Attempted Assassination Of Adolf Hitler 20th July 1944

Today July 20th is the 61st anniversary of the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.


At 12:42 p.m. CET, a powerful bomb explodes in the wooden briefing hut at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair), Hitler's secret HQ near Rastenburg in East Prussia, during Hitler's Lagebesprechung (daily noon-time conference on operations on all fronts) with his chiefs of staff and their aides of the OKW and OKH.

The bomb was placed by Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg, chief of staff of the Ersatzheer (Reserve or Home Army) who had volunteered to take on the task of killing Hitler on behalf of a group of high Wehrmacht officers, among them Field Marshall von Witzleben and Generaloberst Beck, to overthrow the Nazi regime and end the war.

In the coming months, some 5,000 persons implicated in the conspiracy will be executed.

What, if any, was the effect on the final year of the war?

A few of the conspirators attached as well as the Plotzenee death room.

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I believe that whoever the new Fuehrer of Germany was, after Hitler, Allied will resume their business as usual. Infact Western allies showed no interest on the affair. Unless germans surrender unconditionally under whoever might lead them.

What if question in here will lead to the same result. However, the partition of Germany, spreading of influances will be on the negotiation table instead of battlefields. This (might) resulted on less of occupied teritorries by the Red Army which was avoided by Stalin who claimed wherever red army stepped, will be under his grasp. As at 1944, red army was at its prime, Stalin would certainly marched his army to Berlin anyway to secure his prize.

Regards

 

One thing was certain...German resistance stiffened after that, although it was slightly less professional as guys like Kluge and Rommel had to commit suicide or perish on meat hooks.

Hitler imposed fear in his subordinates with his usual efficiency, and made them determined to show loyalty by fighting well past Nazi Germany's expiration date.

 

Originally posted by Kiwiwriter@Jul 20 2005, 02:04 PM
One thing was certain...German resistance stiffened after that, although it was slightly less professional as guys like Kluge and Rommel had to commit suicide or perish on meat hooks.

Hitler imposed fear in his subordinates with his usual efficiency, and made them determined to show loyalty by fighting well past Nazi Germany's expiration date.
[post=36676]Quoted post[/post]

Both Kludge and Rommel had sent messages to Hitler to tell him that the war was over.

 

Coincedently I have written a paper on this exact same topic for my IB History Higher Level Internal Assessment. I ws able to learn that afterwards Hitler ran his own set of purges where he actually praised Stalin for conducting his own for the protection of the regime from such occurrences. Even before this Hitler was having an underground bunker built somewhere in Lower Silesia in Poland, because his Rastenburg Q being believed to being too dangerous. However, this bunker was never completed, on about 20% was, and then it has only been discovered during the 1980's. This also further proves how well the Germans hid these secret facilities and removed all witnesses to them such as the one beneath Hitler's own country villa that was bombed to the ground. An odd fact about that day is that Mussolini saw Hitler only hours after the incident with Hitler still in a poor state from the blast which caused significant hearing loss in one ear, burnt much of his clothes, and made him ever more paranoid than before. Since this was actually the third official attempt by the team that involved Stauffenberg. Also, the point on the Allies being disinterested by German resistance movements is very true. In conclusion the ramifications from this that arised were that Hitler was no longer able to trust anyone which caused all work that was required now to be done at a very slow and uncertain rate, mainly due to his increased paranoia.

 

See here for my part in 'the plot'

Frode Weierud's CryptoCellar | General von Rabenau

 

A brave man indeed, Lucky to escape the aftermath.

 

Ewald von Kleist
Ewald von Kleist, who has died aged 90, was the last surviving member of the Stauffenberg conspirators, the group of Wehrmacht officers who hatched an elaborate plot to kill Hitler in 1944.

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Ewald von Kleist
6:22PM GMT 13 Mar 2013
A lieutenant whose father had been an active anti-Nazi before the war, von Kleist was recuperating from wounds sustained on the Eastern Front when, in January 1944, he was approached by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, Chief of Staff to the Commander of the Reserve Army.
Knowing that von Kleist was due to meet the Führer to show him some new Army uniforms, von Stauffenberg proposed that he wear a suicide vest underneath, and detonate it when he stood next to the dictator.
Taken aback by this alarming proposal, von Kleist asked for a day to decide and travelled home to discuss matters with his father: “He said at once, 'Yes, of course you have to do it... A man who doesn’t take such a chance will never be happy again in his life.’”
“I had been quite sure he would say no,” von Kleist admitted later. “But, as always, I had underestimated him.”
Von Kleist agreed to go through with the plan, but, as luck would have it, Hitler kept postponing the meeting and eventually cancelled it; so the plotters had to return to the drawing board.
In July 1944 von Stauffenberg hatched a new plot in which he would leave a bomb under a table during a meeting of Hitler and his aides at the “Wolf’s Lair”, the Führer’s field headquarters in East Prussia. Von Kleist was among those instructed to be ready in Berlin to stage a coup once the plot had been successful.
On July 20, shortly after 12.30, von Stauffenberg walked into the meeting and put a briefcase containing the bomb, set to detonate in 12 minutes, under the conference table.
After a few minutes, pretending that he had to telephone Berlin, he left the room and hurried to a shelter across the compound to wait for the explosion. When it came, at 12.42, he bluffed his way on to a plane waiting to take him to Berlin.
For the next three hours von Stauffenberg was convinced that Hitler was dead. But one of the officers attending the meeting had barked his shin on the briefcase and moved it, so that a heavy table leg was now between Hitler and the bomb. While four people were killed in the explosion, Hitler escaped with only minor injuries.
When von Stauffenberg arrived in Berlin, the other conspirators had only just begun to put the coup plans into effect. Von Kleist, who at 22 was one of the youngest officers involved, was among those who arrested General Fromm, the head of the Reserve Army, at the War Office.
But news soon filtered through that the Führer had survived, and it was only a matter of time before the building was surrounded by troops loyal to Hitler.
Von Stauffenberg and three other conspirators were shot immediately. Others were subsequently hanged with piano wire, or on meat hooks, after being tortured by the Gestapo. (Hitler had some of the gorier deaths filmed for him to watch.) Eventually more than 5,000 people associated with the plot would lose their lives, including von Kleist’s father, who was executed in prison in April 1945.
Von Kleist himself was taken in for questioning by the Gestapo and spent four months in Ravensbrück concentration camp. However, the charges against him were eventually dropped, for reasons which remain unclear — though he was returned to front-line combat duties which, at that stage in the war, were considered the equivalent of a death sentence.
Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist was born on July 10 1922 on his family estate at Schmenzin in Pomerania (now part of Poland). The family were staunch monarchists and, in the “Generals’ Plot” of 1938, his father, also called Ewald, would travel to London to find out whether the British government was willing to oppose Hitler by declaring war on Germany if he carried out his threat to invade Czechoslovakia. But, in what David Astor later described as “the saddest missed opportunity of the whole hellish experience leading up to the Second World War”, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain refused to reverse his policy of appeasement, writing to his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax: “Kleist is violently anti-Hitler and extremely anxious to stir up his friends in Germany. I think we must discount a good deal of what he says.”
The young von Kleist claimed that he had turned against Hitler after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, when Ernst Röhm and the other leaders of the brownshirt SA were assassinated, and his own father narrowly escaped death. None the less, he joined the German Army in 1940, and was wounded in 1943 while fighting on the Eastern Front.
After the war von Kleist established a leading German publishing house, the Ewald-von-Kleist-Verlag, and in 1962 founded what became the annual Munich Security Conference, a forum that brings together politicians, diplomats and defence officials from around the world for talks on global security policy. During the Cold War years, the Munich Conference played a crucial — if unsung — role in maintaining transatlantic solidarity in the face of the Soviet threat.
In 1991 von Kleist was awarded the US Department of Defense’s medal for distinguished public service, and in 1998 eight Nato defence ministers turned up to mark his retirement from his role as convener of the conference.
Von Kleist retained the carriage and bearing of his Prussian forebears and remained independent-minded throughout his life. In post-war Germany he took a host of unfashionable positions, including advocating the reconstruction of the German armed forces in the 1950s and criticising unilateral nuclear disarmament; in the 1970s he was reported to be on the hit list of the far-Left Red Army Faction. Yet he remained reticent about his role in the Stauffenberg plot, which some Germans continued to regard as treason.
“The older I get,” von Kleist reflected last year, “the more it surprises me that I survived.”
Ewald von Kleist and his wife, Gundula, had a son and a daughter.
Ewald von Kleist, born July 10 1922, died March 8 2013

Ewald von Kleist - Telegraph

 

Sounds like he's finally got the rest he deserves...

RIP...

 

Genesis 18:20-33.

 

Genesis 18:20-33.

Indeed!

"Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not"
Henry Fielding

 

Thanks Owen!

I had forgotten I had been around that long.

 

On 20 July 1944 a German army officer, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, arrived at Hitler's "Wolf's Lair" in East Prussia. His mission on that day was to kill Adolf Hitler. Perhaps he would also save a little of Germany's honour.

As history records, the plot to kill Hitler failed and the war in Europe continued almost another ten months. Inside Germany thousands of Germans were arrested and executed.

On the 70th anniversary of the Stauffenberg plot his son Claus von Stauufenberg, has been interviewed by the BBC World Service. Click on the following link for further information:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28330605

 

Just seen you have resurrected this old thread adding the BBC link while I was writing out a separate post for the WW2 News items section of the forum.

 

I remember as a young boy being fascinated by this attempt to assassinate Hitler, interesting to read about it once again.

 

Let us not forget that there had been almost 30 attempts at the Assassination of Hitler since he came to power.

We planed Operation Foxley - headed by the SOE, which was never green lighted.

As the war progressed the Allies backed away from Killing Hitler as they began to understand that his totally incompetent Military leadership was actually winning them the war.
In a perverse sort of way it was himself by staying alive which sealled Germanys fate.
No doubt the end would have come but it would have lasted longer and cost even more lives even if more capable Military leaders such as Rommel and perhaps Manstein would have fought a defensive war.