Posted on 07/20/2021 9:15:12 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
Minutes after midnight this date in 1944, four senior Wehrmacht officers who had come within an ace of murdering Adolf Hitler less than 12 hours earlier were summarily shot in Berlin — the first of thousands executed for the most famous assassination attempt on the Fuhrer.
One of those rare moments where historical epochs (arguably) turn on the minutest exigencies of chance, the so-called July 20 plot had seen Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg insinuate a bomb into Hitler’s conference room in modern-day eastern Poland, then fly back to Berlin to mount a coup d’etat.
Blam
Stauffenberg had every reason as he left Wolfsschanze to believe the devastating blast at 12:42 p.m. must have killed the Nazi dictator. Little did he know that another officer at the table where the high command was plotting strategy for the eastern front had, in the name of legroom, shifted the deadly satchel to the other side of a heavy oak table support — shielding Hitler from the brunt of the explosion.
Four men died. Hitler had hearing loss, an injury to his right arm, and one hell of a grudge.
Stauffenberg weaseled out of the confused bunker and flew back to Berlin, expecting that his confederates were even then launching Operation Valkyrie — a contingency plan for martial law in the case of civic disturbance that the conspirators intended to use to mount a coup.
Failure to Communicate
Control and distribution of information was not the least of the many threads in the tapestry of July 20, 1944. Hitler had risen to power on his artful grasp of propaganda; today, his headquarters’ mastery of communications would overpower the putschists’ rank amateurism....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
That guy had balls of steel. Big steel ones.
And he got off easy with a firing squad.
He came from an old school Prussian family. His family was part of the military class in pre-nazi Germany. Born and raised to be a soldier from an early age, he saw what was happening to his country and tried to do something before Germany was destroyed. He failed and Hitler made sure everybody and everything fought to the bitter end. Hitler turned Germany into an open grave.
CC
If Hitler was dropping atomic bombs to win the war, Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg would have lined up for another medal.
And yes I know Hitler survived attempts on his life prior to the war.
The most notable was in November 1939 at the BurgerBrauKeller on the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch where after giving a speech Hitler inexplicably left the hall barely fifteen minutes before the bomb, which had been planted in a column behind the speakers platform went off killing a number of SA men. Carpenter Georg Elser was charged with the crime and was executed in April 1845.
Typo. Meant to say’’would they have tried to kill Hitler?’’
But given this opposition circle’s years-long failure to take effective action against Hitler while he went from successful crime to successful crime, …
Hmmmmm…
Probably not. As assassins, they were necessarily opportunistic. But as coup plotters, they needed more than mere opportunity, they needed a political rationale, which a ‘successful’ Hitler would have denied them.
Indeed. IIRC, piano wire around the neck in front of whirring cameras was the fate of a few.
Actually, plotters within the Wehrmacht had been planning to remove Hitler since 1938.
Their hope had been that the Western powers would have held out at Munich, whereupon they planned to put him uner arrest and try him for the abuses of his power and his crimes. Unfortunately, this plan went sour... :-(
I’ll never understand why some German soldier or officer didn’t simply pull out a pistol and shoot the schweinhund in the head.
Well, there were always some bodyguards around in Hitler’s presence.
Furthermore, needless to say why, no weapons were allowed in the presence of the dictator (as could be assumed with any other tyrant as well :-)).
Needless to say, this was not shown on propaganda photos.
All crows under the sky are black, as the Chinese say. Not just in this regard...
One attempt though never carried out was to have been during a presentation of some new uniforms a German officer with a bomb in his uniform was supposed to blow himself and Hitler up but it was never carried out. Another attempt was made on Hitler's private plane with two bottles of mineral water fitted with a British made fuse that was supposed to explode when the plane reached a certain altitude but the plane never reached the required altitude for the fuses to work. The guy had the devil's own luck for sure.
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