Operation Valkyrie
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50 free Operation Valkyrie trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
On 20 July 1944 a group of German officers and civilians came within a few feet of killing Adolf Hitler. Their plan had two halves: a bomb at his headquarters, then a takeover of the capital using an army emergency plan code-named Operation Valkyrie. Both halves failed within hours, and the price was terrible. This quiz is built around the conspirators themselves: who they were, what each was meant to do, and what became of them. It also covers the earlier attempts, the bomb and why it did not kill its target, the chaotic evening in Berlin, the show trials that followed and the way the plot is remembered on screen and in Germany. It suits students of the Second World War, anyone who has seen the film and wants the real story, and quiz players who like their history with a clock ticking. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What everyday item did Claus von Stauffenberg use to carry a bomb into Hitler's conference in July 1944?
A briefcase
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.
Q 02By what name is Hitler's East Prussian forest headquarters, where Stauffenberg's bomb exploded, best known?
Wolf's Lair
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.
Q 03Which Hollywood star played the bomb plotter Claus von Stauffenberg in the 2008 thriller Valkyrie?
Tom Cruise
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.
Q 04Which popular field marshal was offered poison instead of a trial after being linked to Operation Valkyrie?
Erwin Rommel
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.
Q 05Which fellow dictator met Hitler on the day of the July 1944 bomb blast, in what proved their final meeting?
Benito Mussolini
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.
Q 06In which occupied capital did army plotters lock up the SS and Gestapo on 20 July 1944?
Paris
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.
Q 07Operation Valkyrie shares its German name, Walküre, with a famous opera by which nineteenth-century composer?
Richard Wagner
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.
Q 08How were Claus von Stauffenberg and three fellow officers put to death in a Berlin courtyard after midnight?
By firing squad
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.
Q 09Which Nobel Prize-winning physicist pleaded in vain with Hitler for his son's life after the 1944 bomb plot?
Max Planck
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.
Q 10Which Nazi minister foiled his own arrest by putting the arresting officer on the telephone to Hitler?
Joseph Goebbels
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.
Q 11Besides scorched trousers and splinters in his legs, which injury did Hitler suffer in the July 1944 bomb blast?
Ruptured eardrums
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.
Q 12The surrender of an entire German army in which 1943 battle gave Hitler's opponents a new urgency?
Stalingrad
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.
Q 13Which present-day country holds the ruins of Hitler's East Prussian headquarters, bombed by Stauffenberg?
Poland
Q 21Which retired army chief of staff, the plotters' choice for head of state, shot himself as Operation Valkyrie failed?
Ludwig Beck
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.
Q 22Which former mayor of Leipzig did the conspirators of Operation Valkyrie intend to make chancellor of Germany?
Carl Goerdeler
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.
Q 23Which Replacement Army commander, long aware of the conspiracy, had Stauffenberg executed on the night of the coup?
Friedrich Fromm
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.
Q 14In which country was Claus von Stauffenberg serving with a panzer division when he was gravely wounded in 1943?
Tunisia
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.
Q 15Along with his right hand, what did Claus von Stauffenberg lose when Allied aircraft strafed his column in 1943?
His left eye
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.
Q 16Which Lutheran pastor was hanged at Flossenbürg in April 1945 alongside conspirators against Hitler?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been drawn into the resistance through his work for military intelligence. He died two weeks before American troops reached the camp.
Q 17Which Nazi leader did Hitler put in command of the Replacement Army after its officers had tried to overthrow him?
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Q 18What became compulsory throughout Germany's armed forces four days after the bomb plot against Hitler failed?
The Nazi salute
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.
Q 19Claus von Stauffenberg was born in a Bavarian castle holding which hereditary noble title?
Count
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.
Q 20Stauffenberg planted his bomb in Hitler's headquarters about six weeks after the start of which Allied invasion?
The Normandy landings
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.
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.
Q 24Which general rewrote the Operation Valkyrie orders for a coup and killed himself with a grenade once it failed?
Henning von Tresckow
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.
Q 25Which head of the General Army Office in Berlin issued the Operation Valkyrie orders on 20 July 1944?
Friedrich Olbricht
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.
Q 26Which major commanding Berlin's guard battalion first obeyed the plotters' orders, then crushed the coup for Hitler?
Otto Ernst Remer
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.
Q 27Which People's Court president berated the bomb plotters on film and died in an American air raid in 1945?
Roland Freisler
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.
Q 28Which field marshal, Operation Valkyrie's choice to lead the armed forces, stood trial in beltless, oversized clothes?
Erwin von Witzleben
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.
Q 29Which officer, an Olympic gold medallist in show jumping, unwittingly saved Hitler by shifting Stauffenberg's bomb?
Heinz Brandt
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.
Q 30Which admiral, long the head of German military intelligence, was hanged in April 1945 after his diaries were found?
Wilhelm Canaris
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.