20 July Plot
The 20 July Plot, also known as Operation Valkyrie, was a failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler by high-ranking German officers during World War II. The plot, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, aimed to overthrow the Nazi regime and end the war. Despite the attempt, Hitler survived and the conspirators were executed.
7 Key excerpts on "20 July Plot"
eBook - ePub- Ian Colvin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Colvin Press(Publisher)
...CHAPTER XXIII OPERATION VALKYRIE T HE G ERMAN FRONT in Normandy was strained to breaking point in the middle of July 1944 and the Russian armies were lapping through Rumania and Poland towards the Reich. At last the younger men of the German Army took action into their own hands. Colonel von Stauffenberg, who had gone home from the war in Africa after losing an arm, an eye and two fingers from his remaining hand, was not the ideal man to manage an attempt to blow up Hitler, but the Fuehrer had withdrawn so much upon himself in the “Wolf’s Lair”, the name for his East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg, or in his Berchtesgaden enclave, that it was very difficult for anyone to approach him. His own entourage had been carefully chosen by the Personnel Office of the Army and most of them fell under his strong hypnotic influence. The conspirators whom the course of war had sometimes brought together and sometimes scattered again had managed to draw up an operational plan for seizing power in Germany which they sent out in sealed envelopes to be opened only on receipt of the code word “Valkyrie”. It went to the Headquarters of Military Districts from the Headquarters of Home Forces which was commanded by General Fromm. His Chief of Staff was this same Colonel Klaus Schenck von Stauffenberg. 1 The conspirators had at times been very few; but now that the situation was boiling up it became alarming to them how many adherents came in. Everybody wanted to bring his friend and actually quarrelled over the ministerial posts before the coup was even ready. The conspirators tried to widen their circle to include representatives of labour, but the Nazis had their own spies well distributed among the workers. Julius Leber, one of the most prominent of the Social Democratic adherents, was arrested on July 5th, and by July 16th the Gestapo had learned enough to issue a warrant for the arrest of Karl Goerdeler, the political leader of the whole conspiracy...
eBook - ePubMemoirs
Ten Years and Twenty Days
- Karl Doenitz(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Frontline Books(Publisher)
...20. JULY 20, 1944 I learn about the conspiracy—tendency to shake morale at front—my disapproval as member of armed forces but I can condone moral motives—high treason. THE EVENTS of July 20 continue to engage the attention of the German public and to cause dissension among our people. Never have we had more need of unity than at this present moment. It would therefore be a good thing if the differences of opinion engendered by these events could be bridged. But before that can be done there must exist mutual goodwill and a sincere desire on the part of all to appreciate the opinions and outlook of those who disagree with them. Only the truth and an honest attempt to approach the problem unbiased by any thought of present-day political expediency will enable us to bridge the gap. In any examination of July 20 the first point to be decided is whether the conclusions to be drawn should be based on humanitarian and moral grounds or upon grounds of political justification. It is also necessary to define clearly the point at which such an act eases to have any humanitarian or moral justification. At midday on July 20 Vice-Admiral Voss telephoned to me at my command post at Lanke, north of Berlin, from Fuehrer Headquarters in East Prussia and said that it was essential that I should come to Headquarters immediately, adding that he could not explain over the telephone. When I arrived there in the late afternoon Voss and Rear-Admiral von Puttkamer, Hitler’s naval ADC, informed me that a group of staff officers of the Reserve Army had made an attempt on Hitler’s life. The size, composition and aims of this opposition group were completely unknown to me. I was greatly surprised both by the existence of such a conspiracy and by the attempted assassination. My first reaction was one of incredulity that officers could bring themselves, in war time, to do such a thing...
eBook - ePubRommel
A Reappraisal
- Ian F. W. Beckett(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Pen & Sword Military(Publisher)
...CHAPTER SIX Rommel and the 20 July 1944 Bomb Plot Russell A. Hart It has become widely accepted that the conspirators who sought to assassinate Adolf Hitler during the failed 20 July 1944 bomb plot had recently won over Erwin Rommel to their cause and – had Rommel not been severely wounded in an air attack on his staff car on 17 July – that he would have led the plotters in the West towards a separate capitulation in France, thereby giving the attempted coup d’état a chance to succeed, despite the failure to kill Hitler. The events that unfolded after the failed assassination attempt helped forge such an assessment. Rommel came under suspicion of complicity in the bomb plot during the witch hunt that followed its failure and on direct orders from Hitler was forced to commit suicide on 14 October 1944. In return for taking his own life, he was given a state funeral with full military honours, rather than facing trial by the notorious People’s Court established to condemn the guilty. In addition, his family was spared collective arrest and even possible death under the Nazi principle of Sippenhaft: shared collective responsibility and punishment. Unfortunately, the true extent of Rommel’s involvement in the 20 July bomb plot is very difficult to ascertain. Like many of those ultimately snared in the vicious Nazi backlash that led to almost 5,000 deaths, Rommel’s involvement remains ambiguous and unclear, but clearly it was much more minor than both his Gestapo inquisitors and many historians have subsequently concluded...
eBook - ePubOperation "Valkyrie"
A Military History of the 20 July 1944 Plot
- Winfried Heinemann(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Oldenbourg(Publisher)
...The emphasis is misplaced when the German public routinely refers to 20 July as “the anniversary of the attempt on Hitler’s life”; it would be far more appropriate to call it the anniversary of the coup d’état or of the putsch. After the attempt failed, the discussions about its moral legitimacy continued. Some of those arrested distanced themselves from the bomb plot, and some (such as Roland von Hößlin) even declared they had not known about it beforehand. 53 These reactions can of course be explained by the dire circumstances and consequences that the conspirators faced in the aftermath. But in October 1944, Colonel Alexis Freiherr Roenne managed to have a message to his wife smuggled out of his prison cell, in which he wrote: “God has decided against them! He has shown again that even the greatest patriotic aims do not justify the sin needed to reach them!” 54 That the bomb attempt was only a means to an end had important practical implications for the execution of the plot. Stauffenberg was the only conspirator who still had access to the Führer, and time was running out (see Chapter 7.4). However, he was also needed to oversee the military takeover from Berlin, so that a suicide bombing like the one Gersdorff is supposed to have planned (see Chapter 6.5) was out of the question, no matter the consequences. The events also proved that the conspirators had predicted accurately that the Wehrmacht would not move against the Führer as long he was still alive: Once it became clear that Hitler had survived, the military putsch collapsed like a house of cards. 55 7.2 No Time to Lose By the spring of 1942, clear-eyed Wehrmacht officers understood that Germany did not have the wherewithal to conduct a war on two fronts, let alone to win simultaneous wars against both the Soviet Union and the United States...
eBook - ePubThe Hitler Assassination Attempts
The Plots, Places and People that Almost Changed History
- John Grehan(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Frontline Books(Publisher)
...There was now no time to set the fuse, and Hitler left the room to live for another few days. It had been decided that the Valkyrie orders should be issued two hours before the anticipated assassination to make sure the Army units were in place and Berlin sealed off. So certain had the conspirators been that this time the assassination would happen, the orders for Phase One of Valkerie (‘Internal Unrest’) 7 had been issued as planned, instructing the troops of the Reserve Army to mobilize. These orders had to be quickly cancelled before any of Hitler’s acolytes learnt of it. Though a single incident could be explained away as an exercise to test the effectiveness of the genuine Valkyrie measures, the conspirators knew that they could not risk another such failure. Fortunately, on 19 July, Stauffenberg was ordered to meet Hitler the following day at the Wolfsschanze, this time to bring the Führer up to date with the state of preparedness of the fifteen new divisions he had earlier been told to cobble together from the shrinking number of available troops. After the debacle of 15 July, it had been agreed that the assassination would take place whether Himmler or Göring were present or not. Due to the short notice Stauffenberg had received, there was not the time to make the thorough preparations in Berlin that were needed for the coup to be effected smoothly. The consequences of this would prove fatal, though not for Hitler....
eBook - ePubThe Ulrich von Hassell Diaries
The Story of the Forces Against Hitler Inside Germany
- Ulrich von Hassell(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Frontline Books(Publisher)
...They had plotted and undertaken repeated attempts since at least 1937. Depending on who is counting, anything from thirty to forty-one assassination plans were contemplated, and some unsuccessfully attempted. I personally knew Axel Baron von dem Bussche-Streithorst very well; as an officer returned from the front he strapped a bomb to his waist intending to blow Hitler and himself up during a uniform show. Yet Hitler left just minutes before he came close to Axel. The same names recur over and over in the history of the principal German resistance against Hitler: Moltke, Stauffenberg, Yorck von Wartenburg, Goerdeler, Schulenburg, Popitz, Dohna-Schlobitten, Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, Beck, Mertz von Quirnheim, Schlabrendorff, Bussche-Streithorst, Kleist, and many others. Their final – and failed – attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944 led to Hassell’s arrest and his execution on 8 September 1944. Over 8,000 men and women were executed in connection with the July plot. 3 From our (my family’s) perspective, many of these names were those of relatives and close friends; these plots almost appeared to be a family affair. Only as I grew up I gained awareness that the resistance movement included a far wider range of people, among others socialists, communists, university students, and a large group of upright Christians such as Cardinal Clemens August Count von der Galen, Martin Niemöller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Still, the names of many principals evoke the history of Prussia over the last 300 years. It seemed as if these principals of that proud kingdom arose out of the shadows of the past just one last time before the Allies were going to dissolve Prussia forever in 1947. My overly imposing grandmother Ilse von Hassell dominated and sought to control how history was taught to my sister, my brother, and me as well as to our cousins. Only over time did we develop a more balanced view...
eBook - ePubNazi Women of the Third Reich
Serving the Swastika
- Paul Roland(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Arcturus(Publisher)
...She did not hesitate to give her consent. The plan was for her to fake an emergency landing at the Führer’s headquarters and fly Claus back to Berlin to coordinate the coup d’état. In the event, Melitta’s assistance was not required because the conspirators elected to use another pilot. She was fortunate not to be involved because the assassination was foiled by a series of those unpredictable quirks of fate that invariably derail the best-laid plans. After two aborted attempts on 11 and 15 July, which had to be called off because two of the intended targets, Himmler and Goering, failed to show up, it was decided that the third attempt must proceed no matter what. It seemed unlikely that they would get another opportunity to eliminate what Stauffenberg referred to as the ‘psychopaths’ dragging his country to the edge of the abyss. July 20 was a stifling hot day and so the venue for Hitler’s daily briefing was changed to a wooden hut with raised steel shutters and open windows, thereby diffusing the intensity of the explosion. The time bomb, which had been placed in von Stauffenberg’s briefcase, was only half the strength it should have been as there had not been time to prime both packets of explosive before he was ushered into the meeting. And perhaps most crucially, the briefcase was moved after von Stauffenberg left the room to answer a prearranged phone call. When it exploded, the concrete table support deflected the full force of the blast, leaving Hitler with only minor injuries. Stauffenberg and the ring leaders were quickly rounded up and summarily shot which incensed Hitler, who had wanted to prolong their suffering by having them executed by slow strangulation using piano wire. He was also denied the perverse pleasure of having their executions filmed for his subsequent gratification. In his rage, he ordered the death of up to 5,000 people, some of whom committed suicide rather than suffer the indignity of a Nazi show trial...
