Seventy years ago this July 20, a dashing colonel, Claus von Stauffenberg, blind in one eye and missing fingers on one hand, placed a bomb under a conference table in East Prussia. The plan, called Operation Valkyrie, was to kill Hitler, declare martial law to put down an alleged SS coup, and to install a government that would negotiate an end to the war with the Allies.
The plan almost worked: several men in the room were killed, and if Stauffenberg had either used two bombs (one was left behind for reasons that remain unclear) or if the conference had taken place in the usual airtight bunker (it was moved to an airy hut because of the heat), everyone would have been killed. After it emerged that Hitler had survived, the coup in Berlin fell apart, and an opportunist commander, General Friedrich Fromm, had Stauffenberg, his adjutant First Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, his old friend Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, and Lieutenant General Friedrich Olbricht (commander of the reserve army that was to arrest the SS, SD, and Gestapo across Germany) shot.
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