GERMANY: Crack of Doom

Bomb-weary Berliners sat down to another dreary dinner. From radio loudspeakers came pleasant music, scheduled to be followed by a useful lecture on the extermination of rats. The lecture never came. Instead a tense voice clipped in: “Today an attempt was made on the life of the Führer with explosives. . . .”

Around the world as in Berlin the tense voice sounded like the crack of doom. The one question that flashed through every mind was: is this the end, “the crackup? Had the long-awaited struggle between Hitler and his generals begun?

The voice went on: “. . . The Führer suffered no injuries except light burns and bruises. . . . He resumed work and, as scheduled, received the Duce. . . . A short time after, Reich Marshal Goring arrived. . . .” Wounded with Hitler were 12 of his military advisers, some of them seriously. That was all.

Telephone and wire services to neutral countries were cut off. Airplane flights to neutral Sweden and Switzerland were interrupted. For hours the fate of Hitler and of Germany, which was in some degree the fate of every man, woman & child in the world, was shrouded behind an invisible, hermetic barrier.

To the Nation. Seven hours later Hitler himself spoke on the air. He said: “German men and women: . . . If I address you today* I am doing so for two reasons: first, so that you shall hear my voice and know that I personally am -It was 12:59 a.m., Berlin Time. unhurt and well and, second, so that you shall hear the details of a crime that has no equal in German history.

“An extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and at the same time foolish, criminally stupid officers hatched a plot to remove me and . . . the staff of the German High Command. The bomb that was placed by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg exploded two meters [about two yards] away from me on my right side. It wounded very seriously a number of my dear collaborators. One of them has died. . . .

“At an hour in which the German Army is waging a very hard struggle there has appeared in Germany a very small group, similar to that in Italy, that believed that it could thrust a dagger into our back as it did in 1918. . . . It is a very small clique of criminal elements, which will now be exterminated quite mercilessly.

“I order, therefore, at this moment, that no civilian authority accept any order from an authority that these usurpers arrogantly assume. Secondly, that no military authority and no leader of troops and no soldier obey any order by these usurpers. . . .”

Reich Marshal Hermann Goring and Admiral Karl Doenitz spoke after Hitler.

Firm Facts. Through the Nibelung fog a few relatively firm facts jutted out:

¶ A seizure of Government offices in Berlin by the Army collapsed when the officer who had been ordered to take them over smelled a rat, telephoned Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels.

¶ Heinrich Himmler was now the Reich’s “Iron Boss.” He could appoint, promote, execute any officer in any civil or military job on the say-so of nothing higher than his own conscience.

¶ Executed were: 1) bomb-tossing Colonel Graf Claus von Stauffenberg, member of Hitler’s own personal staff since he lost his right arm and eye in Tunisia; 2) Colonel General Ludwig Beck, onetime Chief of Staff, who fought Hitler’s intuition in 1938, had since been in retirement. D.N.B. reported: “He is no longer among living beings.”

¶ The bomb killed three of the men around Hitler. They were: Hitler’s alleged double Heinrich Bergner, General Günther Korten, Chief of Air Force General Staff, Major General Heinz Brandt.

¶ The military salute was abolished. All soldiers were ordered to use the up-armed Heil Hitler.

¶ Over. the radio Dr. Robert Ley, brutal tosspot chief of the Nazi Labor Front, screamed: “Blue-blooded swine, lunatics, idiots, criminals, murderers, reactionaries!”

Twilight Rumors. From the cavernous stage of Hitler’s Europe, from behind the censor’s hastily lowered asbestos curtain, came a confused welter of noises: hoarse shouts, the sound of running footsteps, the sudden stutter of machine guns. It was like the opening scene of a tragic and savage Twilight of the Gods. Rumor cried:

Hitler had been forewarned at Berchtesgaden by the Gestapo, had sent his double, Heinrich Bergner, into the big map room, where a dozen generals and their adjutants were waiting for afternoon conference. Von Stauffenberg mistook Bergner for Hitler. In the same motion with which he gave the Nazi salute, he tossed a hand grenade. There were flames and an explosion. Bergner fell dead.

No, Hitler had been present, and when the grenade—or was it a Teller mine?—exploded under the table, the explosion tore the pants off everyone present. When Benito Mussolini arrived a short time later, Hitler held up the ragged remnants to show that nothing worse had happened to him. Hitler was verging on a nervous breakdown, terrified of further attempts on his life, had -deserted Berchtesgaden for a heavily guarded Rhineland estate.

Rumors about the purge were the most bloodcurdling:

¶ Some 6,000 persons had already been arrested, some of them shot. Some 10,000 had gone into hiding.

¶ Himmler’s strong-arm squads were arresting civilians as well as army officers. Among civilians jailed, perhaps shot: former Nazi Minister for Economics Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, former Foreign Minister Constantin von Neurath.

¶ In one south Bavarian concentration camp the Gestapo had shot a thousand German officers.

¶ Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander in Italy, and Colonel General Sachs, head of the Army’s counter-espionage department, had been arrested.

¶ Baldurvon Schirach, Gauleiter of Vienna and a leading Nazi, had fled from Vienna.

¶ General Fritz Fromm, whose job as head of the Home Army was taken over by Himmler, had been shot.

¶ Four hundred German officers had committed suicide.

¶ A naval revolt had broken out at the Kiel naval base.

¶ In France SS Guards were fighting pitched battles with the Army.

Through this welter of blood, bullets, terror, hysteria, flight and death, it seemed clear Heinrich Himmler had the upper hand. How long he could keep it, with Germany’s military situation growing more critical every day, was anybody’s guess. For the first deep fissure between Wehrmacht and Nazis had cracked the solid-seeming total state. Sooner or later the tremor of, doubt and fear would reach from the top down to the smallest private in the ranks, and the crack would indeed become the crack of doom.

Meanwhile people in the outer world peered at the blood-and-iron orgy and wondered. What they felt about the misfired assassination was neatly and stoutly said by Prime Minister Winston Churchill (see WORLD BATTLEFRONTS) : “They missed the old bastard* but there’s time yet. There are grave signs of weakness in Germany. They are in a great turmoil inside and none can measure the extent.”

* It was 12:59 a.m., Berlin Time.* In euphemistic press reports: “bounder.”