Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933-45

10. PERSECUTION AND JUDGMENT

By the night of July 20, widespread manhunts were already under way. Besides those arrested on Bendlerstrasse, anyone who had had personal or professional dealings with the known conspirators or who had attracted the earlier attention of the security authorities was investigated. Around midnight Helmuth Stieff was taken into custody at headquarters. At about that time Erich Fellgiebel was engaged in a lofty philosophical debate with his adjutant, First Lieutenant Hellmuth Arntz, about the afterlife, which Fellgiebel did not believe in. When the long-awaited call came he replied simply, “I’m on my way.” Arntz asked if he had his pistol, but Fellgiebel said, “One doesn’t do that. One takes a stand.”¹

The next day SS Obersturmbannführer Georg Kiessel was appointed head of a special board of inquiry, which soon numbered four hundred people. Hitler held a briefing to announce guidelines for the judicial proceedings against those involved in the failed coup. Denouncing the conspirators as “the basest creatures that ever wore the soldier’s tunic, this riff-raff from a dead past,” he declared: “This time I’ll fix them. There will be no honorable bullet for… these criminals, they’ll hang like common traitors! We’ll have a court of honor expel them from the service; then they can be tried as civilians…. The sentences will be carried out within two hours! They must hang at once, without any show of mercy! And the most important thing is that they’re given no time for any long speeches. But Freisler will lake care of all that. He’s our Vishinsky.”²

As the days passed, the number of suspects grew larger and larger. Witzleben was among the first to be arrested. Popitz was picked up in his apartment at about five o’clock on the morning of the twenty-first and was soon followed by Oster, Kleist-Schmenzin, Schacht, Canaris, Wirmer, and many others. Only shortly before July 20 the Gestapo officials responsible for surveillance of the military had reported no particular activity, noting only in passing a certain “defeatism” in the circles around Beck and Goerdeler.³ That was the reason Hitler apparently believed at first that the attack was the work of a “very small clique of ambitious officers,” as he said in his radio address to the German people. Now, to the astonishment of virtually everyone, it turned out that Stauffenberg and his immediate accomplices repre­sented only the tip of the iceberg. The conspiracy extended far be­yond the army to civilian circles on both sides of the political spectrum, even to groups presumed to be close to the Nazi Party.

On the evening of July 20 an overly confident Count Helldorf had averred that the police would not dare lay a finger on him. In fact, the investigators hardly hesitated before pouncing. Other conspirators, like General Eduard Wagner, escaped their fates by committing sui­cide. Major Hans Ulrich von Oertzen, who had urged the military district headquarters on Hohenzollerndamm to support the uprising, managed in the bedlam that surrounded his arrest to hide two gre­nades. Shortly before he was to be led away he held one to his head and detonated it. He collapsed on the floor, grievously wounded. With all his remaining strength, he dragged himself to where the second grenade lay hidden, shoved it in his mouth, and pulled the pin. Suicides such as this only extended the circle of suspects to include friends, relatives, and colleagues.

The code of personal honor, always a significant factor in the strange helplessness of the conspirators, influenced their behavior even in defeat. Very few conspirators actually attempted to escape. Most simply arranged their personal affairs and waited calmly for the knock on the door, ready, or so they believed, for anything that might befall them. Many refused to avail themselves of proffered hiding places or even asked to be arrested. Principally they wished to spare their friends and relatives interrogation by the police, but most of them were also operating out of the categorical morality that was the bedrock ol their thinking. “Don’t flee-stand your ground!” was how Karl Klausing rationalized his decision to give himself up; he did not want, he said, to leave his captured comrades in the lurch. Schlabrendorff also refused to flee, as did Trott, evidently “on account of his wile and children.” Tresckow’s brother Gerd knew about the conspiracy, but as a lieutenant colonel in a division on the Italian front he was too far away from the scene to arouse suspicion. Never­theless, he went and confessed to his superior officers and, when told lo forget about it, insisted on his culpability. He was finally arrested and incarcerated in the Gestapo prison on Lehrterstrasse, where, in a state of physical and mental depletion, he took his life in early September 1944.⁴

Time and again, fugitives sought by the police turned themselves in out of a feeling that can best be described as part pride and part exhaustion. They were no longer willing or able to hide out or to continue the duplicitous life they had led for far too long, at the cost, they believed, of their self-respect. Ulrich von Hassell left his home in Havana and traveled to Berlin by a circuitous route, making many stops. For a few days he roamed restlessly through the streets of the capital, then went to his desk and waited calmly for the Gestapo to arrive. Theodor Steltzer, who was already in Norway, refused to flee across the border to Sweden, returning instead to Berlin, where he acted on his belief that a Christian cannot tell a lie, even to a Gestapo interrogator or before the People’s Court.⁵

The motivation behind these and many other unrealistic if honorable gestures was certainly the expectation that the impending trials could be used as a forum for denouncing the Nazis. As the curtains fell on their lives, these brave men hoped for one last chance to expose the true nature of the regime, much as some of them had fervently hoped to do in criminal proceedings against Hitler. The illusion that they would be allowed to speak their minds freely at their trials was soon shattered, however, as was the belief, cherished pri­marily by the military men, that every legal formality would be ob­served and that they would be treated in a manner befitting their standing in society.

Although the investigators found themselves groping in the dark at first over the next few months, they succeeded in arresting some six hundred suspects beyond those immediately implicated in the plot. A second wave of arrests in mid-August, known as Operation Thunderstorm, put five thousand putative opponents of the regime behind bars; most of these people had been connected to various political parties and organizations in the Weimar Republic. Again, even when under interrogation, some of the accused strove more to demonstrate the high moral principle behind their actions than to save their lives, so that the head of the special investigatory commission was soon able to say that “the manly attitude of the idealists immediately shed some light in the darkness.”⁶

Although much of this courageous and self-sacrificing spirit may seem naive, it was perhaps the only defense to which the regime had no answer. Apparently Hitler had originally intended to stage a great spectacle modeled on the Soviet show trials of the 1930s, with radio and film coverage and lengthy press reports, but he was soon forced to abandon all such plans. Schulenburg, for example, declared before the court: “We resolved to take this deed upon ourselves in order to save Germany from indescribable misery. I realize that I shall be hanged for my part in it, but I do not regret what I did and only hope that someone else will succeed in luckier circumstances.” Similar dec­larations from numerous defendants increasingly put the authorities on the defensive, and on August 17, 1944, Hitler forbade any further reporting of the trials. In the end, not even the executions were pub­licly announced.⁷

The Gestapo had considerable difficulty determining the breadth of the conspiracy. It is known, for instance, that Stieff and Fellgiebel held out for at least six days under torture without revealing anything. Contrary to legend, no list of conspirators or a projected cabinet was ever found, and as late as August 8 Yorck was able to tell prison chaplain Harald Poelchau that the Gestapo still knew nothing about the Kreisau Circle. Moltke’s name was not uttered until Leber’s inter­rogation on August 10.⁸ Schlabrendorff, who survived the war to write a detailed account of the four types of torture employed-beginning with a device to screw spikes into the fingertips and progressing to spike-lined “Spanish boots,” the rack, and other horrors-did not reveal the names of his co-conspirators at Army Group Center, even when the mutilated corpse of his friend Tresckow was exhumed and shown to him. Despite severe torments, not much more than was already known could be dragged out of Jessen, Langbehn, Oster, Kleist-Schmenzin, and Leuschner. But what these men refused to reveal in so-called intensified interrogation-in which all the horror and vengeful fury were brought to bear on them-the Allies now did. As if eager to do one last favor for Hitler, British radio began regu­larly broadcasting the names of people alleged to have had a hand in the coup. Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court, was even able to show Schwerin von Schwanenfeld an Allied leaflet that heaped scorn on the conspirators, just as the Nazis’ propaganda was doing.”

The military “court of honor” that Hitler had demanded met on August 4, with Field Marshal Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Lieutenant Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel serving as associates. Without any hearings or presentation of evidence, they drummed twenty-two of­ficers out of the Wehrmacht, thus depriving them of the legal protec­tions of a court-martial, just as Hitler wanted. However extreme this step may have appeared to be, it was actually only the final act in a lengthy process that had revealed to all that the unity and cohesiveness of the army had long since been shattered. It was the last of many gestures of submission to Hitler’s will.

Responsibility for trying the accused officers and the other participants in the attempted coup fell now to the People’s Court, which had been specially constituted in 1934 to judge “political crimes.” Hitler ordered the cases to be heard in closed chambers before a small, select audience. He invited Freisler and-if the reports are accurate-even the executioner to Führer headquarters, where he instructed them to refuse the condemned men all religious and spiri­tual comfort. “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle,” Hitler said.¹⁰

The trials began on August 7 in the great hall of the Berlin Peo­ple’s Court, which was hung with Nazi flags for the occasion. The accused were Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, Hase, Bernardis, Klausing, Yorck, and Hagen. To further humiliate the conspirators, they were forbidden to wear neckties, and Witzleben was even denied suspend­ers for his trousers. Hoepner was dressed in a cardigan. All bore the signs, as one witness reported, of the “tortures they had suffered while in custody.”¹¹ Presiding over the scene was Roland Freisler, attired in his red judicial robes and seated beneath a bust of the Führer.

Freisler had been appointed president of the People’s Court two years earlier, and in him the regime found a man very much in its own image. Hitler always felt a certain distrust toward Freisler, however, and his likening of him to Andrei Vishinsky, the chief prosecutor In the Moscow show trials, suggests the reason: Freisler had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and had become a Soviet commissar after the October Revolution; he liked to boast that he had begun his career as a diehard Communist. With his cynical bent and taste for radical politics, he joined the Nazis in 1925, throwing himself into political and journalistic tasks on behalf of the party and reaping his reward with an appointment as state secretary in the Ministry of Justice. Seizing on a comment by Hitler in his address to the Reichstag justifying the Night of the Long Knives, he made himself a vocal advocate of Gesinnungsstrafrecht, harsh laws that called for defendants in political cases to be punished not so much for their deeds as for the convictions underlying those deeds.

His loud, bullying style-intended, he occasionally conceded, to “atomize” the defendants-was matched by his theatrical tempera­ment, his fondness for adopting extravagant poses, and his pleasure in exercising power over life and death. The psychological corollary to all this was his fawning subservience to Hitler. He played his roles to the hilt, outraged one moment, then cutting, then affable, now and again seeming to enjoy sharp-witted repartee. All in all he was the kind of man who rises to the top in turbulent times, when all values and principles are placed in doubt. The first chief of the Prussian Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, called Freisler “more brilliant, adaptable, and fiendish than anyone in the long line of revolutionary prosecutors.” Despite his repellent characteristics and the clear delight he took in humiliating and defaming those who appeared before him, few were immune to his remarkable charisma. Helmuth von Moltke wrote after his trial that Freisler was “gifted, something of a genius, but not wise, and all this in the highest degree.” According to Freisler’s predeces­sor, Otto Thierack, he was simply mentally ill.¹²

Freisler opened the first day of proceedings by remarking that the court would be ruling on “the most horrific charges ever brought in the history of the German people.” He heaped scorn on the accused, continually referring to them as “rabble,” “criminals,” and “traitors,” men with the “character of pigs”; Stauffenberg he called a “murder­ous scoundrel.” Freisler’s role was to express boundless moral out­rage. The proceedings focused strictly on the deeds that had been committed; any attempt by the accused to introduce the issue of their motives was immediately interrupted. Stieff came before the court first, and when he tried to raise the issue Freisler informed him that as a soldier he needed only “to obey, triumph, and die, without look­ing either left or right” and added, “We don’t want to hear any more from you about that.” None of the accused was allowed an opportu­nity to address the court at length or even to reach any sort of understanding with their attorneys, who were seated some distance away. Not all but a good many of these attorneys openly supported the prosecution’s case. Witzleben’s lawyer, for instance, a Dr. Weissmann, stated in his final summation that the court’s decision had in effect already been rendered by “heavenly Providence when, in a miraculous act of deliverance, it protected the Führer from destruction for the sake of the German people.” Weissmann concluded, “The deed of the accused stands, and the guilty perpetrator will go down with it.” Kreisler sentenced all eight defendants to be hanged, ending the proceedings with the words “We return now to life and to the struggle. We have nothing more in common with you. The Volk has purged itself of you and remains pure. We fight on. The Wehrmacht cries, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We all cry, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight together with our Führer, following him, for Germany’s sake!”¹³

Thus the trials proceeded, case after case. The next session was held on August 10, when Fellgiebel, Berthold von Stauffenberg, Al­fred Kranzfelder, and Fritz von der Schulenburg were paraded be­fore the People’s Court. Freisler seemed particularly irritated by the quiet dignity and disdain of Schulenburg. Josef Wirmer was arraigned not long afterward. When Freisler remarked that Wirmer would soon find himself roasting in hell, Wirmer bowed curtly and riposted, “I’ll look forward to your own imminent arrival, your honor!” Freisler did not always succeed in interrupting the defendants in time. Hans-Bernd von Haeften managed to interject a comment about Hitler’s “place in world history as a great perpetrator of evil”; Kleist-Schmenzin announced that he had been determined to commit trea­son ever since January 30, 1933, and spoke of it as a “command from God”; Schwerin managed to mention “all the murders committed at home and abroad” and, when asked by an angry Freisler if he was not ashamed to be making such a base allegation, retorted, “No!” During the examination phase of the proceedings, Cäsar von Hofacker claimed that he had acted with as much right on July 20 as Hitler had on November 9, 1923, the day of the “beer-hall putsch.” He regret­ted, he said, that he had not been chosen to carry out the assassination, because then it would not have failed. Later he managed to cut Freisler off during one of the judge’s own numerous interruptions: “Be quiet now, Herr Freisler, because today it’s my neck that’s on the block. But in a year it will be yours!” Fellgiebel even advised Freisler that he had better hurry lest he himself hang before he hung the accused.¹⁴

On the afternoon of August 8, immediately following their trials, the first group of condemned men was transported to the execution grounds in Plötzensee prison. Although Hitler had expressly forbid­den any spiritual consolation, the prison chaplain, Harald Poelchau, did manage to “speak quickly” with Witzleben and Hase. But accord­ing to his own report, as he approached Yorck “the conversation was violently interrupted. SS men with floodlights stormed into the cells and filmed the various prisoners before they were hauled away to be executed. The resulting movie, made at the express wish of the Führer, was supposed to show all phases of the entire process, at length and in full detail.”¹⁵

Once inside Plötzensee, the prisoners were allowed only enough time to change into prison garb. One by one, in accordance with prison drill procedures, they crossed the courtyard in wooden shoes, under the ever-present gaze of a camera, and entered the execution chamber through a black curtain. Here, too, a camera recorded their every step as they arrived and were led to the back of the chamber to stand under hooks attached to a girder running across the ceiling. Floodlights brilliantly illuminated the scene. A few observers were standing around: the public prosecutor, prison officials, photogra­phers. The executioners removed the prisoners’ handcuffs, placed short, thin nooses around their necks, and stripped them to the waist. At a signal, they hoisted each man aloft and let him down on the lightened noose, slowly in some cases, more quickly in others. Before the prisoner’s death throes were over, his trousers were ripped off him. After each execution the chief executioner and his assistants went to the table at the front of the room and fortified themselves with brandy until the sound of steps announced the arrival of the next victim. Every detail was recorded on film, from the first wild struggle for breath to the final twitches.

Hitler had already “eagerly devoured” the arrest reports, information on new groups of suspects, and the statements recorded by inter­rogators. Now, on the very night of the first trials and executions, the film of the proceedings arrived at the Wolf’s Lair for the amusement of the Führer and his guests. The putsch, he announced to his assem­bled retinue, was “perhaps the best thing that could have happened for our future.” He could not get enough of watching his foes go to their doom. Days later, photographs of the condemned men dangling from hooks still lay about the great map table in his bunker. As his horizons shrank on all sides, Hitler took great satisfaction from this, his last great triumph.¹⁶

The excess so characteristic of the Nazi regime expressed itself not only in the savageness of the retribution but also in its broad sweep: even distant relatives of the conspirators fell victim to a lust for re­venge worthy of the ancient Teutonic tribes. Himmler discussed the failed coup at length at a meeting of gauleiters in Posen two weeks after the event, declaring that he would “introduce absolute responsi­bility of kin… a very old custom practiced among our forefa­thers.” One had only to read the Teutonic sagas, he said: “When they placed a family under the ban and declared it outlawed or when there was a blood feud in a family, they were utterly consistent… . This man has committed treason; his blood is bad; there is traitor’s blood in him, that must be wiped out. And in the blood feud the entire clan was wiped out down to the last member. And so, too, will Count Stauffenberg’s family be wiped out down to the last member.”¹⁷

Accordingly, Himmler ordered relatives of the Stauffenberg brothers arrested, from their wives all the way to a three-year-old child and the eighty-five-year-old father of a cousin. A third Stauffenberg brother, Alexander, was not involved in the plot but was nevertheless returned from Athens to Berlin, interrogated at length, and dispatched to a concentration camp. The property of all relatives was seized. After an interrogation that yielded nothing of interest, Countess Stauffenberg was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, as was her mother. Her children were placed in an orphanage and given the new surname Meister, which had been dreamed up by the Gestapo, per­haps in an ironic allusion to the Stefan George circle, whose members referred to their mentor as “master.” Similar fates befell the families of Goerdeler, Tresckow, Lehndorff, Schwerin, Kleist, Oster, Trott, Haeften, Popitz, Hammerstein, and many others. While the persecu­tion was extensive, it was also arbitrary: Princess Elisabeth Ruspoli, the mistress of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, was arrested, for example, but Moltke’s family was left largely undisturbed.

In the tumultuous weeks preceding the final collapse of the Third Reich, most of these family members and other “prominent” prison­ers were gathered together and dispatched on a nerve-wracking odys­sey from one concentration camp to the next. In the late afternoon of April 28, 1945, the convoy arrived in Niederdorf in the Puster valley of Tyrol. Under the watch of some eighty SS men the trucks dis­gorged, among others, Hjalmar Schacht; the former French prime minister Léon Blum and his wife; Franz Halder; Kurt von Schuschnigg, the last chancellor of Austria; Martin Niemöller; Falkenhausen; the former Hungarian prime minister Count Nicholas Kállay; a nephew of Vyacheslav Molotov; some British secret service men; and a number of generals from countries formerly allied with Germany-160 people in all. The convoy commander, SS Obersturmführer Stiller, had top-priority orders to lead the prisoners to the nearby Pragser valley, where they would be shot and their bodies disposed of in the adjacent Wildsee. When one of the SS men disclosed to the throng that they were at “the final stop before the end,” panic broke out. In the midst of the ensuing pandemonium one of the prisoners, Colonel Bogislav von Bonin, managed to contact the gen­eral staff of the commander in chief in the Southwest, stationed in Bozen, who asked Captain Wichard von Alvensleben to investigate “what’s going on.” But Alvensleben took it upon himself to go much further. The next morning he showed up with a quickly assembled contingent of troops and freed the prisoners, much to the anger of his superiors.¹⁸

The investigation of the failed coup received new impetus and much new information when Carl Goerdeler was finally arrested on August 12. For three weeks devoted friends had kept him in hiding, largely in and around Berlin, despite the bounty of a million marks on his head. True to form, he wrote yet another report during this time, as if obsessed with a mission that would never end. After a long, exhausting period of vacillation over whether he should continue hid­ing or attempt to flee the country, he seemed to abandon all hope of survival and simply set out to see his West Prussian homeland one last time. After a perilous three-day journey and much camping out in the open forest, he managed to reach Marienwerder. On his way to visit the graves of his parents, however, he was recognized by a woman who followed him so doggedly that he was forced to turn back. After another night under open skies, he was so drained that in the morn­ing he sought refuge at an inn. Here he was recognized again, this time by a Luftwaffe employee who at one time had frequented his parents’ house. She denounced Goerdeler to the police, apparently more out of eagerness to be involved in important goings-on than out of any particular ill will toward Goerdeler or even desire for the million-mark reward.

In the very first sentence he uttered in his initial interrogation session, Goerdeler admitted involvement in planning the coup. But he was eager to distance himself from the attempt on Hitler’s life, describing Stauffenberg’s failure as a “judgment by God.” A few days after the attempt he had admonished an acquaintance he encoun­tered in a Berlin metro station with the words “Thou shalt not kill.”¹⁹ Otherwise though, he spoke volubly about the leading role he had played in the opposition and about the widespread involvement of civilians, all to the great astonishment of his interrogators, who had continued to imagine that they were dealing with a military putsch and now learned for the first time about the civilian aspect-from no other authority than Goerdeler himself.

The willingness with which the former mayor of Leipzig disclosed the names of implicated businessmen, union leaders, and churchmen and detailed their motives and goals made him a traitor in the eyes of many of his fellow prisoners. It has also posed unsettling questions for his biographers. But one needs to make allowances for the shock he felt on being imprisoned, for his shattered nerves, and for the fact that he was held, heavily chained, in solitary confinement far longer than any of the other prisoners. He was dragged through endless interrogations and forced to pass night after night under brilliant floodlights, the door to his cell open and a guard posted outside; still, he did not recant his devotion to the cause. In the notes he wrote during these weeks he described Hitler as a “vampire” and a “dis­grace to humanity,” referred to the “bestial murder of a million Jews,” and lamented the cowardice of those who allowed such things lo happen “partly without realizing it and partly out of despair.”²⁰ There were numerous friends and co-conspirators whom Goerdeler actually saved from arrest, and it is likely that he was also attempting to confuse the Gestapo by inundating them with an avalanche of facts and details.

Primarily, though, Goerdeler was simply acting in accordance with his lifelong belief that truth and reason would prove persuasive, even to Gestapo agents. This time, however, his belief would cost many lives. Thinking that the special commission must already know the general outlines of the plot, Goerdeler never thought to mini­mize things, to portray the monumental efforts of the resistance as merely the ravings of a few disgruntled malcontents. He still be­lieved he had a duty to open Hitler’s eyes to the fact that he was leading Germany into the abyss; he may even have hoped to initiate a dialogue with him. Goerdeler’s “extraordinarily far-reaching ac­count,” as described in the Kaltenbrunner reports, thoroughly rebut­ted Hitler’s notion of a “very small clique of ambitious officers.” Goerdeler’s candor was as admirable as it was fatal. His biographer Gerhard Ritter comments: He wanted not to play down what had been done but rather to make it appear as large, significant, and menacing to the regime as possible. For Goerdeler, this was absolutely not an officers’ putsch… but an attempted uprising by an entire people as represented by the best and most noble members from all social strata, the entire political spectrum, and both the Catholic and Protestant churches. He himself stood up valiantly for what he had done, and he presumed his friends would do the same. In the shadow of the gallows, he still thought only of bringing the entire, unvarnished truth to light and hurling it in the faces of the author­ities. This was impossible at the public show trials, as the shameful proceedings against Field Marshal Witzleben had made chillingly apparent. And so Goerdeler sought to speak out all the more clearly, forcefully, and exhaustively in the interrogations.²¹

The futility of this gesture, on which he had apparently based great hopes, was made clear to him scarcely four weeks after his incarceration at Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. On September 8 he stood before the People’s Court with Ulrich von Hassell, Josef Wirmer, lawyer Paul Lejeune-Jung, and Wilhelm Leuschner. Their trials proceeded like all the rest, with a raving, wildly gesticu­lating Freisler constantly interrupting and refusing to allow any of the accused to explain their motives. In the end Goerdeler was con­demned as a “traitor through and through,… a cowardly, disreputable traitor, consumed with ambition, and a political spy in wartime.” While Wirmer, Lejeune-Jung, and Hassell were executed that same day and Leuschner was dispatched two weeks later, Goerdeler was kept alive for almost five months. He was probably spared so that further information could be extracted from him and so that his skills as a master administrator could be exploited for drawing up plans for reform and reconstruction after the war. The decisive factor in the delay, however, was presumably Himmler’s desire to have Goerdeler as a negotiator in the event that his insane scheme of making contact with the enemy behind Hitler’s back succeeded. This supposition is supported by the fact that Popitz’s life was also spared for some time, even though he had been sentenced to die on October 3.²²

Goerdeler hoped that his date with the executioner would be delayed until the war had ended, saving him and his fellow prisoners. Meanwhile, however, the Allied advance into central Germany was stalled, and Justice Minister Otto Thierack began asking more and more pointed questions as to why Goerdeler and Popitz were still alive. Like so many of his previous fantasies, Goerdeler’s last hope finally burst on the afternoon of February 2, 1945, when bellowing SS men barged into his cell and led him away.

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

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 Führer 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 Flossenbürg 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 out­burst, 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 Flossenbürg, 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 Müller had traveled to Rome on a number of occasions at Oster’s behest and was also incarcerated in Flossenbürg, 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

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 Führer 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 Jäger, and Schwerin von Schwanenfeld; the next week, Stülpnagel, Hofacker, Linstow, and Finckh. Soon thereafter came Thüngen, Langbehn, Jessen, Meichssner, and General Herfurth (despite his refusal to help on the day of the coup attempt). On October 20, Julius Leber and Adolf Reichwein were condemned, then Captain Hermann Kaiser, General Lindemann, Theodor Haubach, and many others.

Moltke was tried on January 9-10, 1945, along with Alfred Delp, Eugen Gerstenmaier, and a few other friends from the Kreisau Cir­cle. Moltke’s connection with the events of July 20 was actually more circumstantial than direct, though he had associated with a number of the rebels. Immediately after the attempted assassination and coup he remarked, “If I had been free, this would not have happened,” a reference to the fact that he had already been arrested by that time. At his trial he continued to insist that he was opposed to any acts of violence.

Despite his negligible role in the coup, Moltke exemplifies better perhaps than any other opposition figure the deep ambivalence of the German resistance. The records of his trial have been lost, like so many others, but on January 10 and 11, shortly after his trial, he wrote two letters to his wife that were spirited out of his cell by Poelchau, the chaplain. They contain far more than just personal comments. An entire intellectual climate emerges in the love of philosophizing, the distaste for practical action, and the religiously inspired joy at the prospect of death. As one of the early chroniclers of the German resistance commented, Moltke’s letters can only be read “with horror and admiration.”³¹

The letters begin with an extensive description of his trial, at which Kreisler sought to portray not Goerdeler but the Kreisauers—“these young men”—as the actual “engine” behind the coup. Moltke em­phasizes repeatedly that he not only agreed with that assessment but was absolutely delighted by Freisler’s decision to drop all specific allegations related to practical preparations for the coup in order to focus on the real crimes: “defeatist” thought and adherence to the Christian and ethical principles to which Moltke and his friends wanted society to return.

“Ultimately,” says Moltke in the first of these long letters, “this concentration on the religious aspect corresponds with the inner na­ture of things and shows that Freisler is a good political judge after all. It gives us the inestimable advantage of being killed for something that (a) we really have done and (b) is worthwhile.” He continues, “It is established that we never wanted to use force; it is established that we did not make a single attempt to organize anything, did not prom­ise a single person a future post-though the indictment said other­wise All we did was think-and really only Delp, Gerstenmaier, and I…And it is before the thoughts of these three isolated men, the mere thoughts, that National Socialism now so trembles that it wants to exterminate everything that is infected by them. If that isn’t a compliment of the highest order! After this trial we are free of all the Goerdeler mess; we are free of all practical questions. We are to be hanged because we thought together. Freisler is right, right a thou­sand times over. If we are to die, then let it be for this… . Long live Freisler!”

These few lines distill both what was memorable about the Ger­man resistance but what, at the same time, constituted its greatest weakness and the most compelling reason for its failure. The “Goerdeler mess” about which Moltke writes so disparagingly was in fact nothing other than a practical relation to the world, to people, and to the forces at work-in a word, to reality. Virtually all the opposition groups, though some more than others, liked to think of themselves as above the concerns of the grimy everyday world, and that attitude seriously compromised their ability to accomplish anything, especially as the Nazis did not respect the distinction but viewed thought and action as one. On the final judgment against Moltke one contemporary who had read the letters commented curtly, “He did more than just think.”

In his second letter, dated January 11, 1945, Moltke returned to his earlier line of reasoning: “Of that entire gang only Freisler recognized me, and of that entire gang only he understands why he must kill me… . The key to the trial lay in the words ‘Christianity and National Socialism have one thing in common, Count von Moltke, and only one: we both demand the whole person.’ Did he realize what he was saying? Just think how wonderfully God prepared this, his most unworthy vessel. At the very moment when I was in danger of being drawn into active preparations for the putsch-when Stauffenberg came to see Peter [Yorck] on the evening of the 19th [of January 1944]-I was taken away, so that I could, and will continue, to remain free of any connection with violence.”

Such shifts in tone from factual narration to pious contemplation are already present in the opening, primarily descriptive passages of the letters, but they become more frequent in the more personal parts that follow, until finally spiritual meditations, biblical references, and verses from songs build to a kind of exuberant longing for death that leaves no room for sorrow and farewell, only a sense of divine mission, fulfillment, and the grace of God. Moltke notes on a number of occasions that he feels “exalted and uplifted,” even though those around him seem “quite shocked.” Toward the end he writes, “I have wept a little, not out of sadness or melancholy, not because I would like to undo what I have done, but because I am thankful and moved by this sign from God. It is not given to us to see him face to face, but we must feel deeply moved when we suddenly realize that he has gone before us our entire lives, a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, and that all at once he is allowing us to glimpse this truth. Now nothing more can happen.”

On January 12, 1945, Moltke’s death sentence was handed down. He was executed eleven days later, on January 23, together with nine other prisoners. Shortly thereafter, on February 3, just as Freisler was launching the proceedings against Fabian von Schlabrendorff, air raid sirens began to howl. In the heaviest aerial attack on Berlin of the entire war, one bomb hit the building on Bellevuestrasse where the People’s Court was in session. A falling beam struck Freisler on the head as he clutched the files on Schlabrendorff. Otherwise no one was injured. A passing doctor was summoned from the street, but he could only confirm that Freisler’s wounds were fatal. (Ironically, the doctor turned out to be the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, whom Freisler had condemned to death the previous day.) Schlabrendorff’s trial had to be postponed, and when he was brought before the court again in mid-March he was acquitted on a technicality: he had been tortured, in violation of the law.³²

Some other of the conspirators managed to cheat death as well, including almost all of Tresckow’s friends in Army Group Center, among them Philipp von Boeselager, Rudolph-Christoph von Gersdorff, and Eberhard von Breitenbuch. Several members of the Kreisau Circle-Horst von Einsiedel, Carl Dietrich von Trotha, Otto von der Gablentz, the Jesuit priest Augustin Rösch, and others-also survived. Eugen Gerstenmaier dodged a death sentence by playing the role of the naive theologian baffled and bewildered by the world of politics; so convincing was he that Freisler condemned him to only seven years in prison. Hans Bernd Gisevius managed to escape to Switzerland, thanks to his foreign connections and especially the in­tervention of Allen W. Dulles, the head of the Office of Strategic Services. Erich Kordt was a safe distance away at a diplomatic posting in China, and Theo Kordt was in Switzerland. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz was well-acquainted with life underground and numbered among the very few, including Jakob Kaiser and the Hammerstein brothers, Kunrat and Ludwig, who managed to survive the war in hiding. Hans von Boineburg was assigned to an army punishment detail, as was Harald Momm, the colonel who had called for a bottle of champagne in Krampitz on hearing news of the attack on Hitler.³³ Less fortunate was Arthur Nebe, who finally went underground on July 24. Making use of all the evasive ruses at his command, he feigned suicide, leaving fake farewell letters behind. He managed to escape detection until January 16 but was finally arrested, brought before the courts, and executed in March 1945. That same month, so close to the end of the war, Friedrich Fromm was convicted on a charge of cowardice and, in what was viewed as an act of leniency, sentenced to be shot by a firing squad. The execution was carried out on March 12, 1945, in Brandenburg prison.

One month later, as the Red Army girded itself for the final assault on Berlin, Hitler’s campaign for revenge was still going strong. The jails were filled to overflowing with political opponents who either had been condemned or were awaiting trial. On April 14 Himmler ordered that none of these prisoners were to survive the war. Earlier, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller had told Moltke’s wife, Freya, “We won’t make the same mistake as in 1918. We won’t leave our internal German enemies alive.”³⁴

By this point, however, events were beginning to overtake Himmler, Müller, and the Gestapo in general. On April 21-the same day that an agitated Hitler called General Karl Koller, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, to Inform him that the heart of Berlin was under artillery bombardment-eleven men who had not yet been sentenced were released. One of them sought, on the spur of the moment, to obtain the release of other prisoners as well. On April 23 his efforts resulted in the freeing of prisoners incarcerated at Moabit prison. The SS, however, had taken charge of liquidating the Gestapo prison on Lehrterstrasse. Here, too, twenty-one inmates facing lesser charges had already been released, among them the lawyer Hans Lukaschek and Kraft von Palombini, who had sheltered Goerdeler. Some of the remaining inmates were informed that they would be released after transfer to headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. They were herded together by SS guards and marched off down Lehrterstrasse in a light rain at about one o’clock in the morning. When they reached the corner of Invalidenstrasse, the guards ordered the prisoners to proceed across a field of rubble. The command “Ready, fire!” rang out and the prisoners fell, all of them shot in the neck. Among those murdered in this fashion were Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels, and Albrecht Haushofer.³⁵

The next day some of the remaining inmates were released and the others were turned over to the judicial authorities. After midnight, however, another SS detachment appeared, took away Albrecht von Bernstorff, Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg, and the trade union leader Ernst Schneppenhorst, and murdered them. When day broke, the rest of the prisoners managed to persuade the warden that it was in his own best interest to let them go before the Russian troops arrived. At around six in the evening, the last political prisoners were released from Lehrterstrasse, including Justus Delbrück of Military Intelli­gence, Professors Gerhard Ritter, Adolf Lampe, and Theodor Steltzer. They fled as the battle for Berlin began in earnest.

In the debates that had raged within the resistance for years, Goerdeler had always argued that the first task of the resistance and the one that had the best chance of success was simply to inform the German people about the crimes of the regime: the fact that the Nazis had set out to provoke war, their enormous corruption, the disgraceful practices of the Einsatzgruppen, the mass murder com­mitted in the concentration camps. Such outrage would be provoked, he imagined, that Hitler and his accomplices would be swept from office.

The failure of the attack on Hitler and the conspirators’ lack of opportunity to make their declaration to the people prevented Goerdeler’s idea from ever being put to the test. But as the writer Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary following a conversation with Cäsar von Hofacker, Hitler would certainly have emerged the victor in a battle of the airwaves.³⁶ His psychological hold over the people, al­though loosening, was still very real, however much the reasons be­hind it had changed. The masses had lost most of their faith and admiration but still had a dark, fatalistic feeling that their destiny was inextricably bound up with his. The ominous propaganda of the last months of the war and fear of the advancing Red Army drove them into the Führer’s arms despite their mounting disgust with the brutal­ity of the regime and with the cowardice, venality, and egotism of its officials. Though they felt suffocated by the pressures of police-state surveillance, informers, and terror, they clung to vague hopes that, as so often in the past, the Führer would find a way to avert catastrophe. On June 16, 1944, the first of his much-heralded “reprisal weapons,” V-1 rockets, were launched against London. Immediately following the events of July 20, a Norwegian newspaper reporter observed the general mood in Germany: “The masses are apathetic; they neither see nor hear and therefore remain totally inert… . They neither weep nor celebrate nor rage.”³⁷

And so the German resistance remained what it had always been: an expression of feelings that may well have been widespread but that only a tiny minority was prepared to act on. Ironically, the social isolation of the resistance continued even after the war, for as the end drew near, Nazi propagandists and Allied spokesmen joined forces in a de facto coalition to belittle the accomplishments of the resistance and disparage its motives. In the House of Commons Churchill de­scribed the events of July 20 as a murderous internecine power struggle and in Moscow Rudolf Herrnstadt celebrated the failure of what he termed the final attempt of “the gentlemen’s clubs, the reactionar­ies” to grab power.³⁸

These altitudes did not change much even after the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. The resistance found no more acknowledg­ment or comprehension after the war than it had under the Nazis themselves, whether in Germany or abroad. On the first anniversary of the execution of Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a church funeral was held but it had to be announced as a service for a “fallen soldier.” The family of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg experi­enced great difficulty in asserting their rights to his estate, as did the dispossessed families of other conspirators. For a long time the occu­pation authorities forbade or placed limitations on publications about the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries were first pub­lished in Switzerland and then in Sweden, while both Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s Offiziere gegen Hitler (Revolt Against Hitler) and Rudolf Pechel’s Deutscher Widerstand (The German Resistance) were on the index of books forbidden by the Allies.³⁹

Denial and dismissal were common everywhere. When the celebrated English military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart attempted to portray the background to the 1938 coup attempt in a London news­paper, publication was prevented by the government. In American prisoner-of-war and internment camps, officers who had participated in the resistance were locked up indiscriminately with generals and SS men who were still pro-Nazi. The theory of the unity of Führer and Volk continued to be upheld. Those who had risked everything in their struggle against the Nazis were held prisoner by the Allies for years-in many cases even longer than their Nazi foes.

In the summer of 1947 the American military administration released Hitler’s former army adjutant General Gerhard Engel and a number of general staff officers from prisoner-of-war camps. Mean­while General Gersdorff, who had undertaken in March 1943 to set off a bomb and kill both Hitler and himself, continued to be held. When he questioned the rationale, he was informed by the camp commandant that “General Engel has demonstrated throughout his military career that he always carries out his orders. He will not engage in any resistance to us in civilian life either, and therefore he poses no threat. You, on the other hand, have shown that you follow your own conscience on occasion and consequently might not obey our orders under certain circumstances. People like you or General Falkenhausen [who also continued to be held prisoner] are therefore dangerous to us. For this reason, you will remain in custody.”⁴⁰

To the many images of the resistance that have been handed down to us, we must add that of Carl Goerdeler sitting alone in his cell in the basement of Reich Security Headquarters. Early in 1945 he made another attempt to break the silence that was beginning to envelop all that he and his fellow conspirators had thought and striven for. In the last of the many papers he wrote, he seems finally to confront the possibility that he took the wrong approach and that everything he had done to prevent Hitler from leading Germany to catastrophe had been in vain. He places hopes in friends who had in fact long since been executed, records a few memories, addresses Germany’s youth and future generations, and finally breaks off his musings in the middle of a sentence filled with desperate thoughts about an “indif­ferent God,” the triumph of evil, and the obliteration of goodness, guilt, and righteousness. “Like the psalmist I quarrel with God,” he writes, “and this struggle decorates the bare walls of my tiny cell, filling the emptiness with my imaginings and my memories.” In the end, he could not continue, finding no answer to the thought to which his mind constantly returned: “Can this be the Last Judgment?”⁴¹