Stuff You Should Know - The July 20th Plot to Assassinate Hitler

Episode Date: January 17, 2019

A lot of people in Hitler's inner circle wanted him dead toward the end of the war. But he proved impossible to kill from within. Listen in today as Josh and Chuck dig into the infamous July 20th plot to blow up Der Führer. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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up court. You know what CJ? I gotta say, I feel like that should be a technical foul, one free throw for the opposing team. Yes, if you rep your town and your team as much as you do, Meek Mill, that he's a Sixer, right? So the opposing team's got to take free throws. Or unless, you know, if we're going off of the curb episode, does Meek have the discography of that compares to like Seinfeld tapes that he could bring to the ref's, you know, hospital bed? Shout out to curb. That was one of the greatest episodes ever. Listen to Running the Break with CJ and Alex on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by FanDuel. Make every moment more with FanDuel Sportsbook, an official partner of the NBA.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright, and there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know about Smokin' Hitler. Smokin' Hitler? Well, you know what's funny is... Tell me what's funny about assassin. Well, I got this idea because I had listened to the recent Friendly Fire podcast episode on Valkyrie. Boy, you're just going all out on Friendly Fire, aren't you? I like it. Okay, it's a good show. Sure it is.

And there aren't many people that know more about history than John Roderick. Like, it's really impressive to hear that guy go off like from the dome. No, I know. He's got quite a brain. And hey, Ben Harrison's no slouch either. He's a little bit of a slouch. He's listening to this, so I gotta rip him. But John, at one point in the show, was like, I can't... You'll see in the show it's such a convoluted plan to blow up Hitler. And he's just like, I can't believe in all those years they couldn't get one person to walk up and shoot him in the head. I saw that too in a couple of places, and it is very vexing and perplexing that not one person said... And apparently,

people agreed to suicide missions. A lot of people wanted to kill him. But personally, they just didn't go... They didn't go... What sound is it like a Luger make? I don't even know. I don't know. I can tell you what a dying German sounds like when they're falling off a building. Oh, is that the Wilhelm scream? Well, we wouldn't put the right one in anyway, so... Never forget. Yeah, anyway, it just seems odd to me that... Because there were, I think, 15 or 16 total plots to assassinate Hitler. And I don't know if there wasn't a single one that was like,

you take a gun, walk up behind him at his desk, and shoot him in the head. And then shoot yourself because it's going to go really badly for you, right? Yeah, I mean, they were all suicide missions, mostly. Not all of them, apparently. Well, that's true. I was surprised because I didn't realize... I think I'd heard people who wanted to assassinate Hitler or something like that. I didn't realize that Hitler was about as charmed a human being as far as surviving assassination attempts goes as they come.

I just didn't realize that. Would you say, like, maybe 15, 16 plots? I think 15 plus this one. Okay. And I mean, like, there were close calls, like, somewhere, you know, he just missed his assassination by a couple minutes, or a bomb didn't go off, even though it was fully functioning and should have, and blowing his plane out of the sky. Yeah, that's the Contro bottle or whatever, yeah. So it's not like he went on as their furor for lack of trying, it just didn't happen for some reason. The assassination attempt that most people think of when they think of

attempts to assassinate Hitler, especially if you're a fan of Tom Cruise, especially if you're a fan of Tom Cruise dressed as a pirate, is the Operation Valkyrie that we're about to talk about. Yeah, I watched that again today. What'd you think at this time around? It's good. I like it. I like the Cruise. It's the accent thing's weird, but you just got to get past it. He, I saw there was like a pretty big outcry from

Germans when he was cast, when it was announced that he was going to play Klaus von Stauffenberg. Yeah. Because Klaus von Stauffenberg, as we'll see, is a national hero of Germany, and Germany does not take kindly to Scientology. I know, it's all a weird mix bag. Yeah, they were not really happy when Tom Cruise's cast to play their national hero. Yeah. They said, Entschuldigung Herr Cruise. That was great.

Thanks. So July 20th, 1944. Yes. Like, do you want to do the whole plan right here? Like we're working this out right now. Okay. All right. All right. New plan. Or just like what happened? I've got it. I've got it. We're going to take a totally different tack. You ready?

All right. Okay. So this Operation Valkyrie that we're talking about, it took place, it was called the July 20th plot, is what it's called. But the operation was actually something larger than that. Yes. And as we'll see, it entailed a lot of people, and these were like high ranking military officials. Some of the highest military officials in the German military, the Wehrmacht,

are you saying that right? Sure. We're involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Right. And Ed put this together for us, and he points out like there are a lot of reasons people had to want to assassinate Hitler. There was people who said, you know, what we're doing with the extermination of the Jews and other people is like completely unconscionable, and this needs to have an input to it.

I think that was mostly Kenneth Branagh. Right. If we're going movie style. Okay. Like in real life though, he supposedly was the one that- Kenneth Branagh? Yeah, had the true conscience of what they were doing was wrong. Who did he play?

Treskau? He's got- it's a tough one. Henning von Treskau, T-R-E-S-C-K-O-W. I'm pretty sure I got that right, that that was the Kenneth Branagh character, and he genuinely was opposed to how they were doing things. Right. Okay, so there was at least one person who felt that way, but he was very much in the minority.

Yeah. There were another group of people who thought, well, you know, these Nazis, they're kind of upstarts, they're like nouveau riche politically speaking. Yeah. And they don't really care about the old guard. Well, I'm part of the old guard. My family is land of gentry in Germany. We have a nice tradition going back hundreds of years,

and now these Nazi upstarts are moving my family out of power. We're no longer in the elite, and I don't like that. That's another reason why people wanted to get rid of that. Yeah, and I think they were like the majority of the people in this plot were those people. Okay. Like they weren't idealist, democratic people who wanted, like they were just trying to protect their heritage.

Right. Some of them were anti-fascists, not all of them. Yeah. But then there was definitely a through line that a lot of people bought into, and may have even been a major motivator for a lot of people too. By the time July 20th, 1944 rolled around, it was very clear to most people inside of Germany and out who were paying attention and who knew everything

that Germany could not win World War II any longer. Yeah. After Normandy, it was dead in the water. Exactly. Yeah. Once we made it to Normandy, it was over. Yeah. And not only had we made it to Normandy by this time,

but we had supplies coming in. We had more and more troops coming in. We were overrunning Europe now. Yeah. Europe was ours. Plus, the Russians were moving their way westward from the U.S. from the east. Not a good position for Germany to be in between the Allies and the Russians.

Yeah. Italy, Mussolini had been overthrown. So Italy was now this soft underbelly, as Winston Churchill put it, that could be attacked from Africa. Was he gone by this time? He was a puppet dictator in the northern part of Italy that was protected by Germany. Because in the movie.

But most of Italy was gone. The movie may be wrong, but in the movie they were like, Mussolini's coming for lunch or whatever. That's true. Okay. But he had lost most of Italy by this time. All right. Gotcha.

But that left Italy exposed to attack from Africa, and Africa had just recently been lost by Rommel. Yeah. So Germany was in no position to win World War II. Yeah. So there were a lot of people, high-ranking officials in the military who said, okay, before they actually make their way into Germany,

that's a point of no return. Maybe we can get rid of Hitler and negotiate a peace that keeps our republic intact. Yeah. And supposedly had even spoken to some of the allied leaders. Yeah. Like, hey, let's just say Hitler was not around. Just hypothetically speaking.

What would that look like for the rest of us? Right. Like, how could we come out of this? Okay. Yeah. No one knows truly how, I don't know, how far down the road those talks went, but it had been mentioned.

So supposedly their point of contact was Allen Dulles, one of the Dulles brothers who would later overthrow the government of Guatemala, among other things, is CIA director. The airport Dulles? Yeah. Interesting. Same Dulles, but that's who they were talking to.

He was like the CIA or the OSS station chief of Switzerland at the time. But I think the Germans were like, okay, we will do this and we'll get rid of Hitler and we want to remain, you know, keep Germany intact, but the Russians cannot be part of the peace talks. We've done some things that they're not very happy about and they can't be part of it

and the Allies wouldn't take that off of the table. Yeah, because if the Russians were in there negotiating, it would be a much different story for Germany. So all of these guys knew that Germany could not win the war. Hitler, who was running the show still, had very different ideas. His idea of fighting this war was, we're going to fight this war until the very last German is killed.

Yeah. Every man, woman, child who can pick up a gun is going to fight to the death against these invaders of our homeland and I'm totally out of my mind and I'm taking the whole country down with me. Yeah, and in the Valkyrie film, they even say like, you know, with Normandy going on and what's happened there and he's just sort of like,

well, I don't know what you're talking about. Everything's going great. Right, give me some more crystal meth. Did he do that? That's the legend. Really? That crystal meth was invented by Nazi scientists and that upper echelon Nazis were all into that big time.

Man, there's so many like, of all the people in history, like so many things that are horrific and true and then so many weird stories from like Nazi treasure hunting to crystal meth addiction. Right. This is just crazy. I read a really interesting New Yorker article about people who treasure hunt for Nazi treasures

in Poland, in the mountains of Poland. And the thing that gives gravity to these claims is that there really are enormous tunnels in the mountains in Poland that you could fit train fulls of gold in. Right. And they think that they actually might have something to them. Oh, really?

Even though that's supposedly a hoax, the Nazi gold thing? Supposedly, but again, they have these tunnel networks that are like really there. It's not like the tunnels themselves are urban legend. It's just these tunnel networks are so expansive that no one's ever mapped them all. Gotcha. But they do exist.

So there may be a gold rich possible wing that no one's ever found. Yeah. Interesting. So, wow, that was a lot. Do you want to take a break and then get into it tomorrow? Are you ready to keep plugging along? No, man, let's talk about Killin' Hitler right after this.

Oh, OK. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now, the extra income helps pay her mortgage.

So, yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca-host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Hitler had done a lot up into this point to have total control over Germany and over the state. Whether it was controlling what news went out to having people swear oaths of loyalty to him as a person,

and not Germany, it really hit me today, the Heil Hitler thing. Soldiers saying Heil Hitler to one another when Hitler's not around. It's not like I would understand if like, well, sure, you do that to Hitler, but he was having them do that to everyone. It wasn't like long live Germany, it was Heil Hitler. And they're like, he's nowhere near here, you realize. You're like, yeah, but we got to say this.

Sure. Otherwise, we're toast. And I think over time, even when you are forced to do that, or kind of brainwashed into doing that or whatever, you kind of adopt that sense, like the eagerness, you know? So it's weird. It's bizarre. It is bizarre.

The other thing we should mention really quickly, too, before we move on is the Sippenhaft. This was an ancient middle-aged blood law, basically, where they say from Germany, where they were like, you know, if you're guilty of a crime, your whole family is. And as you will see, Project Valkyrie was reason enough for Himmler to dust that off. Say, remember that ancient custom?

Well, we're just going to do it here. Yeah, it went even further back than that to like the second century BC, from what I saw. It's crazy. So it's basically the idea is, if you are a traitor, that means you have traitorous blood in you. And since you've passed your bloodline along, then all of the members of your family

must have that same traitorous blood. So the whole family has to be wiped out. That's the idea behind it. Man. It's not clear if Himmler just made this up or whatever, but there was that thread of, if you do something to put the family, to put yourself in jeopardy, you put the whole family in jeopardy.

Yeah. It kept people, like basically spying on, not just their neighbors, but on their own family members. Yeah. And if you want to hatch a plot to kill Hitler, then that puts your family at risk. Exactly. Not just yourself.

Yeah. And then plus also, you can't really discount the fact that he really thoroughly controlled the media. So if there was a resistance, if there were people who did great acts of protest or whatever, it would just be lost. It would not be reported on. And so whatever spark they created,

couldn't grow into a flame. So there was a tremendous amount of control. And even today, historians are still debating how complicit the actual people of Germany were and how much they were coerced into following Hitler. It's a real bone of contention among historians today. Well, I'm sure it was a very mixed bag of allegiances and loyalties and what people truly believed

and what they were, they weren't getting the real information anyway, you know? Exactly. And then that on top of the whole family is going to get wiped out if you do something, could keep people in line. All right. So Operation Valkyrie itself, like we said,

killing Hitler was a small part. Well, not a small part, a major part. But Operation Valkyrie itself was a larger plan to rest control of the German government, basically, from the Nazis and the SS. Yeah, it was an existing operation that got co-opted and made a part of the plot to assassinate Hitler. Yeah, because they knew that just killing Hitler

wasn't enough because someone, I guess, Himmler would have just stepped in in his place. Yeah, there's evidence that Himmler knew about this plot and basically letting it happen so he could take over. Oh, sure. Of course. Treacherous.

So here was the deal. Operation Valkyrie was a contingency plan and this was set up with Hitler's signature to control the reserve army of Germany. So it was basically, I couldn't tell if it was like, our reserves over here? I don't know. I don't think it was quite like that

because they were active duty. Maybe like the National Guard. You think? Yeah, because it says that they were called up to support the front and you call up the National Guard sometimes here in the United States. All right. Yeah, I think it would be like the National Guard here.

Yeah. Well, they were the remnants of the German army that was left back. They were the army that was still in Germany at this point. Right. They weren't out fighting on the front lines although they could be called. They were there to defend Germany. Yeah, exactly.

So if the call came through and Operation Valkyrie was enacted, that basically meant that something's gone wrong and not necessarily that Hitler's dead, but something's gone wrong and that army needs to mobilize basically and keep it the status quo until they hear further. Then there were two people who were authorized to start Operation Valkyrie, which was essentially a signal,

like you said, that something's gone wrong and the army needs to regain control of the country. It was Hitler and Friedrich Fromm who was the army, a reserve army leader. And Fromm basically said to the reserve army, Operation Valkyrie is in effect, the reserve army would fight whoever Fromm told them to. Which is Tom Wilkinson, if you're playing at home.

Man, that guy. He's great. Great actor. He had this English accent and full effect here. Did he? Tom Cruise is speaking American. It's all over the map. Oh, it's crazy.

It was a weird decision. Lots of weird decisions. It was at the time, I mean, have you seen it? I started to and then stopped. Yeah? Yeah. I thought it was a good movie, but. I'm sure it was.

I don't know, I don't remember what it was, but I just couldn't. I know that Brian Singer, the director, made the conscious choice. He was like, I don't want everyone doing these bad German accents. So everybody do different weird accents. So just talk how you talk. And it's a little confusing. I mean, not confusing because you know they're Germans

because they're wearing those fantastic outfits. By Hugo Boss. Is that true? Yes. I heard that he was co-opted but not, didn't actually design the uniforms. I think it's probably like the Adidas, the Danzler Brothers. Remember their factory was co-opted to make torpedoes?

Gotcha. I'm pretty sure the same thing happened, but Hugo Boss's thing was to make the uniforms. Oh, okay. So yeah, I think it's true. I just wondered if he actually designed them. That's what I heard. That's what Russell Brand says.

And by God, there's ever been a truth teller. It's that guy. So Trescal, Kenneth Branagh, like I was saying, he was the one that was really opposed to the brutality of Nazism. And he's the one that developed these amendments to Operation Valkyrie for this plan, which from what I could tell was basically to speed everything up a lot.

Because they had a limited amount of time once they killed Hitler to pull this off. And I think it was like Operation Valkyrie was supposed to be six or eight hours. And he was like, now we need to get this done in like two or three. So those are the amendments that he created? I think so, in addition to some other stuff, but I think it was speed mainly.

All right, which is ironic because it actually got slowed down in the execution. So again, just to restate, because it is a little confusing, Operation Valkyrie was an existing Nazi plan or German Army plan for the Reserve Army, the National Guard, back home in Germany to take control of the country in the event Operation Valkyrie was enacted. And that could be because there was an uprising in a concentration camp. It could be that there was some sort of revolt.

Whatever it was, it was an official Nazi German military plan that existed that got co-opted by the assassination plotters to tailor it so that they could use it in conjunction with assassinating Hitler. And basically trick the Reserve Army into doing their bidding. And everyone, that's three times now. If you don't get it now, just go listen to something else. Okay.

Go listen to Friendly Fire. He's talking to me, everybody. He wants me to stop explaining. Will there be a fourth time? Who knows. Okay. So, well, I guess we need to talk a little bit about Tom Cruise, who was sort of the main player in this assassination attempt.

Yeah, we've got to talk a lot about him. This is the guy who's become a national hero in Germany. Yeah, and here's the deal. Like history, and certainly that film painted him as a hero. I mean, he was a tried and true Nazi up to a point where he decided to kill Hitler. But he was not some great guy who was always like, no, I think what we're doing is wrong, guys.

Right. We should really rethink this. His brother was, his brother Bertolt. Am I pronouncing that correctly? B-E-R-T-E-H-O-L-D. Yeah. Okay. His brother Bertolt, his older brother, was in this plot too.

And he actually was tortured and gave a confession. And apparently in his confession, he said, you know, we generally agree with what the Nazis are doing. We just think Hitler is a little too overeager, overzealous about spilling German blood and trying to conquer the world. But everything else we pretty much agree with. So yeah, these guys were, they were Nazis. They were just anti-Hitler, basically.

Yeah. So Klaus Wendt, Stoffenberg had been wounded previously, I think in Africa, right? Yes, under Rommel. Yeah. And was, in fact, that scene of the film was really good. It's pretty accurate. His, his, there's a bombing and a strafing from a plane that he gets, like, full on all over his body, loses his right hand and everything,

but two fingers and his thumb on his left, loses his left eye and is, basically he's got two functioning fingers and a thumb at this point. Yes. Not the perfect person to carry out a very highly technical bomb planting. Yeah. And that's definitely going to come into play. But apparently Stoffenberg, Klaus Stoffenberg said, you know, enough of this, like people losing their nerve, Quatro bombs not going off.

I mean, come on. If you want it done it right, just do it yourself is basically apparently what his policy was. So he said, I'll do it. I'll kill Hitler. Yeah. He never said, maybe I should just shoot him in the head. Yeah. Well, he wanted to live as evidenced by the actual plot that they came up with. Well, plus they also wanted, not wanted, they sort of demanded that, that Hemler be in the room at the time and also be taken out.

Right. Otherwise, what's the point? Right. So this July 20th plot that we're working up to was actually, could have been called like the, I think, July 2nd plot or the July 8th plot. There were like a few different attempts that were aborted and one of them was because Hemler and Gehring, I believe, were meant to be in the room with Hitler and they weren't. So they called it off, but apparently Klaus Strausberg decided on his own. Klaus Strausberg?

Strausberg. Strausberg. I keep wanting to say Strausberg. Strausberg decided on his own, he's going to kill Hitler anyway. And when he went back in the room to do it after reporting that Hemler and Gehring weren't there to kill Hitler, Hitler had just left the meeting ended early. Yeah. Like that was the kind of like luck that Hitler had.

Yeah. And that was played out pretty accurately in the movie actually. Like he was like, all right, I'm going to do it. And they're like, meetings adjourned. He said, wait, wait, I have something else to say. Just to kind of reset who the major or what the major players are doing. We mentioned Frederick Rome, Tom Wilkinson in the movie. He was the head of the reserve army. And then there was another key player named Friedrich Ulbricht, who was, he was the one that

basically was, because Rome was like, I kind of know about this, but I'm not, I'm not going to play a part in it, but I'm not going to rat you out either. So I'm just going to see where the chips fall. Exactly. Very cowardly. Yeah. He would have basically gone with whoever was in charge. Yeah. Or whoever was on top.

So he wouldn't report it, but he also wouldn't sign the order himself, which meant that Ulbricht had to actually issue a fake order in Fromm's name, mobilizing that, you know, basically Operation Valkyrie's in effect. Right. So Ulbricht Fromm and Stoffenberg were all reserve army high officials. And again, the reserve army is the one who can take control of the country under Operation Valkyrie. We should have a sound effect. Every time we explain that. Maybe Jerry will surprise us.

All right. Should we talk about the actual day? On July 20th? Yeah. I think we should. All right. So Hitler is in the Wolf's lair. That's where he spent, it was, I guess it would have been Poland, huh? Yeah. East Prussia, which is part of Poland. Yeah. So that was where he was hanging out toward the end of the war. Heavily fortified.

Heavily on meth. Well, that would actually make a lot of sense because he was increasingly paranoid. Yes. That's, I think that's part of the evidence. Locked in a bunker doing meth. Probably doesn't help. In East Prussia. Yeah. They call it the East Prussia Blues.

So the, I guess it's called the Wolf, the Wolfschansa in German, but the Wolf's lair. Oh, come on. Give it some flavor. The Wolfschansa. There you go. Yeah. But just very heavily fortified. Like his actual bunker and area was like concrete with like steel doors. It was where the, where you would keep Hitler at that point in the war. Right. Or where Hitler would keep himself.

Yeah. So there was, on this July 20th plot, again, they wanted Himmler and Gehring, if not Goebbels too, in the room with him. Well, Himmler was the big one they wanted. Right. Because he was the, the, the era parent, right? Yeah. But if you'll notice, as many times as they, they tried to do this,

Himmler was nowhere around Hitler at this time. Yeah. Which is again, evidence that Himmler knew something was up and wasn't about to be in the same room as Hitler at any point because he, they knew that, he knew that they wanted to kill Hitler and take him out too. Right. So he was just going to let it play out. So they decided to just go ahead and assassinate Hitler at least.

And this wolf slayer was a perfect location to assassinate Hitler if it was an inside job. Yeah. Like you said, you could not get to him in there from the outside. Mm-hmm. But if you could get in, you could get to him really well because these concrete reinforced bunkers with steel doors that had no windows. Yeah. If you set off a bomb in there, it would be amplified.

Mm-hmm. It would have the, the concussion from the bomb, the blast, the shockwave, would have nowhere to go. So it would just reverberate around the room until it finally went out of steam. Yeah. And it would kill everybody in there. Yeah. No matter where you were, no matter what you were doing, you would be dead from this blast.

Yep. So it was a really good idea when they showed up on July 20th, Stoffenberg and his assistant with two briefcases that each had a time bomb in it with two pounds of plastic explosives. One of those would have killed everybody. They had double the amount. Yeah. And the guy that set this all up in the, in the movie basically said that he was like,

this is pretty redundant to have two of these. Uh-huh. He was like, in that bunker, one of these will kill everyone in that room. Right. Like, don't sweat it, guys. Nothing can go wrong. Yeah. Even though you have to stick this metal thing in there and crack it with a pair of pliers.

Uh-huh. And I notice you've only got two fingers, but this should be fine. Um, nothing can go wrong. What went wrong was something that no one anticipated. Is that meeting, and this changed everything, that meeting didn't take place in the bunker supposedly because it was too hot. Too hot. Hitler didn't like to sweat.

And he was loaded on meth. So, right. So they moved this, this meeting where they were going to go over strategy, like detailed strategy, maps and everything from this death inducing bunker. Yeah. To basically a hut, a flimsy hut, almost open air. It was so flimsy. Yeah.

It had windows and everything. I think the windows were open too because it was hot. Okay. The roof was just kind of like whatever. It might as well have been thatched. And then the, the room also featured a table, a heavy slab oak table with heavy oak and legs. And that's what they had the maps out on. That was a, this will be a big deal in a second.

Yeah. So the plan is we go in there, we, they were going to fake like he needed to change his shirt because he got some blood from cutting his neck while shaving. Staufenberg. Yeah. Okay. And so that's where he would get some private time to, to activate the bomb. He knew he would have, you know, 10 minutes, maybe less to get out of there.

Once he did that. So they, they did so. They broke these capsules, went in there and the plan was that he was going to have it set up where he had someone faking a call coming in to get him out of the room in which he would say, I got to get to Berlin. Right. I got orders like I got to leave now. And Hitler would be like, I give the orders here.

Who told you to go to Berlin? Well, Hitler wouldn't know about any of this. He's knee deep and pounding tables and yelling. So they have the, they have the two briefcases. They only get a chance because as they're cutting open the acid capsule on the one, I guess a sentry outside like called through the door to him and scared him. Yeah. They were like, Hey dude, the meeting's starting.

Okay. So they had to head out. That was another thing. The meeting time changed from one to 1230 because Mussolini was coming and they wanted to make sure they were done in time for his arrival. Right. Okay. So they only got to activate one of the bombs and they just left the other one.

They didn't take it in with them. They just kept it with them. Yeah. So they were down to one bomb. They were in a different venue than the bomb had been planned for. And then now this heavy oak table comes into play. Yeah. So while they were in there, they set it down near Hitler or, you know, Stoffenberg does.

A man named Heinz Brant went and stepped close to the table so he could see things better, knocked over the briefcase. It is just so like, are you kidding me? Yeah. With like how history plays out. Yeah. If he hadn't kicked over that thing, it might have still worked. Yeah.

But he kicked over the briefcase, moved it to the other side of one of those big heavy oak legs. The bomb does go off and Stoffenberg gets the heck out of there quick like. Right. And in his mind, he's like, that bomb, that explosion was massive. Like everyone's dead. Yeah. And we're gone. He and his assistant.

Yeah. So he heads out from the Wolf's lair to a waiting airplane at the nearby air base to fly back to Berlin. And start Operation Valkyrie. Right. That's where we're going to leave it for now. Yeah. We'll be back right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering,

could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, Chuck, so Stoffenberg just set off this bomb.

He and his assistant are on their way to Berlin, right? Yeah, three-hour flight, and while he's in the air, Valkyrie is supposed to have started. Right, but here's the problem. There was a guy stationed at the Wolf Slayer who was meant to report on this, and basically say, go ahead, do your thing, Operation Valkyrie's a go, Hitler's dead. But they hadn't considered that Hitler might survive this assassination attempt, didn't come up with any code word for that. So the guy was just kind of clumsily trying to be like, you know, things aren't so great.

Something big happened, but not that big. So they were like, we don't know what you're talking about. Because people are listening, basically. The guys back in Berlin, these assassination plotters, these conspirators, get this message from the Wolf Slayer, and they still don't know what's going on. They just know something has happened. They don't know if Hitler's dead or what. So the guy, is it Albrecht, who decides to wait until Stoffenberg comes back?

Yeah. To enact Operation Valkyrie. So there's a three hour delay between the bomb going off, and the implementation of Operation Valkyrie. Yeah, and if you'll recall back in the beginning, they sped this whole thing up by three hours in the official plans that Hitler signed off on, so timing was important. Right. So when Tom Cruise lands, he's like, dude, are you kidding me?

Right. It was three hours ago. Right. So that was a big problem with it. A second problem was that they didn't cut the lines from the Wolf Slayer. And apparently, even Goebbels mocked them later after this. They didn't even cut the telephone lines. Yeah, they didn't cut them.

They ceased communications. They tried to, as best they could, but they didn't have control of the Wolf Slayer. All they could do is clumsily mess up the communications to delay it. But there was no radio silence from the Wolf Slayer, which would have let Operation Valkyrie play out. Instead, Germany had a lot of conflicting reports. Oh, man. And different things going on. It was total chaos.

Is Hitler alive? Is Hitler dead? Who's in charge? And so when Stoffenberg gets back and finds out Albrecht has been waiting, sitting on Operation Valkyrie, he immediately is like, put it into play. It's going one way or another. We don't know if Hitler's dead or not, but we're going ahead with Operation Valkyrie, because no one knows if Hitler's dead or not.

So we could conceivably pull it off. Yeah. And I think there were, I think it was like Paris, Prague, maybe Vienna, where some of the strongholds where they needed these people to get on board and start gathering up the SS. In Paris, the quartermaster of the German troops there did receive the message, set the coup in motion. I think it might have happened in Prague, but things were happening. Yeah. But Berlin was the big one, because they knew like, even if they got Paris and the others like fully on board and finished with their duties, if they didn't have Berlin,

they were still kind of screwed. Right. So they actually didn't have Berlin. It was kind of like a seesaw, whether they were going to have Berlin or not. There was enough confusion that I think the guy who was in charge of the reserve army at the time didn't know which way to go from. Well, yeah, from was the sort of coward that was just, he just wanted to not get ratted out. Right. He just wanted things to turn out well for him.

So he sees a chance to basically realign himself with Hitler, because it's clear that it looks like the coup is probably not going to work. So his allegiance is back to Hitler. And so he tries to arrest Stoffenberg and Obrecht, and they in turn arrest him. And there's apparently a shootout, right, in the actual war ministry building. Yeah, because there were literally two different sets of orders, official orders coming out. Right. Because they were, because of miscommunication, they were two different people controlling the German army and the German government.

Right. And so finally, there was a guy who was truly confused. One of the reserve army leaders was genuinely confused. He was trying to follow orders because he thought that there was an SS uprising, like the Operation Valkyrie plotters had said. Yeah. And apparently he got on the phone with Hitler, and Hitler said, do you recognize my voice? Oh, yeah, man.

And the guy was like, yeah, he goes, I'm telling you to arrest these people, that the Nazis are still in charge and to disregard these other orders. I want to send them all crystal masses. Right. Supply is low. And here's the deal. Hitler had ordered, he wanted them taken alive, whereas Fram was trying to speed up their execution, so he wouldn't get ratted out.

And basically, and I think this is kind of true how it played out in the movie, Schoffenberg is like, you're going down too, like you realize this. Right. Like nobody will be spared. Right. So you're kidding yourself if you think this kangaroo court you're going to run us through is going to make any difference. Right.

So Fram said, oh, OK, well, then I'll just have you guys summarily executed. Yeah. That's what he did. Yeah, this court is sort of the definition of a kangaroo court in history. It was called the People's Court, which is kind of funny. There was no Judge Wapner hanging out. There was a Judge Chrysler, though, and there's actually footage of this guy. He had this really shrill voice, and he would, this was a court where you would run people in

and just have a 100 percent chance of like conviction by hanging or firing squad. Yeah, there was a run by Nazi fanatics, and it was a court designed to try people who resisted Nazism. Yeah. And the Sipenhof that we mentioned that all your family is guilty to, this was really where it got enacted the heaviest, and I think like 7,000 people were arrested in this plot? 7,000 people were arrested, 5,000 were executed. Man.

So they really went to town on that Sipenhof thing. They took babies, infants, and put them in concentrations for children under 16. The Stoffenberg brothers, so Fromm summarily executed Klaus Stoffenberg that night at the War Ministry. It's something I saw that I thought was kind of cool. His assistant jumped in front of the bullets, originally intended for Stoffenberg, and then they still killed Stoffenberg anyway, but Fromm was trying to cover up his treks. It didn't work.

Fromm was among the executed at this later kangaroo court. Yeah, I think he was executed in March. And as part of this, the Sipenhof, it was just basically, if there had been any restraints whatsoever on Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, which you could really make the case like, nah, there really weren't, but if there were, they were off now. And once Hitler realized that this was part of a larger plot, he went berserk, and it just became a blood orgy for him, just killing everybody, anyone he could find that might have anything remotely to do with this plot he killed.

He killed people who'd been prisoners for years. He went through and did another purge of people who had just been in prison for maybe thinking of assassinating him years back, totally unrelated. As the allies started to move in and the Russians started to move in, they started killing people in the concentration camps, just stepping it up even more. There's a really good possibility that a lot of those people would have lived had that bomb worked, had it killed Hitler. Oh, sure.

The idea that there were people waiting to negotiate a peace immediately, a surrender of Germany. All those people who died after July 20th, 1944, would have lived. Yeah, I think some of them were offered the opportunity to take their own life, which quite a few of them did, like literally, like, here's a gun, just go in the other room. So, Rommel's a very famous example of that. Yeah, I think, did he signite himself? He was given the opportunity to take a signite pill. Some Gestapo guys came to his house and said, here's how it is.

You're a national hero. If it comes out that you were part of this plot, people are going to start questioning Hitler and Nazism, so we can't have that. We're going to give you the opportunity to kill yourself and we won't make your family part of this Sipenhoft. We'll leave your family alone. Right. So, he chose to take his own life rather than let his family go through this,

and be court-martialed and executed anyway. So, he killed himself from this plot. Yeah, so there was a signite, there was gunshots that you put upon yourself, there were firing squad, and then there was the meat hook hanging, which was, Hitler would require that certain of these people had wire tied around their throat, and then that was hung from a meat hook. And Bertolt von Stoffenberg was one of those guys. Oh, von Stoffenberg's brother?

Yes. Oh, wow. He was strangled multiple times and revived so that they could strangle him again. And Hitler, the whole thing was filmed for Hitler to watch later. So, yeah, he went berserk. After that, apparently, if you went to go visit Hitler, you, even as one of his loyal Nazi military officials, you had to leave your gun outside. Yeah, I think that might have been a rule anyway because, or maybe it was just tradition

to leave your sidearm outside the room because they were doing that in the movie. Oh, really? Yeah, but I think on Roderick's show, he was like, well, you could stick a gun in your pocket. Yeah, in your little garter. Yeah, wherever, in your sock garter. Sure, or your thigh garter. Yeah, depending on what you're into.

I think that's it. I'm surprised he didn't go after, because Von Strasenberg's family was not punished. Like, his wife died like 10 or 12 years ago. Right, but she was sent to a concentration camp and was liberated from it after the war. But they, I mean, she went to a concentration camp for sure. His brother... I can't believe he and her and her kids weren't killed, though. I'm surprised, too.

Like, on the spot. Yeah, it's weird. Apparently, the arbitrariness just increased the terror of it, too. Oh, well, that makes sense. So, that is the July 20th plot, okay, to assassinate Hitler. If you want to know more about that, go listen to the Friendly Fire episode on it. Yeah, it's a good one.

And Hitler, by the way, he was gone, I think, nine months later. Right. So it wasn't, I mean, this is toward the end anyway. Which makes it even worse. Yeah. You know? All right. So, if you already said that, it means it's time for Listener Mail.

So, a quick follow-up on administrative details. We said if we forgot someone, and Lawson Barney wrote in, and I did forget this one. I sent an early color study of my Pando painting, and wanted to make sure it arrived. It's about three by five inches in an envelope. Yes. And it did, and it's wonderful and lovely, and very sorry, Lawson, for that sneaking bias. I also want to say I got something from Allison Gallagher as well.

Oh, nice. I hadn't realized it, so thank you, Allison, for my gifts, too. Nice. It wasn't just Chuck that you sent stuff to. And you can find Lawson's Art at LawsonBarneyArt.com. Yeah, it's beautiful painting. Very nice. All right, Listener Mail, this is, well, this is a very sweet email from a couple.

Hey, guys, right, and thank you for always being there on our long car rides. My wife, Mia, and I have to travel 12 hours from our home in Butte, Montana to Salt Lake City for her cancer treatment at Huntsman Cancer Institute every couple of months. And learning something new from you guys is always a welcome addition on our drive. I thought of her type of cancer in the treatment as an interesting idea for an episode. She was diagnosed with a rare cancer called neuroendocrine tumor, NET. It's on her pancreas, but it's very different from pancreatic cancer. So when Steve Jobs and Aretha Franklin pass of this type of cancer, it's always reported in the

news as pancreatic cancer, which is incorrect and very disappointing because it does take away awareness from NET cancer. The treatment is called peptide receptor radionuclide therapy. It works in a way that sounds like science fiction. The treatment is done through IV and is combined in two parts. One part is attracted to cancer cells and is welcomed into the cell. The second part is attached to the first and releases a small amount of radiation when inside the cancer cells.

Very fascinating, and my explanation is very much glossed over. Again, thank you for the show. Last thing, can you give my wife, Mia, a shout out. That is from Beau Miller. So of course, Mia. Hey, Mia, shout out to Mia. Yeah, hang in there, guys. I know it's a very tough time for you, and I'm glad we can help in some small way while you're

making these long car rides. Yeah, yeah. And we'll look into NET for sure. Yeah, and thank you for reaching out to us, too. If you want to reach out to us, you can find us on StuffYouShouldKnow.com. All of our social links are on there, and you can also send us an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.