by Ian Kershaw
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). The normal mode of execution for civilian capital offences in the Third Reich was beheading. But Hitler had reportedly ordered that he wanted those behind the conspiracy of 20 July 1944 ‘hanged, hung up like meat-carcasses’. In the small, single-storey execution room, with whitewashed 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, 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. 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. Whether Hitler saw the film of the executions is uncertain; the testimony is contradictory.
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. But it was Hitler’s last triumph.
The Stauffenberg plot left its lasting mark on him. The injuries he had suffered in the bomb blast had been, as we saw, 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. 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. He suffered sharp pain in especially the right ear, and his hearing was impaired. 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 eardrums, the worst injury, continued bleeding for days, and took several weeks to heal. He thought for some time that his right ear would never recover. 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. His blood pressure was too high. He looked aged, ill, and strained. 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. 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’. Strangely, the trembling in Hitler’s left leg and hands practically disappeared following the blast. Morell attributed it to the nervous shock. By mid-September, however, the tremor had returned. 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 psychological 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. At military briefings, all personnel were from now on thoroughly searched for weapons and explosives. 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. 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 Army 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.’
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. 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 engaged 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.’ 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.
But, once more looking to his own place in history, and to the reasons why the path of destiny had led to mounting tragedy for Germany, instead of glorious victory, he found a further reason, beyond the treachery of his generals: the weakness of the people. If Speer can be believed, Hitler gave at this time an intimation that the German people might not deserve him, might have proved weak, have failed its test before history, and thus be condemned to destruction. It was one of the few hints, whether in public or in private, amid the continued outpourings of optimism about the outcome of the war, that Hitler indeed contemplated, even momentarily, the possibility of total defeat.
Whatever the positive gloss he instinctively and insistently placed upon news of the latest setbacks as he continued to play the role of Führer to perfection, he was not devoid of understanding for the significance of the successful landing of the western Allies in Normandy, the dramatic collapse of the eastern front which left the Red Army in striking distance of the borders of the Reich itself, the ceaseless bombing that the Luftwaffe was powerless to prevent, the overwhelming Allied superiority in weaponry and raw materials, and gloomy reports
of a mounting, critical fuel shortage. Kluge and Rommel had both urged Hitler to end the war which he could not win. But he continued to dismiss out of hand all talk of suing for peace. The situationwas ‘not yet ripe for a political solution’, he declared. ‘To hope for a favourable political moment to do something during a time of severe military defeats is naturally childish and naïve,’ he went on, during the military briefing session with his generals on 31 August 1944. ‘Such moments can present themselves when you have successes.’ But where were the successes likely to materialize? All he could point to was a feeling of certainty that at some point the Allied coalition would break down under the weight of its inner tensions. It was a matter of waiting for that moment, however tough the situation was.
‘My task has been,’ he continued, ‘especially since 1941 under no circumstances to lose my nerve.’ He lived, he said, just to carry out this struggle since he knew that it it could only be won through a will of iron. Instead of spreading this iron will, the General Staff officers had undermined it, disseminating nothing but pessimism. But the fight would continue, if necessary even on the Rhine. He once more evoked one of his great heroes of history. ‘We will under all circumstances carry on the struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned opponents is tired of fighting any longer, and until we get a peace which secures the existence of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and’ – he was back at a central obsession – ‘which, above all, does not defile our honour a second time, as happened in 1918.’ This thought brought him directly to the bomb plot, and to his own survival. ‘Fate could have taken a different turn,’ he continued, adding with some pathos: ‘If my life had been ended, it would have been for me personally, I might say, only a liberation from worries, sleepless nights, and severe nervous strain. In a mere fraction of a second you’re freed from all that and have rest and your eternal peace. For the fact that I’m still alive, I nevertheless have to thank Providence.’
They were somewhat rambling thoughts. But they were plain enough in meaning: a negotiated peace could not be considered except from a position of strength (which was in realistic terms unimaginable); the only hope was to hold out until the Allied coalition collapsed (but time, and the crass imbalance of material resources, were scarcely on Germany’s side); his historic role, as he saw it, was to eradicate any possibility of a second capitulation on the lines of that of November 1918; he alone stood between Germany and calamity; but suicide would bring release for him (whatever the consequences for the German people) within a split second. In Hitler’s extraordinary perspective, his historic task was to continue the fight to the point of utter destruction – and even self-destruction – in order to prevent another ‘November 1918’ and to erase the memory of that ‘disgrace’ for the nation. It was a task of infinitely greater honour than negotiating a peace from weakness – something which would bring new shame on himself and the German people. It amounted to scarcely less than a realization that the time for a last stand was approaching, and that no holds would be barred in a struggle likely to end in oblivion, where the only remaining monumental vision was the quest for historical greatness – even if Reich and people should go down in flames in the process.
This meant in turn that there was no way out. The failure of the conspiracy to remove Hitler took away the last opportunity of a negotiated end to the war. The horrors of a war which Germany had inflicted on the rest of Europe were rebounding – if, even now, in far milder form – on to the Reich itself. With internal resistance crushed, and a leadership unable to bring victory, incapable of staving off defeat, and unwilling to attempt to find peace, only total military destruction could bring a release.
For Hitler’s countless victims throughout Europe, the human misery had, in fact, still not reached its peak. It would rise in crescendo in the months still to come.
II
The institutional pillars of the regime – the Wehrmacht, the party, ministries of state, and the SS-controlled security apparatus – remained intact in the second half of 1944. And Hitler, the keystone bonding the regime’s structure together, was still, paradoxically, indispensable to its survival while – by now even in the eyes of some close to the leadership – at the same time driving Germany inexorably towards perdition. The predictable rallying round Hitler following the July assassination attempt could not for long conceal the fact that the regime’s edifice was beginning to crumble as the Nazi empire throughout Europe shrivelled and the increasing certainty of a lost war made even some of those who had gained most from Nazism start looking for possible exit-routes. The aftermath of the bomb-plot saw the regime enter its most radical phase. But it was a radicalism that mirrored an increasingly desperate regime’s reaction to internal as well as external crisis.
Hitler’s own obvious reaction in the wake of the shock of Stauffenberg’s bomb had been to turn to his firm loyalist base, the party leadership, and to his most long-standing and trusted band of paladins. In the backs-to-the-wall atmosphere of the last months, the party was to play a more dominant role than at any time since the ‘seizure of power’, invoking the overcoming of adversity in the ‘time of struggle’, attempting to instil the ‘fighting spirit of National Socialism’ throughout the entire people in the increasingly vain attempt to combat overwhelming Allied arms and material superiority by little more than fanatical will-power.
As had invariably been the case in a crisis, Hitler had lost no time following the attempted coup on 20 July in ensuring the continued loyalty of the Gauleiter, the party’s provincial chieftains. Among them were some who had been among his most dependable lieutenants for close on two decades. Collectively, the Gauleiter constituted now, as before, a vital prop of his rule. His provincial viceroys were now, their party positions enhanced through their extensive powers as Reich Defence Commissars, his insurance against any prospect of army-led unrest or possible insurrection in the regions. Increasingly over the next months, as the threads of state administration started to fray and ultimately fell apart, the party chieftains – especially those who acted as Reich Defence Commissars in their regions – were decisive in holding together in the provinces what was left of Nazi rule.
Extended scope for propaganda, mobilization, and tightened control over the population – the overriding tasks of the party as most people looked beyond the end of the regime and looming military defeat into an uncertain future – fell to the Reich Defence Commissars in the last desperate drive to maximize resources for ‘total war’. The shortages of available men to be sent to the front, and workers for the armaments industries, had mounted alarmingly throughout the first half of 1944. Hitler’s authorization in January to Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment, to make up the manpower shortages through forced labour extracted from the occupied territories, while at the same time according Speer protection for the labour employed in his armaments plants in France, had done nothing to resolve the difficulty and merely sharpened the conflict between Sauckel and Speer. Apart from Speer, the SS, the Wehrmacht, and the party had also proved adept at preventing any inroads into their personnel. Bormann had even presided over a 51 per cent increase in the number of ‘reserved occupations’, exempt from call-up, in the party administration between May 1943 and June 1944.
Meanwhile, the labour shortage had been greatly magnified through the double military disaster in June of the Allied landing in Normandy and the Red Army’s devastating offensive on the eastern front. This had prompted Goebbels and Speer to link their efforts to persuade Hitler to agree to a drastic radicalization of the ‘home front’ to comb out all remaining manpower for the war effort. Both had sent him lengthy memoranda in mid-July, promising huge labour savings to tide over the situation until new weaponry became available and the anti-German coalition broke up. But before the Stauffenberg bomb, Hitler had, as we noted, shown little readiness to comply with their radical demands. Whatever the accompanying rhetoric, and the undoubted feeling (which Goebbels’s own propag
anda had helped feed) among the underprivileged that many of the better-off were still able to escape the burdens of war, and were not pulling their weight in the national cause, such demands were bound to be unpopular in many circles, antagonize powerful vested interests, and also convey an impression of desperation. And, as the state administration rushed to point out, the gains might well be less than impressive; only one in twelve of those in the civil service who had not been called up was under forty-three, and more than two-thirds were over fifty-five years old.
Hitler had told his Propaganda Minister as recently as June that the time was not ripe for ‘a big appeal to total war in the true meaning of the word’, that the crises would be surmounted ‘in the usual way’, but that he would be ready to introduce ‘wholly abnormal measures’ should ‘more serious crises take place’. Hitler’s change of mind, directly following the failed assassination attempt, in deciding to grant Goebbels the new authority he had coveted, as Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort, was a tacit admission that the regime was faced with a more fundamental crisis than ever before.
Goebbels’s decisive action to put down the uprising on 20 July unquestionably weighed heavily in his favour when Hitler looked for the man to supervise the radicalization of the home front. And where before he had faced a hesitant Hitler, he was now pushing at an open door in his demands for draconian measures. The decision had in effect already been taken when, at a meeting of ministerial representatives along with some other leading figures in the regime two days after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, head of the Reich Chancellery Lammers proposed the bestowing of wide-ranging powers on the Propaganda Minister to bring about the reform of the state and public life. Himmler was given extensive complementary powers at the same time to reorganize the Wehrmacht and comb out all remaining manpower. The following day, 23 July, the regime’s leaders, now joined by Göring, assembled at the Wolf ’s Lair, where Hitler himself, heavily leaning on Goebbels’s memorandum of the previous week, confirmed the new role of the Propaganda Minister. Hitler demanded ‘something fundamental’ if the war were still to be won. Massive reserves were available, he claimed, but had not been deployed. This would now have to be done without respect to person, position, or office. He pointed to the party in the early days, which had achieved ‘the greatest historic success’ with only a simple administrative apparatus. Goebbels noted with interest the change in Hitler’s views since their previous meeting a month or so earlier. The assassination attempt and the events on the eastern front had produced clarity in his decisions, Goebbels noted in his diary. To his own staff, the Propaganda Minister laconically remarked that ‘it takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason’.