Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

figures such as General Eduard Wagner (responsible as Quartermaster-General for army supplies) and General Erich Fellgiebel (chief of signals operations at Fuhrer Headquarters) connected to the conspiracy, it was no wonder that German military tactics had been known in advance by the Red Army. It had been ‘permanent treachery’ all along. It was symptomatic of an underlying ‘crisis in morale’. Action ought to have been taken sooner. It had been known, after all, for one and a half years that there were traitors in the army. But now, an end had to be made. ‘These most base creatures who in the whole of history have worn the soldier’s uniform, this rabble which has preserved itself from bygone times, must be got rid of and driven out.’ Military recovery would follow recovery from the crisis in morale.⁴ It would be ‘Germany’s salvation.’⁵

I

Vengeance was uppermost in Hitler’s mind. There would be no mercy in the task of cleansing the Augean stables. Swift and ruthless action would be taken. He would ‘wipe out and eradicate (ausmerzen und ausrotten)’ the lot of them, he raged.⁶ ‘These criminals’ would not be granted an honourable soldier’s execution by firing-squad. They would be expelled from the Wehrmacht, brought as civilians before the court, and executed within two hours of sentence. ‘They must hang immediately, without any mercy,’ he declared.⁷ He gave orders to set up a military ‘Court of Honour’, in which senior generals (including among others Keitel, Rundstedt — who presided — and Guderian) would expel in disgrace those found to have been involved in the plot.⁸ Those subsequently sentenced to death by the People’s Court, he ordered, were to be hanged in prison clothing as criminals.⁹ He spoke favourably of Stalin’s purges of his officers.¹⁰ ‘The Fuhrer is extraordinarily furious at the generals, especially those of the General Staff,’ noted Goebbels after seeing Hitler on 22 July. ‘He is absolutely determined to set a bloody example and to eradicate a freemasons’ lodge which has been opposed to us all the time and has only awaited the moment to stab us in the back in the most critical hour. The punishment which must now be meted out must have historic dimensions.’¹¹

Hitler had been outraged at Colonel-General Fromm’s peremptory action in having Stauffenberg and the other leaders of the attempted coup immediately executed by firing-squad. He gave orders forthwith that other plotters captured should appear before the People’s Court.¹² The President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, a fanatical Nazi who, despite early sympathies with the radical Left, had been ideologically committed to the volkisch cause since the early 1920s, saw himself — a classical instance of ‘working towards the Fuhrer’ — pronouncing judgement as the ‘Fuhrer would judge the case himself. The People’s Court was, for him, expressly a ‘political court’. Under his presidency, the number of death sentences delivered by the Court had risen from 102 in 1941 to 2,097 in 1944. It was little wonder that he had already gained notoriety as a ‘hanging judge (Blutrichter)’.¹³ Recapitulating Hitler’s comments at their recent meeting, Goebbels remarked that those implicated in the plot were to be brought before the People’s Court ‘and sentenced to death’. Freisler, he added, ‘would find the right tone to deal with them’.¹⁴ Hitler himself was keen above all — perhaps remembering the leniency of the Munich court in 1924 which had allowed him to turn his trial following the failed putsch into a personal propaganda triumph — that the conspirators should be permitted ‘no time for long speeches’ during their defence. ‘But Freisler will see to that,’ he added. That’s our Vyschinsky’ — a reference to Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the show-trials of the 1930s.¹⁵

It took little encouragement from Goebbels to persuade Hitler that Fromm, Stauffenberg’s direct superior officer, had acted so swiftly in an attempt to cover up his own complicity. Fromm had, in fact, already been named by Bormann in a circular to the Gauleiter in mid-evening of 20 July as one of those to be arrested as part of the ‘reactionary gang of criminals’ behind the conspiracy.¹⁶ Following the suppression of the coup in the Bendlerblock and the swift execution of Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz von Quirnheim, Fromm had made his way to the Propaganda Ministry, wanting to speak on the telephone with Hitler. Instead of connecting him, Goebbels had had Fromm seated in another room while he himself telephoned Fuhrer Headquarters. He soon had the decision he wanted. Goebbels immediately had the former commander-in-chief of the Reserve Army placed under armed guard.¹⁷ After months of imprisonment, a mockery of a trial before the People’s Court, and a trumped-up conviction on grounds of alleged cowardice — despite the less-than-heroic motive of self- preservation that had dictated his role on centre-stage in the Bendlerblock on 20 July, he was no coward — Fromm would eventually die at the hands of a firing-squad in March 1945.¹⁸

In the confusion in the Bendlerblock late on the night of 20 July, it had looked for a time as if other executions would follow those of the coup’s leaders (together with the assisted suicide of Beck). But the arrival soon after midnight of an SS unit under the command of Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny — the rescuer of Mussolini from captivity the previous summer — who had been dispatched to the scene of the uprising by Walter Schellenberg, head of SD foreign intelligence, along with the appearance at the scene of SD chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Major Otto Ernst Remer, newly appointed commander of the Berlin guards battalion and largely responsible for putting down the coup, blocked further summary executions and ended the upheaval.¹⁹ Meanwhile, Himmler himself had flown to Berlin and, in his new temporary capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, had given orders that no further independent action was to be taken against officers held in suspicion.²⁰

Shortly before 4 a.m., Bormann was able to inform the Party’s provincial chieftains, the Gauleiter, that the putsch was at an end.²¹ By then, those arrested in the Bendlerstra?e — including Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, former civil-servant and deputy Police President of Berlin Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, leading member of the ‘Kreisau Circle’ Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier, and landholder and officer in the Abwehr Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld — had been led off to await their fate.²² Former Colonel-General Erich Hoepner, arrested by Fromm but not executed, and Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had left the Bendlerstra?e before the collapse of the coup, were also promptly taken into custody, along with a number of others who had been implicated.²³ Prussian Finance Minister Popitz, former Economics Minister Schacht, former Chief of Staff Colonel-General Haider, Major- General Stieff, and, from the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris and Major-General Oster were also swiftly arrested. Major Hans Ulrich von Oertzen, liaison officer for the Berlin Defence District (Wehrkreis III), who had given out the first ‘Valkyrie’ orders, blew himself up with a hand-grenade. Henning von Tresckow, the early driving-force behind the attempts to assassinate Hitler, killed himself in similar fashion at the front near Ostrow in Poland. General Wagner shot himself. General Fellgiebel refused to do so. ‘You stand your ground, you don’t do that,’ he told his aide-de-camp. Well aware that his arrest was imminent, he spent much of the afternoon, remarkably, at the Wolf’s Lair, even congratulated Hitler on his survival, and awaited his inevitable fate.²⁴

Those who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo had to reckon with fearsome torture. It was endured for the most part with the idealism, even heroism, which had sustained them throughout their perilous opposition.²⁵ In the early stages of their investigations, the Gestapo managed to squeeze out remarkably limited information, beyond what they already knew, from those they so grievously maltreated. Even so, as the ‘Special Commission, 20 July’, set up on the day after the attempted coup under SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Georg Kie?el and soon growing to include 400 officers, expanded its investigations, the numbers arrested rapidly swelled. Kie?el was soon able to report 600 persons taken into custody.²⁶ Almost all the leading figures in the various branches of the conspiracy were rapidly captured, though Goerdeler held out under cover until 12 August. Reports reached Hitler daily of new names of those implicated.²⁷ His early belief that it had been no more than a ‘tiny clique’ of officers which had opposed him had proved mistaken. The conspiracy had tentacles stretching further than he could have imagined. He was particularly incensed that even Graf Helldorf, Berlin Police President, ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi Movement, and a former SA leader, turned out to have been deeply implicated.²⁸ As the list lengthened, and the extent of the conspiracy became clear (all the more so following the remarkably full confession of Goerdeler, anxious to emphasize in the eyes of history the significance of the efforts of the opposition to remove Hitler and his regime), Hitler’s fury and bitter resentment against the conservatives — especially the landed aristocracy — who had never fully accepted him mounted.²⁹ ‘We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but unfortunately forgot to finish off (zur Strecke zu