1

Shock to the System

It takes a bomb under his arse to make Hitler see reason.

Joseph Goebbels, 23 July 1944¹

I

It was the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. By late July 1944, the D-Day landings of the western Allies that had taken place in Normandy on 6 June 1944 had been consolidated. Troops and arms were being shipped over to the Continent in ever greater numbers. Direct ground attack on the Reich itself was now in prospect. On the eastern front, the Red Army, in its massive offensive ‘Operation Bagration’, launched just over a fortnight after D-Day, had smashed through the defences of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre (an immense formation of 48 divisions, in four armies, and pivotally placed over a 700-kilometre stretch of the enormous front), inflicting huge losses, and had advanced more than 300 kilometres. To the south, Rome had fallen to the Allies and German troops were engaged in fierce rearguard fighting near Florence. Meanwhile, ever more German towns and cities were exposed to relentless devastation from the air. With resources and manpower stretched to the limit and hugely inferior to the combined might of the enemy, now forcing back the Wehrmacht from the east, west and south, the writing was on the wall for the Hitler regime.

At least, that was how the western Allies saw it. They were confident that the war would be over by Christmas.² Viewed from Germany, it was a different matter. Here, attitudes about the state of the war and Germany’s prospects varied widely, whether at the elite level, among the civilian and military Reich leadership, or among the public on the ‘home front’ and the millions of men under arms. Defeatism, reluctant acceptance that the war was lost, realistic acknowledgement of overwhelming enemy strength, waning belief in Hitler, and fears for the future were more evident by the day. On the other hand, support for the regime, not just among Nazi fanatics, was still widespread. And many in high places and low still refused to contemplate the prospect of defeat. Their thinking ran along the following lines. The enemy – the unholy coalition of the western democracies and the Communist Soviet Union – could still be repulsed if the war effort could be revitalized; in the event of a serious reverse, the enemy could split apart; new, devastating weapons were on the way and would bring a sharp turn in war fortunes; and, if subjected to significant military setbacks, the Allies would be forced to entertain a settlement, leaving Germany some of her territorial gains and peace with honour. Such thoughts were by no means moribund in the summer of 1944.

Among the mass of the population, however, the predominant feeling in mid-July 1944 was one of mounting worry and anxiety. Whatever their carefully couched criticisms of the regime’s leaders (including Hitler himself) and, in particular, of the Nazi Party and its representatives, the great majority of ordinary citizens were still unhesitatingly loyal in their support for the war effort. The mood was anxious, not rebellious. There was no trace of anything similar to the growing unrest that eventually burst into open revolution in 1918, despite Hitler’s pathological fixation with the internal collapse of that year. There were contingency plans to cope with the possibility of an uprising by foreign workers (numbering by this time, together with prisoners of war, more than 7 million). But there was no serious expectation of revolution by the German population.

Regional reports of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service) indicated an increasingly apprehensive mood, falling to ‘zero point’, producing ‘deep depression’, and amounting to an ‘anxiety psychosis’ and ‘creeping panic’, in the light of the Red Army’s advance in the east. There was intense worry about the likely fate of East Prussia. People feared that, once on German soil, the Russians would never be forced out. Women in particular were profoundly apprehensive. ‘The eastern front will probably soon collapse,’ ran one reported comment. ‘If the Bolsheviks get in, we might as well all hang ourselves, with our children. The Führer should make peace with England and America. The war can no longer be won.’ It was not an isolated sentiment.

Though overshadowed by events in the east, attitudes towards the western front were also gloomy, with widespread acknowledgement of the enemy’s overwhelming superiority in men and resources. There were still hopes of the promised ‘miracle weapons’, though earlier exaggerated expectations of the impact of the V1 missile in air raids on London had left disappointment and scepticism about propaganda claims. And the inability of the Luftwaffe to offer protection against the ‘terror raids’ which were taking place in broad daylight offered a constant source of anger, as well as constant and mounting anxiety. The collapse of the Wehrmacht in the east left many searching for both explanations and scapegoats. Reports from soldiers on leave of the morale of the troops, alleging their lack of belief in victory, and of the inability of their officers, used to material comfort in their rear positions, to provide proper defence, also had a negative impact on mood. And more and more families were receiving the dreaded visit from the local Party leader with the news that their loved one had fallen at the front. ‘How long can we still hold out?’ was a question frequently asked.³

At the other end of the opinion spectrum, among the regime’s elite, such views were unspoken, whether tacitly entertained or not. Leading Nazis continued to give their full support and loyalty to Hitler, not least since their own power was solely dependent upon his. But there were frustrations, as well as the continuous jockeying for position that was endemic to the Third Reich. Hermann Göring was still Hitler’s designated successor. His earlier popularity had, however, vanished, and, within the Nazi elite, his star had been waning for months in the light of the Luftwaffe’s failings. Hitler fell into repeated paroxysms of rage at the impotence of the Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe to prevent the destruction of Germany’s cities. Characteristically, however, he was unwilling to dismiss Göring, conscious as usual of the loss of prestige this would constitute and the gift it would provide to enemy propaganda. Another who had lost his earlier prominence was the once influential Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose every prediction and initiative had proved catastrophically mistaken. He, too, was now little called upon – not least since there was, in effect, no longer any foreign policy to conduct.

As some Nazi paladins lost face, others profited from the adversity. Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, could exploit more than ever his constant proximity to Hitler, controlling the portals to the Dictator’s presence and serving as his master’s mouthpiece. Bormann, born in 1900, an unpretentious figure in his ill-fitting Party uniform, short, squat, bull-necked, with thin, receding hair, was hated and feared in equal measure by leading Nazis, well aware of his ruthlessness, capacity for intrigue, and his opportunities to influence Hitler. He had long been Hitler’s indispensable man behind the scenes, for years managing his private financial affairs and in the mid-1930s organizing the building of the Berghof, the Dictator’s palatial retreat on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. His absolute trustworthiness in Hitler’s eyes was his prize asset. Bormann had risen almost unnoticed in the Party’s central office in Munich, where, through tireless energy and efficiency, along with the necessary ‘elbow power’, he attained mastery of the Party’s bureaucratic apparatus. He was, however, no simple functionary. He had been involved in anti-Semitic and paramilitary organizations in the 1920s before he found his way to Hitler, and had served time in prison for his involvement in a political murder. His ideological fanaticism never wavered to the end.

In 1929 he had married Gerda, herself a fanatical Nazi and daughter of the head of the Party Court (which adjudicated on matters of Party discipline), Walter Buch. Together they had ten children (nine of whom survived, all but one of them after the war becoming Catholics, one even a priest, despite – or because of – their parents’ radical detestation of the Church). The Bormanns appear, from their surviving letters, to have been devoted to each other. Yet the marriage was far from conventional. Gerda positively welcomed Martin’s news in January 1944 that he had succeeded in seducing the actress Manja Behrens, hoped that she would bear him a child, and even went so far as to draft a proposed law to legalize bigamy.

By this time Bormann was one of the most powerful men in Germany. In the immediate aftermath of Rudolf Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941, he had been the obvious choice to take over the running of the Party and, once Hitler made him head of the Party Chancellery, rapidly consolidated his control over its bureaucracy. His role as Hitler’s trusted factotum finally gained its formal recognition when in April 1943 he was granted the title of ‘Secretary of the Führer’. As Germany’s fortunes declined, Bormann used his command of the Party’s central administration, backed by the fanatical Robert Ley, the Reich Organization Leader (and head of the German Labour Front), to reinvigorate the Party and extend its reach, underpinning his second source of power and making him a figure of crucial importance.⁴

There were limits, nevertheless, to Bormann’s power. He could not prevent other leading figures in the regime having direct access to Hitler and exerting their own influence on him. And even within the Party organization, he faced constraints. He was not wholly successful in extending his power over the forty or so regional Party bosses, the Gauleiter. Though nominally his subordinates, some of the Gauleiter, trusted ‘old fighters’ who had proved their worth since the early days of the Party, in many cases had a direct line to Hitler which limited Bormann’s control. One Gauleiter who epitomized the difficulties in imposing any centralized control – or any control at all, for that matter, even from the Wehrmacht authorities in his region – was Erich Koch, who ran his domain in East Prussia as if it were his personal fiefdom.⁵ Like most other Gauleiter, Koch had been appointed a Reich Defence Commissar, giving him extensive powers in the organization of civil defence and the possibility, therefore, which he readily exploited, to interfere in non-Party matters in his province. Already in mid-July 1944 Koch was using his direct access to Hitler to block a proposal by Goebbels, which the Propaganda Minister and Gauleiter of Berlin had negotiated with the railway authorities, to evacuate from the endangered East Prussia around 170,000 Berliners who had taken refuge there from the bombing in the capital city. Koch gained Hitler’s approval to restrict the evacuation to 55,000 women and children from a small number of districts most threatened by Soviet air raids. It was the first of a number of interventions by Koch to prevent evacuation from his region, causing administrative confusion and, more importantly, with fateful consequences for East Prussians.⁶

The massive accretion of power by Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS, Chief of the German Police, Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Nationhood, and Reich Minister of the Interior) had given him mastery of the regime’s entire elaborate repressive apparatus throughout occupied Europe. The sinister figure wielding such immense power was still only in his early forties, a strange, cranky individual – but also a fanatical ideologue. He was unimpressive in appearance, no more than medium height, slender in build, his pale face dominated by his trimmed moustache, rimless glasses, receding chin and extreme variant of the short-back-and-sides haircut. He treated his SS leaders with fussy paternalism and urged upon them the virtues of ‘decency’ at the same time as presiding over the orchestrated murder of millions of Jews in the ‘Final Solution’. As the most feared Nazi leader beneath Hitler, Himmler had even expanded his power within Germany itself when he replaced Wilhelm Frick as Reich Minister of the Interior in August 1943. This move had rendered redundant his aim to create a Reich Ministry of Security, detaching the police from the Ministry of the Interior and placing them under his leadership.⁷ In July 1944, the power-hungry Reichsführer-SS was edging towards new important extensions of his empire, this time in the sphere of the Wehrmacht. Rivalry with the Wehrmacht had always held in check the growth of Himmler’s own military wing, the Waffen-SS. But on 15 July, Hitler gave Himmler responsibility for the indoctrination in Nazi ideals and control over military discipline of fifteen planned new army divisions.⁸ It was a significant inroad into the domain of the Wehrmacht.⁹

Joseph Goebbels (Reich Minister of Propaganda, and head of the Party’s propaganda organization), and Albert Speer (Reich Minister for Armaments and War Production) had utilized the needs of the war to emphasize their own indispensability to Hitler. Losses at the front had left troop numbers severely depleted.¹⁰ Destruction of equipment urgently required a concentrated armaments drive. Labour had to be combed from all possible sources for Wehrmacht recruitment as well as for armaments work. Not least, new efforts in propaganda were vital to mobilize the population, compelling them to recognize the need for utmost self-sacrifice in the interests of the war. Yet here the frustrations with Hitler’s leadership, within a framework of unquestioned loyalty, were evident. They centred on Hitler’s unwillingness to move to the requirements of all-out ‘total war’, meaning much more drastic measures to maximize recruitment to the Wehrmacht and war production.

Goebbels – a diminutive figure in his late forties with a pronounced limp in his right foot (a deformity of which he was very self-conscious), one of the most intelligent Nazi leaders, possessed of a cruel wit, ruthless and dynamic, organizationally able, a fervent Hitler acolyte who in his mastery of propaganda managed to combine utter cynicism with extreme, brutal ideological fanaticism – had been pressing for a move to ‘total war’ (to maximize every conceivable resource of hitherto unused manpower and drastically curtail any activity not essential to the war economy) since February 1943, in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad. Speer had joined him at that time in urging a reorganization and revitalization of the war effort at home. Goebbels most of all aspired to take over the running of the home front, leaving Hitler to concentrate on military matters. But Hitler had commissioned little beyond token steps and total war had remained largely a propaganda slogan. In a long private meeting with Hitler on 21 June 1944, just before the Soviet breakthrough on the eastern front, but with the successful Allied landings in northern France plainly constituting a major threat, Goebbels once more vehemently pressed the case for total war and a drastic overhaul of the political and military command structure. Again Hitler demurred. He wanted, he said, to proceed for the time being ‘along the evolutionary, not revolutionary, way’.¹¹

The depletion of labour resources as a consequence of the enemy inroads from the west and the east had prompted Albert Speer temporarily to join forces with Goebbels in July in the attempt to persuade Hitler to adopt total-war measures aimed at dredging out remaining reserves of manpower. Speer, only thirty-nine years of age, good-looking, cultured and highly intelligent, a superb manager and organizer, and from the outset intensely ambitious, had rapidly established himself in the 1930s as a ‘court favourite’ by exploiting Hitler’s passion for grandiose building projects. Before he was thirty he gained Hitler’s commission to design the Reich Party Rally stadium at Nuremberg. In 1937 he was given responsibility for turning Berlin into a capital befitting a master-race. In the last year of peace he delivered, on time and at breakneck speed, Hitler’s imposing new Reich Chancellery. Hitler saw in Speer the architect of genius he himself had wanted to become. Speer for his part revered Hitler; and he was intoxicated by the power that the favour of the Dictator brought.

When Fritz Todt, in charge of weapon and munitions production, mysteriously died in an air crash in February 1942, Hitler, somewhat surprisingly, appointed Speer to be his new Armaments Minister, endowed with extensive powers. Since then, Speer had masterminded an astonishing rise in armaments production. But he knew the limits had been reached. He could not compete with Allied superiority.¹² In a memorandum written to Hitler on 12 July, Speer purported to accept the Dictator’s claim that the current crisis could be overcome within some four months through new weapons, notably the A4 rocket (soon to be renamed the V2). And he agreed that, despite all difficulties, new recruits were potentially available from different sectors of the economy, including armaments, to replenish the Wehrmacht. At the same time, Speer argued, everything had to be done to strengthen the workforce in the armaments industry, and not simply through more foreign workers conscripted from across the Nazi empire. It was essential to make total-war demands on the population. People were ready to make the necessary sacrifices to their daily lives, he stated – a point that internal SD opinion reports seemed to back up.¹³ He suggested that women could be freed up for work in great numbers and that organizational improvements could produce new labour supplies. He recommended tough measures to ‘revolutionize’ living conditions. A proclamation on the mobilizing of last reserves would produce enthusiasm of a kind not experienced since the Wars of Liberation from Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, he thought.¹⁴

Hitler finally gave an indication that he accepted the need for action. The somewhat colourless head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans-Heinrich Lammers, gave notice on 17 July that Hitler wanted a meeting of ministerial representatives most directly concerned about ‘a further strengthened deployment of men and women for defence of the Reich’ to take place four days later.¹⁵

Leaving no stone unturned in the pressure for total-war measures, Goebbels took up the charge on 18 July, following Speer’s lead, in a manoeuvre plainly coordinated with the Armaments Minister, and pushing in the same direction.¹⁶ In his memorandum to Hitler, Goebbels urged wide-ranging powers to be invested in one man (meaning himself, of course), who would work through the Gauleiter at regional level to galvanize action. He claimed that through the rigorous measures he had in mind he could produce fifty new divisions for the Wehrmacht in under four months.¹⁷

Speer then added his own second memorandum just over a week after the first, providing figures on current manpower in armaments, administration and business, pointing out the organizational mistakes that had allowed large-scale unproductive hoarding of labour, and indicating potential sources of recruitment to strengthen the Wehrmacht. He estimated (though the figures were hotly contested by those who would have to yield manpower) that as many as 4.3 million extra men could be found for the Wehrmacht through an efficiency drive. Though there was a need to protect the skilled workforce in armaments – a self-interested plea – he was adamant that the manpower problem for the needs of the front could be solved, but only if responsibility were given to a ‘personality’, endowed with plenipotentiary powers, and prepared to work with energy and dynamism to overcome vested interests and coordinate the necessary organizational changes in the Wehrmacht and Reich bureaucracy to allow for a rigorous exploitation of available human resources.¹⁸

Speer was making a scarcely veiled request to be handed control over the coordination of armaments and personnel within all sections of the Wehrmacht to add to his existing powers over the production of arms. Had this ambition been fulfilled, Speer would, through his armaments empire, have become the supremo of the total-war drive.¹⁹ What impact this memorandum might have had on Hitler, and on the meeting planned for 21 July to discuss total war, at precisely this juncture cannot be known. For there was no time to present this second memorandum to Hitler before events on the very day it had been composed, 20 July 1944, concentrated the Dictator’s mind.²⁰

II

What hopes Germans still harboured as they reeled from the events on the western then the eastern front in summer 1944 crystallized in what had emerged as the last remaining war aim: defence of the Reich. The grand, utopian ideas of German rule stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals had long since been forgotten, except by lingering fantasists. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, and almost surreptitiously, the once heady vistas of a glorious ‘final victory’, however inchoate they had been, had yielded to bitter reality and to a limited and defensive objective: keeping the enemy from German soil. The time of the devastating blitzkrieg offensives, when the Wehrmacht would cut through weaker enemies like a knife through butter, was long past. In a war that had become a protracted rearguard against powerful enemies with immense resources, Hitler’s limitations as a warlord became ever clearer. At the same time, what he saw as the aim of the war, or how it might end, had become utterly opaque.

He symbolized, of course, an indomitable will to hold onto every inch of territory, never to capitulate. And he could still enthuse those in his presence with the strength of his own will, and with his unquenchable optimism. Hardened military commanders could begin an audience with Hitler sceptically and come out of it reinvigorated. Others, however, were struck by the absence of clear thinking on strategy and tactics. When General Friedrich Hoßbach met Hitler on the evening of 19 July 1944, to be given command of the 4th Army, he saw the Dictator, whose Wehrmacht adjutant he had once been, as ‘bent and prematurely aged’, unable to offer any far-reaching strategic goal and highly superficial in his comments on the tactical position. Hoßbach simply accepted the commission, told Hitler he would act on his judgement when he assessed the situation, and would do his utmost to recover a position lost in the destruction of Army Group Centre.²¹

Numerous military commanders had by this time contested Hitler’s decisions to no avail. It was impossible to sustain a reasoned counter-argument in his domineering presence. As supreme leader, he would brook no opposition. His right of command was accepted by all. And those in positions of authority continued to try to implement his orders. But heady rhetoric, and sacking generals for failing to achieve the unachievable, hardly amounted to a strategy, let alone a clearly defined set of aims. In particular, and crucially, he had no exit strategy from the war in which he had embroiled his country. Repelling the Allied invasion, he had once told his military advisers, would be decisive for the war.²² When the invasion proved successful, however, he drew no conclusions, other than to fight on. Outright victory was no longer attainable. Even Hitler could see that. But negotiating with the enemy from a position of weakness could not be entertained for a second. That left fighting on and hoping something would turn up. And that meant playing for time.

Hitler’s military right hand and mouthpiece, General Alfred Jodl, head of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, reflected the absence of clear strategic goals in addressing his staff on 3 July 1944:

Our own war leadership, on all fronts: focuses now on gaining time. A few months can prove simply decisive for saving the Fatherland…. Our own armaments justify great expectations…. Everything is being prepared, with results in the foreseeable future. So the demand is for fighting, defending, holding, psychological strengthening of troops and leadership. Nail down the front where it now stands.²³

There were many in high positions in the Wehrmacht who shared such a stance. Shoring up stretched defences, holding on, keeping the enemy at bay, rebuilding lines while feverish attempts were made to maximize armaments production, find troop reinforcements and produce new weapons, became ends in themselves, rather than stages on the way to a accomplishment of a preconceived military and political strategy. Colonel-General Heinz Guderian, the redoubtable tank commander, now Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, thus approvingly remarked that, in replacing Field-Marshal Ernst Busch (an ultra-loyalist, but made the scapegoat for grave mistakes in the disaster that had befallen Army Group Centre) by the tough Field-Marshal Walter Model, Hitler had found ‘the best possible man to perform the fantastically difficult task of reconstructing a line in the centre of the Eastern Front’.²⁴ This was, however, not a strategic goal, but merely a ‘fire-fighting’ operation by the man who, for the number of difficult positions he was asked to rescue, became known as ‘Hitler’s fireman’. Most military commanders, whatever their varied level of enthusiasm for Hitler’s regime, acted similarly to Model in doing their utmost to carry out their duties professionally, and with iron discipline, to the limits of their ability and, at least publicly, to ask no questions about political objectives. Those bold enough to voice any views that, however realistic, did not fit the prescribed optimism demanded by Hitler found themselves replaced, as did the highly experienced Commander-in-Chief West, Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, and the able Commander of Panzer Group West, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, at the beginning of July.

In private, leading Wehrmacht officers were divided in their views on war prospects. Alongside the loyalists, and the front commanders who seldom had the time for lengthy contemplation and, in any case, had little perspective on the overall position, were those whose views on Germany’s military and political prospects were far from rosy. Hitler himself had, for years, castigated the allegedly defeatist and negative attitudes that, in his jaundiced opinion, characterized the General Staff of the Army, responsible for overall operational planning in the east. His mounting and bitter disagreements with the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, had led to the latter’s replacement in September 1942 by the energetic and dynamic Kurt Zeitzler. But, worn out by the constant conflict with Hitler that had reached its climax with the destruction of Army Group Centre, Zeitzler suffered a nervous breakdown at the end of June 1944. He had just told Hitler that the war was militarily lost and that ‘something had to be done to end it’.²⁵

Zeitzler was expressing a sentiment then widespread within the General Staff, according to a letter composed in his defence by his adjutant, Oberstleutnant Günther Smend, on 1 August 1944. Smend had been arrested for his connection with the Stauffenberg plot and would be sentenced to death on 14 August and executed on 8 September. His letter may well have been preceded by torture and somewhat exaggerated the subversive feeling at General Staff Headquarters. It gives, nevertheless, a clear insight into the mood. Facing almost certain execution, Smend had no obvious reason to dissemble. Doubts about a final victory had mounted, wrote Smend, since the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943. The widening gulf between the recommendations of the General Staff and Hitler’s decisions had given rise to strong criticism of the Führer, notably in the Operations Section, and this had not been dampened by senior officers. Indeed, the head of the section, General Adolf Heusinger, had himself been party to the condemnation of Hitler’s war leadership.²⁶ There was no longer any firm belief in Hitler. The mood in the entire General Staff was one of despair, prompted especially by the disasters in the east but also by the bad news on all fronts, leading to the conclusion that the war was lost. Critical mistakes had been made, and Hitler was seen as a military liability. On the day of his breakdown, Zeitzler had, according to Smend, been blunt in his assessment of the situation in speaking to Hitler. He had recommended the appointment of Himmler as a ‘homeland dictator’ to drive through the total-war effort that had been propagated but not implemented with the necessary rigour. Thereafter, with Zeitzler out of action and the General Staff effectively leaderless for almost a month, the mood grew that ‘the Führer can’t do it’. Opinion hardened that ‘it’s all madness’. Young officers, especially, held Hitler responsible. It was common knowledge, wrote Smend, that ideas of eliminating Hitler were in circulation.²⁷

On 20 July 1944 such ideas – engendered, adumbrated and elaborated in a conspiracy involving prominent figures in the armed forces, military intelligence, the Foreign Ministry, and other sectors of the regime’s leadership – culminated in the attempt on Hitler’s life undertaken by Count Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the subsequent failed coup d’état launched from the headquarters of the Replacement Army in Berlin. Stauffenberg had placed a bomb under Hitler’s table at a military briefing just after noon that day at Führer Headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb had exploded, killing or badly injuring most of those present in the wooden barrack-hut. But Hitler had survived with only minor injuries. Once it had been plainly established that Hitler was alive, support had drained away from the coup planned to follow his presumed death, which collapsed in the course of the evening. Stauffenberg and three other close collaborators were shot by a firing squad late that night. The other plotters were soon rounded up. Most were tortured, subjected to appalling show trials, and then barbarously executed.

Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt marked an internal shift in the history of the Third Reich.²⁸ With the failure of the plot came not only the fearful reprisals against those involved but also a sharp radicalization of the regime, both in repression and in mobilization. The aftermath of the failed plot had a significant impact on the governmental structures of the regime, on the mentalities of the civilian and military elite (to some extent, too, on the ordinary public), and on remaining possibilities both for ‘regime change’ and for ending the war.

III

Looking back during his post-war interrogations in May 1945, Göring thought it had been impossible to organize an effective anti-Hitler movement at the time of the bomb plot.²⁹ So, in the same month, did General Hoßbach, Hitler’s one-time Wehrmacht adjutant. According to Hoßbach, the attempt on Hitler’s life had no basis of support in the mass of the people or the Wehrmacht. ‘Despite all setbacks, Hitler still enjoyed high popularity in 1944,’ he adjudged. The association of Hitler with patriotic support for the country at war was a strong bond, making it extremely difficult ‘to topple the god’.³⁰ Indeed, those engaged in the plot to kill Hitler knew only too well that their actions lacked popular backing.³¹ Stauffenberg himself accepted that he would ‘go down in German history as a traitor’.³² The immediate reactions to the events of 20 July lend credence to such views.

Among ordinary Germans, there was a widespread sense of deep shock and consternation at the news of the failed assassination. Effusive outpourings of loyalty and support for the Führer were immediately registered in all quarters, alongside furious outrage at the ‘tiny clique’ of ‘criminal’ officers (as Hitler had labelled them) who had perpetrated such a vile deed, and rank disbelief that such base treachery could have been possible. It would, of course, have been near suicidal to voice regrets in public that Hitler had survived – though certainly that was the private feeling of a good many people. So the recorded expressions of support inevitably provide a distorted impression of attitudes. This was even more the case with the extremes of pro-Hitler fervour emanating from the big ‘loyalty rallies’ staged within days all over Germany by a revitalized Nazi Party straining every sinew to mobilize the population by orchestrating ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations of joy at the Führer’s survival and outrage at the monstrous attempt to assassinate him.³³ Even so, all the indications are that there was an upsurge of genuine pro-Hitler feeling in the immediate aftermath of the attack on his life.

The SD took immediate soundings of opinion on the day after the assassination attempt. ‘All reports agree that the announcement of the attempt has produced the strongest feelings of shock, dismay, anger and rage,’ ran the summary of initial reactions. Women were said to have broken into tears of joy in shops or on the open streets in Königsberg and Berlin at Hitler’s survival. ‘Thank God the Führer is alive,’ was a common expression of relief. ‘What would we have done without the Führer?’ people asked. Hitler was seen as the only possible bulwark against Bolshevism. Many thought his death would have meant the loss of the Reich. It was at first surmised that the strike against Hitler was the work of enemy agents, though this presumption soon gave way to recognition that it had been treachery from within, and fury at the fact that this had come from German officers.³⁴

Reports from the regional propaganda offices across the country told the same story. People were shaken by what had happened, but it had strengthened trust in the Führer. Some officers, it was said, felt the reputation of the army to have been so besmirched by the treachery that they wanted to transfer to the Waffen-SS. There was much speculation about how the attack could have happened: the Wehrmacht had been given too much freedom, and the Führer kept uninformed about what was happening. He had been too lenient towards his generals, simply dismissing rather than executing them when they had failed in their duties. It was taken for granted that a ‘new wind’ would now blow. There was a demand for severe reprisals against the ‘traitors’ and for them to be publicly named. Wild rumours circulated implying the involvement of a number of leading military figures, including the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had recently been replaced as Commander-in-Chief West, and even Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.³⁵ People could not understand how such a plot could have gone unnoticed. They were disturbed that at the very heart of the army there had been those working against the Führer’s intentions and actions.³⁶ It was not long before sabotage from within came to be seen as the obvious reason for the recent disastrous collapse of Army Group Centre.³⁷

Coloured though such reports were, they nevertheless represented strands of genuine opinion. People sent in money in thanksgiving for Hitler’s survival. Substantial amounts were collected and passed to the NSV to provide for children orphaned by the war.³⁸ One woman, the wife of a worker and mother of several children, accompanied her gift of 40 Reich Marks to the Red Cross with a note to her local Party office, stating that her donation was ‘Out of great love of the Führer, because nothing happened to him.’ She was happy, she wrote, ‘that our Führer has been preserved for us. May he live long yet and lead us to victory.’³⁹ A corporal apologized to his wife for being unable to send any money home at the beginning of August since he had donated it all to a Wehrmacht collection to show gratitude for the Führer. Many, he said, had given much more. However obliged they might have felt to contribute to the collection, the level of generosity was beyond what was necessary.⁴⁰

Many letters and contemporary entries in private diaries reflect unforced pro-Hitler feelings. ‘I don’t think I’m wrong when I say in such a sad hour for all of us: “Germany stands or falls in this struggle with the person of Adolf Hitler,” ’ ran one diary entry for 21 July from a young pro-Nazi, a prisoner of war in Texas. ‘If this attack on Adolf Hitler had been successful, I am convinced that our homeland would now be in chaos.’⁴¹ This was no exception. More than two-thirds of prisoners of war in American captivity indicated their belief in Hitler in the weeks after the assassination attempt, a rise on levels prior to the bomb plot.⁴² Faith in the Führer was also still strong among serving frontline soldiers. ‘The high number of joyful expressions about the salvation of the Führer’ in letters home from soldiers at the front was remarked upon by the censor.⁴³ It was as well to be extremely careful in expressing any negative views in letters that might be picked up by the censor. But there was no need for effusive pro-Hitler comments. Similar sentiments could be read in the letters that soldiers received. ‘I cannot imagine how things would have developed without the Führer in view of the present situation in our country,’ wrote one woman in Munich to her husband.⁴⁴ A major in the supply unit of an infantry division behind the lines headed his diary entry for 20 July: ‘Evening. Bad news. Attack on the Führer’, noting next day, after hearing Hitler’s late-night broadcast, that it was only a small clique of officers, and that a purge would follow. ‘It’s a crying shame’, he added, that this should take place, and with the Russians ‘at the gates’.⁴⁵ Another officer, on the western front, and evidently sceptical about the course of the war, next day revised his initial view that it had been merely a small officers’ clique and saw the attack as ‘an entire plot against A[dolf] H[itler]’, denoting a split in the Wehrmacht between loyalists and opponents. He recalled someone who had known Stauffenberg speaking of him as an excellent officer and courageous soldier. But he was ‘evidently politically stupid’, he added.⁴⁶

In the upper ranks of the army, too, the response was highly supportive of the regime.⁴⁷ There was immediate dismay and condemnation of Stauffenberg’s strike at the head of the armed forces in the midst of a world war.⁴⁸ The reaction of Colonel-General Georg-Hans Reinhardt provides a telling example. He was an experienced and capable commander who remained a Hitler loyalist despite having to comply with the absurd orders from the Führer in late June 1944 that prevented the retreat of his 3rd Panzer Army, resulting in its destruction by the Soviets. He was distraught at the news of the attempt on Hitler’s life.⁴⁹ ‘Thank God he is saved,’ was his immediate reaction, in consternation and disbelief that such a thing had been possible. ‘Completely broken’, he added next day. ‘Incomprehensible! What has this done to our officer class? We can only feel deepest shame.’⁵⁰ His belief in Hitler remained intact, as did his sense of duty at fulfilling the will of the Führer. ‘Duty calls. I will go where the Führer commands,’ he wrote on taking over command of the remnants of Army Group Centre a month later. ‘It’s a matter of justifying his trust.’⁵¹ General Hermann Balck, a teak-hard tank commander and seasoned campaigner on the eastern front, a strong loyalist and highly regarded by Hitler for his dynamic leadership of armoured formations, had known and admired Stauffenberg, but was forthright in his condemnation of him as a ‘criminal’. His act, which Balck regarded as comparable with the killing of Caesar by Brutus, had made Germany’s difficult situation worse. He saw the causes in a long-standing inability within the officer corps to place ‘oath and honour’ above all else. The ‘General Staff’s revolt’ was ‘shameful’ for the officer corps. But it appeared to be a ‘cleansing storm’ at just the right time. Now there would have to be a merciless purge of all conspirators, a tabula rasa. ‘For us it means attaining victory despite everything under the banner of the Führer,’ he concluded.⁵²

Officers who were far from outright Nazis in their sentiments still faced the perceived dilemma that, even in the plight that had befallen Germany, killing Hitler appeared an intensely unpatriotic act which undermined the fighting front, was morally wrong in itself and constituted a betrayal of the oath of loyalty to the Führer. Such attitudes, whatever the doubts about Hitler’s leadership qualities, made Germany’s military leaders for the most part instinctive loyalists. Proxy for many who felt this way was General Hoßbach, later to be sacked by Hitler as commander of the 4th Army during the last battles for East Prussia in early 1945. Reflecting on the bomb plot less than a fortnight after Germany’s capitulation in May that year, and in full recognition of the calamitous losses and colossal destruction of the last months of the war, Hoßbach offered no realistic alternative to what had taken place. He accepted the patriotic need for the armed forces to ‘redeem Germany from the domination of a criminal clique’. But how this might be achieved he left uncertain. He condemned the attempt to overthrow Hitler’s regime by assassination and coup d’état as ‘immoral and un-Christian’, a ‘stab in the back’, and the ‘most disgraceful treason against our army’.⁵³ In rejecting force, however, his only alternative seemed to presuppose a collective challenge to Hitler’s disastrous leadership by the generals. Since he acknowledged that the bonds with Hitler, both within the Wehrmacht and among the people generally, were still very strong in 1944, it is not clear how he imagined that such a collective challenge might have been possible.

The revival of support for Hitler personally and the corresponding shrill demand for severe reprisals against the ‘traitors’ and a drastic cleansing of those allegedly sabotaging the war effort crucially gave the regime a new lease of life at a most critical juncture. It offered the opportunity, which Nazi leaders were only too keen to grasp, for a thoroughgoing radicalization of every aspect of regime and society, aimed at imbuing in a country with its back to the wall the true National Socialist ideals and fighting spirit necessary to fend off rapacious enemies.

IV

The days immediately following the failed assassination attempt saw extended power pass to Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann. Speer, the fourth big baron, found himself squeezed in the contest dominated by this trio. Even so, his own position, in charge of armaments, still left him irreplaceable and retaining formidable influence. Between them, these four men controlled most of the avenues of power and did much to direct the course of the regime in its final months. They did so, however, within the framework of Hitler’s own supreme authority, which none sought to challenge. On the contrary, their own individual power-bases were derived directly from it. In this way, the bonds with the Führer, which had been a decisive element of his charismatic authority from the early days of the Nazi movement and had become a constituent element of the regime after 1933, remained intact and prevented any internal collapse. The corrosive impact of charismatic authority on the structures of government was also undiminished. Still, now as before, there was no unified government beneath Hitler. The quadrumvirate, far from acting as a coherent body, were to the last effectively at war with each other, trying to use access to Hitler to jockey for power and compete with each other for resources and expanded areas of competence.

Hitler took the first major step in radicalization within hours of surviving the bomb blast in his East Prussian headquarters in appointing Himmler to replace General Friedrich Fromm as Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army.⁵⁴ The headquarters of the Replacement Army had been the epicentre of the plans for the intended coup d’état, and, despite his endeavours to prove his loyalty – once he knew Hitler had survived – by turning on the plotters and having Stauffenberg and three of his co-conspirators shot by a firing squad late in the evening of 20 July, Fromm was himself soon arrested and, some months later, executed.⁵⁵ The Replacement Army was viewed as the Augean Stables that had to be cleansed. In Himmler, the man was at hand to take on this task.

Himmler had, in reality, failed as head of security in the Reich to protect Hitler from the assassination attempt or to uncover the plot that lay behind it. Hitler either ignored or overlooked these omissions in turning now to Himmler to place his stamp on a central office of the Wehrmacht. Himmler, as we noted, had already a foot in the door of the Replacement Army’s sphere of competence on gaining responsibility for ideological ‘education’ on 15 July. His influence was now, however, substantially extended as he brought under his aegis one of the most important positions within the Wehrmacht, on taking charge of armaments, army discipline, prisoners of war, reserve personnel and training. With the Replacement Army, almost 2 million men in conventional military service were placed under Himmler’s control.⁵⁶ It was a significant addition to his already enormous range of powers.

Himmler’s impact was soon felt. He immediately countermanded Fromm’s orders of 20 July and started to fill the key positions in his new domain with trusted SS lieutenants, making the head of the SS operations head office (SS-Führungshauptamt), Hans Jüttner, his deputy in running the Replacement Army.⁵⁷ He then embarked upon a series of pep-talks for army officers. While short on specifics, these speeches gave a clear impression of the changed climate.

As early as 21 July, Himmler addressed officers under his command as Chief of Army Armaments, an area which had now fallen within his own imperium. In 1918, he began, the revolt of the soldiers’ councils had cost Germany victory. This time, there was no danger of anything similar happening. The mass of the people, in bombed-out cities and factories, were of unprecedented ‘decency’ (one of Himmler’s favourite words) in their behaviour. But now, for the first time in history, a German colonel had broken his oath and struck at his supreme warlord. He knew it would come to this one day, he said, vaguely glossing over what he might have been expected to have gleaned of the background to the plot. The attempt to kill the Führer and overthrow the regime had been suppressed. But it had been a grave danger. It had been more like Honduras or South America than Germany. The previous afternoon, he had received the mandate from the Führer to restore order and take over the Home Army. He had accepted ‘as an unconditional follower of the Führer’ who had ‘never in my life been guilty of disloyalty and never will be’. He had taken on the task as a German soldier and not as the commander-in-chief of a rival organization, the Waffen-SS. He now had to clean up. He would, he went on, restore trust and bring about a return to values of loyalty, obedience and comradeship. It was sometimes necessary to go through hell, he declared, but the supreme leadership had strong nerves and knew how to act brutally when necessary. He ended by outlining the meaning of the war: confirmation of Germany as a world power; the creation of a Germanic Reich to grow to 120 millions; and a new order within that Reich. An ‘invasion from Asia’ would recur every fifty, hundred or two hundred years. But there would not always be an Adolf Hitler to help repel it. The necessity, therefore, was to prepare a bulwark against future attacks by colonizing the east through German settlement. ‘We shall learn to rule foreign peoples,’ he stated. ‘We would have to be deeply ashamed if we were now to become too weak.’⁵⁸

Two further speeches by Himmler to officers in the next few days had much the same tenor: the recourse to the baleful precedent of 1918, the fulfilment of duty this time by the people and almost all the army but the shame ‘a colonel’ had brought on the officers corps, the lack of loyalty of some officers, and the need for ruthless action against those guilty of cowardice. The emphasis was once more on the war aims that could not be given up – including, now, mastery over the Continent to afford protection in future wars through the extension of defence frontiers.⁵⁹ The unbounded ruthlessness that was more than ever to become the Reichsführer-SS’s trademark in subsequent months was evident in his message to his liaison officer in Hitler’s headquarters, Hermann Fegelein, that at the sign of any disintegration among divisions serving in the east (which he put down to sedition spread by Communist infiltration) ‘reception detachments’ (Auffangkommandos) of ‘the most brutal commanders’ were to shoot ‘anyone opening his mouth’.⁶⁰

Himmler’s authority to intervene in what had hitherto been army matters was widened still further by another Führer decree on 2 August, giving the Reichsführer-SS powers, through radical restructuring, to inspect and ‘simplify’ (meaning reduce in size, producing savings in manpower) ‘the entire organizational and administrative basis of the army, the Waffen-SS, the police and the Organisation Todt’ to produce more manpower for the army.⁶¹ The last of these bodies, the OT, was the huge construction complex, whose massive workforce Speer had now agreed to expose to the Reichsführer-SS’s new powers for labour saving.⁶² Cuts in what he saw as a bloated army administration had been part of Himmler’s intention from the start, and he was able through his excisions to raise another 500,000 troops for the front and create fifteen Volksgrenadier (People’s Grenadiers) divisions from new recruits.⁶³ With this new authority, Himmler was now a party to the power-struggle at the top of the regime for control of the new total-war drive.

Goebbels was a second key winner from the events of 20 July. The crucial role that he had played in crushing the uprising in Berlin was acknowledged by Hitler. Under the impact of the attack on his life, and the shock to the system that this represented, Hitler was now at last prepared to grant to his Propaganda Minister the position that Goebbels had been seeking for well over a year, and finally make him Reich Plenipotientiary for the Total War Effort.

The meeting of ministers or their representatives chaired by Lammers that took place on 22 July, a day later than had originally been arranged, amounted practically to a ritual acclamation of Goebbels as the new total-war supremo.⁶⁴ At the very outset of the meeting, Lammers – safe in the knowledge that the Reich Chancellery, over which he presided, had been exempted by Hitler from any inroads into its personnel – proposed the Propaganda Minister for the task of mobilizing the civilian sector. Keitel, Bormann and all others present supported the proposition. Goebbels spoke for an hour, portraying the issue as threefold: providing new manpower through cutting back on Wehrmacht administration, drastically reducing the state bureaucracy, and a vaguely couched ‘reform of public life’. The Party, Goebbels acknowledged, did not fall within his purview. That was Bormann’s domain, for him alone to handle. Combing out the military sector was also ruled out of the proposed operations. This was set aside for the new Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Heinrich Himmler.

Speer, who had tried hard in mid-July to press for total war, found himself now largely on the sidelines. His memorandum of 12 July, received, on Hitler’s instructions, only little attention to prevent the meeting becoming immersed in detail. When Speer spoke, in fact, the figures he gave for potential savings from state bureaucracy were immediately contradicted by Lammers and the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart. Vested interests came into play straight away as Stuckart emphasized how little spare capacity for manpower savings existed in the state bureaucracy. Goebbels steered the meeting away from a likely descent into detail and back to the general issue. For the Propaganda Minister, as he plainly stated, total war was ‘not only a material, but especially a psychological problem’, and he acknowledged that some of the measures taken would ‘in part have merely optical character’. Ideological mobilization was, as ever, his chief concern. The meeting ended, predictably, with Lammers agreeing to propose Goebbels for the position as Plenipotentiary next day, when most of those present would gather again to report to Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters.⁶⁵

Goebbels was happy. ‘All those taking part’, he jotted in his diary,

are of the opinion that the Führer must provide the most extensive plenipotentiary powers, on the one hand for the Wehrmacht, on the other for the state and public life. Himmler is proposed for the Wehrmacht, I, myself, for the state and public life. Bormann is to get corresponding full powers to engage the Party in this great totalizing process, and Speer has already received the powers to intensify the armaments process.⁶⁶

When the meeting reassembled in Hitler’s presence the following afternoon, Göring and Himmler were also in attendance. Göring protested in vain at yet a further diminution of his power in handing Himmler responsibility for matters which should properly, he claimed, be those of the commanders-in-chief of the Wehrmacht. Hitler intervened to back Himmler. The resulting experience could then be utilized by Göring and Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, who, as Commanders-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe and Navy, continued to be responsible for their own domains. The compromise was accepted. For the rest, Hitler, who had evidently carefully read Goebbels’ memorandum of 18 July, backed the Propaganda Minister and the proposal for drastic new measures in the total-war effort. ‘The Führer declares that there is no further use in debating specific points,’ Goebbels recorded. ‘Something fundamental has to be done or we can’t win this war.’ Hitler’s position, he noted, was ‘very radical and incisive’. In what would become a cliché in the last months, Hitler spoke of the new radicalization as a return to the Party’s roots. Characteristically, too, he played on the populist assumption ‘that the people wanted a total war in the most comprehensive fashion and that we cannot contradict the will of the people in the long run’. Goebbels was delighted at the outcome, and at Hitler’s changed approach. ‘It is interesting to observe’, he commented, ‘how the Führer has changed since my last talk with him on the Obersalzberg [on 21 June]. Events, especially on the day of the assassination attempt and those on the eastern front, have brought him to the clarity of the decisions.’⁶⁷

Two days later, on 25 July, Hitler signed the decree making Goebbels Plenipotentiary for Total War.⁶⁸ Goebbels was elated over his triumph – a far greater success, he claimed, than he had imagined. His press secretary, Wilfred von Oven, thought he was now ‘the first man in the Third Reich after Hitler’.⁶⁹ Three times in his diary the Propaganda Minister himself spoke of ‘an internal war dictatorship’, implying that this, his coveted goal, would now be in his hands.⁷⁰ It was a fine conceit, but Goebbels was aware that he would remain, if with strengthened authority, only one, not the sole, source of power beneath Hitler and that, as ever, this power would be wielded in competition, not unison. The very wording of the decree, as he recognized, limited the scope of his powers. He could issue directives to the ‘highest Reich authorities’, but any decrees of implementation that arose had to be negotiated with Lammers, Bormann and Himmler (in his capacity as General Plenipotentiary for Reich Administration, which had fallen to him when he became Minister of the Interior). He was dependent upon Bormann’s support for measures involving the Party. And in the case of unresolvable conflict arising from his orders, Hitler reserved his own authority to make any necessary decision. Some exemptions were made on Hitler’s express authority. The personnel of the Reich, Presidial and Party chancelleries, the Führer’s motor vehicle staff, and those involved in planning the rebuilding of Berlin, Munich and Linz were excluded.⁷¹ And a major area, the army, had, of course, from the beginning been carved off and given over to Himmler.

Undeterred, Goebbels presided over a veritable torrent of activity in subsequent weeks, dispatching instructions to all Gauleiter in a telephone conference each midday.⁷² He had to contend with numerous obstacles and vested interests, which he did not always surmount. And, however drastic his interventions, there were in fact fewer slack areas of the economy able to provide extra manpower than he had anticipated, while some of his ‘rationalizations’ proved to be inefficient. In some cases, Hitler himself intervened to limit the cuts that Goebbels sought to impose. Through Bormann, he requested that the Propaganda Minister consider in each case whether the ends justified the means, if this entailed significant disturbance to public services such as postal deliveries.⁷³ Even so, Goebbels raised nearly half a million extra men for the Wehrmacht by October, and around a million by the end of the year.⁷⁴ Many were, in fact, far from fit for military service and were in any case outweighed by German losses at the front over the same period.

As a means of countering the massive Allied superiority in numbers, it is obvious that Goebbels’ total-war effort, scraping the bottom of the barrel, was doomed. But in terms of prolonging the war, and enabling Germany to fight on when beset by disaster on all fronts, the total-war mobilization that flowed from Goebbels’ new powers certainly played its part. Through his measures, the German population were more dragooned, corralled and controlled than ever. Few people were inwardly enthused for long. Most, where they could gain no exemption, had little choice but to fall in with the new demands. Dislocation, atomization and resignation usually followed. Though the appetite for the ever more desperate struggle was diminishing, there was scant room for any alternative.

Martin Bormann, head of the Party’s administration, was the third big winner from the military disasters of the summer and, especially, of the radicalization of the regime that followed the shock of the attempt on Hitler’s life. He exploited the new crisis atmosphere to reinvigorate the Party and massively expand its power and his own power and influence in the process.⁷⁵ Even before the assassination attempt, he had started to sift through the Party organization to make manpower available for the Wehrmacht or the armaments industry.⁷⁶ Goebbels’ total-war initiative was, therefore, both timely for him and could be used to his own advantage. Goebbels set up a relatively small coordinating staff in Berlin, but envisaged the crucial work of the total-war effort being carried out through the Party agencies at regional level. This was grist to the mill for Bormann. He could utilize the changed climate to bolster the power of the Gauleiter in the regions at the expense of the state bureaucracy.

As Reich Defence Commissars (Reichsverteidigungskommissare, RVKs), the Gauleiter already possessed the scope to interfere in matters deemed to pertain to the defence of the Reich in their regions. This had been widened, a week before the assassination attempt, by a decree from Hitler stipulating what would prove to be unclear guidelines for collaboration of Wehrmacht and Party in military operational zones within the Reich. The decree opened the door to future interference by the RVKs in crucial issues within the operational zones such as the evacuation of the civilian population and immobilization or destruction of industry.⁷⁷ Bormann was now able to extend their power substantially in what was in effect a permanent crisis subsumed under the mantle of total war, authorizing them to issue directives to the state administration in areas which had previously been beyond their remit.⁷⁸ The Gauleiter, each of whom had acquired his position through readiness to use ‘elbow power’, were only too happy to comply with the invitation to throw their weight around more than ever.⁷⁹

The decentralization of power that this implies was, however, only one strand of what has been dubbed, slightly awkwardly, a policy of ‘partification’.⁸⁰ While backing the Gauleiter against the state authorities, Bormann was keen to extend the control of the Party Chancellery over the regional chieftains and to hold all reins of authority in crucial policy areas in his own hands. The dominance of the Party, which was happening with his backing in the regions, also took place in central administration: increasingly the Party Chancellery pushed the Reich Chancellery, under Lammers, out of key areas of policy. Lammers’ office as head of the Reich Chancellery, once so important as the link between the Reich ministers and Hitler, now lost all significance, serving from now on as little more than a postbox and distribution agency for orders laid down by Bormann. Lammers, completely sidelined, was to see Hitler for the last time in September.⁸¹ In despair, he would from the following March be incapable of work and driven to a near nervous breakdown.⁸² But in the second half of 1944, there was already no central government, in any conventional sense of the term. Bormann had usurped the Reich administration, combining his control over the Party with his proximity to Hitler to create an enhanced powerhouse in Führer Headquarters.

Even so, it was, however important, not the only powerhouse. ‘Partification’ at the expense of state bureaucracy created neither a streamlined administration nor an alternative central government as the Reich started to fragment. What it did do, however, was to enhance the organizational capacity of the Party and, above all, to strengthen massively the grip of the Party over government and society.⁸³

The key positions in the Nazi movement of Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann enabled them to take advantage of the climate of crisis, amid the shrill cries of treachery and thirst for revenge after the Stauffenberg plot, to promote their own power. Speer, in contrast, enjoyed no position or special standing within the Party. He lacked both a populist touch, such as Goebbels instinctively had, and the organizational base of Himmler or Bormann. There was much more of the technocrat of power than Party activist about him. He had joined forces with Goebbels in the attempt to persuade Hitler to introduce radical measures for total war. But that was before Stauffenberg’s bomb had gone off. His hopes of gaining control over the entire arena of army armaments were immediately dashed when Himmler was made head of the Replacement Army. Speer even had to contend with suspicions, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt, that he himself had been implicated.⁸⁴ And, in the swift moves to create a Plenipotentiary for Total War, Goebbels’ populism and élan caught Hitler’s mood while Speer’s drier assessment of the needs of the armaments industry took a back seat. Bormann’s control of the Party machinery and his conscious push to widen the remit of the Gauleiter, as RVKs, also weakened Speer since his own armaments drive invariably encountered the rooted interests of the provincial Party bosses and their frequent interventions at regional level.

Moreover, once the total-war push was under way, Speer quickly found himself up against his former ally Goebbels and the new alliance that the Propaganda Minister had forged with Bormann, who could usually engineer Hitler’s backing. The obvious question of demands on the scarce manpower located by the various ‘rationalization’ measures, whether this should be allocated to the Wehrmacht or to armaments production, had been characteristically avoided during the time of the short-lived Goebbels–Speer axis. As soon as the issue of power over the total-war effort had been resolved and the question of labour allocation became acute, Speer found himself on the defensive.⁸⁵ He had made powerful enemies in fighting for his own domain. Goebbels’ laconic comment on the Armaments Minister immediately after winning the battle was: ‘I think we have let this young man become somewhat too big.’⁸⁶

Speer’s standing with Hitler had also weakened. Not only was he no longer so obviously Hitler’s favourite; he had to struggle against the increased influence of his own ambitious subordinate, Karl Otto Saur, head of the technical office in Speer’s ministry who earlier in the year had been placed by Hitler in charge of air defence. It would be as well, nevertheless, not to interpret Speer’s relative loss of power in the top echelons of the regime – which the former Armaments Minister was keen to emphasize for posterity – as meaning that he had been ousted from all significant spheres of influence. He continued, in fact, to occupy a decisive position at the intersection between the military and industry. The military needed the weaponry he made available. Industry needed his driving force to produce the weapons, in the face of severe and mounting difficulties. No amount of propaganda or repression by the Party’s populists and enforcers could supply the army with weapons.

On 1 August Speer was, moreover, able to extend his already sprawling empire when Göring was compelled to hand over to him control of the Luftwaffe’s armaments production.⁸⁷ Whatever the internal struggles he had to undertake in the power jungle of the Third Reich during the phase of its inexorable decline, Speer remained indispensable to Hitler and the regime. Writing to Hitler near the end of the war, he claimed: ‘Without my work the war would perhaps have been lost in 1942–3.’⁸⁸ He was surely right. His achievements constitute an important element in the answer to the question of how Germany held out so long.⁸⁹ To this extent, Speer, notwithstanding a weakening of his internal position, was a crucial – possibly even the most important – member of the quadrumvirate that directed Germany’s path into the abyss in the Third Reich’s last months.

V

The combined efforts of the quadrumvirate would have served little purpose had the armed forces shown signs of disaffection and wavered in their backing for the regime. We already saw, however, that, amid the shocked response at Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt, military leaders were keener than ever to demonstrate their loyalty to Hitler and dissociate themselves from the uprising against the regime. The arch-loyalist Jodl, his head bandaged after being slightly wounded in the bomb blast and in deep shock at what had happened, set the tone. He told Goebbels that the loyal generals who worked closely with Hitler would help him ‘ruthlessly hunt down the defeatists, putschists and assassination instigators’.⁹⁰ So outraged was he at the ‘treachery’ from within that he favoured disbanding the General Staff altogether.⁹¹ ‘The 20th of July’, he told officers of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, was the ‘blackest day in German history’, worse even than 9 November 1918, ‘unique in its monstrosity’. Now there would be pitiless reprisals against those reponsible. When ‘everything rotten has been weeded out’, there would be a new unity. ‘Even if luck should be against us, we must be determined to gather round the Führer at the last, so that we may be justified before posterity.’⁹² Jodl sought a personal show of loyalty from the officers present who were to seal their commitment to sharing their destiny with the Führer by a handshake.⁹³

Fear of any connection with the plotters, and the dire consequences such a discovery would entail, naturally played a significant part in the new rush to demonstrate loyalty beyond question. But the support for Hitler and denunciation of treachery by the army against their supreme commander and head of state was for the most part spontaneous and genuine. Even so, Hitler and the regime leadership were leaving nothing to chance. The upsurge of bile vented at the officer corps by Party fanatics, which Bormann even had to dampen down, now offered the perfect atmosphere in which new controls could be introduced and new efforts made to improve the ideological indoctrination of the army. The introduction (initiated by the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces, not by Hitler) on 23 July of the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting instead of the military salute provided an external sign of the reinforced bonds with the Führer.⁹⁴

Hitler’s immediate step, within hours of the assassination attempt, was to restore order in what he had regarded, long before the plot, as the army’s most critical weak spot. For three weeks since Zeitzler’s breakdown at the beginning of July the army had in effect lacked a Chief of the General Staff. With the imminent danger of the Red Army breaking through into East Prussia, a new chief was a vital necessity. And since, in Hitler’s eyes, the source of the cancer that had led to the attempted uprising lay in this key centre of army operational planning, a reliable new chief was essential to make the General Staff both militarily effective and politically sound. Hitler’s intended choice, General Walter Buhle, had been injured in the assassination attempt. He turned, therefore, to the highly experienced and well-respected tank specialist Heinz Guderian, since early 1943 Inspector-General of Panzer Troops. A fervent nationalist and anti-Communist, a personality of great drive and dynamism, extremely forceful in his views, and a daring strategist, Guderian had played a notable part in persuading Hitler, whom in earlier years he had greatly admired, of the tactical value in modern warfare of concentrated and swift panzer attack. He had gained plaudits for the great panzer thrust through the Ardennes in 1940 that had played a major part in the spectacular collapse of Allied forces in France. A year later, his panzer forces had spearheaded the initially notable advances in Russia. Conflict with the Commander-in-Chief of Army Group Centre, Field-Marshal Hans Günther von Kluge, over tactics, and Guderian’s fiery temperament had brought his dismissal in the winter crisis of 1941, but he had been recalled by Hitler in February 1943, in the wake of another crisis, the catastrophe at Stalingrad. Though increasingly sceptical about Hitler’s conduct of the war, and despite being approached by the conspirators, Guderian had the following year kept his hands clean in the plot, and still condemned Stauffenberg’s attempt after the war. He certainly had Goebbels’ imprimatur. The Propaganda Minister described him as ‘insurpassable in loyalty to the Führer’.⁹⁵ In his dealings with Hitler, Guderian would learn in the months to come that loyalty and sound military judgement seldom went hand in hand. But following his appointment on 21 July, he was keen to display his credentials as a loyalist and establish unconditional loyalty in an almost entirely reconstructed General Staff, which had seen so many of its former officers arrested under suspicion of complicity in the plot. He rapidly denounced what he depicted as the defeatism and cowardice that had led to the disgrace of the General Staff, and guaranteed an officer corps now completely loyal to the Führer. One of the early steps he took was to ensure that not merely the high level of ability associated with the General Staff, the ‘intellectual elite’ of the army, but ideological commitment to Nazi ideals was now required. On 29 July he issued the order that every General Staff officer should be a National Socialist Leadership Officer (Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier, NSFO), that ‘he must demonstrate and prove, as well as in tactics and strategy, through an exemplary stance in political questions, through active direction and instruction of younger comrades in the intentions of the Führer, that he belongs to the “selection of the best” ’.⁹⁶ The General Staff, having failed disastrously and criminally in the eyes of the regime’s leaders, was now particularly exposed to Nazification. No further disaffection could be expected from that quarter.

Hitler had established a corps of NSFOs within the High Command of the Wehrmacht in December 1943 and placed it under the charge of General Hermann Reinecke. Its task was to instil the Nazi spirit into troops who, he feared, were being affected by subversive Soviet propaganda. For Hitler and the regime’s leadership, breathing fanaticism into the troops was the road to victory.⁹⁷ There was little liking for the new institution among the officer corps, and the NSFOs had a hard time gaining acceptance. The failed uprising of July 1944 drastically changed the situation.⁹⁸ It was not that the NSFOs were now greeted with open arms by most soldiers, or that their message was warmly welcomed and taken to heart. On the contrary: their presence often remained resented, and their pep-talks frequently still fell on deaf ears. Even so, much of the Wehrmacht’s mass base was still potentially receptive to Nazi ideals, since around a third of ordinary soldiers were or had been members of some Party affiliate.⁹⁹

In any case, the new circumstances meant that there was now no protection against the extended deployment of these military missionaries of Nazi ideology. Their chief, General Reinecke, indicated the possibilities in August: ‘With the traitors wiped out, the last opponents of a decisive politicization of the Wehrmacht have been eliminated. There must be no more obstacles in the way of National Socialist leadership work.’¹⁰⁰ By the end of 1944 there were more than a thousand full-time and as many as 47,000 part-time NSFOs, most of them members of the Party, working in the Wehrmacht. The task accorded them was to ‘educate’ the soldiers to an ‘unconstrained will to destroy and to hate’.¹⁰¹

‘Guidelines for the NS-Leadership’, distributed on 22 July, offer a glimpse of this doctrinal intrusion. The troops were to be fully informed of the ‘cowardly murderous strike against the Führer’ and the events of 20 July. The addresses that evening by Hitler, Göring and Dönitz were to be read out. Every soldier was to be clear that any sign of insubordination would be punished by death. It was the duty of any soldier of honour, conscious of his duty, to intervene as strongly as possible against ‘symptoms of unsoldierly and dishonourable behaviour’. National Socialist Germany would know how to prevent a repeat of the ‘stab in the back’ of 1918 or anything similar to the ‘pitiful treason’ in Italy (at the toppling of Mussolini in July 1943). Only the united strength of all Germans could fend off the threat to the whole of Europe from the Reich’s enemies. One man alone could save Germany from Bolshevism and destruction: ‘our Führer, Adolf Hitler’. The message was, therefore, to stand all the more solidly and fervently behind the Führer, and to fight still more fanatically.¹⁰²

A fateful, lasting consequence of the bomb plot was the elimination of any possibility of the armed forces constituting an agent of regime change in the last months of the Third Reich. At the pinnacle of the military system in the High Command of the Wehrmacht, Keitel and Jodl remained totally behind Hitler, emotionally committed to him in a way that surpassed their functional positions. Wilhelm Keitel, tall and well built, an officer during the First World War and excellent organizer with long experience of army administration, had been deeply impressed by Hitler from the time he had first encountered him back in 1933. At the complete reorganization of the Wehrmacht leadership in early 1938, Hitler, on establishing the OKW, had made Keitel its administrative head. Thereafter Keitel, in whom obedience to the will of the ruler had long been ingrained, was wholly in thrall to Hitler – so much so that he was widely lampooned as being simply his lackey. Alfred Jodl, a tall, balding Bavarian, had also served as an officer in the First World War and, like Keitel, in the small German army during the Weimar Republic. Well versed in operational planning, he had been appointed Chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff just before the invasion of Poland in 1939, and had impressed Hitler a few months later with his part in planning the invasion of Scandinavia, then the major western offensive, in spring 1940. Jodl himself had been full of admiration for Hitler’s leadership during the great victory over France. He thought Hitler was a genius – and, despite later disagreements with him on tactical matters, did not change his mind.

Beyond the OKW, the Army General Staff, under Guderian, could no longer incubate any source of disaffection. Nothing but ultra-loyalty could be expected of the Luftwaffe, under Göring’s command. And the navy was headed by the radically pro-Nazi Grand-Admiral Dönitz. With the Replacement Army under Himmler’s tight control and the General Staff purged and brought into line, any new moves to resist the self-destructive course of the Nazi leadership from the two areas most closely associated with the assassination attempt were ruled out for the duration. And no insurrection could be expected from top generals, the frontline commanders-in-chief or their subordinate officers.

The chief waverer among Army Group commanders, Field-Marshal von Kluge, Commander-in-Chief West, had blown hot and cold on the resistance movement, eventually turning his back on the conspirators, but falling nonetheless under deep suspicion in Hitler’s headquarters. He was to kill himself, still protesting his loyalty to the Führer, some weeks later. Dissident officers in Paris, Vienna and Prague had fallen victim to the purge that followed the quashed uprising.¹⁰³ The other Army Group commanders and leading generals, whatever their disagreements with Hitler’s orders, were outright loyalists, and remained so. Field-Marshal von Rundstedt and Colonel-General Guderian served – the latter, he subsequently claimed, with great reluctance – on the ‘Court of Honour’ which dismissed from the army officers implicated in the bomb plot, throwing them onto the tender mercies of the ‘People’s Court’ and its notorious presiding judge, Roland Freisler.

Field-Marshal Walter Model, Commander-in-Chief at different times of three Army Groups in the east, an excellent tactician, good organizer and stern disciplinarian who had stood up to Hitler on a number of occasions but remained high in the Dictator’s favour, saw himself as purely a military professional, standing aside from politics. But whatever the self-image of the unpolitical soldier – a delusion he shared with other generals – he of course acted politically in a system that made it impossible to do otherwise. He refused to believe the plotters’ claim on 20 July that Hitler was dead, he was the first military leader to send a declaration of loyalty to the Dictator on hearing of his survival, and he never wavered in his support.¹⁰⁴ At the end of July, he sought through a combination of renewed trust in Hitler and straightforward fear to restore wavering morale and discipline in the devastated Army Group Centre, which had lost 350,000 men killed or captured. ‘The enemy stands at East Prussia’s borders,’ his proclamation to his troops ran. But his own men still held a position enabling them ‘to defend the holy soil of the Fatherland’ and repel the danger of ‘murder, fire and plundering of German villages and towns’, as the Führer, people and comrades fighting on other fronts expected. ‘Cowards have no place in our ranks,’ he went on. ‘Any waverer has forfeited his life. It’s about our homeland, our wives and children.’ Intense concentration of all forces could combat the temporary superiority of the enemy in numbers and matériel. The new responsibilities given to Himmler and Goebbels had provided all the necessary prerequisites for this. ‘No soldier in the world is better than we soldiers of our Führer, Adolf Hitler! Heil to our beloved Führer!’ he ended.¹⁰⁵

If each of these examples illustrates the corruption of military professionalism in the Third Reich, the last is of a commander, Colonel-General Ferdinand Schörner, of a different type, a fanatical loyalist from ingrained Nazi conviction, a believer in ‘triumph of the will’ and the need for a revolution of the spirit in the army.¹⁰⁶ An indicator of Schörner’s acknowledged fanaticism was that he had served for a brief spell in March 1944 as ‘Chief of the NS-Leadership Staff of the Army’, responsible for coordinating relations between the military and the Party.¹⁰⁷ He brought to Army Group North on his transfer there on 23 July an unprecedented level of ferocious internal discipline that produced, as in his other commands, countless executions for ‘cowardice’, ‘defeatism’ and desertion. He made it plain at the outset that the slightest show of disobedience would be mercilessly punished. In an early declaration to his generals, he expounded his belief that the war was ‘not to be won by tactical measures alone’. Belief, loyalty and fanaticism were increasingly necessary as the enemy neared German borders. Everyone had to realize that the aim of Bolshevism was ‘the destruction of our people’. It was a ‘struggle for existence’ in which the only alternatives were ‘victory or downfall’. To stop the ‘Asiatic flood-wave’, as he described the Soviet advance, faith in victory was ‘the strongest life force’. He ended his communiqué: ‘Heil to the Führer’.¹⁰⁸ Ten years after the war, an officer who had served under him described Schörner as trying ‘to replace energy through brutality, operational flexibility through inflexible principles of defence, a sense of responsibility through lack of conscience’.¹⁰⁹ With such ruthless leadership, the slightest sign of insubordination, let alone any hint of mutiny, was tantamount to suicide.

Quite apart from their personal loyalty to Hitler, and whatever the individual variation in their views on his conduct of the war, or Germany’s prospects, these and other leading generals saw their unconditional duty as doing all they could to defend the Reich against enemy inroads. Nazi values intermingled, often subliminally, with old-fashioned patriotism. As the pressure on the fronts, east, west and south, mounted inexorably, field commanders had little time for other than urgent military matters. Had they been of a single mind, and even dreamt of staging another putsch to end the looming catastrophe, organizing one would have proved impossible. So would confronting Hitler with an ultimatum to stand down or negotiate peace terms. In practice, however, such thoughts never entered the heads of the military elite. Jodl summarized the stance at the top of the military establishment: ‘fortunately the Allied demand for unconditional surrender [laid down at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943] has blocked the way for all those “cowards” who are trying to find a political way of escape.’¹¹⁰ Doing what was humanly possible to prevent the destruction of the Reich was seen as the unquestioned imperative. In adhering to such a goal, of course, the generals ensured that precisely this destruction would happen.

VI

At a time when Germany was rocked by disastrous military defeat, amid soaring anxieties over the superiority of enemy forces, Hitler’s war leadership and the prospects for Germany’s future, the assassination attempt and uprising had the effect of strengthening the regime – at least in the short term. In the aftermath, mentalities, structures of control and possibilities for action were all changed.

Attitudes were adjusted – to some extent reshaped. Hitler himself was changed. His paranoia had never been far from the surface. Now it knew no bounds. He sensed treachery on all sides. Treachery gave him the explanation of military failure and of any trace of what he saw as weakness in those around him. It prevented any need for the narcissistic personality to contemplate his own part in the catastrophe. ‘Anyone who speaks to me of peace without victory will lose his head, no matter who he is or what his position,’ he was later claimed to have repeatedly threatened those in his vicinity as the fronts were collapsing.¹¹¹ Such a mentality at the head of the regime percolated outwards and downwards. Blind fury, not just at the conspirators, but at the officer corps as a whole, fuelled by a hate-filled tirade by Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front and Organization Leader of the Nazi Party, which advocated the extermination of the aristocracy (described as degenerate, idiotic ‘filth’) – many of the plotters had aristocratic backgrounds – ran in the veins of Party fanatics in these days, but spilled over, too, into the wider public.¹¹² Bormann even had to contain it in the interests of retaining his own control rather than pour oil onto the flames.¹¹³ Wise and cautious voices kept quiet. Signs of anything that could be interpreteted as defeatism now invited fearful reprisals.

Within the armed forces, leading officers of Schörner’s kind needed no encouragement. But the change in mentalities went beyond soldier fanatics. Belief in victory, commitment to the last reserves of will to hold out, rejection of anything that smacked of the slightest doubt in the struggle, became more than ever incontrovertible tenets of all public parlance, constantly reinforced by the more widely deployed NSFOs. Private doubts were best not aired. At whatever rank, anyone voicing criticism of the war effort was taking a risk. Even close circles of friends and comrades had to take care lest any comment that could be seen as subversive should reach prying ears. From the top downwards in every division, every battalion, every company, officers felt the need to demonstrate loyalty and clamp down on the slightest sign of dissent. It was little wonder that the numbers of executions in the military, as in the civilian sphere, started to soar.

The failed uprising also brought the changes we have examined to the structures of rule. Some of these changes had already been initiated, in the light of the intensified pressures of the war, when Stauffenberg’s bomb went off.¹¹⁴ The extended role of the RVKs, and, with that, the increased scope for intervention by the Party into state bureaucracy and spheres of military responsibility offers one example. Goebbels saw this as a further sharp incision into the power of the generals.¹¹⁵ But even where developments were already in train, the events of 20 July and their aftermath served as a sharp accelerator. Radicalization along the line acutely intensified. It was as if the dam had broken and now, finally, a revolutionary war could be fought, on truly National Socialist lines.¹¹⁶

The pillars of the regime had been shaken by the events of 20 July, but were left not only standing, but buttressed. Hitler’s charismatic appeal had long since been weakened, but had been temporarily revived by the attempt on his life. More importantly, his hold over the regime was undiluted. The major wielders of power were divided among themselves but united in their dependence upon Hitler’s favour. Each general of the Wehrmacht, too, knew his command lasted only until Hitler took it away. Beneath Hitler, the regime’s grip had been strengthened. The key controls of the regime were in the hands of Nazi leaders with nothing to lose: they knew, and had participated in, its crimes against humanity, most obviously the extermination of the Jews.

Himmler’s empire extended into the Wehrmacht itself. His ruthless repression, now increasingly against members of the ‘people’s community’, as well as conquered ‘Untermenschen’ and ‘racial enemies’, plumbed new depths. Mobilization for total war underwent a frenzied phase of activity under Goebbels, who at the same time cranked up the propaganda machine into overdrive for the backs-to-the-wall effort. Bormann revitalized the Party, finally offering it the prospect of the social and political revolution its fanatical activist core had always sought. And Speer defied adversity in new exploits of mobilizing the armaments industry.

Military power, too, had been consolidated in the hands of loyalists. As fortunes on the battlefield worsened, the military leadership had bound itself to Hitler more tightly than ever. In the process, it had cut off any possibility of extricating itself from those bonds. It had committed itself to the very dualism that Hitler himself embodied: victory or downfall. Since victory was increasingly out of the question, and Hitler invariably and repeatedly ruled out any attempt at a negotiated settlement, that left downfall. Possibilities had changed. There was now no exit route.

From the comfortable distance of imprisonment just outside London, the recently captured Luftwaffe officer Lieutenant Freiherr von Richthofen said in early August in a conversation secretly bugged by British intelligence that he was glad the assassination attempt on Hitler had failed. If it had succeeded, he claimed, there would have been a ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend such as had bedevilled German politics after 1918. This time, he added, it was politically necessary for the nation to go down the road to the bitter end.¹¹⁷ This assessment was to leave out of the equation the millions of lives that would have been saved had the bomb plot succeeded and the war been rapidly ended. But it was surely correct in its assumption that a new ‘stab-in-the-back’ legend would have arisen, posing a threat to any post-Hitler settlement. And it was undoubtedly correct in its assumption that the failure of the attempt to topple Hitler from within in July 1944 meant that the regime could from now on be overthrown only by total military defeat. Just how the regime might sustain its war effort until that point – as it turned out, still over eight months away – was a question, however, that Richthofen did not pose.