D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

the truth. Hagen then convinced Remer that Goebbels, as Reich Commissioner of Defence for Berlin, was his direct superior. Even though General von Hase had specifically forbidden him to see Goebbels, Remer went to the propaganda ministry. He was still confused by the conflicting stories, and did not entirely trust Goebbels.

‘What do you know about the situation?’ Goebbels asked. Remer recounted what he had been told. Goebbels told him it was not true and put a call through to the Wolfsschanze. A few moments later, Remer found himself talking to Hitler. The voice was unmistakable.

‘Now we have the criminals and saboteurs of the eastern front,’ Hitler said to him. ‘Only a few officers are involved and we will eliminate them by the roots. You have been placed in a historic position. It is your responsibility to use your head. You are under my command until Himmler arrives to take over the Replacement Army. Do you understand me?’

Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring had also arrived in the office and asked what Hitler had said. Remer told him. Goring said that they should call out the SS. Remer replied that it was an army matter and that they would finish the task. Remer went out to find that a panzer detachment, summoned by the conspirators from the tank training base at Doberitz, had arrived in the Berlinerplatz. He spoke to their officer and took them under his command. Remer lifted the cordon around the Wilhelmstrasse and moved his troops to the Bendlerstrasse. The conspiracy was now doomed in Berlin.

In France, meanwhile, Kluge had returned to La Roche-Guyon around 20.00 hours and immediately called a conference. Blumentritt suspected that Kluge was involved in the plot simply because there had been two anonymous calls for him from the Reich. One of them was from General Beck, who failed to win him over at the last moment. Kluge insisted privately to Blumentritt that he had known nothing about the ‘outrage’. He did, however, admit that the previous year he had been contacted twice by the plotters, but ‘in the end’ he had refused.

At 20.10 hours, Ultra intercept stations picked up a signal from Generalfeldmarschall von Witzleben, ironically marked with the ultimate priority of ‘Fuhrer-Blitz’. It began, ‘The Fuhrer is dead. I have been appointed commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht, and also…’ At this point the text ceased. Thirty minutes later, Kluge received a signal from the OKW in East Prussia: ‘Today at midday, a despicable assassination attempt against the Fuhrer was committed. The Fuhrer is perfectly well.’ Kluge rapidly ordered Stulpnagel to release all the Gestapo and SS officers who had been arrested in Paris.

Confirmation that Hitler was alive made the waverers run for cover, even though it would not save them from the Gestapo later. News that Himmler had been appointed commander-in-chief of the Replacement Army was received with horror by army officers, who sometimes referred to him as the ‘Unterweltsmarschall’, the marshal of the underworld. An order was issued that the conventional army salute now had to be replaced by the ‘German salute’ of the Nazi Party.

Unaware that Kluge had already ordered Stulpnagel to release his prisoners, Himmler told the chief directorate of the SS to ring Sepp Dietrich. He was ordered to prepare to march on Paris with the 1st SS Panzer- Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Himmler seems to have been unaware that the division had just been involved in a major battle and could not possibly abandon the Bourguebus ridge at such a moment. He was also unaware that Hitler’s ‘loyal disciple’, Sepp Dietrich, had in Eberbach’s words, ‘almost turned revolutionary’.[48]

Back in Berlin, there was chaos in the Bendlerblock. Generaloberst Fromm, in a doomed attempt to save himself from suspicion, ordered the arrest and instant court martial of four of the other officers involved. He allowed Generaloberst Beck to keep his pistol, provided he used it immediately on himself. Presumably because his hand was shaking, Beck shot himself twice in the head. He grazed his scalp the first time, then inflicted a terrible wound with the second shot. An exasperated Fromm ordered a sergeant, some accounts say an officer, to finish him off.

The four, including Stauffenberg, who tried to take all the responsibility for the attempted assassination on himself, were executed in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock by the light of automobile headlights. A detachment of Remer’s men, who had just arrived, provided the firing squad. When it was Stauffenberg’s turn, illuminated by the headlights, he called out, ‘Long live holy Germany!’ Fromm, as desperate as ever to save himself, gave a grotesque speech over their bodies in praise of Hitler and ended with a triple ‘Sieg Heil!’

In France, Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge ordered the arrest of Stulpnagel at 01.25 hours on the morning of 21 July. That afternoon, Stulpnagel was put in a car to be taken back to Berlin for interrogation by the Gestapo. Because of his seniority, his escort had not taken away his pistol. When the car had stopped en route, presumably to give the occupants a chance to relieve themselves, Stulpnagel attempted to commit suicide, but managed only to shoot both his eyes out. He was taken to a hospital in Verdun to be patched up for the journey on to Berlin, where he would be tried and hanged. At 22.15 hours, it was announced that ‘the Military Commander of France, General von Stulpnagel, has been ambushed and wounded by terrorists’.

News of the assassination attempt ‘came like a bomb-shell’, in the words of Generalleutnant Bodo Zimmermann, one of Kluge’s senior staff officers. ‘As in the case of any sudden, unexpected event, a certain paralysis set in at first.’ For most officers the ‘burning question’ was, ‘What are the men at the front saying and doing? Would the front still hold?’ When word of the attempt reached a Kampfgruppe of the 21st Panzer-Division near Troarn, ‘its pread like wild-fire down the column’. Yet ‘the front kept on fighting as though nothing had happened’. The ‘high emotional tension of battle’ meant that the news only touched the average soldier ‘on the fringe of his consciousness… the combat soldier was in another world’. General Eberbach, on the other hand, later said he was ‘amazed’ at the ‘indignation and anger’ that the attempted putsch had provoked ‘not only among the SS Divisions but also among some of the infantry Divisions’. Most officers were appalled that the plotters could have broken their oath to the Fuhrer.

Eberhard Beck with the 277th Infanterie-Division, recorded what happened when the news reached his artillery battery. ‘Our signaller heard over the radio that an attempt at assassination had been made against Adolf Hitler. His death could have been a turning point for us and we hoped that this pointless war would find its end.’ Their battery commander, Oberleutnant Freiherr von Stenglin, came over and announced that the attempt had failed. Hitler was alive. The order had been given that from now on every soldier must make the ‘German greeting’ (the Nazi salute), instead of the military one. Stenglin made his own sympathies very clear by promptly bringing ‘his hand up to the peak of his cap in the military salute’. Beck recorded that all his comrades were disappointed at the unlucky outcome. A few days later, Allied aircraft came over the German lines dropping propaganda leaflets. These gave details of the bomb plot and also of the Nazis’ new Sippenhaft decree, ordering reprisals against the families of those involved.

The reaction of Stenglin and Beck was far from universal. Most junior officers were shaken and confused, yet preferred not to dwell on the subject. Staff officers like Zimmermann, on the other hand, suffered a ‘feeling of moral oppression and worry’. Some were curiously shocked that Stauffenberg had placed a bomb and then left the scene. An assassination by pistol, during which the assassin had been gunned down, seemed to them more in keeping with the honour of the German officer corps. What depressed them most, however, was that the failed attempt handed all power to the fanatics and eliminated any possibility of a compromise peace. [49] ‘Those who were far-seeing,’ wrote Zimmermann, ‘thought this is the beginning of the end, a terrible signal. The die-hards thought: it is good that the treacherous reactionaries have been unmasked and that we can now make a clean sweep of them.’

In London, hopes were raised that the failed bomb plot ‘might well be the proverbial pebble which starts the avalanche’. But Hitler’s belief that providence had saved him made him even more convinced of his military genius, to the despair of his generals. He happened to be right, however, about one thing. He described the idea of a truce with the British and Americans, perhaps even persuading them to join the war against the Soviet Union, as ‘an idiotic idea’. The plotters, he said, were ‘unbelievably naive’ and their attempt to kill him was ‘like a Wild West story’.

Conspiracy theories flourished in Nazi circles over the next few months, once the large numbers of officers involved in the plot and their sympathizers became clearer. Altogether some 5,000 were arrested. These theories extended beyond the idea that Speidel had deliberately misdirected the panzer divisions on 6 June. Once Plan Fortitude and the threat of a second landing in the Pas-de-Calais were finally seen to have been a brilliant hoax, the