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 done 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 t
wo 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.”
* 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 a
t 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.)
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