The S.S. had at last rallied, thanks mostly to Otto Skorzeny, the tough S.S. leader who had shown his prowess in rescuing Mussolini from captivity. Unaware that anything was up that day Skorzeny had boarded the night express for Vienna at 6 P.M., but had been hauled off the train when it stopped at the suburb of Lichterfelde, at the urging of S.S. General Schellenberg, the Number Two man in the S.D. Skorzeny found the unguarded S.D. headquarters in a most hysterical state, but being the coldblooded man he was, and a good organizer to boot, he quickly rounded up his armed bands and went to work. It was he who first persuaded the tank school formations to remain loyal to Hitler.
The energetic counteraction at Rastenburg, the quick thinking of Goebbels in winning over Remer and in utilizing the radio, the revival of the S.S. in Berlin and the unbelievable confusion and inaction of the rebels in the Bendlerstrasse caused a good many Army officers who had been on the point of throwing in their lot with the conspirators, or had even done so, to think better of it. One of these was General Otto Herfurth, chief of staff to the arrested Kortzfleisch, who at first had co-operated with the Bendlerstrasse in trying to round up the troops, and then, when he saw how things were going, changed sides, ringing up Hitler’s headquarters around 9:30 P.M. to say that he was putting down the military putsch.*
General Fromm, whose refusal to join the revolt had put it in jeopardy from the beginning and who, as a result, had been arrested, now bestirred himself. About 8 P.M., after four hours of confinement in his adjutant’s office, he had asked to be allowed to retire to his private quarters on the floor below. He had given his word of honor as an officer that he would make no attempt to escape or to establish contact with the outside. General Hoepner had consented and moreover, since Fromm had complained that he was not only hungry but thirsty, had sent him sandwiches and a bottle of wine. A little earlier three generals of Fromm’s staff had arrived, had refused to join the rebellion, and had demanded to be taken to their chief. Inexplicably, they were taken to him in his private quarters, though put under arrest. They had no sooner arrived than Fromm told them of a little-used rear exit through which they could escape. Breaking his word to Hoepner, he ordered the generals to organize help, storm the building, liberate him and put down the revolt. The generals slipped out unnoticed.
But already a group of junior officers on Olbricht’s staff, who at first had either gone along with the rebels or stuck around in the Bendlerstrasse to see how the revolt would go, had begun to sense that it was failing. They had begun to realize too, as one of them later said, that they would all be hanged as traitors if the revolt failed and they had not turned against it in time. One of them, Lieutenant Colonel Franz Herber, a former police officer and a convinced Nazi, had fetched some Tommy guns and ammunition from the arsenal of Spandau, and these were secreted on the second floor. About 10:30, these officers called upon Olbricht and demanded to know exactly what he and his friends were trying to accomplish. The General told them, and without arguing they withdrew.
Twenty minutes later they returned—six or eight of them, led by Herber and Lieutenant Colonel Bodo von der Heyde—brandishing their weapons and demanded further explanations from Olbricht. Stauffenberg looked in to see what all the noise was about and was seized. When he tried to escape, bolting out the door and down the corridor, he was shot in the arm—the only one he had. The counterrebels began shooting wildly, though apparently not hitting anyone except Stauffenberg. They then roved through the wing which had been the headquarters of the plot, rounding up the conspirators. Beck, Hoepner, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Haeften and Mertz were herded into Fromm’s vacated office, where Fromm himself shortly appeared, brandishing a revolver.
“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I am now going to treat you as you treated me.” But he didn’t.
“Lay down your weapons,” he commanded, and informed his former captors that they were under arrest.
“You wouldn’t make that demand of me, your old commanding officer,” Beck said quietly, reaching for his revolver. “I will draw the consequences from this unhappy situation myself.”
“Well, keep it pointed at yourself,” Fromm warned.
The curious lack of will to act of this brilliant, civilized former General Staff Chief had finally brought his downfall at the supreme test of his life. It remained with him to the very end.
“At this moment it is the old days that I recall …” he began to say, but Fromm cut him short.
“We don’t want to hear that stuff now. I ask you to stop talking and do something.”
Beck did. He pulled the trigger, but the bullet merely scratched his head. He slumped into his chair, bleeding a little.
“Help the old gentleman,” Fromm commanded two young officers, but when they tried to take the weapon Beck objected, asking for another chance. Fromm nodded his consent.
Then he turned to the rest of the plotters. “And you gentlemen, if you have any letters to write I’ll give you a few more minutes.” Olbricht and Hoepner asked for stationery and sat down to pen brief notes of farewell to their wives. Stauffenberg, Mertz, Haeften and the others stood there silently. Fromm marched out of the room.
He had quickly made up his mind to eliminate these men and not only to cover up the traces—for though he had refused to engage actively in the plot, he had known of it for months, sheltering the assassins and not reporting their plans—but to curry favor with Hitler as the man who put down the revolt. In the world of the Nazi gangsters it was much too late for this, but Fromm did not realize it.
He returned in five minutes to announce that “in the name of the Fuehrer” he had called a session of a “court-martial” (there is no evidence that he had) and that it had pronounced death sentences on four officers: “Colonel of the General Staff Mertz, General Olbricht, this colonel whose name I no longer know [Stauffenberg], and this lieutenant [Haeften].”
The two generals, Olbricht and Hoepner, were still scratching their letters to their wives. General Beck lay sprawled in his chair, his face smeared with blood from the bullet scratch. The four officers “condemned” to death stood like ramrods, silent.
“Well, gentlemen,” Fromm said to Olbricht and Hoepner, “are you ready? I must ask you to hurry so as not to make it too difficult for the others.”
Hoepner finished his letter and laid it on the table. Olbricht asked for an envelope, put his letter in it and sealed it. Beck, now beginning to come to, asked for another pistol. Stauffenberg, the sleeve of his wounded good arm soaked in blood, and his three “condemned” companions were led out. Fromm told Hoepner to follow him.
In the courtyard below in the dim rays of the blackout-hooded headlights of an Army car the four officers were quickly dispatched by a firing squad. Eyewitnesses say there was much tumult and shouting, mostly by the guards, who were in a hurry because of the danger of a bombing attack—British planes had been over Berlin almost every night that summer. Stauffenberg died crying, “Long live our sacred Germany!”32
In the meantime Fromm had given General Hoepner a certain choice. Three weeks later, in the shadow of the gallows, Hoepner told of it to the People’s Court.
“Well, Hoepner [Fromm said], this business really hurts me. We used to be good friends and comrades, you know. You’ve got yourself mixed up in this thing and must take the consequences. Do you want to go the same way as Beck? Otherwise I shall have to arrest you now.”
Hoepner answered that he did “not feel so guilty” and that he thought he could “justify” himself.
“I understand that,” Fromm answered, shaking his hand. Hoepner was carted off to the military prison at Moabit.
As he was being taken away he heard Beck’s tired voice through the door in the next room: “If it doesn’t work this time, then please help me.” There was the sound of a pistol shot. Beck’s second attempt to kill himself failed. Fromm poked his head in the door and once more told an officer, “Help the old gentleman.” This unknown officer declined to give the coup de grâce, leaving t
hat to a sergeant, who dragged Beck, unconscious from the second wound, outside the room and finished him off with a shot in the neck.33
It was now sometime after midnight. The revolt, the only serious one ever made against Hitler in the eleven and a half years of the Third Reich, had been snuffed out in eleven and a half hours. Skorzeny arrived at the Bendlerstrasse with a band of armed S.S. men, forbade any more executions—as a policeman he knew enough not to kill those who could be tortured into giving much valuable evidence of the extent of the plot—handcuffed the rest of the plotters, sent them off to the Gestapo prison on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse and put detectives to work collecting incriminating papers which the conspirators had not had time to destroy. Himmler, who had reached Berlin a little earlier and set up temporary headquarters in Goebbels’ ministry, now protected by part of Remer’s guard battalion, telephoned Hitler and reported that the revolt had been crushed. In East Prussia a radio van was racing from Koenigsberg to Rastenburg so that the Fuehrer could make his long-heralded broadcast which the Deutschlandsender had been promising every few minutes since 9 P.M.
Just before 1 A.M. Adolf Hitler’s hoarse voice burst upon the summer night’s air.
My German comrades!
If I speak to you today it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and secondly, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history.
A very small clique of ambitious, irresponsible and, at the same time, senseless and stupid officers had concocted a plot to eliminate me and, with me, the staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.
The bomb planted by Colonel Count Stauffenberg exploded two meters to the right of me. It seriously wounded a number of my true and loyal collaborators, one of whom has died. I myself am entirely unhurt, aside from some very minor scratches, bruises and burns. I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed upon me by Providence …
The circle of these usurpers is very small and has nothing in common with the spirit of the German Wehrmacht and, above all, none with the German people. It is a gang of criminal elements which will be destroyed without mercy.
I therefore give orders now that no military authority … is to obey orders from this crew of usurpers. I also order that it is everyone’s duty to arrest, or, if they resist, to shoot at sight, anyone issuing or handling such orders …
This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.
BLOODY VENGEANCE
This time, too, Hitler kept his word.
The barbarism of the Nazis toward their own fellow Germans reached its zenith. There was a wild wave of arrests followed by gruesome torture, drumhead trials, and death sentences carried out, in many cases, by slow strangling while the victims were suspended by piano wire from meathooks borrowed from butchershops and slaughterhouses. Relatives and friends of the suspects were rounded up by the thousands and sent to concentration camps, where many of them died. The brave few who gave shelter to those who were in hiding were summarily dealt with.
Hitler, seized by a titanic fury and an unquenchable thirst for revenge, whipped Himmler and Kaltenbrunner to ever greater efforts to lay their hands on every last person who had dared to plot against him. He himself laid down the procedure for dispatching them.
“This time,” he stormed at one of his first conferences after the explosion at Rastenburg, “the criminals will be given short shrift. No military tribunals. We’ll hail them before the People’s Court. No long speeches from them. The court will act with lightning speed. And two hours after the sentence it will be carried out. By hanging—without mercy.”34
These instructions from on high were carried out literally by Ronald Freisler, the president of the People’s Court (Volksgerichetshof), a vile, vituperative maniac, who as a prisoner of war in Russia during the first war had become a fanatical Bolshevik and who, even after he became, in 1924, an equally fanatical Nazi, remained a warm admirer of Soviet terror and a keen student of its methods. He had made a special study of Andrei Vishinsky’s technique as chief prosecutor in the Moscow trials of the Thirties in which the “Old Bolsheviks” and most of the leading generals had been found guilty of “treason” and liquidated. “Freisler is our Vishinsky,” Hitler had exclaimed in the conference mentioned above.
The first trial of the July 20 conspirators before the People’s Court took place in Berlin on August 7 and 8, with Field Marshal von Witzleben, Generals Hoepner, Stieff and von Hase, and the junior officers, Hagen, Klausing, Bernardis and Count Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, who had worked closely with their idol Stauffenberg, in the dock. They were already pretty well broken by their treatment in the Gestapo cellars and, since Goebbels had ordered every minute of the trial to be filmed so that the movie could be shown to the troops and to the civilian public as an example—and a warning—everything had been done to make the accused look as shabby as possible. They were outfitted in nondescript clothes, old coats and sweaters, and they entered the courtroom unshaven, collarless, without neckties and deprived of suspenders and belts to keep their trousers hitched up. The once proud Field Marshal, especially, looked like a terribly broken, toothless old man. His false teeth had been taken from him and as he stood in the dock, badgered unmercifully by the venomous chief judge, he kept grasping at his trousers to keep them from falling-down.
“You dirty old man,” Freisler shouted at him, “why do you keep fiddling with your trousers?”
Yet though the accused knew that their fate was already settled they behaved with dignity and courage despite Freisler’s ceaseless efforts to degrade and demean them. Young Peter Yorck, a cousin of Stauffenberg, was perhaps the bravest, answering the most insulting questions quietly and never attempting to hide his contempt for National Socialism.
“Why didn’t you join the party?” Freisler asked.
“Because I am not and never could be a Nazi,” the count replied.
When Freisler had recovered from this answer and pressed the point, Yorck tried to explain. “Mr. President, I have already stated in my interrogation that the Nazi ideology was such that I—”
The judge interrupted him. “—could not agree … You didn’t agree with the National Socialist conception of justice, say, in regard to rooting out the Jews?”
“What is important, what brings together all these questions,” Yorck replied, “is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forces him to renounce his moral and religious obligations to God.”
“Nonsense!” cried Freisler, and he cut off the young man. Such talk might poison Dr. Goebbels’ film and enrage the Fuehrer, who had decreed, “No long speeches from them.”
The court-appointed defense lawyers were more than ludicrous. Their cowardice, as one reads the transcript of the trial, is almost unbelievable. Witzleben’s attorney, for example, a certain Dr. Weissmann, outdid the state prosecutor and almost equaled Freisler, in denouncing his client as a “murderer,” as completely guilty and as deserving the worst punishment.
That punishment was meted out as soon as the trial had ended on August 8. “They must all be hanged like cattle,” Hitler had ordered, and they were. Out at Ploetzensee prison the eight condemned were herded into a small room in which eight meathooks hung from the ceiling. One by one, after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire being placed around their necks and attached to the meathooks. A movie camera whirled as the men dangled and strangled, their beltless trousers finally dropping off as they struggled, leaving them naked in their death agony.35 The developed film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler so that he could view it, as well as the pictures of the trial, the same evening. Goebbels is said to have kept himself from fainting by holding both hands over his eyes.*36
All that summer, fall and winter and into the new year of 1945 the grisly People’s Court sat in session, racing through its macabre trials and grinding out death sentences, until finally an American bomb fell
directly on the courthouse on the morning of February 3, 1945, just as Schlabrendorff was being led into the courtroom, killing Judge Freisler and destroying the records of most of the accused who still survived. Schlabrendorff thus miraculously escaped with his life—one of the very few conspirators on whom fortune smiled—being eventually liberated from the Gestapo’s clutches by American troops in the Tyrol.
The fate of the others must now be recorded.
Goerdeler, who was to be the Chancellor of the new regime, had gone into hiding three days before July 20, after having been warned that the Gestapo had issued an order for his arrest. He wandered for three weeks between Berlin, Potsdam and East Prussia, rarely spending two nights in the same place but always being taken in by friends or relatives, who risked death by giving him shelter, for Hitler had now put a price of one million marks on his head. On the morning of August 12, exhausted and hungry after several days and nights wandering afoot in East Prussia, he stumped into a small inn in the village of Konradswalde near Marienwerder. While waiting to be served breakfast he noticed a woman in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Wac eying him closely, and without waiting for his food he slipped out and made for the nearby woods. It was too late. The woman was an old acquaintance of the Goerdeler family, a Helene Schwaerzel, who had easily recognized him and who promptly confided in a couple of Air Force men who were sitting with her. Goerdeler was quickly apprehended in the woods.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 169
