Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  As a result, precious hours slipped away. Thiele returned around 3:15 p.m. and, after another conversation with Rastenburg, reported that there had been an “explosion in the conference room” at Hitler’s headquarters, which had left “a large number of officers severely wounded.” He thought that his source at Rastenburg may have “im­plied between the lines” that the Fuhrer was “seriously injured or even dead.” This was what prompted Olbricht and Mertz to decide finally to take the decisive step of issuing the Valkyrie orders, on their own initiative if necessary.8 Shortly thereafter, Haeften telephoned from the airport to announce that he and Stauffenberg had just landed, the attack had been successful, and Hitler was dead. When Hoepner suggested that the conspirators at Bendlerstrasse should wait for Stauffenberg to arrive, Olbricht retorted indignantly that there was no more time to lose. He got the deployment orders out of the safe for Fromm to sign. Meanwhile, Mertz called the senior of­ficers of the Army Office together and informed them that Hitler had been assassinated. Beck would take over as head of state, he contin­ued, while Field Marshal Witzleben would assume all executive func­tions of the commander in chief of the Wehrmacht. Major Harnack was ordered to issue Valkyrie II to all military districts; to the city commandant, General Paul von Hase; and to the army schools in and around Berlin. It was shortly before 4:00 p.m.

  Everything now depended on Fromm. But when Olbricht approached him to report that the Hitler had been assassinated, and asked him to give the orders to implement Operation Valkyrie, Fromm hesitated at the very mention of the word. He had received an official reprimand from Keitel for the alert issued on July 15 and was worried lest he fall back out of favor with Hitler, having just returned to his good graces. He therefore telephoned Keitel to ask whether the rumors in Berlin about the death of the Führer were true. The OKW chief replied that an assassination attempt had been made but that Hitler had escaped with only minor injuries. Where exactly, he wanted to know, was Fromm’s chief of staff, Colonel Stauffenberg? Fromm answered that the colonel had not yet returned, and he hung up. He decided simply to do nothing.

  It is not clear whether Olbricht had already sent the orders for Valkyrie II out over the lines before he went to see Fromm. At this point he presumably still thought that Hitler was dead, and he had good reason to expect that Fromm could be won over. When he returned to his office to announce, “Fromm won’t sign,” he discovered that Mertz had plunged feverishly ahead, carrying the plans a step further. Although “Olbricht had once again grown hesitant,” he was “stampeded” into continuing.9 Captain Karl Klausing already had his orders to secure army headquarters; four young officers, Georg von Oppen, Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, Hans Fritzsche, and Ludwig von Hammerstein, had been summoned from the Esplanade Hotel to serve as adjutants; and Major Egbert Hayessen had already set off for the city commandant’s offices. Olbricht now leapt in, helping to orga­nize matters and speed them along. He contacted the other com­manders who were privy to the coup and called General Wagner in Zossen and Field Marshal Kluge in La Roche-Guyon, while Klausing was asked to send off the teleprinter message that began: “The Führer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers from the rear in order to seize power for themselves!” Klausing fin­ished typing and handed the message to the signal traffic chief, Lieutenant Georg Röhrig, but Röhrig immediately noticed that it did not contain the usual secrecy and priority codes. He chased after Klausing, reaching him at the end of the hall, and inquired whether the message should not have the highest secrecy rating. Without much thought, Klausing replied with a nervous “Yes, yes,” a decision that would have enormous unforeseen consequences. For only four typists were available at Bendlerstrasse who were cleared to send secret teleprinter messages, and it took them close to three hours to trans­mit the text. Without the secrecy requirements, the messages could have been sent out at much greater speed over more than twenty teleprinter machines.

  The first message had barely begun to be transmitted when Klausing reappeared in the traffic office with another. It consisted of a number of instructions that hinted at the true nature of Valkyrie. The new communiqué ordered not only that all important buildings and facilities be secured but also that all gauleiters, government ministers, prefects of police, senior SS and police officials, and heads of propaganda offices be arrested and that the concentration camps be seized without delay. Following an injunction to refrain from acts of revenge came the sentence that unmasked the real intentions of the conspirators: “The population must be made aware that we intend to desist from the arbitrary methods of the previous rulers.”10

  Since this message bore Fromm’s name, the conscientious Olbricht felt obliged once again to go and seek the consent of the chief of the reserve army. Hitler was truly dead, he assured Fromm, informing him that therefore “we have issued the code word to launch internal disturbances.” Fromm jumped to his feet. “What do you mean ‘we’?” he bellowed indignantly. “Who gave the order?” he shouted, insisting that he was still the commander. Olbricht said that Mertz was respon­sible, and Fromm ordered that the colonel be brought to him immediately. When Mertz confirmed what he had done, Fromm replied, “Mertz, you are under arrest!”

  On the way back to his office, Olbricht peered out through a window overlooking the courtyard and saw Stauffenberg’s car pull up. It was 4:30 p.m., almost four hours after the explosion in the Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg gave Olbricht a short, hurried report on the assas­sination, and the two men decided to return together to see Fromm. Stauffenberg insisted once again that Hitler was dead: he had witnessed the explosion himself and had seen Hitler being carried out on a stretcher. Fromm remarked that “someone in the Führer’s entou­rage must have been involved,” to which Stauffenberg coolly re­sponded, “I did it.”

  Fromm was flabbergasted, or at least seemed to be. With mounting rage, he told Stauffenberg that Keitel had just assured him the Führer was alive, to which Stauffenberg replied that the field marshal was, as always, lying through his teeth. Unconvinced, Fromm asked Stauffenberg whether he had a pistol and, if so, whether he knew what to do with it at a moment like this. Stauffenberg said he did not have a pistol and in any case would do nothing of the sort, adding that the attack on Hitler was not the final goal but merely the first strike in a general insurrection. Unimpressed by this news, Fromm turned to Mertz von Quirnheim and ordered him to get a pistol. Mertz replied astutely that since Fromm had taken him into custody he could not carry out orders.

  With mounting anger, Fromm now declared that Olbricht and Stauffenberg were under arrest as well. But as if he had been waiting for these words to be uttered, Olbricht turned the tables on the gen­eral by informing him that he was mistaken about the balance of power: it was up to them, not him, to make arrests. Fromm leapt up and rushed at Olbricht with clenched fists but Haeften, Kleist, and several officers from the map room next door separated the two and held Fromm off with a pistol. Resigned, Fromm announced, “Under the circumstances, I consider myself out of commission.” He offered no further resistance and, having requested and received a bottle of cognac, prepared himself to be led away to the office of his aide, Captain Heinz-Ludwig Bartram.

  In the meantime, Beck, Schwerin, Helldorf, Hoepner, Gisevius, and the chief administrative officer for the Potsdam district, Gottfried von Bismarck, had assembled in Olbricht’s office, and Olbricht now told Hoepner that he was to assume Fromm’s duties immediately. Ever the pedant, even in the midst of a coup, Hoepner demanded to have his appointment in writing. The formalities were being com­pleted when Hoepner ran into Fromm in the hallway as he was being taken to his aide’s office. Bowing slightly, Hoepner said that he regretted having to lake over Fromm s office. The deposed general replied, “I’m sorry, Hoepner, but I can’t go along with this. In my opinion, the Führer is not dead and you are making a mistake.”11

  Ii had by now became clear to those at the Wolf’s Lair that the assass
ination attempt signaled the start of a general uprising. They could hardly fail to notice since, due to a switching error, telegram dispatches from army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse were arriving at Führer headquarters as well. By about 4:00 p.m. Hitler had named Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the new commander in chief of the reserve army. Soon thereafter, Keitel instructed the military districts not to obey the orders they were receiving from Bendlerstrasse. Hitler’s counterattack was gathering momentum. As a result of Klausing’s error in giving the orders the top-secret rating, some military districts even received counterinstructions from Führer headquarters before the original orders from Bendlerstrasse arrived, sowing great confusion at first. In Breslau, the military district commanders de­cided against a coup before they even knew it was under way. In Hamburg, party and SS officials went to the office of the district commander, General Wilhelm Wetzel, to drink sherry and vermouth, raise toasts, and swear that they were not about to shoot one another.

  In all the bewilderment over conflicting reports, Beck declared I that he did not “care what was being said, he did not even care what was true; for him, Hitler was dead,” and he urged his fellow conspirators to adopt the same attitude lest they spread confusion in their own ranks, he had begun dictating an address for broadcast in which, anticipating a counterbroadcast, he argued that it “does not matter whether Hitler is dead or alive. A Führer who engenders such conflicts among his closest associates that it comes to an assassination attempt is morally dead.”12 The only chance that the conspirators still seemed to have was that the fictions they had invented would be widely believed. The key question was whether this makeshift justifi­cation would have enough force to insure that orders passed down the chain of command would be strictly obeyed. Anything less and the coup would not succeed.

  That the course of events still depended on the courage and determination of a handful of officers could be seen on a number of occasions during that chaotic day. Among the outposts that received early warnings was that of the Berlin city commandant, General Paul von Hase. As Operation Valkyrie was launched, he called the head of the army ordnance school, Brigadier General Walter Bruns; the head of the army explosives school, Colonel Helmuth Schwierz; and the com­mander of the guard battalion, Major Otto Ernst Remer, to his head­quarters at 1 Unter den Linden, where he gave them their orders. By 6:00 p.m. the Ministry of Propaganda had been cordoned off, two sentries had been posted in front of Goebbels’s house, and Goebbels himself, having seen what was taking place on the street, had disap­peared into a back room to get a few cyanide capsules.13 Half an hour later the government quarter had also been surrounded by the guard battalion. Only the units from the ordnance school in the Berlin sub­urb of Treptow, which were supposed to occupy the city palace, were delayed, because their trucks did not arrive on schedule to transport them.

  Elsewhere, too, things were going according to plan. Units of the elite Grossdeutschland reserve brigade stationed in Cottbus, near Berlin, occupied the radio stations and transmitters in Herzberg and Königs Wusterhausen and seized control of the local Nazi Party of­fices and SS barracks without encountering resistance. When news of Hitler’s assassination reached Krampnitz, the senior officer at the post, Colonel Harald Momm, shouted, “Orderly! A bottle of cham­pagne! The swine is dead!” Although there were some delays there, the Valkyrie units were finally mobilized. Those in Döberitz, too, were ready to go, and Major Friedrich Jakob had orders to seize the main broadcasting center on Masurenallee in Berlin, block all trans­missions, and then rendezvous with a signal officer who would be dispatched by headquarters. Bendlerstrasse issued a list of targets to be seized, ranging from SS and party offices down to various minis­tries and finally the city administration; the explosives school contrib­uted by forming thirty task forces of ten men each to help. Helldorf alerted the security police to be ready for a wave of arrests.

  But from this point on, things began to go awry. Helldorf received no further instructions. Major Jakob succeeded in occupying the broadcasting center on Masurenallee, but the signal officer failed to appear because General Thiele had vanished. In his absence, Jakob relied for technical information on the station manager, who assured him that broadcasting had stopped when, in fact, it was continuing. Back on Bendlerstrasse, Beck urgently awaited news that the station had been occupied. The units that seized the Nauen and Tegel trans­mitters on the outskirts of Berlin had experiences similar to that at Masurenallee. At 5:42 p.m., and in quick succession thereafter, a series of communiqués was broadcast from Führer headquarters an­nouncing the attack and the serious injuries suffered by Schmundt, Brandt, and the stenographer, Berger, but also reporting that Hitler himself had escaped injury and “resumed his work” immediately.

  At the conspiracy’s headquarters on Bendlerstrasse, signs of uncertainty were beginning to appear. When SS Oberführer Humbert Pifrader arrived, on Himmler’s orders, at 5:00 p.m., demanding to see Stauffenberg, he was arrested with no fuss. But when the commander of the Berlin military district, General Kortzfleisch, appeared shortly thereafter and was similarly arrested after flatly refusing to join the coup, he was belligerent, roaring at Hammerstein, who was standing guard over him, that he wanted to know to whom exactly he had sworn his oath of loyalty. Kortzfleisch eventually calmed down and complained that he just wasn’t prepared to participate in a coup; he had always considered himself nothing but a soldier and was now “interested only in one thing: going home and pulling weeds in my garden.” The conspirators replaced him with General Karl von Thüngen, but even the new man hesitated, feeling that the situation was still far too murky. He lingered for a long time at Bendlerstrasse talking things over before finally proceeding reluctantly to his com­mand post on Hohenzollerndamm, where the chief of staff, General Otto Herfurth, ruminated over the onerous decisions that had fallen to him. Herfurth repeatedly requested more information and delayed the implementation of the orders he was receiving. Finally he sank down onto his field cot and declared himself ill.14

  Although the inner circle of conspirators still held firm, Major Remer, who commanded a guard battalion in Berlin, had figured out by this time that he was risking his neck. Urged on by a suspicious propaganda officer, but in defiance of explicit orders from his superior officer, General Hase, he decided to seek the advice of Goebbels. Remer arrived al Goebbels’s apartment at about 7:00 p.m. to find Major Martin Korff of the explosives school attempting to arrest Goebbels. The minister was clever enough to recognize that Remer felt torn between his oath of allegiance and his orders, and he quickly telephoned Führer headquarters in Rastenburg.

  Hitler himself came on the line and asked Remer if he recognized his voice. When Remer said he did, the Führer conferred on him plenary powers to put down the uprising. Remer scarcely had time to think. Overwhelmed by the discovery that Hitler was still alive and by the magnitude of his new responsibilities, he immediately removed the cordon that had been set up around the government quarter and gradually took command of the units and task forces already in the city center and those arriving there. When Colonel Jäger came to take Goebbels away, the sentries on duty already had orders to protect the minister. The uprising had begun to collapse.

  Those conspirators who had insisted that killing Hitler was the crucial prerequisite for a coup were proved right, though now it was too late. The decisive importance of the Führer was most powerfully evinced by Remer’s actions but could also be seen in the reactions of Fromm, Thüngen, Herfurth, and others and in the endless, para­lyzing debates that took place in many barracks after the initial radio broadcasts reported Hitler as alive. The fact that Olbricht and Stauffenberg were issuing orders that exceeded their authority-a fact cer­tainly noted with suspicion by some officers-did not itself jeopardize the coup, because the Wehrmacht command structure was confusing to begin with and, in any case, all power was finally centralized in the hands of Adolf Hitler. It did, however, mean the chain of command would not function automatically.

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sp; But by this time it was not just the chain of command that was coming apart. Already that afternoon Fellgiebel had despondently refused to speak with Olbricht, informing him in a message that “there’s no reason for all that anymore.” Perhaps Fellgiebel realized what a horrendous error he had made in reporting that the assassina­tion had failed. He saw that the only chance the conspirators had ever really possessed was to forge ahead single-mindedly and to play the one card they had held from the outset In any case, on hearing that Thiele had disappeared (it later turned out that he had gone to see Walter Schellenberg at Reich Security Headquarters), Fellgiebel re­marked that Thiele was “making a big mistake if he thinks he can intricate himself like this.”15 Stieff, too, tried to defect. Meanwhile Hoepner sat in his office and stared darkly and irresolutely ahead, responding lamely to requests for information. If Hitler really was alive, he told Beck, then “everything that we’re doing is senseless.” It would all come down, he added, “to a test of strength.” To which Beck replied acidly, “That’s for sure.”16 But where was Witzleben, his fellow conspirators wondered, and where, for that matter, was Gen­eral Lindemann, who was supposed to read the conspirators’ grand proclamation over the radio?

  Only a few of the plotters refused to give up: Mertz, Olbricht, Heck, Schulenburg, Haeften, Schwerin, Yorck, and Gerstenmaier, who had by now arrived at army headquarters. And then, of course, there was Stauffenberg, hurrying back and forth through crowded offices and hallways from one incessantly ringing telephone to the next, convincing skeptical callers, issuing orders, coaxing, pressuring, reassuring. Even Gisevius, who had always disliked him, was forced to admit that Stauffenberg was the only person “on top of the situation.” Gisevius overheard Stauffenberg tell callers that Hitler was dead. The operation is in full swing, he insisted, the panzers are on their way… Fromm is not available… Of course Keitel is lying… Orders must be obeyed… Everything depends on holding firm… The officers’ time has come.