Away from the maelstrom sat Beck, asking time and again when news would arrive that the broadcasting center had been occupied. Since Lindemann had the only copy of the proclamation, Beck began working on a new version. Then he spoke with Kluge in France, but Clever Hans, true to form, refused to commit himself. Beck also made contact with the chief of staff of the army group that had been nearly cut off by the advancing Red Army in Courland and issued an order to withdraw the troops; he took the time to write a small note to this effect at the top of the proclamation “for future historians.” The order was to be the only one he would issue in his new position.
At about 8:00 p.m. Witzleben appeared at Bendlerstrasse. Everyone realized that the moment of decision had come. Witzleben had just paid General Wagner a visit and knew that the assassination attempt had failed. His cap in one hand and his marshal’s baton in the other, he strode into the cluster of waiting conspirators. Stauffenberg rushed up to deliver a status report but Witzleben brushed him aside, barking, “What a mess!” and proceeded with Beck into Fromm’s office. Beck attempted to calm the furious Witzleben and to give him some idea of the difficulties that had arisen; the field marshal was not, however, in a forgiving mood. Stauffenberg and Schwerin were summoned, and one witness was able to discern through the glass of the sliding door that an angry debate had broken out, with Witzleben periodically banging his fist on the table.
There was no disputing that, for whatever reason, neither the government quarter nor the radio stations had been brought under the conspirators’ control; nor were there even any battle-ready units standing by. Apparently Witzleben made no attempt to seize the initiative and save the situation. He had come, it seemed, solely in order to take command of the Wehrmacht from the conspirators. Stauffenberg and Schwerin stood by “like marble pillars.” After three-quarters of an hour, a red-faced Witzleben burst from the room, stalked through the throng of officers waiting outside, descended the stairs, and drove off. And, as if these events were of no relevance to him, he returned to Zossen and coldly announced to General Wagner, “We’re going home.”17
Only Stauffenberg still appeared unwilling to admit that the coup was doomed. After Witzleben’s departure he hurried back to his telephones, shouting out encouragement with a fervor born of desperation. Even he must have sensed, however, the growing coolness and distance on all sides. At about this point, Fromm discovered that a side door to Bartram’s office had been left unguarded, and he succeeded with his aide’s help in contacting the branch heads of the reserve army and ordering countermeasures. Increasingly convinced that the coup was doomed, some of the branch heads went to see Olbricht and demanded to know what was happening. Told that the Führer was dead, one of them, General Karl-Wilhelm Specht, replied that the radio was reporting just the opposite. He had sworn an oath of loyally to Hitler, Specht said, and could not act on the basis of mere rumors of the Führer’s death. All the other heads supported Specht’s decision. Two hours earlier Olbricht would simply have placed them all under arrest, as he had Fromm and Kortzfleisch. Now, though, they were quietly allowed to depart.
Outside headquarters, other officers who had gone along with the conspirators were beginning to switch sides as well. At 9:00 p.m. Kleist returned from the city commandant’s headquarters and reported that the guard battalion had defected. General Hase had been to see Goebbels and, after a short discussion, accepted his invitation to dinner. This tête-à-tête with the minister had soon been interrupted, however, by the arrival of the Gestapo, who carted Hase away. Fromm, still under guard at Bendlerstrasse, asked Hoepner if he could be moved to his private apartment, one floor above where he was being held. He would do nothing, he promised, to hurt the cause of the conspirators. Hoepner agreed, perhaps simply as a courtesy to an old army comrade but more likely because he had long since abandoned hope and was trying to curry favor with someone who might intercede on his behalf.
Everywhere there were signs that the Nazis were regaining the upper hand. When Gisevius called on Helldorf and Nebe and learned that Himmler was flying back to Berlin, he, like them, became convinced that the coup had failed. At army headquarters, Colonel Glaesemer, the commander of the armored unit from Krampnitz that had taken up position in the Tiergarten in the early evening-who had been placed under arrest by Olbricht for refusing to carry out orders once the tide began to turn-now simply stood up and walked out. Similarly, Mertz attempted to arrest Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schlee of the guard battalion, who, under orders from Remer, was trying to withdraw the sentries from in front of army headquarters. But Schlee escaped easily and soon returned at the head of a detachment to begin countermeasures. Having surrounded army headquarters, Schlee stationed guards with machine guns at every entrance and locked away in the porter’s room all those who attempted to oppose him. Even the valiant Mertz gave up, telling Schulenburg that the “cause is lost.”18
Earlier Olbricht had called a meeting of those officers on his staff who had not been informed about the conspiracy: Franz Herber, Karl Pridun, Bolko von der Heyde, Fritz Harnack, and Herbert Fliessbach. Although they had all come to realize during the course of the afternoon that they were being swept up in a coup, they had continued to carry out their orders correctly, if unenthusiastically. Perhaps it was a mistake for Olbricht not to have taken them into his confidence earlier. In any case, they now displayed the kind of resentment felt by those who have been ignored, a class of people that has more than once been the undoing of tottering regimes. Moreover, these officers were understandably reluctant to be invited onto a sinking ship. When Olbricht withheld information that they demanded to know, evaded their questions, and then ordered them to take over the defense of the building and stand guard, they decided to confer with one another in Heyde’s office. Meanwhile, some distance away, in Mertz’s office, Gerstenmaier was suggesting that the conspirators should ready their weapons. But Yorck objected, saying that if it came down to a direct confrontation, Goring could simply bomb army headquarters to oblivion.
While the officers in Heyde’s office were discussing why they were defending army headquarters and against whom, the weapons Olbricht had promised arrived. Taking pistols, submachine guns, and grenades in hand, they decided to go see Olbricht once again and get some answers. They set off down the hall with a great clatter, sweeping the officers they found along the way into Olbricht’s office. Herber demanded, “Herr General, are you for or against the Führer?” When Olbricht failed to reply, Herber insisted on seeing Fromm. Olbricht referred him instead to Hoepner.
At this moment Stauffenberg entered the room. Pridun and some other members of the group attempted to grab him, but he managed to pull free and escape through the adjoining suite of rooms to Mertz’s office. As he tried to reenter the hall, shots suddenly rang out. No one could later say who fired first. Stauffenberg had managed to load his revolver by using the three fingers of his remaining hand and clamping the stump of his other arm against his hip. He got off a shot at Pridun, but then he himself was hit in the upper left arm and dodged back into the office, leaving a trail of blood.
The shooting slopped as abruptly as it had started. While Olbricht, Herber, and the others set off to find Hoepner, Stauffenberg remained behind and asked one of the secretaries to contact Paris. He still clung to the dim hope that Stülpnagel, Hofacker, and possibly Kluge had finally made their move and that even now the troops were rolling in from the west. All day he had worn his black eye patch, but now he took it off, as if in a gesture of capitulation. The connection with Paris was never established.
In the meantime, Herber and his group were joined by others at Bendlerstrasse who had been waiting to see how events would unfold and who now emerged from hiding places all over army headquarters and headed for Hoepner’s office. Everyone passing through the corridors was confronted at gunpoint with the question “Are you for or against the Führer?” It was shortly after 11:00 p.m. Fully aware of the authority with which he had suddenly been inve
sted, Herber loudly demanded of Hoepner, “What game are you trying to play?” and insisted on speaking with Fromm himself. Hoepner replied that the general was in his private apartment. And while one member of the group set out to get Fromm, the others began to disarm all the conspirators they could find in the offices and hallways.
Within minutes General Fromm appeared, strutting at the head of a retinue of armed supporters. For a moment he halted in the office doorway, obviously savoring the scene before him. Olbricht was standing at the map table with Stauffenberg beside him, Beck sat in the foreground at a small table, and Mertz, Haeften, and Hoepner stood off to the side. Taking a few steps into the office, Fromm remarked, “So, gentlemen, now it’s my turn to do to you what you did lo me this afternoon.”19
In fact, however, Fromm proceeded much more decisively. Wasting no time, he placed the six main conspirators under arrest and demanded, pistol in hand, that they relinquish their weapons. Beck asked to keep his pistol “for private purposes,” to which Fromm replied gruffly, “Go ahead, but be quick about it!” Wishing to make a final statement, Beck raised his revolver to his temple and began, “I think now of earlier times-” But Fromm cut him off impatiently. “I told you, just do it!” he shouted. Beck paused for a moment and then, in front of several onlookers, squeezed the trigger. The bullet merely grazed his head. Fromm ordered two officers to take Beck’s revolver away, but Beck resisted clumsily, firing and wounding himself once again and collapsing in a heap-still alive.
Leaving the former chief of general staff dying on the floor, Fromm turned to the other conspirators: “If you wish to make a statement or write something, you can have a moment to do so.” Stauffenberg, Mertz, and Haeften remained silent, though Hoepner tried to assure Fromm that he had had nothing to do with the entire affair. Fromm remained unmoved. Only when Olbricht asked to be allowed to write a few lines did Fromm show some sign of compassion. “Come to the round table,” he said, “where you always used to sit across from me.”20
But time was pressing. A unit of the guard battalion, it was reported, had arrived in the courtyard. Fromm must also have known that Himmler was on the way and that every one of the arrested officers, with the exception of Hoepner, was in a position to testify against him and had to be silenced. He therefore urged them again to hurry and finally declared, “In the name of the Führer, I have convened a court-martial that has pronounced the following sentence: General Staff Colonel Mertz, General Olbricht, the colonel whose name I will not speak, and First Lieutenant Haeften are condemned to death.”
Stauffenberg spoke out, claiming in a few clipped sentences sole responsibility for everything and stating that the others had acted purely as soldiers and his subordinates. Fromm said nothing in reply, merely standing aside so that the prisoners could be taken out. Glancing down again at Beck, who was still in his death throes, Fromm ordered an officer standing nearby to put him out of his misery. The officer refused, protesting that he was incapable of such an act, and passed the order along to a staff sergeant. The sergeant dragged Beck into an adjoining room and shot him. It was just after midnight.
In the courtyard outside, several military vehicles pulled up, their headlights glaring. Along all the sides of the square, groups of curious onlookers gathered. In the middle stood an execution squad consisting of Lieutenant Werner Schady and ten noncommissioned officers. As the prisoners emerged from the staircase, they were positioned in front of a small pile of sand. Olbricht was the first to be shot. Next it was Stauffenberg’s turn, but just as the squad fired, Haeften, in a defiant gesture, threw himself into the hail of bullets. When the squad again took aim at Stauffenberg, he shouted, “Long live sacred Cermany.”21 Before the sound of his voice died away, shots resounded. The last to die was Mertz.
Fromm immediately dispatched news of the executions by teleprinter: “Attempted putsch by disloyal generals violently suppressed. All leaders shot.”22 Then he descended to the courtyard, passed the crumpled bodies without a glance, mounted one of the vehicles, and delivered a rousing speech celebrating the Führer, his miraculous deliverance, and the works of Providence. He ended with three “Sieg Heils,” joined enthusiastically by the soldiers and onlookers.
Meanwhile Beck’s bloody body was being dragged down the stairs. It was thrown with the others into one of the trucks and carted to the nearby cemetery of St. Matthew’s Church in the Tiergarten. The custodian was instructed to inter the bodies secretly that very night, but the next morning Himmler ordered that they be exhumed and burned, and the ashes scattered “in the fields.”
The other conspirators at Bendlerstrasse-Schulenburg, Schwerin, Yorck, Berthold Stauffenberg, Robert Bernardis, Gerstenmaier, and others-were locked up in the old offices of Stauffenberg and Mertz. For a while it seemed as if another round of executions was imminent. Then, half an hour after midnight, Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who had been summoned to Berlin by Walter Schellenberg, arrived with an SS unit. Kaltenbrunner also appeared, as did Remer, who forbade all further executions. Skorzeny approached the prisoners and without a word tore off their medals and decorations and tossed them into a steel helmet on the floor behind him. Then the radio was switched on and the silent, heavily guarded prisoners were forced to listen to the speech that Hitler was delivering over all stations.
Satisfied with himself and convinced at the end of a long and confusing day that he had once again managed “to come down on the right side,” Fromm went off to see Goebbels. He wanted to be the first to report in person that the conspiracy had been crushed and the ringleaders executed. Then, perhaps, he would even deliver the news to Hitler himself. Instead, upon his arrival at Goebbels’s office, he was immediately arrested.
* * *
The collapse in Berlin was not the end of the coup. Particularly in Prague and Vienna the commanders of the military districts had carried out the instructions from Bendlerstrasse with considerable alacrity, arresting most SS and Security Service (SD) officials and occupying the main public buildings. Now they expressed their regrets to their captives, explaining that it was all a great mistake. The jailers and their erstwhile prisoners raised a few glasses together, and everyone departed.
In Paris the day’s events were much more dramatic. Around 2:00 p.m. Quartermaster General Eberhard Finckh, who had been privy to the secret plot, was alerted by telephone from Zossen that Hitler had been assassinated. About three hours later Stauffenberg himself came on the line to inform his cousin Cäsar von Hofacker that Hitler was dead and the uprising had begun. General Stülpnagel called a meeting of his officers, issued the prearranged orders, and distributed maps to the city commandant’s staff showing the residences of the two most senior SS and SD officials, Carl-Albrecht Oberg and Helmut Knochen, as well as the location of their units. The arrests were planned for 11:00 p.m. so as to cause as little commotion as possible.
While the preparations went ahead, Kluge contacted Stülpnagel and invited him to his headquarters in La Roche-Guyon. In view of the hopelessly superior firepower of the Allies, Kluge had come to share Rommel’s view that Germany could not hold out much longer. He therefore resumed wavering between halfhearted support for a coup and timid opposition. His hopes had initially been raised by the news from Bendlerstrasse but soon grew shaky with the denials from the Wolf’s Lair. After hesitating for a while between the conflicting reports from the two camps, he finally got in touch with Stieff, who confirmed that Hitler was alive and well.
When Stülpnagel and Hofacker arrived in La Roche-Guyon, Kluge, who was by then fully apprised of the situation, showed little patience for their passionate appeals and denied any knowledge of a conspiracy, commenting coolly, “Well, gentlemen, just a botched assassination attempt.” Stülpnagel and Hofacker argued that the apparent failure of the attempt only increased their own responsibility. The uprising could still succeed if the three of them refused to obey Hitler and unilaterally brought the war in the West to an end. But Kluge would not be swayed. Acting as if th
ey had not just been discussing an issue of the highest importance, their last chance to avoid horrific devastation, Kluge invited his guests to a gracious candle-lit dinner, at which he droned on incessantly about his war experiences. His table companions stared glumly into space.
To end this intolerable scene, Stülpnagel finally asked Kluge to step out onto the terrace and told him about the arrests they had planned. Kluge was horrified, summoned his chief of general staff, General Günther Blumentritt, and ordered the immediate cancellation of the measures. He then dismissed Stülpnagel from his position and calmly returned to dinner. The atmosphere now, according to one witness, was “eerie-as if in a morgue.”23 Once again Stülpnagel and Hofacker begged the field marshal to reconsider but all he would say was, “If only that swine were dead!” As they parted, he gave Stülpnagel a piece of well-intentioned advice: “Put on civilian clothes and disappear somewhere.”24
As Stülpnagel took his leave of Kluge, without a parting handshake, at around 11:00 p.m., the task forces in Paris were just setting out from the Bois de Boulogne. Quickly and without encountering resistance, they arrested some twelve hundred members of the SS and SD in their quarters near the Arc de Triomphe. They also took into custody both SS Obergruppenführer Oberg and Security Service chief Knochen, who had first to be located in a nightclub and then summoned to return to his headquarters on avenue Foch. Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, a detachment under the city commandant, Hans von Boineburg, was piling up sandbags for the expected executions. Lawyers on his staff had already drafted indictments accusing Himmler’s subordinates of deporting Jews, blowing up synagogues in Paris, and confiscating “enemy property” in contravention of all legal principles.25
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