The Wolf is in his lair, plotting.
Near the Führer sits a 36-year-old officer, a descendant of an ancient and venerable German family, a combat veteran missing an eye and two fingers. His name is Claus von Stauffenberg. The blood thrums in his temples, his heart heaves in his chest, and his throat dries like withered grass because of what he is about to do.
Hitler and his chief military aides confer with creased brows and hands hovering over maps spread on a great oak table, their eyes fixed upon the world in miniature, everything within reach. The oppressive sunlight of a hot summer day shines through the window opposite the Führer.
Stauffenberg slowly rises. He knows time is running out. In the bustle of the conference room, he quietly announces that he needs to make a telephone call. A few of the 25 or so attendees look up, but mostly he is not noticed as the strategizing carries on. Stauffenberg exits the stifling room, leaving, tucked under the table, his briefcase and the device inside: a bomb.
Stauffenberg is out in the passage now. The telephone operator, Sgt. Maj. Arthur Adam, puts through Stauffenberg’s call to Gen. Fritz Erich Fellgiebel. Stauffenberg holds the receiver to his ear, but once the operator is out of sight, he replaces the receiver. He isn’t actually waiting for Felggiebel’s voice.
Who Was Stauffenberg?
Claus von Stauffenberg was born in 1907 in Swabia in southwestern Germany. He hailed from a well-established noble German family with a long tradition of service to the royal house of Wurtemberg. His father was a staunch monarchist, conservative, and Catholic. Though his mother was Lutheran, Stauffenberg was raised Catholic and took his faith seriously. His mother instilled in her children a Christian piety and a love for the arts, including poetry, visual art, and music.
Even as a child, Stauffenberg expressed a wish to be a hero, believing that the purpose of life was to accomplish great deeds. He was well-suited for such a future, possessing great charisma from a young age, according to “The Plots Against Hitler” by Danny Orbach. He was an idealist and a romantic with strong principles and a handsome, commanding presence. Though of an artistic temperament, Stauffenberg settled on a military career, joining up in 1926. A few years later, in 1933, he married Nina von Lerchenfeld, and the couple had five children together. Mr. Orbach describes Stauffenberg as a strict but loving father.
Mr. Orbach relates that Stauffenberg vacillated in his support for the Nazis during the early days of Hitler’s career, thinking that Hitler might be the champion Germany needed during a dark time. But Stauffenberg’s opinion of Hitler and the Nazis steadily darkened as the reality of Hitler’s rule and policies, some of which conflicted with his Catholic beliefs, became clear. He was appalled by the atrocities the Nazis committed.
The Bomb
By 1943, Germany was losing the war. The German Resistance inclined toward removing Hitler from power entirely, securing control of the government, and beginning peace talks. As the Fates abandoned the Germans, the situation grew desperate. The leaders of the resistance had been carefully observing Stauffenberg for some time, and in the spring of 1943, they recruited him to lead a daring assassination and coup attempt. His high position in Hitler’s military command gave him access to the Führer, and his conviction and magnetism made him a reliable asset and a driving force behind the plot.As related in Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis’s book “Defying Hitler,” one of Stauffenberg’s co-conspirators, Henning von Tresckow, told Stauffenberg: “The assassination attempt must take place at whatever cost. Even if it does not succeed we must still act. For it is no longer a question of whether it had a practical purpose; what counts is the fact that in the eyes of the world and of history the German resistance dared to act. Compared with that nothing else is important.” For the resistance, eliminating Hitler and removing the Nazis had become not just a strategic necessity but also a moral imperative.
The plan possessed an elegant simplicity. The conspirators would subvert a continuity-of-government plan called Operation Valkyrie, using it to initiate and cloak their own coup. Valkyrie was in place in case of unrest, loss of leadership, or some other emergency. It dictated that in a crisis, Gen. Friedrich Fromm would activate the German reserve army to maintain order and control in Germany.
The conspirators planned to kill Hitler and tell their fellow officers that a coup was underway, thus initiating Operation Valkyrie. The conspirators would command the just-deployed reserve troops, who would believe they were stopping a coup, not facilitating one. The conspirators hoped to use these forces and their operatives planted throughout the Reich to take over the government.
But first they must remove Hitler, a daunting task that ultimately fell to Stauffenberg. Stauffenberg was summoned by Hitler to the Eastern Front military headquarters known as “the Wolf’s Lair.” This was his chance. Though the compound was one of the world’s most secure, with minefields, elite guards, trained dogs, and antiaircraft guns, Stauffenberg’s military position allowed him to walk right in.
The evening before the staff meeting in the Wolf’s Lair where Stauffenberg would plant two bombs, he asked his driver to stop in front of a Catholic church, where he prayed for a little while. Though Stauffenberg had suffered for some time from a conflicted, tortured conscience as he wrestled with the decision to commit tyrannicide, Mr. Orbach describes him in this moment as peaceful, kind, and ready for the momentous task that lay ahead.
The time of the meeting came on July 20, 1944. The location was switched at the last minute from an underground bunker to an above-ground room with windows, which would make the bomb blast less effective, the first of several unlucky events. But there was no turning back now.
On the way to the briefing room, Stauffenberg asked permission to change his shirt. This was granted, and he was helped by his adjutant Werner von Haeften, who was in on the plot. They used this time to prepare the bombs, which were to be hidden in Stauffenberg’s briefcase, but they were interrupted before they could set the second bomb. In the hurry and horror of the moment, they decided to leave the second bomb behind.
Stauffenberg entered the conference room and shook hands with the man he was about to try to kill. He deposited his deadly luggage and, a few minutes into the meeting, left for his faux phone call. The bomb was set to go off in minutes. But unbeknownst to him, another officer inadvertently kicked the briefcase away from Hitler, likely providing him with the few extra inches or feet that saved his life.
Meanwhile, Stauffenberg lit a cigarette and strolled out of the building.
A blinding and deafening explosion rocked the room he had left behind, throwing everyone against the wall. From outside, Stauffenberg could see the room smoking as if a dragon lay coiled within. The strength of the blast convinced him that Hitler was dead, and he and Haeften escaped to Berlin to help launch Operation Valkyrie.
The Fall of the Valkyries
The coup suffered critical delay. The conspirators in place throughout the Reich didn’t know what to do with rumors of Hitler’s survival, which were already circulating. They hadn’t anticipated this. Little action took place until Stauffenberg landed in Berlin—a waste of crucial hours. Finally, orders to launch Operation Valkyrie begin to roll out. The conspirators claimed that Hitler was dead and a coup was underway. To stop it, Witzleben, Beck, and Goerdeler were going to form an emergency cabinet. This was to be the new government of Germany.Despite the delay, some troops under the conspirators’ control began to occupy government buildings and communication lines. Stauffenberg’s team commanded the arrest of all SS (Hitler’s paramilitary organization) and Gestapo men. Berlin was touch-and-go, but allies in Prague, Vienna, and Paris achieved some initial success.
But another fateful error occurred. The plotters bungled their handling of the formidable Joseph Goebbels, chief of propaganda and Hitler loyalist. Goebbels sent out radio broadcasts that Hitler had escaped an assassination attempt. As Mr. Thomas and Mr. Lewis state, Goebbels’s message was repeated over and over, while the members of the coup had sent out no public information as yet. Most local commanders—who were now receiving conflicting orders—believed Goebbels, not the conspirators. Mr. Lewis and Mr. Thomas write: “The slow speed at which the Valkyrie orders had been delivered and the radio broadcasts stating Hitler was alive robbed the coup of its impetus.”
The conspirators tried to arrest Goebbels, but, for some unaccountable reason, they sent an officer, who was not privy to the plot, to perform the task. They also hadn’t cut Goebbels’s telephone wire, and when the officer arrived, Goebbels proved to him that Hitler was still alive by putting him on the phone with Hitler; the officer quickly realized his mistake. Everything began to unravel. Mr. Orbach writes: “The ringleaders adhered too tightly to the original plan, failing to act spontaneously as revolutionaries must.”
By this point, the Nazi authorities had recovered from their initial shock and knew something was rotten in Berlin. Soon, their units were closing in on the conspirators. To the end, Stauffenberg kept up his barrage of phone calls to operatives throughout the Reich, reassuring, negotiating, commanding. But the coup had run aground almost as soon as it was out of the harbor. The Nazis besieged the conspirators’ headquarters. In a final gunfight, Stauffenberg was wounded.
Gen. Fromm—who had wavered between allying himself with the coup and remaining with Hitler—could tell which way the wind blew. To save his own skin, he arrested all the ringleaders, conducted a mock trial, and ordered them executed. Haeften attempted to shoot the betrayer, but Stauffenberg told him not to shed more blood. Stauffenberg tried to negotiate on behalf of his comrades, saying that they acted on his orders and should be spared, but with little effect.
In a courtyard illuminated by military truck headlights, with ragged shadows and gloom swarming behind them, four of the leaders, including Haeften and Stauffenberg, faced a firing squad. At the last moment, loyal to the end, Haeften jumped in front of Stauffenberg, taking the bullet meant for him. Stauffenberg now stood alone, staring down the gunmen. A cry rang out, just before the rattle of rifle fire: “Long live our sacred Germany!”
After the Reich was back solidly in the grip of the Führer, Hitler used the coup attempt to round up, imprison, or execute thousands. At first it was for their real or alleged involvement in the coup attempt. Then, it extended to anyone Hitler saw as a threat.
