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

by William L. Shirer

His weird conception of America—by this time Hitler had come to believe his own Nazi propaganda—was given further exposition in a talk, he had with Mussolini at the Russian front late in August 1941. “The Fuehrer,” the Italian records quote him indirectly as saying, “gave a detailed account of the Jewish clique which surrounds Roosevelt and exploits the American people. He stated that he could not, for anything in the world, live in a country like the U.S.A., whose conceptions of life are inspired by the most grasping commercialism and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music.”

“I don’t see much future for the Americans,” he told his cronies a month later during a monologue at headquarters on January 7, 1942. “It’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities… My feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance… Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaized, and the other half Negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar.” (Hitler’s Secret Conversations, p. 155.)

Almost all the generals in the field, as well as those on the General Staff, saw flaws in the pretty picture. They could be summed up: the Germans simply didn’t have the resources—the men or the guns or the tanks or the planes or the means of transportation—to reach the objectives Hitler had insisted on setting.

It was one of the most fateful of Hitler’s moves in the war, for in the end, and in a very short time, it resulted in his failing to achieve either objective and led to the most humiliating defeat in the history of German arms, making certain that he could never win the war and that the days of the thousand-year Third Reich were numbered.

The end itself was anticlimactic. Late on the last day of January Paulus got off his final message to headquarters. The Sixth Army, true to their oath and conscious of the lofty importance of their mission, have held their position to the last man and the last round for Fuehrer and Fatherland unto the end. At 7:45 P.M. the radio operator at Sixth Army headquarters sent a last message on his own: “The Russians are at the door of our bunker. We are destroying our equipment.”

And of those 91,000 Germans who began the weary march into captivity that winter day, only 5,000 were destined ever to see the Fatherland again.*

Altogether, according to a study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Germany extracted in tribute from the conquered nations a total of 104 billion marks ($26,000,000,000).*

The plunder of raw materials, manufactured goods and food, though it reduced the occupied peoples to impoverishment, hunger and sometimes starvation and violated the Hague Convention on the conduct of war, might have been excused, if not justified, by the Germans as necessitated by the harsh exigencies of total war. But the stealing of art treasures did not help Hitler’s war machine. It was a case merely of avarice, of the personal greed of Hitler and Goering.

Even the Slav women seized and shipped to Germany for domestic service were treated as slaves. As early as 1942 Hitler had commanded Sauckel to procure a half million of them “in order to relieve the German housewife.”

“The instructions were that the Jews and the Soviet political commissars were to be liquidated.” “And when you say ‘liquidated,’ do you mean ‘killed’?” Amen asked. “Yes, I mean killed,” Ohlendorf answered, explaining that this took in the women and children as well as the men.

By November Himmler could report to Hitler that 363,211 Jews had been killed in Russia from August through October, though the figure was probably somewhat exaggerated to please the bloodthirsty Fuehrer.

Dr. Richard Korherr, reported to his chief on March 23, 1943, that a total of 633,300 Jews in Russia had been “re-settled”—a euphemism for massacre by the Einsatzgruppen.51 Surprisingly enough this figure tallies fairly well with exhaustive studies later made by a number of experts. Add another hundred thousand slain in the last two years of the war and the figure is probably as accurate as we will ever have.

What became known in high Nazi circles as the “Fuehrer Order on the Final Solution” apparently was never committed to paper—at least no copy of it has yet been unearthed in the captured Nazi documents. All the evidence shows that it was most probably given verbally to Goering, Himmler and Heydrich, who passed it down during the summer and fall of 1941.

The “final solution” went on to the very end of the war. How many Jews did it massacre? The figure has been debated.

Apparently a few German Luftwaffe medics were beginning to have their doubts. When Himmler heard of this he was infuriated and promptly wrote Field Marshal Milch protesting about the difficulties caused by “Christian medical circles” in the Air Force. He begged the Luftwaffe Chief of Staff to release Rascher from the Air Force medical corps so that he could be transferred to the S.S. He suggested that they find a “non-Christian physician, who should be honorable as a scientist,” to pass on Dr. Rascher’s valuable works.

"valuable" -_-

Though skeptical, Dr. Rascher was not the man to ignore a suggestion from the leader of the S.S. He promptly embarked on a series of the most grotesque “experiments” of all, recording them for posterity in every morbid detail.

Seven of them were condemned to death and hanged, defending their lethal experiments to the last as patriotic acts which served the Fatherland.

Benito Mussolini, tired and senile though he was only going on sixty, he who had strutted so arrogantly across Europe’s stage for two decades, was at the end of his rope. When he returned to Rome he found much worse than the aftermath of the first heavy bombing. He faced revolt from some of his closest henchmen in the Fascist Party hierarchy, even from his son-in-law, Ciano. And behind it there was a plot among a wider circle that reached to the King to overthrow him.

Fascism itself collapsed as easily as its founder. Marshal Pietro Badoglio formed a nonparty government of generals and civil servants, the Fascist Party was dissolved, Fascists were removed from key posts and anti-Fascists released from prison.

Italy’s withdrawal from the war had embittered him. It was, he told Goebbels, who had again been summoned to Rastenburg, “a gigantic example of swinishness.” Moreover, the overthrow of Mussolini made him apprehensive of his own position. “The Fuehrer,” Goebbels noted in his diary on September 11, “invoked final measures to preclude similar developments with us once and for all.”

Though Mussolini was grateful for his rescue and embraced Hitler warmly when they met a couple of days later at Rastenburg, he was by now a broken man, the old fires within him turned to ashes, and much to Hitler’s disappointment he showed little stomach for reviving the Fascist regime in German-occupied Italy.

This was the first Russian summer offensive of the war and from this moment on the Red armies never lost the initiative.

The public knew little of how the U-boats were doing. And though the news from Russia, the Mediterranean and Italy grew increasingly bad, it dealt after all with events that were transpiring hundreds or thousands of miles distant from the homeland. But the bombs from the British planes by night and the American planes by day were now beginning to destroy a German’s home, and the office or factory where he worked.

The German people endured it as bravely and as stoically as the British people had done. But after four years of war it was all the more a severe strain, and it is not surprising that as 1943 approached its end, with all its blasted hopes in Russia, in North Africa and in Italy, and with their own cities from one end of the Reich to the other being pulverized from the air, the German people began to despair and to realize that this was the beginning of the end that could only spell their defeat.

The Fuehrer does not believe that anything can be achieved at present by negotiation. England is not yet groggy enough… In the East, naturally, the present moment is quite unfavorable… At present Stalin has the advantage.

All the other Fascist leaders who had voted against the Duce in the Grand Council and whom the Duce could get his hands on were tried for treason by a special tribunal and, with one exception, sentenced to death and shot along with Ciano.

“The work of a thousand years is nothing but rubble,” wrote Goerdeler to Field Marshal von Kluge in July 1943, after visiting the bombed-out areas in the west. In his letter Goerdeler beseeched the vacillating general to join the conspirators in putting an end to Hitler and his “madness.”

The plan worked out at the Smolensk meeting was to lure Hitler to the army group headquarters and there do away with him. This would be the signal for the coup in Berlin.

The mechanism had worked; the small bottle had broken; the corrosive fluid had consumed the wire; the striker had hit forward; but—the detonator had not fired.

The plan was for the colonel to conceal in his overcoat pockets two bombs, set the fuses, stay as close to Hitler during the ceremony as possible and blow the Fuehrer and his entourage as well as himself to eternity. With conspicuous bravery Gersdorff readily volunteered to sacrifice his life.

This last-minute change of schedule, which was typical of Hitler’s subtle security methods, had once again saved him his life.

To Freisler’s savage browbeating she answered calmly, “You know as well as we do that the war is lost. Why are you so cowardly that you won’t admit it?” She hobbled on her crutches to the scaffold and died with sublime courage, as did her brother. Professor Huber and several other students were executed a few days later.

They had not ceased trying to kill Hitler. Between September 1943 and January 1944 another half-dozen attempts were organized.

The brutality of the S.S. in Russia, not to mention Hitler’s order to shoot the Bolshevik commissars, opened Stauffenberg’s eyes as to the master he was serving. As chance had it, he met in Russia two of the chief conspirators who had decided to make an end to that master: General von Tresckow and Schlabrendorff. The latter says it took only a few subsequent meetings to convince them that Stauffenberg was their man. He became an active conspirator.

Rommel hesitated and finally made his decision. “I believe,” he said to Stroelin, “it is my duty to come to the rescue of Germany.” At this meeting and at all subsequent ones which Rommel had with the plotters, he opposed assassinating Hitler—not on moral but on practical grounds. To kill the dictator, he argued, would be to make a martyr of him. He insisted that Hitler be arrested by the Army and haled before a German court for crimes against his own people and those of the occupied lands.

General Pemsel, who was on the other end of the line when Rommel called Seventh Army headquarters, gave a blunt reply to Hitler’s demand that the Allied beachhead—there were actually now three—“be cleaned up by not later than tonight.” “That,” he replied, “would be impossible.”

“From June 9 on,” says Speidel, “the initiative lay with the Allies.”

Once more, on June 29, Rundstedt and Rommel appealed to Hitler to face realities both in the East and in the West and to try to end the war while considerable parts of the German Army were still in being. This meeting took place on the Obersalzberg, where the Supreme warlord treated the two field marshals frostily, dismissing their appeals curtly and then lapsing into a long monologue on how he would win the war with new “miracle weapons.”

The assassination must be attempted at any cost. Even should it fail, the attempt to seize power in the capital must be undertaken. We must prove to the world and to future generations that the men of the German Resistance Movement dared to take the decisive step and to hazard their lives upon it. Compared with this object, nothing else matters.

Since Goering and Himmler usually attended the daily military conferences at the Fuehrer headquarters, it was believed that it would not be too difficult to kill all three men with one bomb. This foolish resolve led Stauffenberg to miss two golden opportunities.

No one seems to have noticed Stauffenberg stealing away. Except perhaps Colonel Brandt. This officer became so absorbed in what his General was saying that he leaned over the table the better to see the map, discovered that Stauffenberg’s bulging briefcase was in his way, tried to shove it aside with his foot and finally reached down with one hand and lifted it to the far side of the heavy table support, which now stood between the bomb and Hitler.* This seemingly insignificant gesture probably saved the Fuehrer’s life; it cost Brandt his. There was an inexplicable fate involved here. Colonel Brandt, it will be remembered, was the innocent officer whom Tresckow had induced to carry a couple of “bottles of brandy” back on Hitler’s plane from Smolensk to Rastenburg on the evening of March 13, 1943, and he had done so without the faintest suspicion that they were in reality a bomb—the very make of bomb which he had now unostentatiously moved farther away under the table from the warlord.

There is something weird and grotesque about this last meeting of the two fascist dictators on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, as they surveyed the ruins of the conference hall and tried to fool themselves into thinking that the Axis which they had forged, and which was to have dominated the continent of Europe, was not also in shambles.

Admiral Doenitz, who had rushed by air to Rastenburg at the news of the attentat and arrived after the tea party had begun, lashed out at the treachery of the Army. Goering, on behalf of the Air Force, supported him. Then Doenitz lit on Goering for the disastrous failures of the Luftwaffe, and the fat Reich Marshal, after defending himself, attacked his pet hate, Ribbentrop, for the bankruptcy of Germany’s foreign policy, at one point threatening to smack the arrogant Foreign Minister with his marshal’s baton.

The trouble was that after the fateful delay and in the present confusion they did not, for all their planning, know how to go ahead. Not even when General Thiele brought word that the news of Hitler’s survival was shortly to be broadcast over the German national radio network does it seem to have occurred to the conspirators that the first thing they had to do, and at once, was to seize the broadcasting central, block the Nazis from getting their word out, and begin flooding the air with their own proclamations of a new government.

“Lay down your weapons,” he commanded, and informed his former captors that they were under arrest. “You wouldn’t make that demand of me, your old commanding officer,” Beck said quietly, reaching for his revolver. “I will draw the consequences from this unhappy situation myself.”

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

It was now sometime after midnight. The revolt, the only serious one ever made against Hitler in the eleven and a half years of the Third Reich, had been snuffed out in eleven and a half hours.

“Why didn’t you join the party?” Freisler asked. “Because I am not and never could be a Nazi,” the count replied. When Freisler had recovered from this answer and pressed the point, Yorck tried to explain. “Mr. President, I have already stated in my interrogation that the Nazi ideology was such that I—” The judge interrupted him. “—could not agree… You didn’t agree with the National Socialist conception of justice, say, in regard to rooting out the Jews?” “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.

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.”