July 20 plot

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The conference room soon after the explosion.
The conference room soon after the explosion.

The July 20 plot of 1944 was a failed attempt to assassinate German dictator Adolf Hitler, the leader of Nazi Germany, and to take power by means of a plan called Operation Walküre, which was supposed to subdue possible unrest. Wehrmacht Heer officer Claus von Stauffenberg played the key role and was in charge of the German Reserve Army's Walküre, allowing him access to Hitler for reports.

July 20 was the culmination of the efforts of the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi regime. Its failure, both in the Wolfschanze and then in Berlin's Bendlerblock, led to the arrest of more than 5,000 people, to the execution of about 200 people and the destruction of the resistance movement.

Contents

[edit] Background

Conspiratorial groups planning a coup of some kind had existed in the German Army and the military intelligence organization (the Abwehr) since 1938. Early leaders of these plots included Brigadier-General Hans Oster, head of the Abwehr Military Intelligence Office, former Army Chief of Staff, General Ludwig Beck, and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben. Plans to stage a coup and prevent Hitler from launching a new world war were developed in 1938 and 1939, but were aborted because of the indecision of Army Generals Franz Halder and Walter von Brauchitsch, and the failure of the western powers to oppose Hitler's aggressions until 1939. This first military resistance group delayed their plans after Hitler's extreme popularity following the unexpectedly fast success in the battle for France.

In 1941 a new conspiratorial group formed. It was led by Colonel Henning von Tresckow, a member of his uncle Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's staff, who commanded Army Group Centre in Operation Barbarossa. Tresckow systematically recruited oppositionists to the Group’s staff, making it the nerve center of the Army resistance. Little could be done against Hitler while his armies advanced triumphantly into the western Soviet Union through 1941 and 1942, even after the setback before Moscow (in December 1941) that caused the dismissal of both Brauchitsch and Bock.

During 1942 Oster and Tresckow nevertheless succeeded in rebuilding an effective resistance network. Their most important recruit was General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office headquarters at the Bendlerblock in central Berlin, who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany. Linking this asset to Tresckow’s resistance group in Army Group Centre created a viable coup apparatus.

In late 1942 Tresckow and Olbricht formulated a plan to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup during Hitler's visit to the headquarters of Army Group Centre at Smolensk in March 1943, by placing a bomb on his plane. The bomb did not go off, and a second attempt days later with Hitler at an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry in Berlin also failed. These failures demoralized the conspirators. During 1943 they tried without success to recruit senior Army field commanders such as Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, to support a seizure of power.

[edit] Planning a coup

Main article: Operation Walküre

By mid-1943 the tide of war was turning decisively against Germany. The Army plotters and their civilian allies became convinced that Hitler must be assassinated so that a government acceptable to the western Allies could be formed and a separate peace negotiated in time to prevent a Soviet invasion of Germany and to avoid as much bloodshed as possible. In August 1943 Tresckow met a young staff officer, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, for the first time. Badly wounded in North Africa, Stauffenberg was a political conservative, a zealous German nationalist, and a Roman Catholic with a taste for philosophy. He had at first welcomed the Nazi regime but had become rapidly disillusioned by the systematic executions of Jewish civilians and the treatment of the Russian POWs. Then, since the beginning of 1942 he shared the widespread conviction among Army officers that Germany was being led to disaster and that Hitler for both reasons must be removed from power. For some time his religious scruples had prevented him from coming to the conclusion that assassination was the correct way to achieve this. After the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942, however, he came to the conclusion that not assassinating Hitler would be a greater moral evil. He brought a new tone of decisive, revolutionary decision-making to the ranks of the resistance.

Olbricht now put forward to Tresckow and Stauffenberg a new strategy for staging a coup against Hitler. The Reserve Army had an operational plan called Operation Walküre (Valkyrie), which was to be used in the event that the disruption caused by the Allied bombing of German cities caused a breakdown in law and order, or a rising by the millions of slave laborers from occupied countries now being used in German factories. Olbricht suggested that this plan could be used to mobilize the Reserve Army to take control of German cities, disarm the SS and arrest the Nazi leadership, once Hitler had been assassinated. Operation Valkyrie could only be put into effect by General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Reserve Army, so he must either be won over to the conspiracy or in some way neutralized if the plan was to succeed. Fromm, like many senior officers, knew in general about the military conspiracies against Hitler but neither supported them nor reported them to the Gestapo.

During late 1943 and early 1944 there were at least four failed attempts to get one of the military conspirators near enough to Hitler for long enough to kill him with handgrenades, bombs or a revolver (November 1943: Axel von dem Bussche, February 1944: Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, von Gersdorff and March11th 1944: Eberhard von Breitenbuch). But this task was becoming increasingly difficult. As the war situation deteriorated, Hitler no longer appeared in public and rarely visited Berlin. He spent most of his time at his headquarters at the Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair) near Rastenburg in East Prussia, with occasional breaks at his Bavarian mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. In both places he was heavily guarded and rarely saw people he did not already know and trust. Himmler and the Gestapo were increasingly suspicious of plots against Hitler, and specifically suspected the officers of the General Staff, which was indeed the place where most of the young officers willing to sacrifice themselves to kill Hitler were located.

By the summer of 1944 the Gestapo was closing in on the conspirators. There was a sense that time was running out, both on the battlefield, where the Eastern front was in full retreat and where the Allies had landed in France on 6 June, and in Germany, where the resistance’s room for maneuver was rapidly contracting. The belief that this was the last chance for action seized the conspirators. By this time the core of the conspirators had begun to think of themselves as doomed men, whose actions were more symbolic than real. The purpose of the conspiracy came to be seen by some of them as saving the honor of themselves, their families, the Army and Germany through a grand, if futile gesture, rather than actually altering the course of history.

One of Tresckow’s aides, Lieutenant Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, wrote to Stauffenberg: “The assassination must be attempted, coûte que coûte [whatever the cost]. Even if it fails, we must take action in Berlin. For the practical purpose no longer matters; what matters now is that the German resistance movement must take the plunge before the eyes of the world and of history. Compared to that, nothing else matters.”[1]

In retrospect, it is surprising that these months of plotting by the resistance groups in the Army and the state apparatus, in which dozens of people were involved and of which many more, including very senior Army officers, were aware, apparently totally escaped the attention of the Gestapo. In fact the Gestapo had known since February 1943 of both the Abwehr resistance group under the patronage of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and of the civilian resistance circle around former Leipzig mayor Carl Goerdeler[citation needed]. If all these people had been arrested and interrogated, the Gestapo might well have uncovered the group based in Army Group Centre as well and the July 20 assassination attempt would never have happened. This raises the possibility that Himmler knew about the plot and, for reasons of his own, allowed it to go ahead.

Himmler had at least one conversation with a known oppositionist when, in August 1943, the Prussian Finance Minister Johannes Popitz, who was involved in Goerdeler's network, came to see him and offered him the support of the opposition if he would make a move to displace Hitler and secure a negotiated end to the war.[2] Nothing came of this meeting, but Popitz was not arrested and Himmler apparently did nothing to track down the resistance network which he knew was operating within the state bureaucracy. It is possible that Himmler, who by late 1943 knew that the war was unwinnable, allowed the July 20 plot to go ahead in the knowledge that if it succeeded he would be Hitler's successor, and could then bring about a peace settlement. Popitz was not alone in seeing in Himmler a potential ally. General von Bock advised Tresckow to seek his support, but there is no evidence that he did so. Goerdeler was apparently also in indirect contact with Himmler via a mutual acquaintance Carl Langbehn. Canaris' biographer Heinz Höhne suggests that Canaris and Himmler were working together to bring about a change of regime, but all of this remains speculation.[3]

[edit] July 20

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On 1 July 1944 Stauffenberg was appointed chief-of-staff to General Fromm at the Reserve Army headquarters on Bendlerstrasse in central Berlin. This position enabled Stauffenberg to attend Hitler’s military conferences, either in East Prussia or at Berchtesgaden, and would thus give him a golden opportunity, perhaps the last that would present itself, to kill Hitler with a bomb or a pistol. Conspirators who had long resisted the idea of killing Hitler on moral grounds now changed their minds—partly because they were hearing reports of the mass murder at Auschwitz of up to 250,000 Hungarian Jews, the culmination of the Nazi Holocaust. Meanwhile new key allies had been gained. These included General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the German military commander in France, who would take control in Paris when Hitler was killed and, it was hoped, negotiate an immediate armistice with the invading Allied armies.

The plot was now as ready as it would ever be. Twice in early July Stauffenberg attended Hitler’s conferences carrying a bomb in his briefcase, but because the conspirators had decided that Himmler and probably Göring must also be assassinated if the planned mobilization of Operation Valkyrie were to have any chance of success, he held back at the last minute because Himmler was not present. In fact, it was unusual for Himmler to attend military conferences. By 15 July, when Stauffenberg again flew to East Prussia, this condition had been dropped. The plan was for Stauffenberg to plant the briefcase with the bomb in Hitler’s conference room with a timer running, excuse himself from the meeting, wait for the explosion, then fly back to Berlin and join the other plotters at the Bendlerblock. Operation Valkyrie would be mobilized, the Reserve Army would take control of Germany and the other Nazi leaders would be arrested. Beck would be appointed head of state, Goerdeler would be Chancellor and Witzleben would be commander-in-chief. The plan was ambitious and depended on a run of very good luck, but it was not totally fanciful.

Again on 15 July the attempt was called off at the last minute, for reasons which are not known because all the participants in the phone conversations which led to the postponement were dead by the end of the year. Stauffenberg, depressed and angry, returned to Berlin. Due to the false assumption that the assassination had succeeded, Operation Valkyrie had been partially unleashed on July 15. Only with severe efforts and much luck had the plotters been able to 'smother up' the events as an exercise. On 18 July rumors reached Stauffenberg that the Gestapo had wind of the conspiracy and that he might be arrested at any time—this was apparently not true, but there was a sense that the net was closing in and that the next opportunity to kill Hitler must be taken because there might not be another. At 10:00 hours on 20 July Stauffenberg flew back to Rastenburg for another Hitler military conference, once again with a bomb in his briefcase. It is remarkable in retrospect that despite Hitler’s mania for security, officers attending his conferences were not searched.

Around 12:10 hours, the conference began. Stauffenberg had previously activated a pencil detonator, inserted it into a 1 kg block of plastic explosive prepared by Wessel von Freytag-Loringhoven, and placed it inside his briefcase. He then entered the room and placed his briefcase bomb under the table around which Hitler and more than 20 officers had gathered. After ten minutes, Stauffenberg made an excuse and left the room. At 12:40 the bomb detonated, demolishing the conference room. Three officers and the stenographer were seriously injured and died soon after, but Hitler survived, suffering only minor injuries. It is possible he was saved because the briefcase had been moved behind the heavy oak leg of the conference table, which deflected the blast. Another theory is that the briefcase was moved by an officer to the other end of the massive table from where Hitler was, because it was in the way, and so the main force of the blast did not reach Hitler. Stauffenberg, hearing the explosion and seeing the smoke issuing from the broken windows of the concrete dispatch barracks, assumed that Hitler was dead, leapt into a staff car with his aide Werner von Haeften, and made a dash for the airfield trying to escape before the alarm could be raised. By 13:00 hours his He 111 was airborne.

By the time Stauffenberg’s plane reached Berlin at about 15:00, General Erich Fellgiebel, an officer at Rastenburg who was in on the plot, had phoned the Bendlerblock and told the plotters that Hitler had survived the explosion. This was a fatal step (literally so for Fellgiebel and many others), because the Berlin plotters immediately lost their nerve, and judged, probably correctly, that the plan to mobilize Operation Valkyrie would have no chance of succeeding once the officers of the Reserve Army knew that Hitler was alive. There was more confusion when Stauffenberg’s plane landed and he phoned from the airport to say that Hitler was in fact dead. The Bendlerblock plotters did not know who to believe. Finally at 16:00 Olbricht issued the orders for Operation Valkyrie to be mobilized. The vacillating General Fromm, however, phoned Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel at the Wolf's Lair and was assured that Hitler was alive. Keitel demanded to know Stauffenberg’s whereabouts. This told Fromm that the plot had been traced to his headquarters, and that he was in mortal danger. Fromm replied that he thought Stauffenberg was with Hitler.

At 16:40 Stauffenberg and Haeften arrived at the Bendlerblock. Fromm now changed sides and attempted to have Stauffenberg arrested, but Olbricht and Stauffenberg restrained him at gunpoint. By this time Himmler had taken charge of the situation and had issued orders countermanding Olbricht’s mobilization of Operation Valkyrie. In many places the coup was going ahead, led by officers who believed that Hitler was dead. The Propaganda Ministry on the Wilhelmstrasse, with Joseph Goebbels inside, was surrounded by troops—but Goebbels's phone was not cut off, another fatal error. In Paris Stülpnagel issued orders for the arrest of the SS and SD commanders. In Vienna, Prague and many other places troops occupied Nazi Party offices and arrested Gauleiters and SS officers.

A soldier holding the trousers Hitler wore during the failed assassination attempt.
A soldier holding the trousers Hitler wore during the failed assassination attempt.

The decisive moment came at 19:00, when Hitler was sufficiently recovered to make phone calls. He was able to phone Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry. Goebbels arranged for Hitler to speak to the commander of the troops surrounding the Ministry, Major Otto Remer, and assure him that he was still alive. Hitler ordered Remer to regain control of the situation in Berlin. At 20:00 a furious Witzleben arrived at the Bendlerblock and had a bitter argument with Stauffenberg, who was still insisting that the coup could go ahead. Witzleben left shortly afterwards. At around this time the planned seizure of power in Paris was aborted when Kluge, who had recently been appointed commander-in-chief in the west, learned that Hitler was alive, changed sides with alacrity and had Stülpnagel arrested.

The less resolute members of the conspiracy in Berlin also now began to change sides. Fighting broke out in the Bendlerblock between officers supporting and opposing the coup, and Stauffenberg was wounded. By 23:00 Fromm had regained control, hoping by a show of zealous loyalty to save his own skin. Beck, realizing the game was up, shot himself—the first of many suicides in the coming days. Fromm declared that he had convened a court-martial consisting of himself, and had sentenced Olbricht, Stauffenberg, Haeften and another officer, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, to death. At 00:10 on 21 July they were shot in the courtyard outside, possibly to prevent them from revealing Fromm's involvement. Others would have been executed as well, but at 00:30 the SS, led by Otto Skorzeny, arrived on the scene and further executions were forbidden. Fromm went off to see Goebbels to claim credit for suppressing the coup. He was immediately arrested and later would be executed.

[edit] Alternative possibilities

Some researchers have speculated that if Stauffenberg had placed the briefcase in a slightly different location the bomb might have had its intended effect on the primary target. But the bomb was supposedly placed behind a very thick leg of the heavy oak conference table, and the leg apparently deflected the blast and prevented the force from reaching Hitler. This theory is supported by the fact that others seated in less fortunate positions were killed or more seriously injured than Hitler. There is also speculation that had Stauffenberg left the second bomb in his briefcase, even without arming it, the detonation of the first bomb could have triggered the explosion of the second bomb and the combined force of the two bombs going off nearly simultaneously might have killed Hitler. An alternate analysis is that the single bomb might have been effective had the meeting been held as originally planned in Hitler's reinforced and subterranean bunker (the "Führerbunker"), instead of the wooden hut that doubled as Speer's barracks and makeshift briefing room. Both compact bombs were designed to kill by expansion inside a room encased with reinforced walls. Speer's wooden hut with open windows did not correspond to these specifications, as it allowed a substantial amount of the blast force to escape to the outside by the open windows. Since some of the blast escaped the room, only those who were in the immediate path of the blast were killed or severely injured.

In 2005, the Discovery Channel's show Unsolved History aired an episode titled, "Killing Hitler" in which each scenario was re-created using live explosives and test dummies. The results supported the conclusion that Hitler would have been killed had any of the three other scenarios occurred [2nd bomb, stronger shelter, moving briefcase to the other side of the strong table leg].

[edit] Participants at the meeting

The following persons were in attendance: German dictator Adolf Hitler, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, General Alfred von Jodl, General Walter Warlimont, Franz von Sonnleithner, Major Herbert Buchs, stenographer Heinz Buchholz, Lieutenant-General Hermann Fegelein, Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Rear Admiral Hans-Erich Voss, Otto Gunsche (Hitler's adjudant), General Walter Scherff, General Ernst John von Freyend, stenographer Heinrich Berger, Rear Admiral Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer, General Walther Buhle, Lieutenant-Colonel Heinrich Borgmann, Major-General Rudolf Schmundt, Lieutenant-Colonel Heinz Waizenegger, General Karl Bodenschatz, Colonel Heinz Brandt, General Gunther Korten, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and Lieutenant-General Adolf Heusinger.

[edit] Bomb casualties

A total of four persons were killed and five seriously injured by Stauffenberg's bomb. Those killed included: stenographer Heinrich Berger, Major-General (Generalmajor) Rudolf Schmundt, Colonel (Oberst) Heinz Brandt, and General Gunther Korten. The injured included: General Walter Scherff, Rear Admiral Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer, Lieutenant-Colonel (Oberstleutnant) Heinrich Borgmann, General Karl Bodenschatz, and Lieutenant-General (Generalleutnant) Adolf Heusinger.

[edit] Aftermath

The courtyard at the Bendlerblock, where Stauffenberg, Olbricht and others were executed.
The courtyard at the Bendlerblock, where Stauffenberg, Olbricht and others were executed.

Over the coming weeks Himmler’s Gestapo, driven by a furious Hitler, rounded up nearly everyone who had the remotest connection with the July 20 plot. The discovery of letters and diaries in the homes and offices of those arrested revealed the plots of 1938, 1939 and 1943, and this led to further rounds of arrests, including that of Franz Halder, who finished the war in a concentration camp. Under Himmler’s new Sippenhaft (blood guilt) laws, all the relatives of the principal plotters were also arrested.

Eventually some 5,000 people were arrested[4] and about 200 were executed [5]—not all of them connected with the July 20 plot, since the Gestapo used the occasion to settle scores with many other people suspected of opposition sympathies.

Very few of the plotters tried to escape or to deny their guilt when arrested. Those who survived interrogation were given perfunctory trials before the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof) and its judge Roland Freisler. The first trials were held on 7 August and 8 August 1944. Hitler had ordered that those found guilty be "hung like cattle".[6] The treatment that had been dealt out to those executed as a result of the Rote Kapelle was that of slow strangulation using suspension from a rope attached to a slaughterhouse meathook.[citation needed] For the July 20 plotters piano wire was used instead.[citation needed]

Many people took their own lives prior to either their trial or their execution, including Tresckow, Kluge, and Erwin Rommel, who was accused of having knowledge of the plot beforehand and not revealing it to Hitler. He was given the option of suicide via cyanide or a public trial by Freisler's People's Court. If he committed suicide, his family wouldn't be subjected to a reprisal. However, with the verdict a foregone conclusion, the People's Court was basically a kangaroo court. If Rommel stood trial, there would have been no chance of successfully defending himself, and his family and staff would have been executed along with him. Rommel committed suicide October 14, 1944. Stülpnagel also tried to commit suicide, but survived and was subsequently hanged.

Fromm's attempt to win favor by executing Stauffenberg and others on the night of July 20 had merely exposed his own previous lack of action and apparent failure to report the plot. Having been arrested on July 21, Fromm was later convicted and sentenced to death by the People's Court. Despite his involvement in the conspiracy, his formal sentence charged him with poor performance in his duties. He was executed in Brandenburg an der Havel. Hitler personally commuted his death sentence from hanging to "more honorable" firing squad. The son of Max Planck, Erwin Planck was executed for his involvement in the July 20th incident.

After 3 February 1945, when Freisler was killed in a USAAF air raid, there were no more formal trials, but as late as April, with the war weeks away from its end, Canaris’s diary was found, and many more people were implicated. Executions continued down to the last days of the war.

The trials and executions were reportedly filmed and later reviewed by Hitler and his entourage. These films were later edited by Goebbels into a 30 minute movie and shown to cadets at the Lichterfelde cadet school but viewers supposedly walked out of the screening in disgust. [7]

Hitler took his survival to be a 'divine moment in history', and as such, commissioned a special decoration to be made. The resulting decoration was the Wound Badge of 20 July 1944, which Hitler awarded to those who were in the conference room at the time. This badge is one of the rarest decorations awarded by Nazi Germany.

Philipp von Boeselager, the German officer who provided the plastic explosives used in the bomb escaped detection, survived the war. He was the last survivor of those involved in the plot and died on May 1st 2008 aged 90[1].

[edit] Planned government

The conspirators were earlier designated positions in secret to form a government that would take office after the assassination of Hitler were it to prove successful. Because of the plot's utter failure, such a government would never rise to power and most of its members were executed. The following were appointed these roles as of July 1944[8]:

The only German political force which was not involved was the Communist Party (KPD).

[edit] Sources

This article is based mainly on the account in Joachim Fest's book Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933–1945 (English edition Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996), with additional material from Ian Kershaw’s two volumes Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (W.W.Norton, 1998) and Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (W.W.Norton, 2000), Peter Hoffmann's The History of German Resistance 1933-1945 and various other works. Acknowledgment must be made also to Roger Manvell and Heinrich Frankel, whose The Canaris Conspiracy: The Secret Resistance to Hitler in the German Army (1969) was a pioneering work.

[edit] Films based on the plot

[edit] Further reading

Roger Moorhouse, Killing Hitler, Jonathan Cape, 2006. ISBN 0-224-07121-1

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler’s Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933–1945, 236
  2. ^ Joachim Fest, Plotting Hitler's Death, 228
  3. ^ Himmler's contacts with the opposition and his possible motives are discussed by Peter Padfield, Himmler, 419–424
  4. ^ The Gestapo claimed 7,000 arrests. This can be found in William L. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, ch. 29
  5. ^ Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis, 693
  6. ^ See Shirer ch. 29
  7. ^ Shirer attributes this anecdote to Allen Dulles in his book Germany's Underground P.83
  8. ^ The list of proposed appointments from The History of German Resistance 1933-1945 P.367

[edit] External links