had issued counter-orders to those Remer was enforcing. When Remer asked for proof, Goebbels picked up the phone and asked to be put through to Hitler at the "Wolf's Lair", then handed him the telephone receiver, upon which Remer heard Hitler's voice, ordering him to crush the plot in Berlin with the troops under his command. Remer with this realised that he had been taking orders from the mutineers, and returning with his troops to the Berlin Military Headquarters, Bendlerblock, he arrested the plotters, including Stauffenberg. Colonel general Friedrich Fromm had the plotters immediately summarily executed by firing squad, despite Remer's protestations that he had been told to keep the plotters alive if possible pending further orders from Hitler, who was returning to Berlin. (General Fromm himself would subsequently be executed by firing squad). That same night Remer was promoted two ranks to Oberst (Colonel), then to General in early 1945. For the rest of the war, Remer commanded the Führerbegleitbrigade (FBB), a field unit formed from a Grossdeutschland cadre, in East Prussia, and during the Ardennes Offensive. He was captured by the United States Army towards the end of the war, and remained a prisoner of war until 1947. Post-war life and political activities After his release from allied captivity, he became involved in West German post-war politics. He set up a political organization entitled the Socialist Reich Party in 1950, which was promptly banned in 1952 for making inflammatory political statements, but not before it had gathered 360,000 supporters in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, and won 16 seats in the state parliament. The Socialist Reich Party also won eight seats in the Parliament of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. The party had received some financing from the Soviet Union, and worked with the Communist Party of Germany, whose aim was the destabilisation of the West German state. Among the campaigning themes of the Socialist Reich Party was that the Holocaust had been an allied propaganda invention, and it accused the United States of building fake gas chambers and producing bogus news-film footage about concentration camps, that the politics of the Allied-powers created West German state were merely a front for American domination, and that West Germany's puppet status of the United States should be opposed. With the party banned, Remer faced criminal charges from the West German Government as being engaged in activity attempting to re-establish a