Heinrich Himmler

When he eventually reached Berlin late that evening after landing at a remote airport, he was far too wary to go to the Bendlerstrasse, the headquarters of his new command. He went straight to Goebbels who, as the senior Nazi Minister in Berlin, had been taking vigorous action against the conspirators ever since he had learned the truth of the situation in Rastenburg. In his dealings with the unit of the Berlin Guards Regiment initially detailed under the command of Major Remer, an ardent Nazi, to arrest him, he reversed the whole situation and put Remer on the telephone to Hitler. Hitler promoted Remer a Colonel for his loyalty and placed the safety of Berlin in his charge. He told him to obey only Goebbels and Himmler, his new Commander-in-Chief who was at that moment on his way to Berlin. Meanwhile, following Hitler’s instructions, Goebbels had arranged for a preliminary announcement of the Fuhrer’s survival to be broadcast at 6.30, and two hours later Keitel sent a teleprinter to all Army Commands announcing Himmler’s appointment and insisting that only commands issued with the authority of the Fuhrer or Himmler were to be obeyed. Stauffenberg, who was valiantly trying to maintain the coup d’etat at the Bendlerstrasse by teleprinter and telephone, gradually found the wind stolen from his sails. Only in France and Austria were active steps taken to join in the coup d’etat. The conspiracy had been a valiant effort on his part and that of General Olbricht, Fromm’s Head of Army Supplies. At nine o’clock it was announced on the radio that Hitler would speak to his people later that night.

So by the time Himmler reached the centre of Berlin from the airport, the essential danger was over. He was forced, however, to arrange for Hitler to countermand a number of hysterical instructions sent by Bormann to the Gauleiters, ordering them to arrest the Army commanders in their areas. When a commando unit under Skorzeny finally reached the Bendlerstrasse around midnight, they found that Fromm, having been freed to resume his command, had held a summary court-martial of the men who earlier in the day had arrested him, and that Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, together with certain others of the inner corps of conspirators had already been shot or forced to commit suicide. Skorzeny forbade any further executions, in the name of Himmler, the new Commander- in-Chief.

Himmler meanwhile had set up his own court of enquiry at Goebbels’s official residence in the Hermann Goring Strasse. Together the two Ministers examined the men brought before them by the S.S., including Fromm himself. The interrogation went on throughout the night, broken only by the need to listen to Hitler’s speech on the radio, which was broadcast at one o’clock in the morning. Goebbels was furious at the wording of this statement, which Hitler delivered in a harsh and weary voice, vowing brutal vengeance on the men who had betrayed him.

The following day Bormann was forced to rectify his error of the night before and transmit less ambiguous instructions which supported Himmler’s new authority. Kaltenbrunner was empowered by Himmler to take charge of the interrogations that followed in preparation for the first phase of the trials which began on 7 August in the Peoples’ Court. Roland Freisler, President of the Court, controlled the proceedings, and the first group of conspirators, tortured, unshaven and dressed in old and ill-fitting civilian clothes, were pressed into the courtroom for an examination which was designed to degrade them before the film cameras set up to record their trial by order of a Fuhrer obsessed by the need for vengeance. Beck, Olbricht and Stauffenberg, the leaders of the conspiracy, were mercifully dead; but their seconds in the courtroom, including Field-Marshal von Witzleben, who was pushed forward to face Freisler’s vicious ridicule in unbraced trousers, the Generals Hoepner and Stieff, and Stauffenberg’s cousin, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, were examined in turn and then condemned to hang naked before the recording lens of a film camera; each of them was strangled by a loop of piano wire suspended from a meat hook. They died on 8 August one by one in the confined space of a small room in the Plotzensee Prison, and it is said some of the men executed hung struggling for five minutes on end before their agony ceased. Hitler watched the record of the executions that night in the projection room at the Reich Chancellery; even Goebbels, hardened as he was, could not look at such fearful suffering. All the prints of this film were subsequently destroyed.

From the point of view of Himmler and his agent Kaltenbrunner, preparation for the trials represented a prolonged series of interrogations that lasted throughout the final months of the war. These interrogations led to more and more arrests and executions; the final death-roll will never now be known, though the number rose into the hundreds.³ The victims included many of the most distinguished members of the resistance, some of them kept alive until the last few days of the war and then killed in the very face of liberation because their tragic testimony would have added weight to the overburdened guilt of the Nazis.

Von Hassell was hanged on 8 September 1944, Langbehn executed on 12 October, Popitz hanged on 2 February 1945, Nebe of the S.S. executed on 3 March. Rommel, Hitler’s and Germany’s ideal general, was compelled to commit suicide on 14 October. Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed on 9 April, the same day as Admiral Canaris.

Himmler made his first public comment on the events of 20 July in an address to a group of Gauleiters and other officials assembled at Posen on 3 August; both Bormann and Goebbels were present. He spoke with a scathing, self-protecting irony of what had happened between himself, Langbehn, whom he called the middleman, and Popitz:

‘We let this middleman chatter, we let him talk, and this is more or less what he said: Yes, it was of course necessary that the war should end, we must come to peace terms with England — following the opinion of the day — and the first requisite is that the Fuhrer must be removed at once and relegated by the opposition to an honorary president’s place. His group was quite certain that no action of this kind be carried out against the S.S.’

He had told Hitler of the matter, and they had laughed together; the appointment with Popitz, however, had not been very revealing. So Langbehn was arrested:

‘At last I pulled in the middleman. Since that time, nine months ago, Herr Popitz looks like a cheese. When you watch him, he is as white as a wall; I should call him the living image of a guilty conscience. He sends me telegrams, he telephones me, he asks what is the matter with Dr X, what has happened to him; and I give him sphinx-like replies so that he does not know whether I had anything to do with what happened or not.’⁴

Himmler, as might be expected, poured ridicule on the whole civilian part in the conspiracy, from Langbehn and Popitz to Kiep and the Solfs. ‘We knew about the present conspiracy for a very long time’, he said. As for the generals, he was equally scathing, ‘Fromm’, he declared, ‘acted like a vulgar film scenario’, and he made the whole Army seem responsible for the conspiracy. He claimed that Stauffenberg was preparing to loose the inmates of the concentration camps upon the people of Germany. ‘It meant that in the next two or three weeks crime would blossom and the communists would reign over our streets.’⁵

These words were meant for public hearing. In private, Himmler was most careful to ensure that the trial of Langbehn and Popitz was kept as secret as possible. When the hearing occurred in the autumn, Kaltenbrunner sent a letter to the Minister of Justice:

‘I understand that the trial of the former minister Popitz and the lawyer Langbehn is to take place shortly before the Peoples’ Court. In view of the facts known to you, namely the conference of the Reichsfuhrer S.S. with Popitz, I ask you to see to it that the public be excluded from the trial. I assume your agreement and I shall dispatch about ten of my collaborators to make up an audience.’⁶

Though both Langbehn and Popitz were condemned to death, Popitz was kept alive until the following February in case more information could be got from him. Langbehn, as we have seen, died in October; he was tortured before the death sentence was carried out.

In his talk to the Gauleiters and other high officials at Posen, on 29 May 1944, Himmler was unusually direct in his reference to the Judenfrage, the Jewish problem. He adopted the frank manner of speech he favoured with his more intimate audiences, the audiences in fact that he most enjoyed addressing. Extermination, he explained, was a hard and difficult operation:

‘Now I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say here in this select gathering, but never to mention it to anybody. We had to deal with the question: what about the women and children? — I am determined in this