Plotting Hitler's Death

him that he was mistaken about the balance of power: it was up to them, not him, to make arrests. Fromm leapt up and rushed at Olbricht with clenched fists but Haeften, Kleist, and several officers from the map room next door separated the two and held Fromm off with a pistol. Resigned, Fromm announced, “Under the circumstances, I consider myself out of commission.” He offered no further resistance and, having requested and received a bottle of cognac, prepared himself to be led away to the office of his aide, Captain Heinz-Ludwig Bartram.

In the meantime, Beck, Schwerin, Helldorf, Hoepner, Gisevius, and the chief administrative officer for the Potsdam district, Gottfried von Bismarck, had assembled in Olbricht’s office, and Olbricht now told Hoepner that he was to assume Fromm’s duties immediately. Ever the pedant, even in the midst of a coup, Hoepner demanded to have his appointment in writing. The formalities were being com­pleted when Hoepner ran into Fromm in the hallway as he was being taken to his aide’s office. Bowing slightly, Hoepner said that he regretted having to lake over Fromm s office. The deposed general replied, “I’m sorry, Hoepner, but I can’t go along with this. In my opinion, the Fuhrer is not dead and you are making a mistake.”¹¹

Ii had by now became clear to those at the Wolf’s Lair that the assassination attempt signaled the start of a general uprising. They could hardly fail to notice since, due to a switching error, telegram dispatches from army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse were arriving at Fuhrer headquarters as well. By about 4:00 p.m. Hitler had named Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler the new commander in chief of the reserve army. Soon thereafter, Keitel instructed the military districts not to obey the orders they were receiving from Bendlerstrasse. Hitler’s counterattack was gathering momentum. As a result of Klausing’s error in giving the orders the top-secret rating, some military districts even received counterinstructions from Fuhrer headquarters before the original orders from Bendlerstrasse arrived, sowing great confusion at first. In Breslau, the military district commanders de­cided against a coup before they even knew it was under way. In Hamburg, party and SS officials went to the office of the district commander, General Wilhelm Wetzel, to drink sherry and vermouth, raise toasts, and swear that they were not about to shoot one another.

In all the bewilderment over conflicting reports, Beck declared I that he did not “care what was being said, he did not even care what was true; for him, Hitler was dead,” and he urged his fellow conspirators to adopt the same attitude lest they spread confusion in their own ranks, he had begun dictating an address for broadcast in which, anticipating a counterbroadcast, he argued that it “does not matter whether Hitler is dead or alive. A Fuhrer who engenders such conflicts among his closest associates that it comes to an assassination attempt is morally dead.”¹² The only chance that the conspirators still seemed to have was that the fictions they had invented would be widely believed. The key question was whether this makeshift justifi­cation would have enough force to insure that orders passed down the chain of command would be strictly obeyed. Anything less and the coup would not succeed.

That the course of events still depended on the courage and determination of a handful of officers could be seen on a number of occasions during that chaotic day. Among the outposts that received early warnings was that of the Berlin city commandant, General Paul von Hase. As Operation Valkyrie was launched, he called the head of the army ordnance school, Brigadier General Walter Bruns; the head of the army explosives school, Colonel Helmuth Schwierz; and the com­mander of the guard battalion, Major Otto Ernst Remer, to his head­quarters at 1 Unter den Linden, where he gave them their orders. By 6:00 p.m. the Ministry of Propaganda had been cordoned off, two sentries had been posted in front of Goebbels’s house, and Goebbels himself, having seen what was taking place on the street, had disap­peared into a back room to get a few cyanide capsules.¹³ Half an hour later the government quarter had also been surrounded by the guard battalion. Only the units from the ordnance school in the Berlin sub­urb of Treptow, which were supposed to occupy the city palace, were delayed, because their trucks did not arrive on schedule to transport them.

Elsewhere, too, things were going according to plan. Units of the elite Grossdeutschland reserve brigade stationed in Cottbus, near Berlin, occupied the radio stations and transmitters in Herzberg and Konigs Wusterhausen and seized control of the local Nazi Party of­fices and SS barracks without encountering resistance. When news of Hitler’s assassination reached Krampnitz, the senior officer at the post, Colonel Harald Momm, shouted, “Orderly! A bottle of cham­pagne! The swine is dead!” Although there were some delays there, the Valkyrie units were finally mobilized. Those in Doberitz, too, were ready to go, and Major Friedrich Jakob had orders to seize the main broadcasting center on Masurenallee in Berlin, block all trans­missions, and then rendezvous with a signal officer who would be dispatched by headquarters. Bendlerstrasse issued a list of targets to be seized, ranging from SS and party offices down to various minis­tries and finally the city administration; the explosives school contrib­uted by forming thirty task forces of ten men each to help. Helldorf alerted the security police to be ready for a wave of arrests.

But from this point on, things began to go awry. Helldorf received no further instructions. Major Jakob succeeded in occupying the broadcasting center on Masurenallee, but the signal officer failed to appear because General Thiele had vanished. In his absence, Jakob relied for technical information on the station manager, who assured him that broadcasting had stopped when, in fact, it was continuing. Back on Bendlerstrasse, Beck urgently awaited news that the station had been occupied. The units that seized the Nauen and Tegel trans­mitters on the outskirts of Berlin had experiences similar to that at Masurenallee. At 5:42 p.m., and in quick succession thereafter, a series of communiques was broadcast from Fuhrer headquarters an­nouncing the attack and the serious injuries suffered by Schmundt, Brandt, and the stenographer, Berger, but also reporting that Hitler himself had escaped injury and “resumed his work” immediately.

At the conspiracy’s headquarters on Bendlerstrasse, signs of uncertainty were beginning to appear. When SS Oberfuhrer Humbert Pifrader arrived, on Himmler’s orders, at 5:00 p.m., demanding to see Stauffenberg, he was arrested with no fuss. But when the commander of the Berlin military district, General Kortzfleisch, appeared shortly thereafter and was similarly arrested after flatly refusing to join the coup, he was belligerent, roaring at Hammerstein, who was standing guard over him, that he wanted to know to whom exactly he had sworn his oath of loyalty. Kortzfleisch eventually calmed down and complained that he just wasn’t prepared to participate in a coup; he had always considered himself nothing but a soldier and was now “interested only in one thing: going home and pulling weeds in my garden.” The conspirators replaced him with General Karl von Thungen, but even the new man hesitated, feeling that the situation was still far too murky. He lingered for a long time at Bendlerstrasse talking things over before finally proceeding reluctantly to his com­mand post on Hohenzollerndamm, where the chief of staff, General Otto Herfurth, ruminated over the onerous decisions that had fallen to him. Herfurth repeatedly requested more information and delayed the implementation of the orders he was receiving. Finally he sank down onto his field cot and declared himself ill.¹⁴

Although the inner circle of conspirators still held firm, Major Remer, who commanded a guard battalion in Berlin, had figured out by this time that he was risking his neck. Urged on by a suspicious propaganda officer, but in defiance of explicit orders from his superior officer, General Hase, he decided to seek the advice of Goebbels. Remer arrived al Goebbels’s apartment at about 7:00 p.m. to find Major Martin Korff of the explosives school attempting to arrest Goebbels. The minister was clever enough to recognize that Remer felt torn between his oath of allegiance and his orders, and he quickly telephoned Fuhrer headquarters in Rastenburg.

Hitler himself came on the line and asked Remer if he recognized his voice. When Remer said he did, the Fuhrer conferred on him plenary powers to put down the uprising. Remer scarcely had time to think. Overwhelmed by the discovery that Hitler was still alive and by the magnitude of his new responsibilities, he immediately removed the cordon that had been set up around the government quarter and gradually took command of the units and task forces already in the city center and those arriving there. When Colonel Jager came to take Goebbels away, the sentries on duty already had orders to protect the minister. The uprising had begun to collapse.

Those conspirators who had insisted that killing Hitler was the crucial prerequisite for a coup were proved right, though now it was too late. The decisive importance of the Fuhrer was most powerfully evinced by Remer’s actions but could also be seen in the reactions of Fromm, Thungen, Herfurth, and others and in the endless, para­ lyzing debates that took place in many barracks after the initial radio broadcasts reported Hitler as alive. The fact that Olbricht and Stauffenberg were issuing orders that exceeded their authority-a fact cer­tainly noted with suspicion by some officers-did not itself jeopardize the coup, because the Wehrmacht command structure was confusing to begin with and, in any case, all power was finally centralized in the hands of Adolf Hitler. It did, however, mean the chain of command would not function automatically.

But by this time it was not just the chain of command that was coming apart. Already that afternoon Fellgiebel had despondently refused to speak with Olbricht, informing him in a message that “there’s no reason for all that anymore.” Perhaps Fellgiebel realized what a horrendous error he had made in reporting that the