However, the Stauffenberg plot left its lasting mark on him. The injuries he had suffered in the bomb blast had been, as we noted, relatively superficial. As if to emphasize his own indestructibility and his manliness in surmounting pain, he made light of his injuries and even joked about them to his entourage.45 But they were less trivial than Hitler himself implied. Blood was still seeping through the bandages from the skin wounds almost a fortnight after the bomb-attack.46 He suffered sharp pain in especially the right ear, and his hearing was impaired.47 He was treated by Dr Erwin Giesing, an ear, nose and throat specialist in a nearby hospital, then by Professor Karl von Eicken, who had removed a throat polyp in 1935 and was now flown in from Berlin. But the ruptured ear-drums, the worst injury, continued bleeding for days, and took several weeks to heal.48 He thought for some time that his right ear would never recover.49 The disturbance to his balance from the inner-ear injuries made his eyes turn to the right and gave him a tendency to lean rightwards when he walked. There was also frequent dizziness and malaise.50 His blood pressure was too high.51 He looked aged, ill, and strained.52 Eleven days after the attack on his life, he told those present at the daily military briefing that he was unfit to speak in public for the time being; he could not stand up for long, feared a sudden attack of dizziness, and was also worried about not walking straight.53 A few weeks later, Hitler admitted to his doctor, Morell, that the weeks since the bomb-attack had been ‘the worst of his life’ — adding that he had mastered the difficulties ‘with a heroism no German could dream of.’54 Strangely, the trembling in Hitler’s left leg and hands practically disappeared following the blast.55 Morell attributed it to the nervous shock. By mid-September, however, the tremor had returned.56 By this time, the heavy daily doses of pills and injections could do nothing to head off the long-term deterioration in Hitler’s health. At least as serious were the pyschological effects.
His sense of distrust and betrayal now reached paranoid levels. Outward precautions were swiftly taken. Security was at once massively tightened at Führer Headquarters.57 At military briefings, all personnel were from now on thoroughly searched for weapons and explosives.58 Hitler’s food and medicines were tested for poison. Any presents of foodstuffs, such as chocolates or caviar (which he was fond of), were immediately destroyed.59 But the outward security measures could do nothing to alter the deep shock that some of his own generals had turned against him. According to Guderian, whom he appointed as successor to Zeitzler as Chief of the General Staff within hours of Stauffenberg’s bomb exploding, ‘he believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became a torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent. In his intimate circle he now found no restraining influence…’60
Although Hitler stressed that his distrust of his military leaders had been vindicated, and though he had found the scapegoats he needed to explain to himself the setbacks on all fronts, he had never contemplated a plot to overthrow him being hatched by those close to the heart of the regime, especially by officers who, far from straining every sinew for Germany’s victory, were doing all they could to undermine the war effort from within. In 1918, according to his distorted vision of the momentous weeks of defeat and revolution, enemies from within had stabbed in the back those fighting at the front. His entire life in politics had been aimed at reversing that disaster, and in eliminating any possible repetition in a new war. Now, a new variant of such treachery had emerged — led, this time, not by Marxist subversives at home threatening the military effort, but by officers of the Wehrmacht who had come close to undermining the war-effort on the home-front.61 Suspicion had always been deeply embedded in Hitler’s nature. But the events of 20 July now transformed the underlying suspicion into the most visceral belief in treachery and betrayal all around him in the army, aimed once more at stabbing in the back a nation engaged in a titanic struggle for its very survival.
