The conspirators were left without news of any kind until 3.30 in the afternoon, when Thiele, Chief of Signals at the Bendlerstrasse, managed to get a vague message from Rastenburg that the attempt had taken place. The measures for the coup d’état under the code name Valkyrie were put into operation. Meanwhile Stauffenberg had been flying back to Berlin confident that his great mission had at last been accomplished.
Himmler arrived at Rastenburg shortly after 1.15 and took immediate action. He telephoned Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and ordered a posse of police investigators to fly at once to Rastenburg. After this it appears that communications with Berlin were shut down by order of Hitler until round 3.30, the time when Thiele managed to telephone from the Bendlerstrasse. Shortly after this, Keitel was able to inform Fromm that Hitler was not dead. Fromm immediately attempted to cancel the Valkyrie operations that the conspirators had launched in his name as Commander-in-Chief. This was too much for the conspirators, and they placed him under arrest. At Rastenburg, Himmler had by now traced the origin of the bomb to Stauffenburg. He telephoned Berlin, where Stauffenburg had landed about 3.45, to order the Count’s arrest either at the airport or the Bendlerstrasse, but the S.S. Colonel who drove to the Bendlerstrasse at 5.30 with two subordinates to carry out the order only found that it was he himself who was put under arrest.
Himmler still believed that he was dealing with an attempt on Hitler’s life by an isolated man or at most by a small group in the resistance; he did not yet realize that a military coup d’état was actually in operation in Berlin. Had he done so, he would not have accompanied Hitler to meet the train bringing Mussolini on a visit to Rastenburg, which it seemed to Hitler unnecessary to postpone. Indeed, he needed an audience to whom he might boast of the special ‘Providence’ that had in its wisdom seen fit to preserve him, even though the audience was only an aged and fallen führer on whom the same Providence had evidently ceased to smile. With Himmler still in anxious attendance, Hitler and Mussolini stared wonderingly at the wrecked conference room which the bomb had destroyed, and it seemed that a miracle had manifestly occurred. Himmler asserted later that his re-conversion to belief in God happened at this moment.2
Now that communications with Berlin had been restored, it was soon realized that a major upheaval was taking place in the capital. Before taking tea with Mussolini and the remaining Nazi leaders at five o‘clock, Hitler ordered Himmler to fly at once to Berlin. With a sudden burst of decision he gave the faithful Reichsführer S.S. formal control of the security of the Reich and made him Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army in the place of Fromm. This gave Himmler what he most desired, direct access to the Bendlerstrasse and a command at last in the Army itself. His last words to Hitler were overheard: ‘My Führer,’ he said, ‘you can leave it all to me.’
Nevertheless, he moved with pronounced caution for a keen soldier sent on an urgent and dangerous mission. While Hitler entertained his guests at what proved to be a socially disastrous tea-party, Himmler returned to Birkenwald before leaving for Berlin. Kersten was wakened from his long afternoon nap by Himmler’s driver bursting in on him with the news from Rastenburg; he got up at once and hurried to Himmler’s study in the villa, where he found him sorting and destroying certain papers. ‘Now my hour has come’, said Himmler. ‘I’ll round up all that reactionary gang; I’ve already given orders for the arrest of the traitors. By preserving the Führer, Providence has given us a sign. I am flying immediately to Berlin.’
When he eventually reached Berlin late that evening after landing at a remote airport, he was far too wary to go to the Bendlerstrasse, the headquarters of his new command. He went straight to Goebbels who, as the senior Nazi Minister in Berlin, had been taking vigorous action against the conspirators ever since he had learned the truth of the situation in Rastenburg. In his dealings with the unit of the Berlin Guards Regiment initially detailed under the command of Major Remer, an ardent Nazi, to arrest him, he reversed the whole situation and put Remer on the telephone to Hitler. Hitler promoted Remer a Colonel for his loyalty and placed the safety of Berlin in his charge. He told him to obey only Goebbels and Himmler, his new Commander-in-Chief who was at that moment on his way to Berlin. Meanwhile, following Hitler’s instructions, Goebbels had arranged for a preliminary announcement of the Führer’s survival to be broadcast at 6.30, and two hours later Keitel sent a teleprinter to all Army Commands announcing Himmler’s appointment and insisting that only commands issued with the authority of the Führer or Himmler were to be obeyed. Stauffenberg, who was valiantly trying to maintain the coup d’état at the Bendlerstrasse by teleprinter and telephone, gradually found the wind stolen from his sails. Only in France and Austria were active steps taken to join in the coup d’état. The conspiracy had been a valiant effort on his part and that of General Olbricht, Fromm’s Head of Army Supplies. At nine o’clock it was announced on the radio that Hitler would speak to his people later that night.
So by the time Himmler reached the centre of Berlin from the airport, the essential danger was over. He was forced, however, to arrange for Hitler to countermand a number of hysterical instructions sent by Bormann to the Gauleiters, ordering them to arrest the Army commanders in their areas. When a commando unit under Skorzeny finally reached the Bendlerstrasse around midnight, they found that Fromm, having been freed to resume his command, had held a summary court-martial of the men who earlier in the day had arrested him, and that Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, together with certain others of the inner corps of conspirators had already been shot or forced to commit suicide. Skorzeny forbade any further executions, in the name of Himmler, the new Commander-in-Chief.
Himmler meanwhile had set up his own court of enquiry at Goebbels’s official residence in the Hermann Goring Strasse. Together the two Ministers examined the men brought before them by the S.S., including Fromm himself. The interrogation went on throughout the night, broken only by the need to listen to Hitler’s speech on the radio, which was broadcast at one o’clock in the morning. Goebbels was furious at the wording of this statement, which Hitler delivered in a harsh and weary voice, vowing brutal vengeance on the men who had betrayed him.
The following day Bormann was forced to rectify his error of the night before and transmit less ambiguous instructions which supported Himmler’s new authority. Kaltenbrunner was empowered by Himmler to take charge of the interrogations that followed in preparation for the first phase of the trials which began on 7 August in the Peoples’ Court. Roland Freisler, President of the Court, controlled the proceedings, and the first group of conspirators, tortured, unshaven and dressed in old and ill-fitting civilian clothes, were pressed into the courtroom for an examination which was designed to degrade them before the film cameras set up to record their trial by order of a Führer obsessed by the need for vengeance. Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, the leaders of the conspiracy, were mercifully dead; but their seconds in the courtroom, including Field-Marshal von Witzleben, who was pushed forward to face Freisler’s vicious ridicule in unbraced trousers, the Generals Hoepner and Stieff, and Stauffenberg’s cousin, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, were examined in turn and then condemned to hang naked before the recording lens of a film camera; each of them was strangled by a loop of piano wire suspended from a meat hook. They died on 8 August one by one in the confined space of a small room in the Plötzensee Prison, and it is said some of the men executed hung struggling for five minutes on end before their agony ceased. Hitler watched the record of the executions that night in the projection room at the Reich Chancellery; even Goebbels, hardened as he was, could not look at such fearful suffering. All the prints of this film were subsequently destroyed.
From the point of view of Himmler and his agent Kaltenbrunner, preparation for the trials represented a prolonged series of interrogations that lasted throughout the final months of the war. These interrogations led to more and more arrests and executions; the final death-roll will never now be known, though the number rose into the hundre
ds.3 The victims included many of the most distinguished members of the resistance, some of them kept alive until the last few days of the war and then killed in the very face of liberation because their tragic testimony would have added weight to the overburdened guilt of the Nazis.
Von Hassell was hanged on 8 September 1944, Langbehn executed on 12 October, Popitz hanged on 2 February 1945, Nebe of the S.S. executed on 3 March. Rommel, Hitler’s and Germany’s ideal general, was compelled to commit suicide on 14 October. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9 April, the same day as Admiral Canaris.
Himmler made his first public comment on the events of 20 July in an address to a group of Gauleiters and other officials assembled at Posen on 3 August; both Bormann and Goebbels were present. He spoke with a scathing, self-protecting irony of what had happened between himself, Langbehn, whom he called the middleman, and Popitz:
‘We let this middleman chatter, we let him talk, and this is more or less what he said: Yes, it was of course necessary that the war should end, we must come to peace terms with England — following the opinion of the day — and the first requisite is that the Führer must be removed at once and relegated by the opposition to an honorary president’s place. His group was quite certain that no action of this kind be carried out against the S.S.’
He had told Hitler of the matter, and they had laughed together; the appointment with Popitz, however, had not been very revealing. So Langbehn was arrested:
‘At last I pulled in the middleman. Since that time, nine months ago, Herr Popitz looks like a cheese. When you watch him, he is as white as a wall; I should call him the living image of a guilty conscience. He sends me telegrams, he telephones me, he asks what is the matter with Dr X, what has happened to him; and I give him sphinx-like replies so that he does not know whether I had anything to do with what happened or not.’4
Himmler, as might be expected, poured ridicule on the whole civilian part in the conspiracy, from Langbehn and Popitz to Kiep and the Solfs. ‘We knew about the present conspiracy for a very long time’, he said. As for the generals, he was equally scathing, ‘Fromm’, he declared, ‘acted like a vulgar film scenario’, and he made the whole Army seem responsible for the conspiracy. He claimed that Stauffenberg was preparing to loose the inmates of the concentration camps upon the people of Germany. ‘It meant that in the next two or three weeks crime would blossom and the communists would reign over our streets.’5
These words were meant for public hearing. In private, Himmler was most careful to ensure that the trial of Langbehn and Popitz was kept as secret as possible. When the hearing occurred in the autumn, Kaltenbrunner sent a letter to the Minister of Justice:
‘I understand that the trial of the former minister Popitz and the lawyer Langbehn is to take place shortly before the Peoples’ Court. In view of the facts known to you, namely the conference of the Reichsführer S.S. with Popitz, I ask you to see to it that the public be excluded from the trial. I assume your agreement and I shall dispatch about ten of my collaborators to make up an audience.’6
Though both Langbehn and Popitz were condemned to death, Popitz was kept alive until the following February in case more information could be got from him. Langbehn, as we have seen, died in October; he was tortured before the death sentence was carried out.
In his talk to the Gauleiters and other high officials at Posen, on 29 May 1944, Himmler was unusually direct in his reference to the Judenfrage, the Jewish problem. He adopted the frank manner of speech he favoured with his more intimate audiences, the audiences in fact that he most enjoyed addressing. Extermination, he explained, was a hard and difficult operation:
‘Now I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say here in this select gathering, but never to mention it to anybody. We had to deal with the question: what about the women and children? — I am determined in this matter to come to an absolutely clear-cut solution. I would not feel entitled merely to root out the men — well, let’s call a spade a spade, for “root out” say kill or cause to be killed — well I just couldn’t risk merely killing the man and allowing the children to grow up as avengers facing our sons and grandsons. We were forced to come to the grim decision that this people must be made to disappear from the face of the earth. To organize this assignment was our most difficult task yet. But we have tackled it and carried it through, without — I hope, gentlemen, I may say this — without our leaders and their men suffering any damage in their minds and souls. That danger was considerable, for there was only a narrow path between the Scylla and Charybdis of their becoming either heartless ruffians unable any longer to treasure human life, or becoming soft and suffering nervous breakdowns.’
He promised the Gauleiters, whom he called ‘the supreme dignitaries of the Party, of this political Order of ours’, that ‘before the end of the year the Jew problem will be settled once and for all.’ He concluded:
‘That’s about all I want to say at the moment about the Jew problem. You know all about it now, and you had better keep it to yourselves. Perhaps at some later, some very much later, period we might consider whether to tell the German people a little more about all this. But I think we had better not! It’s us here who have shouldered the responsibility, the responsibility for action as well as for an idea, and I think we had better take this secret with us into our graves.’
Nineteen forty-four was the year in which Himmler established his highest prestige with Hitler and finally won from him a command on the battlefield in addition to control of the Reserve Army and the Waffen S.S. Yet he was realistic enough at the same time to modify his position over the Jews. There were many practical reasons for this. The machinery of slaughter was becoming increasingly difficult to operate now that the adversities of war were gathering momentum. By the spring of 1944 it was conceivable that areas such as Auschwitz might eventually be overrun by the enemy; with the heavy losses of men and equipment the attempts to mobilize the labour of the prisoners became more urgent. At the same time, an increasing pressure was being brought to bear on Himmler to relent, and this matched a growing fear in his own mind that the revulsion of the world outside Germany to the genocide associated most directly with his name would tell against him if he were ever able to put himself forward as Germany’s negotiator with the Allies in the West.
Himmler never understood the nature of the abhorrence in which his name was held, nor realized the extent of it. He believed that a few apparent gestures of goodwill would be sufficient to re-establish his unfortunate reputation in the West, though the announcements made in America during the summer that there would be trials for war crimes once hostilities were over must have reached his ears.
Himmler began to think again. The constant humanizing influence of Kersten and the intrigues of Schellenberg designed to edge his master into becoming a peace negotiator, combined to make Himmler retreat to some extent from the absolute position he had held in 1943. The first change of policy was, as we have seen, second only to genocide itself in its inhumanity — extermination of unwanted peoples through work. Then came the attempted sale of certain Jews, negotiated on the one side in order to save lives and on the other to gain either money or commodities useful for the war.7 The first important negotiations of this kind were those undertaken by Yoel Brand on behalf of the Hungarian Jews, whom the Nazis had finally succeeded in adding to their victims in 1943. In May 1944 Eichmann offered Brand the lives of 700,000 Hungarian Jews in exchange for 10,000 lorries which the Allies were to deliver to Salonika; this was the first form of barter to be suggested and came to nothing. It was to be followed by other proposals equally appalling, such as Eichmann’s subsequent offer on behalf of Himmler to receive 20 million Swiss francs for the lives and liberties of 30,000 Jews. This last proposal led to the actual transfer of 1,684 Rumanian Jews, who reached Switzerland in August and December 1944, and a further 1,000 Hungarian Jews the following February, for all of whom Himmler received through the Swiss President, Jean-Marie Musi, 5 million Sw
iss francs subscribed through international Jewish charity. These developments were assisted by the proposals Himmler received from a Madame Immfeld to settle liberated Jews in the South of France. The negotiations for the transfer of the money were most complicated and were in fact hindered by the action of the U.S. State Department. Information about this pitiful sale was eventually to reach the ears of Hitler. But by this time, as we shall see, Himmler was deeply involved in negotiations with the Red Cross.
Schellenberg, having reached that stage in his post-war memoirs when he was most determined to promote himself as the humane peace negotiator, describes in some detail how he brought Musi and Himmler together on a number of occasions during the winter of 1944—5. At the first of these meetings, Musi persuaded Himmler to accept money instead of equipment and medicines, while at a second conference, which Schellenberg says took place on 12 January in the Black Forest, the following terms were agreed:
‘Every fourteen days a first-class train would bring about 1,200 Jews to Switzerland. The Jewish organization with which Herr Musi was working would give active support in solving the Jewish problem according to Himmler’s suggestions. At the same time, the beginning of a basic change in the world-wide propaganda against Germany was to be brought about. According to my suggestion, it was agreed that the money should not be paid over directly to the International Red Cross, as had originally been decided, but should be handed to Musi as a trustee.’8
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