The Bendlerblock courtyard, now the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand. Stauffenberg, Haeften, Olbricht and Mertz von Quirnheim were shot here one at a time, shortly after midnight, in the headlights of a lorry.Photo: Adam Carr at English Wikipedia, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The 20 July plot
Stauffenberg’s bomb went off at the Wolfsschanze at 12:42. In Berlin the coup was not crushed by Major Remer’s soldiers, as Remer claimed after the war. Staff officers down the corridor of the Bendlerblock ended it; the first of Remer’s men reached the courtyard about 23:30, in time to supply the firing squad.
01Wolfsschanze, East Prussia
About 12:30, just before the conference. In a side room, on the pretext of changing his shirt. He has one hand and three fingers and works with special pliers. Oberfeldwebel Vogel comes to hurry him; only one of the two kilograms is armed.
The account that the meeting was moved from a concrete bunker into a wooden hut is false: the situation conferences had been held in the barrack since the start of July. The briefcase went down beside the massive table support on the side facing Hitler; after Stauffenberg left, another man pushed it to the far side to get closer to the map.
„Durch dieses Versäumnis blieb die Explosionswirkung begrenzt.““Through this omission the force of the explosion stayed limited.” Peter Longerich, Hitler. Biographie, p. 968
At 12:42 the charge went off. Twenty-four men are in the room. Four are fatally injured. Hitler has bruises, grazes and burst eardrums. In the lightly built barrack the blast escaped through the wooden floor and the open windows.
The charges
24 men in the room
Four men in the room were fatally injured. One of them died that day.
02Twenty July 1944, hour by hour
Stauffenberg had to be in East Prussia to place the bomb and in Berlin to run the coup. The diagonals below are his hours in the air, out of contact with both. Scroll through the day; every time is on one clock, and there was no time difference between the two places.
Two places, one clock
20 July
The Wolfsschanze above, Berlin below. Each dot is a moment of the day.
about 06:00 – about 10:15
Stauffenberg leaves Nikolassee and meets his adjutant at Rangsdorf. Haeften carries two one-kilogram packets of British plastic explosive.
about 12:00 – 12:42
The conference is moved from 13:00 to 12:30 — Hitler expected Mussolini that afternoon. Half an hour vanishes from Stauffenberg's margin. Stauffenberg leaves the room on a pretext. About ten minutes run from crushing the acid capsule to the striker falling.
about 13:00 onward
The Lagebaracke's telephone installation is switched off and countermanded within minutes; it never covered the SS links. Fellgiebel's message to Thiele: “Es ist etwas Furchtbares passiert, der Führer lebt.” Two and a half hours in the air, believing Hitler dead. Berlin already knew he was not.
12:42 – 16:00
Albrecht Ritter Mertz von Quirnheim signs them out himself, against Olbricht's decision to wait. The landing time is genuinely disputed: about 15:45, about 15:00, or about 16:00 depending on the source. Walküre, the coup order, went out about 16:00.
about 16:00 – about 17:00
Counter-orders go out to the Wehrkreis commands. The two sides are now using the same wires, and the regime is using them better. Stauffenberg tells Fromm he set off the bomb himself. Fromm has already spoken to Keitel and refuses; Stauffenberg, Olbricht and Mertz arrest him instead. Beck arrives about 17:00.
about 19:00 – 20:20
Remer's adjutant drives through the cordon to Goebbels, who puts Remer on the line. Hitler places every Wehrmacht soldier in Berlin under his command. Witzleben arrives at the Bendlerblock about 19:30. Keitel's teleprinter message to every Wehrkreis command declares the Bendlerblock's orders invalid.
21:00 – about 22:30
Franz Herber asks his superior Olbricht what is going on and gets no answer. Herber, von der Heyde and Pridun are General Army Office staff officers in the same building — not the guard battalion. About 22:30: Stauffenberg is wounded. Fromm is freed and the conspirators are overpowered. The coup is over.
about 23:30
An hour after it ended, and five hours after Remer's call with Hitler. Fromm forms the firing squad from their ranks. Its barracks were a ten-minute walk away.
shortly after midnight – about 01:00
Stauffenberg, Haeften, Olbricht and Mertz von Quirnheim, in front of a sandheap, in the headlights of a lorry. Beck was already dead. A radio van is fetched from Königsberg, ninety kilometres away. The conspirators never got near a transmitter all day.
03The Bendlerblock, the night of 20 July
At 21:00 staff officers of the General Army Office, in the same building as the conspirators, decided to act: Herber, von der Heyde and Pridun. By 22:30 there was shooting in the corridors, Fromm was free and the coup was over.
Hitler had given Major Otto Ernst Remer command of every soldier in Berlin by telephone about 19:00. His first men reached the Bendlerblock courtyard about 23:30. After the war Remer and his adjutant Hagen told the story the other way round, and the regime preferred it: Winfried Heinemann’s study of the night, published by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in 2020, sets it straight.
Fromm formed the firing squad from Remer’s soldiers. Stauffenberg, Haeften, Olbricht and Mertz von Quirnheim were shot in the courtyard shortly after midnight. Beck was already dead.
04August 1944 – April 1945
Two counts of the arrests and executions that followed are in circulation. The higher pair began as a Gestapo claim and reached English-language accounts through Shirer; the lower is the German specialists’ correction. They are drawn here on one scale, one square per person, and not averaged.
05Volksgerichtshof, Berlin
The Volksgerichtshof tried those involved in or supporting 20 July from August 1944 to April 1945.
Roland Freisler ran most of them himself. Defendants could not choose counsel and saw the charges only briefly beforehand. Witzleben had to hold his trousers up, his belt having been taken, and was abused from the bench for it. Those condemned on 8 August were hanged the same day, on hooks installed at the end of 1942 for the Rote Kapelle.
06The ten
Each name sits at the number of days between the bomb and the death. Carl Goerdeler, the intended chancellor, was kept alive longest, because the regime wanted what he knew.
Oberst i. G. · Chief of Staff, Ersatzheer
Dead the same night
Armed the charge and carried it into the conference; flew back to Berlin believing Hitler dead.
Shot in the Bendlerblock courtyard, shortly after midnight, 20/21 July 1944.
Generaloberst a. D. · Intended head of state
Dead the same night
Reached the Bendlerblock about 17:00, an hour after Walküre was triggered.
Bendlerblock, the same night — two failed shots of his own, then a Feldwebel on Fromm's order.
General der Infanterie · Head of the Allgemeines Heeresamt
Dead the same night
Triggered Walküre with Mertz von Quirnheim about 16:00, having waited three hours for confirmation that never came.
Shot in the Bendlerblock courtyard, shortly after midnight, 20/21 July 1944.
Generalmajor · Chief of Staff, 2nd Army — Army Group Centre
1 day after the bomb
At the front. He had driven earlier attempts on Hitler, including the bomb disguised as bottles of Cointreau put aboard Hitler's aircraft in March 1943.
Suicide with a hand grenade at the front near Ostrów, 21 July 1944, staged to look like a partisan ambush.
Generalfeldmarschall · Intended Commander-in-Chief of the Wehrmacht
19 days after the bomb
Arrived at the Bendlerblock about 19:30, after a day away from Berlin with no reliable information, and left again within the hour.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 8 August 1944, hours after the first Volksgerichtshof trial.
Generalmajor · Head of organisation, Army High Command
19 days after the bomb
Flew to the Wolfsschanze with Stauffenberg that morning. He had supplied and stored the British plastic explosive.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 8 August 1944, tried in the first batch with Witzleben.
Oberleutnant d. R. · Kreisauer Kreis — the civilian resistance circle
19 days after the bomb
In the Bendlerblock through the evening. Stauffenberg's cousin, and with Moltke the co-founder of the Kreisau circle.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 8 August 1944. His last letter to his wife Marion is in the Bundesarchiv.
SA-Obergruppenführer · Police President of Berlin
26 days after the bomb
Held the Berlin Schutzpolizei, which was to have sealed the Wilhelmstrasse and arrested the government. The order never reached him in a form he could act on.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 15 August 1944, on Hitler's personal order.
Legationsrat · Foreign Office — the conspiracy's channel to the Allies
37 days after the bomb
In Berlin. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in the early thirties, he had carried the conspiracy's proposals to Stockholm and Switzerland; all were rebuffed.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 26 August 1944.
Oberbürgermeister a. D. · Intended Chancellor
197 days after the bomb
In hiding. Mayor of Leipzig until 1937, when he resigned over the removal of the city's Mendelssohn statue.
Hanged at Plötzensee on 2 February 1945, after six months of interrogation.
07Sippenhaft
Sippenhaft (“kin liability”) made a family answerable with its liberty, its property or its life for what one of its members had done. 46 children of the plotters were taken to a home at Bad Sachsa. Adult relatives, Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg among them, went to concentration camps.
In spring 1945 a group of over a hundred of these prisoners was assembled at Buchenwald, 12 of them Stauffenbergs, and marched through the Dolomites until the SS lost control of them on 30 April 1945. At Plötzensee, meanwhile, 89 people connected with the 20 July circles had been hanged.
Hitler’s guard battalion did not save his regime on 20 July. Officers inside the Bendlerblock ended the coup themselves, an hour before the soldiers came.
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