Stauffenberg and another conspirator, General Erich Fellgiebel, were about 200 hundred yards away from the hut when the bomb went off. Assuming that Hitler was dead, the count asked Fellgiebel to phone Berlin with instructions to go ahead with a preplanned roundup of top Nazis in the capital; then he flew back to Berlin. By the time he arrived the plot was already unraveling, since Hitler let it be known immediately that an unsuccessful attempt had been made on his life. In Berlin a shocked Goebbels enthusiastically launched an investigation into the affair, which he assumed was the work of the “aristocratic generals’ clique” he despised. It was not difficult to identify the plotters, for the officers in question, after a brief hesitation, began playing their hand. Their efforts were ill coordinated, and military units loyal to Hitler soon cordoned off the former Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse, where Stauffenberg and some of the other putschists had barricaded themselves. To deflect suspicion from himself, General Fromm ordered Stauffenberg, General Ludwig Beck, General Friedrich Olbricht, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften arrested and conducted to a courtyard in the center of the building. There Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz, and Haeften were promptly shot. Beck was allowed to shoot himself, but, bungling the job, was finished off by a sergeant.
This was only the beginning of the grisly retribution exacted by the Hitler regime against the Twentieth of July movement. In subsequent days and weeks the Gestapo combed the Reich in search of anyone with the slightest connection to the plot. In some cases relatives of the men accused of participating in the action were also taken into custody. Many of the arrests took place in Berlin because of its centrality to the plot. Among the figures caught up in the dragnet was Dietrich Bonhöffer, a Protestant pastor in Dahlem who led a group of dissident theologians called the Confessing Church. In 1942 Bonhöffer had tried to organize foreign support for the German resistance through church contacts in Sweden. Another, very different, arrestee was Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the rabidly anti-Semitic and morally reprobate chief of police in Berlin. He had turned against the regime out of despair over the course of the war. Count Helmut James von Moltke, an international lawyer and great-nephew of the famous field marshal, was pulled into the net even though he was already in prison when the bombing occurred. The Berlin defendants were tried before the notorious “hanging judge” Roland Freisler at the local branch of the People’s Court. Those found guilty in the first trial were executed by hanging at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison, where they were suspended by piano wire from meat hooks attached to a roof beam. Since there was no drop from a scaffold, the victims dangled for several minutes before expiring. Goebbels ordered that the executions be filmed for his and Hitler’s later amusement.
Because the Twentieth of July plot failed so disastrously, and because it was so belated, many commentators in later years wrote it off as relatively minor moment in the history of the Third Reich. This is an inaccurate appraisal. There can be no doubt the coup was poorly organized. But with respect to the timing, it has been rightly noted that if the plot had been successful, the loss of additional millions of lives and much physical destruction might have been averted. Taking Germany alone, some 2.8 million people died as a result of the war between September 1, 1939, and July 20, 1944; between the assassination attempt and the end of the war that figure grew to 4.8 million. The mass murder in the death camps in the East, which continued until the Red Army’s liberation of Poland, might have ceased. And the hugely destructive ground attacks on German cities, including that against Berlin, were yet to come.
Here Is the Fascist Lair—Berlin
The Twentieth of July conspirators intended to liberate Germany from within. Their failure to do so meant that the country would have to be conquered by its foreign opponents. As we have seen, some Allied strategists had hoped to force a surrender by pounding German cities into rubble. It had become apparent by mid-1944 that this strategy was not going to work. Not only was the Reich holding on, but its industrial capacity was actually increasing despite the bombing. In Berlin, the target of dozens of major raids, many key plants had been damaged and the transportation system was in shambles. However, through rationalization and the relocation of plants to outlying districts, the city’s industrial production managed to reach its wartime peak in early 1944.
There being no doubt that Germany would have to be conquered with ground forces, Allied armies pressed their assault on the Reich from west and east. When the Americans managed to cross the Rhine at Remagen in early March 1945, it became urgently necessary to decide how best to organize the push across Germany. A second question was where Berlin would fit in the broader picture. A bitter debate broke out in the Western camp over these issues. General Bernard Montgomery and the British wanted to focus maximum effort on a drive across northern Germany with Berlin as the goal. In their view, this represented not only the fastest way to defeat Germany but had the added advantage of taking Berlin before the Russians could get there. But General Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower, the overall commander of the Allied armies, concluded that the most efficacious route to victory lay in destroying large Wehrmacht concentrations in the center and south, a task he believed could be best handled by forces under Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. Ike also decided to let the Russians take Berlin, which by Allied agreement was designated to lie within the Soviet zone of occupation after the war. For him this was not an overly painful decision: his priority was to defeat the Reich as quickly as possible and with minimal loss of Allied lives. Moreover, he believed that the crucial test would come not in Berlin but in the south of Germany, were the Nazis were rumored to be planning a last-ditch defense in the Alps (the rumors turned out to be false).
Eisenhower was much criticized, especially by the British, for not racing the Russians to Berlin. British officers contemptuously referred to the American general’s deference to Stalin as “Have a Go, Joe,” a phrase used by London prostitutes seeking GIs’ custom during the war. Ike himself later told Willy Brandt that if he had to do it over again, he would have ordered American troops to take the German capital. Yet in the context of the time, he probably made the right decision. In late March, when he reaffirmed his basic strategy, Western armies still stood 250 miles from Berlin, while the Russians were on the Oder-Neisse line, only thirty-three miles from the eastern edge of the city. Asked by Ike to estimate probable Western Allied casualties in an assault on Berlin, Bradley projected a loss of about 100,000 men. “A pretty stiff price for a prestige objective,” he said, “especially when we’ve got to fall back and let the other fellows take over.”
The Russians, meanwhile, were gearing up for their push on a city which they considered to be far more than just a prestige objective. “He who controls Berlin controls Germany and whoever controls Germany controls Europe,” Lenin once said. The German capital loomed so important in Russian strategy that its prospective conquest ignited a race between two military rivals every bit as fierce as the fabled contest between Montgomery and Patton. In November 1944 Stalin had promised Berlin to Marshal Georgi Zhukov, who had been the principal architect of the Red Army victories so far. But at a staff meeting on April 1, 1945, as the Russians were making their final plans for the Berlin offensive, the Soviet leader allowed himself to be convinced that Berlin could be taken more quickly if General Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front pressured the city simultaneously with the forces of Zhukov. Understanding the usefulness of competition, and always willing to play off one subleader against another, Stalin drew up two approach routes to the German capital that stopped just short of the city. After reaching that point, he said, “whoever breaks in first, let him take Berlin.”