The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

  That morning Tresckow drove off to the 28th Rifle Division, crept out to no man’s land and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. It blew his head off.

  Five days later the First Quartermaster General of the Army, Wagner, took his own life.

  Among the high Army officers in the West, two field marshals and one general committed suicide. In Paris, as we have seen, the uprising had got off to a good start when General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, the military governor of France, arrested the entire force of the S.S. and S.D.-Gestapo. Now all depended on the behavior of Field Marshal von Kluge, the new Commander in Chief West, on whom Tresckow had worked for two years on the Russian front in an effort to make him an active conspirator. Though Kluge had blown hot and cold, he had finally agreed—or so the conspirators understood—that he would support the revolt once Hitler was dead.

  There was a fateful dinner meeting that evening of July 20 at La Roche-Guyon, the headquarters of Army Group B, which Kluge had also taken over after Rommel’s accident. Kluge wanted to discuss the conflicting reports as to whether Hitler was dead or alive with his chief advisers, General Guenther Blumentritt, his chief of staff, General Speidel, chief of staff of Army Group B, General Stuelpnagel and Colonel von Hofacker, to whom Stauffenberg had telephoned earlier in the afternoon informing him of the bombing and the coup in Berlin. When the officers assembled for dinner it seemed to some of them at least that the cautious Field Marshal had about made up his mind to throw in his lot with the revolt. Beck had reached him by telephone shortly before dinner and had pleaded for his support—whether Hitler was dead or alive. Then the first general order signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben had arrived. Kluge was impressed.

  Still, he wanted more information on the situation and, unfortunately for the rebels, this now came from General Stieff, who had journeyed to Rastenburg with Stauffenberg that morning, wished him well, seen the explosion, ascertained that it had not killed Hitler and was now, by evening, trying to cover up the traces. Blumentritt got him on the line and Stieff told him the truth of what had happened, or rather, not happened.

  “It has failed, then,” Kluge said to Blumentritt. He seemed to be genuinely disappointed, for he added that had it succeeded he would have lost no time in getting in touch with Eisenhower to request an armistice.

  At the dinner—a ghostly affair, Speidel later recalled, “as if they sat in a house visited by death”—Kluge listened to the impassioned arguments of Stuelpnagel and Hofacker that they must go ahead with the revolt even though Hitler might have survived. Blumentritt has described what followed.

  When they had finished, Kluge, with obvious disappointment, remarked: “Well, gentlemen, the attempt has failed. Everything is over.” Stuelpnagel then exclaimed: “Field Marshal, I thought you were acquainted with the plans. Something must be done.”40

  Kluge denied that he knew of any plans. After ordering Stuelpnagel to release the arrested S.S.-S.D. men in Paris, he advised him, “Look here, the best thing you can do is to change into civilian clothes and go into hiding.”

  But this was not the way out which a proud general of Stuelpnagel’s stripe chose. After a weird all-night champagne party at the Hotel Raphael in Paris in which the released S.S. and S.D. officers, led by General Oberg, fraternized with the Army leaders who had arrested them—and who most certainly would have had them shot had the revolt succeeded—Stuelpnagel, who had been ordered to report to Berlin, left by car for Germany. At Verdun, where he had commanded a battalion in the First World War, he stopped to have a look at the famous battlefield. But also to carry out a personal decision. His driver and a guard heard a revolver shot. They found him floundering in the waters of a canal. A bullet had shot out one eye and so badly damaged the other that it was removed in the military hospital at Verdun, to which he was taken.

  This did not save Stueipnagel from a horrible end. Blinded and helpless, he was brought to Berlin on Hitler’s express orders, haled before the People’s Court, where he lay on a cot while Freisler abused him, and strangled to death in Ploetzensee prison on August 30.

  Field Marshal von Kluge’s decisive act in refusing to join the revolt did not save him any more than Fromm, by similar behavior in Berlin, saved himself. “Fate,” as Speidel observed apropos of this vacillating general, “does not spare the man whose convictions are not matched by his readiness to give them effect.” There is evidence that Colonel von Hofacker, under terrible torture—he was not executed until December 20—mentioned the complicity of Kluge, Rommel and Speidel in the plot. Blumentritt says that Oberg informed him that Hofacker had “mentioned” Kluge in his first interrogations, and that, after being informed of this by Oberg himself, the Field Marshal “began to look more and more worried.”41

  Reports from the front were not such as to restore his spirits.

  On July 26, General Bradley’s American forces broke through the German front at St.-Lô. Four days later General Patton’s newly formed Third Army, racing through the gap, reached Avranches, opening the way to Brittany and to the Loire to the south. This was the turning point in the Allied invasion, and on July 30 Kluge notified Hitler’s headquarters, “The whole Western front has been ripped open … The left flank has collapsed.” By the middle of August all that was left of the German armies in Normandy was locked in a narrow pocket around Falaise, where Hitler had forbidden any further retreat. The Fuehrer had now had enough of Kluge, whom he blamed for the reverses in the West and whom he suspected of considering the surrender of his forces to Eisenhower.

  On August 17 Field Marshal Walther Model arrived to replace Kluge—his sudden appearance was the first notice the latter had of his dismissal. Kluge was told by Hitler to leave word as to his whereabouts in Germany—a warning that he had become suspect in connection with the July 20 revolt. The next day he wrote a long letter to Hitler and then set off by car for home. Near Metz he swallowed poison.

  His farewell letter to the Fuehrer was found in the captured German military archives.

  When you receive these lines I shall be no more … Life has no more meaning for me … Both Rommel and I … foresaw the present development. We were not listened to …

  I do not know whether Field Marshal Model, who has been proved in every sphere, will master the situation … Should it not be so, however, and your cherished new weapons not succeed, then, my Fuehrer, make up your mind to end the war. The German people have borne such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness …

  I have always admired your greatness…. If fate is stronger than your will and your genius, so is Providence … Show yourself now also great enough to put an end to a hopeless struggle when necessary …

  Hitler read the letter, according to the testimony of Jodl at Nuremberg, in silence and handed it to him without comment. A few days later, at his military conference on August 31, the Supreme warlord observed, “There are strong reasons to suspect that had Kluge not committed suicide he would have been arrested anyway.”42

  The turn of Field Marshal Rommel, the idol of the German masses, came next.

  As General von Stuelpnagel lay blinded and unconscious on the operating table in the hospital at Verdun after his not quite successful attempt to kill himself, he had blurted out the name of Rommel. Later under hideous torture in the Gestapo dungeon in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin Colonel von Hofacker broke down and told of Rommel’s part in the conspiracy. “Tell the people in Berlin they can count on me,” Hofacker quoted the Field Marshal as assuring him. It was a phrase that stuck in Hitler’s mind when he heard of it and which led him to decide that his favorite general, whom he knew to be the most popular one in Germany, must die.

  Rommel, who had suffered bad fractures of his skull, temples and cheekbones and a severe injury to his left eye, and whose head was pitted with shell fragments, was first removed from a field hospital at Bernay to St. Germain to escape capture by the advancing Allied troops and thence, on August 8, to his home at Herrlingen near Ulm. He receive
d the first warning of what might be in store for him when General Speidel, his former chief of staff, was arrested on September 7, the day after he had visited him at Herrlingen.

  “That pathological liar,” Rommel had exclaimed to Speidel when the talk turned to Hitler, “has now gone completely mad. He is venting his sadism on the conspirators of July 20, and this won’t be the end of it!”43

  Rommel now noticed that his house was being shadowed by the S.D. When he went out walking in the nearby woods with his fifteen-year-old son, who had been given temporary leave from his antiaircraft battery to tend his father, both carried revolvers. At headquarters in Rastenburg Hitler had now received a copy of Hofacker’s testimony incriminating Rommel. He thereupon decreed his death—but in a special way. The Fuehrer realized, as Keitel later explained to an interrogator at Nuremberg, “that it would be a terrible scandal in Germany if this well-known Field Marshal, the most popular general we had, were to be arrested and haled before the People’s Court.” So Hitler arranged with Keitel that Rommel would be told of the evidence against him and given the choice of killing himself or standing trial for treason before the People’s Court. If he chose the first he would be given a state funeral with full military honors and his family would not be molested.

  Thus it was that at noon on October 14, 1944, two generals from Hitler’s headquarters drove up to the Rommel home, which was now surrounded by S.S. troops reinforced by five armored cars. The generals were Wilhelm Burgdorf, an alcoholic, florid-faced man who rivaled Keitel in his slavishness to Hitler, and his assistant in the Army Personnel Office, Ernst Maisel, of like character. They had sent word ahead to Rommel that they were coming from Hitler to discuss his “next employment.”

  “At the instigation of the Fuehrer,” Keitel later testified, “I sent Burgdorf there with a copy of the testimony against Rommel. If it were true, he was to take the consequences. If it were not true, he would be exonerated by the court.”

  “And you instructed Burgdorf to take some poison with him, didn’t you?” Keitel was asked.

  “Yes. I told Burgdorf to take some poison along so that he could put it at Rommel’s disposal, if conditions warranted it.”

  After Burgdorf and Maisel arrived it soon became evident that they had not come to discuss Rommel’s next assignment. They asked to talk with the Field Marshal alone and the three men retired to his study.

  “A few minutes later,” Manfred Rommel later related, “I heard my father come upstairs and go into my mother’s room.” Then:

  We went into my room. “I have just had to tell your mother,” he began slowly, “that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour … Hitler is charging me with high treason. In view of my services in Africa I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It’s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family … I’m to be given a state funeral. It’s all been prepared to the last detail. In a quarter of an hour you will receive a call from the hospital in Ulm to say that I’ve had a brain seizure on the way to a conference.”

  And that is what happened.

  Rommel, wearing his old Afrika Korps leather jacket and grasping his field marshal’s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was driven a mile or two up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel and the S.S. driver got out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the back seat. When the two men returned to the car a minute later, Rommel was slumped over the seat, dead. Burgdorf paced up and down impatiently, as though he feared he would be late for lunch and his midday drinks. Fifteen minutes after she had bidden her husband farewell, Frau Rommel received the expected telephone call from the hospital. The chief doctor reported that two generals had brought in the body of the Field Marshal, who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result of his previous skull fractures. Actually Burgdorf had gruffly forbidden an autopsy. “Do not touch the corpse,” he stormed. “Everything has already been arranged in Berlin.”

  It had been.

  Field Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing that Rommel had died of “wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning the loss “of one of the greatest commanders of our nation.”

  Hitler wired Frau Rommel: “Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa.” Goering telegraphed “in silent compassion”:

  The fact that your husband has died a hero’s death as the result of his wounds, after we all hoped that he would remain to the German people, has deeply touched me.

  Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the German Army, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. “His heart,” said Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedecked body, “belonged to the Fuehrer.”*

  “The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, “appeared to those present to be broken and bewildered … Here destiny gave him the unique chance to play the role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moral apathy.”†45

  The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great. It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Kluge and Rommel, implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of them was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scores of its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapo and judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In this unprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not close ranks. Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the former Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.

  No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and bewildered as he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. He had fallen to a low state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler now forced to drink the bitter cup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted the post of presiding officer over the so-called military Court of Honor which Hitler created to expel from the Army all officers suspected of complicity in the plot against him so that they could be denied a court-martial and handed over in disgrace as civilians to the drumhead People’s Court. The Court of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer in his own defense; it acted merely on the “evidence” furnished it by the Gestapo. Rundstedt did not protest against this restriction, nor did another member of the court, General Guderian—who the day after the bombing had been appointed as the new Chief of the Army General Staff—though the latter, in his memoirs, confesses that it was an “unpleasant task,” that the court sessions were “melancholy” and raised “the most difficult problems of conscience.” No doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellow judges—all generals—turned over hundreds of their comrades to certain execution after degrading them by throwing them out of the Army.

  Guderian did more. In his capacity of General Staff Chief he issued two ringing orders of the day to assure the Nazi warlord of the undying loyalty of the officer corps. The first, promulgated on July 23, accused the conspirators of being “a few officers, some of them on the retired list, who had lost all courage and, out of cowardice and weakness, preferred the road of disgrace to the only road open to an honest soldier—the road of duty and honor.” Whereupon he solemnly pledged to the Fuehrer “the unity of the generals, of the officer corps and of the men of the Army.”

  In the meantime the discarded Field Marshal von Brauchitsch rushed into print with a burning statement condemning the putsch, pledging renewed allegiance to the Fuehrer and welcoming the appointment of Himmler—who despised the generals, including Brauchitsch—as chief of the Replacement Army. Another discard, Grand Admiral Raeder, fearful that he might be suspected of at least sympathy with the plotters, rushed out of retirement to Rastenburg to personally assure Hi
tler of his loyalty. On July 24 the Nazi salute was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

  On July 29 Guderian warned all General Staff officers that henceforth they must take the lead in being good Nazis, loyal and true to the Leader.

  Every General Staff officer must be a National Socialist officer-leader not only … by his model attitude toward political questions but by actively co-operating in the political indoctrination of younger commanders in accordance with the tenets of the Fuehrer …

  In judging and selecting General Staff officers, superiors should place traits of character and spirit above the mind. A rascal may be ever so cunning but in the hour of need he will nevertheless fail because he is a rascal.

  I expect every General Staff officer immediately to declare himself a convert or adherent to my views and to make an announcement to that effect in public. Anyone unable to do so should apply for his removal from the General Staff.*