20 July Plot (1944): Stauffenberg's Attempt to Kill Hitler

The 20 July plot was the most famous attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi regime from within. On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg left a bomb in a briefcase at a military conference in Hitler’s headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, while fellow conspirators in Berlin prepared to seize power. Hitler survived, the coup collapsed within hours, and the regime took bloody revenge on the plotters and many others.

Background

Opposition to Hitler existed in Germany from the start of his rule in 1933 (see Hitler becomes chancellor), but it was small, divided and heavily persecuted. Among military officers, conservative diplomats and civil servants, a network of opponents formed around figures such as the retired General Ludwig Beck and former Leipzig mayor Carl Goerdeler. Some were moved by moral outrage at Nazi crimes, including mass murder in the occupied east, others by the conviction that Hitler was leading Germany to catastrophe.

There had been earlier attempts. In March 1943 Colonel Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff smuggled a bomb onto Hitler’s aircraft, but it failed to explode; days later another officer was ready to blow himself up beside Hitler at an exhibition in Berlin, but Hitler left too quickly. Other groups, such as the Kreisau Circle around Helmuth James von Moltke and the student White Rose, opposed the regime in different ways.

Stauffenberg and the plan

Claus von Stauffenberg, born in 1907 into an aristocratic Swabian family, had been badly wounded in Tunisia in April 1943, losing his right hand, two fingers of his left hand and his left eye. By 1944 he was chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Replacement Army, a post that gave him access to Hitler’s briefings.

The plotters planned to use Operation Valkyrie, an official emergency plan for the Replacement Army to maintain order in case of internal unrest. Once Hitler was dead, Valkyrie orders would send army units to occupy government buildings, disarm the SS and arrest Nazi leaders, with a new government under Beck and Goerdeler. After the D-Day landings in June and the collapse on the Eastern Front, many conspirators knew a coup could no longer win good peace terms, but Tresckow argued that it must be attempted to show the world that Germans had acted against the regime.

The bomb at the Wolf’s Lair

On 20 July Stauffenberg flew to the Wolf’s Lair near Rastenburg with his aide, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften. Before the briefing he went to a side room to prime two packages of plastic explosive, but he was interrupted and could arm only one. The conference had been moved to a wooden hut, the briefing barracks, rather than a concrete bunker.

Stauffenberg placed the briefcase under the heavy map table near Hitler and left the room on the pretext of taking a phone call. At about 12:40 the bomb exploded. The briefcase had apparently been moved to the far side of a solid table support, and the open hut let the blast escape. Four men died of their injuries: the stenographer Heinrich Berger, Colonel Heinz Brandt, General Günther Korten and General Rudolf Schmundt. Hitler suffered only minor wounds, including burns, bruises and damaged eardrums, and that afternoon he received the visiting Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as planned, showing him the wrecked hut.

Convinced Hitler was dead, Stauffenberg and Haeften bluffed their way out of the compound and flew back to Berlin.

The failed coup in Berlin

In Berlin, General Friedrich Olbricht and Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim at army headquarters in the Bendlerblock hesitated for hours, uncertain whether Hitler was dead. The Valkyrie orders went out only in the afternoon, after Stauffenberg’s return. Fromm, who had learned that Hitler was alive, refused to support the coup and was detained.

The decisive moment came when Major Otto Ernst Remer, commanding a guard battalion sent to cordon off government buildings, was put through by telephone to Hitler, who ordered him to crush the revolt. Troops loyal to the regime surrounded the Bendlerblock. In Paris, the military governor Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel had arrested the SS and police leadership, but they were released when news of Hitler’s survival spread.

Late that evening Fromm, anxious to cover his own earlier contacts with the plotters, held a hasty court martial. Beck was allowed to attempt suicide and was then shot. Shortly after midnight Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz von Quirnheim and Haeften were shot by a firing squad in the courtyard. Hitler spoke on the radio around 1 a.m. on 21 July to tell the nation he had survived.

Reprisals

The Gestapo opened a vast investigation. Around 7,000 people were arrested. Leading conspirators were tried before the People’s Court under Roland Freisler in humiliating show trials beginning on 7 August 1944, and many were hanged at Plötzensee prison in Berlin. Freisler’s shouting at the defendants, who were denied belts and proper clothes, was filmed for propaganda use, but the footage was judged too embarrassing to show to the public. Tresckow took his own life on the Eastern Front on 21 July. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, implicated though not part of the bomb plot, was forced to take poison in October 1944. Goerdeler was executed in February 1945 and Fromm himself in March 1945.

Families of conspirators were placed in “kin detention” (Sippenhaft), and children were taken from their parents. Estimates of the number executed vary: around 200 people closely linked to the plot were put to death, while the wider purge accounted for many more.

Key people

• Claus von Stauffenberg, the officer who planted the bomb and drove the coup.
• Ludwig Beck, former army chief of staff, intended head of state.
• Friedrich Olbricht, who launched the Valkyrie orders in Berlin.
• Henning von Tresckow, a leading organiser of military resistance.
• Adolf Hitler, the target, who survived and ordered the reprisals.

Timeline

• 1943, 13 March: A bomb placed on Hitler’s aircraft fails to explode.
• 1943, 7 April: Stauffenberg is badly wounded in Tunisia.
• 1944, 1 July: Stauffenberg becomes chief of staff to Fromm.
• 1944, 20 July, about 12:40: The bomb explodes in the briefing hut at the Wolf’s Lair.
• 1944, 20 July, afternoon: Valkyrie orders are issued in Berlin.
• 1944, 21 July, shortly after midnight: Stauffenberg and three others are shot in the Bendlerblock.
• 1944, 7–8 August: The first People’s Court trial of conspirators.
• 1944, 14 October: Rommel is forced to take his own life.

Legacy

In the first years after the war the conspirators were often viewed with suspicion in Germany, and some were seen as traitors. Over time, and especially in West Germany, they came to be honoured as examples of conscience and courage against tyranny, although historians also discuss the conservative and nationalist views of many of them. The Memorial to the German Resistance now occupies part of the Bendlerblock, and the execution shed at Plötzensee is a place of remembrance. The plot has been retold in many books and films, including the 2008 film Valkyrie.

Why it matters

The 20 July plot showed that some Germans inside the regime’s own institutions were willing to risk everything to end Hitler’s rule. Its failure meant the war continued for another nine months, until Hitler’s death and Germany’s surrender, at a cost of millions more lives.