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July 20th, 1944. We're in East Prussia, at the Wolf's Lair. It's a hot day, stifling. Here in the forest, at his remote campaign headquarters, the Führer has made a concession to the weather. Today's military conference is being staged in a wooden cabin in the grounds. It's not a big space, about 30 feet by 15, but with the windows open they can generate some breeze.
At 12:42 PM the big beasts of the Wehrmacht file in and gather round the map table. Faces are long, sullen, however you sugarcoat it and Hitler has a very sweet tooth. The war on the Eastern Front is a disaster. General Huizinga is soon in full flow, detailing tank movements, troop mobilizations, looking for positives, clutching at straws, and suddenly…
Outside, a hundred yards away, Colonel Klaus von Stauffenberg watches the cabin go up in a fireball. He gives a nod to his aide, who's ready at the wheel of their staff car. They must get the hell out of there, out of the compound. The bomb they've planted has successfully detonated. They have just killed Adolf Hitler. From Neuser, this is the Hitler story. And this is Real Dictators.
A few months earlier, in mid-1944, Hitler exists in a state of delusion and denial. Despite his efforts to prop up Mussolini, Rome has fallen. Italy, now a constitutional monarchy, has signed an armistice with the Allies. Other Axis cohorts – the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the Finns – have little stomach for a protracted fight.
In private, senior figures and generals have been urging their Fuhrer to seek peace before Germany herself is destroyed. In the last 12 months, the Wehrmacht has suffered 1.7 million military casualties, over 4 million since the war began. Losses like this are unsustainable. And then comes a new and dramatic development. When we left Hitler in the last episode, on the morning of June 6th, 1944,
He was at his alpine home, the Berghof, fast asleep in bed. He'd retired in the early hours with strict instructions not to be disturbed. Not until 3pm, in time for his daily briefing, Dr. Chris Dillon,
Hitler's increasingly rarely seen in public after Stalingrad. He's much more prone to withdrawing into his comfort blanket of the Berghoff surrounded by sycophants who are rubbernecking into the night as he regales them with stories from the early days of the movement. He retreats more and more from making decisions. No matter that, through the night, the Berghoff switchboard has been going into meltdown.
It had begun in darkness with reports of Allied paratroopers landing among the hedgerows of Normandy, away in northwest France. Frantic dispatches have flowed in since dawn. An armada of warships and assault vessels has crossed the English Channel. Amphibious landings are taking place along a fifty-mile stretch of flat, sandy beaches. Meanwhile, Hitler snores. Professor Nicholas O'Shaughnessy
Hitler's nightmare is happening now. The Allies have landed. They've breached the defenses. But no one dare wake Hitler. The Fuhrer is asleep. King Redbeard is asleep in his mountain. You mustn't mustn't wake him because he is the most glorious man in all history.
Dr. John Curatola: "It's a completely dysfunctional system. As much as we think the Germans liked order and discipline and stuff like that, it's palace intrigue. Who's holding the reins of power? Who has access to Hitler? Am I Martin Bormann? Do I want to wake him up? No." When Hitler is roused from his slumber, he's not in a good mood. Not at all. He struts about in his dressing gown, ranting and raving. That's much to do with his being woken up as to what's happening in France.
An Allied invasion is no great surprise, but they'd assumed that a landing would come across the shortest stretch of the channel, the Pas de Calais. Plus, storms had been forecast to move in from the Atlantic. It would be impossible to sustain any serious naval action. No, whatever's happening in Normandy, decrees Hitler, it must be a diversion.
And to be fair, some of Hitler's generals are of the same mind. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, his commander-in-chief in the West, has not put his troops on alert. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had been relaxed enough to come home for his wife's birthday. They've all been conned by Operation Fortitude. Using dummy tanks, inflatable aircraft, and fake troop movements, the Allies have staged a diversion.
They'd created the impression that their forces were assembling at a different muster point, further along the English coast. The esteemed US General Patton had even been convinced to greet the army there. This drew the attention of German spies. Meanwhile, the main Allied force has crossed unnoticed. Hitler has been caught napping, quite literally. "All is not lost," the Fuhrer is advised. "Not yet."
if two key panzer divisions can just be moved up to Normandy. Hitler yells at Field Marshals Keitel and Jodl for their pessimism. No way can an Allied army breach the Atlantic wall. The French coast is lined with concrete bunkers and gun emplacements. They should all get back to the real war, the Russian front. In Berlin, Joseph Goebbels is equally unbothered. That evening he goes to dinner, where he's due to play a piano duet with a countess.
For Hitler, it's business as usual. He has a meeting scheduled at 5pm with the dictators of Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Only at 5 minutes to 5, 12 hours after American, British and Canadian troops began hitting the beaches, does Hitler give his first military order, a rather non-specific one. The Allied bridgehead must be eliminated by midnight. Oh, and yes, those Panzer divisions, the ones they've all been banging on about,
Do whatever you need. Sir Anthony Beaver. We see Hitler in a way at his worst in tactical terms because he is so determined to keep control of the battle that is about to begin. None of these divisions can move without my say so. So from that point of view, you know, the local commander has no real decision or ability, in fact, to affect the battle at that particular point. Professor Thomas Weber.
Once D-Day happens, once Allied forces are landing on the beaches in Normandy, the behavior of Hitler is seemingly extremely bizarre. Reasonable arguments have been made that had the commanders in France
received authorization to move immediately with German units towards Normandy that they could have halted the invasion. The real issue is not that the Germans had not anticipated that the invasion was coming, but to underestimate the strength of the invasion forces. Hitler thought that an invasion could be fought off relatively easily, and that was the real miscalculation.
By nightfall, 130,000 Allied troops will be ashore. Within just over a week, a million soldiers will have landed. Remarkably, it will take a full 11 days for Hitler to visit this new Western Front. He will finally be persuaded to drop in at the command bunker at Soissons, 60 miles northeast of Paris. But even then Hitler shocks his onlookers. He sits there, pale and gaunt,
hunched over his maps, doodling on them with the colored pencils he's taken to carrying around. Rommel is now at the heart of the action. He urges a strategic withdrawal, better to pull back and secure a solid defensive line. But this, as we know, is not Corporal Hitler's style. The soldier of the Great War does not concede ground, not an inch.
at the beginning of the war and through the early part of it, he would do things no general would dare to do. I mean, the whole idea of blitzkrieg, this whole knocking them out before they could even know you were coming. That was all really Hitler's doing. The average general would be far, far more cautious.
the conquest of Europe and of European Russia. That is all Hitler. So in terms of a war of conquest, he is a great general. You could say the greatest since Caesar or Alexander the Great, but with feet of clay, fatal weaknesses. And once it becomes a war of stasis rather than a war of kinases, and then once it becomes a war of defense, he's worse than useless.
The culmination of this was deeply ironical. By 1944, the British had decided that to assassinate Hitler with Operation Foxley, which was an SOE project, would be disastrous because they would win the war much more rapidly with Hitler still in command. Hitler's visit to Soissons is not without further farce. For some time now, the Fuhrer has been muttering about a stash of "miracle weapons".
Boring his after-dinner companions with tales of technical wizardry that will yet turn the tide of this war. Because of the Allied landings, he personally advances the program, much to the consternation of his scientists, who haven't fine-tuned things yet. On June 12th, the first one is launched. It's called the V-1 rocket, a proto-cruise missile, a flying bomb.
On the 17th, the day of Hitler's visit to the Normandy bunker, a V1 actually crashes right on top of it, and extraordinarily no one is injured. Once the program is up and running, 10,000 V1s, or Doodlebugs, will strike southern England. If deployed against the British ports, they could have hampered the Normandy invasion. But, as ever,
Hitler knows best. He wants them aimed at London, used as a terror weapon, in the vague notion that the British might still wish to call it quits. Back on the ground, in Normandy, the fighting becomes fierce. When the Wehrmacht does get its act together, it will manage to stall the Anglo-American armies in the narrow lanes and hedgerows, the bocage of the local countryside.
But Germany is now in its strategic worst-case scenario, being attacked from each direction. The long-awaited Second Front is open. Since the spring of 1942, the US Air Force and the RAF have rained down round-the-clock devastation on Nazi Germany. Officially, the goal is to hit military and industrial targets. The Americans claim precision aiming allows them to drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.
In reality, there is huge collateral, meaning civilian damage. The Allies are now leveling whole sections of cities, the same thing the Luftwaffe had tried during the Blitz. As RAF Marshal Bomber Harris puts it, "They are now reaping the whirlwind." Harris thinks that D-Day is unnecessary. Through "area bombing" as it's called, the Third Reich will soon crack.
He believed that it wasn't necessary to invade across the Channel, that he could end the war, kill it by heavy bombing. So as a result, he was putting in these huge raids on Cologne, the thousand bomber raid. But a lot of this was PR in a way, trying to impress the Americans and trying to impress the Soviet Union.
The destruction, yes, was terrible, but it was because the bombing was so inaccurate. The British were actually a bit more accurate than the Americans. Less than 5% of the bombs landed within a few miles actually of the target. The point was though that it was smashing the cities. The campaign has been costly for the Allies too, make no mistake. The life expectancy of bomber crews is brutally short.
the losses are horrific. For the 8th Air Force, for any given mission on average, they're going to lose about 10% of their bombers. Well, if you're an air crewman flying in the 8th Air Force, a pilot or a navigator or machine gunner, you have to fly 25 missions before you come home. So I'm a historian, not a mathematician, but if you're losing 10% of your bomber force on each raid and you've got to fly 25 missions if you do the math, you're not coming home, statistically.
That said, thanks to new American long-range fighters, vulnerable bombers can now be escorted all the way to Berlin. And Germany just can't manufacture defensive interceptors fast enough. Hitler has never grasped the importance of aerial warfare. The Luftwaffe, for example, has never even developed a proper strategic bomber. From the spring of 1943 onwards, the Allies have had mastery of the skies over Europe. Night after night, city after city is pummeled.
Soon they're dropping incendiary bombs, which whip up devastating firestorms. In the Hamburg raid, that July, 30,000 people die as temperatures on the ground reach 1,000 degrees Celsius. In the words of Hitler's armaments minister, Albert Speer, "Six more of these and we're done." The raids will culminate with the Anglo-American obliteration of the old Saxon city of Dresden in February 1945.
As far as the Germans are concerned, the war for a long time is not really a war that they very much have experienced themselves. The war, of course, is experienced through the losses of brothers, fathers and husbands who do not return from the war. But at the same time, life continues in Germany almost unchanged.
But that really changes when the strategic bombing of Germany happens. It's a kind of psychological warfare, I mean, in a way, really as a campaign of terror to terrorize the German population in the hope that they would turn their back on the war effort. It's incredibly difficult to really kind of measure the impact. What really seems to happen is that a lot of Germans
are really now starting to rally behind the war effort. This is a German war of defense. It's a patriotic war of defense rather than a Nazi war. Hitler's tactics are random, even spiteful. When the historic port of Lübeck is bombed, he launches a bizarre revenge mission. He grabs a tourist guide to Britain, part of the popular Baedeker series, and orders the destruction of scenic destinations featured in it: York, Exeter,
Norwich, Canterbury, the Baedeker raids cause minimal damage and have no strategic worth. In Britain, Churchill or the Royal Family visit bomb sites, attempting to boost morale. In Germany, Hitler will countenance no such thing. He's so in denial about the level of destruction that when he travels through cities on his personal train, the shades must be pulled down to shield him from the reality.
On one trip to Berlin, when the blinds are accidentally raised and Hitler sees a hospital wagon full of wounded soldiers, he becomes agitated
Hitler never, never visited any of the casualties, any of the areas which had been bombed. At least the Wall of Hamburg or Dresden later on or whatever. He would express absolute fury. In fact, after the bombing of Dresden, he wanted to bring in the use of lethal gas and things like that. But there was no question of doing it. The only real German leader who did was Goebbels. And Goebbels went round and visited many of the areas and actually made himself very popular as a result.
It frustrates Goebbels because Goebbels recognized the ongoing ability of Hitler to mobilize support that Goebbels had spent since 1933 building up the Hitler myth of this infallible leader sent by destiny to lead Germany back from perdition.
And with Hitler's kind of refusal to appear in public or even to make radio broadcasts by 1944, a lot of the binding glue and cement of the Nazi regime is gone. So it's a pretty grievous blow to the dictatorship, which is founded very much on the supposed singular abilities of one person. At the Berghof, or increasingly at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler sits like a paranoid Caesar. He now has his food tasted by SS guards.
On the odd occasion when Hitler does go out, he wears an oversized steel-reinforced cap that sits over his ears, like a little boy dressing up in his dad's clothes. Albert Speer, as a young architect, had once delighted the Fuhrer with his futuristic plans for a new Germany that would surpass the glories of ancient Rome. These days, his job is to hide the Reich's factories from Allied aircraft.
German industry was actually more productive at the end of World War Two than at the beginning. The bombing did destroy 20% of German industry, but they made up for that. This was due to Speer. He was an expert at concealment, at hiding factories in woods and so on and so forth. And some accused him of having perpetuated World War Two by a full year because of his magisterial approach to the question of wartime production.
But the bombing does terrorize Germans. It just does tell them that the war is lost. There's no doubt about that. More than a quarter of all homes are lost or damaged. 20 million are without gas, electricity, or water. Over 300,000 are killed. In some parts, the scale of loss of human life is greater than it was in 1914 to 18. Some believe it's karma, a payback for what they've done to the Jews.
Professor Helen Roche. As far as the Holocaust goes, we have evidence of soldiers who were sending back photos of persecution to their families. There are all these rumors going around. So the idea that people, quote, didn't know what was happening, which was what everybody said after the war, that
It can't stand. There's been a lot of research been done which shows that people knew more, that people were thinking in some ways of the Allied bombing raids as being like retribution for what was happening in the East, even if they didn't know what the exact mechanisms that people were definitely going to be involved.
exterminated in gas chambers and things like that. There was enough knowledge going around that bad things were happening. Hitler tells his generals that they must gather around me with upraised swords to fight to the last drop of blood for the honour of Germany. On the streets, it's a little different. In Munich, once the hotbed of Nazism, no one does the Heil Hitler greeting anymore. That would invite ridicule.
There have already been multiple attempts on Hitler's life. 150,000 citizens currently languish in jail for opposing the Nazi regime. And they are the lucky ones. Membership of an anti-Nazi movement is a high-stakes game. It usually leads to a horrible end. Those behind the plots are a mix of old conservatives, Prussian nobles, and clergy. All part of the old order that Hitler swept away. They are not all Democrats.
Added to them are the growing number of Wehrmacht officers, who now see the continuation of the war as madness. For some, killing Hitler is still a difficult pill to swallow. It will make him a martyr, better to arrest him and put him on trial. But no, say the majority, Hitler must perish, along with this Nazi nightmare.
As far as the main commanders are concerned, there's no doubt about it. There is a terrible mixed feelings about how are we going to preserve Germany in any form at all? Because unless we come to some sort of deal, particularly with the Western allies, then we're going to be completely crushed and taken over by the Soviet Union. And that will mean Siberia for all of us.
There are those who also feel that, you know, as an honorable German officer, I have sworn loyalty to the Fuhrer and I cannot break my oath. That didn't necessarily mean they liked Hitler, but at the same time, they felt that they had no option. The most concerted efforts have come from the Abwehr, the Nazi military intelligence service. Secrets have been leaked to the Allies. On the quiet, Jews have been saved. In March 1943,
General Henning von Tresckow, if you recall, had placed a bomb on board Hitler's plane. Due to mechanical failure, the device didn't detonate. But Tresckow has found sympathetic officers who are willing to go even further and spark a full-blown military coup. And they've hit upon an ingenious way of doing it: by triggering a piece of emergency legislation. As it stands, in the event of the Fuhrer's unexpected death, a contingency plan exists to maintain order.
It's codenamed Operation Valkyrie. Valkyrie involves the Home or Reserve Army placing Berlin and other key cities under immediate lockdown. This will provide the plotters with a smokescreen, allowing them to occupy key institutions and install their own provisional government. Even better, they will claim the assassination of the Fuhrer to be the work of the SS. This will empower them to lock up the troublesome stormtroopers. The plan is as follows:
Once news of Hitler's death is known, General Ulbricht will secure the instruments of power. General Beck will be declared the new head of state. Karl Goedeler, a conservative politician, the former mayor of Leipzig, will become acting chancellor. Field Marshal Vitzleben will be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Goedeler will then make a radio broadcast to the nation, proclaiming the end of Nazi Germany. His new cabinet will be tasked right away with making peace.
The conspirators have some stellar backing. None other than Rommel hints that the move will have his blessing. Other field marshals tip the plot as a wink. And there's another new recruit to Treskow's assassination squad. A 36-year-old colonel, a count in fact, called Klaus von Stauffenberg.
Count Stauffenberg is a young officer who had initially been attracted by some of the early promises of the Third Reich, but who then for kind of ethical and moral considerations had turned against Hitler in part because of what he had heard or what he had witnessed even in terms of anti-Jewish massacres.
He was a highly courageous young officer who really, out of idealism, decided that he had to kill Hitler. Kind of the other extreme is someone like Rommel. The support he may have given to the resistance was extremely lukewarm at best. Stauffenberg recently lost a right hand and left eye in action. But this doesn't stop him. Invalided back to Berlin,
Stauffenberg pledges himself to the conspirators cause. In fact, he explains, his physical disabilities can be used to their advantage. He's been rewarded with a new staff job at Wehrmacht headquarters as the new chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, the head of the Home Army. This means Stauffenberg will be number two to the very person empowered to trigger the emergency legislation and put Operation Valkyrie into play. And the cherry on top?
As part of his duties, he will be in frequent contact with the Fuhrer himself, hiding in plain sight, a disabled veteran. Stauffenberg will be an unlikely assassin. The best place to take him out will be at the isolated Wolf's Lair. They will use a bomb, a British-made plastic explosive, primed with a timer fuse. For Stauffenberg, assassinating Hitler proves a frustrating process.
On both July 11th and 15th, he's in pole position to blow up the Führer, but he's denied permission. He is to do so only when he can take out other key members of Hitler's inner circle at the same time, getting rid of them all in one fell swoop, chiefly Himmler and Goering. But the plotters are running out of time. The Gestapo dragnet is closing in. Arrests are being made. It's now or never.
Stauffenberg gets the call to attend the Wolf's Lair again on July 20th. All are in agreement: he will kill Hitler regardless. One of the things that makes the 20th of July plot different is that they have so much infrastructure behind them and they'd actually worked out exactly who they would put in place once the coup had happened.
So it was very clearly delineated what the future of government could look like once Hitler was out of the way. In a way, it's difficult to know what that would have been. Would they have continued the war? Or would they have tried to make peace? As military men, they might not have wanted Germany to be seen to surrender on unfavorable terms.
This is not just a few officers who think that they need to kill Hitler. This is really them working hand in hand with other resistance groups, particularly from the conservative elite, but not only of them. I mean, these also include now some trade unionists, some social democrats, some people who are driven by their theological beliefs.
And they have really kind of been meeting for months secretly in country houses and so on. They have drawn up a new constitution. Whereas before, kind of the approach was kind of to say, let's first kill Hitler and let's work out everything else afterwards.
1944, July 20th, 1944 is really different. There we really see a realization on the part of the plotters is that they need to get everything in hand ahead of time. It's important not to fall into the post-war West German interpretation of the plot as being a moral statement against national socialism.
If you look at the expectations of the plotters in terms of retaining their shopping list of large swathes of Europe, we're not talking about a plot that has any kind of liberal ethos behind it. It's about trying to preserve the social clout of the officer corps. It's about trying to ensure that Germany doesn't have to endure much, much worse than the Versailles Treaty after the Second World War.
There's hopes of linking up somehow with the Western powers to defeat Bolshevism. So none of this springs from necessarily a morally commendable context. July 20th, 1944, 10:15 a.m. A plane lands at Rastenburg, East Prussia. Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, disembark. The pilot is instructed to keep the aircraft ready for a quick turnaround.
The Wolf's Lair bunker is under some of the heaviest security in Nazi Germany. It's ringed by three layers of electric fencing and barbed wire. It has machine gun nests, trenches, search towers and minefields. It's crawling with armed guards and vicious dogs. But Stauffenberg is a familiar face. He and Hefton have the necessary passes to get themselves in and, hopefully, out. Security cut the Colonel a little slack because of his injuries.
Nobody looks in his briefcase, which contains the bomb components and a pair of pliers, all wrapped inside a spare shirt. But already events are moving beyond their control. With the weather hot, the meeting, as we know, has been moved to an outdoor cabin. And Hitler has changed his schedule at the last minute. Mussolini is going to drop in and pay him a visit, it turns out. The conference has been moved up to 12.30.
This leaves very little time for the pair of assassins to arm their bomb. With the Fuhrer's conference about to begin, Stauffenberg sits there sweating, still troubled by his wounds. He gets up. He needs a change of shirt, he says. The one that he's carrying in his bag. He and Hefton head to a side room. Hitler's staff have been sympathetic to Stauffenberg, but turning up late for the Fuhrer is a no-no. Someone bangs on the door. The meeting is about to start.
Hefton replies that his one-handed boss is having trouble with his belt and buttons. Out of sight, they furiously assemble their device, clipping the fuse, releasing the vial of acid that will burn through the trigger wire in exactly ten minutes, and replacing it in the briefcase. When Stauffenberg walks into the map room, Hitler is forgiving, conscious of Stauffenberg's damaged hearing. He's met the young colonel several times, and admires his dedication, his bravery.
Stauffenberg can hardly believe his luck. This allows him to stand right next to him at the map table. He places his loaded briefcase right at the Fuhrer's feet. The conspirators have an inside man at the Wolf's Lair, the man in charge of the compound's communications. At the given moment, a phone call will come through, some bogus emergency for Stauffenberg to deal with, to call him away. And so, when the phone duly rings,
Stauffenberg exits. Outside, he and Hefton watch from their car. Nobody could have survived that. With all hell breaking loose, Stauffenberg must bluff his way past the checkpoints. Orders are that no one must leave, but he manages to talk his way through. By 1:00 PM, he's in the air. On the flight back to Berlin, Stauffenberg looks out of the window and ponders a brighter tomorrow.
Right now, General Ulbricht and company should be initiating Operation Valkyrie. But when they land in Berlin, Stauffenberg is flummoxed. Where are the mobilized troops? Isn't Berlin supposed to be locked down in a state of emergency? He makes his way to the nearest telephone, and to his astonishment, he's told that nothing has happened. Valkyrie hasn't been activated. Ulbricht has even gone out for a long lunch.
Confirmation of Hitler's death has not been forthcoming, and General Fromm, the only one with the authority to actually initiate Valkyrie, is having a wobble. Tearing his hair out, Stauffenberg berates his co-conspirators. At his insistence, four hours late, Valkyrie is eventually put into play. Fromm is forced to initiate it at gunpoint. At last, military trucks pour onto the streets, but confusion now reigns.
The Home Army's commanders panic. Rumors are swirling that Hitler isn't actually dead at all. One local commander is ordered by Stauffenberg to arrest Joseph Goebbels. But when he gets there, Goebbels summons him into his office. He has someone on the telephone for him. "You recognize my voice?" says Adolf Hitler. "Now do you believe that I'm alive?" Let's go back a few hours, to the Wolf Lair and the aftermath of the explosion.
Once again, Hitler has ridden his extraordinary luck. As Stauffenberg exits the room, Colonel Heinz Brandt steps into his place. Crucially, he nudges the briefcase out of the way. Beneath the table, it's now on the other side of a thick oak trestle, and this means that when the bomb goes off, the blast is absorbed, and in the flimsy cabin, with open windows, the force of it is dissipated.
The bomb is denied its lethal shockwave. In the swirl of black smoke, no one knows what just happened. Have they been hit by a Russian shell? A Russian aircraft? The enemy must be closer than they think. The immediate concern is for the Fuhrer. He is battered and bruised, his hair is singed, his trousers are almost comically shredded, hanging in strips, like something from a cartoon. But he is essentially okay.
His fixer, Dr. Morel, injects him with sedatives. In a state of tranquilized euphoria, Hitler wanders around, showing off his tattered clothes to his secretaries, staggering about as one observer puts it, like a sailor on a pitching ship. That afternoon Hitler takes tea with Mussolini, just as planned. He has a punctured eardrum and some kind of concussion. His short-term memory will be severely impacted, but it could have been a lot worse.
His stenographer was killed. Colonel Brandt and two generals will die from horrible wounds. Three more lie seriously injured. As Hitler's inner circle begin arriving, rushing to Rastenberg to show solidarity, they start to jab fingers of blame at each other for this and everything else that seems to be going wrong. Admiral Dönitz lashes out at Göring and the failures of the Luftwaffe.
Göring has a go at Ribbentrop, calling him a dirty little champagne salesman, threatening to hit him with his baton. Back in Berlin, the plotters are fighting a rearguard. It doesn't take long for the SS to close in. After an heroic last stand at Wehrmacht headquarters, the Valkyrie gang, Stauffenberg and all, are dragged out into the courtyard. Tromm convenes a firing squad. By the headlamps of an army truck,
They are, one by one, shot dead. Back inside, General Beck is handed a revolver and instructed to do the decent thing. He fails and has a bullet put in him by one of Fromm's men. The summary executions will actually be seen as a hasty attempt by Fromm to cover his own tracks, and he too will soon be liquidated. At 9pm Goebbels telephones Hitler. It's all over. The Fuhrer replies, "That's unusual."
He will take to the airwaves. He needs to reassure his folk. At 1am the news broadcast is heralded by a fanfare, and then comes the Fuhrer's voice. An attempt against his life has been thwarted, he explains. He talks of a cabal of criminal officers, a brand new enemy within to rail against.
It's very hard to make robust claims about what Germans really thought in Nazi Germany, which after all was a polity where any criticism of the regime was a criminal offence that could land you in a concentration camp.
In the First World War, the Nazis believed that Germany had lost the war due to this discontent on the home front. And so there's a huge emphasis on crashing any signs of spreading discontent. And certainly, the 1944 bomb plot, for example, was widely seen as being a second attempt to stab in the back and almost certainly boosted the regime's popularity amongst almost everybody except for the conservative elites.
I was spared a fate which held no horror for me, but would have had terrible consequences for the German people, says Hitler. I see in it a sign from Providence that I must, and therefore shall, continue my work. And he's going to have that work cut out. In the west, a second Allied invasion will soon arrive on France's Mediterranean coast. In the north, Paris will be liberated on August the 25th.
A provisional French government will be set up under General Charles de Gaulle. Simultaneously, Romania will do in Italy and switch sides. On September 2nd, Bulgaria declares neutrality and seeks peace. On September 19th, Finland signs an accord with the Soviet Union and turns to fighting German forces in Lapland. The client regime in Croatia meanwhile is being overrun by Yugoslav partisans.
As the Soviets push on Poland, the Wehrmacht in the west will pull back to a defensive position ahead of the River Rhine, known as the Siegfried Line or Westwall. After the failed Valkyrie plot, other conspirators are rounded up. On August 7th 1944, the ringleaders are put forward for the obligatory show trial of the People's Court, where they are subjected to the haranguing of the infamous Judge Freisler,
Freisler, as it happens, will soon be killed in an Allied air raid, but not before he passes judgment on the eight senior officers who had dared to try and murder his beloved Fuhrer. Denied any semblance of a legal defense, the once proud soldiers shuffle in, dazed, bruised, paraded in shabby civilian clothes. They are the first of many to be tried over the coming months. Without belts, they clutch to keep their trousers up.
This prompts Freisler to condemn General Fitzleben, who has also had his false teeth taken away as a dirty old man, one accused of fiddling with himself.
You had the contrast of the Prussian dignity, the austere Christian heroism of the plotters, and this rabid, odd-looking little man screaming and hectoring at them in an utterly hysterical, hyperbolic voice and sewage of verbal diarrhea pouring from his mouth.
And these men retaining their dignity in the very face of death, in the face of their diabolic tormentor, they stand tight-lipped and stern. That same day, the accused are led to their deaths in Plötzensee Prison. Theirs is a slow and painful execution. They're placed in piano wire nooses and strung from meat hooks. For added indignity, they're stripped naked from the waist down.
The macabre spectacle is filmed for Hitler's delectation and rushed to him at the Wolf's Lair. He delights in watching it over and over again. Later, as the extent of the conspiracy begins to unfold, Hitler orders the SS to show no mercy. He tells them to root out the conspirators' wives and families and sling them all into concentration camps. 7,000 will be arrested and some 5,000 executed.
A full 20,000 suffer in the purge. Admiral Canaris and General Oster of the Abwehr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a leading German theologian, will be hanged for high treason in April 1945. Their executions rushed forward ahead of the Allied liberation. October 14, 1944, the village of Herrlingen in southern Germany, where outside an especially elegant house
the residence of a man clearly held in high regard by the Nazi regime. It belongs to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the star commander of the Wehrmacht. At just after noon, a staff car pulls into the drive. Two men get out, Generals Burgdorf and Meisel. They inform Rommel that they have a warrant for his arrest, for his alleged part in the Valkyrie plot. As it happens, Rommel has an alibi.
Injured in an air attack, he was in a military hospital. His skull was fractured. He's since been at home convalescing. But in Nazi Germany, hearsay is as good as a conviction. Rommel knows enough about Nazi so-called justice. There will be another show trial, followed by a swift execution for himself and his staff, and with disgrace heaped upon his family. But there is an alternative, he's told. Take his own life.
Do this, and he has the word of the Fuhrer that his part in the plot will forever remain a secret. He will be buried as a national hero. His family's needs will be taken care of. Rommel goes inside, puts on his Afrika Korps uniform, and fetches his Field Marshal's baton. He tells his wife that in a quarter of an hour she will receive a phone call. It will be bad news. Bergdorf and Meisel drive Rommel to some local woods.
They hand him a capsule of cyanide. Death will be instant and painless. The generals exit the vehicle and walk away, leaving Rommel to his own devices. They return a while later to find him slumped over the back seat. The Nazi propaganda machine will report Rommel's death as due to an embolism, the result of his injuries. True to the Fuhrer's word, he is buried with full military honors. At the Wolf's Lair,
Hitler looks into the eyes of his beloved pet Alsatian. "Look at me, blondie. Are you also a traitor, like the generals of my staff?" Still high on morphine, he writes a letter to Eva Braun. "My dear Chapelle, I hope to come back soon and so be able to rest, putting myself in your hands. I greatly need tranquility." She replies to him, somewhat presciently, "You know that my whole life is in loving you.
From the time of our first meetings, I promised myself to follow you everywhere, even in death. In the next episode, the dramatic conclusion of Hitler's downfall. With the battle for Berlin raging, the Fuhrer makes his last stand. Underground, in a bunker beneath the Chancellery, he will conduct the final act of his life, a macabre ritual of marriage, murder and suicide. That's next time.
in the final part of the Hitler story.
