The Many Attempts To Assassinate Adolph Hitler | Europe's Secret Armies | Timeline

Shortly after 10 a.m. on the 20th of July 1944, a 37-year-old colonel in the German army arrived by plane at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia. A career cavalry officer, he had served with distinction in Poland, France, Russia, and with Rommel in North Africa. 15 months before, he'd been badly wounded in the desert, losing his left eye, his entire right hand, and two fingers of his left. As chief of staff to the commander of the home army, he had access to top-level military briefing sessions. His name was Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, and his mission on this hot July morning was to kill Hitler. It was his third attempt in nine days. Accompanying Stauffenberg on July the 20th was his adjutant, Werner von Heften. He had with him a briefcase containing two bombs. Shortly before the briefing in the Wolf's Lair was due to take place, the conspirators met in a nearby bunker. There, they set about installing and arming the fuses before transferring the bombs to Stauffenberg's briefcase. They only had time to arm the first bomb before they were interrupted by a sergeant who'd been sent to fetch Stauffenberg. He left the unarmed charge with von Heften and hurried off to the conference, briefcase in hand. In the crush of officers around the table, Stauffenberg could not get close to Hitler. A few minutes later, he left the room on the pretext of attending to an urgent matter, leaving the suitcase against a table leg. Just after 12.40pm, the bomb it contained exploded. In the confusion that followed, Stauffenberg and von Heften made their escape and returned to the airfield, tossing the second unused bomb from the open vehicle. Shortly after 1pm, they took off for Berlin to meet with other conspirators in army headquarters who were ready to launch Operation Valkyrie, the coup that was scheduled to take place as soon as Hitler had been assassinated. But Hitler had survived. The coup failed, and by the evening of the same day, Stauffenberg and other members of the conspiracy had been rounded up and shot at army headquarters in Berlin. Further executions followed. The assassination attempt of July the 20th was just one of over a dozen plots to take Hitler's life after he came to power in 1933. As always, his uncanny good fortune had saved him. While four people around him in the briefing room were killed, and others seriously wounded, Hitler suffered only minor injuries. It seemed as if the man was invincible. But would the assassination attempt have achieved anything even if it had succeeded? By the 20th of July 1944, the tide of the war had turned decisively against Germany. Allied troops were pouring into France from the Normandy beachheads, and their leaders were in no mood to accept anything but Germany's unconditional surrender, with or without Hitler. In a letter he wrote to fellow conspirator Henning von Tresckow, Stauffenberg pondered whether it was already too late. HENNING VON TRESCKOW, SPOKESMAN FOR THE NORMANDY BEACHHEADS On a broad view, resistance within Germany was the resistance that failed. It failed to remove Hitler or restrain him from embarking on military adventures that would end in ruin. It failed to bring down the Nazi regime or prevent the atrocities committed by the SS and Gestapo in occupied countries. It failed to prevent the slaughter of Jews and others deemed by the Nazis to be racially or socially degenerate. Divided by class and politics, it failed to unify around concrete aims and settle on a realistic plan of action. Crucially, it failed to establish credibility with the countries ranged against Germany, and was never able to call on outside help. Even those opposed to Hitler had to admit that he was hugely popular. Many people saw him as the saviour of Germany, avenging the crushing defeat in World War I and the humiliating terms she had been forced to accept in the Treaty of Versailles. Under the terms of the treaty, she had surrendered her overseas colonies, ceded territory to France, Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia, had her army reduced to a token force of 100,000 men, and had been forced to pay war reparations of over £6.5 billion sterling. Hitler's passionate and unflagging denunciation of the treaty played a large part in attracting support for his party. As the Weimar Republic staggered from one crisis to another, many Germans believed the country was crying out for a strong and visionary leader. And some were ready to believe that it had found him. In 1923, unable to bear the crippling burden of war reparations, the German economy collapsed and her currency became valueless. America bailed her out, but when Wall Street crashed, the subsequent worldwide depression caused misery and massive unemployment in Germany. By 1932, over 30% of the workforce was out of work. In the election campaign of that year, Hitler promised to abolish unemployment. Hitler's rise to power was not only assisted by these factors, but also and most strongly by the non-identification of the people with the Republic. So everything he did was against the Weimar Republic, and that found a wide echo among the people who disliked the Republic for various reasons. So Hitler swam on that crest of the hatred of the Republic. Winning 230 seats in July 1932, the Nazis were now the largest party in the Reichstag, the German parliament. But ordinary people as well as politicians were still deeply suspicious of the Nazis, not least because of the reputation of Hitler's private army, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, identified by their army surplus brown shirts and their swastika armbands. The SA's job was to protect Hitler at mass rallies and to beat and terrorize Jews and political opponents. Led by Ernst Röhm, they numbered 170,000, nearly twice the size of the German army. In the November election, the Nazis lost seats, but the conservatives saved them. To increase his support, Hitler began to whip up fears of a Bolshevik takeover and called another election for the German government. Heinz Frauendorf, who was 12 at the time, remembers campaigning for the communists, the KPD. Discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians, all on History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Download the app now to watch everything from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to Operation Barbarossa and D-Day. Immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description. On February the 27th, the Reichstag building went up in flames. Hitler used the incident as a pretext to arrest communist candidates and issue an emergency decree suspending civil liberties. Some left-wing candidates were murdered by the SA and large numbers of communists and social democrats, the SPD, were sent to newly opened concentration camps. But when the election came, the Nazis still could not win an overall majority, polling only 44%. So people should never think that Hitler had the majority of the German voters behind him. He never got the 50% or 51%, which was necessary to change the constitution, but he then got rid of the constitution very rapidly with the aid of the Catholic Centre Party, which thought that communism was worse than national socialism. All the German institutions were got rid of. And Hitler did this without having a majority, but relying on the Enabling Act. And the Enabling Act was only passed with the support of the Catholic Centre Party, but with the opposition of the SPD. The Enabling Act gave Hitler dictatorial powers. He set about using them ruthlessly. At the start of May, trades unions were disbanded to be replaced by the Nazi-controlled German Labour Front. By July, all political parties were dissolved. Political opponents, so-called enemies of the state, were tortured and beaten in Heldenkellen, hero cellars, of which there were 50 in Berlin alone. Countless opponents of the regime simply disappeared during the first weeks and months of Nazi rule. Several political leaders on the left escaped by fleeing abroad, abandoning to their fate the workers who supported them. One who did not was Julius Leber, leader of the Social Democratic Party in the North German city of Lübeck and a deputy in the Reichstag. He barely escaped being murdered by the Nazis the day after Hitler seized power and spent the next four years in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. On his release, he became one of the most committed, clear-sighted and charismatic members of the German resistance. He was later drawn into the July 20th plot by Stauffenberg. The Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung, or conformity to the party line and codes of behaviour, inevitably brought it into conflict with the churches. In 1933, 3,000 of Germany's 17,000 Protestant pastors supported the Nazis through the right-wing and anti-Semitic Christian movement. But inevitably, disputes and schisms arose. A minority continued to protest against the barbarities of the regime. A central figure was Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was arrested in 1937 and sentenced to seven months jail after a show trial. On his release, Hitler had him re-arrested and thrown into Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he remained until the end of the war. In the Catholic Church, individual clerics such as Bishop Garland of Münster did speak out, but their efforts were undermined by internal disputes. By the autumn of 1933, brownshirt numbers had increased over three million. They looked on bitterly as conservative politicians, aristocrats, capitalists and generals flocked to Hitler's banner. These were the very men whose world they wanted to smash. They continued to hold gigantic military parades, sow terror in the streets and set up wildcat concentration camps. Slogans began to circulate demanding a second revolution. The brownshirt leader, Ernst Röhm, stated that the defense of the realm was now entirely a matter for the SA and that the army was little more than a military training school. Werner von Blomberg, Minister of War, conspired with Göring and Himmler, who also feared Röhm's growing power, to blacken his name and force Hitler to remove him. In May 1934, Himmler's deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, launched the campaign of intrigue and rumors against Röhm. Secret reports were leaked advising that the brownshirts were planning a revolt. Army weapons were discreetly made available to Hitler's private bodyguard, the 50,000 strong Schutzstaffel SS. In the early hours of June 30th, SS death squads began to fan out through Berlin. Hitler himself arrested Röhm in his bed. It came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives. Officially, 61 SA traitors were executed, while 13 were shot while resisting arrest. The actual figure was probably between two and four hundred. It was really a decapitating of the SA movement which took place in the summer of 34 and then Night of the Long Knives. But Hitler got also rid of some other people who had been political opponents or people who had been not that far away from him, like General Schleicher, who had been chancellor in 1932 for a short while and could focus or become the focus for an opposition and therefore he was got rid of and murdered. Schleicher was not the only general killed, but the army, tainted by the part it had played in the massacre, failed to call Hitler to account for their murder. Blomberg even forbade officers to attend Schleicher's funeral and a later, when President Hindenburg died and Hitler became head of state, Blomberg ordered all officers and enlisted men to swear a personal oath of allegiance to the Führer Adolf Hitler, offering him unconditional obedience. It was an event that would complicate resistance to Hitler within the The consequence was that many officers were very reluctant to join resistance groups, they were very reluctant to protest against measures of the National Socialists because they had sworn an oath to the Führer. Nevertheless, one has to say that this oath, which also had a tradition in Germany, because in the imperial empire the officers and the soldiers were sworn to the emperor, i.e. to a person, not so much those who recognized how criminal the regime was, but it frightened the people or it served to justify the people who did not want to participate in resistance actions. They could say, we are not allowed, we have sworn an oath to the Führer. The relationship between Hitler and the army was always complex. Distrust and animosity were balanced by a common hatred of the political left and a shared desire to avenge the humiliations of the past. Each sought to exploit the other and, at least initially, they had aims in common. When in 1936 Hitler gave the order to reoccupy the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland, the army and many ordinary citizens began to feel a swelling sense of self-respect. But when on November 5, 1937, Hitler announced his intention to take military action against Czechoslovakia and Austria in the near future, Blomberg and the commander-in-chief of the army, Werner von Fritsch, argued strongly that such overt aggression would force the Western powers to retaliate, resulting in global conflict. Never one to brook dissent, Hitler used the fact that Blomberg had married a prostitute to force his resignation. Fritsch was also forced to step down on a trumped-up charge of homosexuality. Hitler assumed direct and personal control of the armed forces and, on March 13, 1938, at the invitation of the ruling Austrian Nazi party, he ordered German troops into Austria, proclaiming Anschluss or union with Germany. It was a bloodless coup. Hitler's triumphant entry into Vienna was met by jubilation, flowers and the pealing of bells. His approval rating at home soared. As it became apparent that Hitler was setting Germany on a course that would lead to war, resistance began to harden and figures began to emerge. Prominent amongst them was Hans Oster, who was chief of military intelligence of the OKW, the high command of the armed forces. On the civilian side, the pivotal figure was Karl Gerdler, who, as mayor of Leipzig, had worked indefatigably to counter Nazi criminality. Another group formed in the Foreign Office around Adam von Trotz's assaults, including the diplomat Erich Kort. After the Fritsch affair, they were joined by senior army officers. Many of them became part of a sustained pilgrimage to London in the summer of 1938. One emissary after another attempted to persuade the British government to issue a strongly worded declaration of Western determination to oppose any such aggression. The pitiful failure of these forays to London was in large measure due to Chamberlain's appeasement policy and his inability to understand Hitler. But beyond that was the fact that nearly all of these self-declared opponents of the regime held posts within it. They were tainted even before they opened their mouths. It was a pattern of events that was to be repeated. In spite of persistent efforts by the resistance to make common cause with London against Hitler, efforts that were to last throughout the whole war, the British authorities never changed their attitude. Despite early setbacks, resistance was growing. The circles that had formed in the Foreign Office and in military intelligence were joined by radically minded men like the lawyer Peter Jock von Wattenberg and deputy prefect of the Berlin police Fritz Dietloff von der Schulenburg. Oster brought in the commander of the Berlin military district Erwin von Witzleben. The first serious attempt to put pressure on Hitler in the summer of 1938 came from Ludwig Beck, the army chief of general staff who'd always argued strongly against Hitler's war plans. He attempted to persuade Walter von Brauchitsch, who had replaced Fritz as commander-in-chief of the army, to get his generals to resign en masse. Brauchitsch refused and Beck himself resigned, the only general to do so in peacetime. His successor Franz Halder made common cause with Oster and the other conspirators and detailed plans for a coup began to take shape. By mid-September the plans were ready. A special task force had been assembled that under Witzleben's command would force its way into the Reich Chancellery, overpower the SS guards and arrest Hitler. All that remained was for Halder to give the signal to act as soon as Hitler issued orders to invade Czechoslovakia. None of the conspirators could have foreseen that Chamberlain was about to throw a spanner in the works. In late September 1938 the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain confounded everyone by flying to Germany twice in one week to meet Hitler in an attempt to resolve the crisis that had arisen over the Führer's demand that Germany should take over the Sudetenland. On the 29th of September the Munich agreement was signed, ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler in exchange for a promise that he would make no further territorial demands in Europe. Joy and relief amongst the general public was matched by the utter despair of the conspirators. The end of the Munich crisis in September 1938 brought this coup very quickly to an end because Hitler did not resolve to war in that instance and the whole morale of the plotters and the attempts and organizational efforts made to bring this coup about fell to pieces. Months would pass before the resistance would recover from the blow it had suffered at Munich. Hitler meanwhile forged relentlessly ahead. On the night of November the 9th so-called spontaneous demonstrations of SA mobs occurred all over Germany. 400 synagogues were burnt down, 7,500 Jewish owned shops were demolished and 91 Jews were killed. It became known as Kristallnacht, crystal night because of all the broken glass. The splinters were lying on the street and I waited through the splinters. And then I asked my father at home what was going on in a city like Hannover. Then he told me, he had just read in the newspaper, the German people had spontaneously risen up against the Jews, had resisted the Jews because a young Jew, the Herrscher Grünspan, had shot an emissary in Paris. His parents were in the concentration camp. In the wake of Kristallnacht an estimated 20,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps. People were horrified and shamed but by and large they remained silent. In March 1939 Hitler fulfilled his dreams of taking Prague, sending motorized units into the city and overrunning the western provinces of Czechoslovakia. Then to no one's surprise he turned his attention to Poland. The outbreak of hostilities on September the 1st, followed two days later by France and Britain's declaration of war, confirmed all the worst predictions and warnings of the regime's opponents. Opposition began to harden again. The brutal methods the German army used in destroying the Polish army and then occupying Poland upset a number of officers and there are a number of them who wrote to their field marshals and to the chief of staff and to Hitler that they objected to the methods the SS used in their occupation policy which was already heavily influenced by Nazi ideology and the brutality was abhorrent to them. Commander-in-chief of the army Walter von Rauchitsch shared his general's horror at the appalling barbarity of the Einsatzkommandos, Himmler's SS death squads in Poland. But while he steadfastly stonewalled all requests to take action, Franz Halder and the conspirators in military intelligence, the foreign office and the high command decided on the last day of October that action could no longer be delayed. Erich Kort, who had access to the chancellery, volunteered to throw the bomb that would kill Hitler. Oster promised to have the materials ready by November the 11th. Intense preparations were made for the coup that would follow the assassination. The date he had set for the offensive was November the 12th. On November the 8th something completely unexpected happened. Georg Elser, a Swiss clockmaker working in Germany, had come to hate the Nazis for their stranglehold on the unions. Acting alone at the dead of night, he labored for weeks in Munich's to install a time bomb in a column beside the main podium where Hitler was due to speak. At 6 a.m. on Monday the 6th of November, Elser set off the timer. The 50 kilogram bomb was timed to explode two days later at 9 20 p.m. when Hitler would be in full flow. It worked flawlessly. Eight people closest to the podium were killed, 75 others lay injured, but totally unexpectedly Hitler had cut short his speech and left the Burg of Braukeller just eight minutes before the bomb exploded. The event had a catastrophic effect on the conspiracy back in Berlin. Heightened security measures increased the difficulties that they were having in procuring the material for Kort's bomb. At the last minute Oster got cold feet and cancelled the operation. Once again Hitler's extraordinary good luck had saved him and his good fortune continued. In June 1940, after the French campaign, a group of officers planned to shoot Hitler during a parade of troops down the Champs-Élysées, but the parade was cancelled for fear of British air attacks. One time Berlin police chief Franz Dietloff von der Schulenburg attempted to form a commando unit to undertake Hitler's assassination. Once again Hitler's unpredictable changes of location scotched the plan. Through 1940 and 1941 circles of civilian resistance gathered strength. Conservatives like retired general Ludwig Beck gravitated towards the indefatigable former mayor of Leipzig, Karl Goerdeler. Goerdeler's appeal also allowed him to draw in some socialist and former trade union leaders. At the same time a predominantly Christian group known as the Kreisau Circle formed around Helmut James von Moltke. The group included the socialist Carlo Mierendorff who joined after his release from a five-year stint in Lichtenberg concentration camp. As they had no means of putting their ideas into practice critics described them as nothing more than a talking shop. While the conservative and Christian groups looked to the army to stage the coup that would allow them to bring their idealistic notions into reality, opponents on the left could only hold fast to their beliefs and try to survive unnoticed by the Gestapo. We must always not forget that these are the communists and the social democrats who work in the underground all the way through till spring 1944 when a major communist underground group is lifted by the Gestapo and destroyed. They have been working for a change all the way and it would be wrong to concentrate on the national conservatives only. Arvid Harnack and his wife were among the many communists arrested and executed by the regime. Communist groups were always heavily targeted by the Gestapo but they were not alone. A small group of Munich students who went under the name particularly against Jews. They issued appeals and painted slogans on walls calling for an uprising against Hitler. On February the 18th Hans and Sophie Scholl were arrested for distributing leaflets. The Nazis were stunned by their effrontery. In a trial lasting less than three and a half hours they were sentenced to death and executed on the same day. They were not very effective obviously but they were very important because the news spread through Germany at the time among students that there was a movement in Munich which had objected to the Hitler regime and I think though perhaps it's difficult to know whether the majority of students were still on Hitler's side or not but at least it made them begin to think that not everything was right just to follow Hitler so their sacrifice might not have been in vain. Hitler's Russian campaign hardened resistance within the army in the field. It was not just the series of military defeats culminating in the capitulation of the 6th army at Stalingrad in February 1943 that motivated their hatred of Hitler. What disgusted them were the brutal atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen against the Russians and the infamous commissar order requiring that any Red Army political commissars captured should be immediately shot. For officers like Henning von Tresckow, Helmut Stief and Fabian von Schlabrendorf the orgy of executions were an indelible stain on the army's honor. I think with Tresckow is one of the most interesting characters. He belongs to the new generation of the resistors, not the old generals or field marshals or former politically established figures but the new lot who were much more active. Among the older lot there was quite a lot of anti-semitism. They didn't object to every policy with the final solution, etc. They thought of resettlement and whereas Tresckow objected with Stauffenberg to the final solution, to the murder of the Jews, he represented this new element and wanted radical actions. It was not until March 13, 1943 that Hitler agreed to visit the army group at Smolensk where Tresckow was based. At least three different assassination attempts were planned for that day. One of them called for a bomb to be placed in Hitler's vehicle. A second involved an ambush but the presence of Hitler's SS guards prevented both. In the end, Tresckow opted to ask one of Hitler's party to carry a package containing a couple of bottles of Cointreau back to Rastenburg with him on Hitler's plane. As he explained it, it was a debt he owed to Colonel Steele. The package was, of course, a bomb. At the airfield, Schlaberendorf discreetly squeezed the package to break the acid detonator and handed it over. Hitler and his party boarded the Focke-Wulf 200 Condor and took off. 30 minutes later, they should have been blown out of the sky. Once again, Hitler's luck held. The bomb failed to detonate. Later, the conspirators managed to retrieve it. Schlaberendorf opened the package with a razor blade and removed the detonator. The acid had done its work. The firing pin had struck the percussion cap and ignited it but the explosive had not gone off. It remains a mystery to this day but possibly the plastic explosive had become too cold in the plane's cargo hold. Shattered by his failure, Tresckow nevertheless refused to become despondent and only a week later another assassination attempt was made by an officer who had agreed to act as a suicide bomber. The occasion was a visit by Hitler to the Berlin Zughaus to view an exhibition of captured enemy weaponry that Tresckow's army group had put together. The shortest fuse available was a 10-minute one and once he'd ignited it, the suicide bomber stuck closely to Hitler, attempting to interest him in the objects on display. But Hitler paid no attention, nervously as if sensing danger, he scurried through the exhibition and abruptly left by a side door into the chestnut grove on Unter den Linden. His would-be assassin rushed for the nearest toilet and ripped the fuse out of the bomb. It was just a combination of ill luck, Hitler's neck, as if he anticipated that people would carry out an attempt on his life against him, and just fortune or misfortune as you might say. From here on the task of assassinating Hitler would pass to Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, but time was running out. At the Casablanca conference, Churchill and Roosevelt had made it clear that nothing short of Germany's unconditional surrender would satisfy the Allies. So an assassination, even if successful, held out no hope of shortening the war. Meanwhile, the Nazi intelligence operation was closing in on the conspirators. Together with Tresckow, General Friedrich Olbericht, and Mertz von Quernheim, Olbericht's new chief of staff, Stauffenberg set about revising plans for a coup. They hit upon the notion of tailoring an official strategy approved by Hitler for their own ends. The official plan, which was called Operation Valkyrie, was to use the reserve army to put down an uprising by foreign workers if it ever occurred. The crucial difference was that the conspirators planned to add an announcement that Hitler had been assassinated by rogue Nazis. Martial law would be declared, Nazi leaders like Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels would be arrested, the SS would be disarmed, and key installations would be occupied. It was a gigantic hoax. Its weakness was that, apart from Hitler himself, the only person who could launch Operation Valkyrie was the leader of the reserve army, Erich Fromm. He would either have to be neutralized or brought into the conspiracy. Fromm refused to join, but hinted that he might support the conspirators if they succeeded in assassinating Hitler. It was hardly a secure foundation for mounting a coup. Stauffenberg originally intended to remain in Berlin to direct the coup, while someone who'd not suffered his crippling injuries actually carried out the assassination. But none of the attempts planned for the latter half of 1943 and the start of 1944 came to anything. Soon after the Normandy landings, Stauffenberg decided that, as he had access to Hitler's military briefings, he would have to carry the bomb himself. It was a fatal error. In the course of nine days, he had three opportunities to assassinate Hitler. On July the 11th, he flew to Bechtesgaden with a bomb, but on discovering that Goering and Himmler would not be present at the meeting, he aborted the plan. On July the 15th, he attended another briefing, this time at Hitler's headquarters in Rastenburg. A photograph taken on that day shows Stauffenberg in the group around Hitler before the meeting took place. The assassination attempt failed when the briefing ended early, before Stauffenberg could get the bomb into place. The third and final attempt would be made five days later. Blocking all official signal traffic from Hitler's headquarters after the assassination planned for July 20th was a key part of the plan. It would give the conspirators in Berlin time to launch Operation Valkyrie, wrest power from the Nazi leadership, gain control of the radio stations, and neutralize the SS and troops loyal to Hitler. The man deputed to do this was Erich Felkebel, chief of the Army Signal Corps based at Hitler's headquarters. This he achieved, but the telephone call he himself made to Berlin was to inform the conspirators that Hitler had survived the attack. While Stauffenberg flew back to Berlin, the conspirators hesitated. By the time he arrived, Himmler had rescinded the order blocking signal traffic, and the news of Hitler's survival was out. In Berlin, Paris, Vienna, and Prague, the coup collapsed. Soldiers loyal to the regime forced their way into army headquarters and released Fromm. There was a shootout in which Stauffenberg was wounded. Fromm arrested him along with Ulbricht and Heften. Beck tried to shoot himself but failed. One of Fromm's men finished off the job. The conspirators were marched out into the courtyard, where under the headlights of lined up military vehicles, they were shot by firing squad. That night, Hitler addressed the work of Providence and promising to settle accounts with the conspirators the way we national socialists are accustomed to settling them. Soldiers as far away as Russia heard the news. Yes, a mean and cowardly officer's clique tried to murder me or something like that. That's it, right? Almost everyone gave up, right? But it was nothing. They were too cowardly to take themselves into the air. They tried that a few times. And as officers, as active professionals, you never manage to kill someone like that. In retrospect, that judgment is harsh. The conspirators paid a terrible price for their failure. In the days and weeks that followed, Gestapo torturers dragged out of their prisoners the names of others who had been involved. Some, like Treskau, committed suicide. Others, including Lieber, Witzleben, Boster, Stief, Felgibo, Schulenburg, Gürtler and Trotze-Sulz, were tried in the people's court and executed. Many more Germans were to die in prison or in concentration camps before the war was over. Most of these enemies of the Nazis had neither the means nor the opportunity to do anything to bring down the regime. In the end, the very hopelessness of their position is what actually gave the German resistance its dignity and heroism.