal,' he never allowed himself to believe that Hitler and his movement might be a positive force for the restoration of German honor and power.

Furthermore, because Olbricht recognized the legitimacy of the Republic, he discerned the illegal nature of the Nazi regime from the very start.  Nor was he enchanted by Hitler's early successes.  Regardless of how much he may have welcomed an expansion of the Reichswehr, he saw the murders of June 30, 1934 as the barbaric acts of lawlessness that they were. He did not look the other way or rationalize what had been done.  As a result, his moral standards were not corrupted by rationalization of, much less complicity in, crimes. Because Olbricht's opposition and resistance were motivated by moral outrage at the policies and methods of the Nazis, his opinion of and attitude toward the Nazi regime never softened despite internal and international successes.

By 1938, Olbricht's opposition to the increasingly dangerous and lawless Nazi regime had reached the point where he was prepared to consider a coup d'etat against the government. From 1940 onwards he belonged to the inner core of a conspiracy centered around Generaloberst Beck, which actively sought to bring down the Nazi regime. Starting in early 1942, he developed the clever tactic of using a legitimate General Staff plan, Valkyrie, as the basis for a coup against the government. By the end of 1942, according to Gestapo reports, he argued "with increasing urgency that the military must act regardless of how difficult the coup might be." After two failed assassination attempts in early 1943, he recruited Claus Graf Stauffenberg for the Resistance. On July 15 1944, he issued the Valkyrie orders two hours in advance of the first possible opportunity for the assassination.

On 20 July 1944, Olbricht waited only for confirmation that an 'incident' had occurred before he set the coup in motion for a second time in the same week. Once the coup started, he was, according to all accounts, consistently energetic and forceful in trying to drive the coup forward to success. He did not call it off when Keitel denied Hitler was dead, and he arrested Fromm and others.  If one gives credence to the reports of eyewitness -- rather than the most-mortem commentary of historians -- at no time on 20 July did Olbricht hesitate or lose heart.

As for Claus Graf Stauffenberg, all his burning desire to 'save Germany' would have served him little if his next assignment after his severe wounds in North Africa had landed him in any other of the almost infinite number of jobs available to a German army lieutenent colonel in the summer of 1943.  HIs energy and commitment would have brought no benefit to the German Reistance if he had found himself serving, say, on the staff of Military District XVII in Vienna, or -- as a former cavalry officer -- as coordinator of the supply remounts for ain increasingly horse-dependent Wehrmacht. But Olbricht chose Stauffenberg as his new Chief of Staf and so gave him the opportunity to become one of the leading figures in the German Resistance to Hitler.

Olbricht and Stauffenberg worked together well. Stauffenberg brought fresh energy, fresh perspectives and new dynamism to the coup, but he did not replace Olbricht. Rather he complimented him.  While Olbricht was disciplined and mature, canny and experienced, Stauffenberg was passionate, flamboyant and creative. Olbricht and Stauffenberg saw themselves as a team, as comrads, working together towards the same goal. And no description of Olbricht and Stauffenberg would be complete without mentioning that htey liked working together.  One of the secretaries who worked in the small office between their respective offices reported: "When the two of them were together, you heard so much laughter, just laughter."

It is Olbricht's tragedy that his pivotal role in the German Resistance to Hilter has been overshadowed by others and his contributions underestimated, demeaned or forgotten.  

(The above is paraphrased from the concluding chapter of Codename Valkyrie: General Olbricht and the Plot against Hitler, by Helena P. Schrader, Haynes Publishing, 2009.

Olbricht also plays a key supporting role in my novel about the German Resistance An Obsolele Honor 

(Kindle edition: Hitler's Demons: A Novel of the German Resistance.)

Where Eagles Never Flew - Excerpt 3

This Excerpt from Where Eagles Never Flew focuses on the leading female character, the pacifist and Salvation Army volunteer Emily Pryce.

Emily was doing the washing-up after dinner with the radio playing softly in the kitchen. The walls of the terraced cottage were so thin that the music could e heard throughout the house. Fortunately, she was listening to classical music, which not disturb her parents as they sat together in the parlour. Mr. Pryce was reading Pravda, his Russian dictionary beside him for reference, and his wife was correcting exams, as it was end of term.

The telephon rang.

 

Mrs. Pryce was nearest to the door. She scowled and then, remarking indignantly, “Just who can be calling at this time of night?” she went into the hall to answer it. She was even more annoyed when a strange male voice asked for Emily and there were clearly pub noises in the background. She stepped into the kitchen doorway and said sharply, “Emily! Some man is calling you from a pub. You certainly will not meet him there.”

“No, of course not, Mum. Who is it?” Emily was not “seeing” anyone. Once or twice one of the sales representatives at the insurance company hinted about “doing something together sometime,” but he never carried through with an actual invitation. Might he have finally found the courage? Or could it be Michael? Maybe he was in the area for some reason? A little breathless with hope and apprehension she said, “Hello?”

“Miss Pryce?”

 

“Yes.” She still didn’t recognize the voice.

 

“Robin Priestman. We met about a month ago at the Salvation Army Mission.” He sounded as if he wasn’t sure she’d remember, but Emily remembered very vividly. In Fact, she’d agonized over the encounter countless hours since then, trying both to understand her feelings and dissect her behavior so there would be no repeat of her incredible faux pas. The voice in the receiver was continuing, “Look, I’m flying an old Spit down to the Supermarine works near Southampton for factory re-fit tomorrow, and don’t have to get back here until late. I thought maybe we could do something together. Dinner perhaps?”

“Dinner?” Emily was blind-sided. She had never expected to see this young man again. She had certainly never expected him to ask her out. And dinner with a young man she hardly knew was also something she had never actually done before. She had always assumed that anyone she actually with out with would be someone she knew well from University or work or the Mission….

“Yes, why not?” The young man was replying lightly. “Although, actually, I want to take off before dark, so it would be better if we could meet earlier.” The pub noises in the background were very loud – evidently young men in high spirits. Robin raised his voice to be heard over it all. “More high-tea, really Is that all right?”

'Yes, of course,” Emily stammered.

“Four o’clock, then? Where can I collect you?”

Emily registered that she would be at work at that time, and she would have to take time off if she wanted to go early, but she would worry about that tomorrow. She just managed to give Robin her work address before his coins ran out, and the loud buzzing of the telephone cut them off.

Dazed, Emily drifted intot he parlour where her parents looked at her expectantly, her father over his reading glasses and her mother very rigidly from her desk chair. “And just who was that and what did he want?” Mrs. Pryce demanded.

Emily perched on the edge of the nearest chair, the dishcloth still in her hands, and said in a dazed voice. “It was a man I met at the Seaman’s Mission.”

“A sailor?!” Her parents said in horrified unison.

 

“No, he’s Major Fitzsimmon’s nephew. He’s a pilot in the RAF.”

 

“Not much better!” Mrs. Pryce concluded. “One hears they drink like fish.”

 

“Well, I expect that’s a little exaggerated,” Mr. Pryce conceded. “I don’t see how they could be fighting off the Luftwaffe, if they all drank too much all of the time.”

 

“And what did he want with you?” Mrs. Pryce ignored her husband.

 

“He asked me out to tea tomorrow.”

"And you accepted?” Her mother sounded shocked.

Emily looked up and straight at her mother, and suddenly she was no longer uncertain and confused. She was 24 years old and earning her own living. She was tired of being treated like she was still a schoolgirl. “Yes, Mum. I accepted, and I’m going to go to tea with him whether you like it or not.” Then Emily stood and went back into the kitchen to finish the drying up, leaving her started parents gazing at one another baffled.

 

One thing was very clear to Emily: she was attracted to this young man as she had been only once before, to Michael. But after finding out he was in the military, she was intimidated by him, too. The military was an alien and rather frightening world. She wasn’t at all sure she could handle it, but she was determined to at least get to know Robin Priestman better. Surely nothing that came out of the friendship could be worse than spending the rest of her life here in ths horrible house with her heartless parents, doing nothing of any significance.

Growing up in Nazi Germany

Although not herself a prominent figure in the German Resistance to Hitler as Marion Countess Yorck or Axel Baron von dem Bussche were, Renate Bethge and what she told me about growing up in Nazi Germany had a profound impact on my understanding of what Nazism was like for ordinary people.  She too contributed to making An Obsolete Honor  a more authentic account of the period. (The Kindle edition of "An Obsolete Honor" will soon be released under the title "Hitler's Demons")

She was a quiet, unassuming woman, apparently the perfect „Hausfrau“ – housewife – to a famous man. Her husband Eberhard Bethge was famous because he had been Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s closest friend, his confidant and his disciple. Eberhard Bethge had willingly and passionately taken up the burden of publishing Bonhoeffer’s papers, of explaining and interpreting his theological legacy, and of keeping the memory of a great Christian alive in a modern world that was often hostile to faith and religion. But Renate Bethge was herself a woman of great courage and intelligence, and she provided me with some of the most significant insights into what life in Nazi Germany was really like.

Renate was the daughter of Rüdiger Schleicher and Ursula Bonhoeffer, one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sisters. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful coup attempt against the Hitler on July 20, 1944, her father and three of her uncles were executed for treason by the Nazi regime. Her father and her Uncle Klaus were known to have been tortured by the Gestapo before their death. This alone is an indication of how staunchly anti-Nazi Renate’s upbringing was. It was a family that opposed Hitler before he came to power, and recognized the full extent of his immorality. It was a family that was actively involved in trying to put an end to the dictatorship.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that, on the day when “Heil Hitler!” was introduced as the compulsory greeting in school, Renate rebelled. Outraged that she was supposed to greet her teachers every morning with “Heil Hitler,” she stormed home and announced to her parents that she “absolutely refused” to say “Heil Hitler!” Only God, she told her profoundly devout parents, should be adulated in such a manner. (It was customary in much of Germany to say “God’s Greetings” rather than “Good Morning” of “Good Day.”)

Renate’s father was at this time a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Aviation and Head of the Institute for Aviation Law at the University of Berlin. He knew that Renate at this stage in her life wanted to study medicine like his own brother. When his young daughter furiously declared her determination not to “insult God” by saying “Heil Hitler!” he nodded and told her that she was “old enough to make her own decisions.” But he then went on to warn her: “However, you must be prepared to live with the consequences of your decision. If you refuse to say ‘Heil Hitler’ then you may be sent home from school. You will certainly not be allowed to go to high school, and that means you will not be able to go to university to study medicine. The decision you make today will affect your whole future, so make it wisely.” Renate went to school the next day and said “Heil Hitler” just like all the other pupils.

The significance of this story cannot be over-emphasized. It is too simple for anyone who has not lived under a totalitarian regime to think that it is easy to resist and protest. We forget that even small acts of defiance could have large consequences. A child’s stubbornness might not lead inevitably to a concentration camp, but cutting off all avenues to higher education for a bright young person is a powerful disincentive to dissent!

Time and again in my interviews, I was confronted with stories in which compromise was mixed with opposition because even the most courageous and dedicated of opponents had to earn a living. A woman whose closest friends were Jews took a job as translator with the Propaganda Ministry because it was “safer in the lion’s den;” because of where she worked, she was less subject to suspicion and she continued to visit her friends and take them forbidden gifts until they were deported. People joined various secondary organizations, the Frauenschaft, the Deutsche Beamten Bund and the like, to avoid becoming full members of the Nazi Party. It was dangerous to refuse to participate in a comprehensively organized society. It was very dangerous to be seen to reject the spirit of the times.

On the other side of the coin, it is important to remember that not everyone who was a supporter of the Nazi regime was a fanatic or an evil person. Secret opinion polls taken among official members of the Nazi Party in the late 1930s show that a majority of Nazis opposed the Nazi Party policies against the Jews! Most people in Germany supported the Nazis for a variety of complex reasons – because they had provided full employment, because they abrogated the hated Treaty of Versailles, because they had restored national sovereignty to the Rhineland etc. That does not mean that most people supported everything the Nazis did – and certainly not everything that all the increasingly corrupt officials of the regime did.

Ultimately, no matter how much a man or woman hated Hitler, he or she also had loved ones, whom he or she wished to protect from harm. And sometimes love leads us in strange directions. In a tiny, studio apartment in Munich I met the widow of Field Marshal Alfred Jodl. Jodl ended his career as Chief of the Joint Operations Staff (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) – and on the gallows. He was one of the men condemned at the first trial of major Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. But his second wife was Luise von Benda, a close friend and associate of two of the most important leaders of the German military resistance to Hitler, Generaloberst Beck and General Henning von Tresckow.

Luise von Benda had been Beck’s secretary during the period when Beck challenged his fellow generals to join him in a collective protest against Hitler’s planned invasion of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia. Beck urged his fellow generals to refuse to obey Hitler’s orders and advocated confrontation with Hitler that would – he hoped – end in the restoration of “the rule of law.” His secretary worked long and hard with him during this period in his futile efforts to win the support of his fellow generals. She shared Beck’s views on the illegality and disastrous consequences of Hitler’s foreign policy.

Luisa von Benda was furthermore the personal and family friend of Henning von Tresckow. Tresckow was the mind behind two of the most promising assassination attempts against Hitler and a tireless anti-Nazi conspirator. Tresckow did not confide to Luisa what he was planning, but he did keep his opinion of Hitler secret. As another family friend of Luisa von Benda, told me, Luisa shared Tresckow’s opinion of Hitler fully. It was this friend, Ludwig Baron von Hammerstein, who sent me to visit her. “You need to meet her,” he told me smiling, his eyes bright with mischief.

Luisa Jodl was a delicate, fragile woman in her eighties when she received me in Munich. She was anxious to be a gracious hostess, as was fitting for a woman born into the gentry, but she was embarrassed by what she could offer; all her china was chipped, and some of it glued back together again. As the widow of a “major Nazi war criminal,” she had not had an easy life in post-war Germany.

She was nervous too. Of course she had agreed to see me because Ludwig had provided the introduction, and Ludwig Hammerstein was an old friend, dating back to the days when his father had been Chief-of-Staff of the German Army and Luisa had been a secretary at Army Headquarters. But she still feared an American would judge her – and her husband – harshly.

“You have to understand,” she begged me, “my husband was a product of his upbringing.” Her husband, she explained (and most historians agree), was never a Nazi, never a believer in Hitler’s ideology or even in his genius – he was simply a man who could not find the moral courage to disobey. “At the age of seven,” she told me, “he as sent to a cadet school by his father. On the first day, the boys were lined up and told: ‘Gentlemen, you are here to learn how to die well.’” That was it. From that point forward, he had followed the rigid code of self-sacrifice, duty and blind obedience. Trapped by his own sense of duty into serving a man he inwardly detested, Jodl was a man in more desperate need of comfort and affection than many others. And so, although Luise knew that Hitler was leading Germany to both moral and physical destruction, she could not deny her love to the man she knew to be inwardly suffering and in need of what comfort she could offer as a wife.

Luise’s choice, no less than Renate’s, was the very human decision in favor of life and hope for a better future. No one, who has not been in their shoes, has the right to condemn them for it.

A Suicide-Bomber Targeting Hitler: Axel Baron von dem Bussche

Last week I introduced Marion Countess Yorck. This week I'd like to introduce another survivor of the German Resistance, who had an even more profound impact on my novel An Obsolete Honor: A Story of the German Resistance to Hitler (soon to be released in Kindle format under the title "Hitler's Demons.") I came to know Axel very well, twice spending time as his house guest in Switzerland. He was a witty conversationalist, an insightful observer and commentator on contemporary events, and a haunted man. Few people who met him went away unimpressed.

“The survivors of a failed coup are never its heroes,” Axel Baron von dem Bussche told me the first time we met, but by most standards Bussche was a hero. At the age of 24, while a captain in the German Army, Bussche agreed to carry out a suicide-bombing against Adolf Hitler.

When he made this offer it was November 1943 and the conspiracy against Hitler, headed by former Chief of the German General Staff Ludwig Beck, had already made several unsuccessful attempts on Hitler’s life. Twice explosive devices had been activated in Hitler’s proximity, but in one case the bomb failed to detonate and in the other Hitler got out of range before the device could go off. Opportunities to get explosive devices near to the increasingly paranoid German dictator were few and far between, and the conspirators recognized that Hitler’s insistence on seeing the new officer’s uniform modeled for him personally was a rare and perfect opportunity for an assassination attempt. Under normal circumstances, anyone admitted to Hitler’s presence was first searched for arms, but a man modeling a uniform would have to be fully outfitted with side-arms - and grenades.

Axel Baron von dem Bussche was known to the conspirators as a “reliable” officer – i.e. a man who was a bitter opponent of Hitler. He was also tall, blond, blue-eyed, and good-looking. Furthermore, he was a veteran with multiple wound badges and he had been highly decorated. Bussche had the Iron Cross First and Second Class, and the German Cross in Gold at the time he was asked to serve as a model/assassin; he would later receive the Knight’s Cross. In short, he made an ideal “model.” Bussche was asked if he was willing to carry out an assassination attempt and agreed without hesitation.

Bussche traveled to Hitler’s HQ in East Prussia and prepared for the fateful meeting. The Conspiracy provided him with English plastic explosives and a fuse that could be set to various lengths, but Bussche preferred to use a German hand grenade instead. “I was a lot bigger and stronger than Hitler,” Axel told me bluntly, “and I figured I could hold on to him long enough for a three second fuse to go off. The plastic explosives were too unreliable.”

The date for modeling the uniform in front of Hitler was set: Nov. 23, 1943. Bussche waited impatiently, but the uniform failed to arrive. It had been destroyed in the previous night’s air-raid. Meanwhile, Bussche’s leave had run out. His division was involved in the heavy fighting on the Eastern Front, and as a company commander he was needed there urgently. He could not wait for another uniform to be sent. He returned to duty – and was shortly afterwards so severely wounded that his leg had to be amputated. He was in an SS hospital recovering from surgery – with the English plastic explosives he had not used in a suitcase under his bed - when Claus Count Stauffenberg made his assassination attempt on July 20, 1944.

On that same night, after hearing the news, Axel ate his address book page by page to prevent it falling into Gestapo hands. He also resolved to ask his first visitor to dispose of the incriminating explosives in the suitcase under his bed. Unfortunately, the first person who came to see him was “a young lady” and, as Axel put it, “unthinkable to impose on her.” So he had to wait for a second visitor, this time a fellow officer, who obligingly took the suitcase and threw it in a near-by lake – without asking any questions.

But in Berlin, more and more of Axel’s friends and comrades were being swept up in the Gestapo investigation of the July 20th Coup. Guilt by association was the rule, and over the remaining months of the war, men and women hanged for nothing more serious than giving a friend a place to stay the night, or expressing sympathy with the conspirators. As Axel made sure I knew, I had the opportunity to meet him only because friends and comrades did not betray his name - even under Gestapo torture.

So Axel survived the war, and I will never forget the first time Axel contacted me. I was working for a Washington area consulting firm when one day the phone rang. I answered unsuspecting with the company name and the standard question, “How can I help you?”

On the other end of the line a deep male voice barked: “Bussche. Ludwig Hammerstein says we should meet. I want you to come to dinner on Thursday.” The address and time followed. I really wasn’t given a choice – but I would have jumped at the opportunity any way. I knew who Axel Baron von dem Bussche was because by the time I got that call I had been researching the German Resistance for years; I knew Ludwig Baron von Hammerstein, the son of the Chief of Staff and C-in-C of the German Army in the 1930s, quite well.

That dinner in Georgetown was the start of a long friendship which included many conversations particularly during my visits to Axel’s baroque manor outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Axel had a way of telling stories that kept one breathless – but the laughter was never far behind. By the time I knew him, however,  he not only suffered from severe “phantom pains” in his missing leg, but from a guilt complex. He felt guilty for having failed to kill Hitler – although it was not his fault. And he felt guilty that so many of his friends had died in the war and in the aftermath of July 20th, but he was still alive. Last but not least, he felt guilty for not having done more to stop Hitler’s atrocities. This was largely because Axel was one of the few members of the German Resistance who had actually witnessed the atrocities.

It was the summer of 1942. Bussche, having finally recovered from a lung wound that had kept him in Germany “convalescing” in the position of Adjutant to his Regiment's Reserve/Training battalion in Potsdam, was back on the Eastern Front. He was an Infantry First Lieutenant. One quiet day, a sergeant, one of the company couriers, rode up on a motorcycle. “Herr Leutnant, you better come and see this for yourself,” was all the man said. It was an unusual request but something about the man’s demeanor made Bussche go along with the messenger without question.

When he told me the story, he turned on me at this point and, scowling fiercely, growled: “You grew up knowing about Auschwitz! You know that we murdered millions! But I grew up thinking we were a civilized people – the people of Goethe and Beethoven. I had to stare at what was happening for five minutes before my brain would accept what my eyes told me: civilians were being brought up by the truck-load. The SS made them strip off their clothes – men, women and children – and then climb into an open pit which was already filled with a layer of corpses – some of them still twitching. The SS ordered them to lie face down on the others and then the SS shot them in the back of the head.”

Axel was never the same after this experience, and more than 40 years later he told me that he had given much thought to what he should have done. At the time, he said, he had wanted to rush to his superiors and demand that the Army intervene to stop the SS. But he soon recognized that this was futile. The Army had no control over the SS. Only Hitler could stop the SS – and Hitler had given the orders. So Axel became an even more fanatical opponent of Hitler than he had been before. He was prepared to kill himself in order to kill Hitler. But he did not have an easy conscience. He told me that after much soul-searching he had finally realized that what he should have done was step up to the edge of the pit, remove his officer’s uniform with the many decorations for bravery and recording his wounds, and climb into the pit with the victims.

Axel Baron von dem Bussche was a hero by almost any definition of heroism – except his own.

Encounters with Characters: Marion Countess Yorck

When doing research for my novel, An Obsolete Honor: A Story of the German Resistance to Hitler, I had the priviledge to meet several of the surviving members of the German Resistance to Hitler, one of whom was Marion Graefin (Countess) Yorck von Wartenburg. At the time I was researching and writing from my apartment in Berlin and Marion lived in Berlin-Dahlem, so I had the opportunity to visit her many times. The stories Marion shared with me had a major impact on  An Obsolete Honor (soon to be released in Kindle format under the title: "Hitler's Demons.")  I would like to "introduce" the real Marion here:

She was not born a countess. On the contrary she came from solid bourgeois stock. One of six children, Marion was never spoiled, but the family believed in a good education for girls no less than boys. So she was sent to the most progressive and only co-educational school in Berlin, where she was in the same class as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and – what was exceptional in her age – she went on to university to study law.

Not that Marion was a book worm. She told me that she never worried about politics as a girl or young woman and remembers only the “good times” of the “Roaring Twenties” – the period when Berlin was one of the most dynamic centers of art, literature, music and theater in the world, easily on a par with New York, London and Paris.

One day she was invited to an extravagant wedding on a large estate in Silesia. The place next to her was left vacant for a guest who came late. The young man swept in and, Marion felt, treated her far too familiarly. She thought the young count was arrogant and cynical. But Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg fell in love at first sight.

Peter too was a lawyer, and he had soon won Marion over – maybe in part because he never suggested she give up her studies. On the contrary, he helped her get her PhD in jurisprudence. They married shortly after he completed the equivalent of the bar exam in 1930. Although Marion had not yet completed the three-year practical training that was then a required part of German legal training before she could sit for the final exam, Marion was already 26 and wanted to have children. She stopped her studies, and devoted herself to making a home of the little apartment Peter and she shared.

Marion could not tell me exactly when she and Peter slid from opposition and disapproval of the Nazis to resistance and treason. One key factor was their friendship with Helmuth Count Moltke, whom the Yorcks met in 1940. Soon Peter and Helmuth, both sons of families that had produced two of Germany’s most famous generals in by-gone eras, were discussing with increasing energy all that was wrong with Nazi Germany – and what had to be done to set things right.

Neither Moltke nor Yorck were in a position to change anything. Both were civil servants. Nor did the two men initially know about the military conspiracy to depose Hitler. But it was obvious to them from 1941 onwards that Germany would lose the war and that the Nazi regime would one-day fall, and they wanted – in part just to keep themselves from despair, Marion said – to think about what a post-Hitler Germany ought to look like.

Gradually, they drew other people into their circle, selecting men, who had expertise in one area or another, so that all aspects of a future, German state could be properly thought through. Eventually, the connection was made to members of the military resistance, and a loose alliance was formed. While the military conspirators were responsible for getting rid of Hitler and his regime, the Kreisauer Circle, as the group of thinkers around Counts Yorck and Moltke came to be called, was responsible for developing the outlines of a future, post-Nazi German government and constitution.

Molke, it should be noted, opposed an assassination of Hitler. He felt that killing Hitler would enable a martyr-legend to evolve. He feared that Germans would convince themselves that Germany would have won the war “if only the Führer had lived,” and he felt the Germans needed to suffer complete and humiliating defeat in order to fully understand their complicity in the crimes committed in their name by the Nazi regime. Yorck, perhaps more strongly influenced by his distant cousin Claus Count Stauffenberg, supported the assassination attempt. Moltke was arrested for treason on January 11, 1944, before the coup attempt. Yorck took part in the coup and was arrested that same evening.

Marion never saw her husband again after saying good-bye to him on the morning of July 20, 1944. By evening, she knew the coup had failed and Peter was under arrest. All requests to see her husband were denied, but she learned that Peter was to go on trial before the feared “People’s Court” on August 8, along with several of other conspirators. The “People’s Court” was a Nazi institution which had been created in 1934 with the explicit mandate to eliminate all domestic opponents of the National Socialist Movement. By 1944, the Court, headed by the infamous judge Roland Freisler, was notorious for sentencing people to death for nothing more than circulating a joke against the regime or for a diary entry expressing doubt about “Final Victory.” Marion was under no illusion that her husband would get a fair trial, but she made her way to the imposing building that housed the court in the hope of being able to see Peter – and let him see her.

When Marion reached the gatehouse, the guards stopped her. She needed a special pass to attend the trial. But the guards, on learning who she was, invited her to sit in their little booth with them. Here she could hear through a window high in the wall over head the proceedings of the court.

All day, Marion sat with the guards listening to Judge Freisler’s high-pitched, scratchy voice heap abuse and insults on the defendants. He rarely let the defendants answer his questions, but rather cut them off in mid-sentence and mocked whatever they said. Marion could hear neither the court-appointed lawyers nor the men on trial. Because the judge never addressed the defendant by name, only as “Defendant,” she only learned when Peter was before the judge because the guards told her. She could not hear his answers any more than that of the others, but the trial ended with the death sentence.

Marion went home and wrote a last letter to her husband which she personally carried to Gestapo Headquarters. Here she begged the man on duty to give her letter to her husband. She told the Gestapo that her husband had just been sentenced to death, but the duty officer saw no urgency in her request. He sent Marion away. As she was later to learn, by the time she got home again that night, Peter was already dead.

Her own arrest followed the next day. She was arrested, as were the wives of all known conspirators, merely for being who she was - not because anyone suspected she had actually taken part in the planning of the coup. Fortunately for Marion, Nazi ideology cast women in the role of mothers and housewives, not intellectual partners.

Still, Marion’s fate was not easy. She was kept in isolation for weeks on end, locked in a cell with no direct sunlight – a time she came to treasure in retrospect because, as she put it, it was a chance for her to absorb Peter into her inner self. She was interrogated repeatedly, but never tortured. Eventually, she was granted the right to exercise, and then released – just in time to experience the Russian occupation.

Because she had returned to Peter’s parents home in Silesia, Marion found herself hiding in barns and graveyards in order to avoid the orgies of rape and murder that accompanied the Soviet occupation of Germany. Eventually, Marion made it back to Berlin without a serious mishap and there she was able to move into her old house. The Russians, once they had settled down into organized occupation, recognized Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg – despite his aristocratic class - as an “Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighter” and gave Marion a document stating this and ordering everyone to help her!

But Marion kept slipping back across the new Polish border without proper papers to Peter’s home in Silesia. One day the Poles caught her. She was put in prison and her paper from the Russians did her no good. Weeks went by and she had no idea why she was being held. There were lice in the cell and the food, as Marion put it, was worse than what they fed the pigs on Peter’s estate. Eventually, however, she was sent to Warsaw and here, at last, a Russian colonel recognized the significance of her “Anti-Fascist” I.D. He agreed to help her - but first she had to spend another three weeks in a freezing cell, from which water dripped off the walls.

Then just as suddenly as the arrest, Marion was set free. She was in Breslau, a city that had once been German but was now Polish. She had no money. No clothes but what she was wearing and she was, as she put it, “as dirty as a hunting dog.” She had lice too. She went to Caritas, a Catholic aid organization, where she was taken in, given shelter, food, a delousing, a bath and clean clothes. Here she learned to her amazement that Freya von Moltke, the widow of Helmuth Count Moltke, had reported her missing to the Americans, and they had informed the French Consul in Breslau. Although it was not easy, eventually the Caritas managed to get Marion back to Berlin – loaded with secret messages from the Caritas in Poland to their sister organization in Germany.

Back in Berlin, Marion first took work with the social welfare office of the city council. This was dominated by Communists, but Marion’s work was to find and reunite the families of the resistance members. When the coup failed on July 20, 1944, not only were most of the wives, parents and adult children of the condemned also arrested, but the young children and infants of the conspirators were assigned new names and divided up among “good” Nazi families. Thus, quite apart from all difficulties of trying to find loved-ones in a world where the infrastructure was largely obliterated, neither post nor telephones worked, and new borders with new rulers had been created, the survivors of the resistance had to find out under what name and to which Nazi family their small children had been given. It was important work, and Marion enjoyed it. But around her she witnessed the increasing terror of the German Communists and their Soviet masters. Marion had experienced the consequences of one dictatorship far too acutely to be indifferent. She turned her back on the East and looked for new opportunities in the Western Sectors of Berlin.

The Americans at the time (1946) were desperately looking for trained lawyers and judges who were not tainted by a Nazi past. Marion was short just one exam and one last practical internship before being a qualified lawyer. She was advised to complete both qualifications as soon as possible, and no sooner was she finished than she was appointed judge.

One might think that her lack of experience as a lawyer made her ill-suited for the position of judge, but Marion pointed out to me that she had other experiences that were at least, if not more, valuable. Marion knew the smell of prisons from the inside, that “constant mixture of food and urine.” She knew the agonies of isolation, the indignities of lice and filth, and never could she forget the sound of Freisler screaming at her husband without using his name.

Marion vowed that she would never address a defendant by anything other than their proper name. And she vowed she would never condemn anyone to any sentence without first making sure that she understood his or her motives. She rose rapidly in the ranks of the West German judiciary and retired in 1969. And she kept her vows.

Women of the Past Part II: Britain and America in WWII

Last week I wrote about women in Nazi Germany. I pointed out that women who lived through the period were often very frustrated, not to say outraged, by the way modern behaviours and mores were projected backwards. They complained that most films and novels produced today but set in Nazi Germany got things very wrong when it came to the behaviour of women.

Hard as it is for many women today to believe, the same is true for British and American women in the Second World War. The woman’s movement, the pill, equal opportunity laws and successful role models have all contributed to a significant – but often subtle and gradual – alteration of women’s behaviour, attitudes and role in society. I’m not talking here about rigid stereotypes of dumb blond housewives versus savvy modern career girls. Particularly in wartime Britain, many women were doing men’s jobs from factory work to flying. But they did it differently. Most saw their role as supportive, not leading, and they were neither surprised nor offended to be paid less for doing the same work. They thought, as many told me personally, that the pay differential was ‘only fair.’

Likewise, although there was an increase in unwed pregnancy, given the fact that there was inadequate sex education, a widespread lack of effective contraceptives, and the huge emotional stress of a war, the numbers reflect a far lower level of sexual activity than is common today. Yet because the women of World War Two don’t seem as strange to us on the surface, as say, the women of the Civil War or medieval Europe, it is very easy to forget how different they were – and forget some fundamental differences in attitude.

For those interested in a study on women’s roles and men’s attitudes toward them in the Second World War, I recommend my non-fiction study: Sisters in Arms: British and American Women Pilots During WWII.

My novels set in wartime Britain reflect that research. Here are two scenes from The Lady in the Spitfire that highlight the frequently forgotten fact that “nice” women didn’t wear trousers, at least not in a social context. Thus, even when a woman’s uniform put her in trousers there could be consequences socially.

Emily removed her skirt from her parachute pack, thinking again how lucky she had been not to have to use the latter. She removed her flying boots and trousers and changed into the skirt, stockings and pumps. She packed the boots, trousers and Robin’s flight jacket into the parachute bag (frowned upon but practical), slung the parachute pack over her shoulder and re-emerged.

Although a woman pilot and an officer, Emily cannot enter the officers’ mess at an RAF station in her flying uniform. She must always carry a change of clothes with her.

The next example highlights the attitude toward women in trousers that was even more extreme among Americans, who at this point in time (1942) were less used to the sight of women in slacks.

“You saw those sluts come in –“

“What sluts?”

“The girls in slacks!”

“WAAFs, you mean.”

“WAAFs, sure!” Brier sneered, curling his lip derisively. “We know what they’re there for! Service the RAF, don’t they, sir? Well, why not us? What’s the big deal? Just because we’re American, we’re not good enough for them, or what? Since when are whores so fussy? I told her she could have a pair of nylons! You would have thought I spit in her face.”

“Worse,” J.B. told him bluntly. “Where have you been hiding the last three months? Those WAAF all out-ranked you, corporal!”

Another huge difference between now and the 1940s was the attitude toward women in the workforce. Again from The Lady in the Spitfire:

“Barb,” (this was third and youngest of J.B.’s sisters) “wants to quit her job at Jacobsens and go work on the assembly line at Willow Run. She says they pay a lot better, but your father won’t hear of it.”

“I should hope not!” J.B. agreed. “Doesn’t she know what it’s like on those assembly lines? Work till you drop isn’t the worst of it! Jeez, Mom, I’ve heard the worst stories – you know, if a girl is so hot on being down there with a bunch of guys, then they figure there’s only one thing she wants!”

“Well, you talk to Barb about it. She says she knows lots of girls who’ve quit their ‘five-and-dime’ jobs to earn ‘real’ money, and she says they’re all nice girls.”

“Well, that may be what they were when they quit work at Jacobsens or whatever, but it sure the blazes isn’t what they are after they’ve been working in some aircraft factory for a few months!

In the next example, also focussing on women in the work force, I focus on another aspect of job discrimination. This time not sexual, just stereotyping. It too is from The Lady in the Spitfire and describes the USAAF.

“I mean, can you believe it? I’m a great driver and I can fix a tire or change a spark plug better than half the guys in the motor pool. They send me over here, which I thought was because I was so good. But when I get here I find out I’ve been assigned to the motor pool, alright – as a clerk! I’m not allowed to drive anything! Just sit in the office and keep track of who’s driving what. It’s crazy!”

The below example from Chasing the Wind is set in a Salvation Army Seaman’s mission in Portsmouth England during the early summer of 1940, and again addresses attitudes toward women working.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” He put his look into words.

“What makes you think I’m a nice girl?” Emily quipped back without even thinking, falling back into the kind of repartee that was so much a part of her university days.

He laughed, but retorted without missing a beat, “Innocent until proven guilty – or some such thing.” The he gave her another quick but observant glance.“So what are you doing here?” He pressed her.

“Oh, well, in case you missed it, there is a war on, and I wanted to do something useful.”

“Most girls seem to be flocking to the Women’s Services – WRNS and WAAFs and all that. A bit more glamorous than the Salvation Army, surely?”

“Well,” Emily drew a deep breath to answer his question with sufficient forcefulness to assure him that she was not the kind who had eyes only for a uniform. “Glamour is not the issue. I simply don’t want to be a member of a military organization. I admit, Hitler has to be stopped and only military force is going to stop him now, but that does not mean I have to personally join an organization whose raison d’etre is war.”

“Well, it’s not as though the women’s services are being asked to carry guns or drop bombs. Most of what they do is just clerical, answering phones and all that,” the young man pointed out reasonably.

“That may be, but I’d still be part of an organization that quite frankly has been involved in a great deal of oppression – particularly in the colonies....”

Finally, after so much talk about “nice” girls, a dominating distinction throughout the period, I want to highlight the double standard of the time with an excerpt about the hero of Chasing the Wind. The scene takes place at his mother’s house, when his aunt comes upon him after a hasty telephone call.

“Just who was that?” Hattie asked giving him a piercing look.

“Virginia Cox-Gordon.”

Hattie’s eyebrows went up. She didn’t read the gossip pages, but many of her staff – and of course her sister Lydia – did. She knew exactly who Virginian Cox-Gordon was: daughter of a millionaire, debutante and “catch of the season” just last year, before the war started.

“You know your other girlfriends call my flat,” she told him in a low, reproachful voice.

“I’m sorry—“

“Just how many girls did you give my number to?”

“Only two.” He thought about it. “Three.”

Hattie sighed and gazed at him sadly.

“I am sorry they bothered you,” Robin insisted, looking contrite. “I told them not to call unless it was an absolute emergency, and—“

“Yes, well, I’m sure things look very different from your superior male perspective, but to us poor females here on the ground, the fact that you were last seen duelling with two Messerschmitts over the ruins of Calais in the midst of the worst rout in English history seemed very much like an ‘emergency.’ I can’t say I blame them, but I do wonder about you sometimes....”

Robin concluded this might not be the best time to ask her for Emily Pryce’s telephone number.