Joachim Fest - Plotting Hitler's Death

Since this message bore Fromm’s name, the conscientious Olbricht felt obliged once again to go and seek the consent of the chief of the reserve army. Hitler was truly dead, he assured Fromm, informing him that therefore “we have issued the code word to launch internal disturbances.” Fromm jumped to his feet. “What do you mean ‘we’?” he bellowed indignantly. “Who gave the order?” he shouted, insisting that he was still the commander. Olbricht said that Mertz was respon­sible, and Fromm ordered that the colonel be brought to him immediately. When Mertz confirmed what he had done, Fromm replied, “Mertz, you are under arrest!”

On the way back to his office, Olbricht peered out through a window overlooking the courtyard and saw Stauffenberg’s car pull up. It was 4:30 p.m., almost four hours after the explosion in the Wolf’s Lair. Stauffenberg gave Olbricht a short, hurried report on the assas­sination, and the two men decided to return together to see Fromm. Stauffenberg insisted once again that Hitler was dead: he had witnessed the explosion himself and had seen Hitler being carried out on a stretcher. Fromm remarked that “someone in the Führer’s entou­rage must have been involved,” to which Stauffenberg coolly re­sponded, “I did it.”

Fromm was flabbergasted, or at least seemed to be. With mounting rage, he told Stauffenberg that Keitel had just assured him the Führer was alive, to which Stauffenberg replied that the field marshal was, as always, lying through his teeth. Unconvinced, Fromm asked Stauffenberg whether he had a pistol and, if so, whether he knew what to do with it at a moment like this. Stauffenberg said he did not have a pistol and in any case would do nothing of the sort, adding that the attack on Hitler was not the final goal but merely the first strike in a general insurrection. Unimpressed by this news, Fromm turned to Mertz von Quirnheim and ordered him to get a pistol. Mertz replied astutely that since Fromm had taken him into custody he could not carry out orders.

With mounting anger, Fromm now declared that Olbricht and Stauffenberg were under arrest as well. But as if he had been waiting for these words to be uttered, Olbricht turned the tables on the gen­eral by informing him that he was mistaken about the balance of power: it was up to them, not him, to make arrests. Fromm leapt up and rushed at Olbricht with clenched fists but Haeften, Kleist, and several officers from the map room next door separated the two and held Fromm off with a pistol. Resigned, Fromm announced, “Under the circumstances, I consider myself out of commission.” He offered no further resistance and, having requested and received a bottle of cognac, prepared himself to be led away to the office of his aide, Captain Heinz-Ludwig Bartram.

In the meantime, Beck, Schwerin, Helldorf, Hoepner, Gisevius, and the chief administrative officer for the Potsdam district, Gottfried von Bismarck, had assembled in Olbricht’s office, and Olbricht now told Hoepner that he was to assume Fromm’s duties immediately. Ever the pedant, even in the midst of a coup, Hoepner demanded to have his appointment in writing. The formalities were being com­pleted when Hoepner ran into Fromm in the hallway as he was being taken to his aide’s office. Bowing slightly, Hoepner said that he regretted having to lake over Fromm s office. The deposed general replied, “I’m sorry, Hoepner, but I can’t go along with this. In my opinion, the Führer is not dead and you are making a mistake.” 11

Ii had by now became clear to those at the Wolf’s Lair that the assassination attempt signaled the start of a general uprising. They could hardly fail to notice since, due to a switching error, telegram dispatches from army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse were arriving at Führer headquarters as well. By about 4:00 p.m. Hitler had named Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the new commander in chief of the reserve army. Soon thereafter, Keitel instructed the military districts not to obey the orders they were receiving from Bendlerstrasse. Hitler’s counterattack was gathering momentum. As a result of Klausing’s error in giving the orders the top-secret rating, some military districts even received counterinstructions from Führer headquarters before the original orders from Bendlerstrasse arrived, sowing great confusion at first. In Breslau, the military district commanders de­cided against a coup before they even knew it was under way. In Hamburg, party and SS officials went to the office of the district commander, General Wilhelm Wetzel, to drink sherry and vermouth, raise toasts, and swear that they were not about to shoot one another.

In all the bewilderment over conflicting reports, Beck declared I that he did not “care what was being said, he did not even care what was true; for him, Hitler was dead,” and he urged his fellow conspirators to adopt the same attitude lest they spread confusion in their own ranks, he had begun dictating an address for broadcast in which, anticipating a counterbroadcast, he argued that it “does not matter whether Hitler is dead or alive. A Führer who engenders such conflicts among his closest associates that it comes to an assassination attempt is morally dead.” 12The only chance that the conspirators still seemed to have was that the fictions they had invented would be widely believed. The key question was whether this makeshift justifi­cation would have enough force to insure that orders passed down the chain of command would be strictly obeyed. Anything less and the coup would not succeed.

That the course of events still depended on the courage and determination of a handful of officers could be seen on a number of occasions during that chaotic day. Among the outposts that received early warnings was that of the Berlin city commandant, General Paul von Hase. As Operation Valkyrie was launched, he called the head of the army ordnance school, Brigadier General Walter Bruns; the head of the army explosives school, Colonel Helmuth Schwierz; and the com­mander of the guard battalion, Major Otto Ernst Remer, to his head­quarters at 1 Unter den Linden, where he gave them their orders. By 6:00 p.m. the Ministry of Propaganda had been cordoned off, two sentries had been posted in front of Goebbels’s house, and Goebbels himself, having seen what was taking place on the street, had disap­peared into a back room to get a few cyanide capsules. 13Half an hour later the government quarter had also been surrounded by the guard battalion. Only the units from the ordnance school in the Berlin sub­urb of Treptow, which were supposed to occupy the city palace, were delayed, because their trucks did not arrive on schedule to transport them.

Elsewhere, too, things were going according to plan. Units of the elite Grossdeutschland reserve brigade stationed in Cottbus, near Berlin, occupied the radio stations and transmitters in Herzberg and Königs Wusterhausen and seized control of the local Nazi Party of­fices and SS barracks without encountering resistance. When news of Hitler’s assassination reached Krampnitz, the senior officer at the post, Colonel Harald Momm, shouted, “Orderly! A bottle of cham­pagne! The swine is dead!” Although there were some delays there, the Valkyrie units were finally mobilized. Those in Döberitz, too, were ready to go, and Major Friedrich Jakob had orders to seize the main broadcasting center on Masurenallee in Berlin, block all trans­missions, and then rendezvous with a signal officer who would be dispatched by headquarters. Bendlerstrasse issued a list of targets to be seized, ranging from SS and party offices down to various minis­tries and finally the city administration; the explosives school contrib­uted by forming thirty task forces of ten men each to help. Helldorf alerted the security police to be ready for a wave of arrests.