He still exerted psychological power, although its basis had meanwhile changed. What the public now felt was not so much its onetime admiration as a dull, fatalistic sense of an indissoluble reciprocal bond. That feeling was reinforced by both domestic and Allied propaganda, by the threatening advance of the Red Army and the intimidating pressures of the Gestapo, the system of informers, and the SS. All this was blanketed by a vague hope that this man would know the way to avert disaster, as he had done so often in the past. The failure of the assassination and the premature end of the coup spared the German public that decisive question with which the conspirators wanted to confront it by revealing the moral baseness of the regime, the conditions in the concentration camps, Hitler’s deliberate war policy, and the practice of extermination. Goerdeler was convinced that the public would cry out with indignation and that a popular uprising would erupt. But the question was not posed.
Thus July 20 was confined to the decision and the act of a few individuals. The social make-up of the conspiracy, however, meant that when it was crushed, more than a number of rebels died. The doomed Prussian nobles who formed the core of the uprising constituted a class rich in tradition, “perhaps the only and certainly the strongest force capable of governance that Germany has produced in modern times.” It alone possessed “what a ruling class needs and what neither the German high aristocracy nor the German bourgeoisie nor, so it seems, the German working class had or have: coherence, style, desire to rule, forcefulness, selfassurance, self-discipline, morality.”21
Granted, Hitler had corrupted this class, had stripped its members of their powers and exposed their parasitical aspects. But only now did he liquidate them. Along with the bearers of many resounding names, old Germany stepped off the stage. Granted, their eminence had long since been squandered, gambled away in opportunistic and shortsighted collaboration with Hitler. Nevertheless, it must also be granted that the decision to break the onetime alliance came from these men. Hitler’s savage reaction sprang from his never-abandoned resentment toward this old world, his hatred for its gravity, its ethics, its discipline. He had the same ambivalence toward it that he had always felt toward the bourgeois world. “I have often bitterly regretted that I did not purge my officer corps the way Stalin did,” he remarked.22 Taken in this light, July 20 and the executions that followed it constituted the consummation of the National Socialist revolution.
Seldom has a social class managed to carry out its “exodus from history” more nobly than did these Prussian Junkers. But it is also true they made the sacrifice only for their own sakes. Ostensibly they acted in the name of that “sacred Germany” which Stauffenberg once more invoked in his pathetic outcry before the execution squad. But behind that slogan was the conviction of acting as a class, of being subject as a class to a special moral imperative that gave them the right to resistance and made it their duty to overthrow a tyrant. “We are purifying ourselves,” General Stieff replied when asked why they were going ahead with an act whose success was so uncertain.
This desire for self-purification governed all their actions. Hence they could overlook the possible charges of treason, perjury, or stab in the back. It rendered them immune to the misinterpretations and calumnies they saw coming. “Now the whole world will descend upon us and berate us,” Henning von Tresckow said to one of his friends shortly before his death. “But I still hold firmly to the conviction that we acted rightly.”23 In fact both Nazi and Allied propaganda, in one of those dreadful harmonies they exhibited more and more frequently at this stage of the war, denounced the conspirators. Both sides were committed to the thesis of the monolithic character of the regime, of the identity between Führer and people—the Allies even well beyond the war’s end. The occupation authorities, for instance, prohibited publication about the German Resistance. The rather reluctant respect that is nowadays accorded the conspirators preserves elements of this earlier unease. None of their ideas and values have come down to the present day. They left scarcely a trace; and the accidents of history curiously underlined their total disappearance. The bodies of the executed men were turned over to the Anatomical Institute of Berlin University. The head of the Institute had close friends among the conspirators, and therefore blocked their use as cadavers. He had them cremated intact and the ashes buried in a nearby village cemetery. There an Allied air raid destroyed most of the urns.
The events of July 20 once more gave the regime a vigorous radicalizing impulse. If it ever approached the abstract concept of totalitarian rule, it did so in those last months, during which greater devastation was wreaked on the country than in all the preceding years of the war. On the very day of the assassination Hitler appointed Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as commander of the army reserve, thus deliberately humiliating the Wehrmacht. Five days later, Goebbels, who had been incessantly urging Hitler to tighten up the domestic front, was assigned the new post of Reich commissioner for Total War Commitment. Under the slogan “The people want it!” he instantly issued indexes of restrictions, embargos, and shutdowns. Almost all theaters and revues were closed, all academies, all schools of domestic science and commerce. All furloughs were canceled. Obligatory labor for women up to fifty was introduced, and many similar measures taken. On August 24 Goebbels announced total mobilization. Soon all remotely fit men between the ages of fifteen and sixty were drafted into the Volkssturm (militia). “It takes a bomb under his backside to make Hitler see reason,” Goebbels commented.24
Simultaneously, the production of armaments once again reached the highest figures since the beginning of the war. The retreats and incessant air raids constantly caused new difficulties, but Albert Speer repeatedly succeeded in overcoming these by vigorous and ingenious improvisations. The production of artillery pieces was increased from 27,000 in 1943 to more than 40,000, the number of tanks from 20,000 to 27,000, of planes from 25,000 to nearly 38,000. But these extreme increases ruthlessly used up all reserves of strength, as if in preparation for the last battle. There was no way of replacing the resources consumed by such production; the feat could not be maintained, let alone repeated. Consequently, it only accelerated the collapse—all the more so when the Allies began those systematic attacks on refineries that they had once before planned and then rejected. The production of airplane fuel, for example, dropped from 156,000 metric tons in May, 1944, to 52,000 metric tons in June to 10,000 tons in September, 1944, and finally to 1,000 tons in February, 1945.
Thus the means for continuing the war were beginning to cancel one another out. The retreats and bombings resulted in serious losses of raw materials; these in turn reduced the production of weapons and the ability to use the weapons produced, so that new losses of territory followed, which in turn enabled the enemy to base its air forces closer and closer to German territory. From this point on, almost every operational decision was influenced by considerations of armaments; every military conference revolved around reserves of raw materials, transportation difficulties, shortages. From August, 1944, explosives had to be stretched by the use of up to 20 per cent salt. On the airfields readied fighter planes stood with empty tanks. And in a memorandum of that same period Speer came to the conclusion: “Considering the time needed by the processing industries, the production dependent on chromium, which means the entire production of armaments, will cease on January 1, 1946.”25