Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis полностью

Even so, Himmler needed no prompting to take revenge against the families of the plotters, many of them from aristocratic backgrounds. He told the Gauleiter assembled in Posen a fortnight after the attempt on Hitler’s life that he would act in accordance with the ‘blood-vengeance (Blutrache)’ traditions of old Germanic law in eradicating ‘treasonable blood’ throughout the entire clan of the traitors. ‘The family of Graf Stauffenberg,’ he promised, ‘will be wiped out down to its last member.’ The Gauleiter applauded. Claus von Stauffenberg’s wife, brothers, their children, cousins, uncles, aunts, were all taken into custody. The families of others involved in the plot were similarly imprisoned. Only the end of the war vitiated the fulfilment of Himmler’s intention.³² A full-scale police operation (‘Gewitteraktion’ — ‘Storm Action’) in late August to round up opponents of the regime — indirectly rather than explicitly a consequence of the plot of 20 July — brought the arrest, in all, of over 5,000 persons.³³ The ferocity of the onslaught against all conceivable glimmers of opposition following the failed bomb-plot was certainly a show of the regime’s continued untrammelled capacity for ruthless repression. But the utter ruthlessness now contained more than a mere hint of the desperation that indicated a regime whose days were numbered.

On 7 August, the intended show-trials began at the People’s Court in Berlin. The first eight — including Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, and Yorck — of what became a regular procession of the accused were each marched by two policemen into a courtroom bedecked with swastikas, holding around 300 selected spectators (including the journalists hand-picked by Goebbels). There they had to endure the ferocious wrath, scathing contempt, and ruthless humiliation heaped on them by the red-robed president of the court, Judge Roland Freisler. Seated beneath a bust of Hitler, Freisler’s face reflected in its contortions extremes of hatred and derision. He presided over no more than a base mockery of any semblance of a legal trial, with the death-sentence a certainty from the outset. The accused men bore visible signs of their torment in prison. To degrade them even in physical appearance, they were shabbily dressed, without collars and ties, and were handcuffed until seated in the courtroom. Witzleben was even deprived of braces or a belt, so that he had to hold up his trousers with one hand. The accused were not allowed to express themselves properly or explain their motivation before Freisler cut them short, bawling insults, calling them knaves, traitors, cowardly murderers. When, for instance, later in August, Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld tried to point out that his conscience had been wracked by the many murders he had witnessed in Poland, Freisler would stand none of it. ‘Murders?’ he screamed. ‘You really are a low scoundrel. Are you breaking down under this rottenness?’³⁴ The order had been given — probably by Goebbels, though undoubtedly with Hitler’s authorization — for the court proceedings to be filmed with a view to showing extracts in the newsreels as well as in a ‘documentary’ entitled ‘Traitors before the People’s Court’ (‘Verräter vor dem Volksgericht’). So loudly did Freisler shout that the cameramen had to inform him that he was ruining their sound recordings.³⁵ Nevertheless, the accused managed some moments of courageous defiance. For instance, after the death sentence had predictably been pronounced, General Fellgiebel uttered: ‘Then hurry with the hanging, Mr President; otherwise you will hang earlier than we.’ And Field-Marshal von Witzleben called out: ‘You can hand us over to the hangman. In three months the enraged and tormented people will call you to account, and will drag you alive through the muck of the street.’³⁶ Such a black farce were the trials that even Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack, himself a fanatical Nazi who in his ideological ardour had by this time surrendered practically the last vestiges of a completely perverted legal system to the arbitrary police lawlessness of the SS, subsequently complained about Freisler’s conduct.³⁷