Resistance
Hitler's Road to Power
11 November 1918. On the Western Front the guns fall silent. 2 days earlier, Kaiser Wilhelm II had signed his abdication and gone into exile in Holland.
A devastating world war lasting more than 4 years had come to an end.
10 million soldiers had been killed. Over 20 million had been wounded. The civilian population, too, had had to make great sacrifices, especially in the Balkans.
Wide areas of Europe had been devastated by the fighting, especially in Belgium and France.
Three great monarchies had collapsed. On 12 November Karl I of Habsburg abdicated, and Austria became a republic. The multi-ethnic state of Austria-Hungary fell apart into its individual parts. Hardly was Wilhelm II in exile when the republic was proclaimed in Germany. On 15 March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, and workers' and soldiers' councils, the so-called Soviets, installed an initially provisional government.
On 7 November the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Petrograd, and after the Bolsheviks had seized power, the now Bolshevik Russia made peace with Germany on 3 March 1918, but the internal fighting between Red and White Army soldiers was to go on for a long time.
Back to Germany. After the armistice had been signed on 11 November 1918, the victorious powers of the First World War met in Versailles, where they negotiated the peace terms without the participation of the defeated. Little of the moderate ideas of US President Wilson could be felt in this treaty; rather, it reflected the bitter hatred of the European victorious powers towards Germany.
Its terms:
Loss of all German colonies.
Loss of Alsace-Lorraine.
Separation of East Prussia from the rest of the Reich by the Danzig Corridor.
Limitation of the German army to a strength of 100,000 men.
Prohibition of the manufacture of tanks, aircraft, heavy artillery and warships over 10,000 GRT.
Acceptance of sole guilt for the war.
Occupation of the left bank of the Rhine by France for 15 years, with bridgeheads on the right bank.
Payment of enormous reparations.
In the East, the states of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were created as a buffer against Red Russia.
The "shameful dictate of Versailles" left lasting wounds, dark despair and deep-seated feelings of revenge among the German population. The treaty ruined the German economy and was a heavy burden for the young German democracy.
In 1919 there was serious unrest in the German Reich. The red seed threatened to sprout in Germany too, just as communist movements were attracting many followers in many countries. In Germany, too, there were workers' and soldiers' councils, and in many German cities there was fighting between communists and the Reichswehr, formed in March, or between communists and self-appointed Freikorps made up of former soldiers loyal to the government and of citizens' militias. Gradually calm returned to the Reich, and the red uprisings were suppressed, albeit at the price of several thousand dead. The young Weimar Republic, headed by Friedrich Ebert, elected Reich President on 11 February 1919, had survived its first serious crisis, and the Reichswehr its first test.
A short time later there was another attempted coup, the so-called Kapp Putsch.
In the course of reducing the German armed forces to the 100,000 men laid down in the treaty, Reich President Friedrich Ebert commissioned Generals von Seeckt and von Lüttwitz to build up this 100,000-man Reichswehr and to dissolve the existing Freikorps. 300,000 men and 15,000 officers were affected by this discharge. The majority reluctantly complied; a minority was determined to resist. Among them was the so-called Ehrhardt Brigade, which was encamped near the Reich capital. They were joined by a rabid Pan-German, the Generallandschaftsdirektor Kapp from East Prussia.
Together with Ehrhardt, he decided to march the brigade on Berlin, overthrow the Reich government and appoint himself Reich President.
When the Ehrhardt Brigade was about to march into Berlin on 13 March 1920, Reich President Ebert ordered Colonel-General von Seeckt to oppose the advancing troops with the Reichswehr, whereupon von Seeckt, who held the Reichswehr as an instrument of power firmly in his hand, declared curtly: "Troops do not fire on troops."
So on 13 March 1920 the Ehrhardt Brigade occupied the government quarter, from which Reich President Ebert and his ministers fled first to Dresden, later to Stuttgart.
Although the Reichswehr offered no resistance, the trade unions called a general strike, which paralysed public life, so that by 17 March 1920 Kapp was at his wits' end, Berlin was evacuated and Kapp himself fled to Sweden. The old government took power again, and Seeckt remained commander of the Reichswehr, which now gradually became the decisive political power factor in Germany, without whose consent no major political decisions were taken.
The Reichswehr, whose chief von Seeckt felt democracy to be "alien to its nature", also began more and more to develop a political life of its own. From the outset, its leaders were not willing to be content with a strength of 100,000 men, and so an elite cadre army was created which in itself consisted only of leaders and potential leaders, so that in better political times this 100,000-man army could be rapidly expanded. From the outset, efforts were made to break and circumvent the contractual shackles of the Treaty of Versailles. Secret agreements were concluded in the 1920s between the Reichswehr and the Soviet Union. German soldiers practised and tested air and tank warfare on Russian training grounds, all in the greatest secrecy. In this way Germany not only kept pace with the other nations, but was eventually even to surpass them.
In return, Soviet general staff officers were instructed at German war colleges in the teachings of Gneisenau, Scharnhorst, Moltke and Clausewitz.
Be that as it may, the Weimar Republic had survived its second major crisis.
But there was more than enough potential explosive: when the war was over, the Reich groaned under a domestic debt of 144 billion marks, consisting of 89 billion in war bonds and 55 billion in floating debt. Since 1916 the new war bonds had lagged far behind the treasury bills, so that paper money was resorted to to an ever greater extent. By September 1918, 34 billion in paper money was already in circulation, which in practice already meant inflation. Millions of citizens kept their war bond certificates in the cupboard and thought they were good money. In May 1921 the victors' demands on Germany were set at 132 billion gold marks. Germany could not comply, and in January 1923 a Franco-Belgian army occupied the Ruhr. A storm of indignation arose, the Ruhr workers went on strike, and all deliveries and reparations to France were stopped. Supporting the Ruhr population cost a great deal of money, for which again only the printing presses were available, and the bottomless fall of the currency could no longer be halted. 1 trillion, i.e. 1,000 billion marks in paper money, corresponded to 1 gold mark. In November 1923 the so-called Rentenmark was introduced, equivalent to 1 trillion of the old currency.
Inflation destroyed the prosperity of broad middle-class strata; whether thousand-mark notes or war bonds, everything became worthless paper. On top of this there were countless soldiers who no longer served in any army. A vast army of uprooted, desperate, hopeless people arose, full of rage, full of bitterness, without prospects, without happiness and without a guiding star, susceptible to extremists of every shade.
8 November 1923. About 3,000 men are sitting in the great hall of the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich to hear a speech by the head of the Bavarian government, Gustav von Kahr.
Suddenly, during the speech, there is movement at the back of the hall and several men come in. One jumps onto a table and fires a pistol shot into the air. His hair hangs diagonally across his forehead and he has a small moustache under his nose.
Adolf Hitler steps into the public spotlight for the first time.
Who is this Hitler? Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn in Austria. His father was a minor customs official, and Hitler did not stand out at school. However, he had a talent for drawing and applied twice to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, but was rejected twice. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Vienna and hired himself out in poor circumstances as a casual labourer, for instance as a house painter and postcard seller. Even then a deep resentment grew in him that the success he deserved was denied to him, and his rage was directed against the successful, the rich and the wealthy, above all the Marxists and the Jews. Adolf Hitler felt himself to be German and harboured a fervent and almost mystical admiration for the German people, and soon moved to Germany. When war broke out in 1914 he volunteered and fought for 4 years in a Bavarian regiment on the Western Front. Although he only rose to the rank of lance corporal, he received the Iron Cross First Class as a decoration for bravery.
In October 1918 Adolf Hitler was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack near Comines in Flanders. He lay as a patient in a hospital in Pomerania throughout the winter of 1918. It seemed inexplicable to him how the great German Reich could finally have been defeated in November 1918. Somewhere an unbelievable betrayal had been at work. Already in Vienna he had had contact with extremist German nationalist circles and had heard hints there of the hidden, undermining activity of another race, the enemies and bloodsuckers of the Nordic world, -the Jews.
And when he was finally discharged from the hospital, what did he see? The signs of defeat were terrible. From the atmosphere of madness and despair, the forms of red revolution stared at him all around. Armoured cars raced through the streets of Munich, showering passers-by with leaflets or bullets.
Suddenly everything became clear: Germany had been stabbed in the back, had been torn down by the war profiteers, the schemers, the Bolsheviks in their accursed world conspiracy of Jewish intellectuals. Before him he saw his task light up: to free Germany from these plagues. In his regiment he now worked as an informer and "education officer", collecting information about mutinous and subversive elements. In the course of this activity, in September 1919 he attended the meeting of the German Workers' Party in a Munich beer hall, where he found like-minded people. He joined this party and rose quickly within it. In February 1920 the first mass meeting of the DAP took place, and Adolf Hitler was already leading it.
The communists soon recognised their enemy in him and tried to break up his meetings, whereupon at the end of 1921 he set up his first storm detachments: the SA. Within the SA a special protection squad was set up whose sole purpose was his personal protection: the SS.
The collapse of the mark and the French occupation of the Ruhr brought the NSDAP, as it now called itself, a lively influx of supporters, who found relief from their misery in hatred, vindictiveness and patriotism.
Now this Hitler stood in the Bürgerbräukeller and wanted to induce Kahr to follow him, in order to force all of Germany under his power after Bavaria. Kahr escaped, and the next day Hitler marched with General Ludendorff, the hero of the First World War, and 3,000 men of his SA towards the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. The Munich police broke up this march; Hess and Göring escaped to Austria; Hitler was arrested and sentenced to 5 years' fortress confinement in Landsberg fortress, but was released early after 9 months. During this time he wrote "Mein Kampf".
The basic theses of this book are simple:
Man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation, as a community of fighters, is a fighting unit. Every organism that gives up the struggle is condemned to die. The same applies to a nation or race. The ability of a race to survive depends on its purity; therefore it must be cleansed of impurities. Because of its universality, the Jewish race must be pacifist and cosmopolitan. Pacifism, however, is a mortal sin, for it means the capitulation of the race in the struggle for existence.
The German people must not again fight against all enemies at once, but must defeat them one by one. The colonial policy of the pre-war period was a mistake and should be abandoned; Germany must expand its living space in Europe, and above all towards the East. Joining with the Soviet Union against the West would be criminal, for the aim of the Soviets was the triumph of international Jewry.
That was the basic stock of his politics.
When Friedrich Ebert died in 1925 at the age of 54, the aged Field Marshal Hindenburg was elected Reich President, mainly under pressure from the right-wing parties, of which the NSDAP was at that time still only a small splinter group. In the Reichstag elections of 20 May 1928 it had only 12 seats. Following these elections, the SPD formed a governing coalition with the Centre Party and the Democratic People's Party. Because of divergent views and a strong right-wing opposition, however, they were almost incapable of governing, and when on "Black Friday" in November 1929 share prices on New York's Wall Street plunged into the abyss and the world economic crisis with its mass unemployment broke out, the government proved completely overwhelmed, and on 27 March 1930 the entire cabinet resigned. Since the Reichstag, because of its disunity, could not form a majority government, a minority cabinet was formed at Hindenburg's behest, based solely on its power to issue emergency decrees without a parliamentary majority – a dangerous step towards dictatorship.
When Brüning, on Hindenburg's behalf, submitted the emergency decrees to remedy the economic crisis and mass unemployment, the Reichstag rejected them, and the Reichstag was dissolved and new elections called. The liberal parties suffered a defeat and the Nazis entered the Reichstag with 107 seats. By the end of 1932 the number of unemployed had risen to 6,000,000.
On 30 May 1932 Reich Chancellor Brüning, who had governed for 2 years by means of emergency decrees, was dismissed by Hindenburg, not least on the initiative of General von Schleicher, who was head of the Ministerial Office of the Reichswehr Ministry and, although he did not like the Nazis, welcomed the military enthusiasm of the SA and SS. On Schleicher's proposal, the new chancellor was Franz von Papen, who belonged to the far right of the Centre Party. Von Papen dissolved parliament, and the NSDAP emerged from the new elections as the strongest party with 230 seats; the SPD had 133 seats, the communists 89 seats.
The communists' gain in votes was used by the Nazis to paint the red danger on the wall in the most garish colours, although a red seizure of power was not to be expected if only because of the right-wing Reichswehr. Hitler claimed the post of chancellor for himself, and through Hindenburg's son he succeeded in gaining influence over the aged Reich President. On 27 January 1933 Schleicher resigned, and on 30 January 1933 Hindenburg appointed Hitler Reich Chancellor.
The road to catastrophe
Hitler's first step was once again to dissolve the Reichstag and call new elections. The Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933 was a valuable propaganda aid for the Nazis, who blamed the communists. At Hitler's urging, Hindenburg issued an emergency decree one day later that made it possible to arrest enemies of the state without a judicial review within 24 hours.
In the elections of 5 March 1933 Hitler received 43.8% and formed a majority with the German Nationalists, who had 8%. The 81 deputies of the KPD were no longer admitted to the Reichstag, and the KPD was banned.
On 23 March Hitler demanded from the Reichstag an Enabling Act that gave him full freedom of action within the executive. All parties except the SPD agreed, and with that parliament had stripped itself of its power.
One executive measure was the burning on 10 May of thousands of "degenerate" and "un-German" books by people such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Maria Remarque and others.
But for many Nazis, above all Ernst Röhm, such and other measures were not enough. They demanded a "second revolution" and wanted to see the power of the Reichswehr and the industrialists eliminated, while the Reichswehr viewed the growing power of the Nazis, above all of the SA and its small disciplined core, the SS, with concern and suspicion. The SA now had 2.5 million members, and Röhm wanted to turn it into the new National Socialist army.
Both parties, the Reichswehr and the SA, wanted a new, powerful Germany; but while the Reichswehr was imbued with the feudal traditions of the imperial era and was a disciplined force, the SA was a private army consisting largely of thugs and brawlers, which threatened more and more to slip out of Hitler's hands.
Hitler had to decide with whom he wanted to take the further path upwards, with the Reichswehr or with the SA. He chose the generals, not least out of fear of Röhm's private army, and at the urging of the then Reichswehr Minister, General von Blomberg.
On 30 June 1934, with the help of the SS, Hitler carried out a bloody purge, the so-called "Night of the Long Knives". Röhm was shot after Hitler had arrested him personally; the Reichswehr general von Schleicher, who had established links with the SA, was shot with his wife in his house. All over Germany hundreds of people were arrested and shot, often for personal reasons too. The total number of people liquidated is estimated at several thousand, and Hitler flew back to Berlin to put an end to the massacre, which was getting out of control. This ended the Röhm Putsch, which had never taken place at all, and the pact of the generals with Hitler was sealed in blood.
The SA was pushed back to the status of a ceremonial party troop for festive occasions.
On 2 August 1934 Paul von Hindenburg died at the age of 87. Hitler took over all powers except the title and appointed himself "Führer and Reich Chancellor". From then on, all soldiers had to swear their oath of allegiance no longer to the people or the constitution, but to him personally. It read:
"I swear by God this sacred oath that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, and that as a brave soldier I shall be ready at all times to stake my life for this oath."
Hitler was now the sole ruler and had his power sanctioned in a rigged vote in which supposedly 90% of the German people voted for him. The presence of brown-shirted thugs at the polling stations was enough. The system of concentration camps for unpopular people and political dissenters was in full operation. Jews, communists and social democrats were mercilessly persecuted. The Gestapo and the SD shadowed and spied on the masses. Young people were enrolled in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls for education and indoctrination. This was followed by the Labour Service and, as the final stage for the male population, military service. Hitler's undeniable domestic and foreign policy successes achieved before the war, together with the pressure exerted on those who resisted, made it easy to give in to the seducer.
The Wehrmacht, the armaments industry and the RAD took the unemployed off the streets; large projects such as the construction of the largest and most modern motorway network in Europe were tackled.
In foreign and domestic policy, things happen in quick succession:
16 March 1935: Reintroduction of general conscription, an open breach of the Treaty of Versailles, even though secret rearmament had begun much earlier.
18 June 1935: Anglo-German Naval Agreement, without consultation of England's former ally France, in which the ratio of the strength of the German fleet to the British fleet is set at 35:100.
7 March 1936: German troops march into the demilitarised Rhineland.
12 March 1938: German troops march into Austria, annexation of Austria and foundation of the Greater German Reich.
29 September 1938: Munich Conference, consent of England and France to the annexation of the Sudetenland to the German Reich; Hitler said this was his last territorial demand in Europe, and Prime Minister Chamberlain proclaimed in England "peace for our time".
15 March 1939: Hitler breaks the agreement, occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia.
Hitler had achieved all these foreign policy successes, but this had not happened without friction with the generals.
All these great foreign policy successes had involved a great risk. Hitler bluffed, made demands, confronted the Western powers with faits accomplis, broke treaties and rattled his sabre.
Behind all this, however, even at the time of the occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, there was no sufficient military strength, with the exception of the Luftwaffe. The build-up of the German Wehrmacht was anything but complete. Determined military action by France and England would most likely have ended in a German disaster, and the generals knew it.
What they could not know was that the Western powers would dutifully swallow one bitter pill after another that Hitler set before them, intent on avoiding a war and pursuing a policy of "appeasement".
Several times now, circles among the generals toyed with the idea of removing Hitler from power before his aggressive policy dragged Germany into disaster, but each time the Führer was proved right in his decisions. Many generals were dismayed that they had so often not shown themselves equal to events, and gradually acknowledged Hitler's leadership; others, who were not prepared to do so, resigned themselves: against a Hitler who was at the height of his political success and so strongly supported by the masses, nothing could be done.
The Führer had already announced his warlike intentions to the generals in the Reich Chancellery on 5 November 1937, with the qualification that a major war was not to be expected before 1943. Present: Reich War Minister General von Blomberg, Commander-in-Chief of the Army Colonel-General Freiherr von Fritsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the Kriegsmarine Dr. Raeder, the Colonel-General and Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe Göring, and the Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs Freiherr von Neurath.
Blomberg and Fritsch thereupon voiced serious reservations about this policy.
Both then fell victim to a skilfully contrived intrigue: Blomberg was blamed for his marriage to a 24-year-old woman who had once been questioned by the police in a morals case, and had to resign. The possible successor, Fritsch, was accused of homosexuality, and he too had to go. This gave Hitler the opportunity to reshape the leadership with more compliant generals. Walther von Brauchitsch became Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Wilhelm Keitel became Chief of the OKW, nicknamed by some "Lakaitel" (from "lackey"). In total, 60 generals of the army or the Luftwaffe were sacked or moved to posts without influence; Göring was promoted to field marshal. Joachim von Ribbentrop became the new foreign minister.
But that did not yet remove the last opposition to Hitler. In July 1938 General Ludwig Beck tried to persuade the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, von Brauchitsch, to make a joint declaration against Hitler's war plans; von Brauchitsch refused and Beck tendered his resignation. On 27 August Beck handed over the office of Chief of the General Staff of the Army to General of Artillery Franz Halder, who declared that very same day that he rejected Hitler's war plans just as decisively as his predecessor, and together with the head of the Abwehr, Lieutenant-Colonel Oster, and General von Witzleben planned a coup should Hitler attack Czechoslovakia. But Hitler did not attack; England and France gave in, and Hitler was more powerful than ever. The Sudetenland, after the Munich Agreement, was annexed to Germany. Contrary to his promise, Hitler had the invasion of the rump of Czechoslovakia carried out from 14.03.1939 to 15.03.1939, which was the last pill the Western powers were willing to swallow.
After all these events, Hitler has a more compliant leadership. His new target: Poland. To achieve this goal without exposing Germany to the threat of a two-front war, Hitler jumps over his own shadow and presents the astonished and shocked world with his latest coup: the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939. With it, Hitler had a free hand against Poland. France and England had indeed given a guarantee of assistance should Poland be attacked by Germany, but Hitler firmly expects the Western powers to back down. The course is set.
The War
1 September 1939, 4.44 a.m. All along the German-Polish border, the German assault companies lie in their positions. 4.45 a.m.: a single German gun fires, then everywhere there is roaring and rushing: the preparatory fire of the heavy artillery has begun. The old training ship "Schleswig-Holstein", which had put into Danzig a few days earlier for a "friendship visit", opens fire on the Westerplatte. The war has begun…
3 September 1939, surprise and horror in the Reich Chancellery: England and France have issued Germany with an ultimatum and, after the deadline expired, declared war on Germany. "What now?" Hitler asked, but for the time being nothing happened. The French and British in the West stayed quiet; British aircraft bombarded Germany with leaflets, and that was it. The Allies had more than 100 divisions, while the Germans in the West had only a handful of divisions, most of them still in the process of being formed and equipped. The bulk of the fully trained German divisions was tied up in Poland, but the enemy relied on his Maginot Line and waited for the time being.
Within 1 month Poland was defeated, and Russia and Germany shared the spoils. Secured by the non-aggression pact, the bulk of the German army was transferred to the West.
On 9 April 1940 Operation "Weserübung" began, the occupation of Denmark and Norway to secure German ore supplies from Kiruna in Sweden. The operation succeeded, although the Kriegsmarine had to accept heavy losses.
After Hitler had postponed the date of the attack in the West dozens of times, "Case Yellow", the German attack on the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France, began on 10 May 1940. Colonel Oster, head of the German Abwehr, had betrayed the date of the attack to the Dutch, but they did not pass the information on. Thanks to superior tactics and the skilful design of the operation, it was a complete success, although Hitler was already interfering disastrously in the course of operations by halting his armoured divisions outside Dunkirk, thereby enabling 338,226 soldiers, most of them British, to escape across the Channel to England, albeit leaving almost all their materiel behind. On 16 June Paris falls; on 22 June France capitulates.
Churchill, however, the new British Prime Minister since 10 May 1940, wants to fight on. So the war goes on.
The German attempt to gain air supremacy over England as a precondition for an invasion failed. The island cannot be conquered for the time being. So Hitler wants to eliminate the threat at his back, Russia.
However, the start of the campaign was delayed: in Belgrade, which had concluded a pact with Germany just 2 days earlier, an anti-German coup took place on 27 March 1941. Before that, Italy, Germany's ally, had already attacked Greece and taken a beating. These events threatened the German south-eastern flank and the Romanian oil wells, so important for the war economy, so that Hitler felt compelled to crush Yugoslavia and Greece in a vigorous campaign.
As a result, the date of the attack for Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on Russia, was delayed by a few weeks. In addition, German forces were tied down not only in the Balkans, but now also in Africa, where the Italian Marshal Graziani had launched an offensive with 200,000 men against 30,000 British. These 200,000 men were almost completely wiped out in a counter-attack by the 30,000 British, whereupon Hitler felt obliged to send 2 German armoured divisions and 1 light division there under the command of General Erwin Rommel.
On 22 June 1941 the German attack on Russia began, and the German formations advanced tempestuously. In great battles of encirclement, millions of Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner.
But instead of advancing resolutely on Moscow, Hitler frittered away his strength on other objectives, and when the German formations finally advanced on Moscow again, their advance was hampered first by General Mud, then by General Winter. Finally the exhausted, decimated German formations, unprepared for winter warfare, succumbed to Soviet superiority. They had to fall back, but they survived the winter and the front did not break. Even now doubt and mistrust were spreading among large parts of the generals, but the masses continued to believe in their Führer.
On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and shortly afterwards Hitler declared war on the USA. Germany now stood against the British Empire, the USA and the Soviet Union. The year 1942 still brought the Axis powers some successes, but in the end they were Pyrrhic victories.
Stalingrad, El Alamein and Midway marked the turning points in the great struggle. From then on it was downhill.
At the end of January 1943, Field Marshal Paulus capitulated in Stalingrad with 91,000 men – the remnant of over 250,000 men.
On 13 May 1943 the remnants of Panzer Army Africa capitulated in Tunisia – 130,000 German soldiers went into captivity.
In July 1943 the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front failed at Kursk.
In the same month the Allies land in Italy. On 4 June 1944 Rome falls.
2 days later, on 6 June 1944, the Allies land in Normandy.
The great Soviet summer offensive of 1944 destroyed almost the entire Army Group Centre.
Then, on 20 July 1944, an assassination attempt was made on the Führer in his headquarters, the Wolf's Lair. But this was far from the first such action, nor the first form of resistance.
In the civilian sphere, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Count von Galen and the Scholl siblings should be mentioned. But it was clear that removing Hitler was not enough; it would have to be a real coup d'état, and it was clear that this would not be possible without the support of the military. A silent opposition to Hitler had long since formed in the officer corps.
Alongside officers such as Keitel, Jodl and Schörner, who stood loyally by the Führer, there were also those who, for example, in September 1939 brought an SS man before a court martial because he had shot Jewish civilians, or those who ignored Hitler's Commissar Order, which stated that all captured commissars of the Red Army were to be shot. The longer the war lasted, the clearer it became that Germany could not win it and that Germany would be dragged into ruin with Hitler.
The group around Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Colonel-General Ludwig Beck tried several times to obtain honourable terms from the Allies in the event of a successful coup, but in vain.
At the Tehran Conference on 28 November 1943, the Allies had declared their will to continue the war until Germany's unconditional surrender.
Nevertheless, the conspirators were ready to act. Participants in and accessories to the conspiracy also included such personalities as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, Field Marshal von Kluge, the current Commander-in-Chief West, the Berlin city commandant von Hase, the head of signals at the OKW General Fellgiebel, Colonel-General Hoepner, who had been demoted to the ranks, Police President Count von Helldorf and the head of the General Army Office in the OKH, General Olbricht. In October 1943, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg became Olbricht's chief of staff.
In the event of success, the conspirators had prepared Operation "Valkyrie", with which they wanted to take over the powers of government and with which the leading figures of the government apparatus were to be arrested.
Several times the conspirators tried to kill Hitler with explosive devices, and each time something went wrong. Once the bomb did not go off; another time Hitler broke off a visit too early or did not appear at all. Historians count 42 attempted or planned assassinations that were never carried out. Once Operation "Valkyrie" had already started, and only at the very last moment did the conspirators manage to call off the operation. On 20 July 1944 Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was at the situation briefing in the Führer's headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolf's Lair. In his briefcase he had the time bomb made by the British SOE, dropped over France for the Resistance and fallen into German hands: an acid ampoule would be broken by hand; within ten minutes the acid would eat through a wire that kept a spring from releasing; as soon as the spring was released it would accelerate a firing pin, and this would trigger the detonation.
Stauffenberg put the briefcase down near Hitler, leaning against a heavy, large oak table, and left the room on the pretext of having to make a telephone call. A colonel who tripped over the briefcase, however, moved it elsewhere; Hitler was leaning over the table on which the situation map lay, his upper body was shielded from the blast, and he was only slightly injured.
Stauffenberg managed to leave the Führer's headquarters. Operation "Valkyrie" got under way, and at first the conspirators had some success and caused confusion in Berlin, but once it was clear that Hitler was alive, many gave up, and the attempted coup was crushed in the course of that same day.
Now Hitler settled accounts with the conspirators. About 7,000 people were arrested, including some who had nothing to do with the conspiracy. Numerous officers were expelled from the Wehrmacht by a so-called Court of Honour chaired by General Keitel, so that they no longer came under the jurisdiction of the court martial but of Roland Freisler's People's Court. Almost exclusively death sentences were handed down. In Plötzensee prison, 89 of those involved in 20 July were hanged on meat hooks. This was filmed, and Hitler watched it. Thus the last great attempt to remove Hitler and save Germany had failed.
The Second World War was to go on until 8 May 1945 and the complete defeat of Germany. On 30 April 1945 the Führer committed suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. Millions of Germans were already dead. Millions of people had perished in the concentration camps or fallen victim to other measures of the "Final Solution". In total, the Second World War cost 60–65 million people their lives.
Concluding remarks:
Winston Churchill said of the men of 20 July:
"In Germany there lived an opposition which grew ever weaker through its sacrifices and an enervating international policy, but which belongs to the noblest and greatest that has ever been produced in the political history of all peoples. These men fought without help from within or without, driven solely by the restlessness of their conscience. As long as they lived, they were invisible and unrecognisable to us, because they had to camouflage themselves. But in the dead the resistance has become visible."