were envisaged. He was told that ‘loyalty rallies’ were welcomed, and that, in the light of his request, instructions would soon be transmitted to all Gauleiter. These were sent the next day, encouraging huge open-air mass rallies ‘in which the joy and satisfaction of the people at the wonderful salvation of the Fuhrer’ would be expressed.68 Such rallies took place over the following days in towns and cities throughout Germany. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens and Wehrmacht representatives ‘spontaneously’ gave voice to their shock and outrage at the ‘foul attempt on the Fuhrer’s life
The sentiments were identical to those recorded in early soundings of opinion taken by the SD and passed on by the Chief of the Security Police Ernst Kaltenbrunner to Martin Bormann after the news of the assassination attempt had spread like wildfire. A first report, compiled on 21 July, announced uniform reactions throughout the German people of ‘strongest consternation, shock, deep outrage, and fury’. Even, it was claimed, in districts or among sections of the population known to be critical of Nazism, such sentiments could be registered; not a single comment hinted at sympathy for the planned assassination. In some cities, women were said to have burst into tears in shops or on the streets when they heard what had happened. A remark commonly heard was: ‘Thank God the Fuhrer is alive.’ Many were prepared to accept Hitler’s own version in seeing his survival as a sign of Providence and an indication that, despite all setbacks, the war would end in victory. Very many people, the report added, connected ‘mystical, religious notions with the person of the Fuhrer’.70
People initially jumped to the conclusion that enemy agents were behind the assassination attempt — an assumption that triggered a new upsurge of hatred against the British.71 After Hitler’s speech — held so late at night that most people were already in bed, but repeated in the early afternoon of 21 July — the fury turned against those seen as traitors within. There was outrage that the attempt on the Fuhrer’s life had been carried out by officers of the Wehrmacht, something viewed (as Hitler himself saw it) as the treachery behind Germany’s military disasters.72 Full expectations of a ruthless ‘cleansing’ of the officer corps were placed in the ‘strong man’ Heinrich Himmler. Approving comments of Stalin’s purges could be heard. And a speech by Robert Ley violently denouncing the aristocracy gave rise to widespread castigation of the ‘high-ups’, ‘big noises’, and ‘monocle-chaps’. There was resentment that the burdens of ‘total war’ had not been spread evenly; that too many people had been able to avoid them. Such people needed to be forced into line, however tough the measures were to bring this about. Whatever sacrifices were needed to bring the war to a speedy and victorious end would then be willingly borne.73
The failure of the bomb-plot revived strong support for Hitler not only within Germany, but also among soldiers at the front. There was, for instance, a rise in expressions of faith in Hitler among prisoners-of-war captured by the western Allies in Normandy in late July.74 And the military censor who had examined 45,000 letters of ordinary soldiers from the front in August 1944 commented on ‘the high number of joyful expressions about the salvation of the Fuhrer’.75 There was no compulsion in letters back home even to refer to the attempt on Hitler’s life. The pro-Hitler sentiment was doubtless genuine.
Four days after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded, the SD reports still stressed the almost unanimous condemnation of the assassination attempt and the joy at the Fuhrer’s survival. There was now, however, a hint of other voices. ‘Only in absolutely isolated cases,’ it was said, ‘was the attack not sharply condemned.’ A woman in Halle had been arrested for expressing regret at the outcome of the bomb-attack. Another woman in Vienna had remarked that something like that was bound to happen because the war was lasting so long. But — so the SD claimed — even ‘politically indifferent’ sectors of the population reacted heatedly against such comments.76
The backlash of support for Hitler and ferocity of condemnation of those who had tried to kill the Fuhrer, as mirrored in the SD’s reports, had, as we have noted, been fully anticipated by the plotters themselves in the event of their failure. It highlighted the extensive reservoir of Hitler’s popularity that still existed and could be tapped to bolster the regime at a critical time, despite the increasingly self-evident catastrophic course of the war. The Fuhrer cult was far from extinguished.
But Hitler’s popularity, as we have seen, had unquestionably waned over the previous two years. He had personally been drawn increasingly into the blame for the miseries of a war almost certain to end in defeat. It is hard to imagine, therefore, that the unanimity of feelings of joy at his survival recorded by the SD could have been an accurate reflection of the views of the German people as a whole. The SD was unquestionably registering widely expressed opinion, indeed indicating a real upsurge in pro-Hitler feeling. But the opinions the SD’s informants were able to hear would doubtless have been those emanating in the main from regime-loyalists, Nazi fanatics, and those anxious to demonstrate their support or dispel any suspicions that they might be critical of Hitler. People with less positive views were well advised to keep them to themselves — at such a critical juncture quite especially.77 As war-fortunes had worsened, punishment for incautious remarks had become more draconian. Expressing out loud in late July 1944 regret that Hitler was still alive was as good as suicidal. Some people did take risks. A Berlin tram conductor ventured a brief but pointed commentary on Goebbels’s radio address on 26 July, in which the Propaganda Minister had castigated the plotters. ‘It makes you want to throw up,’ the tram conductor remarked.78 He seems to have got away with it.
Critical sentiments could be expressed safely, however, only in privacy, or among trusted family or friends. One boy, for instance, just sixteen at the time, confided on 21 July 1944 in the remarkable diary that he kept in the attic of a house near Hamburg: ‘Assassination attempt on Hitler! Yesterday, an attack on Hitler with explosives was carried out in his study. Unfortunately, as if by a miracle the swine was unharmed… Last night at 1a.m. Hitler gave a speech on the radio. It’s very noticeable that Hitler repeated six times that it’s only a matter of “a tiny clique”. But his extensive measures give the lie to these claims. You don’t need to put in an entire army to wipe out “a tiny cabal”.’79 The boy kept the diary to himself, not even showing it to his parents.
Another diary entry, from a one-time Hitler-loyalist whose former enthusiasm had turned cold, confined itself to the cynically ambiguous comment: ‘Assassination attempt on the Fuhrer. “Providence” has saved him, and therefore we can believe in victory.’80 Letters to loved ones were also best ‘coded’ for safety. One well-educated German, for years a strong critic of Nazism, writing on 21 July from Paris to his Canadian wife in Germany, remarked about the events of the previous day: ‘For some people it can hardly have been a good night, but we must be thankful that the affair ended as it did. For this war, as I have always pointed out, can only be brought to the desired conclusion by Adolf Hitler!’81
Signs that there were voices beyond the unanimous condemnation summarized by the SD, and that the silence of a large majority of the population was evocative, could even be found in official reports from provincial localities. One such report from Upper Bavaria frankly admitted that ‘part of the population would have welcomed the success of the assassination attempt because in the first instance they would have hoped for an earlier end to the war from it’.82 Another report relayed the perilous remark uttered by a woman, hidden in the gloom in the corner of a dark air-raid shelter: ‘If only they’d have got him.’83
At the front, too, opinion about the bomb-plot was more divided than appearances suggested. Implying any regret that Hitler had survived was to court disaster. Letters home had to pass through the control of the censor and might be intercepted. It was safest to keep quiet. So it is remarkable that there was even a slight increase in criticism of the regime in August 1944, and even more telling that some letters risked extreme retribution for the sender. One soldier was lucky. His letter home on 4 August escaped the attention of the censor. It ran: ‘You write in your letter of the attack on the Fuhrer. Yes, we heard of it even on the same day. Unfortunately, the gents had bad luck. Otherwise there’d already be a truce, and we’d be saved from this mess.’84 In other instances, the censor picked up similar bold comments. The death-sentence for the writer of the letter was then an almost certain consequence.85
As the reactions to the bomb-plot revealed, the bonds of the German people to Hitler, if greatly loosened, were far from broken in mid-1944. The failure of Stauffenberg’s attempt had prompted an outpouring of support for Hitler which unquestionably strengthened the regime for a time. The feeling that to attempt to kill the head of state, and at a time when the nation was fighting for its very existence, was a heinous crime was far from confined to Nazi fanatics. The Catholic sector of the population, for instance, recognized for its lukewarm backing for a regime which since its inception had conducted its attritional campaign against the Church, was also prominently represented in the huge demonstrations of loyalty to Hitler in late July.86 Both major denominations — important formative influences on opinion — condemned the attempt to kill Hitler even after the war.87 And as late as the early 1950s, a third of those questioned in opinion surveys still criticized the attack on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944.88 But above all, the voices captured by the SD in the first
