dead.118
The condemned men were rapidly escorted downstairs into the courtyard, where a firing-squad of ten men drawn from the guard-battalion was already waiting. To add to the macabre scene, the drivers of the vehicles parked in the courtyard had been ordered to turn their headlights on the little pile of sand near the doorway from which Stauffenberg and his fellow-conspirators emerged. Without ceremony, Olbricht was put on the sand-heap and promptly shot. Next to be brought forward was Stauffenberg. Just as the execution-squad opened fire, Haeften threw himself in front of Stauffenberg, and died first. It was to no avail. Stauffenberg was immediately placed again on the sand-heap. As the shots rang out, he was heard to cry: ‘Long live holy Germany.’ Seconds later, the execution of the last of the four, Mertz von Quirnheim, followed. Fromm promptly had a telegram dispatched, announcing the bloody suppression of the attempted coup and the execution of the ringleaders. Then he gave an impassioned address to those assembled in the courtyard, attributing Hitler’s wondrous salvation to the work of providence. He ended with a three-fold ‘Sieg Heil’ to the Fuhrer.
While the bodies of the executed men, along with Beck’s corpse which had been dragged downstairs into the yard, were taken off in a lorry to be buried — next day Himmler had them exhumed and cremated — the remaining conspirators in the Bendlerblock (among them Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, Stauffenberg’s brother Berthold, and Yorck von Wartenburg) were arrested. It was around half an hour after midnight.119
Apart from the lingering remnants of the coup in Paris, Prague, and Vienna, and apart from the terrible and inevitable reprisals to follow, the last attempt to topple Hitler and his regime from within was over.
V
Hours earlier on this eventful 20 July 1944, shortly after arriving back in his bunker following the explosion, Hitler had refused to contemplate cancelling the planned visit of the Duce, scheduled for 2.30p.m. that afternoon, but delayed half an hour because of the late arrival of Mussolini’s train.120 It was to prove the last of the seventeen meetings of the two dictators.121 It was certainly the strangest. Outwardly composed, there was little to detect that Hitler had just escaped an attempt on his life. He greeted Mussolini with his left hand, since he had difficulty in raising his injured right arm.122 Fie told the shocked Duce what had happened, then led him to the ruined wooden hut where the explosion had taken place. In a macabre scene, amid the devastation, accompanied only by the interpreter, Paul Schmidt, Hitler described to his fellow- dictator where he had stood, right arm leaning on the table as he studied the map, when the bomb went off. He showed him the singed hair at the back of his head. Hitler sat down on an upturned box. Schmidt found a still usable stool amid the debris for Mussolini. For a few moments, neither dictator said a word. Then Hitler, in a quiet voice, said: ‘When I go through it all again… I conclude from my wondrous salvation, while others present in the room received serious injuries… that nothing is going to happen to me.’ He was ever more convinced, he added, that it was given to him to lead their common cause to a victorious end.123
The same theme, that Providence had saved him, ran through Hitler’s address which was transmitted by all radio stations soon after midnight. He had already inquired in mid-afternoon how quickly arrangements for a broadcast could be made, and been told that the earliest was 6p.m. That was unrealistic. The speech still had to be written, and the afternoon was taken up with Mussolini’s visit. Preparations had to be made for the speech to be networked on all radio stations, and recorded. The equipment for the broadcast had to be brought by road from Konigsberg. But the technical crew were not immediately available; they had gone off swimming in the Baltic.124 Possibly, too, Hitler lost some interest in the idea during the diversions of the day. At any rate, it seems once more to have taken Goebbels’s prompting to persuade him of the necessity of a brief address to the German people.125 It was after midnight before the broadcast eventually took place, followed by addresses by Goring and Donitz.126
Hitler said he was speaking to the German people for two reasons: to let them hear his voice, and know that he was uninjured and well; and to tell them about a crime without parallel in German history. A tiny clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and at the same time criminal, stupid officers has forged a plot to eliminate me and at the same time to eradicate
In fact, as so often in his life, it had not been Providence that had saved him, but luck: the luck of the devil.
15. NO WAY OUT
‘Rather sacrifice everything, absolutely everything, for victory, than for Bolshevism… What would I still go to school for if I’m going to end up in Siberia?… But if we all wanted to think in this way, there would be no hope left. So, head high. Trust in our will and our leadership!!!’
‘It’s always claimed that the Fuhrer has been sent to us from God. I don’t doubt it. The Fuhrer was sent to us from God, though not in order to save Germany, but to ruin it. Providence has determined the destruction of the German people, and Hitler is the executor of this will.’
‘If it doesn’t succeed, I see no other possibility of bringing the war to a favourable conclusion.’
‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’
‘Now I finally have the swine who have been sabotaging my work for years,’ raged Hitler as details of the plot against him started to emerge. ‘Now I have proof: the entire General Staff is contaminated.’1 His long-standing, deep-seated distrust of his army leaders — an inevitable consequence of his ready acceptance of Keitel’s fawning description of him following the triumph in France in 1940 as an unparalleled military genius, the ‘greatest warlord of all time’, together with the inability of the generals, in his eyes, to achieve final victory and, since the first Russian winter, to stave off the endless array of defeats — had found its confirmation. It now seemed blindingly obvious to him why his military plans had encountered such setbacks: they had been sabotaged throughout by the treachery of his army officers. ‘Now I know why all my great plans in Russia had to fail in recent years,’ he ranted. ‘It was all treason! But for those traitors, we would have won long ago. Here is my justification before history’ (an indication, too, that Hitler was consciously looking to his place in the pantheon of Teutonic heroes).2 Goebbels, as so often, echoed Hitler’s sentiments. ‘The generals are not opposed to the Fuhrer because we are experiencing crises at the front,’ he entered in his diary. ‘Rather, we are experiencing crises at the front because the generals are opposed to the Fuhrer.’3 Hitler was convinced of an ‘inner blood-poisoning’. With leading positions occupied by traitors bent on destroying the Reich, he railed, with key
