The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [272]
At 12.42 p.m. on Thursday, 20 July 1944, a 2-pound bomb planted by the Swabian aristocratic war hero Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg ripped through one of the conference huts at the Wolfschanze only 6 feet from where Hitler was studying an air-reconnaissance report through his magnifying glass. Stauffenberg used British fuses because they did not make a tell-tale hissing sound. A series of accidents had meant that the meeting was transferred to a different room outside the bunker, the bomb was moved away from close to Hitler to behind a heavy table leg, and only one rather than two bombs were primed, otherwise the assassination attempt – one of seventeen made against him – would probably have succeeded. ‘The swine are bombing us!’ was Hitler’s first thought after the explosion, which burst his eardrums, hurt his right elbow, scarred his forehead, cut his face, set his hair and clothes alight, shredded his trousers and left more than a hundred splinters in the lower third of both thighs, but nothing more serious than that. ‘Believe me,’ he told his private secretary Christa Schroeder at lunch that day, ‘this is the turning point for Germany. From now on things will look up again. I’m glad the Schweinhunde have unmasked themselves.’54 At 2.30 that afternoon Hitler, Himmler, Keitel, Göring, Ribbentrop and Bormann all arrived at the railway station to greet Mussolini, with Hitler shaking hands with his left hand. By that time, a corporal had recalled a one-armed colonel leaving the hut in a hurry without his yellow briefcase, shreds of which were being found in the wreckage. Hitler’s Army adjutant, General Rudolf Schmundt, was blinded and horribly burnt in the blast, finally dying from his injuries on 1 October. ‘Don’t expect me to console you,’ Hitler told Frau Schmundt, somewhat insensitively in the circumstances. ‘You must console me for my loss.’55 The situation room where the bomb went off itself no longer exists, though there is a memorial stone to Stauffenberg where it once stood. (His remains were dug up by the SS after his execution at 1 a.m. on 21 July, and his final resting place is thus unknown.)
Churchill described the July Plotters as ‘the bravest of the best’, but there were not many of them, and most were extreme German nationalists rather than the idealistic democrats depicted by Hollywood.56 Although 5,764 people were arrested for complicity in the Plot in 1944, and an almost identical number the following year, fewer than a hundred were genuinely involved in it to the extent that they knew what was about to happen, although they did include soldiers as senior as Field Marshal von Witzleben, General Erich Hoepner, General Friedrich Olbricht and Field Marshal Günther von Kluge.57 It was a myth that the Plotters were hanged with piano wire, but true that the film of their execution (by strangulation from meat hooks at the Ploetzensee prison in Berlin) was sent to the Wolfschanze for Hitler’s delectation. What is unclear is whether the Plotters really spoke for many more than themselves. Count Helmuth von Moltke’s ideas for post-war democracy involved elections for local councils only. Claus von Stauffenberg and Carl Goerdeler wanted Germany to return to her 1939 borders, which included the remilitarized Rhineland as well as the Sudetenland. (Stauffenberg was far from the model democrat: he despised ‘the lie that all men are equal’, believed in ‘natural hierarchies’ and therefore