Some 40 assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler have been documented to date. The attempt on Hitler’s life at his headquarters, the ‘Wolf’s Lair’, near Rastenburg (East Prussia) on July 20, 1944 was undertaken by a small group of officers. Although some Wehrmacht leaders were considering eliminating Hitler between 1938 and early 1940, the origins of the July 20 assassination attempt date back to the late summer of 1941. In view of the faltering German advance in the east, but also because of the mass murder of Jewish civilians in these territories, some officers around Henning von Tresckow In the High Command of Army Group Center discussed how the war might be brought to an end.
These ideas solidified into a plan to assassinate Hitler in the years 1942/43. Von Tresckow smuggled a bomb onto Hitler’s plane when he flew back from a troop visit to Smolensk in March 1943, but it failed to detonate. That same month, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff intended to blow himself up with Hitler during a visit to an exhibition in Berlin, but this also failed because Hitler left the exhibition prematurely.
Senior Staff Officer Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg took over the planning of an assassination attempt from the fall of 1943. Numerous plans forged in late 1943/early 1944 failed because none of the would-be assassins had access to Hitler at that time. It was not until Stauffenberg was appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Reserve Army on July 1, 1944 that he gained direct access to the Führer’s headquarters.
Since the conspirators could barely count on support from elsewhere, the assassination plan was based on a deception: the idea was to take the Wehrmacht’s contingency plan that had been drawn up in the event of uprisings by forced laborers in the Reich – under the code name ‘Operation Valkyrie’ – and repurpose this for the coup d’état. This contingency plan was revised with the aim of placing all departments, including the administration, SS and police, under the control of the Wehrmacht in the event of an assumed uprising.
Stauffenberg and his adjutant Werner von Haeften flew to East Prussia on July 20, 1944 with a briefcase containing the explosive device and arrived at the Führer’s headquarters. Stauffenberg and Haeften set off the timer in an adjoining room, but accidentally removed one of the two explosive packages. Stauffenberg then deposited the bag under the map table during the meeting with Hitler and left the room. The bomb detonated at 12:42, killing four people and seriously injuring nine others. Hitler only suffered minor injuries.
Unaware that Hitler had survived the explosion, the conspirators in Berlin mobilized ‘Operation Valkyrie’ at around 4 p.m., but not until urged to do so by Stauffenberg, who had since flown back to the capital. Only in Paris and Vienna was it possible to arrest state officials and SS functionaries, however. The news that the ‘Führer’ was alive was already spreading. That evening, forces loyal to Hitler took control of Berlin and occupied the Bendlerblock – the building where most of the conspirators were at that time. The main participants, including Stauffenberg, were shot at the Bendlerblock after midnight. By the end of the war, 700 people had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the conspiracy; 110 of them were sentenced to death and executed.
‘Operation Valkyrie’ was not mobilized in Munich. The resistance group’s contact, Ludwig Freiherr von Leonrod, had been called to Berlin anyway, so Max Ulrich Graf von Drechsel, who also was privy to the assassination plan, was acting as his replacement. The news of the assassination attempt on the night of July 20/21 was overshadowed by the heaviest air raid Munich had ever experienced. Both conspirators were caught and executed.
July 20, 1944 was the peak of German resistance against the Nazi regime. In spite of looming defeat in the war, however, resistance within the Wehrmacht and the population at large can be assumed to have been isolated. After the war, July 20 gradually became a symbol of the ‘other Germany’ that wanted to break away from National Socialism.
