Strasse that Hitler was dead, a Lieutenant-Colonel Herber, unconvinced, had left
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 845
with about fifteen men for No.20 Hermann-Göring Strasse and armed them with
machine guns and grenades; after confirming that Hitler was alive, they burst in on
General Olbricht, in conference with Stauffenberg and Quirnheim, and arrested
them all after a brief exchange of small-arms fire. There followed an anxious moment
as Remer’s troops arrived, since Herber had no means of contacting either
Hitler or Goebbels to approve of his having arrested these very senior officers.32
Remer had ordered Lieutenant-Colonel Rudolf Schlee to contact this loyal unit at
the war department building. After hearing Schlee’s report, which revealed that the
building was nothing less than the traitors’ headquarters, Goebbels phoned Hitler
and secured authority to smoke them out.33 He told Schlee to go back and arrest
‘every general.’ At about nine P.M. he sent a telex to all the gauleiters—he did not
state by what authority—reporting for their own information that a ‘dilettantish’
plot by reactionary army generals had been uncovered. ‘Gauleiters are called upon
to display extreme vigilance and to ensure that their organisation remains effective
and intact and that they preserve their freedom of action and movement at all costs.
Further directives follow. Heil Hitler. REICHSLEITER DR GOEBBELS.’34
At the same time Bormann, the more usual signatory for such directives, telexed
to the gauleiters his theory that the ‘reactionary criminal vermin’ had staged the
putsch in conjunction with the traitors in Moscow (he named General von Seydlitz
and Count Einsiedel). Had it succeeded, he said, a generals’ clique consisting of
Fromm, Olbricht, and Hoepner were to take power and make peace with Moscow.
Bormann followed with a further message at nine-forty, warning that ‘a General
Beck’ was trying to take over the government. ‘The erstwhile Field-Marshal von
Witzleben is posing as the Führer’s successor. Of course no national socialist gauleiter
will allow himself to be duped by, or accept orders from, these criminals…’35
EVEN now Dr Goebbels’ situation was anything but secure. An armoured brigade
under Colonel Ernest Bolbrinker, one of Rommel’s toughest Afrika Corps regimental
commanders, had arrived at Fehrbelliner Platz from the armoured warfare school
at Krampnitz.36 Another tank unit under Colonel Wolfgang Glaesemer had churned
846 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
to a halt in the Tiergarten park, only a few hundred yards west of Goebbels’ residence.
Remer’s adjutant Lieutenant Siebert found out that General Guderian, the
tank commanders’ superior officer, had given them orders to shoot anybody who did
not obey his orders. What was he up to? It was common knowledge that Hitler had
treated him shabbily in December 1941.37
Remer’s predecessor Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Gehrke offered to go to Fehrbelliner
Platz to find out. Not fully trusting any army officers now, Goebbels sent Hadamowsky,
his chief of staff in the RPL, as well and even when Gehrke reported that Guderian’s
officers were ‘for the Führer’ he was not satisfied and had Remer telephone the
Panzer Reserve Brigade at Cottbus to send a battalion of heavy tanks to Berlin in case
it came to a firefight with Guderian.38
General von Hase was still doggedly trying to salvage Valkyrie. He sent an officer
over to order Remer to return to him. Major Remer, equipped now with Hitler’s
personal authority, replied that on the contrary the general was to come to No.20
Hermann-Göring Strasse. Hase arrived with Schöne and Massenbach. A monocled,
upright officer of striking appearance, Hase put on his most affable air and told Remer
that General Hermann Reinecke (a loyalist Nazi) had ordered him to seize the Bendler
Strasse building. Goebbels intervened and no less affably invited Hase to remain
under his roof as his guest. Hase inquired whether the kitchens could provide a meal,
and there was a courteous exchange about whether a Rhine wine or a Moselle would
complement it better before Goebbels turned to more pressing business. After a
while, Hase asked Remer, ‘Major, could you ask the minister whether I can go—my
wife is waiting for me.’
At this moment however an S.S. man brought a message in to Goebbels. A search
of Hase’s office had turned up a rubber stamp reading ‘Stauffenberg’ and a pad of
blank gate-passes. ‘I am sorry,’ said Goebbels, ‘but I must ask you to remain.’39
Shortly General von Kortzfleisch, the one-eyed commander of Wehrmacht District
III (Berlin) appeared at Goebbels’ door. No doubt anxious to establish his credentials
he snapped at Hase, ‘Well, Mr von Hase! You didn’t expect to find me here!’
He told Goebbels that earlier that day General Olbricht had placed him under close
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 847
arrest when he failed to declare for the plotters, and had replaced him with General
Baron von Thüngen (the judge on whom Goebbels’ enemies had banked at that morning’s
hearing against Colonel Martin). Kortzfleisch unhesitatingly identified Fromm,
Olbricht, and Stauffenberg as the ringleaders.40
Goebbels spared him, although there were sound reasons not to. This was an evening
when he turned a blind eye on many an officer’s shortcomings. Even Guderian’s
actions seemed ambivalent, but Goebbels thought highly of him and Hitler would
shrewdly appoint him to replace Zeitzler the next day. All of these men—including
Hase, Witzleben, Thüngen, Schöne—would eventually be hanged. In fact death was
already beginning its harvest. General Fromm had already had his fellow-conspirators
Olbricht, Quirnheim, and Stauffenberg shot by firing squad in the light of motor
headlamps behind the Bendler Strasse building.
He hoped he had thus saved his own neck. Brought up to Goebbels’ study, the sixfoot
two general, until now commander of Germany’s reserve army, demanded to
be allowed to speak by phone with Hitler. Goebbels ordered his arrest. He believed
he was beginning to understand. So this was why the barracks were full of idle troops.
Fromm, Olbricht, & Co had been cynically holding them back for their Valkyrie. ‘I’ll
see to it, general,’ he told Kortzfleisch, ‘that your barracks empty. And that they are
refilled. Bank on it!’ Inadvertently, the traitors had made Total War a near-reality, and
his heart sang with joy.
His house overflowed with fearful ministers, party officials and prisoners. Arriving
there after midnight Major Balzer found fifty people milling around upstairs. Somebody
asked him to keep an eye on Fromm. Still feigning innocence, Fromm related
that after returning from the Wolf’s Lair that afternoon Stauffenberg and Olbricht
had placed him under arrest. ‘The background as described by Fromm was a bit
obscure,’ reported Balzer, ‘and he was very agitated as he regarded his conveyance to
Goebbels’ home as a kind of arrest.’ After ten minutes’ questioning by Kaltenbrunner,
Fromm was removed—‘It certainly looked like an arrest to me,’ reported Balzer the
next day.41 Smoking nervously, Goebbels telephoned Magd
a in Dresden and told her
some officers had tried to murder Hitler. She burst into tears. More officers arrived
848 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
during the night, including General Hermann Reinecke and Colonel-General Stumpff,
commanding Luftwaffe forces within the Reich. Göring telephoned an offer of flak
units to crush the army revolt. Goebbels turned it down. After midnight Himmler
put in a belated appearance. His explanation that he had been ‘directing counteroperations
from outside Berlin’ seemed reasonable enough. In Goebbels’ study
Himmler expressed relief that Goebbels had used the army itself and not the Waffen
S.S. to crush the putsch. There must not be the slightest blemish on the army’s name.42
It was now July 21. The fated day had passed. At three-forty A.M. Bormann issued a
triumphant dispatch. ‘The traitors’ action can be regarded as at an end.’43 Around
four-thirty Goebbels emerged from his study and announced, ‘Gentlemen, the putsch
is over.’44 He escorted Himmler to his car and shook hands with him. By five his
house was almost deserted. He took Naumann, Schwägermann, and Oven upstairs,
pausing on each tread to tell them more tidbits. At the top he briefly shared a little
table with a bronze bust of the Führer. ‘That was like a purifying thunderstorm,’ he
said, irreverently propping an elbow on the famous quiff. He lit another cigarette.
Months later he would reflect, ‘The Twentieth of July was in fact not only the nadir of
our war crisis, but Day One of our resurgence.’45
WHILE Hitler called all his ministers to the Wolf’s Lair on July 21, Goebbels necessarily
stayed in Berlin. At his ministerial conference he narrated what had happened,
though with cosmetic flourishes. The tanks assembling in Berlin, he averred, were
General Guderian’s, which ‘the Führer had provided for protection.’ Kortzfleisch
had been magnificent. Hase, he scoffed, had behaved like a fool on his arrest—asking
if he ‘might telephone his wifey’ and might he have a sandwich and a bottle of wine,
‘preferably a Moselle.’ It was their duty, Goebbels insisted, to ensure that no stain
attached to the army’s other generals. Himmler, he revealed, had told him that Fromm
had kept six hundred thousand soldiers idle in Germany; these would now be released
to the fighting front. Thus, this putsch was a real breakthrough toward Total
War.46
GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH 849
Some of his listeners remained unconvinced. Immanuel Schäffer wondered how
all this could have escaped Himmler’s notice. And what about Göring’s wiretappers?
47 The London press had a field day, with sarcastic references to several of
Goebbels’ previous utterances. Goebbels instructed his outposts to organise spontaneous
open-air demonstrations of the public’s happiness and joy.48
Inevitably, he claimed that Hitler’s ‘miraculous escape’ was further proof that their
Führer was protected by Providence. Otherwise he ordered the putsch glossed over,
like the Hess affair. He released no word of the plotters’ aims, let alone of the true
scale of the conspiracy which had extended from the eastern front to Paris and Vienna.
49 The traitors remained for Goebbels a ‘minuscule clique of reactionary officers.’
Despite all his efforts however there was enduring damage to the army; it violated
sensibilities that their traitors had been hanged, rather than shot. Officers felt that
their entire caste had been impugned.50 Indeed, the Twentieth of July left residual
issues which were still unresolved in Germany fifty years later.
1 RMVP circular; in files of Propaganda-Staffel north-west, Jul 24, 1944 (Hoover Libr.,
Lerner papers).
2 Generalrichter Dr Helmuth Rosencrantz, MS (‘Büsum diary, Jul 1945’), BAOR Counter-
Intelligence Bureau report CIB/INT/B5/2908/1/0/D, Sep 29, 1945 (NA file RG.407,
entry 427, box 1954m). Rosencrantz had had the trial delayed from Jul 17 to 20 so that his
deputy judge General Baron von Thüngen would be available to try it. Hase attended the
morning session. Sentence, announced at 2 P.M., was nine months’ prison; JG and Naumann
interceded for Martin, and it was reduced to five months’ fortress confinement.
3 Speer chronicle, Jul 20; Sündermann, ‘Jul 21, 1944,’ 62.
4 JG confirmed this in his broadcast of Jul 26.
5 One item concerned an article in the mass circulation Front und Heimat No.22, Jul 1944,
which was considered too flattering about conditions in Soviet-occupied Romania.
Hadamowsky to JG, Jul 21, 1944 (ZStA Potsdam, Rep.62 Re 3, Hadamowsky papers, vol.1).
6 OCMH interrogation of Gen Wilhelm Arnold, chief of army signals, Aug 25, 1945 (IfZ,
Irving collection). Peter Hoffmann, Widerstand, Staatsstreich, Attentat, 852.—Dr Richard
Arnhold, Bömer’s P.A., confirmed that the RMVP’s domestic- and foreign press depart-
850 GOEBBELS. MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
ments had direct telephone and telex links to Dr Dietrich’s office at FHQ. PW paper 80 (NA
file RG.165, entry 79, nox 766).
7 Oven, ‘Jul 23, 1944’, 398f. His recollection was that he told Lorenz that JG was asleep,
whereupon Lorenz dictated it to him.—And see Oven, ‘Der 20.Juli 1944—erlebt im Hause
Goebbels,’ inVerrat und Widerstand im Dritten Reich (Coburg, 1978), 43.
8 Morell treated the ear-ache (diary, Jul 23, 1944).
9 JG to Leni Riefenstahl-Jacob, Jul 20, 1944, 2 P.M.; he deleted the ‘–Jacob’ and a second,
over-fulsome, sentence from the draft (ZStA Potsdam, Rep.90, Go 1, vol.3)
10 BAOR interrogation of Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Jan 23, 1946 (Trevor Roper papers,
IfZ, Irving collection).
11 On Dec 22, 1944 he wrote to the Führer that ‘in a dark hour’ he had trembled for
Hitler’s life (BA file NL.118/106).
12 Otto Ernst Remer’s report on the events, Jul 22, 1944, is in BA file EAP.105/32; publ.
by Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (ed.), Spiegelbild einer Verschwörung. Die Opposition gegen Hitler und der
Staatsstreich vom 20. Juli 1944 in der SD-Berichterstattung (Stuttgart, 1984), vol.i, 12ff; cf.
Hoffmann, 460f. The author also interviewed Remer.
13 Dr Hans W Hagen’s report on Jul 22, dated Oct 16, 1944 (NA film T84, roll 19, 0022ff);
Spiegelbild, vol.ii, 637ff.—Hagen, Zwischen Eid und Befehl. Semler, 132ff.
14 Oven, 398f.
15 Speer’s dramatic and self-serving published ‘memoirs’ are based more on secondary
works than on his memory; he was not ushered out by JG at midnight, as he claims, but left
with Himmler around 4:30 A.M. as Balzer’s report makes clear.
16 From his perch at the absent Schwägermann’s desk, outside JG’s room, Speer tried to
reach his friend Fromm without success. He did speak with Olbricht and complain that he
and JG were being ‘detained’ by soldiers; Speer reported only the latter conversation to JG.
17 Albrecht to his wife, Jul 22, 1944 (IfZ, Irving collection).
18 Schaub MS (IfZ, Irving collection).
19 BBC monitoring report; see the FO’s printed summary of the putsch in PRO file FO.371/
39062.
20 Remer.
Doctor Goebbels: His Life & Death Page 139
