The sentiments were identical to those recorded in early soundings of opinion taken by the SD and passed on by the Chief of the Security Police Ernst Kaltenbrunner to Martin Bormann after the news of the assassination attempt had spread like wildfire. A first report, compiled on 21 July, announced uniform reactions throughout the German people of ‘strongest consternation, shock, deep outrage, and fury’. Even, it was claimed, in districts or among sections of the population known to be critical of Nazism, such sentiments could be registered; not a single comment hinted at sympathy for the planned assassination. In some cities, women were said to have burst into tears in shops or on the streets when they heard what had happened. A remark commonly heard was: ‘Thank God the Führer is alive.’ Many were prepared to accept Hitler’s own version in seeing his survival as a sign of Providence and an indication that, despite all setbacks, the war would end in victory. Very many people, the report added, connected ‘mystical, religious notions with the person of the Führer’.70
People initially jumped to the conclusion that enemy agents were behind the assassination attempt — an assumption that triggered a new upsurge of hatred against the British.71 After Hitler’s speech — held so late at night that most people were already in bed, but repeated in the early afternoon of 21 July — the fury turned against those seen as traitors within. There was outrage that the attempt on the Führer’s life had been carried out by officers of the Wehrmacht, something viewed (as Hitler himself saw it) as the treachery behind Germany’s military disasters.72 Full expectations of a ruthless ‘cleansing’ of the officer corps were placed in the ‘strong man’ Heinrich Himmler. Approving comments of Stalin’s purges could be heard. And a speech by Robert Ley violently denouncing the aristocracy gave rise to widespread castigation of the ‘high-ups’, ‘big noises’, and ‘monocle-chaps’. There was resentment that the burdens of ‘total war’ had not been spread evenly; that too many people had been able to avoid them. Such people needed to be forced into line, however tough the measures were to bring this about. Whatever sacrifices were needed to bring the war to a speedy and victorious end would then be willingly borne.73
The failure of the bomb-plot revived strong support for Hitler not only within Germany, but also among soldiers at the front. There was, for instance, a rise in expressions of faith in Hitler among prisoners-of-war captured by the western Allies in Normandy in late July.74 And the military censor who had examined 45,000 letters of ordinary soldiers from the front in August 1944 commented on ‘the high number of joyful expressions about the salvation of the Führer’.75 There was no compulsion in letters back home even to refer to the attempt on Hitler’s life. The pro-Hitler sentiment was doubtless genuine.
Four days after Stauffenberg’s bomb had exploded, the SD reports still stressed the almost unanimous condemnation of the assassination attempt and the joy at the Führer’s survival. There was now, however, a hint of other voices. ‘Only in absolutely isolated cases,’ it was said, ‘was the attack not sharply condemned.’ A woman in Halle had been arrested for expressing regret at the outcome of the bomb-attack. Another woman in Vienna had remarked that something like that was bound to happen because the war was lasting so long. But — so the SD claimed — even ‘politically indifferent’ sectors of the population reacted heatedly against such comments.76
The backlash of support for Hitler and ferocity of condemnation of those who had tried to kill the Führer, as mirrored in the SD’s reports, had, as we have noted, been fully anticipated by the plotters themselves in the event of their failure. It highlighted the extensive reservoir of Hitler’s popularity that still existed and could be tapped to bolster the regime at a critical time, despite the increasingly self-evident catastrophic course of the war. The Führer cult was far from extinguished.
