Adolf Heusinger

• 1. Introduction

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  Adolf Heusinger was standing next to Adolf Hitler when the bomb went off on the 20th of July 1944. The man who planted it, Claus von Stauffenberg, had placed an explosive device beneath the conference table at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters. Heusinger was there as acting Chief of the General Staff of the German Army, filling in for Kurt Zeitzler, who had suffered a nervous breakdown just weeks before. He was injured in the blast, then arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo.

  He was released without charge. And seventeen years later, he was sitting in Washington, D.C., as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

  Heusinger's life traced nearly every chapter of German military history across the twentieth century: the Kaiser's army, the Weimar Republic, the Wehrmacht, and finally the Western alliance. The Soviet Union wanted him tried for war crimes. West Germany made him its top general. How a single officer navigated all of that, and what it reveals about how nations rebuild after catastrophic failure, is a story that starts long before the bomb went off.

• 2. Volunteer to Strategist

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  Holzminden, in the Duchy of Brunswick, was where Heusinger was born on the 4th of August 1897. He entered the Prussian Army as a volunteer in 1915 and earned the rank of Leutnant by 1916. The First World War ended with him in British captivity in Yorkshire, and he did not return until December 1919.

  By 1920, he had joined the Reichswehr, the army of the Weimar Republic. The Germany he returned to was constitutionally forbidden from maintaining a traditional General Staff under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. The military worked around this by creating the Truppenamt, or Troop Office, a body that functioned as a covert General Staff within the Ministry of the Reichswehr. Heusinger was assigned to its operations staff in 1931.

  When the Wehrmacht re-established its Army General Staff in August 1937, Heusinger moved directly into its Operations Staff. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel on the 20th of March 1939 and to colonel on the 1st of August 1940. By October of that year, he had become the OKH Operations Chief, placing him third in the army's entire planning hierarchy, behind only General Franz Halder and General Friedrich Paulus.

• 3. Planning the Invasions

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  Heusinger accompanied the field staff as the German Army High Command, the OKH, shifted to its wartime organisation. He assisted in planning the invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, and the Low Countries. Each of those campaigns flowed through his office.

  After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the OKH took on primary responsibility for operations in that theatre. The broader Armed Forces High Command, the OKW, handled other fronts. Heusinger remained at his post through this enormous expansion of German military operations and was promoted to Generalleutnant on the 1st of January 1943.

  When General Halder was replaced as Chief of the General Staff in September 1942 by General Kurt Zeitzler, Heusinger kept his position. His continuity across that leadership change made him one of the most consistently influential figures in German Army planning throughout the war's middle years. That continuity would have consequences when Zeitzler finally broke down.

• 4. The Wolf's Lair

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  Zeitzler's collapse came in June 1944, and on the 10th of June, Heusinger temporarily assumed his office as Chief of the General Staff. Six weeks later, on the 20th of July, he was at Hitler's Wolf's Lair for a briefing when Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb detonated beneath the conference table.

  Heusinger was hospitalised for his injuries. Then the Gestapo came for him. Although investigators found evidence that he had contacts with many of the conspirators, no direct link to the plot could be established, and he was released in October 1944. His own autobiography describes how he cooperated with investigators. He made available all information he had about the conspirators and stated that he had not joined the plot because he still felt bound by his obligation as a soldier of the German Reich, even though he personally believed the war was already lost.

  The People's Court cleared him. He received the Wound Badge of the 20th of July 1944 in silver for injuries sustained in the blast. After his release, he was placed in the Führerreserve, a pool of high-ranking officers awaiting new assignments. He remained there until the 25th of March 1945, when he was made chief of the armed forces mapping department. Six weeks later, the Western Allies took him prisoner.

• 5. Nuremberg and the New Germany

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  From 1945 to 1947, Heusinger was held as a prisoner and testified during the Nuremberg Trials. He had observed the war's planning from one of the highest vantage points in the German military, and that testimony carried weight.

  By 1950, Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, had brought Heusinger in as a military advisor. He worked within the Blank Office, the body headed by Theodor Blank that would eventually become the West German Ministry of Defence in 1955. When the Bundeswehr, the new West German armed forces, was formally established that same year, Heusinger returned to active service. He was appointed Generalleutnant in the Bundeswehr on the 12th of November 1955.

  In March 1957, he succeeded Hans Speidel as head of the all-armed forces department. Just months later, in June 1957, he was promoted to full general and named the first Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, the highest uniformed position in the West German military. He held that post until March 1961. A former Operations Chief of the Wehrmacht, a man interrogated by the Gestapo in 1944, was now the commanding general of a democratic Germany.

• 6. NATO, Soviet Accusations, and Secrets

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  In April 1961, Heusinger was appointed Chairman of the NATO Military Committee in Washington, D.C. He served in that role until 1964, when he retired. The Soviet Union, however, was not prepared to let the matter rest.

  In the early 1960s, Soviet publications including Sovetskaia Belorussiia highlighted the fact that Heusinger had never faced prosecution. The Soviet government claimed he bore responsibility for the systematic killings of civilians in Belarus during antipartisan operations in the occupied Soviet territories. No prosecution followed in the West.

  Heusinger died in Cologne on the 30th of November 1982, at the age of 85. The story of his wartime record did not end there. Documents released by the German Federal Intelligence Service in 2014, three decades after his death, suggested he may have been part of the Schnez-Truppe. That was a secret army that veterans of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS attempted to establish in the early 1950s, aimed at addressing the threat posed by East Germany. During his NATO tenure, Heusinger had also operated under the alias Adolf Horn while associated with the Gehlen Organisation, the West German intelligence body built on the networks of former German military intelligence officers.