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The Plots Against Hitler

Page 31

by Danny Orbach


  After the execution of Beck, Stauffenberg, Mertz, Olbricht, and Haeften, the Bendlerstrasse was combed by SS teams led by Skorzeny and Kaltenbrunner. They had the conspirators chained to each other, and brought them to the notorious Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrecht Strasse. Many were greeted there with beatings.6 On the same night the authorities arrested Gen. Erich Fellgiebel, one of the most important actors of July 20. During the evening, the general understood the implications of the failure, and yet he did not try to avoid his impending arrest. He and his closest colleagues, all of them conspirators, sat around the table and discussed the existence of the netherworld. “Had we believed in eternity,” he told his deputy, “we could have bid each other farewell.”7

  In Paris, Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of occupied France, knew that his hour, too, had come. Field Marshal Kluge, eager to save his own skin, reported to the General Staff about Stülpnagel’s part in the conspiracy. En route to Berlin and the Gestapo, the former governor asked his driver to stop near the old battlefield of Verdun, where he had fought as a young officer in the Great War. The driver parked the car, and Stülpnagel walked a little in the field to “stretch his legs.” When he believed he was out of sight, Stülpnagel entered the river, put the pistol to his temple, and pressed the trigger. But his fatigue was stronger than his hand. Instead of hitting the temple, he shot himself in the eyes. The driver found him in the river, bleeding and blind. A wreck of himself, Stülpnagel was led to the Gestapo on a hospital bed.8

  Hermann Kaiser, the relentless broker of the German resistance, whose work made it possible for the various cells to function as a movement, was arrested on July 21 in his sister’s apartment. Unfortunately for the conspirators, the Gestapo discovered his diary and used it as an inexhaustible source of information on the movement. A network, it seemed, is best exposed and dissolved through its normal channels of communication, in this case by squeezing information out of the main broker, who stood in contact with most groups. Ironically, the Gestapo’s failure to capitalize on Kaiser’s arrest in 1943 had saved the German resistance movement from destruction. Now, National Socialist security authorities made amends for this mistake. Hitler was determined to eliminate the organization root and branch. Under his orders, Himmler established the Special Committee 20 July, led by SS officer Dr. Georg Kiessel and supervised by the respective chiefs of the SD and the Gestapo, Kaltenbrunner and Müller.9

  The conspirators were not left in peace even after death. The bodies of Beck, Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz were exhumed and burned. In a sweeping wave of arrests, National Socialist authorities seized most members of both the civilian and the military resistance. Erwin von Witzleben was found by the Gestapo in the country estate of one of his friends. Old and tired, he had gone there to wait for them. The other commanders, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Erich Hoepner, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Fritz von der Schulenburg, were arrested in the Bendlerstrasse that same night. The Gestapo officials soon began a marathon of interrogations to learn as much as possible about the members and leaders of the resistance.

  At first, the conspirators tried to save their friends by playing down their actions. Berthold von Stauffenberg, for example, said that this was merely an assassination attempt that had been planned a few months before by a small group of pessimistic officers. To save Germany, they had decided to kill Hitler and take over the government. Berthold used a well-known strategy of the interrogated: minimizing the time span of the offense so the interrogator would have as little as possible to ask about. Fabian von Schlabrendorff later used the same tactic by arguing that when he came to Army Group Center, Tresckow was still “one hundred and fifty percent” Nazi; later, he gradually became “pessimistic” and finally decided to assassinate Hitler to save the military situation. Hoepner and Witzleben created the impression that they had acted out of their own unbridled lust for power.10

  Yet the conspirators were broken one by one. Torture was probably used, though it isn’t explicitly mentioned in the official documents. Many could not stand the pressure and began confessing to their interrogators. Hayessen and Oertzen were arrested in Berlin. Qm. Gen. Eduard Wagner understood that the Gestapo would soon come, and he ended his own life with a pistol shot. Major Oertzen somehow stole a hand grenade while arrested and blew himself up in the corridor. But most conspirators remained alive, at least for a time.11

  A few weeks after July 20, the Gestapo had been able to extract a great deal of information from interrogations and confiscated documents. A key discovery was the exposure of Tresckow’s resistance group at the eastern front. He had not died in a battle with partisans, it was discovered, but by his own hand. A wave of arrests swept Germany and the remaining occupied territories: hundreds of conspirators were taken, almost every member of the civilian and military resistance. A few went undetected because of brave detainees such as Fellgiebel, who took care not to mention the other conspirators in his headquarters. Even some of the people who confessed tried to incriminate only themselves or people who were already dead, thus saving at least some of their friends.

  Life in the Gestapo prison was hard. Col. Wolfgang Müller later related that he and his friends were held in small cells at the mercy of incessantly abusive guards. According to Müller’s account, the prison authorities constantly invented new regulations to make their life as miserable as possible. They were forbidden to read, write, or cover themselves in the cold nights. Lieutenant Kleist recalled that at night they were dazzled by bright spotlights and forced to stand for long hours. Another witness said that the heat was set high enough to make the prisoners unbearably hot. Some, like Dohnanyi, begged for water but were often refused. The interrogations were long and exhausting. “It was as if I was in a trance,” recalled Margarethe von Oven. “I have no idea what I answered.”12

  At the beginning of August, the Gestapo reached the conclusion that some of their subjects were exhausted, and they passed on eight prominent conspirators to the People’s Court, the platform for National Socialist political justice. Unsurprisingly, Hitler did not want the accused to be tried in military courts. “This time,” he said, “the trials will be quickly concluded. These criminals will not be tried in a military court by their partners in crime, who will be able to delay judgment, but rather expelled from the Wehrmacht and brought to the People’s Court. No honorable death by a firing squad for them—they will be hanged like common criminals . . . The verdict will be executed in two hours, by hanging, without mercy. Most importantly, they are not to be allowed to deliver long speeches.”13

  Through “Courts of Honor,” chaired by Field Marshal Keitel, Field Marshal Rundstedt, and General Guderian, the hapless conspirators were duly expelled from the Wehrmacht. All achievements were derecognized, decorations annulled, and, in Tresckow’s case, at least, personal files burned to ashes. On one surviving page, a large red X covered the paragraphs describing his prior military appointments, with the remark “committed suicide, expelled from the army.” Guderian recalled later that the meetings of the court were “gloomy” and involved “very difficult questions of conscience.”14 But it was the same Guderian, as well as his colleagues, who had handed former friends over to the mercy of the People’s Court.

  The show began on August 7, when the People’s Court convened for its first session. The president of the tribunal was Dr. Roland Freisler, the notorious Nazi judge who had ruled over the execution of countless “political criminals” and “traitors” of all kinds. More than just the straightforward bully he is portrayed as in much of the resistance literature, Freisler was also a National Socialist legal theorist who really believed that the justice he administered represented pure principles of leadership, struggle, and, most importantly, the essence of the Führer’s will. To Hitler he had written, immediately after taking office, that the “People’s Court will try to sentence [defendants] just as you, my leader, would do [had you presided over the court].” “The judges should not hi
de meekly behind the law . . . ,” wrote Freisler’s direct superior, Justice Minister Otto Thierack. “They have to adjust themselves [to the conditions of the war]. This is possible only when they know the intentions and the goals of the leadership, with which they had to be constantly and closely attuned.”15 With such a judicial system, the conspirators could expect only the worst.

  The defendants at the first trial were Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, the conspirators’ commander in chief; Gen. Erich Hoepner, their leader of the Home Army; Capt. Albrecht von Hagen, who had helped to procure Stauffenberg’s bomb; Capt. Friedrich von Klausing, Stauffenberg’s adjutant; Berlin commandant Lt. Gen. Paul von Hase; and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg. Next to them stood Maj. Gen. Helmuth Stieff, whose desertion at the last moment did not save his neck; and Col. Robert Bernardis, one of Stauffenberg’s men in Berlin. All were exhausted from their lengthy interrogations. The worst was still to come.

  Justice Roland Freisler, clad in a cap and crimson gown, has often been stereotyped as a hysterical brute. Indeed, he yelled and screamed, cut the defendants off in mid-sentence, and didn’t allow them to explain their motives. The fact that he was not used to a microphone and yelled right into one amplified the effect of his unique “style.” He was not always noisy, though. Whenever he noticed that a certain conspirator was humiliating himself or getting entangled in lies, he questioned him softly and encouraged him to go ahead and speak at length. Rules of decorum were not observed. Freisler, who served as both prosecutor and judge (the real prosecutor was relatively silent), used again and again terms like coward, swine, ass, traitor, and criminal. Take as an example the following “dialogue” with Hoepner:

  FREISLER: If you deny [that you’re a swine,] how should we zoologically classify you?

  HOEPNER: An ass.

  FREISLER: No! Because being an ass is an intellectual disability. In our dictionary, however, “swine” signifies a defective character.16

  It is all too easy to denounce this specific judge, but one must understand the theoretical framework he adhered to, and the judicial context he worked within.

  Freisler was not an independent judge, even when Hitler did not decide the verdicts, as was the case here. National Socialist judicial theory expected the court to rule “as Hitler would have done,” or, to borrow Ian Kershaw’s apt phrase, to “work toward the Führer.”17 Unlike jurists in liberal democracies, National Socialists (and Bolsheviks) abhorred the idea of impartiality, which underlies the liberal notion of an independent judiciary. Just like any other arm of the state, the court system is a tool to further and protect national ends. In National Socialist Germany, these ends were intimately tied to the person of the Führer.18 Trying to assassinate him was therefore the worst crime of all. The accused was an enemy who should be destroyed, rather than a defendant who had the right to be heard and judged impartially.

  As in many other totalitarian regimes, the Nazis perceived themselves to be constantly threatened by conspirators, spies, and enemy agents. The events of July 20, 1944, not to mention the world war, amplified these threats dramatically. One way to destroy the enemies of the state was by using propaganda, and this was the most important reason for humiliating the defendants. Freisler wanted to show all Germans how miserable and degenerate “traitors” were, even—and especially—if they were previously decorated officers.

  In any case, Freisler’s one-man show almost leads one to forget that there were other judges on the bench. They, like the prosecutor, were almost completely silent. The court-appointed attorneys, with one important exception, competed with Freisler in tirades against their own clients, and some of them even demanded the death penalty. Dr. Arno Weissmann, Witzleben’s attorney, admitted in his concluding speech that “the court has only one duty: to confirm and execute the sentence verbatim.”19 With such attorneys, there was hardly a need for a prosecutor.

  “Witzleben,” wrote SD Chief Kaltenbrunner in a report to the party chancellery, “was revealed in the trial as a decrepit, miserable old man, who had lost the last remnants of his self-respect. Furthermore, it was clearly established that he had agreed to take part in the assassination mainly because he resented his transfer to the reserves.”20 This sentence perfectly reflects the line taken by Kaltenbrunner and Freisler, who did their best to degrade the conspirators as much as possible. The prison guards had given Witzleben, the former field marshal, oversized beltless trousers, forcing him to hold them until even Freisler decided that was too much. His false teeth were also taken away. Sick, a shadow of himself, he stood broken before the judge and answered mainly in monosyllables. It was clear that Witzleben found it hard to face the flow of accusations and abuse being hurled at him.

  Some of the conspirators tried vainly to save their necks. Captain Hagen claimed he knew nothing about the assassination plot and had procured the bomb only at the request of his superiors. He had not given them away, he added, out of personal loyalty. “He pushed back the thought,” wrote Kaltenbrunner sardonically, “that loyalty to Führer and nation is more important than any personal tie.”21 Others, like Hase, Hoepner, Bernardis, and Klausing, stood repentantly before the judge, trembling in fear.

  The only exception was Count Peter Yorck, who represented the Kreisau spirit at its best. When asked by Freisler why he failed to join the Nazi Party, he answered that he “is not and never could be a Nazi.” President Freisler, knowing full well that Yorck had denounced the murder of the Jews in his interrogation, asked him if the reason was “opposition to the National Socialist concept of justice, that the Jews have to be uprooted.” “The vital point running through all of these questions,” answered Yorck, “is the totalitarian claim of the state over the citizen to the exclusion of his religious and moral obligations toward God.”22 Freisler cut him short immediately. The trial was being filmed for educational purposes, and the show must not be spoiled by “long speeches.” The verdict was obviously predetermined: all defendants were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by hanging:

  In the name of the German People! The honorless, ambitious, oath breakers, Erwin von Witzleben, Erich Hoepner, Helmuth Stieff, Paul von Hase, Robert Bernardis, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, Albrecht von Hagen and Friedrich Karl Klausing, betrayed the fallen soldiers, the people, the Führer and the Reich. Their betrayal is without precedent in German history. Instead of fighting in a manly way, adhering to the Führer until victory like the rest of the German people, they tried to murder the Führer in an abominable, traitorous act, thus putting our nation at the mercy of its enemies, only to enslave it in the dark fetters of reaction. These traitors, who betrayed everything we live and fight for, are sentenced to death. Their property is confiscated by the Reich.23

  The next morning, August 8, Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben was led to the gallows in Plötzensee Prison, Berlin, along with Hoepner, Stieff, Bernardis, Klausing, Hase, Yorck, and Hagen. The conspirators were hanged slowly with piano wires dangling from meat hooks. During the war, the hangman, a tough named Roettger, earned a bonus of eighty marks and extra cigarette rations for every head he chopped by guillotine and neck he hanged by rope. He always had a cigarette in his mouth.24

  The horror scene was duly filmed and sent the same day to Hitler for his personal enjoyment. A few days later, the Führer received additional photos during one of the daily meetings. “Hitler put on his spectacles,” recalled one of those present, “eagerly grabbed up the macabre images, and gazed at them for an eternity, with a look of ghoulish delight.” They were then passed around. General Guderian was there but did not protest the humiliation of his former colleagues.25

  This was only the first trial of many. Fritz von der Schulenburg, one of the main defendants in the second trial, behaved very differently from Hoepner, Bernardis, Hase, and Klausing, who tried to excuse themselves or to repent during the trial. “We took this deed upon ourselves,” he said to Freisler, “to save Germany from untold misery. It is clear to me that I’ll be hanged, but I do not regr
et the act [of the assassination attempt], and hope that another will accomplish it at the right moment.” Likewise, Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld said clearly, before being cut short by Freisler, that he had turned against Hitler “because of the murders within and without Germany.”26 “Soon you will be in hell,” the judge told another conspirator, the Catholic lawyer Dr. Josef Wirmer. “Gladly,” he replied, “if you will join me there, Mr. President.”27

  In a subsequent trial, Helmuth James von Moltke was also sentenced to death. Moltke wrote, a short while before his execution, that he stood before Freisler not as a nobleman, Protestant, Prussian, or even German, but only “as a Christian”; and furthermore, he referred thus to himself and to two other prominent Kreisauers who shared the dock with him: “The thoughts of three lonely people were enough to frighten National Socialism . . . Isn’t that a compliment? We are being hanged because we thought together. Freisler is right, 100 per cent right. If die we must, better to do so under this charge.”28

  Moltke was executed along with the once-omnipotent broker Hermann Kaiser and many military resistance fighters arrested at the end of July and the beginning of August. The former governor of France, General Stülpnagel, was led to the hangman in a hospital bed. Among the executed were also Fritz von der Schulenburg, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, and General Fellgiebel. By the end of August, almost thirty key conspirators had been hanged. Until the end of the war, the number of the resistance fighters executed or murdered without trial grew to more than one hundred.

 

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