Plotting Hitler's Death

On 7/20/44, with WWII reaching climax, a group of German anti-Nazi conspirators, led by a dashing, highly decorated young count, Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, detonated a bomb at the E. Prussia military headquarters of Hitler. Altho the bomb failed to maim or kill Hitler, the explosion dramatically announced to the world the existence of a secret, indigenous opposition to the Nazi regime. In this definitive new book, Joachim Fest, an acclaimed biographer of Adolf Hitler, details the events leading up to 7/20, the tense, confused moments before the explosion, in others, because of the omnipresent scrutiny of the Gestapo or Hitler's own instinct for danger. In the end, however, Fest's singular accomplishment is to portray the human side of the German resistance-the conviction & resolve that gave them the courage to defy almost impossible odds, & the fatal indecisiveness that caused them to fail time & again. Plotting Hitler's Death will stands as one of the definitive accounts of a tortured, misunderstood era.

Preface

The resistance that never was

The army succumbs

The September plot

From Munich to Zossen

The new generation

The army groups

Stauffenberg

The eleventh hour

July 20, 1944

Persecution & judgment

The wages of failure

Notes

Note on the Texts

Chronology

Short Biographies

Index