The July 20, 1944, Plot to
Assassinate Adolf Hitler
The July 20 plot was a failed attempt to
assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. It involved a number of both civilian and
military officials. It was the last of at least fifteen separate attempts to
murder Hitler. The motivations of the conspirators and their place in the
history of the Third Reich remain an area of intense debate.
Key Facts
1 Almost all of the conspirators
had a conservative, nationalist perspective and an aristocratic background.
2 The primary military
conspirators were General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von
Tresckow, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, along with Claus-Heinrich
Stülpnagel, the military commander in France.
3 Controversy still surrounds the
plot today, with some seeing the participants as heroes and others as traitors.
The motivations of the individual plotters are still a matter of debate.
The Conspirators:
The key conspirators in the July
20 plot can be divided between civilians and active military (mostly army)
officers. Almost all of the conspirators shared a conservative, nationalist
perspective and an aristocratic background.
The civilians were mainly
individuals who had refused to participate in the Nazi regime. Carl Friedrich
Goerdeler, for example, had been the Nazi mayor of Leipzig, but resigned his
position in opposition to Nazi policy. Ludwig Beck, another important civilian,
was a former general who had resigned in opposition to Hitler’s aggressive war
plans in 1938.
The most important military
conspirators were General Friedrich Olbricht, Major General Henning von
Tresckow, and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, along with Claus-Heinrich
Stülpnagel, the German military commander in France.
The motivations of the
conspirators were likely varied and remain contested to this day. Some were
already members of the “Kreisau Circle” of conservative opponents to Hitler.
Others, like Goerdeler, objected to Nazi anti-Jewish policy as well as the
general mismanagement of the war leading Germany to ruin. Tresckow, too,
appeared to be deeply dismayed by the Nazi’s antisemitic policies and privately
described Kristallnacht as an act of barbarism.
Yet motivations varied widely and
should not be viewed solely in the context of the Holocaust. For many of the
conspirators, the attempted assassination had a more pragmatic objective: to
rescue Germany from catastrophic defeat brought about by Hitler’s increasingly
irrational management of the war. Indeed, a number of the conspirators were
themselves implicated in both war crimes and the Holocaust. Stülpnagel had
closely cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen in their mass murder of Jews when he
commanded the 17th Army in the German-occupied Soviet Union. The Quartermaster
of the Army, Eduard Wagner, who supplied the escape aircraft, had coordinated
Einsatzgruppen cooperation with the army and created the plans to starve Soviet
prisoners of war (POWs), resulting in millions of deaths. Arthur Nebe had
commanded Einsatzgruppe B in the Soviet Union, responsible for the murder of
over 45,000 Jews.
The Plan
After a failed bomb attempt to assassinate
Hitler on his airplane, the conspirators focused on an existing contingency
plan code-named Operation Valkyrie. This operation was originally designed to
militarily combat potential civil unrest in Germany. The conspirators modified
the plan for their own aims, with the intention of taking control of German
cities, disarming the SS, and arresting key Nazi leaders in the wake of the
plot.
As part of the plan, Colonel
Stauffenberg would travel to Hitler’s headquarters in Poland (the “Wolf’s
Lair”), where he would place a briefcase containing two bombs under Hitler’s
briefing table. Once Hitler died in the explosion, the military would claim the
assassination had been part of an attempted coup by the Nazi Party and would
then implement Operation Valkyrie. The Reserve Army would seize key
installations in Berlin and arrest high-ranking Nazi officials, including
Goebbels, while disarming loyal SS units. Meanwhile, upon receipt of the
Valkyrie orders, Stülpnagel would consolidate army power in France as well. In
the confusion of Hitler’s death, Göring, Himmler, and other major Nazi leaders
would be arrested, and a new government established with Goerdeler as
Chancellor and Beck as president. This government would then be positioned to
negotiate an armistice to end the war with more generous terms for Germany.
The Failure of the Plot
On July 20, 1944, Stauffenberg
placed one of two bombs in a briefcase under the table in Hitler’s briefing
room in the Wolf’s Lair. He was unable to arm the second bomb in time. After
Stauffenberg left the room, the briefcase was coincidentally moved under the
heavy support of the table leg. It detonated, but failed to kill Hitler. This
was not, however, immediately known to the conspirators. An ally at Hitler’s
headquarters cut off all communication as Stauffenberg returned to Berlin to
coordinate the implementation of Valkyrie. At first, the plan seemed to go
smoothly as the Reserve Army began taking action, but delays, confusion, and
poor communication robbed the coup of its initiative. Eventually, the fact of
Hitler’s survival was broadcast, and the plot rapidly unraveled.
Aftermath
Some of the plotters were
executed on the same day. General Olricht, Colonel von Stauffenberg, and two
other conspirators were captured at the Benderblock, site of many offices of
the Supreme High Command of the German Army, tried by an impromptu court
martial, and executed by firing squad in the courtyard. Another major plotter,
General Ludwig von Beck, was allowed to commit suicide. He was killed by a coup
de grace after he succeeded only in wounding himself.
In the days that followed, Hitler
ordered a massive hunt for conspirators which continued for months. This search
netted most of the conspirators, along with those who were more peripherally connected
such as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Rommel’s name arose in interrogations but
it was likely he was not directly involved.
Many of the conspirators appeared
before the notorious People’s Courts for show trials, but this practice was
ended as it gave conspirators a platform to condemn the regime. In the end more
than 7,000 people were arrested, and 4,980 were executed, often on the barest
evidence.
Commemoration and collective
memory
A 1951 survey by the Allensbach
Institute revealed that "Only a third of respondents had a positive
opinion about the men and women who had tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the
Nazi regime."
The "first official memorial
service for the resistance fighters of July 20" was held on the tenth
anniversary in 1954. In his speech at the event, Theodor Heuss, the first
President of the Federal Republic of Germany, said that "harsh words"
were necessary, and that "There have been cases of refusal to carry out
orders that have achieved historic greatness." After this speech, public
opinion in Germany began to shift. Nonetheless,
a 1956 proposal to name a school after Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was
opposed by a majority of citizens, and, according to Deutsche Welle.
East Germany's communist
leadership had ignored the assassination attempt for decades, mainly because
the conservative and aristocratic conspirators around Stauffenberg did not
match the socialist ideal.
The first all-German
commemoration of the event did not take place until 1990. In 2013, the last surviving
member of the plot, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, died in Munich. As of
2014, the resistance fighters are generally considered heroes in Germany,
according to Deutsche Welle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_July_plot
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