ON JULY 20, under the blazing East Prussian sun, a dashing colonel, Claus von Stauffenberg, entered a war conference room with Adolf Hitler at his eastern headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfsschanze). Twenty-four men, including Hitler, stood around the large table. Stauffenberg left his briefcase under the table. In the windowed hut (a last-minute change of location from an airtight bunker), Generalleutnant Adolf Heusinger outlined for a furious Hitler the scale of the military disaster befalling Germany. An aide then stepped into the room and told Stauffenberg that there was a call for him. Leaving his briefcase, Stauffenberg departed.

At 12:45, a bomb in the briefcase exploded.1 The heavy table shattered, and the men were thrown back by the force of the blast.2 Oberst Heinz Brandt’s leg was blown off. Regierungsrat Heinrich Berger, who had been standing just across from the briefcase, lost both legs. Flying wood splinters struck and seriously injured Generallutnant Rudolf Schmundt and General Günther Korten of the Luftwaffe. All four men would die as a result of their injuries.3

As the bomb exploded, Stauffenberg made a dash for his car, where his adjutant, Oberleutnant Werner von Haeften, was waiting. Ordering the driver on, they managed to exit the compound and made for a waiting plane bound for Berlin. Operation Valkyrie was under way. Led by Stauffenberg, the resisters would announce an SS plot to overtake the government. They would then use the army to lock down the SS, to arrest Goebbels, Göring, and the rest of the senior National Socialist leadership, and to install a civilian government that would open negotiations with the Allies. Stauffenberg would both plant the bomb and lead the operation, but his Allies in Berlin would launch Valkyrie as soon as they got word of Hitler’s death.

In Berlin, General der Infanterie Friedrich Olbricht, in charge of the military district headquarters within Germany, was responsible for initiating the Valkyrie orders. Unsure of Hitler’s fate, however, he dithered and failed to initiate the coup during the crucial hours during which communications between Berlin and Hitler’s headquarters were cut off (by General Erich Fellgiebel).

When the coup was finally launched, it was too late. Stauffenberg arrived in Berlin to take charge just as the first Valkyrie orders were going out. Keitel, meanwhile, having identified Stauffenberg as the likely organizer of the coup, was in touch with General Friedrich Fromm, head of the Replacement Army, assuring him of Hitler’s safety. Fromm was of central importance because the resisters had only three military formations at their disposal: Fromm’s Replacement Army, the Twenty-Third Infantry Division, and most important, that division’s Ninth Infantry Regiment stationed in Potsdam.4 These troops could move on Berlin, but a successful coup required sufficient numbers of senior German commanders to side with Stauffenberg.

Urged on by Stauffenberg’s friend and chief of staff Oberst Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, Olbricht finally launched Operation Valkyrie just before 16:00.5 Two sets of announcements went out from the Bendlerblock, the massive office complex in the Bendlerstraße that housed the German army’s headquarters in Berlin. The first said that Hitler was dead and that “an irresponsible clique of Party leaders divorced from the front” had tried to “stab the army in the back”—the latter phrase could not have been a coincidence—and to seize power.6 The Reich government was, therefore, declaring a state of emergency and granting Feldmarschall Erwin von Witzleben supreme command of the armed forces and full executive power.7 The second announcement, containing Fromm’s forged signature, issued a series of orders to the armed forces to protect all telecommunications and postal facilities; arrest all senior Nazi officials; occupy all concentration camps and detain their commandants and guards; arrest all Waffen-SS commanders suspected of disloyalty; and occupy all Gestapo and SD offices.8 A young major and another Tresckow protégé, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen, sent out the first orders.9

As Oertzen was sending out those orders, Stauffenberg and his adjutant, Oberleutnant Haeften (who had helped him prepare the bomb for detonation), arrived at the Bendlerblock. “He’s dead,” Stauffenberg reported. He and Olbricht then went to see Fromm, who outranked all the conspirators at the Bendlerblock. When Fromm refused to join the conspirators, they placed him under arrest. Stauffenberg had him locked into an office and kept under guard.10 It was 17:00, and the coup in Berlin was on the cusp of its greatest success.

Generalleutnant Paul von Hase, the commandant of Berlin and a valued associate of Olbricht and Beck, summoned Major Otto Ernst Remer to his offices at Unter den Linden No. 1. Hase gave Remer the Bendlerblock line: the SS had launched a putsch; the army was assuming plenary powers; and he, Remer, was therefore to cordon off the government quarter in Berlin. Remer, a fanatical Nazi and obedient soldier, replied, “Very good.”11 By 18:30, central Berlin was locked down and in the hands of the resisters.

Elsewhere, troops began to mobilize. Following Valkyrie orders, army commanders seized key radio stations, road junctions, and bridges outside Berlin.12 From 18:00, Oertzen received reports confirming that the operations were going well.13

In Krampnitz, in the northern outskirts of Potsdam, Oberst Harald Momm, commander of the Riding and Driving School, shouted when he received the news, “Orderly, a bottle of champagne; the pig’s dead!”14 Against the better judgment of his senior officer, Momm led an armoured infantry training group to the Victory Column in Berlin’s Tiergarten. They were there to check SS troops advancing from the Lichterfelde barracks on Himmler’s order. The SS troops never moved: Himmler was waiting to see which way the wind blew.15

From here, the coup began to fall apart. With no definitive confirmation of Hitler’s death, orders sent out under Olbricht’s name were questioned, only partially implemented, or refused. Although the Berlin wing of the conspiracy was probably doomed by Hitler’s survival all along,16 the decisive moment occurred in the government quarter that had been locked down by Remer. On Hase’s orders to arrest, Remer reluctantly entered Goebbels’s rooms. He was far more suspicious of the propaganda minister than he was of the army.17

Goebbels quickly allayed those suspicions: he put a call through to Hitler. Hitler asked Remer if he recognized his voice, confirmed that he was unharmed, and entrusted Remer with the security of the capital.18 He was to use all means available to crush any resistance. Remer ordered the cordons around the government quarter to be removed immediately.

If things were going badly outside the Bendlerblock, they were going at least as badly within. When Witzleben arrived from Zossen around 19:00 to take command of the Wehrmacht, he went first to General Eduard Wagner’s office, where Wagner told him that the assassination attempt had failed.19 Witzleben was furious; he called the entire coup a “screw-up”20 and left with Wagner.

To make matters worse, Fromm, with the help of a sympathetic officer, began to initiate countermeasures. They made little difference to the coup, which had by then failed, but they were decisive for the fate of the resisters. The assisting officer knew of a little-known exit in the room leading to a dark passage and a staircase to the upper floor.21 He used it to slip out and warn other officers in the building who, somewhat incredibly, did not realize a coup was being conducted in their midst. A senior officer, Oberstleutnant Franz Herber, put a telephone call in to another officer. “Is Wagner part of this?” Herber demanded to know. “Whose side is he on? We want to make a clean sweep here. We will not be forced to join Stauffenberg’s regime.”22 Herber and others decided to demand an explanation from Olbricht. Olbricht gave none, and instead ordered that the building be prepared for a final defence.23

The coup was now collapsing. Olbricht’s orders were never implemented. Herber and the other officers seized arms designed for the defence of the Bendlerblock and instead used them to put down the coup.24 Shots were heard. Fromm was retrieved, and when the general returned to his office, he found Stauffenberg, Mertz von Quirnheim, Haeften, and Olbricht held at gunpoint by armed staff officers.25

Seeking to save his own skin, Fromm then took countermeasures well after the coup had failed. He arrested Stauffenberg, Haeften, Olbricht, and Mertz. After ordering a subordinate officer to finish off Ludwig Beck after his failed suicide attempt, Fromm declared: “In the name of the Führer, a court martial convened by me has pronounced [its] sentence: Oberst von Mertz, General Olbricht, the Oberst whose name I will not mention, and Oberleutnant von Haeften are condemned to death.”26

Stauffenberg, Mertz, Haeften, and Olbricht walked down the stairs into the courtyard calmly, with only Haeften briefly trying to tear himself free. It was almost 00:30. Fromm ordered his assistant to set up a firing squad of ten men under an officer. The courtyard was flooded with car lights. When Stauffenberg stood before the firing squad, Haeften threw himself in front and died first. As he did, Stauffenberg shouted, “Long live holy Germany!” The next salvo killed him. Fromm climbed atop a military vehicle, gave a rousing speech to the troops, and called for three thunderous cheers of “Sieg Heil.” He left the conspirators to be buried and drove off to ingratiate himself to Goebbels.27

One of Stauffenberg’s last acts before his execution was to urge Fromm’s secretary to make a phone call to Paris. He had failed in Berlin, but there was still hope for the resistance in the French capital. “Hopefully,” as General Wagner had more directly put it a few hours earlier, “Paris sees it through.”28

Notes

1. Hoffmann places the time between 12:40 and 12:50; I have taken the midpoint. Hoffmann, Stauffenberg: A Family History, 266.

2. See Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 402–5.

3. This fact and details on the three men’s injuries from ibid., 404–5.

4. Heinemann, “Military Resistance Activities,” 839.

5. Without Olbricht’s permission, Mertz von Quirnheim had sent out some alert orders just after 14:00. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 416.

6. Quoted ibid., 419.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., 419–20.

9. Until recently, little was known about Oertzen. Thanks to a recent biography, based on 240 letters from Oertzen to his then young wife that she only recently made public, we now have a fuller picture. See Lars-Broder Keil, Hans-Ulrich von Oertzen: Offizier und Widerstandskämpfer (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2005).

10. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 422–3.

11. Ibid., 429.

12. In Cottbus, 160 kilometres south of Berlin, Oberstleutnant Hans-Werner Stirius received an order to occupy the National Radio station near Herzberg, the radio transmitters in Königs Wusterhausen, and all major road junctions and bridges in the Cottbus area. By 18:45, Stirius’s men had occupied the Herzberg National Radio station; the Königs Wusterhausen transmitters were theirs by 20:00. In the Infantry School at Döberitz, twenty-five kilometres west of Berlin, Major Friedrich Jakob, a highly decorated officer and tactics instructor who was not privy to the conspiracy, received orders to occupy the Broadcasting House. He ordered his men, fully armed with mortars and machine guns, into trucks. They occupied the building without difficulty, and Jakob ordered the superintendent to stop all broadcasts. The superintendent agreed, took Jakob to the main switch room, and assured the major that everything had been turned off. What Jakob, who knew nothing about radio, could not know was that the central switch room had been moved from the Broadcasting House to an adjacent bunker; broadcasts, including those by Keitel denouncing the coup, continued all night. Ibid., 430–5.

13. Ibid., 431–2.

14. Ibid., 435.

15. I owe this point to Winfried Heinemann.

16. A view also held by Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 483–4.

17. Ibid., 482–3.

18. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 483.

19. Graf von Kanitz to Elisabeth Wagner, April 14, 1964, BArch N 510-82, fol. 1–2.

20. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 497. “Schöne Schweinerei, das” in German. Translated sometimes as “a fine mess,” this gentlemanly phrase hardly conveys the anger and passion that must have consumed Witzleben that night.

21. Ibid., 498.

22. “Wie verhält er sich jetzt? Wir sind bemüht, hier reinen Tisch zu machen.” Dialogue recounted by Graf von Kanitz, letter to Elisabeth Wagner, April 14, 1964, BArch N 510-82, fol. 1–2.

23. Hoffmann, History of the German Resistance, 501–2.

24. Ibid., 502.

25. Generaloberst Erich Hoepner was also there, and Ludwig Beck was either there or arrived shortly. Ibid., 503.

26. Adapted from ibid., 507.

27. Ibid., 508.

28. Quoted in letter from Elisabeth Wagner to Graf von Kanitz, April 5, 1964, BArch N 510-82, fol. 4–6.