Facing the collapse of the coup and in many ways determining the future course of World War II, cancer-ridden Beck, Olbricht, and the three-fingered assassin Stauffenberg wrestled Fromm to the ground and took away his pistol. They locked him in his office without a snack. Fromm received the first time-out of the revolution.
Had the plotters drawn up a pre-coup checklist, it probably would have looked something like this:
Stiff Prussian attitude — check
Note pad for dictating orders — check
Indignant look for questioning underlings — check
Loyal soldiers or weapons — Not needed!
I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render to Adolf Hitler, Führer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, unconditional obedience, and that I am ready, as a brave soldier, to risk my life at any time for this oath.
Few things hindered the army’s resistance more than the oath. Once taken, most officers couldn’t see how they could violate it and remain in the army. To these men the oath was like some pixie dust sprinkled in their eyes. In a way it served as their security blanket. If they ever doubted what to do, they could always fall back on following the oath and sleep well, knowing they did their duty.
At about 6:00 p.m., rebel army troops led by Maj. Adolf Remer, not a party to the plot, surrounded the Propaganda Ministry, with its Radio Berlin transmitter. Inside, the parboiled Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, saw them coming and sprang to action. The plotters, trapped in their Prussian traditions of duty and honor, expected Remer to capture the transmitter, as ordered. Goebbels, wise to Hitler being alive, took advantage of the same instinct to follow orders and invited Remer into his office for a little chat. The slick Goebbels convinced Remer that he was unknowingly taking part in a coup. To back up his claim, Goebbels got Hitler on the phone — the plotmates never thought to cut his phone lines — and he told Remer to obey him and not the army. Remer, his common sense overwhelmed once again by the potent mix of German order-taking abilities and Nazi craftiness, now clicked his heels and ordered his troops to protect Goebbels. Fortified by clear orders, Remer turned on the plotmates.
With one slick move Goebbels, a shriveled PR hack in a poorly fitting suit, had flipped the troops actually carrying the guns over to Hitler’s side. A single phone call had outwitted the career army men, some of the cream of the crop of the General Staff. As usual, the plotmates had no idea the ground had shifted under their feet. Their belief was that all orders would be followed; even if the order meant sending an unknown army major to inexplicably arrest a key member of the Nazi high command. This, however, was not their father’s Germany — it was a whole new world, and the fast-talking, initiative-taking Goebbels ran circles around them. The plotters had stupidly trusted that the officer would explicitly follow their orders. They lost the one great chance to overwhelm the Nazis.
By 7:00 that evening, the troops under Remer marched back to the Bendlerblock and surrounded the plotmates. Inside they were still obliviously issuing orders to their phantom revolutionary army. Somehow they never noticed that no one was replying. Had they bothered to investigate, they would have found their communications had been cut an hour earlier. Now, they were isolated.
But they were not alone. True to form, the plotmates had failed to clear the Bendlerblock of pro-Hitler soldiers, and many still roamed the halls. Later that night some of these officers burst into the offices of the plotters and opened fire. It was a one-sided affair, as the plotmates were still unarmed. They were quickly overpowered, and Fromm, now freed from his time-out, confronted them. Remer’s troops flooded into the building.
Fromm now found himself in a tough spot. He was marginally part of this whole affair. If Hitler had been blown up, Fromm would have taken on a key role. But fate had turned him against his former allies. He latched on to the opportunity to save himself and issued an immediate death sentence on all four conspirators: Beck, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, and another ally, colonel of the General Staff Mertz von Quirnheim. All but Beck were taken away. Fromm gave Beck a chance for the honorable way out by using a pistol on himself. Beck fired a shot that merely grazed the top of his head. An annoyed Fromm grabbed the gun away, but Beck pleaded for another chance to take his own life. Fromm gave the pistol back to the cancerous general. Still the old soldier, who had spent his entire adult life in the army, failed again to accurately shoot a bullet a few inches. A disgusted Fromm brutally ordered a solider to finish off his old, former boss.
Fromm then turned to his old plotmates and ordered them shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock. And there, in the dark of night, highlighted by the headlights of a truck, a squad of German soldiers ended the last gasp of German resistance to Hitler. They had been bred in the generations-old traditions of the Prussian officer corps, had conquered most of Europe, and were now holding their ground against enemies whose size and strength dwarfed their own. Yet they still could not conquer a few square miles of their own city, and the enemy didn’t even know a fight was on.
Outside of Berlin, the coup stumbled blindly forward, not knowing their leaders had fallen. Upon being told that Hitler was dead, Gen. Karl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France and an avid member of the coup, leapt into action and ordered the arrest of senior officers of the SS in the Paris area. Then he headed over to see Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, the commander of the German army on the western front.
It has been said that Prussia is not a country with an army, but an army with a country. Settled by Teutonic knights way back in the thirteenth century, the country occupied most of today’s eastern part of Germany, Poland, and sections of the Baltic countries. Following the unification of Germany in 1871, Prussia had a big country of its own: Germany. The Prussian king became the German king, the Prussian army became the heart of the German army. But after World War II, the Germans who weren’t dead fled Prussia; it was officially dissolved, and the Soviets took a blowtorch to the homeland of the German nobility. The core of Prussia, the estate-rich east, was split up with a section absorbed into Poland and another chunk still an isolated outpost of Russia.
Kluge was yet another one of those halfhearted fence-sitting generals; earlier that afternoon he had received two interesting phone calls. First, Beck had found some down– time to phone Kluge and urge him to join the coup. A short time later, Keitel at Rastenburg rang to let him know that Hitler was alive and Kluge should obey orders from him and not the plotters. Kluge was stunned. Before hearing from Rastenburg, he had been planning to join the coup. But now, that meant violating his oath to Hitler and worse yet, facing his wrath if the coup failed. He was torn — the fate of the war and the lives of millions waited for his decision. Finally he made his choice: he would wait and see what happened to Hitler. Then he would throw his support behind the winning side. When he sat down for dinner with Stülpnagel, Kluge made up his mind and betrayed his caste. He denied any knowledge of the assassination plots, even though he had held discussions about them for years. A stunned Stülpnagel did nothing other than stutter a few syllables. He knew he was a dead man if the coup failed because he had a jail full of angry SS officers being prepped for the firing squad. But once again, the plotmates did nothing when confronted with disaster. Stülpnagel took the bad news in stride, finished dinner, and returned to Paris to release his SS prisoners.