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Over the years of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship, there had been many plots against him…he had a lot of enemies. Some plots involved arrest and imprisonment, many involved assassination. Some were simply the ideas of one or two people talking very quietly, while others were far more elaborate. Most never made it past the idea phase, but a very few did.
And as the war began to turn against Germany, two things happened. First, those planning action against Hitler felt a new sense of urgency, realizing that more moderate leadership could maybe negotiate an end to the war and spare their homeland the destruction that was bearing down on it. Second, those in favor of keeping Hitler around became more frantic in their search for those who didn’t.
And so we come to the most famous assassination plot, and the one that came the closest to success, which occurred at Wolfschanze (Hitler’s fortress in East Prussia) on July 20, 1944. Count Claus von Stauffenberg (shown above) placed a briefcase bomb in the room where he was meeting with Hitler and some of his staff. It was not the best of circumstances for those involved in the scheme, but they strongly believed that the Gestapo was closing in on their group, and if they were to be the ones to kill Hitler, they had to move quickly.
The bomb went off as planned, but Hitler was not killed as planned. Stauffenberg, who had excused himself from the meeting, promptly flew back to Berlin, thinking his briefcase had done the job. But because it hadn’t, the conspiracy rapidly unravelled as co-conspirators sought to distance themselves from the cabal and save their necks. Stauffenberg was quickly arrested (ironically, by General Friedrich Fromm, who was well aware of what was going on), and shot early the next morning.
The German leader, ever the opportunist, used the assassination attempt as a springboard for vengeance. As we have seen on a couple of occasions already, it was very common for people who had no connection with an event to become victims of it. This was no exception. Several hundred people, including German officers and former officers, were executed, many of whom had little or nothing to do with the attempt on Hitler’s life. Some of the executions, like those of Fromm, Admiral Canaris, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, took place in 1945…within weeks of the war’s end.
