The Gestapo had considerable difficulty determining the breadth of the conspiracy. It is known, for instance, that Stieff and Fellgiebel held out for at least six days under torture without revealing anything. Contrary to legend, no list of conspirators or a projected cabinet was ever found, and as late as August 8 Yorck was able to tell prison chaplain Harald Poelchau that the Gestapo still knew nothing about the Kreisau Circle. Moltke’s name was not uttered until Leber’s interrogation on August 10.8 Schlabrendorff, who survived the war to write a detailed account of the four types of torture employed-beginning with a device to screw spikes into the fingertips and progressing to spike-lined “Spanish boots,” the rack, and other horrors-did not reveal the names of his co-conspirators at Army Group Center, even when the mutilated corpse of his friend Tresckow was exhumed and shown to him. Despite severe torments, not much more than was already known could be dragged out of Jessen, Langbehn, Oster, Kleist-Schmenzin, and Leuschner. But what these men refused to reveal in so-called intensified interrogation-in which all the horror and vengeful fury were brought to bear on them-the Allies now did. As if eager to do one last favor for Hitler, British radio began regularly broadcasting the names of people alleged to have had a hand in the coup. Roland Freisler, the president of the People’s Court, was even able to show Schwerin von Schwanenfeld an Allied leaflet that heaped scorn on the conspirators, just as the Nazis’ propaganda was doing.”
The military “court of honor” that Hitler had demanded met on August 4, with Field Marshal Rundstedt presiding and Field Marshal Keitel, General Guderian, and Lieutenant Generals Schroth, Specht, Kriebel, Burgdorf, and Maisel serving as associates. Without any hearings or presentation of evidence, they drummed twenty-two officers out of the Wehrmacht, thus depriving them of the legal protections of a court-martial, just as Hitler wanted. However extreme this step may have appeared to be, it was actually only the final act in a lengthy process that had revealed to all that the unity and cohesiveness of the army had long since been shattered. It was the last of many gestures of submission to Hitler’s will.
Responsibility for trying the accused officers and the other participants in the attempted coup fell now to the People’s Court, which had been specially constituted in 1934 to judge “political crimes.” Hitler ordered the cases to be heard in closed chambers before a small, select audience. He invited Freisler and-if the reports are accurate-even the executioner to Führer headquarters, where he instructed them to refuse the condemned men all religious and spiritual comfort. “I want them to be hanged, strung up like butchered cattle,” Hitler said.10
The trials began on August 7 in the great hall of the Berlin People’s Court, which was hung with Nazi flags for the occasion. The accused were Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, Hase, Bernardis, Klausing, Yorck, and Hagen. To further humiliate the conspirators, they were forbidden to wear neckties, and Witzleben was even denied suspenders for his trousers. Hoepner was dressed in a cardigan. All bore the signs, as one witness reported, of the “tortures they had suffered while in custody.”11 Presiding over the scene was Roland Freisler, attired in his red judicial robes and seated beneath a bust of the Führer.
Freisler had been appointed president of the People’s Court two years earlier, and in him the regime found a man very much in its own image. Hitler always felt a certain distrust toward Freisler, however, and his likening of him to Andrei Vishinsky, the chief prosecutor In the Moscow show trials, suggests the reason: Freisler had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the First World War and had become a Soviet commissar after the October Revolution; he liked to boast that he had begun his career as a diehard Communist. With his cynical bent and taste for radical politics, he joined the Nazis in 1925, throwing himself into political and journalistic tasks on behalf of the party and reaping his reward with an appointment as state secretary in the Ministry of Justice. Seizing on a comment by Hitler in his address to the Reichstag justifying the Night of the Long Knives, he made himself a vocal advocate of Gesinnungsstrafrecht, harsh laws that called for defendants in political cases to be punished not so much for their deeds as for the convictions underlying those deeds.
His loud, bullying style-intended, he occasionally conceded, to “atomize” the defendants-was matched by his theatrical temperament, his fondness for adopting extravagant poses, and his pleasure in exercising power over life and death. The psychological corollary to all this was his fawning subservience to Hitler. He played his roles to the hilt, outraged one moment, then cutting, then affable, now and again seeming to enjoy sharp-witted repartee. All in all he was the kind of man who rises to the top in turbulent times, when all values and principles are placed in doubt. The first chief of the Prussian Gestapo, Rudolf Diels, called Freisler “more brilliant, adaptable, and fiendish than anyone in the long line of revolutionary prosecutors.” Despite his repellent characteristics and the clear delight he took in humiliating and defaming those who appeared before him, few were immune to his remarkable charisma. Helmuth von Moltke wrote after his trial that Freisler was “gifted, something of a genius, but not wise, and all this in the highest degree.” According to Freisler’s predecessor, Otto Thierack, he was simply mentally ill.12
Freisler opened the first day of proceedings by remarking that the court would be ruling on “the most horrific charges ever brought in the history of the German people.” He heaped scorn on the accused, continually referring to them as “rabble,” “criminals,” and “traitors,” men with the “character of pigs”; Stauffenberg he called a “murderous scoundrel.” Freisler’s role was to express boundless moral outrage. The proceedings focused strictly on the deeds that had been committed; any attempt by the accused to introduce the issue of their motives was immediately interrupted. Stieff came before the court first, and when he tried to raise the issue Freisler informed him that as a soldier he needed only “to obey, triumph, and die, without looking either left or right” and added, “We don’t want to hear any more from you about that.” None of the accused was allowed an opportunity to address the court at length or even to reach any sort of understanding with their attorneys, who were seated some distance away. Not all but a good many of these attorneys openly supported the prosecution’s case. Witzleben’s lawyer, for instance, a Dr. Weissmann, stated in his final summation that the court’s decision had in effect already been rendered by “heavenly Providence when, in a miraculous act of deliverance, it protected the Führer from destruction for the sake of the German people.” Weissmann concluded, “The deed of the accused stands, and the guilty perpetrator will go down with it.” Kreisler sentenced all eight defendants to be hanged, ending the proceedings with the words “We return now to life and to the struggle. We have nothing more in common with you. The Volk has purged itself of you and remains pure. We fight on. The Wehrmacht cries, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We all cry, ‘Heil Hitler!’ We fight together with our Führer, following him, for Germany’s sake!”13