20 July plot

The Wolf's Lair conference room soon after the explosion

Date	20 July 1944
Location	Rastenburg, East Prussia, Germany (today Kętrzyn, Warmia-Masuria, Poland) 54°04′46″N 21°29′37″E / 54.079344°N 21.493544°E / 54.079344; 21.493544
Result	Hitler survives the bomb with minor injuries. Military coup d'état against the Nazi government fails within 5 hours. Nazi government victory and insurgents rounded up.

Casualties and losses

4,980 executed/committed suicide out of 7,000 arrested

4 killed

13 injured

4 killed

On 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg and other conspirators attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of Nazi Germany, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The name Operation Valkyrie, originally referring to part of the conspiracy, has become associated with the entire event. The apparent purpose of the assassination attempt was to seize political control of Germany and its armed forces from the Nazi Party (including the SS) and to make peace with the western Allies as soon as possible. The underlying desire of many of the involved high-ranking Wehrmacht officers was apparently to show to the world that not all Germans were like Hitler and the Nazi Party. The details of the conspirators' peace initiatives remain unknown, but they likely would have included demands to accept wide-reaching territorial annexations by Germany in Europe.

The plot was the culmination of the efforts by several groups in the German resistance to overthrow the Nazi German government. The failure of the assassination and the military coup d'état which was planned to follow led to the arrest of at least 7,000 people by the Gestapo, of whom 4,980 were executed.

Since 1938, conspiratorial groups planning an overthrow of some kind had existed in the German Army and in the German Military Intelligence Organization (Abwehr). Early leaders of these plots included Brigadier-General Hans Oster, General Ludwig Beck and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben. Oster was the deputy head of the Military Intelligence Office. Beck was a former Chief-of-Staff of the German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH). Von Witzleben was the former commander of the German 1st Army and the former Commander-in-Chief of the German Army Command in the West (Oberbefehlshaber West, or OB West). They soon established contacts with several prominent civilians, including Carl Goerdeler, the former mayor of Leipzig, and Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, the great-grandnephew of the hero of the Franco-Prussian War.

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Wikipedia