The Delayed Bomb: When the German Elite Finally Decided to Kill Hitler, the Reich Was Already Burning

At 12:42 p.m. on July 20, 1944, the wooden conference hut at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters erupted in a cloud of dust and splintered timber. German colonel and aristocrat Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg was already hurrying toward the airfield, convinced that no one standing around the conference table could have survived. But he had managed to activate only one of the two explosive charges. The briefcase had then been moved behind one of the table’s massive supports, while the meeting itself was being held above ground rather than inside a bunker because of the heat. Adolf Hitler survived with relatively minor injuries. The bomb went off on time. The conscience that planted it did not.

By the time part of Germany’s military elite decided that Hitler could no longer be allowed to live, he had already revealed every reason why he should have been stopped. The Holocaust had largely been carried out. Europe had endured years of occupation and terror. The Western Allies had landed in Normandy, and Germany’s Eastern Front was beginning to collapse. That is why July 20 is not simply a story of courage. It is also a story of delay—of men who dared to act only once the criminal state had become a military catastrophe for Germany itself.

It would nevertheless be wrong to conclude that German resistance began only in 1944. As early as 1938, Ludwig Beck, the former chief of the Army General Staff, tried to persuade Germany’s generals to resign collectively in an effort to prevent Hitler’s war. A plan for a coup during the Sudeten crisis also formed around intelligence officer Hans Oster. It evaporated when the Munich Agreement handed Hitler yet another victory without a war.

The army, meanwhile, had profited from German rearmament, while conservative elites had long regarded Nazism as an ally against the left. Many within the military leadership objected less to Hitler’s goals than to his recklessness and the danger that, in pursuing them, he would destroy the state. Opposition to the war did not always mean opposition to dictatorship. Sometimes it meant only the belief that the dictator was badly managing a war that had seemed perfectly acceptable the day before.

Stauffenberg himself is even more uncomfortable material for a simple heroic legend. He was a Catholic aristocrat, raised in a culture of duty and deeply influenced by the German poet Stefan George. In 1932, he supported Hitler in the presidential election. As an officer, he took part in the invasion of Poland, and in 1939 he declined an opportunity to join an earlier coup attempt. As late as the end of 1941, he welcomed Hitler’s assumption of supreme military command.

It was only in 1942 and 1943, after confronting both mass murder and the catastrophic conduct of the war, that he joined the resistance. His moral transformation was genuine, but it was not tidy. The conspirators’ plans promised the restoration of the rule of law and fundamental freedoms, but they did not envisage a straightforward return to the parliamentary democracy of the Weimar Republic. Their “other Germany” would have been incomparably better than Hitler’s, but, it should be noted, it was not necessarily the Germany that the Federal Republic would later become.

Nor could the conspirators’ motives be reduced to a single noble idea. Some wanted to stop the mass killings. Others were primarily concerned with rescuing the honour of the army or preventing the Reich’s total destruction. Many also hoped that a new government might negotiate an armistice on more favourable terms, even though the Allies had demanded unconditional surrender since 1943. Morality and national interest were not mutually exclusive—they often coexisted within the same person.

More troubling still, some of those connected to the conspiracy had themselves been involved in atrocities. Arthur Nebe, the head of Germany’s criminal police who participated in plans to overthrow the regime, had previously commanded Einsatzgruppe B. That unit was responsible for murdering more than 45,000 Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The German resistance was not a sterile chamber untouched by evil. It was an attempt to escape a system in which some of the conspirators had done far more than merely stand by and watch.

Operation Valkyrie also carried an irony worthy of a collapsing dictatorship. It had originally been devised as a military plan for suppressing possible uprisings by forced labourers and other domestic unrest. The conspirators repurposed it as a mechanism through which the Reserve Army would seize key institutions, disarm the SS and arrest the Nazi leadership. A system designed to protect the regime was to be used to destroy it.

But the coup demanded speed and instead encountered hesitation. Orders did not begin leaving Berlin until the afternoon. The conspirators failed to seize the radio stations, while military commands were simultaneously receiving contradictory instructions from Hitler’s headquarters. In Paris, the SS and Gestapo were temporarily neutralised. In Berlin, however, it was enough to confirm that Hitler was alive. The authoritarian order then revealed its banal advantage: most officers did not have to love the dictator. They merely had to wait and see whose orders still carried authority.

On the night of July 20–21, Stauffenberg and his aide Werner von Haeften were shot in the courtyard of Berlin’s Bendler Block. General Friedrich Olbricht and Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim were also executed by firing squad. Persecution and show trials followed. Thousands were arrested, and many were executed for only the most tenuous connections to the conspiracy.

The assassination attempt failed militarily, and for the overwhelming majority of Nazism’s victims it came too late. Yet by the time of the attempt, its principal organisers already knew that the chances of success had almost disappeared. German general Henning von Tresckow believed the assassination had to be attempted even if it failed—if only to leave proof before the world and history that Hitler and Germany were not one and the same.

That does not cleanse the conspirators’ biographies, nor does it transform July 20 into a story of flawless men who recognised from the beginning what others could not see. Their courage does not erase their years of blindness. But neither do those years of blindness make their later courage false. The historical significance of the attempted assassination lies precisely within that tension. Conscience rarely awakens under clean and uncomplicated circumstances, and elites often begin listening to it only when the bill for the suffering of others finally arrives on their own desk.

July 20 is therefore not a date for comfortable celebration. It is a date that forces an uncomfortable question: how much evil must be committed before obedience becomes betrayal and disobedience becomes a duty? The conspirators answered it in 1944—courageously, imperfectly and too late. In precisely that order.