The Hitler Assassination Attempts: The Plots, Places and People that Almost Changed History

By John Grehan

Throughout his political life, Adolf Hitler was the subject of numerous assassination plots, some of which were attempted, all of which failed. While a few of these have become well known, particularly the bomb explosions at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in 1939 and the Stauffenberg Valkyrie attempt carried out at the Wolfsschanze on 20 July 1944, many others have received far less attention – until now. In this book, John Grehan has examined the known planned or proposed assassination attempts on Hitler, from Chicago to London and from Sweden to the Ukraine – some of which have not previously been presented to the general public by historians. All manner of methods were proposed by those willing to bring Hitler’s life to a premature and sticky end and Hitler was well aware of the danger which lurked potentially around every corner of every road, railway track, every building and even every individual. As a result, an immense, multi-layered security apparatus surrounded the Führer day and night. Despite this, and knowing the risks they faced, many people sought to kill the German leader, and some very nearly did. Yet Hitler survived, often by just a minute or a millimetre, to die ultimately of his own hand. These plots and conspiracies are detailed in this book, along with a unique collection of photographs of many of the proposed or actual assassination locations. All will be revealed in this fascinating compilation of the obscure, the fanciful and the carefully considered attempts to assassinate Hitler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399018913

John Grehan

JOHN GREHAN has written, edited or contributed to more than 300 books and magazine articles covering a wide span of military history from the Iron Age to the recent conflict in Afghanistan. John has also appeared on local and national radio and television to advise on military history topics. He was employed as the Assistant Editor of Britain at War Magazine from its inception until 2014. John now devotes his time to writing and editing books.

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Introduction

The twenty-four officers and stenographers were gathered on all sides of the rectangular oak table for the meeting in the Wolfsschanze , Hitler’s ‘Wolf’s Lair’, in the heart of Gierłoż Forest in East Prussia. The date was 20 July 1944. It was a hot day, and all the windows were open in the lagebaracke which was the scene of the daily situation conferences held to discuss the war situation.

As the conference unfolded, Hitler stretched out across the table to indicate a point on the large-scale map in front of him when, at exactly 1242 hours, there was a blinding flash followed instantaneously by a deafening roar. Bluish-yellow flame shot out of the windows, hurling with it glass and splinters and a cloud of choking black smoke. ‘In a flash the map room became a scene of stampede and destruction,’ recalled General Walter Warlimont, Deputy Chief of the Operations Staff. ‘At one moment … a set of men … a focal point of world events; at the next there was nothing but wounded men groaning, the acrid smell of burning; and charred fragments of maps and papers fluttering in the wind. I staggered up and jumped through the open window.’ As the officers who were unwounded came to their senses, their first thought was for Hitler. ‘Where is the Führer?’ Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was the first to put into words the thoughts that were running through the minds of the stunned survivors. A figure pulled himself up, covered in dust, his trousers cut to ribbons, his hair on fire – Keitel answered his own question, ‘My Führer! You’re alive!’¹

It was true. Hitler was injured and badly shaken, but he was still alive. Nevertheless, this was the closest anyone had come to killing the Führer even though there had been dozens of plots and numerous actual attempts on his life. These efforts had, in the main, been conducted by fellow Germans, despite the near impossibility of organizing any form of resistance or opposition movement in the heavily policed Nazi state.

There were other reasons for the lack of organized opposition to Hitler in Germany apart from the brutal efficiency of the Secret State Police, the Geheime Staatspolizei – the Gestapo – as was explained, in some measure, by Dr Eugene Gerstenmaier, one of the very few opposition figures to survive the Valkyrie plot which culminated in that failed 20 July assassination attempt in the lagebaracke:

I think that no one is inwardly obliged to remain loyal to Hitler and his system for Germany’s sake. Whatever may be said against the conditions in which we are at present compelled to live, we must fairly recognise that they are the consequences of Hitler’s policy. Dazzled by the idea of National Socialism, disgusted by the quarrels of the parties and incomprehensibly blind to what stood behind the man – all in all, foolishly but fairly, the German people gave Hitler a chance. And, perhaps with misgivings, but without resistance, the majority surrendered to him. That is our fault, our great fault. Thereafter, it was beyond the power of an individual, indeed beyond the power of a group of men determined to do everything possible to break the bonds into which Hitler’s total system of terror had been able to cast us.²

The German historian Friedrich Lenz saw the opposition to Hitler quite differently. In 1952, he wrote:

In defence of their meek attitudes towards the methods employed by Hitler after his seizure of power, the opponents now plead the terrorist measures that awaited them, had they done otherwise, but they keep silent about the real reason, which is that in light of the clear wish of the people to give Hitler a chance and to help him, they could not have dared offer any practical resistance if they did not want to risk making fools of themselves or being swept away by their own followers.³

There were, nevertheless, groups in Germany opposed to Hitler that were active not only throughout the Second World War but even before his propulsion to power in 1933, though when he was no more than the leader of a small extremist political party he was despised rather than feared. Even when Hitler became Chancellor, in what was a surprising move undertaken by an embattled Reich President Hindenburg, the Nazi leader was not immediately seen as a threat to the security of the country or its people. Many thought that Hitler would not last long at the Chancellery before being ousted by more sophisticated politicians. But as soon as he assumed power Hitler set about eliminating any real or perceived opponents. The merest suspicion of an individual’s or a group’s disinclination not to wholeheartedly support the Nazis was quickly seized upon and investigated, usually on the basis of guilty until proven innocent. A sizeable part of the Nazi machinery was devoted to neutralizing, either by death or imprisonment, a considerable portion of the German public. Between 1933 and 1939 the ordinary civilian courts convicted 225,000 people of political crimes, their sentences amounting to a total of 600,000 years’ imprisonment, many spending their sentences in the fifty-plus concentration camps spread around the Reich, with some never being seen again. According to some estimates, in the years 1943–45, for example, the Gestapo alone ‘neutralized’ more than 40,000 men. The total number of political prisoners throughout Hitler’s reign may have been as high as 3,000,000, and dissident execution possibly exceeded 12,000 men and women, with the number of capital offences increasing from three to forty-three during the first ten years of Hitler’s reign.⁴

An example of this is the case of Sophie Scholl. In May 1942 she began to study biology and philosophy at Munich University. She had the temerity to join the resistance group known as the ‘White Rose’, which was composed of students, artists and scientists who called for a clear rejection of Hitler and his regime in order, as one of their leaflets put it, ‘to strive for the renewal of the mortally wounded German spirit’.⁵ That was more than enough for the authorities to arrest her, which they did on 18 February 1943, along with her brother Hans. They were seized at the university while throwing hundreds of leaflets from the gallery of the atrium of the university. They were tried in the so-called People’s Court. Both were sentenced to death and duly executed the very same day.⁶

Another woman with less means at her disposal found another method of displaying her repugnance of the regime and urging others to resist. Elise Hampel began her campaign of subversion following the death of her soldier brother during the invasion of France and the Low Countries in the summer of 1940. She expressed her feelings on postcards, writing such provocative statements as ‘Wake up German people, we must free ourselves from Hitler. There is no freedom under this devilish government.’

With the help of her husband, Otto, she dropped her postcards in mailboxes, left them in tenement stairwells, shop windowsills or anywhere that others might see them.⁷ Most of these cards were picked up and handed to the Gestapo, often by people fearing that the cards had been left by the Gestapo to test their loyalty to the regime, but over the course of two years the Hampels wrote and displayed more than 200 postcards across Berlin, often near the district of Wedding, where they lived.

The Gestapo tried to track down the perpetrators by catching them in the act of depositing their inflammatory messages and by seeking to identify individuals purchasing large quantities of blank postcards. But, in the end, Elise and Otto were betrayed by their fellow Berliners and they were arrested by the Gestapo in the autumn of 1942. On 22 January 1943 they were sentenced to death by the 2nd Senate of the People’s Court for ‘demoralizing the troops’ and of ‘preparing for high treason’. They were guillotined on 8 April 1943 in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison.

Women also played key roles in a loose confederation of opposition groups called by the Gestapo the ‘Red Orchestra’. This group sought to undermine the Third Reich in a variety of ways, most notably by passing on information about the German armed forces to the Allies, especially the Soviet Union. This was unquestionably treasonable conduct by any standards and the German security forces were so concerned about the Red Orchestra that, unusually, the Reich Security Service (the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), the Gestapo, and the German military intelligence counter-espionage service, the Abwehr, combined resources to eliminate the group.

The Red Orchestra (so called because of its Soviet links and with its radio operators being referred to as pianists, and group leaders being the ‘conductors’) was made up of three different units: the Leopold Trepper unit, the ‘Red Three’ and the Harro Schulze-Boysen/Arvid Harnack group. The Trepper unit was based in Germany and occupied France and Belgium, the ‘Red Three’ was based in neutral Switzerland while the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack group was based in Berlin. Their internal activities included the printing and distribution of leaflets inciting the people to rise up against the Nazi administration.

It was the interception by the Abwehr of the radio transmissions which led to the various groups being tracked down in 1942. It is believed that as many as 400 men and women were involved in Red Orchestra activities. Arrests, torture and executions followed, with a set of gallows constructed in Plötzensee Prison where eight people at a time could be hanged.

Amongst others who met a similar fate was Helmuth Günther Hübener who was just seventeen years old when, in October 1942, he faced the People’s Court. His ‘crime’ was read out during his sentencing, after being found guilty:

Since the summer of 1941, Hübener has spread the contents of British news bulletins in leaflets and handbills.… All in all twenty different propaganda leaflets of this kind, either drafts or mimeographed copies, have been confiscated. In addition to the British bulletins on the war situation, the handbills contained insults and insinuations against the Führer and his lieutenants and inflammatory attacks on the measures and institutions of the National Socialist government.

Because Hübener was still a youth, the death sentence would not normally apply but, because he was of above-average intelligence, his leaflets were well written and ‘no one could imagine that their author was only sixteen or seventeen, even if he knew that they were composed with the help of notes’. This meant, in the perverse wisdom of the People’s Court, that because the leaflets appeared to have been written by an adult, Hübener had to be punished as an adult. The death sentence was carried out on 27 October 1942.⁸

Even earlier than this, shortly after the start of Operation

BARBAROSSA

the invasion of the Soviet Union, one of the civilian leaders of the opposition wrote of the atrocities being carried out in Germany:

We have 19 guillotines working at considerable speed without most people even knowing this fact, and practically nobody knows how many are beheaded each day. In my estimation there are about 50 per day, not counting those who die in concentration camps – nobody knows the exact number of concentration camps or of their inhabitants.… We only know for certain, that scores, probably many hundreds of Germans are killed daily by the various methods, and that these people die not a glorious death as those in the occupied countries do, knowing that their people consider them heroes, but an ignominious death knowing that they are classed among robbers and murderers.⁹

The families of those who dared to challenge the regime and had been slaughtered for their opposition kept very quiet about what had happened to their loved ones for fear of a similar fate. This meant that the resisters died not as martyrs, celebrated for their courage, but as common criminals. This made their deaths pointless and it acted as a very effective deterrent.

As Herbert Ernst Carl Frahm who, being a member of the far-left Socialist Workers Party, fled from Germany to avoid persecution, admitted:

we referred to ourselves as the ‘opposition’. Of course, we knew about the diversity of those opposing the Nazis, and we were aware of their inadequacy … there was very little resistance deserving of the name that was not soon discovered, with the means available to the totalitarian regime at the time, or even destroyed before it got started.

Herbert Fraham changed his name to avoid being arrested. In his new guise, he returned to Germany after the war becoming Chancellor of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. Frahm is known to the world as Willy Brandt.¹⁰ The German historian Joachim Fest agrees, calling the opposition to the Nazis as ‘The Resistance that never was’,¹¹ and his fellow historian Mommsen believes that the conditions under which Stauffenberg and the Valkyrie conspirators were forced to operate meant that ‘their chances of bringing down the regime from within were virtually non-existent’.¹² This is demonstrated by the fact that no meeting of all the people destined to form the new government after Hitler had been killed had occurred before 20 July and the man earmarked as Chancellor, Karl Goerdeler, whose name will feature many times throughout this narrative, had not even been told of the impending assassination.¹³

Though the Gestapo’s deadly tentacles appear to have stretched far and wide, there were fewer Gestapo agents than is customarily assumed, but their influence was all-pervasive.¹⁴ People were encouraged to report any dissident behaviour, no matter how trivial it might seem. No one could be sure if the person they were talking to was a Gestapo plant, an agent provocateur, or merely someone seeking to curry favour with the authorities by denouncing others to demonstrate their support for the Party. An off-hand comment, or a joke about Hitler, could be a death sentence.

An example of this occurred on 10 October 1943 at a small party in the Berlin flat of the fifty-five-year-old widow Elisabeth von Thadden. Among the gathering of friends and guests was a new member of the group – a doctor at a hospital in Birkenwerder, Brandenburg, called Paul Reckzeh. Three months earlier he had been offered an assignment in Switzerland to ascertain what kind of contacts German emigrants had with the Allies, which led him to Elisabeth Thadden’s flat that autumn evening.

The leading light of Elisabeth’s group was Johanna Solf who had been instrumental in hiding Jewish friends from the Gestapo and providing them with documents and money to help them escape the Third Reich. The Gestapo suspected the subversive motives of the ‘Solf Circle’ as it became known but lacked evidence of its activities.

As the evening progressed Reckzeh made increasingly disparaging comments on Hitler’s handling of the war. This encouraged others to also voice their less-than-favourable opinions of the Führer. Having gained their confidence, some of the group asked the affable young doctor if he would convey letters to their friends in Switzerland. What they didn’t know was that Reckzeh was a Gestapo agent codenamed ‘Robby’ and he was only too happy to accept the letters he was given.

Those letters and his report were soon in the hands of the Gestapo, as were Elisabeth Thadden and members of the Solf Circle. Reckzeh received the promotion he sought to the rank of staff surgeon with the Organisation Todt, and Elisabeth von Thadden and most of the Solf Circle members were arrested and executed.

Professor Dr Walter Arndt was reported to have said in the winter of 1943–4, that ‘This is the end of the German Reich. We are to blame for the war, and all that remains is to [decide] how far the guilty are brought to account and punished.’ He was arrested and sentenced to death by the People’s Court on 11 May 1944. A post office guard in Danzig, Georg Jurkowski was alleged to have spoken in a public street in 1943 declaring that the Führer would soon suffer the same fate as Mussolini and would be dead by January. His ‘subversive’ comments were reported to the authorities and the inevitable death sentence was announced in the People’s Court on 14 October 1943.¹⁵

Despite such systematic oppression, and because of it, there were more than forty known planned attempts on the life of Hitler, as well as other schemes that were considered but not carried through and a number of impromptu, opportunistic efforts. Through inadequate planning or poor execution, but often merely through sheer bad luck, all the attempts failed. Few of those who arranged such internally devised efforts approached the Allies for direct assistance. Had they done so their chances of success would have been immeasurably improved. But the plotters were patriots, good Germans. They did not want the British or the Americans – and especially the despised French – to take the credit for toppling Hitler. It was nothing to do with the Allies. Hitler and the Nazis were their problem, and they would deal with them themselves.

There were, of course, Allied plots to kill Hitler. The most elaborate of those was the SOE’s 1944 Operation FOXLEY but this was not carried through because it was considered that Hitler had, by that stage of the war, become a liability to the German war effort and that no advantage would be gained by assassinating him.

The German resistance (Der Widerstand) did openly approach London, Paris and Washington a number of times before the outbreak of war and clandestinely afterwards. In a bid to alert the Allies to Hitler’s designs upon Czechoslovakia, Karl Goerdeler, a former mayor of Leipzig who had at one time been considered for the post of Chancellor before Franz von Papen in 1932, and led a small highly-conservative opposition group, travelled to Paris in early March 1938 and again the following month. Goerdeler met with Alexis Léger, Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, though he was warmly received, it was with deep mistrust. No one in Paris could quite understand what Goerdeler’s real motives were, as it was distinctly unusual for an influential German to be talking in derogatory tones about his own government to the French. Sir Gilbert Vansittart, the chief diplomatic advisor to the British Foreign Office, bluntly told Goerdeler, when he was approached by the latter in June 1937, that his actions were nothing short of treason, and Britain would have no truck with any subversive activities in Germany. The truth seems to have been that Léger and Vansittart believed Goerdeler was working for Hitler and not against him.

Goerdeler sought only to strengthen Germany’s position in the world, not to weaken it, and the doubt over the motives for his visits to the UK and even the US, which he visited in October 1937, probably arose because his aims were scarcely less expansionist than Hitler’s. He believed in the concept of a Greater Germany incorporating all the predominantly German-speaking territories and the return of Germany’s overseas colonies. Goerdeler even demanded the elimination of the Polish Corridor, a subject which Hitler, at that time, had not yet dared to voice. His fear, which drove him to talk to the Allies, was that Hitler would push too hard and too fast and bring on a war which would benefit no one, especially the Germans: ‘On no occasion did the … Goerdeler group cease to feel that Germany’s real place, by reason of her economic, political and military strength and potential was among the major powers and that she must,’ wrote one German historian, ‘at least on the Continent, win back her old position.’¹⁶

Even as late as May 1941, after Britain had withstood every effort of the German air force to beat the UK into submission throughout the Battle of Britain and the Blitz had failed, Goerdeler was still trying to persuade the British government to accept unrealistic peace terms. These still included the restoration of Germany’s 1914 frontiers, confirmation of the Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland, the return of all Germany’s colonies taken from her in the First World War, as mentioned above, and that there should be no claim by any of the Allied or occupied countries for reparations.¹⁷

It must also be understood that even the perpetrator of the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt, Claus von Stauffenberg, believed that Germany should be the dominant power in Europe. He helped draft a statement of the ideals behind the group of which he had become the most resolute member. In this, he declared: ‘We know that the German has powers that designate him to lead the community of the occidental nations’ and ‘the amalgamation of Hellenic and Christian origins in the Germanic character created western man.’¹⁸ Stauffenberg was claiming that Germany had created the western world which should be under its control – hardly the morally-heroic character he has since been portrayed as.

There were divisions among the various Resistance groupings on the form of government that should follow the collapse of the Third Reich. While there was unanimity of intent amongst the opposition, i.e. to get rid of Hitler, there was no commonality on the outcome. Each opposition group formed its own version of the new Germany that would emerge once the Nazis were no more.

Nevertheless, one theme is identifiable as a constant, which was set down in a lengthy ‘essay’ produced by Generaloberst Ludwig Beck, Chief of the German General Staff, and Goerdeler, entitled ‘The Goal’. This visualised a federation of European nations under German leadership ‘within ten or twenty years’.¹⁹

Indeed, the moral gloss with which the Valkyrie conspiracy has been painted is a relatively recent phenomenon, its shine reflecting a Germany which is kinder to the modern eye. Such authors as Manvell and Fraenkel have helped to create this dazzling effect by calling the conspiracy ‘a Christian crusade against the forces of evil,’²⁰ and many others have followed suit. Yet, as another German historian, Hans Mommsen, has made clear, ‘a number of key figures in the resistance … were involved either in the planning of the war of extermination in the East, or, as many others did, participated in its execution’.²¹ Many of these were ardent supporters of Hitler and his nationalistic ideals until it became obvious that Germany was losing the war. It was the prospect of defeat that motivated Stauffenberg to act against Hitler, as revealed in a paper dropped from his pocket as he was being dragged into the courtyard of the Bendlerblock to be shot after his assassination had failed: ‘If the present course continues, defeat and destruction of the country’s manpower and material strength is inevitable. Imminent disaster can only be averted by removing the present leadership.… Therefore, quick action is necessary.’²²

There were, though, some military figures who opposed Hitler from the outset. These included Generalmajor Hans Oster, the deputy head of the Abwehr who was, as we will read, an early and persistent opponent of Hitler. He led a group that included Edwald von Kleist-Schmenzin who contacted a number of his English friends to enlist British support to halt the Nazis in the days before Hitler had reached the Chancellery in 1933, but his warnings were not taken seriously. Von Kleist-Schmenzin tried again in 1938, this time travelling to the UK as the emissary of Beck’s and Goerdeler’s group.

Being the representative of such a high ranking official, Kleist-Schmenzin was received not only by Gilbert Vansittart but also the Conservative politician Lord Lloyd and the troublesome, then backbencher, Winston Churchill. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, however, would have nothing to do with someone he regarded as nothing more than a revolutionary, a modern-day ‘Jacobite’, to use his exact words.

Oster was not deterred by this rebuff and tried again, this time through the industrialist Hans Böhm-Tettelbach who enlisted the support of a key figure in the German Foreign Ministry in London, Erich Kordt, who prepared a statement for consumption by his British counterparts which warned of Hitler’s dangerous warlike ambitions. Because of the treacherous nature of the statement, it could not be carried in hard copy and was instead committed to memory. Böhm-Tettelbach actually got as far as No.10 Downing Street (albeit through the back door) and met with Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary. British backing for what was, in effect, a coup d’état, was however, out of the question. Hitler, by all appearances, had enormous and widespread support throughout Germany and it was seen that Böhm-Tettelbach represented the views of a few elitist Prussians who felt marginalised by Hitler’s populist policies.²³

Others in Germany were also convinced that Hitler was leading his volke into war and sought help from the Allies to prevent the cataclysm they saw would inevitably unfold. The secretary of state in the German Foreign Office, Ernst von Weizsäcker, tried to warn the British as did Hjalmar Schacht the President of the Reichsbank, who met the Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, a number of times. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, an aristocratic lawyer, Helmuth Graf von Moltke, great-grandnephew of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who had been the Chief of Staff of the Prussian Army, and Count Erich Schwerin von Schwanenfeld, a wealthy landowner, all tried in vain to enlist British support to oust Hitler.

It may seem incomprehensible that the pleadings of such high-ranking individuals should have been ignored. But Britain was set firmly on the path of appeasement and, however distasteful Hitler may have been, he had brought a degree of stability to a country that had witnessed mass unemployment, hyper-inflation and political turmoil in the years following the end of the First World War. The last thing that the British government wanted was another war with Germany – the last one had all but wiped out a generation of young men and virtually bankrupted the country.

The immense popularity of the Nazis in all of this is not to be discounted. The Weimar Republic which followed the First World War was regarded by many throughout Germany as nothing more than the unfortunate consequence of, as it was perceived, the treacherous surrender of 1918 and few believed it to be the kind of government that could lead Germany back to its place at the forefront of nations. From the outset it was hampered by the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, its problems being compounded at the start of the 1930s by the worldwide Depression which hit Germany particularly badly. By 1932 around a third of the population had slid into poverty – and poverty bred anarchy. The Nazi Party had, meanwhile, become the largest in the Reichstag and, whilst unable to win a majority, in the March 1933 election the Nazis amassed 288 seats out of the available 647, amounting to 43.9 per cent of the vote. The nearest rivals, the Social Democrats, managed only 18.3 per cent.

When Hitler was thrust into power he may have ruthlessly eliminated all opposition groups, but this brought political stability. It may have been a bitter pill for ordinary, decent, aspirational Germans to swallow, but the medicine soon began to work. An increasingly stronger Germany began to emerge under a forceful leader. The suppression of the rights of some minority groups, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, was a small price to pay, and was far from unpopular. Toppling Hitler would have inevitably meant a return to the chaos of the past. Such a situation was unimaginable. Only those like Kleist-Schmenzin and Goerdeler could visualise an alternative future for a post-Hitlerite Germany. But they had no public voice.

One group that did have a platform, or more accurately a pulpit, from which it could express its distain for the Nazi regime was the Catholic Church. But even that august body hesitated to vocalise its opposition following the 1933 Concordat with the Vatican in which priests were prohibited from participating in politics. Some, though at a local level, refused to remain silent, only for many of them to find themselves in the Priest Barracks at Dachau concentration camp.

There were attempts by the Catholic Church to enlist help from the United Kingdom to oust Hitler during the war through the Vatican. Talks were undertaken with British officials but they eventually proved fruitless.

Another religious organisation which attempted to take a stand against Hitler was a group of Protestant pastors which formed the ‘Confessing Church’ in 1933. In 1937 one of its leaders, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, publicly opposed the Catholic stance, declaring that it was the church’s moral duty to challenge the government’s policies.²⁴ Predictably, he was soon forbidden to speak in public and was banned from entering Berlin. This served not to deter him, but instead drove him into the arms of those seeking to overthrow the Nazi regime. He joined the Abwehr which, as we will see, became the centre of the armed forces’ opposition to Hitler. Bonhoeffer used his position to contact other religious bodies across Europe on behalf of the opposition. In May 1942 he met Anglican Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a member of the House of Lords and an ally of the Confessing Church, and tried, through him, to make contact with Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, but his appeals were rebuffed. He was arrested on 5 April 1943 and held, without trial, at Tegel military prison before being secretly moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, via Buchenwald. He was accused of being part of the 20 July 1944 plot and was executed at Flossenbürg on 9 April 1945.

The most powerful body that had remained aloof from the political turmoil was the Army. Its role was that of independent guardians of the state, its political neutrality being enshrined in the oath which every German soldier had to take:

I swear by God this holy oath that I will at all times, truly and sincerely, serve my people and Fatherland and that, as a brave soldier, I