Killing Hitler (41 page)

Hitler’s mood, in the aftermath of the attack, can only be described as euphoric. To a horrified Mussolini, he showed off his burns and his tattered clothes and hailed his survival as a “climax.”
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With others, he was less equivocal. One of his doctors recorded that Hitler repeated, over and over, “I am invulnerable, I am immortal.”
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While Hitler exulted in his own survival, Stauffenberg was en route to Berlin to launch Operation Valkyrie. During the two-hour flight, however, he emerged as the prime suspect in the search for the assassin. As one contemporary recalled, it was not long before Stauffenberg’s absence was noted. It was then realized that he had left the situation conference just before the explosion—on the pretense of making a phone call—and had then hurried off without waiting for a connection to be made.
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Yet when he arrived in the capital that afternoon, shortly before 4:00, Stauffenberg was bemused to find neither friend nor foe there to meet him. Even his driver was absent, and he was forced to make his own way to Home Army Command on the Bendlerstrasse.

On arriving there, supposedly the nerve center of the coup, he was astonished to find only hesitation, inaction, and uncertainty. News from Rastenburg had been vague—a communications blackout had been imposed—and caution had been considered the best policy. Some orders
had
been issued, however. The conspirators had, for example, sent out the alert to implement the official Operation Valkyrie to all regional military commands. They had also attempted to bring loyal, or at least compliant, troops into the capital. But, in the flurry of rumor and counter-rumor, this had proved woefully insufficient. By the time that communications to
Hitler’s headquarters were restored, at around 3 p.m., precious hours had already been lost. From then on, the Valkyrie orders of the conspirators would be followed everywhere by counterorders from the Führer and the high command:

Radio Message

The Führer is alive! In perfect health!

Reichsführer-SS
C-in-C Replacement Army. Only his orders valid. Orders from General Fromm, Field Marshal von Witzleben and Colonel-General Hoepner not to be executed!

Maintain contact with
Gauleiter
and Senior SS and Police Commander!
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Stauffenberg galvanized the plotters temporarily, issuing a flurry of instructions and harrying and cajoling by telephone. He also gave the first account of Hitler’s death, claiming that he had seen the Führer’s body being carried away and confessing that he himself had planted the bomb. “No one who was in that room,” he asserted optimistically, “can still be alive.”
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Nonetheless, the mood among the conspirators in the Bendlerstrasse was worsening. Some, even several of those who were central to the plot, were already wavering, hedging their bets and seeking a way out of the impasse. By late afternoon, Stieff was informing on his erstwhile colleagues.
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General Olbricht, too, was losing the stomach for the fight and was hesitating to draw soldiers into the insurrection that were not already compromised.
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Not far away, meanwhile, at Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, a loyalist stronghold was forming. Though surrounded by troops obeying the Valkyrie order, Goebbels telephoned all and sundry to try to find out the truth about the attack at Rastenburg and to make sense of events in Berlin. At around 5 p.m., he finally made contact with Hitler, who informed him that a full-scale military putsch was under way. His first action was to summon Major Otto Remer, whose troops had surrounded the area under orders from the plotters in the Bendlerstrasse. Remer, a convinced National
Socialist, had been told that Hitler was dead and that the SS was mounting a coup. His orders were to cordon off the government quarter and arrest a number of prominent Nazis, including Goebbels. The propaganda minister coolly countered that Hitler was alive—and, to prove the point, telephoned him at Rastenburg. When Remer took the receiver and heard Hitler’s voice, he immediately and involuntarily snapped to attention. Hitler asked him if he recognized his voice.
“Jawohl, mein Führer”
came the reply. He went on: “I order you to seal off the government quarter and to crush any resistance with all means necessary. Every man who is not for me, is to be destroyed. Do you understand?” Remer replied once again:
“Jawohl, mein Führer.”
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The tide was turning.

By 6:30 p.m., when Goebbels gave a radio broadcast confirming Hitler’s survival, the putsch was already unraveling. As word spread that Hitler was alive, troops who had unwittingly served the conspiracy by moving into their Valkyrie positions in and around Berlin began to disperse. In the provinces, the official denial often arrived before the Valkyrie order, thereby sowing little but confusion and bemusement. In the few cities where the military had tentatively risen in sympathy with the coup—such as Paris and Vienna—order was restored with comparative ease. By midevening all that was left of the coup, in practical terms, was the Ministry on the Bendlerstrasse. Soon after nightfall, the building was ringed by SS troops and bathed in the stark glare of countless searchlights.
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Inside, the conspiracy had descended into acrimony. Field Marshal von Witzleben, foreseen by the rebels as the new commander in chief, had already left for home, declaring the coup to be “a fine mess.”
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Olbricht was also looking for a way out, asking Gisevius whether it wasn’t too late for them to “call it all off.”
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As the evening wore on, some staff officers within the Bendlerstrasse who had not been privy to the plot decided to make a display of loyalty to Hitler. After confronting Olbricht, they armed themselves and demanded to see General Fromm, whom the conspirators had locked in his office earlier that day. In
the ensuing melee, Stauffenberg was shot in the shoulder. With his conspiracy patently collapsing around him, he complained to a secretary, “They’ve all left me in the lurch.”
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Some time later, Fromm was released from his confinement and returned to confront the conspirators. “Well, gentlemen,” he began, “now I am going to do to you what you wanted to do to me this afternoon.”
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He declared them under arrest on a charge of high treason and demanded their weapons. General Beck asked to be allowed to keep his pistol “for his private use” and was brusquely urged to “do so at once.”
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The others were granted a few minutes to write their testimonies, statements, and last letters. Fromm then returned, declaring that a court-martial called “in the name of the Führer” had found them guilty as charged and condemned them to death. As the four conspirators were led out of the room, Beck made the first of his two botched attempts to shoot himself in the head. The aged general would later be dispatched by a sergeant.

Around midnight, in the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse, the four men—Stauffenberg, Haeften, Olbricht, and Mertz von Quirnheim (Fromm’s former chief of staff)—were led before a pile of building sand. There, illuminated by the headlights of the army motor pool, they faced a ten-man firing squad from the
Grossdeutschland
Guard Battalion. One by one, without ceremony, the four were shot. The only comment came when Stauffenberg was pushed in front of his executioners. As the shots rang out, he shouted, “Long live holy Germany!”
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In the aftermath, Hitler’s Germany wrought its bloody revenge on Stauffenberg’s Germany. It has been estimated that more than seven thousand arrests ensued, as those interrogated implicated a wider and wider circle of conspirators, plotters, and passive opponents of the regime. Even the families of those arrested were not spared, as their wives and children were consigned to the concentration camps for so-called
Sippenhaft
, or kin detention. Few of those directly implicated were spared. The vast majority of the remaining conspirators were hauled before the Nazi “People’s
Court,” headed by the screeching senior judge Roland Friesler. There they would be berated, abused, found guilty, and then invariably sentenced to death. Field Marshal von Witzleben, for instance, was hanged from a meat hook in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison, his death throes filmed for Hitler’s viewing pleasure. Colonel Stieff suffered the same fate. Even General Fromm, whose actions had crushed the coup, was considered to have been complicit in it and was executed for cowardice in March 1945.

Tresckow, meanwhile, though somewhat remote from the epicenter of Stauffenberg’s attack, was nonetheless well aware that his earlier efforts to mobilize the resistance and target Hitler were bound to come to light during the arrests and interrogations that followed. With his trademark resolve, he opted to take his own life. On the morning of 21 July, he met with his adjutant, Schlabrendorff, for the last time. He said:

Now they will all fall upon us and cover us with abuse. But I am convinced, now as much as ever, that we have done the right thing. I believe Hitler to be the archenemy, not only of Germany, but indeed of the entire world. In a few hours’ time, I shall stand before God and answer for both my actions and the things I neglected to do. I think I can, with a clear conscience, stand by all I have done in the battle against Hitler.
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With that, he asked his driver to take him to the front, where he wandered into no-man’s-land. There, he simulated an exchange of fire with an unseen enemy, held a grenade to his head, and detonated it.
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The official Wehrmacht report noted that “Major-General von Tresckow died a hero’s death fighting in the front line.”
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Sadly, however, Tresckow’s elaborate suicide did not save his family from persecution; his wife, Erika, endured seven weeks of Gestapo interrogation. Nor did it enable him to rest in peace. Though buried with full military honors, his body would be exhumed when his role in the conspiracy became known. It would be taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp and incinerated.

Remarkably, one of the few conspirators to survive the frenzied bloodletting of that autumn was Tresckow’s cousin and aide-de-camp, Fabian von Schlabrendorff. Despite interrogation and bestial torture—which even induced a heart attack—he stubbornly denied complicity and feigned ignorance of the activities of his fellow plotters.
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Finally, at the limit of his endurance, he admitted to knowledge of Tresckow’s plotting, but nothing more. Though tried before the People’s Court, he was, surprisingly, acquitted on the technicality that his testimony had been extracted by the use of illegal torture methods. Nonetheless, still under suspicion and effectively under a death sentence, he was taken to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where Oster and Canaris had been hanged some days before, then to Dachau, and then on an SS death march into Austria. Improbably, he survived it all and was liberated by American troops in early May 1945.

Schlabrendorff’s resilience undoubtedly saved not only his own life but also those of a number of his former co-conspirators, including three of Hitler’s would-be assassins. Axel von dem Bussche was in the infirmary at Hohenlychen in the summer of 1944, recuperating from the injuries received six months earlier on the Eastern Front. Bizarrely, he still had some parts of his bomb, kept in an old suitcase next to his hospital bed. When news of Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt broke, he expected the worst and persuaded a colleague to dispose of them.
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His role as a “model assassin” was not divulged, however, until after the war.

Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff, meanwhile, was serving in Normandy in the summer of 1944, as chief of staff to the 82nd Army Corps. That August, he was awarded the prestigious Knight’s Cross for his actions in the Battle of the Falaise Gap. He, too, was never denounced as a would-be assassin, and his role in the Berlin Armory attempt emerged only with the postwar publication of his memoirs. Lastly, Eberhard von Breitenbuch, who had volunteered to shoot Hitler at Berchtesgaden, also escaped implication in July 1944. As a visitor to Hitler’s bunker in the last weeks of the war, he would be a witness to the very death throes of Nazism that he had hoped to bring about a year earlier.
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All three—Bussche, Gersdorff, and Breitenbuch—would outlive their intended target by several decades.

One former assassin who was less fortunate was Georg von Boeselager. Though he avoided denunciation in the aftermath of Stauffenberg’s attack, he could not avoid the attentions of the Red Army. In late August 1944, he was killed in a Soviet ambush while leading a cavalry brigade in defensive operations near the town of Lomza in northeastern Poland. Posthumously promoted to the rank of colonel, he was awarded the Oak Leaves and Swords to the Knight’s Cross. He was twenty-eight.

Another whose plottings were not revealed was Hubert Lanz. Indeed, Lanz was to gain a quite different reputation. Despite falling into disgrace by disobeying Hitler at Kharkhov, he soon returned to the front, and in September 1943 was in command of the 22nd Army Mountain Corps in Greece. There, some of his troops were responsible for the massacre on the island of Cephalonia—made famous by the novel
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
—in which more than five thousand Italian soldiers were gunned down.
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For his role as commanding officer, Lanz was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment. Clearly the moral outrage he felt on being ordered to send his own troops to certain death in Kharkhov did not recur when he was ordered to massacre his erstwhile Italian allies.