Almost Killing Hitler

If it had not been unusually hot on July 20, 1944, Hitler's conference with Stauffenberg and others would have been held in a concrete bunker, which would have contained the blast of Stauffenberg's bomb. Instead, they met in an aboveground wooden building, where the force dissipated. If a sergeant had not entered the room where Stauffenberg, using pliers modified to accommodate his injuries (wounds had cost him an eye, his right hand and two fingers on his left), was arming the explosives, Stauffenberg might have armed the second bomb, or might have put it in the briefcase with the armed one, which would have detonated both with sufficient force to kill everyone in the room.

Hitler survived and the planned coup unraveled in a few hours. Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad that night. Other conspirators were tried before Roland Freisler, whom Hitler praised as "our Vishinsky," a reference to the chief prosecutor in Stalin's show trials. Taken prisoner by the Russians during World War I, Freisler briefly became a Soviet commissar before returning to Germany and joining the Nazi Party in 1925. Among the conspirators Freisler condemned to death—many were slowly strangled by thin cords looped around butchers' hooks, their agonies filmed for Hitler's enjoyment—was the diplomat Adam von Trott, a direct descendant on his mother's side of John Jay, first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. On Feb. 3, 1945, during the largest air raid of the war, a falling beam in the courtroom killed only one person: Freisler. A doctor summoned from off the street confirmed that Freisler's injuries were fatal. The day before, Freisler had condemned to death the doctor's brother.

By July 1944, decapitation of the Nazi regime probably would not have prevented a crescendo of carnage: In the first 59 months of war, 2.8 million German soldiers and civilians died; in the last nine months, 4.8 million died. Still, Stauffenberg and many others understood the need for a gesture of national purification to refute the narrative—promulgated by Hitler and embraced by the Allies as a politically useful simplification—that the German Resistance was negligible and contemptible. It was neither.

© 2009