Yet another reason for my continued optimism during this period was that we were finally getting the kind of generals I had always wanted. To a man, the older generation of senior commanders had served in the old Imperial Army and gained their spurs in the Reichswehr. They tended to be of noble origin. On the eve of our seizure of power there were proportionally more “vons” among them than there had been in 1914. Much like Halder and his predecessor, Beck, they did not believe in my genius. Almost without exception they tended to look down on me and my closest National-Socialist collaborators. Centuries of tradition, going all the way back to Friedrich Wilhelm I, had turned them into a closely knit clique. As a result, they frequently conspired against me and disobeyed my orders.
But now, at long last, things were changing. More and more officers of the older generation left. A few died in harness, as the aforementioned Reichenau did. Others retired either because they had grown too old or because I, acting through the Wehrmacht Personnel Office, made them do so. Moreover, during World War I most senior commanders invariably spent practically all their time in some comfortable country house kilometers behind the front. The situation in 1939-45 was entirely different. As the trenches were abandoned and mobile warfare took over, many generals set up their forward headquarters in some vehicle as both Rommel and Guderian did. The outcome was that quite a few of them were killed either when visiting their forward troops or by air attack. Among the generals who fell victim to just such an attack was Rommel, who was badly wounded.
Whatever the reason, new men started coming to the forefront. Very few of them had a “von” in front of their names. The most important one was Dönitz, whom I later named as my successor. Others were Waffen SS Generals Dietrich and Hauser and army generals Hube, Model, Rendulic, and Ramcke. Ramcke, a paratrooper who proved his mettle defending Monte Casino, was exceptional in that, while rising from the ranks, he had served in all three branches of the Wehrmacht. The toughest of the lot was Schörner; no other general meted out more death sentences for cowardice, defeatism, and desertion. Had I only had a dozen like him, I might have won the war! Right behind them came even younger men. Prominent among them was SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, the man who rescued Mussolini and helped hold Berlin for me during the attempted July 1944 Putsch. Another was Waffen-SS Colonel Joachim Peiper, our most successful commander during the 1944 Ardennes offensive.
I cannot honestly say that these officers were less parochial than their predecessors. If anything, they were the opposite. Paradoxically, this quality of theirs had its advantages. It made it easy for me, with my much broader background gained by reading and experience, to overcome their doubts and to make them do as they were told. How often did one of them come to my headquarters determined to tell me “the truth” about the situation at the front, yet come out of the conference with his spirits revived! Having fewer ties to the old military traditions, in terms of Weltanschauung they were closer to us National Socialists than their predecessors had been. Essentially, though, they were apolitical. I sometimes got the impression that, for them, even the prospect of victory mattered less for Germany’s sake than as a means by which they could advance their own careers. Having fought their way up through one battle after another, they had steel nerves and were as hard as nails. That was just what I needed at a stage in the war when what counted was not brilliant maneuvers of the kind Manstein was always proposing but a bulldog-like determination to hold every position to the last soldier and the last bullet.
In brief, contrary to what so many historians, determined to prove how deluded I was and totally misunderstanding the real situation, have written, even as late as the spring of 1944 the war had not been lost. Our numerous setbacks notwithstanding, the Reich and its dominant position in Europe were still intact. Our soldiers were fighting bravely. They consistently inflicted more casualties than they took and earned the enemy’s grudging respect. Churchill, who feared that invading the Continent might lead to a bloodbath similar to the one of World War I, in which 600,000 English subjects were killed, had a particularly strong respect for them. As we now know, had it depended on him, the Normandy landings might never have taken place. He would have gone for the Balkans, for Norway—briefly, anything but attacking us head on. And Stalin knew it; meeting him at Tehran in November 1943, he teased him about it.
As late as 1980, thirty-five years after the end of the war, the Pentagon was still busily paying the Wehrmacht the compliment of trying to learn from it. Our civilian population was also holding up well. To be sure, people were not exactly happy. Given our heavy losses, the growing shortages of food and consumer goods, and the rain of bombs that was demolishing their cities one by one, how could they be? But they did not go berserk as Douhet and even some of my own officers had predicted. Nor did they rise in rebellion and overthrow the government, as had happened in 1918. For those who were bombed out we were generally able to find solutions, albeit makeshift ones. The rest did their daily work, grumbled—more at the enemy than at the regime—and held on grimly. The frequent loss of relatives and property to air raids stoked their hatred of the enemy and radicalized many of them. Most also kept their faith in our final victory and eagerly waited for our new wonder-weapons to start making their effects felt. Above all, they continued to give me their trust and to follow where I led. So, almost to a man, did those whom I put in charge of them.
They, and, of course, I, were well aware that the long-promised, oft-postponed Allied invasion of Western Europe was coming closer day by day and that our chances of victory depended on our ability to repulse it. That is why I put Rommel in charge of the Atlantic Wall: to receive the invaders and to throw them back into the sea. Nor was the outcome of the coming battle by any means predetermined. As had been made abundantly clear to me in the context of our invasion of Norway, amphibious operations are the most difficult and most complicated of all military enterprises. Ask Churchill; not only did he lose the Gallipoli campaign, but he wrote an entire volume to justify himself. A sudden change in the weather can easily disrupt a seaborne invasion or even force it to be aborted. That, for example, was what happened to the Spanish Armada back in 1588. Notwithstanding his enormous superiority in men and materiel, General Eisenhower himself feared that he would fail. Given the fiasco at Dieppe in 1942, he well might. As late as 5 June, so atrocious was the weather in the Channel that we had to give up our air and sea reconnaissance. It is no wonder that, making his last preparations, he wrote down a note in which he took full responsibility for an eventual failure.
When the invasion finally came, I personally experienced it as a relief. So did many of my people. It is better to fight than to sit passively under the rain of bombs. Had the battle for Normandy gone in our favor, the situation would have been entirely transformed. Our enemies would have been demoralized. Conversely, our own people’s morale would have been lifted sky high and their readiness to fight on redoubled. We would have been able to move as many as a million troops, including quite a few elite armored divisions, from the west to the eastern front. They would have been more than enough to destroy the Bolshevik hordes once and for all! Or else Stalin, who had long been unhappy with his Western Allies’ procrastination, might have been more prepared to make an acceptable peace with us. In the event, though, the invasion succeeded. The main reason why it did so was that, when I told my generals to keep an eye on Normandy, they refused to believe me. Looking at the map, they kept insisting that the landings would take place at the Pas de Calais! The latter, they said, had always provided the shortest route and the best road network for an eventual invasion of Germany.
How this could happen I have never been able to find out even here in Hell. For many years the standard explanation was that our intelligence services had been misled by a brilliant disinformation campaign the Allies had planned and put into effect. This belief suited them fine. More likely, though, the real reason was different. Starting with Canaris, its head, and reaching way down its ranks, the Abwehr had lon
g been riddled with traitors of the worst kind. Making full use of the veil of secrecy by which any intelligence organization is necessarily surrounded, many of them had betrayed us for years. The swine! As will be remembered, back in 1940 one of them had revealed the date of our attack on the West to the Allies. Later, Canaris himself not only refused to have anything to do with the persecution of the Jews but personally helped some of them escape to Spain and Switzerland.
Now, in the spring of 1944, they and their colleagues—the most important of whom was the aforementioned Speidel—deliberately sought to open the gates to our enemies. I myself received the news of the invasion at the Berghof during what was to prove my last stay at that much-beloved place. Misled by the Abwehr, I and my assistants at OKW, primarily Jodl, at first believed it was merely a diversion meant to disguise the real one, which would be directed against the Pas de Calais. That is why I refused to release the armored divisions which we had kept in reserve and which Rommel, as the commander on the spot, demanded. By the time the confusion was cleared up and the divisions were sent into action, it was too late.
28. Götterdämmerung
Shortly after noon on 20 July 1944 my staff and I assembled for the usual discussion of the situation when a bomb exploded almost literally at my feet. There were 24 people in the conference room. Of those, four, including my long-time adjutant General Schmundt, were either killed outright or died of their wounds later on. Everyone else was injured to one extent or another. I myself escaped with perforated eardrums, hundreds of wooden splinters that had to be taken out of my legs, and singed trousers. Later, I sent the uniform I wore on that day to Fräulein Braun as a keepsake. But the show must go on. That very afternoon I shepherded Mussolini, who happened to arrive on the same day, through the devastation the bomb had wrought. As it had so often in the past, Providence held its protective arm over me.
Thanks to the abolition of “liberal rights,” censorship, and, of course, the Gestapo, in my Reich any kind of overt opposition was almost impossible. In a proper Führerstaat, that was as it should be; the more so because, from late 1939 on, the state in question was engaged in a life-or-death struggle against practically the entire world. Clandestine opposition was something else. Early on we National Socialists assumed that, given the overwhelming popularity of our regime, we would not have to resort to drastic measures. In 1935 the number of those in concentration camps was down to just 4,000; so naïve was Himmler that he thought we might end up closing them altogether! As late as 1939, the number of inmates was still only 21,000. Relative to the size of the population, the number of prisoners in all our corrective institutions combined was no larger than in Switzerland, Finland, and the U.S. And relative to the size of the population, that was just four percent—four percent, I say—of the number Stalin’s Gulag was holding at the same time.
It was only after war had broken out that the system, which now housed not just Germans but people from all over occupied Europe, started growing mightily. Many prisoners were “resistance fighters” who richly deserved their fate. At its peak in early 1945, the number was around 700,000. That was no more, and perhaps less, than the number of our Volksgenossen held in similar camps established by the Czechoslovak, Polish, Hungarian, Yugoslav, and Romanian authorities in the months that followed. But there was a difference. The inmates in our concentration camps had been arrested for a reason. In theirs, since the men had been called up, almost all were women, children, and old men whose sole crime consisted of being ethnically German. So atrocious were conditions that they died like flies. Finally, Himmler’s strict controls made sure that, in our concentration camps, cases of rape were rare. In theirs, by contrast, it was so ubiquitous as to be almost self-evident. At times the victors simply took over our camps and used them for their own purposes. That was what happened, for example, at Auschwitz.
Inside Germany, the opposition could be divided into three kinds. First, there were a handful of rather peculiar individualists bent on killing me for any or no reason. As far as my person was concerned, this was the type I worried about the most. As the near-success of Georg Elser, who tried to blow me up in November 1939 showed, there simply was no way of stopping these people. But they were politically without any significance. Second, there were the Communists. Some of the principal figures had escaped to Moscow where, for reasons no one really understands, Stalin had many of them executed. The rest went on with their plotting. However, as long as the Reich lasted they never made any real headway. Part of the reason was that the Gestapo watched their every move, drove them underground, and prevented them from undertaking anything significant. And perhaps another reason was that, when all is said and done, Communism fits the German people as a saddle fits a cow.
The conservative-reactionary opposition was something else. Many of its leaders came from the highest classes of society. Some occupied posts that gave them real power. Prior to the 20th of July few if any of them were ever arrested or even suspected of plotting against me. Among them were some of Germany’s most respected names, including, I am sorry to say, Yorck von Wartenburg, a descendant of the hero of the 1813 revolt against Napoleon, as well as Helmut James von Moltke, the great-grand-nephew of the great Moltke, and his brother Karl. An expert on “international law,” Helmut James had long worked for the Abwehr. There, he had Canaris to protect him and assist him in his treasonous activities.
Others were officers whose families went back hundreds of years. At least one, Karl Gördler, had been the mayor of a major city (Leipzig). In 1933-36 he also served as Price Commissioner, where he flooded me with all kinds of confusing memoranda which I never bothered to read. Gördler himself was so pro-Jewish that the statue, in Leipzig, of the composer Mendelsohn-Bartholdi had to be dismantled behind his back! From Colonel von Stauffenberg down, most of the rest agreed that the Jews represented a problem which had to be tackled in one way or another. But they opposed our more extreme measures, and they certainly tried to keep their hands clean.
Others still worked for our Foreign Ministry. One and all, they never ceased plotting to remove me from power or, if necessary, to assassinate me. They also planned to set up an alternative government, to continue the war in the east, and to negotiate a separate peace with the West. That is just as I would have done, incidentally, had there been the slightest chance of success. The fact that none of the emissaries they sent first to London and then to neutral countries such as Switzerland and Turkey met with a favorable reception did not deter them. On several occasions their attempts to kill me failed, either for technical reasons—one bomb, planted in my aircraft, never exploded—or because of precautions I had taken such as by changing my plans. Stauffenberg, however, came as close to achieving his purpose as anyone had.
As things turned out, he and his bungling fellow conspirators, almost all of whom were medium-ranking officers, proved themselves no more able to plan and carry out a Putsch than a monkey can play chess. Stauffenberg himself succeeded in bluffing his way out of my East Prussian Headquarters, boarding a plane, and flying back to Berlin. Who would have believed it? However, at that point his luck ran out. Landing, he found that absolutely nothing had been done. Initially, he tried to convince his fellow conspirators that I had been killed. Thereupon they were going to activate a plan, known as Valkyrie, to gain control of the government quarter in the center of Berlin and to arrest Goebbels and other leading figures.
Fortunately, the commander of the Berlin garrison, Major Otto Remer, kept his head. First, he asked to speak to Goebbels by phone. Next, Goebbels put him in touch with me so I could assure him that I was, in fact, alive and well. Once that happened, any chance that the Putsch would succeed was gone. All that remained was to round up the conspirators. Or rather, round up those who had not committed suicide, as Henning von Tresckow did, and those who had not been executed by one of their own comrades, as Stauffenberg was.
Remer’s reward was to be promoted to general, the youngest in the entire army. After the war,
he became a right-wing, “Neo-Nazi” publicist and was put on trial for his efforts. Personally, the aspect of the Putsch that I found hardest to take was the fact that, among the conspirators, there were quite a number of officers whom I had known personally and whose careers I had promoted for years on end. The most important ones were field-marshals Rommel and von Kluge. In view of Rommel’s great popularity I thought it best to allow him to commit suicide, and he obediently obliged. In return, his wife was given a pension, and he himself received a state funeral. Kluge, I am happy to say, did not wait to be arrested. He committed suicide of his own accord, thereby saving us the embarrassment of having to deal with him ourselves.
That very day in a radio address, I told the German people we would treat the conspirators precisely as they deserved to be treated. Himmler, who was always on the outlook for opportunities to expand the power of his Waffen SS at the expense of the Wehrmacht, did a thorough job. Over the next few weeks and months thousands were arrested. Given the elevated status of the accused, I knew we could not expect the courts to act as they should. They had, after all, been obstructing me for years, often looking for—and finding—reasons why people should not suffer the death penalty they deserved. In the case of officers the first step was to have them expelled from the army. That having been done, they, as well as the civilians, were put in front of a Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court). I appointed Roland Freisler as the Court’s President. He was a veteran National Socialist and, as even his enemies admitted, an excellent lawyer. At one point he forced the accused Colonel-General Höpner to admit he was an ass! Unfortunately, he was later killed in an Allied bombing raid.
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