The Final Throw of the Dice - 20 July 1944

 20 July 1944 saw the final attempt by the German military resistance to assassinate Hitler and bring down his murderous and corrupt regime. We all know it failed, but the reasons for that failure have often been misrepresented or misunderstood. 

Early on the morning of 20 July 1944 Stauffenberg again flew to Hitler's HQ in East Prussia with the intention of killing Hitler. Nearly all the principle conspirators were informed about the imminent assassination attempt and warned to be on the alert to fulfill their assigned roles.  Since the briefing at which Stauffenberg would have the opportunity to set off his bomb was scheduled for 13.00, no one expected any thing to happen before that time.

In the Wolfschanze, however, the daily briefing was moved forward by half an hour due to the expected arrival of Mussolini. Stauffenberg activated the fuses on the bomb in one of his briefcases, placed this bomb under the briefing table close to where Hitler was standing and then slipped out of the briefing hut on the pretext of making a phone call. Shortly after 12.40 an explosion took place.  Stauffenberg immediately bluffed his way past the guards controlling the lock-down of Hitler's HQs.  He made it aboard the waiting aircraft and took off, just moments before all aircraft at the field were grounded.  He had succeeded in detonating a bomb in the room where Hitler was standing and in escaping the Wolfschanze with his life, but he had had no opportunity to telephone with Berlin. He was incommunicado until he landed.

General Fellgiebel, the man responsible for informing Olbricht about a successful assassination and then cutting Hitler's HQ off from the outside world, however, learned what Stauffenberg had not waited to find out: that Hitler had survived the blast. When Fellgiebel tried to pass this word on to the conspirators in Berlin, he discovered that someone else, the Deputy Commander of Hitler's HQ, had already taken control of all communications to and from the Wolfschanze.

Thus, it was not until 15.00 that the first news of an "incident" at Hitler's HQs reached the Bendlerstrasse. Olbricht requested more information and at about 15.30 was informed that an explosion had taken place in which several officers were severely injured. According to one version of events the cryptic message passed to Olbricht by his fellow-conspirator General Fellgiebel was: "Something terrible has happened.  The Führer lives!"

In short, the only thing that was clear to Olbricht by 15.30 on the afternoon of 20 July 1944 was that the assassination had failed.  It was not clear, whether Stauffenberg had been killed in his own attempt or had survived the blast only to be arrested.  This put Olbricht in a terrible dilemma.  After all, if Stauffenberg had blown himself up in some kind of accident, it would have been madness to set the coup in motion knowing Hitler was still alive.  In such a situation, the coup might still have had a chance at a latter date with a different assassin.

Shortly before 16.00, Stauffenberg and his adjutant landed at an airfield on the outskirts of Berlin and put a call through to Olbricht, in which Stauffenberg announced to Olbricht that Hitler was dead.  Olbricht went immediately to the C-in-C of the Home Army, Generaloberst Fromm, to try to persuade him, the only man authorized to issue "Valkyrie" in the event of Hitler's death, to do exactly that.  Had Hitler been dead, Fromm might very well have done so, but Fromm was skeptical.  He insisted on proof of Hitler's demise. Olbricht – trusting Stauffenberg's word – himself picked up the phone and put through a call to GFM von Keitel. Keitel, however, emphatically denied that Hitler had been killed.  Fromm consequently refused to issue "Valkyrie."  So Olbricht and his staff issued the orders illegally for a second time.

Between 16.30 and 16.45 Stauffenberg arrived back at the Headquarters of the Home Army.  He reported at once to Olbricht and again - euphorically - insisted that Hitler was dead.  Obviously, this was not true, but one must try to put oneself in Stauffenberg's shoes: after two unsuccessful assassination attempts, he had finally succeeded in detonating a bomb in Hitler's immediate vicinity and then, under highly dramatic circumstances, escaped alive.  Stauffenberg honestly didn't know that Hitler had survived the blast.  Nor did he know that Fellgiebel had failed to close down communications from OKW and that hence the entire Nazi apparatus was still fully functional.

Stauffenberg went with Olbricht to try to persuade Fromm to issue Valkyrie over his signature.  A heated argument ensued in which Stauffenberg claimed, completely fancifully, to have personally seen Hitler's body carried out of the briefing hut.  Olbricht then informed Fromm that "Valkyrie" had already been issued.  Stauffenberg furthermore admitted that he had himself set off the bomb – to which Fromm replied that in that case he ought to shoot himself at once.  Stauffenberg refused, and Olbricht confessed his complicity in the plot.  According to Fromm (the only man involved in this confrontation to survive long enough to be interrogated by the Gestapo) he told Olbricht he was under arrest, to which Olbricht replied that Fromm had mistaken the situation.  Two junior officers loyal to the conspirators were called and entered the office with drawn pistols.  They detained  Fromm under guard, while General Hoepner (as planned by the conspirators) took over Fromm's office and position.  The anti-Nazi Hoepner at once started issuing orders as "Commander-in-Chief" of the Home Army.

After this, the entire coup appeared to go according to plan.  Olbricht and Stauffenrberg went to work telephoning with key offices and commands, informing them of the situation, and generally driving the coup forward.  They answered questions and countered doubts voiced by both the initiated and the uninitiated.  One after another of the subordinate commands received and started carrying out the illegally issued orders.

But Hitler was not dead.  Furthermore, the conspirators at his HQ had been unable to cut off the Wolfschanze from the outside world, and hence Hitler's entire staff, OKW, was fully operational.  This meant that any commander who couldn't or didn't want to believe that Hitler was dead, could contact the Wolfschanze requesting confirmation or details.  Hitler's staff, that had initially assumed that the assassination was the act of a lone man, gradually grasped that in fact a coup was in progress in Berlin.

At roughly 18.00 the first counter-orders went out from OKW.  Keitel ordered that all orders signed by Fromm, Witzleben and Hoepner were null and void.  Furthermore, a public announcement was made over the radio informing the German people that an assassination attempt had been made, but that it had failed.

Thereafter, calls started to come into the Bendlerstrasse from confused subordinate commands where two, contradictory sets of orders had been received.  Olbricht and Stauffenberg tried to convince all these callers that the orders from OKW were the machinations of the SS in an effort to retain control of the state.  The Army, Olbricht and Stauffenberg assured the military commanders, was taking over now that Hitler was dead.  The implication was that the Army was finally "cleaning up" – something very many military men welcomed and supported whether they were part of the conspiracy or not.

As long as the situation remained unclear, the conspirators enjoyed a surprising degree of success.  But gradually doubts grew.  People started to ask themselves "what if Hitler is still alive?"  Clearly, if he were dead, there was no harm in "following orders," but if he were alive and they followed the wrong orders it would mean arrest, possibly torture, and death. Under these circumstances, when officers were confronted with two sets of contradictory orders, the political sentiments of the individual became decisive.  A comparison between the response to the orders in Paris and Military District II is particularly telling.

In Paris, where the Military Governor, General von Stülpnagel, was an opponent of Hitler's going back to the September Conspiracy of 1938, the orders from the Bendlerstrasse were followed willingly and with alacrity.  In Military District II, where the commander was not a conspirator, he could not bring himself to follow the "Valkyrie" orders because these were "clearly treasonous" – even though he admitted that "with his heart" he was on their side.

Likewise in Berlin, it was the certainty of Hitler's survival that turned the tide against the conspirators.  Most spectacularly, the always suspect (from the conspiracy's perspective) commander of the "Grossdeutschland Batallion," the unit responsible for sealing off the government district of Berlin, turned against the conspiracy - but only after speaking with Hitler personally. Major Remer first carried out his military orders meticulously. Goebbels, however, put a call through to the Wolfschanze, demanded to speak to Hitler personally, and then handed the receiver over to the awestruck major.  Major Remer became Hitler's ardent supporter at once.  Hitler personally promoted him two ranks and ordered him to crush the coup with his troops. From one minute to the next Remer went from keeping guard on the Propaganda Ministry to being the man determined to put down the coup.

Had the conspiracy succeeded in a having one of their own – say Axel von dem Bussche – in command of the "Grossdeutschland Batallion" on 20 July 1944, maybe even Hitler's survival would have been immaterial.  But for the vast majority of German officers – just as GFM v. Kluge had foreseen back in early 1943  – Hitler's death was the absolute prerequisite for action against the regime.

Even in the Bendlerstrasse itself, the increasing certainty that Hitler was alive eroded the support that Olbricht and Stauffenberg had initially enjoyed among their respective staffs.  Several officers of GAO decided it was time to go to General Olbricht and find out directly from him what was going on.  They confronted Olbricht at around 22.30 - fully armed since they had been asked to take over guard-duty.  As these officers assured me personally, they did not come in with pistols drawn and they did not threaten General Olbricht.  They still trusted him, but they no longer believed that they had been told the whole truth.

At this inopportune moment, Stauffenberg sought Olbricht out.  Seeing the other officers with their weapons, he decided to flee.  One of the officers shouted after Stauffenberg, ordering him to halt.  Stauffenberg did not.  Shots were fired. Stauffenberg was wounded.

Olbricht was now arrested and escorted by several of these staff officers to where Fromm was still being held in custody by junior officers loyal to the conspiracy.  Fromm was released and immediately ordered the known conspirators – Beck, Olbricht, Stauffenberg, and two others - arrested.  Without the slightest adherence to legal niceties, he summarily found them guilty of High Treason and sentenced them to death. Beck asked permission to shoot himself, and was granted this right. 

Meanwhile, the other four officers were taken down the winding, red-marble stairway from the GAO into the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse.  A firing squad was hastily improvised and the south wall of the courtyard was lit by the headlights of staff cars.  The first four conspirators, Friedrich Olbricht, Claus Graf Stauffenberg, Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim and Werner von Haeften, were shot shortly after midnight.  More than 5,000 other conspirators and sympathizers followed them to an untimely death in the months to come.  The attempt to free Germany of the Nazis from within had failed.

 

The Courtyard of the General Staff HQ where Olbricht, Stauffenberg and others were executed without trial

 

The German Resistance to Hitler was the subject of my PhD thesis. At the time I was the first Western academic granted access to some military archives and documents in what was then still "East Germany." In addition, I conducted interviews with over one hundred survivors of Nazi Germany, both supporters and opponents of the regime. The research culminated in a published dissertation and, later, an English-language biography of General Friederich Olbricht based on the dissertation. It also inspired me to write a novel about the German Resistance, which was recently re-released in ebook format under the title: "Traitors for the Sake of Humanity." Find out more and read reviews of "Traitors" at the publisher's website: Cross Seas Press.

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Planning a Coup 1942

 While many isolated individuals remained vehement opponents of Hitler, as long as Hitler was enjoying near bloodless victories and expanding German power, wealth and territory, it was impossible to consider a coup against him. It was not until the Wehrmacht stalled and was temporarily thrown back in the winter of 1941/1942 that Hitler's bitter opponents started to hope the time might come when they could strike. Planing for such a strike started surprisingly early, when the German army was still on the offensive in the Soviet Union and North Africa.

In the years following the "September Conspiracy," Hitler went from success to success. His regime swallowed the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 – although this was not ethnically German.  He ordered the invasion of Poland just six months later, and a significantly larger army was crushed in just weeks.  In April 1940 his armed forces walked into Denmark and Norway, overwhelming the ill-prepared defences of both neutral countries.  Then in May/June 1940 Hitler pulled off the miraculous: his Third Reich conquered Belgium and Holland in just days, threw the British Expeditionary Force off the Continent in weeks, and forced the French to surrender in little more than a month of fighting.  Hitler controlled the Continent of Europe from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean Sea.  Never had a dictator been so popular, even adored, and there were many who latter joined the Resistance to Hitler – most notably Claus Graf Stauffenberg – who were so euphoric about the dictator's successes that they dismissed all his "minor" faults as irrelevant.

But not everyone in German shared this adulation of Hitler.  A tiny minority of Germans retained their moral principles and their abhorrence of the immoral Nazi regime.  They had no opportunity to take action against the oppressive dictatorship, however, as long as Hitler remained so successful and so popular.

Then in June 1941 came the invasion of the Soviet Union.  Although this campaign was widely popular and initially went very well, by October the offensive started to bog down.  By the start of December 1941, it had failed to reach either Moscow or St. Petersberg.  On 6 December 1944, the Soviet Army opened a massive counter-offensive with fresh troops just brought in from the Urals and beyond.  They exposed the extreme over-extension and exhaustion of the German Wehrmacht, rolling the German front hundreds of kilometers backwards.  

 

The retreating troops were confronted – often for the first time – with the atrocities committed behind their lines by the SS. The evidence of mass murders, the inhumane treatment of prisoners of war, and the military setback soon created a different psychological environment inside Germany.  Those who had always opposed the Nazis, men like Ludwig Beck and Friedrich Olbricht, saw the first glimmer of hope that a coup against the Nazis might gain sufficient popular support to have a chance of success.

In the winter of 1941/1942 General Friedrich Olbricht, the highly decorated and audacious commander of the 24th Infantry Division, found himself trapped in a desk job in Berlin. 

 

General Friedrich Olbricht in Poland 1939

He was now the Chief of the "General Army Office" (GAO) – a central office with responsibility for recruiting, organizing, arming, equipping, clothing, and otherwise providing for the replacements that were sent to the now voracious front.  This position gave him command of no combat troops, but it did put him in a position to oversee practically everything the military was up to inside Germany.  Olbricht convinced the Chief of Counter Intelligence, Admiral Canaris, to convince Hitler that there was a serious threat of revolt on the part of the millions of slave labourers imported to work in the Reich from all the occupied territories.  Hitler in response ordered the Home Army (and hence Olbricht) to develop a General Staff plan for suppressing such an uprising.  The plan was given the code name "Valkyrie."

Decades later, Axel von dem Bussche, a man who would later volunteer to become a suicide bomber in order to eliminate Hitler, spoke with enthusiasm and admiration of his first encounter with "Valkyrie."  

 

Axel von dem Bussche in 1942

Bussche by early 1942 was already an opponent of Hitler.  He was warned by a family friend (who was also an opponent of the Nazis) that he was to obey any orders he got from a "certain" General Olbricht.  Bussche was a 1st Lieutenant at the time; Olbricht was a "three star" general. Since it was obvious to Bussche that he did not need specific instructions from a friend to follow the military orders of a general, he understood perfectly that the "orders" Olbricht was to give him were not normal military orders but rather something else again.

Then one day in early spring 1942, Bussche, then serving as adjutant in a replacement regiment stationed just outside of Berlin in Potsdam, got a call saying that General Olbricht was on his way to visit.  Now, as Bussche worded it, the Chief of the GAO was as far above him as the "dear God is from earth."  Bussche knew at once that this visit had nothing to do with official military duties – a suspicion reinforced after the general's arrival by a series of harmless questions and pleasant small talk that did not warrant the visit.  But then Olbricht suggested that Bussche and he "stretch their legs."  In the middle of an exercise field where no one could hear them, Olbricht started to "educate" Bussche about "Valkyrie."

"Valkyrie" was in Bussche's words: "A well organised plan of the Home Army that was to be used in the event that millions of forced labourers in Germany rose up in revolt."  But Bussche understood perfectly well when Olbricht in his relaxed, Saxon inflection "explained" to Bussche:  "Now Valkyrie, that is for when the forced labourers strike and we have to restore order, you understand?"  And Bussche dutifully assured the general, "Jawohl, Herr General."  So Olbricht continued, smiling, "And if it gets really bad, then we'll have to occupy the radio stations and the ministries in Berlin, you know what I mean?"  "Jawohl, Herr General."  And so the conversation continued until by the end, Bussche knew exactly what the General expected of him – without ever hearing a single word that could be construed as treason or even disloyalty.

Bussche would soon be transferred back to the Eastern Front and so the time frame for this meeting can be fixed without doubt to the late spring of 1942.  It took place at a time when German arms were again on the advance, and the population had forgotten the winter of their discontent.  It took place at a time when Stauffenberg was still convinced that Hitler could – and should – win the war.  But Olbricht, Bussche, Beck and other individuals remained unswerving opponents of the Nazi regime, and although they were few and far between they now had a plan, a plan that could and would be employed to bring down the Nazis as soon as the necessary pre-conditions had been created.

The preconditions for the successful implementation of a coup based on Plan "Valkyrie" were two fold.  First, there had to be a reasonable degree of disillusionment with the regime to make the population supportive of or at least neutral toward Hitler's removal from power.  Second, but most important, Hitler had to be dead.  It was no longer possible to contemplate the mere arrest of Hitler.  First, the Valkyrie Orders could only be issued by the C-in-C of the Home Army if Hitler was "incapacitated," and, second, the army was not freed of its personal oath of "unconditional obedience" to Hitler unless he was no longer among the living.  Thus Hitler's assassination was the first and essential step to a coup d'etat.

Responsibility for the assassination was assigned by Beck and the leadership of the evolving military conspiracy to the cell of anti-Nazi opponents centered in the military Counter Intelligence Department and led by Hans Oster.  Oster's opposition to Hitler's policies also pre-dated the war.  He had been in among the men in the September Conspiracy of 1938 that advocated Hitler's assassination even at this early date.  His opposition to Hitler's aggression had been so great that he had taken the dramatic step of warning the Dutch of the impending German invasion in 1940.  By 1942, Oster's hatred of Hitler and his regime was so intense that he was desperate to kill the dictator and happy to provide the means for doing so in the form of captured British plastic explosives.  

But access to the increasingly cautious and reclusive dictator proved a greater challenge than anyone had initially anticipated. It was this, more than anything, that foiled repeated coup attempts over the next two years.

The German Resistance to Hitler was the subject of my PhD thesis. At the time I was the first Western academic granted access to key military archives and documents in what was then still "East Germany." In addition, I conducted interviews with over one hundred survivors of Nazi Germany, both supporters and opponents of the regime. The research culminated in a published dissertation and, later, an English-language biography of General Friederich Olbricht based on the dissertation. It also inspired me to write a novel about the German Resistance, which was recently re-released in ebook format under the title: "Traitors for the Sake of Humanity." Find out more and read reviews of "Traitors" at the publisher's website: Cross Seas Press.

 Buy Now!