Plotting Hitler's Death

Gerhard Ritter has painted a profound and compelling portrait of Goerdeler as someone whose very relentlessness in the struggle against Hitler was symptomatic of a lack of realism. Arrested as a member of the Freiburg group of professors, Ritter found himself face to face with Goerdeler in prison in January 1945: “A suddenly aged man stood before me,” Ritter later recounted, “chained hand and foot and wearing the same light summer clothing-now shabby and collarless-in which he had been arrested.” What shook Ritter most, however, were Goerdeler’s eyes. Always so luminous in the past, they had now become “the eyes of a blind man.”²³

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On September 15, 1944, Ernst Kaltenbrunner reported that the investigations had been largely completed and that no further revela­tions could be expected. Then, just eight days later, papers fell into the hands of Reich Security Headquarters that proved him wrong. Lieutenant Colonel Werner Schrader, a close confidant of Hans Oster’s at Military Intelligence, had committed suicide, and his driver, feeling despondent and abandoned, approached police inspec­tor Franz Xaver Sonderegger and described to him a bundle of pa­pers that had been deposited in the Prussian State Bank in 1942 and later taken to Zossen, where they were stored in a safe. His curiosity aroused, Sonderegger went to Zossen and opened the safe. What he found were the materials that Beck, Oster, and Halder had produced for the coup attempt in the late 1930s and that Hans von Dohnanyi had gathered together: minutes of meetings, plans for military opera­tions, addresses, notes on the Blomberg and Fritsch affairs, loose sheets of paper-all of it carefully filed. There were even a few pages from the long-sought diaries of Admiral Canaris.

The discovery brought to light the activities of Halder, Brauchitsch, Thomas, Nebe, and others, but what was much more devastating to the regime was the sudden realization once again that the assumption underlying the entire investigation was false. The con­spiracy of July 20 was plainly not the work of a few disgruntled, resentful, or exhausted officers, unhappy with the reversal in the tide of war. Quite to the contrary, the roots of the conspiracy reached as far back as 1938, the highest echelons of the Wehrmacht were in­volved, and the motives of the conspirators were much more complex than anyone had suspected. Kaltenbrunner’s next report spoke of the conspirators’ desire to prevent the outbreak of war, their widespread criticism of the “handling of the Jewish question,” the Nazis’ policy toward the churches, and the generally “harmful influence” of Himmler and the Gestapo.²⁴ Hitler was so alarmed that he ordered that none of the documents was to be entered into evidence in the trials before the People’s Court without his specific approval. He also insisted that the investigation of the new revelations be strictly separate and that the arrest of General Halder and his incarceration on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse be kept secret from all the other prisoners.²⁵

The Nazis’ belief in the unity of Volk and Fuhrer could not survive the Zossen documents and the information they revealed. As one high official in the Ministry of Justice commented in desperation, “We are being engulfed by July 20. We are no longer masters of the situation.”²⁶ Hitler decided to postpone the trials connected with the newly uncovered conspiracy, and when an American bombing raid destroyed part of Gestapo headquarters he ordered the prisoners im­plicated in the conspiracy transferred to Buchenwald and then to Flossenburg in the Upper Palatinate region. It is possible that he even considered sweeping the entire affair under the rug.

On April 4, 1945, the bulk of Canaris’s fabled diaries turned up by accident, once again in Zossen. Kaltenbrunner thought the discovery so important that he personally delivered the black notebooks to the Reich Chancellery the very next day. Immersing himself in the reve­lations they contained, Hitler grew increasingly convinced that his great mission, now under threat from all sides, had been sabotaged from the outset by intrigue, false oaths, deception, and betrayal from within. His anger, hatred, and frustration exploded in a volcanic out­ burst, which concluded with a terse instruction for the commander of the SS unit responsible for his personal safety, Hans Rattenhuber: “Destroy the conspirators!”²⁷

In a farcical procedure, Kaltenbrunner immediately convened two SS kangaroo courts, though they lacked jurisdiction and therefore any veneer of the legality they were meant to display. One court traveled to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Dohnanyi was be­ing held. In order to escape the tortures of his interrogators, he had intentionally infected himself with diptheria bacilli and was still suffering the effects: severe heart problems, frequent cramping, and paralysis. Only semiconscious, he was carried before his judges on a stretcher and, without further ado, condemned to hang. There was not even a written record of the proceedings, though this was strictly required by German law.

Events transpired similarly at Flossenburg, where, two days later, on April 8, 1945, the second kangaroo court condemned Canaris, Osier, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Military Intelligence captain Ludwig Gehre, and army judge Karl Sack. While Canaris still sought a way out during the proceedings, Oster reportedly declared, “I can only say what I know. I’m no liar,” and defiantly owned up to all that he had done. In the end all the accused were condemned to die. That eve­ning Canaris tapped out a final message to the prisoner in the next cell, a Danish secret service officer: “My days are done. Was not a traitor.”²⁸

As the skies began to lighten at dawn the next day, the executions began. The victims were taken to a bathing cubicle, where they were forced to strip; then, one by one, they were led naked across the courtyard to the gallows. Hooks had been attached to the rafters of an open wooden structure. The condemned men were ordered to climb a few steps, a noose was placed around their necks, and the steps were kicked aside.

On the stacks of clothing left behind were found the books that the victims had been reading when the end came: on Bonheoffer’s, the Bible and a volume of Goethe’s works; on Canaris’s, Kaiser Frederick the Second by Ernst Kantorowicz. Although Josef Muller had traveled to Rome on a number of occasions at Oster’s behest and was also incarcerated in Flossenburg, for some inexplicable reason he was not tried and condemned with his fellow conspirators. Late that morning he learned from an English prisoner that the bodies of his friends were already being cremated on a pyre behind the camp jail. “Parti­cles floated through the air,” he later recalled, “swirling through the bars of my cell…little bits of human flesh.” Two days later the rumble of the approaching front could be heard in the distance.²⁹

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The more hopeless Germany’s military prospects became, the more summary and arbitrary was the regime’s great reckoning with its domestic opponents, as the courts reached out to punish people only marginally involved in the uprising. In early October 1944 Martin Bormann took it upon himself to remind Hitler that Erwin Rommel, on a visit to Fuhrer headquarters near Margival the previous June, had flatly contradicted Hitler and had subsequently urged him to end the war. Kluge’s suicide cast further, though never proven, suspicions on Rommel, whose enormous popularity with the German people only made Hitler more jealous and wary. On October 7, while he was still convalescing at home from the serious war wounds he had suffered, Rommel received orders to present himself in Berlin three days later. On the advice of his doctors, he replied that he was unable tomake the journey and asked to send an officer instead. In response, Generals Ernst Maisel and Wilhelm Burgdorf, both members of the military “court of honor,” were dispatched to Rommel’s residence in Herrlingen near Ulm, where, on October 14, they presented him with an ultimatum: either he took poison and received a state funeral or he would be brought before the People’s Court. While this discussion took place, SS units surrounded the village. After Hitler’s emissaries left the house Rommel told his wife that he did not shrink from the prospect of a trial but was certain he would never reach Berlin alive. He was also concerned about the consequences for his family if he opted for a trial. And so Rommel decided to take the poison. “I’ll be dead in a quarter of an hour,” he said before heading out the door to where the two generals were waiting. It was shortly after one o’clock in the afternoon.

About twenty minutes later Maisel and Burgdorf delivered the corpse to a military hospital in Ulm. When the head physician wanted to conduct an autopsy, Burgdorf warned, “Don’t touch the body. Everything is being taken care of from Berlin.” Wilhelm Keitel later said that though Hitler himself first suggested doing away with Rom­mel, the Fuhrer never revealed the real reasons, even to his closest confidants, and insisted to Goring, Jodl, and Donitz that the field marshal had died of natural causes.³⁰

Meanwhile the political trials had continued, at first at a pace of one a week and later about one every two weeks. On August 15, 1944, Count Helldorf, Hayessen, Hans-Bernd Haeften, and Adam Trott were sentenced to death; on August 21, Thiele, Colonel Jager, and Schwerin von Schwanenfeld; the next week, Stulpnagel, Hofacker, Linstow, and Finckh. Soon thereafter came Thungen, Langbehn, Jessen, Meichssner, and General Herfurth (despite