He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on September 8, 1944, but not executed until February 2 of the following year, along with Popitz.* Apparently Himmler delayed the hangings because he thought the contacts of the two men, especially those of Goerdeler, with the Western Allies through Sweden and Switzerland might prove helpful to him if he took over the sinking ship of state—a prospect which began to grow in his mind at this time.37
Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg, the former ambassador in Moscow, and Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, both of whom were to have taken over the direction of foreign policy in the new anti-Nazi regime, were executed on November 10 and September 8, respectively. Count Fritz von der Schulenburg died on the gallows August 10. General Fellgiebel, chief of signals at OKW, whose role at Rastenburg on July 20 we have recounted, was executed on the same day.
The death roll is a long one. According to one source it numbered some 4,980 names.38 The Gestapo records list 7,000 arrests. Among those resistance leaders mentioned in these pages who were executed were General Fritz Lindemann, Colonel von Boeselager, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Colonel Georg Hansen of the Abwehr, Count von Helldorf, Colonel von Hofacker, Dr. Jens Peter Jessen, Otto Kiep, Dr. Carl Langbehn, Julius Leber, Major von Leonrod, Wilhelm Leuschner, Artur Nebe (the chief of the criminal police), Professor Adolf Reichwein, Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, brother of Klaus, General Thiele, Chief of Signals, OKH, and General von Thuengen, who was appointed by Beck to succeed General von Kortzfleisch on the day of the putsch.
One group of twenty condemned, whose lives Himmler had prolonged apparently in the belief that they might prove useful to him if he took over power and had to make peace, were shot out of hand on the night of April 22–23 as the Russians began fighting to the center of the capital. The prisoners were being marched from the Lehrterstrasse prison to the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo dungeon—a good many prisoners escaped in the blackout on occasions such as these in the final days of the Third Reich—when they met an S.S. detachment, which lined them up against a wall and mowed them down, only two escaping to tell the tale. Among those who perished were Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, Klaus Bonhoeffer, brother of the pastor, and Albrecht Haushofer, a close friend of Hess and son of the famous geopolitician. The father committed suicide shortly afterward.
General Fromm did not escape execution despite his behavior on the fateful evening of July 20. Arrested the next day on orders of Himmler, who had succeeded him as head of the Replacement Army, he was haled before the People’s Court in February 1945 on charges of “cowardice” and sentenced to death.* Perhaps as a small recognition for his vital service in helping to save the Nazi regime, he was not strangled from a meathook, as were those whom he had arrested on the night of July 20, but merely dispatched by a firing squad on March 19, 1945.
The mystery which surrounded the life of Admiral Canaris, the deposed head of the Abwehr who had done so much to aid the conspirators but was not directly involved in the events of July 20, enveloped for many years the circumstances of his death. It was known that he was arrested after the attempt on Hitler’s life. But Keitel, in one of the few decent gestures of his life at OKW, managed to prevent him from being handed over to the People’s Court. The Fuehrer, outraged at the delay, then ordered Canaris to be tried by a summary S.S. court. This process was also delayed, but Canaris, along with Colonel Oster, his former assistant, and four others were finally tried at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, less than a month before the war ended, and sentenced to death. But it was not known for sure whether Canaris had been executed. It took ten years to solve the mystery. In 1955 the Gestapo prosecutor in the case was brought to trial and a large number of witnesses testified that they had seen Canaris hanged on April 9, 1945. One eyewitness, the Danish Colonel Lunding, told of seeing Canaris dragged naked from his cell to the gallows. Oster was dispatched at the same time.
Some who were arrested escaped trial and were eventually liberated from the Gestapo by the advancing Allied troops. Among these were General Halder and Dr. Schacht, who had had no part in the July 20 revolt though on the stand at Nuremberg Schacht claimed to have been “initiated” into it. Halder was placed in solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell for several months. The two men, along with a distinguished group of prisoners, German and foreign, including Schuschnigg, Léon Blum, Schlabrendorff and General von Falkenhausen, were freed by American troops on May 4, 1945, at Niederdorf in the South Tyrol just as their Gestapo guard was on the point of executing the whole lot. Falkenhausen was later tried by the Belgians as a war criminal and sentenced on March 9, 1951, after four years in prison awaiting trial, to twelve years’ penal servitude. He was released, however, a fortnight later and returned to Germany.
A good many Army officers implicated in the plot chose suicide rather than let themselves be turned over to the tender mercies of the Volksgericht. On the morning of July 21, General Henning von Tresckow, who had been the heart and soul of the conspiracy among the officers on the Eastern front, took leave of his friend and aide, Schlabrendorff, who has recalled his last words:
“Everybody will now turn upon us and cover us with abuse. But my conviction remains unshaken—we have done the right thing. Hitler is not only the archenemy of Germany: he is the archenemy of the world. In a few hours I shall stand before God, answering for my actions and for my omissions. I think I shall be able to uphold with a clear conscience all that I have done in the fight against Hitler …
“Whoever joined the resistance movement put on the shirt of Nessus. The worth of a man is certain only if he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.”39
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 aff
air, 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 received 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.”
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Page 170
