The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [271]
Yet worse was to come the next morning at the small village of Oradour-sur-Glane, where Major Adolf Diekmann’s unit murdered 642 people, including 190 schoolchildren; the men were shot, the women and children were burnt alive in the church, and the village was razed. Max Hastings cannot entirely rule out as ghoulish exaggeration the reports that the SS burnt a baby alive in an oven. The village can be visited today, a stark reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. Yet as Hastings has pointed out, ‘It is important to remember that if Oradour was an exceptionally dreadful occurrence during the war in the West, it was a trifling sample of what the German Army had been doing on a national scale in the East, since 1941.’ As one of Diekmann’s officers – an Ostkämpfer (Eastern Front veteran) – confidentially told a former officer of the SS Totenkopf Division, ‘in our circles, Herr Muller, it was nothing.’48
‘I am certainly not a brutal man by nature,’ Hitler told his lunch guests on 20 August 1942, ‘and consequently it is cold reason that guides my actions. I have risked my own life a thousand times, and I owe my preservation simply to my good fortune.’49 The black angel hovering over him certainly never performed a better service of protection than on the afternoon of Thursday, 20 July 1944. Hitherto, Hitler had believed that ‘In the two really dangerous attempts to assassinate me I owe my life not to the police, but to pure chance.’ These had been when he had left the Bürgerbräu beerhall ten minutes before a bomb went off there on 9 November 1939, and when a Swiss stalked him for three months at the Berghof.50 Hitler took all the normal precautions against assassination, saying, ‘As far as is possible, whenever I go anywhere by car I go off unexpectedly and without warning the police.’ His chief security officer SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) Hans Rattenhuber and his chauffeur Erich Kempka had ‘the strictest orders to maintain absolute secrecy about my comings and goings’, however high up the official making enquiries about them. Nonetheless, if he felt safe anywhere it would have been at his command headquarters deep in the pine forests of East Prussia (now in Poland) known as the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair), from his long-term Nazi Party codename of Wolf.
‘Here in the Wolfschanze,’ Hitler said on the night of 26 February 1942, ‘I feel like a prisoner in these dug-outs, and my spirit can’t escape.’51 That might be why, when one visits the destroyed buildings today, they resonate with sinister echoes. Jodl called the Wolfschanze ‘somewhere between a monastery and a concentration camp’. The size of twenty-one football pitches and staffed by 2,000 people, it housed Hitler for more than 800 days of his 2,067-day war. The Führerbunker, Hitler’s own quarters where he paced backwards and forwards in the card room – ‘In that way I get my ideas’ – boasted 6-foot-thick concrete walls, a sophisticated ventilation system, electric heating, running hot and cold water and air conditioning. As well as two airfields, a power station, a railway stop, garages and an advanced communications system, the headquarters possessed saunas, cinemas and tea rooms.
‘In consequence of the defeat of the submarine,’ Dönitz stated years after the war, ‘the Anglo-American invasion of Normandy in July [sic] 1944 was now a success and now we knew clearly that we had no more chance to win the war. But what could we do?’52 The answer for some in the German High Command – though certainly not the ultra-loyal Dönitz himself – was to try to assassinate Hitler. There had been some latent hostility between Hitler and his generals, except in those periods at the start of the war when victories came as easily as the subsequent mutual admiration. ‘The General Staff is the only Masonic Order that I haven’t yet dissolved,’ Hitler