Hitler

sentenced todeath’. Freisler, he added, ‘would find the right tone to deal with them’. Hitler himself was keen above all that the conspirators should be permitted ‘no time for long speeches’ during their defence. ‘But Freisler will see to that,’ he added. ‘That’s our Vyschinsky’ – a reference to Stalin’s notorious prosecutor in the show-trials of the 1930s.
    It took little encouragement from Goebbels to persuade Hitler that Fromm, Stauffenberg’s direct superior officer, had acted so swiftly in an attempt to cover up his own complicity. Fromm had, in fact, already been named by Bormann in a circular to the Gauleiter in mid-evening of 20 July as one of those to be arrested as part of the ‘reactionary gang of criminals’ behind the conspiracy. Following the suppression of the coup in the Bendlerblock and the swift execution of Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Haeften, and Mertz von Quirnheim, Fromm had made his way to the Propaganda Ministry, wanting to speak on the telephone with Hitler. Instead of connecting him, Goebbels had had Fromm seated in another room while he himself telephoned Führer Headquarters. He soon had the decision he wanted. Goebbels immediately had the former Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army placed under armed guard. After months of imprisonment, a mockery of a trial before the People’s Court, and a trumped-up conviction on grounds of alleged cowardice – despite the less-than-heroic motive of self-preservation that had dictated his role on centre-stage in the Bendlerblock on 20 July, he was no coward – Fromm would eventually die at the hands of a firing-squad in March 1945.
    In the confusion in the Bendlerblock late on the night of 20 July, it had looked for a time as if other executions would follow those of the coup’s leaders (together with the assisted suicide of Beck). But the arrival soon after midnight of an SS unit under the command of Sturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny – the rescuer of Mussolini from captivity the previous summer – along with the appearance at the scene of SD chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Major Otto Ernst Remer, newly appointed commander of the Berlin guards battalion and largely responsible for putting down the coup, blocked further summary executions and ended the upheaval. Meanwhile, Himmler himself had flown to Berlin and, in his new temporary capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Army, had given orders that no further independent action was to be taken against officers held in suspicion.
    Shortly before 4 a.m., Bormann was able to inform the party’s provincialchieftains, the Gauleiter, that the putsch was at an end. By then, those arrested in the Bendlerstraße – including Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, former senior civil-servant and deputy Police President of Berlin Fritz-Dietlof von der Schulenburg, leading member of the Kreisau Circle Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, Protestant pastor Eugen Gerstenmaier, and landholder and officer in the Abwehr Ulrich Wilhelm Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld – had been led off to await their fate. Former Colonel-General Erich Hoepner, arrested by Fromm but not executed, and Field-Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, who had left the Bendlerstraße before the collapse of the coup, were also promptly taken into custody, along with a number of others who had been implicated. Prussian Finance Minister Popitz, former Economics Minister Schacht, former Chief of Staff Colonel-General Halder, Major-General Stieff, and, from the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris and Major-General Oster were also swiftly arrested. Major Hans Ulrich von Oertzen, liaison officer for the Berlin Defence District (
Wehrkreis
III), who had given out the first ‘Valkyrie’ orders, blew himself up with a hand-grenade. Major-General Henning von Tresckow, the early driving-force behind the attempts to assassinate Hitler, killed himself in similar fashion at the front near Ostrov in Poland. General Wagner shot himself. General Fellgiebel refused to do so. ‘You stand your ground, you don’t do that,’ he told his aide-de-camp. Well aware that his arrest was imminent, he spent much of the afternoon, remarkably, at the Wolf ’s Lair, even congratulated Hitler on his survival, and awaited his inevitable fate.
    Those who fell into the clutches of the Gestapo had to reckon with fearsome torture. It was endured for the most part with the idealism, even heroism, which had sustained them throughout their perilous opposition. In the early