Dan Snow's History Hit - Operation Valkyrie: The Attempted Assassination of Hitler

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

On the 80th anniversary of the 20th of July Plot, Dan explores the dramatic events when members of Germany's military and political elite attempted to kill the führer and launch Operation Valkyrie to overthrow his government.Joining us today is the historian and journalist Nigel Jones, author of Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Assassinate Hitler. All told, over 40 attempts were made to assassinate Adolf Hitler - and those are just the ones that we know of. Nigel takes us through some of the most famous attempts to assassinate Hitler and the 20th July Plot that came the closest to toppling the Third Reich.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In Norse Viking mythology, a Valkyrie was a chooser of the slain. They were female figures who hovered above the battlefield, plucking the souls of fallen warriors, their lifeblood poured into the soil, and taking them up to Odin's feasting hall, Valhalla. There, among friends, among the best and brightest of generations of warriors, they feast and booze forever. Well, until the great cataclysm of Ragnarok and the Valkyries bear them mead.

Now, the Nazis absolutely love a bit of Norse mythology. There is not one name or idea or event from Norse Viking history that was not co-opted, unfortunately, by the Nazis, and Valkyrie is no exception. Valkyrie was a code word, a single word that would bring about a revolution. It would trigger a coup against Hitler, a changing of the guard in Nazi Germany. Eighty years ago, as Germany crashed from one disastrous setback to the next during the Second World War, a group of officers came together to try and kill Adolf Hitler. That one word, Valkyrie, delivered over a telephone line from the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters,

meant that the Fuhrer was dead, he'd been killed, and across his empire it was time for elements of the army to seize control, particularly to jail, well, card-carrying Nazis, passionate believers in the cause, members of the SS and Gestapo. It was the 20th of July, 1944, just a few weeks after D-Day, just a few weeks after the catastrophe on the Eastern Front, Operation Bagration.

The bomb did go off in Hitler's headquarters. Hitler was blown off his feet and the code word Valkyrie was given. To hear more about what happened that day, what happened next, and indeed the several attempts to kill Hitler before then, I'm talking to Nigel Jones in this podcast. He wrote the book Countdown to Valkyrie, the July Plot to Assassinate Hitler. He's a historian, a journalist, a biographer. He's the founding editor of the BBC History magazine. And he's going to take us all through it, 80 years on. Enjoy.

T minus 10. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Nigel, great to have you on the podcast.

Great to be here, Dan. Thank you. Hitler was lucky to have made it to 1944 at all, wasn't he? I mean, talk me through some of the earlier assassination attempts, some of which came very close. Yes, the most famous one of all was in November 1939 in a beer hall in Munich, the same beer hall where he launched his beer hall putsch in 1923, where he would go every year to commemorate that putsch. And a lone wolf, a single man called Georg Elser, a communist, went into the beer hall for days and days ahead of it and chiseled out a hole in the pillar behind

the podium from which Hitler would speak every year and placed in there a time bomb, very, very carefully conducted. He was a watchmaker, so he could do that sort of thing. And he stole explosives and put the whole thing together all on his own without any help whatsoever, because he hated Hitler and thought Hitler was leading the world into war. And it did explode on time on November the 9th but Hitler I don't know why perhaps because he had some sense of impending danger had cut his speech short and had left the beer hall only minutes before the bomb went off so it killed quite a few people it brought the whole beer hall down in ruins never never used again. And Hitler

survived. And of course, they arrested Georg Elzey, who was trying to cross into Switzerland, and tortured him because they wanted to narrate a story that he was in league with the British Secret Services. And it was all a plot by MI6 SIS, which of course was nonsense. It was entirely his own work. But Hitler seemed to have the devil's own luck. But isn't that strange? Because there's a story that Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary, specifically said, we're not in the business of assassinating, because various plots or ideas were stressed to him about taking out Adolf Hitler. And he said, well, we're not in the business of assassinating political leaders.

Exactly so. And on the very day that that bomb went off on November the 9th, 1939, i.e. very, very early in the war, a couple of months after the outbreak of war, the two heads of the British secret services in Holland, in the Netherlands, were kidnapped by the Nazis. The kidnap was ordered by Heydrich and Himmler. These two secret service spymasters had been in talks with Germans who were actually in the SD, in the intelligence service of the SS, but they were posing as high-ranking officers in the army who wanted to bring Hitler down. And these talks were total con, of course, and they kidnapped these two guys. They held them in concentration camps for the rest of the war. They did actually survive the war because they were intending to put them in a

show trial with Georg Elser, with the guy that had set the Munich bomb. And this disaster, the Venlo incident, as it was called, because it happened in the border town of Venlo, put the British off any sort of support for the German resistance against Hitler. So they never, ever had any truck with acceding to the resistance's pleas that they would give them support. There were conspiracies against Hitler as early as 1938, the time of the Munich conference, for example. The army stood ready to launch a putsch and get rid of Hitler. But they were, of course, undermined by Chamberlain giving way to Hitler's demands that he surrender Czechoslovakia. So there was no support from London at all for the conspiracies against Hitler for the rest of the war. Your story about the beer hall,

though, is tragic. He left 13 minutes before the bomb went off, didn't he? And with him was Goebbels, minutes before the bomb went off, didn't it? And with him was Goebbels, Heydrich, Hess, Streicher, Himmler. I mean, it would have taken out the entire senior cadre of the Nazi party in Germany. It would have taken out quite a few of them, but most of all, it would have definitely killed Hitler because the actual pillar that he was standing in front of it exploded and brought the whole roof down. And Georg Elser himself survived captivity right to the last days of the war. He was executed in Dachau in April 1945, having survived up to that point, because they were always intending to put him on a show trial with these British agents after the war. And the two British agents did survive the war and were released at the end of the war.

If anything, that assassination attempt seems to have boosted Hitler's confidence. He said, it's proof that Providence wants me to reach my goal. So it's actually not only failed to take Hitler out, but may have emboldened him. Indeed. I mean, he did say that if an assassin was determined enough, there was nothing really that a victim could do to prevent his assassination. But he made it as difficult as possible by constantly altering his timetables, leaving events early. There was one, for example, a would-be suicide bomber, a high-ranking officer called Gerdorf, Rudolf Gerdorf. He was accompanying Hitler around a display of captured Soviet weaponry in Berlin in 1943.

And he expected that Hitler would stay there for about half an hour looking at all these exhibits. And in fact, he rushed through in about five minutes and rushed out the other end. And Gerstorff had in fact primed a bomb in his pocket to explode in about 10 minutes time. And he had to rush to the loo and deactivate the bomb after Hitler left the exhibition. So that was yet another occasion when Hitler came absolutely within an ace of being killed and was sort of protected by the devil's own luck. So that was 1943. Let's now talk about the 1944 plot. Did they learn from these previous attempts? They did get a bit disillusioned and depressed about that. And the decisive factor in reactivating the military conspiracy against Hitler was the entry into the conspirators' ranks of Klaus von Stauffenberg,

this young, aristocratic, handsome, very talented military officer who had not really been involved in the conspiracy. And then he suddenly arrived. He had been seriously wounded in North Africa in the closing stages of the North African campaign in Tunisia. He had lost an eye, one hand, and all but three fingers on the remaining hand. So he'd been maimed in an allied airstrike against a convoy that he was trying to direct. And he came back to Berlin, and he was given the post of Chief of Staff of the Reserve Army, the Airsets Army, which was like, you could say it was rather like the Home Guard in Britain. It was a scratch force that was primarily intended to put down any rebellion by foreign workers. And then there were about a million foreign workers, slave laborers working in the Reich to fill the

place of all the men who'd gone off to war in vital industries. And the idea was that this reserve army would activate a plan called Valkyrie to put down this rebellion. And Stauffenberg and his friends changed the Valkyrie plan to make it a putsch against the Nazis. And they were intending also to kill Hitler at the same time as launching a military coup, a military putsch, not only in Germany, but also in all European countries that have been occupied by the Nazis in Czechoslovakia, in France, in Norway, they were going to launch a putsch on the same day as they killed Hitler. And that is what almost happened on July the 20th. And what drove Stauffenberg to outright opposition, resistance against Hitler?

A mixture of factors, I think. He did come from the aristocratic officer corps, of which there were many of them by that time were opposed to Hitler. They did regard the Nazis as vulgar, brawling, lower class thugs. But another aspect of it was he saw for himself how disastrous the campaign had been on the Eastern Front and that Hitler's micromanaging and his insistence on holding ground had caused, among other things, the ruination of the Stalingrad offensive and then sacrifice the 6th Army at Stalingrad. Stauffenberg himself didn't see any of the massacres of the Jews that prompted some of his fellow officers. So there was less, I think, of a moral imperative among him. He just thought that Hitler was leading Germany to utter disaster on the military front. And so how do they go about trying to kill Adolf Hitler, who presumably was very well protected? He was indeed very well protected. And the remarkable thing was that they had to use Stauffenberg, who was a maimed man. Don't forget, he only had three fingers on one hand left.

The other hand was missing, and he was blind in one eye. And the reason that he was the assassin, as well as the leader of the coup, of the purge, was that he, as chief of staff of the reserve army, he had access to Hitler at his daily military conferences. So he was invited quite frequently to have military conferences with Hitler. First of all, when Hitler was at his mountain retreat, the Berghof near Berchtesgaden, and then later when he was at his Eastern Front headquarters, the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, as the Germans called it, which is now in Poland, on the Eastern Front. He was called to military conferences on several occasions. And for some reason, although he took his bomb along in a briefcase, a plastic explosive,

which was primed and ready to go. He didn't explode it on these earlier occasions. We don't really know why that was. It may have been that he was waiting for Himmler, Goering and other Nazi leaders to all be present in the conference room with Hitler and to kill them all at one fell swoop. But in any event, on July the 20th, on this final day when he was summoned to a conference, he did decide and he did put it through and it did explode. The bomb went off, but fatally Hitler survived the blast. Let's break down that day. So there in the Wolf's Lair, his Eastern Front headquarters, what's the setup there? It was compared by Jodl, one of Hitler's

leading generals, to a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp. It was a strange encampment surrounded by two rings of barbed wire. It was very, very difficult to get into and out of. You needed special clearance and pass to get there. It was in the forests of East Prussia, the ancient Germanic heartlands, which are now, as I say, in Poland, not that far from the sea. It was very uncomfortable in summer, crowded with midges and mosquitoes. There were lots of lakes around. And the only person who seemed to tolerate it and quite enjoy being there was Hitler himself. And it was a series of bunkers, concrete bunkers. But the scene of the bombing was a hut, a wooden and concrete hut in the outside with all the windows open,

which, of course, lessened the force of the blast when the bomb went off. And because it was such a hot day, they didn't hold the conferences. They usually did in an underground concrete bunker. They held it in this hut on the outside with all the windows flung wide open. And so, as I say, that lessened the force of the explosion. And Staufenberg, how does he get a bomb into that compound? Right. He carried the bomb.

The bomb consisted of two lumps of plastic, explosives, looking rather like, I suppose, the size of a small book of plastic explosives with what was called a time pencil, a fuse plunged into the plastic. And the plastic was rather like child's plasticine of today. It had the same sort of consistency and indeed the same sort of appearance. And he carried this bomb. He had been summoned to a conference, to a midday conference on July the 20th. He carried the bomb in with him. He wasn't searched because, of course, he was a high-ranking German officer. He was trusted that he wouldn't have a bomb in his briefcase. But because of his injuries, he wasn't able, in the time, in the limited time allowed him, he wasn't able to prime both bombs. So he was only able to prime one of them. He made an excuse to retire to

an anteroom to change his shirt. He said he got all hot and sweaty on that day and he wanted to change his shirt. And he needed the assistance of his aide de camp because he only had, of course, change his shirt. And he needed the assistance of his aide de camp, because he only had, of course, one hand. And that was his excuse. But he only had time in about five minutes to prime one of the bombs. And already people were getting a little bit suspicious. The briefcase was very, very heavy. And one of the officers accompanying him offered to let him carry the briefcase into the conference room. So he arrives at the conference room and the conference is already underway. Hitler was already there. He knew Stauffenberg, he met Stauffenberg, he photographed with Stauffenberg three or four days before July the 20th. So he knew who he was

dealing with. And Stauffenberg was supposed to make a report about the readiness of the reserve army. But another general had already started making his report to the conference. Stauffenberg then makes an excuse to leave the conference room with the primed bomb under the table, under this large conference table with its oak supports. And he claimed that he had to take a conference call from Berlin about what was happening in Berlin. And in fact, he didn't do that. He just waited about 50 yards away for the bomb to go off. Another officer called Colonel Brandt leans down, takes the briefcase and moves it because it was in his way, this heavy briefcase, moves it behind one of the two oak supports of the conference table and this has the effect of

shielding Hitler from the main force of the blast. At 12.42 the bomb goes off with a mighty force. Four people are either killed or fatally injured, mortally injured. As a result Hitler himself is blown to the floor, his trousers are shredded, his eardrums both burst, and he has a bottom so bruised he compared it to a baboon's arse afterwards. But effectively, he is still alive, so he has suffered only superficial injuries. Stauffenberg, who's watching from afar, assumes, because of the force of the blast that Hitler has died, jumps into his car, bluffs his way out of the two enclosures, the inner enclosure and the outer enclosure, and beats a headlong retreat, hell for leather in his car, back to the airport from which

he had come, and takes a plane back to Berlin to launch the coup, the putsch, in Berlin. a plane back to Berlin to launch the coup, the putsch in Berlin. Just quickly, if the bomb hadn't been moved by that other German officer, was it close enough to Hitler that you think it certainly would have killed the man? I think it would have killed the man, yes. And certainly as well, if both bombs had been primed, if he'd had time to prime both bombs, that would have killed Hitler as well. Hitler would come within an ace of being killed by an exploding bomb. And so much so that Stauffenberg assumed

that he had died. So when Stauffenberg gets back to Berlin, he's first of all angry that his co-conspirators had not launched their putsch as soon as they heard that there'd been an explosion. and not launch their putsch as soon as they heard that there'd been an explosion. He's angry about that, but he goes around assuring all and sundry that Hitler was dead and the reports that were coming in from Rastenberg, from the Wolf's Lair, that Hitler had survived were lies. Well, how long does it take him to fly to Berlin? There's a plane waiting for him at the airfield, is there? Yes, the same plane that he arrived in is waiting to take him away again to fly it's about an hour and a half's flight away from the wolf's lair back to berlin

so he's he's out of the picture for about three hours and these are vital hours because a signal had been sent from one of the conspirators at the wolf's lair a chap called fel giebel who was in charge of signals and communications from the wolf's lair, a chap called Felgiebel, who was in charge of signals and communications from the Wolf's Lair, he'd given an ambiguous signal because he himself had seen Hitler staggering out of the conference room after the blast. So he knew that Hitler had survived and saw him walking around after the explosion. He knew he wasn't even seriously injured. The conspirators back in Berlin, they were completely confused about whether Hitler was alive or dead. They'd never ever allowed for this possibility that a

bomb would go off. And so the conspiracy couldn't be concealed anymore, but that Hitler would survive the explosion. They'd always assumed that if there was an explosion, that Hitler would be killed by it. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking about Valkyrie. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. And what was their job? Let's come back to these conspirators in Berlin. Who are they and why is Stauffenberg angry at them? What are they supposed to do when they hear about the bomb? They are supposed to launch a coup, the Valkyrie plot, of which the signal was the word Valkyrie, a coup in Berlin and other conspirators elsewhere in Europe, in Paris and in Prague primarily, launching a simultaneous coup in which they would arrest leading Nazis and also members of the SS and the SD and the Gestapo, who were rightly thought to be most loyal to the Nazi regime, they were going to arrest them and take over power. They had a government in waiting. They had well-known civilians who were going to take particular

posts. They'd already assigned cabinet posts to some of these opposition politicians and military posts to some of the generals who were in the conspiracy. It was a very wide-ranging conspiracy. We're talking about scores of high-ranking officers in the German military, primarily in the army, not the Luftwaffe, not the Kriegsmarine, the navy. They were much more Nazified, those two services, than the army. The army had many, many more anti-Nazi officers, mainly from the old Prussian military corps, who regarded the Nazis, apart from anything else, as lower-class vermin. They had a snobbish disregard for the Nazis, apart from the moral objection to the crimes that the Nazis had been committing. And they were also involved in the conspiracy, on the fringes of the conspiracy,

socialists and communists, who the conspirators had made contact with, and as well, theologians, priests and ministers from the Catholic and Protestant churches. They were an important element in the conspiracy. And obviously their input was moral. They objected to the Nazi crimes against the Jews and other minorities. And also it's probably important to say that the conspirators intended to introduce a broad-based government. There were elements in it who were nationalists, who would even like to keep some of the territories that Hitler had conquered, that the Nazis had conquered in the post-Hitler regime, and then down to communists who, of course,

had wished to introduce a socialist regime in Germany. So it was a very politically wide-ranging field that the conspirators embraced. And so Stauffenberg lands in Berlin, finds that they haven't done what they're supposed to. What are they supposed to do? They're supposed to have announced that Hitler was dead and that this home army was taking control. Yes, they were supposed to have sent signals to military units in Berlin and also in Paris and in Prague that Hitler was dead, that a coup had been launched. Their story was that it was elements in the regime had killed Hitler. So all the soldiers who were participating in this coup were being lied to, essentially. They were being told that the Gestapo and the SS had launched a coup, not

actually anti-Nazi elements who were really in charge of the coup. So army units in Berlin started to move. And in Paris, even more successfully, the conspirators in Paris managed to arrest hundreds of SS, SD and Gestapo officers in Paris. They locked them up because they thought that Hitler had been killed, that the putsch had succeeded. So actually the putsch went ahead and in Paris was completely successful. It was less successful in Berlin, primarily due to a Nazi minister, Josef Goebbels, who wasn't at the Wolf's Lair. He was in Berlin in the propaganda ministry. And when the officers came to arrest him, he said, no, no, no, you're being used by traitors. This is an anti-Hitler conspiracy and the Fuhrer is still alive.

And he put the officer who'd been sent to arrest him, a chap called Rehmer, on the phone to Hitler. Hitler promoted him to be in charge of all troops in Berlin and said, do what you have to do to put down the coup, to put down the putsch. And this is what Rehmer absolutely did. He changed sides in an instant once he realised that he was the victim of anti-Nazi conspirators, because he was a keen Nazi himself. So Hitler's blown his eardrums out. He's wounded. He's having to stay in the game here. He's having to get on the phone. He's having to, well, fight for his regime and his life. He is. And also what was a strange happening is that he was going to have his final meeting

with his fellow dictator, Benito Mussolini, who was due to arrive on a visit to the Wolf's Lair. Of course, Mussolini had been deposed the year before, and Hitler had put him up as a puppet ruler of North Italy. He was still very much on Hitler's side. And he arrives by train at the Wolf's Lair, Hitler with cotton wool sticking out of his ears and in a cloak to cloak any injuries he had. His arm was partially paralyzed after the explosion. He meets Mussolini and shows him the ruins of the conference room where the bomb had gone off. And the trouble is him and other Nazi leaders have an open row in front of the Duce, in front of Mussolini. And Mussolini sees the state that the regime has got in and the fact that high-ranking officers

have tried to blow Hitler to smithereens. And that can't have done much to increase his confidence in his fellow dictator. And that was actually the last day that Hitler and Mussolini ever met. What's going on then back in Berlin? They come for Goebbels. He manages to dissuade our man from arresting him. Is there then violence? Is there then sort of people go house to house looking for members of the coup? Who knows who's in the coup?

Okay, what happens is the coup is centred on a branch of the defence ministry in the Bendlerstrasse, a street which is now called Stauff Bendlerstrasse, which is now called Stauffenbergstrasse, in central Berlin. And that is filled with conspirators. It's the headquarters of the Reserve Army. But not all the officers in the Reserve Army are privy to the plans for the putsch. So you've got two sets of officers, those who are ignorant of the putsch, who are Nazis, and loyal to the regime, and the conspirators. And several other conspirators from outside the reserve army have arrived at the Bender Block, knowing that the bomb has gone off, thinking that Hitler has,

or hoping that Hitler has been killed, and joining the ranks of the conspirators in the Bender Block. So the nerve center of the whole thing, and Stauffenberg has arrived back in his office at the Bender Block, is the headquarters of the Reserve Army there. The office is there. And a drama then takes place. They arrest the head of the Reserve Army, the general in charge of the Reserve Army, a guy called Fromm, who is a very, very ambiguous figure. He kind of knew there was a conspiracy going on under his nose, but he held himself aloof from it because he was afraid that the plot would fail. And when indeed it did fail, he tried to arrest Stauffenberg and Stauffenberg's co-conspirators. But he himself was arrested and locked up in his office for a while but then the nazi the pro-nazi

officers get the upper hand and there's a shootout in the corridors of the offices staffberg is wounded in the shoulder staffenberg has been for the last couple of hours on the phone he's conducting a push by telephone trying to persuade officers all over germ and in Paris and in Prague, all over Europe, that Hitler is dead and that his bomb has killed Hitler and that the coup can go ahead and that the anti-Nazi elements will take over. But gradually, people everywhere realize that Hitler is indeed alive. He himself broadcasts later in the night, he goes on the radio and swears vengeance against what he calls a small criminal clique who have tried to kill him. And as the realisation dawns and sinks in that Hitler is alive, so support for the conspiracy and the coup collapses.

What happens to Stauffenberg and those arrested? What happens to Stauffenberg and those arrested? Normans Kings and Popes Who were rarely the best of friends Murder Rebellions And crusades Find out who we really were By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit Wherever you get your podcasts That is down to Fromm, the ambiguous general who wanted to ride with the hounds, hunt with the hares. He wanted to be on both sides at once. So he now realizes that he has to cover his tracks, cover his traces, and put those who were in the know, those conspirators,

under the ground as soon as he possibly can. So he takes Stauffenberg, Stauffenberg's aide-de-camp, who was with him at Rastenberg, and three other leading conspirators. He arrests them, holds an instant court-martial in his offices, tells them they've got five minutes to write farewell letters to their loved ones. And then they are sent down the stairs into the courtyard of the Bender block, where a firing squad has been assembled. By then, it's quite late at been assembled. By then it's quite late at night. In fact, it's gone midnight. And in the early hours, in the first hour of July the 21st, Stauffenberg and his closest co-conspirators are put up literally against the wall and shot by

firing squad. And that is effectively the end of the conspiracy. Doesn't Stauffenberg's aide-de-camp, who you just mentioned, he sort of jumps in front of Schaufenberg at one point? He jumps in front of him and takes the shots, but then Schaufenberg himself realises that he's going to die anyway, and he shouts out, Es lebe unser heiliger Deutschland, long live our sacred Germany, which some people said was, Es lebe unser geheime Deutschland, long live our secret Germany. But in fact, he didn't say that. And some conspiracy theorists have suggested that Stauffenberg was the head of a mystical plot of aristocrats

who wanted a sort of hierarchical Germany. And the conspiracy that he joined was much older than the actual military conspiracy that he'd only joined the year before. He actually said, long live our sacred Germany. And those were his last words. And so presumably the leader of this reserve army is desperately trying to tell his Nazi masters that he's dealt with the plot and there's nothing more to see here. Does he get away with that? He doesn't get away with it. And as soon as Goebbels arrives and meets him, he says, you were very quick to get these people underground. And so Goebbels is instantly

suspicious that Fromm was covering up, indeed, his own ambiguous part on the fringes of the conspiracy. And the same thing actually happened in Normandy. Don't forget, the bomb plot was only a few weeks after D-Day, after the Allies had landed in Normandy, and the Battle Royal was going on in Normandy. And the man who was leading the army group that was fighting in Normandy was a general called Kluger, who had been on the fringes of the conspiracy, like so many of them, like Rommel himself, his predecessor in charge of Army Group B. He also had been on the fringes of the conspiracy, although Rommel wasn't prepared to go as far as having Hitler assassinated. He was ready to say, look, Fuhrer, you've lost the war. It's time to sit down and negotiate. But he wasn't prepared to

join the full ranks of the conspiracy. Even so, that was enough for the Nazis to have Rommel killed. They didn't have him publicly tried because he was such a famous figure that that would have been a PR disaster for the regime to have to say that Rommel too was among these traitors who tried to kill Hitler. General Kluger, who had succeeded Rommel in charge of the army fighting in Normandy, he was ready to join the conspiracy, like Fromm, providing Hitler was dead. That was the essential thing, that a lot more officers would have gone over, would have openly supported the conspiracy, if they knew that Hitler was dead and that there wouldn't be a sweet revenge taken against them.

and that there wouldn't be a sweet revenge taken against them. But the two officers who were concerned with launching the coup in Paris, General Stoltenagel, who was the military governor of Paris, and the ones who'd arrested all the SS and Gestapo members in Paris, of whom there were an awful lot trying to deal with the French resistance, they knew that they were for the high jump. They knew that they would for the high jump. They knew that they would be summoned back to Germany. And both Kluger, in charge of Army Group B, and Stoltenagel, the leading conspirator, were indeed summoned back to Germany. And both of them committed suicide

in Stoltenagel's case unsuccessfully on the way back. Stoltenagel shot his own eyes out with a misplaced shot to his head. And he, unfortunately for him, survived to be tortured and then put on trial in front of the People's Court and hanged, as were most of the other leading conspirators. We haven't yet talked about the People's Court and the revenge the Nazis took against the conspirators, but that was a very, very grim and gruesome story indeed. conspirators. But that was a very, very grim and gruesome story indeed. Tell me about the revenge that the Nazis took on the conspirators and presumably anyone with even the merest taint of conspiracy. Absolutely. As time went on throughout the rest of the war, the Nazis began to realise just how wide-ranging this conspiracy was. But in the days immediately after the putsch, the coup, this conspiracy was. But in the days immediately after the putsch, the coup, in August 1944,

the leading conspirators, those who were directly involved, the people who'd been at the Bändler block with Stauffenberg, were arraigned before this kangaroo court, which went under the title of People's Court, the Volksgericht, which was presided over by a very, very unpleasant character called Roland Freisler, known as Hitler's hanging judge, who delighted, he'd been briefed by Hitler, to make life as humiliating and as difficult for the conspirators who were on trial as he possibly could. So abandoning all pretense at judicial independence or fairness of trial, he would scream and insult these poor conspirators who had already been tortured because they'd been in Gestapo captivity for what they knew.

He would scream and shout insults at them. And then in most cases, they would be sentenced to death and they would be taken directly within minutes of the court having concluded they would be taken from the People's Court to a prison in North Berlin called Plötz the court having concluded they would be taken from the people's court to a prison in north Berlin called Plötzensee where they would be hanged. How many officers do you think they ended up hunting down and killing as a result of this plot? Hundreds, probably as many as 700 in the end, and they went on doing it right up to the end of the war. Right in April 1945, for example, another nest of conspiracy in Germany's military intelligence outfit, the Abwehr, were all hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp, including the famous leader of the Abwehr, the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. He was hanged along with the theologian, the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He had met a British bishop in the middle of the war

to try and get British support for the conspiracy and failing to do that. They were all hanged at Flossenburg concentration camp when the guns of the approaching American armies were already audible to the camp. So the Nazi vengeance went on and on right to the last possible moment. And only a very, very few active members of the conspiracy, probably enough to count on one hand, actually survived. I mean, I met one of them, a guy called Otto Jahn, who later was involved in setting up West German intelligence after the war.

He was one of the extremely few who actually had survived the day. How did he survive? He survived by going underground. And eventually he ended up in Switzerland, I believe. Some of the conspirators did go underground and most of them were hunted down. The guy who was earmarked to be Chancellor, to be the new head of state, was a chap called Goedeler, who had been mayor of Leipzig. And he was a real fool because he thought that Hitler could be persuaded of the error of his ways and shouldn't be assassinated, but should be persuaded that he'd been wrong all along. And he, in an effort to show the Nazis how widespread the

conspiracy was, he named names. So he named people who were involved in the conspiracy on the outer fringes who were then arrested and in many cases killed, that he needed to have done. He just wanted to show the Nazis that almost everyone in the upper reaches of German society was against them. And what effect did it have on Hitler and his decision making for the rest of the war? Well, physically, it did have some effect. We're not quite sure whether Hitler was already suffering from organic diseases. Some people think he had Parkinson's disease. He certainly was on a very weird cocktail of drugs because he put a lot of faith in his personal physician, a guy called Theodore Morel, who fed him some very, very dodgy

drugs indeed that were actually poisonous to his system. So he was in a bad state of health. He didn't take hardly any exercise. He lived a largely subterranean existence. And for a man in his early 50s, he was prematurely aged. His arm after the conspiracy, his hands were shaking permanently. One of his arms was partially paralyzed and he used to keep it behind his back. His eardrums, as I said, were perforated. So physically, the bomb did have an effect of aging him and worsening his already bad physical condition. Psychologically, however, it just reinforced his mania that he was on a mission from Providence to save Germany, to dominate Europe, and to win the war. And he thought, even after July 1944, when any sane person, particularly any sane military person, knew that the German cause was absolutely doomed, they were fighting a war on two fronts, their cities were being bombed to bits by the RAF and the USAF, their armies were in full-blown retreat on all fronts, that the war couldn't possibly be won. But Hitler convinced himself

that the war could be won under his leadership, and that once he'd dealt with this nest of traitors, these old Prussians in the upper reaches of the army, and had promoted lower-born pro-Nazi officers like Model and Schörner to the high-ranking positions that the war could indeed still be won. And Goebbels and Himmler sort of backed him up and in a slavish way said, you're absolutely right, my Fuhrer. Yes, carry on fighting and we will win. Well, we know how that ended. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast and telling me all about this remarkable event 80 years ago. Nigel, if people want to get your book, how can they do that? What's it called? My book is called Countdown to Valkyrie, the Plots to Assassinate Hitler by Nigel Jones. Thank you very much indeed. you