[The following takes place after, and as a direct result of, the failed assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler by Claus von Stauffenberg.]
Fearing for his life, Hitler never again spoke in public. By his orders, hundreds of suspected conspirators were arrested, tortured and executed. Another five thousand of their relatives and suspected anti-Nazi sympathizers were taken to concentration camps. A decree went out for Stauffenberg’s family to be “wiped out to its last member.”
Hitler ordered some of the chief plotters “strung up like butchered cattle.” A motion picture of their execution was rushed to the Wolf’s Lair for the Führer’s enjoyment. By one account, Hitler and his chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, watched in the Führer’s private theater as the shirtless men on the screen swung from piano-wire nooses, writhing and dying while their carefully unbelted trousers fell off to reveal them naked.
Goebbels had demanded for years that Hitler’s enemies be stalked with “ice-cold determination.” But when the top Nazis watched the ghoulish flickering images of the lifeless plotters, it was later said, even the cold-blooded Goebbels had to cover his eyes to keep from passing out.
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “The Plot to Murder Hitler.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 4. Print.
Further Reading:
Nationalsozialismus (National Socialism) / Nazism
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
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