War and Peace by Nigel Hamilton

Author:Nigel Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

“I speak to you today for two reasons,” Hitler began his broadcast, in an unusually somber, sober, almost listless tone—first “so that you can hear my voice and know that I was not injured and am in good health.” Second, “so that you learn about the details of this crime, which is without equal in German history.”8

For decades, night and day, he had worked, Hitler claimed, “only for my Volk!” Any claims he was dead, or that the Wehrmacht was involved, were specious, he lied—his Austrian accent enough to persuade listeners the broadcast was authentic. No civilian was to take instructions from any department that had been “appropriated by the usurpers,” he ordered, announcing that Heinrich Himmler would take command of the Replacement Army from General Fromm, while General Guderian would replace General Schmundt, the operations chief of the general staff, who had been severely wounded—perhaps mortally.

“I am convinced that by crushing this very small clique of traitors and conspirators,” the Führer assured listeners, an atmosphere could be reestablished at home to reflect that of the many courageous German soldiers fighting at the front. “After all, it is not right that hundreds of thousands and millions of brave men give everything, while a very small coterie of ambitious, pitiful creatures at home constantly tries to undermine this attitude. This time we will settle accounts in the way we are used to as National Socialists,” Hitler warned. (Almost five thousand political opponents were ultimately executed.) There were several mentions of gratitude to “Providence and my Creator” for having saved his life—not on his account, but so that he could “persevere in my work.” Orders, moreover, had already gone out to “all troops. They will execute them in blind faith and in accordance with the type of obedience which the German army knows.”9

Fortuitously the Führer was not alone in Rastenburg. Field Marshal Goering, Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, Martin Bormann, and other dignitaries had also gathered that afternoon, having been invited to be present for the Duce’s visit. Following the Führer’s broadcast they now listened as Hitler that night gave way to a rage more venomous, if such were possible, than they had ever heard before.

In September 1943 it had been the Italians who’d betrayed their noble allies; this time, however—particularly with Mussolini present—Hitler needed new scapegoats, and he found them in the senior German officer class he had always suspected of despising him as a mere corporal with a low-class Austrian accent. There would have to be an immediate investigation—a military court of honor, set up and charged with executing the guilty. Not by firing squad, either, as befitting commissioned officers. “They must hang immediately,” the Führer raved, “without mercy,” and in their prison clothes, as common criminals. “He is absolutely determined to set a bloody example and to eradicate a freemasons’ lodge which has been opposed to us all the time,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, one that “has only awaited the moment to stab us in the back in the most critical hour.

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