Plotting Hitler's Death

by Joachim C. Fest

  As the days passed, the number of suspects grew larger and larger. Witzleben was among the first to be arrested. Popitz was picked up in his apartment at about five o’clock on the morning of the twenty-first and was soon followed by Oster, Kleist-Schmenzin, Schacht, Canaris, Wirmer, and many others. Only shortly before July 20 the Gestapo officials responsible for surveillance of the military had reported no particular activity, noting only in passing a certain “defeatism” in the circles around Beck and Goerdeler.3 That was the reason Hitler apparently believed at first that the attack was the work of a “very small clique of ambitious officers,” as he said in his radio address to the German people. Now, to the astonishment of virtually everyone, it turned out that Stauffenberg and his immediate accomplices repre­sented only the tip of the iceberg. The conspiracy extended far be­yond the army to civilian circles on both sides of the political spectrum, even to groups presumed to be close to the Nazi Party.

  On the evening of July 20 an overly confident Count Helldorf had averred that the police would not dare lay a finger on him. In fact, the investigators hardly hesitated before pouncing. Other conspirators, like General Eduard Wagner, escaped their fates by committing sui­cide. Major Hans Ulrich von Oertzen, who had urged the military district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm to support the uprising, managed in the bedlam that surrounded his arrest to hide two gre­nades. Shortly before he was to be led away he held one to his head and detonated it. He collapsed on the floor, grievously wounded. With all his remaining strength, he dragged himself to where the second grenade lay hidden, shoved it in his mouth, and pulled the pin. Suicides such as this only extended the circle of suspects to include friends, relatives, and colleagues.

  The code of personal honor, always a significant factor in the strange helplessness of the conspirators, influenced their behavior even in defeat. Very few conspirators actually attempted to escape. Most simply arranged their personal affairs and waited calmly for the knock on the door, ready, or so they believed, for anything that might befall them. Many refused to avail themselves of proffered hiding places or even asked to be arrested. Principally they wished to spare their friends and relatives interrogation by the police, but most of them were also operating out of the categorical morality that was the bedrock ol their thinking. “Don’t flee-stand your ground!” was how Karl Klausing rationalized his decision to give himself up; he did not want, he said, to leave his captured comrades in the lurch. Schlabrendorff also refused to flee, as did Trott, evidently “on account of his wile and children.” Tresckow’s brother Gerd knew about the conspiracy, but as a lieutenant colonel in a division on the Italian front he was too far away from the scene to arouse suspicion. Never­theless, he went and confessed to his superior officers and, when told lo forget about it, insisted on his culpability. He was finally arrested and incarcerated in the Gestapo prison on Lehrterstrasse, where, in a state of physical and mental depletion, he took his life in early September 1944.4

  Time and again, fugitives sought by the police turned themselves in out of a feeling that can best be described as part pride and part exhaustion. They were no longer willing or able to hide out or to continue the duplicitous life they had led for far too long, at the cost, they believed, of their self-respect. Ulrich von Hassell left his home in Havana and traveled to Berlin by a circuitous route, making many stops. For a few days he roamed restlessly through the streets of the capital, then went to his desk and waited calmly for the Gestapo to arrive. Theodor Steltzer, who was already in Norway, refused to flee across the border to Sweden, returning instead to Berlin, where he acted on his belief that a Christian cannot tell a lie, even to a Gestapo interrogator or before the People’s Court.5

  The motivation behind these and many other unrealistic if honorable gestures was certainly the expectation that the impending trials could be used as a forum for denouncing the Nazis. As the curtains fell on their lives, these brave men hoped for one last chance to expose the true nature of the regime, much as some of them had fervently hoped to do in criminal proceedings against Hitler. The illusion that they would be allowed to speak their minds freely at their trials was soon shattered, however, as was the belief, cherished pri­marily by the military men, that every legal formality would be ob­served and that they would be treated in a manner befitting their standing in society.

  Although the investigators found themselves groping in the dark at first over the next few months, they succeeded in arresting some six hundred suspects beyond those immediately implicated in the plot. A second wave of arrests in mid-August, known as Operation Thunderstorm, put five thousand putative opponents of the regime behind bars; most of these people had been connected to various political parties and organizations in the Weimar Republic. Again, even when under interrogation, some of the accused strove more to demonstrate the high moral principle behind their actions than to save their lives, so that the head of the special investigatory commission was soon able to say that “the manly attitude of the idealists immediately shed some light in the darkness.”6

  Although much of this courageous and self-sacrificing spirit may seem naive, it was perhaps the only defense to which the regime had no answer. Apparently Hitler had originally intended to stage a great spectacle modeled on the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, with radio and film coverage and lengthy press reports, but he was soon forced to abandon all such plans. Schulenburg, for example, declared before the court: “We resolved to take this deed upon ourselves in order to save Germany from indescribable misery. I realize that I shall be hanged for my part in it, but I do not regret what I did and only hope that someone else will succeed in luckier circumstances.” Similar dec­larations from numerous defendants increasingly put the authorities on the defensive, and on August 17, 1944, Hitler forbade any further reporting of the trials. In the end, not even the executions were pub­licly announced.7

  The Gestapo had considerable difficulty determining the breadth of the conspiracy. It is known, for instance, that Stieff and Fellgiebel held out for at least six days under torture without revealing anything. Contrary to legend, no list of conspirators or a projected cabinet was ever found, and as late as August 8 Yorck was able to tell prison chaplain Harald Poelchau that the Gestapo still knew nothing about the Kreisau Circle. Moltke’s name was not uttered until Leber’s inter­rogation on August 10.8 Schlabrendorff, who survived the war to write a detailed account of the four types of torture employed-beginning with a device to screw spikes into the fingertips and progressing to spike-lined “Spanish boots,” the rack, and other horrors-did not reveal the names of his co-conspirators at Army Group Center, even when the mutilated corpse of his friend Tresckow was exhumed and shown to him. Despite severe torments, not much more than was already known could be dragged out of Jessen, Langbehn, Oster, Kleist-Schmenzin, and Leuschner. But what these men refused to reveal in so-called intensified interrogation-in which all the horror and vengeful fury were brought to bear on them-the Allies now did. As if eager to do one last favor for Hitler, British radio began regu­larly broadcasting the names of people alleged to have had a hand in the coup. Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court, was even able to show Schwerin von Schwanenfeld an Allied leaflet that heaped scorn on the conspirators, just as the Nazis’ propaganda was doing.”

  The military “court of honor” that Hitler had demanded met on August 4, with Field Marshal Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Lieutenant Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel serving as associates. Without any hearings or presentation of evidence, they drummed twenty-two of­ficers out of the Wehrmacht, thus depriving them of the legal protec­tions of a court-martial, just as Hitler wanted. However extreme this step may have appeared to be, it was actually only the final act in a lengthy process that had revealed to all that the unity and cohesiveness of the army had long since been shattered. It was the last of many gestures of submission to Hitler’s will.

  Responsibility for trying the accus
ed officers and the other participants in the attempted coup fell now to the People’s Court, which had been specially constituted in 1934 to judge “political crimes.” Hitler ordered the cases to be heard in closed chambers before a small, select audience. He invited Freisler and-if the reports are accurate-even the executioner to Führer headquarters, where he instructed them to refuse the condemned men all religious and spiri­tual comfort. “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle,” Hitler said.10

  The trials began on August 7 in the great hall of the Berlin Peo­ple’s Court, which was hung with Nazi flags for the occasion. The accused were Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, Hase, Bernardis, Klausing, Yorck, and Hagen. To further humiliate the conspirators, they were forbidden to wear neckties, and Witzleben was even denied suspend­ers for his trousers. Hoepner was dressed in a cardigan. All bore the signs, as one witness reported, of the “tortures they had suffered while in custody.”11 Presiding over the scene was Roland Freisler, attired in his red judicial robes and seated beneath a bust of the Führer.

  Freisler had been appointed president of the People’s Court two years earlier, and in him the regime found a man very much in its own image. Hitler always felt a certain distrust toward Freisler, however, and his likening of him to Andrei Vishinsky, the chief prosecutor In the Moscow show trials, suggests the reason: Freisler had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and had become a Soviet commissar after the October Revolution; he liked to boast that he had begun his career as a diehard Communist. With his cynical bent and taste for radical politics, he joined the Nazis in 1925, throwing himself into political and journalistic tasks on behalf of the party and reaping his reward with an appointment as state secretary in the Ministry of Justice. Seizing on a comment by Hitler in his address to the Reichstag justifying the Night of the Long Knives, he made himself a vocal advocate of Gesinnungsstrafrecht, harsh laws that called for defendants in political cases to be punished not so much for their deeds as for the convictions underlying those deeds.

  His loud, bullying style-intended, he occasionally conceded, to “atomize” the defendants-was matched by his theatrical tempera­ment, his fondness for adopting extravagant poses, and his pleasure in exercising power over life and death. The psychological corollary to all this was his fawning subservience to Hitler. He played his roles to the hilt, outraged one moment, then cutting, then affable, now and again seeming to enjoy sharp-witted repartee. All in all he was the kind of man who rises to the top in turbulent times, when all values and principles are placed in doubt. The first chief of the Prussian Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, called Freisler “more brilliant, adaptable, and fiendish than anyone in the long line of revolutionary prosecutors.” Despite his repellent characteristics and the clear delight he took in humiliating and defaming those who appeared before him, few were immune to his remarkable charisma. Helmuth von Moltke wrote after his trial that Freisler was “gifted, something of a genius, but not wise, and all this in the highest degree.” According to Freisler’s predeces­sor, Otto Thierack, he was simply mentally ill.12

  Freisler opened the first day of proceedings by remarking that the court would be ruling on “the most horrific charges ever brought in the history of the German people.” He heaped scorn on the accused, continually referring to them as “rabble,” “criminals,” and “traitors,” men with the “character of pigs”; Stauffenberg he called a “murder­ous scoundrel.” Freisler’s role was to express boundless moral out­rage. The proceedings focused strictly on the deeds that had been committed; any attempt by the accused to introduce the issue of their motives was immediately interrupted. Stieff came before the court first, and when he tried to raise the issue Freisler informed him that as a soldier he needed only “to obey, triumph, and die, without look­ing either left or right” and added, “We don’t want to hear any more from you about that.” None of the accused was allowed an opportu­nity to address the court at length or even to reach any sort of understanding with their attorneys, who were seated some distance away. Not all but a good many of these attorneys openly supported the prosecution’s case. Witzleben’s lawyer, for instance, a Dr. Weissmann, stated in his final summation that the court’s decision had in effect already been rendered by “heavenly Providence when, in a miraculous act of deliverance, it protected the Führer from destruction for the sake of the German people.” Weissmann concluded, “The deed of the accused stands, and the guilty perpetrator will go down with it.” Kreisler sentenced all eight defendants to be hanged, ending the proceedings with the words “We return now to life and to the struggle. We have nothing more in common with you. The Volk has purged itself of you and remains pure. We fight on. The Wehrmacht cries, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We all cry, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight together with our Führer, following him, for Germany’s sake!”13

  Thus the trials proceeded, case after case. The next session was held on August 10, when Fellgiebel, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Al­fred Kranzfelder, and Fritz von der Schulenburg were paraded be­fore the People’s Court. Freisler seemed particularly irritated by the quiet dignity and disdain of Schulenburg. Josef Wirmer was arraigned not long afterward. When Freisler remarked that Wirmer would soon find himself roasting in hell, Wirmer bowed curtly and riposted, “I’ll look forward to your own imminent arrival, your honor!” Freisler did not always succeed in interrupting the defendants in time. Hans-Bernd von Haeften managed to interject a comment about Hitler’s “place in world history as a great perpetrator of evil”; Kleist-Schmenzin announced that he had been determined to commit trea­son ever since January 30, 1933, and spoke of it as a “command from God”; Schwerin managed to mention “all the murders committed at home and abroad” and, when asked by an angry Freisler if he was not ashamed to be making such a base allegation, retorted, “No!” During the examination phase of the proceedings, Cäsar von Hofacker claimed that he had acted with as much right on July 20 as Hitler had on November 9, 1923, the day of the “beer-hall putsch.” He regret­ted, he said, that he had not been chosen to carry out the assassination, because then it would not have failed. Later he managed to cut Freisler off during one of the judge’s own numerous interruptions: “Be quiet now, Herr Freisler, because today it’s my neck that’s on the block. But in a year it will be yours!” Fellgiebel even advised Freisler that he had better hurry lest he himself hang before he hung the accused.14

  On the afternoon of August 8, immediately following their trials, the first group of condemned men was transported to the execution grounds in Plötzensee prison. Although Hitler had expressly forbid­den any spiritual consolation, the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau, did manage to “speak quickly” with Witzleben and Hase. But accord­ing to his own report, as he approached Yorck “the conversation was violently interrupted. SS men with floodlights stormed into the cells and filmed the various prisoners before they were hauled away to be executed. The resulting movie, made at the express wish of the Führer, was supposed to show all phases of the entire process, at length and in full detail.”15

  Once inside Plötzensee, the prisoners were allowed only enough time to change into prison garb. One by one, in accordance with prison drill procedures, they crossed the courtyard in wooden shoes, under the ever-present gaze of a camera, and entered the execution chamber through a black curtain. Here, too, a camera recorded their every step as they arrived and were led to the back of the chamber to stand under hooks attached to a girder running across the ceiling. Floodlights brilliantly illuminated the scene. A few observers were standing around: the public prosecutor, prison officials, photogra­phers. The executioners removed the prisoners’ handcuffs, placed short, thin nooses around their necks, and stripped them to the waist. At a signal, they hoisted each man aloft and let him down on the lightened noose, slowly in some cases, more quickly in others. Before the prisoner’s death throes were over, his trousers were ripped off him. After each execution the chief executioner and his assistants went to the table at the front of the room and fortified them
selves with brandy until the sound of steps announced the arrival of the next victim. Every detail was recorded on film, from the first wild struggle for breath to the final twitches.

  Hitler had already “eagerly devoured” the arrest reports, information on new groups of suspects, and the statements recorded by inter­rogators. Now, on the very night of the first trials and executions, the film of the proceedings arrived at the Wolf’s Lair for the amusement of the Führer and his guests. The putsch, he announced to his assem­bled retinue, was “perhaps the best thing that could have happened for our future.” He could not get enough of watching his foes go to their doom. Days later, photographs of the condemned men dangling from hooks still lay about the great map table in his bunker. As his horizons shrank on all sides, Hitler took great satisfaction from this, his last great triumph.16

  * * *

  The excess so characteristic of the Nazi regime expressed itself not only in the savageness of the retribution but also in its broad sweep: even distant relatives of the conspirators fell victim to a lust for re­venge worthy of the ancient Teutonic tribes. Himmler discussed the failed coup at length at a meeting of gauleiters in Posen two weeks after the event, declaring that he would “introduce absolute responsi­bility of kin… a very old custom practiced among our forefa­thers.” One had only to read the Teutonic sagas, he said: “When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in a family, they were utterly consistent… . This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there is traitor’s blood in him, that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will Count Stauffenberg’s family be wiped out down to the last member.”17