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The sentence was already wrong when it was heard on the radio on the night of July 21, 1944.
"A very small clique of ambitious, unscrupulous and at the same time criminal, stupid officers" would have forged a plot to eliminate it, Hitler raged on the day after the unsuccessful assassination attempt.
The sentence didn't get any truer either when a special Gestapo commission began its work to find other conspirators and their contacts.
The investigative group grew to 400 employees.
400 investigators - for a “very small clique”?
Stauffenberg assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler
On July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg placed a bomb on the card table next to Adolf Hitler during a meeting.
The explosive charge detonates.
But Adolf Hitler survived.
Source: STUDIO_HH
When searching for people and backgrounds, the Gestapo not only had to recognize that the circle of conspirators was larger than assumed, that resistance members were also on the Eastern Front and in Paris, that there were close ties between active military, reserve officers and civilians, that the Relations between the conspirators were not only based on early acquaintances and family relationships, but were often only established in the course of the war.
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The discovery that it was not just about an assassination attempt on the “Führer” and the highest commander in command was nothing short of horror: a coup d'état had been prepared down to the last detail, completely unnoticed by the Nazi security and secret service apparatus.
Confidants stood ready in important positions, orders for the deployment of units on German territory had been written to prevent resistance from troops loyal to the regime.
Civilian officers were inaugurated in the military districts, who were supposed to keep the population calm.
Even the personnel sheet for the first government after Hitler was ready.
In the course of the investigation, the “very small clique” became a real network.
“When did the participants of July 20, 1944 actually get to know each other?” This obvious question from Marianne Meyer-Krahmer, daughter of Leipzig's mayor and resistance fighter Carl Goerdeler, electrified the historian Linda von Keyserlingk-Rehbein more than ten years ago.
Nobody had really dealt with this question before.
Likewise with the investigation of the network of July 20, 1944.
A visitor in front of the wall commemorating those who were executed after July 20, 1944 at the German Resistance Memorial Center
Source: Getty Images
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Keyserlingk-Rehbein set himself the task of answering these questions and analyzed interrogation protocols, investigation reports, indictments and court judgments of the Nazi persecutors as well as the private correspondence of the conspirators, as far as they were received.
When comparing, she concentrated on the letters of the lawyer and founder of the Kreisau district Helmuth James von Moltke, the letters and diaries of the diplomat Ulrich von Hassell and the diaries of the staff officer Hermann Kaiser.
The result of their research is a thick tome ("Just a, very small clique '? The Nazi investigation on the network of July 20, 1944". Lukas Verlag).
The graphical implementation of the contacts is both a visual and practical benefit.
This results in confusing formations at first, but on closer inspection they are incredibly meaningful.
They not only make the network of relationships between the individual groups of July 20, 1944 visible in an astonishing way.
The intensity of the contacts between individuals makes their role in the attempted coup more recognizable.
A chronology of Operation "Valkyrie"
With a bomb placed on his desk in Wolfsschanze, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg wanted to kill the dictator Adolf Hilter on July 20, 1944.
But the coup failed, and Hitler survived only slightly injured.
Source: WORLD / Kevin Knauer
It gets even more exciting when Keyserlingk-Rehbein uses the network to reconstruct the Nazi persecutors from private records.
Then it can be seen that the investigators were by no means able to uncover all the contacts and network of relationships or - whether for tactical reasons or through incorrect assessment - did not allow them to flow into the investigation.
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Failure to arrest is more likely to suggest the latter.
People like the secretary Margarethe von Oven, who typed the “Valkyrie” commands, were not considered to be actively involved.
Others were classified as confidants, even though they were acting persons - which, however, did not prevent the Nazi courts from sentencing them to death.
In many cases, however, the detainees also kept tight, despite long and grueling interrogations, not revealing those who had confided in them or only giving details of people they knew were already dead.
The Gestapo was unable to uncover numerous contacts between Moltke and Hassell and Kaiser with the defense, with the Army Group Center and with the Paris Group - that is, with important centers of the conspiracy.
In Ulrich von Hassell's case, the investigators found 20 contacts with other co-conspirators, but overlooked just as many that Keyserlingk-Rehbein was able to document by comparing sources.
1944 - defeats on all fronts
While the Western Allies land in Normandy, the Red Army overrun the German Eastern Front.
The air offensive puts Germany's cities in ruins.
The assassination attempt on Hitler fails.
Source: WORLD
According to the NS sources, Hermann Kaiser was in contact with 17 other conspirators.
A comparison with the personal records revealed 15 additional contacts, and another 17 co-conspirators knew Kaiser at least by name.
In addition, the historian was able to find 20 additional cross-connections between different subgroups of the network that are not documented in the Nazi sources.
Even with Carl Goerdeler, with 61 contacts at the top of the "networkers", the Nazi persecutors were able to assign most of them, but not all of them.
Keyserlingk-Rehbein discovered six overlooked contacts, five of which connected Goerdeler with central actors of the resistance: Hans von Dohnanyi, Hans Oster, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, Carl-Heinrich Stülpnagel and Erwin von Witzleben.
The Nazi persecutors knew about the earlier phase of the resistance from 1938 onwards, for example through the arrests of Abwehr employees Oster and Dohnanyi in 1943. However, they were apparently unable to get a clear picture of the 1943/44 conspiracy for a long time.
The memorial for the failed resistanceists
Source: Getty Images
Among other things because it was difficult to clarify when one of the suspects or convicts was to be called a resister.
Keyserlingk-Rehbein suspects that the investigators did not fully recognize the involvement of the non-Berlin conspiratorial circles in Paris and the Army Group Center on the Eastern Front.
Evidence of how carefully the military resistance had worked in preparing the coup.
After all the analyzes, the historian comes to the conclusion that around 200 people from different social classes were actively involved in the preparation of the assassination and the attempted coup of July 20, 1944 for years.
The NS sources came to 132 people with 650 contacts between them.
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Either way: not much in relation to the total population, but far more than a “very small clique”.
In addition, they probably knew a lot more about the plans without revealing their knowledge.
Many were probably only willing to take part as soon as the attack had succeeded.
Due to the necessary conspiracy, a final statement about the scope of the network is of course not possible.
Despite all the findings, the Nazi regime stuck to the formulation of the "very small clique".
There were corresponding instructions on language regulation to the security authorities, the SS and the party committees, as well as the courts.
Hitler after the assassination attempt on July 20, 1944
Source: Getty Images
It couldn't be held out.
Only the first trial against the conspirators on August 7 and 8, 1944 before the People's Court was reported in detail in the controlled press.
The more names, faces and fates of those involved in the coup attempt, the more likely the constructed image would have been questioned.
The Nazi leadership did not want to risk that and almost stopped reporting on the further trials.
According to the historian Keyserlingk-Rehbein, a single visualization of the network from July 20, 1944 from the perspective of the Nazi persecutors would have been sufficient "to reveal a blatant contradiction": between the persecutors' knowledge of the large, complex civil-military network of the attempted coup and the tirelessly repeated assertion by the Nazi propaganda that it was only a primarily military “small clique” with reactionary goals.
For this reason, the actual knowledge of the persecutors was not made public.
Anyone who looks at Linda Keyserlingk-Rehbein's book, especially her graphics of the network from July 20, 1944, understands why.
Claus von Stauffenberg in the German Resistance Memorial Center in Berlin
Source: Getty Images
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This article was first published on July 23, 2019.