Tapping Hitler's Generals

BROICH: Do you know, I’ve though it over and I believe it was a put-up job. It’s funny–that business in the ‘Bürgerbräukeller’ in 1939 was a put-up job too, just as the ‘Reichstag’ fire was.[369] At any rate, it’s possible, it is also possible that they were after STAUFFENBERG, because when he came to me he already said to me: ‘It’s a good thing that I am going to the front for a while.’ We discussed this matter from time to time and he always said: ‘If it’s going to be done, it must be done properly, otherwise there will be an awful massacre.’ For that reason, and because he is a very clever and energetic person, I believe that if he had undertaken it he would have carried it out thoroughly. HITLER said the same things in his last speech as he did that time in the ‘Bürgerbräukeller’.

BAO: LEY spoke in an armament factory, I believe, yesterday and said: ‘The English Lords, the German Counts and Barons are all… and that we’ll be annihilated, our families and all. We are all blue-blooded swine.’[397]

BROICH: We were always considered that in the eyes of the Nazis.

BAO: Now it’ll start, there’s sure to be a massacre. LEY and HIMMLER have always tended towards the left.

BROICH: Yes, they always have. I believe, though, that they won’t publish many names, so as to make as little of it as possible, and to prevent the Army from realising: ‘Hello, our field marshalls are being made away with, something must be very wrong here!’

BAO: I hope they won’t start massacring their families!

BROICH: They’ll have to do a lot. BECK was a fine man, the most decent man imaginable. I am convinced that he probably had nothing whatever to do with this business. I mean to say, he went at the same time as FRITSCH did, because already in 1938, he said: ‘I am not joining in these politics.’ When the show started we all said: ‘For God’s sake, has the man gone mad!’ All except some opportunists, and there were quite a few of them. We obviously all wanted to free ourselves from the VERSAILLES Treaty and see a free GERMANY reinstated, but never–I remember the time when everyone was saying: ‘Heavens, a war would be the greatest possible madness!’ I am quite pleased to be here for the time being!

BROICH: The names of all the others–you’ll only hear about it in a roundabout way. They won’t let anything come out, they’ll disappear. They are bound to announce on the wireless: ‘So-and-So and So-and-So’, as at the time of the RÖHM Putsch. They say there were only four people in it, quite ridiculous! If they say, ‘Marschall’ So-and-So or ‘Generaloberst’ So-and-So, then–

SCHLIEBEN: They’d be advertising it.

BROICH: Yes. Then the army people would say: ‘Oh, our “Generals” with long service behind them, can’t be completely in the wrong. If they do that–’

SCHLIEBEN: I’m beginning to see things clearly now, I must admit.

BASSENGE: As a result of today’s news and LEY’s speech, I think that the whole thing is nothing but a put-up job, because that a man like BECK–he has not been on active service for five or six years, he just sits at home, he has got a little house somewhere, and grows his flowers and feeds his hens–he didn’t have anything to do with it. GUDERIAN is a good tank man, terrifically impulsive and so on, but no great personality. The chief of the General Staff must be a calm, dispassionate sort of man, not a hot-head like that. I am convinced that the whole thing is a put-up job. A lot of people here know Graf STAUFFENBERG. He is a sensible man; he wouldn’t have used a cigar-box full of gun-powder. I don’t believe the whole story. The point of the whole thing is just the same as at the ‘Reichstag’ fire and ‘Bürgerbräukeller’; those people have… as an alibi for a similar purse and LEY has expressed it quite clearly, much more clearly than the others: ‘Now comes the second part of the revolution’, and that is the communist part. Now the counts and barons are in for it.

KRUG: I shan’t don this uniform again…

REIMANN: Let’s hope the moment is soon here when we can tear off this damned Swastika thing. Everything is cracking up now. If someone had told us that a little time ago, we’d have asked if he’d drunk a bottle of brandy.

KRUG: Why should they shoot SPONECK’s cousin, when he is a prisoner in GEROLSHEIM?[398]

REIMANN: No one knows. They’ve also shot Graf STAUFFENBERG’s brother, the university professor.[399]

KRUG: And GUDERIAN lends himself to that!

SCHLIEBEN: I don’t know what we are to do after the war. The best thing would be to buy a rope and hang oneself.

BROICH: I’d hang a few others first! Then I should have a certain feeling of satisfaction. We must see how things go, but I’m in favour of forming a ‘Division’ or ‘Regimenter’ from the PW and marching with the English against GERMANY. Now they will exterminate all officer class.