On July 20th this year, President Joachim Gauck of Germany led the country's political elite in commemorating the 70th anniversary of the best-known assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, in 1944. The plot's leader, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg (played by Tom Cruise in the movie Valkyrie), put a briefcase containing a bomb underneath Adolf Hitler's table at the Führer's headquarters in East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler sustained only minor injuries. Von Stauffenberg, who initially believed that Hitler had been killed and had made his way to Berlin to lead the coup, was summarily shot, along with three other participants at the Bendlerblock, the then-military headquarters now housing the Ministry of Defence, where this year's commemoration ceremony took place.
Almost all the other members of the July 20th plot – officers, jurists, trade unionists, clergymen, diplomats – were also executed. Had the assassination succeeded, the plotters had planned to overthrow the regime, arrest leading Nazis, liberate the concentration camps, establish the rule of law, and negotiate peace with the Allies.
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