In 1939, Fromm became Chief of Army Equipment and commander of the Replacement Army. When Operation Barbarossa stalled outside of Moscow in December 1941 and the Russian counter-attack started, Hitler took direct command of the Army and re-organized the armed forces' command structure. The Office of the Chief of Army Armament and the Reserve Army under Generaloberst Friedrich Fromm was created, subordinate to the commander in chief, army. Fromm had enough power at his disposal to control the German state because his position controlled army procurement and production and commanded all army troops inside Germany. At the beginning of 1942, Fromm apparently recommended going over to the defensive for the entire year because of exhausted army stockpiles and the diversion of production, after the initial successes of Barbarossain the summer of 1941.
Though Fromm was aware that some of his subordinates, most notably Claus von Stauffenberg, his chief of staff, were planning an assassination attempt against Adolf Hitler, he remained quiet and agreed to have a part in it in exchange for becoming a top official of the new government after the coup. However, Fromm did not have any direct involvement in the conspiracy. When the attempt to proceed with a mutiny on 15 July 1944 failed, he refused to have any further part in it. On 20 July, news broke that Hitler and several officers of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces had become victims of an explosion in the German military's headquarters on the Eastern Front, the Wolfsschanze, near Rastenburg, East Prussia. Fromm quickly concluded that it was Stauffenberg and the plotters who were behind the explosion, and when he attempted to arrest them, Fromm was quickly overwhelmed and confined to a prison cell in the Bendlerblock, the Berlin headquarters of the Replacement Army, among other branches of the German military, after he had refused to join the plotters in Operation Valkyrie. After the coup failed, Fromm was found by men of the Ersatzheer and freed. Despite Hitler's direct orders to take the conspirators alive, Fromm held a summary court-martial of the active soldiers at his headquarters who had been identified or suspected of being part of the coup. As presiding official, Fromm condemned the officers to death and ordered their immediate execution by firing squad. As for retired Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, Fromm allowed his request to commit suicide, but since the suicide attempt failed, Fromm ordered him to be shot.
Arrest, trial and execution
After the Bendlerblock executions, Fromm went to Goebbels to claim credit for suppressing the coup, to which Goebbels only said, "You have been in a damn hurry to get your witnesses below ground." On the morning of22 July 1944, Fromm was arrested by Nazi officials and locked in jail to await trial. It was clear to them that his actions immediately after the coup's collapse were more likely than not to have been an attempt to use his authority, despite Hitler's specific orders to the contrary, to silence the officers directly under his operational command who might have implicated him for at least "turning a blind eye" to their activities leading up to Hitler's assassination attempt. Fromm was discharged from the German Army on 14 September 1944. The civilian Fromm was sentenced to death and considered unworthy for military duty by the Volksgerichtshof on 7 March 1945. Since the court failed to prove a direct association with the 20 July plotters, he had been charged and convicted for cowardice before the enemy. However, because he had executed the conspirators within reach, he was spared torture and execution by hanging with a thin rope, and sentenced to a military execution. On 12 March 1945, Fromm was executed at the Brandenburg-Görden Prison by firing squad as part of the post-conspiracy purge. His last words before the firing squad were reported to be "I die, because it was ordered. I had always wanted only the best for Germany".
