50 Fun Facts About Operation Valkyrie

What everyday item did Claus von Stauffenberg use to carry a bomb into Hitler's conference in July 1944?

A briefcase hid a block of plastic explosive with a silent chemical fuse. Stauffenberg set it down near Hitler, then slipped out to take a prearranged phone call.

By what name is Hitler's East Prussian forest headquarters, where Stauffenberg's bomb exploded, best known?

Wolf's Lair took its name from "Wolf", a nickname Hitler let only close friends use. He ran much of the war in the east from the compound, hidden in the Masurian woods.

Which Hollywood star played the bomb plotter Claus von Stauffenberg in the 2008 thriller Valkyrie?

Tom Cruise took the lead, and the casting stirred controversy in Germany, where politicians and members of the Stauffenberg family objected to the actor's Scientology.

Which popular field marshal was offered poison instead of a trial after being linked to Operation Valkyrie?

Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, swallowed cyanide on 14 October 1944. In return he was buried with full military honours and his family was left alone; the truth came out only after the war.

Which fellow dictator met Hitler on the day of the July 1944 bomb blast, in what proved their final meeting?

Benito Mussolini arrived that afternoon; the midday briefing had even been brought forward half an hour to make room for his visit. The two men never met again.

In which occupied capital did army plotters lock up the SS and Gestapo on 20 July 1944?

Paris saw the coup come closest to success. Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the military commander in France, had the SS and Gestapo officers there locked up before word came that Hitler was alive.

Operation Valkyrie shares its German name, Walküre, with a famous opera by which nineteenth-century composer?

Richard Wagner wrote Die Walküre as the second opera of his Ring cycle. In Norse myth the valkyries choose who falls in battle, a grim name for a plan to keep order at home.

How were Claus von Stauffenberg and three fellow officers put to death in a Berlin courtyard after midnight?

By firing squad, lit from behind by idling army vehicles. Their own commanding general ordered it within hours of the coup failing, possibly to silence men who knew how much he had known.

Which Nobel Prize-winning physicist pleaded in vain with Hitler for his son's life after the 1944 bomb plot?

Max Planck, then 86, wrote to Hitler himself, but his son Erwin was hanged in January 1945. The founder of quantum theory outlived him by less than three years.

Which Nazi minister foiled his own arrest by putting the arresting officer on the telephone to Hitler?

Joseph Goebbels asked to be put through to Hitler and handed over the receiver. The major heard the Führer's voice, changed sides and went on to crush the coup in the capital.

Besides scorched trousers and splinters in his legs, which injury did Hitler suffer in the July 1944 bomb blast?

Ruptured eardrums were the worst of it, though about 200 wood splinters had to be picked from his legs. Hitler took his survival as a sign that destiny had spared him.

The surrender of an entire German army in which 1943 battle gave Hitler's opponents a new urgency?

Stalingrad cost Germany its Sixth Army and, for many officers, the last hope of winning the war. Within two months of the surrender, conspirators had twice tried to kill Hitler.

Which present-day country holds the ruins of Hitler's East Prussian headquarters, bombed by Stauffenberg?

Poland was given the southern part of East Prussia after the war. Retreating German engineers blew up the bunkers in January 1945, and the ruins stand in woods near the town of Kętrzyn.

In which country was Claus von Stauffenberg serving with a panzer division when he was gravely wounded in 1943?

Tunisia was where the 10th Panzer Division was fighting when Allied fighter-bombers caught his vehicle near Mezzouna. Germany's last foothold in North Africa fell the following month.

Along with his right hand, what did Claus von Stauffenberg lose when Allied aircraft strafed his column in 1943?

His left eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left were gone. After three months in hospital he went back to staff work, and soon stood at the heart of the conspiracy.

Which Lutheran pastor was hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945 alongside conspirators against Hitler?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been drawn into the resistance through his work for military intelligence. He died two weeks before American troops reached the camp.

Which Nazi leader did Hitler put in command of the Replacement Army after its officers had tried to overthrow him?

Heinrich Himmler, already head of the SS and the police, took over the two-million-strong home army and began filling its top posts with SS men.

What became compulsory throughout Germany's armed forces four days after the bomb plot against Hitler failed?

The Nazi salute replaced the traditional hand-to-cap gesture on 24 July 1944 as a public show of loyalty. Until then most servicemen had been free to keep the old military greeting.

Claus von Stauffenberg was born in a Bavarian castle holding which hereditary noble title?

Count was his title from birth, Graf in German, so his full surname ran Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. His father was the last court marshal of the kings of Württemberg.

Stauffenberg planted his bomb in Hitler's headquarters about six weeks after the start of which Allied invasion?

The Normandy landings began on D-Day, 6 June 1944. With the Allies ashore in France and Soviet armies advancing from the east, the plotters knew they were running out of time.

Which retired army chief of staff, the plotters' choice for head of state, shot himself as Operation Valkyrie failed?

Ludwig Beck had resigned in 1938 in protest at Hitler's plans for war. Arrested that night, he asked for a pistol but only wounded himself, and a soldier ended it.

Which former mayor of Leipzig did the conspirators of Operation Valkyrie intend to make chancellor of Germany?

Carl Goerdeler had resigned as mayor in 1937 after local Nazis demolished a monument to the composer Felix Mendelssohn behind his back. He was hanged in February 1945.

Which Replacement Army commander, long aware of the conspiracy, had Stauffenberg executed on the night of the coup?

Friedrich Fromm was the only man besides Hitler who could set Operation Valkyrie in motion, and he refused. His haste that night did not save him: he was arrested within two days and executed in March 1945.

Which general rewrote the Operation Valkyrie orders for a coup and killed himself with a grenade once it failed?

Henning von Tresckow walked into no man's land on the Eastern Front and set off a grenade, staging a partisan attack to shield his family and friends. He had tried to kill Hitler himself in 1943.

Which head of the General Army Office in Berlin issued the Operation Valkyrie orders on 20 July 1944?

Friedrich Olbricht had first proposed using the army's own emergency plan as cover for a coup. His orders went out more than three hours after the blast, while Berlin argued over whether Hitler was dead.

Which major commanding Berlin's guard battalion first obeyed the plotters' orders, then crushed the coup for Hitler?

Otto Ernst Remer was promoted two ranks that same night. After the war he became a leading neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier, and he died in Spain in 1997 while evading a German prison sentence.

Which People's Court president berated the bomb plotters on film and died in an American air raid in 1945?

Roland Freisler was killed when bombs hit his court in February 1945. A plotter on trial that morning survived, was later acquitted, and ended up a judge on West Germany's highest court.

Which field marshal, Operation Valkyrie's choice to lead the armed forces, stood trial in beltless, oversized clothes?

Erwin von Witzleben had to clutch his trousers while the judge jeered at him for fiddling with them. He was sentenced on 8 August 1944 and hanged the same day.

Which officer, an Olympic gold medallist in show jumping, unwittingly saved Hitler by shifting Stauffenberg's bomb?

Heinz Brandt found the bomb at his feet and nudged it out of his way; the blast cost him a leg and he died the next day. In 1943 he had unknowingly carried another bomb onto Hitler's plane.

Which admiral, long the head of German military intelligence, was hanged in April 1945 after his diaries were found?

Wilhelm Canaris ran the Abwehr while quietly shielding Hitler's opponents inside it. He was dismissed in February 1944, and the discovery of his diary in April 1945 sealed his fate.

Operation Valkyrie was officially an emergency plan to crush an uprising by which group inside wartime Germany?

Foreign forced labourers numbered in the millions in German factories, and the regime feared a revolt. Hitler himself approved the plan that the plotters later turned against him.

Whom did the plotters' Operation Valkyrie orders falsely accuse of trying to seize power after Hitler's death?

Nazi Party leaders were named as the traitors, so that army units would arrest officials and SS men in the belief that they were stopping a coup, not carrying one out.

Which Berlin army complex, the plotters' command post on 20 July 1944, houses a memorial to the German resistance?

The Bendlerblock is where Stauffenberg was executed in the courtyard. The street outside, once Bendlerstraße, was renamed Stauffenbergstraße in 1955.

At which Berlin prison were many of the convicted Operation Valkyrie conspirators hanged within hours of sentencing?

Plötzensee was where the first plotters died on 8 August 1944, the day they were sentenced. Hitler had the hangings filmed, and the execution shed is preserved as a memorial.

Which resistance group, led by the Silesian nobleman Helmuth James von Moltke, drew up plans for a Germany after Hitler?

The Kreisau Circle took its name from the Moltke family estate in Silesia, where it met from 1940. Moltke opposed killing Hitler and wanted him put on trial, yet he too was hanged, in January 1945.

Which German term names the rule of kin liability used to jail Stauffenberg's pregnant wife and other relatives?

Sippenhaft held a whole family answerable for one member's act. Stauffenberg's wife gave birth in custody, and their children were sent to an orphanage under the surname Meister.

In March 1943 plotters smuggled a bomb onto Hitler's plane disguised as a gift of bottles of which liqueur?

Cointreau was the cover story, a parcel handed over as payment for a lost bet. The fuse most likely failed in the cold of the unheated luggage hold, and a plotter retrieved the bomb the next day.

The plastic explosive and time fuse in Stauffenberg's bomb had been captured from which of Germany's enemies?

Great Britain had made both the plastic explosive and the pencil-shaped chemical fuse, which German officers took from stocks of captured weapons. The fuse worked silently, with no ticking.

Which new drug did Hitler's physician Theodor Morell use on his injuries after the July 1944 bomb blast?

Penicillin was barely out of testing in 1944, and where Morell got hold of it has never been established. He told American interrogators after the war that he knew nothing about the drug.

Which director filmed the 2008 thriller Valkyrie partly at the real Berlin sites of the 1944 coup?

Bryan Singer was at first refused permission to film at the Berlin memorial where the plotters died, on the grounds that a film set would rob it of dignity. The German government later relented.

Which tool, specially adapted for his three remaining fingers, did Stauffenberg use to arm the bomb on 20 July 1944?

Pliers crushed the end of the chemical fuse and started a silent countdown. Interrupted by a knock at the door, he managed to arm only one of his two charges.

What excuse did Stauffenberg give for slipping into a side room to arm the bomb before Hitler's midday conference?

To change his shirt was believable on a sweltering day, and a man with one hand could fairly ask his aide to help. The pair used the minutes to set the fuse.

What stood between Hitler and Stauffenberg's bomb, absorbing much of the blast when it went off in July 1944?

A thick table leg took the force after an officer pushed the bomb to its far side. The hut's flimsy walls also blew out, which let much of the pressure escape.

The two women who typed the secret coup orders for Operation Valkyrie wore what as a precaution?

Gloves kept their fingerprints off the papers. One typist was the wife of a leading plotter and the other his secretary; the drafts surfaced decades later in Soviet archives.

Which member of Hitler's inner circle appeared on the plotters' draft cabinet lists, once with a question mark?

Albert Speer was pencilled in as armaments minister, with a note that he should not be approached until Hitler was dead. That caution probably saved him from arrest.

Which SS commando leader reached the plotters' Berlin headquarters after midnight and halted the summary executions?

Otto Skorzeny arrived with Waffen-SS troops minutes after the first four officers died, and no more prisoners were killed that night. Hitler wanted the rest taken alive.

In 1943 Axel von dem Bussche volunteered to blow himself up with Hitler while modelling what for him?

New army uniforms for the winter were to be shown to Hitler, with a mine hidden under the clothing. The night before, an Allied air raid destroyed the railway car that held them.

Which young lieutenant, Stauffenberg's adjutant, flew with him to plant the bomb and died beside him that night?

Werner von Haeften threw the unused second charge from the car as the pair raced to the airfield. His brother Hans, also in the plot, was executed the following month.

Which signals general was meant to cut Hitler's headquarters off from the outside world once the bomb went off?

Erich Fellgiebel could only partly block the lines, and it was he who phoned Berlin with the news that Hitler had survived. He had earlier helped bring the Enigma cipher machine into army use.

Which field marshal commanding in the west took cyanide in August 1944 after wavering over Operation Valkyrie?

Günther von Kluge had been courted by the plotters for years without ever committing himself. Recalled to Berlin a month after the coup, he assumed he was implicated and took poison.