away.” The call came from Hitler’s adjutant. Colonel von Below’s
voice sounded odd and shaken. He shouted that a bomb had
gone off under the Führer’s conference table the Führer was
alive, but the Luftwaffe generals Bodenschatz and Korten were
both injured (the latter fatally, as it turned out). After going
with Hitler to the local railroad station to meet Mussolini, whom
he could not abide, Göring went over to the bomb-shattered
conference hut. He marveled how Hitler could have survived
the blast that ripped the heavy oaken table apart. “Today,” he
would tell his men the next day, “I believe more than ever that
an Almighty Providence will favor us with victory.”
A kind of euphoria anesthetized both Göring and Hitler.
He heard Hitler assure Mussolini that fighter production would
soon top five thousand, and that twelve hundred of the “new jet
fighters” were going to mop up the enemy in Normandy. Their
less euphoric henchmen spent the afternoon bitching and back-
biting. “I am still foreign minister,” Ribbentrop was heard to
snap at the Reichsmarschall, who flourished his heavy baton in
mock menace at him, “and my name is von Ribbentrop!”
Some of the instigators of the attempt to kill the Führer,
notably the army’s ex-chief of staff General Ludwig Beck, whom
Göring had always regarded as a wimpish “drawing-room gen-
eral,” were shot by firing squad that same evening. “The whole
creeping poison,” the Reichsmarschall told his men afterward,
“has come from this generals’ clique, and I am convinced that
with the elimination of these [flabby pricks] a roar of approval
will go through the ranks of the entire Wehrmacht.” The subse-
quent blood purge went further than Göring felt obligatory,
however. “Just as in the Röhm putsch,” he told historian Shus-
ter, “more people were shot than necessary.”
In a secret speech to air-staff officers some months later, he
called the assassination attempt “the greatest catastrophe we have