After a couple of earlier attempts to place bombs near Hitler had not come off, Stauffenberg finally decided to carry out the operation on July 20, 1944, during a staff conference at the Führer’s “Wolf’s Lair” in East Prussia. Arriving at the complex by plane on the appointed day, he took his bomb package into a bathroom to set the timing, but an interruption, combined with his injuries, prevented him from fusing all his explosives. Once inside the briefing hut he placed his briefcase containing the bomb as close as he could to Hitler before leaving to take a prearranged phone call from Berlin. As luck would have it, the briefcase was kicked behind the leg of a heavy map table just before the bomb detonated. This detail, along with the hut’s open windows and flimsy walls, which dissipated the force of the blast, enabled Hitler to survive with only minor injuries.
Stauffenberg and another conspirator, General Erich Fellgiebel, were about 200 hundred yards away from the hut when the bomb went off. Assuming that Hitler was dead, the count asked Fellgiebel to phone Berlin with instructions to go ahead with a preplanned roundup of top Nazis in the capital; then he flew back to Berlin. By the time he arrived the plot was already unraveling, since Hitler let it be known immediately that an unsuccessful attempt had been made on his life. In Berlin a shocked Goebbels enthusiastically launched an investigation into the affair, which he assumed was the work of the “aristocratic generals’ clique” he despised. It was not difficult to identify the plotters, for the officers in question, after a brief hesitation, began playing their hand. Their efforts were ill coordinated, and military units loyal to Hitler soon cordoned off the former Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) headquarters in the Bendlerstrasse, where Stauffenberg and some of the other putschists had barricaded themselves. To deflect suspicion from himself, General Fromm ordered Stauffenberg, General Ludwig Beck, General Friedrich Olbricht, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim, and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften arrested and conducted to a courtyard in the center of the building. There Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz, and Haeften were promptly shot. Beck was allowed to shoot himself, but, bungling the job, was finished off by a sergeant.
This was only the beginning of the grisly retribution exacted by the Hitler regime against the Twentieth of July movement. In subsequent days and weeks the Gestapo combed the Reich in search of anyone with the slightest connection to the plot. In some cases relatives of the men accused of participating in the action were also taken into custody. Many of the arrests took place in Berlin because of its centrality to the plot. Among the figures caught up in the dragnet was Dietrich Bonhöffer, a Protestant pastor in Dahlem who led a group of dissident theologians called the Confessing Church. In 1942 Bonhöffer had tried to organize foreign support for the German resistance through church contacts in Sweden. Another, very different, arrestee was Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the rabidly anti-Semitic and morally reprobate chief of police in Berlin. He had turned against the regime out of despair over the course of the war. Count Helmut James von Moltke, an international lawyer and great-nephew of the famous field marshal, was pulled into the net even though he was already in prison when the bombing occurred. The Berlin defendants were tried before the notorious “hanging judge” Roland Freisler at the local branch of the People’s Court. Those found guilty in the first trial were executed by hanging at Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison, where they were suspended by piano wire from meat hooks attached to a roof beam. Since there was no drop from a scaffold, the victims dangled for several minutes before expiring. Goebbels ordered that the executions be filmed for his and Hitler’s later amusement.
Because the Twentieth of July plot failed so disastrously, and because it was so belated, many commentators in later years wrote it off as relatively minor moment in the history of the Third Reich. This is an inaccurate appraisal. There can be no doubt the coup was poorly organized. But with respect to the timing, it has been rightly noted that if the plot had been successful, the loss of additional millions of lives and much physical destruction might have been averted. Taking Germany alone, some 2.8 million people died as a result of the war between September 1, 1939, and July 20, 1944; between the assassination attempt and the end of the war that figure grew to 4.8 million. The mass murder in the death camps in the East, which continued until the Red Army’s liberation of Poland, might have ceased. And the hugely destructive ground attacks on German cities, including that against Berlin, were yet to come.
Here Is the Fascist Lair—Berlin
