Bombing Hitler (7 page)

In its report issued two days after the attack, the SD registered, with some satisfaction, a wave of outrage among German citizens. At first there was mistrust toward the press, then the rumor mill went into gear, reporting that Hitler had been badly injured and that “leading men of the Party and the government” had been killed. When it turned out that there was nothing to these reports, the bitterness shifted to “the English and the Jews”—they must surely be behind it. In the report, it was stated that “in some areas there were demonstrations against Jews” and that workers were exhorting Goring to send the Luftwaffe to “reduce London to rubble.” Hitler considered his speech at the Bürgerbräukeller so essential to his mission that he had it issued as a lavishly illustrated brochure, with three million copies distributed throughout Germany.

Just how deeply the hearts of the Germans were affected by the attack can be gauged from private documents, which mainly conveyed the Party line. A professor wrote Hitler's chief adjutant Brückner: “All of our people are deeply filled with gratitude to Providence. An individual cannot express it to the Führer; but to you, the guardian of the vestibule to the heart of the Führer, who conduct so many streams from the people to him, I may say it . . . it was for me the happiest moment of my long life when I knew the Führer was safe . . .” And the wife of Austrian Fascist Othmar Spann-Rheinisch wrote:

Once again God's angels have protected the Chosen One of the German soul. Thanks be to God and to you, o my Führer! What happens to people is in accord with what they are. What happens to you is in accord with your being, with your destiny: Your being is one with the German spirit, which has brought you forth from the obscurity of your forebears and made you into our heart and our head! May friend and foe alike see that you are invincible, like the German spirit, as invulnerable as Siegfried!

Similar sentiments were on display in businesses throughout Germany. On December 13 the SD announced, “Since the outbreak of war and especially since the Munich attack, business owners in many locations have placed pictures of the Führer in their shop windows.” A liquor store in Kiel inserted a photo of Hitler among a large number of liquor bottles, with a sign that said “We'll never capitulate!”

Many German women, however, were not as confident—the same SD report noted that miscarriages and abortions were on the increase. Many women who had recently become pregnant seemed to be worried about the future—what if their children's providers did not return from the war? And so they took matters into their own hands.

Concerning the bombing itself, Himmler issued orders in the news-papers that any suspicious remark should be reported to the police. This was unlikely to elicit any concrete results from the rumor mill that was constantly churning among the people. Given the wave of denuncia-tions and the increasing number of detainees, the Gestapo was already overburdened.

Many rumors and misstatements resulted in a large number of arrests. On the night of the attack, the police put up numerous road blocks in and around Munich in an effort to catch the assassins. The rural police in Unterhaching stopped a taxi at 5:00 a.m. on November 9. While they were checking papers, the passenger, completely drunk, mumbled, “I didn't mean to shoot the Führer.” Only because he was able to identify himself, and because he had a doctorate and was a reserve officer, was he allowed to go home.

A woman from Ottobrunn remembered a local mechanic telling her in 1936 that “if right now somebody would get out there and mingle with the crowd, he could easily get off a shot at him [Hitler].” This same man, who lived on the road that Hitler had traveled to get to the Obersalzberg, told another witness that “somebody could easily lie in the woods and open fire from there when he [Hitler] passed by.” Someone else had observed this man carrying “a military weapon that could easily be disassembled.” The head administrator for the district forwarded the charges to the senior public prosecutor.

In Moorenweis, a village near Fürstenfeldbruck, a postal worker, who was also a Party member, was overheard saying something in local dialect that the police interpreted as “it would have been no loss if Hitler had been dead.” When he was sent to the Gestapo in Munich over the issue, he claimed to have heard the remark from two farm women. When these two women were questioned, it turned out they had heard something quite different. And on it went. Finally the local police officer threw in the towel, realizing that he had been led on a wild goose chase.

In Berlin, the SD district office itself confirmed how little of the propaganda regarding the positive mood in Berlin was accurate. They collected such statements as “during the period around November 9, great radical changes could be expected.” In Wilmersdorf, there was a rumor that on November 9 Hermann Goring would be named Führer. A sales clerk in a radio shop in Weissensee snitched on a man who made the threatening remark: “Just you wait till the eighth or ninth of November!” The date of the traditional gathering in Munich seemed to have already acquired an almost mythical quality.

After the assassination attempt, a master painter in Berlin expressed regret: “Too bad it failed!” A metal worker doubted that the English Secret Service had carried out the attack, underscoring his political intuition with the remark: “The people were responsible for the attempt—don't believe that the people are 100 percent behind Hitler!”

Hitler supporters in Berlin felt some measure of
Schadenfreude
directed at them because of the attack. Any number of people assumed that Hitler and others would soon be shot to death. A shop owner, who according to the sign in his window served Jews only between 12:00 and 1:00 p.m., received a threatening postcard on November 11 that read, “You son of a bitch, how is it that you refuse to allow Jewish people to shop until after twelve? Have you completely forgotten that 100 percent of your business used to come from Jewish customers? Get rid of this sign fast, or the glass will fly just like it did yesterday in Munich, where the lousy Nazis got bombed.”

Starting in November, subversive anti-Nazi literature increased dramatically. A sticker found on a front door in Berlin contained the following message: “Christians, remember the Sermon on the Mount! Declare war on war!” This was very much in line with the motivation of the assassin.

Deutschland-Berichte
(Reports from Germany), a publication of the Social Democratic Party in exile, also painted a picture of the chaotic thinking prevalent among Germans after the attempt, a picture that included civil unrest, wild rumors, mistrust toward the Nazi press, adoption of English phrases, and, above all, reports of people keeping their heads down in fear. From the German underground the Party leadership received five reports, which revealed no uniform assessment of the mood. According to the first report, the popular imagination had taken the English line and creatively modified it: The “Goring clique” had instigated the attempt, and the military had carried it out. Finally, however, people returned to the Gestapo myth of an English conspiracy: What forces are behind this attack and what forces could have succeeded in deceiving Himmler's Gestapo or in concealing from it that this was about to happen? Somehow, Hitler had to be behind it, they reasoned.

Another report contained speculation as to why, after the initial spate of conflicting opinions, Nazi propaganda was able to prevail so quickly. It came to the following conclusion: “The notion that all are in the same boat is too widespread and the belief in the promises made previously by the antiwar faction too shaken for the proverbial ‘little man' to wish that the bomb had achieved the desired result. Besides, people reason, such an attack can never get all the ‘Führers' at the same time and is therefore pointless. In the best-case scenario, it would result only in internal confusion; and the beneficiary would be the enemy, the war would be lost, and the misery would be even greater than after Versailles—all the efforts since 1933 would have been in vain.” The point was devastating: “So it is with complete amazement that one must conclude that, whoever threw the bomb, the Nazis were the beneficiaries.” The English claim that the attack was “a second Reichstag fire,” i.e., carried out by the Nazis, was given no credence in the report.

However, this line of reasoning continued to flourish under-ground. Once the assassin had acquired a name, a biography, and a profession, this was the very angle used by those carrying out the assault on his integrity. He would come to be regarded as the stooge of the Nazis.

The SD report closed by asking what, if anything, could change the political situation. Answer: only “the decisive military defeat of the Reich.” This view was also shared by some elements of the military resistance.

The bloodbath of the years to come might have been averted if the assassination attempt at the Bürgerbräukellerhad been successful.

For many of the resistance fighters and members of the opposition, the assassination attempt served as a clarion call. The SD report of November 10 announced that in Berlin “at the shop of the Photo-Hoffmann company at Kochstrasse 10, a shop window had been shattered by a stone. The only items on display in the window were pictures of the Führer.” The Czechs, too, could not conceal their satisfaction. “Among the Czech minority in the Sudetenland the
Schadenfreude
at the Munich attack was universally apparent.”

The SD reports did not have much to say about statements by those who supported the attack—this was the purview of the Gestapo. There may have been several hundred Gestapo investigations of people who made remarks about the Munich attack that were suspicious or even supportive. But Gestapo records of reactions to the attacks have been preserved only in Düsseldorf (with seventy files), Würzburg (sixteen files), and Speyer (fifty-eight files).

One of the few cases to become famous was that of Wilhelm Jung, an innkeeper in Neunkirchen and a former member of the SD. When he read the newspaper report about the attempt while sitting in his pub on November 9, he said to a neighbor: “If the Führer and his closest associates had died in the attack, things would already be looking a lot different in Germany.” He went on to say that the assassin, even if he were sitting there in the bar, would not be turned in by anybody. Jung was a little too sure of himself. His views circulated, he was taken into custody, and the witness stuck to her “patriotic” statement in spite of pleas from Mrs. Jung. Jung, a war invalid, was sentenced by a special court to two years in prison, after which he was transferred, at the age of sixty years and in poor health, to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen and later to Auschwitz, where he died in 1942.

The effects of the bomb attack even spread as far as the concentration camps. On the one hand, political prisoners gained hope that someone might one day succeed in eliminating Hitler; on the other hand, the SS guards were in such a rage that they took it out on the prisoners. Immediately after the guards in Buchenwald heard about the attack, they took several Jews out to a quarry and shot them.

A former political prisoner named Rudolf Wunderlich provided further evidence that the SS guards at the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen were quite agitated about the attack. Around November 14, according to his testimony, Dr. Tuppy, a former prosecutor in Vienna, was taken there as a prisoner. The Nazis still had a score to settle with Tuppy. In accordance with prevailing law, he had at one time brought charges against the National Socialist murderers of the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss. Now, upon entering the “Political Department,” (Gestapo headquarters inside the camp), he was almost bludgeoned to death. Later that evening he died in the infirmary.

The news of the Bürgerbräu attack left everyone in a confused state. The Nazis exerted relentless pressure to conform—anyone whose statements attracted attention was turned over to the Gestapo, yet anyone who was reticent could be considered suspicious. Those who had always been vulnerable, such as the Jews, were better off withdrawing completely, avoiding dangerous people or keeping quiet. The only organizations that had not yet been brought into line and could still take a stand—even if it was only to remain silent—were the churches. In the SD Report of November 15, the SS was already taking note that the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church were reacting differently to the attack. The Catholic clergy were content to avoid taking a position, while many Protestants sharply condemned it. In the Protestant churches there were “services thanking God for saving the Führer” and proclamations from the pulpit praising Hitler. As an example, the report described a church service in Stuttgart. The pastor went far beyond thanking God; he emphasized Hitler's service in the First World War, the “brave act of November 9, 1923,” and the “struggle for political power.” And he asked God to “grant our people
Lebensraum”
The old God of the Christians had been given an armband with a swastika—he had been placed into the ranks of the
Alte Kämpfer.

On November 22, the SD followed up with another notice, stating that the Catholic Church had consented to adopt a position condemning the attack. The notice went on to report that the newsletters for the bishoprics of Passau and Freiburg had published statements on November 19 expressing thanks that the Führer's life had been spared. In Freiburg they repeated the Nazi gospel that “foreign powers” were at work, citing Himmler as a source.

Internally, the SS did not suppress the fact that there were doubts among the Catholic clergy about the Party line on the attack. An informant reported from an assembly of priests in Fulda that they believed the claim made by the radio station in Strasbourg that the attack could be traced to Party circles. A few wise members of the clergy expressed the opinion “that it was premature for the death of the Führer since he would have become a martyr of the people.”