Book Five: Beginning of the End
- Throughout 1943, more than a half-dozen attempts had been made on Hitler's life.
- Needless to say, none of them had worked.
- The conspirators made many unsuccessful attempts to draw powerful German Army generals and field marshals to the cause of assassinating the Fuehrer.
- There were disagreements and dissent within the resistance group, and conflicting opinions about what should be done to bring down Hitler.
- By now, Heinrich Himmler was also keeping a pretty close eye on the resistance, and even had some contacts on the inside.
- But Himmler was playing both sides, a game that would eventually result in the deaths of many of the conspirators.
- Shirer describes the conspirators' ongoing attempts to determine what kind of arrangement the Allies would agree to with a new non-Nazi German government.
Operation Flash
- One of the early assassination attempts was designed under the codename "Operation Flash."
- If you've seen the Tom Cruise drama-rama Valkyrie, you'll recognize this one. The plan involved two packs of explosives that had been dressed up to look like bottles of brandy and stowed away in the Fuehrer's private plane.
- It didn't work. For some reason, the bomb had failed to go off.
- Luckily for them, the conspirators were able to recover the faulty bomb before it was discovered, so they lived to try again.
- The second attempt at Operation Flash was a suicide mission, in which one particularly self-sacrificing soldier would bear the responsibility for blowing up Hitler and his entourage.
- You guessed it: that plan failed too.
- Shirer says that he'll tell us about a few other "overcoat" operations—as the conspirators called them—but he pauses for a moment to describe a short-lived anti-Nazi youth movement that arose in 1943 and was swiftly and violently put down by the Nazis.
- The Nazi response to that movement became a message to the conspirators about the dangers of their own mission.
- The Gestapo ruthlessly investigated any German citizens who were suspected of treason; cruel fates awaited the ones that were caught.
- There were other unsuccessful attempts made on Hitler's life.
- As Shirer draws this section to a close, he gives us our first introduction to his man-crush Count von Stauffenberg, whose exploits he'll soon describe in more detail.
The Mission of Count von Stauffenberg
- Count von Stauffenberg may have been played by Tom Cruise in the historical drama Valkyrie, but personally, we think he had a bit of a Robert Pattinson vibe going on.
- Shirer begins this section with an uncharacteristically effusive description of Stauffenberg's breeding, intelligence, and Greek-god looks, qualities that Shirer seems to appreciate quite a lot, despite all of his homophobic commentary elsewhere.
- After explaining how Stauffenberg came to find himself at odds with Nazism and then seriously wounded in battle, Shirer explains that the hunky young soldier's long recovery had given him plenty of time to think.
- He came to the conclusion that he had a mission to complete: killing the Fuehrer.
- Stauffenberg came to join the anti-Nazi conspirators, and General Erwin Rommel—now a Field Marshal—found his way into the group as well.
- Using the code name "Operation Valkyrie" they designed a two-pronged plan that would begin with the assassination of Hitler, and end with an armed coup in Berlin and other major cities in the German Reich.
- Operation Valkyrie was set to move forward in July 1944.
The Anglo-American Invasion, June 6, 1944
- As the anti-Nazi conspirators honed their plans for "Operation Valkyrie," the Allied forces had been making some plans of their own.
- During the spring of 1944, the Germans had been trying to anticipate when and where the Allies might attempt to make a landing in Nazi-occupied France.
- However, they were caught unawares when the Allied invasion began in Normandy on June 6—the day that, in Allied nations, has gone down in history as the most important day of WWII.
- As the German Army officers tried to mobilize a resistance, Hitler created delays.
- Later, when it became clear that the invasion wasn't going to be put down easily, Hitler frustrated his Army officers again by refusing to let them withdraw.
- On the Eastern front, things were going just as badly for the German troops.
- Field Marshal Rommel was injured in an Allied attack on July 17, and his injuries were serious enough to sideline him. Shirer sees this as a disastrous occurrence for the conspirators.
The Conspiracy at the Eleventh Hour
- As the Allies moved forward with their invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, the anti-Nazi conspirators were faced with an important decision.
- Since the Allies were so close to victory, they wondered if an assassination attempt, and its risks, were worth it.
- Because the group was being infiltrated by the Gestapo, they knew they had to move quickly.
The Coup of July 20, 1944
- Count von Stauffenberg was now the main guy in the conspiracy, the one who wouldn't just carry out the assassination of Hitler, but who'd also lead an armed coup in Berlin.
- Before the fateful day of July 20, 1944, the conspirators had two failed attempts to carry out "Operation Valkyrie."
- The second failure was a particularly dangerous one, as it attracted suspicious attention from both the OKW and the Gestapo.
July 20, 1944
- After a huge buildup, Shirer provides a detailed account of Count von Stauffenberg's failed attempt to assassinate Hitler at his headquarters in Rastenburg.
- He begins by taking us up to the point of the bomb blast itself, and describes its immediate aftermath in and around the headquarters.
- Although Stauffenberg—watching from a safe distance—saw the bomb go off in Hitler's conference, he left the scene before making sure that Hitler had actually been killed.
- To be fair, he was in a hurry: not only did he need to escape before anyone put two and two together and realized that the bomb had come from him, but he also needed to get back to Berlin to command the armed coup of the city.
- By the time Stauffenberg made it to Berlin, he was unpleasantly surprised to discover that his fellow conspirators hadn't yet set the coup in motion. They'd lost three hours while they were waiting for him to return from Rastenburg.
- Back at Hitler's headquarters, the Fuehrer only sustained minor injuries in the blast. He and his officers began to figure out who was behind the attempted assassination.
- In Berlin, the conspirators were simply too disorganized and too slow to act; their hesitation and poor planning made them no match for the likes of Hitler and his cold and calculating henchmen.
- The principal conspirators, including noble and dashing Count von Stauffenberg, were swiftly executed.
Bloody Vengeance
- In the wake of the failed July Plot, Heinrich Himmler and his Gestapo rounded up thousands of German citizens who had either belonged to, or known about, the resistance.
- In his words: "There was a wild wave of arrests followed by gruesome torture, drumhead trials, and death sentences carried out, in many cases, by slow strangling while the victims were suspended by piano wire from meathooks borrowed from butchershops and slaughterhouses. Relatives and friends of the suspects were rounded up by the thousands and sent to concentration camps, where many of them died. The brave few who gave shelter to those who were in hiding were summarily dealt with." (5.29.295)
- Shirer offers a detailed example of the unfair trials, which continued into the winter of 1945.
- An American bomb fell on the courthouse on the morning of February 3, 1945. The presiding judge was killed and most of the court records destroyed.
- Most of the men who had participated in (or known about) the conspiracy were executed.
- Some of those who'd been arrested were eventually rescued by the advancing Allies.
- Several German Army generals who had been involved in the conspiracy chose to take their own lives rather than submit to the tortures of the Gestapo.
- Field Marshal Rommel, whose death was publicized to the German public as a sudden brain seizure, was forced to commit suicide with cyanide when his contact with the conspirators was discovered.
- Shirer describes how the rest of the German Army officer corps caved before Hitler in the wake of the Fuehrer's brutal revenge against the conspirators, with a number of them even participating in the drumhead trials and swift executions of their fellow officers.
- Shirer offers his own perspective on the reasons why the surviving German officers chose to renew their pledges to Hitler rather than resist the purge he was carrying out against them.
- Ultimately, he argues that "the mass of the German people, in uniform and out, were not ready for a revolution—in fact, despite their misery and the bleak prospect of defeat and foreign occupation, did not want it. National Socialism, notwithstanding the degradation it had brought to Germany and Europe, they still accepted and indeed supported, and in Adolf Hitler they still saw the country's savior." (5.29.376)