The shadow of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler still haunts Germany

Seventy-nine years ago today, 20 July 1944, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, a much-wounded young Wehrmacht officer, packed a briefcase in a broiling Berlin and flew to the ‘Wolf’s Lair’ the headquarters of Adolf Hitler deep in a Polish forest 100 miles behind the eastern front. 

Stauffenberg – who had lost an eye, a hand, and all but two fingers on his remaining hand in North Africa – packed a deadly load wrapped in a spare shirt: two lumps of captured British-made plastic explosives along with their detonators. Summoned to attend a military conference with the Fuhrer, his true aim was to assassinate the dictator who was leading his beloved Germany to disaster.

Stauffenberg succeeded in planting his bomb and bluffed his way out of the tight security screen surrounding the Wolf’s Lair to return to Berlin and launch Operation Valkyrie: a military putsch to depose the Nazis and end the Second World War.