by Ian Kershaw
What the conspirators had done to Fromm had been to lock him in his room and give him sandwiches and wine. Fromm was less naïve. He had his neck to save – or so he thought. He told the putschists they were under arrest and demanded they surrender all weapons. Beck asked to retain his ‘for private use’. Fromm ordered him to make use of it immediately. Beck said at that moment he was thinking of earlier days. Fromm urged him to get on with it. Beck put the gun to his head, but succeeded only in grazing himself on the temple. Fromm offered the others a few moments should they wish to write any last words. Hoepner availed himself of the opportunity, sitting at Olbricht’s desk; so did Olbricht himself. Beck, meanwhile, reeling from the glancing blow to his head, refused attempts to take the pistol from him, and insisted on being allowed another shot. Even then, he only managed a severe head-wound. With Beck writhing on the floor, Fromm left the room to learn that a unit of the guard-battalion had entered the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. He knew, too, that Himmler, the newly appointed commander of the reserve army, was on his way. There was no time to lose. He returned to his room after five minutes and announced that he had held a court-martial in the name of the Führer. Mertz, Olbricht, Haeften, and ‘this colonel whose name I will no longer mention’ had been sentenced to death. ‘Take a few men and execute this sentence downstairs in the yard at once,’ he ordered an officer standing by. Stauffenberg tried to take all responsibility on his own shoulders, stating that the others had been merely carrying out his orders. Fromm said nothing, as the four men were taken to their execution, and Hoepner – initially also earmarked for execution, but spared for the time being following a private discussion with Fromm – was led out into captivity. With a glance at the dying Beck, Fromm commanded one of the officers to finish him off. The former Chief of the General Staff was unceremoniously dragged into the adjacent room and shot dead.
The condemned men were rapidly escorted downstairs into the courtyard, where a firing-squad of ten men drawn from the guard-battalion was already waiting. To add to the macabre scene, the drivers of the vehicles parked in the courtyard had been ordered to turn their headlights on the little pile of sand near the doorway from which Stauffenberg and his fellow-conspirators emerged. Without ceremony, Olbricht was put on the sand-heap and promptly shot. Next to be brought forward was Stauffenberg. Just as the execution-squad opened fire, Haeften threw himself in front of Stauffenberg, and died first. It was to no avail. Stauffenberg was immediately placed again on the sand-heap. As the shots rang out, he was heard to cry: ‘Long live holy Germany.’ Seconds later, the execution of the last of the four, Mertz von Quirnheim, followed. Fromm at once had a telegram dispatched, announcing the bloody suppression of the attempted coup and the execution of the ringleaders. Then he gave an impassioned address to those assembled in the courtyard, attributing Hitler’s wondrous salvation to the work of Providence. He ended with a three-fold ‘Sieg Heil’ to the Führer.
While the bodies of the executed men, along with Beck’s corpse, which had been dragged downstairs into the yard, were taken off in a lorry to be buried – next day Himmler had them exhumed and cremated – the remaining conspirators in the Bendlerblock were arrested. It was around half an hour after midnight.
Apart from the lingering remnants of the coup in Paris, Prague, and Vienna, and apart from the terrible and inevitable reprisals to follow, the last attempt to topple Hitler and his regime from within was over.
VI
Hours earlier on this eventful 20 July 1944, shortly after arriving back in his bunker following the explosion, Hitler had refused to contemplate cancelling the planned visit of the Duce, scheduled for 2.30 p.m. that afternoon, but delayed half an hour because of the late arrival of Mussolini’s train. It was to prove the last of the seventeen meetings of the two dictators. It was certainly the strangest. Outwardly composed, there was little to denote that Hitler had just escaped an attempt on his life. He greeted Mussolini with his left hand, since he had difficulty in raising his injured right arm. He told the shocked Duce what had happened, then led him to the ruined wooden hut where the explosion had taken place. In a macabre scene, amid the devastation, accompanied only by the interpreter, Paul Schmidt, Hitler described to his fellow-dictator where he had stood, right arm leaning on the table as he studied the map, when the bomb went off. He showed him the singed hair at the back of his head. Hitler sat down on an upturned box. Schmidt found a still usable stool amid the debris for Mussolini. For a few moments, neither dictator said a word. Then Hitler, in a quiet voice, said: ‘When I go through it all again … I conclude from my wondrous salvation, while others present in the room received serious injuries … that nothing is going to happen to me.’ He was ever more convinced, he added, that it was given to him to lead their common cause to a victorious end.
The same theme, that Providence had saved him, ran through Hitler’s address transmitted by all radio stations soon after midnight. Hitler said he was speaking to the German people for two reasons: to let them hear his voice, and know that he was uninjured and well; and to tell them about a crime without parallel in German history. ‘A tiny clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and at the same time criminal, stupid officers has forged a plot to eliminate me and at the same time to eradicate with me the staff practically of the German armed forces’ leadership.’ He likened it to the stab-in-the-back of 1918. But this time, the ‘tiny gang of criminal elements’ would be ‘mercilessly eradicated’. On three separate occasions he referred to his survival as ‘a sign of Providence that I must continue my work, and therefore will continue it’.
In fact, as so often in his life, it had not been Providence that had saved him, but luck: the luck of the devil.
26
No Way Out
I
‘Now I finally have the swine who have been sabotaging my work for years,’ raged Hitler as details of the plot against him started to emerge. ‘Now I have proof: the entire General Staff is contaminated.’ His long-standing, deep-seated distrust of his army leaders had found its confirmation. It suddenly seemed blindingly obvious to him why his military plans had encountered such setbacks: they had been sabotaged throughout by the treachery of his army officers. ‘Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years,’ he ranted. ‘It was all treason! But for those traitors, we would have won long ago. Here is my justification before history’ (an indication, too, that Hitler was consciously looking to his place in the pantheon of Teutonic heroes). Goebbels, as so often, echoed Hitler’s sentiments. ‘The generals are not opposed to the Führer because we are experiencing crises at the front,’ he entered in his diary. ‘Rather, we are experiencing crises at the front because the generals are opposed to the Führer.’ Hitler was convinced of an ‘inner blood-poisoning’. With leading positions occupied by traitors bent on destroying the Reich, he railed, with key figures such as General Eduard Wagner (responsible as Quartermaster-General for army supplies) and General Erich Fellgiebel (chief of signals operations at Führer Headquarters) connected to the conspiracy, it was no wonder that German military tactics had been known in advance by the Red Army. It had been ‘permanent treachery’ all along. It was symptomatic of an underlying ‘crisis in morale’. Action ought to have been taken sooner. It had been known, after all, for one and a half years that there were traitors in the army. But now, an end had to be made. ‘These most base creatures to have worn the soldier’s uniform in the whole of history, this rabble which has preserved itself from bygone times, must be got rid of and driven out.’ Military recovery would follow recovery from the crisis in morale. It would be ‘Germany’s salvation’.
Vengeance was uppermost in Hitler’s mind. There would be no mercy in the task of cleansing the Augean stables. Swift and ruthless action would be taken. He would ‘wipe out and eradicate’ the lot of them, he raged. ‘These criminals’ would not be granted an honourable soldier’s execution by firing-squad. They would be expelled from the Wehrmacht, brought as civilians before the court
, and executed within two hours of sentence. ‘They must hang immediately, without any mercy,’ he declared. He gave orders to set up a military ‘Court of Honour’, in which senior generals (including among others Keitel, Rundstedt – who presided – and Guderian) would expel in disgrace those found to have been involved in the plot. Those subsequently sentenced to death by the People’s Court, he ordered, were to be hanged in prison clothing as criminals. He spoke favourably of Stalin’s purges of his officers. ‘The Führer is extraordinarily furious at the generals, especially those of the General Staff,’ noted Goebbels after seeing Hitler on 22 July. ‘He is absolutely determined to set a bloody example and to eradicate a freemasons’ lodge which has been opposed to us all the time and has only awaited the moment to stab us in the back in the most critical hour. The punishment which must now be meted out has to have historic dimensions.’
Hitler had been outraged at Colonel-General Fromm’s peremptory action in having Stauffenberg and the other leaders of the attempted coup immediately executed by firing-squad. He gave orders forthwith that other plotters captured should appear before the People’s Court. The President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, a fanatical Nazi who, despite early sympathies with the radical Left, had been ideologically committed to the völkisch cause since the early 1920s, saw himself – a classical instance of ‘working towards the Führer’ – as pronouncing judgement as the ‘Führer would judge the case himself’. The People’s Court was, for him, expressly a ‘political court’. Under his presidency, the number of death sentences delivered by the court had risen from 102 in 1941 to 2,097 in 1944. It was little wonder that he had already gained notoriety as a ‘hanging judge’. Recapitulating Hitler’s comments at their recent meeting, Goebbels remarked that those implicated in the plot were to be brought before the People’s Court ‘and sentenced to death’. Freisler, he added, ‘would find the right tone to deal with them’. Hitler himself was keen above all that the conspirators should be permitted ‘no time for long speeches’ during their defence. ‘But Freisler will see to that,’ he added. ‘That’s our Vyschinsky’ – a reference to Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the show-trials of the 1930s.
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. 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. 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.
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 – 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. 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.
Shortly before 4 a.m., Bormann was able to inform the party’s provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, that the putsch was at an end. By then, those arrested in the Bendlerstraße – including Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, former senior 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. 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. Prussian Finance Minister Popitz, former Economics Minister Schacht, former Chief of Staff Colonel-General Halder, 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. Major-General Henning von Tresckow, the early driving-force behind the attempts to assassinate Hitler, killed himself in similar fashion at the front near Ostrov 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.
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. 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, expanded its investigations, the numbers arrested rapidly swelled to 600 persons. 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. 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. As the list lengthened, and the extent of the conspiracy became clear, Hitler’s fury and bitter resentment against the conservatives – especially the landed aristocracy – who had never fully accepted him mounted. ‘We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but unfortunately forgot to finish off the class struggle on the Right,’ he was heard to remark. 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.
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 e
ven 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. 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’. So loudly did Freisler shout that the cameramen had to inform him that he was ruining their sound recordings. 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.’ 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.