182. Battleground '44 - The July Bomb Plot
59:11 Share

Hello and welcome to the Battleground 44 podcast with me, Saul David and Roger Morehouse. This is the second of two parts on the attempted assassinations of Hitler in the Second World War and of course very timely given that we've just had another politician narrowly surviving what was an almost lethal and game-changing plot.

Last time, Roger, we spoke about the various plots on Hitler's life before the July bomb plot. We talked about a number of characters and, of course, also briefly mentioned Stauffenberg, who is going to plant the actual bomb, play the key role in the July bomb plot of 1944. But tell us a little bit about Stauffenberg, because he's a fascinating character, isn't he? He comes from a very sort of conservative background.

aristocratic background, but not necessarily someone who was, as I think we briefly mentioned last time, averse to the Nazis' war aims, certainly their recovery of German territory, at least at the start of the Second World War. Yeah. I mean, he's very much nobility. He's

Catholic, born in 1907. So he is that generation that grows up as a child during the First World War. So they sort of experienced the war at one remove through the propaganda and so on. He experiences then as a young man, as a youth, as he would have seen it, the humiliation of Germany in the post-war. So Versailles and then the hyperinflation and so on.

which is, I think we're unwise to sort of play that down for that generation of Germans like him. You know, this was a great country brought low. You know, it was only a few years before that it had been, you know, one of the great empires, you know, bestowed the world, bestowed Europe. And then there it is now a sort of humble republic, territorially truncated, economically and politically in chaos, right?

and even the currency is worthless. Can you imagine? So by 1923, the hyperinflation, Germany really is in the doldrums at that point. And for that generation, this is like, what the hell just happened? And you can see that there was a sort of thirst, and it's a very popular thing. This is not just confined to someone like Stauffenberg. There's a general thirst for someone. Will someone just sort this out?

And, you know, Weimar does stabilize after the hyperinflation. They restore the currency, for example. There's a political stabilization in the mid-1920s, which runs up until 1929. And then with the Wall Street crash, pulls the rug out of the German, from underneath the German economy yet again. So within six years, you've got...

you know, two economic crashes, which is the thing that we have to remember. I think everyone points the finger at Wall Street crash and says, that's what did it. Well, you know, you can, you could make the case that actually, you know, even as fragile a political system in a society as Weimar Germany was, it can survive one economic crash, but it can't survive two in close succession.

And if you look at 23 and then 29 or the aftermath of 29, you've got two really fundamental economic crashes within six or seven years. And that is enough to kill anybody's belief in the system, whatever the system is.

So that's essentially, you know, that's what brings Hitler to power. And that's what, you know, for people like Stauffenberg, for that generation, they looked at that and thought, well, this, you know, this guy, we don't have to like him. We can think as he did, because as a, you know, nobleman, well-educated and all that sort of thing, he looked at someone like Hitler and Hitler's cronies and he said, well, you know, there's sort of something of the street. He used to refer to them as the brown plague. So he had no particular love for Nazism. He saw it as all fundamentally beneath him.

But at the same time, because of the low base that Germany had sunk to, he was willing to go along with the Nazi project, particularly that expansion in the 1930s once they're in power. You know, you've got restoration of the Saarland, you've got the remilitarization of the Rhineland, and then the Anschluss with Austria. All of that achieved, you know, without firing a shot effectively. Not literally, but, you know, not without going to war anyway.

And someone like Stauffenberg would look at that and say, yeah, good. That's where we should be. We should be up there. That's where this country should be. It doesn't mean he loved the Nazis, but he was willing to go along with the project in the short term. And he was not exceptional in that at all. There's a great moment at the end of the First World War, which really encapsulates what you're saying there, Roger. His father, we should mention, was Oberhof Marshall, which is effectively Court Chamberlain, I think, isn't it, to the

King of Württemberg. And of course, with the end of the various monarchies, the abdication of the various monarchs at the end of the First World War, his dad is effectively out of a job. But it's more than that, isn't it? As you say, Germany's been brought low. And there's a lovely quote from Stauffenberg, my Germany cannot perish if she goes down now.

she will rise again strong and great. After all, there is still a God. So he's already looking forward to the rebirth of Germany at the end of the First World War. So as you say, he's relatively sympathetic towards, certainly towards the war aims, the nationalist war aims of the Nazis. This is going to change, isn't it? But I think you also hinted last time

He fights in the Polish campaign. And we should also mention, because this is significant, he's a member of the elite of the German army. That is the general staff. These are the guys. So, you know, we're going all the way back to the 19th century now. One of the reasons why Prussia had so much success in various wars is because it had a general staff. Well, certainly well before the British did. And these were the best of the best. You know, the brightest soldiers.

And he had been trained in this kind of elite group. And this elite group also included von Tresckow that you mentioned in the previous episode. And we'll come back to him in a moment. In other words, the general staff, these elite guys play an absolutely key role, don't they, in opposition to Hitler. So,

it's worth putting that on the table but the point I was trying to make is that during the Polish campaign I think you touched on this last time he takes part in it and he makes some pretty uh robust comments about his attitude towards the Poles and where they should fit into the sort of post-war uh status quo uh yes he does so he participates in the Polish campaign he is then a captain at that point in the first light division which is one of the sort of

Yeah, it's a reasonably elite, we could say, Wehrmacht division. He writes a few letters home, for example, which we know in which he writes about the Poles, for example, as being a very mixed population. Now that's code. That's code for their, for goodness, aren't there a lot of Jews here?

And he says that in very disparaging terms. There was none of this sort of diversity is our strength sort of thing. It was very much, you know, this is a bad thing that they're so ethnically mixed. And he goes on to say that the Polish people are a rabble and that their future was that, you know, they would only be comfortable under the German nauts, so under German control.

And all this is kind of Nazi boilerplate kind of rhetoric from that time. And it's worth saying it's kind of standard German boilerplate rhetoric. You know, Nazism didn't kind of erupt out of nowhere, certainly with those prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or anti-Polish sentiment. You know, a lot of that anti-Polish sentiment goes back to the, you know, the Germany, the Imperial Germany of 1871 onwards.

which of course had large Polish minority populations in the East and beyond into Prussia. I mean, Prussia tended to be, you know, when it went through its nationalistic stage in the mid-19th century, also was quite brutal towards its Polish populations. The general German attitude towards the Poles in this period, you know, in the 19th century anyway, tended to be, it's a little bit how the British treated the Irish.

You know, they were kind of, you know, a client state, an occupied state. The people were inferior, naturally inferior, Catholics, of course, both of them. So that brought suspicion with it, of course. So it's very much analogous to how London viewed Ireland at the time. You know, country cousins that needed a strong hand to help them along the way. That was the most benign spin you could put on it.

So he, you know, he wasn't, yes, he was parroting Nazi rhetoric, but it was, it had a longer tail than that. So it goes back into, you know, German imperial rhetoric as well. But yeah, he had, so he's, you know, he's willing to go along with all of this expansion. He's quite happy to do that. And the same thing participates in the French campaign in 1940 as an officer in Sixth Panzer. And he is approached at that point for the first time by some of his fellow officers. So some of those fellow, very often aristocratic officers

Wehrmacht officers who already at that point, some of them were saying that Hitler was reckless and that Hitler needed to be removed, not yet necessarily killed, but certainly to be removed or reined in. So he was approached already in 1940 for the first time by some of his fellow brother officers saying, it's always done with illusions and euphemisms, but might you be interested in getting involved in this? And he basically said no.

He cited the oath of allegiance, incidentally, which is kind of interesting. All of those Weimar soldiers had made a personal oath of allegiance, not to the constitution or to the state, but to Adolf Hitler personally. And that meant something. I mean, you ask any military man, the oath of allegiance means something, right? It's not undertaken lightly. So whatever he might have thought, and I think really at that stage, he probably has the same

ambivalent attitude towards the Nazis themselves as he had had before, which is fundamentally kind of a class issue. He saw them as beneath him, quite simply. But he was willing to go along with the project because he saw it as being fundamentally good for Germany, right? The end result was a good thing. Germany back on top, Germany restoring its lost territories. And in the case of defeating Poland and France in 39 and 40, rewriting the script for the First World War, who wouldn't want that?

So he's willing to go along with all of that. But of course, that does change. And that's the shift, which is what's sort of interesting with Stauffenberg, is where that shift kicks in. Yeah. So before we take up the story with Stauffenberg, Roger, it's worth clarifying, I think, what we mean by General Staab. So he gets appointed to the elite General Staab, otherwise known as the General Staab, with the qualification IG. And

And that means that he will then be sent out or was sent out to various formations to serve as a staff officer on those formations. So he never has a kind of combat role per se, but he's always very, very close to the action, like all good staff officers should be, not necessarily always in the British Army. So it's worth mentioning that, isn't it? And of course, we'll come on to how he gets badly injured in Tunisia shortly.

Yeah, no, exactly right. So yeah, he is very much, you know, among the sort of, you know, the elite of his sort of year group and so on. Absolutely. And, you know, and as I said, he's broadly sympathetic still at that point to the aims of the regime, even if he doesn't necessarily like the regime itself.

Just one point we should probably bring in from his talk about his early life was that there was this influence of an obscure poet. His name was Stefan Georg. Both he and his brothers, Stauffenberg, had sort of, to some extent, kind of sat at the feet of this guy. He's sort of, you know, German nationalist, slightly sort of mystical, with a mystical bent and so on. And he had this concept of the secret Germany.

which was a sort of, you know, again, sort of mystical, an eternal Germany, a Germany of culture, a Germany that remains even if, you know, the politics doesn't in a sense. So again, you can see this fits with his, with Stauffenberg's mentality and that of many of that generation.

was that Germany itself as a sort of a concept, as a thing, was eternal. And it was something that it didn't matter who was in government. It didn't matter if the economy had crashed. You know, Germany was eternal. This comes up again later on, this idea of some sort of spiritual connection to, you know, a sort of semi-mythical Germany. So that comes up later on as a sort of motivator to him, for him.

Okay, just to set the scene for the next bit, which is as he gradually becomes disillusioned with the Nazis and gets drawn into some of the conspiracies, just going to read out a quick extract from a biography, I think one of the better biographies of Stauffenberg or the Stauffenberg family. A model soldier and a devout Roman Catholic, he preferred reading history and writing poetry to the typical pursuits of a young officer, dancing, drinking and hunting parties.

Stauffenberg's charm, directness and brilliance tended to dominate conversations. He liked to talk, to examine all the arguments, even to play devil's advocate against the views of his interlocutor. So this is a highly intelligent, cultured man, but also someone, as you've pointed out, Roger, who is drawn very much to the rejuvenation of Germany. This is going to change, isn't it? When does it change and why do you think it changed? It changed, I mean, it's very often...

stated, I think there's an element of truth in this, but it's rather too simplistic. He was injured in April of 1943 in Tunisia in the North African campaign and really seriously injured. So he's overseeing German movement of the unit that he was with, which was 10th Panzer, through a sort of mountain pass. And they were subjected to a strafing attack by Allied aircraft.

and he lost his right hand, he lost his ring finger and the little finger on his left hand and his left eye, as well as hundreds of shrapnel injuries beyond that. So he's really seriously maimed.

And he wasn't even expected to survive those injuries because they're pretty bad. And especially if it happens out in the wilds of Tunisia, that would normally, I think, be assumed to be pretty life-threatening. But he survived it and came back to Munich and sort of months of recuperation and so on. And it's very often described that that experience, which is, I suppose, you could say a near-death experience in a way, was in some way the catalyst for his recovery.

for his sort of turn. And I think there's a degree of truth in that, not least because he did spend essentially six months then in recuperation, lying in bed, various operations, very much inhabiting his own head. And I suppose to some extent, wondering what it was all about and what it was all for. So I think in that respect, there probably is some truth in this, but it's also true as well that he was already turning before that happened.

And you can see from various accounts of friends of his and acquaintances that he was someone already before that who was becoming increasingly vociferous in his criticisms of the Nazis.

And there's even a suggestion that he was actually, you know, his appointment to the 10th Panzer in North Africa was engineered to get him out of the way because he was too outspoken. You know, he was going to get into trouble. So they said, well, just, you know, ship him off to North Africa and he won't do any damage over there. He won't get arrested at least, you know, there's no SS and so on. So it's clear, but I think that he was turning already. And the turning point for Stauffenberg and many of those with him is really knowledge of the Holocaust.

So, you know, obviously, German invasion of the Soviet Union, middle of 41. In the wake of that, you've got this, for the first time, really, it does happen in the Polish campaign as well. But you've got the first, you know, large scale mass shootings of Jews in eastern Poland, and in the Baltic states, and in what's now Belarus and Ukraine.

This is that phase of, you know, what we call the Holocaust by bullets. This is mass shooting rather than gassing. And it's pretty hard to hide, you know, the shooting of, you know, say five or 10,000 people. It's a pretty hard thing to hide. So,

the rumour mill, you know, amongst, it is happening behind the lines of the Wehrmacht, but, you know, pretty much everyone knows and there's somebody always knows somebody who's seen it, you know, who's witnessed this going on. So the rumour mill is sort of going, you know, running in overdrive at this point. And very quickly, you know, someone like Henning von Tresckow, who was then on the staff of Army Group Centre in 42, for example,

You know, he knows this is going on. It's going on in the rear of his units. He knows it's going on. And you can probably see the radio traffic that's going and the decrypts and so on. So, you know, it's an open secret effectively. And for people like Stauffenberg, with all of that baggage that we talked about, you know, that they're willing to go along with this project, but they don't fundamentally like it. They don't fundamentally like the Nazis. They see them as being beneath them. They see them as being criminal people.

It's fundamentally a sort of criminal regime. That certainly was Henning von Tresckow's view. Now, he's a very early adopter in the resistance. He's anti-Hitler already in about 1938. But for most of them, the Holocaust, knowledge of the Holocaust, that you've got mass killing, mass killing of civilians,

unarmed civilians, you know, behind the lines by the thousands, their view of that is this cannot be tolerated. This is a besmirching of Germany's honor and Germany's good name. It's signing the death warrant of all of those things that Stauffenberg was talking about with the idea of a secret Germany, of a holy Germany, right? That sort of honorable cultural nation that will always persist and all of that sort of thing.

The Holocaust threatens all of that because it's so disgraceful.

So it's their knowledge of that, that, that makes them turn, that makes, you know, just what previously would have been, you know, raised eyebrow. Oh yeah. Bloody Hitler doing, doing his thing again. But you know, what can you do? It turns it from that into, we actually have to do something about this guy. Right. So there's a really palpable shift and it really is a moral revolt. That's the only words, words we can use for it. I mean, it sounds quite sort of grand, but you know, in the case of someone like Henning von Tresckow and Stauffenberg as well, it is a moral revolt that,

They are morally protesting about what's going on. So it's not that they can foresee the end of the war, that the war is going to be lost. Not yet at that stage. That kicks in later on. That kicks in by the time we get to the summer of 1944. But in this phase that we're talking about, it's a moral revolt against the Holocaust.

Yeah. And what's significant about Stauffenberg, I think, after he recovers, you've explained his injury. So he's beginning to recover, presumably towards the end of 43, early 44, are the next jobs he's going to have. And the key one, of course, eventually is chief of staff.

to the commander of the Home Army, also known as the Replacement Army. This is really significant, Roger, isn't it? Because it puts him in a position where not only is he able to attend conferences with Hitler, and the relevance of that is obvious, but he also has some kind of control over this reserve military force that ultimately in Operation Valkyrie is going to be used, they hope, the conspirators, to actually topple the regime.

So the access to Hitler thing is this last piece of the jigsaw. So that sort of clicks in really very late in June 1944 for him. And this was the fundamental problem that all of those, all of them, it's a relatively small number of plotters, but the problem they faced fundamentally during the war was that Hitler had basically become a recluse.

So he would sort of shuffle between his various headquarters. If you were lucky, you might get him to come and visit you in the field, visit an army headquarters in the field.

But that was comparatively rare. So that's what Treskow did in, as we mentioned, I think before, that's what Treskow did in the spring of 43 when he invited Hitler out to Smolensk on the Eastern Front and they smuggled the bomb back onto Hitler's plane on the way back, which failed to explode. So that was one attempt. But the difficulty was always getting access to Hitler. That was always the fundamental obstacle.

So for Stauffenberg, yeah, we'll come back to Valkyrie in a minute. But that question of access, that crucial piece of the jigsaw is finally solved for him in June of 44, very late, because he was then at that point, another promotion and he's required to report directly to Hitler at Hitler's situation conferences. So that gives him access.

But prior to that, they've already got this plan, which has been sort of hashed out. And he's actually friends within the military hierarchy. When he's again available for work, obviously he's no good for the front line because he's only got three fingers left. But he is very suitable for a staff job. So they give him a staff job, as you said, within the replacement army.

And this was a unit that was set up. It basically sort of shadows the army itself and it has two main purposes. The first one is training of new recruits. Each generation of new recruits get trained up once

within Germany before they go and, you know, go and serve wherever they serve. So basic training is undertaken, overseen by the replacement army. And secondarily, they are responsible for sort of, you know, domestic security, as it were, you know, you've got millions of foreign forced laborers in Germany itself, in greater Germany. You've got also millions of POWs,

across German occupied territory. So in a sense, the potential threat from those two elements was seen that it needed a response, that effectively the replacement army was responsible for that as well.

So in the event that, you know, they, there might be some breakout from a prison camp or breakout from a, um, a forced labor camp or whatever. Um, you'd probably have them dealt with by the reserve, by the, by the replacement army, the reserve army. So that was their, their two tasks. Um, and in dealing with those threats. So this plot, um,

Operation Valkyrie, which becomes sort of the code name of the assassination attempt. But it was a genuine operational plan for the Home Army. And it had been drawn up to deal with exactly that, to deal with domestic unrest, to deal with a breakout from POW camp or whatever it might be. And crucially, what the plotters were able to do, and this is where Stauffenberg comes to the fore within that organization,

along with Tresco at the time. Tresco later sort of drops out of the Reckoning. But at that point, he is very much in the plot. What they do is to basically kind of twist the Valkyrie plan to their own purposes.

So that they can use that as the coup element, an attempt using the replacement army to essentially seize power from the organs of the Nazi state, the SS, the Gestapo and the various ministries.

So they're sort of twisting it slightly to use it for their own purposes. And crucially for them, it was never enough just to assassinate Hitler, right? All right, you've got the difficulty of access, but it's still a difficult thing to do. But still, for them, it wasn't enough just to kill him. You had to kill him and simultaneously seize power, right? Because if you just killed him, you just get, you know,

Goebbels or Bormann or Heinrich Himmler or one of those, or probably an ugly triumvirate of all three would take power and it would be just as bad as Hitler, right? That was the logic. Or alternatively, the Third Reich itself would collapse, which is also for them as political conservatives, this is no good either because what happens if Germany collapses? The Red Army just marches through and communizes the whole thing. So they didn't want that either.

So what you wanted was to assassinate Hitler on day one and at the same time have a sort of thoroughgoing coup running in the background to seize prominent ministries to make sure that the SS and the Gestapo are suitably emasculated and controlled and take power. So you needed that Valkyrie plan to run in the background for that wider coup. That's what it was for.

So all of this began, the Valkyrie plan is already being thought out late 43, early 44, amongst those officers in the replacement army. And then the last piece of the jigsaw, as I said, was Stauffenberg having been given access to Hitler because he has to report to Hitler, which comes in June of 44. So it's very much the last thing. Prior to that, they really didn't know who was going to be the assassin. And they're kind of sounding out various

you know, like-minded individuals to see if there was someone that they could persuade to do it. And in the end, you know, Stauffenberg was given that job and it became pretty obvious, okay, it's going to be me, isn't it? Right? And it was. Okay. Do join us in a moment to hear more of Roger's assessment of the July bomb plots.

Welcome back. So we know the bomb plots date. It's the 20th of July, but there were actually a couple of previous attempts, weren't there? And that's by Stauffenberg himself I'm talking about, not by the earlier plots, some of which you discussed last time, Roger. So tell us briefly what happened in those early attempts and then why, how and why did 20th of July unfold?

Yeah, so the earlier ones were sort of aborted, really, I suppose you could say. Stauffenberg had shown this willingness to be the assassin, to pull the trigger, as it were, as long as the wider coup took place at the same time. And they initially thought that they could target Hitler at the Baerkhof in Berchtesgaden. So he was first called there to address Hitler, which he did.

And he had the bomb with him at the time. So he had these two clam charges, which had been used previously by Henning von Tresckow when he invited Hitler to Smolensk. And that's what made up the Brandy Bottle Bomb, as it's known, were these two British clam charges, which had been, they actually come from resistance circles in Holland that had been compromised and wound up by the Gestapo. So they had found their way into Germany.

German military intelligence circles and stores, along with a couple of British time pencils, which is how they would be armed, right? So all of that equipment, British in origin, Stauffenberg now had, and he had those in his briefcase, and he's kind of ready to go at Beiter's Garden in the Baerkorf. And that particular time, again, you know, what they wanted to do was to try and hit as many of the senior Nazis as possible.

And that first time, and bear in mind as well, they're also dealing with a lot of his fellow conspirators are rather nervous about all of this because they know it's a death sentence if this goes wrong. And the chances are it will go wrong. They're basically signing their own death warrant. So, you know, one of them was described as being nervous as a racehorse.

um, over all of this. So they would, they were a bit skittish, let's put it that way. Um, and the first time, you know, they basically didn't get the okay. So he was, he was kind of sending by telephone saying, right, okay, I'm here. Hitler's here. Um, so-and-so is here, you know, Goebbels, whoever else it was, are we good to go? And they go, no, okay, don't do it. Don't do it. Cause there's, there's skittish, right? So that's the first one.

So again, he goes and he does his meeting with an unfused bomb in his briefcase, you know, presents himself to Hitler and all of that stuff.

And then the second time was five days before the eventual bomb plot, you know, where it's actually followed through, where you could say he had a trial run, but he was at Rastenberg. He was at the Wolfslehr in Rastenberg in East Prussia, had to present to Hitler for a situation conference. And again, he had the bomb in his bag. He was ready to go.

Message came through. They said, you know, who else is there? And he said, well, it's just Hitler. It's just Hitler and sort of staff officers. There's no senior Nazis at all.

And they said, no, don't do it. So they've kind of galvanized themselves a bit from the last time, but they still want to target more and more than just Hitler amongst the sort of senior personnel. So that's twice now that he's kind of gone to the brink and stepped back, which can't have done much for his nerves, to be honest. And there was a quote from him at the time where he said, you know, doing this, this is a road you go down only once.

because of the state of his nerves. And I think that's understandable because as we're saying, he's basically expecting this to be his last act on planet Earth. And finally, on the 20th of July 1944, so again, he's called to the Wolfschanze, the Wolfslayer in East Prussia, to go and present to Hitler's Situation Conference.

He flies out from Berlin with his adjutant, Werner von Heften. It's about a three-hour flight to East Prussia. They arrive late morning. He has a sort of breakfast out underneath a tree. It's a very hot, sunny day.

He has a couple of meetings with other sort of senior individuals, and then he's told that the meeting itself that he was supposed to take part in has been brought forward. And it was now going to be at 1230 because Mussolini was due to arrive at Rastenberg that afternoon. So, you know, it sort of threw the timing up a little bit.

So, okay. So, so Stauffenberg then has to sort of galvanize himself and think, right, we've got the meeting at half past 12. So he's, he asks one of the staff officers there, he says, can I, I need to change my shirt. And it's been a hot day, sweaty and so on. In the film, if you, if you watch the Tom Cruise film, it shows him just nicking his neck with the razor when he shaves. So it means that his, his shirt is got, is bloodied on the collar. So that's the excuse for him to change his shirt. In reality, I think, um,

It was just sweaty because it was a hot day and so on, which is a bit less cinematic. But, you know, there we go. So he says, I need to change my shirt prior to the meeting. So he goes, you know, he's given a room to do that in, goes into the room with his adjutant Werner von Heften and they have to fuse these two charges. So these two charges are basically these clam charges about the size of a hardback book.

And the fuses they have to use, these time pencil fuses, again, it's like a pencil, same sort of size, shape. And it's basically a sort of a brass hull, which you push into the explosive. And then it has a vial within it, which has, I think from memory, I think it was copper chloride. We always just describe it as acid, but it's not. It's copper chloride.

which you crush the vial with a pair of pliers, and then that eats through a small piece of wire, which is holding back a striking pin. So that's how the time pencil works. And basically, the thicker the wire, the longer the time pencil will run for. So it's a very, very crude fuse mechanism. Stauffenberg does that. It's interesting that, as I said before, he has some total of three fingers. You could say, well, two fingers and a thumb.

But he insisted on fusing the charge himself. So he had this sort of modified pair of pliers with which he could crush the vial and set the time pencil. But he insisted on doing it himself. And this says something about the man. You know, he had his adjutant with him who had, you know,

functioning hands and the right number of fingers. And he could have said, you know, could you do that for me? But he didn't. He wanted to do it himself. He wanted to be the man, you know, the man to do it, to take ownership of it. Not in an arrogant way, I don't think, but because he wanted to take ownership of the operation.

So he's fusing this time pencil, sticking it into the explosive, ready to slip it into his bag. At the same time, changing his shirt. Then the adjutant knocks on the door and says, Colonel Stauffenberg, they're waiting for you. You have to hurry up sort of thing. So it's stressful. You can imagine the stress he's under. He's finally got the go after two false starts.

He's just set the time pencil fuse, which is a pretty vague, vague thing. The one that he had was set for 10 minutes, right? So could have been any, could go off, you know, really anywhere with heat. It could go off quicker because the reaction would be quicker. So it could go anywhere from about sort of seven minutes to 15 minutes. It could explode. So he's setting this thing, changing his shirt. There's a knock on the door. They're waiting for you, you know, so okay, okay, I'm coming.

He's stressed. He's utterly stressed. And he forgets in the process, he forgets to put the second charge into his briefcase, right? So he's only got one of those clam charges in the briefcase. Had he put the second charge in, it would have exploded anyway, and it would have been a much bigger explosion. It would have exploded sympathetically, as they say. So he didn't need to fuse the second one. He could have just put it in his bag. But because of the stress, he doesn't do it. Very telling point.

Anyway, turns up at the situation conference. He's already said to them, you know, because of my injuries, I'm hard of hearing. So I need a place next to Hitler, right? Cunning. So he's given a place next to Hitler.

He comes in, he puts his bag down and there's this huge sort of oak conference table, as you can imagine, big conference table. And it has what I always call slab, solid slab legs. So not like individual legs, but big sort of slab, solid legs. And he puts his briefcase down containing the bomb just on the inside of one of those slab legs.

And then he mutters something about having to make a phone call, which is all quite normal because people are always coming in and going out of those conferences all the time. He's muttered something about making a phone call, disappears out again. So he knows that's going to go off probably in about five minutes. He then watches from the outside, supposedly taking a phone call and watches from the outside as the bomb goes off. Absolute chaos. You know, the windows are blown out. You know, the room is wrecked.

They're screaming. Nobody knows what's going on. And he is absolutely convinced from having watched this happen from 50 yards away. He's absolutely convinced that nobody could have survived in that room and then makes his excuses and bluffs his way past the guards and with his adjutant gets back on his plane, heads for Berlin.

in the hope that the necessary message has got through. They had an inside man at the telephone exchange at Rastenberg. They had an inside man there who was supposed to send a message to Berlin and basically say, all systems go. So all of that had to have happened. And then he's flying back to Berlin. He's three hours out of the loop, but he's convinced that he's killed Hitler. We know, of course, that he didn't. So the bomb exploded at 1242.

The key aspect of all of this is that one of those presents, a Colonel named Heinz Brandt, who actually dies that very day because he's one of the, one of the three that killed, he evidently, you know, kicked the briefcase. The briefcase got in his way and he moved it. So while Stauffenberg is out of the room, he moved it to the other side of the slab leg. Okay. Carries on with the conference. They're all leaning over the, over the map table and so on. It then explodes and,

Um, three people are killed pretty much instantly, basically die the same afternoon. One of them being Colonel Brandt who'd moved the bag. Um, I think from memory, Brandt had, had his legs blown off. Um, there was another, another senior officer there who was essentially eviscerated, um, by the blast. And the third, the third guy was the stenographer who was keeping all the records of the discussions. So those three are, are mortally wounded and, you know, died the same afternoon. And a fourth, um,

a member of the party that was present. His name was Rudolf Schmunt, another colonel adjutant at Rastenberg. He died of his wounds in October of that year, so a couple of months later.

So, four people ultimately are killed. Hitler is quite badly injured actually. I mean, you know, cuts and contusions. He's leaning over the table when the bomb goes off. So, to some extent, the table itself shields him from the blast. But he still has loads of, you know, oak splinters in his legs, for example, you know,

Some of our listeners might have seen that sort of famous picture of someone holding up Hitler's trousers after 20th of July with those sort of shredded trousers. That shows you how much of the blast, you know, would have gone into his legs, his oak splinters and so on. So all of the four that were killed

We're all at the far end of the table. So that's where the blast was. And it was on the other side of that slab leg because Brandt moved it. So had the bomb been on the inside of that slab leg, the blast would have come this way towards Hitler, you know, from right to left. And that would have, you know, would probably have meant that it would have been much, much more serious injuries for Hitler himself, maybe even fatal.

So the two crucial aspects here are the first one that Stauffenberg, in his stress, had forgotten to put the second charge in because that would have made it a bigger charge, bigger explosion. And secondarily, the bag itself got moved. So Hitler was basically protected by the table itself rather than, you know, in the line of the blast. So those two factors basically save Hitler's life.

So there he is, you know, he's got perforated eardrum, you know, contusions, bruises, lots of splinters and so on. And already when Mussolini comes that afternoon, he's already saying, you know, I've been preserved by Providence, you know, for great things. You know, that's how he viewed these things. It was always a sign from a higher power. He never really talked about God. He used to talk about Providence.

which was just some vague higher power. So he was already sort of building that narrative or at least making that narrative to himself the same afternoon.

Just a very quick point, which I think is important to kind of get in at this stage. Is it fair to say that from the moment the bomb goes off and it doesn't kill Hitler, the plot is finished? I mean, there's absolutely no... It's interesting, isn't it? Because we'll come on to what happens in Berlin and Paris to a certain extent in a moment. But is that fair to say it requires Hitler to be killed if he survives or better off and sooner or later the plot's going to fail?

I think that is fair comment. I mean, the key thing here is that you could effectively, because of that news, the radio blackout and so on, the message blackout that they tried to institute, you could utilize that blackout effectively.

in Berlin in the short term to potentially take power if you were kind of robust about it and, you know, go ahead and determined and ruthless and all of those things. Unfortunately, most of the plotters weren't any of those things. That's one of the fundamental problems. So you could have just exploited the not knowing, right?

for the short term. And that might have been enough to get you over the line and take control. But yeah, for a lot of those, a lot of those involved Hitler's survival, which meant that all of those oaths of allegiance still, you know, were still valid and still, still carried, carried weight.

Hitler's survival meant, you know, the game was up, you know, it was lost. So it was kind of, it was kind of predicated on him being killed and then trying to take power. So there's some wriggle room and gray area there, but not very much. So fundamentally, I'd say you're absolutely right.

Okay. And Stauffenberg does... I mean, what's extraordinary for me is that he actually gets out of the concentric rings of security at the Wolf's Lair after the explosion's gone off, which is at the point at which you would have thought they're going to shut down everything. No one moves. We don't know for the Satans here. And yet he...

It's extraordinary, isn't it? He gets through these multiple layers of security, gets to his plane. No one grounds all the planes at the nearby Rastenberg airfield and is able to fly back. Now, as you've already pointed out, the game's probably up at this point, but it's still quite dramatic, isn't it? What happens next? Because he's eventually going to get back to the HQ of the replacement army. And that's the Bendler block in Berlin, Germany.

You can still go to that location today, can't you? There's a plaque on the wall commemorating the bomb plot. Yeah, a very good museum as well. Very good museum to all aspects of the German resistance. Yeah, it's very much worth seeing. So just run us through the denouement. What happens next in Berlin?

Well, there's a difference between what happened and what should have happened. And what should have happened was that the message would go out, coded message would go out from a chap called Phil Giebel, who was their man on the inside in the communication center, which would go out to Berlin and basically say, all systems go, the bomb's gone off, do your thing, right? That message was garbled. They then shut down communications anyway.

And then bear in mind, of course, as I said before, that the fellow plotters in Berlin are all rather nervous and twitchy and slightly ambivalent and don't really want to sort of put their necks on the line. So they basically hesitate. So they basically wait and think, well, we haven't really heard what's going on. And at this time, basically, you know, Stauffenberg's in the air for three hours. So when he lands mid-afternoon, you know, somewhere around four o'clock in Berlin, he

There's no car waiting for him, for example. You can imagine, what the hell? I'm supposed to be leading a coup against the regime. What's happened here? No car waiting for him, no driver. He then makes a couple of phone calls and he realizes that his fellow conspirators in Berlin have done precisely nothing. They've been agonizing and wringing their hands for three hours and wondering what they should do and becoming increasingly twitchy.

So he then gets driven back to the Bendele Block, which is in a state of uproar because there's a sort of core of plotters at the Bendele Block. There's also lots of other personnel working in the... It's an ordinary office of the German army. There's a lot of personnel there who are none the wiser and are very loyal to the regime. So they're all working kind of cheek by jowl. So within that sort of quite weird scenario, they basically have to then put Operation Valkyrie into operation and

which means that, you know, Stauffenberg is on the phone and he's sending telexes and he's, you know, he's basically grabbing the whole thing, the whole conspiracy by the neck and saying, right, this is what we're going to do. And he goes and does it. So he gives it briefly the sort of vitality and vigor that it needed to have at quarter to one in the afternoon rather than four o'clock.

And he does, you know, there are some notable successes. So, you know, forces loyal to Valkyrie and that, when we explain that, it doesn't necessarily mean they know what's going on. These are just replacement army forces that have been called up and given the order, you know, go and take the army, go and surround the army headquarters wherever it is or such and such a ministry, go and do that. Right. So they go and do it. They're in ignorance of the wider intention of the coup. Right.

But they do it anyway. And this is why the survival of Hitler is so important. Because had Hitler died, then there's a chance that those soldiers might have carried on doing what they were doing in sort of half ignorance of the wider plot. But once it was clear that Hitler had survived, the game was up.

So they're basically phoning everybody, galvanizing everybody, saying, right, go and do this, go and do that, and sending out telexes and phoning everyone. And they have some successes. They briefly take Paris. The military command posts in Paris are taken by forces loyal to Valkyrie. The same thing in Vienna, I think, briefly, and I think also briefly in Breslau.

from memory. So they have a couple of successes and they do surround various ministries in Berlin as well. Most notable among them, Goebbels' propaganda ministry. And it does seem to be going reasonably well. And then of course, you have the problem that word comes through definitively that Hitler survived.

And there's a wonderful sort of encapsulation of that scene, which is one of those forces, one of those leaders of the forces that's doing that surrounding of various ministries and so on, who's actually surrounding the propaganda ministry where Goebbels is, is a member of the Großdeutschland Division, which is an elite Wehrmacht division.

but still fiercely loyal. And he goes into Goebbels' office and he basically says, you're under arrest, I have orders to arrest you. And Goebbels said, what do you mean? And he says, well, the narrative they've given is that there's a coup by the SS and they are to secure all sort of outposts. So he goes into Goebbels and explains this and Goebbels says, no, no, no. Listen, there's been assassination attempt on Hitler and then he gets Hitler on the phone.

and plays it to this chap. His name is Major Rehmer. And Rehmer, kind of that point, you can see him, you know, he like physically kind of comes to attention. And at that point, you can see the thing is crumbling because, you know, the narrative they've been given is not true. Hitler's obviously survived whatever's gone on. And then, you know, there's a radio broadcast where Hitler says, you know, he's been attacked by this group of adventurers and bandits.

and they must not be allowed to take power. So, you know, with that, basically the thing collapses. So those piecemeal gains that they had fall away. They, you know, the troops sort of melt away. They go back to barracks, whatever.

And that essentially is it. And your left, you know, it's almost like an explosion which briefly comes out and then closes right back into its very core, which was the Bendler block, right? So the plotters at the Bendler block, that's where it's sort of the final sort of scene is. That same evening, the final scene plays out. And it's kind of tragic because there's various, as I said, there's various troops within the Bendler block who are loyal to the regime, right?

And when it becomes clear that there's something afoot, you know, there are shots fired, for example, and Stauffenberg takes a bullet in the shoulder in one of these scuffles.

And at one point he complains, he said, they've all left me in the lurch, meaning his fellow conspirators. So he did try and galvanize them briefly, but it didn't work and they've left him in the lurch. And they all start, you know, to some extent sort of reverse squirreling, we would call it now, I suppose, to try and save their own skins. Most notable among them in that respect was Schaffenberg's commander, who was General Fromm.

who tried to arrest the plotters. I mean, he was kind of in on it. He was always vacillating and always very equivocal, as many of them were. But then when it all goes wrong, he swiftly kind of, you know, about face and he orders them to be arrested. More than that, he orders them to be tried by court martial to be carried out that very afternoon by him, right? So he's basically covering his own tracks.

Carries out this court martial against the four plotters from within his own office, effectively. Five, sorry, five. And lo and behold, they're all sentenced to death for treason. So the five of them that are found guilty of treason, sentenced to death, one of them was General Beck.

He requested the opportunity, as he put it, to do the right thing and was given a pistol and basically told to get on with it. He then botched his own suicide and had to be dispatched by a sergeant. And actually, if you ever go to the Bendler block in Berlin, you can ask one of the guides to show you the spot at which Beck killed himself. It's kind of strangely moving.

Because it feels very, a lot of the sort of decor and stuff is not really changed from then. So it does feel a bit like you're standing in the place. And the remaining four who were Stauffenberg himself, his adjutants Werner von Heften, Merz von Quirnheim and Friedrich Olbricht.

They were all taken out that same night, one by one, into the courtyard of the Bendelblock, which is where the plaque is now on the wall, if you ever go there. There was a pile of building sand there. And one by one, they're led out in front of a firing squad, which had been taken from members of the Großdeutschland Division. So again, this is Rehmer's own division. And they're shot one by one.

Stauffenberg, it is said, it is disputed, but it is said that he declared just prior to his execution, long live secret Germany. So long live that Germany that he was trying to preserve, that Germany of Stefan Georg, the honourable sort of cultural nation that will be there forever, that no sort of political shenanigans can undermine Germany.

he is said to have called out, uh, long live secret Germany, um, prior to his death. But as I said, it is disputed. Finally, Roger, um, there were a number of other people, of course, involved in the plot and they're gradually, you know, the net widens and they're taken in the families of quite a lot of people, including Stauffenberg are also arrested and kept in concentration camps for the duration of, of the war. Um,

But there is one particularly famous casualty of the plot. And I just want to ask you quickly about him. And that, of course, is Erwin Rommel, who has also fought in Tunisia. He was ultimately the commander of Stauffenberg there. And he comes back. Is it pretty clear that he knew of the plot and was supportive of it? That's certainly the suggestion. It's an interesting one.

I'm not entirely sure this has been entirely completely cleared up. Now he of course was injured. Um, again, strafing attack. He was in his staff car, I think in Normandy, um, was injured a couple of days from memory. I think it was the 17th of July. He was injured a couple of days before Steffenberg did his thing.

and was himself then confined to a hospital bed for a time. Now, in the aftermath of 20th of July, as you said, there is this sort of growing sort of dragnet. So they've got the plotters themselves. They have the families of the plotters. They have anyone that had shared an office with the plotters, and so it went on. And then you've got the wider political conspiracy. So they round that up, and they end up rounding up something like 7,000 people.

the majority of whom incidentally are shot. So it's something like 5,000 are shot

or executed in various ways. Some of them in the most gruesome way, you know, hanged with piano wire and that sort of thing. But as the wider plot or the wider investigation sort of goes wider and wider, you end up with, you know, things like document caches of, you know, who we've spoken to and who will be, you know, a representative of the new post-Hitler government and all that sort of thing. So, of course, you pick those people up.

Very, very few people actually escaped the dragnet. There are a couple of examples. Once Hans Gisevius, who went on to write a very good memoir of it, and Fabian von Schlabrendorf, who was actually Tresckl's adjutant, and he survived the whole thing. Bizarrely, he survived because he was being tried at the People's Court, which was the sort of vehicle for all of this, in February of 1945.

On the same day that Berlin was raided by the United States Air Force and the courtroom was hit and the sort of shrieking judge, this is Judge Freisler, who's the famous shrieking judge. You know, he was killed in the air raid and Schlagmordorf survived. And they did try and sort of rearrange the trial and so on. But then the end of the war intervened and lo and behold, he survived the end of the war, you know, still in a prison cell.

It's quite a remarkable story. But yeah, so Rommel was approached in October. So as late as October of 44. So a couple of months later after the events we're talking about. And it's basically by a couple of, I think they must be Gestapo operatives. I'd have to check. But they basically come and they say, well, you know, you've been implicated in this wider investigation. Your name has come up. Now, this could be that

It could be entirely innocent that Rommel had perhaps a reputation for being critical of the regime. So that had been noted by the plotters and they said, well, maybe he's someone that we could work with. But Rommel was pretty loyal to Hitler. I mean, he commanded, you know, Hitler had numerous bodyguard units, right?

In the early days of the war, Rommel had commanded one of those bodyguard units. So he was a pretty loyal soldier in that respect. I think he was certainly disillusioned with the progress of the war and with the leadership of the war. That's probably no secret. So what I think what's most likely, and I'm happy to be corrected if there's anything more up to date on this, but what I think is most likely is that because of that critical position that he had, you know, he'd come to the attention of the plotters as someone who might be amenable.

And he was probably either mentioned in interrogation or he was on the paper trail somewhere. So they went to him and said, you've been implicated. Now, you could go to trial, but what would that do for your reputation? What would it do for your family's reputation? Or you could do the right thing. And of course, he goes and does the right thing, commits suicide.

And that was the end of Rommel. So it's still, as far as I know, and I said, this was a few years ago when I, when I did this book and I haven't really revisited it, I'll be honest, but as far as I remember, and as far as I knew at the time, I think, I think he was implicated in a way that was, that was relatively innocent, if you like. Um, it might be that, that, that, that, uh, you know, further information has come to light, but as I remember, that was the, that was the reason.

But it does show you how wide that sort of dragnet went and how ruthless it was.

that someone like Rommel could basically be persuaded that the best thing to do in his situation was to commit suicide rather than face down any sort of accusation of complicity. Yeah, and not least because he was still one of the best generals Germany had and they were going to need him more than ever in the months ahead. That's absolutely fascinating, Roger. Thanks so much for that. Well, that was great stuff from Roger. Do join us on Friday for another roundup of the news from Ukraine and next Wednesday, of course, for another episode of Battleground 44. Goodbye.