By the time the true story emerges, they will have a new government in place and will have secured the backing of the army leadership. Former chief of staff Ludwig Beck, still much respected by the officer corps and one of the original members of the conspiracy, is to serve as head of state, with Olbricht as minister of war and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben as head of the German army.
This not only gave him direct contact with Hitler, but allowed him, along with Olbricht, to place many sympathetic officers in key positions. Although Olbricht knows the approximate time the bomb should have gone off, he cannot act until he hears for certain that the assassination has taken place. He orders several attempts to contact the Wolfsschanze. None get through until p.
But since the bomb clearly has been detonated, Olbricht and Beck agree that Valkyrie must be set in motion. Olbricht contacts fellow conspirator Lt. Paul von Hase, the city commandant in Berlin.
Hase sends a battalion to sur round a number of key government buildings. Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, the Berlin police president and fellow Valkyrie conspirator, is told to place his force in readiness to arrest high-ranking Nazi officials.
Olbricht himself arrests Gen. Friedrich Fromm, commander of the Replacement Army. Almost nothing goes right. One also had to mount a coup to bring down the government. This meant that Stauffenberg — whose allies, for all their moral bravery, were largely wavering and indecisive — had to be in two places at once; in Rastenburg to kill Hitler and then in Berlin to lead the coup.
In the event he managed to do neither, and the attempt collapsed. However, I would argue that even had he succeeded in killing Hitler, the Nazi government would have been very difficult to dislodge, not least because the coup plotters were regrettably rather less brutally determined than they might have been. They were not. In lionising Stauffenberg as a saint, we overlook the fact that — for all his valour and morality — he was politically closer to Hitler than he was to Churchill.
Nigel Jones: Stauffenberg was certainly no saint — but he was a genuine hero, and in our distinctly unheroic age, we may be unable to recognise his rare qualities. They were in fact a broad front, ranging from ultra-conservatives like Carl Goerdeler; old fashioned Prussian military men like Ludwig Beck and Erwin von Witzleben, adhering to antiquated but honourable codes and values; idealistic internationalists such as Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and his Kreisau Circle; Catholic and Protestant clergy such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Social Democrats and trade unionists including Julius Leber; and even communists.
Unrealistic in their political aims they may have been; Nazi-lite they definitely were not. Stauffenberg was typical of them in having himself moved from a position of aristocratic elitism to favouring a post-Hitler government embracing strands of political opinion ranging from reactionaries to Marxists. About the only point dividing them by July was whether Hitler should be assassinated or arrested and put on trial.
Most of the conspirators were Christians. Unless things worked out extremely well, a war with his former allies — now reinforced with battle-hardened German troops - would most likely have seen the Soviet Union swept from the map and Stalin deposed.
A more likely outcome would have been Stalin accepting less favourable terms than he was able to secure at Yalta. Of course, Stalin may well have decided to go for broke and attack. So what then? The Red Army pulling it off against all the odds and overrunning the whole of Western Europe?
An A-bomb dropped on Moscow? The possibilities are endless. What would have been a certainty had Stalin chosen not to fight is that everything would be thrown into the defeat of Japan. With the boffins of the Manhattan Project still just under a year away from detonating their first atomic bomb, this would have involved a full-scale invasion by conventional military means of Japan and its territories. Millions would have likely died in the resulting bloodbath, and much of Japan would have ended up in ruins.
The war, then, would likely have been over by either the end of or the start of The price paid in Allied lives would have been very high. Of course, none of this or the thousands of other scenarios a successful July 20th plot throws up happened. After they failed to kill Hitler, the plotters were quickly rounded up and either killed themselves or executed, often horribly. Stauffenberg was arrested, court-martialed and shot by a firing squad along with three fellow conspirators in the early hours of June 21st.
Many of the July plotters met their end stripped naked while they slowly strangled to death dangling from short ropes attached to meat hooks. Book Operation "Valkyrie" Winfried Heinemann Heinemann, W. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Heinemann, Winfried. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Heinemann W.
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg;
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