Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

While the bodies of the executed men, along with Beck’s corpse which had been dragged downstairs into the yard, were taken off in a lorry to be buried — next day Himmler had them exhumed and cremated — the remaining conspirators in the Bendlerblock (among them Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, Stauffenberg’s brother Berthold, and Yorck von Wartenburg) were arrested. It was around half an hour after midnight.¹¹⁹

Apart from the lingering remnants of the coup in Paris, Prague, and Vienna, and apart from the terrible and inevitable reprisals to follow, the last attempt to topple Hitler and his regime from within was over.

Hours earlier on this eventful 20 July 1944, shortly after arriving back in his bunker following the explosion, Hitler had refused to contemplate cancelling the planned visit of the Duce, scheduled for 2.30p.m. that afternoon, but delayed half an hour because of the late arrival of Mussolini’s train.¹²⁰ It was to prove the last of the seventeen meetings of the two dictators.¹²¹ It was certainly the strangest. Outwardly composed, there was little to detect that Hitler had just escaped an attempt on his life. He greeted Mussolini with his left hand, since he had difficulty in raising his injured right arm.¹²² Fie told the shocked Duce what had happened, then led him to the ruined wooden hut where the explosion had taken place. In a macabre scene, amid the devastation, accompanied only by the interpreter, Paul Schmidt, Hitler described to his fellow-dictator where he had stood, right arm leaning on the table as he studied the map, when the bomb went off. He showed him the singed hair at the back of his head. Hitler sat down on an upturned box. Schmidt found a still usable stool amid the debris for Mussolini. For a few moments, neither dictator said a word. Then Hitler, in a quiet voice, said: ‘When I go through it all again… I conclude from my wondrous salvation, while others present in the room received serious injuries… that nothing is going to happen to me.’ He was ever more convinced, he added, that it was given to him to lead their common cause to a victorious end.¹²³

The same theme, that Providence had saved him, ran through Hitler’s address which was transmitted by all radio stations soon after midnight. He had already inquired in mid-afternoon how quickly arrangements for a broadcast could be made, and been told that the earliest was 6p.m. That was unrealistic. The speech still had to be written, and the afternoon was taken up with Mussolini’s visit. Preparations had to be made for the speech to be networked on all radio stations, and recorded. The equipment for the broadcast had to be brought by road from Königsberg. But the technical crew were not immediately available; they had gone off swimming in the Baltic.¹²⁴ Possibly, too, Hitler lost some interest in the idea during the diversions of the day. At any rate, it seems once more to have taken Goebbels’s prompting to persuade him of the necessity of a brief address to the German people.¹²⁵ It was after midnight before the broadcast eventually took place, followed by addresses by Göring and Dönitz.¹²⁶

Hitler said he was speaking to the German people for two reasons: to let them hear his voice, and know that he was uninjured and well; and to tell them about a crime without parallel in German history. A tiny clique of ambitious, unconscionable, and at the same time criminal, stupid officers has forged a plot to eliminate me and at the same time to eradicate (auszu-rotten) with me the staff practically of the German armed forces’ leadership.’ He likened it to the stab-in-the-back of 1918. But this time, the ‘tiny gang of criminal elements’ would be ‘mercilessly eradicated (unbarmherzig ausgerottet). On three separate occasions he referred to his survival as ‘a sign of Providence that I must continue my work, and therefore will continue it’.¹²⁷

In fact, as so often in his life, it had not been Providence that had saved him, but luck: the luck of the devil.