In the meantime Stauffenberg and Haeften had reached the Restricted Area I guardhouse. The lieutenant in charge, having seen and heard the explosion, had already taken the initiative of ordering the barrier lowered, but recognizing the striking figure of Stauffenberg, he allowed the car to pass after a brief pause. More difficulty was encountered at the outer guardhouse on the way to the airfield. By this time an alarm had been raised and all entry and exit forbidden. The staff sergeant on duty was not about to be intimidated by Stauffenberg’s commanding bearing, and for a moment everything seemed to hand in the balance. Thinking fast, Stauffenberg demanded to speak by telephone to the commandant of Führer headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Streve, with whom he had a lunch appointment. Fortunately, he could only reach Streve’s deputy, Captain Leonhard von Möllendorff, who did not yet know why the alarm had been issued and therefore ordered the staff sergeant to allow Stauffenberg to pass. Halfway to the airfield, Haeften tossed the second package of explosives from the open vehicle. At about 1:00 p.m. the car reached the waiting airplane, and within minutes the conspirators took off for Berlin.
At just about this point, news of the blast reached army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse. Fellgiebel had taken steps about an hour earlier to block all signal traffic to and from both headquarters in Rastenburg, and he now received confirmation by telephone that this had been done While the communications blackout was certainly part of the conspirators’ plan, it would also have been a plausible reaction to the hastily issued instructions from Hitler’s staff that no news of the attack be allowed to reach the public. As a result, suspicion did not immediately fall on Fellgiebel, who soon had the amplification stations in Lötzen, Insterburg, and Rastenburg shut down as well. As Fellgiebel had frequently pointed out, however, it was technically impossible to cut the headquarters area off completely from the outside world.
As a result, Fellgiebel himself managed to put through a telephone call to the conspirators’ base of operations on Bendlerstrasse. But this call only caused more problems because the conspirators were faced with a situation that apparently none of them had foreseen and for which they had no code words: the bomb had gone off but Hitler had survived.
For the second time that day, then, General Fellgiebel found himself in a position to change the course of history. He basically had two options open to him. He could hide from Bendlerstrasse the fact that Hitler was alive and do everything possible to maintain the communications blackout of the Wolf’s Lair, resorting to violence if necessary. However hopeless it might seem, this ploy would help heighten the general confusion and at least keep the coup attempt going. The personal risk he would run by taking this course was not particularly great, as his fate would be sealed in any case if the coup failed. On the other hand, he could tell Bendlerstrasse that Hitler had survived and try to abort the coup attempt, at least the communications component, before it had really gotten under way. After all, he understood better than anyone else the impossibility of maintaining a communications blackout under these circumstances.
In the end, however, Fellgiebel hit on a third course. He informed his signal corps chief of staff at Bendlerstrasse, General Fritz Thiele, a fellow conspirator, that the assassination had failed but gave him to understand that the coup should proceed nevertheless. He thus blew away the elaborate smoke screen shrouding the attempt to seize power and revealed it as a straightforward revolt. According to Stauffenberg’s biographer Christian Muller this was a “major psychological blunder.” By informing Bendlerstrasse of the true state of affairs, Fellgiebel left it to the weak-willed group assembled there to decide what to do, at least until Stauffenberg’s arrival.4 Shortly after 3:00 p.m., Fellgiebel’s order blocking signal traffic was rescinded by Himmler, who had been summoned to Rastenburg, and Hitler began to swing into action, inquiring how soon it would be technically possible for him to address the German people directly over all radio stations in the Reich.
Meanwhile the hunt for the would-be assassin was launched. Initial suspicions fell on the construction workers employed at Führer headquarters. But then Sergeant Arthur Adam came forward to say that he had seen Stauffenberg leave the briefing barracks before the explosion without his briefcase, his cap, or his belt, but little attention was paid to this information at first. Lieutenant Colonel Sander even shouted at Adam that if he really harbored “such monstrous suspicions about so distinguished an officer” he should go directly to the Security Service (SD).5 Instead, Adam approached Martin Bormann, who took him to see Hitler. One piece of evidence quickly led to the next, leaving little doubt among the Führer’s confederates that Stauffenberg was the culprit. They did not yet realize, however, the enormity of the conspiracy or that a coup d’ état was under way in Berlin.
Shortly alter hearing of the attack, Himmler had ordered the head of the Reich Security Headquarters (RSHA), Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the superintendent of police, Bernd Wehner, to fly from Berlin to Rastenburg to take over the political and technical investigation of the assassination attempt. When Wehner arrived at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, the plane was ready for takeoff. The waiting Kaltenbrunner, who was not privy to the latest information, stunned his companion by announcing, “The Führer is dead!” Before the superintendent could regain his composure, Kaltenbrunner asked calmly whether he might like to play a few games of skat to while away the time.6
Somewhere in the skies between Berlin and Rastenburg the two planes must have crossed paths. It is not difficult to imagine the emotions Stauffenberg must have been feeling or the questions racing through his mind, in contrast to the icy calm of his adversary in the other plane. Having succeeded in igniting a bomb at Hitler’s feet-the event that had always been thought of as the “initial spark” that would touch off the great upheaval by which the entire Nazi regime would be overthrown-he now found himself condemned to more than two hours of anxious waiting. He could only pin his hopes on others: on Olbricht and Mertz, who alone held the levers of power; on reliable friends like Yorck, Hofacker, Schwerin, and Schulenburg, as well as on Jäger, Hoepner, Thiele, Hase, and many others, including the liaison officers in the military districts. He could only assume that orders would be followed unquestioningly down the chain of command-perhaps even with the acquiescence of General Fromm- alter Olbricht issued the Valkyrie II code word.
The reality that awaited him was far different. As his plane neared Berlin, the coup had not advanced at all. Fellgiebel’s indecisive and rather vague message—“something terrible has happened: the Führer is alive”—left Thiele unsettled and confused. To clear his mind he decided abruptly to go for a walk, apparently without bothering to inform Olbricht, and for nearly two hours he was nowhere to be found. Olbricht, too, had received a telephone call, probably around 2:00 p.m., from General Wagner in Zossen, and in view of the puzzling information from Rastenburg, they agreed not to act for the time being. After all, Fellgiebel’s message might have meant that the bomb had failed to go off or that Stauffenberg had been discovered and arrested, or that he was fleeing or that he had already been shot. Just five days earlier, Olbricht had issued the Valkyrie orders prematurely, and he knew that any repetition of that fiasco was bound to be fatal. This time, furthermore, in contrast to July 15, Fromm was present and would have to be dealt with.7