by Ian Kershaw
It took little encouragement from Goebbels to persuade Hitler that Fromm, Stauffenberg’s direct superior officer, had acted so swiftly in an attempt to cover up his own complicity. Fromm had, in fact, already been named by Bormann in a circular to the Gauleiter in mid-evening of 20 July as one of those to be arrested as part of the ‘reactionary gang of criminals’ behind the conspiracy.16 Following the suppression of the coup in the Bendlerblock and the swift execution of Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz von Quirnheim, Fromm had made his way to the Propaganda Ministry, wanting to speak on the telephone with Hitler. Instead of connecting him, Goebbels had had Fromm seated in another room while he himself telephoned Führer Headquarters. He soon had the decision he wanted. Goebbels immediately had the former commander-in-chief of the Reserve Army placed under armed guard.17 After months of imprisonment, a mockery of a trial before the People’s Court, and a trumped-up conviction on grounds of alleged cowardice – despite the less-than-heroic motive of self-preservation that had dictated his role on centre-stage in the Bendlerblock on 20 July, he was no coward – Fromm would eventually die at the hands of a firing-squad in March 1945.18
In the confusion in the Bendlerblock late on the night of 20 July, it had looked for a time as if other executions would follow those of the coup’s leaders (together with the assisted suicide of Beck). But the arrival soon after midnight of an SS unit under the command of Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny – the rescuer of Mussolini from captivity the previous summer – who had been dispatched to the scene of the uprising by Walter Schellenberg, head of SD foreign intelligence, along with the appearance at the scene of SD chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Major Otto Ernst Remer, newly appointed commander of the Berlin guards battalion and largely responsible for putting down the coup, blocked further summary executions and ended the upheaval.19 Meanwhile, Himmler himself had flown to Berlin and, in his new temporary capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, had given orders that no further independent action was to be taken against officers held in suspicion.20
Shortly before 4 a.m., Bormann was able to inform the Party’s provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, that the putsch was at an end.21 By then, those arrested in the Bendlerstraße – including Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, former civil-servant and deputy Police President of Berlin Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, leading member of the ‘Kreisau Circle’ Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier, and landholder and officer in the Abwehr Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld – had been led off to await their fate.22 Former Colonel-General Erich Hoepner, arrested by Fromm but not executed, and Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had left the Bendlerstraße before the collapse of the coup, were also promptly taken into custody, along with a number of others who had been implicated.23 Prussian Finance Minister Popitz, former Economics Minister Schacht, former Chief of Staff Colonel-General Haider, Major-General Stieff, and, from the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris and Major-General Oster were also swiftly arrested. Major Hans Ulrich von Oertzen, liaison officer for the Berlin Defence District (Wehrkreis III), who had given out the first ‘Valkyrie’ orders, blew himself up with a hand-grenade. Henning von Tresckow, the early driving-force behind the attempts to assassinate Hitler, killed himself in similar fashion at the front near Ostrow in Poland. General Wagner shot himself. General Fellgiebel refused to do so. ‘You stand your ground, you don’t do that,’ he told his aide-de-camp. Well aware that his arrest was imminent, he spent much of the afternoon, remarkably, at the Wolf’s Lair, even congratulated Hitler on his survival, and awaited his inevitable fate.24
Those who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo had to reckon with fearsome torture. It was endured for the most part with the idealism, even heroism, which had sustained them throughout their perilous opposition.25 In the early stages of their investigations, the Gestapo managed to squeeze out remarkably limited information, beyond what they already knew, from those they so grievously maltreated. Even so, as the ‘Special Commission, 20 July’, set up on the day after the attempted coup under SS-Obersturmbannführer Georg Kießel and soon growing to include 400 officers, expanded its investigations, the numbers arrested rapidly swelled. Kießel was soon able to report 600 persons taken into custody.26 Almost all the leading figures in the various branches of the conspiracy were rapidly captured, though Goerdeler held out under cover until 12 August. Reports reached Hitler daily of new names of those implicated.27 His early belief that it had been no more than a ‘tiny clique’ of officers which had opposed him had proved mistaken. The conspiracy had tentacles stretching further than he could have imagined. He was particularly incensed that even Graf Helldorf, Berlin Police President, ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi Movement, and a former SA leader, turned out to have been deeply implicated.28 As the list lengthened, and the extent of the conspiracy became clear (all the more so following the remarkably full confession of Goerdeler, anxious to emphasize in the eyes of history the significance of the efforts of the opposition to remove Hitler and his regime), Hitler’s fury and bitter resentment against the conservatives – especially the landed aristocracy – who had never fully accepted him mounted.29 ‘We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but unfortunately forgot to finish off (zur Strecke zu bringen) the class struggle on the Right,’ he was heard to remark.30 But now was the worst possible time to encourage divisiveness within the people; the general showdown with the aristocracy would have to wait till the war was over.31
Even so, Himmler needed no prompting to take revenge against the families of the plotters, many of them from aristocratic backgrounds. He told the Gauleiter assembled in Posen a fortnight after the attempt on Hitler’s life that he would act in accordance with the ‘blood-vengeance (Blutrache)’ traditions of old Germanic law in eradicating ‘treasonable blood’ throughout the entire clan of the traitors. ‘The family of Graf Stauffenberg,’ he promised, ‘will be wiped out down to its last member.’ The Gauleiter applauded. Claus von Stauffenberg’s wife, brothers, their children, cousins, uncles, aunts, were all taken into custody. The families of others involved in the plot were similarly imprisoned. Only the end of the war vitiated the fulfilment of Himmler’s intention.32 A full-scale police operation (‘Gewitteraktion’ – ‘Storm Action’) in late August to round up opponents of the regime – indirectly rather than explicitly a consequence of the plot of 20 July – brought the arrest, in all, of over 5,000 persons.33 The ferocity of the onslaught against all conceivable glimmers of opposition following the failed bomb-plot was certainly a show of the regime’s continued untrammelled capacity for ruthless repression. But the utter ruthlessness now contained more than a mere hint of the desperation that indicated a regime whose days were numbered.
On 7 August, the intended show-trials began at the People’s Court in Berlin. The first eight – including Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, and Yorck – of what became a regular procession of the accused were each marched by two policemen into a courtroom bedecked with swastikas, holding around 300 selected spectators (including the journalists hand-picked by Goebbels). There they had to endure the ferocious wrath, scathing contempt, and ruthless humiliation heaped on them by the red-robed president of the court, Judge Roland Freisler. Seated beneath a bust of Hitler, Freisler’s face reflected in its contortions extremes of hatred and derision. He presided over no more than a base mockery of any semblance of a legal trial, with the death-sentence a certainty from the outset. The accused men bore visible signs of their torment in prison. To degrade them even in physical appearance, they were shabbily dressed, without collars and ties, and were handcuffed until seated in the courtroom. Witzleben was even deprived of braces or a belt, so that he had to hold up his trousers with one hand. The accused were not allowed to express themselves properly or explain their motivation before Freisler cut them short, bawling insults, calling them knaves, traitors, cowardly murderers. When, for instance, later in August, Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld tried to point out that his conscience had been wracked by
the many murders he had witnessed in Poland, Freisler would stand none of it. ‘Murders?’ he screamed. ‘You really are a low scoundrel. Are you breaking down under this rottenness?’34 The order had been given – probably by Goebbels, though undoubtedly with Hitler’s authorization – for the court proceedings to be filmed with a view to showing extracts in the newsreels as well as in a ‘documentary’ entitled ‘Traitors before the People’s Court’ (‘Verräter vor dem Volksgericht’). So loudly did Freisler shout that the cameramen had to inform him that he was ruining their sound recordings.35 Nevertheless, the accused managed some moments of courageous defiance. For instance, after the death sentence had predictably been pronounced, General Fellgiebel uttered: ‘Then hurry with the hanging, Mr President; otherwise you will hang earlier than we.’ And Field-Marshal von Witzleben called out: ‘You can hand us over to the hangman. In three months the enraged and tormented people will call you to account, and will drag you alive through the muck of the street.’36 Such a black farce were the trials that even Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack, himself a fanatical Nazi who in his ideological ardour had by this time surrendered practically the last vestiges of a completely perverted legal system to the arbitrary police lawlessness of the SS, subsequently complained about Freisler’s conduct.37
Once the verdicts had been pronounced, the condemned men were taken off, many of them to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. On Hitler’s instructions they were denied any last rites or pastoral care (though this callous order was at least partially bypassed in practice).38 The normal mode of execution for civilian capital offences in the Third Reich was beheading.39 But Hitler had reportedly ordered that he wanted those behind the conspiracy of 20 July 1944 ‘hanged, hung up like meat-carcasses’.40 In the small, single-storey execution room, with white-washed walls, divided by a black curtain, hooks, indeed like meat-hooks, had been placed on a rail just below the ceiling. Usually, the only light in the room came from two windows, dimly revealing a frequently used guillotine. Now, however, certainly for the first groups of conspirators being led to their doom, the executions were to be filmed and photographed, as with the filming of the court proceedings presumably in line with Hitler’s instructions or those of Goebbels, and the macabre scene was illuminated with bright lights, like a film studio. On a small table in the corner of the room stood a table with a bottle of cognac – for the executioners, not to steady the nerves of the victims. The condemned men were led in, handcuffed and wearing prison trousers. There were no last words, no comfort from a priest or pastor; nothing but the black humour of the hangman. Eye-witness accounts speak of the steadfastness and dignity of those executed. The hanging was carried out within twenty seconds of the prisoner entering the room. Death was not, however, immediate. Sometimes it came quickly; in other cases, the agony was slow – lasting more than twenty minutes. In an added gratuitous obscenity, some of the condemned men had their trousers pulled down by their executioners before they died. And all the time the camera whirred.41 The photographs and grisly film were taken to Führer Headquarters. Speer later reported seeing a pile of such photographs lying on Hitler’s map-table when he visited the Wolf’s Lair on 18 August. SS-men and some civilians, he added, went into a viewing of the executions in the cinema that evening, though they were not joined by any members of the Wehrmacht.42 Whether Hitler saw the film of the executions is uncertain; the testimony is contradictory.43
Most of the executions connected with the attempted coup of 20 July 1944 followed within the next weeks. Some took place only months later. By the time the blood-letting subsided, the death-toll of those directly implicated numbered around 200.44 But it was Hitler’s last triumph.
His initial euphoria at what he took to be his survival ordained by Providence, and at the explanation the ‘treachery’ of the plotters offered for the causes of Germany’s military ill-fortune, soon evaporated. The reality of daily setbacks, crises, disasters was too strong even for Hitler to suppress completely. There was little respite. He rapidly had to turn his attention again to military affairs.
However, the Stauffenberg plot left its lasting mark on him. The injuries he had suffered in the bomb blast had been, as we noted, relatively superficial. As if to emphasize his own indestructibility and his manliness in surmounting pain, he made light of his injuries and even joked about them to his entourage.45 But they were less trivial than Hitler himself implied. Blood was still seeping through the bandages from the skin wounds almost a fortnight after the bomb-attack.46 He suffered sharp pain in especially the right ear, and his hearing was impaired.47 He was treated by Dr Erwin Giesing, an ear, nose and throat specialist in a nearby hospital, then by Professor Karl von Eicken, who had removed a throat polyp in 1935 and was now flown in from Berlin. But the ruptured ear-drums, the worst injury, continued bleeding for days, and took several weeks to heal.48 He thought for some time that his right ear would never recover.49 The disturbance to his balance from the inner-ear injuries made his eyes turn to the right and gave him a tendency to lean rightwards when he walked. There was also frequent dizziness and malaise.50 His blood pressure was too high.51 He looked aged, ill, and strained.52 Eleven days after the attack on his life, he told those present at the daily military briefing that he was unfit to speak in public for the time being; he could not stand up for long, feared a sudden attack of dizziness, and was also worried about not walking straight.53 A few weeks later, Hitler admitted to his doctor, Morell, that the weeks since the bomb-attack had been ‘the worst of his life’ – adding that he had mastered the difficulties ‘with a heroism no German could dream of.’54 Strangely, the trembling in Hitler’s left leg and hands practically disappeared following the blast.55 Morell attributed it to the nervous shock. By mid-September, however, the tremor had returned.56 By this time, the heavy daily doses of pills and injections could do nothing to head off the long-term deterioration in Hitler’s health. At least as serious were the pyschological effects.
His sense of distrust and betrayal now reached paranoid levels. Outward precautions were swiftly taken. Security was at once massively tightened at Führer Headquarters.57 At military briefings, all personnel were from now on thoroughly searched for weapons and explosives.58 Hitler’s food and medicines were tested for poison. Any presents of foodstuffs, such as chocolates or caviar (which he was fond of), were immediately destroyed.59 But the outward security measures could do nothing to alter the deep shock that some of his own generals had turned against him. According to Guderian, whom he appointed as successor to Zeitzler as Chief of the General Staff within hours of Stauffenberg’s bomb exploding, ‘he believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence…’60
Although Hitler stressed that his distrust of his military leaders had been vindicated, and though he had found the scapegoats he needed to explain to himself the setbacks on all fronts, he had never contemplated a plot to overthrow him being hatched by those close to the heart of the regime, especially by officers who, far from straining every sinew for Germany’s victory, were doing all they could to undermine the war effort from within. In 1918, according to his distorted vision of the momentous weeks of defeat and revolution, enemies from within had stabbed in the back those fighting at the front. His entire life in politics had been aimed at reversing that disaster, and in eliminating any possible repetition in a new war. Now, a new variant of such treachery had emerged – led, this time, not by Marxist subversives at home threatening the military effort, but by officers of the Wehrmacht who had come close to undermining the war-effort on the home-front.61 Suspicion had always been deeply embedded in Hitler’s nature. But the events of 20 July now transformed the underlying suspicion into the most visceral belief in treachery and betrayal all around him in the army, aimed once more at stabbing in the back a nation engag
ed in a titanic struggle for its very survival.
Alongside the thirsting for brutal revenge, the failed bomb-plot gave a further mighty boost to Hitler’s sense of walking with destiny. With ‘Providence’ on his side, as he imagined, his survival was to him the guarantee that he would fulfil his historic mission. It intensified the descent into pure messianism. ‘These criminals who wanted to do away with me have no idea what would have happened to the German people,’ Hitler told his secretaries. ‘They don’t know the plans of our enemies, who want to annihilate Germany so that it can never arise again. If they think that the western powers are strong enough without Germany to hold Bolshevism in check, they are deceiving themselves. This war must be won by us. Otherwise Europe will be lost to Bolshevism. And I will see to it that no one else can hold me back or eliminate me. I am the only one who knows the danger, and the only one who can prevent it.’62 Such sentiments were redolent, through a distorting mirror, of the Wagnerian redeemer-figure, a hero who alone could save the holders of the Grail, indeed the world itself, from disaster – a latter-day Parsifal.