The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

Reports from the regional propaganda offices across the country told the same story. People were shaken by what had happened, but it had strengthened trust in the Führer. Some officers, it was said, felt the reputation of the army to have been so besmirched by the treachery that they wanted to transfer to the Waffen-SS. There was much speculation about how the attack could have happened: the Wehrmacht had been given too much freedom, and the Führer kept uninformed about what was happening. He had been too lenient towards his generals, simply dismissing rather than executing them when they had failed in their duties. It was taken for granted that a ‘new wind’ would now blow. There was a demand for severe reprisals against the ‘traitors’ and for them to be publicly named. Wild rumours circulated implying the involvement of a number of leading military figures, including the former Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Walther von Brauchitsch, Field-Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who had recently been replaced as Commander-in-Chief West, and even Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the High Command of the Wehrmacht.³⁵ People could not understand how such a plot could have gone unnoticed. They were disturbed that at the very heart of the army there had been those working against the Führer’s intentions and actions.³⁶ It was not long before sabotage from within came to be seen as the obvious reason for the recent disastrous collapse of Army Group Centre.

³⁷

Coloured though such reports were, they nevertheless represented strands of genuine opinion. People sent in money in thanksgiving for Hitler’s survival. Substantial amounts were collected and passed to the NSV to provide for children orphaned by the war.³⁸ One woman, the wife of a worker and mother of several children, accompanied her gift of 40 Reich Marks to the Red Cross with a note to her local Party office, stating that her donation was ‘Out of great love of the Führer, because nothing happened to him.’ She was happy, she wrote, ‘that our Führer has been preserved for us. May he live long yet and lead us to victory.’³⁹

A corporal apologized to his wife for being unable to send any money home at the beginning of August since he had donated it all to a Wehrmacht collection to show gratitude for the Führer. Many, he said, had given much more. However obliged they might have felt to contribute to the collection, the level of generosity was beyond what was necessary.⁴⁰

Many letters and contemporary entries in private diaries reflect unforced pro-Hitler feelings. ‘I don’t think I’m wrong when I say in such a sad hour for all of us: “Germany stands or falls in this struggle with the person of Adolf Hitler,”’ ran one diary entry for 21 July from a young pro-Nazi, a prisoner of war in Texas. ‘If this attack on Adolf Hitler had been successful, I am convinced that our homeland would now be in chaos.’⁴¹ This was no exception. More than two-thirds of prisoners of war in American captivity indicated their belief in Hitler in the weeks after the assassination attempt, a rise on levels prior to the bomb plot.

⁴² Faith in the Führer was also still strong among serving frontline soldiers. ‘The high number of joyful expressions about the salvation of the Führer’ in letters home from soldiers at the front was remarked upon by the censor.⁴³ It was as well to be extremely careful in expressing any negative views in letters that might be picked up by the censor. But there was no need for effusive pro-Hitler comments. Similar sentiments could be read in the letters that soldiers received. ‘I cannot imagine how things would have developed without the Führer in view of the present situation in our country,’ wrote one woman in Munich to her husband.⁴⁴

A major in the supply unit of an infantry division behind the lines headed his diary entry for 20 July: ‘Evening. Bad news. Attack on the Führer’, noting next day, after hearing Hitler’s late-night broadcast, that it was only a small clique of officers, and that a purge would follow. ‘It’s a crying shame’, he added, that this should take place, and with the Russians ‘at the gates’.⁴⁵ Another officer, on the western front, and evidently sceptical about the course of the war, next day revised his initial view that it had been merely a small officers’ clique and saw the attack as ‘an entire plot against A[dolf] H[itler]’, denoting a split in the Wehrmacht between loyalists and opponents. He recalled someone who had known Stauffenberg speaking of him as an excellent officer and courageous soldier. But he was ‘evidently politically stupid’, he added.⁴⁶