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

by William L. Shirer

Colonel Glaesemer escaped from his confinement by a ruse, telling his guards that he had decided to accept Olbricht’s orders and would himself take command of the tanks, whereupon he slipped out of the building,

The panzer colonel was not the only officer to slip away from the haphazard and gentlemanly confinement imposed on those who would not join the conspiracy—a circumstance which contributed to the swift end of the revolt.

But he himself had done nothing to help at a time when his authority as a field marshal might have rallied more of the troop commanders in Berlin and abroad.

The energetic counteraction at Rastenburg, the quick thinking of Goebbels in winning over Remer and in utilizing the radio, the revival of the S.S. in Berlin and the unbelievable confusion and inaction of the rebels in the Bendlerstrasse caused a good many Army officers who had been on the point of throwing in their lot with the conspirators, or had even done so, to think better of it.

They had no sooner arrived than Fromm told them of a little-used rear exit through which they could escape. Breaking his word to Hoepner, he ordered the generals to organize help, storm the building, liberate him and put down the revolt.

They had begun to realize too, as one of them later said, that they would all be hanged as traitors if the revolt failed and they had not turned against it in time.

In the world of the Nazi gangsters it was much too late for this, but Fromm did not realize it.

Stauffenberg died crying, “Long live our sacred Germany!”

Relatives and friends of the suspects were rounded up by the thousands and sent to concentration camps, where many of them died. The brave few who gave shelter to those who were in hiding were summarily dealt with.

He had made a special study of Andrei Vishinsky’s technique as chief prosecutor in the Moscow trials of the Thirties in which the “Old Bolsheviks” and most of the leading generals had been found guilty of “treason” and liquidated.

“What is important, what brings together all these questions,” Yorck replied, “is the totalitarian claim of the State on the individual which forces him to renounce his moral and religious obligations to God.”

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 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.

Some who were arrested escaped trial and were eventually liberated from the Gestapo by the advancing Allied troops.

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.

Hitler is not only the archenemy of Germany: he is the archenemy of the world.

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.

“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.”

Instead it sought to preserve its “honor” by what a foreign observer, at least, can only term dishonoring and degrading itself.

No doubt they did, for Rundstedt, Guderian and their fellow judges—all generals—turned over hundreds of their comrades to certain execution after degrading them by throwing them out of the Army.

On July 24 the Nazi salute was made compulsory in place of the old military salute “as a sign of the Army’s unshakable allegiance to the Fuehrer and of the closest unity between Army and Party.”

This elite group, founded by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and built up by Moltke to be the pillar of the nation, which had ruled Germany during the First World War, dominated the Weimar Republic and forced even Hitler to destroy the S.A. and murder its leader when they stood in its way, had been reduced in the summer of 1944 to a pathetic body of fawning, frightened men.

This paralysis of the mind and will of grown-up men, raised as Christians, supposedly disciplined in the old virtues, boasting of their code of honor, courageous in the face of death on the battlefield, is astonishing, though perhaps it can be grasped if one remembers the course of German history, outlined in an earlier chapter, which made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.

In his case, what had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation and assumed that others lied to him.

By an incredible exercise of will power which all the others in Germany—in the Army, in the government and among the people—lacked, he was able almost singlehandedly to prolong the agony of war for well nigh a year.

It had flickered out because almost all the men who kept this great country running, generals and civilians, and the mass of the German people, in uniform and out, were not ready for a revolution—in fact, despite their misery and the bleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did not want it. National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country’s savior. At that time [Guderian later wrote]—the fact seems beyond dispute—the great proportion of the German people still believed in Adolf Hitler and would have been convinced that with his death the assassin had removed the only man who might still have been able to bring the war to a favorable conclusion.

By a hypnotism that defies explanation—at least by a non-German—Hitler held the allegiance and trust of this remarkable people to the last. It was inevitable that they would follow him blindly, like dumb cattle but also with a touching faith and even an enthusiasm that raised them above the animal herd, over the precipice to the destruction of the nation.

At the first meeting, Schlabrendorff says, he had an opportunity to examine Hitler’s oversize cap. He was struck by its weight. On examination it proved to be lined with three and a half pounds of steel plating.

One of the difficulties of piecing together the deeds of the plotters is that the memories of the few survivors are far from perfect, so that their accounts not only often differ but are contradictory.

Actually the Solfs were released from Moabit prison on April 23, apparently because of an error.

He was so shadowy a figure that no two writers agree as to what kind of man he was, or what he believed in, if anything much. A cynic and a fatalist, he had hated the Weimar Republic and worked secretly against it and then turned similarly on the Third Reich.

At their meeting at Casablanca Churchill and Roosevelt had issued on January 24, 1943, their declaration of unconditional surrender for Germany. Goebbels naturally made a great deal of this in trying to whip the German people into a state of all-out resistance but in the opinion of this author his success has been grossly exaggerated by a surprisingly large number of Western writers.

Pills and liqueur glasses containing various medicines were ranged around his place, and he took them in turn.

Speidel quotes the writer Ernst Juenger, whose books had once been popular in Nazi Germany but who eventually had turned and had joined the Paris end of the plot: “The blow that felled Rommel on the Livarot Road on July 17 deprived our plan of the only man strong enough to bear the terrible weight of war and civil war simultaneously.”

The leader of the “Rote Kapelle” (Red Orchestra) was Harold Schulze-Boysen, a grandson of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz, a picturesque leader of the “lost generation” after the First World War and a familiar Bohemian figure in those days in Berlin, where his black sweater, his thick mane of blond hair and his passion for revolutionary poetry and politics attracted attention.

Through his mother he got into the Luftwaffe as a lieutenant at the outbreak of the war and wormed himself into Goering’s “research” office, the Forschungsamt, which, as we have seen in connection with the Anschluss, specialized in tapping telephones.

The author recounts that Stauffenberg had told the Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal Count Preysing, of what he intended to do, and that the bishop had replied that he honored the young man’s motives and did not feel justified in attempting to restrain him on theological grounds.

His “von” had come through adoption by an aunt—Fräulein Gertrud von Ribbentrop—in 1925, when he was thirty-two years old.

A few weeks before, Leonrod had asked an Army chaplain friend of his, Father Hermann Wehrle, whether the Catholic Church condoned tyrannicide and had been given a negative answer. When this came out in Leonrod’s trial before the People’s Court, Father Wehrle was arrested for not having told the authorities and, like Leonrod, was executed.

But the soldiers refused to look at it—at the Cadet School at Lichterfelde they walked out as it began to run—and it was soon withdrawn from circulation.

Nevertheless the Rommel family noticed that this gentleman of the old school declined to attend the cremation after the funeral and to come to the Rommel home, as did most of the other generals, to extend condolences to the widow.

As American troops neared his place of confinement near Lake Constance in southern Germany, he escaped with twenty others by a ruse and took refuge with a Catholic priest, who hid the group until the Americans arrived.

Capping an unusual career, Speidel held an important command at NATO in the late 1950s.

They also found the Seine bridges, many of them works of art, intact.

So swift was the advance that the Germans did not have time to destroy the harbor facilities at Antwerp. This was a great stroke of fortune for the Allies, for this port, as soon as its approaches were cleared, was destined to become the principal supply base of the Anglo–American armies.

The much-publicized Siegfried Line was virtually unmanned and without guns.

Under all circumstances we will continue this battle until, as Frederick the Great said, one of our damned enemies gets too tired to fight any more.

All the coalitions in history have disintegrated sooner or later.

At Hitler’s insistence the production of civilian goods had been maintained at a surprisingly large figure throughout the war—ostensibly to keep up morale. And he had balked at carrying out the prewar plans to mobilize women for work in the factories.

Nazi ideology had taught that the place of the German woman was in the home and not in the factory—and in the home she stayed.