The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (212 page)

That punishment was meted out as soon as the trial had ended on August 8. “They must all be hanged like cattle,” Hitler had ordered, and they were. Out at
Ploetzensee prison
the eight condemned were herded into a small room in which eight meathooks hung from the ceiling. One by one, after being stripped to the waist, they were strung up, a noose of piano wire being placed around their necks and attached to the meathooks. A movie camera whirled as the men dangled and strangled, their beltless trousers finally dropping off as they struggled, leaving them naked in their death agony.
³⁵
The developed film, as ordered, was rushed to Hitler so that he could view it, as well as the pictures of the trial, the same evening. Goebbels is said to have kept himself from fainting by holding both hands over his eyes.
^*
36

All that summer, fall and winter and into the new year of 1945 the grisly People’s Court sat in session, racing through its macabre trials and grinding out death sentences, until finally an American bomb fell directly on the courthouse on the morning of February 3, 1945, just as Schlabrendorff was being led into the courtroom, killing Judge Freisler and destroying the records of most of the accused who still survived. Schlabrendorff thus miraculously escaped with his life—one of the very few conspirators on
whom fortune smiled—being eventually liberated from the Gestapo’s clutches by American troops in the Tyrol.

The fate of the others must now be recorded.

Goerdeler, who was to be the Chancellor of the new regime, had gone into hiding three days before July 20, after having been warned that the Gestapo had issued an order for his arrest. He wandered for three weeks between Berlin,
Potsdam
and East Prussia, rarely spending two nights in the same place but always being taken in by friends or relatives, who risked death by giving him shelter, for Hitler had now put a price of one million marks on his head. On the morning of August 12, exhausted and hungry after several days and nights wandering afoot in East Prussia, he stumped into a small inn in the village of
Konradswalde
near
Marienwerder
. While waiting to be served breakfast he noticed a woman in the uniform of a Luftwaffe Wac eying him closely, and without waiting for his food he slipped out and made for the nearby woods. It was too late. The woman was an old acquaintance of the Goerdeler family, a Helene Schwaerzel, who had easily recognized him and who promptly confided in a couple of Air Force men who were sitting with her. Goerdeler was quickly apprehended in the woods.

He was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on September 8, 1944, but not
executed
until February 2 of the following year, along with Popitz.
^*
Apparently Himmler delayed the hangings because he thought the contacts of the two men, especially those of Goerdeler, with the Western Allies through
Sweden
and
Switzerland
might prove helpful to him if he took over the sinking ship of state—a prospect which began to grow in his mind at this time.
³⁷

Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenburg, the former ambassador in Moscow, and Hassell, the former ambassador in Rome, both of whom were to have taken over the direction of foreign policy in the new anti-Nazi regime, were executed on November 10 and September 8, respectively. Count Fritz von der Schulenburg died on the gallows August 10. General Fellgiebel, chief of signals at OKW, whose role at Rastenburg on July 20 we have recounted, was executed on the same day.

The death roll is a long one. According to one source it numbered some 4,980 names.
³⁸
The Gestapo records list 7,000 arrests. Among those resistance leaders mentioned in these pages who were executed were General Fritz Lindemann, Colonel von
Boeselager
,
Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer
, Colonel Georg
Hansen
of the Abwehr, Count von
Helldorf
, Colonel von
Hofacker
, Dr.
Jens Peter Jessen
,
Otto Kiep
, Dr. Carl Langbehn, Julius Leber, Major von Leonrod, Wilhelm Leuschner, Artur Nebe (the chief of the criminal police), Professor Adolf Reichwein, Count Berthold von Stauffenberg, brother of Klaus, General Thiele,
Chief of Signals, OKH, and General von Thuengen, who was appointed by Beck to succeed General von
Kortzfleisch
on the day of the putsch.

One group of twenty condemned, whose lives Himmler had prolonged apparently in the belief that they might prove useful to him if he took over power and had to make peace, were shot out of hand on the night of April 22–23 as the Russians began fighting to the center of the capital. The prisoners were being marched from the Lehrterstrasse prison to the Prinz Albrechtstrasse Gestapo dungeon—a good many prisoners escaped in the blackout on occasions such as these in the final days of the Third Reich—when they met an S.S. detachment, which lined them up against a wall and mowed them down, only two escaping to tell the tale. Among those who perished were
Count Albrecht von Bernstorff
, Klaus
Bonhoeffer
, brother of the pastor, and
Albrecht Haushofer
, a close friend of
Hess
and son of the famous geopolitician. The father committed suicide shortly afterward.

General Fromm did not escape execution despite his behavior on the fateful evening of July 20. Arrested the next day on orders of Himmler, who had succeeded him as head of the Replacement Army, he was haled before the People’s Court in February 1945 on charges of “cowardice” and sentenced to death.
^*
Perhaps as a small recognition for his vital service in helping to save the Nazi regime, he was not strangled from a meathook, as were those whom he had arrested on the night of July 20, but merely dispatched by a firing squad on March 19, 1945.

The mystery which surrounded the life of Admiral
Canaris
, the deposed head of the Abwehr who had done so much to aid the conspirators but was not directly involved in the events of July 20, enveloped for many years the circumstances of his death. It was known that he was arrested after the attempt on Hitler’s life. But Keitel, in one of the few decent gestures of his life at OKW, managed to prevent him from being handed over to the People’s Court. The Fuehrer, outraged at the delay, then ordered Canaris to be tried by a summary S.S. court. This process was also delayed, but Canaris, along with Colonel Oster, his former assistant, and four others were finally tried at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, less than a month before the war ended, and sentenced to death. But it was not known for sure whether Canaris had been executed. It took ten years to solve the mystery. In 1955 the Gestapo prosecutor in the case was brought to trial and a large number of witnesses testified that they had seen Canaris hanged on April 9, 1945. One eyewitness, the Danish Colonel Lunding, told of seeing Canaris dragged naked from his cell to the gallows. Oster was dispatched at the same time.

Some who were arrested escaped trial and were eventually liberated from the Gestapo by the advancing Allied troops. Among these were General Halder and Dr. Schacht, who had had no part in the July 20 revolt though on the stand at Nuremberg Schacht claimed to have been
“initiated” into it. Halder was placed in solitary confinement in a pitch-dark cell for several months. The two men, along with a distinguished group of prisoners, German and foreign, including Schuschnigg,
Léon Blum
, Schlabrendorff and General von Falkenhausen, were freed by American troops on May 4, 1945, at Niederdorf in the South Tyrol just as their Gestapo guard was on the point of executing the whole lot. Falkenhausen was later tried by the Belgians as a war criminal and sentenced on March 9, 1951, after four years in prison awaiting trial, to twelve years’ penal servitude. He was released, however, a fortnight later and returned to Germany.

A good many Army officers implicated in the plot chose suicide rather than let themselves be turned over to the tender mercies of the Volksgericht. On the morning of July 21, General Henning von Tresckow, who had been the heart and soul of the conspiracy among the officers on the Eastern front, took leave of his friend and aide, Schlabrendorff, who has recalled his last words:

That morning Tresckow drove off to the
28th Rifle
Division, crept out to no man’s land and pulled the pin on a hand grenade. It blew his head off.

Five days later the First Quartermaster General of the Army, Wagner, took his own life.

Among the high Army officers in the West, two field marshals and one general committed suicide. In
Paris
, as we have seen, the uprising had got off to a good start when General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, the military governor of France, arrested the entire force of the S.S. and S.D.-Gestapo. Now all depended on the behavior of Field Marshal von
Kluge
, the new Commander in Chief West, on whom Tresckow had worked for two years on the Russian front in an effort to make him an active conspirator. Though Kluge had blown hot and cold, he had finally agreed—or so the conspirators understood—that he would support the revolt once Hitler was dead.

There was a fateful dinner meeting that evening of July 20 at
La Roche-Guyon
, the headquarters of Army Group B, which Kluge had also taken over after Rommel’s accident. Kluge wanted to discuss the conflicting reports as to whether Hitler was dead or alive with his chief
advisers, General Guenther
Blumentritt
, his chief of staff, General Speidel, chief of staff of Army Group B, General Stuelpnagel and Colonel von
Hofacker
, to whom Stauffenberg had telephoned earlier in the afternoon informing him of the bombing and the coup in Berlin. When the officers assembled for dinner it seemed to some of them at least that the cautious Field Marshal had about made up his mind to throw in his lot with the revolt. Beck had reached him by telephone shortly before dinner and had pleaded for his support—whether Hitler was dead or alive. Then the first general order signed by Field Marshal von Witzleben had arrived. Kluge was impressed.

Still, he wanted more information on the situation and, unfortunately for the rebels, this now came from General Stieff, who had journeyed to Rastenburg with Stauffenberg that morning, wished him well, seen the explosion, ascertained that it had not killed Hitler and was now, by evening, trying to cover up the traces. Blumentritt got him on the line and Stieff told him the truth of what had happened, or rather, not happened.

“It has failed, then,” Kluge said to Blumentritt. He seemed to be genuinely disappointed, for he added that had it succeeded he would have lost no time in getting in touch with Eisenhower to request an armistice.

At the dinner—a ghostly affair, Speidel later recalled, “as if they sat in a house visited by death”—Kluge listened to the impassioned arguments of Stuelpnagel and Hofacker that they must go ahead with the revolt even though Hitler might have survived. Blumentritt has described what followed.

Kluge denied that he knew of any plans. After ordering Stuelpnagel to release the arrested S.S.-S.D. men in Paris, he advised him, “Look here, the best thing you can do is to change into civilian clothes and go into hiding.”

But this was not the way out which a proud general of Stuelpnagel’s stripe chose. After a weird all-night champagne party at the Hotel Raphael in Paris in which the released S.S. and S.D. officers, led by General Oberg, fraternized with the Army leaders who had arrested them—and who most certainly would have had them shot had the revolt succeeded—Stuelpnagel, who had been ordered to report to Berlin, left by car for Germany. At
Verdun
, where he had commanded a battalion in the First World War, he stopped to have a look at the famous battlefield. But also to carry out a personal decision. His driver and a guard heard a revolver shot. They found him floundering in the waters of a canal. A bullet had shot out one eye and so badly damaged the other that it was removed in the military hospital at Verdun, to which he was taken.

This did not save Stueipnagel from a horrible end. Blinded and helpless, he was brought to Berlin on Hitler’s express orders, haled before the People’s Court, where he lay on a cot while Freisler abused him, and strangled to death in
Ploetzensee prison
on August 30.

Field Marshal von
Kluge
’s decisive act in refusing to join the revolt did not save him any more than Fromm, by similar behavior in Berlin, saved himself. “Fate,” as Speidel observed apropos of this vacillating general, “does not spare the man whose convictions are not matched by his readiness to give them effect.” There is evidence that Colonel von Hofacker, under terrible torture—he was not executed until December 20—mentioned the complicity of Kluge, Rommel and Speidel in the plot.
Blumentritt
says that Oberg informed him that Hofacker had “mentioned” Kluge in his first interrogations, and that, after being informed of this by Oberg himself, the Field Marshal “began to look more and more worried.”
⁴¹

Reports from the front were not such as to restore his spirits.

On July 26, General
Bradley
’s American forces broke through the German front at
St.-Lô
. Four days later General Patton’s newly formed
Third
Army, racing through the gap, reached
Avranches
, opening the way to
Brittany
and to the Loire to the south. This was the turning point in the Allied invasion, and on July 30 Kluge notified Hitler’s headquarters, “The whole Western front has been ripped open … The left flank has collapsed.” By the middle of August all that was left of the German armies in
Normandy
was locked in a narrow pocket around Falaise, where Hitler had forbidden any further retreat. The Fuehrer had now had enough of Kluge, whom he blamed for the reverses in the West and whom he suspected of considering the surrender of his forces to Eisenhower.