Hitler's Last Witness (20 page)

‘Let me take over,' I said as I relieved one of my two despairing colleagues. The very modern switchboard did not let us down, and it was possible, partly by circuitous routing, to restore all required lines to FHQ Wolfsschanze for Goebbels.
[8]
Not until later did I learn that the conspirators had blocked off some of the telephone lines.

Hitler was alive. He spoke to Goebbels, then Remer. ‘Do you recognise my voice?' he asked the major. Remer agreed that he did. Hitler ordered Remer to place himself and his battalion under his, therefore Hitler's, and Goebbels's personal orders. ‘You will have to work things out with Goebbels. I cannot undertake anything from here.' Thus the phantom was gone. Only minutes later, I saw Remer in the Reich Chancellery courtyard. Suddenly it grew hectic, and I heard excited shouting: ‘
Schnell
!
Schnell
!' Quicker than it takes to tell, Remer took his troops out. The Reich Chancellery was back in our hands. My tension fell away, and I was soon overcome by exhaustion, having been torn from sleep on account of the assassination attempt.

In all I spent only about half an hour at my workplace, and there was time to go to my service quarters and the kitchen to prepare my rations for the journey back. As planned, I was at Berlin Anhalter station at 2100 hrs to return to FHQ Wolfsschanze. That same night, Hitler made a radio broadcast to the people, in which he said that a quite small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous, criminal and stupid officers had wanted to get rid of him. He considered that the failure of the attempted assassination was a sign that he should continue with his life's work, as he had done hitherto.

I heard about the speech later. I slept most of the time on the night train to Rastenburg. Being so tired, I had hardly given thought to what the location of the attempted assassination of Hitler was going to look like. I reached FHQ Wolfsschanze in the early morning hours of 21 July. My colleagues gave me an excited report on the previous day's events.

The situation conference barrack hut was a wreck. An RSD colleague let me through the barriers and led me to the incident scene. The bomb would have killed Hitler had Major General Rudolf Schmundt, the Wehrmacht chief adjutant to Hitler, not lifted Stauffenberg's briefcase, which the latter had placed below the table, and placed it behind himself because his feet kept coming into contact with it. Otto Günsche, who had been hurled through the window by the blast, had observed that and told my colleague Arthur Adam, who repeated it to me. Schmundt had therefore taken most of the blast.

Adam had been duty telephonist at the time of the attempt, and it was he who had first identified Stauffenberg as the perpetrator. Adam made his report to Hitler personally that Stauffenberg had left the conference without retrieving his belt and cap from the cloakroom. The telephonist remembered that Stauffenberg had impressed upon him to have a car ready from the motor pool, but it had not arrived at the required time. As a result of his jitters, which Adam had not observed however, Stauffenberg must then have forgotten his cap and belt. Once the bomb had gone off, Stauffenberg had succeeded in leaving the Führer-Sperrkreis without any problems, but then he had been stopped at the outer Sperrkreis exit. The colleague who drove him to the airfield told me that, when they were stopped at the control post, he had turned off the engine. Stauffenberg had then barked at him to leave the engine running. Stauffenberg wanted to speak to the responsible lieutenant colonel about being stopped, but he was not present, and so he had himself connected to his deputy. Rittmeister Leonhard von Möllendorff finally gave permission for him to proceed.

I knew who Stauffenberg was. In the latter days at the Berghof, he had frequently attended situation conferences. Nothing else about him had struck me, apart from his outer disfigurement.
[9]
We colleagues did not think of him as a would-be assassin of Hitler. An assassin he certainly was. But his assassination attempt was levelled at everybody present in that room in which he had placed the bomb. Four men had ultimately died because of it, but not Hitler.
[10]
At the time of the explosion, Stauffenberg would not have been in the conference room, but might have had himself called out to take a telephone call, as often happened.

It could have been the way in which things would end for me. I had often imagined it: I report that I have a telephone call for the Führer, and bang! – it is over for me. That something could happen to me in the bodyguard – that was obvious. Not for nothing were our lives each insured in the sum of 100,000 Reichsmarks. But that an assassination attempt would be planned in such a way as to make short work of our own men too, that was something we had never thought of. That made Stauffenberg a murderer of his colleagues for us. There was really nothing worse. I had known Rudolf Schmundt since he had been a captain, and I thought a lot of him. I was much affected when he died as a result of his injuries in the military hospital at Rastenburg at the beginning of October.

Hitler showed himself to be particularly bitter that Stauffenberg had not shot himself after his plan failed. That was cowardly and unworthy of an officer. With the failure of this assassination attempt, it got through to Hitler's opponents that once more he had proved unconquerable. He felt himself as a person confirmed in his incomparably outstanding importance and believed in Providence. His standard retort ‘Nothing will happen to me' now had a completely different meaning. In any case, behind the events of 20 July there stood a clear exclamation mark.

As arranged, Hitler received Mussolini on the day of the assassination attempt. His work had to go on. When I arrived on 21 July, everything was proceeding as usual. No especial excitement. I watched the repairs to the barrack hut and talked to the men of the building squad. I briefly befriended one of the workers and established that he came from Silesia. Later, I sent him all the photos that I had taken of him at work repairing the barrack hut. How could I have anticipated that one day a Hollywood film producer would ask me about them.
[11]
The photographs are now all in Poland with the man's heirs. I kept none back; I did not appear in any of them.

Dreadful revenge was taken against the conspirators. After Stauffenberg and some of his co-conspirators had been sentenced to death and executed that same night, Hitler ordered that the remainder should be tried by the People's Court. In the bodyguard we never spoke about these trials. They were things never talked of. It is alleged occasionally nowadays that Hitler asked to see photos of the executions of convicted conspirators. I do not believe that. It was not like him – that was not his concern. To the best of my knowledge, he never looked at pictures of gruesome events, nor could he bring himself to confront human suffering by looking at it directly. If he could avoid it, he would not address such things. Visits to military hospitals and such like were anathema to him.

Outstanding Generals

I did not find the situation after the assassination attempt to be particularly changed or tense. We received no new instructions on security precautions, nor were we of the
SS-Begleitkommando
more anxious afterwards – Hitler himself least of all. Nevertheless, more often than before, he would smell conspiracy and treason whenever we had bad news. On one occasion I heard him and Keitel arguing loudly near an open window. I found it difficult to identify which of the two was talking – their voice tone was very similar.

The cause had been an operation in Finland in which heavy losses had been sustained.
[12]
This had resulted from wrong information being supplied by the Wehrmacht command staff. Accordingly, Hitler had given the order to advance without the necessary military equipment being to hand. Three hundred urgently needed field guns were in the harbour at Tallinn and had not been unloaded. Hitler was beside himself: ‘How can something like that happen? How can I give orders if I have not been correctly informed about the situation? I – I am ultimately responsible for everything!'

Finally, Hitler fell seriously ill with jaundice, which kept him bedridden for a fortnight. He could not make the daily situation conferences. He still looked quite weak when he resumed at these conferences in early October. Shortly afterwards, he dismissed the doctors who had treated him – Karl Brandt and Hans-Karl von Hasselbach. He continued to trust only Professor Morell.

In October, we heard of Rommel's death, and of the circumstances of his forced suicide. That he had been given the choice of poison or a pistol. I did not want to think about it and pushed it from my mind. Much later, in Soviet captivity, I met Alfred Gause, Rommel's former chief of the general staff, who had been replaced later by Hans Speidel.
[13]
Gause had not understood why he had been replaced.
*
He told me how he had tried to convince Rommel to stay clear of the plot. Gause had noticed that plans for a coup were circulating. Rommel was involved in so far as feelers had been put out to see if he would be prepared to accept the post of Reich president in the event of a successful coup. Gause confided that the best he had been able to come up with was to request leave to visit his wife for her birthday, then he went not to his own wife, but to see Rommel's wife Lucie. He had visited her out of consideration for her safety and also to make her understand as clearly as possible that her husband was in great danger. He had almost pleaded: ‘Frau Rommel, save your husband! He must go to Hitler.' His only way out of the trap was to report at the higher level that something was afoot. The field marshal did not actually need to go into details. ‘Your husband has access to the Führer at any time, but he just has to tip him off, and then he is free of the thing,' Gause recalled having attempted to convince Frau Rommel. Well, later Rommel could not be saved.

I took an increasing interest in the course of the war and weighed up whether I should take a chance and visit my native province of Silesia. I talked to Albert Bormann about having a couple of days' leave. We were standing in front of the situation conference barrack hut. The conference had just ended and Hitler was coming out. Bormann was carrying a signature blotting book, and I had some despatches to deliver. Hitler saw that and came over to us directly. Bormann told him: ‘This young man wants to visit his home in Upper Silesia. What do you think of that? Can we let him?'

‘Yes, yes,' Hitler said, nodded and added impishly, ‘but if you fall into Schörner's hands, even I will not be able to do anything for you. Then even my own signature will not be of any use to you.'

He probably meant that General Ferdinand Schörner would press-gang me into his ranks, as he needed every man he could lay hands on. Hitler had a very high opinion of the general, recently awarded the Swords to his Knights Cross with Oak Leaves, and he was not the only one.
[14]
After the war, a Russian said to me: ‘If Hitler had had a dozen Schörners, then you would have had a chance!'

In the end I did not go to Silesia – my enquiry having originated basically from my curiosity to hear from Hitler how things really were on the Eastern Front. I would have liked to have brought some papers and photos to safety from there, but my Aunt Sofia did that later. She spent the end of the war not in Berlin but with her mother at Alt-Schalkowitz. I never saw my grandmother Ottilie again. I discovered years later that she had died at the age of eighty-seven. Her last word to my aunt was ‘sugar'. I believed that this was because my grandmother always had a very sweet tooth.

On 20 November 1944, we left FHQ Wolfsschanze for ever. Hitler transferred his headquarters to the vicinity of Bad Nauheim, from where he would direct the impending Ardennes offensive. We had a short stay in Berlin before going on. I was shocked at the scene that greeted me. Since I had left the capital on 20 July, it had received some devastating bombing raids.

We took the special train to FHQ Adlerhorst, so-named by Hitler at Ziegenberg. The opening days of the offensive from 16 December 1944 were very successful, but when the weather changed the Allies regained air superiority and the offensive came to a standstill. I remember only constant military conferences, and a coming and going of generals. My memory of it was overshadowed by what followed. At Ziegenberg it became certain – we were heading for the end.

1
By this time, Hermann Fegelein was the holder of the Knights Cross with Oak Leaves. It was claimed that units of his division, 8th SS Cavalry Division
Florian Geyer
, had committed several war crimes.

2
Helmuth Stieff (1901–1944) did not carry out the attempt. He was sentenced to death on 8 August 1944, in connection with the attempted coup of 20 July 1944, and executed the same day at Berlin-Plötzensee.

3
On 7 March 1945, Alfred Jodl, head of the Wehrmacht command staff at OKW, married his secretary Luise Katharina von Benda.

4
The marriage was apparently annulled on 2 October 1944. See Christa Schroeder,
He Was My Chief
, London 2009, pp. 196–7.

5
By the end of the war there were about 400 RSD men. See Peter Hoffmann,
Die Sicherheit des Diktators
, Munich/Zürich 1975, p. 56.

6
The Volkswagen of KdF car (KdF= Kraft durch Freude, Strength through Joy, a National Socialist holidays organisation) had the typical look of a beetle, but the name VW Beetle comes from the 1950s. Inga Spilker, actress, was the second wife of Robert Ley (1890–1945), leader of the single German ‘trade union', the Arbeitsfront.