But Hitler’s popularity, as we have seen, had unquestionably waned over the previous two years. He had personally been drawn increasingly into the blame for the miseries of a war almost certain to end in defeat. It is hard to imagine, therefore, that the unanimity of feelings of joy at his survival recorded by the SD could have been an accurate reflection of the views of the German people as a whole. The SD was unquestionably registering widely expressed opinion, indeed indicating a real upsurge in pro-Hitler feeling. But the opinions the SD’s informants were able to hear would doubtless have been those emanating in the main from regime-loyalists, Nazi fanatics, and those anxious to demonstrate their support or dispel any suspicions that they might be critical of Hitler. People with less positive views were well advised to keep them to themselves — at such a critical juncture quite especially.77 As war-fortunes had worsened, punishment for incautious remarks had become more draconian. Expressing out loud in late July 1944 regret that Hitler was still alive was as good as suicidal. Some people did take risks. A Berlin tram conductor ventured a brief but pointed commentary on Goebbels’s radio address on 26 July, in which the Propaganda Minister had castigated the plotters. ‘It makes you want to throw up,’ the tram conductor remarked.78 He seems to have got away with it.
Critical sentiments could be expressed safely, however, only in privacy, or among trusted family or friends. One boy, for instance, just sixteen at the time, confided on 21 July 1944 in the remarkable diary that he kept in the attic of a house near Hamburg: ‘Assassination attempt on Hitler! Yesterday, an attack on Hitler with explosives was carried out in his study. Unfortunately, as if by a miracle the swine was unharmed… Last night at 1a.m. Hitler gave a speech on the radio. It’s very noticeable that Hitler repeated six times that it’s only a matter of “a tiny clique”. But his extensive measures give the lie to these claims. You don’t need to put in an entire army to wipe out “a tiny cabal”.’79 The boy kept the diary to himself, not even showing it to his parents.
Another diary entry, from a one-time Hitler-loyalist whose former enthusiasm had turned cold, confined itself to the cynically ambiguous comment: ‘Assassination attempt on the Führer. “Providence” has saved him, and therefore we can believe in victory.’80 Letters to loved ones were also best ‘coded’ for safety. One well-educated German, for years a strong critic of Nazism, writing on 21 July from Paris to his Canadian wife in Germany, remarked about the events of the previous day: ‘For some people it can hardly have been a good night, but we must be thankful that the affair ended as it did. For this war, as I have always pointed out, can only be brought to the desired conclusion by Adolf Hitler!’81
Signs that there were voices beyond the unanimous condemnation summarized by the SD, and that the silence of a large majority of the population was evocative, could even be found in official reports from provincial localities. One such report from Upper Bavaria frankly admitted that ‘part of the population would have welcomed the success of the assassination attempt because in the first instance they would have hoped for an earlier end to the war from it’.82 Another report relayed the perilous remark uttered by a woman, hidden in the gloom in the corner of a dark air-raid shelter: ‘If only they’d have got him.’83
At the front, too, opinion about the bomb-plot was more divided than appearances suggested. Implying any regret that Hitler had survived was to court disaster. Letters home had to pass through the control of the censor and might be intercepted. It was safest to keep quiet. So it is remarkable that there was even a slight increase in criticism of the regime in August 1944, and even more telling that some letters risked extreme retribution for the sender. One soldier was lucky. His letter home on 4 August escaped the attention of the censor. It ran: ‘You write in your letter of the attack on the Führer. Yes, we heard of it even on the same day. Unfortunately, the gents had bad luck. Otherwise there’d already be a truce, and we’d be saved from this mess.’84 In other instances, the censor picked up similar bold comments. The death-sentence for the writer of the letter was then an almost certain consequence.85
