World War II Day by Day

Berlin, Germany · August 7, 1944

On July 20, 1944, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in his brief­case in a con­ference room at the East Prussia head­quarters of Adolf Hitler, the Wolf’s Lair (Wolfs­schanze), before excusing him­self to take a call in the tele­phone exchange hut. In the con­ference room were Hitler and his senior officers, exa­mining opera­tions maps spread over an oaken table. It is thought that one of the parti­ci­pants, seeking leg room, moved the brief­case behind a mas­sive support almost as wide as the map table itself. When the bomb exploded, the support leg deflected the blast from its intended victim. The deto­na­tion was the start of Opera­tion Wal­kuere (Val­kyrie), the code­name of the officers’ coup. Hitler sur­vived the blast to thwart the coup and, in con­cert with Reichs­fuerher-SS Hein­rich Himm­ler’s Gestapo (secret state police) and the Nazis’ poli­ti­cal courts, ex­tracted a savage revenge in the final stages of the war in Europe.

Begin­ning on this date in 1944 Nazi Judge-Presi­dent Roland Freis­ler of Berlin’s People’s Court (Volks­gerichts­hof) opened a series of show trials against the con­spi­rators rounded up in the drag­net. The trials were held in the swas­tika-bedecked Great Hall of the Berlin Cham­ber Court. Selected civil ser­vants, party func­tion­aries, mili­tary officers, and jour­nalists were among the 300 or so in atten­dance. Behind Freis­ler on the dais was a film camera so that Hitler could later view the pro­ceedings. The defen­dants that day—two jurists and six army officers—were pre­vented from con­sulting with their law­yers and forced to stand before the court in shabby clothes. Freis­ler shouted down their attempts to address the court at any length and with a stri­den­cy that made it diffi­cult for the film crew to record the defen­dants’ testi­mony so that their words could be heard by a film audi­ence. All eight were con­demned to death and hanged imme­di­ately. There was no possibility of appealing the verdict.

Four more show trials were held in August, and in every in­stance the accused was sen­tenced to death. Of the 7,000 alleged plot­ters—mili­tary and civil­ian—arrested by the Gestapo, nearly 5,000 were exe­cuted—among them two field marshals, 19 gene­rals, 26 colo­nels, two am­bas­sadors, seven diplo­mats, one cabi­net minis­ter, three secre­taries of state, as well as the head of the Reich Police.

Operation Valkyrie and Defendants in Roland Freisler’s “People’s Court”

Left: Claus von Stauffenberg (1907–1944) was a colonel in the Ersatz­heer (Replace­ment Army) and the driving force behind the July 20, 1944, plot to assas­si­nate Hitler and take control of Ger­many. For his involve­ment in the failed bomb plot known as Opera­tion Val­kyrie, he and several co-con­spi­ra­tors were shot by a firing squad in the Bendler­block (head­quarters of the Ersatz­heer) in Berlin on the night of July 21, 1944, their bodies dumped in a shallow grave. A cinematic retelling of the officers’ plot was released in late 2008, starring the American actor Tom Cruise. Bendlerstrasse, the street on which army headquarters was located, has been renamed Stauffenbergstrasse.

Right: Roland Freisler (1893–1945). As then-Secretary of State for the Reich Minis­try of Jus­tice, Freis­ler attended the January 1942 Wann­see Con­fer­ence out­side Berlin. Rein­hard Hey­drich, chief of the Reich Secu­rity Head Office and head of the Ger­man secret police appara­tus, had called the par­ti­ci­pants together as part of the Nazis’ quest to find a “final solu­tion to the Jewish Question,” i.e., how to the murder Europe’s Jews. In August 1942 Freis­ler was appointed “Presi­dent of the People’s Court” in the German capital.

Left: Freisler (center) in the Great Hall of the Berlin Cham­ber Court, August 1944. Freisl­er’s kan­ga­roo “People’s Court” had been set up to judge “poli­tical crimes.” Begin­ning in August 1944 Freis­ler presided over the trials of those charged in connec­tion with the July 20 bomb plot to assas­si­nate Hitler. Freis­ler was killed in his court­room during an Allied air raid in Febru­ary 1945 when he was hit on the head by falling masonry. Luise Jodl, wife of Ger­man Gen. Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Opera­tions Staff of the Armed Forces High Com­mand, was working at Luet­zow Hos­pital when Freis­ler’s body was brought in. “It is God’s ver­dict,” some­one commented. As Luise Jodl recalled: “Not one person said a word in reply.”

Right: Sixty-two-year-old Field Marshal Erwin von Witz­leben, shown in this photo from August 7, 1944, was the first to stand before Freis­ler, who imme­di­ately chas­tised him for returning a fleeting Nazi salute. Witz­leben was further humil­i­ated by being forced to hold his trousers at his waist, for he had been deprived of a belt or sus­pen­ders. Next to face Freis­ler was former Col. Gen Erich Hoep­ner, com­mander of the Ersatz­heer to which Stauf­fen­berg belonged. Freis­ler addressed the defen­dant as “Schweine­hund.” When Hoep­ner corrected Freisl­er, saying he was not a Schweine­hund, Freisler asked him what zoological category he fitted into.

History Channel Documentary on the Rise of Adolf Hitler and Operation Valkyrie—The Failed Officers’ Plot to Assassinate the German Leader (Multiple Episodes)