Gerd Von Rundstedt - The Attempt To Kill Hitler

The Attempt To Kill Hitler

Rundstedt had resisted all attempts to recruit him to the various conspiracies against Hitler that had been operating inside the German Army since 1938. Although he had not denounced or reported any of the officers who had approached him, he had shown no sympathy with their appeals. By June 1944 the conspirators had given up on him (and indeed on all the senior field commanders), because he was not approached by the group around Tresckow and Stauffenberg who hatched the unsuccessful plot to kill Hitler with a bomb at the Wolf's Lair (Wolfsschanze), his headquarters in East Prussia, and had no inkling of what was planned. When he heard of the attempt on 20 July, his reaction was very hostile. A year later, in June 1945, he told the investigating commission preparing for the Nuremberg Trials: "I would never have thought of such a thing, that would have been base, bare-faced treachery." Since he had every reason to try to put himself in a sympathetic light at Nuremberg, this certainly reflects his view in June 1944. He also argued, however, that the attempt to kill Hitler was pointless, because the German Army and people would not have followed the conspirators. "The Army and also the people still believed in Hitler at that time, and such an overthrow would have been quite unsuccessful." He reiterated his traditional sense of his duty as a soldier: had he supported the plot, he said, "I would have emerged and been considered for all time the greatest traitor to my Fatherland."

This makes it clear that even in 1944 Rundstedt still equated Hitler's regime with the German fatherland, and this was still the view of the large majority of officers of the German armed forces. There was a deep aversion among the officer corps to anything that smacked of Landesverrat (treason to the fatherland), particularly in wartime. This was despite the honourable precedent of Field Marshal Ludwig Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, who in 1812 defied King Friedrich Wilhelm III at Tauroggen to withdraw the Prussian Army from the French alliance. Furthermore, officers like Rundstedt who argued that a coup against Hitler would not have won support in the Army or among the German people were, in the view of most historians, correct. Joachim Fest, writing of Tresckow, says: "Even officers who were absolutely determined to stage a coup were troubled by the fact that everything they were contemplating would inevitably be seen by their troops as dereliction of duty, as irresponsible arrogance, and, worst, as capable of triggering a civil war." On the attitude of the people, Fest writes: "Most industrial workers remained loyal to the regime, even as the war ground on."

Runstedt was thus above suspicion of involvement in the 20 July plot, but he could not escape entanglement in its bloody aftermath. A large number of senior officers were directly or indirectly implicated, headed by Field Marshals Kluge, Rommel (very peripherally) and Witzleben, and Generals Falkenhausen, Erich Fellgiebel, Friedrich Fromm, Paul von Hase, Gustav Heistermann von Ziehlberg, Otto Herfurth, Erich Hoepner, Fritz Lindemann, Friedrich von Rabenau, Hans Speidel, Helmuth Stieff, Stülpnagel, Fritz Thiele, Georg Thomas and Eduard Wagner, as well as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Many of these would have been known personally to Rundstedt. Witzleben was an old colleague, and Stülpnagel had been his subordinate in Ukraine and his colleague in France. These considerations do not seem to have influenced his conduct at all.

Hitler was determined not only to punish those involved in the plot, but to break the power, status and cohesion of the Prussian officer corps once and for all. Since traditionally German officers could not be tried by civilian courts, he decided that the Army must expel all those accused of involvement. They could then be tried before the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof)), a special court established in 1934 to try political crimes, and presided over by the fanatical Nazi Roland Freisler. Hitler therefore ordered the convening of a Court of Honour (Ehrenhof) to carry out the expulsions, and appointed Rundstedt to head it. The other senior members were Keitel and Generals Guderian, Walther Schroth and Karl-Wilhelm Specht. This court considered only evidence placed before it by the Gestapo. No defence counsel were permitted, and none of the accused was allowed to appear. On this basis, several officers were expelled from the Army, while others were exonerated. Among those the court declined to expel were Halder (who had no involvement in the plot), and Speidel (who was deeply implicated). Those expelled appeared in batches before the People's Court, where after perfunctory trials most of them were executed by hanging.

No incident in Rundstedt's career has damaged his posthumous reputation as much as his involvement in this process. John Wheeler-Bennett wrote in 1967: "To such a nadir of supine degradation had come the child of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau and Moltke." He called the Court "the final farce of casuistry" and accused the officer corps of washing its hands, Pilate-like, of their comrades. Rundstedt's biographer writes: "This was something for which some Germans, while they were prepared to forgive him everything else, could and cannot excuse him." Speidel, despite the fact that he was spared, was bitterly critical of Rundstedt after the war, when he became a senior officer in the new West German Army. As a result, Rundstedt to this day is denied official honours such as having Army barracks named after him. Blumentritt, always loyal to his old Chef, complained in 1953: "He has had to endure vindictiveness and jealousy even up to and after the hour of his death."

Rundstedt gave his account of these events before the IMT Commission in Nuremberg: "The Court of Honour to which I belonged... had to prejudge the assassinations. The following had to be considered: Somebody who was brought in front of the court in Berlin, guilty or not guilty, could not be a soldier any more. If the person in question expected a certain sentence from the court, having been found guilty on the grounds of his own evidence, and it could only be prison death, we had to sentence him to expulsion from the army. If on the contrary, there was the possibility that the person in question was not guilty, we only sentenced him to discharge... Later on, if the judgement was 'not guilty', he was reinstated. Thank God, in many cases we could apply the latter form, just discharge. The whole Court of Honour was a very heavy burden for me. But, in the interest of the army, I could not evade it." In another interview, he described it as: "the worst thing I've ever experienced in my military career. This apologia of course ignored the fact that no defence evidence whatever was presented. The court had to accept or reject the evidence presented by the Gestapo.