Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

In his official quarters on Bendlerstrasse, General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, the army commander in chief, greeted Hitler with obvious skepticism. An officer who was present reported that Hammerstein introduced the chancellor “in a benevolently conde­scending fashion; the assembled phalanx of generals were coolly po­lite, and Hitler made modest, obsequious little bows in all directions. He remained ill at ease until after dinner, when he was allowed an opportunity to speak for a longer period at the table.” 3Drawing on all his skills of persuasion, Hitler did his best to win the officers over. He promised that conditions within Germany would be “completely re­versed,” military preparedness would be improved, and-according to the notes of another of the participants-there would be “no toler­ance of any views that run counter to the objectives [pacifism!]. Those who do not convert will have to be bent. Marxism will be eradicated, root and branch.” On the subject of foreign policy, Hitler referred primarily to abandoning the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and mentioned only in passing “the conquest of new Lebensraum in the East,” The latter comment did not arouse any particular surprise or doubts among the generals, who were skeptical about politicians to begin with and did not pay especially close attention to their exact words. More important to the assembled officers was Hitler’s assurance that, in contrast to developments in Italy, there would be “no amalgamation of the Reichswehr and the party-affiliated SA” and that the army would remain “apolitical and nonpartisan.” 4Many of the officers came away with the impression that Hitler would prove a more congenial chancellor than any of his predecessors over the previous few years, although opinion was divided. Applause was only polite, and Hitler himself remarked afterwards that he felt as if he was “talking to a wall the whole time.” 5

The cracks that the Führer nevertheless found in this wall were the newly appointed minister of defense, Werner von Blomberg, and the head of the Bureau of Ministers, Colonel Walter von Reichenau. Confounding the expectations of the German Nationalist leaders who helped make Hitler chancellor, these two military men would soon become enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi cause, though for very different reasons. Blomberg was an impulsive, unsettled figure, who in the course of his life had embraced in quick succession democracy, thee anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and Prussian socialism, then had come close to accepting Communism after a trip to Russia, and eventually had endorsed the authoritarian state, before falling for Hitler with all the exuberance of his nature. Later he said that in 1933 he was suddenly filled with feelings that he had never expected to experience again: faith, reverence for a leader, and total devotion to an idea. Hitler, he once remarked, acted on him “like a great physi­cian.” 6According to Blomberg’s intimates, a friendly comment from the Führer was enough to bring tears to his eyes.

Reichenau, on the other hand, was the very embodiment of the modern officer, devoid of prejudice or sentiment. With the cool calculation of one lacking strong political sympathies of his own, he perceived the new men in government simply as the leaders of a mass movement whose strength he would tap to improve the position of the army and enhance Germany’s glory and prestige. A gifted man who combined elegance, toughness, and a taste for power, he was never personally tempted by National Socialism; he respected it as a political force without taking its ideology seriously. Reichenau be­lieved that the Reichswehr, with its “seven antiquated divisions scat­tered across the entire country,” was totally incapable of asserting itself. To expect it to do so was a “daydream” suitable only to the realm of “fiction.” Hoping to cement the army’s relationship with Hitler, marginalize the Nazi Party, and edge out its paramilitary wing, the SA, he proposed that the Reichswehr adopt the motto “Forward into the new state.” 7

Reichenau was relatively undisturbed by the excesses that accompanied the Nazi seizure of power. It always required an element of terror, he said soon alter assuming his new position, to purge a state of all its rot and decay. What did cause him considerable dismay, however, was the mounting power of the SA. Its ranks had swollen to over a million since the mass conversions of the spring of 1933, and it was expressing its dissatisfaction ever more vehemently. Hitler’s brown-shirted legions took a dim view of his legal revolution, which seemed to be undermining their interests, and they looked on bitterly as conservative politicians, aristocrats, capitalists, and generals-the very men whose worlds they wanted to smash-began assuming places of honor at celebrations of the national revival, while they, the eternally mistreated foot soldiers of the revolution, were expected simply to parade by.

The brownshirts felt they were the vanguard of the revolution, not just extras. They had learned from their slogans and songs how revolutions had been carried out since time immemorial: the fortresses of the old order were stormed in a torrent of bloodshed and plunder and the new order raised on the wreckage of the old-with the greatest rewards going to the most loyal soldiers. They could not understand Hitler’s sly concept of revolution by infiltration and ruse, and their rugged leader, Ernst Röhm, was particularly lacking in the patience and cunning required. And so, while the SA continued, in the disor­derly style it had adopted in the spring of 1933, to sow terror in the streets, to open up its own “wildcat” concentration camps, and to disrupt trials and legal proceedings-occasionally going so far as to beat up fellow party members who showed too much restraint- Röhm reminded his followers with mounting anger of the sacrifices they had made and the dead they mourned. When his demands on the government went unheeded, he found himself increasingly driven lo take the stance of the betrayed revolutionary.

Bitterly disappointed by the course of events and spurred by the agitated masses, who were eager for the spoils of victory, he whipped up his followers in the SA with speeches and harangues, insisting that “the national revolution must end now and become a National Socialist revolution.” Talk began to circulate in SA circles of the need for a “second revolution” to boost the Nazi movement fully into the saddle, to free it from its wretched mire of half measures, and to sweep Röhm and his organization to the top. When Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick warned in the summer of 1933 that he would take “severe measures”—at the very least putting disorderly SA members in “protective custody”—and followed through by clamping down on SA activities, Röhm threatened to march two brigades up to Frick’s headquarters in the Vossstrasse and give him a public whipping. 8

But Röhm did not confine himself to making extravagant remarks before cheering supporters. His slogans promising a “second revolution” were aimed first and foremost at the Reichswehr, which had so far successfully resisted Gleichschaltung and, in Röhm’s view, epito­mized the “forces of reaction” and the official tolerance of them. Röhm felt that the planned expansion of the Reichswehr, and the countless openings it would create for officers in particular, should be directed at satisfying the career ambitions of SA leaders. The logic of the situation led naturally, in his view, to the conclusion that all the armed forces should operate within the framework of the SA and gradually be molded into a National Socialist people’s army. “The gray cliffs must inevitably be swallowed by the brown tide,” Röhm proclaimed as he forged ahead with plans to take the much smaller army, with its gray field uniforms, into the embrace of the brown-shirted SA, transforming it into a popular militia. 9