Downloaded from YTS.MX
The 20th of July, 1944.
The Wolfsschanze,
Germany's headquarters on the eastern front.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
Nestled away in the deep forests of Poland,
Adolf Hitler is drawing up plans
that he believes could secure his victory in Europe.
The führer strategies
are interrupted by a knock at the door.
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg,
Hitler's trusted chief of staff walks in
holding a briefcase.
But Stauffenberg is not here to talk battle plans,
he's here to kill Hitler.
There were lots of plots to kill Hitler,
and he survived so many
that it made Hitler feel that he really did have
this kind of divine providence behind him
that made him survive.
The most celebrated plot against him
was the July bomb plot of July, 1944,
in which you've got this kind of cadre of senior officers
all over the Third Reich
who have been meeting in secret for many years actually.
On the 20th of July, 1944,
Claus von Stauffenberg
made a serious attempt on the Führer's life
by bringing a bomb into the briefing room where Hitler was,
placing it under his desk
and hoping that it would kill Hitler.
Adolf Hitler,
the most notorious dictator of the 20th century.
Outraged by the Treaty of Versailles
and Germany's humiliation in the first World War,
Hitler fiercely campaigned
to rescue the Fatherland from ruin.
The mood in Germany at the end of World War I
was that of a humiliated and defeated people and nation.
This fight had been going on for four years.
Millions of people had died and no one had got anything,
or no one had got anywhere.
It was a mood of revolution,
a mood of deep dissatisfaction, a mood of instability,
and it felt like the country was on the brink of collapse.
His mesmerizing public speeches
called for a new order in Germany,
one which would cast off the weakened incompetent structure
of the Democratic regime,
and instead install a supreme national leader.
Citizens from all corners of the country
fell for the relentless promotion of his ideology,
and Hitler successfully recast himself as Germany's savior.
What Hitler is absolutely amazing at is speechmaking.
And to begin to understand Hitler,
you've really gotta understand
that he was the most amazing demagogue.
Hitler's speeches are really vitriolic,
but they're very effective,
and they attract regular audiences,
and he's really good at using populist themes.
And labels scapegoats for losing the war.
You name it, Jews, communists,
you know, whoever Hitler hates,
that given moment, he'll lay into them.
Listeners are listening and watching this,
and they're thinking, yes,
these are the reasons for our economic hardships.
And Hitler's also got this huge personal magnetism,
and he's got this instinctive understanding
of the psychology of crowds.
And of course,
you know, like any really brilliant public speaker,
he's going to use that to his advantage.
It's like a conductor with an orchestra.
Like many dictators before him,
he became insistent on protecting his godlike image
and divine right to power.
The Führer kept himself away
from the more violent and brutal aspects of the regime.
He promoted anti-Jewish propaganda,
but refused to bloody his own hands,
relying instead on his loyal circle
to rid Germany of its enemies me.
So the issue of how Hitler managed
to keep his popular image clean
while the final solution was underway
is obviously a very interesting
and a very difficult question.
But I suppose the essence of it is two things.
First of all, that those mass shootings
that were taking place in the USSR were not on German soil.
And of course, the second part, the most important part too,
that the death camps, all of those were on Polish soil.
So they were out of the immediate frame of sight
or reference of the Germans.
So again, in some way, they were happening elsewhere
and not really in their immediate field of vision.
Hitler is always mindful of public opinion.
I think that it's always important to remember that Hitler,
you know, does always worry about
what the German people think about him.
He doesn't just sort of seize power in 33 and then not care.
You know, he wants to be liked, he wants to be popular.
He's a political leader after all.
And all political leaders,
democratic, or fascist or otherwise, want to be liked.
However, Hitler and the Nazis
were not entirely immune to the consequences
of their dark agenda.
Feelings of disillusionment and disgust
built up amongst certain individuals.
And by 1944,
Hitler faced the biggest threat to his life yet.
Out of Hitler's Nazi regime,
spilled not only a drive to preserve
the country's economy and global status,
Nazism also meant the annihilation of Germany's enemies.
And in 1935, the creation of the Nuremberg Laws
set its sites firmly on the most hated group in Germany,
the Jews.
So we know that from as early as
Hitler's writings in "Mein Kampf,"
that he was personally antisemitic.
So we see his personal antisemitism
translated into state policy.
There were many different measures, legal measures
taken against the Jews, and also illegal measures as well.
So very early on,
there was a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
Very early on too, there was a civil service law,
which essentially threw out Jewish civil servants
from their positions.
The Nuremberg Laws
really put into place some legal parameters
for how the situation would be with Germany's Jews.
But what they did really was to turn
Germany's Jews into second class citizens,
really to take away their equal citizenship rights.
And also to forbid marriage or sexual relations
between Jews and Aryans.
Many citizens bought into the ideology
that the very presence of Jews threatened the German people.
Ordinary people everywhere
began practicing antisemitic views
and encouraging the idea that Jews were an inferior race,
separate to the superior Aryan Germans.
Before long, such poisonous rhetoric
turned into violent action.
And on the 9th of November, 1938,
the Nazi regime coordinated a wave of attacks
across the country.
You suddenly get this thing called Kristallnacht,
the Night of Broken Glass in 1938,
where the Nazis just literally set fire
to synagogues everywhere.
The world really noticed Kristallnacht,
you know, this absolutely horrific
destruction, slaughter, violence
carried out by the state against its own people.
It showed the world what Hitler was.
He was effectively a gangster and a murderer.
The violence was supposed to look
like an unplanned outburst of popular anger against Jews.
But in reality,
Kristallnacht state-sponsored vandalism and arson.
Nazi leaders actively coordinated it
with Adolf Hitler's support.
There's no doubt about the centrality
of antisemitism to Hitler's worldview.
There's absolutely no doubt about that.
But what he seemed to be trying to do
was sort of stay in the shadow
so that when we get a pogrom like this,
that the public, the German public and the population
were quite affronted by it.
Maybe not because they particularly supported the Jews,
but because it was a kind of a sort of flagrant violation
of law and order and sort of
a kind of very violent, violent affair across the land.
So, you know, it wasn't popular in that respect.
So there's that idea then
that Hitler was sort of staying in the shadows
and not being associated with that.
I think he managed to maintain his popularity
during this time,
first of all, because he was staying in the shadows
of more unpopular policies.
And there was certainly that sentiment
among the German population
because of this myth that surrounded the führer,
that well, if there were unpleasant things going on
or policies that they didn't like,
then somehow that Hitler couldn't know about it,
that he wasn't associated with it,
that it had to be one of the other leaders.
Universal approval of the violent pogroms
was not a reality for Hitler.
In fact, opposition lurked in unexpected places
and arose from unexpected individuals.
Major general Henning von Tresckow
absolutely despised the Nuremberg Laws
and the violent Kristallnacht attacks.
From as early as the 1930s,
the Nazi officer had been plotting Hitler's overthrow
and gathering a trusted circle of people
to assassinate the Führer.
Tresckow's disgust towards extreme antisemitism,
consequently spurred him on to become a key architect
of Operation Valkyrie.
Meanwhile, at the graveyard attached to the institution,
bodies are exhumed for autopsy.
20,000 are buried here,
15,000 who died in a lethal gas chamber
were cremated and their ashes in turd.
Death books found hidden in the wine cellar
of the Hadamar institution revealed part of the story
of the mass killings.
The bulky volumes contained thousands of death certificates.
Profession unknown, nationality unknown
was written after each name.
Feelings of disenchantment, however,
did not halt with Hitler's anti-Jewish policies.
In 1939, one of the darkest programs of the Nazi regime
came into existence.
Aktion T4.
Where Hitler's popularity starts to take a real dent
is his association,
or the Nazi association with what is called the T4 program.
Now, the T4 program
is named after the address in which it was headquartered,
Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin.
And it really was the most repellent form
of kind of Nazi quote unquote "medicine"
that you could imagine.
Because it was this idea
that you have to treat a people as a body.
But what if you've got part of your body as a population
that is considered to be weak,
i.e. sort of cancerous or deformed,
or has hereditary illnesses?
Well, why don't you just chop them off as well?
Because if you can get rid of them,
i.e. people with congenital problems,
you are gonna stop those bad genes being passed on.
And that's essentially what the T4 program is.
It is basically chopping people out of life.
You're killing them.
You're killing children with epilepsy.
You're killing people who've got mild spinal deformities.
You're killing people who've even got stutters
because you are saying they're genetically weak
and we don't want them,
if we're gonna make this strong, blonde Aryan race
full of perfect super humans.
It's kind of pseudo medicine, it's pseudoscience.
The unlawful system of mass murder,
outraged many German citizens,
particularly Protestants and Catholics,
who led protests against the exterminations.
Relatives of patients everywhere frantically panicked
with many, withdrawing their relatives
from asylums to care for them at home.
In some places, doctors and psychiatrists
also cooperated with families
to have patients discharged or transferred
to private clinics beyond the reach of T4
Führer Chancellery Director Phillip Bouhler
and physician Karl Brandt led the killing operation.
Under their leadership, T4 operatives established
six gassing installations for adults
as part of the euthanasia action.
For every person killed, a death certificate was prepared,
giving a false, but plausible cause of death
to hide the evil reality.
Hitler publicly canceled the program in 1941
after outcry from the German people.
However, the killings in fact, continued
until the end of the war.
By 1945, the Nazis had callously murdered
as many as 300,000 innocent people.
The T4 euthanasia program
represented in many ways a rehearsal
for Nazi Germany's subsequent genocidal policies.
Planners of the final solution
later borrowed the gas chamber method
to eradicate the Jewish and Roma populations
on a scale never before seen in history.
Two years into the largest conflict in history,
Adolf Hitler devised his riskiest move yet,
Operation Barbarossa
Hitler despised Bolshevism and Stalin's regime.
Intent on wiping out the Soviet Union,
he ordered Nazi troops to invade Russian occupied territory
on the 22nd of June, 1941.
Hitler had assured the high command
that we have only to kick in the front door,
and the whole rotten edifice will come tumbling down.
But Russia was not France.
Despite the serious losses inflicted on the Red Army
and extensive territorial gains,
the mission to completely destroy Soviet fighting power
was not achieved.
The Soviets were not going to go down easily.
Had Hitler stopped
after he'd successfully conquered France
and the low countries,
and not decided in June, 1941
that he was going to invade
this really quite big country called Russia,
he may have stayed in power.
But of course, what Stalin's got
is a lot of room to fight him,
because he can retreat and retreat and retreat and retreat,
and you've still got thousands of miles of Russia behind you
that you can fall back on.
But also what Stalin does is he's very good at regrouping
and getting his forces back together.
Germans use a lot of overdesigned tanks,
overdesigned uniforms, overdesigned weapons.
What the Russians are good at doing is
just getting things together in a kind of makeshift way.
But that works.
You know, everything Russians have,
uniforms, tanks, weaponry,
really simple, really easy to use,
really easy to mass produce very, very quickly.
German kit takes ages to produce.
So this is another real problem that's faced by the Germans.
1942 would be an even worse year
for Hitler's fight in the East.
The Führer hoped to take
the strategic city of Stalingrad easily,
but the well-armed Red Army and the fierce Russian winter
made German soldiers' lives absolute hell.
By mid-November,
the Germans found themselves outnumbered, outgunned,
extremely low on food and medical supplies,
and surrounded by Russians.
But Hitler refused to withdraw troops.
He placed prestige over lives and commanded
they hold their positions to the last man
and the last round.
He also promised additional provisions,
provisions that never arrived.
So when the tide of the war turned in 1943
with a battle of Stalingrad
and then the fortunes went the other way,
then that sort of question of the infallibility
of the Führer came to be called into question.
So whilst by this point after Stalingrad,
the cult of the leader was diminished somewhat,
he'd created this myth of the Soviet hordes
and this great Soviet enemy to such an extent
that out of fear and out of desperation,
both the army and the home front
really worked until the bitter end before capitulation.
Left with little choice,
German general Friedrich Paulus went against Hitler's orders
and surrendered his weakened troops to Russia
on February the 2nd 1943,
an act which Hitler later called "treason."
The heavy defeat, punctured the Führer's power in Europe,
and a lurking feeling of disenchantment
spread throughout the German army.
Stalingrad soon became a major catalyst
for conspirators across the Third Reich
to join the plot to kill Hitler.
Claus von Stauffenberg was no exception.
He had witnessed firsthand the absolute catastrophe
on the eastern front
and became convinced that Hitler had to be removed.
Stauffenberg was born into an aristocratic family.
Despite joining the Wehrmacht,
he, like many elites,
tended to view the Nazis with this taste.
However, it would not just be a class issue
that persuaded Stauffenberg
to turn away from his divine leader.
His time on the Eastern front opened his eyes
to the mass murder of Jews and Slavs.
Outraged, the young officer openly stated,
"They are shooting Jews in masses.
These crimes must not be allowed to continue."
As well as places like Auschwitz,
which were relatively easy to keep quite secret,
what people also knew about from troops
returning from the front,
and especially from the Eastern front,
was the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads
that went behind the German lines,
killing anybody they regarded as
being an enemy of the Third Reich,
such as Jews and communists and so on.
And the Einsatzgruppen killed millions of people,
and it was impossible to keep that quiet.
Stauffenberg became so vocal in his criticism,
his officers decided that he should be posted to Tunisia,
a move which would end with Stauffenberg
losing his left eye, his right hand, and two fingers
in a surprise attack by American fighter aircraft.
Stauffenberg's life-changing injuries
did not hinder his mission
to rid Germany of its ruthless dictator.
Instead, his fate placed him in an even better position
to implement the plot,
right at the heart of Berlin.
In September, 1943,
Stauffenberg was posted to the headquarters
of the replacement army on the Bendlerstrasse.
Here he would be introduced to two key conspirators,
Major General Henning von Tresckow,
and General Friedrich Olbricht.
The tide of the war was now turning against Germany.
The trio had to move first to implement the plot.
We shall defend our island,
whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on beaches, landing grounds,
in fields, in streets, and on the hills.
We shall never surrender.
Olbricht put forward a new strategy
for staging a coup against Hitler.
The replacement Army had an operational plan called
Operation Valkyrie
to be used in the event of a breakdown of law and order.
Valkyrie was the perfect way to mobilize the reserve army
during the takeover.
Tresckow and Stauffenberg worked tirelessly
to modify Valkyrie
and at the same time remain undiscovered.
The pair drafted plans to occupy German cities,
take control of Heinrich Himmler's SS and Gestapo,
and even arrest the Nazi leadership.
The plotters finalized every tiny detail,
even devising a whole new government structure,
following takeover.
General Ludwig Beck would be placed as head of state,
the long-term resistor Dr. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler
would become Germany's new chancellor.
Tresckow would take control of all German security services,
and either Olbricht or Stauffenberg
would serve as state secretary.
The only question that remained was how to kill Hitler.
There were lots of plots to kill Hitler,
and he survived so many
that it made Hitler feel
that he really did have this
kind of divine providence behind him
that made him survive.
But actually, the most kind of celebrated plot
against him was the July Bomb Plot of July, 1944,
in which you've got this kind of cadre
of senior officers all over the Third Reich
who've been meeting in secret for many years actually,
what they wanna do is to get rid of Hitler.
And they don't want to get rid of Hitler because he's evil,
that may be part of it,
they want to get rid of Hitler
because they think he's fighting the war badly,
and they just are fed up with him.
And indeed Hitler is fighting the war badly
'cause he's a terrible, terrible strategist.
The conspirators considered poisoning his food
and even shooting the Führer at a dinner party.
But by late 1943,
Hitler had become increasingly paranoid and suspicious,
often abruptly changing plans or tightening access.
In the end, a time bomb was the only option.
At the time of planning,
none of the conspirators had direct access to Adolf Hitler.
However, in 1944, everything changed for Stauffenberg.
General Friedrich Fromm,
the commander of the replacement Army,
appointed Stauffenberg as his chief of staff.
Fromm was the only officer other than Hitler
who could initiate Operation Valkyrie with his signature.
Aware of his subordinate's plan,
he made a deal to remain quiet
on the condition that he became a top official
in the new government after the mutiny.
The plan was coming into place,
and Stauffenberg was now in a position
where he could see Hitler on a regular basis.
Of all the conspirators,
he was the best placed to become the assassin.
Time was ticking.
Certain defeat in the war closed in,
and the coup needed to take place soon
to save Germany from total destruction.
The Army had posted Tresckow to the eastern front
and the original assassin, General Hellmuth Stieff
had backed down from the plan.
Stauffenberg took total control of the resistance,
but in doing so,
he placed himself as both the assassin and the commander
of the Valkyrie Operation in Berlin.
Hidden away in the dark shadows of the Masurian woods,
Hitler was gathering his most trusted offices
for a military conference at the Wolfsschanze.
It was the 20th of July, 1944,
and Stauffenberg found himself
in the Eastern front headquarters,
alongside his aide, Lieutenant Werner von Haeften.
Briefcase in hand,
the Colonel now had the perfect opportunity to plant a bomb
that could change the course of history forever.
So on 20th of July, 1944, everything's in place.
You've got people in Berlin ready to take over the SS.
You've got various army units all over the Third Reich,
ready to go, the drop of the code word "Valkyrie,"
which is gonna say that Hitler's being killed.
However,
the summer sun had reared its brutal head.
The atmosphere was intense and uncomfortable.
And irritated by the heat,
Hitler moved the meeting from the Führerbunker
to a wooden hut.
At 12:30pm, Stauffenberg excused himself to a nearby room,
claiming he needed to change his shirt.
But in reality, the pair began fussing the first bomb.
A guard knocked at the door,
urging the colonel to hurry.
Haeften and Stauffenberg panicked.
The Führer was waiting
and no time remained to fuse the second bomb,
one bomb would have to do.
As the seconds slipped away,
Stauffenberg swiftly excused himself
under the pretext of making a phone call.
But unbeknownst to the would-be assassin,
Colonel Heinz Brandt positioned next to Hitler,
inadvertently collided with the briefcase,
deftly nudging it behind a table leg.
The fate of Europe now hung in the balance.
At 12:42pm, the bomb detonated.
Shock waves reverberated through the Wolfsschanze.
Stauffenberg and Haeften quickly escaped
driving to a nearby airfield
to return to Berlin and finish the job.
The hopes of resistance crumbled as the aftermath unfolded.
Stauffenberg, Olbricht, and Ludwig Beck
rushed to commandeer various government buildings
and arrested general Fromm for refusal to cooperate
until Hitler's death had been confirmed.
But soon came the news they had been fearing.
Hitler was, in fact, very much alive.
As it happened, the furniture took most of the blast,
and Hitler got away with just very superficial injuries.
And put into place straight away,
the capture, the arrest, and then the execution
of all of those who were involved in that bomb plot.
Had the bomb found its place to Hitler's left,
had the meeting unfolded in the Führerbunker,
and had Stauffenberg triggered both devices,
the assassination success would've seemed inevitable.
Yet fate intervened.
Hitler emerged with only limited injuries,
sheltered by a table leg
that absorbed the brunt of the blast.
The plan had faltered, the tables had turned.
The dream of a world without Hitler
slipped through the grasp of those who dared to defy.
Furious and humiliated,
Hitler ordered commanding officer Otto Ernst Remer
to arrest the conspirators and bring them to him alive.
But a bitter general Fromm had other ideas.
To hide his involvement
from ordered immediate court martials,
the conspirators now faced swift and brutal reprisals
for their bold attempt to alter the course of history.
Ludwig Beck asked for a pistol and shot himself,
the first of many suicide attempts in the coming days.
At 00:10 hours on the 21st of July, 1944,
Colonel von Stauffenberg, General Friedrich Olbricht,
Lieutenant Werner von Haeften
and another officer, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim
were killed by firing squad in the Bendlerblock courtyard.
On the eastern front, Tresckow learned of the plotters fate
and committed suicide.
Until the end, he remained loyal to the cause.
The plot to kill Hitler was well and truly over.
The 20th of July, plot
serves as a testament to the bravery of those
who dared to stand against a ruthless regime.
Even in the face of almost insurmountable odds.
If the plan had succeeded,
it would've undoubtedly shortened the war by many months
and saved countless lives.
However, Hitler's days were still numbered,
and he would face the looming shadow of death
sooner rather than later.
The Russians move steadily from the East
whilst the western allies crossed the Rhineland.
By April, 1945, 3 million Soviet troops
dealt brutal blows to the last traces
of the German resistance.
With the Russians at the gates to Berlin,
Adolf Hitler had nowhere to run.
The first half of 1945 is probably
the darkest six months in Germany's history
because it being invaded by
the Russians, the Red Army from the East,
and you've got the other allies
coming through from the west.
And it's the Russians who reach Berlin first,
and when they reach Berlin,
it's a city in rubble, it's a city in flames,
it's a city in chaos.
It's a city in which
squads of marauding loyal Nazis
are going around hanging people
who are not taking part in the resistance to the city.
It's a city in which
you then got some Nazis committing suicide.
It is the most benighted, appalling place you can imagine.
And you've got the Soviet army
literally raping and pillaging this city.
Towards the end of the war, of course,
Hitler was spending more and more time
in his mountain retreat, The Berghof.
And then people were seeing less of him.
He was making less and less public appearances.
And then eventually, in the last months of the war,
into the Führerbunker.
And this is when public opinion of the Führer
starts to crumble.
Hitler's last days in the Führerbunker
under the Reich Chancellery in center of Berlin,
are kind of terrible end of a Shakespearean tragedy.
As the thunder Russian artillery all around them
and they're deep, deep inside this
sort of concrete underground fortress.
Everybody's sort of kind of going mad and especially Hitler.
On April the 30th,
he committed suicide in his bunker
as the city at the heart of his thousandth year Reich
burned to the ground and crumbled in ruins around him.
The war in Europe ended forever on May the 7th, 1945,
and Hitler's rule was finally over.
The question of how much the Germans knew
about what had happened to the Jewish population
is very complex.
So certainly they knew
that their Jewish compatriots were disappearing,
being taken away.
They were being taken away they believed
as indeed some of the Jewish people themselves believed,
they were taken away to work in the East.
During the war, word leaked out
from people who had escaped some camps.
There were aerial pictures taken of places like Auschwitz.
So, you know, by the middle of the war,
the world at large had a very good idea
that this slaughter was being carried out
on an industrial scale.
Yes, some rumors did circulate back
from soldiers on leave,
and other information did filter back to the Reich.
But the German population was busy with facing its own war,
dealing on a day-to-day basis with the course of the war,
allied bombings, rationing, food shortages.
There was a deliberate policy on the part of the Nazis
that this extermination should take place,
not on German soil so these death camps were all in Poland,
so they were outta the direct line of vision
of the German population.
When the Germans fully appreciated
what had been done in their name by the Nazis,
it took a very long time for that to sink in.
If you look at public opinion polls carried out
in the 40s and the 50s in Germany,
there was still a lot of residual affection for Nazism.
It was felt that this was something
that had made Germany great again.
It was something that had got things moving and done.
Yes, there had been excesses,
the small matter of the Holocaust clearly.
But people, some people in Germany were willing just to say,
if we can divorce the kind of genocide bit from Nazism,
you know, is Nazism so bad?
Minority of Germans were still
affectionate towards Nazism and towards Hitler.
The tyrannical force of Nazi Germany
sent the world into chaos.
An empire of hate, violence, and discrimination
had spread across the world like a virus.
The atrocities of the Nazi regime
came to popular attention.
Both the Western and the Soviet forces
came to liberate the Nazi camps,
and they were absolutely shocked and horrified
with what they found.
And once that became known to the German people as well,
then they were again absolutely horrified and appalled
about what had been carried out in their name
by the Hitler dictatorship.
Hitler's rule left a mark on history,
a reminder that this behavior should never be tolerated
and the world should not dismiss
such brutal atrocities again.
Certainly there are a lot of reasons
why you might have voted for Hitler in the 30s,
not all of which involved you being evil.
But certainly if you are a fan of Hitler
after the war still,
and after all the revelations that have come out,
then I would say you definitely are evil.
Today the Valkyrie conspirators
are memorialized as heroes,
even inscribed into the very geography of Germany
through street names.
A reminder that in times of darkness,
there will always be those brave enough to fight evil
even from the inside.
German guns.
German bombs.