Hitler’s suspicions were now kindled. A call to the airfield at Rastenburg supplied the interesting information that Stauffenberg had taken off from there in great haste shortly after 1 P.M., giving as his destination the airport at Rangsdorf. Himmler immediately ordered that he be arrested on landing there, but his order never got through to Berlin because of Fellgiebel’s courageous action in closing down communications. Up to this minute no one at headquarters seems to have suspected that anything untoward might be happening in Berlin. All now believed that Stauffenberg had acted alone. It would not be difficult to apprehend him unless, as some suspected, he had landed behind the Russian lines. Hitler, who, under the circumstances, seems to have behaved calmly enough, had something else on his mind. He had to greet Mussolini, who was due to arrive at 4 P.M., his train having been delayed.
There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of the two fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyed the ruins of the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinking that the Axis which they had forged, and which was to have dominated the continent of Europe, was not also in shambles. The once proud and strutting Duce was now no more than a Gauleiter of Lombardy, rescued from imprisonment by Nazi thugs, and propped up by Hitler and the S.S. Yet the Fuehrer’s friendship and esteem for the fallen Italian tyrant had never faltered and he greeted him with as much warmth as his physical condition permitted, showed him through the still smoking debris of the Lagebaracke where his life had almost been snuffed out a few hours before, and predicted that their joint cause would soon, despite all the setbacks, triumph.
Dr. Schmidt, who was present as interpreter, has recalled the scene.29
Mussolini was absolutely horrified. He could not understand how such a thing could happen at Headquarters….
“I was standing here by this table [Hitler recounted]; the bomb went off just in front of my feet … It is obvious that nothing is going to happen to me; undoubtedly it is my fate to continue on my way and bring my task to completion … What happened here today is the climax! Having now escaped death … I am more than ever convinced that the great cause which I serve will be brought through its present perils and that everything can be brought to a good end.”
Mussolini, carried away as so often before by Hitler’s words, says Schmidt, agreed.
“Our position is bad [he said], one might almost say desperate, but what has happened here today gives me new courage. After [this] miracle it is inconceivable that our cause should meet with misfortune.”
The two dictators, with their entourages, then went to tea, and there now ensued—it was about 5 P.M.—a ludicrous scene that gives a revealing, if not surprising, picture of the shabby, tattered Nazi chiefs at the moment of one of the supreme crises in the Third Reich. By this time the communications system of Rastenburg had been restored by the direct order of Hitler and the first reports from Berlin had begun to come in indicating that a military revolt had broken out there and perhaps one on the Western front. Mutual recriminations, long suppressed, broke out between the Fuehrer’s captains, their shouting echoing through the rafters though at first Hitler himself sat silent and brooding while Mussolini blushed with embarrassment.
Admiral Doenitz, who had rushed by air to Rastenburg at the news of the attentat and arrived after the tea party had begun, lashed out at the treachery of the Army. Goering, on behalf of the Air Force, supported him. Then Doenitz lit on Goering for the disastrous failures of the Luftwaffe, and the fat Reich Marshal, after defending himself, attacked his pet hate, Ribbentrop, for the bankruptcy of Germany’s foreign policy, at one point threatening to smack the arrogant Foreign Minister with his marshal’s baton. “You dirty little champagne salesman! Shut your damned mouth!” Goering cried, but this was impossible for Ribbentrop, who demanded a little respect, even from the Reich Marshal. “I am still the Foreign Minister,” he shouted, “and my name is von Ribbentrop!”*
Then someone brought up the subject of an earlier “revolt” against the Nazi regime, the Roehm “plot” of June 30, 1934. Mention of this aroused Hitler—who had been sitting morosely sucking brightly colored medicinal pills supplied by his quack physician, Dr. Theodor Morell—to a fine fury. Eyewitnesses say he leaped from his chair, foam on his lips, and screamed and raged. What he had done with Roehm and his treasonable followers was nothing, he shouted, to what he would do to the traitors of this day. He would uproot them all and destroy them. “I’ll put their wives and children into concentration camps,” he raved, “and show them no mercy!” In this case, as in so many similar ones, he was as good as his word.
Partly because of exhaustion but also because the telephone from Berlin began to bring further details of a military uprising, Hitler broke off his mad monologue, but his temper did not subside. He saw Mussolini off to his train—it was their final parting—and returned to his quarters. When told at about 6 o’clock that the putsch had not yet been squelched, he grabbed the telephone and shrieked orders to the S.S. in Berlin to shoot everyone who was the least suspect. “Where’s Himmler? Why is he not there!” he yelled, forgetful that only an hour before, as his party sat down to tea, he had ordered the S.S. chief to fly to Berlin and ruthlessly put down the rebellion, and that his master policeman could not possibly have arrived as yet.30
The long and carefully prepared rebellion in Berlin had, as Stauffenberg learned to his dismay when he landed at Rangsdorf at 3:45 P.M., got off to a slow start. Three precious, vital hours, during which the Fuehrer headquarters had been shut off from the outside world, had been lost.
Stauffenberg, for the life of him, could not understand why, nor can a historian trying to reconstitute the events of this fateful day. The weather was hot and sultry, and perhaps this had a certain effect. Though the chief conspirators had known that Stauffenberg had left for Rastenburg that morning “heavily laden,” as General Hoepner was informed, to attend the 1 P.M. Fuehrer conference, only a few of them, and these mostly junior officers, began to drift leisurely into the headquarters of the Replacement Army—and of the plot—in the Bendlerstrasse toward noon. On Stauffenberg’s last previous attempt to get Hitler, on July 15, it will be recalled, General Olbricht had ordered the troops of the Berlin garrison to start marching two hours before the bomb was timed to go off. But on July 20, perhaps mindful of the risk he had run, he did not issue similar orders. Unit commanders in Berlin and in the training centers in nearby Doeberitz, Jueterbog, Krampnitz and Wuensdorf had been tipped the night before that they would most probably be receiving the Valkyrie orders on the twentieth. But Olbricht decided to wait until definite word had come from Fellgiebel at Rastenburg before again setting his troops in motion. General Hoepner, with the uniform which Hitler had forbade him to wear in his suitcase, arrived at the Bendlerstrasse at thirty minutes past noon—at the very moment Stauffenberg was breaking the capsule of his bomb—and he and Olbricht went out for lunch, where they toasted the success of their enterprise with a half bottle of wine.
They had not been back in Olbricht’s office very long when General Fritz Thiele, chief signals officer of OKH, burst in. He had just been on the telephone to Fellgiebel, he said excitedly, and though the line was bad and Fellgiebel was very guarded in what he said, it seemed that the explosion had taken place but that Hitler had not been killed. In that case Thiele concluded that the Valkyrie orders should not be issued. Olbricht and Hoepner agreed.
So between approximately 1:15 P.M. and 3:45, when Stauffenberg set down at Rangsdorf and hurried to the telephone, nothing was done. No troops were assembled, no orders were sent out to the military commands in other cities and, perhaps strangest of all, no one thought of seizing the radio broadcasting headquarters or the telephone and telegraph exchanges. The two chief military leaders, Beck and Witzleben, had not yet appeared.
The arrival of Stauffenberg finally moved the conspirators to action. On the telephone from Rangsdorf he urged General Olbricht not to wait until he had reached the Bendlerstra
sse—the trip in from the airfield would take forty-five minutes—but to start Valkyrie going at once. The plotters finally had someone to give orders—without such, a German officer seemed lost, even a rebellious one, even on this crucial day—and they began to act. Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, Olbricht’s chief of staff and a close friend of Stauffenberg, fetched the Valkyrie orders and began to dispatch them by teleprinter and telephone. The first one alerted the troops in and around Berlin, and a second one, signed by Witzleben as “Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht” and countersigned by Count von Stauffenberg—they had been drawn up months before—announced that the Fuehrer was dead and that Witzleben was “transferring executive power” to the Army district commanders at home and to the commanders in chief of the fighting armies at the front. Field Marshal von Witzleben had not yet arrived at the Bendlerstrasse. He had got as far as Zossen, twenty miles southeast of Berlin, where he was conferring with the First Quartermaster General, Wagner. He was sent for, as was General Beck. The two senior generals in the plot were acting in the most leisurely manner on this fateful day.
With the orders going out, some of them signed by General Fromm, though without his knowledge, Olbricht went to the office of the commander of the Replacement Army, told him that Fellgiebel had reported that Hitler had been assassinated and urged him to take charge of Valkyrie and assure the internal security of the State. Fromm’s orders, the conspirators realized, would be obeyed automatically. He was very important to them at this moment. But Fromm, like Kluge, was a genius at straddling; he was not the man to jump until he saw where he was landing. He wanted definite proof that Hitler was dead before deciding what to do.
At this point Olbricht made another one of the disastrous mistakes committed by the plotters that day. He was sure from what Stauffenberg had told him on the telephone from Rangsdorf that the Fuehrer was dead. He also knew that Fellgiebel had succeeded in blocking the telephone lines to Rastenburg all afternoon. Boldly he picked up the telephone and asked for a “blitz” telephone connection with Keitel. To his utter surprise—communications, as we have seen, had now been reopened, but Olbricht did not know this—Keitel was almost instantly on the line.
FROMM: What has happened at General Headquarters? Wild rumors are afloat in Berlin.
KEITEL: What should be the matter? Everything is as usual here.
FROMM: I have just received a report that the Fuehrer has been assassinated.
KEITEL: That’s all nonsense. It is true there has been an attempt, but fortunately it has failed. The Fuehrer is alive and only slightly injured. Where, by the way, is your Chief of Staff, Colonel Count Stauffenberg?
FROMM: Stauffenberg has not yet returned to us.31
From that moment on Fromm was lost to the conspiracy, with consequences which would soon prove catastrophic. Olbricht, momentarily stunned, slipped out of the office without a word. At this moment General Beck arrived, attired in a dark civilian suit—perhaps this was a gesture toward playing down the military nature of the revolt—to take charge. But the man really in charge, as everyone soon realized, was Colonel von Stauffenberg, who, hatless and out of breath, bounded up the stairs of the old War Ministry at 4:30 P.M. He reported briefly on the explosion, which he emphasized he had seen himself from a couple of hundred yards away. When Olbricht interjected that Keitel himself had just been on the phone and sworn that Hitler was only slightly wounded, Stauffenberg answered that Keitel was playing for time by lying. At the very least, he contended, Hitler must have been severely wounded. In any case, he added, there was only one thing they could now do: use every minute to overthrow the Nazi regime. Beck agreed. It did not make too much difference to him, he said, whether the despot was alive or dead. They must go ahead and destroy his evil rule.
The trouble was that after the fateful delay and in the present confusion they did not, for all their planning, know how to go ahead. Not even when General Thiele brought word that the news of Hitler’s survival was shortly to be broadcast over the German national radio network does it seem to have occurred to the conspirators that the first thing they had to do, and at once, was to seize the broadcasting central, block the Nazis from getting their word out, and begin flooding the air with their own proclamations of a new government. If troops were not yet at hand to accomplish this, the Berlin police could have done it. Count von Helldorf, the chief of police and deep in the conspiracy, had been waiting impatiently since midday to swing into action with his sizable and already alerted forces. But no call had come and finally at 4 o’clock he had driven over to the Bendlerstrasse to see what had happened. He was told by Olbricht that his police would be under the orders of the Army. But as yet there was no rebel army—only bewildered officers milling about at headquarters without any soldiers to command.
Instead of seeing to this at once Stauffenberg put in an urgent telephone call to his cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, at General von Stuelpnagel’s headquarters in Paris, urging the conspirators to get busy there. This was of the utmost importance, to be sure, since the plot had been better organized in France and was supported by more important Army officers than in any other place save Berlin. Actually Stuelpnagel was to show more energy than his fellow generals at the center of the revolt. Before dark he had arrested and locked up all 1,200 S.S. and S.D. officers and men in Paris, including their redoubtable commander, S.S. Major General Karl Oberg. Had similar energy and similar direction of energy been shown in Berlin that afternoon, history might have taken a different turn.
Having alerted Paris, Stauffenberg next turned his attention to the stubborn Fromm, whose chief of staff he was, and whose refusal to go along with the rebels after he had learned from Keitel that Hitler was alive was seriously jeopardizing the success of the plot. Beck had no stomach to quarrel with Fromm so early in the game and excused himself from joining Stauffenberg and Olbricht, who went to see him. Olbricht told Fromm that Stauffenberg could confirm Hitler’s death.
“That is impossible,” Fromm snapped. “Keitel has assured me to the contrary.”
“Keitel is lying, as usual,” Stauffenberg put in. “I myself saw Hitler’s body being carried out.”
This word from his chief of staff and an eyewitness gave Fromm food for thought and for a moment he said nothing. But when Olbricht, trying to take advantage of his indecision, remarked that, at any rate, the code word for Valkyrie had already been sent out, Fromm sprang to his feet and shouted, “This is rank insubordination! Who issued the order?” When told that Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim had, he summoned this officer and told him he was under arrest.
Stauffenberg made one last effort to win his chief over. “General,” he said, “I myself set off the bomb at Hitler’s conference. The explosion was as if a fifteen-millimeter shell had hit. No one in that room can still be alive.”
But Fromm was too ingenious a trimmer to be bluffed. “Count Stauffenberg,” he answered, “the attempt has failed. You must shoot yourself at once.” Stauffenberg coolly declined. In a moment Fromm, a beefy, red-faced man, was proclaiming the arrest of all three of his visitors, Stauffenberg, Olbricht and Mertz.
“You deceive yourself,” Olbricht answered. “It is we who are now going to arrest you.”
An untimely scuffle among the brother officers ensued in which Fromm, according to one version, struck the one-armed Stauffenberg in the face. The General was quickly subdued and put under arrest in the room of his adjutant, where Major Ludwig von Leonrod was assigned to guard him.* The rebels took the precaution of cutting the telephone wires in the room.
Stauffenberg returned to his office to find that Oberfuehrer Piffraeder, an S.S. ruffian who had distinguished himself recently by superintending the exhuming and destroying of 221,000 bodies of Jews murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the Baltic regions before the advancing Russians got to them, had come to arrest him. Piffraeder and his two S.D. plain-clothes men were locked up in an adjacent empty office. Then General von Kortzfleisch, who had over-all command of the troops i
n the Berlin-Brandenburg district (Wehrkreis III), arrived to demand what was up. This strictly Nazi General insisted on seeing Fromm but was taken to Olbricht, with whom he refused to speak. Beck then received him, and when Kortzfleisch proved adamant he too was locked up. General von Thuengen, as planned, was appointed to replace him.
Piffraeder’s appearance reminded Stauffenberg that the conspirators had forgotten to place a guard around the building. So a detachment from the Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland, which was supposed to be on guard duty but wasn’t, was posted at the entrance. By a little after 5 P.M., then, the rebels were at least in control of their own headquarters, but that was all of Berlin they were in control of. What had happened to the Army troops that were supposed to occupy the capital and secure it for the new anti-Nazi government?
A little after 4 P.M., when the conspirators had finally come to life following Stauffenberg’s return, General von Hase, the Berlin commandant, telephoned the commander of the crack Guard Battalion Grossdeutschland at Doeberitz and instructed him to alert his unit and himself to report at once to the Kommandantur on the Unter den Linden. The battalion commander, recently appointed, was Major Otto Remer, who was to play a key role this day, though not the one the plotters had counted on. They had investigated him, since his battalion had been allotted an all-important task, and satisfied themselves that he was a nonpolitical officer who would obey the orders of his immediate superiors. Of his bravery there could be no doubt. He had been wounded eight times and had recently received from the hand of Hitler himself the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves—a rare distinction.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany Page 167