Tapping Hitler's Generals

I was taken, manacled, in an ordinary passenger train to BERLIN, I arrived in the evening, when it was dark, and said to him: ‘Listen, take off the manacles, I swear I won’t run away. I will hold on to your trouser leg.’ We went through BERLIN, the manacles were removed–we crossed over the Potsdamer Platz in the dark and then went inside. They took my uniform away, put me in an awful suit of drills, manacled me again, and threw me into the cell, where they left me for a week without any sort of trial. I said: ‘Is one interrogated here, or is one simply hanged or shot without being interrogated, or what happens? Make an end of it! Does one remain lying here till one dies?’

I have been wounded twice in my left forearm here and I was able to pull off the left manacle–they were handcuffs. I had to try to get the handcuff on again. I could risk that when I lay in the bed, under the cover. A fellow looked through the peephole every ten minutes. I was always afraid I should drop off to sleep and that a hand would suddenly be hanging out underneath the cover.

When the air-raid warning went those condemned to death were not taken to the shelter but were chained hand and foot and thrown into bed.

ELFELDT: Tell that to KITTEL some time. He maintained that it was all just propaganda.

PFUHLSTEIN: I’d rather not, it’s not particularly pleasant for me either. That was an indication to me as to who was and who wasn’t condemned to death, old SCHULENBURG, the ambassador, for instance.[467]

SCHLIEBEN: How much did you say at your interrogation?

PFUHLSTEIN: I had decided on a definite limit. I admitted without any hesitation: ‘I had orders to occupy a western part of BERLIN and to put out of action the SS artillery school near JÜTERBOG.’ The basis of the plan was KLUGE’s and BECK’s intention of setting up a ‘Reichsgeneral-stabschef’ under HITLER and creating a new army C-in-C and ‘Reichsgeneralstab’ and they intended to take the whole matter up with the FÜHRER and tell him that they were of the opinion that this plan simply must be carried out and that should the FÜHRER be unwilling to agree to the proposal it was then intended to get FELLGIEBEL to cut his lines of communication and by surround his HQ to exert pressure on the FÜHRER to accept the proposal. As far as this I had to–OSTER had given all that away.

EBERBACH: Was that read out to you?

PFUHLSTEIN: Yes. I was fetched from my cell and dragged into the washroom where I had three minutes in which to wash myself. There, standing naked in front of the wash-stand, I saw OSTER, as white as the wall. He looked at me, a look which told me everything–he had admitted all that he knew.[468]

EBERBACH: Did they torture you?

PFUHLSTEIN: Not me. That one look was sufficient to tell me that I would have to admit everything OSTER knew about me. The bearing of that man told everything.

SCHLIEBEN: What was OSTER?

PFUHLSTEIN: CANARIS’S Chief of Staff.