Bomb-weary Berliners sat down to another dreary dinner. From radio loudspeakers came pleasant music, scheduled to be followed by a useful lecture on the extermination of rats. The lecture never came. Instead a tense voice clipped in: "Today an attempt was made on the life of the Führer with explosives. . . ."
Around the world as in Berlin the tense voice sounded like the crack of doom. The one question that flashed through every mind was: is this the end, "the crackup? Had the long-awaited struggle between Hitler and his generals begun?
The voice went on: ". . . The Führer suffered no injuries except light burns and bruises. . . . He resumed work and, as scheduled, received the Duce. . . . A short time after, Reich Marshal Goring arrived. . . ." Wounded with Hitler were 12 of his military advisers, some of them seriously. That was all.
Telephone and wire services to neutral countries were cut off. Airplane flights to neutral Sweden and Switzerland were interrupted. For hours the fate of Hitler and of Germany, which was in some degree the fate of every man, woman & child in the world, was shrouded behind an invisible, hermetic barrier.
To the Nation. Seven hours later Hitler himself spoke on the air. He said: "German men and women: . . . If I address you today* I am doing so for two reasons: first, so that you shall hear my voice and know that I personally am -It was 12:59 a.m., Berlin Time. unhurt and well and, second, so that you shall hear the details of a crime that has no equal in German history.
"An extremely small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and at the same time foolish, criminally stupid officers hatched a plot to remove me and . . . the staff of the German High Command. The bomb that was placed by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg exploded two meters [about two yards] away from me on my right side. It wounded very seriously a number of my dear collaborators. One of them has died. . . .
"At an hour in which the German Army is waging a very hard struggle there has appeared in Germany a very small group, similar to that in Italy, that believed that it could thrust a dagger into our back as it did in 1918. . . . It is a very small clique of criminal elements, which will now be exterminated quite mercilessly.
"I order, therefore, at this moment, that no civilian authority accept any order from an authority that these usurpers arrogantly assume. Secondly, that no military authority and no leader of troops and no soldier obey any order by these usurpers. . . ."
Reich Marshal Hermann Goring and Admiral Karl Doenitz spoke after Hitler.
Firm Facts. Through the Nibelung fog a few relatively firm facts jutted out:
¶ A seizure of Government offices in Berlin by the Army collapsed when the officer who had been ordered to take them over smelled a rat, telephoned Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels.
¶ Heinrich Himmler was now the Reich's "Iron Boss." He could appoint, promote, execute any officer in any civil or military job on the say-so of nothing higher than his own conscience.