Vengeance was uppermost in Hitler’s mind. There would be no mercy in the task of cleansing the Augean stables. Swift and ruthless action would be taken. He would ‘wipe out and eradicate (ausmerzen und ausrotten)’ the lot of them, he raged.6 ‘These criminals’ would not be granted an honourable soldier’s execution by firing-squad. They would be expelled from the Wehrmacht, brought as civilians before the court, and executed within two hours of sentence. ‘They must hang immediately, without any mercy,’ he declared.7 He gave orders to set up a military ‘Court of Honour’, in which senior generals (including among others Keitel, Rundstedt — who presided — and Guderian) would expel in disgrace those found to have been involved in the plot.8 Those subsequently sentenced to death by the People’s Court, he ordered, were to be hanged in prison clothing as criminals.9 He spoke favourably of Stalin’s purges of his officers.10 ‘The Führer is extraordinarily furious at the generals, especially those of the General Staff,’ noted Goebbels after seeing Hitler on 22 July. ‘He is absolutely determined to set a bloody example and to eradicate a freemasons’ lodge which has been opposed to us all the time and has only awaited the moment to stab us in the back in the most critical hour. The punishment which must now be meted out must have historic dimensions.’11
Hitler had been outraged at Colonel-General Fromm’s peremptory action in having Stauffenberg and the other leaders of the attempted coup immediately executed by firing-squad. He gave orders forthwith that other plotters captured should appear before the People’s Court.12 The President of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, a fanatical Nazi who, despite early sympathies with the radical Left, had been ideologically committed to the völkisch cause since the early 1920s, saw himself — a classical instance of ‘working towards the Führer’ — pronouncing judgement as the ‘Führer would judge the case himself. The People’s Court was, for him, expressly a ‘political court’. Under his presidency, the number of death sentences delivered by the Court had risen from 102 in 1941 to 2,097 in 1944. It was little wonder that he had already gained notoriety as a ‘hanging judge (Blutrichter)’.13 Recapitulating Hitler’s comments at their recent meeting, Goebbels remarked that those implicated in the plot were to be brought before the People’s Court ‘and sentenced to death’. Freisler, he added, ‘would find the right tone to deal with them’.14 Hitler himself was keen above all — perhaps remembering the leniency of the Munich court in 1924 which had allowed him to turn his trial following the failed putsch into a personal propaganda triumph — that the conspirators should be permitted ‘no time for long speeches’ during their defence. ‘But Freisler will see to that,’ he added. That’s our Vyschinsky’ — a reference to Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the show-trials of the 1930s.15
It took little encouragement from Goebbels to persuade Hitler that Fromm, Stauffenberg’s direct superior officer, had acted so swiftly in an attempt to cover up his own complicity. Fromm had, in fact, already been named by Bormann in a circular to the Gauleiter in mid-evening of 20 July as one of those to be arrested as part of the ‘reactionary gang of criminals’ behind the conspiracy.16 Following the suppression of the coup in the Bendlerblock and the swift execution of Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz von Quirnheim, Fromm had made his way to the Propaganda Ministry, wanting to speak on the telephone with Hitler. Instead of connecting him, Goebbels had had Fromm seated in another room while he himself telephoned Führer Headquarters. He soon had the decision he wanted. Goebbels immediately had the former commander-in-chief of the Reserve Army placed under armed guard.17 After months of imprisonment, a mockery of a trial before the People’s Court, and a trumped-up conviction on grounds of alleged cowardice — despite the less-than-heroic motive of self-preservation that had dictated his role on centre-stage in the Bendlerblock on 20 July, he was no coward — Fromm would eventually die at the hands of a firing-squad in March 1945.18
