The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

by William L. Shirer

Winston Churchill himself, who had taken over as Prime Minister on the first day of battle, was dumfounded. He was awakened at half past seven on the morning of May 15 by a telephone call from Premier Paul Reynaud in Paris, who told him in an excited voice, “We have been defeated! We are beaten!”

The British had decided, he says, as a last resort and if all other conventional methods of defense failed, to attack the German beachheads with mustard gas, sprayed from low-flying airplanes.

Witzleben was troubled by hemorrhoids.* The operation to correct this painful and annoying condition was a routine case of surgery, to be sure, but when Witzleben took a brief sick leave in the spring to have it done, Hitler took advantage of the situation to retire the Field Marshal from active service, replacing him with Rundstedt, who had no stomach for conspiring against the Leader who had so recently treated him so shabbily.

But Fromm was too ingenious a trimmer to be bluffed. “Count Stauffenberg,” he answered, “the attempt has failed. You must shoot yourself at once.” Stauffenberg coolly declined. In a moment Fromm, a beefy, red-faced man, was proclaiming the arrest of all three of his visitors, Stauffenberg, Olbricht and Mertz. “You deceive yourself,” Olbricht answered. “It is we who are now going to arrest you.”

People ask now: Have the Germans changed? Many in the West appear to believe so. I myself am not so sure,