Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a servile mouthpiece of Hitler, ordered Stülpnagel to fly to Berlin. Stülpnagel sent Jünger regrets through his secretary for having to cancel a scheduled breakfast and then, instead of flying, ordered a driver to take him by car past the battlefields of Verdun where he had fought in the Great War. During a fierce rainstorm, Stülpnagel shot himself in the temple on the banks of the Meuse River. His driver rescued him from the water, still alive. He had blinded himself but was brought to an army hospital, guarded by the SS, and then taken to Plötzensee in Berlin, where he was tried by the notorious Peoples Court’s judge Roland Freisler on 30 August and hanged six weeks later. Kluge was replaced by General Walter Model on 17 August and ordered to report to Berlin. He took his own life with cyanide pills near Metz on 19 August.
Kluge’s representative in Paris, General Günther Blumentritt, may have saved the day for Jünger and others in the group that met at the Hotel George V. On the evening of 20 July, he sat down with Oberg and Knochen in the Salon Blue of the Hotel Raphael and, in a scene seemingly out of a tale by Rabelais, ordered several bottles of fine champagne to placate them. Blumentritt tried to frame the entire affair as a gross misunderstanding. Having been caught flatfooted by the plot that developed on their watch, it was in the SS commanders’ self-interest not to delve too deeply into the extent of the German Wehrmacht officers’ involvement in the botched coup.[41]
With Jünger having been so close to key members of the German Resistance, the question must be posed how he survived the brutal crackdown by the SS in Paris after 20 July. It is widely claimed that Hitler protected him, saying “Nothing happens to Jünger” (“Dem Jünger geschieht nichts”). There is only one source for this supposed utterance, namely Friedrich Hielscher, who heard it from Wolfram Sievers, an SS officer who was hanged after the war, in June 1948.[42] (Hielscher and Jünger carried on an extensive correspondence for fifty-eight years).
The Hielscher-Severs source seems credible, but it is uncorroborated. According to one biographer, Jünger was to have been called before Roland Freisler’s Peoples’ Court in the spring of 1945. Only the chaos of the final months of the war saved him.[43] Hitler is not known to have made compassionate exceptions, to say the least, even for war heroes. Erwin Rommel would be a good example. The more likely explanation is that Jünger was inordinately careful. He burned his manuscripts and letters on sensitive matters, as noted above, and he was in fact opposed to any attempt to assassinate Hitler or work against the party dictatorship, as much as he disliked both. He expressed his opposition to assassinations of dictators several times in his journals. He argued from historical precedents in which the aftermath of such killings had produced greater tyranny. In the specific case of Germany, he feared that a successful elimination of Hitler would lead to a new Stab-in-the-Back Legend.[44]
By early 1944, the liberation of Paris was imminent. Jünger noted that the Americans were in Renne on 5 August. He climbed up to the top of Sacré-Coeur to bid goodbye to his beloved Paris as the cobblestones baked in the hot sun. “Cities are feminine and only smile on the victor,” he noted enigmatically. On 10 August, he visited Florence Gould for the last time. Three days later he took a walk with Charmille on the banks of the Seine. The Paris journals end there. The next day, 14 August, the evacuation of the German army began, and Jünger was seated on one of the first military transports out of the city.
He received news of the liberation of Paris back home in Kirchhorst. On 17 August, the German army began placing explosives around the French capital, not only intending to hold off the Allied advance but also honoring Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris if necessary. Columns of German military vehicles were on the move everywhere in the metropolis. The French Resistance plastered the capital with posters calling for a general strike and mobilization against the Germans. The war journals are curiously silent about all this frenetic activity. On 20 August, he visited a cemetery and ruminated about short life spans. On 21 August, he joined some boys in a fishing expedition. Finally, on 23 August he noted that “the Americans have entered Paris” and then went off for a swim and sunbathing. Attacks on collaborators in Paris began at this time, and Jünger noted with bitterness how many of his Paris friends were arrested, beleaguered, or attacked by mobs. “They say Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts.”[45]
On 25 October, before departing for the Italian front, Jünger’s son Ernstel visited Kirchhorst for the last time. On 27 October, Jünger was formally decommissioned from military service. He returned to his books and his garden, although constant Allied bombing made life difficult and dangerous even in rural areas in Germany.
On 12 January 1945, Jünger received the dreadful news that his eldest son, his namesake Ernstel, had been killed on 29 November 1944 in, of all places, the marble cliffs of Cararra, Italy. The boy had been overheard talking to a friend, Wolf Jobst Siedler (later an important writer and publisher in the Federal Republic), expressing “defeatist” remarks about the Hitler regime. Ernstel was also caught listening to foreign radio broadcasts. A spy denounced both boys, and they were arrested in January 1944. Hitler had recently given orders that fresh recruits (Ernstel was eighteen) were to be trained not only in the best military tactics but also as sharp ideological warriors. The actions of Ernstel and Wolf could therefore have led to death sentences.
Jünger had received permission to leave Paris in February 1944 and met with the authorities in Berlin, displaying his Pour le Mérite medal ostentatiously at his neck. In April, Ernst and Gretha visited the presiding judge in Ernstel’s case, Admiral Scheurlen,[46] who reduced an initial harsher penalty to Frontbewährung, which meant the boy was allowed to return to military service to prove his worth and was given a dangerous assignment in the Italian mountains. Jünger was never sure whether his son had been shot by the enemy or executed by the SS, with a shot to the back of the neck.[47]
For the most part, the war journals consist of dispassionate, precise observations, showing little emotion and only limited introspection, as when, for example, Jünger ruminates about his tendency to fall into depression, la frousse. By contrast, for weeks after he and Gretha received news of the boy’s death, he returned repeatedly to ruminating on the poignant pain of losing his eldest son. “I cannot stop thinking about Ernstel. So much about his life is a riddle that is hard to solve.”[48]
The war journals end with Jünger unenthusiastically commanding the local Volkssturm, the national militia of males between sixteen and sixty not already serving in the army, which had been announced by Hitler in the fall of 1944. As refugees streamed through the countryside, some billeted in his house, Jünger retreated as much as possible into his books and letters, hiding out in a garden cottage or upstairs in his attic. Perpetua took command of the household and kept intruders at bay. On 29 March, on his fiftieth birthday, he heard news from his publisher that Goebbels had forbidden mention of his name in the press, “the only honor that I prize.”[49] His final thoughts in these journals were about his dead son. As he watched American army tanks and other armored vehicles pass by on a road nearby, with jets streaming overhead, a “parade of dangerous toys,” he sensed the “incursion of a superpower into a completely crushed region.”[50] The only saving grace, at least Ernstel did not see this, for “it would have hurt him too much.”
44
See especially Jünger,
47
Wolf Jobst Siedler,