Fromm immediately dispatched news of the executions by teleprinter: “Attempted putsch by disloyal generals violently suppressed. All leaders shot.”22 Then he descended to the courtyard, passed the crumpled bodies without a glance, mounted one of the vehicles, and delivered a rousing speech celebrating the Führer, his miraculous deliverance, and the works of Providence. He ended with three “Sieg Heils,” joined enthusiastically by the soldiers and onlookers.
Meanwhile Beck’s bloody body was being dragged down the stairs. It was thrown with the others into one of the trucks and carted to the nearby cemetery of St. Matthew’s Church in the Tiergarten. The custodian was instructed to inter the bodies secretly that very night, but the next morning Himmler ordered that they be exhumed and burned, and the ashes scattered “in the fields.”
The other conspirators at Bendlerstrasse-Schulenburg, Schwerin, Yorck, Berthold Stauffenberg, Robert Bernardis, Gerstenmaier, and others-were locked up in the old offices of Stauffenberg and Mertz. For a while it seemed as if another round of executions was imminent. Then, half an hour after midnight, Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, who had been summoned to Berlin by Walter Schellenberg, arrived with an SS unit. Kaltenbrunner also appeared, as did Remer, who forbade all further executions. Skorzeny approached the prisoners and without a word tore off their medals and decorations and tossed them into a steel helmet on the floor behind him. Then the radio was switched on and the silent, heavily guarded prisoners were forced to listen to the speech that Hitler was delivering over all stations.
Satisfied with himself and convinced at the end of a long and confusing day that he had once again managed “to come down on the right side,” Fromm went off to see Goebbels. He wanted to be the first to report in person that the conspiracy had been crushed and the ringleaders executed. Then, perhaps, he would even deliver the news to Hitler himself. Instead, upon his arrival at Goebbels’s office, he was immediately arrested.
The collapse in Berlin was not the end of the coup. Particularly in Prague and Vienna the commanders of the military districts had carried out the instructions from Bendlerstrasse with considerable alacrity, arresting most SS and Security Service (SD) officials and occupying the main public buildings. Now they expressed their regrets to their captives, explaining that it was all a great mistake. The jailers and their erstwhile prisoners raised a few glasses together, and everyone departed.
In Paris the day’s events were much more dramatic. Around 2:00 p.m. Quartermaster General Eberhard Finckh, who had been privy to the secret plot, was alerted by telephone from Zossen that Hitler had been assassinated. About three hours later Stauffenberg himself came on the line to inform his cousin Cäsar von Hofacker that Hitler was dead and the uprising had begun. General Stülpnagel called a meeting of his officers, issued the prearranged orders, and distributed maps to the city commandant’s staff showing the residences of the two most senior SS and SD officials, Carl-Albrecht Oberg and Helmut Knochen, as well as the location of their units. The arrests were planned for 11:00 p.m. so as to cause as little commotion as possible.
While the preparations went ahead, Kluge contacted Stülpnagel and invited him to his headquarters in La Roche-Guyon. In view of the hopelessly superior firepower of the Allies, Kluge had come to share Rommel’s view that Germany could not hold out much longer. He therefore resumed wavering between halfhearted support for a coup and timid opposition. His hopes had initially been raised by the news from Bendlerstrasse but soon grew shaky with the denials from the Wolf’s Lair. After hesitating for a while between the conflicting reports from the two camps, he finally got in touch with Stieff, who confirmed that Hitler was alive and well.
When Stülpnagel and Hofacker arrived in La Roche-Guyon, Kluge, who was by then fully apprised of the situation, showed little patience for their passionate appeals and denied any knowledge of a conspiracy, commenting coolly, “Well, gentlemen, just a botched assassination attempt.” Stülpnagel and Hofacker argued that the apparent failure of the attempt only increased their own responsibility. The uprising could still succeed if the three of them refused to obey Hitler and unilaterally brought the war in the West to an end. But Kluge would not be swayed. Acting as if they had not just been discussing an issue of the highest importance, their last chance to avoid horrific devastation, Kluge invited his guests to a gracious candle-lit dinner, at which he droned on incessantly about his war experiences. His table companions stared glumly into space.
To end this intolerable scene, Stülpnagel finally asked Kluge to step out onto the terrace and told him about the arrests they had planned. Kluge was horrified, summoned his chief of general staff, General Günther Blumentritt, and ordered the immediate cancellation of the measures. He then dismissed Stülpnagel from his position and calmly returned to dinner. The atmosphere now, according to one witness, was “eerie-as if in a morgue.”23 Once again Stülpnagel and Hofacker begged the field marshal to reconsider but all he would say was, “If only that swine were dead!” As they parted, he gave Stülpnagel a piece of well-intentioned advice: “Put on civilian clothes and disappear somewhere.”24
As Stülpnagel took his leave of Kluge, without a parting handshake, at around 11:00 p.m., the task forces in Paris were just setting out from the Bois de Boulogne. Quickly and without encountering resistance, they arrested some twelve hundred members of the SS and SD in their quarters near the Arc de Triomphe. They also took into custody both SS Obergruppenführer Oberg and Security Service chief Knochen, who had first to be located in a nightclub and then summoned to return to his headquarters on avenue Foch. Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire, a detachment under the city commandant, Hans von Boineburg, was piling up sandbags for the expected executions. Lawyers on his staff had already drafted indictments accusing Himmler’s subordinates of deporting Jews, blowing up synagogues in Paris, and confiscating “enemy property” in contravention of all legal principles.25
Shortly after midnight Stülpnagel returned to his headquarters in the Hôtel Majestic. Defying Kluge’s orders, he did not immediately release the arrested officials and troops. Instead he went to the Hôtel Raphael next door, which served as the officers’ mess. The rooms were packed, and in the great din there was much clinking of glasses. Officers and their civilian co-workers-people who were privy to what was going on and people who had had no idea-were all celebrating the arrests and the apparently imminent end of the war. Suddenly a voice from the radio room rose above the general clamor, announcing that the Führer was about to speak.
The room fell silent. Stülpnagel entered, took a few steps forward toward the radio, and then remained there, still as a statue, as Hitler began to speak. The Führer raged about “a very small clique of ambitious, wicked, and stupidly criminal officers,” thanked Providence for his survival, and condemned the “coterie of criminal elements which is now being mercilessly rooted out.” One officer noted that Stülpnagel was under “tremendous tension” but “showed no sign of emotion as he stood there, his hands crossed behind his back, twisting his gloves.” When Hitler finished, Stülpnagel turned on his heels and strode from the room without a word.26