Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Operation Valkyrie and the Plot to Kill Hitler (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey everyone, this is Gary. I thought my voice is getting better, but today it actually got a lot worse. So with that, here's another encore episode. Adolf Hitler single-handedly started the Second World War. While the Allies were desperately trying to end the Third Reich and Hitler personally, they weren't the only ones trying to bring Hitler's reign to an end. Inside Nazi Germany, a small but committed group sought to remove Hitler from power, and they finally took action in July of 1944. Learn more about Operation Velcary and the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:01:04 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from End. PR. By the summer of 1944, things were not looking good for Nazi Germany. The Western allies had finally landed in France, opening up a second front for the war. And on the eastern front, things weren't looking very good either. The Soviets were on the march, and German forces were retreating. While Hitler managed to lay all the blame for Germany's problems on the feet of his many generals, those in the know realized the problem was not with Germany's generals, the problem was with Hitler himself. Despite success early in the war, Hitler was not a brilliant

Starting point is 00:01:46 military strategist. The higher-ups in the German Vermeck saw Hitler as the problem, and the only way to avoid a complete defeat for Germany was to eliminate Hitler. I should note that while we tend to paint history with a very broad brush, there were many officers in the German military who were not members of the Nazi party. The German officer corps had traditionally been made up of aristocrats who viewed themselves as being professional. Plans to remove Hitler from within the German military had been around since at least 1938. All of the plots and plans eventually went nowhere for a variety of reasons. Some plotters were indecisive, some plans were leaked out, and some plans just failed. For example, there was a bomb placed in Hitler's plane in 1943 that just didn't detonate.

Starting point is 00:02:29 Another attempt, weeks later in Berlin, also failed. Just finding other conspirators was difficult, given the pervasive presence of the Gestapo in the SS. By 1944, a new plot to eliminate Hitler started coalescing. The plotters and the new plan were united only in their desire to see Hitler gone. They all had different visions for Germany after the war, but regardless of what they wanted for Germany, step one was removing Hitler. The general consensus was that with Hitler gone, it would be possible to negotiate with the Allies, hopefully to preserve their pre-1939 boundaries and avoid the punishing reparations which were handed down after the First World War. The initial organizers of the plot were Major General Henning von Trescoe and General Friedrich Oldbrick.

Starting point is 00:03:14 Field Marshal Erwin von Witzelben was also part of the plot. But in August of 1943, Treskow met a young lieutenant colonel by the name of Klaus von Staufenberg. Staufenberg had been severely wounded in Tunisia in April of 1943 when his car was strafed by a British fighter plane. He lost his left eye, right hand, and two fingers on his left hand. Staufenberg was a German nationalist. and a Catholic. He had very ambivalent views of Hitler. He supported the nationalistic part of Hitler's program, but abhorred the treatment of Jews and other minority groups. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that eliminating Hitler was for the greater good, that if Hitler were killed, millions would be

Starting point is 00:03:53 saved. The conspirators faced a problem. First, they had to kill Hitler. Capturing him and putting him on trial was not an option. Members of the SS took a personal vow of loyalty to Hitler, and the only thing which could break that vow was Hitler's death. So long as Hitler was alive, they would face active resistance from within Germany. The next problem was that killing Hitler wasn't sufficient. So let's say you assassinate Hitler. Then what? How do you take control of the German government in that vacuum that Hitler would create? Thankfully, the answer to that question was provided by Hitler himself. It was an emergency plan which was created for the continuity of the German government in the event of a General Civil Breakdown. It was known as Operation Valkyrie. Operation Valkyrie is often thought to be the name

Starting point is 00:04:41 of the plan to assassinate Hitler, and it was not. It was the name of the plan which would be implemented after the assassination of Hitler. Operation Valkyry would be implemented by the German Reserve Army, which was their equivalent of the National Guard. The Reserve Army would assume control in all the various localities after the plotters announced that the Nazi party had killed Hitler in an attempted coup. This was the mechanism that they would use to claim control of the country once Hitler was dead. Then the question was, how exactly do you kill Hitler? There had been other plots that had been exposed, so by 1944, Hitler no longer appeared in public. A sniper taking him out at a public appearance wasn't an option. Poisoning him also wasn't an option because all of his food was

Starting point is 00:05:25 prepared specially for him and he had a food taster. This led the conspirators to conclude that the best option to kill Hitler would be a bomb. The plan developed by Treskow and Staufenburg was to plant a bomb at a meeting that was to be held at a venue called the Wolfslaer. The Wolfslayer was Hitler's military headquarters located in what was then East Prussia. Today, the location is in the Polish town of Kenson. There were several reasons why the Wolfslayer was selected. The first was that it could be assured that Hitler would be there. Hitler often changed his plans at the last minute, but he regularly held briefings in a reinforced bunker at the Wolfslayer. The other reason was the bunker itself, where the meetings were held. The bunker was an ideal place for a bomb. It was heavily fortified

Starting point is 00:06:09 with no windows and only one reinforced door. The blast wave from a bomb would be contained in the bunker, amplifying its damage. On July 1st, 1944, Staufenberg was appointed chief of staff to General Friedrich Fromm, the head of the German Reserve Army, the man who would have the authority to initiate Operation Valkyry. This position gave Staufenberg access to the briefings with Hitler at the Wolfslayer. As such, Staufenberg decided that he would deliver the bomb himself so he could be sure it was done properly. The plan was for Stelfenberg to have two explosives in a satchel which he would bring to a briefing in the bunker. He would get the satchel as close to Hitler as possible, then excuse himself, step out of the bunker, and it would blow up killing everyone inside.

Starting point is 00:06:53 In theory, this plan would have worked. It was decided to an act. the plan on July 20th, 1944, when both Himmler and Goring would be in attendance. Staufenberg would be presenting a status report on the Reserve Army. At 11 a.m., Stelphenberg arrived at the Wolfslaer, along with two of his conspirators, Major General Helmuth Stife and First Lieutenant Verner von Hafton. At 1135, Stauphinberg excused himself to change his shirt, when he armed only one of the explosives with the aid of First Lieutenant Hafton. This was the first thing to go wrong. They were supposed to arm two explosives, not one. Then at 1237 p.m., Staufenberg enters the briefing room and meets Hitler. However, it wasn't in the bunker. Due to extremely warm weather, the meeting was moved to an

Starting point is 00:07:38 above-ground wooden building with windows and a breeze. This was the second major deviation from the plan. Staufenberg placed his satchel with the bomb close to Hitler underneath the table. His excuse for getting close to Hitler is that his hearing was damaged due to his injuries. At 1240, Stelphenberg excused himself to make an important phone call minutes before the bomb was scheduled to detonate. However, as soon as he left the room, the satchel with the bomb was moved to the other end of the table from where Hitler was standing. And this was the third major deviation from the plan. At 12.42 p.m., the bomb inside the satchel exploded. While everything did not go according to plan, this was still a bomb in an enclosed area. The walls of the building were blown out, as was the roof,

Starting point is 00:08:23 and part of the wooden structure was on fire. Staufenberg, hearing the explosion and assuming that Hitler was dead, jumped into a car and headed for an airplane waiting to take him to Berlin, where Operation Valkyry would be initiated. Hitler, of course, was not dead. In fact, other than being shaken up, his pants being shredded from splinters, and some damage to his arm, he survived mostly unscathed. One stenographer was killed instantly,

Starting point is 00:08:49 and four of the 20 people in the room later died from their wounds, but no other senior officials were killed. Things began to unravel for the plotters immediately. Staufenberg, seen fleeing the scene, was immediately suspected. General Fromm, the man who had to give the order to initiate Operation Valkyry, was contacted by General Kidal, who informed him that Hitler was very much alive. Fromm, who probably knew about the plot but wasn't actively involved, now came down hard on the suspected conspirators to show his loyalty to Hitler.

Starting point is 00:09:19 When he confronted them in person, they ended up putting him in a cell. Meanwhile, General Olbrich had gone around Fromm and initiated Valky without him, and this caused confusion around the Reich as local officials disarmed SS units thinking that Hitler was dead. As the chaos died down by the evening, Fromm was freed from a cell and commenced to court-martial and execute several of the conspirators, including General Oldbrick, Colonel Staufenberg, and Lieutenant Hafton. Needless to say, Hitler was furious and now even more paranoid. The Gestapo began arresting anyone and everyone who had any association with the conspirators. Their investigations found evidence of past plots, which led to even more arrests.

Starting point is 00:10:01 The Gestapo also used the assassination attempt to pretty much arrest anybody that they had any sort of issue with. Over 7,000 people were arrested in association with the assassination attempt, and almost 5,000 were executed. Even General Fromm, who executed the immediate people responsible for the plot, was eventually executed. The fact that he killed the plotter so quickly was seen as a sign that he was trying to get rid of anyone who could testify against him. Most of the people involved in the plot didn't try to escape or even deny their guilt. General Tresco, one of the original men behind the plot, had been sent to the Eastern Front months before. But when news got out that Hitler was still alive, he killed himself with a hand grenade. The assassination attempt only made Hitler more

Starting point is 00:10:45 paranoid in the last months of the war. He was constantly assuming that his top generals were plotting against him, making him unable to trust his most confident commanders. So in a roundabout way, it probably shortened the war by simply making Hitler make bad decisions. None of the men in the inner circle of the plot to kill Hitler seemed to have any regrets for what they tried to do. They knew that they would be considered traitors, but they also knew that posterity would look kindly upon them. And in hindsight, they were right. Hitler has become the epitomimit. of evil, and now they're considered heroes. If only one of the three things which went wrong had gone right, Hitler probably would have been killed, and the trajectory of the war and the history

Starting point is 00:11:25 of the world would have been changed. Before he took his own life, General Truskow told another member of the German resistance, Fabian von Schleibendorf, about his decision. He said, quote, The whole world will vilify us now, but I am totally convinced that we did the right thing. Hitler is the arch enemy not only of Germany, but of the world. When in a few hours time I go before God to account for what I have done and left undone, I know I will be able to justify what I did in the struggle against Hitler. None of us can be whale his own death. A human being's moral integrity begins when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his convictions.

Starting point is 00:12:05 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiever. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports. the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere or daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters. If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Operation Valkyrie and the Plot to Kill Hitler (Encore)

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