Hitler

stages of their investigations, the Gestapo managed to squeeze out remarkably limited information, beyond what they already knew, from those they so grievously maltreated. Even so, as the ‘Special Commission, 20 July’, set up on the day after the attempted coup, expanded its investigations, the numbers arrested rapidly swelled to 600 persons. Almost all the leading figures in the various branches of the conspiracy were rapidly captured, though Goerdeler held out under cover until 12 August. Reports reached Hitler daily of new names of those implicated. His early belief that it had been no more than a ‘tiny clique’ of officers which had opposed him had proved mistaken. The conspiracy had tentacles stretching further than he could have imagined.He was particularly incensed that even Graf Helldorf, Berlin Police President, ‘Old Fighter’ of the Nazi Movement, and a former SA leader, turned out to have been deeply implicated. As the list lengthened, and the extent of the conspiracy became clear, Hitler’s fury and bitter resentment against the conservatives – especially the landed aristocracy – who had never fully accepted him mounted. ‘We wiped out the class struggle on the Left, but unfortunately forgot to finish off the class struggle on the Right,’ he was heard to remark. But now was the worst possible time to encourage divisiveness within the people; the general showdown with the aristocracy would have to wait till the war was over.
    On 7 August, the intended show-trials began at the People’s Court in Berlin. The first eight – including Witzleben, Hoepner, Stieff, and Yorck – of what became a regular procession of the accused were each marched by two policemen into a courtroom bedecked with swastikas, holding around 300 selected spectators (including the journalists hand-picked by Goebbels). There they had to endure the ferocious wrath, scathing contempt, and ruthless humiliation heaped on them by the red-robed president of the court, Judge Roland Freisler. Seated beneath a bust of Hitler, Freisler’s face reflected in its contortions extremes of hatred and derision. He presided over no more than a base mockery of any semblance of a legal trial, with the death-sentence a certainty from the outset. The accused men bore visible signs of their torment in prison. To degrade them even in physical appearance, they were shabbily dressed, without collars and ties, and were handcuffed until seated in the courtroom. Witzleben was even deprived of braces or a belt, so that he had to hold up his trousers with one hand. The accused were not allowed to express themselves properly or explain their motivation before Freisler cut them short, bawling insults, calling them knaves, traitors, cowardly murderers. The order had been given – probably by Goebbels, though undoubtedly with Hitler’s authorization – for the court proceedings to be filmed with a view to showing extracts in the newsreels as well as in a ‘documentary’ entitled ‘Traitors before the People’s Court’. So loudly did Freisler shout that the cameramen had to inform him that he was ruining their sound recordings. Nevertheless, the accused managed some moments of courageous defiance. For instance, after the death sentence had predictably been pronounced, General Fellgiebel uttered: ‘Then hurry with the hanging, Mr President; otherwise you will hang earlier than we.’ And Field-Marshal von Witzleben called out: ‘You can handus over to the hangman. In three months the enraged and tormented people will call you to account, and will drag you alive through the muck of the street.’ Such a black farce were the trials that even Reich Justice Minister Otto Georg Thierack, himself a fanatical Nazi who in his ideological ardour had by this time surrendered practically the last vestiges of a completely perverted legal system to the arbitrary police lawlessness of the SS, subsequently complained about Freisler’s conduct.
    Once the verdicts had been pronounced, the condemned men were taken off, many of them to Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. On Hitler’s instructions they were denied any last rites or pastoral care (though this callous order was at least partially bypassed in practice). The normal mode of execution for civilian capital offences in the Third Reich was beheading. But Hitler had reportedly ordered that he wanted those behind the conspiracy of 20 July 1944 ‘hanged, hung up like meat-carcasses’. In the small,