An Honourable Defeat (33 page)

Chapter Fourteen – Aftermath

Helldorf and Gisevius had waited with growing impatience at the Police Praesidium in Alexanderplatz for the order to go into action to come from Bendlerstrasse. News of the bomb at Rastenburg had come through earlier and Nebe had been summoned to Gestapo Headquarters. Finally Gisevius could stand it no longer and asked Helldorf to let him have a car to get back to the Bendlerblock, where he intended to face the music with his fellow conspirators. Helldorf told him roundly that he was out of his mind, and added bitterly, ‘For years these generals have shat all over us. They promised us everything: they’ve kept not one of their promises. What happened today was right in line with the rest — more of their shit.’

Gisevius was one of the few to survive. He managed to go underground, and later made his escape with Nebe. After they had separated, Nebe was arrested, as was Helldorf. Both were tried by the People’s Court and subsequently executed. Gisevius, with the help of forged papers supplied by the OSS in Switzerland, managed to get back to Zurich where he sat out the war.

By the time the SS arrived in force at the Bendlerstrasse, it was all over. The bodies of the chief conspirators had already been taken away to a nearby churchyard for a hasty burial — they were later exhumed and burnt, their ashes scattered to the four winds on Hitler’s orders. Hammerstein has a theory that Fromm had them shot so quickly in order to spare them torture and interrogation, but in that case why did he spare Hoepner, his special friend? In the event, he saved neither Hoepner’s life nor his own. Fromm was arrested later and shot on Hitler’s orders, ironically for cowardice. He died with the words ‘Heil Hitler’ on his lips. At least he was granted the honour of a military execution by firing squad. The other conspirators, most of whom faced death either in Plötzensee prison or in Flossenburg concentration camp, were stripped naked (in accordance with SS practice) and either guillotined or hanged. Those who were hanged suffered the worse fate: on Hitler’s orders they were suspended from hooks on an iron girder (still in place in Plötzensee’s execution hall) by thin cord — in consequence they died by slow strangulation. The Führer had the process filmed and for a time afterwards watched the film daily in his private cinema at the Wolf’s Lair. He also had the show trials secretly filmed. Most were conducted by the vile former Communist Roland Freisler, who signed himself when writing to Hitler, ‘Your political soldier’.

As the coup came to an end on the night of 20-21 July, in Mertz von Quirnheim’s office, Schulenburg, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Wartenburg and Gerstenmaier busied themselves by frantically destroying all the coup documents there. There was no question of escape, as they were trapped in the room by counter-coup staff officers. At last they were formally arrested by SS General Hermann Reinecke — a ‘real horror’, as Hammerstein remembers him. Otto Skorzeny, the brutal Austrian SS colonel whose daring rescue of Mussolini had found such favour with Hitler, arrived at 1a.m. to tear the badges of rank from the uniforms of the conspirators. Schulenburg said, ‘Evidently the German people must drink this cup to the dregs. We must make a sacrifice of ourselves. Later, mankind will understand what we did.’ Schwerin said to Gerstenmaier, ‘After all, one can’t do more than die for what one believes in.’

They were all handcuffed and taken out of the building along bloodstained corridors, down bloodstained staircases. They thought they would be shot in the courtyard too, but they were taken instead to Gestapo Headquarters in nearby Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. There they were divested of their ties, belts, shoelaces and jackets. Kleist and Oppen had also been arrested. Kleist was beaten up and forced to spend the rest of the night standing up in his cell.

More and more people were brought in during the course of 21 July, and the Berlin prisons at Plötzensee and Lehrterstrasse filled up. Kleist, Schwerin von Schwanenfeld and Wartenburg were loaded on to a lorry. Kleist thought they were going to be executed. He watched the route the truck took with interest: a sandy track would mean they were being taken to a parade ground where he knew they would be shot by half-trained SS men. A tarred road would lead to Plötzensee and the guillotine. Better the guillotine and a quick death, he thought. Instead they were taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where they were interrogated, Kleist for eight and a half hours at a stretch. He remembers that Schwerin was concerned for his welfare — Schwerin was twenty years his senior. Such concern was a rare thing and shows the humanity of the men of the Resistance. Schulenburg was also taken to Ravensbrück, but not before receiving a severe beating from Humbert Achamer-Pifrader, avenging himself for his Bendlerstrasse arrest. Hammerstein and Kleist remember Pifrader as a cold bureaucrat. Obviously some passion must have stirred him on this occasion.

Four hundred Gestapo officials worked on the ‘case’ of 20 July 1944, and for months Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Security Service, sent daily reports to Hitler via Martin Bormann. There were twenty-eight arrests by the end of 21 July, and the total had reached fifty-six by the 24th. We will never know the final figures, though they ran into thousands, as other scores were settled under the umbrella of the investigation, or the fate of each and every member of the conspiracy. Few sought to flee; of those who did, only a handful escaped. Himmler, in an extravagant display of loyalty to the Führer whom he was plotting in his black heart to betray, invoked the ancient Teutonic custom of imprisoning the entire family of a condemned man, in order to root out the bad blood. Thus all the relatives of the Stauffenbergs, the Hammersteins, the Wartenburgs, the Schwerin von Schwanenfelds, and so on, were arrested. It is however typical of the Nazis that Schwanenfeld’s four sisters who had married and therefore had different surnames were not arrested. Women who had married into the conspirators’ families, on the other hand, did not escape. Forty-four children from twenty families were taken to a National Socialist children’s home in Bad Sachsa. The idea was to give them new names and identities, and indoctrinate them with Nazi ideology. The elder of Schwanenfeld’s two sons subjected to this treatment, Wilhelm, aged fifteen, made sure at night in the common dormitory that they all remembered their real names and what they stood for.

As soon as the coup was over, Hitler, Göring and Dönitz made radio broadcasts to the nation. Hitler referred to ‘an extremely small clique of ambitious, conscienceless, and criminal and stupid officers’. Göring recounted that

An inconceivably base attempt at the murder of our Führer was committed today by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg on the orders of a miserable clique of one-time generals who, because of their wretched and cowardly conduct of the war, were driven from their posts.

Admiral Dönitz was even more fulsome:

Holy wrath and immeasurable rage fill our hearts at the criminal assault which was intended to take the life of our beloved Führer. Providence wished to have it otherwise; Providence guarded and protected the Führer; thus Providence did not desert our German Fatherland in its fated hour
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In Paris, the coup had gone well at first. Kluge had continued to sit on the fence, but Stülpnagel managed to arrest and imprison the entire SS force there. Later, when news of the coup’s failure reached him, he was obliged to let them go again. Many would not leave prison for fear of one of their own techniques being used against them — to let prisoners go and then shoot them ‘while they were trying to escape’! Stülpnagel subsequently attempted suicide by shooting himself through the temple,. but succeeded only in blinding himself. He later stood trial and was executed. Kluge, realising that his shilly-shallying had not endeared him to Hitler or saved him from the Führer’s wrath, wrote the dictator a letter expressing his loyalty and regret, and took poison. General Eduard Wagner shot himself at Zossen immediately after the failure of the coup.

On the east front, Fabian von Schlabrendorff took the news of the failure of the coup to Tresckow. He took it calmly and said: ‘I must shoot myself. The trail will lead to me and they will try to wring other names out of me. I must avoid that likelihood.’
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The next day, when the two men parted company, Tresckow was resolute. He said:

Now the whole world will fall on us and curse us. But I am still of the firm opinion that we did the right thing. I hold Hitler to be not only the arch fiend of Germany, but the arch fiend of the whole world. In a few hours I will stand before God’s judgement seat, to lay before Him my sins of commission and omission, and I know I will stand by my good conscience in the matter of what I undertook against Hitler. When God once told Abraham that He would spare Sodom if he could show Him ten just men there, so I hope that God will not destroy Germany, because we stood firm for our country. Not one of us can complain that we must die. Everyone who joined the conspiracy put on the Shirt of Nessus. The moral worth of a person only shows itself when he is prepared to die for what he believes in.

On 21 July, Tresckow visited 28 Commando Division. He explained everything to the commander, Major Kuhn. Then he walked into no-man’s-land, where he mimicked an exchange of fire with two pistols, so that Kuhn could report that he had died in action. Once out of sight, he took out a rifle grenade, pulled the safety pin, and blew his head off. Schlabrendorff took his body home to Brandenburg, where Henning von Tresckow was buried next to his parents. He was forty-three years old. Later the Nazis exhumed the body and burnt it.

Schlabrendorff was now on the run himself. He avoided the first huge wave of arrests that followed 20 July, and developed a sixth sense for danger, but he was finally taken on 17 August. He was taken to Berlin, where he had to guide his two Gestapo escorts through Friedrichsstrasse Station, as they did not know the city. Once in prison there, however, his treatment became noticeably more brutal. He was tortured and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp to await trial. While in prison he got to know Dietrich Bonhoeffer, although conversation between prisoners was strictly forbidden.

He was finally brought to trial before Freisler late in the morning on 3 February 1945. The trial was interrupted by an enemy air raid and the court took refuge in the basement. But the court building took a direct hit and a dislodged beam fell on Freisler’s head, breaking the judge’s cranium in two places and killing him. He had Schlabrendorff’s case notes in his hand at the time. During the same raid, Gestapo Headquarters was hit and went up in flames. Schlabrendorff’s trial was not resumed and he survived the war, one of the very few of the conspiracy who did.

Another survivor was Gersdorff, whose career after 20 July is of psychological interest. By that time he had become Chief of Staff to the 7th Army in France. After the failure of the coup he found that he was faced with three choices: suicide, ‘crossing the English Channel’, or going underground in France. However, once he had learnt that the information the Security Service had against him was not incriminating, he tried to persuade Kluge to negotiate with the US general, Bradley. This was one of several schemes the Resistance had to open up the west front to the Allies. Kluge would not entertain such an idea, so Gersdorff returned to his post. He never considered surrender and when he was finally taken prisoner he escaped. He rejoined the German lines, and later led his troops out of the Falaise ‘pocket’, where they had been surrounded. He was promoted to Major-General and went on fighting until the end. He was also awarded the Knight’s Cross by SS-Obergruppenführer (General) Paul Hausser. Perhaps he finally succeeded in doing what many officers attempted — a retreat into simple military duty.
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Perhaps though he felt that his only course now was to do what he had been trained to do to the best of his ability until the end.

Freisler’s death came far too late for the majority of the conspirators, whom he had sent to execution in the latter half of 1944. His hectoring tone cannot be heard in the official stenographers’ reports of the trials, and these also excise his foul language, but both can still be appreciated in the surviving film of his performances. His method was so thuggish that he attracted the criticism even of his fellow Nazis, though on one occasion he was moved to comment that it was hardly appropriate for a former general (Hoepner) to appear before him in a hand-me-down cardigan. He also demanded that Witzleben be given some means of supporting his trousers in court. By such small but vicious humiliations did the Nazis drive their revenge home, so that even Freisler was moved to some sense of propriety, if not humanity. Humanity did not figure in this man’s personality. At Hoepner’s trial, he was as brutal and humiliating as always:

‘You are not a Schweinehund?’ Freisler stretched in his judge’s seat and spitefully barked at the defendant. ‘Well then, if you don’t want to be a Schweinehund, tell us what zoological class you consider to be your proper category?’ Hoepner hesitated briefly. With the [concealed] sound camera grinding away, Freisler pursued his point. ‘Well, what are you?’ An ass.’
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Witzleben had taken refuge at the estate of his aide, Graf Lynar, in Kalau, but his arrest followed almost immediately. He was tried and executed in early August along with Hoepner, Stieff, Hase, Wartenburg and Klausing. Kleist and von Oppen were released in the hope that they would lead the Gestapo to other conspirators. Neither did so, and both survived the war.

Goerdeler had hidden at the home of his friend Krafft Freiherr von Palombini in Naumberg. Palombini himself was arrested at 7.30a.m. on 21 July but Goerdeler managed to escape via the back door and the garden. The Palombinis’ Polish maid quickly tidied his room to make it look as if it had been unoccupied. Goerdeler reached Berlin and found refuge with various loyal friends, changing his abode almost nightly, but still finding time to write political memoranda. His thirteen-year-old youngest daughter, Benigna, was arrested on 29 July and taken to Heilbronn Prison. On 1 August, the day after his sixtieth birthday, a reward of 1 million Reichsmark was announced for his capture. As time ran out — he did not want to imperil his family — he made a foolhardy visit to his old home town of Marienwerder to pay his respects at his parents’ grave. Inevitably in such a small town he was recognised, and betrayed by a Luftwaffe woman whose family had received much kindness from Goerdeler’s in the past. Once arrested, he was extremely loquacious at his interrogations, in the hope of spinning out the process until it was too late to bring him to trial.