SPONECK: I could imagine GUDERIAN[392] having done that in order, say, to try to bring in some sort of order.
THOMA: But with a man like HIMMLER?!
BROICH: GUDERIAN is an honourable man.
THOMA: Yes, certainly. But he is bound to them now. Anyone who has been cursed like that and then… from HIMMLER – he accepted a stolen estate, so he is bound to them.[393]
SPONECK: He couldn’t refuse it.
BROICH: He couldn’t refuse it, so what could he do?
THOMA: I think he should at least have said: ‘I will wait until the war is over.’
SPONECK: Oh, that’s frightfully difficult.
THOMA: LEEB[394] and those sort of people refused it.
?: Yes, but they have been removed.
THOMA: But they did refuse it!
SPONECK: GUDERIAN wanted to be somebody, I can believe that.
THOMA: Well, he won’t be anybody now.
SPONECK: Let’s wait and see, I have got confidence in GUDERIAN.
THOMA: Not with HIMMLER! They will let hell loose now on all and sundry.
?: Obviously, they will let fly at all the Generals now.
SPONECK: I would like to say that, however terribly the rage of the Nazis against the Generals is now, it may not be at all a bad thing for the future. One fine day the Nazis will disappear and then those people, who were hounded by the Nazis will…
?: Yes, that’s true.
SPONECK: The officers’ party. On the whole those who are being persecuted now by the Gestapo will be better off in the future. Perhaps this deed is something which the people will put to our credit one day.[395]
?: Yes, the people will say: ‘That was our Army, we have always pinned our hopes in the Army, they tried to do something.’ (Laughter).
Document 147
CSDIC (UK), GRGG 162
Report on information obtained from Senior Officers (PW) on 19–22 July 44 [TNA, WO 208/4363]
THOMA: Do you know who has got command of the GAF? STUMPFF.
BASSENGE: That’s the best solution. He doesn’t decide anything, he doesn’t decide anything at all, he just dithers about until the opportunity has gone by. That is the best thing they could do; he is such an idiot. I believe I am beginning to see daylight, Sir. It was a put-up job – that attempt to blow HITLER up was a fake – it was a put-up job in order to have a pretext for getting rid of all the unwanted people at one blow!
THOMA: Yes, it may be that a second 30 June is coming, seeing that they pulled that off so well. That’s quite clear to me. But at any rate the STAUFFENBERG business could be – from his nature and his ways, it is quite possible for him… but they make propaganda too.
BASSENGE: He wouldn’t be so stupid as to make a plot with insufficient means; he wouldn’t do that, he is certainly much too clever for that; and to plant a little bomb like that in HITLER’s room, which doesn’t even work, which was probably nothing but a hand grenade done up in cardboard… Perhaps they knew, HIMMLER knew, that STAUFFENBERG was the leader of some counter-movement.
THOMA: STAUFFENBERG held his tongue just as little as I have and spoke just as openly.
BASSENGE: They got wind of it and said: ‘How can we do it? Either we suppress it completely and don’t publish any communiqué at all, in which case this movement will be damned or destroyed for the moment, but that is no good because a new one will be formed immediately. We will do it like this: we will invent a story that a murderous attempt has been made by this movement, we will make a big affair out of it and in that way we can get popular support in introducing measures for suppressing any and every opposition. We will lock them all up and dismiss them all.’
THOMA: They will shoot… You wait and see; the SS men will come into the units and the devil alone knows – but it won’t do them any good now.
BROICH: Do you know, I’ve though it over and I believe it was a put-up job. It’s funny – that business in the ‘Bürgerbräukeller’ in 1939 was a put-up job too, just as the ‘Reichstag’ fire was.[369] At any rate, it’s possible, it is also possible that they were after STAUFFENBERG, because when he came to me he already said to me: ‘It’s a good thing that I am going to the front for a while.’ We discussed this matter from time to time and he always said: ‘If it’s going to be done, it must be done properly, otherwise there will be an awful massacre.’ For that reason, and because he is a very clever and energetic person, I believe that if he had undertaken it he would have carried it out thoroughly. HITLER said the same things in his last speech as he did that time in the ‘Bürgerbräukeller’.
BAO: LEY spoke in an armament factory, I believe, yesterday and said: ‘The English Lords, the German Counts and Barons are all… and that we’ll be annihilated, our families and all. We are all blue-blooded swine.’[397]
BROICH: We were always considered that in the eyes of the Nazis.
BAO: Now it’ll start, there’s sure to be a massacre. LEY and HIMMLER have always tended towards the left.
BROICH: Yes, they always have. I believe, though, that they won’t publish many names, so as to make as little of it as possible, and to prevent the Army from realising: ‘Hello, our field marshalls are being made away with, something must be very wrong here!’
BAO: I hope they won’t start massacring their families!
BROICH: They’ll have to do a lot. BECK was a fine man, the most decent man imaginable. I am convinced that he probably had nothing whatever to do with this business. I mean to say, he went at the same time as FRITSCH did, because already in 1938, he said: ‘I am not joining in these politics.’ When the show started we all said: ‘For God’s sake, has the man gone mad!’ All except some opportunists, and there were quite a few of them. We obviously all wanted to free ourselves from the VERSAILLES Treaty and see a free GERMANY reinstated, but never – I remember the time when everyone was saying: ‘Heavens, a war would be the greatest possible madness!’ I am quite pleased to be here for the time being!
BROICH: The names of all the others – you’ll only hear about it in a roundabout way. They won’t let anything come out, they’ll disappear. They are bound to announce on the wireless: ‘So-and-So and So-and-So’, as at the time of the RÖHM Putsch. They say there were only four people in it, quite ridiculous! If they say, ‘Marschall’ So-and-So or ‘Generaloberst’ So-and-So, then—
SCHLIEBEN: They’d be advertising it.
BROICH: Yes. Then the army people would say: ‘Oh, our “Generals” with long service behind them, can’t be completely in the wrong. If they do that—’
SCHLIEBEN: I’m beginning to see things clearly now, I must admit.
BASSENGE: As a result of today’s news and LEY’s speech, I think that the whole thing is nothing but a put-up job, because that a man like BECK – he has not been on active service for five or six years, he just sits at home, he has got a little house somewhere, and grows his flowers and feeds his hens – he didn’t have anything to do with it. GUDERIAN is a good tank man, terrifically impulsive and so on, but no great personality. The chief of the General Staff must be a calm, dispassionate sort of man, not a hot-head like that. I am convinced that the whole thing is a put-up job. A lot of people here know Graf STAUFFENBERG. He is a sensible man; he wouldn’t have used a cigar-box full of gun-powder. I don’t believe the whole story. The point of the whole thing is just the same as at the ‘Reichstag’ fire and ‘Bürgerbräukeller’; those people have… as an alibi for a similar purse and LEY has expressed it quite clearly, much more clearly than the others: ‘Now comes the second part of the revolution’, and that is the communist part. Now the counts and barons are in for it.
393
In February 1944, Guderian was assigned the Polish estate Deipenhof in the Reichsgau Wartheland for the equivalent of RM1.24 million. The German Reich dispossessed the Polish owners. Ueberschär/Vogel, ‘Dienen und Verdienen’, pp. 169–72.
394
Generalfeldmarschall Ritter von Leeb (5.9.1876–29.4.1956) received from Hitler in 1941 and 1943 two monetary gifts totalling RM888,000, which he used in August 1944 to acquire a woodland property of 214 hectares situated north of Passau. It is therefore incorrect to say that he turned down donations. Ueberschär/Vogel, ‘Dienen und Verdienen’, pp. 151–7. Leeb commanded Army Group North during the Russian campaign in 1941. Relieved by Hitler on 6.1.1942, he was not used again. Leeb was firmly opposed to the invasion of France, and was the only Army Group commander prepared to participate in a coup under Halder. When Halder was surprised by Hitler’s change of mind on 5.11.1939 and cancelled the coup preparations, Leeb lost interest and obeyed Hitler’s orders to prepare the attack. Subsequently he had no further contact with the opposition. Peter Hoffmann, ‘Staatsstreich’, pp. 161–5, 175, 179–83, 188f, also Leeb, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’, esp. pp. 50–4.
395
Here Sponeck had figured out the motivation of the conspirators, to go through with the coup despite its poor prospects in order to prove that the German resistance movement ‘had dared to take the decisive gamble’ as Henning von Trescow put it. It was not the intention to whitewash the Army morally or the officer corps as a whole, only the conspirators. Fest, ‘Staatsreich’, p. 240.
396
British propaganda called the Elser attempted assassination ‘a second Reichstag fire’. Haasis, ‘Georg Elser’, p. 56. The ‘Germany reports’ of the SPD exiles show that immediately after the attempt there were suspicions that either Hitler himself, or certain NSDAP circles, were the string-pullers. This was based on the fact that it would not otherwise have been possible to have planned and carried out the action without the Gestapo and SS having known about it (ibid.). The SS came across rumours at a Fulda clerical seminar that attributed the attempt to the Party. The clergymen obtained their information from a Strasbourg transmitter (ibid., p. 61). A few days after the attempt Heinrich Müller assumed that Strasser and the Schwarze Front were behind Elser (ibid., p. 210), a theory advanced by the ‘St Galler Tageblatt’ on 24.11.1939 in an article probably inspired from Germany. Ernst Eggert, a stool pigeon at Sachsenhausen, circulated the rumour at the beginning of 1940 that Elser was an SS man and the attempt had been staged. His reasoning for this was that Elser was receiving such good treatment in custody that he could not possibly be a ‘real’ assassin and at the least had a good relationship with the SS. From his cell at Sachsenhausen Martin Niemöller also espoused this theory; he had heard the rumour before Elser arrived at the camp and maintained the assertion after the war (ibid., p. 214ff). One of Elser’s guards, SS man Walter Usslepp, alleged that Hitler and Himmler had put Elser up to it personally (ibid., p. 222). Many corresponding witness accounts occur in the IfZ archive ZS/A.17.
397
Ley said in his speech, ‘Degenerate to the marrow, blue-bloodied into idiocy, corruptible to the point of tribulation and cowardly as all low creatures, that is the nobility which the Jew sends forth against National Socialism, puts a bomb in their hands and turns them into murderers and criminals… if reactionaries believed they could raise their heads again, now they will have finally understood that their time has gone for ever. We will make up for that which had previously, perhaps consciously, been overlooked. This scum must be eliminated, exterminated root and branch. It is not sufficient just to seize the culprits and bring them ruthlessly to account – the whole brood must be wiped out. This goes above all for the traitors in Moscow, London and New York. Every German must be made aware that if he sets himself up against Germany at war, in print or by the spoken word, or incites treason by his act, then he and his family must die… whoever betrays us will be exterminated.’ Robert Ley, ‘Gott schütze den Führer’, in ‘Der Angriff’, No. 180, 23.7.1944. Short extracts are reproduced in Conze, ‘Adel und Adeligkeit in Widerstand’, p. 269.