Hitler Blows Up

A lot of people tried to kill Hitler. As we already know, none of those people succeeded. In this week's episode, we start with an audio story depicting one of those failed attempts. Next, Mark walks us through some of the many failed plots to kill one of history's greatest villains. And then we ask: What if? 

We'll hear a short audio interlude where we meet Hitler's replacement. Finally, Mark gives us a short glimpse into a world in which an assassin successfully kills Hitler! How would this have changed the war? How many lives could have been saved? Press play, and let's take a trip. 

Transcript

Introduction
Hello, my name is Mark Bouffard. Welcome to What If World History?

Like you, I share a passion for civilizations, cultures, and stories of the past. This show looks at the epic events that sewed the fabric of our history and sculpted the world we now know. And it imagines: What If they happened a little bit differently?

Would it change the outcome? What might the “new history” look like? 

I invite you to explore the possibilities with me. 

Before we begin, I’d like to take a quick minute to ask you to drop a review on the podcast in whatever app you are listening. You can also follow What if World History? on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

If this is your first time listening, we will explore events as they happened in our history, then we will explore an alternative timeline and show how it will shape a new future. Along the way, we will put you in the shoes of some of the key players 
through a series of Diaries. 

Let’s take a trip.

Our episode today is:
Hitler Blows Up
We will detail a successful plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler at his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on July 20. And we will muse how his death would save 10 million lives and lower the heat of the coming Cold War.

Listener note: Any discussion on Adolph Hitler, his abhorrent policies, or his disillusioned supporters is fraught with danger. I truthfully thought about staying a mile away from the subject. But the more research I did into his assassination attempts, it felt like a compelling subject that could be explored appropriately from a historical discussion. Here is my attempt. 

Assassin’s Diary
Claus von Stauffenberg
Wolf’s Lair, East Prussia
July 20, 1944

As the plane landed and taxied down the grass runway, Claus von Stauffenberg scribbled his last words to his wife, Nina. He thanked her for 11 years of marriage and five beautiful children. He asked for their forgiveness for what he was about to do and the consequences it might bring against them. 

Stauffenberg wanted her to know why he was going to kill the Fuhrer. He wanted her to know it was for his atrocities, for the people of Germany, and most importantly, Stauffenberg was doing it for their futures, because he didn’t expect to have one past the next few hours.

Stauffenberg was dressed in polished leather boots and a crisp, gray German uniform, that was cuffed on the left sleeve to account for his missing hand. He snapped salutes to the soldiers who greeted the plane and stepped into a waiting car with this aide, Werner von Haeften.

The short bumpy drive through the forest to the camp brought a breezy respite from the smothering summer heat. The military conference was supposed to take place late in the afternoon, but a visit from Mussolini, pushed the conference up to noon at the apex of the day’s humidity and temperature.

As Stauffenberg stepped out of the car, he asked the Major who greeted him if he could change his shirt before the meeting started. The travel and temperature necessitated a change, he stated. Stauffenberg was shown to the Major’s personal quarters, where he and Haeften closed the door to the room.

Working quickly, Haeften and Stauffenberg unwrapped the two bricks of British plastic explosives in the briefcase. A curt knock on the door let them know the conference was about to start. Using a pair of pliers, Stauffenberg deftly snapped the glass vial in the pencil-fuse and buried it into the top of the brick. Again he pinched the glass vial and buried the second fuse into another plastic explosive. Snapping the case shut, they left the room.

Haeften drifted outside to wait near the car. Stauffenberg entered the room while one of the Generals was giving a dire update on the Eastern Front, where several divisions were about to be encircled by the Red Army. He slid past Colonel Brandt, who was standing against the wall, and sat down in an open chair next to Hitler. He pushed his big leather briefcase, filled with 2 Kg of plastic explosive, next to his right foot.

Stauffenberg knew the 10 minute-fuse could go off at any time. It had been three minutes, but in this temperature, the degradation of the wire that would trip the detonator could accelerate and cause the bomb to explode in 6-8 minutes. He leaned to his right and asked the stenographer to watch his briefcase while he fetched some papers for his presentation.

Silently and cooly, Stauffenberg rose from his seat and exited the conference room. Colonel Brandt occupied his seat, but did not move his briefcase. A few minutes later the building exploded in a shower of concrete, wood and metal. The entire hut collapsed onto the ground as the walls and floor disintegrated from the blast. Any part of the structure that hadn’t exploded was burning furiously. Soldiers were running to quell the fires and look for survivors. 

Stauffenberg chanced a look into the wreckage as he walked to the flat, collapsed slab that covered the ground where the conference room stood. He was a veteran of many wars, but the carnage from the explosion was more than he had seen. It was obvious that any man or woman in that conference room, and even the rest of the building, did not survive the explosion.

Stauffenberg expected to feel elation at accomplishing his assassintation. Instead, he felt a heavy sadness over the necessity of killing so many other fellow soldiers in this attempt. He nodded to Haeften and the car sped towards the airfield.

Much had been accomplished in the last few hours to reshape the war, but the next few hours would determine how successful their coup would be in reshaping Germany’s future.


A Lot of People Tried to Kill Hitler
In researching the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, I discovered that there were many different assassination attempts against him starting as early as 1932. Hitler was quoted as saying “I might be killed by a criminal, or by an idiot, at any time.”

In his book, “Killing Hitler” Roger Moorhouse states: “As chancellor, Hitler became heir to a surprisingly violent tradition of assassination plots. The famous nineteenth-century chancellor Otto von Bismarck had escaped two such attempts, and the volatile years after World War One had seen a spate of political murders, culminating in the assassination of the foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, in Berlin in the summer of 1922.

Hitler’s security was handled by the Schutzstaffel (SS) or “Protection Squad”. SS applicants were strictly vetted and discipline was tight. The soldiers in this unit were to be efficient, resourceful, trustworthy, and above all “blindly devoted” to Adolf Hitler. Their motto was “my honor is loyalty”.

From the beginning of his leadership, Hitler was the target of several inept assassination attempts. In early 1932, Hitler and several members of his staff fell ill after dining at the Kaiserhof hotel in Berlin. A few weeks later a poisoned letter was sent to him from a member of the Bavarian State Parliament, but it was intercepted.

Several military and civilian plots in 1934 and 1935 were stopped in the planning stages by the Gestapo. On October 5, 1939, members of the Polish army hid 500kg of TNT in a ditch along the route of Hitler’s victory parade through Poland. However, the parade route was diverted at the last minute and the sappers never got their chance.

Moorhouse surmises: “On one hand, Hitler was obsessed with his own mortality. He viewed himself as the “man of destiny,” the man to lead Germany out of slavery. Yet his fragile constitution caused him to believe that his time was short. By 1936 he was complaining of a catalog of ailments, including tinnitus, migraines, insomnia, eczema, stomach cramps, flatulence, and bleeding gums. 

In addition to all of that, Hitler was preoccupied with the idea that he might fall victim to an assassin. He took an extraordinary interest in security measures and demanded that they be constantly updated and intensified. 

For would-be killers, pistols or knives were not good options for the assassination attempt. All visiting officers were required to remove their belts and weapons. It was widely believed that Hitler not only wore a bulletproof vest but sported a service cap reinforced with steel. Poisoning too was out of the question, as all of Hitler’s food was specially prepared by his own cooks and was tasted for him by his personal physician, Dr. Morrell. The weapon of choice, therefore, was usually, the time bomb.

In November of 1939, a German carpenter placed a timed bomb at the Burgerbraukeller in Munich where Hitler would commemorate his Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler left the hall early, the bomb detonated on time, missing him, but killing eight and wounding sixty-two.

In his book, “Killing Hitler”, Moorhouse details one plot that should have worked. Colonel Henning von Tesckow, a member of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s staff, told a colleague, “The assassination must be attempted at all costs. What matters now is no longer the practical purpose of the coup, but to prove to the world and for the records of history that the men of the resistance movement dared to take the decisive step. Compared to this objective, nothing else is of consequence.” 

On March 13, 1943, Tesckow smuggled explosives disguised as a case with two brandy bottles onto Hitler’s plane. The plane took off and the conspirators waited for news of an accident. After months of planning and testing different explosives and fuses, their parcel did not explode. Hitler’s plane had landed safely. 

The fuse worked, the firing pins struck, the percussion cap evidently ignited. Still, the bomb did not detonate, perhaps because the explosive, carried in the plane's hold, was sensitive to cold.

Tresckow was able to retrieve the unopened package by exchanging it for two real brandy bottles and the plot was not discovered. According to Moorhouse, one of the conspirators quipped Hitler had a “guardian devil.”

A week later on March 21, another plot came minutes away from success. Moorhouse again details the conspiracy. “Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdoff had been detailed as host during the exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry in Berlin. Since it would be impossible to plant a bomb under the dais or in the lectern, he realized he would have to become the world’s first suicide bomber.  

Gersdoff states, “At this point, it became clear to me that an attack was only possible if I were to carry the explosives about my person, and blow myself up as close to Hitler as possible.”

Hitler was supposed to tour for 30 minutes, so Gersdorff set a ten-minute fuse. He began gamely providing information on the numerous items on display and attempting to engage Hitler’s interest. As he pointed out the exhibits, he stayed as close as possible to Hitler’s side, concerned that the explosives might detonate at any moment. 

However, he quickly realized that Hitler wasn’t listening and was distracted. Gersdorff tried once again to interest the Fuhrer in one of the exhibits--one of Napoleanic standards raised from a river bed--but the effort was in vain. 

“Instead,” he recalled “Hitler went, or rather ran, out of the side door. During his short tour of the exhibition, he had barely looked at anything and had not said a word.” The planned thirty-minute tour lasted a mere two minutes. Gersdorff stopped the fuse and composed himself at a nearby club. The next plot would be the biggest, boldest and most direct attempt at, not just killing Hitler, but the entire Nazi establishment.



State of the War in July 1944
In thinking about the timing of the July 20 assassination plot, it is important to think about the state of the war. And in the minds of many in the German High Command, the outlook was quite bleak. In their eyes, the impetus for the cabal was Hitler’s inept leadership of the German forces and his insistence of fighting to the last man for every inch of ground--regardless of staggering losses.

A month before, on June 6, the Allies successfully invaded the Normandy coast. Hitler’s vaunted Atlantic Wall had been crushed in a matter of hours. Despite clear signs that the landing was a major offensive, Hitler slept late, withheld Panzer tank support, and hindered the local command-and-control of his generals, Rommel and Rundstedt.

By the end of the first week of the invasion, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions of tons of supplies were successfully established in France. By June 26, the deepwater port of Cherbourg, although sabotaged, was in Allied hands.

The Panzer and SS Divisions guarding Caen, a crucial transportation hub, were cut off during furious fighting in June and July. Again Hitler overruled a strategic retreat and ordered each unit to fight until the last man. By mid-July, the forces and the city were destroyed. The Allies fully occupied the town by July 21.

The Wehrmacht, or German defense forces, were systematically being pushed back across France as the Allies broke out of the Normandy region. In fact, a month after the assassination attempt, on August 25, Paris would be liberated from German occupation.

In Italy, four major Allied offensives in the early part of 1944, had broken the German Winter lines south of Rome. The German Tenth Army narrowly escaped annihilation and Rome was occupied by the Allies on June 4. The Allies captured Florence and were pushing aggressively into Northern Italy, but were halted by the terrain and entrenched Wehrmacht defenses. Unlike in Western Europe, the Germans had a strong, fortified defensive line to hold back the Allied advance.

On the Eastern Front, the Soviets launched a massive offensive on June 22 in Belarus that essentially destroyed the German Army Group Center at the cost of thirty divisions and three hundred thousand men over the next few weeks. After that defeat, the Russians launched another offensive in Western Ukraine and Eastern Poland. As was the case in Western Europe, the German armies were being driven back by campaigns that overwhelmed them with huge waves of troops, equipment, and material.

In other wartime theaters, the situation was just as dire for Germany’s partners. In the Pacific, the Allies invaded Saipan on June 15. This decisive, strategic offensive breached the Japanese inner defense zone less than 1200 miles from Tokyo. According to Wiliam Hopkins in his book, “The Pacific War”, the dwindling Japanese force on the island was wiped out after a nighttime banzai attack of 3,000 to 4,000 troops. Two days later the island was seized.

Additionally, US forces continued to press the Japanese defensive perimeter back through amphibious landings in other islands. In mid-June 1944, they began their offensive against the Mariana and Palau islands and decisively defeated Japanese forces in the Battle of the Philippine Sea. 

From the perspective of German military leadership, the war was heading towards a crushing defeat. Loyalty and duty to the country were strong Prussian military traditions, but some key German officers were about to break their oaths in an attempt to save millions of lives.

The Plot
As I detailed earlier, key high-ranking members of the German military were involved in several conspiracies and direct attempts on Hitler’s life. 

According to Moorhouse in “Killing Hitler”, “Of all the disparate resistance groups, the military opposition to Hitler was perhaps the most contradictory. It would be the German army that would supply Hitler with some of his bitterest opponents, and which, in due course, would come closest to removing him altogether.

As a resistance center, the German military also had a number of distinct advantages over its civilian plotters. It was immune to the attention of the Nazi security organizations. The military was the only body capable of removing the party leadership while maintaining order at home and at the front. It could also provide a replacement administration. Most crucially, a few military figures, at the staff level and above, had access to their target. They were also armed and in the business of killing.”

But among the would-be civilian and military conspirators, there was not a consensus on the best course of action. Some wanted Hitler arrested and arraigned for trial. Others knew he had to die.

One conspirator recalled, “The general conviction was that German troops would never be willing to accept a different command as long as Hitler lived. But news of his death would instantly bring about the collapse of the myth surrounding his name. Hence there was no way of gaining the support of large numbers of German troops without eliminating Hitler.”

The assassination attempt that became known as The July 20 Plot had its roots on the Tunisian coast of North Africa. There, a brilliant young officer, Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg was strafed by American aircraft while directing a tactical withdrawal. Stauffenberg lost his left eye, most of his right hand, and two fingers of his left. He was also riddled in the back and legs with shrapnel. His doctors did not expect him to survive the day.

In “Killing Hitler”, Moorhouse provides some additional context for Stauffenberg’s motivations. “As with many of his colleagues, the decisive factor in Stauffenberg’s conversion appears to have been the atrocities perpetrated by the SS against enemy civilians, and especially the Jews. In May 1942, he received a graphic eyewitness account of the mass executions in a small Ukrainian town. His immediate reaction was that Hitler had to be overthrown. In time, he came to advocate tyrannicide and even volunteered to carry out the attack himself.”

One of the original assassination conspirators, who worked with Tresckow in his attempts, was General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office headquarters at the Bendlerblock in central Berlin. There he controlled an independent system of communications to the Replacement Army.

Olbricht, and later Stauffenberg, planned to use the German military’s own plans to ensure the success of their coup. In his book, “Operation Valkyrie”, Pierre Galante states: “Operation Valkyrie had originally been drawn up by the Wehrmacht, with Hitler’s approval, to allow for any contingency that would place the Reich in imminent danger--Hitler’s death, an Allied invasion, or an insurrection.” 

Galante goes on: “The conspirators, of course, had introduced certain modifications: The army would seize power in Berlin, and military commanders would take whatever steps were necessary to secure the districts under their command. As soon as word came of Hitler’s death, the conspirators planned to implement Valkyrie, to occupy the key strategic points and communications centers of Berlin, arrest Goebbels, and proclaim General Beck provisional chief of state until a legally constituted civilian government could be installed. The ultimate purpose of the conspiracy was to offer the Western Allies an immediate ceasefire as a prelude to a negotiated peace. The war was irretrievably lost for Germany, and every day, every hour that passed only increased the toll of victims on both sides who had been sacrificed to the bloodlust of a madman.”

On July 1, Stauffenberg was appointed Chief of Staff to General Fromm at the Reserve Army headquarters in central Berlin. In this role, he would attend many of Hitler’s military conferences in some of the most secure locations in all of Germany. He became convinced that he would be the man to kill Hitler. That moment would be a few weeks later on July 20.

Stauffenberg was asked to attend a conference at Hitler’s Northern Command Post, the Wolfsschanze or “Wolf’s Lair”, in East Prussia. It was fairly close to Berlin, with a flight of just a few hours. The conference would be in a one-story wood hut with a roof of reinforced concrete and brick supports. As before, the assassins would use a timed fuse and two bricks of plastic explosive hidden in a leather briefcase.

Moorhouse in “Killing Hitler” picks up the assassination attempt: “Despite the extreme tension of the moment, most eyewitnesses recalled that Stauffenberg did not betray a trace of nerves. He had, however, committed a grievous error. In his haste, Stauffenberg did not set a fuse in the second slab of explosive. What is more, he had neglected to place the unfused explosive in the briefcase. His bomb, therefore, was only half the bomb it should have been.

At around 12:42 pm, Wolfschanze was shaken by the cacophony of an explosion. In a flash, the map room became a scene of stampede and destruction. There was nothing but wounded men groaning, the acrid smell of burning, and charred fragments of maps and papers fluttering in the wind.”


Aftermath
In “Operation Valkyrie”, Pierre Galante provides details on Hitler in the aftermath of the bombing. Fraud Gertraud Junge, one of Hitler’s personal secretaries, visited him moments after he was taken back to his personal quarters. She said. “The Fuhrer looked very strange. His hair was standing on end, like quills on a hedgehog, and his clothes were in tatters. But in spite of all that he was ecstatic--after all hadn’t he survived? ‘It was Providence that spared me. This proves I’m on the right track. I feel that this is the confirmation of all my work.’”

The conspirators in Berlin were to immediately enact the protocols of Operation Valkyrie, with them in control of the communications. Instead though, they waited for three hours for Stauffenberg to fly back and arrive at the Berlin headquarters. The signal for Operation Valkyrie was initiated late in the day, but time was up.

The tide quickly turned against the plotters when Hitler was proven to be alive. One of the unwitting commanders, who had followed his responsibilities in Operation Valkyrie, was Major Otto Remer. Convinced Hitler was killed, he had been ordered to surround the government section of Berlin and arrest a number of prominent Nazis, including Goebbels.

When he arrived to arrest him at the Propaganda Ministry, Goebbels telephoned Hitler and handed the phone to Remer. After Remer immediately recognized the voice on the end, Hitler said to him “I order you to seal off the government quarter and crush any resistance with all means necessary. Every man who is not for me, is to be destroyed.”

In “Killing Hitler” Moorhouse summarizes the final end for the main plotters. Around midnight, in the courtyard of the Bendlerstrasse, the four men--Stauffenberg, Haeften, Obricht, and Mertz von Quirnheim--were led before a pile of building sand. There, illuminated by the headlights of the army motor pool, they faced a ten-man firing squad from the Grossdeutschland Guard Battalion. One by one, without ceremony, the four were shot. The only comment came when Stauffenberg was pushed in front of his executioners. As the shots rang out, he shouted “Long Live Holy Germany.”

Goebbels, who was one of the main targets of the coup, had a brutal verdict on the execution of the plot. He wrote to a friend, “If they hadn’t been so clumsy! They had an enormous chance. What dolts! What childishness! When I think how I would have handled such a thing. Why didn’t they occupy the radio station and spread the wildest lies? Here they put guards on my front door. But they let me go right ahead and telephone the Fuhrer, mobilize everything. They didn’t even silence my telephone. To hold so many trump cards and botch it--what beginners.”

Another unnamed German official stated, “One could say they sought less to seize power than to inherit it by assassination.”

Hitler’s secretary, Gertraud Junge, believed his death would have meant a sooner end to the war. She wrote: “All I see is millions of soldiers now lying buried somewhere, gone forever, who might instead have come home again, their guns silent and the sky quieter once more. The war would have been over.”

By some calculations, over ten million soldiers and civilians died in Europe in the ten months from Stauffenberg's attempt in July 1944 to the final German surrender the following May.



What If? Scenario
So let’s imagine, in our What If? Scenario that Hitler was indeed assassinated, and the coup, though difficult, was ultimately triumphant. For the July 20th plot to successfully kill Hitler only one of two small circumstances need to change from the reality of events.

First, the site of the military conference would be changed. On many occasions, according to Hitler’s secretary, they were held in the bunker of the Wolf’s Lair. In a confined space, surrounded by reinforced concrete, the effect of the explosion would be magnified by a factor of three. Unlike the barracks, where the explosion exited the wooden walls, open windows and raised floor, the concussive blast of the plastic explosives would have reverberated within the room. 

Most people believe that explosions are fatal because victims are torn apart or hit with flying shrapnel. Those are common causes of death in an explosion, but the majority of fatalities come from the blast damage to internal organs. Livers are lacerated internally, lungs are torn from the rib cage, the heart muscles tear open. While the room’s occupants might not literally have been torn apart, the internal damage from the explosion would have certainly been fatal to them.

The other factor that would enable the assassination to be successful would be small tweaks to the bomb itself. Keep in mind Stauffenberg had two 1-kilogram bricks of plastic explosive, but only used one. In his rush, Stauffenberg could only prime one bomb. His aide later threw the brick in the woods as they headed to the waiting plane. Two bricks would have doubled the effect of the blast, and most likely would have been fatal to all twenty of the room’s occupants.

Stauffenberg, or Tresckow in an earlier attempt on Hitler’s plane, could have used a more reliable fuse, which were available to these soldiers. They used a time-pencil fuse in which pliers were used to crush a glass vial on the fuse. The acid would deteriorate the wire that held a spring-loaded detonator. British fuses, which were reliable in duration and execution, would have been easily accessible to these military leaders. Any of these factors would have magnified the effect of the bomb and guaranteed success in killing Hitler.







Shouldering the Weight of the World
Carl Goerdeler, German Chancellor
Berlin, Germany
August 1, 1944

As Carl Goerdeler pinched the brow of his nose and closed his weary eyes, his thoughts turned to the tumultuous past few weeks. As the new Chancellor of Germany, he felt the weight of history on his shoulders. Primary to his concerns was the culmination of peace talks with the Allies and the rebuilding of his country. 

Over the course of a few hours on July 20th, members of his cabal had managed to assassinate the former Chancellor, Adolph Hitler, and had bloodlessly taken over the machinery of the German government.

Well,not bloodlessly in a literal sense. Twenty-two people were killed in the bomb blast along with Hitler, and Goebbels and Himmler were both murdered in their respective offices. And there were still pockets of zealot SS troops who had fortified themselves in the Bavarian mountains near Berchtesgaden. But, with the Wehrmacht home guard no longer actively engaged in fighting, they could be dispatched to end any lingering resistance.

There had been no state funeral for Hitler or his High Command. The bodies had been burned unceremoniously and their ashes scattered in a nameless field. With Himmler’s death, the ghettos, concentration and death camps that he ran were quickly shut down. The prisoners were fed, clothed, and released back to their hometowns. Repatriation, reparation and atonement to these poor souls would never erase the stain on his country’s legacy.

In announcing Hitler’s death and his ascension to leadership, Goerdeler acknowledged the presence and purpose of these 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites. Goerdeler wanted to shock the German people, and the world, into fully understanding the evil intentions of the Third Reich. 

The Allies had offered generous terms to end the war. They were far better than the terms at the end of the First World War, where he had served on the Eastern Front. Germany would be allowed to pull all forces back from occupied territories to the borders established in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The Wehrmacht would be reduced to a fraction of its current size, but that was fine with Goerdeler. He wanted the industrial sector focused on rebuilding the infrastructure that had crumbled under the weight of Allied bombs.

Goerderler and his countrymen would bear the physical and emotional scars of the Third Reich for generations. But in his gut, he felt a seed of hope that they could rebuild the country. And that was enough for him to keep moving forward.

What If Aftermath
In our What If scenario, the death of Hitler is immediate and evident. And the plotters in Berlin act decisively, with no delay in announcing his death and enacting Operation Valkyrie in support of their coup.

At 1 p.m., while Stauffenberg was still in flight back to Berlin, Friedrich Olbricht enacted Operation Valkyrie after announcing Hitler’s death over the Home Army communications channels. The announcement reads: “The Fuhrer Adolf Hitler is dead! A treacherous group of party leaders has attempted to exploit the situation by attacking our embattled soldiers in the rear in order to seize power for themselves.”

Still stunned by the news and unsure of any other actions to take, the Home Army mobilizes in Berlin, Munich, Paris and other key cities. Government ministries are occupied; Himmler’s and Goebbels’ respective headquarters are seized in East Prussia. And radio stations and telephone offices are placed under control of the Home Army. The mayors of the major cities, who were also consipriators, supported the Home Army movements and fomented resentment of the SS and Nazi officials as perpertrators of the assassination.

Members of Hitler’s inner circle were quickly rounded up and executed without trial. This would cause furor in the coming days, but it would head off any organized resistance for the transitional government.

Both Stauffenberg, placed in the Reserve Army Headquarters, and Olbricht, as chief of the General Army Office, organized military leadership in Europe, Italy and the Balkans to arrest any Nazi and SS leadership. Given the level of mistrust between the regular army and the SS and Nazi’s, the orders are gladly carried out. These arrested leaders would soon see the end of a hangman’s rope for their crimes against civilians and concentration camp populations.

Effectively leaderless, the SS troops, Nazis and Gestapo that managed to escape the first purge, would retreat to the mountain fortress of Berchtesgaden. Their holdout would last a few months while the rest of Germany re-organized its government and military organizations. Eventually, they would die fighting to the last man as their fortress was overrun by the Home Army.

The planned government consisted of Ludwig Beck as president, Carl Goerdeler as Chancellor, Stauffenberg as State Secretary, Olbricht as Minister of War and Tresckow as Chief of Police. Within hours of taking over the mantle of leadership, Goerdeler directly reached out to General Eisenhower to request a cease fire and began surrender negotiations. A conference was hastily arranged for Paris on August 1, but fighting on the Western front quickly ceased by July 23. 

On the Eastern front, the Russians, unopposed, quickly seized many of the Balkan territories as the Germans began a mass evacuation of their fortified positions. Instead of May 1945, VE Day would sweep England, the United States and rest of Europe by August 20, 1944.

Like in our recent history, puppet governments would be created in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Under the Warsaw Pact, which was established in 1955, the Soviet Bloc takes shape in much the same way.

Unlike our recent history, there would be no foreign occupation of Germany by the Russians or Communists. No Berlin Wall is erected to divide East and West Germany or the Communists from the Capitalists. A unified Germany begins the slow process of rebuilding.

A sudden end to the hostilities also negates the mass exodus of German scientific talent from the dangers of war and the whims of Hitler. 

Russia does not have access to 2,200 German scientists who were forcibly removed in 1946. On the other side, the United States may not be able to recruit 1,600 German scientists, engineers and rocket technicians through Operation Paperclip. But, they are able to emigrate a number of key scientists like Wernher von Braun through the promise of unlimited funding and a ready-to-build infrastructure that did not exist in Post-War Germany. With an exclusive stable of rocket scientists, the United States, not Russia would be the first to space, and then the first to the moon.

In the Pacific theater, Japan would fight on alone. Allied forces designated or deployed to Europe could be shifted to the island-hopping campaign underway along the Japanese Island Perimeter. However, before ancillary European forces could be deployed in any large number in the Pacific theater, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, ended the war roughly the same time.

In the end the timely death of Hitler will shorten the war in Europe. This will save 10 million lives, at least, from the horrors of war, starvation and genocide.

Conclusion
Thank you for joining me, Mark Bouffard on this trip. This show is produced and edited by Beto McQuade. I’d like to thank my editors, including Clint Buehle, my twin brother Matt Bouffard, and my retired journalist uncle Kevin Bouffard. The music you hear is Shane Ivers of silvermansound.com.

Don’t forget to review, like and subscribe to this podcast. Check out our blogs on whatifworldhistory.com and follow us on your favorite social media channel.

This has been What If World History? In our next episode, we will look at the death of Attila the Hun. And we will ponder his death at the ancient age of 65, not from a drunken stupor and a bloody nose. Instead he will die in his bed surrounded by his brood of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. And with his extended life, millions more would die under the sword of his army and much of Europe would fall under his rule.