Communists planned an attack on Hitler, Blomberg, G�ring, G�bbels and Hess.
Group Markwitz 1935
Location: unknown
The group Markwitz wanted to kill Hitler, but the Gestapo infiltrated the group. All the members of the group were killed.
Hagana 1936
During 1936, David Frankfurter, a Jewish medical student living in Berne, killed Wilhelm Gustloff, Hitler's deputy in Switzerland. Gustloff became Frankfurter's substitute target when the assassin realized his primary target, Adolf Hitler, was beyond his reach. A year later it was learned through SS contacts with the Hagna, the Jewish intelligence service in Palestine, that Gustloff's murder was part of a failed assassination plan against Hitler by a Paris-based group known as the Alliance Isra�lite Universelle.
Strasser�s Plan December 1936
Location: N�rnberg Stadium
In December 1936, a young German Jew who had been living in Prague infiltrated into Germany as part of a plot to kill Hitler by blowing up a building in the Nuremberg Stadium. Helmut Hirsch, acting under the influence of Otto Strasser, one of Hitler's most virulent opponents, agreed to plant the bomb built by another of Strasser's followers.
Hirsch arrived in Stuttgart on December 20, three days before the scheduled meeting with his contact, a Strasser disciple who was to deliver the bomb. Hirsch did not know his contact had been arrested crossing the German-Polish border with the bomb, and under questioning by the Gestapo he revealed the bombing plan and identified the would-be bomber. Since Hirsch had used his own name at the hotel when he completed the forms required of all guests, it was a simple matter to track him down and arrest him.
On 8 March 1937, Helmut Hirsch was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by beheading. The execution was carried out on 4 June in Pl�tzensee.
Otto Strasser probably instigated more than a few death plots against Hitler. Otto and his brother, Gregor, were socialists before joining Hitler's National Socialist Party. Gregor entered into an unqualified allegiance to Hitler, but Otto held some serious reservations. He openly disagreed with Hitler on important issues such as a major strike by metalworkers in Saxony. Otto Strasser championed the workers; Hitler, who was being subsidized by wealthy industrialists, was ordered by them to disclaim Strasser and condemn his support for the strikers. Hitler and Strasser met twice in Berlin's Hotel Sanssouci on 21 and 22 May 1930, to reconcile their differences. Neither man budged from his position and they parted enemies. Expelled from the Party, Otto Strasser formed his own socialist organization, which he called the Schwarze Front (Black Front).
When Gregor Strasser died in Hitler's attack on the SA, Otto realized that he had lost the protection his brother's position in the Nazi Party had afforded him and that his own life was now in danger. He fled Germany and continued to scheme against Hitler from asylum in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and later Paris. Throughout 1937 and 1938, German intelligence uncovered a steady flow of information revealing plots to kill Hitler by the Black Front, as well as other opponents of the F�hrer, many of whom were German �migr�s.
Josef Thomas 1937, November 26
Location: Reichskanzlei Berlin
A mentaly ill man called Josef Thomas from Ebersfeld ran around in the Reichskanzlei. He got arrested. No one ever heard from him again.
Bomb 1937
Location: Sportpalast Berlin
An unknown person puts a bomb in the speakers platform of the Sportpalast. It is said that the bomb didn�t go off because the guy who placed it got, in some way, stuck in the toilets.
Dohnanyi 1937
Dr. Johannes von Dohnanyi of the Abwehr, personal advisor to Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gurtner, had disapproved of Hitler and his Nazi Party almost from the beginning when, through his post in the attorney general's office, in Hamburg, he was exposed firsthand to Nazi brutality. As early as 1937 Dohnanyi tried to recruit Hitler's adjutant, Hans Wiedemann, in a plot to shoot the F�hrer.
Maurice Bavaud 1938
Location: various
The year 1938 was a busy time for another would-be assassin, Maurice Bavaud. Through a strangely twisted logical reasoning, Bavaud concluded he must kill Hitler because the German dictator had reneged on his promise to squash the communists. Bavaud was a Swiss citizen attending a French Catholic seminary in Brittany when he came under the influence of another seminarian, Marcel Gerbohay. Gerbohay founded a small secret society of seminarians who called themselves the Compagnie du Myst�re. This group was pledged to fight communism wherever it appeared, especially in Russia.
Gerbohay portrayed himself as a descendant of the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over three hundred years. He prophesied they would rule again when the communists were overthrown. Hitler, whom many thought would be the instrument for the destruction of the Russian communists, was now showing every indication that he intended to co-exist peacefully with the Soviet Communist regime.
At Gerbohay's bidding, Bavaud set off from the seminary on a mission to assassinate Hitler because of his outward tolerance of the communists. He returned to his family's home in the west Switzerland town of NeuchU00E2tel and lived briefly with his parents and his five brothers and sisters. While he earned his keep helping his mother in a small grocery she ran to supplement her husband's postal workers salary, Bavaud studied German and read the French translation of "Mein Kampf".
On October 9 he bid his family farewell and set off on an odyssey that would crisscross Germany in pursuit of Adolf Hitler. He told his family he was going to Germany to find work as a draftsman, a trade he had learned before joining the seminary. He spent a fortnight visiting relatives in the German resort town of Baden-Baden. Telling these relatives he was going to Mannheim to seek work, he instead left Baden-Baden and proceeded south to the Swiss border town of Basel, where he purchased a 6.35-millimeter Schmeisser automatic pistol. He then traveled four hundred miles by rail to Berlin, where he expected to find Hitler.
In Berlin Bavaud learned that the F�hrer was at his mountain retreat near Berchtesgaden. Determined to kill his quarry, Bavaud immediately entrained for the resort three hundred miles to the south. Arriving in Berchtesgaden on October 25, he checked into an inexpensive hotel, the Stiftskeller, and found a source where he purchased extra ammunition for his pistol. To improve his nonexistent shooting skills he went deep into the woods and used trees for target practice. He decided that he would be able to shoot Hitler if he could get within twenty-five feet of him. It apparently did not occur to Bavaud that there was no guarantee that if he was successful in shooting Hitler the F�hrer would necessarily die.
Unfortunately, Bavaud again missed connections when Hitler left Berchtesgaden shortly after he arrived. Dejected over this second failure to find his target, Bavaud decided to plan more carefully by learning as much as possible about Hitler's movements before taking further action. However, his German was only rudimentary, and he was severely handicapped in these inquiries.
One afternoon while eating lunch he met two French instructors with whom he carried on a lively conversation, claiming to be an ardent admirer of Hitler who wanted to meet the F�hrer. Although his companions could not be of any help, the conversation was overheard by a police captain sitting at the next table who spoke French. Captain Karl Derkert told Bavaud that he was connected with Hitler's security and assured the young Swiss that to arrange a personal audience with Hitler would require a letter of introduction from a high-ranking foreign official. But if he only wanted to see Hitler up close, Deckert advised, he should go to Munich in time for the anniversary of the 9 November 1923 Putsch. Hitler traditionally led a parade through the city's streets that retraced the route he and his band had taken in 1923.
On October 31 Bavaud once again boarded a train, this time for Munich, where he rented a furnished room. Using a tourist map, Bavaud plotted the route of the march during the days preceding the celebration, looking for a vantage point from which to shoot Hitler. A series of grandstands had been constructed along the route, and for one of them he was able to obtain a ticket by impersonating a reporter for a Swiss newspaper.
Not entirely confident with his marksmanship, he located a suitable site about twenty-five miles from the city where he could safely practice his shooting skills.
The morning of November 9 was cold and clear. Dressed in a heavy overcoat, with his pistol inside the coat pocket, Bavaud made his way through the thousands who thronged the streets of Munich and arrived at the grandstand near the Marienplatz with time to spare. He found a front-row seat and sat quietly, hoping to remain inconspicuous while he waited for Hitler. The street in front of him, as well as along the entire march route, was flanked on both sides with two rows of burly SA men who stood shoulder to shoulder to keep the crowd from rushing into the streets. The intended assassin knew he would have to shoot Hitler from the grandstand because it would be impossible for him to push his way through the brown-shirted guards. Suddenly the cry went up, "The F�hrer is coming!"
Rising as one, the people in the grandstand, Bavaud included, stood to view the approaching parade. Inside his pocket his hand gripped the pistol tightly, ready to remove it quickly when Hitler came within range. With his heart pounding, the young man stood poised to act as the line of marchers approached. When the parade drew abreast of Bavaud, disappointment gripped him as he realized that Hitler was marching on the opposite side of the street, not in the center as he had expected.
This placed his target more than fifty feet away, twice his confidence range with his weapon. Bavaud released his hold on the Schmeisser and could do nothing except watch Hitler and his entourage turn a corner and disappear from view.
Bavaud was disappointed but far from discouraged. He purchased some tastefully expensive stationery and envelopes and returned to his room, where he proceeded to forge a letter of introduction to Hitler from French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin.
The letter stated that Bavaud carried a second letter that was to be read by Adolf Hitler only. It was a poorly conceived ruse born of desperation. That Bavaud even imagined such a letter would gain him admittance to Hitler's presence is incredible. To believe that the foreign minister of France would use this young Swiss citizen to carry important correspondence to the F�hrer of Germany instead of his own ambassador was the height of foolishness.
Hearing erroneously that Hitler had returned to his retreat, Bavaud again boarded a train for Berchtesgaden. At the station he hired a taxi to take him to the Berghof, but he was prevented from entering the grounds by the armed guards who told him Hitler was not there, but still in Munich. Bavaud rushed back to the railroad station and took the next train to Munich, arriving there about the same time Hitler's private train left on its way to Berchtesgaden.
Frustrated and nearly out of money, Bavaud gave up his quest to kill Hitler and decided to leave the country. He did not have enough money to travel to Switzerland, so he hid aboard a train bound for Paris where he hoped to obtain from the Swiss embassy sufficient funds to return to his parents' home. When he was discovered by a railroad conductor he was turned over to the police at Augsburg, who handed him to the Gestapo because he was a foreigner and because he was carrying a gun and letter addressed to Hitler. For some insane reason Bavaud had failed to dispose of the incriminating letters and the weapon he intended to use against Hitler.
Under arduous interrogation Bavaud eventually confessed his plan to the Gestapo. He was put on trial, found guilty, and on 14 May 1941, was beheaded
Having traveled hundreds of miles pursuing his fantasy to kill Hitler, Marcel Bavaud succeeded only in bringing about his own demise. Perhaps he would have accomplished his mission had he been a bit more imaginative and more resourceful, but he was doomed from the beginning because of a grievous lack of planning. Even when certain failure became apparent, the poor fellow was not smart enough to rid himself of the evidence that ultimately incriminated him.
Maurice Bavaud (January 15, 1916 in Neuch�tel - May 14, 1941 in Berlin-Pl�tzensee) was a Roman Catholic Swiss citizen who in 1938 attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
Bavaud was a Catholic theology student, attending the Saint Ilan Seminary, Saint-Brieuc, Brittany, and a member of an anti-communist student group in France called Compagnie du Myst�re. The group's leader, Marcel Gerbohay, had a lot of influence over Bavaud. Gerbohay claimed that he was a member of the Romanov Dynasty, and convinced Bavaud that when communism was destroyed, the Romanovs would once again rule Russia, in the person of Gerbohay. Bavaud believed what Gerbohay had told him, became obsessed with the idea that killing Hitler would help the plans to materialise, and finally decided to carry out the assassination himself.
On 9 October 1938, Bavaud travelled from Brittany to Baden-Baden, then on to Basel, where he bought a Schmeisser 6.35 mm (.25 ACP) semi-automatic pistol. In Berlin, a policeman, Karl Deckert, overheard Bavaud saying that he would like to meet Hitler personally. Deckert advised Bavaud that a private audience could be arranged if Bavaud could obtain a letter of introduction from a suitable foreign VIP. Deckert advised him to travel to Munich for the anniversary of the 1923 "Beer Hall Putsch", which Hitler attended every year. Bavaud followed those instructions by buying a ticket for a seat on the reviewing stand by posing as a Swiss reporter, intending to shoot Hitler as the latter passed during the parade. Bavaud abandoned this attempt when, on November 9, Hitler turned out to be marching in the company of other Nazi leaders whom Bavaud did not want to injure.
Bavaud next purchased expensive stationery and forged a letter of introduction in the name of the French nationalist leader Pierre Taittinger, which claimed that Bavaud had a second letter for Hitler's eyes only. He travelled to Berchtesgaden in the belief that Hitler had returned there, only to find that Hitler was still in Munich. When Bavaud returned to Munich, he discovered that Hitler was just leaving for Berchtesgaden.
Having exhausted his money, Bavaud stowed away on a train to Paris, where he was discovered by a conductor who turned him over to the police. He was interrogated by the Gestapo and admitted his plans to assassinate Hitler.
Bavaud was tried by the Volksgerichtshof on 18 December 1939, naming as his motives that he considered Hitler a danger to humanity in general, to Swiss independence, and to Catholicism in Germany. Swiss diplomacy made no effort to save Bavaud; Hans Fr�hlicher, the Swiss ambassador to Germany even publicly condemned Bavaud's assassination attempt. An offer from the Germans to exchange Bavaud for a German spy was turned down, and Bavaud was sentenced to death. He was executed by guillotine in the Berlin-Pl�tzensee prison on the morning of 14 May 1941.
Aftermath
Bavaud's father Alfred attempted to rehabilitate his son's name and reputation, resulting in a court decision on 12 December 1955 reverting the death sentence but posthumously condemning Bavaud to a five-year sentence, arguing that Hitler's life was protected by law just as any other life. A second verdict of 1956 reverted the prison sentence and Germany paid Bavaud's family the sum of CHF 40,000 in reparation.
In 1976, Rolf Hochhuth idealized Bavaud as a "new William Tell", while in 1980 Klaus Urner relativized Hochhuth's heroic picture, analyzing psychological aspects of Bavaud's motivation. In 1989 and again in 1998, the Swiss Federal Council admitted that the Swiss authorities did not make a sufficient effort to save Bavaud. Finally, in 2008, the Swiss government honored the life and effort of Bavaud. In 2011, a small monument was erected in Hauterive near Neuch�tel.
Oster group, 1938, September 28
Location: unknown
Members of the resistance were scattered throughout the army, the Foreign Ministry, the police, and nongovernmental circles and were essentially a small minority in a totalitarian state that engaged freely in terror, imprisonment, and murder against its enemies, real or imagined.. They could not meet in large numbers to engender support for their struggle against the Nazis without arousing Gestapo interest in them. Nor could many of them risk being seen with each other because of government restrictions. Contact between different government agencies was strictly limited and in some cases forbidden, such as between officials of the Foreign Ministry and the General Staff, unless the individual involved was a liaison officer. Gestapo and SS secret police units worked ceaselessly to uncover opponents of the regime. Considering the overwhelming resources against them, it is miraculous that practically anyone who joined the 1938 resistance movement survived long enough to be executed by the Nazis in 1944 and 1945.
During 1938 latent anti-Nazi and anti-war sentiment among individual officers in the German army gradually coalesced into a hardcore group determined to depose Hitler. Early in the year the first tentative beginnings of an organized coup took form. By year's end a solid nucleus of ranking officers was plotting to kill the F�hrer. However, many of the generals who recognized that Hitler's plans for conquering Europe harbored the seeds of Germany's destruction rejected assassination, opting instead for arrest and imprisonment.
Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster, Chief of Staff of the Abwer, the counterintelligence section of the military High Command, was a much-decorated veteran of World War I. He was a deeply religious parson's son, a highly charged and temperamental man, without personal ambitions. Oster viewed Nazism as anti-Christian and persisted in his efforts to depose Hitler until his own execution in 1945.
A group of military conspirators around him planned a coup when the troups to enter Czechoslovakia were mobilised. Hitler's ultimate fate had not yet been decided, but most senior officers believed he should be tried on charges of treason for committing Germany to a senseless war, or declared insane and committed to an asylum. Little is known about the detailed military plans for the coup. Except for General Franz Halder, a deeply religious and sensitive man from a background steeped in military tradition, none of the ranking army officers who were involved survived the war. General Halder stated that he left the details to General Erwin von Witzleben, keeping for himself only the final authority to issue the order that would begin the coup.
Everyone now waited for the order to come from General Halder, who in turn waited for Hitler's orders to prepare to attack Czechoslovakia before he would commit the coup's forces to action. During this slack period the conspirators debated Hitler's fate. Although Halder despised the Nazis and deplored their tyrannical rule over Germany, he also believed strongly in his personal oath of loyalty to Hitler. Halder opposed outright assassination, which might besmirch the army's reputation. If Hitler had to die, Halder preferred it to happen in some way not directly connected with the army or the army's actions in conducting the coup.  Other senior officers, including Beck, Witzleben, and Canaris, wanted Hitler brought to trial for the crimes committed by his regime. They wanted the public to clearly understand what these crimes were, so the army could never be accused of stabbing Germany in the back, a reference to the "stab in the back" theory expounded at the end of World War I and which Hitler used to great advantage in his rise to power. The theory, invented by Hindenburg and Luddendorf, held that democratic-minded politicians had stabbed the German army in the back, by calling for armistice, just when it was poised to win its greatest victory in the war.
Hans Oster and others, including Dr. Hans von Dohnanyi, wanted to have Hitler declared insane by a panel of doctors. Dohnanyi had been collecting evidence to submit to such a panel for over five years, and his psychiatrist father-in-law, Professor Karl Bonh�ffer, had already agreed to chair the panel.
Major Heinz and his well-armed escort team (which was to fight its way into the Chancellory) thought otherwise. In Heinz's words, "Hitler alive has more weight than all the troops at our disposal". His plan was to entice Hitler into some action that would provoke a gun battle in which the F�hrer would be killed. At first Oster refused to go along with murdering Hitler, but Heinz's premise that a live Hitler was too dangerous a force to permit the establishment of a stable government in Germany was persuasive enough to win him over. They agreed, however, that no senior officer, not even Witzleben, was to know of their decision to kill Hitler.
By 15 September 15, Heinz's assault squad was poised for action. They were secreted at the Berlin safe houses maintained by the Abwehr. Throughout Berlin and the surrounding suburbs military officers, police officials, and civilians, all members of the conspiracy to overthrow the Nazi regime, waited tensely for the word to begin. They all felt certain of three facts. First, that Hitler would issue the order to attack Czechoslovakia; second, that Britain and France would declare war on Germany, or at least rattle enough sabers to make it clear that they were about to declare war; and third, that the coup would succeed in deposing the Nazis and the war would be prevented. What they did not expect was the willingness of Neville Chamberlain to throw Czech independence to the wolves and allow Hitler to do as he pleased.
Then the unthinkable happened. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to confer with Hitler personally. On 14 September, Chamberlain announced in the House of Commons that he would meet with the Reich Chancellor the following day.
In Britain the forces for appeasement mobilized to gather public support for Chamberlain's peace plan of giving Hitler what he wanted. Chamberlain's Air Minister, Sir Kingsley Wood, doctored a report from the Air Staff estimating that Germany's entire bomber force was under fifteen hundred planes, with less than one-third of them capable of being a threat to Britain in case of war. The altered report, which was leaked to the press, said that Germany was capable of sending fifteen hundred bombers against Britain, causing a half a million casualties in three weeks. The British public was painted a picture of skies darkened by masses of German bombers turning London and other major cities into infernos.
At the final Munich meeting on 28 September Hitler renounced his plans to destroy Czechoslovakia. France and Britain allowed him to intervene in Czechoslovakia by occupying the Sudetenland with German troops. The threat of war was averted. So, too, was the threat to Hitler's life that had been mounted by the coup's assault squad hidden in buildings all around the Chancellory. The assault squad was dispersed and their weapons returned to the Abwehr warehouse.
Everyone who knew of the planned coup recognized that the regular conscript troops would probably refuse to obey orders to arrest Hitler after such a great victory. Nevile Henderson, the Germanophile British ambassador, wrote to Lord Halifax, "by keeping the peace, we have saved Hitler and his regime".
The full import of the Munich debacle did not become entirely clear until after the war. At the Nuremberg trials, Marshal Keitel was asked whether Hitler would have attacked Czechoslovakia had France and Britain taken a stronger stand behind the Czechs. Wilhelm Keitel, who served Hitler faithfully throughout the war, answered, "Certainly not. We were not strong enough militarily".
American historian William Shirer, in his "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" (1960), took the view that although Hitler was not bluffing about his intention to invade, Czechoslovakia would have been able to offer significant resistance. Shirer believed that Britain and France had sufficient air defences to avoid serious bombing of London and Paris and would have been able to pursue a rapid and successful war against Germany. He quotes Churchill as saying the Munich agreement meant that "Britain and France were in a much worse position compared to Hitler's Germany". After Adolf Hitler personally inspected the Czech fortifications, he privately said to Josef G�bbels, "we would have shed a lot of blood" and that it was fortunate that there had been no fighting. [Josef G�bbels diary, 2 October 1938]
 
Hitler's bloodless victory in Munich disheartened the resistance. Never before had Hitler's popularity been higher than when the Sudetenland was annexed to the Reich. Some of those who took part in the planned coup would never again consider such activities favorably. They felt betrayed by the Allies' spineless capitulation to Hitler's blackmail.
Others remained dedicated to the cause of overthrowing Hitler: men like General Witzleben, General Beck, Lieutenant Colonel Oster, Gisevius, Schulenburg, and Major Heinz, joined by new resistance members, they regrouped to prepare for a renewed opportunity.
Also active in 1938 had been a group of would-be assassins gathered together by Dr. Wilhelm Abegg, a former Prussian state secretary. Abegg's plan was to build a compact bomb small enough to be concealed inside the clothing of an assassin yet powerful enough to cause widespread damage when it exploded. Abegg sought to eliminate as many Nazi leaders as possible along with Hitler.
Abegg devised an imaginative scheme to accost Hitler and the other Nazis with a deception that just might have worked. He formed a team of ten assassins, all former Prussian police officers who had served time in Nazi concentration camps and who had been ransomed by Abegg. The Prussians were to be dressed in stolen uniforms of Italian army courier officers. Each man was assigned a target whom he would approach, presumably with an important message from the Italian government. The man assigned to Hitler was to blow himself up along with his target, while the others were to shoot their assigned targets at the same time.
Abegg's plan was never activated because he had difficulty constructing a suitable bomb. After learning through contacts in the military that high-ranking officers were planning a coup against Hitler, he decided to step aside and leave Hitler's assassination to the generals. He believed they could carry it out much more effectively than he could.
During the period between the signing of the Munich accord and the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, the resistance movement, which had been less an organized movement and more a disjointed series of anti-Nazi or anti-war groups and individuals who had managed against all odds to unite in the 1938 coup, suffered dismemberment. Military officers were moved to new postings, and government officials, especially those in the Foreign Ministry, were transferred to new locations throughout the Reich.
General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord 1939, September 
The coming of war, followed two days later by declarations of war against Germany by Great Britain and France, generated a flurry of activity among officers and others who felt that Germany was doomed unless Hitler was dead. In one instance, Albrecht von Kessel and Adam von Trott zu Solz, both members of Weizs�cker's Foreign Ministry circle, proposed to Lieutenant General Alexander von Falkenhausen that he invite Hitler to inspect the fortifications on the Bohemian border. Once there, Hitler's schedule would include a tour of a bunker where the general or a close aide would detonate a live grenade. The scheme was a bit bizarre, and Falkenhausen, although a coup sympathizer, did not think the plan was workable. He never sent the invitation.
Hitler did receive another invitation, however. This one was from Colonel General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, an independent-minded and tough officer who despised Hitler and the Nazis. Having retired as Commander-in-Chief of the army in 1933, he was recalled during the mobilization for the Polish invasion and appointed commander of Army Detachment A on the Lower Rhine. Although frustrated because his headquarters was in Cologne, far from Hitler, Hammerstein-Equord began plotting ways to kill Hitler as soon as he arrived at his command.
Since it was impossible for him to travel to Berlin without express permission, Hammerstein-Equord decided to invite Hitler to visit him. His persuasion for this visit was that the Allies would hear about Hitler inspecting the western defenses, and this would encourage their belief that Germany's western frontier was well defended. Once he lured Hitler within his reach, he would "render him harmless once and for all." Confidants who knew of his intention to kill Hitler did not doubt that this general, known as the "man of iron nerve," could do it if Hitler accepted his invitation.
Adolf Hitler was acutely aware of General Hammerstein-Equord's sentiments toward the Nazi Party, and he had no wish to jeopardize his safety by placing himself within the general's reach. He declined to visit Cologne. Shortly afterward, Hammerstein-Equord was transferred to Silesia and then quickly placed into permanent retirement. Before he died in April 1943, he confided to a friend his disappointment at the generals' placid submission to Hitler's authority, and how most refused to support the movement to overthrow the Nazis. "These fellows," he said, "make me, an old soldier, an anti-militarist." It is unfortunate that in 1938, when the case for action against Hitler became apparent, Hammerstein-Equord had no troops under his command and could not carry out an earlier pledge to kill Hitler if he were given troops.
Although both Britain and France declared war on Germany after the invasion of Poland, the Allies took no direct military action against Germany. This absence of real war, which later became known as the "phony war," gave many Germans hope of escaping another war of the magnitude of the 1914 to 1918 conflict. The absence of actual fighting between the Allies and Germany gave rise to the premise that a compromise could be found to re-establish peace.
All possibility for a peaceful solution vanished on September 27, 1939, when the F�hrer told the officers commanding the army, air force, and navy that he was determined to "destroy the enemy." He would, he told them, attack France and Great Britain. The neutrality of Belgium and Holland would be swept aside as German forces overran the French in their own country, leaving Great Britain to carry on alone.
As word spread of Hitler's intention to start a shooting war with the Western Allies, the resistance was given a new life and a new cause, to save the peace by preventing a war almost every competent observer knew would ultimately mean the destruction of Germany. Many of the men now proposing to depose the dictator had also been involved in the aborted coup of September 1938. Again they risked the possibility their actions might result in a civil war between their camp and the masses of new army recruits and the civilian population, most of whom viewed Hitler as a modern Caesar. In addition, what weighed heaviest on General Halder's mind was the fact that Germany was now officially at war with Great Britain and France. He did not want a coup attempt to cause turmoil within Germany that the Allies could exploit by invading the country during the transition from one government to another.
It is significant that the men who planned the overthrow and killing of Hitler did so because they were German patriots. While they had no quarrel with many of Hitler's earlier policies, especially reclaiming territory taken from Germany by the treaties following World War I, they did not want to acquire the land by force. Many believed that despite their just cause, force would lead to retaliation against Germany and finally to another war, perhaps another World War.
Warsaw 1939, October 5
Location: crossing Aleje Jerozolimskie - Nowy Swiat
The Polish army wanted to blow up Hitlers car, when it crossed the (now called) Square Charles de Gaulles. A human error prevetend the bomb to explode.
Himmler's Bomb Plot 1939, November 8
Location: B�rgerbr�ukeller, M�nchen
Heinrich Himmler was undeniably Adolf Hitler's most sadistic henchman, an epitaph befitting the abominable crimes he committed against humanity. When this unimposing, pudgy little man wearing pince-nez spectacles bit open a cyanide capsule lodged between two teeth on the right side of his mouth during an examination by a British army doctor on 23 May 1945, he took many secrets with him. The most ominous was his role in a bombing that barely missed killing Hitler in 1939.
Hitler customarily participated at the annual meeting in Munich commemorating the failed putsch of November 8-9, 1923. The meeting, held in a large hall of the B�rgerbr�ukeller, was always well attended by the "Old Fighters" who had participated in Hitler's first attempt to seize power.
The SS routinely began guarding closely any facility in which the F�hrer was scheduled to appear at least several days before his arrival. This tight advance security was calculated to preclude the possibility of a political antagonist placing a bomb in the building set to explode during Hitler's visit. The "Old Fighters" convention was no exception to this practice. Several days before the meeting, crack SS guards placed the hall under maximum security.
Despite stringent security precautions, a thirty-six-year-old artisan named Georg Elser who was both a trained carpenter and master electrician unaccountably managed to slip undetected into the vast beer hall over a span of several nights just before the meeting. Elser had only recently been discharged from the concentration camp at Dachau where he was serving an indeterminate sentence for his activities as a member of a communist organization, the Red Front Fighters League.
Each night Elser worked quietly at his deadly task alone in the darkened hall. A diminutive man with a pale complexion and long dark hair offset by bright darting eyes, Elser bent to his work preparing the instrument for Adolf Hitler's demise with a special dedication.
Directly behind the platform from which Hitler traditionally delivered his speech was a pillar that was a main support for the roof. Dark wood paneling encased the support column. Elser cut an opening into the paneling allowing him entree to a narrow space between the panel and the support. The opening was sufficiently wide to permit him access to the space, yet small enough to escape notice by a casual observer. He fashioned a tiny door from a matching piece of paneling to disguise the opening. Elser's only fear was that a close examination of the pillar would expose his miniature door.
Incredibly, Elser managed to conceal himself inside the hall, undetected, on thirty-five separate occasions. As the date for Hitler's speech drew near, Elser worked feverishly to complete the preparations for his bomb.
As part of his death plot he had taken a job at a quarry specifically to enable him to steal Donarit, an explosive with the properties he required. He added to the Donarit some black powder and the explosive removed from a stolen 75-millimeter shell. The final touch was two Westminster clocks synchronized to pinpoint the timing of the explosion.
Because the F�hrer was in the midst of the invasion of Poland, and because Germany was technically at war with both France and Britain, the meeting organizers planned a scaled down program for the 1939 ceremonies. At first Hitler decided to forego his customary speech and delegate his second in command, Rudolf Hess, to broadcast a nationwide radio address commemorating the anniversary. At the eleventh hour Hitler changed his mind. He would attend the ceremonies and deliver the speech in person.
On November 8 Hitler flew to Munich, but in deference to the foggy November weather he ordered that his personal train meet him there for the return trip. To avoid disrupting the normal train traffic, Hitler's train was scheduled to leave the Munich station at 9:31 P.M. that evening. To meet this departure time he would have to leave the beer hall no later than 9:10 P.M. Hitler's previous habit at these gatherings was to begin his speech at 8:30 P.M., speak for about one hour, and then spend approximately thirty minutes sipping weak beer and chatting with the rank and file members who had supported him from the early years.
When the F�hrer arrived, the large hall, gaily decorated with flags and banners, was packed with three thousand celebrants. The Blood Banner, the Nazi flag that had been used on the day of the putsch, was in its place of honor, and the party luminaries who were attending had taken their seats. Most prominent among them were Heinrich Himmler, Josef G�bbels, Hans Frank, and Alfred Rosenberg.
The crowd rose to its feet and cheered when Hitler strode in at 8:00 P.M. He waved and smiled broadly. Hitler stepped to the platform and waited the better part of ten minutes, allowing the ovation to die down before beginning his speech. When the room was finally quiet he launched into a diatribe against Great Britain that lasted nearly one hour.
Predictably, Hitler accused Britain of fighting in World War I and then, just a month earlier, declaring war on Germany again purely for her own imperialist motives. He denounced the British claim that they were fighting for liberty and justice, and he mockingly shouted that God had rewarded Britain's good deeds with 480 million people around the world to dominate. Again and again his speech was interrupted by wild cheering.
Seated in the front row was a nervous Max W�nsche, the F�hrer's young military aide, who kept checking his watch. He feared Hitler's speech would run too long and he would miss the train. W�nsche had given the train crew strict orders to leave the station precisely at 9:31 P.M., as Hitler had instructed. While a backup train would arrive a short time later as a security precaution, the young officer did not relish the prospect of waiting around the empty station for the alternate train while the F�hrer's temper rose.
As Hitler continued his attack on Great Britain, only a few feet behind him Georg Elser's two Westminster clocks quietly ticked away the minutes.
Hitler laughed at the British claim that they were fighting for civilization, and he questioned whether the civilization for which they fought was to be found in the mining districts of Newcastle or the urban slums of London. Meanwhile, the Westminster clocks ticked off their inexorable countdown to destruction.
At seven minutes after nine Hitler ended his speech. Joined by Himmler, G�bbels, and his personal bodyguard, he promptly left the hall amid the deafening cheers of his supporters. Hitler's party boarded a fleet of waiting automobiles and sped directly to the railroad station. W�nsche was enormously relieved; the convoy would arrive in time to depart on the first train.
Thirteen minutes after leaving the hall, as the entourage proceeded through the city toward the station, a loud explosion was heard coming from the direction of the hall. Everyone turned instinctively to the rear window of their cars, but they were too far from the explosion to see what had caused the blast. By the time they arrived at the station the night was filled with the sounds of police and ambulance sirens and the ringing of fire bells.
Minutes before Hitler's train left the station, Eva Braun and her close friend, Herta Schneider, were welcomed aboard. As the train gathered speed through the darkness, the privileged passengers partied, with Hitler the only teetotaller aboard. When the train arrived in Nuremberg, G�bbels got off and entered the stationmaster's office to send several messages and receive the latest dispatches.
The propaganda chief returned pale and obviously shaken. In a trembling voice he told Hitler of the bombing of the B�rgerbr�ukeller. At first Hitler thought G�bbels was joking, but when he realized it was true he too turned pale and sat quietly for a few minutes to regain his composure. As the color returned to his face he spoke with controlled emotion. He attributed his timely exit from the hall only minutes before the explosion to a benevolent Providence and insisted it was a sure sign he was destined to reach his goal.
 
 
Hitler spoke by telephone      with SS General von Eberstein, the Munich police chief (who had      been flatly forbidden to encroach on this strictly Party preserve      with regular police security measures), and consoled the anguished      SS general: Don't worry-it was not your fault. The casualties      are regrettable, but all's well that ends well." By 7 A.M.      the news was that six people had been killed (the death toll      later rose to eight) and over sixty injured.
- David Irving, "Hitler's      War"
Hitler then commanded his personal adjutant, Julius Schaub, to ensure that everything possible would be done for the victims of the explosion.
Georg Elser's bomb caused a section of the B�rgerbr�ukeller's roof to collapse on the Nazi Party gathering. Eight people died and sixty-three were injured. Eva Braun's father was among the injured. The ensuing peculiar series of events defies logic.
Ever wary of the omnipresent British Intelligence, Hitler quickly concluded that two British agents operating in Holland were responsible for the bombing. The two agents, Major R. H. Stevens and Captain S. Payne-Best, were negotiating with a man they believed to be a member of an anti-Nazi conspiracy in the German High Command. The man was actually an SS double agent.
Late that night Himmler telephoned the agent, SS Major Walter Schellenberg, in Venlo, a hamlet just across the Dutch border. He instructed Schellenberg to break off negotiations with the two British officers, kidnap them, and bring them into Germany. Schellenberg was hesitant at first, but Himmler made it clear the order came directly from Hitler.
The following day Schellenberg waited at a cafe in Venlo for his scheduled meeting with Stevens, Payne-Best, and a Dutch military intelligence officer, Lieutenant Klop. When the Buick carrying the three arrived at the cafe at precisely 4:00 P.M., the man known to them as Major Sch�mmel was seated on the cafe terrace casually sipping an aperitif. Suspecting nothing, the trio stepped from the car and immediately came under deadly fire from a crack squad of SS Security Service men commanded by the notorious Alfred Helmut Naujocks.
Naujocks had been responsible for the staged attack on a German radio station in Gleiwitz, using prison camp inmates dressed in stolen Polish army uniforms. The incident had provided Hitler with an excuse for attacking Poland. A man of useful SS talents, Naujocks later disguised German soldiers as Dutch and Belgian border guards to prepare for the German invasion of those countries in May 1940.
In the gunfight that erupted behind the Venlo cafe, Lieutenant Klop was mortally wounded and both British officers taken prisoner. The SS squad then towed the disabled Buick across the frontier, less than two hundred feet away.
On the same day, Georg Elser was arrested near the town of Constance as he attempted, along with thousands of others, to flee into Switzerland. A search uncovered a large amount of incriminating evidence, including an unused postcard from the B�rgerbr�ukeller, drawings of detonators and shells, parts of a detonator, his old membership card in the Red Front Fighters League, and a substantial sum of money in Swiss and German currency.
The kidnapping of Stevens and Payne-Best proved futile. Intense questioning of the two men failed to produce the slightest shred of evidence that they were even remotely connected to the Munich bombing. Elser, however, confessed to setting the bomb but refused to implicate anyone else. He told his interrogators that he had acted alone and had told no one of his scheme to kill Hitler. When they demanded to know why he wanted to kill the F�hrer, Elser said he thought it was the only way to prevent Germany from going to war.
Despite repeated beatings and torture by Gestapo agents, Georg Elser insisted he had acted alone. Meanwhile, Hitler publicized the bombing as an "English plot." He wisely recognized the propaganda value of the assassination attempt, and he shrewdly used it to incite German public resentment against Great Britain. On November 21, Hitler declared he had incontrovertible proof that the British Secret Service was behind the bombing and that two British agents had been arrested near the Dutch border.
Finally, in the official explanation of the conspiracy to kill him, Hitler strung together every faction or individual that had ever opposed him. Elser was labeled a communist activist (to which there was some truth) who had been persuaded to become a British agent by Hitler's old National Socialist nemesis, Otto Strasser. The British were accused of supplying Elser with the materials to construct the bomb and promising him safe passage to sanctuary in Switzerland after the assassination.
In a Gestapo-produced film, Georg Elser actually demonstrated how he had manufactured the bomb that devastated the B�rgerbr�ukeller meeting hall, and he explained how he had planted it behind the wood paneling covering the support pillar. When Himmler brought the film and the Gestapo report to the F�hrer, he refused to view the movie. Hitler categorically denounced the conclusion, which Himmler supported, that Elser had acted alone. Hitler rejected the report and attacked Himmler personally for failing to expose the conspiracy.
Himmler's advocacy of the conclusion that Elser acted alone in spite of his knowledge that Hitler believed the bomber was part of a conspiracy -- and wanted the Gestapo investigation to indicate so -- is out of character for a man whose reputation was one of total subservience to the F�hrer's wishes. The logical position was for him to agree with Hitler and place the blame on the two British intelligence officers whom Schellenberg had kidnapped. It was completely unlike Himmler, and without explanation, to take the position he did, unless he was withholding information about the bombing from Hitler.
Major Stevens and Captain Payne-Best spent five years in various concentration camps but managed to survive the war. Shuttled from camp to camp, the two were eventually confined at Niederdorf in South Tyrol. There American forces liberated them on 28 April 1945. Several survivors of plots to kill Hitler on 20 July 1944, were rescued at the same time.
Himmler rewarded Schellenberg for his kidnapping of the two British officers by promoting him to major-general in the SS. He soon became a specialist in foreign espionage, and in early 1940 he furnished Hitler with a report that claimed to prove the existence of close ties between British military intelligence and Dutch military intelligence agencies. Hitler cited that report as part of his justification for invading Holland, which was a neutral country.
Georg Elser's punishment for attempting to kill Hitler was most unusual. It raises provocative questions about exactly who was actually behind the B�rgerbr�ukeller bombing. Dictators such as Hitler and Stalin relish a prominent, well publicized trial of their enemies, real or imagined. It allows them to convince the public that evil men and women exist who plot against their authority, thereby justifying the need for draconian security measures. Holding these show trial victims up as examples, even if the evidence is fabricated by the prosecution, serves as a powerful deterrent to other potential opponents. There was ample precedence to expect that the Nazis would parade the Munich bomber before the public in a show trial, presenting all manner of evidence to implicate Hitler's personal and public enemies, especially the British. Incredibly, no such trial ever took place. Not until after the war was lost did Elser pay with his life for the attempted assassination.
Instead of a trial and public execution, Georg Elser was interned as a prisoner with special privileges by Himmler's SS. In a succession of concentration camps he was treated decidedly better than other inmates. He was referred to as a "special prisoner" known under the code name "Eller." In his biography of Adolf Hitler, Robert Payne described Elser as a prisoner who was to be feared or at least respected because he possessed important state secrets.
Ironically, although Elser did not know Stevens and Payne-Best, who were both alleged by the Nazis to be his accomplices, he met them in prison. At Sachsenhausen Elser met Payne-Best, whom he learned the Nazis wanted to implicate in the bombing. Elser told the Briton a fascinating story about how he had come to plant the bomb.
According to Elser, he was arrested as a communist activist in Munich during the summer of 1939 and sent to Dachau for re-education training. One day during his stay at Dachau he was summoned to the commandant's office, where he was questioned about his carpentry and electrical skills. His interrogators confided to him that several high-ranking Party officials were suspected of plotting to kill Hitler, but despite sufficient evidence the Gestapo was reluctant to arrest them because of the chaos it would cause in the upper echelons of government while the country was at war. Elser was asked if he would build and plant a bomb timed to explode shortly after Hitler completed his speech at the annual Munich celebration. In return for his co-operation he would be released from the camp, given a large sum of money, and allowed to escape to Switzerland.
Elser accepted the offer. After he fulfilled his part, he was arrested in a gross breach of the agreement. Following his arrest he was told it was a mistake because several overzealous border guards had not been informed of the plan. While he was held in custody, Gestapo agents coached him in testimony he was to deliver implicating both Stevens and Payne-Best in the bombing. Unaccountably, the expected trial never took place.
Later, after he was transferred from Sachsenhausen to Dachau, Elser related essentially the same story he had told Payne-Best to a noted Dachau inmate, the prominent anti-Nazi pastor, Reverend Martin Niem�ller.
Georg Elser finally paid for his crime four and one-half years later, just weeks before the end of the war. In the declining months of the Third Reich, many opponents of the regime being held in concentration camps and prisons were slaughtered by the Nazis. Elser's death was made to look as if it happened during an Allied bombing raid.
Among the documents uncovered after the war was a letter from Gestapo chief Heinrich M�ller to the commandant of Dachau, SS-Obersturmbannf�hrer Eduard Weiter, instructing him to kill Elser during the next air raid. M�ller even told Weiter the exact words to use when announcing Elser's death. On 16 April 1945, Weiter announced that Georg Elser had been mortally wounded during an Allied bombing raid.
Unfortunately for historical accuracy, the elusive answer to the question of who was actually behind the bombing of the Munich beer hall will probably never be resolved. Three viable possibilities exist: (1) Himmler arranged the bombing with Hitler's approval to stir up anti-British hatred among the German population; (2) Himmler arranged the bombing, without Hitler's knowledge, for whatever personal reason he may have had; and (3) Elser accomplished the entire task by himself.
Taking the last first, practically no one with any understanding of the workings of Nazi Germany could conclude that Georg Elser, a man of limited intelligence, could possibly have succeeded in placing the bomb undetected by security agents. Most historians agree that Himmler, for some unclear motive, planned the entire incident. At the time of the bombing, William L. Shirer wrote in his diary the phrase, "smells of another Reichstag fire". Robert Payne concluded that Elser had been Himmler's tool.
If in fact Shirer and Payne are correct and Himmler actually did arrange the bombing, an important new question requires an answer. Was the bomb planted with Adolf Hitler's knowledge and approval? This question may be easy to answer by looking at the political result of the explosion. Hitler used the attempt on his life to arouse German resentment against Britain. He accused the British of trying to win the war by killing him. His strategy worked. Hitler's wild, unsupported accusations radically increased anti-British feelings among the German population.
It is difficult, though, to imagine Adolf Hitler allowing Himmler or anyone else to plant a time bomb just a few feet away from where he stood. It is even more difficult to imagine Hitler permitting a known communist and enemy to plant the bomb. Without question, if the bomb had exploded while Hitler was speaking, he would have died. It is hard to believe that even Hitler would take such a chance with his life merely for propaganda reasons. Surely the same thing could have been accomplished by the arrest of known British agents, such as Stevens and Payne-Best, and by prosecuting them before a Nazi court on fabricated charges using bribed or coerced witnesses to testify that the two had planned to kill Hitler. The effect might have been less spectacular than a bomb that killed eight people, but the result would have probably been no less effective in its impact on the public's perception. It is unlikely that Hitler would actually risk his life to achieve such a questionable propaganda advantage.
When all the facts are assembled, it seems reasonable to assume that Heinrich Himmler plotted the bombing. If, as is likely, Hitler knew nothing of the plan in advance, it is clearly possible that Himmler, an ambitious schemer who longed for great military power (as evidenced by his ultimately building the SS into a private army of thirty-five divisions), could have contrived to kill Hitler so he could replace him as Germany's triumphant head of state just as the Third Reich stood on the verge of military conquest.
Georg Elser has been the subject of rumours and various conspiracy theories since the B�rgerbr�ukeller bombing. After the war, Protestant pastor and theologian Martin Niem�ller, also in custody in the 'Bunker' at Sachsenhausen, gave credence to the rumour that Elser had been a member of the SS and that the whole assassination attempt had been staged by the Nazis to portray Hitler as being protected by Providence. 
In 1948 Allen Welsh Dulles, the future Director of Central Intelligence (de facto head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) possibly summed up the full range of conspiracy theories when he wrote:
"On 8 November a bomb exploded in B�rgerbr�ukeller in Munich shortly after Hitler had given his annual speech on the anniversary of the beer hall putsch of 1923 and after he had left the building. This event still remains unresolved.
"Some evidence suggests that the infernal machine was exploded with the knowledge of Hitler and Himmler in order to consolidate the German sense of community, or, as in the case of the Reichstag fire, to give rise to a new wave of terror. I heard there were photographs showing a high-ranking SS officer standing next to Hitler with a watch in hand, to take care that the leaders escaped in time. Others claim the attack was the work of communists acting independently and without the knowledge of other anti-Nazi groups. A new report presents the plot as the attempted assassination of an illegal socialist group".
Julius Schaub, who was responsible for seeing      to it that his chief reached the railroad station on time, nervously      passed him cards on which he had scrawled increasingly urgent      admonitions: "Ten minutes!" then "Five!"      and finally a peremptory "Stop!"-a method he had previously      had to use to remind his F�hrer, who never used a watch,      of the passage of mortal time. "Party members, comrades      of our National Socialist movement, our German people, and above      all our victorious Wehrmacht: Siegheil !" Hitler concluded,      and stepped into the midst of the Party officials who thronged      forward. A harassed Julius Schaub managed to shepherd the F�hrer      out of the hall at twelve minutes past nine. The express was      due to leave from the main railway station in nineteen minutes.
- David Irving, "Hitler's      War"
In 1969 historical research by Anton Hoch based on "The Gestapo Protokoll" (interrogation report) dated 19�23 November 1939, found that Elser had acted alone and there was no evidence to involve the Nazi regime or any outside group in the assassination attempt.
Coup 1939, November
Location: unknown
By late October 1939, General Halder was surrounded by coup conspirators. His deputy and senior quartermaster of the General Staff, General Karl Heinrich von St�lpnagel, was an active participant in urging Halder to begin planning for a new coup attempt to avoid a shooting war with the Allies. Other officers of colonel and lower rank rallied behind St�lpnagel, including one, Lieutenant Colonel Henning von Tresckow, who would eventually head a future conspiracy to kill Hitler.
Finally, events began to take shape when Hitler announced that his attack on the neutral countries would take place between November 15 and 20. The coup planned for 1939 was not as well organized or armed as the coup planned in 1938, but it still had a chance to succeed if Halder could gather the courage to give the command. Halder was already sensitive about his role in the impending coup. He remembered the June 1934 massacre Hitler had perpetrated on the SA, and he surmised that Hitler had learned of their plans and intended to do the same to the OKH. He envisioned army headquarters surrounded by armed SS groups, the building searched by Gestapo agents, and possibly the members of the General Staff murdered like R�hm and his associates. This fantasy drove Halder to desperate measures, since not enough armed guards were posted at OKH headquarters to withstand an assault by the SS.
Halder  proposed to Admiral Canaris he would be ready to act if the Abweher chief would take the responsibility of killing Hitler. The Admiral exploded in anger and replied that Halder should "shoulder the responsibility in a clear-cut fashion."
The men who had spent tense hours anxiously waiting for the coup to begin heard nothing from Halder. His promised order never came, and they now sat around in small groups at OKH and Abwehr wondering what to do next. Although they were clear about their goals, without a leader they could not order out the troops necessary for the coup.
Hitler began a new series of postponements of the offensive, first to November 19, then November 22, then December 3. His indecision continued until May 1940, when the attack was finally launched. During this time people like Oster, Gisevius, Groscurth, Canaris, and the other hard line plotters tried unsuccessfully to persuade Halder to set the coup in motion before the shooting began. As each new date was fixed, the coup leaders reacted with increased tension not unlike the anticipation felt by soldiers who, knowing an attack is about to start, wait tensely for the final order to begin. After each emotional high of preparation there was a letdown in frustration as Hitler once again postponed the attack. Further, many resistance members saw this interval as their last opportunity to elicit from the Allies an agreement to refrain from attacking Germany while a coup was in process. They expected that after the violation of neutral countries and the spilling of French and British blood, the Allies would be in no mood to deal with any Germans, Nazi or not.
The irresolute behavior of top army leaders, which led to the failure of the two planned coups, the first in 1938 and the second in 1939, convinced most of the conspirators that an elaborately organized coup might not be the best way to topple Hitler. What was required was to present the leading generals with a fait accompli, Hitler's death. From now until 1944, elaborate coup plans took a back seat to efforts by individuals and small groups to assassinate Hitler.
Group Oster 1939, November
Location: Reichskanzlei
Erich Kordt of the Foreign Ministry decided to take an action that he hoped would free the generals from their oath of allegiance to Hitler. He was one of the few conspirators who had access to the F�hrer, although it was limited to Hitler's anteroom. He was well known in the Chancellory and could enter the anteroom with impunity. Now his visits became more frequent and his behavior more conspicuous, a tactic calculated to ensure that all the guards got to recognize him as a routine visitor. Oster promised to furnish explosives from the Abwehr supply for Kordt's use. His plan was simple. When Hitler emerged from his inner office and entered the anteroom (as was his practice either to give instructions to an aide or to welcome his next appointment), Kordt would approach him, grab him tightly, and explode the bomb, which would kill both men.
The opportunity never materialized because the Gestapo had assumed control of all explosives in the Reich, including those in the Abwehr arsenal. Gestapo control meant that the distribution of explosives was strictly limited to those who could demonstrate an approved need, which few conspirators could. This answers the many critics who ask, "Why didn't someone blow Hitler up during a meeting, or simply shoot him?" It was almost impossible to enter the F�hrer's presence without being searched, and carrying a weapon was forbidden. Kordt would certainly have been arrested if he was discovered with his pistol in Hitler's presence.
 
Erich Kordt (10 December 1903 � 11 November 1969), was a German diplomat who was involved in the German Resistance to the regime of Adolf Hitler.
A convinced Anglophile, Kordt spoke perfect English after gaining a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. He joined the German Foreign Office in 1928, and was posted to Geneva and Bern in Switzerland. He then served as Legationsrat (counsellor) in the London Embassy under Ambassdor Joachim von Ribbentrop, for whom he developed both a personal dislike and a professional disdain. Despite this, he became a member of the Nazi Party in November 1937, and in February 1938, when Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister, he was appointed head of the Foreign Office's "Ministerial Bureau".
Both Erich Kordt and his brother, Theodor, played a part in the Oster Conspiracy of 1938, which was a proposed plan to assassinate Adolf Hitler if Germany went to war with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland.
Theodor Kordt, who acted as Charg� d'Affaires at the London embassy, was considered a vital contact with the British on whom the success of the plot depended; the conspirators needed strong British opposition to Hitler's seizure of the Sudetenland. Erich used his brother as an envoy to urge the British government to stand up to Hitler over the Czechoslovakia crisis, in the hope that Army officers would stage a coup against Hitler.
However, in the event, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, apprehensive of the possibility of war, negotiated interminably with Hitler and eventually conceded to him. This destroyed any chance of the plot succeeding since Hitler was then seen in Germany as the "greatest statesman of all times at the moment of his greatest triumph".
In June 1939, Kordt went to London to warn Robert Vansittart, the diplomatic advisor to the British government, of the secret negotiations between Germany and the Soviet Union which were to lead to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. He was dismayed that all approaches made by the German resistance movement within the German Foreign Office were ignored by the British.
In April 1941, Kordt was posted to Tokyo as German embassy First Secretary and later to Nanking as German Consul, where he worked as an agent for the Soviet spy Richard Sorge until 1944. He narrowly avoided being killed by a Japanese hitman when Japanese Intelligence discovered his espionage activities.
Postwar
In June 1948, at the Nuremberg Trials, Kordt testified on behalf of Ernst von Weizs�cker, State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry of Nazi Germany, and later German ambassador to the Vatican. Weizs�cker was on trial for his role in Hitler's aggressive foreign policy. Partly as a result of Kordt's testimony, Weizs�cker was acquitted. This aroused the hostility of Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who blocked Kordt's return to a career at the Foreign Office. From 1951, Kordt was a professor of international law at the University of Cologne.
NKVD attack 1939
Location: Osteria Bavaria, M�nchen
English agents of the Russian NKVD investigated Hitlers habits in order to kill him. They plan to blow Hitler up in the restaurant Osteria Bavaria. When Germeny reached an agreement with Russia the plans get cancelled.
Paris 1940, July 27
Location: Champs-Elys�es
All chance of organizing a coup ended, at least temporarily, on 19 May 1940, when German panzers stormed into Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and France with startling success. In a stunning defeat, France signed an armistice on June 22 conceding to Germany the right to occupy half the country. The Low Countries had capitulated within days of the attack.
Decisive victory boosted Hitler's stature with the German people to even greater levels, while the generals who predicted disaster looked patently foolish. The resistance members now faced the prospect of having no support from troop commanders. Even General, now Field Marshal, Witzleben, a firebrand of anti-Hitlerism, said he had abandoned all hope of a coup because Hitler was far too popular with the people. He said the younger army officers and men would not support a coup because they could see no reason why the man who had restored Germany's national pride and regained the territory taken from her in 1918 should be replaced by force.
With plans for a coup suspended indefinitely, the more virulent anti-Nazis now turned to the remaining alternative, a simple assassination of Hitler. If it succeeded, they hoped the army would act to prevent G�bbels, Himmler, or G�ring from taking power. Much like the earlier attempts on Hitler's life by political opponents, assassination plots developed by military officers usually involved a tight circle of conspirators and placed the plotters in grave danger.
At this point in the war, as Hitler began preparations to invade the Soviet Union, virtually every ranking member of the conspiracy against him -- including its leaders, General Beck -- was reconciled to the inescapable truth that arresting and imprisoning Hitler was no longer a viable option. The Nazi organizations, especially the SS, had grown too large and powerful and would not abdicate their privileges without a struggle, which would result in a civil war. This was especially true if Hitler remained alive and his supporters thought there was a chance they could free him. Except for a small few whose religious beliefs forbade tyrannicide, everyone agreed with Major Wilhelm Heinz, who had commanded the assault squad designated to shoot Hitler in the 1938 coup: "The Living Hitler must die".
During the next four years no fewer than twelve bona fide attempts to kill Hitler were made by military officers. Many took their lead from General Hammerstein's 1939 strategy and sought to induce the F�hrer to visit an army field headquarters.
The first of these assassination intrigues was scheduled soon after the French signed the armistice. Plans were immediately made for a victory parade in Paris, which everyone expected the F�hrer to review. The parade was set for July 27, and a flood of troops were moved toward the former French capital to take part in the celebration.
In Paris, two men planned Hitler's death. They were Lieutenant Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg and Dr. Eugen Gerstenmaier. Schulenburg was a reserve officer who, as vice president of the Berlin police, had been an active participant in earlier attempted coups in Berlin. He was called to active duty in May 1940. Gerstenmaier was an official of the Evangelical Church who worked in the Information Division of the Foreign Ministry. The two had talked earlier in Berlin of organizing a small officer's cadre to arrest Hitler, but nothing came of it. Now they decided to carry out their mission to unseat the Nazis by killing the Party leader, Adolf Hitler. The coming victory parade in Paris provided the opportunity they needed. Their plan called for shooting Hitler while he stood in the reviewing stand along the parade route.
On July 20 Hitler cancelled the parade. He quietly slipped unannounced into Paris in the early morning hours of July 23 and visited several places of personal interest, including Napoleon's tomb, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, and the Palace of Justice. Just as discreetly he left the city, his would-be assassins unaware of his brief sojourn there.
Paris 1941, May 21
Location: unknown
In May 1941, a parade of German troops was again scheduled for Paris. German army and SS divisions were assembled and a reviewing stand for Hitler and other dignitaries was constructed near the Place de la Concorde for the parade on the Champs-Elys�es.
 
A plan to kill Hitler while he reviewed the parade was worked out by staff officers of Field Marshal von Witzleben's headquarters. Witzleben was Commander-in-Chief West, with headquarters outside Paris in St. Germain. The staff members and an operations officer from the Paris commander's staff were to shoot Hitler point-blank. If they failed to kill him, another officer was assigned to throw a bomb at him. The shooters were Captain Graf Schwerin von Schwanenfeld and Major Hans Alexander von Voss, both of Witzleben's staff, and Captain Graf von Waldersee of the Paris staff. Hitler frustrated his enemies once again, declining at the last minute to make the trip to Paris.
 
A third Paris-based attempt on Hitler's life, of which little is known, allegedly involved Witzleben's replacement as Commander-in-Chief West, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, SS-Sturmbannf�hrer Hans-Victor von Salviati, and Major Achim Oster. The plotters again invited Hitler to visit Paris in 1942, but the wary F�hrer refused their invitation.
Most assassination plots relied on Hitler's adherence to a predetermined agenda, but the assassins were invariably thwarted by Hitler's practice of avoiding routine or established schedules in his travels. Hitler's policy was to live his life "irregularly," as he put it. "Walk, drive and travel at irregular times and unexpectedly" was his personal formula for security against assassins.
Borisov 1941, August 4
Location: Heeresgruppe Mitte
War with Russia, which began on 22 June 1941, with a threepronged German attack across Soviet borders, opened new opportunities to eliminate Hitler. Because many German field marshals and generals considered the invasion a potential disaster rivaling Napoleon's ill-fated 1812 Russian campaign, several of them flirted, although briefly, with the resistance, but some came to stay.
Major General Henning von Tresckow.was a Prussian who had served as a platoon commander during World War I, traveled internationally for a bank following the war, re-entered the army in 1924, and served in various posts, including several years on the General Staff.
Growing disgust for the Nazi war crimes enabled Tresckow to expand his resistance base. He used his position as senior operations officer on Field Marshal von Bock's staff to mold the staff into the core of a new resistance movement against Hitler. Among the dissenters who operated at Army Group Center under Tresckow's leadership were Lieutenant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, the man who had informed the British of General Hammerstein's plan to kill Hitler; Lieutenant Colonel Hans Alexander von Voss, who had planned to shoot Hitler in Paris during the planned May 1941 parade; Lieutenant Colonel Georg Schulze-Buttger; Lieutenant Colonel Berndt von Kleist, who maintained communications with the resistance in Berlin; and Colonel Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, who would later make a suicide attempt on Hitler's life.
Schlabrendorff, who survived the war and wrote his memoirs of the resistance, traveled to Berlin in October 1941 to examine the possibility of rescuing the coup with resistance leaders there. He met with von Hassell to explore the Allies' attitude toward fostering a change of government, and he was told that the German resistance could expect no help from the Allies but could doubtlessly negotiate a reasonable peace if Hitler was removed.
Tresckow first planned to assassinate Hitler in the late summer of 1941, while the Russian campaign was still going well for the Germans. Bock's troops were only two hundred miles from Moscow, which many of the generals deemed the most important target in the Soviet empire, when Hitler issued an order to divide Army Group Center's Panzer and other mobile forces in half, transferring half to Army Group North for its thrust against Leningrad, and half to Army Group South to help von Rundstedt's drive to capture Kiev, capital of Ukraine. Army Group Center would then have basically only infantry troops for its attack on Moscow.
Halder and Brauchitsch at OKH, and Bock at Army Group Center, objected strenuously to Hitler's plan -- so strenuously that the F�hrer decided to visit Army Group Center to personally deliver the order to Bock. Tresckow and Schlabrendorff welcomed this opportunity to kill Hitler and arranged, with a small group of officers, to shoot him when he entered one of their headquarters buildings.
Unfortunately, the conspirators were committed to fighting a war, and their energies were divided between pursuing combat plans and organizing the assassination. Also working against them was Hitler's obsession with the "irregular" in his actions.
The visit was scheduled several times only to be cancelled, rescheduled, then cancelled again.
Finally, in early August a fleet of cars arrived from the F�hrer Headquarters in East Prussia to await Hitler's arrival. Hitler refused to use cars supplied by the army for fear they might be booby trapped with explosives. When he finally arrived at Bock's headquarters in Borrisov, Tresckow and his fellow conspirators were overwhelmed at the amount of security people that accompanied him and the rigid security measures they imposed. The would-be assassins barely caught a glimpse of Hitler, much less an opportunity to shoot him.
Orsja 1941, November 13 (not proven and unconfirmed attack)
Location: unknown
Stalin heard from the English that Hitlers train Europa came to Orsja on 13 November. The place where the train stood was bombed. But Hitler wasn�t there. He was at the Wolfschanze at that time. The story was never confirmed, not by the Russians and not by the Germans. There�s no proof of a bombing at all.
Moskow 1941
Location: unknown, not important
The NKVD made plans to kill Hitler in Moskow after the city fell in German hands. But it didn�t.
Poland 1942, June 8
Location: railway between Dirschau (Tczew) and Konitz (Chojnice)
There are stories about the Polish resistance derailing a train. They thought it was Hitlers train Amerika, but it wasn�t. There�s not much sure about this story, though.
Soviet planes 1942
Sovijet planes shoot at Hitlers plane. Some bullets hit the plane.
Airfield Zaporozje February 1943
Location: east of the city
When Hitler met Manstein in Zaporozje, his pilot was waiting for him on the airfield. Russian tanks came very close to the airfield, but because they didn�t have enough fuel and because they thought there were a lot of heavily armed Germans in the area, they decided not to attack. This obviously doesn�t really count as an attack on Hitlers life.
Poltava 1943
Location: Headquarters Heeresgruppe B
Another plot to assassinate Hitler was hatched at Army Group B Headquarters at Walki near Poltava in the Ukraine. This time the conspirators were General Hubert Lanz, his Chief of Staff, Major-General Dr. Hans Speidel and Colonel Count von Strachwitz, the commanding officer of the Grossdeutschland Tank Regiment. The plan was to arrest Hitler on his anticipated visit to Army Group B in the spring of 1943. Hitler, at the last minute, changed his mind and instead decided to fly to Zaporosje, further east, on 15 February 1943 to meet Fieldmarshall Von Manstein instead of going to Poltava.
Cointreau bomb March 1943
Location: Smolensk, Heeresgruppe Mitte
Field Marshal G�nther von Kluge, commander of Army Group Center on the eastern front, finally managed to lure Hitler into visiting his headquarters at Smolensk.  Colonel Henning von Tresckow, who hated Hitler and the Nazis, together with Lt. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Colonel Rudolf von Gersdorff and Cavalry Captain Georg von B�selager had hatched plans to get rid of their F�hrer. The final one was to destroy Hitler's plane in midflight. This option had several distinct advantages: Field Marshal Kluge's approval was not necessary, and Hitler's death would not directly involve army officers who could have underlying misgivings because of their oath.
It did, however,  require two vital ingredients: (1) a detailed schematic of Hitler's plane, especially the armored compartment where the F�hrer stayed during flight, and (2) enough sophisticated explosives to do the job. The force of the explosives was critical because Hitler's armored compartment was constructed in such a manner that if his plane was disabled the compartment could be detached from the aircraft and float gently down, using special parachutes that were connected to it. It was therefore vital to destroy the armored section of the plane to succeed.
Tresckow contacted Captain Ludwig Gehre, a member of the conspiracy in Berlin, and asked him to obtain copies of the prints for Hitler's Condor aircraft. Gehre called a close friend and member of the resistance, Otto John, who was employed by Lufthansa, and invited him to his house. Swearing John to secrecy, Gehre outlined the scheme to bomb Hitler's personal aircraft and asked John if he could get plans of the craft. John cautioned Gehre that it would be next to impossible to plant a bomb on the F�hrer's Focke-Wulf 200 Condor. The aircraft was kept under tight security by armed SS guards who searched every person approaching the plane, including the ground crews who serviced and cleaned it. John, however, was able to get drawings of the craft, and these were forwarded to Tresckow in Smolensk.
Next Tresckow and Schlabrendorff needed the explosives with which to do the job. It would seem that senior officers attached to a frontline army headquarters would have easy access to explosives, but this was not the case. All explosive materials in the Third Reich were kept under tight inventory control by the Gestapo. The material for their bomb would have to be acquired in small amounts over a period of time.
Tresckow assigned this task to Colonel Rudolf-Christoph Baron von Gersdorff, the Army Group Center Intelligence Officer. What was required, Tresckow explained to Gersdorff, was an explosive material that was compact yet yielded a high energy explosion using noiseless time delay fuses.
Gersdorff told Tresckow that German-made time delay fuses were unworkable because they all emitted an audible hiss. He canvassed several Abwehr supply depots, finding what he needed at an arsenal maintained by the Sabotage Division. Explaining that he was training a cadre to counteract disruptive partisan activity, he asked the officer in charge of the arsenal if he could demonstrate several different types of explosives his teams might use.
Gersdorff settled on "Plastic C," a volatile substance the British regularly supplied to partisan bands throughout occupied Europe. Quantities had fallen into the Abwer's hands when German army units either tracked British parachute drops or recovered them from captured partisans. Plastic C consisted of over 88 percent hexogen, with the remainder an amalgam of materials such as axle grease to prevent the hexogen from crystallizing. An officer who was knowledgeable in the use of Plastic C proudly showed Gersdorff what less than a pound would do, when he detonated it under the turret of a captured Soviet tank. The force of the explosion blew the turret off the tank, hurling it more than twenty yards away.
Gersdorff asked the arsenal commander, Lieutenant Buchholz, for samples of Plastic C, along with various fuses and detonators to demonstrate the explosive for Field Marshal Kluge. After signing the required receipts and receiving thorough instructions on handling the material and the detonators, he was provided a modest quantity. A few more trips to other supply depots gave Gersdorff enough Plastic C to make several test runs, with enough left to sabotage Hitler's plane.
Tresckow, Gersdorff, and Schlabrendorff experimented with the explosive and found its only disadvantage was that at temperatures below zero degrees Centigrade it sometimes failed to explode. Satisfied that Plastic C would do the job, providing the temperature was not too cold, they fashioned a package to look like two bottles of Cointreau, a premium brandy bottled in square decanters. The square shape was easy to duplicate, making the package appear authentic. The package was heavily wrapped and tied tightly with cord to discourage closer inspection.
An ingenious device to detonate the bomb was chosen from Gersdorff's selection. When a small vial of acid in the device was crushed, the acid spilled into a wad of cotton. The acid then ate through a tiny trip wire that released a plunger that drove the detonator into the explosive. Once the capsule was broken, the acid would require thirty minutes until it was absorbed by the cotton and the spring was released.
When the deadly package was ready, Schlabrendorff kept it inside a metal box in his quarters, awaiting Hitler's visit. The conspirators at Army Group Center now had preparations solidly in place for two alternative plans to kill Hitler. No one connected with the plot doubted that if one misfired the other would succeed. As far as the plotters were concerned, when Hitler made his expected visit he was as good as dead.
On 13 March 1943, the sky over Smolensk was a cloudless blue expanse. The operations officer at the small airfield near headquarters heard the steady drone of approaching aircraft and watched the distant specks take sharper form as he called Kluge's duty officer with the news that the F�hrer's plane was about to land. Tresckow and the field marshal hurried into staff cars for the short ride to the airstrip. Overhead, three Condors approached the runway escorted by a formation of Messerschmidt-109 fighters. While Kluge and Tresckow went to greet Hitler, Schlabrendorff telephoned Gehre in Berlin to alert him that Operation Flash was about to begin. Gehre immediately informed Olbricht, then Dohnanyi, who promptly told Oster. Oster, in turn, contacted Beck with the news. The resistance waited anxiously for the word to strike.
The Condors landed and taxied off the runway to allow the fighter escort room to land. Hitler stepped from the lead Condor, descended the steps, and greeted Kluge and his staff warmly. He declined Kluge's invitation to drive him to headquarters in his staff car. Hitler, appearing older than most of those present remembered him, and exhibiting a noticeable stoop, proceeded to his personal car, which his chauffeur, Erich Kempka, had driven to Smolensk. The detachment of SS guards that accompanied Kempka was supplemented by a platoon flown in on the second Condor.
Rounding out the entourage were several staff officers; Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell; a stenographer; Hitler's personal chef; and a photographer to record highlights of the visit for posterity. The chef personally prepared all Hitler's meals. Dr. Morell, who like his arch-rival G�ring had grown rich and fat off his relationship with the F�hrer, always tasted Hitler's food in his presence before the F�hrer ate anything.On an earlier visit to a frontline headquarters several Soviet tanks had come ominously close to Hitler's plane, prompting the SS to beef up the F�hrer's security force. His escort for this visit was double the usual complement. Sensing Hitler's preoccupation with security, Army Group Center seized on this opportunity to volunteer a squadron of Cavalry Regiment Center's troops, under command of Major K�nig, to augment Hitler's security shield. The officers of this squadron, who had sworn to shoot Hitler, were now perfectly positioned to kill him while he walked from his car to the headquarters building, or when he was returning to the car. An earlier suggestion to shoot Hitler while he ate in the mess was rejected by Kluge because he felt it unseemly to shoot a man while he was eating. Also, there was the risk of hitting one of the officers seated with Hitler, possibly even Kluge, whom the conspirators expected would assume command of the entire front and stabilize the situation until a truce was arranged.
The assassins in Cavalry Regiment Center never received the order to shoot, possibly (as explained later by Major K�nig) because Hitler changed his original route and the mounted guard did not have a clear shot at him. It is also not improbable that the SS guards, fingers tight around the triggers of their submachine guns, kept too close a watch on the armed soldiers whom they might have viewed as a potential threat. In any event, no shots were fired.
During lunch Tresckow approached one of Hitler's staff officers, Colonel Heinz Brandt, whom Tresckow saw alight from the F�hrer's own plane. He asked Brandt if he could take a package of two bottles of Cointreau with him to High Command Headquarters. They were a gift for Colonel Helmuth Stieff, Tresckow explained, and he did not want to risk their being broken if he sent them through the normal mail. Brandt cheerfully agreed.
When lunch was over and Hitler prepared to depart, Lieutenant Schlabrendorff slipped off to his quarters and retrieved the bomb. At the airport he waited until Hitler said his farewells and started to board his plane, followed closely by members of his entourage. Tresckow nodded to Schlabrendorff, who pressed a key against the package, crushing the capsule of acid, then with a broad smile handed the package to Colonel Brandt, who carried it aboard Hitler's plane.
The fighters took off first, circled the field several times, and signaled the all clear. Within minutes all three Condors were airborne, flying a course for Rastenburg in East Prussia.
Tresckow and Schlabrendorff returned to their headquarters, where the latter called Gehre in Berlin to tell him that Operation Flash was in its second stage, meaning they were waiting for confirmation of Hitler's death. Tresckow estimated that Hitler's Condor would mysteriously explode somewhere in the vicinity of Minsk, a half-hour's flying time from Smolensk.
For two anxious hours Tresckow and Schlabrendorff waited for news that Hitler's plane had crashed. They expected the first announcement to come from the commander of the fighter planes that escorted Hitler, but no word came. Finally a confirmation was received from Rastenburg that the F�hrer's plane had landed there safely. Stunned, the two officers could not believe their ears. Schlabrendorff immediately called Gehre and gave him the coded message that Operation Flash had failed. Gehre, sickened by the tension and the disappointment, passed the word to General Olbricht and then Oster and Dohnanyi.
Tresckow and Schlabrendorff were at a loss about what to do next. Obviously, the bomb had not exploded. Had the secret of their lethal package been discovered before it could explode? If so, the Gestapo was surely on the way to arrest them. If the bomb failed to explode because of a defect, the package would have to be retrieved before it was delivered to Colonel Stieff. Either way, the two men could be in grievous trouble.
They had to know what had happened. Finally, Tresckow called Colonel Brandt in Rastenburg and casually asked if he had delivered the package to Stieff. To his great relief, Brandt said he had not had a chance to deliver it yet. Tresckow then explained that Brandt had been given the wrong package, and would he hold on to it until the next day when it would be exchanged for the correct package. Brandt replied that he would be glad to, and the conversation ended.
The following morning Schlabrendorff took a scheduled courier flight to Rastenburg bearing a package containing two bottles of Cointreau. When he arrived at Brandt's office, the colonel playfully tossed the package containing the bomb from one hand to the other, joking about dropping the two bottles of expensive brandy he thought it contained. Schlabrendorff, trying to remain calm, exchanged the packages and withdrew as quickly as possible. He had no idea why the bomb had not exploded and he was afraid that Brandt's juggling would cause the explosion right there. Leaving the building, he took a staff car to the railroad station in nearby Korschen, where he boarded a train to Berlin.
On board the train Schlabrendorff locked himself inside the private compartment he had reserved and carefully opened the package. Examining the bomb, he immediately saw what had happened. The capsule had broken under the pressure of his key and the acid had permeated the cotton, causing the wire to break and the spring to release the detonator, which slammed home causing a blackened mark where it struck, but for some unknown reason the Plastic C had failed to ignite. What probably happened was that Colonel Brandt left the package in the unheated luggage compartment instead of taking it into the heated passenger section with him. The extreme cold caused the explosive material to crystallize immediately -- and when the strike hit, nothing happened.
In Berlin Schlabrendorff met with Oster and the other conspirators. He showed them the flawed bomb and how close they had come to killing Hitler.
Von Gertsdorff attempt 1943, March 21
Location: Zeughaus, Unter den Linden, Berlin
On March 21 the country would observe a national holiday known as Heroes' Memorial Day. Traditionally the F�hrer participated in the ceremonies honoring German soldiers who had died in previous wars. Schlabrendorff was still in Berlin when Tresckow proposed to Gersdorff a way to kill Hitler when he came to the event. As part of the program, Hitler was to inspect an assortment of captured Soviet weapons on display in the Berlin Armory. Because the weapons had been captured largely by Army Group Center, an officer from that army was invited to accompany Hitler on the tour to answer any technical questions he might have. This was an important duty because Hitler was always fascinated by new weapons developments and usually asked tough questions. Gersdorff had been selected for this job.
During their conversation, Gersdorff and Tresckow concluded that the only way to kill Hitler during the tour was through a suicide mission. Gersdorff would have to set off a bomb hidden on his person, then wrap his arms around the F�hrer tightly until the explosion killed them both. Tresckow was reluctant to ask this of his comrade in the conspiracy, but Gersdorff confessed that since his wife's death a year earlier he really had little to live for, and if through his death he could accomplish the great patriotic good that would come from killing Hitler, he was more than willing to make the sacrifice
Gersdorff arrived in Berlin two days before the ceremonies and established himself in the Hotel Eden. The following morning Schlabrendorff brought him the bomb package that had been placed on Hitler's plane on March 13. Gersdorff chose from a variety of British fuses. He discarded several instantaneous fuses because he would need time to grab Hitler and hold on to him. He decided to use a ten-minute fuse, which was the shortest timed fuse he had aside from the instantaneous fuses. This would provide sufficient time to set the fuse in action and get close enough to Hitler to grab him in case they were separated. He knew from the schedule, which he had obtained from General Schmundt, Hitler's Chief Adjutant, that the F�hrer was allotting ten minutes for the weapons tour, so he planned to set the fuse off just before the tour began.
Just after noon on March 21 Hitler arrived for the ceremonies and was greeted by the chiefs of the armed forces and other government and Party dignitaries. Inside the hall he delivered a speech for fourteen minutes while Gersdorff, a bomb hidden in each pocket of his greatcoat, waited patiently by the entrance to the weapons exhibit. When Hitler finished speaking he left the platform and walked toward the exhibit. As Hitler approached, Gersdorff reached into his left pocket, a highly risky gesture when Hitler and his bodyguards were around, and released the fuse. He did not want to press his luck by arming the bomb in his right pocket, and he assumed that when one went off it would ignite the other. He had ten minutes until the explosion.
To everyone's amazement, Hitler ignored Gersdorff and strode into the exhibit hall at an ever quickening pace. Gersdorff rushed to catch up with him, attempting to draw his special attention to certain exhibits in an effort to slow him down, but Hitler continued to ignore him and also paid no attention to others, including G�ring, who tried to point out interesting aspects of certain exhibits. Hitler was in and out of the exhibition hall in two minutes, not the ten minutes that had been scheduled.
At the exit Gersdorff was turned back by SS guards, as this was as far as he was supposed to go. The stunned officer watched helplessly as Hitler virtually raced from the hall. Regaining his thoughts amidst the confusion and frustration, he remembered the live bomb in his left pocket. Frantically he looked for some place he could go to deactivate the bomb. He looked at his watch, eight minutes left, and prayed the bomb did not detonate prematurely. Locating a nearby men's room, he quickly went inside and locked himself in a stall. Removing the bomb from his pocket, he pulled off the striker, making the bomb inoperative. Gersdorff collapsed onto the toilet seat and dropped his head into his hands, panting heavily from the tension.
The only positive result of these failed attempts on Hitler's life was that General Olbricht, who had been listening to reports of the ceremonies over the radio and waiting for news of the explosion, uncovered deficiencies in the coup planning that must be corrected before the next attempt. To help with this task, Tresckow asked for and received a sick leave of several months' duration. He spent virtually the entire time working on resistance organizational problems and helping refine the plans for the coup that was used the following year.
Operation �M�nchen�, spring/summer 1943
Location: F�hrerhauptquartier Vinnitsa and its region
The Russian NKVD tried to find out what Hitler�s habits were when he was in Vinnitsa, so they could take him out. But they started their observations too late: in the spring/summer of 1943. Hitler had been there for the last time in March 1943 and he only came back there for a short stay on 27 August 1943. After that the FHQ was destroyed.
Olga Tsjechova 1941-1943
Location: unknown
Wild plans to have Hitler killed by the actress Olga Tsjechova couldn�t be carried out because she didn�t have a lot of contact with Hitler between 1941 and 1943. Hitler spend a lot of time in the Wolfschanze. When the Russians started to win the war, the plans were cancelled.
Did Stalin really stop attempts on Hitler's life?
By Guy Walters
The Telegraph 
4 June 2010
Another week, another highly dubious revelation about the Second World War. This time it's from the Russians, specifically from the lips of one General Anatoly Kulikov, who has claimed at a conference on military history in Moscow that Stalin cancelled at least two attempts to kill Hitler. "A concrete plan to assassinate Hitler in his Bunker was developed," said Kulikov, "but Stalin suddenly cancelled it in 1943 over fears that after Hitler's death his associates would conclude a separate peace treaty with Britain and the United States".
Adding that he had documentary evidence to support his claims, the general also claimed that a second plan almost came to fruition, and that the intended assassin had even infiltrated Hitler's entourage, but Stalin once more cancelled any operation.
These stories certainly raise my eyebrows, as I'm sure they do those of many others. While the notion that the Russians had planned Hitler's assassination is feasible � after all the British had their own Operation Foxley � the idea that the Soviets had inveigled someone into Hitler's inner circle seems too fantastical and the stuff of thrillers alone. Last night I consulted Professor Peter Hoffmann, the author of the excellent "Hitler's Personal Security", a peerless account on the attempts on Hitler's life. He told me: "The obvious answer is: Where is the evidence? We should see documents, names, for example especially names of persons who are described as having infiltrated Hitler's entourage and their identification as having been present in Hitler's entourage".
Until General Kulikov presents his evidence, I think we can safely dismiss his stories as Junk History.
Operation Foxley
Location: Obersalzberg
The English gathered a lot of information about Hitler on the Obersalzberg. They wanted to bring snipers to the hill who could kill Hitler. When in 1944 it became very clear that the Germans would lose the war, the plans were cancelled.
Operation Foxley
Adolf Hitler was the centre of the Nazi system. Around him revolved a loose confederation of fiefdoms, whose leaders engaged in a ceaseless struggle to protect and enhance their power. If Operation Foxley, the plan devised by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to assassinate Hitler, had succeeded, this system would have been thrown into chaos.
Count von Stauffenberg and various fellow conspirators, whose courage was equalled only by their ineptitude, were plotting a similar operation from the German side. There was, however, not the slightest possibility that they could have taken advantage of the chaos.
Rather more likely was the emergence of a coalition of the major fiefdoms, with Hermann G�ring as Reichsverweser (literally state caretaker), co-existing uneasily with Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, Karl D�nitz and a clutch of popular generals such as Erich von Manstein and Erwin Rommel.
The most plausible date for SOE's assassination of Hitler would have been around 13-14 July 1944. By this time the Russians had reached the old Polish-Soviet frontier. From what is now known about the frame of mind of many prominent generals in Germany around this time, we can guess that the new administration would have sent peace feelers to the western allies, who would have reiterated their demand for unconditional surrender.
For Himmler and the SS even a negotiated peace would have posed serious problems. He would have been worried about how he was going to explain the 'final solution' (the extermination of all Jewish people, and other 'Untermenschen', in Nazi-held territories) to the outside world, and might well have decided to close down the gas chambers, and tried to pass the death factories off as labour camps. 
Germany still in control of Europe 
At this stage, however, a reversal of policy would have been prudent rather than pressing. Germany still controlled Europe - with the exception of southern Italy and the Normandy beachhead - from the Atlantic to the Vistula, the Carpathians and the lower Danube. There were still cards to play, which, if handled skilfully, might yet have elicited from the Anglo-Americans something more palatable than a demand for unconditional surrender.
Moreover, the propaganda machine run by G�bbels would have both lionised the martyred F�hrer - the modern Siegfried - and hinted that with the F�hrer now in Valhalla the war might begin to go better. In the summer of 1944 most of the German people were assailed by doubts about the continuing pursuit of the war, but they were not yet prepared to give up
How would the death of Hitler have affected the Reich's production of war material? Overall very little, except in one important area. In June, Speer and G�ring had pleaded with the F�hrer to abandon the conversion of the Me262 jet fighter into a bomber, but to no effect. With Hitler gone, the Luftwaffe might have had twice as many Me262s available in the autumn of 1944, not enough to establish air parity with the Allies, but enough to have made the air war in the west less one-sided.
Eastern Front
Hitler's death would have had a much greater effect on the conduct of operations. On the Eastern Front, Erich von Manstein, Heinz Guderian and others had already proposed withdrawal from the Baltic states, which Hitler had refused, partly because the navy claimed it needed the coastal waters for training submarine crews. D�nitz would have continued his resistance to the proposal, but without Hitler's support he would have lost the argument and the generals would have had their way.
A new line on the Front would have emerged, running south along the heavily fortified border of East Prussia to the Vistula, and thence along the Carpathians to the lower Danube in Rumania. It would have been shorter than the actual line, and taken advantage of natural defensive features, making it more formidable.
The army already had a contingency plan, Margarethe II, for the occupation of Rumania if the country tried to defect, but Hitler had refused to countenance putting the plan into action, saying that he trusted the Rumanian leader Marshal Ion Antonescu. With Hitler gone, Margarethe II would have swung into action in August, allowing the Germans to block the 200-mile-wide corridor between the Carpathians and the Danube, and thereby halt the Soviet offensive into the Balkans.
Western Front
Operations in the west, too, would have been profoundly affected by the F�hrer's demise. On 28 June Hitler had rejected a plan, put forward by von Rundstedt and Rommel, which suggested a German withdrawal back to the line of the Seine. With Hitler gone, this plan could have been put into effect. There would have been no Mortain counter-attack and no Falaise pocket, with their attendant losses.
Instead a defence of the Seine would have been followed by a defence of the Somme, and then the Meuse and Moselle, and so on back to the Reischswald and eventually the Rhine. This early withdrawal from France - about three weeks sooner than the one that did occur - would have saved some 250,000 men and much equipment, some of which could have been redeployed to the Eastern Front, particularly in Rumania.
Hitler's demise, then, would have allowed Germany to adopt defensive strategies on both western and eastern fronts, fighting on shorter, more defensible lines. And with Rumania still under German control, the oil crisis of late 1944 would have been less severe. In addition, Germany would still have had access to the strategically important minerals of the Balkans and Anatolia, so that many of the log-jams that delayed jet aircraft production would not have occurred.
Moreover, without Hitler there would have been no Ardennes offensive, and consequently no squandering of precious resources. Instead the Germans would have imposed a series of attritional slogging matches on the Anglo-Americans, fought on ground of their own choosing. In the east the fierce resistance offered to the Soviets on the frontiers of East Prussia and the Carpathians would have been stronger yet, while the great tank battles that actually took place on the plains of Hungary at Debrecen, would have been fought to defend the oil fields of far-off Rumania.
The disparity in production and manpower between the Allies and Germany, however, was so great that the Eastern Front would have given at some point, whoever was in charge. On 12 January 1945 the Soviets launched a great offensive in central Poland, which carried them from the Vistula to the Oder - dangerously close to Berlin, in other words - in less than three weeks.
In our alternative world, it is difficult to see how the Vistula - Oder offensive, however vigorously resisted, could have been stopped. Soviet deception had persuaded Hitler to concentrate his forces in Hungary and East Prussia, but there is no reason to suppose that other German generals, even those unhindered by their F�hrer, would not also have fallen victim to false intelligence.
A radical solution to the Soviet advance
On 23 January, Soviet forces reached the Oder, only 60 miles east of Berlin. Shocked by the speed of the Soviet advance, the German naval high command actually discussed a radical solution - opening Germany's western front and allowing the Anglo-Americans unimpeded access through Belgium and the Rhineland into the heart of the Reich.
They hoped the Allies would thus be drawn in to join with Germany in keeping the Russians to the east of the Oder - but this idea was not discussed outside the Naval high command, as there was little trust between them and the other two services. In the absence of Hitler it is likely that such a scenario, in effect an Anglo-American relief in place of the German army, followed by German demobilisation, would have been widely, and in some quarters favourably, canvassed.
Would it have become policy? It is possible, given that the crisis produced by the Vitula-Oder offensive would have fractured the loose coalition running Germany. G�ring and Himmler, now weak and discredited, would have gone to the wall, and a new government composed of Army and Waffen SS generals, could have announced that Germany's western borders were now open.
The Yalta conference, at which the Anglo-Americans and Soviets were to agree the post-war division of Europe, was only two weeks away. With their forces still west of the Meuse, and bogged down in the Appenines in Italy, the Anglo-Americans were expecting to go to Yalta as supplicants, with the Russians in a strong position.
But if the plan had been followed, suddenly Berlin would have been offering unconditional surrender. The dowry would have been significant - not just control over central Europe but over south-eastern Europe to boot. The price of acceptance for the Allies, however, would have been immense - an irrevocable breach with the Soviets. The British, perfidious as ever, would probably have accepted, but there would have been problems with the Americans, who thought they needed Soviet support for the war against Japan.
If the Germans had taken the initiative, and had begun pulling back from their western defences, it is difficult to see how Anglo-American forces could have avoided being sucked into the resulting vacuum, and pushing on to face the Russian advances, no matter what political decision had been made in London and Washington.
Soviet Belligerence
By ending the war three months early, Germany would have escaped the last of the terror raids, particularly the destruction of Dresden. In addition, the bulk of German territory would have been surrendered to a disciplined, civilised enemy, so that the murder, rape and pillage of the Soviet advance would have been confined to areas east of the Oder. There would have been war crimes trials, but possibly not as extensive as those that actually took place.
The long-term political impact of the way the war ended would have been immense if Operation Foxley had succeeded. If it had, and Stalin had been excluded from the Balkans or from Berlin, he would not have accepted the situation. He would probably have launched offensives against the Allies as they advanced into Germany in their attempt to keep Russia out of central Europe. One can imagine Anglo-American and Soviet forces clashing in Carpathian passes, or shelling each other across the Oder.
In this scenario, the Cold War would have started with a bang the moment the Anglo Americans reached the German side of the Eastern Front. In June 1945 Churchill, worried by increasing Soviet belligerence, actually did propose the re- mobilisation of German forces as a way of opposing Stalin, a suggestion that was quickly buried by the chiefs of staff. In the post-Foxley world, he may have got his way.
The spring and early summer of 1945 would have been the period of maximum danger, as Russian and Allied troops faced each other. This confrontation would have eased only with the first successful test of the American atomic bomb on 16 July, which would have dictated a policy of prudence to Stalin.
This end to the war would have left a bad taste in many mouths. The political left in the west would have railed about the betrayal of the Soviet Union, and accorded to the Soviet system much greater legitimacy than it actually had. Conversely the right in Germany would have seen the 'Volk' stabbed yet again in the back, not once but twice (by the Allies and by the treachery of their own generals. They would have said that if Hitler had lived, if the borders had not been opened, Germany might yet have avoided the humiliation of an Anglo-American occupation. There would have been soul searching, but not as much as that produced by the reality of total, utter defeat.
The legacy of betrayal could only have served to make the post-war world more dangerous than it actually was. The Soviet Union, faced with a resurgent, psychologically undefeated Germany allied to Britain and America, may have withdrawn ever deeper into paranoia, perhaps not unreasonably. The crises of the early Cold War years would have happened not in Berlin or Budapest, but in Iran or the Norwegian-Finnish frontier.
These crises might have been containable, but it is unlikely that the world would have been as lucky as it actually was, in October 1962, when the Soviets deployed missiles to Cuba. All that was required to tip the balance in favour of war at that time was a slight increase in paranoia, a condition that is highly likely to have been rampant in the world - if Operation Foxley had succeeded.
Find out more
"Plotting Hitler's Death: The German Resistance to Hitler 1933-1945" by Joachim Fest (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996)
"Hitler, G�ring and the Obersalzberg" by Bernhard Frank (Anton Plenk, 1989)
"Hitler's Personal Security" by Peter Hoffman (MacMillan, 1979)
"Operation Foxley: The British Plan to Kill Hitler" by Mark Seaman (MacMillan, 1979)
"The Good Nazi: The Life and Lies of Albert Speer" by Dan Van der Vat (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)
"Hitler 1936-1945": "Nemesis" by Ian Kershaw (Allen Lane, 2000)
"Inside Hitler's Command" by Geoffrey Megargee (University Press of Kansas, 2002)
Hitler (Introductions to History) by David Welch (UCL Press, 1998)
About the author
Duncan Anderson joined the War Studies Department at Sandhurst as a senior lecturer in 1987, and has been Head of Department since 1997. He has written several books on World War Two, and worked for the British Army and other NATO forces in Germany, both lecturing and conducting staff tours.
Egon Hanfst�ngl, summer 1943
Location: Obersalzberg
Egon Hanfst�ngl, the son of Putzi, presented plans to kill Hitler on the Obersalzberg. Roosevelt rejected the plan.
In 2002 Charles Fenyvesi was combing through the declassified WWII files at the U.S. National Archives when he came across a surprise. In July 1943 Count Helmuth James von Moltke - the German military intelligence service (Abwehr) representative at the German High Command and an anti-Nazi - made a secret visit to the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) in Istanbul offering to turn Wehrmacht against the Waffen-SS and make a separate peace with the Americans. Moltke also gave the OSS a list of the high rank Germans involved in the conspiracy: Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Field Marshal Wilhelm List, Colonel General Ludwig Beck, Colonel General Franz Halder.
Tresckow, 1943
Location: Rastenburg
Late in 1943 Tresckow attempted to get himself assigned as Field Marshal Manstein's Chief of Staff in the hope of convincing Manstein to join the resistance. The field marshal rejected the appointment, telling the army personnel chief that while Tresckow had no peer as a staff officer, he had a negative attitude toward National Socialism. This reproach spelled finis to Tresckow's career and his effectiveness in the resistance. He was transferred to the eastern front, where he could do little except wait to hear that Hitler was dead and the coup had begun.
Before his departure Tresckow engineered three final attempts on Hitler's life. In one, Colonel Stieff secretly gathered a large quantity of explosives to use in an attack on Hitler. Two officers took the explosives to the grounds of Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia, where they buried them under a water tower to wait for the right occasion to use them. Inexplicably, the material exploded for no apparent reason, causing consternation among the SS guards and redoubling of security measures.
With unusual good luck for the resistance, one of their member officers was assigned to investigate the incident. Colonel Werner Schrader dragged his inquiry on so long that he never issued a report.
Porn-plan
Location: Obersalzberg
A crazy plan of some American soldiers was to throw down a lot of pornographic material on Hitlers mountain to make the puritan Hitler go mad. The colonel the soldiers discussed the plan with, said that they were maniacs with an insane plan...
Treskow 1943, November or December
Location: Berlin (?), demonstration of uniforms
In late November or early December 1943, Hitler was supposed to view a selection of proposed new uniforms for the army. Several alternative samples were made, and he wanted to have the final word on which were to be produced and distributed, especially to the troops fighting in Russia. One of the officers chosen to model the new uniforms was Captain Axel von dem Bussche, a member of Tresckow's inner circle. Bussche dismantled a German hand grenade and fashioned a bomb with a four-second fuse, which he proposed to carry in the pocket of the greatcoat he was going to model. Once in Hitler's presence, he planned to release the timer and grab Hitler so the two of them would be blown up together.
The viewing was postponed repeatedly while Bussche waited impatiently to perform what he expected would be the final act of his life. The sample uniforms were stored in a railroad boxcar parked on a siding in Berlin. One night during the regular allied bombing, the car received a direct hit and was destroyed, along with the uniforms that were to provide the opportunity to place an assassin within reach of the F�hrer.
On February 11, 1944 another �overcoat� attempt was made. This time the volunteer model was Ewald Heinrich von Kleist, son of one of the original conspirators and included Major General Helmuth Stieff. Again the RAF saved the day with an air-raid just before the demonstration was about to take place forcing its cancellation.
Von Breitenbuch plan 1944, March 11
Location: Obersalzberg
In March 1944, Captain Eberhard von Breitenbuch, personal aide to Field Marshal Busch, told Tresckow that he was going to attend a conference at Hitler's Berchtesgaden headquarters where he would shoot Hitler, knowing full well that he himself would probably be shot to death by the SS guards. Tresckow offered to give him explosives, but Breitenbuch said he was an excellent shot and would require only seconds to draw his pistol, aim at Hitler's head, and squeeze off at least one and possibly several shots. He was confident Hitler would be killed.
On the day of the conference, Busch and his aide arrived in the anteroom at Hitler's quarters where they met other field marshals. When the SS major opened the door to the F�hrer's conference room the conferees entered in ranking order. Breitenbuch, the most junior officer, last. The SS major put his hand out to restrain Breitenbuch and told him that aides were not permitted to attend the meeting. When Busch protested that he required his aide's presence, the major informed the field marshal that it was Hitler's decision and could not be countermanded.
For the next several hours Breitenbuch waited anxiously in the anteroom, brooding over the reason he was excluded from the conference with Hitler. He thought that perhaps someone had learned of his intent to murder the F�hrer. This seemed to be the most logical explanation, and every time an SS man walked through the room Breitenbuch feared the worst. Around noon the meeting broke up and he followed Busch out of the building, looking nervously around, half expecting to be arrested. No explanation was ever given for his exclusion from the conference, but once again fate stepped in and saved Hitler from an assassin.
Operation Hellhound, June 1944
Location: Obersalzberg - Milan
The plans of the American airforce to bomb the Obersalzberg got stranded because of discussions with the British. Only airphotos were made of the area. On 4 November 1944 they did bomb a hotel in Milan, of which was said that Hitler was there at the time. Hitler was at the Wolfschanze at the time.
Stauffenberg in Berchtesgaden 1944, July 6
Location: Berchtesgaden/Salzburg
One needed only to look at Colonel Claus Count von Stauffenberg to know that he had already paid a high price for Hitler's war. A black patch covered the empty socket that had been his left eye. His right hand was missing, as were two fingers of his left hand. Despite these disfigurements, suffered when a U.S. fighter plane attacked his North African Panzer column, Stauffenberg remained a handsome and charming officer.
In the fall of 1943, after several head operations required by his wounds, Stauffenberg recovered enough to join the active resistance at the strong urging of his uncle, Count Nikolaus von Uxkull. His uncle knew of Stauffenberg's attitude toward Hitler and the Nazis, which was formed indelibly from his experiences in the Russian campaign before he was assigned to Africa. Uxkull confided in his nephew that there were other officers who felt as he did, and that they were organized into a formal resistance group determined to kill Hitler and remove the Nazis from power. He asked his nephew to join them.
When Stauffenberg was restored to active duty he reported to Colonel General Kurt Zeitzler, who had replaced Halder as Chief of the General Staff in September 1942. The disabled colonel requested assignment to a frontline unit, but Zeitzler, recognizing his enormous potential, felt Stauffenberg's talents deserved to be nurtured. Zeitzler wanted him to broaden his experience so that one day he could command a corps or perhaps even an army. Instead of sending him to the front, Zeitzler appointed Stauffenberg Chief of Staff of the General Army Office under General Friedrich Olbricht.
The next time he saw his uncle, Stauffenberg told him he had decided to join the resistance. He is also reported to have told him that since the generals had failed to unseat Hitler, now it was time the colonels accomplished the task. It was then Count Uxkull felt it safe to tell him that his new superior officer, General Olbricht, was a key figure in the conspiracy against Hitler.
In September 1943, Stauffenberg helped Olbricht and Tresckow, who was still in Berlin on sick leave, reorganize plans for a renewed coup attempt. They were joined occasionally by General Beck, whose recovery from cancer surgery was taking longer than expected. Pointedly absent from these proceedings was the man who had once been a central figure, Hans Oster. Now under close Gestapo surveillance, Oster had been ordered by Keitel to stay away from military installations. Reluctantly he obeyed, for fear of betraying the identities of the other conspirators.
The new pattern for the coup that evolved from the original concept of 1938 was "highly sophisticated" as the Gestapo would later admit. It centered around the unlikely use of the Replacement Army, which was a reserve force of walking wounded, trainees, cadets in military schools, workers who could quickly be pulled from their jobs, and men on sick leave. It was not an effective fighting force, but was intended originally to be used to supply replacements to frontline units. The Replacement Army was controlled by General Olbricht's superior, Colonel General Friederich Fromm, an overweight bureaucrat filled with his own importance. Fromm refused to have anything to do with the conspiracy unless the plotters killed Hitler; then, he said, they could count on his support.
In early 1943 the conspirators, disadvantaged by the fact that not even their leading military officers commanded troop formations, hit on the idea of molding the Replacement Army into a force to support their coup. Olbricht spoke to Hitler about the internal dangers to the Reich presented by the over four million foreign workers and prisoners of war within its borders. Enemy nationals concentrated in such numbers posed a serious threat if they organized a rebellion in any significant strength against the largely inadequate civil police forces. Olbricht proposed to develop a contingency plan using the Replacement Army as a safety valve that could be called on to put down a worker's revolt, or even move against enemy saboteurs who might infiltrate the Reich. Hitler was enthusiastic about the proposal and told him to work out the details. Tresckow and Stauffenberg concentrated on the project throughout the fall of 1943, assisted by a select committee of dedicated officers.
The idea of employing troops to control potential internal emergencies appealed to the High Command; consequently, they gave the Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Fromm, wide latitude to requisition and deploy troops in case of a domestic disturbance. This should have aided the conspirators, but an impasse existed between Fromm, who refused to cooperate unless the conspirators demonstrated they could succeed, and resistance leaders, who could do little without a commitment of Replacement Army backing. A possible solution to this dilemma was advanced by Olbricht, who decided that when the time was right he would ask Fromm to commit the Replacement Army and the military district forces to the coup. If Fromm refused, Olbricht would arrest him and issue the orders in his name, anticipating that most troop commanders would carry them out.
A set of substitute orders was prepared and updated regularly by Stauffenberg, changing the original response to the signal "Valkyrie," which meant an internal disturbance, to mean "surround and neutralize all SS and Gestapo installations within the Reich, and commandeer all communications facilities, particularly public radio stations."
Consistent with earlier coup plans, neutralizing the SS was a critical issue, since that organization was devoutly loyal to Hitler.
Now the Waffen SS became equally important. Grown to parallel the regular army, the Waffen SS had its own Panzer and mobilized units, which actually outnumbered the army in some military districts. While a few Waffen SS commanders might throw in their lot with the army if Hitler was dead, many more could be expected to wage a civil war against the army. At the same time, the army would have to maintain its position on all fronts facing the Allies. The speed with which the conspirators moved against these potential opponents was vital to success.
Just as Tresckow before him, Stauffenberg recognized that Hitler's assassination was paramount. With Hitler dead the coup might succeed, but if Hitler was merely arrested or confined, he would be a rallying point for his supporters.
After conferring with other officers who were candidates for the job of assassin, Stauffenberg decided the surest course of action was to do the "dirty work," as the conspirators called it, himself. When in late spring of 1944 he was appointed Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Stauffenberg soon found the opportunity he needed.
When Stauffenberg became General Fromm's new Chief of Staff on 1 June 1944, an appointment Fromm had requested because of Stauffenberg's organizational skills, he immediately sought ways to try to win Fromm over to the resistance.
Five days later the Allies swept ashore at Normandy in such overwhelming strength that many German army leaders read the invasion as the prelude to disaster. In the south, the Allies were pushing relentlessly up the Italian peninsula. In the east, the German army steeled for the expected Soviet summer offensive. Intelligence reports made it clear that the Soviet army was now far superior in men and material to the German defenders. With Germany being squeezed on all sides into an increasingly tighter circle, and her cities ablaze and crumbling under continuous Allied bombing, Stauffenberg questioned whether the effort to kill Hitler was still worthwhile, since the end of the war was obviously so near.
Stauffenberg asked Tresckow for guidance. Never one to waver, Tresckow, without hesitation, responded as Stauffenberg doubtlessly expected: "The assassination must be attempted at all costs. Even if it should not succeed, an attempt to seize power in Berlin must be undertaken. What matters now is not the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence".
Encouraged by Tresckow's counsel, Stauffenberg forged ahead with his plans. He was pleased to find that as Chief of Staff to Fromm he would have ample opportunity to kill Hitler. As Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army, Fromm now regularly appeared at Hitler's military conferences to report on the status of his forces. His Chief of Staff usually accompanied him.
While his infirmities would seem to make Stauffenberg an unlikely assassin, they also made him the least likely to be suspected by Hitler's security people. Also, he had become virtually the only member of the resistance with direct access to the person of the F�hrer and the resolve to carry out the assassination.
Fate decreed that Stauffenberg was the man. He began preparations for the assassination. Major General Helmuth Stieff had been hoarding a cache of explosives in Rastenberg, and Stauffenberg dispatched two officers who were resistance members to bring them back to Berlin. The explosives used acid-based fuses housed in thin glass tubes about the thickness of a pencil. With both their families moved to the relative safety of the south of Germany, Claus and Berthold Stauffenberg now shared an apartment in a Berlin suburb. Alone in his bedroom each night, Claus practiced with a small pair of pliers squeezing hard enough to break the glass and start the fuse.
On June 7, the day after the Normandy invasion began, Stauffenberg accompanied Fromm on a visit to Hitler's headquarters near Berchtesgaden. The handful of men attending the conference included Himmler and a grossly overweight G�ring. Stauffenberg came away from this conference encouraged. He now had direct access to Hitler, and he had entered his presence without being searched. Even his thickly packed pigskin briefcase had stirred no interest. At this conference the briefcase contained nothing but documents, but it would soon carry the explosive intended as the instrument of Hitler's death.
Acting on the latest advice from Tresckow, Stauffenberg flew to Paris on June 23 to visit his old friend, Colonel Eberhard Finckh, Deputy Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief, West. Stauffenberg told Finckh of his plans to kill Hitler and the coup that would follow to seize the government and control the army. He asked Finckh to pass this information to General Stulpnagel, the Military Governor, whom Stauffenberg knew would support the coup.
Meanwhile, Tresckow sent Colonel von B�selager, the cavalry officer who had planned the shooting of Hitler during his visit to Army Group Center, to ask Field Marshal Kluge to support the coup. Kluge had replaced von Rundstedt as Commander-in-Chief, West, when Hitler tired of the old field marshal's "pessimism." As usual Kluge wavered, and Tresckow regretted he had been unable to make the trip himself because he believed he could still hold sway over Kluge. Tresckow sent a message to Kluge suggesting that he allow the Allies to break through the German lines to force the High Command to see the futility of the situation. Kluge replied that it was unnecessary to do anything to encourage a breakthrough, since it would happen soon enough anyway.
Stauffenberg had no reservations. To him the situation was clear-cut. He could find no other officer with access to Hitler who was willing to attempt the assassination; consequently, he would do it himself. The other resistance leaders did not favor this decision. Stauffenberg was now the driving force behind the coup, and its success relied heavily on his talents. They feared that his absence from Berlin during the critical hours after the assassination, while he was flying back to the capital, would have an adverse effect on the results.
Stauffenberg readied his briefcase, carefully packing it with two pounds of explosives, and waited for his next opportunity. He felt he was destined to do the job, and he prepared to accomplish it as quickly as possible. He looked forward anxiously to his next trip to Hitler's headquarters.
July 1944 began ominously, with the arrest of several resistance members. Rumors spread that the Gestapo had learned of the coup and was about to seize all the plotters, but no further arrests followed and the work went forward. On July 6, Stauffenberg again went to the Berghof to hear Hitler's order for fifteen newly formed grenadier divisions to be rushed to the eastern front to stop the Soviet advance. Stauffenberg took the briefcase bomb into the conference room but made no attempt to trigger it, for reasons known only to himself. At the meeting's end Hitler assigned him the job of locating the personnel necessary to fill the proposed grenadier divisions.
Stauffenberg in Berchtesgaden 1944, July 11
Location: Obersalzberg
Stauffenberg's next chance to put his bomb to use came on Tuesday, July 11. As the growing military crisis threatened the collapse of Germany's eastern front, Hitler called for an update on Stauffenberg's progress in organizing the fifteen new "blocking divisions." Hitler referred to them in this way because he believed they would block the Soviet advance, that they would somehow plug the holes that were expanding daily in the German defenses.
Hitler's attitude before this conference was indicative of his growing panic and vituperative treatment of his lieutenants. Things were going badly on all fronts, and Hitler typically placed the blame squarely on his generals and field marshals who were prudently advocating strategic retreat. Refusing to face reality, something no one around him would point out, he assumed Stauffenberg could create crack grenadier divisions from the worn-out veterans and raw recruits in the Replacement Army.
Stauffenberg went over his plans in his mind during the ninety-minute flight from Berlin to the small airfield in Freilassing, just north of Berchtesgaden. Inside his briefcase, under a fresh uniform shirt, was the bomb and timer fuse. He was accompanied by his acting adjutant, Captain Friedrich Karl Klausing. His regular adjutant, Lieutenant Werner von H�ften (who earlier in the year had volunteered for a suicide attempt on Hitler's life) was too ill to travel.
On landing at Freilassing, Stauffenberg instructed the pilot of his Heinkel HE-111 not to wander too far from the plane because he might have to return to Berlin in a hurry; then he and Klausing got into a waiting staff car for the ride into the nearby mountains to Hitler's retreat.
At the Berghof, Stauffenberg, clutching the briefcase with his one hand, told Klausing to stay with the car and be prepared to race down the mountainside to the waiting aircraft if he exited the meeting without his briefcase. Stauffenberg's plan was to set the acid fuse timer, place the briefcase in the conference room, and leave as unobtrusively as possible before the bomb exploded. As the colonel walked up the terraced steps toward the main building, Klausing checked his watch. It was 1:00 P.M.
Inside the building, Stauffenberg left his revolver and hat on the table reserved for this purpose and entered the conference room carrying the briefcase. He set it down carefully under the conference table and listened to the proceedings.
Stauffenberg surveyed the room. His heart sank when he saw that Himmler was not present. Goring was there, but without Himmler Stauffenberg did not want to leave his bomb. He quietly withdrew from the conference room, knowing that the present discussion would continue for at least several more minutes. He started toward a bank of telephones, but first stopped at a nearby washroom where he splashed cold water on his face to ease his tension and rinse off the sweat streaming down his forehead.
Stauffenberg asked the telephone exchange operator to place a call to General Olbricht in Berlin. When the call went through the two conspirators conversed, using predetermined code words. Stauffenberg reported Himmler's absence and the two agreed to abort the assassination, at least until the next conference. Stauffenberg returned to the conference room and waited to give his progress report on the fifteen new divisions that Hitler was convinced would stem the Soviet advance.
At 3:30 P.M. Stauffenberg returned to the waiting car carrying his briefcase. Noting Klausing's surprise at seeing the briefcase again, he explained to him what had happened. Meanwhile, General Olbricht contacted the resistance members who had been waiting for the signal to begin the coup. Count Helldorf, whose Berlin police forces were poised to arrest leading Nazis, and the officers of the Ninth Infantry Reserve Regiment at Potsdam, who were to lead their troops into the government center in Berlin and isolate it from the rest of the city and country, were told to stand down and await further instructions.
That evening Stauffenberg met with coup leaders in Berlin, including Generals Beck and Olbricht. The conversation focused on what should be done at the next conference if Himmler was not present again. While some saw the need to wait until both Himmler and Hitler could be killed at the same time, others disagreed, saying there was too little time left in which to act before Germany was totally destroyed. They insisted the bomb must be set at the next meeting, whether Himmler was present or not. In the end, no firm decision was reached either way. They would wait to see what happened at the next conference. If Himmler was absent again, Stauffenberg should call Olbricht's office for instructions. 
Stauffenberg at the Wolfschanze 1944, July 20
Location: Briefing room
The next few days were dark ones for the resistance. On Sunday, July 16, Stauffenberg received news that General Alexander Falkenhausen, military commander in Belgium and northern France, and a supporter of the coup, had been dismissed. The following day news arrived that Rommel had been severely injured and hospitalized. Although Rommel was not a member of the resistance, Stauffenberg had hoped he would come over once Hitler was dead, especially since he made no effort to hide his pessimism about Germany's future from Hitler, who now brushed off his one-time favorite as a "coward."
On 18 July, Stauffenberg received a report that the Gestapo had been ordered to arrest G�rdeler, a key member of the resistance and the man designated to be Germany's new Chancellor. He warned G�rdeler and told him to go into hiding. Reluctantly, G�rdeler left Berlin for Westphalia.
Tense meetings were held between Stauffenberg, Beck, Olbricht, and other coup conspirators at his residence at No. 8 Tristanstrasse, Wansee. It was finally decided that they no longer wanted to endure the tension of waiting for news of Himmler's presence at one of Hitler's conferences. Things were getting out of hand. Hitler had to be eliminated at all costs.
Stauffenberg was instructed to set his bomb at the next meeting, no matter who was there, as long as Hitler was in the room.
On 19 July, General Heusinger was at Hitler's conference reporting that the Soviets were breaking through all along the eastern front. He told Hitler that additional troops were needed if the Germans had any hope of halting the Soviet advance, and he asked how many men the Replacement Army could provide for this purpose.
Field Marshal Keitel interrupted with a suggestion that Colonel Stauffenberg attend the following day's conference to provide "facts and figures" about the combat readiness of the fifteen new grenadier divisions he had been ordered to organize.
Hitler rose to his feet, terminating the conference, and said, "Good, send for Stauffenberg tomorrow."
Colonel Stauffenberg worked late into the evening of 19 July 1944, making last-minute updates to the operation tables for the fifteen divisions Adolf Hitler had ordered him to create from the military rubble of the Third Reich. It was not a successful undertaking. With increasing frequency in the past two years, Hitler had prescribed imaginary divisions created out of thin air, largely by reducing existing divisions to half their assigned strength and forming additional units with the overflow.
He must have known that the next day the "dirty work" would definitely be done. The decision was now reached that the bomb would be set whether Himmler was present or not. There would be no telephone calls seeking instructions from superiors; he would do it.
Secure in his Wolf's Lair headquarters deep in the East Prussian forest at Rastenburg, Hitler was awake until past 2:00 in the morning. Typically, his practice was to engage in animated conversation with aides until well past midnight and sleep until late in the morning, which is why the "morning military conference" seldom began before 2:00 P.M. On this night he left instructions that he should be awakened at 9:00 A.M., an unheard of hour for the F�hrer; however, he was expecting Mussolini in the afternoon and his "morning military conference" was actually scheduled for late morning.
Daybreak on 20 July 1944, carried with it a promise of oppressive heat and later, w hen he entered the room, Stauffenberg must have realized the bomb he was carrying might not be sufficient for the job. Instead of a solid concrete structure in which these conferences were usually held, this building was constructed of wood and contained several large windows that were open to allow a summer breeze in. Stauffenberg had expected a solidly built conference chamber that would contain the blast and increase the force of the explosion, but now it was obvious that the wood walls and windows of the room being used would allow at least a portion of the blast to escape the room, reducing the damage it would inflict to those inside.
A massive oak table on which several military maps were spread occupied a large portion of the 18-by-40-foot room. Close to either end of the table were thick oak supports practically the width of the tabletop. Over two dozen men stood in place around the table, with Hitler himself standing near the center, his back to the door and facing the open windows.
Stauffenberg, satisfied that his briefcase was placed under the table as close to Hitler as he could get it, and possibly fearing that the unseasonably high temperature could accelerate the chemical reaction and detonate the bomb prematurely, quietly informed Keitel, "Herr Field Marshal, I have to make an urgent call to Berlin." Keitel nodded his permission and Stauffenberg unobtrusively left the meeting. Stauffenberg's departure attracted no particular interest, since officers were constantly entering and leaving the conference room for a variety of reasons.
General Adolf Heusinger was summing up the situation in East Prussia. Just as he said, "If the Army Group does not withdraw from Lake Peipus, a catastrophe will. . . " at 12.42 p.m., a violent blast hurled everyone to the floor, setting fire to hair and uniforms. Over the bedlam several officers could hear the ever-faithful Keitel, unhurt by the blast, calling out, "Where is the F�hrer? Where is the F�hrer?" General Heusinger, who was momentarily knocked unconscious, came to and found himself on his back next to Hitler, who was also unconscious. Heusinger crawled to the door and managed to drag himself painfully into the hall, where several officers and men helped him exit the building. His uniform, face, body, and legs were burned, and both ear drums had been broken. His right arm and hand bled profusely from numerous splinters that had been launched into the air when the table was ripped apart by the bomb.
Keitel groped his way through the thick smoke and dust, past wounded men crying out for help, until he found the F�hrer just regaining consciousness. The Field Marshal helped Hitler to his feet; the latter's pants had been shredded. Hitler looked at Keitel with a dazed expression, then collapsed into his arms. He was carried to his quarters where a doctor dressed his wounds, which turned out to be superficial.
Others in the room were not so lucky. Hitler's stenographer, Heinrich Berger, had both legs blown off and died a few hours later. General Rudolf Schmundt, Hitler's adjutant, lost a leg and died in a hospital on October 1. Two days after the blast General  G�nther Korten, Chief of Staff for the Luftwaffe, and Colonel Heinz Brandt died of their wounds. Everyone's uniform was burned or tattered, and most received wounds that required a stay of several days in the hospital at Rastenburg.
Investigators later concluded that had the explosion occurred inside the Bunker-like structure usually used for these conferences, everyone in the room would have been killed, many of the bodies unrecognizable from the blast and fire. When it was learned that Stauffenberg and H�ften had a second bomb identical to the first, most investigators agreed that no one could have survived if both bombs had exploded simultaneously. Once again, Hitler had cheated death.
At Wolf's Lair men were beginning to piece together what had happened. Everyone in the conference was accounted for except Colonel Stauffenberg, who it was quickly learned had sped away immediately following the explosion. When it was found that Stauffenberg's H-111 was airborne, a hurried call was placed to Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin with orders to scramble a fighter squadron to shoot down a westbound H-111 bearing the identification number of Stauffenberg's plane. The fighters never took off. It is believed that the order was suppressed by Major Friedrich Georgi, General Olbrich's son-in-law on the air staff, who suspected it had something to do with his father-in-law's coup.
If Stauffenberg could have delegated an alternate to plant the bomb while he stayed in Berlin, the coup would have gotten off to a better start; but during this time of indecision the one man who would have been decisive, and who had the respect of all the plotters, was out of touch on the return flight from East Prussia. On the other hand, had this coup been as well organized as the 1938 attempt, it might have succeeded despite Hitler's survival of the Wolf's Lair explosion.
Meanwhile, some basic assumptions were emerging at Wolf's Lair. Once it was determined that the bomb had probably been set by Stauffenberg, the assassination attempt was thought to be the act of a single individual. It did not apparently occur to anyone that the bombing might have been part of a conspiracy. In fact, Hitler himself was the likely author of the single assassin theory. Not until nearly 4:30 P.M. when Hitler lifted his communications blackout and word was received that Operation Valkyrie was in progress, did anyone suspect that a coup attempt was related to the bombing. Until now nothing was done to safeguard the Nazi regime against a coup because none was suspected. Now Himmler entered the investigation, calling on his Berlin Gestapo headquarters to find out what had happened and who was involved. Meanwhile, considerable time had passed, and neither side had actually made any significant headway.
During the next few hours a communications battle was waged between Wolf's Lair and Stauffenberg at the Bendlerstrasse. From Wolf's Lair came regular reports that Hitler was alive and well. Using the telephone and teleprinters at his command, Stauffenberg countered with denials and issued fresh orders for the arrest of all SS and SD members throughout the Reich and the occupied territories.
General von Hase, the City Commandant, had ordered the Grossdeutschland Battalion to surround and seal all entrances and exits to a list of government buildings, including several housing the SS. The battalion was commanded by a young officer, Major Otto Remer, who had a distinguished combat record but whose loyalties had not been determined.
Major Remer followed orders; he surrounded the buildings he had been assigned and set up roadblocks around the government quarter. So far these were the only troops at the disposal of the coup. The police were held in readiness by Count Helldorf, who waited for instructions that never came.
A liaison officer between Remer's battalion and the Propaganda Ministry became suspicious of the orders and slipped off to see the Propaganda Minister, Josef G�bbels, in his apartment on the Hermann-G�ringstrasse. When informed of the army's activities and the rumor that Hitler was dead, a shocked G�bbels agreed that Remer should be brought to him.
After some soul searching about his responsibility as an officer, Remer decided to answer G�bbels's summons. Following a brief discussion during which G�bbels ascertained Remer's loyalty to the F�hrer, he called Wolf's Lair. His call went through with no trouble, demonstrating once again the fatal error on the part of the conspirators of failing to close down even civilian communications within Berlin.
G�bbels explained the situation in Berlin, as he now knew it, to Hitler, and handed the phone to Remer. This single brief telephone conversation was the turning point in Berlin, and it spelled ultimate disaster for the coup. Hitler told Remer that a failed attempt had been made on his life. He placed Remer in charge of all troops in Berlin and instructed him to arrest anyone involved in the coup, and to shoot all who resisted him.
This was an intoxicating moment for the young major. Hitler had made him his personal military representative in Berlin, responsible to the F�hrer only. If Remer had been part of the resistance, perhaps it might have had a better chance at success. Remer immediately recalled his own troops and took control of all other units the coup leaders had ordered into the city. He then surrounded the Replacement Army headquarters on the Bendlerstrasse, signifying to anyone who cared to took that the coup against the Nazi government had failed.
Major Remer surrounded the Replacement Army Operations Center at the Bendlerstrasse, and even worse, Himmler was en route to Berlin to take command of all troop formations in the city and to deal with the traitors.
Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators, H�ften, Olbricht and Mertz von Quirnheim, were arrested and taken to the inner courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse Headquarters where a firing squad was waiting. Several cars and trucks had been drawn in a semicircle with their lights focused on the row of sandbags where the condemned men stood silently. Seconds before the shots were fired, Stauffenberg shouted, "Long live holy Germany". In a final act of loyalty, H�ften threw himself in front of Stauffenberg, who was merely wounded by the first round. A second volley was needed to finish him. The soul of the conspiracy against Hitler died at 12:30 A.M., 21 July 1944.
Before the second round of executions could be carried out, they were stopped by SS Obergruppenf�hrer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was acting as Himmler's personal representative, and SS Sturmbannf�hrer Otto Skorzeny, Himmler's choice to command the Replacement Army. They wanted prisoners who could be interrogated, not corpses.
At exactly 1:00 A.M., 21 July, Hitler broadcast a speech that was carried throughout occupied Europe. In his harsh, flat voice the F�hrer announced the unsuccessful attempt on his life: "Men and women of Germany, I do not know how many times there have been plans and attempts to assassinate me. If I speak to you today it is, first of all, in order that you should hear my voice and know that I am unhurt and well, secondly that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history".
Hitler went on to identify Stauffenberg as the intended assassin of the F�hrer and high-level German military leaders. He called the conspirators a "small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous, and at the same time criminal and stupid officers". He compared them with the anonymous cowards who had stabbed the German army in the back in 1918. To emphasize that the plotters had not infected the army with their poison, he assured his listeners that "this circle of usurpers is very small and has nothing in common with the German Wehrmacht". They were, he went on, "a tiny gang of criminal elements that will be ruthlessly exterminated".
Hitler then described the measures he had taken to excise what he called "this tiny clique of traitors". Himmler was made Commander-in-Chief of the Replacement Army and charged with punishing the conspirators. "This time we are going to settle accounts with them in a manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed". These were chilling words for the conspirators. They knew exactly what Hitler had in store for them. Death would be a slow, torturous agony for the men who had plotted Hitler's death and the destruction of the Nazi government.
Hitler told Joachim von Ribbentrop: "I will crush and destroy the criminals who have dared to oppose themselves to Providence and to me. These traitors to their own people deserve ignominious death, and this is what they shall have. This time the full price will be paid by all those who are involved, and by their families, and by all those who have helped them. This nest of vipers who have tried to sabotage the grandeur of my Germany will be exterminated once and for all".
Members of the SS were never seriously recruited into the 20 July plot, most often since the SS had sworn a personal oath to Hitler that included service above life itself. Therefore, SS members were not considered reliable conspirators for an attempt to kill Hitler. One very notable exception was Arthur Nebe who was implicated in the plot due to his anti-Nazi feelings even though he was a full member of the SS and had even commanded an Einsatzgruppe. Nebe's "fall from grace" was considered due to his many years as a civilian police detective and how he saw most the SS security police as incompetent. Nebe himself was quoted, upon investigating the death of Reinhard Heydrich, that the Gestapo seemed more concerned with reprisals than actually investigating the crime. Even so, Nebe's exact fate after the bomb plot remains unclear to this day. Most reports state he was executed; however, alternate theories suggest Nebe escaped Germany under an assumed name with reports placing him in Ireland as late as 1960.
Arthur Nebe) (13 November 1894 � 21 March 1945) was a key functionary in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany. Nebe rose through the ranks of the Berlin and Prussian police forces to become head of Nazi Germany's Criminal Police (Kripo) in 1936, which was folded into the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) in 1939.
Nebe served as commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B deployed largely in modern-day Belarus behind Army Group Centre during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In late 1941, he was posted back to Berlin and resumed his career within the RSHA. Nebe commanded the Kripo until he was denounced and executed after the failed attempt to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944.
After the close of the World War II, 24 senior leaders of the Einsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial in 1947�48, part of the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials held under United States military authority. The men were charged with crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership in the SS (which had been declared a criminal organization). Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were among the judgments; only four executions were carried out, on 7 June 1951; the rest were reduced to lesser sentences. Four additional Einsatzgruppen leaders were later tried and executed by other nations.
Several Einsatzgruppen leaders, including Otto Ohlendorf, claimed at the trial to have received an order before Operation Barbarossa requiring them to murder all Soviet Jews.[145] To date no evidence has been found that such an order was ever issued.[Longerich, Peter (2010). "Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews. Oxford; New York: Oxford University].
German prosecutor Alfred Streim noted that if such an order had been given, post-war courts would only have been able to convict the Einsatzgruppen leaders as accomplices to mass murder. However, if it could be established that the Einsatzgruppen had committed mass murder without orders, then they could have been convicted as perpetrators of mass murder, and hence could have received stiffer sentences, including capital punishment. Streim postulated that the existence of an early comprehensive order was a fabrication created for use in Ohlendorf's defence. This theory is now widely accepted by historians.
Longerich notes that most orders received by the Einsatzgruppen leaders�especially when they were being ordered to carry out criminal activities�were vague, and couched in terminology that had a specific meaning for members of the regime. Leaders were given briefings about the need to be "severe" and "firm"; all Jews were to be viewed as potential enemies that had to be dealt with ruthlessly. British historian Sir Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler's apocalyptic remarks before Barbarossa about the necessity for a war without mercy to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism" were interpreted by Einsatzgruppen commanders as permission and encouragement to engage in extreme antisemitic violence, with each Einsatzgruppen commander to use his own discretion about how far he was prepared to go.[Kershaw, Ian (2008). "Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution". New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.]
Most of the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes were never charged, and returned unremarked to civilian life. The West German Central Prosecution Office of Nazi War Criminals only charged about a hundred former Einsatzgruppe members with war crimes. And as time went on, it became more difficult to obtain prosecutions; witnesses grew older and were less likely to be able to offer valuable testimony. Funding for trials was inadequate, and the governments of Austria and Germany became less interested in obtaining convictions for wartime events, preferring to forget the Nazi past.
Born in Berlin, the son of a Berlin school teacher, Nebe volunteered for military service in the 17th Pioneer Battalion during the Great War, where he was wounded twice by poison-gas.
In 1920 Nebe Nebe joined the Berlin detective force known as the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo; Criminal Police), a similar organization to the United Kingdom's Criminal Investigation Department, and attained the rank of Police Commissioner in 1924. In early 1932 Nebe and other  detectives formed the NS (National Socialist) Civil Service Society of the Berlin Police.
A professional policeman and the author of an authoritative treatise on criminology, Nebe joined the NSDAP on 1 July 1931 and the SS on 2 December 1936.
Following the Nazi seizure of power, Kurt Dal�ge recommended Nebe in April 1933 to be Chief Executive of the State Police.
Kurt Dal�ge (15 September 1897 � 24 October 1946) was a German Nazi SS-Oberst-Gruppenf�hrer and Generaloberst of the Police (ranks equivalent to colonel-general, or four-star General) as chief of the national uniformed Ordnungspolizei (Order Police), and ruled the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia as Deputy Protector after Reinhard Heydrich's assassination. After the end of World War II, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, convicted as a war criminal and executed in 1946.
Dal�ge, son of a Prussian state official, was born in the small Upper Silesian town of Kreuzburg (now Kluczbork). He entered the Imperial German Army in 1916 and served with the 7th Garde Infantry Regiment, on the Eastern Front. In October 1917, he attended officer training in Doberitz. During his service on the Western Front, he was severely wounded in the head and shoulder. He was hospitalised and declared 25% disabled. Dal�ge was awarded the Iron Cross, second class (1918) and the Wound Badge in Black (1918).
After World War I, Dal�ge became leader of Selbstschutz Oberschlesien (SSOS) - Upper Silesian Self Defense  � an Upper Silesian veterans' organization engaged in combat with the Poles in that region. In 1921, he also became active in the Freikorps Rossbach while studying engineering at the Technical University in Berlin, where he eventually earned a civil engineering degree. Two years later he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP). In 1926 he joined the Sturmabteilung (SA), eventually becoming the leader of Berlin's SA and G�bbbels' Deputy Gauleiter (or Party leader) in Berlin. Throughout the period 1926�1929, Dal�ge led the Berlin-Brandenburg division of the SA.
In July 1930, in accordance with Hitler's wishes, Dal�ge resigned from the SA and joined the SS with the rank of SS-Oberf�hrer. His main responsibility was to spy on the SA and political opponents of the Nazi Party. Berlin SS headquarters was strategically placed at the corner of L�tzowstrasse and Potsdamerstrasse, opposite the SA headquarters.
In August 1930, when Berlin SA leader Walter Stennes had his men attack the Berlin Party headquarters, it was Dal�ge's SS men who defended it and put the attack down. Sometime afterwards in an open letter to Dal�ge, Adolf Hitler proclaimed "SS Mann, deine Ehre hei�t Treue!" (SS man, your honour is loyalty); and "Meine Ehre hei�t Treue" (My honour is loyalty) was duly adopted by the SS as its motto. Hitler promoted both Dal�ge and Heinrich Himmler to SS-Obergruppenf�hrer, with Dal�ge the SS leader of northern Germany while Himmler controlled the southern SS units out of Munich in addition to serving as national leader for the entire SS. In 1932 Dal�ge became a Nazi Party delegate in the Prussian state parliament, and in November 1932 was elected to the Reichstag representing the Berlin East electoral district, a seat he retained until 1945. At the same time, Hermann G�ring moved Dal�ge to the Prussian Interior Ministry, where he took over the nonpolitical police with the rank of General der Polizei. Intrigue created by G�ring, Himmler and Heydrich surrounding Ernst R�hm led to Dal�ge playing an important role in the infamous Night of the Long Knives during which R�hm along with many leading members of the SA were killed between 30 June to 2 July 1934, thus neutralising the SA and shifting the balance of power within the party to the SS.
Evidence of Dal�ge's ruthlessness goes beyond his intrigue against his former SA comrades and are discernible in his remarks concerning anyone he considered a threat to society. He once argued that, "the consciously asocial enemies of the people (Volksfeinde)" must be eliminated by state intervention "if it hopes to prevent the outbreak of complete moral degeneration". Historian George Browder claims that Dal�ge "bragged that the Police Institute for detective training had especially been reorganized according to NS viewpoints" and that advancement within his organization was contingent to a considerable degree upon the internalization of Nazi ideology.
By November 1934, Dal�ge's authority over the uniformed police was extended beyond Prussia to encompass all of Germany. That meant he commanded municipal police forces, the rural gendarmerie, traffic police, the coastguard, the railway police, the postal protection service, fire brigades, the air-raid services, the emergency technical service, the broadcasting police, the factory protection police, building regulations enforcement, and the commercial police.
In 1936, the entire German police force was reorganized with the administrative functions previously exercised by the now largely defunct federal states reassigned to the nominal control of Reich Interior Ministry, but under the actual control of Himmler's SS. Making the most of his police expertise and coinciding his appointment, Dal�ge wrote and published a book entitled, National-sozialistischer Kampf gegen das Verbrechertum" (NS Struggle against Criminality). That same year, Himmler appointed Dal�ge as chief of the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), which gave him administrative, though not executive, authority over most of the uniformed police in Nazi Germany. He commanded the Orpo until 1943, rising to the rank of SS-Oberst-Gruppenf�hrer und Generaloberst der Polizei. By August 1939, the strength of the Orpo under Dal�ge's command and control had reached upwards of 120,000 active-duty personnel.
Further indications of the brutality coming from Dal�ge's office (Chief of the Ordnungspolizei), are shown in a report dated 5 September 1939 outlining the methods to be employed during pacification operations in Poland. Concerning uniformed police battalions for planned reprisal actions around the Polish town of Czestochowa, the report gave the following instructions: "the leader of this battalion is ordered to take the most drastic actions and measures such as those in the upper Silesian industrial area, the hanging of Polish franc-tireurs from light poles as a visible symbol for the entire population".
During the war in 1941, he attended a mass shooting of 4,435 Jews by Police-Battalion 307 near Brest-Litowsk and a mass shooting of Jews in Minsk. Further in October 1941, Dal�ge signed deportation orders for Jews from Germany, Austria and the Protectorate to Riga and Minsk. On 7 July 1942, he attended a conference led by Himmler which discussed the "enlargement" of Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to mass-murder Polish Jews in the General Government district of occupied Poland and as to other matters involving SS and police policies in the east.
In 1942 Dal�ge became the Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, following the assassination of Deputy Protector Reinhard Heydrich. Although Konstantin von Neurath was nominally Protector, he had been stripped of his authority in 1941, so Dal�ge was Acting Protector in all but name. In June 1942, along with Karl Hermann Frank and other SS operatives, he ordered the villages of Lidice and Le��ky razed to the ground in reprisal for Heydrich's death. All of the men in both villages were murdered, while many of the women and children were deported to Nazi concentration camps.
In May 1943, Dal�ge became seriously ill after a massive heart attack. In August, he was relieved of all of his day-to-day responsibilities and spent the rest of the war living on a property in western Pomerania given to him by Hitler.
In May 1945, he was arrested by British troops in L�beck and interned in Luxembourg and then at Nuremberg where he was charged as "a major war criminal". In September 1946 after being extradited to Czechoslovakia, he was tried for his many war crimes committed in the Protectorate. Throughout his trial, Dal�e was unrepentant, claiming that he was beloved by "three million policemen", only following Hitler's orders and that he had a clear conscience. He was convicted on all charges and sentenced to death on 23 October 1946. Dal�ge was hanged in Pankr�c prison in Prague on 24 October 1946 after having attempted suicide previously.
In October 1933 Nebe was ordered by Rudolf Diels, then head of the Gestapo, to arrange the liquidation of Hitler's rival Gregor Strasser. This began the process of turning Nebe against the Nazis.
Rudolf Diels (16 December 1900 � 18 November 1957) was a German civil servant and head of the Gestapo in 1933�34. He obtained the rank of SS-Oberf�hrer and was a prot�g� of Hermann G�ring.
Diels was born in Berghausen in the Taunus, the son of a farmer. He served in the army during World War I and afterwards studied law at the University of Marburg from 1919. At university he had a reputation as a drinker and philanderer. While there he also received a number of dueling scars resulting from the academic fencing once practised by young upper-class Austrians and Germans in trying to prove their manhood. The scars did not greatly detract from his good looks and in fact imparted a quite striking appearance.
He joined the Prussian interior ministry in 1930 and was promoted to an advisory position in the Prussian police in 1932, targeting political radicals, both Communists and Nazis. He was head of the Prussian Political Police when Adolf Hitler came to power. G�ring was made minister for Prussia in 1933, replacing Carl Severing, and was impressed with Diels' work and new-found commitment to the Nazi Party. Diels became a prot�g� of G�ring's. In April 1933, G�ring appointed him as chief of the new Prussian state police department 1A, concerned with political crimes. Department 1A was soon renamed the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), or Gestapo.
On 27 February 1933 the Reichstag fire occurred and Diels was the main interrogator of the principal accused, Marinus van der Lubbe. He told Hitler he thought that the fire was set by this single man. However, Hitler was convinced it was the Communists. Diels also ordered Arthur Nebe to arrange the killing of Gregor Strasser in October 1933; ironically Strasser was later killed during the Night of the Long Knives in which Diels himself was almost killed.
Diels attracted the attention of political rivals, including SS chief Heinrich Himmler and his deputy, Reinhard Heydricha, who began to spread rumours about his loyalty to Adolf Hitler. One of these stories claimed that Diels had joined the conspiracy being organized by Ernst R�hm.
In 1933 and 1934, Himmler and Heydrich took over the political police of state after state. Soon only Prussia was left outside their control. Concerned that Diels was not ruthless enough to effectively counteract the power of the Sturmabteilung (SA), G�ring handed over control of the Gestapo to Himmler on 20 April 1934. Also on that date, Hitler appointed Himmler chief of all German police outside Prussia.
Heydrich, named chief of the Gestapo by Himmler on 22 April 1934, also continued as head of the SS Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst, SD). Effectively smeared, but with G�ring's aid, Diels narrowly avoided execution during the Night of the Long Knives in the summer of 1934, fleeing his post for five weeks. Thereafter, he was briefly Deputy Police President of Berlin before being appointed Regierungspr�sident (administrative president) of the local government of Cologne.
He maintained his association with G�ring, marrying a cousin of his protector. G�ring often saved him from prison, notably in 1940 when he declined to order the arrest of Jews. He was later arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 after the 20 July Plot to assassinate Hitler and imprisoned, but survived.
He presented a affidavit for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials but was also summoned to testify by G�ring's defence lawyer. Diels gave evidence against the leaders of the Nazi Government. As he was considered to be innocent of war crimes he was allowed to serve in the post-war government of Lower Saxony from 1950 and then in the Ministry of the Interior until his retirement in 1953. 
Diels published his memoirs, "Lucifer Ante Portas", in 1950.
Rudolf Diels was killed on 18 November 1957 as his rifle went off as he was taking it from the trunk of his car, preparing for a hunt.
In 1933 he came to know Hans Bernd Gisevius, then an official in the Berlin Police Headquarters and Gisevius introduced him to Hans Oster
In July 1936, the Kripo became the criminal police department for the entire Reich. It was merged, along with the Gestapo, into the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) or Security Police. At that point, Reinhard Heydrich was in overall command of the SiPo (Gestapo and Kripo) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) (Security Service), the intelligence service of the SS and the Nazi Party. As chief of the Kripo, Nebe reported to Heydrich. His aversion to Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler grew even though he continued to regularly lunch with them.
In 1938, Nebe joined forces with future fellow conspirator Dr. Karl Sack (Judge Advocate-General of the Wehrmacht) against Himmler and Heydrich's plot against General Werner von Fritsch. That same year, Hans Oster recruited Nebe into the conspiracy for the September 1938 coup attempt, a plot to overthrow Hitler if he went to war with Czechoslovakia over the Sudetenland. Nebe supplied the conspirators with information regarding SS strength, logistics, and safe houses throughout the Berlin area.
Karl Sack (born June 9, 1896 in Bosenheim (now Bad Kreuznach), executed 9 April 1945 in Flossenb�rg concentration camp) was a German jurist and member of the resistance movement during World War II.
Sack studied law in Heidelberg where he joined a 'Burschenschaft' (Burschenschaft Vineta) and after a time in legal practice became district court judge in Hesse. He transfered to the military judiciary in 1934. 
The rapid expansion of the Wehrmacht expedited Sack's career in the Reich War Ministry. As a judge in the Reichskriegsgericht (Reich Military Court), Sack was involved in the investigation leading to the proceedings against Chief of Army High Command Colonel-General von Fritsch in 1938. Fritsch was falsely accused by the Gestapo of homosexuality, and Sack was able to prove that these accusations were untenable.
During World War II, Sack maintained contacts within the resistance circles in the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counter Intelligence around Admiral Canaris, Major General Hans Oster, and Hans von Dohn�nyi and with the military opposition.
The conspirators' plans briefly envisioned Karl Sack as Justice Minister within a planned post-coup civilian government. In the wake of the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944, Karl Sack was arrested on 9 August 1944, and brought before an SS drumhead court-martial presided over by Otto Thorbeck, and sentenced to death.  On Hitler's orders, he was executed in the Flossenb�rg concentration camp on 9 April, 1945.
In 1984, Sack's role as a member of the resistance was remembered with a bronze plaque placed in the former Reichskriegsgericht in Berlin-Charlottenburg. There was some opposition to this honour as Sack favoured a far-reaching interpretation of what constituted desertion, which must have led to more than a few death sentences.
Hans von Dohn�nyi (Born 1 January 1902, Vienna, Austria-Hungary - Died 8/9 April 1945) was a German jurist of Hungarian ancestry, rescuer of Jews, and German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime.
Dohn�nyi was born to the Hungarian composer Ern� Dohn�nyi and his wife, the pianist Elisabeth Kunwald. After his parents divorced, he grew up in Berlin. He went to the Gr�newald Gymnasium there, becoming friends with Dietrich and Klaus Bonh�ffer. From 1920 to 1924, he studied law in Berlin. In 1925, he received a doctorate in law with a dissertation on "The International Lease Treaty and Czechoslovakia's Claim on the Lease Area in Hamburg Harbour".
After taking the first state exam in 1924, he married Christel Bonh�ffer, sister of his school friends, in 1925. About this time, he began putting the stress on the "a" in his last name (which is of Hungarian origin, stressed on the first syllable).
Dohn�nyi worked at the Hamburg Senate for a short time and in 1929, began a career at the Reich Ministry of Justice, working as a personal consultant with the title of prosecutor to several justice ministers In 1934, the title was changed to Regierungsrat ("government adviser"). In 1932, he was adjutant to Erwin Bumke, the Imperial Court President (Reichsgerichtspr�sident; at this time, Germany was still officially the Deutsches Reich {German Empire), in which capacity he put together Prussia's lawsuit against the Empire, which Prussia had brought after the Preu�enschlag, Franz von Papen's dissolution of the Prussian social-democratic government through an emergency decree in 1932. As an adviser to Franz G�rtner from 1934�38, Dohn�nyi became acquainted with Adolf Hitler, Josef G�bbels, Heinrich Himmler and Hermann G�ring. He had access to the justice ministry's most secret documents.
Spurred by the murders of alleged plotters of the 1934 Night of the Long Knives, "legitimized" murders carried out on government orders, without trial or sentence, Dohn�nyi began to seek out contacts with German resistance circles. He made records for himself of the regime's crimes, so that in the event of a collapse of the Third Reich, he would have evidence of their crimes. In 1938, once his critical view of Nazi racial politics became known, Martin Bormann had him transferred to the Reichsgericht in Leipzig as an adviser.
Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Hans Oster called Dohn�nyi into the Abwehr of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Led by Wilhelm Canaris, it quite quickly became a hub of resistance activity against Hitler. Dohn�nyi protected Dietrich Bonh�ffer from conscription by bringing him into the Abwehr with the claim Bonh�ffer's numerous ecumenical contacts could be useful for Germany.
Dietrich Bonh�ffer (4 February 1906 � 9 April 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, anti-Nazi dissident, and key founding member of the Confessing Church, was known for his staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship, including vocal opposition to Hitler's euthanasia program and genocidal persecution of the Jews.
After the failure of the 20 July Plot on Hitler's life in 1944 and the discovery in September 1944 of secret Abwehr documents relating to the conspiracy, Bonh�ffer's connection with the conspirators was discovered. He was transferred from the military prison Tegel in Berlin, where he had been held for 18 months, to the detention cellar of the house prison of the Reich Security Head Office, the Gestapo's high-security prison. In February 1945, he was secretly moved to Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally to Flossenb�rg concentration camp.
On 4 April 1945, the diaries of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, were discovered, and in a rage upon reading them, Hitler ordered that the Abwehr conspirators be destroyed.
Bonh�ffer was condemned to death on 8 April 1945 by SS judge Otto Thorbeck at a drumhead court-martial without witnesses, records of proceedings or a defense in Flossenb�rg concentration camp. He was executed there by hanging at dawn on 9 April 1945, along with fellow conspirators Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Canaris's deputy General Hans Oster, military jurist General Karl Sack, General Friedrich von Rabenau, businessman Theodor Str�nck, and German resistance fighter Ludwig Gehre, just two weeks before soldiers from the United States 90th and 97th Infantry Divisions liberated the camp, three weeks before the Soviet capture of Berlin and a month before the capitulation of Nazi Germany.
Bonh�ffer's brother, Klaus Bonh�ffer, and his brother-in-law R�diger Schleicher were executed in Berlin on the night of 22�23 April as Soviet troops were already fighting in the capital.
In 1942, Dohn�nyi made it possible for two Jewish lawyers from Berlin, Friedrich Arnold and Julius Fliess, to flee with their loved ones to Switzerland, disguised as Abwehr agents. Altogether, 13 people were able to leave Germany without hindrance, thanks to Dohn�nyi's forgeries and operation known as U-7. Dohn�nyi covertly went to Switzerland to make certain the refugees would be admitted, and also ensuring they received money to support themselves.
During late February 1943, Dohn�nyi busied himself with Henning von Tresckow's assassination attempt against Hitler and the attendant coup d'�tat. The bomb that was smuggled aboard Hitler's plane in Smolensk after being carried there by Dohn�nyi, however, failed to go off.
On 5 April 1943, Dohn�nyi was arrested at his office by the Gestapo on charges of alleged breach of foreign currency violations: he had transferred funds to a Swiss bank on behalf of the Jews he had saved. Both Bonh�ffer and Christel Dohn�nyi were also arrested, although she was released about a week later.
Military judge Karl Sack, a member of the resistance, deliberately delayed Dohn�nyi's trial, but, in 1944, Dohn�nyi was delivered to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. His involvement in the 20 July Plot came to light after the plan failed. Also, the Gestapo found some of the documents he had earlier saved and hidden and decided Dohn�nyi was "the spiritual head of the conspiracy� against Hitler. On Hitler's orders, on 6 April 1945, he was condemned to death by an SS drumhead court and executed two or three days later (depending on the source).
After the fall of the Nazi r�gime, the chairman of the drumhead court, Otto Thorbeck, and the prosecutor, Walter Huppenkothen, were accused in West Germany of being accessories to murder. After the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) had at first quashed a lower court's two acquittals, it changed its mind in 1956 during the third revision of the case, quashed Thorbeck's and Huppenkothen's sentences, and acquitted them of the charges of being accessories to murder by their participation in the drumhead trial on grounds that the court had been duly constituted and the sentence had been imposed according to the law then in force, without either of the accused having perverted justice.
On the centenary of Dohn�nyi's birth in 2002, G�nter Hirsch, president of the BGH, called those who had sentenced Dohn�nyi to death "criminals calling themselves judges". Hirsch said the 1956 ruling was shameful because as a result, not a single one of the Nazi-era judges who sentenced 50,000 Nazi opponents to their deaths were themselves found guilty after the war.
On 23 October 2003, Israel honoured Dohn�nyi by recognizing him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving the Arnold and Fliess families, at risk to his own life. His name has been inscribed in the walls at the Holocaust remembrance centre Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
On 27 September 1939, Himmler ordered the creation of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA); the new organisation encompassed all security services and police, except for the uniformed service. The RSHA was divided into main departments, including SiPo and Kripo, which became Department V of the RSHA. Department V was also known as the Reich Criminal Police Office (Reichskriminalpolizeiamt, or RKPA). Nebe was put in charge of Amt V, and promoted to the rank of SS-Gruppenf�hrer,
Nebe embraced the preventative mission of the Kripo to "exterminate criminality" and fostered Nazi ideology within the police department. Under Nebe's leadership, equipped with arbitrary powers of arrest and detention, the Kripo acted more and more like the Gestapo, including the liberal use of preventative custody, and large-scale roundups of so-called asocials.
Nebe's ties to mass murder may originate in 1939, when he sent a commissioner in his Criminal Police Office, Christian Wirth of Stuttgart, to the Euthanasia organisation.
In 1941,  just prior to Operation Barbarossa,perhaps sensing some reluctance on the part of his subordinate to get his hands dirty, Reinhard Heydrich selected Nebe to command Einsatzgruppe B, which would follow the Wehrmacht�s Army Group Center in the invasion of the Soviet Union. 
There are reports of his volunteering for this command from Nazis being tried for war crimes themselves after the war and while it is quite possible he did, in fact, volunteer for the position, there is also the distinct possibility that he was assigned the position and the war criminals were lying - they were, at the time, attempting to clear SS Intelligence Chief Reinhard Heydrich of war crimes.
Nebe asked for a transfer to the International Police Commission to avoid this duty, but Heydrich insisted; anti-Nazis Ludwig Beck and Hans Oster urged Nebe to accept, so they would have direct evidence of SS crimes and organization. He worked with Henning von Tresckow and Fabian von Schlabrendorff to reduce the atrocities committed, and often massaged the numbers reported to his superiors (including one claim that his task force was responsible for more than 45,000 killings).
A different picture of Nebe is shown through the August 1941 mass-shooting of 100 people in Minsk. On Himmler's request, Nebe held the demonstration. Himmler attended the shooting; just after the event, he vomited. After regaining his composure, Himmler decided that alternate methods of killing should be found. He told Heydrich that he was concerned for the mental health of the SS men. Himmler wanted Nebe to come up with something less distressing.
With the technical assistance of Dr. Albert Widmann, Nebe experimented with the use of explosives and carbon monoxide gas vans (used to suffocate victims) to kill the mentally defective in lunatic asylums in Minsk and Mogilev, to spare his men the anxiety of shooting them.
Of his work in the east, historian Gerald Reitlinger stated:
�The headquarters of Nebe's extermination group were at Minsk and later Smolensk, where he was in touch with another old friend, Colonel Hans Oster, who was attached to Central Army Group headquarters. Nebe is said to have fought against Heydrich's orders and disclosed them to the Oster circle, who had used him as an information post for the past four years. No doubt that is why Heydrich's reports credit Nebe's stewardship with the quite modest score of 46,000 executions as against Stahlecker's 221,000".
He returned from Russia convinced that the war would end with the military defeat of Germany. In late 1942 after the Wannsee Conference, Nebe informed his fellow conspirators of the plans for the so-called Final Solution.
In March 1944, after the 'Great Escape' from Stalag Luft III POW camp, Nebe was ordered by Heinrich M�ller, Chief of the Gestapo (Amt IV, or Department 4, of the RSHA), to choose 50 of the 73 captured prisoners to be executed in the Stalag Luft III murders. It is reputed that this selection caused Nebe great distress.
Arthur Nebe appears to have been on the fringe of the 20 July 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler at Rastenburg. Supposedly, his mission in the plot was to lead a team of twelve police officers to assassinate Heinrich Himmler, but his whereabouts on the day remain in question (He may have been in Berlin with conspirator General Paul von Hase) as does the method by which he was to have received the signal to act.
Historian Reitlinger characterized Nebe as "a very questionable member of the  Resistance Circle at the time of the great bomb plot".
Nebe � using various disguises after a warrant was issued for his arrest on24 July 24 � fled into hiding.  There are many versions of what happened next; one of the most logical is that Nebe contacted a female acquaintance in the police, one Adelheid Gobbin at the end of July, requesting help.  She took him to her apartment and then arranged a hiding place with the Walter Frick family at Motzen on Lake Motzen, twenty miles south of Berlin.  Gestapo investigator Willy Litzenberg appears to have tracked Gobbin down in January 1945 and in a later interrogation, she revealed Nebe�s hiding place.  Nebe, who according to one source attempted to fake his own suicide in January, was arrested in February 1945 and sentenced to death by the People�s Court.
On 21 March 1945, executioners at Pl�tzensee Prison in Berlin hanged Arthur Nebe (and Walter Frick).  Contrary to this, sightings of him were reported in Tunin during 1956 and in Ireland during 1960. Whether these reports are truthful or not is still unknown.
To this day, Arthur Nebe remains a controversial figure in the history of the German conspiracy against Hitler
Having been a major figure in Himmler's SS empire as Head of the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police) and later having belonged to Einsatzgruppen - B (attached to Army Group Center), Nebe has been posthumously accused of all manners of war crimes. But a careful study of his life reveals the very opposite.
Nebe begins his career in the Criminal Police long before Hitler's accession to power earning an impeccable record in the fight against crime.
Though initially fond of Hitler and his vows to restore Germany to great power status, Nebe soon develops serious doubts about the Nazi regime following the R�hm massacre. As his doubts accumulate, he eventually confides to his close friend and colleague, Hans-Bernd Gisevius, his intention to resign from the force, especially after the Criminal Police is absorbed into the SS empire. Gisevius persuades him to stay on arguing that the conspirators desperately need someone within Himmler's empire to carefully document all the crimes that were being perpetrated by the Nazi regime - evidence the conspirators hope one day to use to bring Hitler, G�ring, Himmler, and the rest to justice before Germany and the world.
Hans Bernd Gisevius (July 14, 1904 � February 23, 1974) was a German diplomat and intelligence officer during World War II. A covert opponent of the Nazi regime, he served as a liaison in Z�rich between Allen Dulles, station chief for the American OSS and the German Resistance forces in Germany.
Gisevius was born in Arnsberg in the Prussian Province of Westphalia. After law school, he joined the Prussian Interior Ministry in 1933 and was assigned to the newly formed Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo. After joining the Gestapo, he immediately had disagreements with his senior, Rudolf Diels, and was discharged. He continued with police work in the Interior Ministry. When Himmler took over Police functions in 1936 in the German Reich, he removed Gisevius from office.
Throughout his time working for the Gestapo Gisevius described himself as living in constant fear, entering and exiting through the back door, clutching a pistol at his side - all resultant from his misgivings with the terror apparatus to which he was assigned, since according to him, it was like "living in a den of murderers".
Gisevius later transferred to the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Although he had no position of power, he maintained connections, notably to Arthur Nebe, that kept him informed of the political background. Gisevius joined the secret opposition to Hitler, began gathering evidence of Nazi crimes (for use in a later prosecution) and attempted to restrain the increasing power of Heinrich Himmler and the SS. He maintained links with Hans Oster and Hjalmar Schacht.
When World War II started, Gisevius joined the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, which was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who was secretly an opponent of Hitler. Canaris had surrounded himself with Wehrmacht officers opposed to Hitler and he welcomed Gisevius into this group. Working from the consulate in Z�rich, Hans Gisevius was involved in secret talks with the Vatican. Canaris arranged for the appointment of Gisevius as Vice Consul in Switzerland, where Gisevius met with Allen Dulles in 1943 and agreed to serve as a liaison for the German opposition to Hitler, an assembly which counted among its members General Ludwig Beck, Abwehr Chief Canaris, and Mayor Carl G�rdeler of Leipzig.
Several members of the conspiratorial circle against Hitler including Gisevius, "all kept homes within easy walking distance of each other". According to Gisevius, the original plot to kill Hitler earlier (namely, before the acquiescence of Great Britain over the Sudetenland) was literally derailed by Neville Chamberlain whose actions he claims "saved Hitler".
Upon returning to Germany, he was investigated by the Gestapo, but released. In 1944, after the failed July 20th assassination attempt against Hitler, Gisevius first hid at the home of his future wife, the Swiss national Gerda Woog, and fled to Switzerland in 1945, making him one of the few conspirators to survive the war. There, he contacted the Swiss authorities.
Peter Hoffmann's biography of Hitler assassination conspirator Claus Graf von Stauffenberg ("Stauffenberg, A Family History," 1992) indicates that after the failure of Stauffenberg's bomb plot in July 1944, Gisevius went into hiding until 23 January  1945, when he escaped to Switzerland by using a passport that had belonged to Carl Deichmann, a brother-in-law of German Count Helmuth James von Moltke, who was a specialist in international law serving in the legal branch of the Foreign Countries Group of the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, "Supreme Command of the Armed Forces"). Through the help of the American Allen Dulles in Berne, Switzerland and of the German Legation (in Berne)'s Georg Federer, the passport was modified and a visa obtained for Gisevius that enabled him to escape to Spain.
Gisevius served as a key witness for the defense at the Nuremberg Trials when he was called as a witness by defendants Hjalmar Schacht and Wilhelm Frick. His testimony was crucial in securing the acquittal of Schacht on all counts, but Frick was found guilty. His testimony was also particularly damaging to Hermann G�ring, Wilhelm Keitel and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who were all convicted.
His autobiography, "Bis zum bitteren Ende" (To the Bitter End), published in 1946, offered a sharp indictment of the Nazi regime, many of whose leading members Gisevius knew personally, as well as of the German people, who, Gisevius claimed, pretended not to know about the atrocities being committed in its name. At the same time, it also offers an insider's account of the German resistance movement.
In 1946 Gisevius was charged and acquitted by the Swiss authorities in a trial for espionage. Gisevius was later criticized as he diminished the contributions of other members (i.e. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg) of the opposition to Hitler. Gisevius reported in his 1948 book, "To the Bitter End", that he considered SS Chief Heinrich Himmler a bit of a hypocrite whereas he saw Reinhard Heydrich as one who epitomized a true German, in accordance with Nazi ideals at least.
In the early 1950s he moved to the United States and lived in Dallas, Texas, but soon returned, and lived in Switzerland. Gisevius died in M�llheim in Baden-W�rttemberg in 1974.
In 1938, Nebe joins forces with future co-conspirator Dr. Karl Sack (Judge Advocate-General of the German Army) to torpedo Himmler's plot against General Werner von Fritsch.
General Hans Oster recruits Nebe into the conspiracy for the September 1938 coup attempt. Nebe supplies his colleagues in the know with vital information regarding SS strength, logistics, and safehouses throughout the Berlin area.
During 1941-42, Nebe is assigned to Einsatzgruppen-B in occupied Russia. He manages to save thousands of Russian civilians from execution by falsifying figures and claiming credit for slaughters that have never been carried out. Nebe is soon suspected by fellow SS-Einsatzgruppen colleagues of being "soft"; mass executions being undertaken by SS Sonderkommandos in his absence.
In late 1942, using a special code-language, Nebe informs co-conspirators of secret conferences he has attended chaired by Himmler to develop a clandestine extermination program referred to repeatedly as 'The Final Solution'. The program involves the extermination of European Jewry and all other categories of people deemed by the F�hrer as unfit to exist. Measures such as transportation by rail in sealed wagons and gas chambers are discussed.
On 20 July 1944, he is on hand in Berlin at the side of co-conspirator General Paul von Hase to support Stauffenberg's July 20th uprising. Nebe organizes police raiding parties awaiting orders to arrest key Reich ministers. The orders never arrive.
After successfully evading the Gestapo for half a year using a variety of disguises, Nebe is finally caught in February 1945.
On 2 March 1945, Nebe is sentenced to death by the People's Court and hanged.
-- Jewish Virtual Library
Historians have a uniformly negative view of Nebe and his motives, despite his participation in the 20 July plot. Robert Gellately writes that Nebe's views were virulently racist and antisemitic. Martin Kitchen casts Nebe as an opportunist, who saw the SS as the police force of the future, and as an "energetic and enthusiastic mass murderer, who seized every opportunity to undertake yet another massacre", yet he "was clearly unable to stand the strain and was posted back to Berlin".
Comprehensive reports filed by the Einsatzgruppen have been analyzed by historian Ronald Headland as "historical 'Messages of Murder'" that provide insights into the worldview of its leadership. Headland writes that the reports "bear witness to the fanatic commitment of the Einsatzgruppen leaders to their mission of extermination"; their ideology and racism are evident in the "constant debasement of the victims" and "ever present racial conceptions concerning Jew, Communists, Gypsies and other 'inferior' elements". Headland concludes that Nebe was an ambitious man who may have volunteered to lead an Einsatzgruppe unit for careerist reasons, to get a "military decoration", and to curry favor with Heydrich. Any misgivings he may have entertained as to the feasibility of the undertaking failed to prevent him from overseeing the murder of close to 50,000 people in the five months he spent as commander of his unit.
Gerald Reitlinger describes Nebe's reasons for joining the Einsatzgruppen as "placation" and a desire to hold on to his position in the Criminal Police Department, which, since 1934, had been "invaded by amateur Gestapo men" and was later taken over by Heydrich. "If Nebe did in fact retain his office till 1944, it was because of the five months he spent in Russia, or, as his friend Gisevius politely referred to, at the front".
Alex J. Kay writes that "the role, character and motivation of those involved both in planning�and in some cases carrying out�mass murder and in the conspiracy against Hitler deserve to be investigated more closely". He places Nebe in this category, with Franz Halder, chief of the OKH,
Franz Halder (30 June 1884 � 2 April 1972) was a German general and the chief of the OKH General Staff from 1938 until September 1942, when he was dismissed after frequent disagreements with Adolf Hitler. Until December 1941 Halder's military position corresponded to the old Chief of the General Staff position, which during World War One was the highest military office in the German Imperial Army. Halder's diary during his time as chief of OKH General Staff has been a source for authors that have written about such subjects as Adolf Hitler, the Second World War and the NSDAP (the Nazi party). In William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich", Halder's diary is cited hundreds of times.
In 1902, Halder joined the 3rd Royal Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment in Munich. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1904, upon graduation from War School in Munich, then he attended Artillery School (1906�07) and the Bavarian Staff College (War Academy) (1911�1914), both in Munich.
In 1914, Halder became an Ordnance Officer, serving in the Headquarters of the Bavarian 3rd Army Corps. In August, 1915 he was promoted to Hauptmann (Captain) on the General Staff of the 6th Army (at that time commanded by Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria). During 1917 he served as a General Staff officer in the Headquarters of the 2nd Army, before being transferred to the 4th Army.
Between 1919 and 1920 Halder served with the Reichswehr War Ministry Training Branch. Between 1921 and 1923 he was a Tactics Instructor with the Wehrkreis VII in Munich.
In March 1924 Halder was promoted to major and by 1926 he served as the Director of Operations (Oberquartiermeister of Operations: O.Qu.I.) on the General Staff of the Wehrkreis VII in Munich. In February 1929 he was promoted to Oberstleutnant (lieutenant colonel), and from October 1929 through late 1931 he served on the Training staff in the Reichswehr Ministry.
After being promoted to Oberst (colonel) in December 1931, Halder served as the Chief of Staff, Wehrkreis Kdo VI, in M�nster (Westphalia) through early 1934. During the 1930s the German military staff thought that Poland might attack the detached German province of East Prussia. As such, they reviewed plans as to how to defend East Prussia.
After being promoted to Generalmajor in October 1934, Halder served as the Commander of the 7th Infantry Division in Munich.
Recognized as a fine staff officer and planner, in August 1936 Halder was promoted to Generalleutnant. He then became the director of the Manoeuvres Staff. Shortly thereafter, he became director of the Training Branch (Oberquartiermeister of Training, O.Qu.II), on the General Staff of the Army, in Berlin between October 1937 and February 1938. During this period he directed important training maneuvers, the largest held since the reintroduction of conscription in 1935.
On 1 February 1938 Halder was promoted to General der Artillerie. Around this date General Wilhelm Keitel was attempting to reorganize the entire upper leadership of the German Army. Keitel had asked Halder to become Chief of the General Staff (Oberquartiermeister of operations, training & supply; O.Qu.1 ) and report to General Walther von Reichenau. However, Halder declined as he felt he could not work with Reichenau very well, due to a personality dispute. As Keitel recognized Halder's superior military planning skills, Keitel met with Hitler and enticed him to appoint General Walther von Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief of the German Army. Halder then accepted becoming Chief of the General Staff of the Army (Oberkommando des Heeres) on 1 September 1938, and succeeded General Ludwig Beck.
A week later, Halder presented plans to Hitler on how to invade Czechoslovakia with a pincer movement by General Gerd von Rundstedt and General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. Instead, Hitler directed that Reichenau should make the main thrust into Prague. Neither invasion plan was necessary once Mussolini persuaded Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain back to the bargaining table in Munich. In the run up to the war, Halder � in an attempt to avoid what they were certain would be a catastrophic war for Germany � was the main actor in a plot with several other generals in the Wehrmacht and Abwehr to remove Hitler from power. A plot was put in place, ready to go at Halder's command, which would be given if Hitler gave the order to proceed with the planned invasion. The plot included a plan to kill Hitler and say "he died trying to escape" (they all agreed he would be too dangerous to keep alive). However, on 29 September Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler�s demands, and the British and French surrendered the largely German populated Czech region of Sudetenland to Germany, with Hitler promising to stop there. (Which promise Hitler broke the following spring). Halder put an immediate stop to the coup attempt, only hours away from reality, as peace had been preserved � for the moment. Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich meant the end of the plot, which shook Halder to the core and left him weeping according to Halder's former adjutant, Burkhard M�ller-Hildebrand. There would be no war with France and England over the Sudetenland. Hitler's popularity reached an all-time high. A coup then was not possible, nor desirable. The catastrophe Halder and the other generals feared was averted. On 1 October German troops entered the Sudetenland.
Halder participated in the strategic planning for all operations in the first part of the war. For his role in the planning and preparing of the invasion of Poland he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 27 October 1939.
On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, the generally accepted start of World War II. On 19 September, Halder noted in his diary that he had received information from then SS-Gruppenf�hrer Reinhard Heydrich that the SS (Einsatzgruppen) was beginning its campaign to "clean house" in Poland of Jews, intelligentsia, Catholic Clergy, and the aristocracy. This led to future criticism by historians that Halder knew about the killings of Jews much earlier than he later acknowledged during post-World War II interviews, and that he failed to object to such killings. Halder noted in his diary his doubts "about the measures intended by Himmler".
During November 1939, Halder conspired with General Brauchitsch. Halder declared that he would support Brauchitsch if he were to try to curtail Hitler's plans for further expansion of the war, but Brauchitsch declined (the so-called Zossen Conspiracy). Brauchitsch and Halder had decided to overthrow Hitler after the latter had fixed "X-day" for the invasion of France for 12 November 1939, an invasion that both officers believed to be doomed to failure. During a meeting with Hitler on 5 November, Brauchitsch had attempted to talk Hitler into putting off "X-day" by saying that morale in the German Army was worse than what it was in 1918. This statement enraged Hitler, who then harshly berated Brauchitsch for incompetence. After that meeting, both Halder and Brauchitsch told Carl Friedrich G�rdeler that overthrowing Hitler was simply something that they could not do, and that he should find other officers if that was what he really wanted to do. Equally important, following heavy snowstorms, on 7 November 1939 Hitler put off "X-Day" until further notice, removing the reason that had most motivated Brauchitsch and Halder to consider overthrowing Hitler. On 23 November 1939, G�rdeler met with Halder to ask him to reconsider his attitude. Halder gave G�rdeler the following reasons why he wanted nothing to do with any plot to overthrow Hitler:
That the men who staged the November Revolution and signed the armistice that took Germany out of a losing war were hated all over the Reich as the "November Criminals". General Erich Ludendorff had launched the Kaiserschlacht in March 1918, which led directly to Germany's defeat in November 1918. This should have hurt Ludendorff's reputation, yet most people in Germany still considered Ludendorff one of Germany's greatest heroes. So even if Hitler were to launch an invasion of France that signally failed, most people would still support him, and unless Hitler was discredited, which seemed unlikely, anyone who acted against him to end the war would be considered a "new November Criminal". Therefore, the Army could do nothing.
That Hitler was a great leader, and there was nobody to replace him.
That most of the younger officers in the Army were extreme National Socialists who would not join a Putsch.
That Hitler deserved "a last chance to deliver the German people from the slavery of English capitalism".
Finally, that "one does not rebel when face to face with the enemy".
Despite all of G�rdeler's best efforts, Halder would not change his mind.
While Halder opposed Hitler�s expanded war plans, like all officers he had taken a personal loyalty oath to Hitler. Thus, he felt unable to take direct action against the F�hrer. At one point, Halder thought the situation to be so desperate that he considered shooting Hitler himself. A colonel close to Halder noted in his diary that "Amid tears, Halder had said for weeks that he had a pistol in his pocket every time he went to Emil [cover name for Hitler] in order to possibly gun him down".
At the end of 1939, Halder oversaw development of the invasion plans of France, the Low Countries, and the Balkans. In late 1939-early 1940, Halder was an opponent of Operation Weser�bung, which he believed was doomed to failure, and made certain that the OKH had nothing to do with the planning for Weser�bung, which was entirely the work of OKW and the OKM.] Halder initially doubted that Germany could successfully invade France. General Erich von Manstein's bold plan for invading France through the Ardennes Forest proved successful, and ultimately led to the fall of France. In early April 1940, Halder had a secret meeting with Carl Friedrich G�rdeler, who asked him to consider a Putsch while the Phony War (the lull in the war between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of France) was still on, hoping that the British and French were still open to a negotiated peace. Halder refused G�rdeler's request. G�rdeler told Halder that too many people had already died in the war, and his refusal to remove Hitler at this point would ensure that the blood of millions would be on his hands. Halder told G�rdeler that his oath to Hitler and his belief in Germany`s inevitable victory in the war precluded his acting against the Nazi regime. Halder told G�rdeler that "The military situation of Germany, particularly on account of the pact of non-aggression with Russia is such that a breach of my oath to the F�hrer could not possibly be justified", that only if Germany was faced with total defeat would he consider breaking his oath, and that G�rdeler was a fool to believe that World War II could be ended with a compromise peace.
On 19 July 1940, Halder was promoted to Generaloberst, an equivalent of a modern NATO Four-Star General. In August, he began working on Operation Barbarossa, the invasion plan for the Soviet Union. Shortly thereafter, to curtail Halder�s military-command power, Hitler limited his involvement in the war by restricting him to developing battle plans for only the Eastern Front. On 17 March 1941, in a secret meeting with Halder and the rest of the most senior generals, Hitler stated that Germany was to disregard all of the rules of war in the East, and the war against the Soviet Union was to be a war of annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg). Halder, who was so vocal in arguing with Hitler about military matters, made no protest. On 30 March 1941, in another secret speech to his leading generals, Hitler described the sort of war he wanted Operation Barbarossa to be (according to the notes taken by Halder):
"Struggle between two ideologies. Scathing evaluation of Bolshevism, equals antisocial criminality. Communism immense future danger...This a fight to the finish. If we do not accept this, we shall beat the enemy, but in thirty years we shall again confront the Communist foe. We don't make war to preserve the enemy...Struggle against Russia: Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia...Commissars and GPU personnel are criminals and must be treated as such. The struggle will differ from that in the west. In the east harshness now means mildness for the future".
Though General Halder's notes did not record any mention of Jews, the German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that, because of Hitler's frequent statements at the same time about the coming war of annihilation against "Judeo-Bolshevism", his generals could not have misunderstood that Hitler's call for the total destruction of the Soviet Union also comprised a call for the total destruction of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union.
In 1941, contrary to his post-war claims, Halder did not oppose the Commissar Order. Rather, he welcomed it, writing that: "Troops must participate in the ideological battle in the Eastern campaign to the end". As part of the planning for Barbarossa, Halder declared in a directive that, in the event of guerrilla attacks, German troops were to impose "collective measures of force" by massacring entire villages. Halder's order was in direct contravention of international agreements banning collective reprisals. In December 1941, Hitler fired von Brauchitsch and assumed the command of OKH himself. Halder was not happy about this, but chose to stay on as the best way of ensuring that Germany won the war. Halder appeared on the 29 June 1942 cover of "Time" magazine.
During the summer of 1942, Halder told Hitler that he was underestimating the number of Soviet military units. Hitler argued that the Red Army was nearly broken. However, Halder had recently read a book about Stalin's defeat of Anton Denikin between the Don bend and what was then Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War. That battle resulted in Tsaritsyn being renamed Stalingrad. Halder was convinced the German Sixth Army was in the same position that Denikin was back then. Furthermore, Hitler did not like Halder's objections to sending General Manstein�s 11th Army (then finishing the siege of Sevastopol, at the other end of the front) to assist in the attack against Leningrad. Halder also thought that an attack into the Caucasus was ill-advised. Finally, because of Halder�s disagreement with Hitler�s conduct of the war, Hitler concluded that the general no longer possessed an aggressive war mentality. The final straw came after Halder learned of an intelligence report showing Stalin could muster as many as 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad and west of the Volga. He told Hitler that the situation along the Don was a disaster waiting to happen if Stalin turned that force loose on Stalingrad. In response, Hitler gave a speech announcing that he intended to find a replacement for Halder. Halder walked out stating "I am leaving", and was retired into the "F�hrer Reserve" on 24 September 1942. 
Halder was replaced by Kurt Zeitzler on the same day.
On 23 July 1944, following the failed 20 July assassination attempt on Hitler's life by German Army officers, Halder was arrested by the Gestapo. Although he was not involved in the 20 July plot, intense interrogations of the conspirators revealed that Halder had been involved in earlier conspiracies against Hitler. Halder was imprisoned at both the Flossenb�rg and Dachau concentration camps. Halder's wife Gertrud chose to, and was allowed to, accompany her husband into imprisonment. On 31 January 1945, Halder was officially dismissed from the army. His service to Germany during Hitler's reign was plagued by complexity and personal misgivings but his professed role in possible intrigue during his tenure as the Chief of Staff and his survival make for a remarkable story, especially when one considers the plight of others who fell into disfavor or mistrust with Hitler. As one historian remarked when comparing his fate to that of many of his comrades among the General Staff, Halder was indeed "fortunate". In the last days of April 1945, together with some members of the families of those involved with the 20 July plot and other 'special' prisoners, he was transferred to the South Tyrol, where the entire group of nearly 140 prisoners was liberated from their SS guards by members of the Wehrmacht, and then turned over to US troops on 4 May after the SS guards fled. Halder spent the next two years in an Allied prisoner of war camp.
During the 1950s, Halder worked as a war historian advisor to the U.S. Army Historical Division, for which he was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 1961. During the early 1950s Halder advised on the redevelopment of the post-World War II German army.  
and Georg Thomas, head of the Defence, Economy and Armament Office in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) (Supreme Command).
Georg Thomas (20 February 1890 � 29 December 1946) was a German general in the Third Reich. He was a leading participant in planning and carrying out economic exploitation of the Soviet Union. Thomas's role in plotting against Hitler has led some historians to describe him as a member of the German resistance, while others find his record more ambiguous.
Thomas was born in Forst (Lausitz), Brandenburg. The factory owner's son and later general joined Infantry Regiment 63 as an ensign and a career soldier in 1908. From 1928, he dealt with armament questions at the Army Weapons Office in the Reich Defence Ministry in Berlin. Thomas continued to work as the Chief of Staff for the Army Weapons Office in the Reich Defence Ministry from 1928-1938, where he intensively studied the dynamic of national economics and war preparations, pushing forward the idea of a "defense economy" - that is, the marshaling of Germany's resources for the purpose of war under a central planning commission. Despite his misgivings with National Socialism following the dismissal of Colonel General Baron Werner von Fritsch on trumped up allegations of homosexuality, Thomas remained an important member of the German General Staff. Nevertheless, it was upon von Fritsch's removal in 1938 that Thomas experienced his first major inner conflict with National Socialism. It is speculated that he stayed aboard from here forward to foment plans for a coup. In 1939, he became head of the Defence Economy and Armament Office in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW). He was a member of the board of Kontinentale �l AG (an oil company whose purpose was to exploit petroleum resources in occupied countries) as well as Reichswerke Hermann G�ring, a major iron and steel company.
Thomas, who since 1940 had been a General of Infantry recognized early on that Germany's ability to wage a lengthy war was limited by the state of its economy. Since he still had contacts with his former superior Ludwig Beck, as well as with Carl Friedrich G�rdeler and Johannes Popitz, he got to work as early as 1938-39 on the planning for a military coup d'�tat against Adolf Hitler. When the threat of war with the Western Powers loomed great in the wake of Hitler's bold political moves to secure the Austrian Anschlu�, the acquisition of the Sudetenland, and then with the impending Blitzkrieg into Poland awaiting the German General Staff, Thomas produced an extensive report for Hitler assessing the risks. Thomas' analysis was replete with graphics and statistics demonstrating the military-economic superiority of the Western Powers, at which Hitler balked and exclaimed that, "he did not share General Thomas' anxiety over the danger of a world war, especially since he had now got the Soviet Union on his side" (consequent the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact). Not only was Thomas worried about an attack provoking the British and French but so were Generals von Brauchitsch, Colonel-General Halder, and Quartermaster General von St�lpnagel, yet Hitler refused to countenance any delays or reluctance from his military staff about his plans and more earnestly pushed forward the attack despite their sound arguments otherwise.
During the planning phase of Operation Barbarossa, General Thomas' pragmatic and realistic nature once again gripped him as he thought a full-scale war with the Soviet Union should be delayed until the logistical concerns were remedied. Along said lines, Thomas informed Colonel-General Franz Halder, then Chief of the OKH General Staff, that the attack on the Soviet Union would experience logistical delays due to the fact that Russian railways were of a different gauge than German ones. Thomas also warned Halder of the insufficiency of German transport vehicle tires for the task ahead of them, and most significantly, Thomas revealed to Halder that they (the Germans) only had two months worth of fuel oil and petrol to support the advancing assault. Inexplicably, Halder did not convey this information to Hitler and when Thomas attempted to do this himself, General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel stepped in and prevented the report from going any further. Reassurances soon made their way to General Thomas when no less than Reichsminister Hermann G�ring told him not to worry about using up Germany's resources since "they would soon be masters of France, Belgium, and Holland," likewise adding that they would plunder all the available resources in the "captured territories".
In November 1942, Thomas resigned from the Defence Economy and Armament Office. Albert Speer and his Armament Ministry, meanwhile, had taken over almost all the expertise relating to armament issues. Of note, during the autumn of 1943 (Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad in January 1943), Hitler asked for a projection over the progress the Germans might expect to make in the near term. Chief of the Operations Staff for the OKW, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl submitted the report to Hitler as commanded, but Hitler became irate when the estimates were given to him, reflecting back sardonically on earlier calculations made by General Thomas who "rated the Soviet war potential as high". As a result of the negative assessment about the campaign's future in the East, Hitler forbade any more war studies by the OKW. From what the sources indicate, General Thomas tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to bring the German General Staff and Hitler back to reality about their long-term prospects for success. The pragmatism of Thomas likely contributed to his disillusionment with the regime and its leadership, perhaps leading him to believe that a coup was necessary to stop Germany from being totally annihilated. Nonetheless, Thomas participated in the planning and brutal exploitation of the Eastern theater; thereby making his actions and intentions duplicitous and difficult to interpret. Many historians have taken exception with depicting General Thomas as a resistance fighter, one even remarked that Thomas' resistance "was one against a policy leading to defeat, rather than against the regime as such," despite that he was later implicated in Operation Valkyrie.
After the failed attempt on Hitler's life at the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia on 20 July 1944, all the old plans from 1938-39 were found, leading to Thomas's arrest on 11 October 1944, followed by stays in the Flossenb�rg and Dachau concentration camps. In late April 1945 he was transferred to Tyrol together with about 140 other prominent inmates, where the SS left the prisoners behind. They were liberated by the Fifth U.S. Army on 5 May 1945
Thomas died in Allied custody in 1946.
Several apologetic accounts produced by bomb plotters described Nebe as a professional police officer and a dedicated member of the German resistance. In 1947, Hans Gisevius described Nebe's position at the head of Einsatzgruppe B as a "brief command at the front". Gisevius changed his story in the 1960s, when Nebe's role with the Einsatzgruppen was exposed. In "Wo ist Nebe?" (Where is Nebe [1966]), Gisevius claimed that Nebe was reluctant to accept the posting but had been persuaded to take it by the opposition leaders Hans Oster and Ludwig Beck, who had wanted Nebe to retain a key role in Heydrich's apparatus. Gisevius also claimed that Nebe exaggerated the number of victims in reports to Berlin by adding a zero to the number of those killed.
Historian Christian Gerlach, writing about the 20 July conspirators and their complicity in "War Crimes of the Wehrmacht", refers to Nebe as a "notorious mass murderer". He discusses the role of Henning von Tresckow and his adjutant Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who were members of the resistance, and writes:
"Schlabrendorff claimed that he and Tresckow had convinced themselves that under the mask of the SS leader lurked a committed anti-Nazi..., who invented pretexts for sabotaging Hitler's murderous orders. We succeeded in saving the lives of many Russians. The Russian population often expressed their thanks to us".
According to Schlabrendorff, Tresckow personally brought Nebe to the army group [of conspirators]. Nothing was said about the 45,467 murder victims of Einsatzgruppe B by November 1941, the point at which Nebe returned to Berlin.
Gerlach doubts that Nebe falsified Einsatzgruppe B reports, to "sabotage Hitler's murderous orders". Gerlach puts Schlabrendorff's claims in the context of bomb plotters' memoirs and "existing discourse" on the opposition group within the high command of Army Group Center: "Especially with reference to the murder of the Jews, [it is said that] 'the SS' had deceived the officers by killing in secret, filing incomplete reports or none at all; if general staff offices protested, the SS threatened them. (...) This is, of course, nonsense".
The historian Waitman Wade Beorn writes: "...some have argued that [Nebe] deliberately inflated the numbers of Jews he reported killed. Yet all evidence indicates that he was quite content to play his role in Nazi genocide and that his subsequent displeasure with the regime may have stemmed from the imminent Nazi defeat but not opposition to the Holocaust".
Just as quickly as the coup in Berlin had unravelled, so did the entire network of conspirators. Himmler turned the SD and the Gestapo loose in a bloodlust vengeance against anyone who was even remotely suspected of complicity in the assassination and the coup. When it was fully over, between six hundred and one thousand Germans had lost their lives. Some were executed just days before the war ended in a Nazi purge of all enemies.
Many of these men and women might have survived had it not been for the German penchant for keeping meticulous records of everything, even the conspiracies to kill Hitler. At the behest of both Beck and Oster, the Abwehr center of the conspiracy had kept copies of every memorandum, coup plan, lists of people to be arrested, and most incredible of all, the names of virtually everyone involved in the conspiracies since the first coup of 1938. It is probable that they hoped to give the world an accurate description of how these Germans opposed Hitler, but when this cache was discovered in a security zone safe on 22 September 1944, it spelled death for hundreds of people who otherwise might never have been suspected.
This record of the assassination plans altered the probe of the 20 July bombing. Originally the Gestapo worked under the impression that the attempt on Hitler's life was provoked by army officers who were unhappy with the course of the war, but now they knew that the planning had been going on for six years by officers and civilians who were anti-Nazi, and they now knew there had been several other attempts on Hitler's life. As a result, hundreds of new names were added to those slated to appear before the infamous People's Court for quick trial and execution.
The Nazis also ruthlessly applied their 'kith and kin' method of dealing with opponents. This meant that every member of a traitor's family, including those by marriage, was to be hunted down and exterminated. When it came to the Stauffenbergs, Hitler himself ordered that the entire family be "made harmless." On 3 August 1944, Himmler, now the undisputed master of Germany with all police, SS, and Home Army forces under his direct control, said the entire Stauffenberg family "will be exterminated down to its last member".
Colonel Stauffenberg's wife and four children were arrested and imprisoned. Freed by the Allies at the end of the war and pregnant at the time of her arrest, she gave birth to her fifth child while in prison
 
In 2005, the Military Channel's show "Unsolved History" aired an episode titled 'Killing Hitler' in which each scenario was re-created using live explosives and test dummies. The results supported the conclusion that Hitler would have been killed had any of three other scenarios occurred::
both bombs detonated;
20th June to 1st July 1946
One Hundred and Fifty-Ninth Day: Thursday, 20th June, 1946
This whole plot was part of Speers mitigation which formed his defence at the Nuremburg trials. He originally dropped the bombshell by asking Franz von Papen's attorney to ask the head of the SS Security Service Otto Ohlendorf during his cross examination if he had ever heard of any plot by Speer to assassinate Hitler, obviously he had not but he achieved his purpose by bringing it to the attention of the court.
The subject was raised at a later sitting and examined in depth.
For more info read "Speer:The final Verdict" by Joachim Fest, "The Bunker" by James P O'Donnell and "Inside the Third Reich" by Albert Speer