The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  And that is what happened.

  Rommel, wearing his old Afrika Korps leather jacket and grasping his field marshal’s baton, got into the car with the two generals, was driven a mile or two up the road by the side of a forest, where General Maisel and the S.S. driver got out, leaving Rommel and General Burgdorf in the back seat. When the two men returned to the car a minute later, Rommel was slumped over the seat, dead. Burgdorf paced up and down impatiently, as though he feared he would be late for lunch and his midday drinks. Fifteen minutes after she had bidden her husband farewell, Frau Rommel received the expected telephone call from the hospital. The chief doctor reported that two generals had brought in the body of the Field Marshal, who had died of a cerebral embolism, apparently as the result of his previous skull fractures. Actually Burgdorf had gruffly forbidden an autopsy. “Do not touch the corpse,” he stormed. “Everything has already been arranged in Berlin.”

  It had been.

  Field Marshal Model issued a ringing order of the day announcing that Rommel had died of “wounds sustained on July 17” and mourning the loss “of one of the greatest commanders of our nation.”

  Hitler wired Frau Rommel: “Accept my sincerest sympathy for the heavy loss you have suffered with the death of your husband. The name of Field Marshal Rommel will be forever linked with the heroic battles in North Africa.” Goering telegraphed “in silent compassion”:

  The fact that your husband has died a hero’s death as the result of his wounds, after we all hoped that he would remain to the German people, has deeply touched me.

  Hitler ordered a state funeral, at which the senior officer of the German Army, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, delivered the funeral oration. “His heart,” said Rundstedt as he stood over Rommel’s swastika-bedecked body, “belonged to the Fuehrer.”*

  “The old soldier [Rundstedt],” Speidel says, “appeared to those present to be broken and bewildered … Here destiny gave him the unique chance to play the role of Mark Antony. He remained in his moral apathy.”†45

  The humiliation of the vaunted officer corps of the German Army was great. It had seen three of its illustrious field marshals, Witzleben, Kluge and Rommel, implicated in a plot to overthrow the Supreme warlord, for which one of them was strangled and two forced to suicide. It had to stand idly by while scores of its highest-ranking generals were hauled off to the prisons of the Gestapo and judicially murdered after farcical trials before the People’s Court. In this unprecedented situation, despite all its proud traditions, the corps did not close ranks. Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself. Before the wrath of the former Austrian corporal, its frightened leaders fawned and groveled.

  No wonder that Field Marshal von Rundstedt looked broken and bewildered as he intoned the funeral oration over the body of Rommel. He had fallen to a low state, as had his brother officers, whom Hitler now forced to drink the bitter cup to its dregs. Rundstedt himself accepted the post of presiding officer over the so-called military Court of Honor which Hitler created to expel from the Army all officers suspected of complicity in the plot against him so that they could be denied a court-martial and handed over in disgrace as civilians to the drumhead People’s Court. The Court of Honor was not permitted to hear an accused officer in his own defense; it acted merely on the “evidence” furnished it by the Gestapo. Rundstedt did not protest against this restriction, nor did another member of the court, General Guderian—who the day after the bombing had been appointed as the new Chief of the Army General Staff—though the latter, in his memoirs, confesses that it was an “unpleasant task,” that the court sessions were “melancholy” and raised “the most difficult problems of conscience.” No doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellow judges—all generals—turned over hundreds of their comrades to certain execution after degrading them by throwing them out of the Army.

  Guderian did more. In his capacity of General Staff Chief he issued two ringing orders of the day to assure the Nazi warlord of the undying loyalty of the officer corps. The first, promulgated on July 23, accused the conspirators of being “a few officers, some of them on the retired list, who had lost all courage and, out of cowardice and weakness, preferred the road of disgrace to the only road open to an honest soldier—the road of duty and honor.” Whereupon he solemnly pledged to the Fuehrer “the unity of the generals, of the officer corps and of the men of the Army.”

  In the meantime the discarded Field Marshal von Brauchitsch rushed into print with a burning statement condemning the putsch, pledging renewed allegiance to the Fuehrer and welcoming the appointment of Himmler—who despised the generals, including Brauchitsch—as chief of the Replacement Army. Another discard, Grand Admiral Raeder, fearful that he might be suspected of at least sympathy with the plotters, rushed out of retirement to Rastenburg to personally assure Hitler of his loyalty. On July 24 the Nazi salute was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

  On July 29 Guderian warned all General Staff officers that henceforth they must take the lead in being good Nazis, loyal and true to the Leader.

  Every General Staff officer must be a National Socialist officer-leader not only … by his model attitude toward political questions but by actively co-operating in the political indoctrination of younger commanders in accordance with the tenets of the Fuehrer …

  In judging and selecting General Staff officers, superiors should place traits of character and spirit above the mind. A rascal may be ever so cunning but in the hour of need he will nevertheless fail because he is a rascal.

  I expect every General Staff officer immediately to declare himself a convert or adherent to my views and to make an announcement to that effect in public. Anyone unable to do so should apply for his removal from the General Staff.*

  So far as is known no one applied.

  With this, comments a German military historian, “the story of the General Staff as an autonomous entity may be said to have come to an end.”46 This elite group, founded by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and built up by Moltke to be the pillar of the nation, which had ruled Germany during the First World War, dominated the Weimar Republic and forced even Hitler to destroy the S.A. and murder its leader when they stood in its way, had been reduced in the summer of 1944 to a pathetic body of fawning, frightened men. There was to be no more opposition to Hitler, not even any criticism of him. The once mighty Army, like every other institution in the Third Reich, would go down with him, its leaders too benumbed now, too lacking in the courage which the handful of conspirators alone had shown, to raise their voices—let alone do anything—to stay the hand of the one man who they by now fully realized was leading them and the German people rapidly to the most awful catastrophe in the history of their beloved Fatherland.

  This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility. By now the generals knew the evil of the man before whom they groveled. Guderian later recalled Hitler as he was after July 20.

  In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him: it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence.47

  Nevertheless, it was this man alone, half mad, rapidly deteriorating in body and mind, who now, as he had do
ne in the snowy winter of 1941 before Moscow, rallied the beaten, retreating armies and put new heart into the battered nation. By an incredible exercise of will power which all the others in Germany—in the Army, in the government and among the people—lacked, he was able almost singlehandedly to prolong the agony of war for well nigh a year.

  The revolt of July 20,1944, had failed not only because of the inexplicable ineptness of some of the ablest men in the Army and in civilian life, because of the fatal weakness of character of Fromm and Kluge and because misfortune plagued the plotters at every turn. It had flickered out because almost all the men who kept this great country running, generals and civilians, and the mass of the German people, in uniform and out, were not ready for a revolution—in fact, despite their misery and the bleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did not want it. National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country’s savior.

  At that time [Guderian later wrote]—the fact seems beyond dispute—the great proportion of the German people still believed in Adolf Hitler and would have been convinced that with his death the assassin had removed the only man who might still have been able to bring the war to a favorable conclusion.48

  Even after the end of the war General Blumentritt, who was not in on the conspiracy but would have supported it had his chief, Kluge, been of sterner stuff, found that at least “one half of the civil population was shocked that the German generals had taken part in the attempt to overthrow Hitler, and felt bitterly toward them in consequence—and the same feeling was manifested in the Army itself.”49

  By a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people to the last. It was inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle but also with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation.

  * On his sixtieth birthday, October 30, 1942, Kluge received from the Fuehrer a check for 250,000 marks ($100,000 at the official rate of exchange) and a special permit to spend half of it on the improvement of his estate. Notwithstanding this insult to his honesty and honor as a German officer, the Field Marshal accepted both. (Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, p. 40.) Later when Kluge turned against Hitler the Fuehrer told his officers at headquarters, “I personally promoted him twice, gave him the highest decorations, gave him a large estate … and a large supplement to his pay as Field Marshal …” (Gilbert, Hitler Directs His War, pp. 101–02, a stenographic account of Hitler’s conference at headquarters on August 31, 1944.)

  * “We are to be hanged,” Moltke wrote to his wife just before his execution, “for thinking together.”

  * It is said in some of the German memoirs that in 1942 and 1943 the Nazis were in contact with the Russians about a possible peace negotiation and even that Stalin had offered to initiate talks for a separate peace. Ribbentrop on the stand at Nuremberg made a good deal of his own efforts to get in touch with the Russians and said he actually made contact with Soviet agents at Stockholm. Peter Kleist, who acted for Ribbentrop in Stockholm, had told of this in his book.3 I suspect that when all the secret German papers are sorted, a revealing chapter on this episode may come to light.

  * Executed by the Nazis.

  * At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’s oversize cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be lined with three and a half pounds of steel plating.

  † Executed by the Nazis.

  * One of the difficulties of piecing together the deeds of the plotters is that the memories of the few survivors are far from perfect, so that their accounts not only often differ but are contradictory. Schlabrendorff, for example, who had brought the bombs to Gersdorff, recounts in his book that because they could not find a short enough time fuse the Zeughaus attempt “had to be given up.” He apparently was unaware, or forgot, that Gersdorff actually went to the Zeughaus to try to carry out his assignment, though the colonel says that the night before he told him he was “determined to do it” with the fuses he had.

  * Hassell describes the painful scene in his diary. “He asked me to spare him the embarrassment of my presence,” Hassell writes. “When I started to remonstrate he interrupted me harshly.” (The Von Hassell Diaries, pp. 256–57.) Only when Weizsaecker was safely settled down in the Vatican later, as German ambassador there, did he urge the conspirators to action. “This is easy to do from the Vatican,” Hassell commented. Weizsaecker survived to write his somewhat shabby memoirs. Hassell’s diary was published after his execution.

  * Bonhoeffer, Dohnanyi and Oster were all executed by the S.S. on April 9, 1945, less than a month before Germany’s capitulation. Their extinction seems to have been an act of revenge on the part of Himmler. Mueller alone survived.

  * Apparently Himmler had widened his net in the intervening four months. According to Reitlinger some seventy-four persons were arrested as the result of Dr. Reckse’s spying. (Reitlinger, The S.S., p. 304.)

  † First the Japanese ambassador intervened to delay their trial. Then on February 3, 1945, a bomb dropped during a daylight attack by the American Air Force not only killed Roland Freisler, while he was presiding over one of his grisly treason trials, but destroyed the dossier on the Solfs, which was in the files of the People’s Court. They were nevertheless scheduled to be tried by this court on April 27, but by that time the Russians were in Berlin. Actually the Solfs were released from Moabit prison on April 23, apparently because of an error. (Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis, p. 595n., and Pechel, Deutscher Widerstand, pp. 88–93.)

  * Canaris was made chief of the Office for Commercial and Economic Warfare. With the assumption of this empty title the “little Admiral” faded out of German history. He was so shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of man he was, or what he believed in, if anything much. A cynic and a fatalist, he had hated the Weimar Republic and worked secretly against it and then turned similarly on the Third Reich. His days, like those of all the other prominent men in the Abwehr save one (General Lahousen), were now numbered, as we shall see.

  * The Kleists, father and son, were later arrested. The father was executed on April 16, 1945; his son survived.

  † Hitler often discussed this technique with his old party cronies. There is a stenographic record of a monologue of his at headquarters on May 3, 1942. “I quite understand,” he said, “why ninety per cent of the historic assassinations have been successful. The only preventive measure one can take is to live irregularly—to walk, to drive and to travel at irregular times and unexpectedly … As far as possible, whenever I go anywhere by car I go off unexpectedly and without warning the police.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 366.)

  Hitler had always been aware, as we have seen, that he might be assassinated. In his war conference on August 22, 1939, on the eve of the attack on Poland, he had emphasized to his generals that while he personally was indispensable he could “be eliminated at any time by a criminal or an idiot.”

  In his ramblings on the subject on May 3, 1942, he added, “There can never be absolute security against fanatics and idealists … If some fanatic wishes to shoot me or kill me with a bomb, I am no safer sitting down than standing up.” He thought, though, that “the number of fanatics who seek my life on idealistic grounds is getting much smaller … The only really dangerous elements are either those fanatics who have been goaded to action by dastardly priests or nationalist-minded patriots from one of the countries we have occupied. My many years of experience make things fairly difficult even for such as these.” (Ibid., p. 367.)

  * At their meeting at Casablanca Churchill and Roosevelt had issued on January 24, 1943, their declaration of unconditional surrender for Germany. Goebbels naturally made a great deal of this in trying to whip the German people into a state of all-
out resistance but in the opinion of this author his success has been grossly exaggerated by a surprisingly large number of Western writers.

  * Because of Allied air superiority in the West, Hitler had forbidden his senior commanders to travel by plane.

  * “If, in spite of the enemy’s air superiority, we succeed in getting a large part of our mobile force into action in the threatened coast defense sectors in the first hours, I am convinced that the enemy attack on the coast will collapse completely on its first day,” Rommel had written General Jodl on April 23, less than two months before. (The Rommel Papers, ed. Liddell Hart, p. 468.) Hitler’s strict orders had made it impossible to throw in the armored divisions “in the first hours” or even the first days. When they finally arrived they were thrown in piecemeal and failed.

  * The talks lasted from 9 A.M. to 4 P.M., with a break for lunch—“a one-dish meal,” Speidel recounts, “at which Hitler bolted a heaped plate of rice and vegetables, after it had been previously tasted for him. Pills and liqueur glasses containing various medicines were ranged around his place, and he took them in turn. Two S.S. men stood guard behind his chair.”