Dönitz: The Last Führer (64 page)

The one capital where the conspirators enjoyed decisive success was Paris; a dedicated band around the military Commander of the city, von Stülpnagel, had set the operations in motion that afternoon, and as dusk fell some 1,200 SS and Gestapo were surrounded and imprisoned in their barracks without a shot fired; their chiefs were taken and held separately. Whether any of Admiral Krancke’s staff in Paris knew of the intended
Putsch
beforehand is not clear; the late Admiral Wegener, then first staff officer, Navy Group West, has stated that when an obscure wire was shown to him earlier that afternoon he had told the officer of the watch to take it to the Admiral, then he beckoned to the rest of the staff and took them riding in the Bois de Boulogne.
¹⁶⁴
It was obvious a
Putsch
was taking place, and he did not wish to be involved in action against the
Putschists
which Admiral Krancke, a convinced Nazi, would assuredly order. By the time he returned from the ride it was clear that Hitler was still alive.

This was the decisive factor for the man on whom responsibility for the spread of the revolt in France rested, Field Marshal von Kluge, Commander Army Group West. He had already told von Stülpnagel that with the Führer still alive he could not support the
Putsch
. At about 11 o’clock the Paris conspirators heard of the collapse of the Berlin revolt from a call Stauffenberg made immediately prior to his arrest; there was nothing for them to do then but to prepare themselves for arrest or suicide.

Admiral Krancke provided a postscript to the Paris failure, indicating the mood of the Navy. Learning that the Paris SS had been arrested, he made repeated calls to von Kluge and Stülpnagel, demanding their release, finally threatening to use his own forces for the purpose. Whether this was a considered bluff is not clear—most of his small force were wireless specialists, and neither he nor anyone else wanted Germans fighting Germans in the centre of Paris; perhaps he banked on this; certainly when Stülpnagel was told of the threat he reluctantly ordered the release of the prisoners. It was two o’clock in the morning.
The revolt had failed. It was another twelve hours though before Dönitz relaxed the Navy’s state of readiness.
¹⁶⁵

He himself remained at the
Wolfschanze
throughout the 21st, issuing another proclamation:

Three days later he joined his name to that of Keitel and Göring in offering Hitler the adoption of the Nazi salute in all arms of the services ‘as a sign of their unbroken loyalty to the Führer and the close union between the armed services and the Party’.
¹⁶⁷

Meanwhile a blood purge was under way, more horrifying and sadistic than anything the Party had yet descended to as it wreaked hideous revenge on its hated class enemy. Within three weeks the first show trial took place in the Peoples’ Court in Berlin, presided over by a turn-coat
former Communist leader, Roland Freisler: von Witzleben, Hoepner, Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg—a friend of von Moltke’s and member of the resistance from the beginning—and other leading
Putschists
who had not taken their own lives were verbally assaulted and humiliated by this ambitious proselyte; despite his extraordinary rantings Yorck succeeded in making the moral case for the resistance: ‘What is fundamental and linking all these problems together is the State’s totalitarian hold on the citizen, excluding the individual’s religious and moral obligations before God.’
¹⁶⁸

The sentence of death was implicit in Freisler’s proceedings, only the manner may have been in doubt, and that not for long; immediately after he had pronounced, all the accused were taken to Plötzensee prison, and in a low-ceilinged dungeon, lit dazzlingly by studio bulbs and reflectors, they were hanged one by one from meat hooks while a cine camera in the corner recorded their agony
pour encourager les autres
. Other trials and barbarous executions followed; the numbers are not known with any certainty, but the tale of vengeance and martyrdom continued up to the last weeks of the war, extending, as Hitler had promised in his frenzied outburst at the
Wolfschanze
tea party, to the traitors’ families; their young children were placed in the care of National Socialist Welfare organizations, given new surnames and denied all news of their parents’ fate.

It is interesting that in the Navy itself only three officers were arrested, one of them Stauffenberg’s brother, Bertholt, who was the conspirators’ legal adviser; another was 1c in the headquarters operations staff; his special duty during the
Putsch
was to observe Dönitz and if necessary arrest him. Probably there were others who were sympathetic to the plotters, at least in the thinking departments of the service, and especially those whose duties gave them access to uncensored intelligence from outside, but given the known extreme views of the C-in-C Navy and the majority of Flag Officers, these had little chance of taking an active part.

On August 24th, Dönitz called his Flag Officers together at yet another
Tagung
to explain to them and through them to the service as a whole the events and lessons of the attempted
coup
. It is evident that he had been briefed by Himmler or his chief agent, Kaltenbrunner, for his opening remarks reveal a wide knowledge of the extent of the conspiracy not available from trial reports; he began by reciting with deep cynicism the rebels’ ideas: once the Führer had been removed, both the ‘Anglo-Saxons
and the Russians would be convinced that our aggressive spirit had disappeared … we would at once be granted an honourable peace without partition’,
¹⁶⁹
whereupon a new government would institute immediate freedom of expression, press freedom, restoration of individual rights, removal of special courts, opening of concentration camps and so on. It is interesting that he did not include in this catalogue the punishment of war criminals although the members of the resistance had long considered it ‘absolutely essential for the restoration of the rule of law, and with it peace in Germany and the community of nations’ that the many crimes committed during the war should be punished,
¹⁷⁰
and therefore deemed it ‘necessary to establish a retrospective German law’. They had defined a war criminal as anyone ‘who orders a criminal action or who, in a responsible position, instigates the crime, or who spreads general doctrine or instructions of a criminal character…’
¹⁷¹
There can be no possible doubt from Dönitz’s remarks at this
Tagung
of August 24th alone that he came into this category.

Having given his summary of the conspirators’ aims, Dönitz poured scorn on their methods as ‘laughable and historically uninformed’; they had believed they had only to say the word and without any attempt to seize the communications, the radio stations, telephone exchanges and telegraph offices, the government would fall. The truth about this failure is not so simple as he made out; some aspects remain a mystery today. He poured similar scorn on the conspirators’ intentions to free concentration camp inmates:

Here he demonstrably overstepped the facts as he knew them. He had heard Himmler at the 1943 Gauleiters’
Tagung
speak of the ‘50 to 60,000 political and criminal criminals … in the concentration camps’, who together with ‘approximately a further 150,000, among them a small number of Jews, a great number of Poles and Russians and other rabble in the concentration camps’ were employed by Minister Speer for his
‘vitally important tasks’.
¹⁷²
Dönitz was, of course, working closely with Speer on the naval construction programme and knew that his colleagues’ slave labourers were not murderers and sex offenders; within three months he was calling for 12,000 of them to supplement the shipyard workforce!

As his final shot at the ‘narrow-mindedness … and monstrously uneducated presumption’ of the conspirators, Dönitz revealed they had intended subordinating the
Kriegsmarine
to the General Staff of the Army!

He went on to summarize the overall situation: there were two possibilities before them; the first was to capitulate as the General Staff clique had wished; he outlined the consequences—disarmament, the destruction of all war production, a prohibition on the possession of aircraft and U-boats—in short, although he did not say so, a return to the position after the First World War. The Russians would create a Communist government immediately and remove all members of those classes which would oppose it. ‘In addition millions of us would be freighted to the east in order to rebuild … because certainly the east was destroyed by us. That these millions of men, our whole labour force, would not see the homeland again is similarly self-evident.’ Therefore, he concluded, capitulation did not come into the question.

Again some doubts about his real thoughts and motives occur. Certainly there was everything to fear from Stalin, whose treatment of the officer class, clergy and intelligentsia in occupied countries and bloody purges within Russia were notorious; certainly he believed that the British had started the war in order to destroy Germany and that Churchill and Roosevelt would fulfil their pledge to partition the Fatherland; but he also knew that an Anglo-Saxon occupation would carry none of the terrors of a Russian occupation, and by the date of his address the western allies had broken out of their bridgehead and advanced as far as the line of the Seine; Paris was being liberated as he spoke. With his intimate knowledge of the conspiracy as revealed in this talk, he probably knew that the western Commanders, Rommel and von Kluge, both of whom had been in the plot, had long since conceded defeat and hoped to secure an armistice with the Anglo-American enemy, which alone might allow Germany to hold her eastern front against Bolshevism. This was an alternative he did not mention, though—which leads to the conclusion that this part of the address was deliberately dishonest, the highly coloured picture of the terrors of
Russian occupation deliberately misleading propaganda, and one is again left with the question of whether this falseness arose from his indestructible commitment to his soldier’s goal, in this case to the continuation of the fight as commanded by the Führer, or whether guilt and complicity in war crimes branded as punishable by fellow Germans of the resistance played an equal part.

The only other possibility, he went on, was ‘fanatical further fighting’. There was no half-way house; compromise was ‘false and impossible’. And he repeated his frequently expressed conviction that any ‘deviation from this fanatical and resolute struggle’ implied a weakness, anyone who deviated ‘in the last from the National Socialist State’ weakened the State’s unity and resolution, hence the war effort; finally, ‘anyone who expresses the least defeatism weakens the will to resistance of the people and must in consequence be ruthlessly annihilated’.

The soldier had no right to question whether an order to fight had purpose; the calling and task of the soldier was to fight; were each man or group to start questioning whether his orders made sense it would shake the profession of arms to the foundation and signify the dissolution of the
Wehrmacht
. In this, of course, he was correct; in explaining it, though, he was surely explaining the great responsibilities invested in military leadership—in those who were listening to him, above all in himself as Supreme Commander. Naturally he argued afterwards and to the end of his life that he, too, was simply a soldier carrying out the orders of his C-in-C, the Führer, Adolf Hitler; naturally he wished to believe that any Commander, like Beck, Rommel or von Kluge who exercised independent judgement, hence broke his oath of loyalty to the Führer, was a miserable traitor, for in doing so he passed on his own responsibility. But whether at the time he made this speech his subconscious and very human desire was to cast off responsibility, or whether he was impelled more by the doctrines of unreason, hate and destruction that informed National Socialism is, of course, not revealed by the record.