Heinrich Himmler

News of the Allied landings in Normandy in the small hours of the morning of 6 June, two days after the liberation of Rome, came as a surprise to the Nazi leaders. Hitler was in Berchtesgaden, and Rommel, who was in command of the Army Group controlling Holland, Belgium and Northern France, was spending the night at his home in Ulm. Goring was resting at Veldenstein, one of his castles in the south, when he received the telephone call from his aide Brauchitsch that hurried him by road to a situation conference held during the afternoon at Klessheim, a baroque palace near Salzburg where Hitler had acted as host to Mussolini and Ciano in 1942, and bullied Horthy in 1944. The conference was attended by Himmler, who came from his special train stationed near Berchtesgaden which he was using as his headquarters during the times Hitler was on the Obersalzburg, while Ribbentrop travelled from Fuschl, his summer palace near Salzburg where, according to Schellenberg, he had been brooding on the idea of shooting Stalin with a revolver disguised as a fountain-pen. Meanwhile, Hitler had gone to bed after hearing the news from France, leaving an order that he was not to be disturbed.

No record survives of what Himmler, Goring and Ribbentrop discussed at this meeting. Only the circumstance of an invasion could have brought these three together without the master-presence of Hitler, who did not emerge from his retirement to face his generals in France until 17 June, when he summoned Rundstedt and Rommel to a conference at Margival, near Soissons, the day after the first V-weapon had been launched against London. According to General Speidel who was present, Hitler looked ‘pale and sleepless’; his restless fingers played with coloured pencils and, when they ate, he swallowed a sequence of pills and medicines after bolting down a plate of rice and vegetables. He broke his promise to visit Rommel’s Group headquarters two days later, returning to Berchtesgaden the same night that a stray V-bomb turned off course to London and exploded near his bunker. Instead, he received Rundstedt and Rommel on the Obersalzburg on 29 June, a week after the Russians had begun their major offensive; he rejected their appeal to end the war and lectured them on his miracle weapon. On 1 July Rundstedt was replaced by Kluge. Rommel, left alone, warned Hitler in a letter dated 15 July that defeat in France was now inevitable; two days later he was severely wounded in his staff car by a low-flying aircraft.

The situation could scarcely be worse on both fronts. By early July the Russians had reached Polish territory and were threatening East Prussia. Himmler continued in the south, where Hitler remained brooding until 14 July, when he transferred his headquarters to the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia. Himmler followed him north, but was not present at his first staff conference on 15 July, the day Hitler authorized him to form fifteen new S.S. divisions to replace the losses on the Eastern front, an order that in fact anticipated by five days his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, a post from which General Fromm was to be dismissed on 20 July. It was here, too, on 20 July that the group of senior officers in the Reserve Army almost succeeded in killing Hitler at his mid-day conference and achieving a coup d’etat in Germany.¹

A briefcase holding a time-bomb was planted by Colonel the Count von Stauffenberg, Fromm’s Chief of Staff, under the Fuhrer’s conference-table. At 12.42 the bomb exploded, ten minutes after Stauffenberg had broken the capsule holding the acid which ate through the wire controlling the firing-pin. But the briefcase under the table had been inadvertently pushed by another officer to a position which shielded Hitler from the worst effects of the blast. Two minutes later Stauffenberg passed successfully through the first check-point at Rastenburg on his way to the aircraft which was to fly him back to his fellow-conspirators at the Bendlerstrasse, the War Office in Berlin. He believed Hitler was dead.

Neither Himmler, Goring nor Ribbentrop were at the conference at the time of the explosion, and Goebbels was in Berlin. Goring was at his headquarters fifty miles away. Himmler’s centre in East Prussia was the villa Hagewald-Hochwald, at Birkenwald, on the Maursee lake; his official train was stationed nearby. Kersten had given him treatment during the morning; Himmler told him that he believed the whole course of the war would be affected by the troubles developing between the Americans and the Russians. Kersten then went for a long walk, lunched in the peaceful setting of the villa and later slept in his compartment on the train.

^{Felix Kersten}

^{Kersten with Himmler}

Himmler was at Birkenwald at the time of the explosion; he was summoned immediately by ’phone, and his bodyguard Kiermaier remembers the rough journey they made at speed over the uneven country roads, covering the twenty-five kilometres in about half an hour.

It had been arranged that General Fellgiebel, the Army Chief of Signals, who was one of the conspirators, should send a signal in code to the generals at Army headquarters at the Bendlerstrasse in Berlin immediately after Hitler’s death, so that the complex operation of the coup d’etat could be put in motion; after this he was to sever Rastenburg’s communications with the outside world for as long as he could. After seeing the bomb explode, Stauffenberg had jumped into his car and left for the airport in the full belief that Hitler was dead. But a few moments later Hitler, Keitel and the other survivors emerged dazed, shocked and wounded from the shattered building, and Fellgiebel, not knowing what to do for the best, joined the running men who rushed to help the Fuhrer and tend the injured officers. By Hitler’s express orders no news of the explosion was to be given to the outside world, and the S.S. took charge of the area. Fellgiebel found it impossible to report what had happened to the Bendlerstrasse.

The conspirators were left without news of any kind until 3.30 in the afternoon, when Thiele, Chief of Signals at the Bendlerstrasse, managed to get a vague message from Rastenburg that the attempt had taken place. The measures for the coup d’etat under the code name Valkyrie were put into operation. Meanwhile Stauffenberg had been flying back to Berlin confident that his great mission had at last been accomplished.

Himmler arrived at Rastenburg shortly after 1.15 and took immediate action. He telephoned Gestapo headquarters in Berlin and ordered a posse of police investigators to fly at once to Rastenburg. After this it appears that communications with Berlin were shut down by order of Hitler until round 3.30, the time when Thiele managed to telephone from the Bendlerstrasse. Shortly after this, Keitel was able to inform Fromm that Hitler was not dead. Fromm immediately attempted to cancel the Valkyrie operations that the conspirators had launched in his name as Commander-in-Chief. This was too much for the conspirators, and they placed him under arrest. At Rastenburg, Himmler had by now traced the origin of the bomb to Stauffenburg. He telephoned Berlin, where Stauffenburg had landed about 3.45, to order the Count’s arrest either at the airport or the Bendlerstrasse, but the S.S. Colonel who drove to the Bendlerstrasse at 5.30 with two subordinates to carry out the order only found that it was he himself who was put under arrest.

Himmler still believed that he was dealing with an attempt on Hitler’s life by an isolated man or at most by a small group in the resistance; he did not yet realize that a military coup d’etat was actually in operation in Berlin. Had he done so, he would not have accompanied Hitler to meet the train bringing Mussolini on a visit to Rastenburg, which it seemed to Hitler unnecessary to postpone. Indeed, he needed an audience to whom he might boast of the special ‘Providence’ that had in its wisdom seen fit to preserve him, even though the audience was only an aged and fallen fuhrer on whom the same Providence had evidently ceased to smile. With Himmler still in anxious attendance, Hitler and Mussolini stared wonderingly at the wrecked conference room which the bomb had destroyed, and it seemed that a miracle had manifestly occurred. Himmler asserted later that his re-conversion to belief in God happened at this moment.²

Now that communications with Berlin had been restored, it was soon realized that a major upheaval was taking place in the capital. Before taking tea with Mussolini and the remaining Nazi leaders at five o‘clock, Hitler ordered Himmler to fly at once to Berlin. With a sudden burst of decision he gave the faithful Reichsfuhrer S.S. formal control of the security of the Reich and made him Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army in the place of Fromm. This gave Himmler what he most desired, direct access to the Bendlerstrasse and a command at last in the Army itself. His last words to Hitler were overheard: ‘My Fuhrer,’ he said, ‘you can leave it all to me.’

Nevertheless, he moved with pronounced caution for a keen soldier sent on an urgent and dangerous mission. While Hitler entertained his guests at what proved to be a socially disastrous tea-party, Himmler returned to Birkenwald before leaving for Berlin. Kersten was wakened from his long afternoon nap by Himmler’s driver bursting in on him with the news from Rastenburg; he got up at once and hurried to Himmler’s study in the villa, where he found him sorting and destroying certain papers. ‘Now my hour has come’, said Himmler. ‘I’ll round up all that reactionary gang; I’ve already given orders for the arrest of the traitors. By preserving the Fuhrer, Providence has given us a sign. I am flying immediately to Berlin.’