One month later, as the Red Army girded itself for the final assault on Berlin, Hitler’s campaign for revenge was still going strong. The jails were filled to overflowing with political opponents who either had been condemned or were awaiting trial. On April 14 Himmler ordered that none of these prisoners were to survive the war. Earlier, Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller had told Moltke’s wife, Freya, “We won’t make the same mistake as in 1918. We won’t leave our internal German enemies alive.”34
By this point, however, events were beginning to overtake Himmler, Müller, and the Gestapo in general. On April 21-the same day that an agitated Hitler called General Karl Koller, the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe, to Inform him that the heart of Berlin was under artillery bombardment-eleven men who had not yet been sentenced were released. One of them sought, on the spur of the moment, to obtain the release of other prisoners as well. On April 23 his efforts resulted in the freeing of prisoners incarcerated at Moabit prison. The SS, however, had taken charge of liquidating the Gestapo prison on Lehrterstrasse. Here, too, twenty-one inmates facing lesser charges had already been released, among them the lawyer Hans Lukaschek and Kraft von Palombini, who had sheltered Goerdeler. Some of the remaining inmates were informed that they would be released after transfer to headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. They were herded together by SS guards and marched off down Lehrterstrasse in a light rain at about one o’clock in the morning. When they reached the corner of Invalidenstrasse, the guards ordered the prisoners to proceed across a field of rubble. The command “Ready, fire!” rang out and the prisoners fell, all of them shot in the neck. Among those murdered in this fashion were Klaus Bonhoeffer, Rüdiger Schleicher, Friedrich Justus Perels, and Albrecht Haushofer.35
The next day some of the remaining inmates were released and the others were turned over to the judicial authorities. After midnight, however, another SS detachment appeared, took away Albrecht von Bernstorff, Karl Ludwig von Guttenberg, and the trade union leader Ernst Schneppenhorst, and murdered them. When day broke, the rest of the prisoners managed to persuade the warden that it was in his own best interest to let them go before the Russian troops arrived. At around six in the evening, the last political prisoners were released from Lehrterstrasse, including Justus Delbrück of Military Intelligence, Professors Gerhard Ritter, Adolf Lampe, and Theodor Steltzer. They fled as the battle for Berlin began in earnest.
In the debates that had raged within the resistance for years, Goerdeler had always argued that the first task of the resistance and the one that had the best chance of success was simply to inform the German people about the crimes of the regime: the fact that the Nazis had set out to provoke war, their enormous corruption, the disgraceful practices of the Einsatzgruppen, the mass murder committed in the concentration camps. Such outrage would be provoked, he imagined, that Hitler and his accomplices would be swept from office.
The failure of the attack on Hitler and the conspirators’ lack of opportunity to make their declaration to the people prevented Goerdeler’s idea from ever being put to the test. But as the writer Ernst Jünger wrote in his diary following a conversation with Cäsar von Hofacker, Hitler would certainly have emerged the victor in a battle of the airwaves.36 His psychological hold over the people, although loosening, was still very real, however much the reasons behind it had changed. The masses had lost most of their faith and admiration but still had a dark, fatalistic feeling that their destiny was inextricably bound up with his. The ominous propaganda of the last months of the war and fear of the advancing Red Army drove them into the Führer’s arms despite their mounting disgust with the brutality of the regime and with the cowardice, venality, and egotism of its officials. Though they felt suffocated by the pressures of police-state surveillance, informers, and terror, they clung to vague hopes that, as so often in the past, the Führer would find a way to avert catastrophe. On June 16, 1944, the first of his much-heralded “reprisal weapons,” V-1 rockets, were launched against London. Immediately following the events of July 20, a Norwegian newspaper reporter observed the general mood in Germany: “The masses are apathetic; they neither see nor hear and therefore remain totally inert… . They neither weep nor celebrate nor rage.”37
And so the German resistance remained what it had always been: an expression of feelings that may well have been widespread but that only a tiny minority was prepared to act on. Ironically, the social isolation of the resistance continued even after the war, for as the end drew near, Nazi propagandists and Allied spokesmen joined forces in a de facto coalition to belittle the accomplishments of the resistance and disparage its motives. In the House of Commons Churchill described the events of July 20 as a murderous internecine power struggle and in Moscow Rudolf Herrnstadt celebrated the failure of what he termed the final attempt of “the gentlemen’s clubs, the reactionaries” to grab power.38
These altitudes did not change much even after the fall of the Third Reich in May 1945. The resistance found no more acknowledgment or comprehension after the war than it had under the Nazis themselves, whether in Germany or abroad. On the first anniversary of the execution of Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a church funeral was held but it had to be announced as a service for a “fallen soldier.” The family of Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg experienced great difficulty in asserting their rights to his estate, as did the dispossessed families of other conspirators. For a long time the occupation authorities forbade or placed limitations on publications about the German resistance. Ulrich von Hassell’s diaries were first published in Switzerland and then in Sweden, while both Fabian von Schlabrendorff’s Offiziere gegen Hitler (Revolt Against Hitler) and Rudolf Pechel’s Deutscher Widerstand (The German Resistance) were on the index of books forbidden by the Allies.39
Denial and dismissal were common everywhere. When the celebrated English military writer Basil H. Liddell Hart attempted to portray the background to the 1938 coup attempt in a London newspaper, publication was prevented by the government. In American prisoner-of-war and internment camps, officers who had participated in the resistance were locked up indiscriminately with generals and SS men who were still pro-Nazi. The theory of the unity of Führer and Volk continued to be upheld. Those who had risked everything in their struggle against the Nazis were held prisoner by the Allies for years-in many cases even longer than their Nazi foes.