Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

A very small clique of ambitious, wicked and stupidly criminal officers forged a plot to eliminate me and along with me virtually the entire staff of the German leadership of the armed forces. The bomb which was planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg burst two meters to the right of me. It very seriously injured a number of associates dear to me; one of them has died. I myself am completely uninjured except for some very small scrapes, bruises or burns. I regard it as a confirmation of my assignment from Providence to continue to pursue my life’s goal as I have done hitherto….

  The group represented by these usurpers is ridiculously small. It has nothing to do with the German armed forces, and above all with the German army. It is a very small coterie of criminal elements which is now being mercilessly extirpated…. We will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settle them.15

  That same night a wave of arrests began, directed against all suspects whether or not they had anything to do with the coup. A second wave about a month later (“Operation Thunderstorm”) again rounded up several thousand suspected oppositionists, chiefly members of former political parties.16 A “July 20th Special Commission,” staffed by 400 investigators, continued until the last days of the regime, tracking down every clue and issuing a steady series of bulletins about its success, thus demonstrating the extent of the resistance. Crushing pressure, torture and blackmail soon uncovered the outlines of an opposition that had functioned for years, had been extremely thorough theoretically but incapable of action. It had produced a plethora of letters and diaries, which gave it the character of a permanent monologue. The way the persecutors went about their task is illustrated by the fate of Henning von Tresckow, who had shot himself on July 21. He was mentioned in the armed forces communiqué with praise as one of the army’s outstanding generals. But as soon as his part in the abortive coup came to light, his corpse was dragged from the family vault, to the accompaniment of savage abuse of his relatives, and taken to Berlin, where it was used in the interrogation of his stubbornly denying friends as a means of breaking their morale.

  In general, the regime, contrary to its ideal of dispassionate sternness, displayed a remarkable cruelty, for which Hitler himself repeatedly gave the cues. Even in his periods of utmost control, he had shown a need to avenge himself in the most excessive fashion for every snub, every rejection. The savage extermination policy practiced upon the Poles, for instance, was not primarily the application of a theory concerning the treatment of the peoples of the East. Rather, it was Hitler’s personal revenge upon the one country in the East whose alliance he had vainly sought in order to realize his main vision, the grand march against the Soviet Union. And when Yugoslavia attempted, as a result of an army officers’ coup, to withdraw from the Tripartite Pact into which she had been forced, Hitler was so beside himself with fury that he had the defenseless capital of the country systematically bombed from a low altitude for three full days. That was “Operation Punishment.” Now, in 1944, a few days after the attempted assassination, he commented after a military conference: “This has to stop. It won’t do. These are the basest creatures that ever in history wore the soldier’s tunic. We must repel and expel the offscourings from a dead past who have found refuge among us.”

  On the legal measures to be taken, he declared:

  This time I’m making short work of it. These criminals are not to be brought before a court-martial, where their accomplices are sitting and where the trials are dragged out interminably. They’re going to be expelled from the armed forces and face the People’s Court. And they’re not to receive the honorable bullet, but are to hang like common traitors! We’ll have a court of honor expel them from the service; then they can be tried as civilians and they won’t be soiling the prestige of the services. They must be tried at lightning speed, not be given a chance to make any grand speeches. And within two hours after the announcement of the verdict it has to be carried out! They must hang at once without the slightest mercy. And the most important thing is that they’re given no time for any long speeches. But Freisler [the president of the People’s Court] will take care of things all right. He is our Vishinsky.17

  Such in fact was the procedure. A “court of honor” with Field Marshal von Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel as associates, on August 4 meted out dishonorable discharges to twenty-two officers, among them one field marshal and eight generals. For the first time in the history of the German army this was done without giving the persons involved a chance to plead. Hitler received daily reports on the interrogations. He also insisted on being kept abreast of arrests and executions, and “greedily devoured the information.” He received Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court and the chief executioner, in the Führer’s headquarters, and ruled that the condemned were to be denied the consolations of religion or, in fact, any consolations of any kind. His instructions were: “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle.”18

  On August 8 the first eight conspirators were executed in Plötzensee Prison. One by one they entered the execution room in prison garb and wooden shoes. Passing by the guillotine, they were led to the hooks fastened to a rail running across the ceiling. The executioners took off their manacles, passed a rope around their necks and bared the bodies to the hips. Then they raised the condemned, dropping them into the noose, and pulled off their trousers while they were slowly strangled. The records as a rule noted the duration of the execution as up to twenty seconds, but the orders were to protract the process of dying. After each execution the executioner and his aides braced themselves with a drink held ready on a table. Movies were taken of the proceedings, and that same evening Hitler had these films shown down to the last twitches of the condemned.

  Hitler’s savagery expressed itself not only in the intensity but also in the extent of the persecution. Sippenhaft—responsibility of the conspirators’ next of kin—was justified on an ideological basis. Two weeks after the failed coup, Heinrich Himmler declared in a speech at the gauleiters’ meeting of August 3, 1944, held in Posen:

  For we shall introduce here absolute responsibility of kin. We have already acted on that basis and… let no one come to us and say: what you are doing is Bolshevistic. No, don’t take this amiss, it isn’t Bolshevistic at all, but a very old custom practiced among our forefathers. You can read up about it in the Teutonic sagas. When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed, or when there was a blood feud in a family, they were utterly consistent. When the family was outlawed and banned, they said: This man has committed treason; the blood is bad; there is traitor’s blood in him; that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. The family of Count Stauffenberg will be wiped out down to the last member.19

  Following this principle, all relatives of the Stauffenberg brothers ranging from a three-year-old child to a cousin’s eighty-five-year-old father were arrested. Members of the families of Goerdeler, von Tresckow, von Seydlitz, von Lehndorff, Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Yorck von Wartenburg, von Moltke, Oster, Leber, von Kleist, and von Haeften, as well as many others, suffered a similar fate. Field Marshal Rommel was threatened with both the arrest of his family and a public trial unless he committed suicide. Generals Burgdorf and Maisel, who carried that message of Hitler’s to him, also brought him an ampoule of poison. Half an hour later they took the corpse to an Ulm hospital and forbade any autopsy: “Do not touch the corpse,” Burgdorf informed the medical head of the hospital. “Everything has already been arranged from Berlin.”

  The executions continued until April, 1945.

  Thus the trail of the attempted coup of July 20 trickled out in execution barracks and morgues. The plot had failed primarily because of the psychological obstacles in the way of an act that ran counter to far too many habits of thought and reflexes sanctified by the traditional values of the military class. The resolute core among the consp
irators was desperately frustrated by this problem.

  One handicap that burdened “Operation Valkyrie” from the start was the fact that it had been planned to fit into the fiction of the “legal coup,” respecting the officers’ complex about violating their oath, and their horror of mutiny. On the crucial day of July 20, one of the chief rebels, General Hoepner, had refused to take command of the army reserve until he received a written order explicitly empowering him to do so. Pedantry of this sort gave the coup, in spite of all its moral high-mindedness, a peculiarly clumsy and almost farcical character. In retrospect, many of the episodes and details have some of that unforgettable quixotic quality displayed by General von Fritsch in 1938: after Himmler’s schemes had brought about his resignation, he wanted to challenge the Reichsführer-SS to a duel. Here, an ancestral world, imbued with rigid values, was encountering a group of unprincipled revolutionaries; and those among the conservatives who did not succumb to the new spirit reacted, almost without exception, awkwardly and oddly. Goerdeler, for example, thought he could bring Hitler around and induce a change of heart in verbal confrontation. Consequently, he had all along opposed the idea of an assassination, and a few days after July 20, while in flight, he greeted a woman co-conspirator with the admonishment: “Thou shalt not kill.” Stauffenberg and other conspirators intended, after the restoration of legality, to surrender voluntarily to a court of law.

  Most of the group demonstrated the same kind of inveterate rectitude, even after the failure of the coup. Incapable of fleeing and hiding, they waited for their arrest. “One mustn’t run—one must endure,” Captain Klausing, one of the leading plotters in the High Command of the armed forces, explained. Theodor Steltzer even returned from Norway. General Fellgiebel, immediately before his arrest, rejected a proffered pistol; that just wasn’t done, he remarked. The old-fashioned, touching nature of all this behavior was exemplified by the way Carl Goerdeler strapped the knapsack to his back, picked up a staff, and set out on foot to escape his pursuers. In the interrogations, too, some of the participants were obviously more intent on proving the seriousness and resoluteness of the opposition than on defending themselves. Others for moral reasons refused to lie, though their pride was only playing into the hands of the investigators. One of the heads of the July 20 special commission commented that “because of the manly attitude of the idealists we were instantly on the right track.”

  The highly moral basis of the undertaking led to another curious fact: the attempted putsch was started without a shot being fired—which necessarily reduced its chances of success. The initial decision to utilize military channels of command was justified on the ground that the idea was to issue orders, not engage in shooting. Hans Bernd Gisevius, onp of the conspirators, quite rightly asked why the SS leader and the pro-Hitler general who blocked the way of the rebels at the Bendlerstrasse headquarters of the OKW had not been arrested and “immediately stood up against the wall.” Shooting the two, he said, would have sparked the coup and given it credibility by imparting to it the nature of an extreme challenge. At this point it became apparent that July 20 was an officers’ coup in another respect: it lacked the enlisted men who could shoot, make arrests and occupy positions. In the accounts of that day we repeatedly come upon mentions of the small squad of officers who held themselves in readiness for special assignments. Late in the evening not even the High Command of the armed forces had a detachment of guards at its disposal; Colonel Jäger vainly asked General von Hase for the shock-troop platoon with which he was to arrest Goebbels. Basically, the plot had no striking power; and even the officers at its head were mostly intellectual types, staff officers rather than tough-minded soldiers like Major Remer. Beck’s two failures in his effort to commit suicide at the end of the day can be taken as a symbol of the conspirators’ utter ineffectuality when it came to acting.

  Finally, however, the coup also lacked popular support. On the evening of July 20, as Hitler was accompanying Mussolini back to the railroad station at headquarters, he paused by a group of railroad workers and said: “I knew from the first that men of your sort were not involved. It’s my deep conviction that my enemies are the ‘vons’ who call themselves aristocrats.”20 He had always felt almost insultingly sure of the common man, as though he had a sure grasp of the peoples’ wishes, behavior, and limits even now. And, in fact, the public, with a kind of mechanical reaction, first viewed the coup as a crime against the state that evoked a mixture of indifference and repugnance. One of the reasons for this reaction, to be sure, was the still considerable coherence of the state and, above all, Hitler’s continuing prestige.

  He still exerted psychological power, although its basis had meanwhile changed. What the public now felt was not so much its onetime admiration as a dull, fatalistic sense of an indissoluble reciprocal bond. That feeling was reinforced by both domestic and Allied propaganda, by the threatening advance of the Red Army and the intimidating pressures of the Gestapo, the system of informers, and the SS. All this was blanketed by a vague hope that this man would know the way to avert disaster, as he had done so often in the past. The failure of the assassination and the premature end of the coup spared the German public that decisive question with which the conspirators wanted to confront it by revealing the moral baseness of the regime, the conditions in the concentration camps, Hitler’s deliberate war policy, and the practice of extermination. Goerdeler was convinced that the public would cry out with indignation and that a popular uprising would erupt. But the question was not posed.

  Thus July 20 was confined to the decision and the act of a few individuals. The social make-up of the conspiracy, however, meant that when it was crushed, more than a number of rebels died. The doomed Prussian nobles who formed the core of the uprising constituted a class rich in tradition, “perhaps the only and certainly the strongest force capable of governance that Germany has produced in modern times.” It alone possessed “what a ruling class needs and what neither the German high aristocracy nor the German bourgeoisie nor, so it seems, the German working class had or have: coherence, style, desire to rule, forcefulness, selfassurance, self-discipline, morality.”21

  Granted, Hitler had corrupted this class, had stripped its members of their powers and exposed their parasitical aspects. But only now did he liquidate them. Along with the bearers of many resounding names, old Germany stepped off the stage. Granted, their eminence had long since been squandered, gambled away in opportunistic and shortsighted collaboration with Hitler. Nevertheless, it must also be granted that the decision to break the onetime alliance came from these men. Hitler’s savage reaction sprang from his never-abandoned resentment toward this old world, his hatred for its gravity, its ethics, its discipline. He had the same ambivalence toward it that he had always felt toward the bourgeois world. “I have often bitterly regretted that I did not purge my officer corps the way Stalin did,” he remarked.22 Taken in this light, July 20 and the executions that followed it constituted the consummation of the National Socialist revolution.

  Seldom has a social class managed to carry out its “exodus from history” more nobly than did these Prussian Junkers. But it is also true they made the sacrifice only for their own sakes. Ostensibly they acted in the name of that “sacred Germany” which Stauffenberg once more invoked in his pathetic outcry before the execution squad. But behind that slogan was the conviction of acting as a class, of being subject as a class to a special moral imperative that gave them the right to resistance and made it their duty to overthrow a tyrant. “We are purifying ourselves,” General Stieff replied when asked why they were going ahead with an act whose success was so uncertain.

  This desire for self-purification governed all their actions. Hence they could overlook the possible charges of treason, perjury, or stab in the back. It rendered them immune to the misinterpretations and calumnies they saw coming. “Now the whole world will descend upon us and berate us,” Henning von Tresckow said to one of his friends shortly before his death. “But
I still hold firmly to the conviction that we acted rightly.”23 In fact both Nazi and Allied propaganda, in one of those dreadful harmonies they exhibited more and more frequently at this stage of the war, denounced the conspirators. Both sides were committed to the thesis of the monolithic character of the regime, of the identity between Führer and people—the Allies even well beyond the war’s end. The occupation authorities, for instance, prohibited publication about the German Resistance. The rather reluctant respect that is nowadays accorded the conspirators preserves elements of this earlier unease. None of their ideas and values have come down to the present day. They left scarcely a trace; and the accidents of history curiously underlined their total disappearance. The bodies of the executed men were turned over to the Anatomical Institute of Berlin University. The head of the Institute had close friends among the conspirators, and therefore blocked their use as cadavers. He had them cremated intact and the ashes buried in a nearby village cemetery. There an Allied air raid destroyed most of the urns.

  The events of July 20 once more gave the regime a vigorous radicalizing impulse. If it ever approached the abstract concept of totalitarian rule, it did so in those last months, during which greater devastation was wreaked on the country than in all the preceding years of the war. On the very day of the assassination Hitler appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as commander of the army reserve, thus deliberately humiliating the Wehrmacht. Five days later, Goebbels, who had been incessantly urging Hitler to tighten up the domestic front, was assigned the new post of Reich commissioner for Total War Commitment. Under the slogan “The people want it!” he instantly issued indexes of restrictions, embargos, and shutdowns. Almost all theaters and revues were closed, all academies, all schools of domestic science and commerce. All furloughs were canceled. Obligatory labor for women up to fifty was introduced, and many similar measures taken. On August 24 Goebbels announced total mobilization. Soon all remotely fit men between the ages of fifteen and sixty were drafted into the Volkssturm (militia). “It takes a bomb under his backside to make Hitler see reason,” Goebbels commented.24