Mussolini were back at the Fuhrer’s bunker where Goring, Ribbentrop, Donitz, Keitel, and Jodi were assembled. The conversation once again centered around Hitler’s salvation, but soon passed into mutual and increasingly ugly reproaches. Admiral Donitz inveighed against the treacherous army, and Goring joined him; but then Donitz also attacked the air force and its inadequate performance. Whereupon Goring attacked Ribbentrop for the failure of his foreign policy and, if the account of the incident is correct, finally raised his marshal’s baton and waved it threateningly. Ribbentrop, addressed without the preposition denoting nobility, rapped back at Goring that he was the Foreign Minister and that his name was
The events in Berlin, with their crises, climaxes, and debacle, have also been described many times over: the incomprehensibly delayed launching of “Operation Valkyrie”; the failure to cut oif news from the Fuhrer’s headquarters; Remer’s telephone conversation with Hitler (“Major Remer, do you hear my voice?”); the arrest of Fromm; Stauffenberg’s persistent pleading and propelling the slow-moving mechanism into action; Field Marshal von Witzleben’s angry scene at the headquarters of the High Command of the armed forces; the radio announcement around nine o’clock that Hitler would speak to the German people that very evening; the first signs of helpless perplexity on the part of the conspirators; the arrest of City Commandant von Hase; then again Stauffenberg still passionately urging but meeting no response, and finally reappearing late in the evening, resigned, his eyeflap removed, passing through the rooms of the OKW; and finally Fromm’s theatrical reappearance on the scene, suddenly reasserting control over the seemingly paralyzed military apparatus on which the conspirators had placed their hopes. All this followed by the arrests, by Beck’s several unsuccessful attempts at suicide, by the hastily arranged executions in front of the sandpile in the inner courtyard, illuminated by the headlights of a few trucks; and finally Fromm’s “Hurrah!” for the Fuhrer.
Toward one o’clock in the morning Hitler’s voice spoke over all German radio stations:
German racial comrades! I do not know how many times an assassination attempt against me has been planned and carried out. If I speak to you today, I do so for two reasons: first, so that you may hear my voice and know that I myself am uninjured and well. Secondly, so that you may also learn the details about a crime that has not its like in German history.
A very small clique of ambitious, wicked and stupidly criminal officers forged a plot to eliminate me and along with me virtually the entire staff of the German leadership of the armed forces. The bomb which was planted by Colonel Count von Stauffenberg burst two meters to the right of me. It very seriously injured a number of associates dear to me; one of them has died. I myself am completely uninjured except for some very small scrapes, bruises or burns. I regard it as a confirmation of my assignment from Providence to continue to pursue my life’s goal as I have done hitherto….
The group represented by these usurpers is ridiculously small. It has nothing to do with the German armed forces, and above all with the German army. It is a very small coterie of criminal elements which is now being mercilessly extirpated…. We will settle accounts the way we National Socialists are accustomed to settle them.15
That same night a wave of arrests began, directed against all suspects whether or not they had anything to do with the coup. A second wave about a month later (“Operation Thunderstorm”) again rounded up several thousand suspected oppositionists, chiefly members of former political parties.16 A “July 20th Special Commission,” staffed by 400 investigators, continued until the last days of the regime, tracking down every clue and issuing a steady series of bulletins about its success, thus demonstrating the extent of the resistance. Crushing pressure, torture and blackmail soon uncovered the outlines of an opposition that had functioned for years, had been extremely thorough theoretically but incapable of action. It had produced a plethora of letters and diaries, which gave it the character of a permanent monologue. The way the persecutors went about their task is illustrated by the fate of Henning von Tresckow, who had shot himself on July 21. He was mentioned in the armed forces communique with praise as one of the army’s outstanding generals. But as soon as his part in the abortive coup came to light, his corpse was dragged from the family vault, to the accompaniment of savage abuse of his relatives, and taken to Berlin, where it was used in the interrogation of his stubbornly denying friends as a means of breaking their morale.
In general, the regime, contrary to its ideal of dispassionate sternness, displayed a remarkable cruelty, for which Hitler himself repeatedly gave the cues. Even in his periods of utmost control, he had shown a need to avenge himself in the most excessive fashion for every snub, every rejection. The savage extermination policy practiced upon the Poles, for instance, was not primarily the application of a theory concerning the treatment of the peoples of the East. Rather, it was Hitler’s personal revenge upon the one country in the East whose alliance he had vainly sought in order to realize his main vision, the grand march against the Soviet Union. And when Yugoslavia attempted, as a result of an army officers’ coup, to withdraw from the Tripartite Pact into which she had been forced, Hitler was so beside himself with fury that he had the defenseless capital of the country systematically bombed from a low altitude for three full days. That was “Operation Punishment.” Now, in 1944, a few days after the attempted assassination, he commented after a military conference: “This has to stop. It won’t do. These are the basest creatures that ever in history wore the soldier’s tunic. We must repel and expel the offscourings from a dead past who have found refuge among us.”
On the legal measures to be taken, he declared:
This time I’m making short work of it. These criminals are not to be brought before a court-martial, where their accomplices are sitting and where the trials are dragged out interminably. They’re going to be expelled from the armed forces and face the People’s Court. And they’re not to receive the honorable bullet, but are to hang like common traitors! We’ll have a court of honor expel them from the service; then they can be tried as civilians and they won’t be soiling the prestige of the services. They must be tried at lightning speed, not be given a chance to make any grand speeches. And within two hours after the announcement of the verdict it has to be carried
Such in fact was the procedure. A “court of honor” with Field Marshal von Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel as associates, on August 4 meted out dishonorable discharges to twenty-two officers, among them one field marshal and eight generals. For the first time in the history of the German army this was done without giving the persons involved a chance to plead. Hitler received daily reports on the interrogations. He also insisted on being kept abreast of arrests and executions, and “greedily devoured the information.” He received Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court and the chief executioner, in the Fuhrer’s headquarters, and ruled that the condemned were to be denied the consolations of religion or, in fact, any consolations of any kind. His instructions were: “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle.”18
On August 8 the first eight conspirators were executed in Plotzensee Prison. One by one they entered the execution room in prison garb and wooden shoes. Passing by the guillotine, they were led to the hooks fastened to a rail running across the ceiling. The executioners took off their manacles, passed a rope around their necks and bared the bodies to the hips. Then they raised the condemned, dropping them into the noose, and pulled off their trousers while they were slowly strangled. The records as a rule noted the duration of the execution as up to twenty seconds, but the orders were to protract the process of dying. After each execution the executioner and his aides braced themselves with a drink held ready on a table. Movies were taken of the proceedings, and that same evening Hitler had these films shown down to the last twitches of the condemned.
Hitler’s savagery expressed itself not only in the intensity but also in the extent of the persecution.
