The trial of the 20 July plotters

On Monday 7 August 1944 the first trial of those involved in the 20 July plot opened in the great courtroom of the Kammergericht, the Berlin Court of Appeal, in the district of Schöneberg. Eight officers stood before the People’s Court, the Nazi tribunal for cases of high treason: Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben, Colonel General Erich Hoepner, Major General Hellmuth Stieff, Lieutenant General Paul von Hase, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bernardis, Captain Friedrich Karl Klausing, and two reserve lieutenants, Albrecht von Hagen and Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. The presiding judge was the court’s president, Roland Freisler, who for two days interrupted, mocked and shouted at the defendants while hidden cameras filmed the proceedings for a propaganda film.

The verdict came on 8 August: all eight were sentenced to death for high treason. A few hours later, that same day, they were hanged in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison. In keeping with the order of Adolf Hitler – as witnesses later testified – that the condemned be hanged “like cattle for slaughter”, the executioner used thin cord (according to some accounts, wire) attached to butcher’s hooks fixed to a rail beneath the ceiling; according to witnesses, the executions were filmed. The often repeated statement that the conspirators’ bodies were “hung on meat hooks” is therefore essentially accurate, though it needs qualifying: the condemned were hung on the hooks alive – this was the method of execution itself, designed to prolong their death agony and to humiliate them. The trial of 7–8 August opened a series of several dozen hearings that went on until April 1945, and the repression also reached the conspirators’ wives, children and relatives.

Expelled from the army

After the failure of the coup, Heinrich Himmler and the Gestapo under his command set about breaking up the conspirators’ network. Hitler wanted them tried not by a military court but by a political one, whose verdicts would leave no room for doubt and whose proceedings would serve propaganda. The law stood in the way: officers on active service came under the jurisdiction of the Reich Military Court (Reichskriegsgericht). The solution was the so-called Army Court of Honour (Ehrenhof), set up by Hitler’s decree of 2 August 1944. It was chaired by the most senior field marshal, Gerd von Rundstedt, and its members were Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, and Generals Walter Schroth and Karl Wilhelm Specht.

The Court of Honour did not question the accused and allowed no defence counsel; it relied solely on the findings of the Gestapo, and Hitler personally decided on its recommendations. At its first sitting on 4 August it expelled Witzleben, Stieff and Hase, among others, from the Wehrmacht (Hitler had already dismissed Hoepner from the army in January 1942, after he withdrew from before Moscow without authorisation). According to German historians, between 4 August and 14 September 1944 the Court of Honour expelled 55 officers from the army, and a further 29 were discharged on its recommendation. Those expelled ceased to be soldiers – in law they came before the People’s Court as civilians.

Judge Freisler

The People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) was established in April 1934, after the Reichstag fire trial, whose outcome – the acquittal of the Bulgarians, among them Georgi Dimitrov – had disappointed the Nazis. It was meant to try cases of high treason and treason faster and more harshly than the ordinary courts; each of its senates had, alongside two professional judges, three lay members chosen from loyal party functionaries and SS and SA officers. From August 1942 its president was Roland Freisler, a lawyer born in Celle in 1893, a prisoner of war in Russia during the First World War, a member of the NSDAP from the mid-1920s and later state secretary in the Reich Ministry of Justice. In January 1942 he attended the Wannsee Conference as that ministry’s representative. Under his presidency the number of death sentences passed by the court rose sharply; in February 1943 it was he who sentenced the students of the White Rose to death, among them Sophie Scholl.

Hitler wanted the conspirators’ trial to serve as an example and a warning. According to post-war accounts, he demanded that the condemned be hanged within two hours of sentence, with no right to seek clemency. The hearings were moved from the court’s seat on the Bellevuestraße to the imposing courtroom of the Kammergericht on the Elßholzstraße, where cameras and floodlights could be concealed. Several hundred carefully selected spectators – officials, officers and journalists – were admitted. The court-appointed defence lawyers were in practice passive; some of them even agreed with the prosecution.

The hearing of 7–8 August

The defendants had already been through weeks of Gestapo interrogation, and some of them – according to witnesses and the prisoners themselves – had been tortured. They appeared in court in shabby, often ill-fitting clothes, without ties or braces. The best-remembered scene involved Witzleben, who, deprived of his belt, had to hold up his trousers; Freisler mocked him, and when the field marshal raised his arm in the Hitler salute at the start of the hearing, the judge forbade him to do so as a man “without honour”. Hoepner, who had earlier refused to commit suicide and had demanded a trial, was brought into the courtroom in a cardigan and oversized clothes; Freisler heaped insults on him.

The defendants had little chance to defend themselves, but some of them managed to say why they had acted. Yorck, a cousin and friend of Claus von Stauffenberg and one of the founders of the Kreisau Circle, spoke of the “totalitarian claim of the state on the citizen” that disregarded his religious and moral obligations to God – Freisler cut him off before he could finish. Stieff admitted that he had taken part in the preparations and had kept explosives. According to an account whose authenticity is uncertain, Witzleben told the judge at the end that within a few months the “tormented people” would call him to account.

On 8 August all eight were sentenced to death by hanging for high treason; the court also ordered the confiscation of their property. The recordings proved useless for propaganda: Freisler shouted so loudly that he drowned out the defendants’ quiet answers, and their calm bearing did not fit the image of traitors. The planned film Traitors before the People’s Court (Verräter vor dem Volksgericht) never reached the cinemas – the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, concluded that showing it to a wide audience would have the opposite effect; it was screened only to a narrow circle and the material was classified as secret. The surviving fragments were shown publicly only in 1979, and they remain one of the best-known records of Nazi justice.

Execution at Plötzensee

On the afternoon of 8 August the condemned were taken to Plötzensee Prison in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Nord, where death sentences had been carried out since 1933 – first with the axe, later with the guillotine. In the brick execution shed a steel rail with hooks ran beneath the ceiling. The condemned were brought in one at a time; a short noose of thin cord was placed around their necks and they were hoisted up so that they strangled slowly instead of dying of a broken neck, as in a conventional hanging. According to the testimony of those present, floodlights and cameras were set up at the execution, and the footage was to be sent to Hitler. The film itself has not survived, and whether Hitler watched it remains disputed – post-war accounts contradict one another. The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered so that no graves would remain.

Plötzensee became the main place of execution for those condemned in the 20 July trials. According to the memorial that now occupies the former execution shed, 89 people were put to death there in connection with the plot; others were executed in concentration camps and prisons, or murdered without trial in the last weeks of the war.

Punishing the families

The repression did not end with the conspirators themselves. On 3 August 1944, addressing an assembly of Gauleiters in Posen (Poznań), Himmler announced that collective liability (Sippenhaft) would be imposed on the plotters’ families, invoking a Germanic tradition in which a whole clan answered for the deed of one of its members; according to the surviving record of the speech, he said that the Stauffenberg family would be “wiped out down to its last member”. The Gestapo had used similar practices before – after Georg Elser’s assassination attempt in 1939 it had arrested his relatives – but never on such a scale.

Wives, siblings, parents and even more distant relatives of the conspirators were arrested. Countess Nina von Stauffenberg, pregnant with her fifth child, was sent to prison and then to Ravensbrück concentration camp; she gave birth to her daughter Konstanze in January 1945 in Frankfurt an der Oder. The conspirators’ children – 44 of them in August and September 1944, and two more in February 1945, aged from one month to 15 years – were taken to a children’s home at Bad Sachsa in the Harz mountains. They were given new surnames, the younger ones new first names as well, and forbidden to speak about their families; Stauffenberg’s four children there bore the name Meister. Under Gestapo plans, the younger children were to be given up for adoption by SS families and the older ones sent to National Socialist boarding schools.

From October 1944 some of the children and wives were released – the reasons are still unclear – and by the end of the year 28 children had returned to their families. The rest, including Stauffenberg’s children, were to be taken to Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945, but an air raid on the railway station at Nordhausen thwarted the plan; they were freed by the Americans, who took Bad Sachsa on 12 April. The adult “kin prisoners” (Sippenhäftlinge) – among them more than a dozen members of the Stauffenberg family – were moved by the SS from camp to camp as hostages in the last weeks of the war, until they were freed in South Tyrol at the beginning of May 1945.

Further trials

The first hearing opened a long series. As early as 10 August Freisler sentenced General Erich Fellgiebel, the Wehrmacht’s chief of signals, who on 20 July had tried to cut the Wolf’s Lair off from the outside world, together with the assassin’s brother, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg; Berthold was executed the same day, Fellgiebel on 4 September. In August Lieutenant Colonel Caesar von Hofacker, the conspirators’ liaison officer in Paris, also stood before the court; according to accounts, he told Freisler that today it was his head at stake, but in a year it would be the judge’s. On 8 September those sentenced to death included the former Lord Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, who had been intended as chancellor, and the former ambassador in Rome, Ulrich von Hassell. Goerdeler, whom the Gestapo was still interrogating, was not executed until 2 February 1945. In January 1945 Helmuth James von Moltke, the founder of the Kreisau Circle, was sentenced and executed even though he had taken no part in preparing the assassination – Freisler justified the sentence solely by his discussions of Germany’s future after Hitler.

Some of the accused did not live to stand trial. Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, whom Hitler suspected of contacts with the conspirators, poisoned himself on 19 August after being relieved of his command in the West; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was forced to commit suicide on 14 October. General Friedrich Fromm, who on the night of 20 July had ordered Stauffenberg shot in order to cover up his own contacts with the conspiracy, was convicted of “cowardice” and shot in March 1945. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, General Hans Oster and the pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer were hanged after an SS drumhead court on 9 April 1945 at Flossenbürg concentration camp, and on the night of 22–23 April 1945, as the Red Army was entering Berlin, SS men shot more than a dozen prisoners, among them Klaus Bonhoeffer and Albrecht Haushofer. In all, more than 200 people were executed in connection with the plot; at Plötzensee alone, according to the memorial there, 89 people linked to the 20 July circles died between 8 August 1944 and 9 April 1945.

Freisler’s death

Freisler did not live to see the end of the war. On 3 February 1945, during one of the heaviest American air raids on Berlin, he was killed in the People’s Court building on the Bellevuestraße. His death has been described in two ways: according to most accounts he was struck by a bomb splinter on his way to the shelter, while according to Fabian von Schlabrendorff, whose trial was then in progress, he was crushed by a beam in the cellar while holding Schlabrendorff’s file. The doctor called to certify the death was – according to the same account – the brother of Rüdiger Schleicher, whom Freisler had sentenced the day before. In March 1945 Freisler’s successor acquitted Schlabrendorff, who survived the war and later became a judge of the Federal Constitutional Court.

Place in the war

The trial of 7–8 August 1944 was a demonstration of the regime’s power: the army had itself handed its officers over to a political court, and Field Marshals Rundstedt and Keitel had lent their names to the expulsion of their comrades. The Wehrmacht, in which the Hitler salute had been compulsory since the end of July, was finally subordinated to the party. Fear of the Gestapo and of reprisals against families effectively deterred any further attempt to end the war from within – in the months that followed, as the front approached the borders of the Reich, there was no further organised move against Hitler.

The film of the trial, instead of crushing the defendants, has survived as evidence against their judges. It shows that the People’s Court was not a court but an instrument of terror, and that the verdicts had been decided before the hearing began. None of the court’s judges or prosecutors was ever finally convicted by a court of the Federal Republic of Germany after the war; only in 1985 did the Bundestag declare that the People’s Court had been an instrument of Nazi terror and that its judgments had no legal force. Since 1952 the former execution shed at Plötzensee has housed a memorial to the victims of National Socialist justice, and the anniversary of 20 July is observed in Germany as a day of remembrance for the resistance.