The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

by William Shirer

  * Rundstedt’s dismissal may have come partly as the result of his blunt words to Keitel the night before. The latter had rung him up to inquire about the situation. An all-out German attack on the British lines by four S.S. panzer divisions had just floundered and Rundstedt was in a gloomy mood.

  “What shall we do?” cried Keitel.

  “Make peace, you fools,” Rundstedt retorted. “What else can you do?”

  It seems that Keitel, the “telltale toady,” as most Army field commanders called him, went straight to Hitler with the remarks. The Fuehrer was at that moment conferring with Kluge, who had been on sick leave for the last few months as the result of injuries sustained in a motor accident. Kluge was immediately named to replace Rundstedt. In such ways were top commands changed by the Nazi warlord. General Blumentritt told of the telephone conversation to both Wilmot (The Struggle for Europe, p. 347) and Liddell Hart (The German Generals Talk, p. 205).

  * Speidel quotes the writer Ernst Juenger, whose books had once been popular in Nazi Germany but who eventually had turned and had joined the Paris end of the plot: “The blow that felled Rommel on the Livarot Road on July 17 deprived our plan of the only man strong enough to bear the terrible weight of war and civil war simultaneously.” (Speidel, Invasion 1944, p. 119.)

  * This came out in the “Rote Kapelle” affair in 1942, when the Abwehr discovered a large number of strategically placed Germans, many of them from old, prominent families, running an extensive espionage network for the Russians. At one time they were transmitting intelligence to Moscow over some 100 clandestine radio transmitters in Germany and in the occupied countries of the West. The leader of the “Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra) was Harold Schulze-Boysen, a grandson of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, a picturesque leader of the “lost generation” after the First World War and a familiar Bohemian figure in those days in Berlin, where his black sweater, his thick mane of blond hair and his passion for revolutionary poetry and politics attracted attention. At that time he rejected both Nazism and Communism, though he considered himself a man of the Left. Through his mother he got into the Luftwaffe as a lieutenant at the outbreak of the war and wormed himself into Goering’s “research” office, the Forschungsamt, which, as we have seen in connection with the Anschluss, specialized in tapping telephones. Soon he was organizing a vast espionage service for Moscow, with trusted associates in every ministry and military office in Berlin. Among these were Arvid Harnack, nephew of a famous theologian, a brilliant young economist in the Ministry of Economics, who was married to an American woman, Mildred Fish, whom he had met at the University of Wisconsin; Franz Scheliha in the Foreign Office; Horst Heilmann in the Propaganda Ministry; and Countess Erika von Brockdorff in the Ministry of Labor.

  Two Soviet agents who parachuted into Germany and were later apprehended gave the “Rote Kapelle” away, and a large number of arrests followed.

  Of the seventy-five leaders charged with treason, fifty were condemned to death, including Schulze-Boysen and Harnack. Mildred Harnack and Countess von Brockdorff got off with prison sentences but Hitler insisted that they be executed too, and they were. To impress would-be traitors the Fuehrer ordered that the condemned be hanged. But there were no gallows in Berlin, where the traditional form of execution was the ax, and so the victims were simply strangled by a rope around their necks which was attached to a meathook (borrowed from an abattoir) and slowly hoisted. From then on this method of hanging was to be employed, as a special form of cruelty, on those who dared to defy the Fuehrer.

  * All four, Leber, Reichwein, Jacob and Saefkow, were executed.

  * There is disagreement among the historians whether Stauffenberg set out for Rastenburg or the Obersalzberg. The two most authoritative German writers on the subject, Eberhard Zeller and Professor Gerhard Ritter, give contradictory accounts. Zeller thinks Hitler was still at Berchtesgaden, but Ritter is sure this is a mistake and that the Fuehrer had returned to Rastenburg. Unfortunately Hitler’s daily calendar book, which has proved an unfailing guide to this writer up to this point, was not captured intact and does not cover this period. But the best evidence, including a report on Stauffenberg’s movements drawn up at Fuehrer headquarters on July 22, indicates pretty conclusively that on July 15 Hitler was at Rastenburg and that it was there that Stauffenberg planned to kill him. Though the two places from which Hitler tried to conduct the war—he was rarely in Berlin, which was being unmercifully bombed—were about equidistant from the capital, Berchtesgaden, being more centrally located and near Munich, where the Army garrison was believed to be loyal to Beck, had certain advantages over Rastenburg for the conspirators.

  * General Adolf Heusinger, Chief of Operations of the Army High Command, recounts that on July 19 the news from the Ukrainian front was so bad that he inquired at OKW whether the Replacement Army had any troops in training in Poland which might be thrown into the Eastern front. Keitel suggested that Stauffenberg be summoned the next day to advise them. (Heusinger, Befehl im Widerstreit, p. 350.)

  † FitzGibbon says (20 July, p. 150) “it is believed that he had previously confessed, but of course could not be granted absolution.” The author recounts that Stauffenberg had told the Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal Count Preysing, of what he intended to do, and that the bishop had replied that he honored the young man’s motives and did not feel justified in attempting to restrain him on theological grounds. (Ibid., p. 152.)

  * A number of writers have declared that Hitler’s daily military conferences at Rastenburg usually took place in his underground bunker and that because of repairs being made to it and because of the hot, humid day, the meeting on July 20 was shifted to the building aboveground. “This accidental change of place saved Hitler’s life,” Bullock writes (Hitler, p. 681). It is to be doubted if there was any accidental change of place. The Lagebaracke, as its name implies, was, so far as I can make out, the place where the daily conferences were usually held. Only in case of threatened air raids were the meetings adjourned to the underground bunker which, at that, would have been cooler on this sweltering day. (See Zeller, Geist der Freiheit, p. 360, n.4.)

  * According to the account given Allied interrogators by Admiral Kurt Assmann, who was present, Stauffenberg had whispered to Brandt, “I must go and telephone. Keep an eye on my briefcase. It has secret papers in it.”

  † A good many writers have contended that at this moment General Fellgiebel was to have blown up the communications center and that his failure to do so was disastrous to the conspiracy. Thus Wheeler-Bennett (Nemesis, p. 643) writes that “General Fellgiebel failed lamentably in the execution of his task.” Since the various communications centers were housed in several different underground bunkers, heavily guarded by S.S., it is most improbable that Stauffenberg’s plans ever called for blowing them up—an impossible task for the General. What Fellgiebel agreed to do was to shut off communication with the outside world for two or three hours after he had sent word to Berlin of the explosion. This, except for an unavoidable lapse or two, he did.

  * The official stenographer, Berger, was killed, and Colonel Brandt, General Schmundt, Hitler’s adjutant, and General Korten died of their wounds. All the others, including Generals Jodl, Bodenschatz (Goering’s chief of staff) and Heusinger, were more or less severely injured.

  * Ribbentrop had been a champagne salesman and then had married the daughter of Germany’s leading producer of the wine. His “von” had come through adoption by an aunt—Fräulein Gertrud von Ribbentrop—in 1925, when he was thirty-two years old.

  * A few weeks before, Leonrod had asked an Army chaplain friend of his, Father Hermann Wehrle, whether the Catholic Church condoned tyrannicide and had been given a negative answer. When this came out in Leonrod’s trial before the People’s Court, Father Wehrle was arrested for not having told the authorities and, like Leonrod, was executed.

  * “To think that these revolutionaries weren’t even smart enough to cut the telephone wires!” Goebbels is said to have exclaimed
afterward. “My little daughter would have thought of that.” (Curt Riess, Joseph Goebbels: The Devil’s Advocate, p. 280.)

  * There are conflicting stories as to why the Berlin radio was not seized. According to one account, a unit from the infantry school at Doeberitz had been assigned this task, which was to be carried out by the commandant, General Hitzfeld, who was in on the plot. But the conspirators failed to warn Hitzfeld that July 20 was the day, and he was away in Baden attending the funeral of a relative. His second-in-command, a Colonel Mueller, was also away on a military assignment. When Mueller finally returned about 8 P.M. he found that his best battalion had left for a night exercise. By the time he rounded up his troops at midnight, it was too late. According to a different story, a Major Jacob succeeded in surrounding the Rundfunkhaus with troops from the infantry school but could get no clear orders from Olbricht as to what to do. When Goebbels phoned the text of the first announcement Jacob did not interfere with its being broadcast. Later the major contended that if Olbricht had given him the necessary orders the German radio network could easily have been denied the Nazis and put at the service of the conspirators. The first version is given by Zeller (Geist der Freiheit, pp. 267–68), the most authoritative German historian on the July 20 plot; the second is given by Wheeler-Bennett (Nemesis, pp. 654–55/1.) and Rudolf Sammler (Goebbels: The Man Next to Hitler, p. 138), both of whom say Major Jacob gave the above testimony.

  * His treachery did not prevent his being arrested for complicity in the plot and hanged for it.

  * Though the film of this trial was found by the Allies (and shown at Nuremberg, where the author first saw it) that of the executions was never discovered and presumably was destroyed or the orders of Hitler lest it fall into enemy hands. According to Allen Dulles the two films—originally thirty miles long and cut to eight miles—were put together by Goebbels and shown to certain Army audiences as a lesson and a warning. But the soldiers refused to look at it—at the Cadet School at Lichterfelde they walked out as it began to run—and it was soon withdrawn from circulation. (Dulles, Germany’s Underground, p. 83.)

  * Father Alfred Delp, Jesuit member of the Kreisau Circle, was executed with them. Goerdeler’s brother, Fritz, was hanged a few days later. Count von Moltke, the leader of the Kreisau Circle, was executed on January 23, 1945, though he had had no part in the assassination plot. Trott zu Solz, a leading light in the Circle and in the conspiracy, was hanged on August 25, 1944.

  * “The sentence affected him deeply,” Schlabrendorff, who saw a good deal of Fromm at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo prison, later recounted. “He had not expected it.” (Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, p. 121.)

  * It is only fair to add that Rundstedt probably did not know of the circumstances of Rommel’s death, apparently learning them only from Keitel’s testimony at Nuremberg. “I did not hear these rumors,” Rundstedt testified on the stand, “otherwise I would have refused to act as representative of the Fuehrer at the state funeral; that would have been an infamy beyond words.”44 Nevertheless the Rommel family noticed that this gentleman of the old school declined to attend the cremation after the funeral and to come to the Rommel home, as did most of the other generals, to extend condolences to the widow.

  † General Speidel himself, though incarcerated in the cellars of the Gestapo prison in the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin and subjected to incessant questioning, became neither broken nor bewildered. Being a philosopher as well as a soldier perhaps helped. He outwitted his S.D. tormentors, admitting nothing and betraying no one. He had one bad moment when he was confronted with Colonel von Hofacker, who, he believes, had been not only tortured but drugged into talking, but on this occasion Hofacker did not betray him and repudiated what he had previously said.45

  Though never brought to trial, Speidel was kept in Gestapo custody for seven months. As American troops neared his place of confinement near Lake Constance in southern Germany, he escaped with twenty others by a ruse and took refuge with a Catholic priest, who hid the group until the Americans arrived. Speidel omits this chapter of his life in his book, which is severely objective and written in the third person, but he told the story to Desmond Young who gives it in his Rommel—The Desert Fox (pp. 251–52 of the paperback edition).

  Capping an unusual career, Speidel held an important command at NATO in the late 1950s.

  * In his memoirs, Guderian, who constantly emphasizes how he stood up to Hitler and criticizes him bitterly, makes no mention of these orders of the day.

  Book Six

  THE FALL OF THE THIRD REICH

  30

  THE CONQUEST OF GERMANY

  THE WAR CAME HOME to Germany.

  Scarcely had Hitler recovered from the shock of the July 20 bombing when he was faced with the loss of France and Belgium and of the great conquests in the East. Enemy troops in overwhelming numbers were converging on the Reich.

  By the middle of August 1944, the Russian summer offensives, beginning June 10 and unrolling one after another, had brought the Red Army to the border of East Prussia, bottled up fifty German divisions in the Baltic region, penetrated to Vyborg in Finland, destroyed Army Group Center and brought an advance on this front of four hundred miles in six weeks to the Vistula opposite Warsaw, while in the south a new attack which began on August 20 resulted in the conquest of Rumania by the end of the month and with it the Ploesti oil fields, the only major source of natural oil for the German armies. On August 26 Bulgaria formally withdrew from the war and the Germans began to hastily clear out of that country. In September Finland gave up and turned on the German troops which refused to evacuate its territory.

  In the West, France was liberated quickly. In General Patton, the commander of the newly formed U.S. Third Army, the Americans had found a tank general with the dash and flair of Rommel in Africa. After the capture of Avranches on July 30, he had left Brittany to wither on the vine and begun a great sweep around the German armies in Normandy, moving southeast to Orleans on the Loire and then due east toward the Seine south of Paris. By August 23 the Seine was reached southeast and northwest of the capital, and two days later the great city, the glory of France, was liberated after four years of German occupation when General Jacques Leclerc’s French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division broke into it and found that French resistance units were largely in control. They also found the Seine bridges, many of them works of art, intact.*

  The remnants of the German armies in France were now in full retreat. Montgomery, the victor over Rommel in North Africa, who on September 1 was made a field marshal, drove his Canadian First Army and British Second Army two hundred miles in four days—from the lower Seine past the storied battle sites of 1914–18 and 1940 into Belgium. Brussels fell to him on September 3 and Antwerp the next day. So swift was the advance that the Germans did not have time to destroy the harbor facilities at Antwerp. This was a great stroke of fortune for the Allies, for this port, as soon as its approaches were cleared, was destined to become the principal supply base of the Anglo–American armies.

  Farther south of the British-Canadian forces, the U.S. First Army, under General Courtney H. Hodges, advanced with equal speed into southeastern Belgium, reaching the Meuse River, from which the devastating German breakthrough had begun in May 1940, and capturing the fortresses of Namur and Liege, where the Germans had no time to organize a defense. Farther south still, Patton’s Third Army had taken Verdun, surrounded Metz, reached the Moselle River and linked up at the Belfort Gap with the Franco-American Seventh Army, which under the command of General Alexander Patch had landed on the Riviera in southern France on August 15 and pushed rapidly up the Rhone Valley.

  By the end of August the German armies in the West had lost 500,000 men, half of them as prisoners, and almost all of their tanks, artillery and trucks. There was very little left to defend the Fatherland. The much-publicized Siegfried Line was virtually unmanned and without guns. Most of the German generals in the West believed t
hat the end had come. “There were no longer any ground forces in existence, to say nothing of air forces,” says Speidel.1 “As far as I was concerned,” Rundstedt, who was reinstated on September 4 as Commander in Chief in the West, told Allied interrogators after the war, “the war was ended in September.”2

  But not for Adolf Hitler. On the last day of August he lectured some of his generals at headquarters, attempting to inject new iron into their veins and at the same time hold out hope.

  If necessary we’ll fight on the Rhine. It doesn’t make any difference. Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more. We’ll fight until we get a peace which secures the life of the German nation for the next fifty or a hundred years and which, above all, does not besmirch our honor a second time, as happened in 1918 … I live only for the purpose of leading this fight because I know that if there is not an iron will behind it, this battle cannot be won.