Chief of General Staff or Death on the Scaffold
Major General Henning von Tresckow (1901 - 1944)
A report about the young
Lieutenant Tresckow by
one of his senior officers
said that he would "either
become Chief of General
Staff or die on the scaffold".
Born in
Magdeburg 1901 into a family of landed gentry, an officer during World War I
and subsequently a successful stockbroker, Tresckow rejoined the Reichswehr
in 1924. Like many of his fellow officers who became Hitler's and the Nazis'
arch enemies, he first flirted with National Socialism, to become the brains of
the resistance group formed by army officers fighting on the eastern front.
At the beginning of World War II, Tresckow was General Staff officer of an
infantry division in East Prussia. Promoted to Major General, he later served
as Chief of Staff of the Army Group Center on the Russian front. Determined to
end the war before the German armies collapsed on the eastern front, Tresckow
began to plan an independent assassination attempt at the end of 1942. On 13
March 1943 he enticed Hitler to Smolensk and smuggled a time bomb into his
aircraft with the help of his cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff, which failed to
go off. Tresckow also played a leading role in the plans for several other
attempts on Hitler's life during 1943, and in October of the same year joined
forces with Colonel Count Stauffenberg.
The Allied invasion of Normandy gave a new urgency to their plans and Tresckow
stressed to those who still hesitated the need to prove to the world and future
generations 'that the German Resistance movement dared to take the decisive
step and hazard their lives on it'.
A Prussian conservative through and through and a man of UNUSUAL integrity,
Tresckow took his own life with a hand grenade on 21 July 1944 at the eastern
front near Ostrow, Poland. The failure of Stauffenberg's assassination attempt
on 20 July 1944 had convinced 
him
to commit suicide rather than endanger other conspirators by revealing information
under torture, his personal escort officer reported "death through
partisans".
Tresckow circa 1938 with his sons Mark and
Rüdiger.
Henning von Tresckow was buried in the small graveyard of his family's estate
Wartenberg, Neumark. Only a few days later, the Gestapo dug out his body. His
involvement in the conspiracy had become known. His body was burnt and his
ashes scattered over the fields.
Tresckow's last known words were
about the Biblical promise to Abraham to spare Sodom if there were ten just men
in the city. 'He will, I hope, spare Germany because of what we have done
and not destroy her. None of us can complain. Whoever joined the Resistance put
on the shirt of Nessus. The worth of a man begins when he is ready to sacrifice
his life for his convictions.'
Resistance hotbed: Henning von Tresckow as
First General Staff officer of the Heeresgruppe Mitte.
Tresckow (fourth from right) and his co-conspirator and first cousin Fabian von Schlabrendorff (right, with glasses) 1943 at a briefing. Schlabrendorff survived to become later a renowned lawyer and judge at the highest German court, the Federal Constitutional Court, Bundesverfassungsgericht
