A hero of the resistance to the Nazis, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (1907–1944) nearly succeeded in a complicated plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in 1944. He managed to plant a bomb that came within inches of killing the German dictator—an outcome that could have ended World War II, shortened the Holocaust, and prevented the Soviet invasion of Eastern Europe.
Handsome and charismatic, von Stauffenberg was the scion of an aristocratic and devoutly Roman Catholic military family in southern Germany. Von Stauffenberg eventually rose to the rank of army chief of staff, putting him in regular contact with Hitler.
Although von Stauffenberg was an ardent German nationalist, he became disillusioned with the Nazis and Hitler soon after the beginning of World War II. The persecution of Jews and mistreatment of Soviet prisoners of war, in particular, convinced him that Hitler had to be stopped. In 1942, when a friend asked him how to change Hitler’s mind, von Stauffenberg replied, “Kill him.”
The plot against Hitler eventually involved hundreds of soldiers, including several high-ranking officers. Von Stauffenberg volunteered to carry the briefcase bomb into Hitler’s bunker in East Prussia. He arranged to leave the room just before the bomb was set to explode, when he would join the other plotters to take control of the government and negotiate a peace settlement with the Allies.
But von Stauffenberg had a poor understanding of how bombs worked, and he armed only one of the two explosives packed into his suitcase. Still, the plot might have been successful if another officer had not moved the briefcase to get a closer look at a map after von Stauffenberg left the room. The bomb killed four people in the bunker, but not Hitler. Von Stauffenberg was arrested and executed by a firing squad later that night. Many of the coconspirators soon met a similar fate, often after prolonged torture by the Gestapo.
The majority of the military and civilian casualties in Germany occurred during the final ten months of the war, and they might have been averted if the July 20 plot had been successful. The failure of the conspiracy haunted the participants. As one of his coconspirators told a newspaper decades later, “Stauffenberg was the wrong man for this—but no one else had the guts.”
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- A memorial to von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators was opened at the Bendlerblock by the government of West Germany in 1980.
- Actor Tom Cruise (1962–) played von Stauffenberg in a 2008 movie adaptation of the July 20 plot, Valkyrie, which was filmed on location in Germany. One of von Stauffenberg’s grandsons, Philipp von Schulthess (1973–), appears in the film as a German military officer.
- The last surviving member of the plot, Philipp von Boeselager (1917–2008), died in Germany at age ninety.
