Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  On July 4, 1944, the Gestapo arrested Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein as they were attempting to extend the network of Resistance cells by making contact with the Communist group that had formed around Anton Saefkow. In thus striking, the Gestapo itself propelled events toward a decision. Even Stauffenberg seems to have wavered for a moment at this time. A message from Tresckow, which incidentally revealed the innermost motivations of the conspirators, implored Stauffenberg to put aside all considerations of success or failure and wait no longer: “The assassination must be attempted, coûte que coûte. Even if it does not succeed, they must act in Berlin as if it did. The practical purpose no longer matters; what matters is that the German resistance movement should have taken the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, anything else is of no consequence.”8

  On June 6, 1944, the invasion forces began moving out of the ports of southern England. An armada of 5,000 vessels headed for the coast of Normandy, while British and American parachute units dropped on the flanks of the intended landing zone. Toward three o’clock in the morning the first landing craft entered the water several miles off the coast, and, in rough seas, moved out of the shadow of the transport fleet.

  As they approached shore toward dawn some three hours later, thousands of planes flew over the coastal strip and dropped a hail of bombs on the German positions. Simultaneously, the entire landing area was bombarded by heavy naval guns. At some points, especially at the foot of the Cotentin Peninsula and near the mouth of the Orne, the landing operation succeeded against unexpectedly meager German resistance. But in the central part of the landing area, near Vierville, the Americans ran into a German division that by chance had been alerted for an invasion exercise, and encountered withering fire (Omaha Beach). The defenders fired at a “carpet of people,” one report put it; the entire beach was covered with burning armored vehicles, ships, and dead and wounded men. By evening the Americans had taken two small bridgeheads, and the British and Canadians had seized an expanse of beach amounting to nearly 200 square miles. Above all, the Allies possessed numerical superiority in the landing area.

  The quick success of the landing operation once again exposed German inferiority in matériel and military forces. Even the time and place of the invasion had taken the Germans by surprise. Because of German weakness in the air, the Allied troops and fleets had assembled undiscovered in the deployment area of southern England. German military counterintelligence had, it is true, precisely predicted the time of the landing, but the Abwehr was in bad odor and no attention had been paid to this information. Field Marsha] von Rundstedt, the commander in chief in the West, had informed Hitler as recently as May 30 that no signs of an impending landing could be observed. Field Marshal Rommel, inspector of the coastal defenses, had left his headquarters on June 5 and gone to Berchtesgaden for a talk with Hitler. Moreover, the German leadership was convinced that the enemy attack would come at the narrowest point of the Channel, in the Pas de Calais, and had therefore placed the main force there. Hitler, on the other hand, guided by his peculiar “intuition,” had expressed the view that Normandy was just as likely an invasion area; but he had finally bowed to the opinion of his military experts, all the more so since that opinion seemed to be confirmed by various movements on the enemy’s part.

  The invasion exposed a disastrous failure of leadership on the German side. The crisis had been foreshadowed when Hitler could not manage to forge the divergent views of his generals into a coherent plan for fending off a landing. The result was a series of muddled compromises, aggravated by the prevailing confusion of authority. On June 6 various command centers were scattered all over Berchtesgaden, not one of them able to function wholly independently, communicating with one another solely by telephone throughout the morning, and arguing chiefly over the release of the four reserve divisions in the West. Hitler himself, meanwhile, after one of his long, empty nights of palaver had gone to bed toward morning, with orders not to be awakened for the present. A first military conference took place at last early in the afternoon; but Hitler had asked the participants to meet in Castle Klessheim, about an hour’s drive by car from Berchtesgaden, for he was expecting Hungarian Premier Sztójay there on that day. After his arrival he went up to the map table; from his look one could not tell whether he suspected the Allies of a feint or was himself trying to deceive his entourage. In Austrian dialect he said the equivalent of: “So this is it!” A few minutes later, after being briefed on the latest developments, he went to the upper rooms for the “show sit.” Shortly before five o’clock in the afternoon he finally issued the order “that the enemy is to be annihilated at the bridgehead by evening of June 6.”

  Almost throughout the initial phase of the invasion Hitler retained that somnambulistic calm, seemingly divorced from reality, that he had displayed on the first day. Again and again in the preceding months he had declared that the offensive in the West would decide victory or defeat: “If the invasion is not repulsed, the war is lost for us.” Now, with his faith in his infallibility, he was unwilling to realize that the landing operation was indeed the invasion. Instead, he held considerable forces in the area between the Seine and the Scheldt, where they waited in vain for the landing of those phantom divisions that the enemy by a stratagem had conjured up for him (“Operation Fortitude”). Meanwhile, in his usual manner, he interfered in the fighting even on the lower planes of command and made decisions rationally incompatible with the situation at the front.

  On June 17 Hitler at last yielded to Rundstedt’s and Rommel’s impatient urging and came to the rear area of the invasion front for a personal briefing. The talks took place in the Wolfsschlucht II Führer’s headquarters in Margival, north of Soissons, which had been set up in 1940 for the invasion of England. Hitler “looked pale and sleepless,” Rommel’s chief of staff, General Speidel, wrote. “He played nervously with his glasses and with pencils of all colors, which he held in his hand. He was the only one seated, hunched on a stool, while the field marshals were kept standing. His earlier magnetic force seemed gone. After a brief, frosty greeting he started shouting, bitterly expressing his displeasure at the successful landing of the Allies and trying to find fault with the local commanders.”

  Rommel pointed out the enormous enemy superiority. Hitler rejected that excuse, as he rejected, too, the request for permission to withdraw the threatened German forces from the Cotentin Peninsula and to bring up the reserves from the Pas de Calais. Instead, Hitler expatiated with increasing emphasis upon the “decisive” effect of the secret “V” weapons, and promised “masses of turbo fighters” that would drive the enemy from the skies and at last force England to her knees. When Rommel attempted to turn the discussion to political questions and to insist, in view of the grave situation, on steps toward ending the war, Hitler brusquely interrupted him. “Don’t you worry about the continuance of the war, but about your invasion front,” he said.9

  The antipathies that emerged in the course of this meeting intensified Hitler’s already strong distrust of the officer corps. Significantly, shortly before his arrival he had had the area ringed by SS units, and during the one-dish meal with von Rundstedt and Rommel he started to eat only after the food had been tasted. Throughout the meal two SS men were posted behind his chair. Before they parted the generals tried to persuade Hitler to come to Rommel’s headquarters and listen to the reports of several frontline commanders. Reluctantly, Hitler agreed to come on June 19. But shortly after Rundstedt and Rommel had left Margival, he himself returned to Berchtesgaden.10

  Within ten days the Allies had landed nearly a million men and 500,000 tons of matériel. But even now, after calling on Hitler in Berchtesgaden, the field marshals could not persuade him to yield them so much as freedom of decision in operational matters. Icily, he listened to their representations and ignored their request for a talk in a small group. Instead, he abruptly relieved von Rundstedt of his post. He appointed Field Marshal von Kluge to succeed hi
m.

  Kluge’s first appearance at the front made it plain how deceptive and distorted the image of reality had become in Hitler’s entourage. Kluge had just spent two weeks as a guest at the Berghof, and in spite of his critical if vacillating attitude toward Hitler, he had become imbued with the view that the leadership of the troops in the West was suffering from a failure of nerve and defeatism. On his arrival at the invasion front, he reproached Rommel in a heated argument with being unduly impressed by the enemy’s material superiority and therefore blocking Hitler’s justified orders. Furious at the commander in chief’s “Berchtesgaden style,” Rommel challenged him to go to the front and see for himself. As could be expected, two days later Kluge returned from his visit to the front considerably sobered. On July 15 Rommel, by way of Kluge, addressed a teletype message to Hitler: “The unequal struggle is nearing its end,” he wrote, and concluded with a demand: “I must ask you immediately to draw the necessary conclusions from this situation.” To General Speidel he remarked: “If he [Hitler] draws no conclusions, we shall act.”11

  Stauffenberg was also bent on taking action—all the more so since it appeared that the entire Eastern front was also breaking under the impact of the Soviet summer offensive. A fortunate circumstance had arisen: on June 20 Stauffenberg had been appointed chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the army reserve (sometimes called the home army), and thus had admission to the military conferences in the Führer’s headquarters. Upon taking office on July 1 he had told Fromm that he must in fairness inform him he was planning a coup d’etat, Fromm had listened silently and asked his new chief of staff to assume his duties.

  On July 6 and 11 Stauffenberg had been summoned to conferences in the Führer’s headquarters at the Berghof. After so many fiascos he had now resolved to undertake both the assassination and the leadership of the coup personally. On both occasions he had taken a package of explosives with him and had arranged for his immediate return to Berlin. But he had both times given up his plan since neither Göring nor Himmler, whom he intended to eliminate simultaneously, was present in the conference room. Another attempt on July 15 miscarried because Stauffenberg found no opportunity to set the ignition mechanism before the beginning of the conference, On July 11 and July 15 the troops that were to occupy Berlin had been placed on emergency footing; both times the undertaking had to be called off and all elements of suspicion eliminated.

  On July 17, two days after the last attempt, the conspirators learned that an order for Goerdeler’s arrest was pending. Unlike the cases of Leber, Reichwein, Moltke, and Bonhoeffer, they felt that Goerdeler was not the sort of person who would be able to keep silent under Gestapo interrogation. Stauffenberg took this information as the final mandate for action; the Rubicon had now been crossed, he remarked. That same day Rommel was severely wounded, thus putting one of the key figures in Stauffenberg’s game out of commission. For the field marshal enjoyed great prestige among the Allies, and the latest idea had been to have him obtain an armistice in the West, evacuate the occupied areas, and use the returning armies to support the coup. Nevertheless, Stauffenberg refused to be deterred at this point. He would now act no matter what the circumstances, he declared, but added that this would be his last attempt.

  A few days earlier the Führer’s headquarters had again been transferred from Berchtesgaden back to Rastenburg. The convoy stood ready to depart and everyone had already gone to their cars when Hitler turned back once more and re-entered the Berghof. He stepped into the salon, stood a while in front of the big window, and then walked about the room with slow, uncertain steps. For a few moments he lingered in front of Anselm Feuerbach’s Nana. He indicated to one of the bystanders that he probably would not be returning to this place.12

  Stauffenberg had an appointment to report in Rastenburg on July 20.

  The assassination attempt and the dramatic events of that day have been frequently described: the sudden shift of the conference to a barrack whose thin walls did not confine the explosion; Stauffenberg’s belated arrival, after he had been surprised in an adjacent building while he was setting the time fuse with a pair of pliers; the search for Stauffenberg immediately after he had placed the bomb under the heavy map table and left the room; the explosion as Hitler, leaning over the table and propping his chin in his hand followed General Heusinger’s report on the map. Stauffenberg stood beside his readied car some distance away and observed a huge cloud of smoke rise up over the barrack, wood and paper whirl through the air, and people rushing out of the shattered building. Then, certain that Hitler was dead, he made his escape and flew to Berlin, while much precious time passed.

  Like everyone else in the room, Hitler had experienced the explosion as an “infernally bright darting flame” and a deafening crash. When he got up out of the burning, smoking debris with blackened face and the back of his head singed, Keitel came running toward him, shouting, “Where is the Führer?” and helped him get out of the room. Hitler’s trousers hung in shreds; he was covered with dust, but only lightly injured. He had escaped with slight bleeding at his right, elbow, and a few trivial bruises on the back of his left hand; and although both his eardrums had been ruptured, he suffered some loss of hearing only for a short time. The injuries to his legs were the worst; many splinters of wood had been driven into the flesh. But at the same time he discovered to his surprise that the trembling in his left leg had largely ceased. Of the twenty-four persons who had been in the room at the time of the explosion, only four were severely injured. A prime factor in protecting Hitler had been the heavy table top he was leaning over at the moment of detonation. He was excited, but at the same time seemed curiously relieved. Repeatedly, and with some satisfaction, he told his retinue that he had long known of a conspiracy and now at last he could unmask the traitors. He displayed his tattered trousers like a trophy and did the same with his jacket, which had a square hole ripped out of the back.13

  His calm derived principally from the sense of a “miraculous rescue.” It was as if he owed to this treacherous act his reinforced sense of his own mission. That, at any rate, was his interpretation of the event when Mussolini arrived in Rastenburg in the afternoon for a previously announced visit. As they looked at the devastated conference room, Hitler said: “When I call it ali to mind again, I conclude… that nothing is fated to happen to me, all the more so since this isn’t the first time I’ve miraculously escaped death…. After my rescue from the peril of death today I am more than ever convinced that I am destined to carry on our great common cause to a happy conclusion.”

  Obviously impressed, Mussolini added: “This was a sign from heaven.”14

  In the course of the afternoon, however, his self-mastery was to give way. Toward five o’clock Hider and Mussolini were back at the Führer’s bunker where Göring, Ribbentrop, Donitz, Keitel, and Jodi were assembled. The conversation once again centered around Hitler’s salvation, but soon passed into mutual and increasingly ugly reproaches. Admiral Donitz inveighed against the treacherous army, and Göring joined him; but then Donitz also attacked the air force and its inadequate performance. Whereupon Göring attacked Ribbentrop for the failure of his foreign policy and, if the account of the incident is correct, finally raised his marshal’s baton and waved it threateningly. Ribbentrop, addressed without the preposition denoting nobility, rapped back at Göring that he was the Foreign Minister and that his name was von Ribbentrop. For a while Hitler seemed lost in thought; he sat dully brooding, sucking on the various colored lozenges prescribed by Dr. Morell. But when one of the disputants spoke of the purge of Röhm, he sprang to his feet and began without the least preamble to rage. The punishment he had inflicted on the traitors then was nothing in comparison to the retaliation he would practice now, he screamed; he would annihilate the guilty together with their wives and children; no one who had opposed the workings of Providence would be spared. While he was shrieking, white-clad SS servants moved silently through the rows of chairs, accompanying the
murderous tirade by serving tea.

  The events in Berlin, with their crises, climaxes, and debacle, have also been described many times over: the incomprehensibly delayed launching of “Operation Valkyrie”; the failure to cut oif news from the Führer’s headquarters; Remer’s telephone conversation with Hitler (“Major Remer, do you hear my voice?”); the arrest of Fromm; Stauffenberg’s persistent pleading and propelling the slow-moving mechanism into action; Field Marshal von Witzleben’s angry scene at the headquarters of the High Command of the armed forces; the radio announcement around nine o’clock that Hitler would speak to the German people that very evening; the first signs of helpless perplexity on the part of the conspirators; the arrest of City Commandant von Hase; then again Stauffenberg still passionately urging but meeting no response, and finally reappearing late in the evening, resigned, his eyeflap removed, passing through the rooms of the OKW; and finally Fromm’s theatrical reappearance on the scene, suddenly reasserting control over the seemingly paralyzed military apparatus on which the conspirators had placed their hopes. All this followed by the arrests, by Beck’s several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, by the hastily arranged executions in front of the sandpile in the inner courtyard, illuminated by the headlights of a few trucks; and finally Fromm’s “Hurrah!” for the Führer.

  Toward one o’clock in the morning Hitler’s voice spoke over all German radio stations:

  German racial comrades! I do not know how many times an assassination attempt against me has been planned and carried out. If I speak to you today, I do so for two reasons: first, so that you may hear my voice and know that I myself am uninjured and well. Secondly, so that you may also learn the details about a crime that has not its like in German history.